Akira's Recs

i made this account to support amazing ff/imagine writers on here...and to be horny.

[drizzlingtears]

“You’re so quiet, what’s wrong?” I’m creating my own fantasy world to escape from reality so shut up.

[lustedbby]

BAELOR IS THE TYPE TO TALK YOU THROUGH IT

"yeah, just like that," he groans into the crook of your neck as you ride him. "you are beautiful, my princess." his large palms settle on your hips, adjusting you just enough to make it feel even better for both of you.

his hips meet yours with wet, rhythmic slaps as he picks up the pace. he is losing his mind over the way you take him in so greedily, and over the way your whimpers sound so wonderfully wrong beneath his steady guidance. "exquisite. you look perfect," he murmurs, his hand gently brushing along your cheekbone before pulling you into a kiss. baelor needs his wife to know that she is the only one who can bring him to such a state. this man would never make you deprived.

"i can see you are getting tired, sweetheart, but hold on just a little longer," he whispers, the moment he notices how you begin to whimper and tremble beneath him. "you are doing so well." his grip on your sides tightens just slightly, spurred on by the way you ride him and the way your pussy clenches around his length with a certain hunger. baelor's eyes roll back involuntarily at the sensations you are giving him. restrained grunts escape his lips. "gorgeous… keep going."

"you have no idea how beautiful you look from this angle right now," he says as his shining eyes meeting yours. "let us try a little harder." baelor says this before letting himself go completely, driving into you with even greater intensity as he quickens the pace.

you tighten around him, and a wave of pleasure crashes over you. tears well up in your eyes, and baelor pulls you into a tender embrace, gently wiping the tears from your salty cheeks. "you were incredible, my love," he says, before kissing you as if you were the most precious thing he has ever possessed.

[kiwi]

“you’re so polite!” thank you i have anxiety

[obskurity]

Declan O'Hara + Cameron Cook - Rivals S2E5

[whateyescantsee]

Could I possibly adore him more?!?

Bringing out the fangs.

[whateyescantsee]

Could I possibly adore him more?!?

Bringing out the fangs.

[thewolveswithin]

Jack O’Connell, Lola Kirke, and Peter Dreimanis (Remmick, Joan and Bert) join Miles Caton (Samuel "Sammie" Moore) during the “I Lied to You” performance from Sinners at the 98th Academy Awards

[baldwinhearts]

Your writing gives me life and I had a brainwave that I would like to share if you feel like turning it into something real for Baelor x reader

Being the hand of the king and the heir, it’s always “your grace” this, “my prince” that, “lord hand” etc. So he goes absolutely FERAL when you softly use his given name in bed.

Ok love you bye

SAY MY NAME (+18) — baelor targaryen

gif credits: @christophernolan

Summary: To the realm, he’s “Your Grace,” “Lord Hand,” “the Prince.” But in your bed, when you, his wife, softly whisper “Baelor,” the unbreakable heir of the Iron Throne goes feral — possessive, reverent, desperate. He talks you through every slow, deep thrust, begging you to say his name again while he fills you.

Additional tags: fem!read; no use of Y/N; +18; MDNI

A/N: and here it is, anon! i hope you love it! 💜

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

The royal apartments are dim, lit only by the dying fire and a single candelabrum on the bedside table. The sheets are already twisted, damp with sweat and need. Baelor — Hand of the King, heir to the Iron Throne, the man the realm calls “Your Grace,” “my prince,” “Lord Hand” — is between your thighs, naked and trembling with restraint.

He’s been worshipping you for what feels like hours.

His mouth on your cunt, slow, deliberate licks, sucking your clit until your hips buck, then pulling back just when you’re about to shatter. His fingers inside you — three now — curling, stretching, stroking that spot that makes your vision white. His free hand pinning your hip to the bed so you can’t chase the pleasure.

He’s hard against your thigh, leaking, but he hasn’t asked for anything. He never does until you’re sobbing.

You’re close again, thighs shaking, breath hitching, and he stops. Again. You whine, high, desperate, fingers twisting in his dark hair. “Please—”

He lifts his head, lips glistening, eyes blown black.

“Please what, sweetling?” he murmurs, voice wrecked. “Tell me.”

You arch, trying to grind against his hand, but he holds you still.

“I need—I need more—” you gasp. “I need you inside me. Please, Baelor.”

The name slips out, soft, intimate, unguarded. His whole body locks. He surges up, mouth crashing into yours, and kisses you like he’s trying to devour your soul. His tongue is everywhere, claiming and tasting, while his hands yank your thighs wider.

“Say it again,” he growls against your lips. “Say my name.”

“Baelor—”

He groans, raw, animal, and thrusts into you in one brutal stroke. You scream, your back bowing and your nails raking down his shoulders. He doesn’t pause — he fucks you hard, hips snapping, cock slamming deep, hitting every spot that makes you see stars.

“Again,” he snarls. “Say it again.”

“Baelor—”

He bites your neck hard enough to mark, then soothes it with his tongue. “Fuck—yes—my name—only my name—”

You’re sobbing now, overwhelmed and overstimulated, cunt clenching around him like a fist. He pins your wrists above your head with one hand, the other grips your throat — not choking, just holding, making you feel owned.

“Look at me,” he demands. “Look at your husband while he fucks you like you deserve.”

You do, eyes locked on his, and he slows just enough to torture, rolling his hips, grinding against your clit with every thrust.

“You feel that?” he rasps. “Feel how deep I am? Feel how I stretch this perfect little cunt? This is mine. You’re mine. Say it.”

“I’m yours,” you whimper. “Baelor—please—”

He groans, hips stuttering, then picks up the pace again, pounding into you so hard the headboard slams against the wall.

“Come for me,” he growls. “Come on your husband’s cock. Come while you say my name.”

“Baelor—Baelor—Baelor—”

You shatter, screaming his name, walls fluttering, clamping, milking him. He follows, burying himself deep, roaring your name, cock pulsing, spilling hot and thick inside you, filling you until it leaks out around him.

He stays inside, still hard, and lowers himself over you, forehead pressed to yours. “Again,” he whispers, voice wrecked. “Say it again.”

“Baelor,” you breathe, soft, reverent.

He shudders, kisses you slow, deep, and starts moving again.

The night is long. He takes you in every position — gentle, then rough, then gentle again — always talking you through it.

“Look at me.”

“Feel that?”

“You’re so beautiful.”

“Come for me, love.”

“Say my name.”

And every time you do — soft, broken, and needy — he loses control a little more. By dawn you’re both trembling, tangled in the sheets, his hand resting protectively over your lower belly. He kisses your temple, voice hoarse.

“I love when you say my name,” he murmurs. “No titles. Just me. Just yours.”

You smile, sleepy, sated, and whisper against his lips: “Baelor.”

He groans, soft, wrecked, and pulls you closer.

The realm can keep their “Your Grace.” In this bed, he’s only yours.

[flixpii]

LET ME TASTE YOU. DAY FOUR.

⤷ ‎ # ‎ ‎ featuring ‎ ‎ remmick × fem!reader ۶ৎ

𝐞𝐯𝐞𝐫𝐲𝐨𝐧𝐞 𝐢𝐧 𝐭𝐡𝐞 𝐝𝐞𝐥𝐭𝐚 𝐤𝐧𝐨𝐰𝐬 𝐲𝐨𝐮 𝐚𝐬 𝐭𝐡𝐞 𝐬𝐨𝐧𝐠𝐛𝐢𝐫𝐝 𝐰𝐢𝐭𝐡 𝐭𝐡𝐞 𝐬𝐰𝐞𝐞𝐭𝐞𝐬𝐭 𝐛𝐥𝐮𝐞𝐬 𝐚𝐫𝐨𝐮𝐧𝐝. 𝐫𝐞𝐦𝐦𝐢𝐜𝐤 𝐤𝐧𝐨𝐰𝐬 𝐲𝐨𝐮 𝐚𝐬 𝐭𝐡𝐞 𝐰𝐨𝐦𝐚𝐧 𝐰𝐡𝐨 𝐤𝐞𝐞𝐩𝐬 𝐬𝐥𝐚𝐦𝐦𝐢𝐧𝐠 𝐡𝐞𝐫 𝐰𝐢𝐧𝐝𝐨𝐰 𝐢𝐧 𝐡𝐢𝐬 𝐟𝐚𝐜𝐞… 𝐚𝐧𝐝 𝐬𝐭𝐢𝐥𝐥 𝐬𝐢𝐧𝐠𝐬 𝐟𝐨𝐫 𝐡𝐢𝐦 𝐚𝐧𝐲𝐰𝐚𝐲. (𝐰𝐜 : 𝟏𝟐.𝟓𝐤)

𝜗ৎ゛CUPID’S NOTES ⸝⸝.ᐟ⋆ y'all i was so biased with the lengths of these fics... what can i say? remmick was the first jack character that i fell in love with 🤭 and idc he has brown eyes in my mind. happy valentine's day, babes ! i love y'all ♡

. ♡ ݁˖ CONTENTS black!reader (yawp). 1930s mississippi delta setting. racism & segregation era context. stalking / peeping. obsessive behavior. light manipulation / guilt-tripping. size kink. messy pussy eating. praise kink. mild possessiveness / territorial vibes. unprotected p in v. creampie. light biting. mild pain / pleasure mix. light overstimuation. remmick is a yearner™. mdni 18+

He knocks–not the sharp, police-knuckle rap that makes your heart slam against your ribs, not the lazy drag of fingers that some men use when they think they got a right to your time.

It’s the same careful tap he’s been using all summer, three slow knocks against the warped wood of your window frame, like he doesn’t want to wake the house, like the two of you are conspirators instead of you being the one stuck in here trying very hard not to commit a crime.

You sit cross-legged on your narrow bed, dress loosened, slip straps hanging off your shoulders, a comb in your hand. 

The night outside presses against the glass, hot and thick with cicadas. Sweat beads at your temples and slips down the back of your neck, gathering at your spine as the little fan in the corner ticks without doing much more than push warm air around. From the road you can still hear a car now and then, rolling slow through the Delta dust, but out here where your house leans into a row of other houses, it is mostly crickets, a distant dog, and him.

“Songbird.”

His voice comes low through the thin wall, through the slat of raised window he knows to aim for. It’s hazy around the edges, worn down from talking to wood and paint instead of you.

You see the shadow of his shoulders first, a broad smudge among the lilac bushes under your window, and then the vague shape of his hat, the brim pushed back as he tilts his face up.

You drag the comb through a tangle a little harder than necessary and pretend you don’t hear him.

He has been out there long enough that you don’t remember when he started tonight. Might have been right after you came home from the juke and kicked off your shoes, might have been after you finished scrubbing off rouge and sweat in the yellow tin basin.

At some point during St. Louis Blues in the little bar off the highway, you caught a flash of brown eyes near the back, hat pulled low and shoulders hunched, and you just knew he would be there when you got home. 

He follows your songs that way, like smoke chasing the last of the breeze.

“Songbird,” he tries again, softer. “You still awake?”

You roll your eyes at the floorboards and bite down on the inside of your cheek so you don’t answer by reflex. You made that mistake once, months ago, when he first started this nonsense and you cracked your window two inches to hiss at him that it was late and you were tired and he needed to take his fool self back wherever he came from.

He had smiled then, shaky but bright, like being cursed out by you made his whole night. He said your name like he’d been rolling it around in his mouth all day and wanted to show you he’d learned it right. He had stammered about how sorry he was, about how he didn’t mean no harm, about how he just wanted to hear you sing again because the way you sound does something to him, and that was the first time you really looked him over instead of pretending he was just a smudge in your peripheral.

Remmick.

You learned his name that night, too, because he tripped over it when you asked, like it surprised him to give it. White man with a broad frame that never seems to decide what to do with itself, shirt pulled tight over his shoulders. 

The first night you saw him at the juke joint, he looked lost more than anything, eyes wide and dark as wet dirt, mouth parted just slightly while you sang Trouble in Mind. You felt those eyes on you the entire set, heavy at your back when you turned, fixed on your mouth when you leaned toward the mic. 

There was something hungry in it that you didn’t appreciate from a stranger with his skin and in this state, in this year. You brushed past him on your way out, heard the clumsy shuffle of him trying to stand, and by the time you hit the dark road toward home, you heard his boots behind you.

You remember stopping under a streetlamp mid-way down, hand on your pocket knife, turning slow. 

He froze where the light caught him, hat in his hands like a schoolboy, muttering apologies so fast you nearly laughed. He said he hadn’t meant to scare you, he swore he just wanted to say you sounded like you had angels in your throat, and you told him in a voice low as thunder that angels don’t let strange men follow them down dark roads. 

You told him to keep his distance, to stop behind that fencepost and not move one step closer, and you walked the rest of the way home with the back of your neck prickling and the sound of his boots scraping at a careful distance behind you.

Next night he was outside your door. Night after that at your window. Always gentle, always pleading, never quite bold enough to step up on the porch unless you spoke through the wood to tell him to go.

“Darlin’,” he says now, voice hoarse around the word, like it has been dragged up from somewhere deep. “Please. I ain’t—I ain’t gonna bother you long. Just want…” He trails off, breath puffing against the glass. “Just want to hear you. Been a hard day.”

You snort under your breath. “Whole Delta had a hard day,” you mutter, not loud enough for the words to carry, just enough to satisfy your own sense of fairness. 

Your fingers work the comb through the ends of your hair. The house creaks as someone down the row closes a door. Somewhere, a baby wails and then quiets. You live alone; your neighbors do not. That is one blessing: no one here shares your walls enough to wake up when he comes whispering.

You remember the first week he tried this, how it kept your nerves stretched thin and made you sleep with your hand under your pillow every night, fingers wrapped around the little knife until your palm ached. 

A white man loitering outside a Black woman’s house after dark in Mississippi is more than a nuisance; it is a match thrown near dry grass. You told him, sharper and colder each time, that you didn’t know what his game was, but it wasn’t funny and it wasn’t safe, and if anybody saw him out here, it wouldn’t be his neck on the line first.

He had said, voice trembling on the edges, that he knew. You believed he did, at least a little, because he always stayed just on the edge of shadow, close enough that you could hear him breathe, far enough that a passing white patrol might not connect him to your doorway. Pathetic, you told your reflection more than once as you unpinned your hair. Crawling. Dog-like. 

And yet, he keeps coming back.

“Been out here a while now,” he says, as if you don’t know. You picture him looking at his hands, rubbing his palms on his trousers; he always does when he gets impatient, like he’s trying to scrub something off that never quite goes. “Feet hurt. Thought maybe you’d taken pity on me by now.”

A stubborn laugh bubbles up in your chest and you swallow it down, closing your eyes for a moment. 

You picture him in front of the bar two nights ago, leaning against the outside wall once your set finished, dragging on a cigarette with that hunched posture that makes him look more sorry than dangerous. One of the other women, Pearl, had nudged you with her elbow and nodded toward him, smirking.

“White boy got it bad, huh?” she’d whispered, lips barely moving, her bracelets chiming low as she reached for a drink. “Never seen nobody stare like that without droolin’.”

“He a creep,” you murmured back, not bothering to deny the way his stare heated your skin. “I told him to get lost.”

Pearl had watched him another beat. “Mm. Then why he still out there every night?” She gave you a look that made your ears burn before sauntering off toward a table of men who had been tipping heavy all evening.

You pry your eyes open now and stare at the warped ceiling. 

Why is he still out there? Why do you still hear his voice through your walls, in your bathwater, humming scraps of the songs you sang two weeks ago like his memory walks around inside your house as easy as your own feet? 

You don’t have a good answer that doesn’t make you feel foolish, so you avoid thinking too hard about it.

“Sweetheart,” he says again, and this time your name rides underneath it. “I know you’re there. I heard you come in from the juke. Been hearin’ you walk back and forth, too.” His breath hitches into something like a nervous laugh. “I ain’t—I don’t mean that like I’m, uh—God, I sound worse every night, don’t I?”

You set the comb down on the little table next to your bed and slide off the mattress. The floorboards cool against your bare feet despite the heat, worn smooth by years of steps. You cross the cramped room in three strides, hip bumping the dresser, shoulder brushing the hanging dress you washed this morning.

Mosquitoes hum against the screen when you reach the window, the little lace curtain trembling with their efforts. His silhouette shifts when your shadow falls across him.

“I’m gonna pretend you didn’t just admit you been listening to me walk,” you say, finally letting your voice slip out, low and edged. “What do you want, Remmick?”

He goes still in a way you feel more than see, like every inch of him pulls tight at once. Then, slowly, he tips his head back, face turned up toward the sliver of your opened window. Moonlight catches on his cheekbones and the bridge of his nose.

He looks worse than the last time you saw him, like sleep hasn’t been catching him right either. There are shadows like bruises under his eyes and stubble on his jaw, and his shirt hangs open at the throat, collar limp and damp with sweat.

“Evenin’,” he says, as if it is the first time he has seen you in days and you’ve stumbled into each other at the market. The corner of his mouth lifts, wobbly. “You look… you look real nice tonight.”

You snort. “You can’t even see me.”

“Can, actually.” His gaze traces the line where the curtain doesn’t quite meet the frame. “Little bit. Enough.”

Your hand tightens on the edge of the sill. “You still haven’t answered my question.”

He swallows, adam’s apple bobbing in his throat, and you catch the shine of his tongue as he licks his lips. “Just want to hear you sing,” he says, soft as dawn. “Been two nights. Feels longer.”

“You were at the bar tonight.”

“Not like that,” he answers. “I mean, I was, yeah, but there’s so many people. Drinks, noise, fellas hollerin’ and talkin’ over you like they don’t know they sittin’ in the presence of—” He clamps his mouth shut. “It ain’t the same.”

A little hum slips out of your throat before you can stop it. “And what’s so special about here, then?”

“Here, it’s just us.” He says it so simply that your stomach flips. “Just you and me and the crickets, songbird. No one leanin’ on you, askin’ you for more when you’re tired. Just you doin’ what you do because you want to.”

You hate that he isn’t wrong. You hate more that he noticed.

“How long you plan on standin’ out there tonight?” you ask, folding your arms under your chest and leaning against the frame. 

“As long as it takes,” he says without missing a beat. There’s a certainty under the words that wasn’t there the first week he started coming around. 

“That so?” You arch a brow even though he can’t see it.

“That’s so.” He shifts his weight, boots grinding in the dirt, and you hear the faint creak of leather when he adjusts the strap of whatever bag he’s carrying tonight. 

Sometimes he brings you little things, like you might open the door faster for offerings. A jar of honey he swore he had gotten from a cousin, once. A pressed wildflower tucked under your doormat another time that made you pause in the doorway longer than you meant to.

He clears his throat. “I brought you somethin’. For singin’.”

You hesitate, fingers brushing the frame. “What?”

There’s a shuffle, a rustle, and then his hand appears at the edge of the window, palm up, fingers slack. Moonlight paints his knuckles pale, the scars on them silver. In his palm is a little tin, dented and familiar: throat lozenges from the drugstore in town, the ones you buy whenever your voice starts to rasp from too much smoke and not enough water.

“Figured your throat gets sore,” he says. “Figured if I was gonna be selfish and ask for songs, I should at least try to make it easier on you.”

You stare at the tin for a long moment, feeling your jaw clench. It occurs to you that he must have watched you in town, too; a strange little thought that prickles down your spine and settles low in your belly. You reach through the gap and pluck the tin from his hand, careful not to let your fingers linger.

“Thank you,” you say grudgingly, backing away from the window before you do something you regret, like soften.

“So you’ll sing?” The question rushes out like he’s been holding it back behind his teeth. “Just one. Anythin’ you want. I won’t ask for nothin’ else tonight, I swear it, cross my heart.” His voice drops at the end, rough. “Been hearin’ you in my head for days. Hard to sleep when you’re up there, you know?”

You flip the little tin over in your hands, thumb tracing the worn label. 

Hard to sleep. 

You know that story; your own bed hasn’t felt restful in weeks. On nights you don’t work, you catch yourself humming in the dark just to fill the quiet, only to hear his voice drift up from outside, joining you on the last note like he can’t help it.

You should close the window. You should tell him again that being here is dangerous, that there’s men in this town who would happily string him up as a lesson for crossing streets he shouldn’t cross and they would set your house on fire while they were at it. You should remind him of what world you live in and what your body is worth to that world. You should do a hundred sensible things you can list in order, and yet you stand there in your slip with your hair falling loose around your shoulders, listening to Remmick breathe outside your window as if his lungs and yours are sharing the same space.

“Stay where you are,” you say finally, voice low and firm. “You step one foot on my porch, I shut this window and you don’t hear a note. Understand?”

“Yes, ma’am.” He answers so fast it almost trips over itself, and there’s a faint thread of something like pleased heat in it that makes your skin prickle. “I ain’t movin’.”

You clear your throat, more to steady yourself than anything, and set the tin on the sill. The night presses closer, as if it can hear the decision settling in your bones. You close your eyes and let your shoulders drop, drawing in a breath that tastes like dust and honeysuckle and cigarette smoke from the juke joint still clinging to your hair.

“You listening?” you ask.

“Always,” he says, quiet and sure.

You let the first note spill out into the dark, low and smooth, wrapping around the house, the yard, the man standing beneath your window like a ghost that finally found what it has been haunting for.

You slip into a blues you have been humming under your breath all week, something slow that climbs up from your chest and unspools itself in a steady line. 

The first verse rolls out low, notes curling around every corner of the room before they slide through the crack of the window and into the hot dark outside. You let your voice stretch just enough to show its shine, not enough to tear, each word rounded and sure, carrying every bit of the ache you pretend you don’t feel when you are scrubbing dishes or counting tips at the end of the night.

You sing about trains you have never ridden and men you do not intend to wait for, about river water that carries sins downstream, about a woman who knows she should leave and loves the hurt anyway.

Your eyes drift half-closed and you forget, for a small moment, that you are a woman standing in a slip with a stranger under her window and remember instead what it feels like to stand under a bare bulb in some smoky shack while everyone goes quiet, waiting for your tongue to touch the next word.

There’s no soft shuffling in the dirt now, no nervous creak of leather. The sound of the crickets thins and warps around your voice. Every time you lean into a word, pushing it out on the edge of breath, you feel his attention sharpen, a weight pressing up through the floorboards.

You don’t need to see him to know he is standing with his head tipped back, lips parted, eyes fixed on the place where your shadow moves behind the curtain.

You glide into the second verse and let yourself bend it, slipping in a little run between syllables just because you know you can. The memory of his face at the bar, eyes glassy and stunned, flickers through your mind. You remember the way he gripped the back of his chair when you hit a high note that night, knuckles white, jaw clenched like he was holding something back.

That image sits in your chest now as you drag the last chorus out, holding the note until your lungs ache, until you feel heat prick behind your eyes, until you hear something down below that sounds an awful lot like a broken sound pressed into a palm.

You let the note fall away, let the last word dissolve into the sticky air, and then it is just night again. Crickets pick up their song. The fan clicks. Your breath sounds too loud in your own ears.

For a moment he doesn’t speak. That might be the strangest part, the stretch of silence where you can almost believe he has evaporated, carried off by the song like smoke through the trees. You open your eyes and glance down anyway. 

His hands hang useless at his sides, fingers curled as if he wanted to reach for something and forgot what. His hat is pushed back far enough that you can see the damp mess of his hair plastered to his forehead, a few curls clinging to his temple. His chest rises and falls too fast for a man who has just been standing still.

“Lord,” he says finally, voice wrecked. “I swear, there ain’t nothin’ on this earth sounds like you.”

You shift your weight, leaning your shoulder against the frame, fighting the urge to preen. “You got your song,” you remind him. “That’s all you asked for.”

“That’s all I said out loud,” he answers, and there’s a faint thread of humor in it, worn thin but still there. His voice shakes as he pushes on. “Whole rest of me been beggin’ for more.”

You feel a little prickle at the base of your neck. “More what?”

He looks up at you then, properly, as if the shadows aren’t there at all, as if he can see every inch of you pressed to the wood. “Come outside,” he says lowly. “Just for a minute. Let me see you proper while you sing. Or—” His tongue darts over his lips. “Or let me come in. Sit in the corner and keep real quiet. Won’t touch a thing, won’t touch you. Just wanna be close when you do that again.”

You huff out a breath that is almost a laugh. “You lost your mind? You know what it would look like with you in here?”

“No one gotta know,” he says quickly, and there it is—that little twist in his tone that makes your spine stiffen. “It’s late. Folks asleep. Houses dark down the row. Door stays shut, curtains stay closed, nobody the wiser. Just a woman and a man tryin’ to make it through a hard night with somethin’ pretty to listen to.”

You narrow your eyes, even though you know he can’t see it. “You talk real pretty when you want somethin’.”

He smiles, a crooked thing that never quite reaches his eyes. “Ain’t that what singin’ is? Talkin’ pretty about hurt?” He spreads his hands a little, palms up in some show of helplessness.

“And it ain’t just me that wants it. I hear you, too. Hear you pacin’ in there on nights you don’t go out. Hear you hummin’ to yourself like you got words stuck in your throat with nowhere to go.” His voice softens, slips under your skin. “You lonely, same as me. Just ‘cause you got four walls don’t mean you ain’t.”

Heat flashes in your chest, quick and irritated. “Boy, you don’t know a thing about what I am.”

“I know you open that window for me,” he says, and now the sweetness has an edge. “You could keep it shut. Could’ve done it when I first knocked. Could’ve done it after I said your name. Could’ve done it before you sang. But you didn’t. You stay right there talkin’ to me instead. Maybe there’s a reason for that.”

You feel your jaw set. “You call this talkin’? You out there makin’ a nuisance of yourself and I’m tryin’ to keep you from gettin’ both of us killed.”

“I’m careful,” he insists, quick and eager, stepping half a pace closer before he remembers your warning and stops. “I am, I swear. I wait till the lamps go out before I even come down this road. I stay off the porch like you said. I’d never put you in a bad way on purpose, you know that.” He leans up on his toes a little, voice dropping. “But there’s a lotta hurt in this place already that ain’t got nothin’ to do with me. Man’s entitled to one good thing now and then.”

“Entitled,” you repeat, and the word tastes sour in your mouth.

His hand goes to the back of his neck, rubbing there like he can erase what he said. “That ain’t—I didn’t mean it like—I’m just sayin’ you’re—” His fingers curl in his hair, tugging. When he speaks again, the manipulative slant smooths over with desperate honesty, which might be worse.

“You don’t know what you do to me when you sing,” he murmurs. “Feels like somebody took a knife to my chest and carved a space out that’s only shaped like you. I walk around all day hearin’ your voice in things that ain’t even there. Machinery, train whistles, wind in the damn corn.”

Your heart missteps, then steadies. You hear the push under his words; he knows what strings to pull now, the small ones tied to your pride and your loneliness and that little ache you get when you leave the stage at night and go home to a house still hollow with someone else’s history. He is trying to wedge himself into that hollow.

“Come outside,” he urges again. “You ain’t gotta let me in if that’s too much. Just… sit on the steps with me. You can keep your knife in your hand if it makes you feel better.”

You imagine it for a foolish second: the two of you sitting shoulder to shoulder on the old wooden steps, the boards warm under your thighs, night wrapped around you while you sing something low and mean into his ear.

His eyes on you, not through a screen or from the back of a smoky room but close enough that you can see every little twitch in them. His hands braced on his knees, trying not to reach. 

Your body answers the picture before your mind does; a tight curl low in your belly, a flash of heat between your thighs that makes you angry with yourself.

“No,” you say, throat tight.

He stares up at you, confusion flickering across his face like he expected the story to go another way. “No?”

“No.” You let the word sit heavy. “You sang your little sad speech, you got your song, and now you gonna turn around and go wherever you go when you ain’t hauntin’ my doorstep. I ain’t comin’ out there, and you sure as hell ain’t comin’ in here.”

His shoulders slump, but only for a beat. Then he straightens, mouth pressing into a thin line. “You don’t mean that,” he says quietly, a last attempt to shove. “You wouldn’t have sung if you did. You wouldn’t—”

You shift closer to the window, fingers gripping the edge. “You don’t tell me what I mean,” you cut in, voice low and sharp enough to slice through the night. “You don’t know me like that, Remmick. You got a pretty voice and a hard crush and too much time on your hands. That’s all this is.”

His eyes darken. For a second something hot flashes through them, something that looks almost dangerous, and you feel your body tense, old lessons about men and their tempers flickering up from your bones. Then he swallows it back down, shoving it somewhere behind his ribs, and when he speaks his voice is small again.

“I just…” He trails off, fingers flexing useless at his sides. “I just wanna be where you are.”

“And I just wanna sleep,” you answer. “You think I sound good now? Wait till you let me rest.”

That pulls the faintest huff of laughter out of him, even through his barely concealed impatience. It twists something in your chest you stubbornly ignore.

“Go home, Remmick,” you say. “Wherever that is. I’m done tonight.”

His mouth opens, and you hear the beginning of your name, as if he is about to try one more angle, some last little phrase to slip under your skin. 

You don’t give him the chance. Your hand closes around the edge of the warped frame and you yank the window shut in one firm motion.

The sound of it slamming into place is loud in the small room, rattling the leftover breath from your lungs. The night air cuts off, replaced by the close, familiar heat of your house and the faint whir of the fan. 

His next words smear into a muffled rumble against the glass, nothing but shapes and tone now, stripped of language. You catch “songbird” in there somewhere, maybe your name again, maybe please, but the rest dissolves into a low, frustrated murmur you refuse to decipher.

You pull the latch down with a short, decisive click and let your forehead rest for a moment against the cool pane. 

Outside, his shadow lingers under the window, hazy and uncertain. After a while, the shape of him shifts and turns away, stretching long across the yard as he steps back into the road. 

You push the curtain closed, shutting him and his hunger and his sad, pretty words back out into the Delta night, and you stand in the hush that follows, heart steadying itself against your ribs, throat still tingling with the last note you sang for a man you just told to get lost.

Next evening, after a long shift in a bar near the river where cigar smoke clings to your throat and some fool tries to slip a hand lower than your waist, you walk home with your shoulders tight and your jaw clenched. 

You spend longer than usual washing up, scrubbing someone else’s touch from your hips with a rag gone gray. You hang your dress over the chair, pat your skin dry, and tell yourself you’re going to bed before the crickets finish tuning up.

He knocks before you even make it to the mattress.

Three soft taps against the same strip of wood, like he tuned himself to your footsteps. You stand in the middle of the room, caught between bed and window, pulse beating low and unhappy in your throat. He doesn’t say anything at first, just rests his knuckles there like he is feeling for your heartbeat in the walls.

You name slips from his lips eventually, voice rough with not enough sleep. “You home?”

After a moment of no answer, you hear him shift, hear the faint scrape of his boot on the hard-packed dirt.

“I know you can hear me,” he goes on. “I heard you comin’ down the road. Those little coins in your pocket jingle every time you take a step. Hard sound to mistake.”

You swallow. Stupid boy, watching the way your skirts sway, the way your hands move, the way your pockets sound. Stupid girl, for knowing exactly which detail he’s talking about.

“I ain’t askin’ to come in tonight,” he promises, maybe sensing how close you are to shutting him out altogether. “Just… if you feel like it, give me one song. I’ll stay right where I am. They been talkin’ over you again.” He doesn’t say how he knows, he doesn’t have to. You hear the bar in his voice. “Let me hear you right.”

You stand there for a long, stiff moment, fingers digging into the cotton at your thighs. Then you sigh, cross the floor, and crank the window up just enough to let your voice out but not his hands in. 

He thanks you like you saved him from drowning.

After that, it becomes a thing you pretend it isn’t.

Some nights he is already out there before you get to take a bite of dinner, a shadow tucked into the corner of the tiny yard. Other nights he shows up late, after you have put out the lamp and slipped under the sheet, his soft knock pulling you out of shallow, restless half-sleep. Some nights you tell him to go to hell and mean it. Some nights you do not answer at all and lie there listening to him murmur to himself, his words too muffled to catch, his presence loud anyway.

On the nights you do sing, he drinks it like he is starving.

He picks up the geography of your voice faster than any man has picked up the geography of your body.

He learns which songs you choose when you are tired, which when you are mad.

He starts bringing offerings more often: a peach gone soft around the edges but still sweet, wrapped in his worn handkerchief; a small square of chocolate he admits he lifted off a shipment at the depot; a stub of pencil and a little notebook, saying maybe you can write your own story someday, if you ain’t already.

In exchange, you learn more about him than you want to.

You learn that he works loading and unloading crates down by the river. You learn that he stays in a room above a store with thin walls and a landlady who takes too much interest in his comings and goings. You learn that he comes from a place further east where the soil is red and mean, and that he left because he was tired of tilling land that wasn’t his for a man who didn’t remember his name half the time.

“You remember mine,” he says once, night pressing close and humid. “It feels good. Hearin’ it in your mouth. Even when you say it mean.”

“You earn mean,” you answer, but it comes out softer than you like.

Sometimes he slips into stories about his mama without realizing it, about how she sang while she cooked, about how she died younger than she should have after a winter sickness, about how he can’t hear certain old hymns without feelin’ like somebody twisted his ribs from the inside. On those nights he tries to apologize, taken aback by his own sentiment.

“Don’t apologize for missing your mama,” you tell him through the half-open window, shoulder pressed to the frame. “Ain’t a thing wrong with that.”

He laughs, rough and low. “You say that like you ain’t out here lettin’ some fool boy moan about his troubles when you got your own.”

“You pay in lozenges and stolen chocolate,” you say dryly. “Consider the fee settled.”

He starts to tease you back more. It sneaks up on you in pieces: a crooked joke here, a sly remark there.

You see the shape of his grin in silhouette and know when he’s about to say something sideways before it leaves his mouth. He tells you you’re spoiled when you complain about heat.

You tell him he’s nosy when he guesses what dress you worked in that night based on how hoarse you sound. It isn’t friendship, not with the way he looks at you like you are a miracle and a curse in one body, but it sits near it, crooked on the shelf.

And under all of it, something else coils tighter.

His patience doesn’t disappear overnight.

The first time you hear the edge, it is a Tuesday, and you have refused three nights in a row.

“No,” you say, flat, when he asks if you’ll sing. You are too tired, neck aching from leaning over a chipped piano at a bar where the smoke was so thick you could taste it on your tongue with every breath. All you want is water and quiet.

He stands in your yard, shoulders hunched, hands jammed deep in his pockets. “You ain’t sang for me since Saturday,” he says, not accusing, but not quite casual either.

“I’m allowed to rest,” you remind him.

“Didn’t say you weren’t,” he answers, but his jaw works. “Just… three nights is a long stretch, that’s all.”

“You gonna wither without my voice?” you ask, intending it to land light, but he takes it dead serious.

“Feels like it sometimes,” he says. “I spend all day hearin’ folk talk about nothin’, and all night hearin’ you in my head, and I come out here ‘cause I think maybe I’ll get the real thing, and then—”

“And then you don’t,” you cut in. “World don’t end.”

There is a pause. When he speaks again, the plea is still there, but woven through it is something tighter, thinner. “Feels a little like it does to me,” he murmurs.

You feel a flicker of anger at that, sharp and hot. Who is he to hang his whole sky on your throat and then make it your problem when it clouds over? You open your mouth to say as much. Then you close it again, tired down to your bones. “Good night, Remmick,” you say instead, and shut the window.

He is quieter after that, for a few days. Still comes, still knocks, but doesn’t push as hard. You start to think maybe the edge was a fluke.

It isn’t.

Weeks drip by, long and humid, days blurring into each other, and his need ferments like fruit left in the sun—it thickens. You feel it in the way his compliments change, lose some of their awkward stutter and gain a weight that sits low in your belly.

“You don’t know what you look like when you sing,” he tells you one night, voice rough. “You get this little crease right here.” He taps his own brow. “Makes a man want to smooth it away with his thumb. Makes him think about what else he might smooth on you if you let him.”

Your breath catches. “Keep talkin’ like that and I’ll smooth your jaw with my fist.”

He laughs, a real sound this time, warm and startled. “Worth it,” he says under his breath, maybe not meant for you to hear.

On another night, rain drums on the roof and your hair hangs damp around your face as you lean in the window, arms folded. He’s soaked to his shoulders, shirt clinging to every line of his chest and stomach, water dripping off the brim of his hat. You tell him he is a fool for being out in this storm. He shrugs, rainwater running down his neck.

“Could drown in worse things than fresh water and your voice,” he says, almost flippant. When you don’t answer, he shifts, fingers flexing at his sides. “Let me in outta the rain, songbird. Just tonight. I’ll sit on the floor, swear I won’t touch nothin’ but the puddle I bring in.”

“No,” you say, heart pounding a little too fast at the image his words paint. “You’ll drip all over my floor.”

He huffs. “That’s your worry?” There’s a note in his tone now, a tightness that wasn’t there in June. “Nevermind your good friend Remmick gettin’ struck by lightning for your sake, you’re fretting about your floorboards.”

“You ain’t my friend,” you remind him, a little too sharp, because it stings to hear.

He goes still, blinking rain out of his lashes. For a second, puzzlement flashes clear on his face, and underneath it, a flicker of something like annoyance. “No,” he says slowly. “Guess I ain’t.” He tips his head. “Wouldn’t wait outside my friend’s house like this, would I?”

You don’t have an answer for that.

By the time two months have curled in on themselves, his visits feel less like interruptions and more like a strange second life, one that only exists in the narrow space between your window and his shadow. 

The town knows nothing of it. The bar doesn’t see the way your shoulders tense in the late hours, anticipating the walk home. Your neighbors only know that you sing more at night now, soft tunes that slide under their dreams.

He knows more.

He knows what your voice does when you’re sick, when you’re joyful, when you’re furious. He knows your favorite hymn and the song you only sing when you are sure no one is listening. He knows the sound your bare feet make on these boards. He knows the way your silhouette looks when you stretch, arms over your head, nightgown shifting over the curve of your thighs.

And you, in spite of every rule you made for yourself, know him. You know which footsteps on the road are his before he knocks. You know the hitch of his breath when you hit a note he likes, the way his voice drops half an octave when he calls you darlin’ after a long day. You know how his patience frays and knots, how his need coils tighter each time he is denied what he hasn’t even truly asked for yet.

You start to feel it before you see it: a different sort of tension under his words, a low hum that sits under the compliments and the begging, something heavier.

Then one night, it’s just there.

Heat hangs low over the Delta, a wet weight pressing down on the roof. You come home earlier than usual from the juke, worn but not wrung out, your throat pleasantly used rather than scraped raw. You wash up in the little basin, strip out of your dress, and pull on a slip that clings in the humidity.

The house is quiet, fan ticking in the corner, window cracked just enough to let the night breathe in.

You hear his steps come up the road. They have a particular drag at the end of each stride, like his boots are a half size too big.

Tonight there’s extra weight in it, something deliberate. He doesn’t pause in the yard the way he usually does. The boards under your front steps complain softly, and your spine straightens.

He’s on the porch.

You go to the window, crossing the room with your pulse already thudding, and nudge it open another inch. The curtain stirs, and through the narrow gap you see him.

Remmick sits on the top step, elbows on his knees, hat dangling from one hand. His sleeves are rolled to his forearms, shirt open at the throat, hair mussed like he’s run his fingers through it too often. He isn’t pacing or shifting like he usually does; he’s very still, coiled in place, eyes aimed straight at your window even before you speak.

“You’re on my porch,” you say, voice low but clear enough to carry.

He tips his head back, finds you through the dim. Moonlight glances off his cheekbones. There’s a faint curve at one corner of his mouth that isn’t quite a smile.

“Evenin’,” he answers. His voice is hoarse, but the words sit steady. “Yeah. I am.”

“You’re breakin’ your rule.” Your fingers rest on the sill, not quite gripping. “You said you’d stay out in the yard.”

“Kept it a long time,” he says, shrugging one shoulder. “Longer than most men would.” The line has a dry edge that makes your brows pull together. “Figured I earned one step closer.”

“You figured wrong.”

“Maybe.” He huffs a breath. His knuckles flex around the brim of his hat. “Yard ain’t doin’ it tonight.”

“What’s so special about tonight?” you ask, even though you can feel the answer in the way he’s looking at you.

His gaze drifts, slow and unashamed, over the sliver of you he can see: bare forearm on the sill, curve of shoulder, the outline of your chest under thin cotton where the curtain doesn’t quite hide you. It rakes back up to your face, and whatever softness he’s been hiding behind goes thin.

“Been standin’ out here for weeks, listenin’ to you sing about men who ain’t worth your time,” he says, tone calm in a way that feels more dangerous than any pleading. “Watchin’ fellas in those bars put hands on what they don’t deserve. Then I gotta come park myself in the dirt like some stray dog and be grateful you throw me a song through a crack in the wall.” His jaw tightens. “Not tonight.”

Heat flickers low in your belly at the flatness of it, at the way he’s not hiding what sits under the words anymore. “You could also not come at all,” you point out.

“I tried that,” he says. “Didn’t take.”

You roll your eyes, even as your fingers curl a little harder on the sill. “What do you want, Remmick?”

His eyes stay on yours. Whatever rawness is in him tonight is packed down under something else—restraint, sure, but also decision.

“Want you to let me in,” he says simply. “Or you can come out here. I ain’t picky on the doorway, long as I’m on the same side of it as you.” He leans back a little on his hands, making a show of spreading himself out on your step, the outline of him filling your porch like he’s already claimed it. “I’m done pretendin’ I’m satisfied listenin’ from the bushes.”

Your breath stalls for a beat. “You really just say that to me?” you ask, incredulous. “Like there ain’t a dozen ways this could go bad for both of us if somebody sees you walkin’ out my house?”

He nods, slow. “I know where I am,” he says. “Still want it. That oughta tell you how far gone I am.”

You let the silence stretch, testing him. He doesn’t fill it with babble the way he might have a month ago. He just looks up at you, forearms tight, jaw set, waiting.

“And what exactly is it you want once you’re on ‘the same side of the doorway’ as me?” you ask finally, because you want to hear him say it, and you hate that you do.

His throat works as he swallows. When he speaks, his voice drops, losing the rough humor, losing the excuses.

“Want to make you feel as good as you sound,” he says. “That’s it. That’s all I been thinkin’ about for weeks.”

For a moment the words just hang there between you, heavy and humid as the air. You feel them all the way down your spine, pooling low, making your fingers tense on the sill. 

Make you feel as good as you sound. 

You should laugh in his face. 

Instead, you hear yourself say, “You talk a lot of mess for somebody who ain’t ever been invited nowhere.”

His mouth twitches, almost a smirk. “Been invitin’ myself to your window for weeks,” he says. “Figured I’d keep the theme goin’.”

You should close the window. You really should. 

Your hand even finds the frame, thumb pressing into the groove where the latch catches. But the sight of him there on your step—legs stretched out, forearms tight, shirt open just enough to show a damp patch at his chest—does something hot and traitorous to you. 

You picture him gone. Picture the porch empty, the night quiet. You picture waking up tomorrow with no soft knock, no low songbird, no man under your window drinking down your voice like salvation.

Your stomach dips hard at the thought.

“You come in here, you don’t touch the curtains. You don’t touch the front door. You do exactly what I say or I put you back out before you can get your boots off. You understand me?” you ask, voice steady even while your heart knocks against your ribs.

His eyes sharpen, something electric flickering there, quick and bright. “Yes, ma’am,” he says quietly. 

You draw in a breath that shakes a little at the end and pull back from the window. The boards creak under your feet as you cross to the door. Your hand fits on the little metal knob, slick with a sheen of sweat. For one beat you brace yourself there, palm flat, jaw clenched, listening to your own pulse.

Then you turn it.

The door swings inward with a soft scrape. Warm night air rushes in, carrying the smells of dirt and river. Remmick is already on his feet, hat in his hands, eyes catching every inch of you he can see in the dim front room light. He stops in the doorway, shoulders filling the frame, and actually hesitates, waiting for something you don’t understand.

“Remmick,” you say, impatience curling through your voice just enough to hide the tremor under it, “either come in or get off my porch.”

He lets out a short breath, steps forward, and your little house seems to shrink around him at once. He toes his boots off just inside without you telling him, like he’s afraid to track the outside world too far into your space.

He stands there in his sock feet, hat twisting once between his fingers before he sets it down careful on the little table by the door, as if he thinks you might throw him out for denting it.

Up close like this, with lamplight licking over him instead of moon, he looks even more undone than he did from the window. Sweat beads at his hairline, darkening the curls at his nape. His shirt clings to him, outlining the slope of his chest and the narrow line of his waist. His pupils are blown wide, eating most of the brown color of his eyes.

You shut the door behind him. The click of the latch sounds loud, final.

He works his jaw, dragging his gaze back to your face. “Didn’t think you ever would,” he says, and it comes out low, almost rough.

“Don’t make me regret it,” you answer, lifting your chin. You cross your arms under your breasts more for armor than modesty, aware of the way your slip stretches over them, of how the thin cotton clings to your stomach and hips. His gaze flickers down, then back up, like it hurts him not to stare.

“I wouldn’t dare,” he says, and something in the way he stands there tells you he understands you’re not talking about neighbors or mobs. You’re talking about you. Your body. Your say-so.

You tilt your head toward the back. “Bedroom’s that way.”

“You want me in there?”

You roll your eyes for show. “I didn’t let you in here to sit at my kitchen table and knit, did I?”

A breath that might almost be a laugh pumps out of him. “No, ma’am,” he says. 

You turn and walk down the short hall, feeling his presence behind you. The room feels different as soon as you step into it with him at your back, smaller and sharper, edges of familiar things suddenly vivid; the basin, the chair, the low bed with its thin quilt. You move to the side of the bed and turn to face him.

He stops dead in the doorway, hands hanging useless at his sides, eyes raking over you in a slow sweep. There’s awe there, sure, but it’s braided with something else now, something darker that you feel in the way his gaze pauses at the swell of your breasts, the flare of your hips, the bare line of your legs.

“Sweetheart,” he says, almost under his breath. “You look…” He trails off, shakes his head a little as if the words he wants keep sliding away from him. “Ain’t no language I know for this.”

You feel heat lick up your throat and try to squash it with sarcasm. “For a man with no words you been talkin’ all night.”

He licks his lips, a small flick of tongue that makes your pulse jump. “Been talkin’ for weeks,” he corrects, and there’s that edge again—thin, impatient. “Now I wanna put my mouth to somethin’ else.”

The bluntness of it steals the breath from your lungs for a beat. You feel your thighs press together on instinct.

“Bold,” you say, because you have to say something.

His mouth tips into a crooked half-smile you haven’t seen full-on before. “Been thinkin’ about you every night, hand on myself, tryin’ not to say your name ‘cause I know the walls in that room ain’t thick,” he says, voice low. “Bold’s the least of it.”

Your stomach flips. “You been—”

“Yeah,” he cuts in, no shame in it, just simple admission. 

You stare at him for a long breath, something hot and slow uncoiling low in your belly. It strokes at that little twisted pride in you, that thrill that has nothing to do with sense and everything to do with being wanted this badly.

“Show me,” you say finally.

“What?”

“Show me how you’ve been thinkin’ about me,” you clarify. “You said you wanted to make me feel good. Start there.”

For a half second he looks taken aback. Then you see something in him shift in the way his posture straightens, the way his shoulders square. That pathetic, pleading note that has colored his voice for weeks doesn’t vanish—it sinks down, becomes fuel—but what rises to the surface is focused, hungry.

“Yes, ma’am,” he murmurs again, but this time it sounds less like chastened obedience and more like a promise.

He closes the small distance between you in three strides. Up close his heat hits you like a wall, the scent of sweat and tobacco and something else underneath, something sharp that’s just him. He stops just short of touching you, his hands hovering at your sides, eyes searching your face.

You hold his gaze, feel your heartbeat thrumming in your throat, in your wrists, between your legs. All the nights of him outside this house, all the songs slipped through cracks, all the times you’ve gone to bed hot and restless and pretending you were mad rather than wanting. They all stack themselves behind you like a wall.

“Hurry up and touch me, Remmick,” you say.

He lets out a breath that sounds almost like a curse and sinks his hands into your waist, fingers spreading, thumbs digging into the soft flesh just above your hips. His grip is careful at first, like he’s testing the strength of you, the weight. Then his thumbs stroke once, firm, and you feel his control fray at the edges.

“God,” he mutters, more to himself than you. “So damn soft.”

His mouth finds yours before you can answer. it lands full and hot, lips plush. 

For all his months of hanging back in the yard, he kisses like a man who has been saving it up, tilting his head to slot his mouth over yours just right, one hand coming up to cradle the back of your skull. He swallows the little sound that slips out of you, low and involuntary.

His tongue brushes your lower lip and you open for him without thinking. He groans into you, pulls you closer until you are flush chest to chest, no more air between your bodies than there was between your words at the window. The hand at your waist slides down to the small of your back, pressing you into the hard line you can feel beneath his pants.

You break the kiss for air, panting lightly, but he doesn’t stray far. His mouth drags along your jaw, down the column of your throat, leaving damp heat in its wake. He finds a spot just beneath your ear that makes your knees soften and lingers there, teeth scraping, tongue soothing.

“You have no idea,” he murmurs against your skin, voice gone thick and southern-slow, “how many times I pictured you like this. How many nights I stood under that window and wanted to put my mouth on every inch of you instead of the words.”

“You’re talkin’ again,” you manage, fingers sliding up into his hair, feeling the damp curls under your nails.

He huffs against your throat. “Promised you I’d use it different,” he says. His hands skim down over your hips, bunching your slip up as they go, knuckles grazing the sides of your thighs. “Lemme get on my knees.”

The request punches straight through your composure. “For what?” you ask, voice already starting to fray around the edges.

He pulls back enough to look you in the eye. Whatever restraint he walked in here with is hanging by a thread now. His pupils are blown wide, his breath coming heavier. He slides one hand from your hip to the side of your thigh, fingers pressing into the soft flesh there.

“Let me taste you,” he says, and the words are pure hunger. 

Your answer is a sharp exhale and a tiny nod you barely manage to restrain. “Bed,” you say, because your legs are not to be trusted.

He moves you backward with a surety you haven’t seen from him before, hands guiding you until the backs of your knees hit the mattress. You sit, then scoot up as he gives a little tap to your thigh. He follows, but instead of climbing over you, he drops to his knees at the side of the bed.

The sight of him there knocks something loose in you. Remmick, who has haunted your nights from the shadows, sunk down at your bedside on worn knees, hands sliding up along the outside of your thighs, spreading you gently.

He pushes your slip up, up, until the hem pools around your waist and the night air kisses the damp heat between your legs.

He pauses, breath catching. You feel his gaze on you, heavy, almost physical. His fingers flex on your thighs, thumbs stroking once along the crease where they meet your pelvis.

“You’re wet already,” he murmurs, voice gone rough as gravel. 

You swallow hard. “You been runnin’ your mouth,” you point out, because you can’t give him all the power.

A crooked grin ghosts across his lips. “Guess I did somethin’ right,” he says, then leans in.

His breath hits you first, hot and damp, sending a shiver through you. Then his mouth is there, open and hungry, tongue flattening from base to tip in a slow, deliberate lick that makes your spine arch. You gasp, hand flying to his hair on reflex, fingers curling in the damp curls.

He groans the moment he tastes you, a low sound that vibrates against you. His hands tighten on your thighs, holding you open, and then he goes back in, more urgent this time, lips sealing around your clit, suckling it into the heat of his mouth. The sensation is sharp, bright, pleasure sparking out through your limbs.

“Rem—” you start, but the rest of his name fractures into a sigh as he drags his tongue down, down, licking into you, sloppy and eager. He is messy with it, unashamed; there’s no careful, tentative tracing. He eats you like a man who has been starving and finally found a meal, nose pressed into soft hair, mouth wet with you.

Your thighs try to close around his ears, muscles jumping, but his grip is iron. “Uh-uh,” he mutters against you, voice muffled but firm. “You called me in here, sweet girl. You’re gonna let me have what I came for.”

The possessive note in it should scare you. Instead, it lights you up.

He alternates between broad, slow licks that gather your slick and circle it back up, and tight, focused attention on your clit, tongue flicking, lips sucking, the faint scrape of teeth when he can’t help himself. He groans every time you roll your hips into his face, like your little movements are feeding him too.

“Sound so good,” he mumbles into you, words stuttering around your flesh. “All those nights, thinkin’ about what you’d sound like like this. I was close. But this? This is… Better than any song you sang through that window.”

You can’t even muster a reply. Your back bows, fingers digging into his hair, the other hand fisting in the thin quilt. Heat builds quick and insistent, your breath coming shorter, your voice breaking free in little gasps and curses you’d never let loose on stage.

“Remmick,” you gasp, hips stuttering. “There—there, right there—”

He grunts, adjusts, and then pins your clit with his mouth, sucking hard while his tongue flicks over it in short, relentless strokes. His hands slide down to the backs of your thighs, dragging you closer to the edge of the mattress, angling you just right. You feel the faint scrape of his stubble on your inner thighs, the way his jaw moves against you as he chases your pleasure like it owes him money.

It hits you fast, a sharp, spiraling clutch starting low and exploding outward. 

Your whole body tightens, belly coiling, thighs clamping as much as his hold allows. Your voice pours out of you without thought, broken and raw, his name in there, some scattered praise, some profanity.

Your climax rips through you, wet and hot, and he moans into you like he’s the one getting taken apart, licking you through it, drinking down everything you give.

You ride his face until you can’t, until the oversensitivity has you trying to jerk away. He eases up, merciful, but doesn’t let you go entirely. Just gentles his tongue, offering soft, slow licks that make your hips twitch. When you finally sag back on your elbows, chest heaving, he pulls away just enough to look up at you.

His mouth is shiny with you. His lips are pink and swollen, chin gleaming, a smear of you on his cheek. His pupils are blown black, and there is a wild, satisfied glint in them that makes your breath catch all over again.

“You taste so good,” he says, almost conversational, voice hoarse. “Shoulda known.” He drags the back of his hand across his mouth, then seems to change his mind halfway through and sucks the slick from his knuckles instead, eyes never leaving yours. “Could stay down there all night.”

Your cheeks burn, your whole body buzzing, but some stubborn streak in you rises, even as your thighs still tremble. “Your turn,” you manage, nodding toward the thick bulge straining against his fly. It looks obscene now that you’ve caught your breath enough to really see it, the outline of him pressing hard under the worn fabric, big and insistent.

A muscle jumps in his jaw. “Ain’t doin’ this for my turn,” he says, but his hand is already at his waistband, fingers fumbling with the buttons. “But I ain’t gonna lie and say I ain’t been dreamin’ about bein’ inside you since June.”

He gets his trousers open and his cock springs free, heavy and flushed, slapping lightly against his lower belly. Your mouth goes dry.

He is thick, longer than you expected, veins standing out along the shaft, head slick with precum that glistens in the lamplight. The size of him sends a spear of apprehension through the haze of your arousal, but it’s wrapped in curiosity that makes your toes curl.

He catches your look and his mouth hitches, ego sparked. “You see why I been standin’ out in your yard beggin’ for months,” he says, hand wrapping around himself at the base, giving one slow stroke that makes his head tip back on a low groan. “Ain’t a lot of folks I can give this to proper.” His gaze snaps back to your face. 

You swallow, legs spreading a little wider on the bed, wariness and want warring in your chest. “You better make it worth all that waitin’,” you say, because if you don’t keep talkin’ you’re going to start begging, and you refuse to let him have that satisfaction first.

His answering grin is sharp, pleased. “Oh, I plan to,” he says, standing and stepping in between your knees, looming over you. “I been rehearsin’ in my head for weeks.”

His hands slide up your thighs, rough palms catching on hypersensitive skin as he drags you closer to the edge of the mattress. One hand braces beside your hip as the other guides his cock to your entrance, the blunt, hot head nudging against your slick folds. Even that small pressure makes you suck in a breath.

He pauses immediately, eyes flicking up to yours. “You good?” he asks, and there is no impatience in it now, only focused concern.

You nod, throat tight. “Go slow,” you say. “At first.”

He pushes in, a careful, steady pressure that has your breath hitching in your lungs. The stretch burns in a way that sends sparks shooting up your spine, your body protesting and yielding at the same time. He groans, low and deep, the sound guttural, like the feel of you around him has punched it out of him.

“Jesus,” he pants, knuckles white where he grips the mattress. “You’re squeezin’ me so tight.” His hips rock a little, then still. 

You breathe through the stretch, muscles clenching, then relaxing around him. He is big, yes, but you are wet and already loosened from his mouth, and after the first inch or two, your body starts to understand what to do with him. You exhale slowly, shoulders dropping.

“Keep goin’,” you whisper.

He obeys, inch by inch, pushing deeper, every bit of progress dragging a different sound out of you. Little gasps, broken sighs, curses under your breath you didn’t know you had. When he bottoms out, hips snug against the back of your thighs, you feel impossibly full, stuffed so deep it’s like he’s sitting up under your ribs.

He stays there, buried all the way in, chest heaving, eyes squeezed shut like it’s taking everything in him not to move. “You… fuck,” he mutters, almost to himself. “You okay?”

You take stock. There’s still a faint burn around the edge of that stretch, but underneath is a deep, throbbing ache that is not quite pain, not quite pleasure, something poised right between, waiting for the right angle to tip. You roll your hips experimentally, just a little, and the way his cock drags against a spot inside you makes stars prickle at the edges of your vision.

“I’m okay,” you breathe. “You can move.”

He opens his eyes and locks them on your face like that is the only thing tethering him to restraint. Then he pulls out almost all the way, slow enough that you feel every ridge of him, and pushes back in with a steady, rolling thrust.

You moan, long and helpless. His mouth drops open and his control frays visibly.

“God damn,” he grits out, thrusting again, a little stronger this time. “Look at you takin’ it. Look at you.”

His hand finds your knee and hooks it up around his hip, opening you wider, changing the angle so that the next stroke grinds over that tender spot inside. You cry out, hand flying up to brace on his shoulder, nails digging into the warm, solid muscle there.

“That it?” he asks, voice ragged but intent. “Right there?” He snaps his hips again, sharper, and your answer is a strangled sound that makes his eyes roll back for a heartbeat. “Yeah,” he says, almost to himself, breath coming hot. “Right there. I got you.”

He pulls out slow, almost all the way, letting you feel every inch of him leave you, then drives back in with a deep, rolling push that forces a sound out of you you’ve never heard from your own throat. He does it again, and again, setting a rhythm that feels like it’s shaking your little house down to the nails. 

You can feel how thick he is, how you have to stretch around him with every push, fluttering and clutching, your body adjusting and then demanding more. He watches your face as he moves, eyes dark, jaw clenched, as if he’s cataloging each expression, storing them away.

Sweat slicks his chest, beads at your temples, slides down your spine. The cotton of your slip is bunched around your waist, his hips smacking against bare thighs with every stroke.

“Look at you,” he pants again, dropping his gaze for a moment. “You feel this?” He slows and presses in even deeper, grinding his hips down, and his free hand slides from your knee to your lower belly, palm spreading flat.

He presses, just enough to make you aware of how full you are, how he sits inside you. “Right here. That’s me. All of me.”

The pressure makes you whimper, head tipping back. You can feel him from the inside and the outside both, his cock snug and heavy, his hand splayed over the faint swell he creates in your abdomen. It sends a dizzy rush through you, something primal and greedy, your body clenching around him in a reflexive, possessive squeeze.

He groans, low and filthy. “Oh, you like that,” he breathes, rubbing small circles with his thumb on your belly while he holds himself deep, letting you feel every throb. “Got you so full. Been dreamin’ about this, you stuffed on me, holdin’ me so tight I can barely think.”

He draws back and starts to move again, no longer cautious. He finds a pace that has your whole body rocking, long, deep thrusts that roll his hips into you, followed by short, sharp ones that punch little gasps out of your chest.

The bed creaks in protest, wooden slats complaining beneath you. The little fan rattles against the window frame, useless against the heat that builds between your bodies.

He leans over you, bracing one forearm beside your head, the other hand dropping between your bodies to find your clit. The slide of his rough fingertips against the slick there makes your hips jerk. His touch is surprisingly careful at first, circling, stroking in time with his thrusts, testing how much you can take.

You arch into it, a broken whine escaping your throat before you can catch it. It only encourages him. He groans, mouth dropping to your shoulder, teeth scraping over damp skin.

“That’s it,” he murmurs, eyes hungry when he pulls back enough to see you. “Sing for me. Want to hear what you sound like when you come on my cock.”

“You’re—talkin’ too much,” you gasp, even as your body chases everything he gives it, grinding up into his hand and down on his length like you’re trying to climb him.

He laughs, breathless against your mouth, his lips brushing yours with each word. “You’ve complained about my mouth all night,” he says.

“But it ain’t stoppin’ you from squeezin’ me like that.” His fingers press a little harder, finding the exact pressure that makes your toes curl, two fingertips rubbing tight circles, slippery and steady. “And you sound so pretty when you talk back.”

He snaps his hips forward with a little more force and your breath stutters, your voice cracking into a louder cry. He catches it with his mouth, kissing you through it, swallowing the sounds, tongue sliding against yours with a desperate, messy hunger that matches the way he’s moving below.

The pleasure builds fast, sharper this time, pushed along by the constant, relentless drag of him inside you and the focused attention at your clit.

Your belly tightens, a hot coil winding tighter and tighter. Your thighs shake where they’re hooked over his hips, muscles fluttering, on the edge of giving out. You can feel your slick dripping down between you, feel him slide through it, hear the wet sounds of it every time he drives in.

He breaks the kiss to look down between your bodies for a second, watching the way he disappears into you, cock glistening each time he pulls back.

“You see that, darlin’?” he rasps, almost awed. “Milkin’ me already and I ain’t even seen how you come yet without my face between your thighs.”

You reach down on instinct, fingers brushing his knuckles where he works your clit, feeling the way his hand moves and the way your body leaps under each touch. Your other hand digs into his back. He grunts, hips jerking, thrusts going rougher for a few beats.

“Remmick, I—” you start, not even sure what you’re asking for, only that it’s too much and not enough at the same time, that you’re stretched tight as a wire and another second of this might break you.

“I know,” he grits out, eyes locked on your face, watching every twitch and gasp like it feeds him. “I know. You’re right there.” He adjusts his angle and his fingers speed up, rubbing harder, tighter.

“Come on,” he urges, voice cracking. “Been thinkin’ about this for weeks, you squeezin’ me while you fall apart. I need it. Need to feel you go.”

He thrusts deep and holds, grinding his hips down, pinning you to the mattress while his fingers work you without mercy. The pressure at your clit goes from strong to overwhelming, pleasure slipping straight into something blinding and consuming until it snaps.

Your climax slams into you, white-hot, tearing a shout from your throat that would put any stage wail to shame, raw and ragged and loud in the small room. Your whole body locks, back arching off the bed, head tipping back, mouth open on his name. Your walls clamp down around him in tight, pulsing waves, squeezing his cock in desperate, fluttering spasms that feel like they might wring him dry.

He curses, a raw, cracked sound, hips stuttering. “Fuck—oh, fuck—that’s it, that’s it, that’s it—” He drives into you a few more times, shallow and desperate, then buries himself as deep as he can and comes with a choked groan, face dropping to your neck.

You feel him jerk inside you, heat spilling, his breath fanning hot and ragged across your skin as he rides it out, muttering your name like a spell.

His mouth is open against your throat, panting, lips dragging over sweat-slick skin. At first it is just heat and breath and the scrape of stubble.

Then his teeth catch on you—sharper than you expect, a little too sharp—and for a heartbeat you think he is just clumsy, drunk on the feel of you.

“Remmick—” you gasp, half warning, half aftershock, nails biting into his shoulders.

“I got you,” he murmurs, voice wrecked against your pulse.

He nips, a quick, precise press right over the steady beat, and something in that bite feels wrong and perfect all at once, not just teeth but a pricking sting that sinks deeper than it should. A hot bloom of pain flashes, thin and bright, and then his mouth seals over it, sucking.

You feel it in two places at once: the pull at your throat and the answering tug low in your belly, deep where he’s still seated inside you.

Your body answers with a shiver that runs all the way through your spent muscles, another small wave of pleasure rolling over the edge of the last. He groans like he can taste it, tongue lapping at the small welling of blood, sucking slow and greedy.

The copper tang hits your own tongue when you swallow, faint in the back of your throat. Your pulse stutters, not entirely from fear.

His fingers flex on your hips, holding you steady as he licks at the sting, tongue soothing over the punctures until the sharpness blurs into a throbbing heat that makes your toes curl.

Something in the back of your mind notes how those teeth had no right being that sharp in a human mouth. The thought slides away under the heavy haze in your limbs, tucked somewhere you can drag out and examine later.

For now there is just his mouth, his weight, his cock softening slowly inside you while he drinks the last smear of red from your skin like he cannot stand to waste it.

Only when he is satisfied does he let your throat go, licking the mark once more before lifting his head.

For a long moment, the only sounds in the little room are harsh breathing and the slow tick of the fan. He stays buried in you, heavy and hot, his weight braced on his elbows so he doesn’t crush you completely.

You feel his heart thundering against your chest, feel your own trying to match it.

Eventually he manages to lift his head, just enough to look at you. His hair is a mess, curls sticking up any which way from your fingers, his face flushed, eyes still dark and a little dazed. There’s a faint smear of red at the corner of his mouth he doesn’t seem to notice.

“There,” he says hoarsely, a crooked, tired grin tugging at his mouth. “Told you. Better than the yard.”

event tags 💌 @perfume-and-oatmilk @tomiesgalpal @bleedingsunlight @meetmeatyourworst @valvalvalval-val @sinfulteeth @madkingcrowley @foxtufts @amaranthine-enihtnarama

[iamyourwayout]

New makeup BTS pics of Jack / Remmick from Mike Fontaine's Instagram! [x]

[lovebugism]

✶ — MY MAN ON WILLPOWER !

summary: when baelor reveals that he intends to fight with ser duncan in the trial of seven, you give him a compelling reason to stay. (3k)

characters: baelor targaryen / fem!reader, ft. maekar targaryen, aerion targaryen, and ser duncan

contents: another fix it fic because i'm still a widow in mourning :D, fem!reader, can be read as targaryen!reader because aerion and r have some real sibling behavior in this, mentions of pregnancy and pregnancy symptoms, very brief mentions of vomit, allusions to smut (MDNI)

You’d christen the Ashford Castle study if Baelor allowed it.

You’d lift the skirt of your pretty silk dress, drape yourself across his lap in his chair by the fireplace, and make a common whore of yourself in the empty room, if only your husband would let you. Most men, normal men, would perhaps jump at the opportunity for a quick fuck, but Baelor was not like most men. He was honorable, righteous; a man of both unwavering duty and impossible restraint.

When you throw yourself against him, wrapping your arms around his broad shoulders and pressing wet kisses to his scruffy neck, he only exhales a quiet laugh against your hair. He knows there is no time for such intimacy — not when there’s a prisoner in the castle awaiting his fate, and a young prince who wants to see a man’s head on a pike — and he mourns every second he doesn’t get to spend with you.

“How could you possibly be so wanting a time like this, hm?” Baelor hums teasingly, smoothing his hands up and down the length of your waist.

You pull off of his pulsepoint with a quiet smack, wearing a sheen of spit on your swollen lips as you grin up at him. “How could you possibly be so handsome at a time like this?” you retort.

“That must be the ale speaking, my dear,” he quips with a shy smile.

You meet his soft, brown-blue gaze with a pair of squinted eyes. “I’m perfectly temperate, I’ll have you know,” you argue, smiling despite yourself as you rise to the toe of your boots. The tip of your nose drags over the bridge of his as you murmur, “So forgive me, my love, for missing you…”

Your words trail off as you lean forward to press a sweet kiss to his lips, slow and languid — savoring the mint leaf taste in his mouth and the coarse scruff of his beard against your skin. You’d melt into him entirely if the gods allowed it. But Baelor possesses far more self-restraint than you do in the matter, and pulls away with a quiet click before you can deepen the kiss.

“Have you spoken to the maester yet, like I asked?” he wonders gently.

A flicker of confusion passes across your face. “For what?”

“Your dizzy spell this morning, for one. And your sudden food aversions, for another,” the older man lists, lips quirking into a gentle smile. (He’d make mention of your mood swings, too, if he had a death wish.) “As well as your… newfound appetite.”

You shove him by the shoulder, only partially playful. “Having an adoring wife is hardly enough to warrant a visit to the maester, Your Grace.”

“That was not my point,” Baelor laughs under his breath, turning on his heel and walking the short distance to his chair at the makeshift council table. He fans out the tail of his black coat before dropping into the creaking wooden seat. The melting candles on the table cast a flickering orange glow across his face as he tilts his chin to smile up at you. “I only want to make sure you’re okay, my love.”

“And I will be…” you hum in a mischievous lilt, towering over the man with the skirt of your dress balled into fists. You swing your leg over his spread thighs and brace your hands on his broad shoulders as you descend over his lap. “…When you give me what I want.”

“Spoiled thing,” Baelor scolds despite his own sly grin, gripping your hips in a pair of wide hands. “The rest of the council will arrive at any second, and you wish to hump my thigh like a bitch in heat.”

“I’ve pleasured you in less time,” you tease.

“You minx—” he chuckles and swats softly at your thigh.

Your entwined laughter fills the quiet, candlelit study and trails off in tandem as you close the distance between you. Baelor lifts his chin to meet you halfway when you duck down to press another kiss to his mouth. Your plush lips just barely brush his chapped ones before a set of footsteps echoes down the long hall.

“Seven fucking hells…” Maekar huffs, deep voice bouncing off the cobbled walls. “Haven’t I suffered enough for one day?”

“Oh, don’t stop on my account,” Aerion grins from behind his father when you slide off of Baelor’s thighs. “You wouldn’t have room for one more over there, would you—?”

He’s cut off by a dull smack of his father’s sudden backhand colliding with his jaw — not nearly enough to hurt, but enough to take the young boy by surprise. He cradles his cheek and gapes while Maekar continues on towards the long table.

“What in the seven hells was that for?” Aerion shouts boyishly.

“For bothering me…” Maekar mumbles vaguely, beneath the scraping of his chair as he takes his seat beside his brother.

Aerion shrinks inside himself as he follows behind his father like a hurt puppy. He scowls when he catches you snickering from Baelor’s other side, helping yourself to the small bowl of grapes that the help had set out for you — the only thing you can eat without the sheer thought of it making you utterly nauseous.

“Why is she not leaving?” Aerion argues like a child.

“Why did The Hedge Knight not kill you when he had the chance?” you retort in a gritty monotone, with a purple grape wadded in your cheek. “See? I can ask questions, too…”

Baelor and Maekar turn in tandem to gawk at your sudden ire. You and Aerion had a way of bickering like stubborn children, but you weren’t always quite this brash.

“I should have your tongue for that,” the silver-haired boy scolds, dragging the bowl of nuts away from his father and closer to him.

“On what grounds?” Maekar grumbles, lip twitching in disgust beneath his silver mustache as Aerion cracks one under the hilt of his dagger. “If you lack the fortitude to withstand harmless bickering, I’ll send you to the fucking septas instead of the battlefield…”

“You won’t defend your own son?” Aerion squints.

“Stop whinging,” you and Maekar answer simultaneously.

“Enough,” Baelor spits. “All of you.”

You flash your husband a wordless look of offense as another set of heavy footsteps enters the room — a pair of knights escorting Ser Duncan inside the expansive study. Your eyes grow wet, glittering with unshed tears beneath the flickering candlelight, because you’re not used to the older man’s scolding.

Baelor softens with a sigh, momentarily forgetting how sensitive you’ve grown in the past weeks (in more ways than one). He reaches for your hand beneath the table and wraps his larger fingers around your colder ones, giving you a reassuring squeeze there. Maekar grumbles a sound of disgust in his throat.

“T-Trial by combat,” Ser Duncan stutters, like he’d been preparing the words for some time and overthought exactly how to say them. He shifts before the prying eyes at the council table, like a prey animal trapped inside a seven-foot-tall man. “That— That is my right, is it not?”

Aerion answers the knight’s question with another hearty slam of his dagger against the table. “I refuse,” the boy shrugs before popping a walnut into his mouth.

Maekar grits his teeth at the boy’s audible chewing. “You cannot… refuse—”

“A trial of seven,” he declares instead, smirking through the crumbs in his mouth. “That is my right. I do believe.”

Duncan looks to Baelor, who looks to Aerion, who looks to Maekar, who looks to you.

“What the fuck is a trial of seven?” the father wonders aloud, pointing his question to the only person in the room who’s memorized nearly every book in the Red Keep.

“It came across the Narrow Sea with the Andals and their seven gods,” you explain. “They believed that if seven champions fought, the gods would be more likely to intervene, and see the guilty party appropriately punished. It hasn’t been invoked in nearly two centuries. Not since Damon the Devout—”

“Show off…” Aerion mumbles against the slam of his dagger.

“It’s more likely to be used by pious knights,” you continue with a pointed glare thrown the silver-haired boy’s way. “It’s not typically reserved for cowards who’d sooner risk the lives of his men rather than fight with honor—”

“Make no mistake, Daeron has been wronged in this as well,” Aerion explains with his mouthful, mostly towards his father. “Ser Duncan must pay for his crimes against each of us. Or shall we leave the Targaryen honor in doubt?”

“Do not speak to me of honor, boy,” Maekar spits. “This is fucking nonsense—”

“Aerion is within his rights,” Baelor says, much softer than the tension filling the candlelight study. He leans forward in his seat and flashes the Hedge Knight a look that borders on sympathetic. “We have no choice. You must find six other knights to fight beside you before dawn—”

“But I have no one else!” Duncan thunders as his pleading eyes dart to you. “Surely your gods must have something to say about that.”

“The Andals believed that, if the cause is just, men will rally behind it,” you explain softly, cowering in your seat. “And if they do not, then it’s because you are guilty— or because you’re facing a prince who fears his own chances of winning…”

Your head swivels slowly to look at the boy across the long table. The emotion in your chest snuffs out in an instant, replaced with a more fiery anger that prickles at your skin. Most of your feelings felt like that most days — misplaced and a little too big for your own body.

“What can I say?” Aerion grins. “I am nothing if not a pious knight—”

He’s cut off by Maekar’s chair scraping harshly at the cobble as he rises from his seat, yanking Aerion from his chair by the lapel of his coat. The boy stumbles over his feet as he scrambles to keep up with the man’s longer strides.

“Idiot,” the father spits, pushing his son off down the hall.

Lightning flashes purple in the sky, casting a daunting hue through the stained-glass windows, moments before thunder rolls overhead. Something about it feels like a bad omen.

“Find your champions, Ser Duncan,” Baelor tells the younger man. “You are dismissed.”

The guards reanimate from their posts by the doorway and take the dumbfounded Hedge Knight with kind eyes by the shoulders, urging him back the way he came. When they are finally gone, you and Baelor are left alone again, like you’d longed for all day, though something about this silence feels distinctly different than the one before.

Your eyes dart over the edges of the older man’s profile as he focuses on the darkened hall, down where his brother and Ser Duncan had disappeared. There’s something distant in his gaze, as though he were a thousand miles away in thought.

“My love?” you call gently to him, lifting a hand to cradle his bearded jaw. “What are you thinking about now?”

Your thumb swipes over his pale cheek. He melts instinctively into your touch, settling further into your delicate hand as his blue-brown eyes dart to yours. He blinks the pondering haze from his gaze and says, “About your going to see the maester—”

“Baelor…” you sigh dismissively.

“Please, my love,” he begs, always soft with you, but a little extra now — weighed down by his own stress and all the love he has for you. “I already have enough to worry about. Ease my mind on this, at least.”

The storm finally breaks on your way out of the infirmary, and now you know for certain it is a bad omen.

You return from the maester’s quarters with your cloak drenched in rain and a whole lot more than you bargained for — a babe, namely, which had taken seed in your womb two or three moons ago, who was most assuredly the culprit for your fainting spells, nausea, and your… suddenly carnal urges.

You spent about five minutes after the fact puking in the nearby garden, because a child was not something you had talked about with your husband — who had already done his duties as a father — let alone something you thought you wanted for yourself. You spend another five minutes trekking through the dimly lit castle to tell your husband the news.

The heavy wood creaks when the posted knight opens it for you. You murmur a quiet thanks and pass through the threshold into your candlelight bedroom, slipping your wet cloak from your head. The door thuds shut behind you a second later, in time with your heart falling to your stomach, when you catch Baelor looming before the wooden stand at the corner of the room — where Valarr’s black armor has been prepped to wear.

Your shoes scuff the cobbles as you freeze suddenly in place. The sound catches the attention of the man across the room, whose head snaps in your direction. He softens at the sight of you, rain-drenched and wet-eyed.

“Baelor?” you call to him, voice still weak from the previous wave of nausea.

“What did the maester say, my love?” he asks, wiping his oiled palms on a white cloth, from where the armor had been waxed to prevent rust.

You answer him with a question of your own, voice taut as your eyes dart between him and the lavish metal on the stand across the room. “What is this?”

“Armor,” he answers vaguely.

“Okay,” you nod. “But why is it in here?”

“Because I plan to use it,” the man confesses, unable to lie, least of all to you. “When I fight for Ser Duncan on the morrow.”

You flinch like he’s just backhanded you. You think it would hurt less if he had.

“Why in the seven hells would you do that?” you spit like fire.

Baelor meets your anger with a softness that never seems to leave him.

“You said it yourself, my love. If a cause is just, then just men will fight for it,” he answers with a sad smile, dropping the cloth to the table and walking slowly over to you. “Ser Duncan will be lucky to find six knights by sunrise, anyway. At least, I know I’ll have some air of immunity in the matter— The oath of the Kingsguard prevents them from harming a prince of the blood.”

“Why are you saying this like you’ve already thought about it?” you ask him in a fragile whisper, tilting your chin to keep his gaze when he towers over you. “Like you’ve already decided?”

“Because I have,” Baelor tells you. “Because it is the right thing to do—”

“The right thing to do,” you argue through gritted teeth, blinking back the burning tears that sting the backs of your eyes. “Is not risk your life when you know you have a son and a pregnant wife counting on you. When you have an entire kingdom relying on you—”

“Pregnant?” the man echoes with his greying brows lowered in confusion. It takes him a long moment thereafter to catch his breath. “You… You mean to say that… You’re with child?”

You swallow hard, nodding wordlessly for a moment, because this was not exactly how you planned on telling him that your lives were about to change forever.

“Yes,” you answer weakly, with your eyes turned to your hands wringing into knots before you. “The maester seems to think so, anyway. He assumes it might be a boy from the way I’m carrying thus far, but… It’s still too early to tell, he says…”

It takes you several moments to get the courage to meet his eyes again. You peer up at the man from beneath your lashes, clumped together with the tears you’d shed on the way over. You find his brown-blue irises glittering in the flickering candlelight, growing glassy at the revelation. The look of shock, adoration, and distant horror softening his weathered features makes your throat tighten with emotion all over again.

“That is why you cannot go, Baelor,” you whimper. “I forbade it. I’ll slaughter Aerion myself if I must, but I will not let you go.”

Baelor exhales hard through his nose, a faint laugh that doesn’t quite match the wet look in his gaze. He sighs and engulfs your wringing hands with his larger, gently calloused ones. “My love—”

You reject his softness, jerking your fingers from his grasp and reaching instead for the lapel of his black coat. You pull him closer and force him to meet your stern, teary-eyed gaze.

“You have to stay. You have to live,” you tell him firmly. “For me. For Maekar. For Valarr— For your unborn son.”

“A daughter,” Baelor corrects, half-strangled, and musters a wavering smile at the look you give him. “I hope it’s a girl. My sons have caused me enough stress for a lifetime, I think…”

You exhale through your nose in place of a laugh, softening under his touch when his wide palms smooth over your waist. You loosen your grip on his coat and trail your hands down his forearms until they settle much more gently over his wrists.

“Well, then, I hope she has your eyes,” you smile.

“And your everything else, Gods be good.” Baelor quips with a wider grin.

“So you’ll stay?” you whisper on bated breath, distantly fearful of his response.

“Aye,” Baelor nods once. “I’ll stay.”

You spend the long night discussing arrangements, baby names and birth plans and the like. Prince Aerion yields to his injuries by daybreak, the word of the Hedge Knight’s innocence spreads by nightfall, and the Targaryen camp returns to the Red Keep the following morning.

A baby girl is born to you some seven months later — named Casella, after Baelor’s Dornish grandmother — and she has his eyes.

[cosmictheo]

𝐒𝐇𝐄'𝐒 𝐌𝐘 𝐖𝐈𝐅𝐄 | baelor targaryen

| gif credits: @allyriadayne |

A/N: I am absolutely in love with @idksmtms's fics of Maekar having a young wife whom Dunk confuses with his daughter, and I just kept thinking about how Baelor would react if it happened to him 😭 so I wrote this. Special thanks to @vhagars-dementia for constantly blessing this fandom with her ideas!!! I dedicate this to you <3 And to all my Baelor enthusiasts.

— summary: ser duncan the tall thinks you're just a beautiful girl close to his own age, but his innocence is his undoing when he mistakes you for just another targaryen cousin. the only problem? you are actually the lady of dragonstone and baelor’s wife. — pairing: baelor targaryen x wife!reader — word count: 2k — content: controversial young wife!reader, age gap, humor, mentions of reader's hair length, jealous!baelor, implicit sexual references, pda.

The hedge knight spends more time than ever with the family, forever trailing after Aegon like a loyal hound, laughing, jesting, and, above all, eating.

It was only to be expected that the prince would invite his dear friend to the feast held at Dragonstone for the celebration of your name day. Your husband, Baelor, had prepared a banquet worthy of you, with an enormous cake and hundreds of servants rushing frantically through the castle, adorning the halls with flowers and colors chosen to your liking. He knew you exceptionally well, so it had been easy for him to decorate precisely how you'd like.

You had told him, of course, that such splendor was unnecessary, that a small supper with the family would have more than sufficed. Yet Baelor delighted in spoiling you, for you were the finest blessing he had been granted in a lot of time.

Whenever Ser Duncan the Tall found himself in your presence, he devoted most of his time to watch you from afar—seeing you laugh beside Baelor, play with Egg, or even speak comfortably with Prince Aerion. Your presence was nothing short of glorious, a magnet for eyes and devotion wherever you went. Your nature was exquisite—kind, gentle, and so unbearably sweet that at times Dunk thought you could scarce be of the same blood as the rest of them. 

And your beauty… that was another matter entirely. You were the loveliest sight the humble eyes of a hedge knight had ever beheld. Your form was wondrous, your face celestial, your long hair falling over your shoulders like a silken cascade, and your smile... it stole the very breath from his chest every time. Each time you entered his sight, a sigh would just escape out of him, soft and helpless, like a boy hopelessly in love.

“Do not even think it, Dunk,” Egg warns him, as he had more than once before, quick to notice the besotted look upon his big friend’s face as they sat together at the table. “That's out of your power to reach, Ser.”

But Dunk does not answer. He is far too intent upon you as you appear in the great hall’s doorway. 

Today you wear a gown of red, dazzling, adorned with pearls and white embroidery that spreads across your bodice, climbs your shoulders, and trails down the length of your spine, where darker crimson stitching forms the likeness of dragon scales. Your hair lies loose down your back, softly waved, gleaming in the candlelight.

All rise at your entrance.

Dunk is the last. He nearly stumbles over his chair in his haste, its legs scraping loudly against the stone floor as he shoves it back. That alone—and you—turn him red as a summer apple.

Valarr, seated at his other side, watches his brutish motion with poorly hidden amusement.

“My love,” Baelor calls first, his face gentle as drifting clouds, fondness curving his lips as he comes to greet you properly. “Happy name day.”

You accept his embrace, smiling as he presses a tender kiss to your hair.

After him, the others come in turn, forming a line to offer their wishes, their thanks, their gifts—small tokens and letters placed into your hands.

Egg flings himself into your arms, making you laugh and sway back a step beneath the force of him. Baelor, standing close at your side, smiles at the sight. Ever tender are you with the younglings, and for that, he loves you all the more. You shower his children with a devotion so maternal and steadfast that one would never guess they did not spring from your own womb.

“Thank you, my sweet Aegon,” you tell him, stroking the fine, pale silver-gold hair already sprouting upon his head. The boy had even brought you a flower—one of those you cherished most, a silent token of his affection.

Duncan feels painfully out of place when his turn comes. Standing empty-handed while his stomach twists into a tight, miserable knot.

He is already flushed when you lift your gaze to him, your eyes sparkling with amusement at the familiar effect you have upon him—his trembling hands, his stammer, his shy smiles. He's so cute!

“Ser Duncan. I hope you would be here,” you greet him warmly, you know well the bond he shares with Aegon; to have him present is a comfort to your heart. “Aegon speaks wonders of you. It does not surprise me to see you have become each other's shadow.”

“My lady,” Dunk answers you, his voice no louder than a mouse’s squeak. His gaze, much against his better judgment, betrays him, making a swift, helpless journey over the length of your body.

And Baelor notices, of course; his smile fades, slow and certain, as he watches the knight’s every movement like a hawk perched upon your shoulder. A single brow lifts slightly, and a deep, thoughtful furrow begins to cloud his brow.

Duncan clears his throat and casts your husband an apologetic glance before daring to look at you again. “I— I beg your pardon. I would not wish to be an intrusion upon your name day. Your father was kind enough to grant me to attend.”

The hall falls into sepulchral silence. The small conversations that bloom among the Targaryens die at once when Dunk’s words echo through the great chamber, their meaning plain, their offense unmistakable and unashamed. Even the youngest cease their play, and the servants stand frozen right where they are.

All turn to stare at Duncan now, and they look upon him with mortified eyes, as though none dare breathe.

Somewhere, someone fails to smother a laugh—most likely Aerion.

Egg’s mouth falls open in mortification. He looks up at his friend, his expression stricken, willing him to understand—to see—that what he has just said is wrong. Very wrong.

Duncan looks down at him when his small squire gives his shin a furtive kick, meant to draw his notice without the others seeing. He frowns, bewildered, not understanding what offense he has given now to deserve such a blow.

And when he looks back to the grown folk, he finds you watching him with an expression poised in perfect balance between horror and amusement. There is even the faintest hint of a smile at the corner of your lips, one you must press away when you turn your head toward your prince.

Baelor does not look pleased as you do.

His face is uncommonly stern, his brow drawn tight, his lips pressed into a hard, unforgiving line, he is trying to gather every shred of his restraint to keep from striking the foolish knight upon your name day.

“She is my wife, Ser Duncan,” he clarifies, his patience stretched thin, drawn so taut it borders upon offense. His hand comes to curl around your waist as you lean into him, lifting one hand to his chest in quiet reassurance.

You are still trying to hide that treacherous, amused smile.

“Oh—Seven—” Dunk breathes, realization striking him at last. He drops at once to his knees, bowing his head in reverence and shame. “I beg your forgiveness, Your Grace. I—I did not know. My manners are poor—you must understand, I never m–meant offense.”

“Of course not, Ser,” you reply kindly, looking down at him, still leaning against your husband’s chest. He lets out a soft sigh beneath your touch, your hand rising and falling with the steady motion of his breath.

Baelor makes a sharp, dismissive gesture for him to rise. “See that it does not happen again.”

“Of course!” Dunk scrambles to his feet at once, his face burning red with shame. “I only meant that she is so young and beautiful, and you—”

His frantic blue eyes fall upon Valarr, standing just behind his father. The prince shakes his head swiftly, his mismatched eyes widening in urgent warning, bidding him to hold his tongue.

Dunk obeys at once and his jaw snaps shut so hard it almost snaps apart.

“You witless boy,” Maekar rebukes him, his face twisted with disgust and disdain when the hedge knight dares glance his way, standing at your side like some old, ill-tempered hound. “That should cost you your fucking tongue.”

Your soft laughter breaks through the tension of the moment, and all turn to look at you, the heavy air easing when they all realize this offends you not half so deeply as it does them.

“I am certain Ser Duncan meant no malice, Maekar,” you say, seeking to soothe them—most of all your husband. “And I should not like to see any tongues torn out upon my name day, please.”

Baelor’s gaze remains fixed upon the mortified knight, his hand coming to rest upon the pommel of his sword—a blade he carries in quiet defiance of your pleas to remain unarmed this day. He thinks, perhaps, that he shall have a use for it against Ser Duncan.

“... shall we eat at last, then?” Comes Daeron’s unmistakable voice from somewhere within the hall. “I am hungry. And thirsty.”

“Of that, none have any doubt,” Maekar mutters, rolling his eyes as he returns to the table.

The others follow in his wake, granting you and your husband a moment alone.

Ser Duncan gives you another quick, apologetic bow before hastening out from beneath your husband’s gaze.

You cannot hold it any longer.

A breath of laughter escapes you, soft and bright, and you turn in Baelor’s arms to face him fully. 

He is still watching the place where Duncan stood, his jaw tight, his shoulders rigid beneath your touch, as if the insult lingers in the air like a foul smell.

Your fingers curl more firmly into the front of his doublet to call for his attention.

“My prince,” you whisper with a smile when his two-toned eyes finally meet yours. “My heart...”

You rise onto your toes and press a gentle kiss to his cheek, his beard tickling against your skin. His body noticeably softens beneath your warm affection.

Another kiss follows, softer still, at the corner of his mouth.

And one more, sweet and lingering, upon his lips.

“Peace,” you plead humorously against his mouth, your fingers toying idly with the Hand of the King’s badge on his chest. “You look as though you mean to challenge the poor knight to single combat over a slip of the tongue, my love.”

“I am not amused,” he manifests, his tone remarkably sullen, yet you press another loving kiss to his lips to chase away his pettish little pout.

“No?” You lean closer, your voice drops into something more playful and teasing, “is it because he thinks you're old, husband?”

His lips tremble at your words, holding back an ironic smile, and his hands tighten at your waist, pulling you closer against him.

Baelor clicks his tongue, and your gaze falls to his lips as he does. “I am not old.”

“Well, considering my own age... truthfully, you are a bit older,” you continue to tease him, biting back a small laugh at his startled reaction. “Should I begin calling you father now, hm?”

His beautiful eyes narrow.

You grin—and steal another quick kiss before he can protest.

“Do not push your luck, wife,” he warns all the same, a playful little smile curving his lips. His hand slides down to the small of your back before he delivers a sharp, scolding swat to your backside, making you jolt lightly against him.

His brow arches slightly. “You are the only one left breathless and trembling like some frail, ancient little thing. Or must I remind you how you clung to me the other night and begged me to—?”

Your hand flies to his mouth, covering it before he can utter another word.

“My prince,” you hiss under your breath, though laughter trembles in your voice, your eyes wide with scandalized amusement. “You grow bold. We are in a hall full of eyes, and your sons sit but a stone's throw away.”

His lips move against your palm, pressing a lingering, heated kiss there that sends a shiver down your spine. Baelor gently pulls your hand away, though he does not let go of your fingers, his thumb stroking your knuckles with a slow, possessive rhythm, grazing your betrothal ring.

“Let them look,” he dismisses, leaning into you to kiss your lips properly, claiming them. And claiming you.

The heated kiss, at last, forces Duncan’s eyes away from you, and Baelor smiles against your mouth as he watches him behind you, finally closing his own eyes to savor the honeyed sweetness of your kiss.

[sylasthegrim]

Better Death than Dishonor

Pairing • Baelor Targaryen x wife reader

Tags • spoilers for akotsk episode 4, established marriage, light angst & comfort, smut, lovemaking, p. in v. sex

Wordcount • 2,250

On the night before the Trial of Seven, Baelor is troubled and ponders what it means to truly be honorable and to stand for what is righteous. He makes peace with his decision while in your arms.

Ashford was gloomier than you had anticipated, but you kept your complaint to yourself—after all, your husband Prince Baelor had spoken against you joining him on his journey, but you had scarcely been able to stand the idea of being separated for too long. For a few days before the departure, you had even expected him to use his rank as prince and Hand of the King to order you to stay behind in King’s Landing, but with a last sigh and a word of wise advice, he had allowed you to come.

The Targaryens were not in favor with the people of the realm, you knew, and in the end the presence of a lady would perhaps soothe some of the tensions—now, that hope had vanished, and you could see how heavily it weighed on your husband’s mind. The line of his shoulders was tense, and there was a frown on his handsome face, much like when he was pondering an unsolvable problem.

Maekar had been insufferable since you’d arrived, which was expected from your brother-by-law, but for once you could hardly blame him as his sons had been missing, and now you wished they hadn’t joined this journey altogether. 

Night had fallen over the castle for a few hours now, but your husband still seemed far from finding rest. Baelor was pacing the length of his guest chambers, absently twirling his rings and sighing from time to time, sounding weary and preoccupied.  

As Hand of the King he had often pondered difficult matters into the darkest hours of the night, however for some reason this particular one clung to him. He loathed to admit it out loud, unwilling to admit the failures of his own blood, but his nephew Prince Aerion had crossed a line no honorable man should have.

While he understood the dangers of representing the death of a dragon for common amusement, he could not condone the wanton violence Aerion had unleashed on the puppeteers. Now good men might lose their life for it, and he lamented the waste of honorable spirits and proficient swords.

Sensing his unease and internal torment, you had spent the last hour watching him like a hawk, your eyes following his pacing from the best, where you were nestled, comfortably resting in the hearth’s warmth and the numerous pelts provided.

There was no adequate word to say how much he appreciated your silent presence, which was more grounding than any other outlet might have been—some men took to wine to soothe their spirits, all he needed was for you to rest your eyes on him, and allow him to exhaust his thoughts until he had reached an acceptable conclusion.

“Come to bed, my love,” you gently called after a sigh too many, and on instinct, his legs moving without his conscious mind, he started taking a few steps towards the bed. “Surely night will bring you clarity.”

Baelor sighed, twirling one of his rings around his finger, feeling the smooth edges of its stone. “I wish I had your certainty,” he replied. “However I don’t think sleep will come easily tonight.”

At that you sat up, leaning back against the pillows—you made the most enticing sight, your skin glowing in the low light of the candle at your bedside, your natural beauty coming through despite the late hours and obvious worry etched on your face.

“Are you truly so worried about this trial?” you inquired, reaching out to him, and he gladly came, obeying your silent call. “I am sure Maekar and Aerion will be fine, they always are. Nothing can cut such harsh characters,” you added with barely concealed contempt.

Standing over you, he allowed you to take one of his hands in yours, sighing contentedly when you pressed a reverent kiss to the back of his, then soothed his knuckles with the softness of your palm. 

“That is not what troubles me, my love,” he said, his chin dipping forward in weariness.

“What is it, then?”

For a moment he allowed himself to get lost in your eyes and soft touch, wondering whether the decision he feared he would make on the morrow was the right one—but how could he call himself a man of honor and stand idly as his nephew abused his power and his rank to reign terror over common people. He dared not speak any of this aloud, for fear of worrying you more than was necessary. 

“Ser Duncan was right, in coming to the defense of these folks,” he conceded, shaking his head. “I only regret that Aegon called for him, otherwise an honorable man might not be headed for his death.”

This gave you pause—you looked up at your husband beneath your lashes, and he wanted to smile at how your gaze never bore anything but love when it was placed upon him. Better men than him had dreamed of a wife such as you, and so little had been granted their wish, and he could only hope to be deserving of this blessing.

“This world is rarely kind to honorable men,” you said regretfully, taking his hand to the side of your face, resting your cheek against it before he turned his palm and you buried your face in it, cradling his wrist like his touch alone was more precious than any earthly matter.

“Because it is so, does not mean it causes me no trouble,” Baelor admitted, and it prompted you to rise to your knees on the edge of the mattress. “I am afraid Ser Duncan will not find seven knights to his cause.”

Without a word, you reached for his rings and pulled them off, one by one, setting them aside on the bedside table. They made a sharp clinking sound in the otherwise quiet room, and when your hands came for his belt, he did not stop you, and soon his calf-length doublet was set aside at the foot of the bed.

“No more of this. Tomorrow shall come whether or not you agonize over it. Come to bed,” you murmured again, your hands spreading warmth at his chest, pressing your palms into the firm muscle of his shoulders before looping your wrists at the back of his neck.

The tips of your fingers dug into the tension there and Baelor let go of a breath he did not know he was holding, his shoulders dropping slightly. 

There was no need for a verbal answer, as you knew the language of his body well enough—you waited patiently for him to divest himself of the rest of his clothing, toeing off his boots and dropping his trousers and breeches. Rising higher on your knees, you pressed kisses to his face, the wrinkles at the corner of his eyes that faded into the sharpness of his cheekbones whenever he winced, the corner of his mouth hidden by the neat edge of his graying beard.

Though he loathed to lose your warmth even for a second, he curled his hands around your arms and unhooked them from around his neck to lift his shirts off his shoulders—when the fabric had passed over his face, a small smile pulled at his lips—you had done much the same, discarding your nightgown.

Although the simple pleasure of admiring your body would be enough to soothe him, from the planes of your skin to the curves of your breasts, belly and hips, he yearned to feel your touch and lose himself in your embrace.

One hand to your face, cradling your jaw every so carefully, he slanted his mouth over yours in a slow, practiced dance. His lips were warm, if slightly chapped, but ever so familiar. There was a comfort to the way he kissed you, reverently, with unwavering wonder, as though each night he was rediscovering the pleasure of being in your arms, and never grew tired of it.

The drag of his carefully trimmed beard was delicious against the sensitive skin of your face, and you surrendered to him fully, leaning back into his strong hand resting at the small of your back.

Baelor groaned when you went limp in his grasp, allowing him to tip you back onto the mattress, your knees falling apart with the practice of a thousand nights, welcoming his body into yours as though their natural state was to be one. 

“Baelor,” you sighed, the sound of his name on your lips sweeter than any other.

“My love,” he answered, as he always did, refusing to let any of your calls or declarations go unanswered.

Rocking your body into his, you settled into the soft wave of your mounting arousal. On the road, finding the comfort necessary for a moment of intimacy was harder, but it made it all the more precious. It had been a short while since you had felt him inside of you and you longed for it, much as it seemed he did. His length was a hard line of heat at your core, sliding expertly over your core with each roll of his hips, and a plea was on your lips before you could form the thought, but it was not needed.

Never had you ever needed to beg—whatever you desired was yours, if it was in his power to grant it.

Mouth over yours, his tongue curling with yours as though words and promises could pass from his mind to yours in this way, he reached between your bodies and took hold of himself. Ever so careful not to hurt you, he parted your folds, nudging the head of his manhood into the slight dip that led into your body.

“Baelor,” you called again, melting into him, and he sighed your name just as reverently. 

Gently but firmly, he breached you in one smooth thrust that felt like coming home after battle. Baelor groaned aloud, burying it into the crook of your neck—he marvelled at how the first push into you always made his mind spin, the heat of your body going to his head like no wine ever could. It was made even more so by the way you arched into him, your hips rolling to meet his, your hands tightening at his shoulders.

It made him want to declare his love in languages he did not know, to profess endless vows, both earthly and divine. Out there, he was the Prince of Dragonstone, the Hand of the King—in your arms, he could be a simple man, praying at the altar of your love.

The drag of his length against your walls was a relentless wave and your pleasure, a mounting tide. Each thrust was more intense than the last and soon the two of you were caught in a whirlpool, unable to escape the furious chase towards release. Baelor knew the tells of your face and your body, how you curled your knees at his waist, how you grew wetter around his length, clenching on the downstroke. 

Although you found breath at his very skin, your hands roamed across his body—along the expanse of his back, across his broad shoulders and down his arms, then up again to tangle at the short hair at his nape. His senses thrummed whenever you would trail down his beard, feeling the corners of his mouth through his beard, pressing humming kisses to his lips.

A sound like a sob falling from your lips was his undoing, and he could only watch as you broke apart in his arms, shattering into breathless moans—never did your eyes leave his as long as they could stay open, and even when they fluttered shut and your head lolled back onto the sheets, he kept looking down at you.

Baelor’s own pleasure was found in strong pulses, the tension at the base of his spine releasing with breathtaking force, and your body welcomed it, still shivering, your peak coursing through you longer, leaving you sated and in bliss, your arms stretched above your head.

Baelor hummed his own delight in the divot between your breasts, stretching the moment for as long as he could, then kissed the soft skin inside of your arm, before slowly entangling you and laying down on the sheets. With a soft sound you followed him, curling your limbs along his side, your thigh hooked over his, your head resting at his breast.

A sudden dread curling at the pit of your stomach and you sighed. Baelor waited for you to speak, but he already knew the warning that was coming. He curled his arm around you, the tips of his fingers tracing a line from your shoulders blades to your spine. 

“I beseech you, my love, please be careful on the morrow,” you murmured. “At the trial.”

Baelor sighed amusedly, at how perceptive you were once again proving yourself to be, and how well you knew him and his mind, oftentimes better than he knew himself. “Come back to me unscathed, shall you?” you whispered at his heart beating steadily under your cheek.

“I shall,” he vowed.

“Some days I wish honor did not matter to you as it does, so that you would be kept safe, but who would you be without it?” you mused aloud, tracing a mindless pattern on the graying hair at his chest. 

“A man undeserving of his heritage,” he answered, pressing a reverent kiss to the crown of your hair, and as usual, you answered, your soft lips whispering a prayer against his skin.

Dividers by @zaldritzosrose. Comment if you wish to be added to my Baelor taglist.

PLEASE COMMENT AND/OR REBLOG TO SHOW SUPPORT ♡

Baelor taglist: @multyfangirl @valarrs-targaryen @mafencey1 @thenameswinter99

[coligraven]

𝐒𝐇𝐈𝐍𝐄, 𝐁𝐀𝐁𝐘, 𝐒𝐇𝐈𝐍𝐄

welcome to derry x reader | richard "dick" hallorann x black! fem! reader

dick had never met such a beautiful woman before... much less one with such a strong shine. little did he know, she would change the trajectory of his life forever.

OR

the story of how you and dick got together

cw - smut, 18+, fluff, angst, takes place in the 40s, age gap (reader is 21 and dick is 29 when they first meet), reader has an unnamed brother (dead), reader has the shine.

a/n - let me know if y'all want a part two.

Hawaii, 1946.

The moment Dick stepped foot on that Hawaiian airstrip, your presence hit him like a brick to the face.

Sharp.

Heavy.

Loud.

It came without warning, an ache-inducing force that screwed his eyes shut and made his head ring—if he was being honest, a brick would've hurt less.

Not malevolent, but idle and painful in the same way shrill feedback whined in a microphone, or nails scraped on a chalkboard.

It made him violently flinch—to the rightful confusion of the airmen around him—its weight pressing heavy on his chest and shoulders almost as if someone was sitting right on top of his neck.

Knowing that would've made sense of why a grown man suddenly slapping his hands over his ears mid-march.

"Ay, c'mon, man! Keep it movin'!" one of them grumbled, brows furrowed as Dick froze, the two roughly colliding and creating a pile-up in line.

A chorus of other sharp complaints erupted from further back—some more savory than others—while a few rough shoves made their way forward.

At the noise, the man in front of him turned around, his expression one of confusion before he surveyed the situation.

Soldier.

Ears covered.

Eyes distant.

Frozen.

It didn't take a rocket scientist, especially for a fellow man in the service.

"Hey! Take it easy, alright?" he defended, brows furrowed as he shot a sharp glare at the men behind, resting a careful hand on Dick's shoulder as he softly ushered him forward. "C'mon, brother, you gotta keep movin'."

Dick allowed himself to be led, his eyes and ears slowly but surely beginning to refocus as his body acclimated to the intense sensation.

It wasn't easy, but gradually he lowered his hands, breath faintly regulating as the shrill whine became just barely bearable, allowing him to resume walking on his own.

But although the weight was lightened, it was nowhere near gone, and, in fact, made his every step feel about twenty pounds heavier.

"You alright there?" the good Samaritan asked, his smile one of comfort. "We lost you for a minute."

Coming back to himself, Dick shook his head in apology, sliding a hand over his face.

"Y-Yeah," he croaked. "M'sorry, I just—"

"Hey, don't worry about it. My brother's the same way," the man sighed, tapping an understanding pat on his back. "We all got diff'rent things to deal with now that the war's over."

Turning, he held out his hand to shake.

"Fred Johnson."

Dick took it.

"Dick Hallorann."

But from then on, as hard as he tried to listen to Fred as he chatted away, Dick couldn't help but allow his mind to travel back to the impression made by whatever he had been hit with upon arrival.

Never in his entire life had he ever felt a Shine so strong.

It was potent, broad like a thick fog seeping its way into forbidden space, touching, reaching.

Feeling.

While getting accustomed to the sensation might not have been pleasant, it wasn't long before the sensation itself became partly soothing and even a bit satisfying.

A distinctly warm hum he had never felt, a silvery soft voice he had never heard.

And it followed him no matter where he went on base.

The hangar.

The barracks.

The canteen.

Hell, the goddamn bathroom.

Every time he ventured further inward, the thicker the "fog" seemed to become.

It got so bad that when he was called into the medical wing for a classified check-up, he physically struggled to make it down the hall, almost as if an invisible barrier was in the way, stretching in an attempt to keep him from stepping further.

Dick wrestled with it, teeth locked tight as he did everything in his power to press forward, even as his boots began to slide on the linoleum floor.

If anyone saw him like this—a negro airman hunched over, struggling to move in an empty hallway—he was sure they would ship him off to the nearest asylum.

But, by a stroke of luck, he managed to grab on to a door handle, using it as leverage to hoist himself up before yanking it wide open.

And the moment he did, it felt as if the bubble had popped.

In an instant, all the feedback in his head was gone—the noise, the buzz, the weight—a kaleidoscope of light and happiness blooming in its place.

In an instant, the world turned Technicolor, vibrancy and saturation previously invisible to the human eye now bursting from every inch of the room, drowning the room in pure and potent life.

The plants perked higher.

The sky glowed bluer.

The air became clearer.

As a whole, the world seemed better.

But Dick didn't notice.

How could he?

How could he notice anything else in the room, anything else in the world, when the most beautiful woman he had ever seen was sitting right in front of him?

With the sunlight from the window hitting just right?

With hair falling so perfectly?

With big eyes staring back at him like two glittering gemstones of brown garnet?

This must be what people felt like when they were about to die... or maybe when they've just come to life...

He honestly wasn't too sure.

And he honestly didn't care.

For the first time in a long time, he felt whole—really and truly whole.

So whole that he didn't even realize he'd been standing there and staring at you like an idiot for five minutes straight.

"Mr. Hallorann?"you called for the umpteenth time, praying that this would be the one to get his attention. "Mr. Hallorann."

At the angelic sound of your voice, he snapped himself out of it, eyes refocusing to really look at you.

Your face was faintly flushed, cheeks puffed and lips upturned awkwardly.

It wasn't every day you felt a man fall in love with you in real time.

"Mr. Hallorann, if you're ready, Dr. Corcoran will see you now."

Your curt statement instantly sobered Dick, forcing him to remember himself, and where he was.

"O-Oh, yes," he quickly cleared his throat, straightening up his posture. "Yes, I am. Thank you, ma'am."

Avoiding all eye contact, he speed walked toward the doctor's office, physically restraining himself from looking back at you as he proceeded with what he came for.

...

You weren't a stranger to the perks that came with being an empath.

As a child, you used it to suss out when your aunt was upset—when it was right to ask her for something, when it was time to keep quiet, when your brother had just gotten a beating.

As a woman, you used it to survey your surroundings—what men to stay away from, what officers had bad tempers, what the other women on base felt about you.

As a nurse, you used it to assist your work—finding what hurt where, understanding a patient's pain, knowing exactly what to say to make it all feel better.

Did you have much control over your power?

No, not as much as you'd like—every emotion had a different intensity, and every person felt things differently, making it impossible to blanket everything.

Were there times when you felt your power was more trouble than it was worth?

Yes, but that came with the territory of super-powered compassion—growing up during the Great Depression, you had gotten more than your fair share of whoopings for giving money to the homeless when you were already quite poor yourself.

Were there times when you wished you'd never been cursed with this power at all?

Absolutely, but you'd dealt with it all your life, what else could you possibly know?

And whether you liked it or not, it had given you a very useful leg up in the world, especially for a woman and even more so for a black women.

Though, it was times like these... times when Dick Hallorann entered the room... that you began to rue the day you'd been born.

You'd felt him before you saw him, your eyes still trained on the Moscow Mule you'd been nursing as his familiar, swirling apparatus of tensity nudged its way into the bar.

You'd sensed him when he first arrived, too—you were mid-flu shot, the sudden and surprising buzz in the back of your head nearly startling you into maiming a Private.

And even during your meeting in the medical wing—with great difficulty given his overwhelming flood of wonder and adoration—you sensed him, and knew quite instantly that he was just like you.

At first, you were over the moon.

You had never met a person like you before, and thus your first instinct was to introduce yourself, ask him about it, pry free all the little details.

But it wasn't long before the words of your brother began to echo in your mind.

"Listen to me, (n/n)... you can never ever never tell anybody about what you can do."

"Never? ...But why?"

"'Cause it's different, and people wouldn't understand... they'd call you crazy."

"But you understand."

"That's 'cause I'm your brother. I'm s'posed to understand. But people like Aunt Zola... they'd hurt you, or lock you up somewhere."

"I don't wanna be locked up!"

"I don't want you locked up either! S'why I'm gonna make sure we stay okay. I'll get some money, we'll move away, and be able to do whatever we want. I promise."

"Reaaally?"

"Go on, check if m'lyin'."

Your little eyes screwed shut, cheeks puffing and brows furrowing as you concentrated, a smile stretching across your lips as his sincerity bled through clear as day.

"See! I promise, (n/n), once I save up, we'll be gone. And we'll travel the world together... just you and me."

There was safety in silence, a protection in privacy.

Certain things would have to remain a mystery if you wanted to maintain your way of life.

"'Scuse me," a familiar voice asked. "This seat taken?"

Shit.

You didn't have to look up to know who it was... but you did—only he had that distinct emotional mixture of curiosity, fear, and attraction.

And sure enough, there stood Mr. Hallorann, dressed in a nice, button-down shirt, tie loosened just enough to free up his neck.

Judging by his expression, he seemed to be having a hard time being near you, face stuck between pain and faint comfort.

Regardless, you sighed, taking a sip of your drink, "I s'pose not," and nodded to the stool next to you.

He took it, plopping himself down and ordering a beer before turning to you, wincing and squinting as if he had just glared into the sun.

Jesus, it was a goddamn miracle you hadn't been sensed by every person in Oahu...

Unable to take it anymore, his gaze sharpened, training on your face—much to your severe confusion and discomfort.

"Don't panic," his voice suddenly echoed, though his mouth failed to move. "I'm not here to hurt you."

Instantly, your eyes went saucer wide, and you nearly spit out your drink mid-sip, body already positioned to sprint out the joint as you shot to your feet.

But before you could, Dick firmly grabbed your hand, fingers interlocking.

"Hey, hey, hey, easy... please listen to me.  I promise, I'm not here to hurt you... I just wanna talk."

You hesitated, eyes frantically flicking over his face, power going into overdrive as you searched for even the slightest hint of insincerity.

But you found none.

So you sat back down.

"What is this...?" you asked, warily, still unsure as to how you both were talking without talking. "Some kinda trick?"

"Mhm-mhm. No tricks... just Shining."

Even more confused, you cocked a brow.

"Shining?"

He nodded.

"S'what my grandma used to call it... talkin' without speakin', seein' without seein'... some people can do it... people like you and me."

"I don't know what you're talkin' about. Whaddya mean seein' without seein'?"

"This thing we got... when I was little, it let me see things."

"What kinda things?"

"Dead ones."

You shook your head, an uncomfortable smile settling on your face as you attempted to stand once again.

"See, sir, you must have me confused. I've never seen no dead nothin' in my life, so if you'll please excuse me—"

"(n/n), please... I—"

"(n/n)?"

You sharply cocked your head, eyes wide at his audacity.

Dick winced.

He fucked up.

"Now let's get one thing straight here, Mr. Hallorann, there is only one man in this world that can call me (n/n) and he has been gone for a long time. So you would do well to keep that name out your goddamn mouth.

"You're right. You're right, I'm sorry. I didn't mean to offend. It just slipped."

"Like I'm about to do right out this place. Now, let me go."

"Wait, please, jus' listen for a moment. M'tryin' to help you—"

"With all due respect, sir, the day I need your help, is the day I drop dead."

"You're gonna be dead if you don't stop for a minute and listen."

You scoffed aloud, calling the attention of the bartender.

"Are you threatening me?!"

"(y/n), you're makin' a scene..."

"I don't care if I'm puttin' on a whole damn play! Just who the hell do you think you are?! And how the hell do you know my name?!"

"I'm a man that's tryna keep you from sendin' yourself to an early grave! And if you'd take a deep breath and relax for two damn seconds, I'd tell you!"

"Who do you think you're yellin' at?!"

"Jesus, woman, will you listen?!"

CRACK!

Without warning, his beer bottle burst, shards of brown glass and frothy liquid exploding all over the bar.

You both flinched in perfect sync, Dick because a rather large chunk of bottle had lodged itself into his hand, you because you felt it happen to him.

"Oh, my God," you gasped, eyes wide as blood began to steadily flow from the meat of his palm. "Oh, my God, Mr. Hallorann, I-I'm so sorry. I don't know what came over me."

Swiftly, you took his hand in yours, snatching a handkerchief from your pocket and pressing it against the wound, positioning it around the piece of glass before turning to the barback.

"Sir, could we please get a first aid kit?"

"Right here, ma'am."

"N-Nah... s'okay," he winced, eyes squinting through the harsh and potent fluctuations of you washing over him, the pain in his hand paling in comparison to what you were inflicting on his mind.

It was really and truly a miracle no one had discovered you yet—he wouldn't be surprised if every island in Hawaii could sense you now.

The barback ducked under the counter and grabbed the first aid kit, plopping it on the counter.

And you got right to work.

Dick watched with awe and surprise as you patched him up as methodically as a well-oiled machine, removing the glass, disinfecting the wound—now that you had slowed the bleeding—dressing it with gauze.

You had even given him a few quick stitches with some topical anesthetic, finishing before he'd even knew you started.

"Jesus..." he marveled, staring down at his perfectly treated hand. "I ain't never seen someone get fixed up so fast."

His gaze flicked up to you.

"You Nurse Corps?"

With a faint smile, you shook your head, packing the supplies back into the kit.

"Wish I could've," you sighed, eyes falling. "Would've been good at it, too, what with my... abilities and all."

Confused, his brows furrowed.

"Whaddya mean?" he asked. "Seein' things? Dead things? That woulda helped you?"

A scoff left your lips before you could stop it, your body unable to stave off an eye roll.

"I told you, I don't see things," you reminded, pointedly. "This Shine, or whatever it is you call it... shows up different for me."

His eyes widened slightly.

"Different how?"

Wary, you looked around, before turning back to him.

"When I was little, this power it... it let me feel things. Things that I had no business feelin'."

"What things?"

You paused a moment, searching for an example.

"If I played outside with the other children, and one of 'em fell over and cut up their knee? My knee would hurt, too... or if someone was sad, I could look them right in the eyes and tell just how sad they were... and feel it just as they did."

You shook your head, letting out an empty chuckle.

"My Aunt Zola... who was an evil, evil woman... I could feel exactly how much she hated me, exactly how much she wanted me to wander out her door and never come back."

Dick's face fell, but you pressed on.

"I know it's not like seein' the dead... but as a little girl, it was scary in its own right. Imagine walkin' down the street bein' able to feel who was fixin' to hurt somebody. Feel the grief of a wife who'd just lost her husband. Feel the pain of a homeless man with a nasty case of frostbite."

Slowly, your shoulders sank.

"I was terrified. I didn't know how or why I could feel all these things, and it only got stronger the older I got. It was gettin' harder and harder to tell the difference between my feelin's and someone else's, and it wasn't long before I gave up goin' outside all together. To save myself the pain."

A faint smile graced your lips.

"'Til my brother realized what was goin' on. He wasn't like me, but when I explained what was happenin', he believed it. And despite not knowin' what to do, he somehow found a way to make it all better. Distracted me when the feelin' got too much."

Shutting the first aid kit, you glanced down at the bartop.

"And the moment he turned eighteen, he got us both up out of that old woman's house. Joined the Navy and got stationed all the way out here. Even landed me a job as a nurse on base. It was a change, for sure, given we were Jersey folk, but we had each other... 'Til... 'til that day."

Your gaze lifted to meet his, expression hollow, eyes distant.

"There was so much terror... so much fear... When Pearl Harbor was attacked, the whole island erupted in a pain I'd never felt before... a pain I could taste, a pain I could feel in my lungs... The burnin', the drownin', the bombin'... it was pure torture. A-And I couldn't take it... so-so I fell to pieces in the middle of a barrack. Crawled under a bed, curled up into a ball, and screamed for hours."

With a sigh, you twisted your drink.

"When they finally got me to come to... my brother was dead. I couldn't feel him anymore. The Harbor was destroyed and America was at war. And 'cause of my hysteria, I was barred from the Nurse Corps. Which was a blessing in disguise 'cause I can't even begin to imagine the hell I'd be put through dealin' with all them gunshot wounds... lost limbs... dyin' men..."

You chuckled humorlessly, eyes glassy as you looked down at yourself.

But Dick was quick to take your hand in his, touch feather-light and gentle as he held it firmly, forcing your attention toward him.

His expression was soft, a unique concoction of sincerity, sympathy, and understanding swirling around inside him.

"You're not alone," he stated, voice just as earnest as him. "If there's anybody that can understand what you been through... it's me. I know how scary this shit can be."

His face dropped slightly, warning.

"But I also know there are some people out there that are even scarier. And with all due respect, ma'am, you don't exactly make yourself hard to find."

Carefully, he rested his other hand over yours, which was still held tight in his palm.

"So, please... let me help you... just enough so you can hide yourself better. If you want nothin' to do wit' me after that, then I'm gone."

You paused a moment, eyes flicking over his face.

No lies.

No half-truths.

No ulterior motives.

Just honesty—with a rather strong hint of attraction.

No reason to say no.

With a soft grin, you rested your free hand over his, a faint burn singing your cheeks at his rather potent, internal reaction to your smile.

"(y/n) (n/n)," you introduced yourself, starting all over.

He perked up, unable to bite back his own smile as his eyes met yours.

"Dick Hallorann."

...

From then on, the two of you were inseparable.

Well... as inseparable as you could be while working on an army base.

At least once or twice a week he would stop by the infirmary when you were free—be it by some sorry excuse of a paper-cut or a sore throat—and give you lessons on how to better control your Shine.

How to block out certain things you didn't want to feel, certain things you didn't want to know about people.

How to conceal your metaphysical presence, keep from alerting everyone within a hundred mile radius where you were.

How to pinpoint and focus on certain individuals, rather than receiving everyone's emotions all at once.

You were a fast learner, and with every skill you mastered came less and less reason for him to come around.

But he still did.

Even more than before.

He'd sneak into the medical wing at the end of the day when you were cleaning, the two of you staying up at ungodly hours, talking, laughing, getting to know one another.

You'd see each other around the base, sharing stolen glances and secret smiles while he'd tell you a joke in your mind, just to hear your laugh as you passed by.

He'd bring you flowers and little things that reminded you of him, talk to you about things he had never told anyone before, not even his grandmother.

And on weekends, days when the base was quiet and the men were free to let loose, you both went out dancing, cutting a rug and having a ball at a local club with fellow colored airmen and their women.

In fact, it was at one of these clubs that the two of you shared your first kiss—he'd said you looked too pretty under the lights, and couldn't help himself; but when he tried to apologize, you grabbed him by the collar and kissed him back.

After that, it didn't take long before you both realized you were completely head over heels for one another.

You'd felt it from him since the day he first stumbled in, but he didn't need your Shine to know that you had fallen, too.

.

.

.

Hawaii, 1947.

"(y/n), baby..." Dick cleared his throat, swallowing thickly as the two of you started over a quaint, wooden bridge. "there's... there's somethin' I been meanin' to tell you."

It was illuminated by ten beautiful lamp-lights, their glow orange and hazy, painting the flora wrapped around the banisters and posts like a scene from a fairytale.

You turned to him with a smile, "Alright... what is it?"

As you looked up at him, your eyes sparkled in the starlight—all pretty and bright and doe-like—washing his body in another coat of nerves and filling him with the sudden urge to loosen his tie.

Jesus, how the hell was he going to get through this...

Sensing his unease, your smile fell, the two of you coming to a stop in the middle of the bridge.

Almost immediately, your Shine went to work.

Apprehension?

Worry?

Nervousness?

Dick was almost never nervous, and even if he was, what would he have to be nervous about right now?

Something was up.

"Hey," your brows furrowed, hand rising to cup his cheek. "what's the matter? Is everything alright?"

Instantly, he leaned into your touch, fingers softly clutching your wrist, holding you close.

He let out a shaky breath, as if steadying himself for something big while his gaze met yours, its usual warmth slightly dulled.

Your eyes widened slightly, a faint pang of fear striking your heart as they frantically flicked over his solemn face.

"Dick, you're scarin' me..."

"M'sorry... I don't meant to it's just that I..." he sighed, bracing for your reaction. "I been reassigned."

Your heart sank, all previous hints of joy now wiped clear off your face, "Reassigned... where?" 

"Detroit. I ship off tomorrow afternoon."

"Oh..."

All that happiness... all that bliss... gone as if it was never there.

He was leaving.

Just when you had found your love, your Dick... he was being taken away, and you had no say in the matter.

Glassy eyed, you turned away, lips rolling in an attempt to keep yourself together.

"I suppose I knew this day was coming... jus' didn't know when."

You could already see it.

Letters, frequent at first, before growing few and far between.

Memories, originally fresh and clear, slowly corroding away, crumbling and cracking under the weight of time.

Women, pretty ones, throwing themselves at him because—and let's be honest here—Dick was a handsome man, with a smile that could make any girl weak in the knees.

It wouldn't be long before you were tossed to the side, and eventually forgotten.

"Whoa, whoa, whoa, there," Dick quickly caught, hands carefully cupping your face while his eyes met yours with a softness, honesty radiating from him. "Nobody's forgettin' nobody. That's not all of what I wanted to tell ya."

Your shoulders dropped, a deep groan of relief nearly slipping past your lips, "Oh."

"Jesus, baby, you think I could ever forget you?" his thumb slid over your cheek, almost offended by the notion.

His free arm wrapped around your waist, pulling you flush against him while he leaned in, playfully meeting your lips in a kiss.

And another.

And another.

And another.

"Don't think that's even possible."

You laughed, relishing in it for a moment before resting your hands on his chest.

"Alright, then, what's all of what you wanted to say? Don't keep me in suspense."

Jesus...

It was the moment of truth.

No more stalling.

With a deep breath, Dick squared his shoulders, clearing his throat and readying himself for whatever was to come.

"When I first saw you, baby... it was like takin' my first breath," he started, tone smooth and steady. "My whole world came to a stop... knocked me on my ass 'fore I even knew what to do with myself."

He chuckled, letting out a playful scoff as he took your hand in his and rested it over his heart.

"You had me seein' colors I ain't never knew existed. Was like a glow was surroundin' you... like you were some kinda angel."

You keened under his gaze, cheeks burning as you bashfully turned away.

"You ripped the rug right out from under me. And from that moment on, I knew that you was the woman I was gonna spend the rest of my life lovin'."

Instantly, your eyes went wide, completely taken aback.

"I knew it the second I walked through that door. Hell, I know you knew it, too. I was gone. And after that night at the bar, I couldn't keep myself from runnin' to you."

Leaning forward, he rested his forehead against yours.

"Everything goes quiet when I'm with you, baby, all the noise, all the bullshit... and even when we're apart, I can still feel you with me... feel your touch in my chest. I don't think there's a corner of this world far enough I could go to escape. And I thank God for it every day 'cause I don't want to."

He grinned, shaking his head in disbelief.

"You make me weak, (y/n)... and I love you for it."

He clutched your hand tighter, pupils dilated and vulnerable as pressed a soft kiss into your knuckles before slowly dropping to a knee, his gaze not leaving you for a moment.

Your free hand flew to your mouth, muffling a gasp as he carefully pulled a gold band from his pocket.

"Baby, I love you more than I ever loved anything. There ain't no other woman on this earth I'd rather spend my life with... so I want you to be my wi—"

"Yes!" you blurted, completely jumping the gun and tackling him in a hug, nearly taking him to the ground as you tossed your arms around his neck.

Dick instantly moved to cradle you, allowing the wind to be knocked out of his chest as he attempted to keep both you and the ring in his grasp.

Without hesitation, you locked your lips with his, his face in your hands as you poured every ounce of passion you could into the kiss.

"Wait, baby... baby... baby, you 'sposed to let me ask the question!" he chuckled between breathes, fighting between fervently kissing you back and getting his words out.

"I knew what you was gonna say," you grinned, cheekily. "But I 'spose if you want me to stop so you can ask proper..."

"Hey, I ain't say all that, now," he smirked, pulling you right back in.

He captured your lips once again, smiling into you as your body went slack in his grasp, allowing him to slip the simple gold band on your ring finger.

Oh, but this was only the beginning...

...

The very next morning, you and Dick set your plan in motion.

Servicemen on deployment couldn't take anybody but their wives and their children with them, no exceptions.

Which meant if you wanted to come along with him to Detroit, you both would have to be married with the papers to show for it before 1300.

So, after all the nurses banded together to pretty you up in a nice white dress, and the airmen gave Dick a fresh haircut in his best Service Blues, the two of you marched right into the local courthouse.

And at first they gave you quite a hard time.

White courthouse.

Colored couple.

And a quite ridiculous ask to have all the paperwork processed in a few hours.

But after calling in a few favors and a lot of convincing—most of which thanks to Dick's Shine—the two of you were officially married, with Fred as your witness. 

 And an hour later... you were on a military-sanctioned flight to Detroit, everything you ever owned in your suitcase, with the last five years of your life growing distant behind you.

.

.

.

Detroit, 1947.

"What you think, baby?" Dick asked as he shoved his hands in his pockets, a knowing smirk curling on his lips. "I done good?"

"Done good?" you scoffed, ecstatic, unable to tamp down your beaming smile. "This is perfect! Oh, my God, it's beautiful!"

Your new place, rented from the military, was a sight to behold—at least for you, a woman who had only ever lived in army bases and overcrowded tenements all her life.

While others with more privileged backgrounds would've seen a house with worn-down porch steps—with chipped paint on the banisters, with shudders that were off-center—you saw a home.

A future.

A space with four walls and a roof for you and your husband to lay your heads.

Who wouldn't be happy about that?

"And wait 'til you see the inside," his arm snaked around your lower back. "C'mon, lemme show you."

Without warning, his other arm hooked under your knees, swiftly scooping you up bridal-style.

You squealed, quickly grabbing onto his neck as he began to trudge forward, "Dick! What on earth—!"

"When you get married, you gotta carry your wife into her new house. If ya don't, the marriage is doomed to fail," he defended with a cheeky grin. "You ain't never heard of that?" 

"Can't say that I have," you giggled.

"Well, indulge me. I'm not takin' any chances."

Playfully, you rolled your eyes, tightening  your hold and allowing your husband to march up the porch steps, over the threshold, and into your new living room. 

That sweet sentence did something to you.

At his commitment, you felt a buttery, warm arousal sink into your gut, making your stomach flip and awakening something deep and low within your core.

"S'a little flat," Dick admitted as he looked around, eyes flicking from the military standard issue furniture to the rather bland color of the walls. "But I think a few pictures an' some flowers could spruce it up real nice."

You smiled as your eyes fell on Dick's Adam's Apple, watching as it bobbed in his throat while he talked, zeroing in on his neck an imagining your lipstick coating it in kisses.

Then they caught on something else.

The matching gold band wrapped around his ring finger.

A reminder of what you had now, of who you were now.

Dick's wife. His bride. His woman.

Without a word, you cupped his cheek, turning him to face you.

Confused, he offered you a questionable stare, worry creeping into his dark brown eyes.

But before he could even ask, you closed the gap, giving in to your arousal and the intoxicating scent of his cologne as you pressed your lips against his.

Dick hummed at the contact, pleasantly surprised.

He kissed you back, lowering your feet to the ground and pressing himself against you in an attempt to get closer—and improve his angle.

You sighed into him in satisfaction and approval as he wrapped his strong arms around your waist, his lips soft and warm, drawing you in with every passing second.

God, how you loved his lips... and his body...

Your hands indulged him, cascading down his toned forearms and feeling up his chest.

"Mmm," he moaned into the kiss, pulling away.

His body was vibrating with pure playfulness and admiration, if your Shine was anything to go off of.

"What's gotten into you tonight?" he chuckled. "Not that I'm complainin'."

You giggled at his dopey, pleased smirk.

Any excuse to touch you was excuse enough for him.

You shook your head, praying that he saw the need in your eyes.

"You... if I have anythin' to say about it," you answered, coyly.

As soon as the words were out, Dick's pupils dilated and the air grew thick with tension.

His hands left your waist to slide down your ass, grabbing it—much to your enjoyment.

"Is that so?" he teasingly asked, smiling at the way your breath hitched when he yanked you into him.

You loved it when he got all aggressive.

"Well, then..."

He leaned down to sweep your lips up in a kiss as heated and deep as the last one, inviting your lips and tongue to explore his.

His strong hands squeezed your ass again, massaging the soft globes over your dress, making you weak in the knees.

Thank God he was holding you up because you would've been a puddle on the floor with how jelly-like your knees began to feel.

You'd been kissing and touching this man for a little over a year, and yet every time you still melted like it was your first.

You loved him.

You adored him.

You wanted and needed him more than you needed air.

"Dick?" you softly whispered, pulling away from the kiss.

"Mmm-hmm," he hummed in acknowledgement, his lips moving to your neck.

You moaned at the contact, tossing your head back and letting yourself smile as pleasure rippled across your skin.

"You wanna know somethin'?" you asked, fingers lacing in his thick hair.

"What is it, baby?" he questioned, not missing a beat as he kissed down your throat, nuzzling his nose into your neck to breathe in your perfume.

You placed your hands on either side of his handsome face to gently pull him away, bringing him to a stop with hooded eyes and parted lips.

"We're married," you whispered, unable to stop the excitement and joy from pooling in your voice.

You watched Dick's eyes widened slightly, as if the realization just hit him, too—though, in actuality, he hadn't been able to stop thinking about it since the two of you left the courthouse.

His dark lips curled into a smile, flashing you his pearly whites.

"We are," he replied. "I'm your husband."

"And I'm your wife," you added, thumbs stroking his cheeks. "And do you know what your wife wants you to do tonight?"

Your husband's brown eyes darkened, reminding you of the richest Swiss chocolate.

"What does my wife want, baby?" he asked, his voice growing lower and more hushed.

He pressed his lips into one of your hands, kissing the inside of your palm.

The fire inside you flared hotter and brighter, desperate to be snuffed by him.

"I want you to take me... I want you to make me yours."

You pressed a soft yet needy kiss to his lips, gently sucking on his bottom lip and drawing a groan out of him.

"That's what I want," you softly sighed. "Will you please give it to me?"

It was an innate need.

A dull ache grown in your throbbing core that could only be soothed by your husband.

You needed him and him alone.

And you needed to be his.

At first, Dick could hardly believe the words, blinking in shock.

But that shock quickly vanished once he realized you were serious, leaving behind the hot, sizzling stare of arousal.

He chuckled, drawing his thumb over your bottom lip.

"Oh, you're gonna get it."

Suddenly, you were lifted off the ground and tossed over his shoulder, his feet already making their way toward the stairs.

"Ain't said nothin' but a word."

SMACK!

"Oh!" the word escaped you uncontrollably as Dick's big hand came down onto your ass.

The sharp strike made your pussy jump excitedly, especially when the skin began to sting.

When he charged into your shared bedroom, he slammed the door shut with his foot, not even sparing a glance back as he put you down and captured your lips once again, the two of you colliding in a flurry of teeth and tongue and hastily discarded clothes.

Eventually, the back of your legs hit the bed, sending you both crashing on top of it, but even with the interruption, it wasn't long before the two of your were as naked as the day you were born.

He sat up on his knees, giving you a front-row seat to the beauty between his thighs.

His pants and his briefs were gone, long kicked off, along with his shoes and his shirt, revealing his gorgeous body and dark happy trail.

You reached out to touch him, feel him, hold him, and he let you, relishing in the feeling of your warm hands on his skin, smirking at your whimpers.

"M'all yours, baby," he cooed, leaning down to position himself right in front of your core. "And this... is all mine."

Jesus Christ...

Before you knew it, Dick had his face in your pussy, his big hands grasping your thighs to pry them apart.

He licked and lapped at you like you were his last meal, his tongue quick yet precise, seeming to nail the perfect spot every time.

"Oh, God, yes!" you moaned, your voice reaching full volume as you writhed your hips against his magical mouth, his nose nudging against your clit. "God, yes, Dick, oh! You're so good!"

The brown-eyed stud stared at you intensely from his spot at the V of your legs, sucking gently.

With a wet pop, he pulled away, pride rolling off him in potent waves.

"Yeah? Your man makin' you feel good?" 

You frantically nodded, whining for more.

"Tell me all about it, baby," he pressed a hot kiss against your inner thigh. "Lemme know how good."

And he dove right back in, his tongue licking along your slit before dipping into your wet hole as his nose swiped against your clit like a credit card, pushing you past the point of ecstasy.

The sounds that escaped him were sloppy and juicy, his wet merging with your even wetter pussy.

It didn't take long for your orgasm to crest, making you feel like a balloon filled with too much air.

"D-Dick, I think I'm gonna... think I'm gonna cum!" you warned, your words laced with moans and gasps. 

He moaned right back into your pussy, still eating away.

"Mmm-hmm," he encouraged, desperate to make you feel good. "Cum. Cum for me, baby."

Overtaken by his voice and his touch, you let your orgasm wash over you, drawing moans that would embarrass any woman were she not drunk on her husband's tongue.

The shivers that took hold of your body were intense, making you thrash and buck against Dick's mouth as he cleaned you up.

But you couldn't focus on them for long.

Not when your husband was standing between your legs and looking down at you like that, eyes hooded and lips shining in your juices.

"I need to fuck you, baby," he said, voice hushed and low.

He cupped your face in a single hand, softly running his thumb over your cheek.

"Yes," you whispered, the word having just as much conviction as when you said I do. "I need you, Dick... please."

Dick visibly shivered, as if something had taken over him at your response.

And after giving you a deep and passionate kiss, he wrapped his hand around his cock and fed it into your pussy, inch by inch, taking it slow.

You gasped, eyes growing wide at the stretch of his length.

You had never taken him before, the sensation a bit more intense than you anticipated.

Without a condom, you could feel all of him—every vein, ridge, and soft patch of skin stretched around his shaft.

Dick's face was as beautiful as the starry night in the nearby window, his expression twisted in pleasure as he rocked his hips into you.

"God, baby, you feel so good," he groaned, bottom lips catching between his teeth. "N-Need... ah, fuck! Been needin' you like this for so long."

"M-Me, too!" you gasped, grasping his shoulders for dear life as his hips bumped into you, sending tendrils of pleasure into your clit. "God, give it to me, baby, please!"

A groan of lost restraint escaped Dick as he bent down to capture your lips in a sloppy kiss as he rocked a little faster, a little deeper, filling you with more of his cock every passing second.

He fucked you into the mattress, perching your leg on his shoulder so he could settle even deeper, nearly mounting.

Oh, he gave it all to you.

He gave it to you all night, as much as you wanted.

As much as you could take.

He flipped you over and fucked you from the back, his thrusts rough and manic, his hands gripping your ass so tight you were sure it would leave bruises.

He fucked you up against a wall, your body flush against his, trapped between the two as he babbled about how "fuckin' good" your pussy was and "oh, fuck yes, yes" as he slammed balls deep into you.

He fucked you on the floor, your body bouncing on top of him as his hips thrusted up to meet yours, his hands grasping and massaging your tits as his thick cock sank into your wet folds and velvety walls again and again.

Each thrust was agonizing, taking you to a place of euphoria so intense it was almost painful.

"Ah, ah, oh, fuck! Yes! Yes!"

You couldn't muster any words longer than that.

"Fuck, look at you, baby," Dick grunted, staring up at you as you took his big cock. "Lookin' so goddamn beautiful... so perfect... think I'm 'bout to burst..."

Sure, he had gone completely insane, utterly drunk on you and fucking like he'd never be able to again.

But what was robbing your ability to speak was the all-encompassing, overwhelming overflow of love exuding from his every pore.

It oozed everywhere, flooding your every sense and drowning you in nothing but his potent and powerful devotion.

You couldn't even block it out, the love so supreme and possessed that it was overloading your Shine, bringing you to tears.

"Y-You... love me!" you cried, hot tears rolling down your cheeks as your voice reached above the loud bed-springs and his rigorous fucking. "God, Dick... you love me so much!"

Instantly, Dick flipped you over, laying you on your back and sinking deeper.

"You feel me, baby?" he smiled in your ear. "Tell me how much you feel me. Tell me how much I love my wife."

It was so hard to do while the man was knocking your brains out your skull, but you found the willpower to do it anyway.

"So much!" you sobbed, overcome with the intensity and emotion as he wrapped his arms around you, locking you against him. "I love you so much, Dick! Need you s'much!"

"Yeah?" he teasingly asked, pressing a wet kiss into your collarbone. "Y'need me, baby girl? Y'love me?"

He adjusted his grip on you again, damn near folding you in half.

"Get ready, baby, 'cause you 'bouta get it all..."

You thought you were getting fucked before?

He shifted into a entirely different being as he rutted into you like a machine, hips pistoning, cock throbbing, pulsing, until finally, finally...

"Oh, fuck!" he bellowed, his voice ricocheting off the walls of your bedroom as he filled you to the brim with all of him.

You gasped as his spunk filled you, spilling into your pussy, bringing with it a warm, gushing sensation that triggered your own orgasm.

"Shit!" he groaned, encouraging you with his quick thrusts. "Cum with me, baby! Fuckin' give it to me!"

You had no choice but to.

With your eyes in the back of your head and your legs in the air, you came all over him.

His thrusts slowed to deep rocks of his hips as he fucked his cum into you, making sure none of it spilled until it was ready to pull out.

Spent.

Filled.

Probably knocked up.

All things you realized you were as you laid on the bed, weakly mewling as Dick continued to stroke.

When he was finally done, he slowly pulled out, moaning with you at the loss of contact and your pussy gushed your mixed release.

"Don't move, baby," he cooed. "Lemme clean you up."

Mustering some strength, he got up and strode into the bathroom, grabbing a damp washcloth before returning to wipe up the mess you both made, paying close attention to your puffy lips and clit.

When he finally finished, he gently moved himself under your exhausted form and laid down with you on his chest, the both of you sweaty and beat but absolutely satisfied.

You rested a hand over his heart, the hand that housed your wedding band, the simple gold almost glowing in the moonlight.

Moonlight shined in the brown eyes that stared down at you in utter adoration, holding promises of endless love and so much more.

"I love you, baby," he murmured into your hair, pressing a soft and sincere kiss on the top of your head as his arms snaked tightly and protectively around you.

You smiled, pressing a kiss on his chest before resting your hand on top of it.

"I love you, too, honey."

.

.

.

[ddlydevotion-deactivated2026022]

˚୨୧₊ "RICHARD W/ CURVY/CHUBBY! WIFE READER ." ‧₊˚

CW: Body image issues, unhealthy relationships w food, nsfw content, reader is implied to be a woc

a/n: this wasn’t proofread so I apologize for any messy writing.

Your body wasn’t something that you ever found any shame in, but the standards swarming the women around you would often make their way towards you and invade your mind. You’d find yourself standing in front of the mirror with your blouse lifted to reveal your lower belly. You’d stare down at your thighs as they filled out your skirt and couldn’t help but notice how differently they looked from the women celebrated in the fashion magazines (or any magazine for that matter). You knew it was stupid to even think about punishing your body to become a certain size, as none of the women in your immediate family even looked like that.

So, why would you suddenly be the first woman in your family to shrink to a size that you were never meant to be?

On top of that, your husband, Richard, would never allow you to continue with your hobby of self destruction. He’d listen to you ramble about how you were worried that you’d eaten too much throughout the day. He wouldn’t say anything for the first few minutes, he’d just listen. He’d look you directly in the eye as you spoke to him with tears streaming down your cheeks, your glossed lips quivering in shame. He felt his heart squeeze.

“You needa get outta here with that, baby. Cmon, you had an extra somethin’ and you’re over here treatin’ yourself like a criminal.” // “I wish you wouldn’t do this to yourself, baby.“

He definitely gets frustrated from just how negative you can get about your body at times, but he also knows that it’s a habit he can help you kick. He’d hold you, all of you, as the two of you sit on the couch together as a reminder that your body isn’t something to hide from him. Whenever the two of you ate a meal together he’d push his last piece of food towards you, especially if he noticed you holding out the entire time. “C’mon, spoil yourself.”

Anytime that he loved on you before having to go off to the base, he’d hug you tight and a surprised giggle would leave your lips as his hand smacked down onto your ass. “I love the way you fit in my hands. So fuckin perfect, baby.”

He loved coming up behind you as you got ready in the mirror. Whether you were getting dressed up or adding some finishing touches, he’d always wrap his arms around you and press himself right up against you. “What are you doin’, hm? Tryna hypnotize me lookin’ in the mirror like that?” He’d meet your eyes through the mirror before leaning down to press a kiss to your neck, his arms greedily wrapping themselves tighter around your plush waist.

taglist: @warfaredoll @lostre <3

[unicoo]

I need more Dick with a reader who has the shine!!

Contemplating doing it myself but I already have so many fics in my brain currently 😭

[bananasandhoney]

sistas, i need y’all to hurry up and feed me with these dick hallorann fics…i need ittttttttt i.need.himmmmmmmmmmmmm