CONTENTS: farmer! cowboy! jack abbot x pregnant! wife! f! reader, cowboy! jack abbot au, farmer! jack abbot au, fluff, cute toddler moments, smut, fingering, somnophilia, pregnancy fetish
Word Count: 2.3k+
SUMMARY: after becoming pregnant, jack becomes obsessed with your body. once you give birth, he takes control of his life by the reins
lamb divider by @/neosprites
a/n: @meetmeatyourworst asked for a part two to cowgirl so here you go! hope y’all enjoy!
You rubbed at your swollen tummy while you waddled around the garden, you basket in tow as you picked at the plentiful harvest. Your sundress danced in the slight breeze, the fabric gently hugging your soft curves.
Jack would be out in the pasture, checking on his cattle. His eyes would land on you. You struggling to bend down as you plucked tomatoes off the vine. His heart twinged slightly. He was happy that you were carrying his kin, but seeing how you were constantly exhausted made his heart shatter.
He remembers the day you announced the big news.
You held up the pregnancy test, Jackie's eyes studying the two pink little lines. You squealing the minute Jack Abbot hoisted you into the air with his arms wrapped below your butt.
"We're having a baby!" he cheered. "We're having a fucking baby!"
He'd spin you around before setting you back down. Holding your head in your hands, his lips seeking yours. His tongue grazing across yours, spit being exchanged between your warm mouths.
"We're having a fuckin' baby," he whispered against your lips.
His hands gripped along the reins that dragged along the neck of his horse, him tensing as he watched you trudge through the plowed dirt decorated with your plants. He wanted to lift your belly, freeing yourself of the weight. Yet, he leaned across the back of his mare, sighing as he adjusted his cowboy hat.
You'd peek up from the garden, slightly waving to him underneath the sun. His hand would just raise in response, totally enamored by your pregnant self in the fabric of your dress. He watched you for a while as you plucked the fruit of your garden. Your rooster crowing in the background while the sun hung heavy along the horizon.
The sky would grow dark, Jack's hand always encircling your plush stomach. He would feel how his kiddo would squirm and kick along the walls of your womb. The ever growing child pulsing beneath your belly.
"Hey, sweetie," Jack cooed, hush whispers against the skin. You both knowing it was a girl. "You're always moving when you hear daddy’s voice, yeah?"
Jack, who would have his most intimate moments with his daughter while you slept. Always kissing your stretchmarks while the flesh would bend and fold beneath his touch.
"Do y'know how much mommy and I love you?"
Your skin would project with your baby's feet kicking into your side. Jack seeing the constant movements resting below your belly. You'd wince in pain suddenly at the contractions, him afraid to wake the stirring baby.
He'd rub your tummy for a while, feeling how your womb would settle beneath his touch. Just a subtle hand resting on your belly while you slept. Little breaths puffing from your mouth, totally wiped from waddling around in the hot sun. Kisses graced your collar and plump breasts, your boobs being way bigger than usual.
His kisses lacing the hairs on your crotch and trailing to your center, practically begging for him while you slept. You'd be wet, your folds sparkling in the moonlight. His constant licks lapping at your center, digging into your filled cunt. It was great, your womb swollen with his child, the birth coming in the following days.
He couldn't help it, seeking below the barrier of your underwear, sliding the fabric to the side. His tongue dancing along your slick folds and your bud. You'd slightly squirm under him, your large belly swaying from side to side. Your puffy ankles resting on top of his back. He'd watch you, how you moaned in between breaths. It was beautiful, his mama all cute and needy in her sleep. He'd also notice the glint of your wedding ring, the large rock sitting large and present on your finger.
A few hours later, you'd stir awake, always having to pee since becoming pregnant. You'd return from the bathroom, hardly prodding Jack's shoulder. He'd groan, his body stretching under your touch, a low hum spilling from his chest.
"Jackie, why is my underwear all wet?"
"Mmpf—," he growled with his eyes still closed. "M'sorry, you just looked so pretty."
You just smiled, pressing a cute kiss to his forehead.
The next morning, you'd be cracking eggs in the pan while the farmhands chatted at the table. You wearing one of your t-shirts that allowed your big stomach to poke through. Flipping the pancakes and heating the bacon, a shirtless Jackie graced your presence. The constant affection normal for the farmhands to see. Jack's arms settled on your sides, the fingers slowly making their way to smooth over the harsh skin of your stomach. His palms slightly lifting the muscle, you sighing with relief.
"Thank you, Jackie," you said, relaxing into his bare chest and placing a kiss along the expanse of his neck.
"Anytime, sweetheart."
Jokes and stories would be passed back and forth between Jack and the farmhands. Sometimes you laughing so hard your womb shook. Jack's rough hand would settle on your thigh under the table, smirking when he turned to you for your reaction to the most recent prank that was told. The boys consumed the hearty breakfast, praising you for your hard work even while you were pregnant.
Now, you were wobbling towards the goats, their constant bleating filling your ears.
"Yeah? Y'all excited to meet the little one? Our little farmhand?" you asked, sprinkling the feed across the grass. They would all squeal in response.
You were sat there, propped up against the fence. A bottle in your one hand and the other kneading into your warm belly. The kid suckling at the nipple of the bottle, little horns peaking from the hairs resting on the little one's head.
"That's it, I bet you miss your mama, don't you?"
Jack's horse would trail to you, him not even leading, his horse always following, being drawn to you. The horse stood there above you, Jack sitting on her backside. She'd slightly nuzzle you, you chuckling as you palmed her cheek. Standing up, your finger nails scratched further into the horse's fur, him admiring while you watched.
"Just thought we'd check in on you, sweetheart," Jack piped up. "You doing okay?"
"More than okay, Jackie."
You'd pet the horse for a while, patting Jack's thigh when you passed him to go to the chicken coop. He'd steer the horse to follow, obsessed with your unsteady gait as you walked.
"Just gonna watch me now?" you asked, picking up the eggs that nestled in the cubbies.
"Yeah," he laughed, his mouth curving. "Like watching you work.
"Yeah?"
"Yeah."
It wasn't until he came in while you stirred the brownie batter in the bowl. Him placing kisses along the nape of your neck while he once again hoisted your stomach up.
"Jackie, you gotta stop doing that!"
"Can't help it, doll," he rasped. "You get to feel my daughter all the time. God forbid I wanna hold her too."
Once the men all ate, you would be relaxing in bed, reading another baby book. Jack felt like you and him read a million, almost creating a book club, discussing the contents consistently. You wanted to be prepared, always ready for what you were getting yourself into. Jack plucked the book from your hands, kissing along the thin fabric that settled upon your sternum.
You moaned under his lips, kisses laced upon your shoulders and neck. His hand steady on top of your tummy, the stretchmarks glowing red on your skin. He'd slurp at your neck for a while, and then your swole stomach. Adorning your expanded flesh in hot kisses, his tongue swirling along the marks that rippled through your skin.
He would briefly pull away, shrugging off his shirt and unzipping his jeans. He returned to you, a smile gracing his lips as he kissed you.
You'd sit there, petting at the silver curls, little gasps leaking from your lips. He jerked your hips suddenly, your pregnant body slightly wavering as you settled on top of him. Your belly bare and present in front of him, his hips slightly lifting to shrug off his boxers. Once his cock was free, he drew the inches across your folds. Your clit beckoning for the feel of his length. He teased you for a bit, pumping along your slick center.
The minute he pressed himself into your needy hole, he groaned. Your plump womb bouncing over him, hoping to induce labor with his constant thrusts.
Both nurseries, one in his apartment and one at the farm, were decorated with monograms of the baby's name, little furniture in every part of the room for the tiny creature. Onesies were hanging in the closet, everyone spoiling you with the clothing during your baby shower. Diapers piled high along the walls, the two hospital bags always ready. Once again, one in his apartment, one in the farmhouse.
The bag sitting in the corner of the room at the ready, all while you were riding on top of him. Your hips drawing him further into you.
"Oh, Jackie," you moaned, your stomach slightly tensing. Your hands were placed on the stretched skin while his thick cock rammed into you.
"Yeah? You okay, sweetheart?"
"Mhm, ah—" you hiss, him shifting his hips to meet your spot. "Fuck, baby."
His torso would rise to kiss your plump breasts and your large belly.
"M'sorry, doll," Jack whispered, his breath crossing your skin. "You just look so beautiful, all pregnant and needy like this."
Your hips, moving up and down, your insides encircling and hugging his cock so nicely. The movements were slow, your body so worn that you couldn't keep up.
Slow draws around his cock would Jack to groan, his member jerking inside you.
"Oh, baby, I love seeing you like this," his voice rough with pleasure. "You're so hot, carrying our child— ah—, and— fuck!"
He could hardly keep up as well, just seeing your curvey large body. Fuck, it was too much.
"Jackie, gonna cum—. Oh, fuck!"
"Fuck that's it, sweetheart," Jack heaved. "Just keep riding me, yeah? Keep riding this ole' bull."
The slight roll of your hips did him in, hot spurts lacing your insides. Your own leaking around his cock. He'd hold you for a minute, balancing your soft figure on top of him.
In the coming days, he found himself holding your daughter. His shirt off, meeting the baby skin to skin, slightly bouncing his bicep while she rested in his arms.
You, dark circles decorating your under eyes. Your tummy still swollen from birth. An exhausted smile plastered on your face as you watched your husband hold your little one.
"God, she's so beautiful, sweetheart. You did a good job with her," Jack cooed.
You reached across the arm of the hospital bed, your hand placed along his forearm.
"We did a good job, couldn't have been pregnant without you after all."
The moment the doctor mentioned that you both couldn't have intercourse for six weeks, Jack sighed heavily. He knew he couldn't, he was a doctor of course! However, the minute the words came from the doctor's mouth, reality set in. All Jack wanted was to fuck his brand new mama the minute they put their baby to sleep.
So in that time, you kept busy. You gave your little one a tour of the farm. Jack holding the swaddled child in his arms while you listed off all the names of your animals.
Or even how she'd grow restless, little squeals and cries coming from her mouth. Jack would saddle up, having you hop on while he tried to hush his daughter. The minute you got settled, he'd pass her to you. You both would ride together as the slight bob of the horses gait calmed her down.
"Yeah? You like riding our horsey? I knew you would, my little equestrian."
The minute those six weeks were up, Jack would climb into bed with you. You, all insecure with your flabby belly. Him, constantly placing kisses on the recovering flesh.
"Jackie," you pouted. "M'all ugly now."
"Now you're not, sweetheart," he whispered, placing another kiss. "You did so well, carrying our kid n' all."
As time passed, beyond the moment your daughter took her first steps, said her first word, she became reckless. Always running around wanting to explore everything.
You and Jack would be sat in the grass while she explored the field around the chicken coop.
Jack pulling down the brim of his cowboy hat to shield from the sun, your skirt splayed on the greenery below.
"Mama!" your daughter cheered. "Wook! Chickie!"
You just chuckled, watching as she fumbled with the fluffy feathered chick. Running up to you, showing the little bird off.
"Beautiful, sweetie," you smiled as she placed the chick in your hands.
"Mama, I love chickie."
"I know you do."
She'd take off, sprinting to the coop. You started to get up until Jack placed a hand on your shoulder.
"I got it."
You watched him, slightly faltering while trying to stand on his bum leg. The moment he got up, he took off. Jogging to meet your little one. She was peeking into the little cubbies when Jack's eyes finally landed on her.
"Dada, wook!" She held up an egg to him. "Got an eggy!"
"You do," Jack smirked. "Mighty fine one at that."
In the days ahead, you would return to his apartment in the city. Bouncing your toddler on your hip while you scrambled some eggs on the stove, waiting for Jack to return from his shift.
He'd return, an odd smile on his face after a long shift. You turned to him the minute he crossed into the threshold. Him kissing you and then your toddler, beaming with joy.
"Something happen?" you asked, a nervous feeling bubbling in your stomach.
"I'm retiring," he admitted. "…and we're moving to the farm."
Your shocked look slowly turned into a bright grin.
"Jackie, that's amazing!"
"Can't stand being away from my girls," he said in between sweet kisses on your lips. "I'm finally starting my life with you."
Prompt: Two strangers discover they’ve been swapping items unknowingly through a communal space, each leaving an X in return until curiosity forces a meeting.
Summary: After discovering some unfamiliar clothes in your laundry (and losing some of your own in return), you begin exchanging messages with another resident in your apartment complex.
Word Count: 15.5K
Tags & Warnings: 18+ MDNI! Modern AU, unspecified age gap (Ezra is intended to be older, but use your own imagination on how much older), no use of Y/N, minimal descriptions of reader character, second-person POV, reader is getting over a recent breakup, mildly pervy Ezra, pleasure dom Ezra, SMUT (dry humping, vaginal fingering, squirting, biting, unprotected P in V sex, overstimulation, creampie, Ezra’s filthy yapping and filthy fucking).
Written for @jolapeno’s Dear-uary Epistolary Writing Challenge. Dividers by @saradika-graphics.
Read on AO3 | Main Masterlist
You have never considered yourself to be an especially domestic person.
Sure, you are a decent cook, but the handful of recipes you rotate between each week require little in the way of culinary skills. The ingredients are simple and cheap, the prep work is minimal, and the actual cooking involves nothing more than a couple of burners on the stovetop or perhaps a slow cooker if you’re feeling especially ambitious. The final products are always serviceable, but nothing more complex or skillful than what a college student might be able to achieve in their first apartment.
You’re a reluctant cleaner, as well. Your dishes tend to pile in the sink for days before you work up the gumption to scrub them, and you’re embarrassed to admit to the amount of time you have gone without vacuuming your carpets or mopping your kitchen floor. When you make plans to have friends over – or god forbid a date – you often have been guilty of racing around your apartment at the last possible minute, frantically cleaning things that ought to have been cleaned ages ago. It seems the potential shame of someone else thinking you lived in a messy home is the only motivator strong enough to get you into gear.
But there is perhaps one domestic task in which you find genuine joy. Laundry.
You love the ritual of it – the simple satisfaction of sorting, the methodical, repetitive action of folding, the tidy little piles of underwear and socks and pajamas and jeans spread out over the surface of your bed as you worked. You love watching the way your dresser goes from barren to pleasingly full as the soft drone of your current audiobook or a favorite podcast drifts through your headphones. You even love the scent of your detergent – it’s a small luxury, but you notice it every time you open your closet, and it never fails to make you smile.
Every Sunday morning, the routine is the same, and with it comes a meditative calm that always helps you center and reset yourself for the coming week. You’ve found yourself leaning on the consistency, the predictability of it all even moreso in recent weeks, which is why when you encounter a peculiar piece of clothing mixed in with your clean laundry, still warm from the dryer downstairs, you almost toss the thing straight into the garbage.
It's a large men’s sock – charcoal gray, crew length, and heavily worn. It sports two holes, one in the toe and one in the heel, and the knit fabric has pilled so intensely that from far away, it almost looks speckled. A ragged piece of clothing if you’ve ever seen one and nothing like anything in your own wardrobe. Instantly, you presume it must be his.
The mere thought of him leaves a bad taste in your mouth, and you eye the offending sock with reproach. Eight months of your life wasted on a man who could never seem to remember your takeout order, who called your master’s degree cute, who always had some new excuse to not introduce you to the gaggle of fellow finance bros constantly blowing up his phone and filling his evenings with cocktail hours and “networking events.”
Looking back on it now, you can be more honest with yourself about all the things you had ignored in the moment – all the little red flags that might have been passable on their own but combined with everything else painted a picture of a man who saw you as a convenience rather than a privilege, a little something to be kept on the side, held at arm’s length until he grew bored of you and moved on. And he had moved on, in the tritest way possible – with an intern from his office named Kyleigh.
You are eager to do the same, to pack the lackluster memories of him away in a box and shove that box so far into the back of your mind that you forget it even exists. This sock, sticking out bizarrely in the basket of soft creams and delicate blushes that you favor, has derailed those efforts. You’ve been doing so well avoiding thoughts of him.
You toss it into the paper grocery bag you have tucked into the corner of your bedroom, the one containing the handful of little things you’ve found around your apartment in the three weeks since his departure that you know belong to him. A blue silk tie. A bulky black phone charger that is incompatible with your phone model. A half-used tube of plain, unflavored Chapstick. A dogeared copy of Atomic Habits. And now this sock.
You have no idea how it ended up in your hamper in the first place, but it hardly matters, you decide. You refuse to let the thought of it – or the man it belongs to – darken your peaceful morning any longer. You’ll get the bag of stuff back to him at some point. Until then, he’ll simply have to make do with a missing sock.
What begins as a singular sock, however, quickly becomes more as over the next several weeks, you continue to discover foreign items of clothing in your laundry.
First, another sock, this one navy blue and even more worn than the first, the fabric loose and shapeless with time. Then, a pair of maroon men’s athletic shorts with frayed, raw hems around the legs and worn-out elastic at the waist. A ribbed undershirt in age-patinaed white comes next, and then finally, a true treasure – the softest, most perfectly worn-in gray t-shirt. It is oversized (for you, anyway) and pure cotton, stretched and softened with countless washes and wears so that it pools like butter in your hands, and for the first time, it occurs to you that there is no way that these mysterious items of clothing are relics of your relationship that you had simply missed on your first pass through your apartment to gather his things. Your ex, for one, had had many flaws, but hanging on to shabby, hole-riddled clothing that was nearly falling apart was not one of them. And for another thing, you feel certain that you would have known if your ex had owned a t-shirt like this one while you were together. If he had, you would have stolen it for yourself a long time ago.
For lack of something better to do with them, the navy sock, basketball shorts, and undershirt all make their way into the paper bag anyway. The t-shirt, however, gets folded neatly and added to your pajama drawer. Some poor man in your apartment building may be missing it now, but in a building with over a hundred units and only one basement laundry facility, you cannot imagine the complexities of attempting to reunite it with its owner.
His loss will simply have to be your gain.
The week following the fortuitous discovery of the most perfect t-shirt known to man, you encounter another disruption to your sacred routine, though this time, rather than a mysterious item of clothing somehow joining your basket, it comes in the form of a hand-written note.
The laundry facility in your apartment complex is nothing to speak of, and for as much as you enjoy this particular chore, you prefer to spend as little time in the dingy, windowless room as you can manage. Two rows of stainless steel, coin-operated washers abut each other down the center of the linoleum-tiled square, while matching dryers stack two high and six wide against the far wall. The air there is stuffy, warm and humid and smelling strongly of bleach, and the constant hum and rumble of the machines is almost more than the noise cancelling in your headphones can handle.
Typically, you don’t choose to linger – you grab your favorite washers as quickly as you can manage, and you set a timer on your phone for the duration of the wash so you can return to your apartment to wait out the cycle. Today, however, as you are slotting your collection of quarters into your machines, something out of place catches your eye.
Stuck to the wall of dryers is a crumpled piece of lined paper, clearly ripped from a spiralbound notebook and scribbled on in haste. You cock your head at the sight, frowning. You’re certain it must have been left by a fellow resident, for any messages from the complex’s management would have at least been typed and printed out.
Internally, you roll your eyes – how often had a passive aggressive note left in a common area actually resulted in changed behavior? You came across them on occasion, in the mail room or in the lounge or in one of the elevators, and whatever it was the poster was disgruntled about only ever seemed to worsen after that. Still, once you have your washers going, you can’t help but approach the dryers to get a better look at the curious thing.
Your suspicions are quickly confirmed – it is from another tenant, written in a tight, hurried scrawl in dry, patchy blue ink and taped to the steel face of one of the dryers with a raggedly-torn piece of masking tape. It reads:
You find yourself quirking a puzzled smile as you read, the corners of your lips curling up at the writer’s flowery word choice. It’s almost comically formal for something clearly written in a rush, and the juxtaposition of the courtly language with the humble, jagged-edged notebook paper sparks your intrigue. Of course, there’s also the matter of the handful of mysterious garments you have been collecting. You can’t help but wonder whether this…loquacious neighbor of yours is the owner of the scruffy clothing items slowly collecting dust in the corner of your bedroom.
That would be another odd comparison, you think. That someone so meticulous with their words should be so careless with their clothing. You suppose you shouldn’t judge – perhaps he simply cannot afford to replace his things when they wear through. But still, you can’t reconcile the image you have created in your mind of the author of this note with the unkempt man who owns the clothes that keep ending up in your laundry.
It might be worth responding if only to satisfy your growing curiosity.
When you return to the laundry room to move your clothes from the washers to the dryers, you bring with you a bright pink, oversized sticky note from your favorite stationary set and attach it to the wrinkled piece of notebook paper.
Your curiosity drives you back down into the laundry room the next day.
It’s rare for you to deviate from your routine like this, but there’s something that feels almost fantastical about this nameless, faceless exchange. The author of that note might be someone you have encountered a thousand times without ever knowing.
The thought inspires your imagination, makes you think of fairytales and fate and all kinds of other childish things. Perhaps you have crossed paths with this stranger – with their funny, fanciful language and their unkempt presentation – in the mail room or in the elevator or outside the leasing office. You trade courteous hellos and the occasional polite smile with your neighbors when you see them, but you have never intentionally sought any of them out before. This person could be anyone, and that has you making your way back to the basement long before your next planned laundry day.
The moment you enter the stuffy, grimy little room, your eyes go straight for the wall of dryers where the last note was left. A smile splits your face almost immediately. The note from yesterday is gone, as is your bright pink reply. In their place, another torn piece of notebook paper has been left, this time stuck to the face of the dryer with a clear strip of packing tape. More secure, more intentional, like whoever had left it had intended for it to be able to stick in place for a long time even in the humid, poorly-ventilated space.
Drawing your lower lip between your teeth in anticipation, you’re thankful to be the only person in the room as you eagerly dart over to read it.
In the same hurried penmanship as the previous note, this one reads:
A rush of satisfaction floods you as you read. This is the mysterious owner of the clothes you’ve been finding! You must have a washer or dryer preference in common, you think, if his belongings continue to be mixed in with yours. You can see how it could happen, particularly if he was in a rush. A dark colored sock left in the bottom of the drum or stuck to the side after a spin cycle wasn’t unheard of.
Perhaps you ought to do a better job of checking your machines before blindly dumping your clothes in…
You also feel confident now that this is, in fact, a man that you’re dealing with, which makes his choice of vocabulary all the more intriguing. Not that there is anything especially feminine about his choice of words, but more that the men you find yourself spending time with tend to get their intellectual stimulation from manosphere podcasts and YouTube comedians. This man writes like a scholar, like a patron of the arts, like a Regency-era lordling. It is as refreshing as it is puzzling, and the sparkling prose combined with the mystery of the whole thing has you feeling rather enchanted.
And, perhaps the greatest victory of all, is that E makes no mention whatsoever of your new favorite t-shirt. The thin, buttery-soft thing has become a staple of your loungewear collection over the last few weeks. The way it falls over your skin so perfectly, the way it wraps itself around you like a friend – you can’t imagine parting with it now. Thankfully, it sounds like you won’t have to.
Pulling your pink pad of sticky notes out of your bag, you excitedly pen your reply.
Several more days pass before your now-daily trips to the laundry room finally bear fruit.
It’s Saturday morning, and rather than finding a new piece of crinkled notebook paper in place of the old, instead you find that someone has written on your pink sticky note, adding their own message to the bottom of the scrap of stationary. You recognize the handwriting immediately, though it’s even more irregular than usual. Scribbled in the lower right corner of the note, it reads:
In cramped, halting, angular strokes, a phone number has been added to the bottom of the note – even smaller than the words he somehow managed to fit on the same sheet of paper as your own. But by some miracle, with a squint and a turn of your head, you’re able to read it, and you pull your phone out of your pocket to quickly save it in your contacts.
laundry neighbor🧦, you call him in your address book with a smirk, and you decide to shoot him a text when you arrive back at your apartment. In the meantime, however, you are quick to yank both of the old notes off of the dryer, crumple them up into a ball, and toss them into the nearby garbage can.
As you catch the elevator back to your floor, you can’t help but wonder about the kind of man who was perfectly comfortable leaving his personal phone number in a public space for anyone to read and do with as they chose, but who drew the line at retrieving a small stack of holey, threadbare clothes from the same public space. You can’t imagine who in their right mind would want to steal the things that you had inadvertently collected from this man over the last several weeks; in fact, you feel confident that if you had ever seen them there while doing your own washing, you wouldn’t have spared them a second thought.
If anything, you think, if they had been left there long enough, I might have taken the liberty of throwing them in the trash.
Still, you suppose there’s no accounting for taste. And E had admitted to being superstitious about the shorts in particular, so perhaps this strange man was simply a creature of habit, one who did not part with such things easily.
A creature of habit who keeps strange hours and writes like someone from a different century. No matter how much you try, you simply cannot make heads or tails of this mysterious man.
Several hours pass before you receive a reply from the enigmatic E. You’re preparing to settle in for the night, a book and a glass of wine in hand, when your phone vibrates in the pocket of your pajama pants. Digging it out, you quirk a curious smile at what you see.
hi e! saw your response to my note about your clothes. when would be a good time for us to meet up so i can get those back to you?
Ah! Good morning, little bird!
I suppose I should say good evening, though it is my morning. Apologies for the delayed reply. As I mentioned, I keep odd hours.
I would be available to meet with you tonight after my shift, if you are amenable? I typically return home around 4 in the morning.
You make no attempt to smother the incredulous laugh that bubbles up in your chest as his suggestion. What kind of person tried to make plans for 4:00 in the morning? You couldn’t imagine dragging yourself out of bed in the middle of the night to meet with a stranger just to hand off a couple socks. Shaking your head, you’re quick to type out a reply.
4 am??? 😳 you weren’t kidding, those are some weird hours 😅
sorry dude i will def be asleep at 4 😪
how about this time tomorrow? if you work nights, would you be awake then?
Three bouncing dots appear at the bottom of the screen, flashing in and out of existence a handful of times before his message finally coalesces.
An astute observation and suggestion. Ordinarily, yes, I would. But unfortunately, I have already agreed to an extended shift tomorrow to cover for a colleague.
A frown knits across your brow, your thumb tapping against the edge of your wine glass as you ponder your options. In your mind, you run through your schedule for the week, matching it up against what little you know of E’s availability. It’s a challenging fit. A brief flash of irritation passes through you at the strange man’s stubbornness. If only he would allow you to simply leave the clothes in the laundry room – then he could collect them at his leisure, and the issue would resolve itself.
However, as you begin to type up precisely that suggestion (with no small amount of snark), you find yourself pausing.
If you leave the clothes for him to pick up on his own, you may never have the opportunity to meet him, to finally put a face and a voice to the person behind the notes. As it stands, you don’t even know this man’s name, but this odd little exchange easily has become the most entertaining thing to happen to you in a long time. It’s been a nice distraction from the absence of your ex, strangely making you feel a little less alone.
Drawing your lower lip between your teeth in contemplation, you delete the message you had been typing and compose another one instead.
You would put the ball in his court, put the responsibility on him to coordinate a plan for you to connect. The moment the message marks as delivered, you see those bouncing dots appear again. His reply is quick, as though he had been waiting on the other end of the line the whole time you deliberated. The thought has a strange warmth settling in your chest, blooming in your cheeks.
ok no worries. you wanna just text me whenever you’re free and we’ll see when our schedules line up? i’m pretty flexible but it sounds like we might work opposite hours 😅
Indeed, a common occurrence, I’m afraid, but such is the life of a bartender.
But yes, I will be in touch. I appreciate you looking after my things until we can arrange a meeting! I am in your debt for your patience.
Your flush deepens at the compliment, and you cannot fight the grin that tugs at your lips. Flatterer, you think to yourself.
not a problem! we’ll make it work eventually 😊
Not ten seconds passes, and then:
Looking forward to it, little bird. Enjoy the rest of your evening.
you too 😊 have a good shift
Good morning, little bird! The sun is rising, and I am preparing to retire. Do you perhaps wish to meet in the lobby before then? I’m unsure of your schedule, but I know many of the other tenants are departing for work at this time.
sorry e 🙁 I left about 20 min ago, got a workout class on monday mornings. sleep well!
Thoughts of the man who has ostensibly become your pen pal linger at the back of your mind throughout your work day. It’s been a while since you received a “good morning” text from anyone, though you are quick to scold yourself for the little flutter that thought sets off in your stomach.
You think of the appalling collection of socks and lounge clothes, now removed from the bag of your ex’s belongings and taking pride of place on your kitchen counter, right next to the entrance to your apartment. That, truly, is all you know about him, you remind yourself – that he wears socks with holes in them and shorts with no elastic and undershirts with pit and neck stains. Not exactly the most appealing prospect.
Not that there ought to be anything appealing about him. He could be barely out of school. He could be an old man. He could be married. If his glittering prose and flattering pet names have charmed you, then you have no one but yourself and your own fanciful imagination to blame.
Of course, none of these musings stop you from shooting off a quick text to him on your way home from work.
hey! i’m headed home now, you awake? could meet up downstairs in 15?
To your disappointment, your message remains unread for several more hours. It isn’t until you’re queueing up your third episode of your favorite syndicated reality show, wrapped in a blanket and cradling a late-night bowl of ice cream in your lap, that you receive a response.
Apologies once again, birdie. By the time I noticed your message, I was already in the car. Thank you for keeping in contact – your diligence for a neighbor you do not even know is admirable.
lol i try 🤷♀️ 😊
The next time you hear from E, it is early in the morning. You’re barely awake, eyes still bleary as you prepare yourself a cup of coffee, and the notification that greets you when you open your phone for the first time is two new messages from him, sent a couple hours ago.
I am certain you will not see this until morning, but be cautious using the northeast elevator tomorrow. It is making the most bizarre noise, and the door is rather sluggish on opening. Just now, I was nearly unable to fit through to exit the car when I reached my floor.
I have informed maintenance, but I am sure you know as well as I how long it takes that old codger to get anything done. If it is not blocked for use by the time you leave tomorrow, I would suggest waiting until the other is available.
Your chest warms at the consideration, that he would have such a harrowing experience and think to warn you against it. Fully awake now, you thumb a reply and send it off, hoping he sees it when he wakes tonight for his shift.
omg thanks for the heads up! glad you’re okay and didn’t get stuck!
Later, after safely making your way downstairs and over to the parking deck, you cannot seem to stop yourself from sending another.
there is an out of service sign on it now, thank god! have a good sleep e!
[Attached: JPG]
fyi reno crew in the lobby today. idk if you have your car in the deck but you may wanna take the side exit and walk around. the workers gave me a dirty look for walking on the unsealed floor lol
Awful rude of them. You couldn’t have known.
If management didn’t want tenants in the lobby today, perhaps they ought to have put up proper signage.
Thank you for the message, birdie. I will do as you suggested. I hope you had a pleasant day at work.
…what is it that you do for a living, if you don’t mind my asking?
i’m a librarian 🤓 📚
!!!
Forgive my ineloquence. I was unaware I have been corresponding with a scholar!
lmao says the man who writes like someone out of an austen novel
I will take that as a compliment!
Do you enjoy it?
the way you talk or being a librarian? 😉
Clever girl. 😏 Both. Either.
yes very much! to both 😇
and how do you know i’m a girl? all you know for sure is we live in the same building. i could be anyone 👀
The way you speak is decidedly feminine, though you’re right, I should not make such assumptions.
I apologize if I have offended you. No disrespect was intended.
😂 you’re fine, just giving you a hard time. you assumed correctly anyway
how about you? do you enjoy what you do?
It certainly is not my first choice of occupation, but it pays enough for me to make my way through the world, which is a privilege in itself.
It also helps that I am quite good at it, if I do say so myself.
lol nothing wrong with knowing yourself!
what would be your first choice? if not bartending?
I would be an academic. I do love books.
well if you ever find yourself awake during normal business hours you’re welcome at the library anytime. we have a few of those 😉
Cheeky bird.
Things continue in this vein for several more days – courteous, neighborly messages about things happening around the complex that turn into brief, companionable conversations. Missed offers to meet, incompatible schedules, sleep and work and fitness classes and plans with friends somehow always seeming to come at the worst possible moments. You find yourself equal parts aggravated and entertained by what has turned into a never-ending game of phone tag with someone who you still, somehow, have never met. It wasn’t exactly what you had signed up for when you responded to the bedraggled little note in the laundry room, but you couldn’t say you were disappointed at how things had turned out.
At this point, the novelty of the clothes taking up space on your kitchen counter has faded, the little pile melting into the background and simply becoming part of your daily scenery, and every time you see E’s moniker and the little sock emoji come across your phone screen, you can’t help but smile. It’s been the best distraction you could have asked for, though a part of you knows that such a sentiment is leaning further away from whimsical and more toward delusional.
Perhaps that’s why when the charming, fresh-faced barista at your favorite coffee shop finally works up the gumption to ask for your number, you give it to him.
Perhaps that’s why when that same barista asks you out for dinner and drinks, you agree.
Little bird, I have tremendous news! The coworker whose shift I covered a while back has offered to return the favor. I am available this evening to collect my laundry from you. When would be best for us to meet?
oh e i’m sorry ☹️ this would have been a great night for it too! but i actually have a date. i’ll be gone most of the evening.
I see. Not to worry, birdie. I hope you enjoy yourself.
thanks 😊 i hope so too lol
You’re nothing but a lump of dry mouth and regret the next morning when the cheerful little buzz of your phone draws you out from under the downy refuge of your blankets. Your curtains are pulled tight, though a bit of the late morning sunshine still manages to spill through the gaps around the window frame, and you frown at it venomously as though your stare could will the light to dampen itself in spite of the idyllic weather.
Dragging the brightness of your phone screen all the way down, you open your notifications with a grumble.
How do you fare this morning?
[Attached: GIF]
Haha! That well? Not the pleasant evening you were hoping for, little bird?
date was boring
he was so boring
drank too much trying to make it fun
Ah, I see. In my experience, a good breakfast and an electrolyte-boosting beverage would do you well.
You glance over at your bedside table where two bottles of pale blue liquid sit, leaving rings of condensation on the painted wood surface. One is half empty, the other still unopened.
doordashed a couple bottles of gatorade. too hungover to make breakfast.
Less than 30 seconds later, another notification appears at the top of your screen.
Venmo: @Ezra-1982 paid you $20 “🍳🥓🥞”
Order yourself the “Farmer’s Combo” from the diner on 35th. Have them add cheddar to the scrambled eggs. You will not regret it.
Ezra.
His name is Ezra.
Rubbing the sleep from your eyes, forcing the fog from your throbbing head, you tap out your reply as quickly as you can manage.
omg you did not have to do that
Perhaps not, but you deserve nothing less after such a lackluster experience.
The unexpected generosity has you melting, as does the sweetness of his words. After the disappointment of your first foray back into the dating world, such kindness from a total stranger was equally surprising and moving. It makes you want to share it all with him, to explain in detail all of the various ways in which the barista had been a terrible choice. His stilted manner, his excessive fondness for vodka Redbulls, his awkward sense of humor…
ugh you can say that again
he sucked so bad e omg
idk why i said yes to him in the first place
His sloppy mouth, his grabby hands, his clumsy fingers, his complete lack of interest in making sure you came…
The way he had completely and utterly failed to keep quiet as he stumbled out the door in the middle of the night.
def should not have brought him home
You pause for a moment, the words of your most recent message staring back at you from your phone screen as though taunting you. The blush rising in your cheeks is enough to make your blankets feel suddenly stifling, and your stomach drops at the realization that E – Ezra, your neighbor, a man you have never met but on whom you are quickly developing a bit of a schoolgirl crush – is going to read it. The two of you have never discussed anything like this before. Even in your little occasional flirtations, there has never been even the suggestion of anything sexual.
This unknown stranger really does not need to know anything about your sex life, you decide.
However, just as you are about to recall the message, you watch in horror as the “delivered” status flips to “read.”
A wave of nerves floods your system, pushing out the last of the grogginess still clouding your mind, and try as you might, you can think of no excuse you could spin, no joke you could tell.
shit was hoping you hadn’t read that yet
Alas, little bird. There is no need to be embarrassed.
sorry idk why i’m trying to gossip w/ you like one of my girlfriends. plz forget i said anything
i don’t wanna make this any weirder
For a handful of long, tense moments, your message remains unanswered. You watch, vaguely nauseous, as the three bouncing dots appear, then disappear, then reappear again. After a breathlessly long time of no typing at all, another notification pops up at the top of your screen.
Venmo: @Ezra-1984 paid you $5 “☕”
Add a latte to your order from the diner. I find that everything looks a bit brighter after a good cup of coffee.
Even a night of disappointing congress.
Your cheeks flare to life once again, the flush reaching from the tips of your ears down your neck to your chest. “Congress,” he called it. What a classy, delicate word for the sweaty, inept fumbling you had experienced last night in this very bed.
Which reminds you. You need to wash your sheets.
💀💀💀
thank you e 🙈💗
[Attached: JPG]
holy shit this food is incredible. it’s bringing me back to life.
also 10/10 recommendation on the eggs and the latte. you’re the best e, thank you
You’re most welcome, little bird. Be gentle with yourself today.
i will 🤗
any chance i could grab you before you go to work tonight? feeling much more human, got your clothes all ready to go by the door
I have underestimated you, birdie. I must stop doing that.
I did not assume you would have any interest in social interaction today given the state you were in this morning. I am already at the bar.
ah ok no worries
i really will get your clothes back to you, e. i promise.
I know you will, sweetheart. I trust you.
You feel a bit crazed as you dig through the drawers of your dresser, rummaging through the neatly folded piles of clothing with such frustrated carelessness that you know you’re going to have to reorganize it all later. It isn’t like you to misplace something like this – you’re meticulous about your clothes, far more so than you are in any other area of your life (except perhaps your work). The idea of anything just up and disappearing from your wardrobe is unheard of.
Perhaps, if it were anything else, it wouldn’t bother you so much. Perhaps, if tomorrow was any other day, you wouldn’t mind choosing something else to wear. But it does, and you do.
You have another date tomorrow night.
Not a repeat of the disastrous liaison with the barista, thank god, but a friend of a friend, someone you encountered occasionally at parties or bars who often offered to buy you drinks and smiled at you a little too long to be strictly friendly. You had never taken his flirtations especially seriously, but after the unmitigated failure that was your last attempt at getting back into the dating scene, your ego admittedly is feeling a bit bruised. It makes you willing to give him a real shot. Even if it winds up being underwhelming, you feel certain that anything would be better than the fucking barista.
Which means that you need those god-forsaken panties.
They’re your favorites – the cheeky, lacy, baby pink pair that stretched over your skin so softly, that framed the globes of your ass so delicately you couldn’t help but feel every inch a woman in them.
Pulling them on over your hips is a one-way ticket to feeling your sexiest, most feminine self, and you can’t imagine going on a first date without them to boost your confidence. And you just washed them – they should be right at the top of the pile, nestled precisely in your top dresser drawer, exactly where they belong. And yet…they aren’t.
Collapsing onto your bed in an aggravated heap, you tug your phone out of the pocket of your lounge shorts. Opening your messages, you tap on your conversation with E and fire off a quick text before you can think better of it. The flush that follows arrives not far behind, part of you a bit mortified at what you’re about to ask your faceless neighbor. But you’re desperate, and you know he will help you if he can.
i have a longshot of a question for you
Please, shoot!
did you happen to do laundry last night?
I did, indeed! Why do you ask?
did you use the same washers and dryers you normally do?
I always use the same machines. You’ve got me terribly curious now, little bird. What’s this about?
would you mind checking your dried clothes for me? i seem to be the one missing something this time.
i know the chances of them ending up with you are slim but i had to at least ask lol
Of course, hold on a beat.
A few tense, nerve-wracking minutes pass as you stare at your phone, tapping your foot anxiously, chewing on your lower lip as you wait. You doubt he has them. What would be the chances? Your apartment building has over a hundred units – there was no way with all of the other residents whose faces you had never seen, whose names you did not know, that E had been the one to use the same machines directly after you.
And yet…what if he had?
What if your favorite panties are currently tangled in his laundry basket, all mixed up with his well-loved shirts and shorts and jeans and socks? What if he goes to check for them, and the little flash of baby pink peeks out at him from between the grays and the navys and the olive greens, all feminine and delicate and sweet?
What if this mysterious man, who calls you his “little bird” and who has managed to thoroughly charm you over notes and texts and money for coffee, was about to catch a glimpse of your underwear for the first time, and you’re not even there to see his face when he does?
[Attached: JPG]
You wouldn’t happen to be missing these delicious little things, would you, birdie?
And there they are – draped over a calloused palm, dangling from thick, long, achingly masculine fingers. The blushing pink color of the lacy fabric contrasts stunningly with his tanned skin, and although you wouldn’t describe yourself as being particularly petite, the size of his hand somehow manages to make them look delicate in his grip.
The flush in your cheeks spreads instantly, making your ears burn, your chest feel tight and hot. Low in your abdomen, something stirs, something that had woken a handful of other times before – like when he had called you a “clever girl” or a “cheeky bird.” You had wondered then – what this man looked like, what he sounded like, whether he was as attractive in reality as you pictured him in your mind. Even without seeing his face, you feel now you know with certainty. You don’t have to wonder anymore.
Anyone with hands like that would turn your head. Knowing they were attached to someone who spoke to you like someone out of a regency-era novel is the final straw.
omg e
Am I to take that as a yes?
yeah those are mine 💀🙈
Are you at home, by chance?
You frown, your heartrate picking up as it beats a tattoo against the insides of your ribs.
yeah i’m here. why?
Well, I am clearly in the building, as well. I will be for the rest of the evening. Would you be amenable to coming over? I would happily come to you if you would prefer, but I would understand if you wish for your precise unit number to remain unknown.
Oh, god.
You take a deep, steadying breath and will your hands not to shake at the sudden wave of nerves twisting your belly into knots. He wants to meet you. Finally. And right now.
ok. yeah i’ll come to you if that’s okay
Of course. I’m in apartment 802. Come on over whenever you’re ready.
The frown between your brows deepens. 802? You’re in unit 902. Is it possible…
Has E been directly beneath you this entire time? Is it possible that not only does he share a building with you, but he is your downstairs neighbor?
wait. 802???
…yes?
He is. E – Ezra, your correct yourself (if you’re going to meet the man, you ought to be able to call him by his name) – lives directly below you. At least you know precisely how to get to him, you muse as you type out your response.
ok just making sure. be there in 10.
The next few minutes are spent in a flurry – brushing your teeth, fluffing your hair, refreshing your perfume, and confirming that you haven’t accumulated any unknown stains on your favorite oversized gray t-shirt or your shorts. You contemplate briefly whether you should change your clothes before making your way down to Ezra’s apartment, but ultimately you decide against it. Your lounge clothes are cute, and wouldn’t it be odd, you think, to show up on his doorstep looking like you felt the need to dress up for something when he knows your routine enough by now to know that you wouldn’t be leaving the complex today?
As you tuck your bare feet into your favorite pair of slides, you consider that you might be overthinking things.
It takes you another minute to gather your phone, your keys, and the small stack of his clothes that you are embarrassed to note has started to collect a fine layer of dust. The sight serves as a stark reminder of what this really is, all it has ever really been – a neighbor doing a favor for another neighbor. The return of items lost, even though the loss was weeks ago now. That is all your acquaintance with Ezra really is, at the end of the day. It’s friendly, but it is also impersonal.
These reminders to yourself ring hollow in your mind as you make your way to the stairwell. You don’t believe them, and you can’t help but hope that Ezra won’t, either.
The man that answers the door of apartment 802 looks both exactly like and nothing like you pictured.
He opens the door with confidence, an open and charming smile splitting his face the moment he lays eyes on you. He takes you in with a sweep of his dark, soulful eyes, tanned skin crinkling at their corners as he grins, and nothing could have prepared you for the way your heart begins to race as you do the same. Fuck, he is so handsome. Wild, dark brown hair, shorter on the sides and back than on the top, sticking up every which way with a single shock of blonde directly over his right eye. A prominent, Romanesque nose perched over a pair of full, soft-looking lips. Patchy, scruffy facial hair. A thin, pale scar twisting across his left cheek.
He looks like a creative, like a scoundrel – an artist or an activist or a rebellious academic who refuses to play by the rules. Precisely your type, you think, heat pooling low in your belly.
As you take in his attire, it immediately becomes apparent that the clothes you hold in your hands are an excellent representation of the rest of his wardrobe. He’s barefoot, a pair of navy-blue athletic shorts hanging low and loose on his narrow hips, and the black t-shirt that stretches snugly across his impossibly broad chest is heavily faded with many washes and sports several tiny holes along the seams.
Another hole, this one much larger than the rest, reveals itself as he shifts to rest his arm high against the doorframe. Leaning over you with casual self-assurance, the man tracks the way your gaze immediately darts to his underarm with the move. You can see the thick, dark hair of his armpit through the gap in the fabric, and the strangely intimate sight almost instantly brings a flush to your cheeks.
“Well, now,” he croons, slow and long and with an accent that flusters you even more. “Either you’ve found yourself on the wrong doorstep, or you must be the mysterious little bird that’s been chirping so sweetly in my ear every day for the last month.” He drops his grip on the old brass doorknob and extends his hand to you. It’s the same hand that had been photographed holding your panties mere minutes before – big, broad-palmed, calloused. “Name’s Ezra. What’s yours, birdie?”
You accept the handshake with minimal hesitation, offering him your name in return. “I’m, uh. I’m glad we could finally make this work,” you stammer. “I was kind of starting to feel like I had taken your stuff hostage.”
To that, Ezra chuckles, and the warm rasp of the sound settles itself somewhere beneath your navel. “Your willingness to be so flexible and communicative is deeply appreciated,” he drawls. “I’m sure most people in your position wouldn’t have been so accommodating.”
The earnestness of his words has you feeling almost bashful as you quickly reassure him, “Oh, I didn’t mind, really. You were the one who had to go without your stuff for this long. It was the least I could do.”
“See, that is precisely what I mean. Sweet as sugar and twice as lovely.” The man winks, offering you another charismatic smile, and you can’t smother the flustered chuckle that bubbles up in your chest.
There is a moment then when the two of you stand in silence – just the span of a heartbeat where you look at each other through the archway of his apartment door, him inside, you outside, each of you sizing up the other, quietly putting a face to all of the little pleasantries you’ve exchanged over the past weeks. That moment stretches, becomes two, and you watch as something akin to a blush, the first vulnerability he has displayed thus far, blooms across the tips of his ears.
Just before the quiet begins to edge into awkwardness, Ezra claps his hands and steps back away from the doorframe, sweeping his arms in a wide, beckoning gesture.
“Well, let us not delay any longer, shall we?” he says brightly. “Come, birdie, step inside, and I’ll retrieve your own garments which have gone astray.”
You hesitate only a moment before accepting his invitation, and as you cross the threshold, he closes the door behind you. You think that perhaps the sound of the knob catching in its place ought to make you nervous – after all, you have never really met this man before today and now here you are, alone with him in his home. But instead, the way your pulse picks up speed feels more like anticipation than fear.
As you hover in the narrow entryway, you notice that the floorplan of his unit is perfectly identical to yours. The open kitchen, the modest living room, the short hallway down which you knew you would find a single bedroom and bathroom. You’ve never been inside another unit in this building before, and it feels almost surreal as you take in a space that bears so many resemblances to your own while still very clearly being inhabited by someone else.
Ezra seems oblivious to your observations. Instead, he is all business as he retreats without preamble down the hallway toward his bedroom. You stare after him, confused for an instant as to why he would just leave you alone, but then you realize –
Your panties are in his bedroom.
Trying desperately to distract yourself from that brain-melting thought, you allow yourself to glance around the place. Your first impression is of the almost overwhelming number of plants that take up the living space. You recognize a few – snake plants and ZZ plants in mismatched pots on every available flat surface, spider plants and pothos dangling from macrame hangers in front of the windows, a lush monstera taking up most of the western corner, a fiddle-leaf fig standing sentinel by the sliding glass door. The rest you couldn’t even begin to guess at, but the overall effect is one of a vibrant oasis of greenery, and you can’t help but be impressed.
“Wow, you have so many plants!” you gasp, wandering deeper into the apartment as you marvel at your surroundings.
Ezra’s voice is muffled as he replies from the bedroom, “Indeed. This side of the building gets such abundant sunshine during the day, but I don’t often have the opportunity to enjoy it. It somehow feels less wasteful to know that another living thing is reaping the benefits.”
“Huh. Never thought about it like that.” You feel a charmed smile tugging at your mouth. “Maybe I should get a few.”
His decorating taste is clearly eclectic, almost every item found in the dusty labyrinth of a thrift store or at an estate sale. There’s a vintage sofa in burnt orange corduroy that has plainly seen better days, a cracked leather armchair that looks like it once belonged in the study of some wealthy professor, and an overflowing bookshelf stuffed to the brim with books of all sizes and levels of wear. Butted up against the kitchen island is a little 1960s dining table with a single chair, the surface of which is littered with several abandoned, half-drunk cups of coffee. You also can’t help but smirk as you notice the chunky green ashtray on the coffee table in the very center of the living room with a partially-smoked joint resting in the middle.
“It’s quite a rewarding past time. I would encourage anyone with the time and the interest to try their hand at plant guardianship.” He emerges from the bedroom as he speaks, the smallest scrap of pale pink lace visible in the clench of his right fist. “Does your dwelling get light such as this?” he asks, gesturing at the tall windows, the sliding door leading out onto the balcony, the streaming sunlight painting the room a pale gold.
The question jerks you back to the present, reminds you why you’re here and of the strange coincidence you had discovered just before coming down to meet him.
“Actually… You know, it’s funny. Mine is almost exactly the same.”
Ezra quirks a dark, prominent brow at you, his expression pleasantly interested. “Is that so?”
“It’s, uh. Actually why I wanted to verify your unit number.” You rub the back of your neck, suddenly feeling strangely self-conscious. “I’m in 902.”
The man goes still at your confession, and the look of intrigue on his face shifts to a frown. He’s quiet for a moment, pursing his lips, before echoing, “…902?”
You nod. “Yeah. I’m directly above you.” Pointing to the white, spackled surface over your heads, you add, “My floor is your ceiling.”
A pause, and then a slow, creeping grin spreads across his roguish face, warping the thin white scar across his cheek. His dark eyes shine with something like awe as he murmurs, “Fascinating.”
“I know! What are the chances, right?”
“You are the unfortunate neighbor who has such abysmal luck with men.”
All good humor leaves your body then, and you find yourself blinking dumbly back him. His unexpected words hang in the air for a moment, and as you take a deep breath, you manage to stammer, “…What?”
Ezra’s grin transforms into something closer to a smirk, a knowing gleam darkening his gaze. “There was a man a while back, a frequent visitor. I could hear the weight of his footsteps often.” With slow, even steps, he approaches you, closing the distance between you with every word he drawls. “And sometimes, on the weekends, I would be woken from my sleep during the day to the sound of your bedframe squeaking and scraping across the floor, directly above me. You put on quite the performance for him, all those little cries and moans.” His words have the gentle flush you’ve worn since he opened the door flaring to life once again, and you fight the urge to cover your cheeks with your palms, to hide your eyes from his.
“Did he ever figure out that they were all fabricated?” he rasps, leaning into your space as he comes to stand before you. He whispers the question like something asked in the strictest confidence, like the two of you are gossiping together over a bottle of wine or a pot of tea. It’s ingratiating as much as it is humiliating, and the casual intimacy is enough to have your stomach clenching in your abdomen.
“I-I don’t know what you mean.” Your words lack conviction even to your own ears. You have never been a skilled liar, but this attempt is truly abysmal.
Deep wrinkles form between Ezra’s brows as he frowns at you, his tone taking on the soft timbre of reproach. “Oh, come now, little bird. I know the difference between manufactured pleasure and the real thing. Now, the unfortunate boy you drunkenly brought back to your domicile a few nights ago, the one that you said, and I quote, ‘sucked so bad.’ You didn’t even attempt such a performance for him, though if I recall, he was rather loud.” He looks you up and down, that perceptive gaze tracing from the top for your head to the tips of your toes and back again. “And it’s no wonder you did not find your rapture with him, birdie, he lacked all sense of rhythm.”
Involuntarily, you are thrown back to that regrettable night – the awkward barista’s sharp, angular body hovering over you, his too-wet kisses, his grabby, wandering hands, his irregular thrusts, the barely-lukewarm interest all of it inspired…
You do cover your cheeks then, spinning on your heel to break his all-too-discerning stare. “Oh…my god.”
But Ezra is undeterred. He continues, “When we conversed the next morning, I did think it an odd coincidence that you should describe such an underwhelming night when I knew for certain my upstairs neighbor had had much the same experience. Imagine my surprise to learn that it was not a coincidence at all.”
Swallowing thickly, you shake your head, as though the motion might erase the last few moments and somehow bring you back to a time when you did not know that this man – your neighbor, your friend, the person you have been casually crushing on in spite of never having seen him before today – has not only been hearing you have sex for the last several months but also has known all this time that it was bad sex. Somehow that little detail makes it all the more appalling, though you aren’t certain you could explain how.
“This is mortifying,” you mutter, almost to yourself, the words coming out smothered and strange as you slip your fingers over your eyes, palms pressing against your mouth.
Before you manage to disappear into yourself, however, a large, warm, calloused hand wraps itself around one of your wrists and draws your hand away from your face.
“Nonsense, birdie, nothing at all to be embarrassed about.” His voice is low and gentle as he bids you to look at him. “If anyone ought to feel any humiliation in this scenario, it ought to be those incompetent fools granted the unparalleled privilege of getting the share the bed of a kind, intelligent, and heart-stoppingly beautiful young woman such as yourself.”
Your brows draw upward in surprise, and you drop both your hands, thoroughly disarmed and taken aback by his words. “T-Thank you, E. You’re sweet.”
Shifting on his feet, the man inches just that little bit closer to you, enough that you can feel the warmth radiating off of him, enough that you’re overwhelmed by the scent of him. Something woodsy and green, deep and fresh and colored with an inescapable undertone of sweat. You think it ought to be repellant, being this close to a strange man who undeniably smells like he didn’t bother to put any deodorant on this morning, but instead, it just makes you feel a little weak in the knees.
Ezra smells like a man, like a sweaty man in the middle of a dense, evergreen forest, and it makes some primal part of you, deep inside, ache and throb and want.
You startle softly as he gently takes ahold of your chin between his thumb and forefinger, the touch pulling you out of your reverie and forcing you to meet his eyes. God, his skin is so warm, his dark brown eyes so beautiful and earnest. You couldn’t look away even if you wanted to.
“Far as I can tell,” he croons, his accent elongating and softening his words in a way that has your heartbeat stuttering, “it’s been a tragically long time since you were properly satisfied. And that’s just a cryin’ shame.”
With the most delicate pressure, he slowly, tenderly tugs your chin forward and upward. You can feel his breath on your cheek, on your lips, hot and damp and smelling of spearmint. The sensation has your eyelids flagging, your mouth parting. He’s so close now, a hairsbreadth away. You wonder what his stubble will feel like, whether it will leave friction burns on the tender skin of your jaw.
You’ve never slept with a man with facial hair before, you think to yourself. Would he leave those same burns under your breasts, on the insides of your thighs, too?
The moment the thought crosses your mind, you rip yourself out of his grip with a gasp, practically throwing yourself backward and colliding with the edge of the coffee table. The edge catches against the backs of your calves, and you stumble, rattling the ash tray and sending the half-smoked joint rolling across the table.
“Birdie! Are you – ”
You brush off his concern, retreat to the kitchen in a flurry of excuses.
You don’t know this man, you remind yourself, willing your heartbeat to stop racing, the space between your thighs to stop throbbing. Prior to five minutes ago, you had never even seen his face, and you were about to kiss him? And not only that, but you’re already thinking about fucking him?
Sure, the E you knew was kind. Intelligent, well-mannered, thoughtful. Wickedly funny. All things you looked for in a potential partner. But was all of that real? Was this man – Ezra – the same man you thought you knew?
He follows you into the kitchen, handsome face pinched with contrition, dark eyes wide and shining. “I apologize if I – ”
But you do not let him finish. Instead, you gather up the little pile of clothes you had brought for him and thrust them in his direction. “Here – your clothes,” you say hurriedly, avoiding his eyes. “All the socks, the undershirt, and the shorts. So if I could just get my – ”
This time, it is Ezra who cuts you off. “Your lacy little unmentionables?”
He opens his fist, and you watch as your favorite pair of panties tumbles from his grip and dangles tantalizingly in mid-air, his thick index finger threaded through the gusset.
Abandoning his stack of laundry on the kitchen counter, you lunge for them, but he sees you coming a mile away. He yanks them out of your reach before your fingers can close around them, like a child on the playground teasing another with a coveted toy, and you stare at him incredulously.
“Ah, ah,” he tsks, his smile placid, almost smug as he watches your frustration and embarrassment grow. “You know, until I saw you on my doorstep, I wasn’t certain, but now that you’re here, I’m afraid there’s one more thing I’m going to need if you want these delightful delicates back.”
Unsure whether to blame your pounding pulse on anger, humiliation, or arousal, you can do nothing but blink back at him. “What?”
“Your shirt,” he specifies, gesturing to the oversized gray t-shirt currently draped over your frame. “Or, perhaps more accurately, my shirt.”
“This is my shirt,” you snap venomously. You are certain now – it’s anger. It has to be. The audacity of this man –
But Ezra is unperturbed, unmoved by your vitriol. His tone is calm and matter-of-fact as he replies, “No, little bird, it’s mine. Lost about the same time as the rest of articles you recovered from the laundry facility.”
You shake your head in confusion. “But…you never mentioned – in your notes, you always just said – ”
“I know, that it is true, but I was mistaken.” He glances down at the pair of underwear in his hand, allowing the intricate fabric to slip between his fingers and pool in his palm as he speaks. “You see, the shirt you’re wearing is not one I reached for often. It’s even older than those shorts you’ve been looking after for me. It took me well over a week to notice that it had disappeared from my wardrobe, as well.” His eyes flick back up to yours, dark lashes lowering as he studies you. “By that time, you had already established which of my items you had in your possession. It never occurred to me to ask if you had the shirt, as well.”
Your jaw works, mouth opening and closing as you struggle with how to respond. You think back to the day you found this shirt, tangled up in one of your bath towels fresh from the dryer, the same day you had found the sweat-stained undershirt. You couldn’t believe your luck, couldn’t believe the soft, perfectly-aged flawlessness of it – the way it had caressed your skin, the way it draped so effortlessly over your shoulders and skimmed your curves so delicately. It had never once occurred to you that this shirt might have been owned by the same person as the undershirt that had clearly seen better days.
“But… This is my favorite shirt,” you murmur despondently, all the fight leaving you as you run your fingertips over the hem.
Ezra’s gaze follows your touch, tracing across the edge of the shirt with an almost feverish gleam. “I can see why,” he rasps, his tongue coming out to wet his plush lower lip. “It is…enchanting on you. But I really must insist. You see, if I allow you to keep it, I will be plagued for the rest of my days by thoughts of you in this shirt – my shirt. And it will surely drive me mad.”
Your eyes snap to his, and for the first time, you feel as though you are able to glimpse a sliver of the man beneath the fanciful language and the slovenly clothes and the cluttered, eclectic apartment. Ezra has an edge to him, a ferocity he keeps well-hidden, but as he allows himself to take you in, you can see it – something animalistic, something raw and ragged and hungry. You watch as his hand clenches tightly around your panties, his thumb rubbing possessively over the little satin bow on the front, and all at once, the anger and embarrassment warring in your chest falls away, leaving only burning need in its wake.
You had never felt anything like this – this crackling electricity, this smoldering desire – with your ex. And certainly never with that worthless barista. This feels primal, a dangerous compliment to the silliness of the swooning, blushing infatuation you had felt for him before today.
How were you supposed to stand strong, to not give in to him when you had fascination, affection, and lust all working against you?
Did it really matter that you had never seen his face until this afternoon?
You’re certain that your conflict must be showing on your face because Ezra looks ready to charge across the kitchen and throw you up onto the kitchen counter at a single word from you. He’s twitchy and eager, his fingers spasming down by his sides, his fist clenching around your panties so hard you can see his knuckles turning pale.
“Come on now, birdie,” he urges, the stretch of silence almost seeming to cause him physical pain. “Have mercy on an old man and hand it over.”
His words have you swallowing thickly, a wave of heat flooding your chest and spreading to the apex of your thighs. You shift on your feet, pressing your thighs together in an unconscious search for friction, but he spots it – of course, he does. You watch as a muscle in his jaw jumps at the sight, his nostrils flaring as though to catch a whiff of your scent, and god, there’s that animal again – that feral savagery that you never would have known he possessed if you hadn’t coaxed it out of him. He’s beautiful like this, you think, just on the ragged edge of his self-control; it is that look that has you crossing your arms over your chest and drawing your t-shirt up and over your head.
The man blinks heavily, releasing a long, shuddering breath as you hold the shirt out to him by its collar. You dangle it from your fingertips, just as he had your panties, and he looks on with burning eyes as you let it drop to the floor in a puddle of gray cotton.
“Gods above, girl, look at you.”
You have no more words to describe the look on Ezra’s face. He looks enraptured, like a man in thrall, and you resist the urge to cover yourself. Your plain cotton bralette is easily one of the least glamorous underthings in your collection, but with the way he drinks in your figure, you would think that you had just revealed the most intricate, salacious piece of lingerie the man had ever seen. It makes you feel beautiful, powerful, and in control for the first time since you stepped through his door.
“Happy now?” you ask, your voice coming out weaker, breathier than you had intended. Your words are confident, almost taunting, but your tone betrays that you are just as affected by this game you’re playing as he is.
The smallest hint of a smile quirks the corner of his mouth. “I am, indeed. And yet now I fear I will find myself plagued by thoughts of another subject but a…similar flavor.”
With one last sweep of his gaze, the look like a caress as it trails across your body, he takes a step forward, then another, then another. When he finally stands no more than a handful of inches from you, he crouches down and scoops the abandoned shirt off the tiled kitchen floor. Heart in your throat, pulse in your pussy, you watch as he slowly rises back to his full height, brings the shirt to his face, and inhales.
“Goddammit,” he growls, eyes falling shut as he breathes in the soft fabric. “Smell so sweet, little bird. And it’s still warm.”
Your stomach bottoms out at that, the desperation in his voice like a drug that has your knees weakening beneath you. You’re so wet now; you can feel it slicking your panties, dampening your little cotton shorts.
“Ezra.” It spills softly from your mouth like a plea, unbidden and unashamed, and he nods slowly, eyes still closed, as though drinking in the sound of your need like water.
“I do so enjoy the sound of my name on your lips,” he admits. He makes no attempt to hide his own hunger anymore, and it calls to the one in you, stoked so confidently and carefully by his words. “Would you like me to see if I can make you say it again?”
Ezra kisses like a man starved. You’ve never experienced a need like his, the heat and the urgency of it a physical thing, dragging its silvered claws along your nerve endings, leaving you with no choice but to melt into him as he ravages your mouth. Desperation drips from his tongue past your lips, radiates from his hands into the very marrow of your bones. There’s something almost unhinged in the way he grips back of your neck, the way he runs his fingers through your hair, the way he eats at your mouth with a decadence that has you whimpering. It’s terrifying and thrilling in equal measure – that he could have such an effect on you so immediately.
He had lamented how long it had been since you had been “properly satisfied.” From the way he touches you, you wonder if he ever has.
“Gods, birdie,” he groans, dragging his mouth across the edge of your jaw to your ear, catching the soft little lobe between his teeth. “The sweetest thing I’ve ever tasted. What divinity is responsible for bringing you to my doorstep?”
You can do nothing but sigh in reply, the heat of his breath on your neck sending sparkling shivers down your spine. You cling to him tighter, dig your nails into the cotton of his T-shirt, and he groans at the dull bite of them embedding themselves in the ropey muscles of his shoulders.
“Hnng – the delicate little bird has claws.” He drops both hands to your ass with a smack, each one taking a broad palmful of your cheeks, and grips you so hard you can feel your pussy lips start to spread with them. Your face burns as you realize that he almost certainly can feel your heat on his fingertips – he’s mere inches from the core of you, the only thing separating his touch from your cunt the thin, damp layers of your shorts and panties.
“You should know…” he murmurs into the soft, vulnerable patch of skin behind your ear. “I am going to wring every. last. ounce. of pleasure out of you. I want to savor every drop of it. And if you even think about attempting to placate me with one of those fake little cries I know you favor, I can assure you, I will know, and I will not stand for it. Do you understand?”
You nod, sliding your fingers up into his dark, unruly hair. “Yes. Yes, I understand.”
The scruff of his beard scrapes along your neck as he grins. “Atta girl. Now. Hold on tight.” And with little warning, Ezra slips his hands down to the underside of your ass cheeks and lifts you into the air. You let out a little yelp, your legs wrapping around his waist on instinct alone, and the hum of his laughter sings in your veins as he carries you to the bedroom.
“There she is. That’s what you needed, isn’t it?”
“Ezra…!”
“Fuck, sweet girl, I know. Keep on grinding for me. Keep going ‘til I say so.”
He has you on his lap, knees on either side of his hips as you straddle him in the center of his bed. His torso is propped up on an abundant pile of pillows stacked artlessly against the wall behind him, and his hands haven’t left your tits in countless minutes. He has no headboard, you notice absently, just a thin photo-realistic tapestry depicting a moss-covered forest hanging at the head of the bed, but as off-putting as you would find that under normal circumstances, in this moment, you can’t bring yourself to care.
“Feels so good,” you whimper, head thrown back, eyes drifting shut, hips working, working, working over the sizeable bulge pressing insistently against your cunt through the fabric of your clothes. He’s so hard beneath you, and his hands – his broad, thick, calloused hands – are performing magic on your nipples.
He had long since pulled down the flimsy cups of your bralette, allowing the soft swell of your breasts to spill over the tops, and after drawing the tips of them into achingly hard points with his tongue, he has contented himself with endlessly rubbing, pinching, and tugging at them while you grind against him. The constant stimulation is driving you insane – every caress of his thumb is like a crackling arm of lightning arcing down your nerve endings to your slick, swollen clit, and every thrust of your hips has the leaking head of his cock catching on that clit, and god damn, you’ve never come just from dry humping before, but you feel dangerously close to doing so right here in this near-stranger’s bed, all over his lap.
And Ezra knows it, too. With a smug, filthy smirk, he nods slowly, encouragingly. “Yeah, it does. Can feel you soaking me through my shorts.”
You pant, leaning back to brace your palms on his knees behind you, shifting your angle, seeking more of his hardness. The moan that leaves your mouth as you find the perfect position would be embarrassing if you weren’t so far gone. As it is, it barely even registers. “Oh my god, oh my god – ”
Your neighbor shakes his head, tongue darting out to wet his lips as he traps each of your nipples between his thumbs and forefingers and squeezes, making your hips judder. “No god here, baby. Goddess, maybe. Never seen anything that made me believe in the almighty quite so much as you.”
His praise sends a wave of heat through you, and you can feel sweat starting to bloom along your hairline, under your breasts, in the creases of your thighs. Fuck, your legs are burning, your hips are sore from being spread so wide over him, and god, why won’t he just fuck you already?!
“Ezra, please – ”
“You can come like this, birdie.” His voice is low, strained and rasping but somehow steady. “Come just like this, and then I’m all yours.”
And he’s right – it doesn’t take much longer for it all to become just too much. His torturous attentions on your tits, the low, rich, rasping drawl of his encouragements, the impossibly hard and thick length of him pressing so perfectly against your dripping pussy – all of it stokes the flames in your belly, winds that coil deep inside. In the end, all it takes the wet drag of his tongue against your neck and a whispered “let go, little bird, I got you” in your ear, and you are gone.
Ezra’s hand comes up to cup the side of your face as you come down, his thumb stroking your cheek with surprising tenderness as you whimper and sigh and shake under his grip. “There she is,” he croons, all gentle warmth. “How’d that feel?”
All you can manage in reply is a weak nod. You list forward, seeking his mouth with your own, and you feel him grin into the kiss as you slot your lips against his.
“Fuck, E, please?” you murmur, fingers finding the short, wild strands of hair at the base of his skull and tugging gently.
“Please?” He echoes the word into your mouth, his breath hot on your face as he traces the tip of his prominent nose along yours. His eyes are heavy-lidded, his pupils blown wide, but they shine with good humor just the same. “Please what, baby?”
“Fuck me.” You sound petulant, demanding, almost childlike to your own ears.
With a warm chuckle, his slick tongue darts out to flick playfully at the seam of your open, panting mouth. “Soon. Very soon.”
“I dare not admit to how many times I thought about this. It would surely ruin your good opinion of me.”
You can barely string together enough brain cells to process Ezra’s words, let alone form a coherent response.
You’ve shed the remainder of your clothes, as has he, and you’ve traded places now – your reclined torso supported by the pile of pillows against the wall while your neighbor kneels on the mattress between your spread legs. He pumps his cock – even thicker than you had guessed, flushed ruddy and dripping pearls of precum – with one hand, while the other busies itself between your legs. The stretch of his first two fingers is incredible, the gentle, focused swirl of his thumb on your clit only adding to the sensation. It’s so delicious you can’t keep still, your hips grinding and thrusting to meet his touch.
Eyes fluttering with overwhelm, weak little moans dropping from your open mouth, you stammer, “Y-You thought about this?”
He nods, that blonde shock of hair over his right eye bobbing with the motion. “I did, indeed. Couldn’t help myself, gods forgive me.” His dark, burning gaze remains focused on your cunt, intent on not missing a moment of the way his fingers glisten with your wetness. The intensity of that stare makes you tremble. “From that very first missive I found in the laundry facility. That…precious pink stationary, with the strawberries around the outside. It smelled sweet. Damn near drove myself mad thinking about it.”
Fuck, his fingers – they keep dragging against something inside you – something along the front wall of your pussy, something you know exists but have never found a partner who was interested in seeking it out. The feeling is foreign but completely spine-melting, a pleasure so deep and round and full that you can barely keep your eyes from slipping shut.
“I wondered what you might look like, what you might sound like. I wondered if you got as much satisfaction from our correspondence as I did. I wondered whether you enjoyed it when I dared to flirt, even if it was just a little bit.” His gaze flicks up to yours briefly, his hand still working his cock, his fingers still buried in your wetness. “Did you, little bird? Did you like when I flirted with you?”
You nod, blinking heavily as you try to hold his eye contact. “Yes,” you sigh, the sound coming out high-pitched and whining. “I did, I liked it.”
“And what about now? Do you like this? Do you like how I toy with your captivating little cunt?”
You moan and nod again. “I do, yes, E, fuck.”
The desperation in your voice makes Ezra smile. “She’s so pretty, sweetheart. So soft and juicy, spilling down my fingers like a ripe little peach in the middle of summer.” He pulls his fingers from you then, and you yelp in protest, your hands flying to his wrist to try to drag him back inside you. But he brushes off your grip like a harmless pest. Instead, he sticks out his tongue and drags his pointer and middle finger across it, leaving a trail of your milky slickness across his tastebuds. “Sticky. Sweet. Rich,” he groans, eyelids dropping closed, losing himself in the taste of you for a moment. “Full to bursting.”
He seems to remember himself, to finally hear your pleas of protest, and it takes him no more than half a beat to slip his fingers back inside you once again. “I want one more moment of ecstasy from you, birdie,” he growls, and you feel your deepest muscles clench down around him at the sound. “Let me watch you fall one more time, and then I will give you this cock.”
You nod again, your head bobbling on your neck as weakly as a newborn’s, and the grin he gives you in return in positively filthy.
“Excellent.”
The stroke of his fingers changes then, no more drugging, hypnotic in and out, no more tender swirl around your over-sensitive bundle of nerves. Instead, he starts to press on that soft, spongy, elusive spot deep within you, the pressure strong and insistent. Your back arches at the sensation, your hands flying out to grip onto his bare, freckled shoulders to hold yourself steady, but even the heat of his skin under your fingers isn’t enough to ground you. Instead, all you can do is drop little rhythmic moans synched with the motion of his hand. He jacks his wrist up and down, quick and firm and unrelenting, his fingertips pressing releasing pressing releasing pressing releasing, and slowly, steadily, something begins to build in you.
It’s searing hot and molten, pooling in your abdomen and leaking into your bloodstream. Your chest flushes, then you neck, then your face, and you swear your limbs are going numb as the pressure below your navel ratchets higher and higher.
“Ez-Ezra,” you whine. “That feels – I – ”
Somewhere at the edges of your awareness, you can sense him nodding, can feel the heat of his stare as he watches you. “I know, I know. Don’t fret now. You can give in to it. Feels good to surrender.”
A bolt of adrenaline rushes through you as that pressure morphs, transforms into the sudden, immediate, and desperate need to pee. The feeling mortifies you, and you shy away from it immediately, hips squirming away from his touch as you try not to embarrass yourself in front of this man you just met, but before you can get far, Ezra abandons his grip on his cock and instead uses that hand to push down hard on your lower stomach, holding you in place.
“Ah! Ezra!”
“Don’t fight your rapture, girl,” he rumbles. “Give me all that sweet nectar.”
Your orgasm hits you like a freight train.
It bowls you over, knocking the wind from your lungs, robbing the voice from your throat, and you can’t even manage to cry out as that dam inside you breaks and you flood his hand. Liquid gushes from you with such force that you can hear it hit his forearm, his knees, his bedsheets. He groans deep in his chest, resonant and victorious, but it sounds far away to you, like you’ve dunked your head underwater or filled your ear canals with cotton fluff. You’re so lost to your own ecstasy, you can hardly be bothered to acknowledge him, but still his miraculous fingers fuck you through the throes of it.
As you drift back to awareness, as your eyes blink open, you find that your nails have left deep, blood-red crescents in the tanned skin of his shoulders, and Ezra is gazing at you with something like pride shining in his dark eyes.
Your throat is dry and hoarse as you stutter, “I didn’t know – I’ve never – ”
“That’s my girl,” he whispers, dropping a surprisingly tender kiss to the very tip of your nose. “Lie back now. I’ve got one last trick up my sleeve.”
“Shit. Oh, shit. Oh, shit.”
He’s so deep inside you now, thick and long and throbbing, and tears are starting to gather at the corners of your eyes from the stretch and the force of him. He has your knees hooked over his shoulders, your hands braced against the bare wall above you to keep your head from bumping into it, and between your legs, Ezra pants and sweats and grinds his teeth as he pounds into you with enough force to rock the bedframe.
“In all my time…on this green earth…never felt anything like you, birdie. What did this old man…ever do…to deserves something so sweet? So…soft. So wet. So fucking…tight, goddammit, sweetheart – ”
From the moment he slipped inside you, he hasn’t shut up. Not that you want him to, but you’ve never had a bed partner be quite so vocal before. You think it might take some getting used to, though if what you’ve experienced with him so far is anything to go off of, you feel confident that it would be worth it for the orgasms alone. This man treats your pleasure like it’s his, like he gets just as much out of watching you fall apart as you do experiencing it. It’s intoxicating, making you want to deliver for him just as badly as he clearly wants to for you.
Your pussy feels swollen and almost achy, your clit throbbing with the paired sensations of pain and pleasure with every grind of his pubic bone against yours. You’re exhausted, your vision hazy, your mouth parched, your hips sore. If he manages to make you come even one more time, you think you might actually pass out.
And yet, you fight to keep your eyelids open, to keep your gaze on him. Your cunt still drools for him in spite of your overwhelm, and you’re gripped with the bone-deep need to stay the course. You want to make him feel as good as he makes you feel. You want to be good for him.
He deserves it, you think. He deserves everything you can offer him and more.
“All those theatrical moans, those high-pitched cries,” he continues, voice dropping to a husky growl as he drags the tip of his nose along the soft, supple skin of your calf. “Where are they now, little bird, eh? Turns out when someone really fucks you right, you go almost totally quiet. Isn’t that so?”
You gasp out a soft, strained, “Mm hm.”
Ezra’s teeth flash as he grins, sweat dripping from his brow, slicking down both blonde and brown hair to the surface of his forehead. “I know, baby. Dick so good, you can’t even make a sound.”
He shifts slightly, bearing the weight of his upper body on one hand instead two as the other delicately brushes your wild hair out of your face. You’re sure you’re a sight, all folded up like this under him, drenched in your own sweat and his, your hair tangled and your eyes fighting not to cross in pleasure.
“Thought about you so many times, birdie. Thought about the girl that made those sounds, too,” he confesses. He’s breathing heavily, his pace never slowing, never stopping. You can feel the flex of his abdomen as he thrusts, can feel the delectable friction of the tip of his cock against your tender G-spot. “What cosmic alignment…what turn of fortune…that you and that girl should be one and the same.”
“E-Ezra. It’s – it’s so – ”
“I know, sweetheart, I know.” His fingertips are so gentle against your cheek, a spine-melting contrast to the rough, powerful, insistent way he pounds into your body. Fuck, his cock is so good – you clench down around him involuntarily, the weight and the girth and the heft of him pressing so perfectly against every swollen, over-worked nerve ending within you. “But I told you – every last drop, remember? And you’ve still got one more to give me. I can feel it.”
On instinct, you shake your head, a whine bubbling up in your throat as your vision starts to blur. “Can’t – it’s too much – ”
“You can.” Ezra’s voice is breathless but firm, leaving no room for negotiation.
“But – ”
He groans your name then, and the sound of it on his lips forces your eyes open once more. “I can feel this precious little pussy clamping down on me. She’s speaking to me, baby. She wants to come, doesn’t she? One more time? She wants to squirt her delicious nectar all over me, I can tell.”
You have no more brain power left to formulate a response. A weak, whining “fuck” is all you can manage.
“It’s all right, little bird.” The wicked smirk on his face is audible in his voice. “You don’t have to say a thing. I can do all the talking for now – you just relax.”
Before long, that pressure returns – that weighty, swollen, urgent sensation low in your abdomen, the one that makes you seize up on instinct, one of your hands flying to his hip as though to push him away. But you are entirely too weak and overwhelmed to have much of an effect. Instead, Ezra just nods knowingly and chuckles.
“Right there? Is that what this pussy needs to give up her treasures?” He holds steady, hitting the exact same spot over and over and over, and you can’t help but whimper through clenched teeth. “Breathe, birdie. Breathe deep and let go.”
You’re too far gone to even consider disobeying.
You do as he says – dropping your jaw, drawing a deep, soothing breath into your lungs, feeling your belly rise with it, feeling your diaphragm stretch, and like magic, all of the resistant tension in your hips and core releases, and you’re coming.
You’re thighs-trembling, neck-straining, hands-clenching, cunt-gushing coming. Your mouth open on a silent scream, you ride the tidal wave with half-awareness, barely hearing Ezra’s babbled praises, barely feeling the vital grip of his fingers around your hips, barely sensing the bloom of warmth deep inside you as he fills you with his cum. The only sensation that breaks through it all is the sharp pinch of his teeth biting into the soft flesh of your inner thigh. But you don’t mind – you think you might actually relish the bruise that is sure to come later.
The world is hazy as you come down – the late afternoon sun streaming through Ezra’s window casts long shadows across the bed, and you notice belatedly that the two of you have cast every single pillow and blanket onto the floor during your tryst. You shiver as the sweat between you begins to cool, and for the first time, you start to feel the sopping wet mess you have made of his fitted sheet as it sticks to you unpleasantly. You hope he has a waterproof mattress cover underneath it – otherwise, he is in for a very expensive steam cleaning bill.
Even in your growing discomfort, however, you cannot bring yourself to move. Every muscle in your body feels wrung out; every joint feels weak and wobbly. And your mind – your mind is blissfully, delightfully blank. You smile faintly, allowing your fingertips to trail leisurely over your chest, your stomach, your hips. You are entirely sated, and it is glorious.
Ezra, for his part, appears to feel the same. He braces himself over you with lax, rounded shoulders, his head hanging loose on his neck, his eyes closed, silent at last. His softening cock still rests inside you, but you don’t mind it – he’s warm, and you’re starting to chill. Not for the first time, you’re struck by how beautiful he is. So much more so than you ever could have imagined when you first responded to that crinkled little note in the laundry room.
When he finally withdraws from you, he lets out a soft, rasping groan, and between your legs, you feel the slick warmth of his cum dripping out of your swollen, sensitive hole. You catch him watching it for a moment, a faint smile lifting the corner of his mouth, before he collapses onto the bed next to you with a sigh.
“Well, birdie,” he quips after a moment of satisfied silence, “I suppose I have some more laundry to do, eh?”
His words surprise a laugh from you, the motion forcing even more of his cum to slip down between your ass cheeks. “Yeah, I think that might be a good idea,” you say with a tired smile, turning on your side to face him. “I can help, if you want.”
His grin broadens, and he shoots you a cheeky, crinkle-eyed wink. “No need, sweetheart. I know how to clean up my own messes.”
It’s hours later when your phone vibrates on your night stand, pulling you from your shallow, restless sleep. The time reads nearly midnight, but you rub the grit from your eyes anyway as you scan the message lighting up the screen.
The next time I fuck you, little bird, you’re wearing those lacy panties.
A delicious thrill trips down your spine at Ezra’s words. Drawing your lower lip between your teeth, you thumb a quick reply.
🤭 on one condition
i want to wear the tshirt too 😜
Oh, you mean MY t-shirt?
no
MY tshirt 😇
Being the Cody’s on-call emergency nurse isn’t easy. A dislocated shoulder turns into late night gunshot wounds and before you know it, you’re part of the family. After a rough night, Pope needs some TLC. And who else can help him if not his favorite nurse? You’re the only one who can stitch him up, physically and emotionally.
masterlist
Word Count: 12.3k (was supposed to be 5k. oops.)
Warnings: existential crisis, does this count as a slow burn?, plot points from seasons 3 and 4 (just some dialogue and a job that goes bad), pope “kicked puppy” cody shows up on your door step, medical inaccuracies probably idk, descriptions of medical care including needles and stitches, poor craig literally cannot catch a break lmao, Smurf™, porn with feelings, reader smokes weed, cannon typical violence and pope being used to do the family’s dirty work, angst, he’s referred to as pope until one scene and then he’s andrew, pope lowkey has a competency kink, SMUT (18+), oral (f receiving), squirting, missionary, pope just wants to make you feel good, unprotected piv sex, pope has a praise kink and likes to suck titties (shocking, i know), breeding kink if you squint, cockwarming, no use of y/n for reader, can you tell my favorite trope is 'you take care of him when he's hurt and he falls in love with you'
A/N: pope fic time!! i need you to know that i called my mother about how to do stitches for this btw (she works in healthcare). I really really hope it’s enjoyable for you all! I’m sorry if I wrote anyone a little OOC. I need my man :c i wanna give him a kiss on the forehead and a bath and clean clothes and tell him its gonna be ok :c.
You walked into the ER waiting room with irritation already stirring in your stomach. You were supposed to be at home, taking a scented bath, drinking wine and reading your new book an hour ago. But one of the night nurses called out and his replacement wouldn’t be there for another two and a half hours. You drew the short straw, having to stay behind. Mainly because the rest of the nursing staff had lives, kids, responsibilities. And you didn’t. You had moved away from your hometown of Oceanside back when you went to nursing school, and all the responsibilities that remained there. You got tired of seeing the same people, hearing about the same couples break up and get back together again. So when you got a scholarship to go to a different nursing school out of state, you took it readily. Too bad when you graduated the only clinic to offer you a job was an ER in Wildomar. Only an hour away from the life you tried to leave behind. You didn’t hate it. It was close enough that you could go home and see your parents’ dog, far enough that you could have your own life. But if it were up to you, you’d be long gone by now. At least you never saw any of the unsavory characters from high school.
That’s what you thought, anyway, until you looked at the next name on the call list. Your steps faltered. ‘Liam Broker.’ You knew that name. A shiver crawled up the bottom of your spine. Liam didn’t exist. He wasn’t a real person. It was their alias. The Codys. Whenever they needed to fly under the radar, especially when they needed medical care after some dubious activities, they used that name. Sure, it could be a real guy, you really hoped it was, but when you turned around to call the name, all hope was lost. There they were, Deran and Craig, sitting in your ER. Your mouth went dry and you pressed your eyes shut. You took a deep breath before making yourself known to them. Deran was slumped in the shitty ER chair, bouncing his knee and nibbling on the skin of his thumb. Craig’s head was tossed back, counting ceiling tiles and trying not to move his arm.
“Mr. Broker,” you made a point to emphasize the name. “You can come back now.” Both of their heads snapped to look at you. You stood in front of them, death grip on the clipboard Craig had filled out.
“No shit.” Deran huffed, raking his gaze across you. Craig furrowed his brow. Like he kinda remembered you, but not from where. You and Deran were friends in high school. You ran in the same circles, smoked on the beach with the same people, and even rode along in the car he stole for his 16th birthday. You weren’t best friends, but you were close enough. He was a formative part of your teen years. You had an argument three days before you left for school. You couldn’t remember exactly what was said, but you remembered feeling so distraught that you never wanted to see him again. You walked them back to a room.
“Alright, dislocated shoulder?” You murmured, eyes scanning the chart. Craig was perched on the table, swinging his feet absentmindedly. He nodded.
“Yea,” He scratched behind his ear. “I’ve had it dislocated before, but it’s not going back in.”
“That happens,” You acknowledged, washing your hands in the sink before putting on a pair of gloves. “After so many home alignments, you’ve gotta have a professional do it.” Your eyes flicked to Deran. “Do I want to know how this happened?” They both hesitated for a moment and then shook their heads. You sighed. “Alright, take off your shirt, Craig.” The man startled slightly, looking at Deran. Surely confused about how you knew his real name. Deran just gave him a look and a small nod. Maybe easing his nerves, telling him they weren’t about to be arrested. Craig did as he was told. You gently examined the shoulder. “No wonder it didn’t work,” you muttered “It’s a posterior dislocation. You gotta get a different angle.” You readjusted your position and grabbed onto Craig’s bicep. With a quick push, you heard the joint slot back into place. He sucked in a breath, but exhaled in relief after a moment. You peeled off your gloves and tossed them in the bin. “I’ll tell the doctor we were able to get it back in. She’ll prescribe you some pain meds. For your use only.” You quirked an eyebrow and Craig nodded. “She should be in shortly.” You pulled back the door and left. Your heart was hammering against your sternum. The first time you had seen any of the Codys in years. You had survived. But you weren’t done yet. You made it a whole five steps down the hall before you felt a gentle hand pull you back by the wrist. You whirled around, ready to throw a punch, but you were met with Deran’s face. His brow was furrowed and his mouth was parted slightly, like he hadn’t quite decided what he was going to say yet.
“Hey,” was what he settled on. You shook your head in amusement.
“Really?” You scoffed, but you felt a smile dawning “That’s what you’re going with? Hey, Deran.”
“I, uh, didn’t know you worked here.”
“Clearly.”
“How was school?” Deran’s arm fell from yours and he shoved his hands into his pockets, shoulders rising slightly.
“It was good,” you answered honestly. Your voice didn’t hold any anger or resentment. “I’m a nurse now, so…y’know, I’d consider that a success.”
“That’s awesome.” Deran grinned.
“What about you?” You asked “How’s surfing? I know you wanted to go pro. You were really good.” Deran’s face fell slightly. A momentary lapse in his facade before the mask was up again.
“Yea, I, uh. I just do it for fun now. It got too stressful.” His words didn’t convince you. You sensed there was a lot more to that story, but you didn’t ask. Didn’t really want to. It wasn’t your business. “I’m working in, um…I work for…” He gestured to the air around him. You understood.
“Family business?”
“Yea.”
“I’m sorry to hear that.” You knew that Deran and his brothers were doing some shady shit in high school. Sometimes their mother would pull them from school for a few days. The next time you would see Deran, he would have bruises on his arm. He always said he was surfing and a rogue wave caught him. But after the third time, you had a hard time believing him. After you saw Smurf tucking a gun into Deran’s waistband in the school parking lot, it made you question if they were involved in gang activities. You brought up your concerns to your father, who had some connections to a few of the neighborhoods, but the moment the Cody name was said, he clammed up, made you promise you wouldn’t get yourself too involved with them. The night of prom, when you and Deran had snuck away from the main afterparty to smoke a joint, he had confided in you that he was scared he’d be stuck in Oceanside forever, working for his mom (he never elaborated what that meant, but you guessed). You assured him that he was talented, and he was. He was by far the best surfer you’d ever seen. But it seemed that his fears had come true and you truly felt sympathy for him. You had been lucky, getting out when you did. Of course, you had ended up back where you started, but you technically could leave whenever you wanted. You sensed that Deran didn’t have that luxury.
Deran nibbled on the inside of his cheek. “Listen,” He inhaled, setting his gaze anywhere but your face “I’ve…I’ve missed having you around. You’re, like, one of the only normal people in this place. I’m sorry for, uh, our fight before you left. I really am. I actually own a bar down in Oceanside. If you’re ever in the area, I still owe you that drink from when you stole that handle of Tito’s for me.” A smile twitched onto your lips.
“Yea,” you said softly, “Yea, I’ll stop by when I’m in town next.” Deran let out a laugh of relief.
“Yea?” He seemed genuinely happy “Okay, cool. Yea, sick I’ll, um, I’ll see you around then. I should probably make sure Craig doesn’t raid the cabinets.” He gave you a nod and slipped back into the room. You stayed put until the latch of the door clicked. You took a few deep breaths. Your mind swirled with thoughts. Did you really want to get yourself re-involved with them? You shook away the existential crisis that crept into the edges of your mind. You still had three hours left of your shift, and you heard elevated voices from the waiting room. You had other things to think about.
Sure enough, as the weeks went by, the encounter with the Codys drifted to the back of your brain. You hadn’t been back to Oceanside since their visit. You weren’t exactly avoiding Deran, you just really didn’t have the time between shifts to make the drive only to sit at a bar. So the sun rose and fell and you didn’t pay any attention to the tug in your heart that you couldn’t put a name to. It was an emotion you were familiar with, but you couldn’t quite put your finger on what it was. It felt like a pulling sensation, like there was a string connected to your soul urging you down a path. You’d felt it frequently when you were in school. You had once considered it homesickness, a feeling that you didn’t belong in your current position in life. But a trip back home never quelled it for long. The feeling had been tamed for months, but Deran’s visit stirred it up again. You needed something different. You were pretending to be normal, with a normal job, a normal apartment, a normal life. But it just wasn’t cutting it anymore.
Some nights it was all you could think about. You were cuddled up on your couch with a beer sweating untouched on your side table. You stared out your window at the streetlamps flickering. You remembered that night, a few days before you left for school, when you had called Deran to hang out one last time. He pulled up to your house with a car you knew didn’t belong to him. You had rode down the highway for hours, picking up some shitty burger and talking about anything you could think of. When he dropped you back at your house, you had said what was lingering between you. You vaguely remembered how the fight started. You had told him you found an apartment just off campus and that he had a spot on your couch whenever he needed it. He was confused and you said you knew his family was…different. If he ever decided it wasn’t for him, he could call whenever and you’d pick him up. Deran had gotten defensive. He took your words as saying he didn’t belong in his family. You tried to soothe the flames but it was too late. He exploded. You couldn’t remember what exactly he said, what you had said in retaliation, but you did remember slamming the door of the car and running to your room, crying until your throat and eyes were raw. You hadn’t seen him since. The truth was you always missed Deran. He was kind. He was real, unafraid to talk about the realities of growing up in a town like Oceanside- whereas everyone else you knew tried to wave off any criticisms saying it was a ‘unique’ place to live. You needed his friendship in nursing school. During the long nights and even longer mornings. You missed the way he could make you laugh in any situation. He was the one who got you through your first breakup by baking you (burnt) brownies and only half-joking to beat the kid up. When your ex walked into school the next day with a black eye, you gave Deran a hug, even though he denied knowing anything about it.
The internal battle of whether or not to let him back into your life was raging in your mind. You wanted your friend back, but you had decidedly left Oceanside for a reason. Your skin crawled when you were there for too long. Like you were trying too hard to fit into a sweater two sizes too small. Reaching out to Deran felt like a betrayal to yourself. You had worked so hard to get out, just to go back. But then again, you weren’t the same person you were as a teenager. You had grown in inexplicable ways and just because you wanted to reconnect with a friend did not mean you were throwing everything away. You tossed your head back onto your couch and took a swig of the room-temperature beer. You watched as a cat trotted down the sidewalk, dipping into the bushes. If only the universe would give you a sign or some-
Bzzt. Bzzt. Bzzt.
Your brow furrowed. Was your…phone…ringing? When was the last time that happened? You scrambled to find it, flipping your blanket onto the floor and searching the couch. You heard your phone clatter out of the blanket and you tentatively grabbed it. An unknown number. Maybe it was one of the new night shift nurses needing something again. You pressed the accept button and raised it to your ear.
“Hello?” You heard your name gasped out on the other side. Your body stiffened. “Deran? How..How did you get this number?” He ignored your question. He just said your name again.
“I really need your help,” his voice was shaky “I…fuck, something happened, something went wrong. Craig he’s, he was shot, I don’t know if… I can’t help him. He needs help.”
“Okay, take a deep breath,” You tell him, already scrambling to get your shoes on. “Send me your address. I’ll be there as soon as I can.” Deran sent you an address and you plugged it into your GPS. “I’ll be there in forty minutes, okay? Keep pressure on the wound and do not let him fall asleep. Can you do that?”
“Y-Yea I can do that. Please hurry.”
“I’m leaving now. I’ll see you there, it’s okay, I’m on my way.” You hung up and rushed to your bathroom, throwing open one of the cabinets and grabbing the make-shift triage kit your mom made you buy when she learned you’d be living by yourself. You had thought it was stupid at the time, but it seemed that mothers really did know best. You were in your car in less than a minute, tearing down the streets as fast as you could.
You pulled into the Codys’ driveway thirty-two minutes later. You were thankful no cops were out because you were going at least twenty over the speed limit the entire time. You had never actually been to the Cody house. You had heard about the intense parties they threw, but you were never invited (as if your parents would even let you go if you were). It was a gorgeous house, but you decided you would admire the architecture after Craig was stable. You turned off your car and grabbed your kit. A young man you didn’t recognize was waiting for you. Nervous energy rolled off him in waves.
“He’s in the kitchen,” The kid said, bringing you through the front door and into the house. You took a sharp inhale when you walked into the kitchen. There were bloodied rags scattered around the floor. Craig was sprawled across the island, his jeans in a pile on the ground. Deran was pressing a fast-saturating kitchen towel against the side of Craig’s thigh. Deran’s eyes were panicked. Craig was taking short breaths. Deran seemed to relax slightly when he caught sight of you. You blinked at the scene. You didn’t know if your skills were that good.
“Well, baby, aren’t you going to do something?” Your eyes shot up from Craig to the woman who was leaning against the stove. You recognized her. Smurf, dressed in a floral silk robe, hair perfectly pressed, leaning with her hands crossed over her chest. The woman’s voice was smooth and unhurried, like her dying son was more of an inconvenience than a tragedy. You snapped yourself out of your daze and gave a curt nod. You placed your kit on the kitchen island, next to where Craig was laid out.
“Hey, Craig,” You said, voice a touch louder than it needed to be, but Craig’s eyes were glassed over. “We’ve got to stop meeting like this, man.” A small smile cracked his ashy lips. Okay, that was good, he could hear you. “I’m going to look at the wound, alright? Might be a bit uncomfortable.” He gave a weak nod. You shifted down to where Deran was pressing against his brother’s leg with all his might. “Good job,” You told him, quiet enough just for him to hear “I’m going to lift the towel, okay?” Deran nodded, but didn’t move his hands. You gently loosened his fingers and lifted the towel in a way that would shield Craig’s view. You saw one entry wound on the outside of Craig’s thigh, about six inches above the knee. You rolled his leg slightly and let out a breath when you saw an exit wound. “Okay,” you sighed, giving a nervous smile “Good news is that it’s through and through. And it missed the bone. So no surgery for you tonight. You’re still bleeding, but it doesn’t look like the femoral was nicked, so we’re going to do a tourniquet before I start doing anything, okay? S’not going to feel nice.” You felt Smurf’s burning gaze on you. You ignored it. You asked Deran to get Craig’s belt from his jeans on the floor. You wrapped the leather around Craig’s upper thigh, tightening it until the bleeding slowed. Craig spat out in pain and Deran rushed to his side, grabbing his hand and mumbling something into his ear. Thankfully, the tourniquet worked. The blood slowed to a trickle. You wiped the sweat off your brow with the sleeve of your shirt. You muttered to yourself, forming a treatment plan. You wiped your hands free from blood on the kitchen towel. You opened the triage kit and got the saline solution. You worked quickly, flushing the wound before dressing it. You noticed that Craig’s face was starting to regain some color. When the wound was properly wrapped, you loosened the tourniquet. When blood didn’t soak through the bandages, you let out a sigh of relief. You turned to the sink, washing your hands and watching the red water swirl down the drain.
“Okay,” you said, hands only shaking a little bit. “That dressing should be good for the next few days. Lots of rest, obviously, and keep your leg elevated when you’re sitting. Don’t get it wet until it’s scabbed on both sides. Showers only when it does.” You turned to Deran. “Come by the hospital tomorrow, I’ll get you some antibiotics. If he gets a fever or you notice a lot of swelling or he bleeds through the bandage, hospital. Immediately. Got it?” Deran mumbled his agreement. You stood there for a moment. You noticed a man standing on the other side of the kitchen. His jaw was set, eyes locked on you. Assessing you. Sizing you up. You suddenly felt very self-conscious. Your gaze met his and a spark tingled your lower spine. Had he been standing there the entire time, just staring at you? You felt your chest tighten, but you forced yourself to remember your patient. You placed a calming touch on Craig’s non-injured knee. “I don’t want to be your nurse again, okay? Stay safe. And drink some water.” Craig laughed and relaxed his head against the island.
“No promises.” He croaked out. Deran laughed airily, like it was more of a stress reliever than actual amusement. The kid who had let you in clapped Craig on the shoulder and Smurf hummed before leaving the kitchen, the kid following her. The man at the other end of the kitchen tilted his head.
“Drive safe,” he said. His voice was gruff but pleasant, like gravel crushing under tires. He blinked at you once more before pushing himself off the wall and walking away. You looked at Deran but he shook his head. Don’t ask. You collected your things into the triage kit and clipped it back closed. Deran walked you back to your car. You shivered in the night air, but you couldn’t tell if it was because it was chilly or because of the high-adrenaline situation you had just handled.
“I really appreciate you coming tonight.” Deran said, opening the door to your car.
“Does this happen often?” You asked. There wasn’t any judgement in your voice, just strict curiosity. Deran lifted his gaze behind you, bouncing slightly on his feet.
“Sometimes,” he allowed, “Usually if it’s bad we go down to Mexico.” You nodded, chewing the inside of your lip.
“Next time, call me,” You told him. “I’ll be here.” Deran looked as surprised as you felt. Did you really say that?
“You sure?”
“I don’t want you to die. Not after I just got you back.” Your eyes found your sneakers. You noticed then that you had mismatching shoes. You put them on too quickly to care. Deran put a hand on your shoulder.
“Okay,” he smiled. “I will.”
“Goodnight, Deran. Keep an eye on him.” You climbed into your car and closed the door. You pulled out of the driveway and began the drive home, riding in silence with nothing but your thoughts. A very dangerous feeling was swirling in your body. You loved that he called you of all people. It was something dangerous, almost (definitely) illegal, but you were the correct choice for the job. You noticed that the tugging feeling in your chest had vanished. You had never felt so alive. You wanted to do it again. That also happened to be the night you first met Pope Cody.
═ ═ ═ ╰☆╮ ═ ═ ═
A year passed. True to his word, Deran called you about a month later. The kid, who you learned was his nephew J, got into a fight with some gangbangers and needed stitches. So you were on their step an hour later, suture kit in hand. That was the dance. They called, you showed up. You treated all of the boys, except one. You heard Pope was, well, an ‘interesting’ guy. More animalistic. He preferred to slink off by himself when he was hurt than have someone help him. Which was odd considering he was the one who got hurt the most. At first, it hurt your feelings. You had felt like they didn’t trust you. You noticed a truck following you a few weeks after the night Craig got shot. It lingered outside your apartment building a few intersections down. You saw it in the parking lot of the ER when you worked late. A grey Ram with the same license plate. You had seen it in the driveway that night. You knew they were doing recon on you, but you didn’t mind. You knew you were clean. The tail lasted a few weeks and then you didn’t see the truck again.
Most of your calls weren’t necessary, checkups after alley fights or disinfecting small cuts. You could tell the guys enjoyed having you around. The more you were there, the more you let your personality show and over the course of a year, you considered yourself friends with the Cody boys. One night at Deran’s bar, he slipped you a wad of cash. He told you to find a new apartment. One closer to them. They didn’t always have an hour to wait for your services. You scoffed, rejecting the money. But you moved into a new apartment anyway, halfway between the Cody house and the hospital. You had been adamant that you would not be accepting monetary exchange for your triage skills. That was too illegal for you. You preferred to say it was like doing a friend a favor. Craig always insisted on finding a way to pay you back for your work on his leg, so you had settled on an agreement. Weed. High quality, too. And when you smoked the premium bud on your porch overlooking the ocean, the thought of patching up criminals under the table felt a lot less stressful. Your social life improved, too. You finally received your first invitation to a Cody party in the form of a text from Craig, followed by a cat picture with its thumbs up. You laughed and immediately accepted.
You sat on one of the loungers by the pool. The music echoed through the yard, bass vibrating your bones in an enjoyable way. Deran flopped onto the wicker couch beside you. The arm candy on Craig’s left scoffed slightly and nestled closer to him. You took the last sip from your beer and relaxed against the chair. The party had a good turnout, people splashing around in the pool and dancing by the speakers. But you weren’t looking at them. Your eyes only had one target: Pope. He fascinated you. The way he would linger at the edge of gatherings, much like he was at that moment, eyes scanning the crowd. He was always alert, twitchy in the most adorable way. You had gained a fondness for Pope. The way he held his arms tight against him. The way his mouth twitched when one of his brothers said something stupid. And especially the way he would clench his fists when he caught Craig running his eyes over your body.
You knew Craig found you attractive, but you had made it clear that it would never result in anything. Craig respected it, but you still caught him looking at your ass when you walked past from time to time. You didn’t mind it. You considered it a confidence booster. But Pope, for some reason, wasn’t exactly thrilled with his brother ogling you. And you thought it was endearing. You figured it was probably just some code of honor. Pope seemed like a man who stuck to his own moral code, and maybe the objectification of women was something he strongly opposed. Deep down, though, you hoped it was something more. At first, you cared for him the way you might care for an abandoned dog. You wanted to clean him up and give him a warm meal. And you still did, but your increasingly frequent encounters with him turned your pitiful admiration into something more akin to a crush. Pope was a handsome man. You had caught him in the bathroom trying to stick a bandaid on the back of his shoulder a few months ago. It wasn’t going well. His beautifully plump biceps got in the way. You clicked your tongue at him and applied the bandage. He just blinked at you before giving a gruff ‘thank you’ and pushing past you into the hall. The sight of him with his shirt off was enough for the physical attraction to settle in your abdomen, but you really wanted to get to know him more. You could sense there was a lot more to him than met the eye. He was the muscle of the family operation, you knew that. Of all his brothers, he was always the one with the most bruises, the bloody knuckles. It should have scared you, but it didn’t- it only made you more curious because you saw the gentleness in him. You had gone surfing with the brothers one morning (technically they were surfing and you were watching them on the beach) when Pope saw a kitten stuck in a tidepool. He ran from his brothers and scooped up the tiny scrap of fur, only putting it down when the people he called from the ASPCA showed up to collect it. That showed you he wasn’t an evil man, just misunderstood. You were determined to understand him.
Pope was no different at the party, gaze flicking from the people in the pool to the people by the gate. He gripped the throat of his beer bottle tightly enough that you could see his knuckles begin to whiten. He sat on a low line of stones belonging to a fountain. A small stream of water trickled behind him. You tilted your head in curiosity. Pope hadn’t blinked in over a minute.
“Does he always do that?” You asked to no one in particular, but Craig followed your gaze. “The staring, I mean.” Craig just chuckled and took another drag of his joint.
“Yea,” He confirmed “Pope’s got a bit of a staring problem. I can tell him to knock it off if you want.” You shook your head. Part of you wanted to laugh. Craig tell Pope to do something? Unlikely.
“No, it doesn’t bother me, I was just curious.” Your eyes flicked to the beer bottle in his hand. It was empty, and had been for a while. You rose to your feet and went to the cooler on the other side of the couch. You dropped into a squat as you dug around and pulled out 2 beers. Deran watched you closely. He leaned over the arm of the furniture to talk to you under the noise of the party.
“Careful,” he warned. You looked up, brows furrowed in confusion. Deran bounced his leg. He had a serious look on his face. “He can be…unpredictable.” You didn’t need to ask who he was talking about.
“I thought he liked me.”
Deran chuckled and looked out to the party. “Especially if he likes you.” You let out a noise of amusement.
“I’ll be safe. Promise.” You held out your pinky to him. You made several pinky promises in high school. Only some of which you broke. The man smirked and reached out his hand, linking his finger to yours. You stood up and grabbed the two beers, giving Deran a nod and weaving your way through the party. It was packed, bodies swayed and fused together, neon necklaces blinking in the night. You genuinely didn't know how Smurf had so many connections with the younger people of Oceanside. She had a lot of issues, but damn did she know how to throw a good party.
You emerged on the other side of the mass of people. Pope was still sitting on the rocks, eyes glazed over. “Mind if I sit?” Pope’s eyes snapped up to you. He looked surprised, like he hadn’t expected the question to come from your mouth. He blinked at you and shook his head. You plopped yourself beside him. You handed him one of the beers. “That thing’s been empty for, like, an hour. Figured I’d get you another one.” Pope looked at the bottle. His fingers tightened around the glass in his hand. His eyes went back to the party. With a purse of your lips, you set the fresh beer on the stones between the two of you. You took a sip of your drink. “Who are these people?” You asked him.
“Fuck if I know.” He scoffed. “They always just…show up whenever Smurf has a party. Word moves fast in a town like this.” You hummed in agreement and looked over your shoulder to take in a better view of the fountain you were sitting on. A little stream of bubbles caught your eye. You gasped and whirled around fully to face the water. The movement made Pope jump slightly. He clutched his beer closer to his chest and looked at you with wide, startled eyes.
“There’s a turtle!” You cooed, smiling widely at him. “Look!” Without thinking, you grabbed his bicep to get his attention. You pointed at the corner of the fountain, where a little pointed nose poked from the water. You watched as it ducked back under the surface. You turned to see if Pope had seen it, but his eyes were locked on you. Or rather, your hand, where it was still gripping the meat of his arm. It was hard to tell in the dark lighting, but you could’ve sworn you saw a twinge of red blush creeping up his neck. You realized your mistake at once. Pope had a thing about personal space. You removed your touch quickly. “I’m sorry,” You tucked your hands into your lap. “I got excited. There was this pond in my backyard growing up. I loved seeing what kinds of critters would show up.”
“S’alright.” He murmured, voice annoyingly monotone, blinking away whatever he had been thinking. A beat passed. “Do you like it? The fountain?”
“Oh, yea!” You grinned “I like the whole ‘overgrown’ vibe it gives.” The fountain was made of mossy stone bricks, with algae and a few water flowers skimming the surface. You knew it had to be a curated look. The Codys were never sloppy.
“I made it.” Pope said. “When I got out of prison. I took a sledgehammer to the old one and built this one from scratch.” You sensed pride in his words. If you didn’t know better, you might have thought he was trying to impress you. He set his empty bottle down in the grass and picked up the one that had been waiting for him.
“It’s nice to have a project,” You agreed. “Sometimes you just need to forget the real world and dedicate yourself to a task.”
“Is that why you patch up felons for fun?” Pope took a sip of his beer.
“Yea, sure.” You giggled “Something like that.” But it was exactly like that. Your work with the Codys gave you a purpose outside of work. You had something to do now besides just trudging through work and collapsing face first on your bed, just to repeat it all again the next day. A weird hobby, but a hobby nonetheless. “I just like having patients who don’t complain about every little thing I do. It’s not like you have much of a choice. ” You had meant it as a lighthearted comment, but Pope’s brow furrowed.
“People complain?” His face was a picture of confusion. “About you?” You shrugged.
“Sometimes.”
“Why?” He huffed “You’re a great nurse. You’re smart and capable and…nice.” His voice got quieter at the end and his fingernails scraped at the label on the sweaty bottle.
“Well,” You sighed, “when people are in pain, they don’t always think before they speak. It’s not personal.” You bumped your knee lightly against his. “It’s nice to know I’m appreciated here, though.”
“We’d be dead without you,” Pope continued. “And that’s not even flattery, that's just fact.” You held out your beer.
“Cheers to that.” You clinked your bottle against his and the two of you drank. You could feel him relaxing a bit next to you. Still looking out into the crowd, but not as jumpy. “Deran says you’re usually in your room during these things.”
“I don’t like parties.” Pope confirmed.
“Why are you out here then? What’s so special about tonight?” His eyes briefly moved from the party to your face. His lips moved a bit, like he was thinking of an answer.
Pope couldn’t tell you it was because of you. He knew you’d be here and he had hoped to talk to you. He wanted to make sure you were doing okay, that none of his brother’s asshole friends bothered you. Because he liked you. More than liked you. You were all he thought about while he stayed up at night, sometimes looking at the ceiling, sometimes with his hand down his pants. Pope wanted to get to know you, learn if he consumed your thoughts the way you consumed his. But he couldn’t tell you that. So, instead, he said, “The weather’s nice.”
═ ═ ═ ╰☆╮ ═ ═ ═
You had been dead asleep when your phone’s ringtone tore through the haze of your dreams. You scrambled to groggily accept the call and when you heard Deran’s voice, you were instantly awake. The job had gone bad. Well, technically, the job itself was fine. The boys had cosplayed EMTs in order to rob soundboards from a music festival. One their drive home, the ambulance was hit. And they were hurt. Bad.
You got to the Cody house the same time as they pulled into the driveway. Deran opened the driver’s side door and practically fell out of the truck.
“What the fuck happened?” You hissed, wrapping Deran’s arm around your shoulder to help him up.
“Semi truck ran a stop sign,” His voice was wet and bloody. His lip was split down the middle and blood dripped from the corner of his mouth. Must’ve bit his tongue.
“A semi truck hit you?” Your eyes were wild. You deposited Deran on one of the pool chairs. You helped him sit back and looked up to see Pope and Craig helping each other follow behind you. You shook your head in disbelief and took a deep breath. Your eyes immediately went to Pope. He had deep gashes on his arm and neck. Blood darkened the hair at his temple and you could tell it hurt to walk. He looked so disheveled, so raw. So hot. The uniform clung to his body and you felt desire curl in your belly. You shook it off immediately, shame burning in your veins. You were objectifying a man who needed medical attention. Your medical attention. Pope and Craig sat together on another lounger next to Deran’s. You wiped your forehead of the sweat that was already beginning to gather there. “Okay,” You huffed, mainly to yourself “Okay.” You did a quick inventory. Craig looked superficially fine, but he had that dazed look in his eyes that told you he probably had a concussion. Deran got the worse of it, glass stuck in his nose and several lacerations all over his body. You assumed he was driving.
Suddenly, Pope wasn’t on the chair anymore. You looked around for him. He was limping toward the house. “Pope!” You called after him “You-”
“I’m fine!” He growled, teeth bared. “I’ve gotta make a call.” His voice was deep, almost sinister, and final. He tore the sliding door open and practically fell into the kitchen, disappearing from view. You pressed your eyes together and let out a frustrated grumble, but returned your focus back to Deran. You worked quickly, picking the glass from both Deran and Craig’s wounds. You had to give Deran a few stitches in his lip and several bandages across his face, but he was a good sport about it. Craig just needed a sling for his arm, which was broken and would need a cast from urgent care in the morning. He hadn’t vomited and was generally aware, so you weren’t too worried about the concussion, but you still made him talk to you while you worked on cleaning the scrapes on Deran’s shoulder.
Headlights pulled you from your conversation. You looked at Deran, silently asking if they were expecting someone. From the way he tensed beneath you, you assumed they were not. Before Craig could get up, the sliding door opened. Pope emerged from the house, bandages on his arm and neck. A fine enough job, but the bleeding hadn’t been contained. He walked towards the gate, steps uneven and face furious. J appeared from the driveway. His brows shot up as he saw the state of his uncles.
“Holy shit.” He whispered.
“Nice of you to join us,” Pope bit out, words laced with venom. “Have a nice drive back?”
“I couldn’t just leave,” J reasoned, shrugging with his hands in his pockets “It would have looked suspicious.” Pope let out a humorless laugh.
“Suspicious.” He echoed, slinking into J’s personal space. “You know what looks suspicious, J? The fact that the driver of the semi knew who you were.” He pressed an accusing finger into J’s chest. “Told me to ‘say hi to my nephew.’ You know anything about that?” To J’s credit, the boy looked genuinely taken aback.
“No.”
“Don’t fucking lie to me,” Pope hissed, shoving J away from him. “I told you what happens when you lie to me.” After the push, Pope swayed slightly, staggering before catching himself. You were on your feet in an instant, approaching him from behind in case you had to stabilize him. He shot you a look over his shoulder that told you to back off. You didn’t.
“You’re still bleeding,” You said calmly, pointing at his back, where a dark patch had begun to seep through the clean shirt he’d put on.
“M’not.” He grumbled, but he seemed less sure. More dazed. Pope took another step. And almost fell to the ground. You were able to tuck your arm under his armpit, hand splayed on his chest, and hold him up long enough until J got his other side. The two of you pulled him to the nearest chair. J gave you room and you began tugging at his shirt. “Get off f’me,” He barked at you, starting to get up. You put your hands on his chest and pushed him back into the chair.
“Andrew. Sit. Down.” Your voice was firm, commanding. Your jaw was set and you held his gaze steadily. Pope blinked up at you in surprise. You had used his name. His real name. He swallowed and nodded. Pope straightened his spine, flinching as he slid one of his hands across his lower back. When he pulled his hand away, blood coated his fingers. Suddenly, the earth shifted beneath him and he gripped the table beside him, breath coming out in short huffs.
“I think there’s some broken glass,” He rasped out. “I didn’t feel it before.” J got the triage kit while you helped Pope get his shirt off.
“Next time,” You growled at him, eyes still harsh, “let me take a look at you before you go sulk in the bathroom.” Pope’s gaze fell from you and he gave a little nod. You scoffed and shook your head, directing him on how to get the best angle and removing the tiny shards of glass that were embedded in his skin.
By the time you finished making sure everyone was cared for, you were exhausted. You were standing in the kitchen, washing your tools and hands of the blood that stained them. The overhead lights were too bright, your vision was a little fuzzy, and the entire night felt like a strange dream. But that was okay, because all three men were stable. Craig and Deran had left to fake a car accident that gave them plausible reason to go to the hospital in the morning. J had slipped out a few minutes after Pope’s attention was no longer on him. And Pope was sitting at the dining table outside, staring at the reflections that danced across the pool. You let your eyes follow the curve of his shirtless torso. You had told him to keep it off for the night, to let his wounds breathe. His bandages were fresh (you had replaced the shoddy ones he’d put on) and you didn’t see any blood blooming across the gauze. A good sign. If only he had let you do it in the first place. Your nose twitched with irritation. Stupid, stubborn man. You scrubbed harder at the skin of your hands, only stopping when they were rubbed raw and the blood was washed from under your fingernails. You sighed and turned off the faucet. The embrace of sleep called to you and you felt your eyelids droop. You leaned back against the counter and rubbed at your eyes. When you brought your hands down, Pope was standing inside, giving you one of his looks. You hadn’t heard him come in. You really tried to grasp what emotion he was trying to convey, but it was lost on you.
“What?” You asked, harsher than you meant to. He flinched. Barely, but enough to notice. Pope just stood there, wringing his hands and looking at you with those large, sad eyes. You exhaled through your nose. “I should go home.” You pushed yourself off the counter and grabbed your keys. Pope moved to block your exit.
“No.” His voice was soft, almost intimately so.
“No?” Your eyes crinkled in confusion. “What do you mean, no?”
“It’s late,” he said simply “You can stay here. If you want.” You looked behind you to see the time on the microwave. It was 4 am. You rubbed a hand over your face. Pope had a point. You were falling asleep washing your hands. You probably shouldn’t drive. He seemed like he had his mind made up and, honestly, you really didn’t have the energy to fight him on it. You gave him a small nod. Pope’s eyes lit up, half expecting you to refuse him, and gestured for you to follow him. You did. He took you down an unfamiliar hallway and turned into a room you instantly recognized as his. You’d never seen it before, but it was so unmistakable Pope’s. No clutter, not even a wall decoration. Just a bed with neatly tucked in sheets and a dresser that had a picture frame laying face-down on it. You were too busy taking in the space to notice that Pope had begun striping the bed. A new pair of sheets rested on the bedside table.
“Oh, you don’t have to do that,” You protested weakly. You could hear the exhaustion fraying the edges of your voice.
“Don’t be ridiculous, everyone needs clean sheets.” He tucked in the corners of the fresh white linens before standing back and admiring his work. You couldn’t tell him that you didn’t want clean sheets. You wanted to be able to smell him as you fell asleep. Having your skin against the same fabric as his made your legs tingle. But that was probably just the sleep deprivation talking.
“Thank you.” you said instead. He gave an acknowledging noise and gathered the old sheets in his arms. He began to walk out, but you brushed your hand against his shoulder. “Hey, I’m…I’m sorry I was so rude earlier. I shouldn’t have pushed you like that. It was unprofessional.” You took a deep breath, debating if you should continue. “I just don’t enjoy seeing you hurt. I hate watching you suffer. Knowing I can help you but not being able to. I hate it. I get it if you have a hard time asking for help. But it’s what I’m here for. I want to help you, Pope.” I want to take care of you. That was what you wanted to say. I want to be there for you. Please let me be there for you. A tense moment of silence expanded between the two of you. Pope’s bottom lip disappeared under his teeth.
“Don’t be sorry, I…” He trailed off. You could tell he had a lot he wanted to say, but didn’t quite know how to string the words together. He shook his head. “Goodnight.”
“Goodnight.”
Pope walked out of the room. You realized then that you had taken his bed. You were about to follow him and ask where he planned on sleeping that night, but the hall lights turned off, plunging the room into darkness, and you took that as a sign that Pope was done with you for the night.
═ ═ ═ ╰☆╮ ═ ═ ═
Several weeks passed and you didn’t hear anything from the Codys. Based on Pope’s interaction with J that night, you assumed there was some family tension. And you were happy with staying away from that. You had texted Craig and Deran to check up on their healing progress and it was going well. But outside of that, life had been normal. The California summer was in full swing, and you were sprawled out on your bed, comforter kicked to the floor and starfishing under your ceiling fan to keep as cool as possible. A task that was working fine enough until you heard a knock at your door. Your head snapped up and adrenaline shot through your body. You checked the time on your phone. It was only 9 pm, but it was still an odd hour for visitors- especially considering you never got any. Pope had warned you about this, that enemies of his family and other dangerous people might come seeking you out in the dead of night. But would they knock? You swallowed your anxiety and crawled out of bed. Quietly, you tiptoed across the floor of your apartment to look out the peephole of the door. You relaxed instantly when you saw the familiar face. You unlocked the door and gently swung it open. The warm night air brushed against your thighs and you could smell the dew beginning to collect on the grass.
“Pope?” You said groggily, rubbing at your eyes. “What are you doing here?” You noticed that his car wasn’t anywhere to be seen. “How’d you get here?” You lived at least three miles from the nearest bus stop. Pope didn’t say anything and you were able to get a look at him as awareness started to sweep sleep from your brain. His cuts on his neck and arm were almost healed, but he had a new gash above his eyebrow. Blood painted the side of his face. A face that was contorted in despair. His eyes were massive dark spots and they were fixated on you. You were suddenly hyper aware that you were only wearing a large t-shirt and sleep shorts that barely covered your ass. You shifted self-consciously. Pope’s chest was rising and falling with quick, panicked breaths. One of his hands was pressed to his abdomen and the other was clenching and unclenching rapidly. He looked beaten, physically and emotionally.
“I’m sorry,” He choked out. His voice was shaky and wet. His eyes darted around and his body was tense. “I…I didn’t know where else to go. I can’t go back to that house. You’re the only one I…You’re the only one I trust to help me.”
“What happened?” Pope didn’t reply. His lip quivered and a sob shook through him. His free hand rose to his face to cover his mouth. Tears welled in his eyes and he let out another sobbing breath. “Oh, Andrew.” Your face fell and your heart swelled. You threw your arms around his neck and pulled him close to you. His face fell to the crook of your neck and he cried against you. You felt the wetness of his tears on your skin. You held him tightly, running comforting strokes over his back and his hand gripped onto the fabric of your shirt. “It’s okay,” You soothed. “It’s okay.” You stood there for what could have been minutes or hours, in the doorway of your apartment, just holding him. The only sounds were his sniffles and the occasional car driving past. When he was ready, Pope pulled back, but his hand still fisted the back of your shirt. Shiny streaks of tears stained his cheeks and his breathing was still hiccuping. Your hand gently disentangled him from your back and you walked him inside your apartment. You closed the door and locked it. You led him by the hand to your couch, where you told him to sit while you got your medical supplies. After you deposited him, he sat there for a moment, blinking and arm still outstretched. He flexed his hand, confused that your warmth was no longer in his palm.
When you returned, you were holding your kit. You unpacked it on the coffee table. Nylon threads, a hooked stitching needle, disinfectant, water, a washcloth, bandages, and a dose of lidocaine that had been too easy to snatch from the medicine cart at the hospital. After mixing some water and disinfectant solution, you sat back on your knees, looking up at him from your position on the ground. Pope was pressing his hand to his side and you could see the deep red that was beginning to slip through his fingers. You laced your fingers around his and gently removed his palm.
“Gonna take a look, okay?” You told him and he nodded. Sweat was beginning to bead at his temples. You lifted the side of his shirt with care and sucked in a breath when you saw the slash that cut through the side of his abdomen. Likely a knife wound of some kind. You put on your gloves and disinfected the cut, running your fingers along the edge of the wound to assess its depth. Pope shivered beneath you. “Okay,” you breathed “Looks pretty straightforward. You’ll need stitches, but it didn’t cut deep enough for more than one layer.” You gave him a tight smile “Doable.” Pope’s eyes were half-lidded as he looked down at you and his jaw was slackened slightly. He really was beautiful, even with the bruises and blood and despair splashed across his face. You took the dose of lidocaine and took the cap off the syringe. You offered him one of your hands to hold. He took it without hesitation. “Squeeze if you need to. You won’t hurt me. It’s gonna sting a bit, okay?”
“Okay,” his voice was breathy, ragged, and he squeezed your hand tighter. You pressed the needle below the wound and plunged the syringe down. Once he was sufficiently numbed, you prepared the sutures. It took some convincing to have Pope let go of your hand, but after assuring him that, yes, both hands were needed for the stitches, he grumbled and released you.
You stitched him up quickly and efficiently, looping the thread over the gash and pulling tight. At the half-way point, Pope’s legs were shaking from the shock. You squeezed his knee reassuringly. “We’re about halfway done, alright? You’re doing so well for me.” Pope froze beneath you and his breath hitched. He blinked hard and turned his face from you. You noticed he was holding his breath. “Breathe for me, Pope. In and out. I’m almost done, I promise.” His neck reddened and his jaw clenched, but he did as you said.
“Good.” You soothed. Pope looked at you. He had the same look in his eyes as he did when he was on alert, like he was trying to read you. You ignored it. After another line of stitches, you tied off the thread and shucked off your gloves. “All done!” You tossed your gloves and the needle into a red biohazard bag. You pulled yourself up onto the couch and grabbed the washcloth from the coffee table, wetting it with the water and disinfectant solution. You gently turned his face to get a better look at his temple. “You gonna tell me what happened?” You used your pointer finger to dab at the cut above his eyebrow.
“Smurf’s usin’ me as her little…attack dog again.” His voice was shaky, coming down from his adrenaline high caused by the stitches. “That’s all I am to her. I mean just look at me.” His gaze settled heavy on his knuckles and he flexed them. They were bruised purple and scabbed over. “Everything I touch gets mangled and bloody. And the worst part is I don’t even know why I do it. At some point I did but…the more I think about it, I can never remember a reason. It’s what I’ve always done. It’s just…who I am. That's all I am.”
“That’s not true.”
“It is.” he bit back “And if you keep…if you keep getting close to me you’re gonna realize that one day. You’re gonna realize what I am. I…I hurt people. She sent me after this guy ‘nd I beat him in front of…in front of his kid. Who does that? I’m a monster!” His voice was gravelly, growing louder with each word. Pope’s lip quivered and his anger morphed into a kind of despair.
“You’re not a monster.” Your voice was unwavering. “You don’t scare me, Pope,” You told him. And you meant it. Your free hand went to rest on his forearm and he flinched slightly. But he didn't pull away. “You could never scare me. You’re so much more than that and it kills me that you don’t see it.” His lips pressed together and his brow twitched. The muscles at the corners of his mouth pulled upward and then relaxed, and you saw him swallow. He looked like he was on the verge of tears. He took a few deep breaths.
“Please,” Pope choked out, voice barely above a whisper. His gaze moved from where it was burning a hole in your carpet to capture your eyes in an equally blazing way. His eyes were wide, pleading, dark, and wet. His eyebrows tilted up ever so slightly, the way a dog would when begging for scraps at a table. He clenched his jaw and swallowed, pressing his palms together tighter. As if it was the only way to stay grounded in the moment. “Call me Andrew.” You tilted your head, lowering your hand from his face.
“Andrew,” Your voice was equally as soft. You raised the washcloth again, gesturing for him to turn his head so you could regain your angle. But he didn’t move, keeping your eyes locked with his. You could feel the heat radiating from his bare chest. Maybe caused by the adrenaline crash after fighting for his life. Maybe caused by the way the air had shifted slightly between you two. Not too intense, just enough to notice. It shifted from the simple relationship of patient and nurse to something more charged. Something more intimate. You swallowed. He stared into your soul, searching for something with his eyes. Those eyes. Big and wet and dark as ink. You knew Pope- Andrew- had a staring problem. And from a distance, you didn’t mind it, but up close, it was intimidating. His face was blank and you couldn’t tell what was churning in that mind of his. Andrew’s gaze held the normal edge that you were used to, like an animal unsure of its next move. But underneath it, there was something softer. Squishier. A hesitance that was so unlike the man you knew. Like he was waging a war with himself and he wasn’t sure what outcome he preferred, whether he won or lost.
Suddenly, his lips were on yours. It was a cautious kiss, slow pecks testing the waters. You inhaled sharply. Surprise jolted through you, but soon melted into bliss as you pressed your face against his. You dropped the washcloth to the ground and brought your hands to his face, holding his cheeks. They were still sticky with dried tears. You felt the stubble against his skin. You hadn’t really noticed that it was there until just now. He was usually so clean-shaven, neatly kept like the rest of his appearance. But he must not have shaved that morning and the thought of seeing him disheveled, seeing him broken down to his most intimate forms, made your heart tumble with yearning. Andrew slowly raised his hand and traced his fingers down yours, as if he was checking to make sure you were real. Like you were actually touching him like that.
You poked your tongue out, testing the waters even further, giving him a chance to back out if all he needed was something gentle. Andrew exhaled sharply as he opened his lips and let your tongue into his mouth, breath fanning across your nose. You felt his fingers dance across your waist and settle on your upper thigh. Your kisses became more open and less controlled. Your lips worked against his and he nipped at your mouth before soothing the bite with his own tongue. The kiss got sloppy fast, both of your breathing becoming shallow and more needy. His tongue ran against yours and Andrew whimpered slightly as he sucked on your bottom lip. His grip became harsher, digging into the meat of your thigh and pulling you closer to him. You ignored the burning in your lungs for as long as you could, but you eventually had to pull away from him, gasping for breath and feeling a string of saliva still connecting the two of you. Your eyes fluttered open. Andrew was looking at you, hungry, eyes half-lidded and lips swollen and red. Pants were coming through his parted lips and his nose twitched. The sight sent a shock of arousal down your spine before pooling as heat in your lower abdomen. You needed him. Your hands slid down his face and neck before settling on his chest. Andrew sucked in a breath at your touch. He tensed slightly under your fingers, and something told you it had been a long time since he felt a touch like this. Gentle. Nonthreatening. Needy.
Andrew held your gaze as he slid off the couch and onto the floor, kneeling between your legs. His fingers slid up your thighs and hooked into the waistband of your shorts. You could see the painfully hard outline of his cock pressing against the fabric of his jeans. He looked up at you with reverence, lips parted and eyes wide. Like he was about to start praying at an altar. You wiggled your hips forward and felt the wetness beginning to collect between your folds. All you wanted was to feel his tongue in you. Feel his lips suckle on your clit and watch his face as he tongue-fucked you to your release. But you reigned yourself in. Your hands rested on his.
“Wait,” You whisper. Andrew let out a frustrated whimper. How could you deny him this? When it was so clearly the only thing he wanted? “Andrew, we don’t have to. You had a rough day a-and I don’t want you to do something you’ll regret. We can just talk if that’s what you want.”
“Won’t regret it,” He insisted, gripping the fabric of your shorts in his fingers “I’ve wanted to do this for so long. Needed you for such a long time.”
“But your stitches. I-”
“Shut up.” He sighed, tugging on your shorts. “Please. Let me taste you.” You opened your mouth before closing it. You had run out of excuses. You lifted your hips and let him pull your shorts down. Andrew lifted your ankle and pulled the garment off you. His eyes darkened when he saw you weren’t wearing underwear. They felt too constraining in the heat of the night. You shimmied forward on the couch so that your pussy was level with his face. He licked his lips and you felt like you were about to die from how badly you needed him. He pulled you down closer to him, burying his face between your folds and taking a deep inhale. The first swipe of his tongue against you made you toss your head back against the couch with a sigh. Andrew flattened his tongue and dragged his jaw upwards, licking a broad stripe up your entire sex. He wrapped his lips around your clit and gave a harsh suck, making your thighs clasp against his ears. His hands pressed your legs closer to him, urging you to squeeze his head between your legs- a position he would die in if you’d let him. He teased you, swirling the point of his tongue around your bundle of nerves until you were gasping before swiping the muscle down the length of your cunt, dipping into your hole just enough for you to feel a pleasant burn then letting it slip out and flatting it against you. The cycle was brutal. The band in your belly tightened and loosened. It was like he knew exactly how to work your body right up to the edge and how to let you down gently while still sending bursts of pleasure through your body. You were completely lost in the pure bliss Andrew blessed you with. Your hand flew to his hair, tugging lightly on his curls and pressing your thighs tighter against him as he moaned into your wetness. You could see a wet spot forming on the tent in his pants and he bucked against the air. And yet Andrew was so lost in you, too- your taste, your feel, your smell- that he really didn’t notice his own discomfort.
When he finally slipped two of his fingers into your hole, curling up against the spongy spot, while also furiously licking at your clit, your moans grew louder. Your juices ran down his knuckles and he pressed a third finger into your heat. Your breathing was more ruined, eyes screwed shut as you chased your release. You didn’t notice, but Andrew’s gaze was locked on you, memorizing every little twitch of your mouth, every little noise that fell from your lips. A moment he’d like to relive every night for the rest of his life, if you’d let him. Even if you didn’t, he’d be jerking himself off to it for eternity, only imagining how you looked in that moment. You were glowing, a light sheen of sweat shining on your face and a mix of spit and slick coating your inner thighs. He curled his fingers again and reveled in the way you clenched against him. You rutted against his face. It wasn’t intentional, really, just a primal need. You used his face to get yourself off, and Andrew’s eyes drifted closed, immersed in the sensation of being reduced to an object for your own pleasure. It wasn’t long before you felt your abdomen tighten. You pressed your legs even tighter against him. The feeling of his fingers, his tongue, and his other hand rubbing soothing circles on your thigh was too overwhelming. You came with a cry, throwing your head back and pulling Andrew’s face deeper into you. You felt a wetness rip from your pussy, squirt coating Andrew’s face. You were too lost in your pleasure to care. You shook against him, riding out the last traces of your orgasm on his tongue. You breathed heavily, eyes slowly opening to look at him. Andrew sat back and looked at you, swiping a finger through the squirt that coated his chin. Embarrassment rose in your chest, and you shifted so that you were sitting up.
“I’m…so sorry,” You gasp, still slightly out of breath. “I didn’t mean to…do…that.” Andrew made sure you watched as he sucked his fingers clean. His eyes were dark with lust, lips puffy and slicked. You could see the curls at the back of his head plastered against the column of his neck by sweat. He didn’t say a word, just wiped his mouth with the back of his hand and crawled up on top of you, laying you down on the couch. One of his arms braced himself next to your head and the other fiddled with the button on his pants. You helped him pop it and tug the zipper down. Andrew kicked off his jeans and pulled his boxers down just enough for his cock to jump out. You licked your lips hungrily as he guided his length to your entrance. He slid his dick through your folds, coating his tip in your juices before slowly pushing into you. The burn was instant and you sucked in a breath, grabbing his biceps to steady yourself as he pushed deeper into you. You both groaned in unison as Andrew bottomed out and his other arm came down, caging your head beneath him. He kissed you again as he rolled his hips slowly, swallowing your moans.
“You okay?” He asked, drawing your bottom lip between his teeth. You nodded.
“You’re just…” You gasped “You’re so big.” He kissed up your jaw and behind your ear.
“M’sorry,” He whispered, “Jus’tell me if it’s too much.”
Andrew set a slow pace at first, like he was scared that releasing his full strength would hurt you. The slow drag of him against you was sinful. Addictive. Dangerous. You wanted- no, you needed more. You wrapped your legs around his waist and dug your heels into his ass, urging him to fuck you harder. He obliged, shifting from rolling his hips to snapping in and out, forcing moans from deep in your chest. Andrew’s breaths were coming out in short puffs, sweat dripping down his face as he put all of his energy into fucking you into the cusions of your couch. After a particularly loud moan spilled from your lips, he shoved two of his fingers in your mouth. You realized instantly that they were the same two fingers that had curled inside of you only moments before.
“Shhh,” Andrew grumbled “Don’t wanna wake the neighbors. You gonna be a good girl f’me and keep quiet?” You nodded emphatically and Andrew swirled his fingers against your tongue, gathering your spit before withdrawing and immediately rubbing circles around your clit with the wettened digits. Your core tightened around him at the feeling and your nails clawed down his back. He shuttered and groaned at the sensation, humping harder against you. His hip bone was grinding into yours, and your shoulder was beginning to ache from the awkward position, but you felt so full and so content that you didn’t dare complain. You would rather die than lose the sensation of Andrew inside of you. Andrew looked down at you with pure awe. You were his Goddess beneath him, allowing him the highest honor of being able to not only touch you, but to bring you to the verge of inexplicable pleasure for the second time. Each one of his thrusts purged a small, high-pitched moan from him.
“Feels so good,” You whine, fingers digging into the meat of his shoulder. Your second orgasm was building fast. You could tell Andrew was getting close, rhythm becoming uneven.
“Yea?” He whined. The sound was heartbreaking, high pitched and broken and small. “I make you feel good? ‘M I doin’ a good job fucking you?” It wasn’t dirty talk, but a genuine question. He needed to hear it, the sounds coming from you weren’t enough.
“So good. You fuck me so good Andrew.” He mewled at your words, burying his face in your neck and moaning into your skin.
“Gonna fill you up. Wanna have you squirting on my face every day for the rest of my life,” He rambled “Wanna feel you come around me over and over again. Squeezing me so tight. S’like you were made for me. Only me.”
“Fuck, please, Andrew!” You moaned, words coming out breathy with every thrust into you “Only you!” Your words spurred him on. He pulled your shirt up just high enough where one of your breasts was on display. Andrew bit his lip at the sight, eyes locked on the smooth curves of your tit. His mouth captured your nipple, tongue swirling and lips sucking as he snapped his hips into you. Andrew’s teeth grazed the bud and the band in your belly snapped, causing a squelching sound to fill your living room as you came on his cock. Andrew wasn’t far behind, small whimpers and moans mixed in with short pants as he emptied himself into you while still latched onto your nipple, gasping out small ‘thank you’s as he did. He pushed as far into you as physically possible, emptying his seed right against your cervix.
Andrew collapsed on top of you, face nuzzled into your neck and peppering kisses against your sweaty skin. Your fingers scratched at his scalp, grounding both of you as you came down from your high. Your legs were shaking and your walls were still fluttering. Andrew began to pull out but you let out a needy whine and squeezed your heels into his rear, begging him to stay put. He let out a little huff of amusement and lifted his head, pressing kisses to your forehead, eyelids, nose, and eventually mouth. He swiped an eyelash from your cheek and looked down at you with a glowing smile. The two of you stayed there for a few moments before he broke the silence.
“Thank you,” he croaked out, voice raw from his moans. “For letting me in tonight.” You smiled at him, pressing your lips to his in a series of short kisses.
“Any time.” You hum. “Seriously, though, no strenuous activity for a few days. I don’t want to redo your stitches. I’m pretty proud of them.”
“No promises,” He mumbled. “Might just have to pop one so I can come back and see my favorite nurse.”
“Y’know,” you drawl “I do offer a bedside service. If you're interested.”
“Yea?” He laughed airily, “What’s that gonna cost me?”
“Dunno,” you shrugged, pressing another open-mouthed kiss to his lips. Your hands ran up his shoulders and nestled into his hair. You felt his cock twitch inside of you when you started playing with the curls. “But I’m sure we can get creative with the payment plan.”
summary: against better judgement, you send a letter to a man at folsom with very sad eyes. against even better judgement, you send letters every week for years until he stops replying one day. and against everything you know, when he shows up at your door, you invite him inside.
pairing: prison letters reader x andrew cody
word count: 12.4k
tags: reader is silly and does things i do not recommend. kids do not write letters to prisoners and fall in love with them. unless it's andrew cody obviously. lots of context no one asked for. nurse!reader, descriptions of wound (andrew cuts himself to get into your work because why wouldn't he!), descriptions of wound handling, smut (oral - f receiving and mating press and the tiniest hint of breeding). takes place in season one, but just imagine he's got season two's hair. you have to fully immerse yourself in the fact that it's andrew cody and then ask yourself—wouldn't you take him home too? it's not her fault!
author's note: here she is! thank you for the patience ♡
you honestly had signed up as a joke. the club was known through your campus to be run by a couple of bleeding hearts. no one had thought the school would approve their activities—letters to prisoners. it was a recipe for disaster.
you should have known better.
but a friend of a friend was involved, and you knew it would make your nursing school application look better, and honestly, you didn’t think anything would come of it. a couple of letters here and there. you had thought it’d be all anonymous, messages of motivation and prayers signed with a first name only.
until your friend—bleeding heart and hopeless romantic, trying to appeal to those very same qualities in you—had shown you the website. that’s when you should have realized it wasn’t just a recipe, it was going to be a disaster.
the prisoners recorded videos—thirty seconds, short and sweet. a name, a couple of sentences about them, hometown and hobbies. underneath the video you could see what they had been arrested for. only the ones who were in for petty crimes—drugs and robbery, things where no one else had really gotten hurt, were allowed to partake. that was good at least. didn’t need any murderers sending letters to pretty co-eds.
your friend picked the guy she thought was the cutest. you watched his video—he was handsome, you couldn’t deny it. but the more videos you watched, the less you wanted to write a letter. you could almost see it, the desperation behind their eyes. it seemed like every man had nefarious intent. like your prettily written letter would not be used for motivation and prayers of a better life outside.
you decided not to send one. you’d rather have an empty slot on your application than a bad feeling in your gut for the rest of the semester. it’s not like the prison was across the country—it was just a couple of hours away.
she asked you to give it one more chance, watch a couple more videos. just pick a cute one, she’d told you. when you’d made a noise of disapproval, she had rolled her eyes.
“okay, pick whoever seems the nicest, then.”
so you had.
the video had been labeled andrew cody. first degree robbery.
the man in the video had been incredibly genuine. you don’t remember exactly what he had said—just bits and pieces. you knew he was from oceanside, born and raised from the way he sounded. he said he had a lot of brothers and a sister back at home. that he spent his time working out and reading books to distract himself from how noisy it was inside. the first thing he’d do when he got out was go to the beach and listen to the waves and breathe in the clean salty air.
and deep down inside, you knew you were just as much of a bleeding heart as the rest of your friends. you had folded instantly.
but it wasn’t just that. you spent the next several nights thinking about him. sad eyes, a singular half-smile at his own joke and then a real one when he mentioned going to the beach once he was released. he’d followed it up with—not that it’ll be any time soon. that made you sad, in turn. you thought about what he was like before prison—did he smile more? was he always so sad?
you thought about a lot of things. more than whatever your friends did, telling you how they had sent their letters, flirty yet inherently professional, so as not to get in trouble with the advisor.
you took a while to send yours. first you couldn’t think of what to write—everything felt so stupid compared to what he must be going through. andrew would hardly want to hear about the mundaneness of your daily life, or the struggles of trying to get into the nursing program.
you thought about not sending a letter at all after the first few times you tried to put pen to paper.
and then you thought about how sad he must feel, how lonely and scared, how terrible it would be to see all the other prisoners get letters besides him.
so you drove to the beach. you surprisingly had more in common with andrew cody than you even realized when you selected him. there was nothing you loved more than the beach, which is why you had even picked your college to begin with. and now, four years later about to graduate, you couldn’t imagine living anywhere else.
you caught the sunrise. you brought your little notebook with you to the water after setting your bag down on the bench. the seagulls were flying around, a couple of other beach-goers walking along the border where the sand met the ocean. it was a day like any other.
there were two sides of you—a hopeless romantic inside of an inherently logical girl. one side argued how stupid it was to send letters to a stranger. the other wondered if this would be the day that changes your life. you push away the thought and focus on writing the damn thing.
you thought andrew might like if the letter smelled like the salt-water. the stupid idea felt a lot less silly when you were attempting it, bringing your notebook all the way down to the water and hovering it. a slightly bigger wave caught you by surprise, the corners getting wet where it splashed up.
cursing to yourself, you walked back to the bench with sandy feet. and then you started writing.
dear andrew, and then you paused. fuck. you got out some of the introductory stuff—your first name, that you were a nursing student. it took a while to get the rest of the page filled, until you stopped for a moment and thought about what you would tell the man with the sad eyes if he was sitting next to you.
i came to the beach to write this letter. i’m sorry if the corners are wrinkled when you get it, i almost dropped it in the water trying to get it to smell like the beach so you had a little piece of home with you. i’m not near oceanside but it’s still the pacific.
i can’t imagine how hard it must be to grow up near the water and then be so far away for so long. but at least you know it’ll always be waiting for you when you get released. they want us to write motivational things but i’m not sure how motivating it would be for you reading this letter about my silly life. so i thought i’d write about the beach instead.
it’s about seven in the morning. the weather isn’t too cold and sky is pink and orange right now. the waves were calmer an hour ago when i got here but now it’s getting more intense. there’s a couple with their dog, and another man running on the sand. i’m on a bench writing this, but i’ll walk along the water again before i leave. i would try to send you a shell but i’m sure they’d take it away. maybe sand?
i love the sound of the waves too. my school isn’t close enough to hear it, but i have one of those machines that makes the noises. it helps a lot when i’m trying to sleep. maybe you can get one when you get out too.
you fill up a page, and then another page. when you fold up the letter and slip it into the envelope, you take a couple grains of sand and drop it in there. a little piece of home for him.
then you mail the letter, and think that was that.
+
two weeks later, you get a letter in the mail. you’d heard some of the other girls had also gotten responses—some had been mildly wholesome, while others had been more along the lines of what are you wearing?
but you weren’t worried when you opened yours. andrew didn’t seem the creepy type to you, it felt more like… like he would be glad to have someone to talk to.
you read it in bed, holding an old stuffed animal tightly. his handwriting is stiff and neat, the evenness of the letters and dotted i’s and crossed t’s makes you smile. the way he wrote your name, with bleeding ink like he had pressed too hard into the paper while doing so, made you smile wider.
the first line—thanks for the sand—made you laugh.
andrew writes of the book he’s just read, how the beach you described sounds just like the one in his hometown, and a request that you tell him more about your life in the next letter. his letter isn’t as long as yours, which makes sense to you. he couldn’t have that much to write about. but the last line is what really gets you—thank you for the letter. it’s nice to talk to someone.
you blink away tears, unsure when you had started crying. you reread the letter twice over the next day and a half, deciding to head back to the beach early in the morning to write the next one.
and you’ve always been bad at this. your friends have always called you a hopeless romantic—but maybe you’re just in too deep. it was the product of having been alone for your entire life, not having the dreamy, intense love that so many of your friends had already gone through once or twice at this age. the result had manifested in how you treated the world around you. every door someone held open, every nice response, every lingering gaze could mean something more. that this could be the person, that this could be your soulmate.
you knew it was stupid. nothing could be stupider than assuming that a prisoner, for god’s sake, would be anything more than just that—a prisoner you write letters to. but your heart still beats faster each time you reread the letter, and when you think of his pretty, sad eyes and earnest expression, the urge to write another letter haunts over your entire body.
dear andrew, thank you for writing back. thank you again for writing back and not being creepy (like the responses some of my friends got). i could tell you more about my life but i really wasn’t lying—it’s pretty silly and mostly boring, but since you asked so nicely i’ll try for you. right now i’m getting ready for graduation. i bought a white dress last week. i’m waiting to hear if i got into the nursing program here. i majored in nursing so I just need to do one more year and then after that i can go work in the hospital. i’m thinking about labor and delivery since i think it would be so nice to see babies all day, but one of my friends said the emergency room is always hiring. she thinks it would toughen me up. but I’m not so sure i want to be tough. just incase all of this school talk is boring you, i’ll just tell you about my day on the condition that you'll tell me about yours. yesterday i woke up early and went on a walk. i made breakfast and went to class, and then studied in the library. my friend showed me a creepy response from one of the fellow inmates (by the way, thank you again for not being creepy.) i walked to get a chai—i don't really like coffee. and then i studied, watched the bachelor. it was terrible! my favorite contestant got sent home :(. and had dinner, then I went to sleep early because i woke up early to come to the beach today to write this for you. so i went to sleep thinking about this letter and woke up thinking about it too.
you add a little bit more about your routine this time, just so he has something to read about. you try to make yourself sound interesting where you can—but you’re really not. and you don’t want to force it, make your letters sound grand and full of lies.
you don’t know why—it’s not like you’ll ever meet him. but lying to andrew feels wrong, you guess.
stupid. you’re stupid for adding the last part—but something in your heart flutters reading the line again, because you did. andrew’s sad eyes are in your mind all the time, and you know it’s just a silly infatuation, that he’s a prisoner and you’re a random student and more likely than not, he’s not going to respond to this letter. but you still keep it in.
and so you send the letter. and what’s worse—the one you get back makes your heart swell. he says that you describe your routine so well he can almost see it happening in his head like a movie. he says that he could describe his day-to-day but that it might make you sad. you’re sure it will. he seems to know a lot about you from just a handful of letters.
you reply. he sends another. you reply. and before you can even discern what’s happened, this has been going on for the better part of a year and a half.
andrew gets all the life updates—your nursing school acceptance, how the first year goes. early morning clinicals, the mean preceptor who made your life hell for a month, the baby you got to help deliver, the cat you’re thinking about getting. and the not so great stuff—despite the nursing shortage, it seems the only available job at the hospital you like is in the emergency room.
you don’t give him names but he figures it out well enough. the program you sent the letters through was smart enough not to include the university’s name in the return address, but dumb enough to use a p.o. box in the same city. and in that city, there’s only two colleges, and only one of those has a nursing program.
these are the things he uses to figure out where you are after he gets out—not that you need to know any of that just yet.
after you get the job, the letters are stamped with the mark of the local post office. you must not know that they’re doing that, now that you can’t send the letters through the school anymore. that’s the last piece of the puzzle, figuring out which emergency room you had been working in.
he keeps those letters. they’re his sanctuary—pages and pages about your life. the highs and lows of an innocent girl who thought it would be a good idea to send letters to a prisoner. letters where you asked about him, how he was feeling, how he was doing. how much time he had left, how he thinks the next parole meeting will go, how that annoying guard has been recently. how’s your family, andrew?
if he closes his eyes, he can almost see you. you’re a faceless entity, a glowing angel with a halo hovering in his mind when he really needs you. you’re too perfect to be real—and he knows you would be outside too. if you can care this much through letters, go out of your way to send them even after you graduate, he can only imagine how you’d be if you stood in front of him.
the other students who sent letters stopped after one or two. he’s likely the only one who’s still getting them, and when someone questions who they’re from, he tells a story about his girl, waiting for him outside. a nurse—smart and pretty and devoted and who never fails to send him a weekly update. lives too far to drive up here but he’ll be there one day.
and then he gets sent to solitary.
he doesn’t like to think about it, if he can avoid it. sometimes the noises of the world get to him, brings him back to days and hours he wish he could wipe from his memory. the sound machine you recommended in your very first letter helps some. but the day he goes free, there’s only one sound he knows will calm him down—your voice, the first time he’ll get to hear it.
he has to go home first. he needs a car, the internet, a couple of phone calls to make sure he’s going to the right place.
days turn into weeks. unfortunately—very unfortunately. the only thing andrew wants is to finally see you in person, to finally hear what your voice sounds like. what color is your hair? what color are your eyes? he knows you like yellow—what would he find if he saw you? yellow hair clips? painted nails? how about your apartment? would the walls be yellow?
no, probably not. you rent. you wouldn’t do anything that wouldn’t get you your security deposit back. you’re too good for that, too safe.
yellow sheets, maybe. blankets, pillows. if he closes his eyes, he can imagine himself in it.
he tries to leave after the first job but there’s too many watchful eyes, too many moving pieces. he needs to get everything together—his truck, cash and some cards, a plausible excuse. he needs to make sure no one comes following him, needs to make sure that in his quest to come find you, he doesn’t get you tangled into the web of his family instead. he’s stuck somewhere between figuring out how to keep you safe and the realization that the safest you’ll ever be is right now, before he comes for you.
but fuck, if it doesn’t haunt him. the fact that he’s finally so close to you. that you’re a car ride away. that somewhere out there is the girl who, one day, realized another letter wouldn’t be coming.
had you cried then? been upset? wondered what had happened? bothered to find out if he was dead or freed or living without you? he hates that he couldn’t get you another letter to explain himself, but he figures explaining in person would be easier, and better. in all those years, you never once wrote him about a date or a boyfriend or anything in that realm.
the way your last few letters were, it were almost as if he was your boyfriend. (he lets the thought linger inside him for a few seconds, if that. any longer and it would possess him like a demon and he’d be rendered useless. unable to work, unable to think, unable to breathe. just him and the idea that he was that important to someone else.)
+
and then one day, a couple days after a job and after being fed up with the entire world being scared of him, he leaves to find you.
that’s just the thing—no one understands him. all his life, he’s been the unstable one, the one others are worried about, frightened of. but no one understands that there’s nothing to be afraid of.
no one, except maybe you.
so he says he’ll be back in a week, and he drives down to the hospital where you work.
he hasn’t gotten a real look at you yet. he spent the first night in the parking lot of the emergency room. he watches hordes of nurses go in and out, and no one stands out. he spends some time doing research—nurses only work three times a week.
his odds of seeing you for the rest of the time he’s in town are fifty/fifty. it feels like he should be able to pick you out from a crowd, with the way he knows you so intimately, but he can’t. he keeps an eye out for yellow water bottles or shoes or lunch bags, but he doesn’t see any for two days.
so he decides that he needs to get inside.
pope keeps a pocket knife on his person, and another one hidden in the car in case of emergencies. that’s what he uses to slice his palm open so he has an excuse to get inside. not too deep—he’s not stupid. just deep enough to need stitches, shallow enough that he can still feel all his fingers and wiggle them around.
and then he goes inside, and he waits.
each time the doors open, a different nurse steps out. some are too old, others too young. no one has anything yellow on them, or the personality that he knows could only belong to you. cheery, but serious. empathetic to a fault. you would probably cry if you saw a kid crying, just like how you used to write to andrew, telling him you had cried thinking about a patient you lost and their family, cried thinking about him alone in prison.
you’ve shed tears for him. a man you’ve never even met. he has to recognize you when he sees you. he knows he will—the two of you are bonded in more ways than one. through ink and blood and tears.
“david?” a voice calls out. so lost in his thoughts, he’d not realized the doors had opened again or the name he’d given them. he looks up, making eye contact with the nurse, his nurse, and she walks closer. “david?” the voice repeats, and he raises the non-bloody hand.
you are just like he thought you’d be. your hair is pulled back, which is a shame. he wants to see what it looks like when it’s down, what it smells like when you get close enough. pieces in the front fall out from behind your ear. his finger twitches momentarily.
and, he thinks with a pleasant sort of smugness, there is yellow—the plastic band around the stethoscope, the badge reel with a smiling cartoon on it, the pens tucked neatly in your scrub top pocket.
“hi david, i’m going to be your nurse today,” you start, looking at him in the eyes. your eyebrows furrow a little, like you’re trying to remember why this man looks so familiar—it’s not like he had expected it. his hair isn’t the same anymore, longer than the video you had seen of him. if that was your benchmark, he certainly looked somewhat different. he doesn’t fault you for not recognizing him right away. in fact, it’s better this way. “if you’re ready, i can take you back now.”
you smile at him, beautifully. a bright, wide smile, like there’s nothing in this world you’d rather do than take david back, and have a look at whatever’s bothering him. it’s genuine, it’s safe, it’s warm. how do you do it? he thinks briefly to himself, how do you make everyone feel like they’re the most important person in the world? just with a smile and a couple of sentences you must say a thousand times a shift.
andrew’s not one for many words, but his thoughts run rampant—he’s always thinking. he can’t get his brain to turn off, not now, not ever. even putting pen to paper was hard for him, even for you. but you seem to understand him, just like you did back then. without words, without talking, without touching or knowing. you just know him.
you take him to a bed behind a curtain and start rattling off a list of rehearsed questions. first name, age, date of birth. the more he says, the more you seem to get a step closer to recognizing him, but he doesn’t push it.
you come closer to the bed and gesture to his wrapped up, bleeding hand.
“may i?”
“yes. yes,” andrew says, unsure of how it’ll be to feel your hands on him for the first time. you start slowly, unpeeling the layers of gauze that he had brought with him from home as a just incase. he doesn’t flinch or wince, but you still speak up.
“i’m sorry, i know it’s not very comfortable.” you apologize without needing to, and he’s sure it’s because you want him to feel better about it. “how did this happen again?” you ask, staring at his wound closely. you’re not very far from his face. he can feel your breath even against his skin.
“accident. was cutting something.”
“well, you should be more careful, david.” his middle name has always felt foreign to him, though somehow, it doesn’t seem that way coming from your lips. andrew briefly feels like there’s nowhere else he’d rather be than here, no one else he’d rather be than david, getting his hand tended to by you.
“yeah. i should.”
“well i’m going to go ahead and get this cleaned up. just to be sure, any drug allergies?” he shakes his head. “great. we’re gonna clean it and then the doctor will be in here to stitch it up and we’ll get you on your way back home. does that sound okay?”
you look at him earnestly. as if on the off chance he said it didn’t sound okay, you’d have an answer ready to go. nothing to shame him, nothing to make him feel bad. just to comfort him and make him feel better. like there’s nothing more important than getting him back home with aid instructions for the rest of the week.
memories of your letters wash over him like a warm wave over soft sand. you’ve known from the jump that you were meant for this, but it all suddenly makes sense. how kind you are, how gentle you are with him, how you’d be with anyone.
you were meant for this, just like how you were meant for him.
“that sounds okay.”
you sit on a stool at the level of his hand. you dab with the cleaning solution and tell him you’re sorry about the sting. it’s half a dozen apologies in the short time he’s known you, and he sits and wonders, staring at your pretty hair and the undoubtedly smooth skin of your neck, that he’ll have to work you out of that habit.
you shouldn’t be apologizing for anything, much less helping people the way you do.
he stares at you while you think of another question to ask him to distract him from the pain of cleaning his wound.
and your patient is nothing if not a starer. when you got up to add something to the chart and stopped to chat with a fellow nurse and friend of yours about how long it might take the doctor to see him—calling him by his nickname, mister sliced hand in bed four—she interrupted you half way through the conversation.
“the one who’s staring at us right now?” you turned your head too quickly to see what she was talking about, and were faced with sliced-hand david, looking at you and the other nurse.
not in a creepy way, like some other past patients of yours. he’s just…looking. like he’s waiting for you to come back. his gaze doesn’t leave you, you notice. he watches your friend as though he’s watching over you.
the thought is almost… sweet.
and then you shake your head and turn around, breaking the eye contact. you have a bad habit of doing this—turning every interaction, every look into your eyes and held-open door into something more than it was.
your new friends at the hospital also call you a hopeless romantic. you knew that you were just sort of an idiot when it came to these things. it was the long-standing result of still never having been in a real relationship. you’d never felt the fireworks, never known the rom-com sort of true love and happy ending. you had never even gotten to the angst-filled third act breakup.
so maybe you were still a bit of a projector—projecting every single interaction into something more than it was. a patient with a staring problem became a man who was looking out for you, worried for you, love at first sight.
and you shake your head again. snap out of it. you had a problem, seriously.
the closest you’d even come to anything remotely related to love at first sight was the insane amount of letters you’d written to a prisoner a few years ago, and even then—
stop. it. you barely knew what the guy looked like, and yet, you found yourself wondering all the time what had happened to him. if today would finally be the day you’d find out. he could be the stranger next to you in the coffee shop. the person buying fruit next to you in the grocery store.
for all you know, he could be the next guy who walks into your life, and yet—
“you are seriously such a goner,” she says with a laugh, playfully shoving your shoulder.
“what? i-i just got lost in my thoughts.”
“a guy could blink at you and you’d be imagining your embroidered towels and baby names-”
“that is not true-”
“right, i know. you’re right. you’re just gonna hold out for mister prisoner until you’re an old lady with a bunch of cats-”
“hey! i have one cat and he is adorable, okay-”
“yeah, yeah. that’s how it always starts. one cat.”
“i’m going to go take care of my patient now.”
“don’t let him blink at you.”
you roll your eyes and make your way back to bed four, where david stares up at you with pretty, sad eyes. eyes that seem a little familiar, but it’s hour eight of twelve and you’ve taken care of half a hundred people so far. your tiredness seeps through your pores but you still smile and sit on the stool.
“sorry about that, david.”
“are you okay?” he asks, incredibly earnestly. you blink at him dumbly. once, then twice.
“yes?” you reply slowly, unsure of what he means. maybe you’re more tired than you thought. “is everything okay?”
“i saw her push you.” you blink again.
“oh. oh. no, no, she’s my friend. that was just, um-” you blank momentarily. his concern is so palpable you can feel it in the air. “-a joke. she was joking.”
“oh. okay.” david goes silent but his eyes are still on you. you decide the best course of action is to change the subject.
“so! david. this might be hard but no going in the water for at least a couple days. maybe more, depending on what the doctor says.”
“sure. can i.. can i still go sit on the beach?”
“yeah. that should be fine.” you clean out the wound further, but he doesn’t wince. “do you do that often?”
“yes. it calms me down.”
“me too. something about the sand and the waves. the air is just-”
“cleaner.” for the first time that night, david interrupts you. your eyes leave his hand to look up at his face.
“yeah,” you agree, slowly, wondering why his words feel so familiar to you. “cleaner.”
there’s a brief pause, and david doesn’t say anything. you look back down at his hand, continuing your work. but something inside of you stirs, curiosity poking and prodding at your memories. you’ve heard that before, somewhere, and even then you had thought about how no one had ever used that word to describe the ocean air before, when—
“i thought you wanted to deliver babies. do you not want to do that anymore?”
as if it was in slow motion, you retract your hands away from his. you move your head to look up at him and your jaw falls open a little—you had known david looked a little familiar, but when you had seen that thirty second video of him, his hair had been short and his skin had been a little paler, and the man sitting in front of you now—
well he wasn’t cute anymore.
he was handsome now—dark brown curls grown out. he looked like he’d spent some time in the sun, recently. his eyes—sad and pretty as they were—seemed a bit softer now. and your gaze on him made them even softer, like he was trying his best not to frighten you. how someone takes care of a skittish animal, ready to bolt at any second.
you swallow, and then bring your hands back to his, keeping the piece of soaked gauze on top of his wound gently
“i-i do. want to. this was just the only job opening when i-” you pause, sucking in a deep breath. he already knows about this—andrew. it was in one of your letters. “when i finished school.”
you feel his hand move under your touch, and then his other hand, the unwounded one, over yours. his grip isn’t tight, but it’s tense. hard. like he wants to make sure you can’t just disappear like sand between his fingers.
“i thought you might have found another job by now.”
“it-it’s hard. you get used to something and it’s hard to leave.” you pause again. there’s a million and one questions storming through your mind, but you stare into hazel eyes and they all go quiet, one by one. “you said your name is david-”
“i wanted to see if you would recognize me.”
“i’m sorry, i-”
“don’t apologize.” andrew, like his letters, speaks concisely. you should have guessed. you would send him pages just to get a few paragraphs back—and he would always say it’s because he didn’t have much to talk about, that learning about your day to day was much better than whatever he could tell you.
it was the first time your heart fluttered with the knowledge that out there, somewhere, is a man who wants to hear about your day. the closest you had ever gotten to the semblance of a real relationship. a man who cared about you, even if he never said as much. it was always clear to you, through his carefully chosen words and the things he wrote you about and how much he said he liked hearing about you.
he used to ask you questions about things from a dozen letters ago. remember to follow up after some big exam or a really hard week at work. asked you what you did to feel better. tell you what he would do to help you feel better—nothing creepy, never creepy. if you were supposed to be scared of him, you never were. he never gave you any reason to.
“are you okay?” andrew asks, and you blink yourself out of your thoughts.
“yes. yes, sorry. i just-” it’s a little ridiculous.
you’re a smart girl. you’ve always been a smart girl. you don’t do stupid things—you don’t drink yourself silly at bars and go home with random men. you don’t say yes to dates with strangers, despite how much you believe that a stranger can become a soulmate in an instant. you don’t put yourself in situations you can’t get out of.
but when it comes to andrew, you haven’t listened to a single one of your own rules. you sent him letters for ages after the other girls in your class had stopped. you had opened up about your life and wanted to learn about his life in exchange.
and despite every greater instinct, you had fallen asleep for years thinking about the day he might walk back into your life.
“did you ever get my last letter, andrew?”
you’re not even sure where the words came from—that’s the last thing you should be saying right now. how did you find me? when did you get out of prison? why are you here right now? should have all come before.
but something inside you burns, like it has for years, with the knowledge that he never sent you another letter. and you need to know why.
andrew sits up a little straighter, taking heavy breaths and staring at you. it’s the first time he’s heard you say his name, his real name. you two haven’t moved an inch, his hand still on yours. he blinks slowly at you and you don’t realize it, but you’re holding your breath.
“i did. i-i was in solitary. they don’t let you write letters there.”
“oh. i’m so sorry,” you say, and it’s second nature. you hate what andrew went through, and seeing him in front of you brings you back to the first letter you ever got back from him. how polite he was in it, how sweet the whole thing seemed. it was never meant to get this far, but it had, and you—
you are nothing if not a believer of soulmates and fate.
“that’s okay. not your fault.”
“but still. that must have been really hard.”
“i wanted to write back. i-” he stops, pulling out something from the pocket of his button-up shirt. he unfolds a piece of white notebook paper—and the breath you were holding leaves you quickly. that’s the paper you used to write him letters on.
“is that my last letter?” when andrew moves to look at you, he’s expecting it. a nervous lilt to your voice, fear in your eyes. like he’s crazy, like you’re scared.
instead he glances over hesitantly and you’re beaming up at him.
“you carry around.. my last letter?” the words come out as a smile forms on your face—pretty and genuine and sincere. you stare at him expectantly, and he doesn’t know how to respond.
“i…” the words falter. “i just wanted to ask you about it. did you, did you get that cat?”
“i did!” it comes out louder than you meant it, drawing the attention of some other nurses around you. you turn briefly, using your free hand to push the curtain so it’s closed around you two. “sorry. i did, yes. he’s so cute. i don’t have my phone or i’d show you the pictures-”
“that’s okay. you-you can show me later.”
“but i didn’t say i was getting a cat in that one. i just said i was thinking about it,” you feel breathless.
“but there was another one before that. you mentioned it then too. i figured you’d get it since you were thinking about it so much.”
“yeah. yeah, exactly.” your brain can’t seem to compute what’s going on. any fear that had been in you, if there was any of it to begin with, has completely melted away, replaced with a warm, glowing feeling in your chest, slowly spreading out to your limbs.
you had been thinking about getting a cat for ages—a thought you had mentioned to andrew maybe twice. and your justification had been just as andrew said, because you were thinking about it so much.
how did he know that?
and then the curtain opens behind you, and the doctor comes in to stitch up andrew’s hand. you have to pull away from his hand and andrew thinks you’re leaving, eyes following you and his expression shifting, but you don’t leave. you go to the cabinets to pull the supplies and help the doctor and and keep your eyes focused on the wound while his hand gets stitched up. eight stitches and not a single wince of pain or discomfort.
and though the thought makes butterflies emerge and fly around your stomach, when you finally look up at andrew, he’s been staring at you the entire time.
+
you have a tiny apartment in a shitty neighbourhood. it doesn’t feel safe at all, save for the fact that one of the houses down the street is owned by a rookie cop and his wife. there’s not that much crime, but the area inherently feels bad.
maybe it’s just that way to him—since he doesn’t want you living in a place like this.
it’s fine for now though. he’ll get you a better place soon enough. it’s by the water, and when he closes his eyes, he can hear the waves crashing on the sand. the sound alone might be enough to justify why you’d live here.
he keeps his eyes shut, just for a half dozen heartbeats, when he pulls up against your curb. he just wants to hear it before he says goodbye—it’s getting late, almost dark, and you must be exhausted. you’ve been at work all day and though you act like you’re completely fine, he knows how intense it is. there’s other letters, safely stored away, where you told him about how breaks are far and few in between, how you barely get time to drink water and eat a snack because of how busy it gets. he offered to stop and pick you up something to eat but you refused, saying you had food at home that you shouldn’t waste.
you sit in the passenger seat of his truck, staring around it as if you’re looking for some more information about it. anything would help you—half-empty drinks or gum wrappers or extra clothes in the backseat, but there’s nothing. the truck looks like he just got it yesterday, no sign of use or anything branding it as andrew’s car.
“can i walk you to your door?” you snap out of your thoughts.
okay—maybe it wasn’t the smartest idea in the world to let a virtual stranger drive you home. but when his hand was taken care of and you give him the paper instructions with way too many sample packets of antibiotic gel, all he said was that he’ll wait for you.
“wait for what?”
“to make sure you get home safely.”
and, really, what are you supposed to say to that? no, i’m good, thanks. you’d be even stupider than you already are to say that to someone who is just trying to be nice to you.
(he’s more chivalrous than any guy you’ve ever talked to, and probably more than any guy your friends have ever complained to you about. and more than that, it’d be rude to say no, especially once he realized you wait for a shoddy-at-best bus to get you home because you don’t have a car and it’s too dark to walk. he wouldn’t take no for an answer after that.)
and more than that—he waited another two hours for you to get home. every time you’d step out to bring back another patient, you’d see him, sitting there, waiting patiently for you. glancing up when the door would open to get a glimpse of you, of the small smile you shot his way before taking back whoever’s turn it was.
and he’s not a real stranger, a voice in the back of your head keeps reminding you. you’ve known him for longer than some of your coworkers have known their fiancees and husbands. and in all the time you’ve known him (meaning all the letters you’ve sent and received), you’ve never gotten a creepy word or even a fragment of a sentence that frightened you.
so you think the least you can do is let him drive you home and walk you up the two flights of stairs.
“of course. thank you, for-” your sentence gets interrupted. andrew gets out of the car and you turn to do the same, but then you see him—walking around the front of his truck, coming to your side and then opening the door for you.
oh.
your heart thuds dully in your chest at the very idea of andrew opening his car’s door for you to get out. after driving you home and politely asking to walk you up. whatever inhibitions you had melt away and you briefly think that whatever he asked of you, you’d do it in a heartbeat, no questions asked.
if that made you stupid, then so be it. you’d gladly be the stupidest girl on the planet if you get to feel whatever it was that andrew cody has made you feel for the last couple of hours.
his truck is jacked up tall, and he gives you his hand, the one without the cut, to help you get down, and you accept. he closes the door for you and lets you lead the way up the stairs.
silently, you two walk up the creaky steps together. hands brush together for all of seconds and he briefly wishes seconds lasted longer, until you’re standing in front of your door.
you’d once had a cute spring-themed wreath on the door, bought on clearance from the local store after easter, and a matching door mat. your elderly neighbor had told you to get rid of it because it was basically an invitation to criminals that a young girl lived here alone. you’re stupid, but not that stupid.
and now your front door looks barren and empty. there’s a few plants you can see from the window sill but the curtains are drawn and there’s an extra dead bolt a fellow nurse from the hospital’s husband had helped you install.
you look up silently at andrew and he looks back at you. this is it—it’s supposed to be goodbye. any normal girl would know that this is where the night needs to end, that you need to process what all of this means and if you had any friends you trusted with this information, calling them and asking what to do.
but you don’t want to call your friends, because you know what they’d say—to lock your door and get a restraining order and burn andrew’s letters, the ones you kept in a cute box under your bed and reread much too often for anyone’s comfort.
and you’re not a normal girl.
“do you want to stay for dinner?”
there’s not much to study on andrew’s expression—he keeps it stern and serious for the most part. his eyes are soft when they look at you and they soften even further when you say those words.
“yes. yes, thank you.”
you think maybe he wasn’t expecting it. you think that you weren’t expecting it either, not exactly sure where the words had come from. but you still lead andrew inside, showing him the only slightly comfortable couch you had to get delivered since you didn’t have anyone to help you lug a used one up the stairs. the squeaky door that leads to the bathroom, the tiny space you called your kitchen. your bedroom is behind a closed door and andrew stares at it when you go inside to change out of your scrubs and come back out in the kind of clothes that you sleep in.
and then he stares at the shut door even after you leave, before realizing that you’ve already made your way to the space between the living room and kitchen, a narrow expanse with a small round table and some placemats with flowers on them. you set down your backpack and take your hair out of the clip that holds it back for you at work and suddenly, he’s staring again.
it’s just a little too close to everything he’s been dreaming about for years.
“i’m really sorry. i was supposed to go grocery shopping but i hate bringing everything up-”
“don’t apologize.”
“also, i’m-i’m not really a good cook. i’m sorry-”
“i don’t think anything you make can be worse than prison food.”
“i really doubt that. you’ve never had my cooking.”
you glance back him and he meets your eyes at the same time, and you both start laughing. it’s nothing crazy—andrew didn’t seem like the kind who laughs easily anyway, but he cracks a smile and the noise is indelible—all you can think of is how you can get him to laugh again.
“do you like spaghetti?”
+
if someone had told you yesterday that this time tomorrow, andrew from your letters would be sitting across from you at your dining table, eating spaghetti that you made while rushing, looking so in place in your tiny home that your heart hurts, you think you would have passed out.
you watch him while he eats, absentmindedly swirling your own noodles on the plate, unable to focus on eating when he’s really in front of you. after countless dreams and days spent wondering what had happened to him and if he was okay and if he ever thought about you. he’s… bigger than you thought he would be. shoulders broader than you had realized from that tiny video. his mannerisms interest you more than they should—how quiet he is, but how he seems to latch onto every word when you go on and on. just like the letters, it seems he’s still a listener.
(it doesn’t help matters when he tries to clear the table and wash the dishes after—you have to wrestle the plates out of his hand and tell him to go sit down, that he can’t get his bandage wet. jostling against his iron-hard body was not on the list of things you thought you’d get to do today, and the very realization that andrew is twice as strong as you on his worst day does…things to you. things that do not need to be named or explored right now. he’s still a stranger, you try to remind yourself. no he’s not.)
but it seems that he can’t sit still. he wipes down the counter and then comes back to help you dry your yellow dishes and when you both finish up, with you still smiling at him and unsure of what excuse you can conjure to get him to stay, he finds it all by himself. you tell andrew to go sit on the couch while you finish up and he does, and when you follow him out there, he’s standing in front of it. he turns his head to look at you and then back at the couch.
your cat is perched on his usual spot, and you go over to him, scratching the top of his head between his ears and making extremely childish, stupid-sounding noises at him.
“andrew this is wardy,” you say, picking him up and bringing him closer. “he’s really friendly. i promise.”
“hello, wardy.” when he says it, you look up at him with a look he can’t find words to describe. as close to love as you can get it when it’s a technically a stranger. the way he greets your cat and helps you clean and knows more about you than some of your friends and coworkers do.
there’s no words for it. it just is.
so you sit on the couch next to andrew, your cat between the two of you, and you wait for him to tell you that he wants to leave. you flick on the television, settling for whatever silly romance movie is playing on your netflix account, sitting in the almost-silence with andrew and wondering why still, it doesn’t feel necessarily uncomfortable.
eventually andrew reaches out to pet wardy, and he curls up into his touch, settling comfortably against his forearm. (his huge, thick, veiny forearm, you think briefly, before chasing the thought away with a broom. and then another one—no wonder he had bled so much at the hospital. with veins like these.)
“this area’s not the best,” andrew says, speaking as though you need to be reminded of it, to know that he doesn’t approve.
“i know. but it’s cheap and it’s near the beach.”
“but you live alone. it’s dangerous.”
“but-” you glance over at him. he takes up most of your couch, wardy’s head resting against his thigh now, while he continues petting him. he looks over at you and it’s clear—this isn’t an argument. “you’re right. but i mean, how bad can it be? if you’re here now?”
you pause. stupidly, you’ve just revealed whatever thoughts have been rattling around in your head. like the fact that you’re assuming he’s going to be here more often, when the truth is that you have no idea if that’s true.
why would it be true? you tried, in earnest, to make sure your life never seemed anything more than it really was in your letters. but andrew drives a brand new truck and wears an expensive watch and you have absolutely no idea what he was robbing or why he was doing it—and you never asked. the assumption that just because he found you, meant that he was going to keep you was completely insane. a misgiving on your part, because surely, whatever’s waiting for him back home is better than your crappy cooking and a tiny apartment and a cat that you—
“sorry, i’m sorry. that’s such a jump. we just met. i’m so sorry, i can-” you stand up, and so does andrew.
“why are you apologizing?”
“because i just.. i don’t know.” you try to pace around your apartment but you only get a few steps away before you have to come back. “this is crazy. we’re both crazy.”
you feel it in the air before you hear him say it. it gets tenser, quieter, more serious. like what you’ve both been dreading for the last few hours is about to happen.
“do…do you want me to leave?” you turn to face him quickly.
“no! no, i don’t. that’s why this is crazy. people are going to think we’re insane. i don’t want you to go. i want you stay. i want you to tell me everything i missed in the last year and a half. i want to know what you did with my letters. i want to know-”
and when andrew reaches forward to grab your forearm—gently, not meant to hurt you—you freeze in your tracks. staring up at him, all the words in your brain, every stupid thing your friends ever told you about this make-shift relationship you had concocted in your head melting away.
“i want that too.”
“oh. well, i just thought-”
and this time, he doesn’t let you finish, leaning in for a kiss that makes your knees give out. andrew’s mouth—wet and hot and on fire—kisses you like you two were made for each other.
as cheesy as the thought feels, you swallow it and wrap your arms around his neck. it’s every stupid romance movie you’ve ever seen coming to life, your life. all because of him. he doesn’t break the kiss, not even to breathe. you feel his tongue poke into your mouth and you accept it gladly. you fall back on the couch and the movement of it makes wardy scamper off, and you move your head just for a second to see where he runs off too, but andrew doesn’t stop. he lines kisses along your cheek and your jaw until you turn back and he gets your lips again.
you feel his weight on top of you, and briefly, you wonder if you should tell him.
countless nights spent wondering what this would feel like, how he would kiss you, all the things he would do to you. you have to keep reminding yourself, you’re just a stupid girl—it’s not your fault that a few nice letters was enough to make you head over heels for the last few years.
because somewhere deep down inside, you knew. you knew that it would be like this, that it would be perfect, that it would be everything you wanted. that he would take care of you and want you as badly as you want him. your crown title of hopeless romantic had finally paid off.
another thought stirs as he keeps kissing you. it’s feverish and hot and makes you warm all over—how long it’s been since he’s had someone, how he kisses you like he’s out of practice. his mouth is so hard against yours it almost hurts, but you welcome the pain. it’s like he’s proving to you that he’s really there now, that nothing can tear him away from you.
but then he does pull away. you catch your breath, hands traveling to his face and running your fingers through his hair. andrew’s pretty eyes close and you cherish it—that you made him feel like that. he leans into your touch, head resting against your hand while you both take long, heavy breaths.
andrew leans in, pressing your foreheads together.
“i-i’ve wanted to do that,” another breath. you feel butterflies continuously emerge and flutter around your chest and your stomach, all the way down to between your legs. “since your first letter.”
and then you can’t resist—leaning back in for another hard, wet kiss. you feel him shift, strong hands on your hips, but staying firmly there, not traveling despite how much you wish they would. he’s been polite again, you think. waiting for you to give him permission.
“you can-” you start, but andrew keeps pressing kisses against your neck that make it hard to finish your sentence. “you can touch me.” you expect his hands to spread—grope and grab and tease until you’re begging for more. for him to be impatient and hungry and not stop until he’s inside of you.
“i can’t believe you’re real,” he says quietly, one hand moving up to your waist and touching the soft skin there gently. he traces up your arms and then down before intertwining his fingers with yours. you stare up at him, stupid as ever. every time you think you know anything about andrew, he proves you wrong.
“i can’t believe you are, either,” you say, tilting your head up for another kiss. a short, chaste one this time. “you’re just as nice as i knew you’d be.”
“you think i’m nice?” he asks, voice low. you nod in response, words escaping you. you settle to answer with another kiss, hands going to his shoulders to steady yourself, tugging and pulling on his bottom lip with your teeth.
you push up until he understands, and he uses two huge hands to get you into his lap, sitting up with his back against your couch. you straddle him, trying your hardest to not lose your train of thought as you realize how hard he is against you.
“i think you’re too nice,” you tease, unsure where you’re finding the confidence. under you, andrew looks spacey and flushed and all kissed out, but you don’t plan to stop. you lean in to press kisses to his cheeks and work your way to his jaw and neck. when you stop to look at him again, he looks hopelessly up at you, and you think he’s waiting again, waiting for permission to do something. “i think you’re so nice that you’re not telling me everything you’ve wanted to do to me these last few years.”
the way andrew looks up at you after you said that—god. you wish you could engrain it into your memory. you’re not someone who does this often, but you might just be good at figuring out how to get andrew to crack. he looks up with some of the hunger you’d imagined there’d be, and it makes something stir inside of you.
it feels strange to be wanted the way andrew wants you right now. you’re just not used to it, not entirely sure that you’d ever feel this way. that someone would ever make you feel this way.
your thoughts are wiped again when he pulls you into another kiss, and you deepen it, moaning into his mouth. you’re being so loud that your older neighbor might be able to hear you, but you can hardly bring yourself to care right now. andrew is quiet, like you thought he would be, but each soft grunt and heavy sigh is enough to make your entire body tingle.
you think you’re being better at staying quiet yourself when andrew scoops you up into his arms, carrying you like it’s nothing for him. you yelp loudly, forgetting everything for a second, realizing how lovely it feels to be carried by him. he leads you two to your bedroom, setting you down gently on the bed.
you stare at him, hovering above you, wondering how you’ll get to do this. how you’ll get his clothes off and watch out for his hurt hand and that you’ll finally get to feel him inside of you—when he just stops moving.
andrew looks up and around your bedroom, craning his neck to take in all of it. you’re not sure why, stuck in a position under him that forces you to just watch.
“is everything okay, andrew?” when you say his name, he turns back to stare down at you.
“yes. yes, it is. it’s just-” he pauses, looking back up and then down. the room is decorated with lots of pretty frames. there’s yellow curtains on the windows and your sheets are yellow under you too, just like he’d suspected. seeing it in real life almost sends him back to years ago—the first time he’d wondered what your bedroom looks like. the place from where you write your letters, the place you read them. “it looks just like i thought it would.”
and just like every other part of tonight, your reaction continues to surprise him. you smile and then laugh, holding onto his shoulder even tighter.
“spend a lot of time thinking about my bedroom, huh?” you tease, and he remains just as confused as ever.
you are such a conundrum. andrew thinks that he wants you so badly he can’t form a proper thought—and then the thoughts merge and blend and anger at the very idea that you’re so trusting of him. you should be more careful. you shouldn’t trust anyone how much you’re trusting him right now—inviting him inside your home, letting him into your bedroom.
and then you pull him down for another kiss and it all washes away like letters in the sand.
eventually he does pull away—though it takes an enormous amount of self control. the words you said on the couch haven’t completely left him yet and he still needs to answer you. you claw and pull at his shirt so he lets you take it off of him, you trace a hand down his chest, stopping at his heart and pressing your palm flat against him.
you’re staring, he thinks, but you’re really just admiring. taking in every detail, every scar and bruise so you can ask him about it later, moving your fingers down his abs and biting your lip while you stare daggers at his chest.
he moves away from your touch though, as sad as it makes you.
“you wanted to know everything i’ve thought about you?” andrew says, and the words make you tense up—thighs clenching, walls fluttering just from words alone. your fingers tighten around his bicep where you’ve been holding on, and you nod up at him dumbly. “can i show you?”
your head falls back onto your pillow with a thud. you nod again.
you let andrew set the pace—he peels off your clothes and you lift your hips and raise your arms in compliance. he starts with a kiss to your stomach that makes you whine, fingers leaving his skin and grabbing onto your sheets instead just to have something to hold on to.
you’re embarrassingly wet—you already know you are. it’s almost painful how badly you want him, even against better judgement that tells you that you could have, at the very least, taken things slowly.
you guess andrew just brings it out of you.
his kisses move south and you brace yourself, every muscle tensing up in anticipation. andrew is silent except for his deep breaths and somehow, with each one deeper than the last, they make your entire body shudder in anticipation. when he finally gets to your leaking cunt, you hear it. a strangled moan, sounding painful and from the depth of his chest and filled with want and need. just from looking at you. you can’t imagine what he’ll sound like when—
“this is what i thought about. this is always what i thought about.”
and then andrew licks down the length of your cunt with the flat of his tongue, and you can’t think about anything else anymore. he’s relentless, exploring you with his mouth like he’s a man starved. you can hear the noises, obscene and sloppy and wet as they are.
and then you feel it—his mouth around your clit while one finger prods at your tight opening. your back rises off the bed but he holds you down with one huge hand over your stomach. his finger slips inside you more easily than he thought it would. though you’re wetter than he imagined, he doesn’t stop teasing your clit.
your wetness coats everything—his tongue, his lips, his chin. your thighs are wet too, and he’s sure he can get your yellow sheets soaked too if he could tease you long enough. but he’s been incredibly patient all these years, unsure if he can wait any longer to get what he’s wanted.
his hand keeps you pinned down while his mouth stays on your clit and then andrew adds another finger and you thrash up against him. it’s useless against the weight of his hand holding you down, but your body moves anyways, hands wrangling into his brown curls, likely making a complete mess of them. you keep pulling and he moans between your legs and the vibration makes you thrash harder, a completely exhilarating cycle.
when he finally releases you from his grip, you think the other hand will explore up and down your body, but true to form, you’re wrong. andrew finds your hand and holds onto it, lacing your fingers with his while he keeps going.
when adds a third finger, you realize that he’s saying something against you. you can’t quite make it out with your heart thudding in your ears and how loud you’re being, but then it becomes a little clearer—
“you taste even better than i thought you would-” and you can’t stop it, the tension in your stomach winding tighter and tighter before it snaps altogether. a white hot heat washes through your body and makes you shake even harder, but andrew’s hold on you keeps you completely grounded. he works you through it, not stopping even once, not until you’re trying your hardest to pull away from him. you try to catch your breath but it’s useless. your head feels completely empty.
incoherent, you grab at andrew, murmuring something about inside, please, and he really tries to stay level headed. but one glance at your naked, writhing body and your expression while you beg for him is enough to tip him over the edge.
resisting you requires a level of self control that he doesn’t think he’ll ever be able to have.
andrew doesn’t think he’s ever had any self control when it comes to you. it’s why he did this, isn’t it? showed up at your hospital with your sweet letter folded up and somehow convinced you, without saying much of anything at all, to trust him and let him back into your life. he doesn’t even know how he did it—he can’t recall most of what he said to you. it plays in his head like a movie, like how your letters used to.
he doesn’t know what he did to deserve your trust, just knows that he’ll do whatever he has to in order to keep it forever.
andrew’s thoughts about keeping you cloud him while he lifts up your legs, manhandling your body while you squeal under him. he pushes your knees to your chest and lets your legs hang in the air while he hovers over you. all he can think about is getting inside of you—-giving you exactly what you’ve been begging for, fulfilling every fantasy he’s had about you in the last three years. the noises you’ll make. how tight and wet and warm you’ll feel around him. how you’ll look with his cum dripping out of-
“andrew, please, please,” you plead, and he’s not sure that you understand exactly what you’re asking for. it’s good that it’s him you picked for those letters, good that he’s the one who tracked you down.
someone else, well, he thinks, lining himself up with your soaking wet entrance, someone else might have had bad intentions with you. not andrew, though.
his intentions for you are only good. intentions to keep you happy and safe and move you away from this tiny apartment and make sure you get the job that you want, no matter who he has to threaten in order to do so. intentions to keep everything taken care of so the only thing you ever have to worry about again is him, just like you’d done for all those years when you wrote to him.
and as he slips inside, he knows those letters are in this bedroom somewhere, that this bed is where you read them, that these were the pretty hands that held his letters and these were the pretty eyes that read them.
you stare at him while he hovers over you, not pushing in just yet. andrew’s dick is just like the rest of him—thick and broad and so wide that you don’t know how you’ll be able to walk tomorrow. there’s veins too, just like his arms, and it’s all you can think about with him enclosed over you.
when he pushes his thick head past your fluttering walls, you make a noise like nothing he’s ever heard before. pure want and heat wrapped up with pleasure and pain. you keep begging for more but he’s not sure you can even handle it—but who is andrew to deny you?
he pushes further inside of you, now half way, and you cry out. andrew leans in to kiss you again, swallowing the noise and letting you moan against his lips.
another thrust and he’s almost all the way in. he pulls out and pushes back in, and then he starts his rhythm. your tits bounce with every thrust and he watches entranced, until his eyes go back to where you and him meet. in this position, on his knees with you folded underneath him, he can see it perfectly.
it’s enough to make him finish instantly. you look completely fucked out under him, crying out with each push of his hips.
your open your wet eyes and glance up at him. through wet lashes and blinking eyes, you get out a few words, stopped by each thrust.
“is it-” you gasp, words getting caught in your throat because andrew is so deep inside of you that you can feel him in your stomach and your chest. “is it what you imagined, andrew?”
“god, yes,” he says, and the sound is so perfect to you. it comes out broken, in the form of a gasp and a moan combined, and you want to hear it again and again. he says your name like it’s a prayer grounding him to you and you keep your arms wrapped around his neck, holding him close to you and bringing him in for another kiss. you can feel andrew’s pace start to stutter, his moans getting louder and his grip on you getting tighter. you hold his face in your hands, locking eyes again.
“inside, andrew, please, i want it inside, please, please,” and again, andrew thinks to himself, like some besotted fool, who is he to deny you? he releases whatever inhibitions he had left and fills you up with his cum—rivulets almost never ending. it leaks out around his dick, messing up your sheets and staining your thighs and making a mess of everything. he hears your heavy breaths and looks to see you smiling sweetly up at him.
and then he collapses next to you.
“hi andrew,” you say quietly next to him. your hands go to his, playing with his fingers and running the pad of your thumb over the veins on his hand. “was it how you thought it’d be?”
“it was better,” he says, breathless. you giggle and lean in to press a kiss to his cheek—and for a moment, he forgets everything. the circumstances of your introduction and the way he’d discovered you long forgotten for a few heartbeats. just you and the sound of your laugh and the promise of the future he wants with you before him.
“there’s still some things i thought about that we didn’t get to yet,” you tease, and he wonders, briefly, what he’s going to do with you.
and then you two hear it—scratching at your closed bedroom door.
“oh god,” you say, sitting up in bed.
you groan a little since your thighs are sore and it’s a wet, sticky mess between them. andrew keeps his hand on your arm and helps you sit up, and joins you in the position, like he’s preparing to help if you need something.
“warden, stop,” you say, but he doesn’t listen. you turn to andrew. “i’m gonna get him.” you try to move your legs and put weight on them, but you feel your knees buckle immediately, with andrew rushing to your side to help you back into bed.
“oh my god. you broke me.”
“i’ll get him. just-just sit down.”
andrew opens the door and picks up your cat like it’s second nature, bringing him to you on the bed before getting in right beside you. your cat is sweet but there’s not many people over at your apartment, and you worry for a moment that he won’t be nice to andrew when he wants your attention. but wardy doesn’t move from his position, staying curled up again andrew’s chest and arm, completely at ease.
“he likes you. that makes sense,” you say, smiling up at him, leaning in to pet wardy’s head.
but andrew doesn’t understand.
“warden. i thought you said his name was wardy?”
“that’s just a nickname.”
“why warden?”
“oh well. it’s silly, um-”
“tell me.”
“well, uh. well, warden is just the letters in andrew. uh, rearranged.”
“oh.”
“i’m sorry. i’m so sorry, is that creepy? i was really projecting, i guess, when i got him. i just loved your letters so much and i’ve never had a boyfriend or anything like that-”
★ˎˊ˗ BUNNY!READER is the sweetest thing to hang around the cody house. she is bubble-gum optimism with legs, an assistant of sorts for smurf. she is small-town manners with endless thank-yous, head tilts, and soft gosh really? smiles. danger slides right past here, she'll wave at a man with a gun the same way she waves at the mailman, because she's certain good manners are bulletproof. she sweeps through their world in pastel cardigans and scuffed ballet flats, oblivious to the way most men drool over her. they call her bunny because she's skittish and bright-eyed; she prefers to think it's the lucky kind of rabbit's foot charm.
★ˎˊ˗ BUNNY!READER is andrew pope cody's weakness. he is the silent hinge in every doorway, the shadow that moves when she moves. her sugar-rush chatter pries open something fierce in him: devotion that borders on possession. he files away her schedule, intercepts threats before she notices, and tightens the world around her tiny step by step, safety coating that looks like care until you test the locks. she thinks he's just being protective; he knows the line between love and ownership gets thinner every time she smiles up at him.
★ˎˊ˗ BUNNY!READER loves collecting pastel hair bows and sparkly claw clips. she loves bubble-gum flavored lip gloss and those old-school roll-on glitter sticks that leave a faint shimmer on her collarbones. she loves early 2000s rom-com soundtracks on repeat and hand-decorating cupcakes. she loves stuffed animals that double as travel pillows and spontaneous roadside flower stands. she loves journaling with glitter gel pens and dotting her i with a tiny heart dot. and she loves when pope carries her over puddles because she's wearing impractical shoes.
★ˎˊ˗ BUNNY!READER dislikes watered-down coffee and dry hands (she keeps cheery-vanilla lotion in every drawer). she's not a fan of loud, sudden noises and cigarette smoke. she dislikes scratchy fabric tags and bitter flavors and being left of read. she dislikes horror movies or true-crime podcasts ("why would i pay to be scared on purpose?") she dislikes rain on hair-wash day and seeing animals in distress (ASPCA commercials require an immediate channel change.)
SOCIAL MEDIA AU COLLECTION
part I
LOOSE PAGES FROM THE ARCHIVE
ᯓ✮ 18+ ONLY these stories contain explicit content, mature themes, and dark material. minors, please do not read or interact. you will be blocked.
ᯓ✮ GENERAL CONTENT WARNINGS explicit sexual scenes, age-gap relationship, obsessive/possessive behavior, morally gray expressions of love, innocence-to-corruption dynamics, dub-con undertones, stalking, coercion, violence, strong language.
╰┈➤ˎˊ˗ individual fics will include specific content warnings. please review them before reading. YOU and only you are responsible for the content you choose to consume
ᯓ✮ FORMAT each fic is a self-contained one-shot set in the same timeline. details overlap and reference one another, but there is not strict chapter order.
╰┈➤ˎˊ˗ fics are listed from newest to oldest
smut = ✧ clean (ish) = ♡ angst = ✩
♡ SUMMER’S IN THE AIR AND BABY, HEAVEN’S IN YOUR EYES when you end up drunk and alone on a beach, pope drops everything to bring you home and tries very hard not to want more than he should.
♡ SHED SOME LIGHT ON ME pope goes to smurf's house only to find you playing dress-up in lingerie
♡ SUGAR ON THE TRIGGER you discover pope's 'no' turns into a 'yes' the second you flash a little cleavage
♡✧ HELL ON YOU at a sweltering cody family pool day, pope ends up with you in his chair. your squirming quickly turns into a private torment as pope tries to hide just how hard you're making him
♡✧ PEARL NECKLACE after a creep makes a gross comment to you outside your apartment, pope is forced to explain what a pearl necklace really means. spoiler: it's not jewelry
♡ SUN-SPLIT LOVERS when pope tries to protect you from his family's crude conversations, he ends up having to answer your uncomfortable questions about sex
♡ TENDER IS THE CONCRETE you scrape your knees by the pool, pope attempts to fix it
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germansingergirl
areudirty
dededos
annaxmalina
