summary — you and steve harrington, your bodyguard, have become quite aware of each other's habits. you start to feel like you'd do anything for each other without even noticing it.
content 3.4k words, bodyguard!steveharrington x reader, no pronouns
note this is my most favourite bodyguard steve work to date oh em geee i love him
The gala had been beautiful in the way that expensive things always are — all candlelight and champagne flutes and people laughing too loudly at jokes that aren’t funny.
The venue is the kind of place that makes you feel underdressed regardless of what you wear, all gilded ceilings and marble floors that reflect the chandeliers back at themselves like they’re in love with their own light.
You'd smiled until your cheeks ached. Shook hands until your fingers felt numb. You'd made conversation about things you didn't care about with people who didn't care about them either, and you'd done it all in heels that had stopped being bearable somewhere around the second hour and had since crossed fully into the territory of active cruelty.
You were good at this — the performance of it. Eight months of events like this one had sharpened you into something efficient and practised. You knew which smile to use for which room, knew how to laugh at the right moment, knew how to hold a glass of champagne for an entire evening without actually drinking it. You had it down to a science.
Steve had never been particularly impressed by the science.
He appears at your elbow around eleven, materialising the way he always does — quietly, without announcement, close enough that the sleeve of his suit jacket brushes your bare arm.
He's been working the periphery of the room all night, which is how he prefers it. Watching the exits, watching the crowd, watching you in the particular way he watches you, that you've given up pretending not to notice.
"You're doing that thing with your jaw," he says, low enough that only you can hear him beneath the string quartet and the ambient roar of two hundred people performing at each other.
You keep your smile in place, keep your eyes on the couple across the room who've been trying to catch your attention for the past ten minutes. "What thing?"
"The clenching thing." He reaches past you to set his untouched glass of sparkling water on a passing tray, and for a moment, his arm is across your eyeline, steady and unhurried. "The I'm exhausted and my feet are killing me, but I would rather combust than admit it thing."
"That's a very specific thing."
"You're a very specific person."
You finally look at him. That’s always a minor risk — looking directly at Steve when he’s standing close enough that you can see the slight loosening of his tie, the hair that never quite behaves, no matter how carefully he'd started the evening.
He looks back at you with that particular expression he has, the one that’s patient and a little bit knowing and careful in a way that makes your sternum feel too small.
"I'm fine," you say.
"You've said hello to the same group of people twice in the last hour without realising it."
"That's networking."
"That's autopilot." He shifts slightly, angling himself toward you without making it obvious, the way he's learned to do so that it looks like casual conversation and not what it actually is. "Say the word, and we go. Car's already out front. I texted Carter twenty minutes ago."
Of course, he did. Of course, he'd anticipated it before you'd even consciously registered how tired you were.
That’s the thing about Steve that you hadn't expected when this arrangement began — you'd expected competent, you'd expected professional, you'd even been prepared for charming.
You had not been prepared for perceptive. For the way he pays attention to you with a kind of quiet consistency that nobody has ever really bothered with before.
You want to argue. You are good at arguing with him — genuinely good at it, which surprises you because most people fold under the particular brand of stubborn that you've developed over years of being underestimated.
Steve doesn't fold. He pushes back with this infuriating calm and occasionally a smile that makes an argument feel less important than it had a moment ago. It’s become something of a sport between you. A very confusing sport with rules that seem to be changing gradually, and without your full consent.
But your feet are screaming, and your face hurts from smiling, and the thought of another hour of this makes something in your chest cave quietly inward like a building settling.
"Five minutes," you smile without a lot of light. "Let me say goodbye to the Hargrove table."
Something in his expression eases — barely perceptibly, the way tension leaves a room slowly. "I'll get your coat."
—
The rain had started while you were inside. Of course it had.
Steve meets you outside the cloakroom with your coat already open, holding it out by the lapels so you can slide your arms in without fumbling — a small thing, effortless, the kind of thing he'd started doing without either of you commenting on it.
Early on, you'd said thank you every time. Somewhere around month four, you think you stopped, because the gratitude had started feeling inadequate for what it was actually expressing, and inadequate felt worse than silence.
The doorman near the entrance has a stand of umbrellas, and Steve lifts one without breaking stride, shaking it open one-handed as you step out from beneath the awning and into the night.
The rain is steady and cold, the self-serious kind that means business, and the pavement in front of the venue gleams under the amber streetlights like dark polished glass.
Your car is idling at the curb roughly ten metres away, where there’s room for the SUV, Carter visible through the windscreen.
Steve falls into step beside you, umbrella raised. You’re maybe halfway there when you notice it.
You notice it the way you notice most things about him — sideways, peripheral, the brain catching something before the conscious mind catches up.
A faint cool mist against your left hand. You look down. Your hand is well within the umbrella's coverage. You look up, following the angle of the canopy, and the whole picture sets itself with a clarity that's almost annoying.
The umbrella is tilted entirely over you. The rain is hitting Steve's right shoulder in a steady dark bloom that is spreading down the back of his jacket, darkening the grey wool by degrees. He’s looking straight ahead at the car, expression perfectly even, apparently unbothered by the fact that he’s getting rained on in a suit that probably cost more than most people's rent.
"Steve."
"Mm."
"The umbrella."
"What about it." More of a statement than a question.
You stop walking. He takes one more step before the absence of you registers, and he stops too, turning to look at you with an expression that’s making a genuine effort to be neutral and falling slightly short of the mark.
"It's completely over me," you say.
"That's the idea."
"That's not — you're soaked."
"I'm a little damp."
"Your whole shoulder is —"
"It's rain." He nods toward the car with the patient air of someone who considers this topic closed. "It's fifteen feet. Let's just —"
"Steve." You reach up and take hold of the umbrella handle — his hand is already there and your fingers close over his, which neither of you had planned and neither of you immediately correct.
You pull the umbrella toward centre. Toward both of you. It brings you closer together, your shoulder against his arm, the warmth of him immediate through the fabric of your coat.
The umbrella now covers the space between you imperfectly, not quite reaching either edge. "Don't do that."
He looks down at you. Up close, in the rain and the amber light, there’s something moving across his face that he can’t name and doesn’t try to. The string of water drips from the umbrella's edge, caught the light for a moment before it falls.
"Do what?" he says, quieter.
"The self-sacrificing thing." Your fingers are still on the umbrella handle. His hand hasn't moved. "You do it constantly and you act like I don't notice."
"I'm just holding an umbrella."
"You tilted it entirely over me and were going to stand there and get rained on and not say a single word about it."
A pause. The rain keeps falling. Somewhere behind you a car door closes.
"I'd rather we both get a bit wet," you say, "than you take all of it."
Something shifts in his expression. Something slight and unannounced, like a key turning in a lock that nobody has acknowledged exists.
"Noted," he says, finally. And he doesn’t move the umbrella back.
—
The car is warm and dark and smells like leather and the faint trace of whatever product Steve uses in his hair, which you had clocked sometime around month three, and had been pointedly not thinking about ever since.
Carter has the radio on low — something ambient and instrumental, the kind of music that exists specifically to fill silence without demanding anything from it — and the rain is hitting the roof in a steady percussion that’s frankly unfair given how tired you already are. Like the universe offering you a lullaby and expecting you to decline.
You have your phone out with every intention of returning three emails that have been sitting unanswered since this afternoon. Important ones, probably. Your assistant had flagged at least two of them.
"You don't have to do that tonight," Steve says from beside you.
You don’t look up. "I know."
"It's nearly midnight."
"I'm aware of what time it is."
A pause. You can feel him looking at you in the particular way he does — not intrusive, not demanding, just present in a way that is somehow more noticeable than if he'd been staring.
"The emails will be there in the morning," he says.
"So will my anxiety about them."
He doesn’t push further. That’s another thing about him that you hadn't expected and hadn't prepared for — he knows when to stop. Most people either drop things too early or don't drop them at all. Steve has some internal calibration that tells him exactly where the line is, and he stops precisely at it every time, and it’s one of the more quietly disarming things about him.
You answer one email. The words keep sliding off each other in a way that suggests your brain is running on significantly reduced power, the sentences take longer to form than they should, your thumb hovers over the keyboard for stretches that are becoming embarrassing.
The city begins to thin outside the window. The streetlights grow further apart. The radio plays something without edges.
You answer half of a second email.
The phone screen is very bright. You turn the brightness down. That helps for approximately ninety seconds before your eyes begin their campaign of passive resistance, growing heavier in increments too small to catch until they’re simply, undeniably, difficult to keep open.
You blink hard. Sit up slightly straighter. Refocused on the email.
Hi David, thank you for your message regarding the —
Your head dips. You catch it. Steve says nothing.
— regarding the proposed timeline for —
You blink again, slow. The rain on the roof is so constant it stops sounding like rain and starts sounding like quiet itself, like the audio equivalent of a weighted blanket, like something designed specifically and maliciously to undo the last of your resistance.
The phone goes dark in your hand on an auto-lock timer. You don’t unlock it.
You aren’t aware of the precise moment it happens. That’s the nature of that particular kind of exhaustion — it doesn’t announce itself or give you the chance to negotiate. It simply arrives, folds you under, and takes the decision out of your hands entirely.
One moment, the dark interior of the car, the glow of passing lights through the rain-streaked window. Then nothing.
What you aren’t aware of, and won’t be aware of until later, is the way it happens. The slow lean — incremental, unconscious, following the pull of gravity and warmth — until your head comes to rest against Steve's shoulder. The slight shift of him as he registers it. The pause, long enough to count, long enough to make a choice.
He doesn’t move. He doesn’t clear his throat or shift away or do any of the things that would be easy and reasonable. He stays exactly as he is and lets you sleep and says nothing.
He does, after a moment, reach forward with his free hand and adjust the air temperature, turning it up a degree. A small thing. A thing nobody would ever know he'd done.
Carter glances in the rearview mirror once and keeps driving.
The radio plays on.
You sleep on, completely unaware of the fact that Steve sits very still for the remainder of the journey with his eyes forward and the careful expression of a person thinking through something they aren't quite ready to say out loud.
The city lights run across the window in amber and gold. The rain tapers slightly as you leave the centre behind. He doesn’t move until Carter takes a corner and the motion shifts you slightly, and his arm comes up, instinctive, automatic, before he catches himself and lowers it back. His hand settles at the edge of the seat instead. Not quite touching. Very nearly.
You sleep through all of it.
You wake briefly, once, somewhere on the motorway. A foggy and graceless resurfacing — the world dark and moving, the rain soft on the roof, a vague awareness of your own weight leaning into something solid. The shoulder resolves itself first. Then the sleeve of his jacket, slightly cool and faintly damp from the rain. Then the warmth of him beneath it.
Your brain performs a slow inventory of the situation from somewhere very far underwater. You should sit up, it offers, with very little conviction.
You should say something, it tries again. Or move. Or acknowledge this in some way.
You do none of those things. The warmth is too complete and the exhaustion is too total and Steve isn't moving, and somehow that last fact is the one that settles everything.
He isn't moving. He'd had forty minutes to move, and he hadn't, which meant something that your three-quarter-asleep brain didn't have the capacity to fully examine but noted carefully for later, filed it somewhere it would absolutely surface at an inconvenient moment.
You mean to sit up.
You let your eyes close instead.
The last thing you’re aware of is the sound of the rain, and the steady warmth of him, and the radio playing something low and wordless into the dark.
—
"Hey." Close and quiet. A hand on your arm, careful. "We're here."
The car has stopped. The rain has thinned to almost nothing, just the occasional tap against the glass. You blink, slow and graceless, at the hotel lobby burning gold through the window, and then you blink at your own hands, and then you become gradually and unhappily aware that you had been asleep on Steve’s shoulder for what had apparently been the entire journey.
You sit up. Your neck protests. Steve is watching you with an expression you have been cataloguing for months without successfully filing under any category you trusted.
"How long was I asleep?" you ask.
"About forty minutes."
"Please tell me I didn't snore."
The corner of his mouth moves. "I'm not going to tell you that."
"Steve—"
"You're fine." He reaches across and pushes the car door open, which requires him to lean briefly across your eyeline, and you look at the ceiling of the car with great focus until he’s done. "Come on. Before you fall back asleep sitting up."
"I don't do that."
"You absolutely do that."
—
The hotel is the quiet kind of grand. All deep carpet and low lighting and the particular hush of a place that charges enough per night to insist on it. Your rooms are side by side on the fourteenth floor, 1407 and 1408, which had been a logistical arrangement at the start and had since become something that felt, without any discussion, simply correct.
You say goodnight in the corridor. Steve waits until your door closes — you know because you listen for the sound of his own door and it doesn’t come until after yours clicks shut, which is something you never once comment on, or think about more than what was probably advisable.
You shower. You change into something that isn't architecture held together by ribbons and your own stubbornness. You sit on the edge of the enormous white bed in your cardigan and your socks, and you feel, profoundly, the particular peace of being somewhere quiet after somewhere loud.
Then you pick up the room service menu and stare at it for far too long because your brain is still operating at roughly sixty percent capacity.
You order the pasta because you want it. You order the soup because it’s cold outside. You order the bread because it’s been a very long night and you feel you’ve earned it.
And then, already reaching to set the phone down, you notice the last item in your basket.
A burger. Medium-well. No onion. Extra pickles. Mustard instead of mayo.
You stare at it.
The specific and complete wrongness of it registers slowly and then all at once. That was not how you ordered a burger. You don’t even particularly like mustard. There’s exactly one person in your life who orders a burger that way, and you know it because you had watched him do it across eleven meals, in nine different cities, over eight months, sitting across from him in hotel restaurants and airport lounges and once in the front seat of a hire car outside a motorway service station in the rain.
The particulars had apparently been transcribed somewhere in your brain without ever asking your permission.
You look at the confirmation screen for a long moment.
Then you put your phone down, fold your hands in your lap, and sit with the information quietly for a minute.
Then you pick the phone back up and complete the order.
When the knock comes twenty minutes later, you open the door, sign for everything, tip generously, and stand in the corridor in your socks, staring at the bag with the burger in it.
You pick it up. You walk four steps to the left.
You knock on the door of room 1408.
A pause — the television going quiet, the sound of movement. Then the door opens, and Steve is there in a grey t-shirt and joggers, with his hair damp from the shower, and he looks at you, and then at the bag, and then back at you, and his expression does something that starts as confusion and lands somewhere else entirely.
"Don't," you say, before he can get there.
"I haven't said anything."
"You were about to say something insufferable."
"I was going to say—" he pauses, recalibrating, a smile threatening the corner of his mouth "—how did you know?"
"I don't want to talk about it."
"That's—"
"Against my will," you say. "Completely against my will. I was barely conscious. It just happened."
He takes the bag from you, and the back of his hand is warm where it passes over your fingers, and neither of you say anything about that either. He’s smiling properly now, not his professional smile, not his public one — the other one, the quieter one, the one that does something unhelpful to the general situation of being near him.
"Thank you," he says.
"Go to sleep," you say.
"You too."
You turn back toward your own door. Behind you, you hear him stay — hear the absence of his door closing, the particular quality of silence that means he’s still there, still in the doorframe, the way he always waits until you’re inside.
It’s a small thing. It’s the kind of small thing that has been accumulating for months, quietly and without ceremony, like rain collecting in something that has only just begun to understand it's a vessel.
You let yourself into your room. You don't look back.
But you’re smiling by the time the door clicks shut, alone in the quiet with the particular warmth of someone who’s only just starting to understand how much they've already let another person in — and finding, somewhat to their own surprise, that they don't mind at all.
summary — you and steve harrington, your bodyguard, have become quite aware of each other's habits. you start to feel like you'd do anything for each other without even noticing it.
content 3.4k words, bodyguard!steveharrington x reader, no pronouns
note this is my most favourite bodyguard steve work to date oh em geee i love him
The gala had been beautiful in the way that expensive things always are — all candlelight and champagne flutes and people laughing too loudly at jokes that aren’t funny.
The venue is the kind of place that makes you feel underdressed regardless of what you wear, all gilded ceilings and marble floors that reflect the chandeliers back at themselves like they’re in love with their own light.
You'd smiled until your cheeks ached. Shook hands until your fingers felt numb. You'd made conversation about things you didn't care about with people who didn't care about them either, and you'd done it all in heels that had stopped being bearable somewhere around the second hour and had since crossed fully into the territory of active cruelty.
You were good at this — the performance of it. Eight months of events like this one had sharpened you into something efficient and practised. You knew which smile to use for which room, knew how to laugh at the right moment, knew how to hold a glass of champagne for an entire evening without actually drinking it. You had it down to a science.
Steve had never been particularly impressed by the science.
He appears at your elbow around eleven, materialising the way he always does — quietly, without announcement, close enough that the sleeve of his suit jacket brushes your bare arm.
He's been working the periphery of the room all night, which is how he prefers it. Watching the exits, watching the crowd, watching you in the particular way he watches you, that you've given up pretending not to notice.
"You're doing that thing with your jaw," he says, low enough that only you can hear him beneath the string quartet and the ambient roar of two hundred people performing at each other.
You keep your smile in place, keep your eyes on the couple across the room who've been trying to catch your attention for the past ten minutes. "What thing?"
"The clenching thing." He reaches past you to set his untouched glass of sparkling water on a passing tray, and for a moment, his arm is across your eyeline, steady and unhurried. "The I'm exhausted and my feet are killing me, but I would rather combust than admit it thing."
"That's a very specific thing."
"You're a very specific person."
You finally look at him. That’s always a minor risk — looking directly at Steve when he’s standing close enough that you can see the slight loosening of his tie, the hair that never quite behaves, no matter how carefully he'd started the evening.
He looks back at you with that particular expression he has, the one that’s patient and a little bit knowing and careful in a way that makes your sternum feel too small.
"I'm fine," you say.
"You've said hello to the same group of people twice in the last hour without realising it."
"That's networking."
"That's autopilot." He shifts slightly, angling himself toward you without making it obvious, the way he's learned to do so that it looks like casual conversation and not what it actually is. "Say the word, and we go. Car's already out front. I texted Carter twenty minutes ago."
Of course, he did. Of course, he'd anticipated it before you'd even consciously registered how tired you were.
That’s the thing about Steve that you hadn't expected when this arrangement began — you'd expected competent, you'd expected professional, you'd even been prepared for charming.
You had not been prepared for perceptive. For the way he pays attention to you with a kind of quiet consistency that nobody has ever really bothered with before.
You want to argue. You are good at arguing with him — genuinely good at it, which surprises you because most people fold under the particular brand of stubborn that you've developed over years of being underestimated.
Steve doesn't fold. He pushes back with this infuriating calm and occasionally a smile that makes an argument feel less important than it had a moment ago. It’s become something of a sport between you. A very confusing sport with rules that seem to be changing gradually, and without your full consent.
But your feet are screaming, and your face hurts from smiling, and the thought of another hour of this makes something in your chest cave quietly inward like a building settling.
"Five minutes," you smile without a lot of light. "Let me say goodbye to the Hargrove table."
Something in his expression eases — barely perceptibly, the way tension leaves a room slowly. "I'll get your coat."
—
The rain had started while you were inside. Of course it had.
Steve meets you outside the cloakroom with your coat already open, holding it out by the lapels so you can slide your arms in without fumbling — a small thing, effortless, the kind of thing he'd started doing without either of you commenting on it.
Early on, you'd said thank you every time. Somewhere around month four, you think you stopped, because the gratitude had started feeling inadequate for what it was actually expressing, and inadequate felt worse than silence.
The doorman near the entrance has a stand of umbrellas, and Steve lifts one without breaking stride, shaking it open one-handed as you step out from beneath the awning and into the night.
The rain is steady and cold, the self-serious kind that means business, and the pavement in front of the venue gleams under the amber streetlights like dark polished glass.
Your car is idling at the curb roughly ten metres away, where there’s room for the SUV, Carter visible through the windscreen.
Steve falls into step beside you, umbrella raised. You’re maybe halfway there when you notice it.
You notice it the way you notice most things about him — sideways, peripheral, the brain catching something before the conscious mind catches up.
A faint cool mist against your left hand. You look down. Your hand is well within the umbrella's coverage. You look up, following the angle of the canopy, and the whole picture sets itself with a clarity that's almost annoying.
The umbrella is tilted entirely over you. The rain is hitting Steve's right shoulder in a steady dark bloom that is spreading down the back of his jacket, darkening the grey wool by degrees. He’s looking straight ahead at the car, expression perfectly even, apparently unbothered by the fact that he’s getting rained on in a suit that probably cost more than most people's rent.
"Steve."
"Mm."
"The umbrella."
"What about it." More of a statement than a question.
You stop walking. He takes one more step before the absence of you registers, and he stops too, turning to look at you with an expression that’s making a genuine effort to be neutral and falling slightly short of the mark.
"It's completely over me," you say.
"That's the idea."
"That's not — you're soaked."
"I'm a little damp."
"Your whole shoulder is —"
"It's rain." He nods toward the car with the patient air of someone who considers this topic closed. "It's fifteen feet. Let's just —"
"Steve." You reach up and take hold of the umbrella handle — his hand is already there and your fingers close over his, which neither of you had planned and neither of you immediately correct.
You pull the umbrella toward centre. Toward both of you. It brings you closer together, your shoulder against his arm, the warmth of him immediate through the fabric of your coat.
The umbrella now covers the space between you imperfectly, not quite reaching either edge. "Don't do that."
He looks down at you. Up close, in the rain and the amber light, there’s something moving across his face that he can’t name and doesn’t try to. The string of water drips from the umbrella's edge, caught the light for a moment before it falls.
"Do what?" he says, quieter.
"The self-sacrificing thing." Your fingers are still on the umbrella handle. His hand hasn't moved. "You do it constantly and you act like I don't notice."
"I'm just holding an umbrella."
"You tilted it entirely over me and were going to stand there and get rained on and not say a single word about it."
A pause. The rain keeps falling. Somewhere behind you a car door closes.
"I'd rather we both get a bit wet," you say, "than you take all of it."
Something shifts in his expression. Something slight and unannounced, like a key turning in a lock that nobody has acknowledged exists.
"Noted," he says, finally. And he doesn’t move the umbrella back.
—
The car is warm and dark and smells like leather and the faint trace of whatever product Steve uses in his hair, which you had clocked sometime around month three, and had been pointedly not thinking about ever since.
Carter has the radio on low — something ambient and instrumental, the kind of music that exists specifically to fill silence without demanding anything from it — and the rain is hitting the roof in a steady percussion that’s frankly unfair given how tired you already are. Like the universe offering you a lullaby and expecting you to decline.
You have your phone out with every intention of returning three emails that have been sitting unanswered since this afternoon. Important ones, probably. Your assistant had flagged at least two of them.
"You don't have to do that tonight," Steve says from beside you.
You don’t look up. "I know."
"It's nearly midnight."
"I'm aware of what time it is."
A pause. You can feel him looking at you in the particular way he does — not intrusive, not demanding, just present in a way that is somehow more noticeable than if he'd been staring.
"The emails will be there in the morning," he says.
"So will my anxiety about them."
He doesn’t push further. That’s another thing about him that you hadn't expected and hadn't prepared for — he knows when to stop. Most people either drop things too early or don't drop them at all. Steve has some internal calibration that tells him exactly where the line is, and he stops precisely at it every time, and it’s one of the more quietly disarming things about him.
You answer one email. The words keep sliding off each other in a way that suggests your brain is running on significantly reduced power, the sentences take longer to form than they should, your thumb hovers over the keyboard for stretches that are becoming embarrassing.
The city begins to thin outside the window. The streetlights grow further apart. The radio plays something without edges.
You answer half of a second email.
The phone screen is very bright. You turn the brightness down. That helps for approximately ninety seconds before your eyes begin their campaign of passive resistance, growing heavier in increments too small to catch until they’re simply, undeniably, difficult to keep open.
You blink hard. Sit up slightly straighter. Refocused on the email.
Hi David, thank you for your message regarding the —
Your head dips. You catch it. Steve says nothing.
— regarding the proposed timeline for —
You blink again, slow. The rain on the roof is so constant it stops sounding like rain and starts sounding like quiet itself, like the audio equivalent of a weighted blanket, like something designed specifically and maliciously to undo the last of your resistance.
The phone goes dark in your hand on an auto-lock timer. You don’t unlock it.
You aren’t aware of the precise moment it happens. That’s the nature of that particular kind of exhaustion — it doesn’t announce itself or give you the chance to negotiate. It simply arrives, folds you under, and takes the decision out of your hands entirely.
One moment, the dark interior of the car, the glow of passing lights through the rain-streaked window. Then nothing.
What you aren’t aware of, and won’t be aware of until later, is the way it happens. The slow lean — incremental, unconscious, following the pull of gravity and warmth — until your head comes to rest against Steve's shoulder. The slight shift of him as he registers it. The pause, long enough to count, long enough to make a choice.
He doesn’t move. He doesn’t clear his throat or shift away or do any of the things that would be easy and reasonable. He stays exactly as he is and lets you sleep and says nothing.
He does, after a moment, reach forward with his free hand and adjust the air temperature, turning it up a degree. A small thing. A thing nobody would ever know he'd done.
Carter glances in the rearview mirror once and keeps driving.
The radio plays on.
You sleep on, completely unaware of the fact that Steve sits very still for the remainder of the journey with his eyes forward and the careful expression of a person thinking through something they aren't quite ready to say out loud.
The city lights run across the window in amber and gold. The rain tapers slightly as you leave the centre behind. He doesn’t move until Carter takes a corner and the motion shifts you slightly, and his arm comes up, instinctive, automatic, before he catches himself and lowers it back. His hand settles at the edge of the seat instead. Not quite touching. Very nearly.
You sleep through all of it.
You wake briefly, once, somewhere on the motorway. A foggy and graceless resurfacing — the world dark and moving, the rain soft on the roof, a vague awareness of your own weight leaning into something solid. The shoulder resolves itself first. Then the sleeve of his jacket, slightly cool and faintly damp from the rain. Then the warmth of him beneath it.
Your brain performs a slow inventory of the situation from somewhere very far underwater. You should sit up, it offers, with very little conviction.
You should say something, it tries again. Or move. Or acknowledge this in some way.
You do none of those things. The warmth is too complete and the exhaustion is too total and Steve isn't moving, and somehow that last fact is the one that settles everything.
He isn't moving. He'd had forty minutes to move, and he hadn't, which meant something that your three-quarter-asleep brain didn't have the capacity to fully examine but noted carefully for later, filed it somewhere it would absolutely surface at an inconvenient moment.
You mean to sit up.
You let your eyes close instead.
The last thing you’re aware of is the sound of the rain, and the steady warmth of him, and the radio playing something low and wordless into the dark.
—
"Hey." Close and quiet. A hand on your arm, careful. "We're here."
The car has stopped. The rain has thinned to almost nothing, just the occasional tap against the glass. You blink, slow and graceless, at the hotel lobby burning gold through the window, and then you blink at your own hands, and then you become gradually and unhappily aware that you had been asleep on Steve’s shoulder for what had apparently been the entire journey.
You sit up. Your neck protests. Steve is watching you with an expression you have been cataloguing for months without successfully filing under any category you trusted.
"How long was I asleep?" you ask.
"About forty minutes."
"Please tell me I didn't snore."
The corner of his mouth moves. "I'm not going to tell you that."
"Steve—"
"You're fine." He reaches across and pushes the car door open, which requires him to lean briefly across your eyeline, and you look at the ceiling of the car with great focus until he’s done. "Come on. Before you fall back asleep sitting up."
"I don't do that."
"You absolutely do that."
—
The hotel is the quiet kind of grand. All deep carpet and low lighting and the particular hush of a place that charges enough per night to insist on it. Your rooms are side by side on the fourteenth floor, 1407 and 1408, which had been a logistical arrangement at the start and had since become something that felt, without any discussion, simply correct.
You say goodnight in the corridor. Steve waits until your door closes — you know because you listen for the sound of his own door and it doesn’t come until after yours clicks shut, which is something you never once comment on, or think about more than what was probably advisable.
You shower. You change into something that isn't architecture held together by ribbons and your own stubbornness. You sit on the edge of the enormous white bed in your cardigan and your socks, and you feel, profoundly, the particular peace of being somewhere quiet after somewhere loud.
Then you pick up the room service menu and stare at it for far too long because your brain is still operating at roughly sixty percent capacity.
You order the pasta because you want it. You order the soup because it’s cold outside. You order the bread because it’s been a very long night and you feel you’ve earned it.
And then, already reaching to set the phone down, you notice the last item in your basket.
A burger. Medium-well. No onion. Extra pickles. Mustard instead of mayo.
You stare at it.
The specific and complete wrongness of it registers slowly and then all at once. That was not how you ordered a burger. You don’t even particularly like mustard. There’s exactly one person in your life who orders a burger that way, and you know it because you had watched him do it across eleven meals, in nine different cities, over eight months, sitting across from him in hotel restaurants and airport lounges and once in the front seat of a hire car outside a motorway service station in the rain.
The particulars had apparently been transcribed somewhere in your brain without ever asking your permission.
You look at the confirmation screen for a long moment.
Then you put your phone down, fold your hands in your lap, and sit with the information quietly for a minute.
Then you pick the phone back up and complete the order.
When the knock comes twenty minutes later, you open the door, sign for everything, tip generously, and stand in the corridor in your socks, staring at the bag with the burger in it.
You pick it up. You walk four steps to the left.
You knock on the door of room 1408.
A pause — the television going quiet, the sound of movement. Then the door opens, and Steve is there in a grey t-shirt and joggers, with his hair damp from the shower, and he looks at you, and then at the bag, and then back at you, and his expression does something that starts as confusion and lands somewhere else entirely.
"Don't," you say, before he can get there.
"I haven't said anything."
"You were about to say something insufferable."
"I was going to say—" he pauses, recalibrating, a smile threatening the corner of his mouth "—how did you know?"
"I don't want to talk about it."
"That's—"
"Against my will," you say. "Completely against my will. I was barely conscious. It just happened."
He takes the bag from you, and the back of his hand is warm where it passes over your fingers, and neither of you say anything about that either. He’s smiling properly now, not his professional smile, not his public one — the other one, the quieter one, the one that does something unhelpful to the general situation of being near him.
"Thank you," he says.
"Go to sleep," you say.
"You too."
You turn back toward your own door. Behind you, you hear him stay — hear the absence of his door closing, the particular quality of silence that means he’s still there, still in the doorframe, the way he always waits until you’re inside.
It’s a small thing. It’s the kind of small thing that has been accumulating for months, quietly and without ceremony, like rain collecting in something that has only just begun to understand it's a vessel.
You let yourself into your room. You don't look back.
But you’re smiling by the time the door clicks shut, alone in the quiet with the particular warmth of someone who’s only just starting to understand how much they've already let another person in — and finding, somewhat to their own surprise, that they don't mind at all.
very long bodyguard!steve piece i've been slowly working on past few months (but more the past few weeks) is finally coming together..... first part up soon me thinks???
some hyper famous artists like Van Gogh transcend overratedness and become underrated because they're so normalized. Like I'll look at a van Gogh and I'm like wait this really is amazing you guys don't get it
OR OR reader goes out with santos and mel after the fourth of july shift and gets drunk with them and calls jack for a ride home and he drops them off one by one but he stays with her and tucks her in and it’s sooooo fluff
yay thank u for the request i hope u enjoy!! | 1.6k of fluff, ‘her’ used in reference to reader once
The humidity outside somehow feels less stuffy after having been in the bar for a couple of hours.
You tip your head back when a gentle breeze blows through, soft as a whisper but it kisses your heated skin all the same.
“Shit,” Trinity mutters from behind you, looking down at her phone. Her face shines a little with sweat, baby hairs sticking to her forehead.
“What’s wrong?” Mel asks immediately. She’s let her hair down tonight, both literally and metaphorically, and you’re glad to have witnessed it.
Today’s shift was a lot. More so than usual, and when Santos had suggested a night out to Mel, and then to you when she caught you listening in, it was easy to accept.
Your throat aches a little from the numerous songs you shouted more than sang, but it’s a welcomed scratchiness. It reminds you that you’re here and alive.
You turn towards the pair that are now both focused on Trinity’s screen, their brows scrunched. One concerned, one more annoyed.
“What is it?” you ask.
“Literally no Uber wants to go to three different drop-off spots,” Trinity tells you. “And if they do, they're charging an insane amount.”
You let the next words slip out before you really think of it. Later, you’ll blame it on the alcohol, but you’re hardly more than tipsy by now. The last two drinks you had were water.
“I can call Jack.”
Trinity and Mel stare at you.
“Abbot,” you add.
“You can call Jack Abbot?” Trinity asks you, something almost teasing in her tone.
“Yeah,” you say, shifting on your feet. “Unless you wanna walk?”
“Oh, no. Please, call Abbot,” she tells you.
“I think it’s a good idea,” Mel says, smiling a soft, encouraging smile.
“Okay, I’ll just-” you point over your shoulder and step away, digging your phone from your purse. His contact is easy enough to find. You stare at it, your finger hovering over the screen.
You’ve had his number saved for a few weeks now. He’d given it to you after a rough shift, finding you by your locker and typing it into your phone himself with an urge to “call if you need anything.”
And you just… haven’t. You’ve pulled up his contact countless times. Looked at his name there as he’d typed it; Not Dr. Abbot. Just ‘Jack.’
Still, you couldn’t bring yourself to just hit the call button. He’s your attending, and sure he’s flirty with you, but he’s a little flirty with almost everyone. And ‘call if you need me’ is just a thing people say. At least, that’s what you’ve been telling yourself lately.
You suppose tonight you’re testing to see if he really meant it. If you’re not totally alone in wanting to get more of him somehow.
You press the button and hold your phone up to your ear, looking to see if Trinity and Mel are watching you. They are. Mel gives you a thumbs up.
And then you’re turning back around, because after only three rings, the line clicks, and a low “hello?” slides through the speaker.
“Hi!” you say, wincing at how awkwardly it comes out. “Um, it’s me. Are you busy?”
Jack ignores your question. “What’s going on?”
“Me and Mel and Santos are out and no Ubers are taking us. You know, Trinity’s actually a pretty good singer. Anyways, I was wondering if you could come get us? It’s totally fine if not, I mean, it’s warm, so we could walk-”
“How drunk are you?” Jack asks you, not judgemental or accusing, just curious.
“Just enough to let myself call you,” you say quietly. “Not enough to not know what I’m doing.”
“Okay,” he says. “Tell me where you are.” Like it’s that simple for him to drop whatever he’d been doing just because you asked him to. Like whatever he heard in your voice was convincing enough. Almost like he didn’t need any convincing at all.
He shows up only a few minutes later, pulling up to the curb right in front of you and leaning over to open up the passenger side door.
You wave at him. He wiggles his fingers back and nods at you, urging you to get in beside him.
Trinity and Mel climb into the backseat, chatting quietly between each other.
You watch as Jack pulls away from the curb, listening to Mel’s directions back to her place. Watch as he turns up the AC when he catches you fan yourself, an arm reaching over to aim the vent towards you.
“Thank you,” you say.
And when he turns his head to quickly wink at you, it’s hard to come up with anything else.
He drops Mel off, and soon enough it’s Trinity’s turn.
“You gonna be okay?” Santos asks you, more suggestive than anything, once Jack’s parked.
Only, Jack takes her seriously. He twists around in his seat to look at her and say “I’ve got her.”
You sink into the passenger seat, embarrassed and delighted.
She salutes him and climbs out of the car. And then it’s just you and Jack.
“Is it okay?” you start, a sudden nervous flutter in your stomach. “That I called? I mean, I hope you weren’t busy, or-”
“Sweetheart,” he stops you, that same low, patient but sure voice as on the phone. “I gave you my phone number. I want you to use it.”
“Oh, okay. Good. That’s good.”
Jack has the hand not holding the steering wheel resting on the centre console. He shifts his over just enough that his knuckles brush your arm once, twice, before pulling away again.
“Good,” he agrees with a little nod.
And before you can say something else, he’s parking outside your building. You only just realize then that you hadn’t been giving him any directions to get there.
You look at him, his black t-shirt tights across his shoulders, his hair curling around his ears. Then, there’s his fingers squeezing the steering wheel, his knee bouncing.
He’s nervous, too, you think. Or affected, at the very least.
It’s what makes you brave enough to say: “Do you want to come up?”
And Jack, turning his head to look into your shining, shy, hopeful eyes could never say no to you. Not even when he probably should.
He lets you lead the way to your door, a hand hovering behind your lower back in case you stumble. You fumble with your keys until he takes them from your hand and unlocks your door for you, holding it open with an outstretched arm that you have to duck under to walk inside.
It’s only when you bend down to take off your shoes that you feel the lingering effects of the alcohol, your vision a little fuzzy around the edges, your head swimming and focused all at once. Because every thought is about Jack.
Jack, standing in your living room like he was meant to be there, like the space just miles itself around his presence. Jack, leaning down to help you slip your shoes off when he catches you struggling, a warm hand on the back of your leg, letting you use his shoulder for support.
When he straightens up again, he’s much closer than before. You suck in a breath, eyes dancing across his face. His do the same, before settling on your mouth.
Your chin tips up the slightest bit, like you’re making room for him, inviting him, and Jack nearly accepts it. But you’ve been drinking, and this isn’t anything new for him. It’s not spur of the moment. He’ll want you the same tomorrow, more even.
So when he leans in, and you let your eyes slip closed, he doesn’t let himself kiss your mouth, but presses his lips softly to your cheek, then to the hinge of your jaw, before pulling away.
“You should get some rest,” he tells you.
You nod, a hand coming up to your cheek like you’re keeping his touch there a little longer. “Will you- do you wanna stay?”
“Sweetheart.”
“We don’t have to do anything, it’s just late, and-”
“I’ll stay,” Jack tells you.
You lead him to your bedroom, and if you thought his presence in your living room was something, this is entirely more destabilizing.
Where there’s an alternate reality where he’s in here for more. Where he’s leaning over you on the mattress, where his smell is etched into your sheets. And maybe it isn’t so far fetched, not with how he looks at you.
How he’s taking care of you tonight.
To that point, Jack goes into your dresser and picks out some pajamas for you once he finds the right drawer, setting them on the edge of the bed. He’d assumed you’d go into the bathroom to change.
Instead, he watches you reach for the hem of your top. His eyes widen slightly as you lift it, exposing your stomach. He turns around before it gets above your chest.
Jack’s meant to be a strong man, but the sight of your bare skin—skin that’s new to him—makes his heart stutter. Makes him weak.
“I have a spare toothbrush in the bathroom,” you tell him, prompting him to turn back around to find you now changed. “And I have some sweatpants if you want to change. They might not fit you, but-”
“I’m alright,” he says. Really, he’s thinking similarly to you. Thinking about a world where his toothbrush lives beside yours and he’s got a spare change of clothes here already.
And when you settle into bed after brushing your teeth, Jack’s prosthetic leaning against the nightstand, facing him with your cheek pressed into your pillow, that world doesn’t feel so far away.
“Thank you for coming,” you whisper, eyes fluttering sleepily.
