Kyle "Gaz" Garrick x f!reader | a gift to @massivescissorsthingperson for their donation to Mikinakoos Children's Fund, Ontario Indigenous Women's Empowerment Fund, Anishinabek Nation 7th Generation Charity |
Prompt: it's your classic case of mistaken identity, turns out there is more than one Kyle in London wearing cargo pants and a fuckass hat.
cw: drinking, mentions of blacking out, kidnapping but like what rapunzel does to flynn in tangled-> (thanks kore), kyle is tied up
Stupid fuckass hat.
Kyle wakes to the sound of muttered curses. His head is fuzzy, with a rhythmic pounding and a dryness in his mouth he knows well from past hangovers. Only, typically, he wakes up in his own bed and his hands and feet aren't bound. The ropes are tight, but tied haphazardly, he could easily free himself but the bed beneath him squeaks any time he moves. Each time the muttering in the other room stops and then, after a beat, starts again, feet pacing back and forth.
It's dark, artificial and absolute. His eyes are covered by what feels suspiciously like a plush eye-mask. It smells faintly of lavender. Or maybe it's the pillow. Or the blankets tucked around him.
How did he get here?
Kyle thinks about the night before, the loud pub, his mates from London all rowdy over the footie match that was on the TV. There had been a constant flow of pints and shots and pretty pretty birds stopping by just to say hi. Kyle didn't usually entertain that kind of attention, he was on leave, could be called back at any time, he didn't need to hurt some woman's heart with his choice of career.
But there was someone who caught his eye.
You.
You had come into the pub and taken a seat at the far end of the bar nursing a drink while looking at something on your phone before looking around the bar as if searching for something, or someone.
You had run into him by chance, both of you queued up for the bathroom. You had complimented his hat, said it was patriotic, asked if he served. He had waved you off with a laugh. But he hadn't missed the way you eyed the hat, then his boots and his jacket. None of it was regulation, but he supposes there might have been something vaguely military about it.
He had approached you, slipped into the empty seat next to you and asked what you were drinking. You looked surprised to see him again, even more when he offered to get you a drink. You told him you had been stood up. You had seemed nervous, told him pretty boys at the pub didn't typically buy you drinks. He had thought it was a shame and was drunk enough to tell you so.
It gets fuzzy from there. Had he left with you? Had he left with his mates? Had someone picked him up off the street? Recognized him? Had you been with him?
Stupid fuckass hat.
That same phrase again, the voice panicked and frustrated. He wants to think he recognizes it, that he will get some answers to his questions but his brain is fuzzy and his left arm is starting to fall asleep from the way he's laying on it. And is his captor baking? It smells strongly of sugar, butter and something chocolaty.
When the door finally opens he's ready for it. His feet are free, his hands still tied and numb, but he's listened long enough to know his captor is alone and in the habit of singing along to the songs on the radio in between bouts of cursing.
"Oh, you're a—"
Kyle leaps out of the bed, the room must not have been very big because his shoulder hits a soft stomach, the person lets out a shocked oof as they fall to the floor.
It is you.
You scramble away from him, the eye mask pulling off in the scuffle. You are not dressed like any captor he has met before, typically they don't wear satiny robes and house slippers. Nor do they bake while they have a man tied up in the other room. Well, maybe not the terrorist types he typically deals with.
"Fuck, are you okay? I didn't mean to, I mean, fuck." You drop your head back against the wall.
"Didn't mean to what? Tie me up?"
Kyle wiggles until he can sit up. He's in desperate need of paracetamol and water, and to get his hands free.
"No, I mean, yes because I did tie you up, which feels totally illegal and I'm so sorry, but, shit, would you believe me if I said I thought you were someone else?"
You had tied him up on accident?
Kyle can't help but laugh, it pulls uncomfortably on his arms yet he doesn't stop. His RTI training had prepared him for getting captured but he always imagined it would be by trained professionals, that he would wake up in a chair with guns trained on him. Maybe some light waterboarding, threats to his body, his friends, his family.
"Can you untie me?"
It's a simple enough request.
"I could," you start and then eye him uncertainly, "but could you maybe agree to not kill me? I mean, at minimum it would be great if you didn't call the cops?"
"Fucking hell, kill you?" he asks, shocked because what about him last night or when he had been unconscious had screamed killer to you.
You leap up, not bothering to help him and return, looking sheepish and holding his hat, his wallet with both his ID and his military ID — which you would have seen if you had been snooping— the knife that Ghost had gotten him last Christmas, and his phone which lights up repeatedly with messages.
"I have tea and cookies and there is a cake in the oven and I can make you a cup of coffee if you prefer, just..." you trail off, standing in the doorway with his things.
"Fine, okay? I won't call the cops, just untie me."
Your unease quickly melts away into a smile. Far too naive, far too trusting for someone who had panicked and tied him up in fear he might kill you.
Your kitchen is tidy despite the chaotic way you move around it, first grilling him on his tea preference, then making him a plate with far more sweets than he could ever eat (Ghost would be in heaven if someone tied him up and fed him sweets). You're babbling as you go, something about an ex-boyfriend and a friend and you had been out of town. None of it was making sense and the paracetamol you had given him had yet to do its job.
"Sit down and tell it t'me slower."
You sit obediently, your own cup of tea is only lukewarm now but you sip at it gingerly before turning to Kyle.
"I was away on a work assignment, my friend started dating this total loser, Kyle. Kind of bloke who walks around in camo, has the stupid blacked out flag hat, the stolen valor type. Well he cheats on her, then starts harassing her, following her around to her favorite places and we tried telling the police about it but they didn't give a shit, so I thought I would scare him."
"Scare him?"
"Look, it wasn't a very well thought out plan, was it? You weren't supposed to blackout, we didn't even drink that much. You weren't even the right Kyle!"
"So your plan was to lure back the military obsessed stalker ex to your flat? And what? Scare him straight?"
It's ballsy, he'll give you that.
"No. Yes? Maybe, but when I realized you weren't him you were so far gone. Bloody hell are you heavy, and then I got you here and kept panicking. A knife? Really?"
"And the ex? Evil Kyle."
"Already bothering her at the cafe this morning. Fuck, I am so dumb."
You look as though you want the floor to swallow you, the embarrassment is clear on your face, in the way you bite at your lip.
Kyle's phone lights up again, there's no name on the caller id, but he recognizes the number.
"I gotta take this call, but after you can convince me not to press chargers by telling me about what else you can bake."
Your face brightens, the barest hint of a smile at the corners of your lips, your eyes widening and the frown marks between your brows smoothing out in surprise.
"Okay, yeah sure, you can take it in my room. I promise I won't try to poison you or anything."
Kyle has multiple missed calls and texts, when he calls back the number he isn't at all surprised to hear Ghost's voice on the other end, gruff and bored with his own leave.
"Thought I was goin' t'ave t'send out search an' rescue," he says instead of hello.
"You free?"
"Got a bottle o'whiskey an' a date with my 'and later, why?"
"Cancel the date, got a job for you. Goin' to break a few laws and maybe a few bones."
"Aww, didja meet someone? Too busy fuckin' t'answer my calls?"
"You could say I was tied up."
Simon laughs, "kinky, Garrick, I like it."
AN: if you missed it, a few other writer are doing this in order to raise money to help the Indigenous communities in Canada that have been impacted by fires. Please consider donating, or spreading awareness by reblogging!
cw: explicit sexual content, dubcon elements, serial dater Kyle Garrick, fake dating in a way, stalking, emotional manipulation, implied violence
Kyle is off his game.
It’s an unfamiliar position, one he resents himself for slipping into at all.
If he thinks on it too long, the kiss of a blunt, rubber blade presses at the side of his neck, right over the pulse. Ghost’s voice echoes in his ear, not bothering to hide his satisfaction over catching Price’s favorite and the record ‘older and, “—that’s ‘ow you die, Sergeant.”
He drags a hand over his neck and rolls it. The ache in his jaw pulses all the way up to his head. So does the next memory of sitting at Price’s desk, staring down three failed recce exercises. Pretending not to notice Ghost pleased as punch on the far wall.
Pretending not to notice the new gold ring on the old man’s finger.
“You’re hangin’ on by the skin of your teeth, Gaz. It’s not like you.”
Six months’ deployment will do that to a man. ‘Course, it didn’t do that to Soap or Ghost or Cap—but him. It reeks of failure. A lapse he should’ve been able to muscle through, and could, if he had a little more time. Kyle said as much, but the way Price regarded him said that the call had already been made. Paperwork stamped and filed away out of reach.
“Eight weeks leave. Approved, starting tomorrow. Go home, Gaz. Rest. Relax. Do not let me see or hear from you before your eight weeks are up, understood?”
Kyle had nodded, molars almost dust. What sticks out now as he plays it back is how Price rubbed at his ring and the faraway look in his eye as he added—
“Find a girl to pass the time with.”
Everything after that blurs. He couldn’t say how the meeting ended, only that two days later, he stood in the doorway of the cold, barely-lived-in city flat with a chip on his shoulder and no idea of how to grind it down.
Typically, when he has nothing better to do, Kyle runs.
He runs himself ragged outside, on the track or at the gym, at all hours. Sleep eludes him. It’s no good to lay in the dark, watching the ceiling and the headlights that sneak in through the curtains. The silence gets to him. There’s no chatter or stomping outside his door. No one telling him when to get up, where to go, what to do to fill the hours of the day. So running is how he copes.
He doesn’t track the time or distance. He goes by feel, specifically, the burn. How long before it blooms in his calves and then migrates to his lungs and throat, until it feels like they’re lined with fiberglass. He runs until all he can hear is the stock algo playlist du jour in his ears.
When he finally stops, it’s because his body at last turns on him and he doesn’t want to limp home. He folds over on the pavement, hands braced on his knees, hamstrings snarling at how close he came to ruining them anyway.
It’s never enough.
He drags himself home, taking the long way to wear down what’s left, but the rest of the day is there when he gets back. Long, idle hours with nothing to fill them. He needs a mission. He needs a boost.
So, he takes his Captain’s advice. He finds a girl.
Well. He finds girls.
The first is all nerves, with mile-long legs in heels.
Her arms wrap around him in the hallway of her building. She makes a small sound when he gathers her up against her door. Surprise, then ardor. Giggly when he bends her over the plaswood kitchen table. Afterward, she prattles on about going for breakfast in the morning, and insistently paws at him while he dresses. He gets her name wrong on the way out and she corrects him instantly, lips puckered around a pouty scowl of regret. He forgets it by the time he reaches the station.
The second is louder and five times needier. She clings to his bicep, afraid he’ll vanish if she lets go. He works her up in the last cubicle of the men’s toilet, her head tipped back against the marked-up wall while he marks up her neck in return. When he pauses, hand up her skirt, he sees hearts in her eyes. It extinguishes what he wants then and there. He unlatches the door before it can go any further, and she asks if they’re leaving. The wounded look she gives him rolls off his shoulders as she follows him out, all but sprinting back to her friends.
Objectively, he has fun, all this messing around, but it doesn’t stick.
By morning, it’s gone. In its place, the sense that he’s mislaid something important without ever knowing where he set it down or what it was, exactly. But by the end of the week, he’s got matches aplenty on different apps. Proof, as if he needs it, that he draws the eye.
That if he really wanted to, he could.
He takes to ending his morning runs with coffee.
Same spot, same order. Back to the wall, earbuds out, watching throngs of people stream past on their way to work. He itches for more, but no. This is what he’s been ordered to do.
Across the way, a couple lifts a pram in tandem over the curb, working effortlessly as partners. A two-person team. The wife bends to check on the kid, her full arse on display. He sips without thinking and scalds the roof of his mouth, nearly pitching the steaming cup into the street on reflex.
He hisses through his teeth and reaches for his phone instead.
For the first time in ages, he opens Instagram. The account he made a decade ago and never used. His work is not exactly conducive to having a life, much less documenting one. He scrolls anyway, checking in on old classmates and cousins. Spying their engagements, promotions, and toddling children in coordinated outfits. Milestones, one after another. Evidence of forward motion.
He pauses on a photo of a former footie teammate—arm slung around his wife, both glowing and smiling on a beach somewhere. His ringed hand rests on the curve of her belly.
He lingers on that detail long enough for the screen to go black.
Eight weeks is long enough to fuck off somewhere warm. Book a flight, find a beach. Find a bird and pretend he could be a man who belongs in pictures like that. The sun warming his back, an arm curled around him like he’s the center of a world.
The thought fizzles. He’s seen the inside of enough planes this year alone.
He’s stuck on the blank screen when a pair of shoes steps into his line of sight.
Polished burgundy leather. Fancy.
His gaze tracks upward to stockinged legs that disappear beneath a skirt. The rest is wrapped in a buttoned coat.
Then he reaches the face, and it catches him off guard. Open and welcoming. Your cheeks lift in a tentative smile, lips stained a shade of red that suits you perfectly. Your eyes are warm and bright with an energy he burned through several streets back.
You hesitate, indecision writ plain in your drawn-up shoulders. The worry of your fingers pinching a card.
“Excuse me, hi. I don’t mean to bother you, but do you have a minute?”
You’re younger than him. Not by a decade, maybe, but in his line of work, even four or five years is a gulf of experience. You don’t read as especially confident. He reckons you’re breaking it in like those expensive shoes on your feet. Your manicured fingers tremble as you offer your card, and his attention snags on the tiny, intricate designs decorating them.
You give him a name. It burrows right in.
“—I run a boutique matchmaking service, well, not run, as in by myself, exactly, but, well, I’m building my client base—”
He takes the card, and your relief is immediate, as if you’d cleared the highest hurdle. The cardstock is thin. A cheap, creamy white, with a heart and arrow logo that looks like it came free with the template. Your name and a website sit below the words Made to Last Matchmaking.
He blinks, attention snapping back, realizing he’s missed the meat of your pitch while he was busy deciding exactly what, if anything, to do with you.
“—dating can be so difficult in this day and age, and I’m working to revitalize the old fashioned way of meeting people face-to-face, outside of those lousy, impersonal apps. Now, obviously, I don’t know if you’re single, but, well, do you have any trouble meeting people? I’m offering steep discounts—”
His mouth twists with delayed offense. One look and you decided he’s lacking. That he has another problem to fix.
He looks from the card back to your face, brow furrowing. “I don’t need help.”
Your smile falters, but you recover quickly and snap back into place. “Of course. I just thought I’d ask.”
“What about me gave you the idea?”
That gives you pause. You must know you’ve stepped in it.
“You seem like someone who might be too busy to find someone, or…particular.”
Particular. He scoffs.
Kyle reclines, hooking one arm over the back of the café chair, and catches them—your eyes. The quick dart from the sweat cooling on his biceps to where his thighs strain the hems of his shorts, then away again. Kyle doesn’t call you out, but a thoroughly smug pleasure unfurls in his chest. He isn’t ignorant of his looks, never has been.
Pretty eyes, pretty hair, and a smile he knows how to use. Down to the scar on his cheek, which he lets do some of the talking when he flirts and talks around what he does for a living. Beyond what God saw fit to give him, he has a spendy vintage watch on his wrist and the activewear he’s in now is performance-grade. He can’t afford cheap on his salary.
And maybe that’s the real reason you approached. So he could be the feather in your cap.
He can see it: his face splashed on the front page of your website, in a carousel of success stories. Handsome, young, reasonably well-to-do. His first name above a tidy testimonial he’d be required to supply as a satisfied client. Exaggerated enough to sell and proof of concept.
He knows he’s a catch by any metric that matters.
But particular? That, he won’t touch.
“Not that it’s any of your business, but I’ve got a date this weekend.”
You press your pretty lips together and rub. He wants to know what kind of lipstick holds that well. You give him a tight smile in a look that says you’ve realized the conversation’s a dead end, but have to back out of it politely.
“Really? Lucky girl.” You adjust the strap of your purse, puffing up a touch, birdlike. A vexed dove. One small, dismissive flutter of your hand toward his cup of coffee. “Sorry for taking up some of your busy morning.”
Then you’re gone with a crisp turn on heel, pumps practically thundering as you rejoin the crowds. He watches until you meld into the mob completely, then reads your card again. He glares at the embossed letters and bends it between two fingers, shoving it into his pocket.
Only then does he tip back to prop up his feet on the empty chair across from him. His sprawl bumps the café table, and his cup wobbles in slow motion before it dumps straight into his lap.
The coffee’s cooled enough, but it drenches him completely. A half-second later, the cup hits the pavement and shatters, and a dozen passerby turn in his direction.
Perfect.
At home, he texts and inveigles the girl from the cubicle into a date.
It doesn’t stop his surveying at the gym, tracking the pretty birds that flit past his stations. No one holds his attention.
On his way out, he stops for an overpriced juice. As the cashier hands it over, he catches her nails—painted a plain, forgettable milky white.
Just like that, his thoughts veer off where they don’t belong.
He wonders if you’ve found any takers yet.
Cubicle Girl cancels minutes after he sits down. A wall of text along the lines of I talked to my friends and you’re stringing along a nice girl.
It puts him back at square one, but he won’t stay there for long. He’s got a phone and bar full of options.
There’s no rush. It’s Friday. The place is packed, bar to dance floor. The air is thick with body spray and perfumes, the souring musk of sweat, liquor, and vape pens. The seat beside him will remain empty as long as he wants it to.
By drink two, he’s attracted a warm-blooded stray who has wandered off from her group. One compliment about her smile, and she’s more than happy to join him. She’s in town for a conference and wouldn’t you know it, she’d love recommendations from a local. Never mind he’s only home a handful weeks out of the year, and doesn’t recognize half the block anymore. He plays along, chatting her up until he’s certain she’s about to invite him back to her hotel.
Until she drops she’s sharing lodgings with her colleagues.
He thinks of Soap, who doesn’t mind an audience. Kyle has never understood the appeal.
His place is out of the question. When he spends months at a time sharing close quarters with Soap and Ghost, he keeps his space his.
Kyle doesn’t push it when she announces her party is moving on, or when she stalls, suggesting they meet up next time she’s in town. He dismisses the idea, and tells her to enjoy the rest of her trip. He does not give her his number.
Alone again, he reclaims his spot at the bar, ignoring the peals of high-pitched laughter and cheery voices all around him. It all eats at him more than it should, especially when his thoughts drift back to the girl on the street and the cheap business card.
He thinks about the way you saw him and decided he needed help. Him.
If the matches and messages blowing up his phone aren’t enough proof that he knows what he’s doing, what is? He hasn’t needed help in this department since he enlisted. No wingman, certainly no coaching. He knows exactly what he brings to the table. It’s not arrogance if it’s true, and for him, it usually is.
Still. He has to give you this, if only in the privacy of his own head. A reluctant and begrudging concession—there is more that he wants, that until recently, he’d had little patience for, and no interest in entertaining beyond the abstract.
It’s Price’s fault, the greedy bastard. Cap had only shared the one picture of his new missus, and even that had been heavily influenced by drink. Stupefying, really, how Price swore him to secrecy with all that color in his puffed-up cheeks. He’d herded Kyle out onto the pavement beyond that dingy pub, one bear-like mitt locked tight around his phone while the other cupped protectively over the screen to shield it from prying eyes, cigar pinched between his teeth like he was guarding yet another state secret instead of showing off a pretty woman.
“Beautiful, isn’t she? Skittish. Got some bad habits we’re still tryin’ t’break, but toothache sweet.”
The photo itself had been nothing, mundane and domestic, yet it’s burned into his skull.
Price with his arm around her shoulders, his hand fisted in the chain of a small heart necklace at her throat. Her shy face. And the look on Price’s? Kyle’s never seen him smile like that—never thought Price could make a woman smile like that, either. That’s what stuck.
Because he wants it for himself.
And if a man like Price—irascible, immovable, inflexible—can lasso a piece of heaven and pin it down long enough to plant a flag in it, then there’s no reason he can’t do the same.
He knocks back the rest of his drink and resentfully writes the night off as a wash. He signals to the bartender for his tab, and a hand lands on the bar beside him.
The nails are a familiar vibrant shade he remembers admiring. His cheek twitches with a smile, but he squashes it. Good thing, too, because the first thing out of your mouth is,
“Your date running late?”
Fucking hell.
You hover, angled toward the bar, one hip cocked slightly while you peer down at him. The slope of your face sits half in shadow while the lighting catches on the brownish-mauve stain of your lips and the smears of glitter on your eyelids.
Then you turn to flag the bartender down and neon spills across you, filling in the rest. Greens, blues, and pinks—refracted color sliding over your skin like the inside of a kaleidoscope. A strobe light from the dance floor lights up your face, three concentric circles pulse over your features. Your eyes shine, glossy with however long you’ve been drinking, as you set an empty glass on the bar.
Kyle can’t look away. His heart lurches.
“She canceled. Something came up.”
“Nooo,” You smirk as you fold onto your elbow, cheek settling into the bridge of your curled fingers. “That’s a shame.”
He chuckles under his breath and scratches his brow, using it as cover for another peek.
Tonight you’re in a silk velvet skirt the color of moss, gold where the lights touch it, in a halo for your hips, and a black top that leaves your arms bare and dips low. A thin gold necklace rests against the sheen of sweat gathering at the tops of your breasts, drawing attention exactly where it ought to.
Who exactly are you when you’re not trying to set all the single men and women in the city up for a living?
“Hardly.”
“Clearly. Her loss, I bet.”
“Absolutely.” He leans back in his seat. “You stalking me, by the way? That determined to land me?”
“As if. No, I’m here—thank you,” you pause mid-sentence to accept your cocktail from the bartender. Kyle taps his card against the reader before you can reach for your purse. Your smile turns wry. “Thanks. I’m here for a hen party.”
You take a half-step closer and twist, revealing a garish button pinned to your top. The silhouette of a hot pink hen with swooping lettering Team Bride. He laughs, then he gets a lungful. Juniper gin and jasmine perfume. He’d like to lean in and bury his nose in your neck for another whiff, lick the sweat off from below your ear to see if it tastes the same. Cross-reference it with the sheen on your tits.
“Client’s?”
“In a way. It’s for a friend I set up with an old coworker three years ago.”
“So you’ve always been a meddler?”
“I’ve got a knack for it.”
“Better remember that when I win back your favor.”
“That implies you had it.”
He lays a hand dramatically over his heart. “And here I was thinking paying for your drink might make up for the other day.”
“That’ll take more than one cocktail, I think.”
“Are you trying to guilt me into buying a round for the entire party?”
“Maybe.” You smile coyly behind your glass. “But you were considerably less charming last we met.”
“Yeah, well, I hadn’t realized who I was talking to.”
“Wow.”
“If I get drinks, do you think the bride-to-be would mind if I crashed for a bit?” he grins, surprising even himself, but he can’t help it.
Normally, he wouldn’t be caught dead at a hen party. Been there, done that, it’s either too much of a good thing or a bloody hazard—hauling Soap out of a pub before he pounces on some poor, unsuspecting girl. And yet, because it’s you? He’ll make an exception. Play nice, charm your friends, let them interrogate him if it means another hour or two of puzzling you out.
Your nose scrunches with a laugh. “Not this time, stranger.”
You squeeze his shoulder as you say it, as a warm and friendly gesture. All it really does is superheat the alcohol in his bloodstream. Makes him think about what those fingers would feel like clawing at his back.
“It’s Kyle,” he manages, clamping one hand down on his thigh. “My name?”
That earns him a brief once-over.
“Not this time, Kyle.”
It takes effort to keep his arse planted instead of tailing after you when you head back to your friends. A whole flock of women crowded around a table near the back, all wearing that same pink button save for the bride in white.
It’s his turn to drag out his departure, sticking around longer than he should for a man with no drink in hand. And Christ, he should probably just walk up and ask you out properly, like a sane man would.
But he already cocked that up at the café. His ego too busy sneering at your pitch to notice the woman giving it and the opportunity. Now, seeing you again while he’s fresh off back-to-back false starts, it’s difficult to separate how much of this is pure want and how much is pride rearing its head. Because by the looks of it, you might actually be too good for him.
Convenient, that Price’s voice should surface in his head.
“I’m tellin’ you, Gaz. You see something you want, you take it.”
He runs his tongue along his teeth, deciding to get out before he does something stupid just then. He’s perfectly capable of waiting until he gets home for that.
Kyle finds your card beneath a menu for Ola’s and mulls it over for all of three seconds before pulling up the website.
It’s not quite as shameless as he originally imagined, but the site is awash with photos of happy couples. He scrolls past a manifesto on love, an overly romantic mythos about soulmates for the tender-hearted, and for those less-inclined, hard statistics. The reviews he knew would be there encourage visitors like him to Take a chance, tempt Cupid’s aim.
Instagram next. Boutique, just like you said. The company account only has a couple hundred followers. Near the beginning is a photo of you beside another woman who must be your co-founder. It doesn’t take long to find you in the followers list. Your personal account is public. Bold, considering how you’d been earlier.
Curated, but not contrived, and chock full of colorful squares. Stray cats, graffiti, uni throwbacks, plates at restaurants—then he reaches a series of posts from a girl’s trip!!! beach holiday, dated a year ago.
(Where was I? he wonders, Getting shot at, probably.)
The crown jewel of the collection is you.
Stretched out on your stomach on a towel, a book open and tented in front. A beer bottle stuck into the sand within reach. You’re looking back over your shoulder at whoever took the photo, hand lifted to shield your eyes from the sun, smiling wide.
A persimmon silk scarf wraps around your hair. The straps of your swimsuit press into your shoulders, taut over your arse, and dig in enough to flash a crescent of a cheek dusted in sand.
The caption’s simple: beach bum
He exhales through his nose.
Yeah. I’ll say.
He takes you to bed with him like that. Your smile and arse beaming down at him in the dark, his fist working furiously beneath the sheets.
He imagines what kind of internal struggle you’d put up, with him staring you down. Would you be self-loathing? Shy, embarrassed? Would you be in disbelief as you spread your legs, or apologetic that you ever doubted him as his cock slid home in your warm cunt?
He shudders, cursing into the dark, staring at the pixels of your arse until his retinas fry. He’d take you on your hands and knees, just to watch it bounce.
His orgasm comes quick at the thought, messy strings of cum splashing up his abs. He groans as he squeezes himself on the upstroke, going until there’s nothing left but a puddle on his skin.
If you were here, he’d tell you to lick it up. Gather it on the tip of one of those nails and suck it off.
His cock twitches at that and he groans in discomfort, but he finds himself swiping through your photos again, beginning and end.
You, at your first proper job, a sneaky selfie in the lift. You, holding a friend’s new labrador puppy. You, on holiday in Madrid with your parents. Notably absent from all of it—a partner.
Secondary fantasy follows the first.
You, on that beach towel again, except this time with him stretched out beside you. Him, nudging at your hip until you roll onto your back for a kiss. Sand sticking to warm, sweaty skin. The curve of a pregnant belly beneath his palm.
It should embarrass him, but it does the opposite.
He stays up late combing through the scraps the internet offers up. Your university’s blog to your extended family’s businesses. Abandoned accounts you probably forgot were public. A sprawling Pinterest account from half a decade ago, dated in taste but deliciously informative: places you dreamed of visiting, the wedding aesthetic of the time, and other evidence of the hopelessly romantic life you’ve imagined. All these breadcrumbs left behind without realizing someone might follow them. It’s basic recon.
Once he’s seen enough and the decision’s made, the rest comes easy. Here’s his worthy pursuit. The opposite of Price’s orders, but once the old man learns the details, he’ll understand. Might even be proud.
Twice now, you’ve come within reach. If that isn’t the universe conspiring in his favor, what is? Fate insists upon putting you in his path—he’ll draw Cupid’s bloody bow himself.
“So, Mr. Garrick, what made you change your mind?”
Today you are in plum. Monochrome, the top a shade lighter than the trousers it’s tucked into. Stylish glasses perch atop your nose and he can’t tell if they’re prescription or decorative.
You are far too professional and clothed for his liking.
“Just ‘Kyle’. Our conversation got me thinking, is all.”
“How so?”
“I did some self-reflecting,” Half a lie. He certainly reflected when he wiped his belly in the mirror last night. “And I think you’re right. I’m particular.”
The pinch of your lips when you suppress a smirk nearly takes him.
“It’s not necessarily a bad thing. Being selective is important. Most people just don’t stop to assess themselves honestly, and consider how to engage with or present themselves to other people.”
Kyle filled out the inquiry form in bed, expecting a wait. Instead, you’d carved time out immediately. A casual coffee chat to ensure he knew what he was getting into and more paperwork to formally onboard him into your little operation.
He didn’t know what to fully expect, only that it brought him into your orbit and gave him the opportunity to start luring you down from the sky. He didn’t think you’d be so upfront.
“How I present myself. What, you think I need a new look? New haircut?”
You smile slyly and glance down at your notes. “No, I think we both know that isn’t the problem, but according to you, you haven’t had a serious relationship in years. You listed work as the primary obstacle, which, fair enough, but I know plenty of married soldiers.”
Not many like him, he wants to argue, but you aren’t wrong, either. There are operators who manage to build lives between deployments, but they don’t do what he does. They only play at it.
You tilt your head, and he gets the distinct impression you’ve stopped reading from whatever internal script guides these things.
“And between us? I don’t actually think work is the real problem.”
Defensiveness flares on first instinct. He could shut this down. Deflect and charm you sideways, or turn it all into a joke. Instead, he keeps his face agreeable, because snapping at you would be shortsighted.
“Suppose that’s why I’m here, hm? So, what’s next?”
That restores your smile.
You launch into your explanation of the entire process. Intake and compatibility assessments and vetting.
He mostly listens, but the lion’s share of his attention falls to your mouth. The short pauses you take to collect your thoughts. The shine of your lipstick and how this one leaves a print on your cup.
“I actually have someone in mind for you.”
His brows shoot up mid-sip. “Oh?”
You nod, pleased with yourself. “Potentially. It’ll take one or two days before I can set you up. Background check, first.”
Kyle nearly laughs into his coffee. Kate and her connections scrubbed his records years ago. All you’ll find is the good soldier Kyle Garrick.
The meeting winds down not long after. Your phone buzzes and you frown at the screen.
“Oof,” you wince, gathering your things. “Afraid I need to take this and be on my way.”
He rises as you do, leaning closer when you offer your hand. What do you know, fits perfect.
“I’m looking forward to working with you, Kyle.”
He gives your hand a little squeeze before letting it go. “Likewise.”
He’s approved within days.
You forward the results and his first match. Kyle skims the details while breakfast burns on the stove.
Camille is an orthopedic surgeon, an avid outdoorswoman, and a fellow runner. Ambitious, disciplined, and a good person on paper. In another life, she might’ve suited him. Unfortunately for her, he’s already met you.
He meets her at a restaurant she’s been wanting to try for months, and he tries sabotaging the evening from the start. He arrives fifteen minutes late, shirt visibly wrinkled, and prolongedly whinges about paying nearly thirty quid for grilled octopus.
She takes it all in stride.
She’s unflappable. She gives as good as she gets, too, parrying every attempt he makes to scuttle the date.
Doubt creeps in when their plates are cleared. Maybe he’s overestimated his ability to tank things, and you’re actually good enough at this to make him forget why he signed up in the first place. Then football comes up, and he mentions Liverpool. A side effect of spending months on end with Price.
The warmth drains out of her face. Honestly, it’s comedic. She breaks and saw limbs every day, and this is what disgusts her.
By dessert, she’s monosyllabic. The guilt for having wasted her time is there and gone as he pays, reasoning that now she has something to report-worthy for you. She’ll probably ask that you screen for club loyalties, and the next poor bastard you pair her with can sit beside her nursing United’s losses for the rest of their lives together.
Every date comes with a debrief with feedback from both parties. He rings you while Camille disappears into the back of a taxi alone.
“Well?”
“Sadly,” he says gravely, “We had irreconcilable differences.”
“Oh? What happened?”
“She supports Manchester United.”
“You’re joking.”
“‘Fraid not.”
“Football? Really?”
Kyle smiles to himself, looking toward the ground as he nudges a pebble with his foot. “What can I say?”
Your sigh crackles warmly down the line. “Okay. You’ll try again.”
Dates two, three, and four follow in quick succession.
The women continue to be perfectly pleasant. He continues to kneecap things.
Date two sours when he talks in circles until she gives up trying to pry anything meaningful out of him. Date three doesn’t last when she asks him for his birth time, and he tells her astrology is fake.
Date four is tough, because she’s funny and clever. She works in publishing and takes pride in her tracking her reading. It pains him to lie, especially with the stack of books waiting for him back at his quarters on base, but he tells her he doesn’t read for fun, and doesn’t see the appeal.
When they part for the night, she’s kind enough to tell him they’d work better as friends.
So when you text him the morning after date four, asking if he can pop by for a quick check-in, he knows it’s all on course.
You share your office with your co-founder, your desks side by side and decorated with small tokens. One framed photograph draws his eye. The trip to Istanbul last spring to visit your cousin. Beside it, a photostrip from the bar down the street from your flat. In the corner, a vase with no flowers. He’ll fix that later.
You’re gorgeous, though the puffiness beneath your eyes leaves you looking frazzled, like you’ve slept poorly all week. The sleeves of your cardigan are shoved unevenly to your elbows, the front buttons misaligned. You greet him as you organize a stack of papers.
“So this is more of a progress report.”
You slide the papers across the desk—they’re feedback forms, neatly transcribed in your handwriting.
He skims. Most of it trends positive.
Attractive. Funny. Intelligent. Easy to talk to. Confident.
Then come the circled sections.
Off-putting comments. A little condescending. It felt like he lost interest halfway through? Hit a wall. Emotionally constipated. Cracks jokes at inappropriate moments.
Kyle bites the inside of his cheek to keep from smiling.
You tap the pages. “As you can see, there’s a pattern. You start strong. Your dates like you. Everything’s grand until you either disengage or, frankly, kill the conversation.”
“Maybe I’m just boring.”
“You are not boring, but there’s a difference between being charming and being emotionally available.”
His teeth will leave a permanent indent in his cheek by the time you’re done here. You frown, seemingly mistaking his silence for offense, but truly, he isn’t. Every one of those dates went exactly as he intended. He’d been as unavailable as he needed to be to end up here.
“Kyle, look, I think you–”
Your phone buzzes suddenly on your desk. The name Daniel flashes across the screen.
“For the love of…” you mutter under your breath. Your thumb comes down hard on decline, and you stare at the screen for a beat. You flip it face down, then plow on without apology. “As I was saying…I think you’re throwing the dates.”
There that is—but what was that? Who was that?
“Throwing them? What makes you say that?” he asks innocently.
“That’s what I’m trying to figure out.”
Your phone lights up with a voicemail notification. It sits upon a stack of countless others, and you ignore those too. Makes him wonder if this Daniel’s why you haven’t slept. Shit landlord, maybe? Another, needier client?
“Maybe I haven’t taken out the right person yet.”
“Mmhm, and not one of those lovely women qualified. Curious. Well,” You clasp your hands atop your desk. “I called you in because I think it’s time we discussed–”
Your phone starts vibrating again. Persistent bastard.
The glare you shoot at your phone is downright venomous. You finally snatch it up, shut it off, and then bury it with a shove into your purse. Both hands come up to your temples and massage circles as you worry your bottom lip between your teeth. A sigh forcefully hisses out. When the irritation ebbs, it leaves behind pure exhaustion in every part of your pretty face.
Kyle leans back into your line of sight. “Unhappy customer?”
“No. That’d be simpler.” You turn fully to him, rubbing at your forehead next. “My boyfriend.”
“Boyfriend?”
The world about falls out from underneath him. Nothing he found suggested a boyfriend. It’s a glaring gap in his intelligence. Ghost would have a field day.
Unless, this Daniel was—
“Sort of. My ex.” Bingo. “It’s complicated.”
The weariness with which you say it stirs up ugly feelings. He imagines the kind of man who keeps calling after being ignored and what he’d look like bleeding from the mouth.
His jaw hurts again.
“Yeah, looks like he’s rung you about a hundred times. He bother you like that often?”
“No, not usually. It’s just, well yesterday, I…” You stop yourself with a light slap to your forehead. “We’re not here to talk about my love life.”
The universe intervenes on your behalf with the swing of the office door.
Your co-founder appears carrying coffees, stopping short when she sees him. “Oh, sorry. Didn’t know we had a guest. I’ll, um….”
You shoot to your feet. “It’s alright. We’re done here. Kyle? I’ll see you out.”
He lets you hustle him out, the two of you nearly knocking shoulders as you hurry down the hall, shrugging into your coats as you go.
Outside, you stand with him at the bottom of the steps, crossing your arms tight across your chest as the wind sends leaves tumbling down the street.
“So, okay, back to what I was saying before that.”
You return to the bullet points of the check-in, as if you can shove the entire Daniel-not-boyfriend situation back into Pandora’s box. You go on about intentionality and all the ways he can supposedly work on himself. He doesn’t interrupt, because this new development with your ex changes things, and he needs to factor it in.
Ten minutes ago, Daniel hadn’t existed. Now the loathsome oaf sits squarely in his path like a dead policeman. Or, more apt, a sinkhole.
Kyle watches you suppress a yawn mid-sentence and he’s irritated all over again.
You’re sweet. Clever. Earnest to a fault. He would wager that you’ve given this man several chances, and what have you got in return? Apparently many sleepless nights and no flowers to show for them.
Fortunately, Kyle is more than capable of changing tack.
“Maybe you could coach me.”
The suggestion derails whatever you were about to say next. You blink, eyebrows lifting up and up and up.
“Coach you?”
“Yeah. Maybe you’re right and I’m rusty.”
You laugh nervously. “Kyle. That’s not—I don’t think—that’s not what I do. I’m not a dating coach, that’s more her thing.” You point a thumb back toward the office windows where your partner’s probably halfway through her latte by now. “I could set up a meeting?”
Kyle tries to look disappointed and your expression breaks a little. A sliver, but that’s all he needs. Once he finds an opening, he knows how to force the rest of himself through it.
“I don’t want her. I want you.”
You let him pick the place and he’s glad you did.
It’s the sort of posh restaurant he’d catch endless hell for if the rest of the 141 ever found out he brought a date to it. Olive tile lines the wall behind the bar, and every table is made from rich sapele wood. Glowing fixtures posted few and far between, while smaller tables like yours make do with candlelight. Smoke and scorched citrus drift out every time the kitchen door swings open, turning hopeful heads when someone in a white apron sweeps past with plates.
Your nails drum while you take the place in with quick, furtive glances. Your attention flocks to the loaded shelves behind the bar then to a waiter balancing a tray full of oysters nested in ice.
You haven’t outright said you’re impressed, but he assumes.
The moment your wine glass is filled, though, you snap right back to attention.
“So, Kyle, is it as awkward for you as it is for me that this was arranged?”
Right. The roleplay. You’d mentioned it in your texts.
It took some cajoling to get you here. Out there on the blustery walk outside your office, imploring you to sit down with him over a nice meal to help him figure out where, oh where, he’s been going wrong. You said three times that this was unofficial, a favor rather than a formal extension of the matchmaking package, and therefore absolutely could not appear in any review.
Kyle agreed to all of it, because he knew it would be worth it.
And now you’re here, pretending this is purely educational while he thinks about how the fuck your ex botched things with you.
He hadn’t spent the intervening days idle. He found the worm lurking on the follower list of a friend. One query led to another, then a brief chat with an old contact still working for the Met, through which he uncovered a nasty little trail. Several small disasters follow Daniel. Nothing dramatic enough to make the evening news, but enough to paint a picture—one he doesn’t want you in.
Multiple CCJs and thousands of pounds in gambling debts. Assault within the last year. Three employers in eighteen months with behavior cited as reason for dismissal.
You spend your days vetting strangers for other people, yet what care do you take for yourself?
“Not at all. We all need a little push sometimes.”
“Really?”
“‘Course. I suspect even you need one from time to time.”
You huff quietly through your nose, but the conversation comes easier after that.
First comes family.
He gives the broad strokes. That cannot change too soon, even if he has plans for you that stretch farther into the future. With the spotless records you’ve already pulled, you should be satisfied. He talks about his mums, their troupe of rescue cats. About his last trip out of the country, where he fell down a flight of steps in Minsk and walked away only mildly concussed.
(He leaves out how that happened. That his target tried throwing him down them, and how the man ended up going headfirst beneath Kyle’s tumbling weight, and never got back up afterward.)
In return, you tell him about your siblings. Your old job in marketing and how you pivoted. About university, too, and how half your social circle ended up dating because you kept introducing people. You weren’t lying about your aptitude.
The waiter comes and goes. Somewhere between dishes, the conversation loses its scaffolding entirely. You lean across the table, eyes glittering. Laughter sweet as honey and bubbly as champagne.
For a fake date, it certainly feels real.
And for him, it’s as simple as flipping a switch. All that effort spent sabotaging his dates redirected. He doesn’t waste time now that he has you to himself. Every detail goes into the ever-thickening file he’s been compiling on you.
“You know, you’re easier to talk to than anyone else you’ve set me up with.”
You snort. “That’s because this is practice. I’m not trying to impress you.”
“Too late.”
“Mm, I believe ‘joking at inappropriate moments’ was feedback you received.”
Kyle grins. “I’m dead serious. Best date in years.”
Before you can roll your eyes, he reaches and settles his hand over yours. Your gaze drops to where you touch, then returns to his face with an uneasy look.
“This is practice,” you repeat.
“Doesn’t have to be.” He drags his thumb over the back of your knuckles. “See, I’ve been listening to everything you’ve said about chemistry and all that. Think we’ve got it.”
“Kyle.”
“You’ve had a good time, right? Be honest.”
You worry your lip instead of answering. Your gaze bounces from your drink, to the candle, to the dining room beyond his shoulder. Anywhere but his face.
When it finally returns, you admit it with a sigh. “Yes, alright, I’ve had a good time.”
The satisfaction that sparks in his chest is wholly disproportionate in its strength. He has to resist smiling too broadly, galvanized by your concession.
“Right. And if you were your own client?” He gestures between the two of you. “Would you set us up?”
“That’s beside the point.”
“Is it? Look, I know you’ve got that ex of yours, or whatever you want to call him,” he adds when your brow furrows. “He’s a piece of work.” The kindest thing he could say after what he’s found. “Walk me through it. One more drink and let’s see if we can’t sort it.”
Your fingers twitch beneath his.
It’s funny, really. In the field, getting answers is often ugly business. Fear, exhaustion, pain, truth serum. Most people who find themselves seated across from him are either terrified civilians trapped in a mess far bigger than themselves, or enemy combatants determined to die before informing.
You are neither. You’re a pretty girl with wine in her belly. Nervous, certainly, but you haven’t tucked tail. You could have fled at any time. Could’ve smacked him and told him to piss off.
Force was never going to work on you. It would’ve driven you off. Not that he minds a chase, but it would be unnecessary. Given enough room, you’ll arrive at the conclusion he wants all on your own. That’s the beauty of it. It’s masterclass. He is, after all, good at what he does. Always has been.
When the waiter sidles up, you ask for a refill.
It all spills out after that. You and Dan have a history. You technically go all the way back to primary school. Thick as thieves for years. You, a shy and bully-prone girl. Him, your pigtail-pulling protector, happy to terrorize everyone else if they left you alone.
In secondary, without much fanfare, he became your boyfriend. In the years that followed, your on-again, off-again man.
When he was good, he was easy to love. He’d stay up until four in the morning to help you study for exams. He knew your coffee order. He’d show up with your favorite takeaway when you were ill. Charmed complete strangers into hour-long chats when you went out. Picked you up all the way in Swindon once when you got a flat. He could be warm and thoughtful in these fleeting moments, enough to make you picture your life together in five, ten years.
Then the tide would inevitably turn.
He’d remember your anniversary but forget your birthday. Borrow your car without telling you and return it empty. Lose job after job because someone else was always the problem. Borrow money and never repay it.
The good and bad came in waves, and you’d become a champion swimmer. You kept hoping he’d grow up, and that the version you fell for would eventually turn up and stick. But the money—the mounting pile of debts and the broken promises attached to them—proved to be the final straw. You couldn’t keep pretending the good outweighed everything else.
Nowadays, your family hates him. His name taboo amongst your friends. Every time the relationship implodes, everyone celebrates. And like clockwork, weeks later, he worms his way back into your life, hat in hand, talking about the good old days.
As if Kyle needed any more reason to loathe the man.
You insist you’ve been better as starting the company changed things. You promised your partner you wouldn’t let Daniel drag you backwards, and for the most part you’ve kept that promise.
It’s just that he keeps testing you.
“He showed up at my flat last week.”
“What’d he want?”
“What do you think?” Fair. “He said he’d had a rough week and needed to talk.”
Daniel didn’t appreciate being told no, and within eight hours, you’d received eighty calls and a hundred plus texts—even after you blocked him.
The more you talk, the more tired you sound. By the time the bill arrives, you’re quiet.
Neither of you speak much more until you’re outside. Your chin stays tucked, all embarrassed now that your dirty laundry has been aired. You search this way and that for an opportune exit.
He won’t allow it. Every date comes with a debrief, after all.
He steers you toward the corner with a hand on your back. People pass, heads bowed against the wind, and music spills nearby from an open pub door. You stop beside a cut-through and begin fastening the remaining buttons of your coat, staring intently at your fingers.
“I’m sorry for dumping all that on you. Now that I’ve said it out loud, it sounds pathetic.”
“Pathetic?” He scoffs. “No. He’s skint, can’t keep a job, and thinks terrorizing you is a winning strategy. Pretty sure we know who the pathetic one here is.”
Despite yourself, a laugh escapes, but you still won’t look at him. “He wasn’t always like this.”
“Oh, they never are, are they?”
The corner of your mouth quirks. For the first time since Daniel’s name entered the conversation, you look relieved.
Kyle steps closer. “You know, for a matchmaker, you’ve got terrible taste in men.”
You tip your face up at last. “Yeah? What does that make you?”
It is, though you don’t know it, a trick question. He has done terrible things. He will continue to do terrible things. The world keeps providing reasons. The blood on his hands is there to stay.
He’s spent weeks in pursuit. Hunting, if he were being honest, though that hardly seems accurate when you’ve given him only opportunities the whole way. He’s never had to offer you an exit—not that he would. Maybe what he’s done makes him a terrible man, but watching your eyes flit to his mouth and back again, he doesn’t think it matters all that much.
He doesn’t preempt whatever objection is rattling around in your head. All he can think of is closing the space between your mouths.
Your throat clears.
“I should get home.” In a blink, you straighten and step around him, phone already in hand. “This was fun.”
Seven words to take the wind out of his sails. Aren’t you playing hard to get, taking things slow.
He lets you pass. The impulse to pull you into the dark alley to change your mind and speed things along rears its head. Ghost’s influence, most like.
“So you admit it. Does it mean you’d like to do it again?”
You make him wait until your ride is accepted before you look up almost bashfully from underneath your lashes. “It’s probably a wildly stupid decision, but...”
And another seven words for the urge to recede. A few more days won’t kill him.
“I can’t keep your money if I’m the one dating you. I’ll refund it.”
“Nah, keep it. You did exactly what I hired you for,” You walked right into it. “Found me a match.”
A smile tugs at your mouth. “We’ll see.”
“We will.”
Kyle relieves the ache of returning home alone with a long shower.
He finishes with a grunt, stomach and abs twinging with a side-stitch. His spend drips down the tile and swirls into the drain. With it, several options for how to approach his last loose end, most of which would land him in hot water.
(If he was stupid enough to get himself caught.)
Every idea falls short. Daniel’s a parasite who keeps crawling back. A cockroach. He could call in another favor with the Met, pad the man’s colorful file, make life more inconvenient for a while, but that won’t cut it.
He has his address. It would take him less than an hour to knock on the man’s door for a chat.
Yet, for all Daniel’s run-ins with the law, he’s exactly the sort to go crying to the police. Kyle has no desire to explain things to Price, let alone why he’s spent mandated leave paying social calls to a bird’s ex-boyfriend. Worse still, he’d also go crying to you, and that’d squander weeks of work.
He has to outsource.
Price is out, for obvious reasons. Soap would get too involved as he always does. Nik’s disappeared into one of his periods of radio silence. It leaves him with one unsavory choice.
He doesn’t want Ghost to know about you yet. He has a habit for collecting things people would rather keep quiet and saving them for a rainy day. Kyle, far less talkative than Soap, has always been one of his favorite marks. Unfortunately, he’s also the exact man for the job.
He sends the text when he goes to bed, and the reply is there when he wakes.
ETA 36.
Well into his morning run, his phone buzzes.
A selfie. Your co-founder, grinning over a box filled with cardamom buns and chocolatines, thumbs raised in emphatic approval.
Another. You, cradling the bouquet he had delivered to your office. A sunrise-colored bunch of snapdragons, peonies, and paper moons. Your smile peeks out from behind the petals.
Thank you for the treats xx
His runner’s high hits like never before.
One last point of due diligence: a visit to the halfwit.
Kyle tracks him down to a sticky-floored Grosvenor that’s seen better days, an apt comparison to the man himself. Daniel’s as unremarkable in the flesh as he is in his socials and police records, hunched over a poker table with a pint at his elbow and a shrinking stack of chips in front of him.
He only half pays attention to the slot machine he’s claimed. The flashing lights and chirping speakers drown out most of the table talk, but the louder notes of Daniels’s complaints carry.
A bored-looking woman hovers at his shoulder, nursing the dregs of a cocktail, chipped nails tapping idly while her attention wanders. He slaps his cards onto the felt after another losing hand, gesticulating at his companion while the dealer calmly pushes the pot toward the winner. He curses, knocks back his drink, and grudgingly buys back into the game, but not before awkwardly trying and failing to coax the woman down for a kiss. She turns her head without so much as looking at him.
Beyond him, posted beside the cashier’s cage, two broad-shouldered men speak amongst themselves, occasionally nodding toward Daniel’s table.
Kyle watches him unravel all over again when the next hand is dealt.
He decides then and there there’s no need to get any closer or learn anything more. Simply clapping eyes on the lout is enough. He’s not worth the risk.
Besides, Ghost’ll leave a more lasting impression.
Ghost has the rear of the pub to himself.
Last booth, back to the wall, one thick leg swung wide and extended out into the open floor waiting to trip someone. Two empty pint glasses at the edge of the table. He’s probably scared off any wandering staff. Kyle takes him a third.
“Could’ve texted you were here early, LT.”
“Needed the ‘me’ time. Soap’s insufferable without you to throw at ‘im.”
Kyle snorts. “Cap suspect anythin’?”
“‘e knows better than to pry when I take personal time,” he pulls the pint closer. “So, you fuckin’ stir crazy? What’s this about needin’ some bastard’s legs broken?”
That wasn’t what Kyle had sent. He’d mentioned an ‘old friend’ who needed setting straight, that he couldn’t be recognized, and that the job called for Ghost’s brand of finesse. Promised he’d owe Ghost a favor. He sticks to his story, offering no more detail than necessary.
“Mm. Called me ‘ere to do your dirty work. Wonder what Price’d say about his star pupil dishin’ out a little clandestine ‘urt?” Ghost tugs his mask aside for a drink, smirking. “Lemme see ‘er.”
Kyle bristles. “What?”
“The girl.” Ghost jerks his chin. “If I’m gonna get my ‘ands dirty for some bird, I wanna see.”
“This isn’t for—”
“Sure it isn’t. Y’asked me to slip off base, off the books, to rough up some schoolyard bully? Fuck if it ain’t for a woman. So let’s see ‘er.”
There’s no point in arguing. Kyle pulls up the selfie from that morning, and slides his phone over.
A man wandering to the toilet slows, neck craning to eavesdrop and steal a look, and Kyle glares to hurry him on his way.
“This ‘er?”
Kyle looks back at Ghost.
The look in his eyes sends a shiver down Kyle’s spine. Ghost’s pupils have fattened, his thick brow lower in focus. The big man’s gone completely still save for his chest, expanding like bellows in a deep, ragged inhale. His free hand migrates below the table to shamelessly adjust himself.
Kyle glances down at the screen and unclenches his fist with relief. Ghost has swiped one too far. He’s staring at the photo of the co-owner. Poor girl.
“Not her. Go back one.”
Ghost doesn’t do that right away, opting to airdrop himself the photo first, then swiping back. When your face pops up, he doesn’t nod or comment, and Kyle is absolutely fine with that. The last thing either him or you need is his approval. Once his phone is back in hand, he forwards everything he’s compiled on Daniel.
“And that’s him.”
A chuckle rumbles from across the table as Ghost skims the text. He turns the cracked screen to show the unimpressive mugshot that Kyle’s Met contact had forwarded. “S’rare for me to be the more ‘andsome one. She blind?”
“Watch it.”
Ghost just laughs. Kyle could save his life twice over, and he’d still dodge paying a compliment.
The discussion of what to do with Daniel is short. No killing, no permanent damage— physical at least—unless he decides to bother you again.
“Garrick,” Ghost leers down at the ring-shaped crack in his phone’s screen, its epicenter right around your friend’s face. “Favor for a favor.”
Kyle’s gaze slides right off the picture. Plausible deniability.
“‘Course.”
You pick this time. An intimate spot, where you get the best table.
(You know the head chef, you explain. Introduced her to her wife, a former coworker.)
Tonight you’re dressed in that deep burgundy shade again. A full-bodied red to make his mouth water. You’re brighter than you’ve been, though for the first quarter hour, you’re obviously nervous. There’s no pretense of coaching or protocol to fall back on. Knee bouncing, nails drumming.
Over the entrée, you don’t use Daniel’s name, apparently having adopted your friend’s taboo, and add that he never took you to a dinner like this—excluding your practice date. It’s brand new territory, being on the receiving end of effort. An advantage he won’t waste.
Everything he’s learned about you finally earns its keep. This is the home stretch. With only a handful of weeks left before his return to base, he wants to spend as much time as possible with you firmly nailed down.
The conversation threads from travel to music to books. He mentions cities he’s visited because he knows they were on your bucket list at one point. Namedrops authors whose books he’s seen in the background of your posts. Drops seeds he knows will make you bring up your family.
Kyle spends the meal waiting for the other shoe to drop, searching for a sign that you have any inkling of what he’s done, what he’s doing, but it never comes.
By the time you stumble out of the restaurant, you’re warmed by an endless supply of complimentary prosecco. Behind you, the staff have stacked the chairs and stools, all the candles but the one at your table snuffed. You slip both hands around the crook of his arm and lean in, painted lips curling into a smile that tells him you’ve lost complete track of your troubles. That alone would have been enough, but then you ask, slightly slurring—“What d’you say to a nightcap?”
Kyle can’t remember the last time he’s had company.
He watches you like a hawk from the door, toeing off his shoes and hanging your jacket as you amble further into his flat. Your fingers trail over the table before your attention meanders to the photographs on the wall.
In the periods of limbo such as this, the leaves he spends here as opposed to his mum’s, this place feels fake. Set dressing—sparse and unornamented, what is here are remnants of the man before the task force. Before Piccadilly and Price. Might as well be fossilized in amber or lidded like a time capsule. There’s been no sense in changing much.
You turn, surveying, and he can’t help but wonder what blanks you’re filling in. Whatever picture you’ve painted, he’ll spend the rest of his life speculating how close it is to the real thing. Is Kyle a terrible man? You don’t know. You never will. You’ll never learn that at this very moment, your ex is having the worst night of his life because Kyle arranged it. You won’t know that you’re standing in his home because he spent weeks laying the bricks in the road that led here.
Still, he would like you to know him as a good man. So if you find his space lacking, he will make room. He’ll let you breathe life into every empty corner.
You do the song and dance. Kyle offers the perfunctory drink, the one you ostensibly came back to his for. You turn it down, so instead he meets you at the mouth of the hall.
Though, as he closes the distance, he reckons you could’ve done with one last ounce of liquid courage. You sobered up too much in the car.
His hands land on your hips, bunching up the wine-red linen as he draws you the slightest step closer. Your eyes go big. The first part of the beginning of his name slips out, a soft and uncertain K, as you look utterly at a loss for what comes next now that you’re this close. Your faces hover an inch apart, but he diverts, dipping his head to skip his lips up the line of your neck to the spot beneath your ear. You melt, fingers curling in his shirt, and emboldened, he follows your jaw back down to your mouth, pausing long enough to let you meet him halfway.
He means for the first kiss to be sweet and exploratory, erring on the side of caution given who has had you before. That changes when everything from his navel down twitches at the softness of your lips.
He snakes a hand up to direct your head by the nape, tilting it up further to deepen the kiss almost immediately. His tongue eagerly swipes into your warm and so-far welcoming mouth. He licks behind your teeth and the roof of your mouth, his slow-growing hunger tested by the taste. He hums as you clutch at his shoulders, and when he pulls back, your grip loosens.
“You alright, angel?”
You swallow, smile wobbly. “Yeah.”
“C’mere, then.”
Seconds and thirds of your tongue stretch the time it takes to reach his room. Clothes fall by the wayside, namely your pretty dress, but his shirt goes too. While your hands skim up the carved planes of his stomach and chest, his fiddle with the hook of your bra. It pops open and catches his foot briefly on the descent before he shakes it off. The kissing comes to a pause when your legs hit the edge of his bed. You topple backwards and he lets you.
You land with a quiet oof and rise quick to your elbows, but stop when you see him looming over you.
Your expression flickers. One feeling gets overtaken by the next between blinks. A hint of embarrassment to a swell of delight to an uncharacteristic shyness. Underneath them all is want. Stark enough to survive every passing squirm.
Once upon a time he imagined you maybe hating this. Had he been hasty and pounced too soon, under poorer circumstances, you almost certainly would have. But this way? You’ve been aching for it, haven’t you? Sweet, love-lorn girl. Probably touched yourself after carrying that bouquet home. Did you think of him later, when ducking to smell the peonies, only for your brain to misfire and conjure your scent instead? God, he fucking hopes so.
You track his hands as he works off his belt and trousers, breath hitching when he finally drops a knee to crawl over you. Once he’s in range, you tug him down for a kiss.
Yeah, you’ve been wanting it.
The minutes pass by like this—languid kisses, heavy petting, and sweet nothings. For someone presumably so pent up, you’re savoring.
His fingers pet the skin below your navel then hook over the waistband of your knickers. Your hips buck, jutting against the leg he’s slotted between yours. He chuckles against your lips then moves to mouth at other expanses of skin.
You fidget as he merely holds onto the fabric. He gets caught up in the hills and valleys, leisurely touring your tits and stomach. He waits until you’re distracted by him dragging his teeth over the curve of a breast to twist and push his fingers into your panties.
“Fuck, baby.”
You say his name, but the sound’s pure fuzz before it ever reaches his ears. He drags his fingers through your warmth and shows them to you. Sticky, tacky, wet.
“All worked up, huh? All for me?” He answers his own question with a nod and you echo it a moment later.
He licks his fingers first, then pushes them into your mouth.
You nod a second time unprompted, and the sight of your kiss-swollen lips wrapped around his fingers makes his cock pulse.
After you suck them clean, he trails them back down.
His fingers slip back between your folds, teasing your entrance every few passes until he feels your thighs jerk. It takes very little for one to sink in and little more to add another. He’s lazy with it, slowly sliding them in and out, the whole of his hand stretching the cotton it’s trapped inside. He’d like to peel your panties off and take a proper look, but he’s glued to your face.
“Kyle, please,” you pant, claws digging in where you can reach. Pinpricks on his forearm and shoulder.
“Yeah? You like that, angel?”
Words fail you when the heel of his hand presses to your clit. Sensitive like the rest of you. He rubs it in tandem with the fingers stuffed inside, rubbing incessantly at a spot that’s got you shivering.
“Think you do, oh, I really think you do—feel that? You needed this, didn’t you?”
He knew it wouldn’t take much, but the speed at which you hurtle to the brink prompts ink-blots to appear at the edges of his vision. He’s drunk on it. Can’t get enough of it—your pitchy and shallow breaths, your needy pussy, all your scratching—and he hasn’t even gotten his cock in you yet.
You come with a cry, a couple tears rolling down your cheeks, cunt pulsing around his knuckles.
Through the aftershocks, you weakly paw at him, but he only lethargically pets between your folds. He kisses your temple and neck, grinning against your jaw when you mumble about his cock. You blindly reach for it, eyes welded shut and beaded with tears. You’re so good to think of him, but he can wait. He can still taste prosecco.
He migrates down the bed, using your lagging coherency to get your ruined panties off and tucked into the mattress. It isn’t until his arms hook under your thighs that you realize what he’s doing. You try to close up, but that’s what his shoulders are for.
“Kyle, wait, it’s too much—”
Yet after one long swipe, he knows it’s not enough. ‘Least not for him.
He kisses with an open mouth, using more spit and pushing it through your already sopping folds tongue-first. He latches on to your crying clit, sucking and rolling his tongue until you’re shaking more violently than before, so worked up neither of you can tell if the hands on his head are pushing him away or pulling him in.
Your hole clenches around his tongue when you come for the second time. The orchard-sweet taste of wine gushes over his tongue again.
He’s slower with his retreat this time, shoving his boxers off and indulging himself. He stamps his nose to the fat and hair above your cunt for a whiff before he climbs up to brush the tears from your cheeks.
You’re stunned, out of breath and words. You jolt some when he leans down to kiss your tear tracks, cock dragging over the crease of your thigh and leaving a trail.
“I, um, wow, I’ve never…” You eke out as you wipe your forehead. “Back-to-back like that.”
“What else haven’t you done?” He lifts your hand to kiss the divot of your wrist, pressing a sly smile to it.
You push at his chin as if shooing him away, but breathlessly laugh.
He is teasing, but your lack of an answer leaves a blank space for his imagination to fill. He’ll find whatever lines you drew for your ex and test them for himself. After all, according to you, these things loop back to compatibility. Sometimes it just takes the right partner.
He smooths his palms up your legs.
You’re primed for him, prepped by hands and mouth, your spit and cum-slick cunt gleaming up at him—a homing beacon calling him in. You watch him in awe like he’s the man with the golden touch. He’s never felt so god-like between a woman’s legs before, and he’s had a few.
He lifts his cock off the warm cradle of your thigh. He brushes the tip of it over your clit and licks his lips at how your whole body shivers.
This is a courtship some might wrinkle their noses at and say it’s too short a runway to be sure. Others’ll politely talk around it and call it a whirlwind romance. Doesn’t matter a whit to him. Not with how easy it is for him to sink inside you. Proof has a wet-hot grip.
He drops over you, leaning down on a forearm to swallow the noises you make as he bottoms out. One soft plea escapes.
“Oh, Kyle, please—”
Somewhere in the world, a starting gun fires.
Like that first kiss, maybe these first seconds inside you ought to unfold slowly. A little more tenderness to cement the fact that this is it for the both of you. That bit of goodwill and sense shrivels when he pulls out a couple inches and sees your pupils dilate.
You see something you want, you take it.
He holds on long enough to give you a sporting chance. A few minutes of gentle rocking and smooth, shallow strokes. All it is a wind-up though, he knows it, and he’s sure you do too when your eyes and mouth open wide when he pulls out. He pushes one of your legs open and toward your chest to watch your skin stretch taut around him.
He drives the breath out of you with that first earnest thrust. You won’t get a lungful until he’s done.
Your hands fly to his biceps, slick palms scrabbling at their swell as he gets going.
Gorgeous, is all he can think. An angel spread out in his bed, tits bouncing in time with his thrusts. Sweat shines along your neck. He stoops to lap it up, moving from your throat to the tears beading under your eyes, answering another indulgence he seems incapable of denying himself. If providence saw fit to lay you at his feet—it would be a shame to ignore whatever impulses that follow.
His face returns to the junction of your shoulder and neck, eyes shutting so all he hears are the punchy noises he knocks out of you. His thrusts turn shallow, furious. Your hands jump to his back, nails scraping down his skin and setting off a chain of tremors in his spine. He groans and shudders as he pushes up, peeling himself off of you.
His cock slips out as he readjusts. A shiny gloss paints its length, droplets of pre-cum dribbling onto your waiting cunt. It’s a head rush seeing a pretty girl like this. Fucking obscene.
“Fuck, angel,” he rasps as he feeds his cock back into your twitching hole. “You are something else.”
You’re far past coherency. Distilled to needy moans and whimpers that struggle to even make it out around his thrusts. His hands plaster to your hips, pulling you to meet him when it’s clear you’re past keeping up with him, too.
“Kyle,” you gasp as he zeroes in on a spot that makes your nails sink into him.
“I know—I know—”
You’re both so close, circling each other and racing to the finish.
You bite your bottom lip, back bowing off his bed, until the whole line of your body draws taut before coming hard. Thought finally abandons him, warm static filling his head and ears, complete tunnel-vision on the cunt strangling his cock and his own release hot on its heels.
He drags your hips up, sweaty palms on sweaty skin, and buries himself in as deep as he can go. A long, hissed-out fuck skating through his teeth as he empties himself into you.
It’s everything he’s wanted and more, this. Vindication twice over and then some.
He groans as he pulls out, watching his cum leak and pool between your folds. One last weak jerk and a stringy tag of it lays a trail down your crack.
A delirious, half-drunk mumble guides him back up the bed to where he tucks into your side like a good man. A hand ghosting over your quivering stomach to your face, stroking your cheek languorously along until you’re planet-side.
You don’t wake up much after that, not even when he cleans you up. He watches you breathe deeply, body and mind fully relaxed into a prosecco and orgasm-induced sleep.
Your ex problem, hopefully a hundred kilometers away and moving.
Kyle’s still awake when your phone lights up sometime after two.
Careful not to wake you, he reaches across your warm body and lifts it from the nightstand. It takes two attempts to guess your passcode—your mum’s birthday, very cute—and one new text awaits.
An unknown number with a long, winding apology riddled with typos. More excuses he plainly expects you to believe that boils down to something’s come up, a job opportunity overseas, and don’t expect to hear from him anytime soon.
Kyle considers deleting it, but it’s better if you have some measure of closure. Out of sight, out of mind and all.
He finds a text waiting on his phone as well.
All it is is another photograph. Daniel in a queue outside a coach bound for Dover, black-eyed and snot-faced. A plastic bag stuffed with clothes with a toothbrush protruding from a hole in the bottom. His face turned, looking over his shoulder, but missing the camera completely.
As tempting as it is to keep it as a token, that’s the message he opts to delete. No loose ends.
In the morning, while he’s making breakfast, you tell him you’re going to pop by the chemist on the way home.
You don’t want a baby yet, new business and all, and you want to see where this goes. Fair enough. He’s in no rush because he already knows where this’ll go, but then the thought wells up, dark and thick as oil: the look on the old man’s face if he manages to knock you up before the new Missus Price.
His mind runs with it, beyond the horizon of what exists and into the future.
A strip of coastline, both of you hiding out under an umbrella. Sand sticking to your damp skin. Your hand in his, a ring glittering in the light as you admire it.
A cold afternoon in the city, him knotting your scarf and buttoning your coat over the bump of your belly.
You, standing in the doorway of your home, puppeting his baby’s arm in a wave, cooing Hi daddy, we missed you, daddy.
He can see it all so clearly.
But he’s staring down the tail-end of leave, so he simply kisses your cheek and tells you to forward the receipt.
He’ll start making plans for phase two of his grand plan tomorrow. For now, he’s got you where he wants you. That’s more than enough for him.
premature Tools and Equipment section: The Clean Cart is a thing I've been using for a few weeks that I find useful and maybe you will too
The Clean Cart is an addition to my household cleaning routine to help me deal with the worst part of cleaning surfaces: there's shit on the surface and in order to clean it, I have to find somewhere to put all the shit. Which involves cluttering up some other surface, and I might just decide to leave it all there, making the problem worse there. Enter, the Clean Cart
here pictured mid-cleaning my kitchen counter, complete with piles of cans for recycling. The Clean Cart is a movable neutral zone, and while it does need a Frog and Toad Cookies rule, there's only one.
The Clean Cart must start and end empty.
When you want to clean a surface, wheel the cart in and dump all your shit on it. Are some of these items actually meant to go somewhere else? Don't worry about it! It goes on the Clean Cart. For now you're just getting shit off the surface. Now you can clean in peace, and when you're putting stuff back, if you decide that actually the teapot should go in the dishes or the jeans should go in the wash or the spanner should go in the drawer, you can put it there now.
It separates "Get shit off the surface" and "Figure out where all this shit goes" in a way that is very helpful for me. As long as you can keep yourself from using it for more storage, this works. I considered using one layer as a cleaning supplies holder but I have decided that making it very clear when it's empty was more useful. I got it in white because pretty much everything else in my apartment is dark so it stands out and looks like it shouldn't be anywhere.
john price x fem!reader | the surrogate au | masterlist
part 12: absent
cw: angst
Your lunch break is peeking around the corner at you when the Teams Chat on your work computer begins to explode.
Notification bubbles pop up in the bottom right corner of the screen, obscuring the work you're doing on another program, and as soon as one vanishes, another one appears to take its place. Your eyes flicker to the clock ticking away. In ten more minutes, you'll be free to leave and indulge in that goat cheese you and John got at the Sunday market. It's all you've been able to think about since you first clocked in. You can already hear it whispering at you to just take an early lunch, but you've learned that there are a few people who work from home who have nothing better to do than to track the timestamp of every single thing everyone ever does on a project. Your absence won't be missed.
Sighing, you open your Teams window while telling yourself it won't hurt to react to the messages so you can prove you read them before wandering off to find some well deserved food, but what you hoped would be a short message has turned out to be a huge wall of text sent by your team lead. It's dizzying. You scoot forward in your chair to get closer to the monitor only for your stomach to get in the way—or rather, the baby.
39 weeks has stretched you thin. You feel like puff pastry rolled so thin that you're see through, and then stuffed so full you're threatening to rupture. The doctors tell you that you'll hit labor any day now, but you think Lottie has taken that to mean any hour with how often she's sending you check-in texts. It's like she's waiting for you to send her a photo, baby in hand; proof of your hard work coming to fruition.
Before you have the time to daydream of that, your team lead has other plans.
His message rivals the length of Tolstoy's War and Peace, outlining several projects and who he wants heading them. Many of your co-workers have reacted to the message with thumbs up, or asked clarifying questions that your team lead answers with too much excitement and heavier verbiage than needed. You skim through the message with glassy eyes, ready to move on with your day, until you see your name listed for a solo project. Something easy, but long winded enough to keep you busy for longer than your body will allow.
Due at the end of the month!
Your scoff is enough to disturb the baby. Heels dig into your stomach, pressing against your ribs until you're breathing deep just to get enough air into your lungs. Your hands hover over the keyboard to respond to his insane request, but you're not sure how to word it. Standing up for yourself always feels like a battle. You ask for an inch but everyone reacts as if you're demanding a mile. Unearned. Unworthy. Even now your mother's teeth nip at your ear, malice ready to spew down your spine.
Shaking your head, you roll out your shoulders before your fingers finally settle down on the keyboard. Eloquent and kind. (No one likes listening to a whiny girl).
I am unable to be the solo head on this project, as my due date is next week. If I had a partner working on it with me, I would be able to assist until the baby's arrival. Would you be able to assign someone else with me?
You hit send. Amicable enough. Blunt and straight to the point without unnecessary flowery thank yous! or other types of ass kissing. A part of you wants to add in how you're sticking around for their sake. You could have started your maternity leave weeks ago, giving yourself the time to prepare for the birth. But you have no clothes to buy. No nursery to furnish. What else would you do besides work?
Lunch hits the clock but you can't move from your desk. Your team lead is typing in chat, displaying his name at the bottom of the screen as he orchestrates his response. You could leave—you should leave—and return to the message later, but you're glued down. Stuck watching and waiting until it eventually pops up on your screen.
I set the deadline with your due date in mind. You should have plenty of time for your hospital stay and to finish this project up when you return! Thanks for your help.
Your mouth opens but you can't get a sound to come out. No gasp, no scoff—his audacity shocks you into silence as you try to think of something to say in response to something so outlandish. Are you a machine? Something meant to give birth and then return to work as if your whole body isn't being changed and moulded to fit the needs of something else?
When your fingers return to the keyboard, they fly. Wicked sharp, with terrifying attention to detail:
Once I've given birth I won't be able to work on any projects. I will be taking a few weeks off for maternity leave. Again, I am willing and able to assist someone else with this until my due date, but afterwards I won't be at work.
His response comes quickly. Short. Blunt. Slicing.
I thought this birth was a surrogacy. Don't you have to keep the baby to get maternity leave?
All you can do is stare at his message. It burns into your vision, letters etching into your corneas so that no matter where you look the image follows you—not even the tears lining the tender rims of your eyes wash it clean. The message gets deleted but the damage is already done. He cannot paint over the hole he punched clean through your chest. You're leaking. An unsightly existence that pushes shame into your throat like fresh bile.
Private messages ring through your speakers. None of them are from your team lead, of course. You never receive apologies from the people who owe them to you. They're from your co-workers, mostly women, assuring you that they're in your corner and telling you that he was out of line for saying something so cutting.
He slaps a bandaid on the situation. A message sent only because he was caught with his hand in the cookie jar:
Don't worry about it. I'll assign the task to someone else.
You stand from your chair as fast as your body will allow. Lead-like limbs weigh your feet down as you shuffle out of your office and into the heart of the cottage. All of a sudden, you're starving for air. No matter how much passes your lips, it's not enough, and you're left with a dry mouth and aching chest.
Once you reach the kitchen, you close your eyes and attempt to focus on the senses around you. Bare feet on cold floor, seeping into the thick skin of your heels, chilling you until a shiver is crawling up your spine and settling at the base of your skull. A faint aroma from breakfast lingers in the air, but the scent turns your stomach. The twist morphs into an ache. Dull. Squeezing from the bottom of your pelvis all the way up to your sternum as if something is attempting to gut you—to excise the pain that burrows too deep for you to rip out yourself.
Something stirs beneath your skin, wriggling and writhing until you move. You can't stay still. Wiping the tears from your eyes, you waddle to put your shoes on before shrugging your coat over your shoulders and vanishing outside where the temperature is bitter and pierces through you almost as bad as any word ever could. Without socks, the texture of the inside of your shoes digs deep into your feet like glass shards you can't pick out.
A thin layer of snow coats your property in a post-new-years celebration but the beauty is lost on you. Dazzling rime coating the tapering branches on the trees means nothing to you when you're focused on the ground and how your feet break through the crust of snow like they're the eggshells you always walked on when you were around your mother. It hits you square in the chest like a baseball, and you don't even know where the trigger comes from. It's as if your team lead was created in a lab to see just how close the universe could replicate how it felt to be a little girl who was too stupid to ever be loved properly.
It's all your fault—always has been. (Your dad leaving. Every bad mark you ever got in school. Getting pneumonia from playing in the rain. Your first boyfriend shattering your heart into unmendable pieces. Eating alone during lunch. Jamming your finger in the front door. Breaking your mum's favorite mug. Laughing too loud in your room. Hugging your granny too tight. Being too much. Being too you. Existing in the dining room, in the living room, in the backyard, too close to your mum, in school, at the park during the summer, sitting on the bench waiting for someone to notice you, to say hi, to save you, to say you're worth it, worth everything you've ever dreamed of. Lying in bed, music playing in your earbuds so as to not annoy mum, staring at the ceiling, daydreaming about what would happen if you were to get hurt. Comatose in a hospital, unmoving, unspeaking, but still able to hear how your mum might apologize, how the friends you forged in your mind would come to care for you, how you'd wake up with a new life, a better one, one where you could hug your mum without feeling every muscle in her body tense as if it detested the very idea of your existence. A new life where you could be loved). Everything bad that has ever happened to you has been because of you.
Once, your mother told you she hoped that you would have a kid that acted just like you so you could see first hand everything she had to suffer through while raising you. Even to this day, you wonder what's so terrible about you that you would be cursed with something so cruel.
"Darling?"
A gloved hand slips over your bicep stopping you in your tracks. You can feel the texture of it through your jacket, pressing into your skin, indenting you, morphing you into a shape you wish you could recognize but can't. John's eyes are somehow so warm compared to the algid backdrop that sprawls out behind him. A blue so dark you could swim in it, deep like blood swirling in water.
Another ache ripples through you and it only grows in intensity the longer you stare at John, teeth digging into the inside of your cheeks as you try not to fully break. Your perimeter is crumbling. Powdery snow blowing away with the slightest breath of wind. The tears on your face begin to freeze to your cheeks, but John beats you to wiping them away. He tosses something in his other hand onto the ground before using the soft side of his glove to soak up the brine. It isn't until you look at the ground to avoid his gaze that you realize he's been shoveling the sidewalk, something of which you've ruined by tracking more snow onto the freshly cleared areas.
"What's wrong?" His voice is so tender that the words fall around his teeth, like slow cooked meat slipping off bone.
You sniff but the snot building up in your sinuses hardly moves, forcing a sharp sigh out of your mouth as you shake your head. "Work is just… just so frustrating."
It's impossible to tell him how you're spiraling—why you're spiraling. Everything always links back to her in some unexpected way. It blindsides you. Whenever you feel useless (which is often) it always bubbles up to the surface like blood you can't wash clean; a wound that refuses to heal.
"I'm sorry, darling. You'll be on leave before you know it," John gently rationalizes.
He pulls you closer, body against his. His warmth bleeds through the layers separating the two of you, like nothing in the world would ever be able to fully keep the two of you apart. It's impossible to fully let your guard down long enough to go limp against him, but you try anyway. In the midst of the snow, of the pain still rippling through your abdomen.
"I just can't handle them sometimes. It's like they're not even human with the way they don't realize we have feelings or need breaks or are people. I love working from home and I'm happy with my schedule and the flexibility it offers but—ah!"
You lurch forward like someone is tugging on your bellybutton. John's hands rest on your shoulders, keeping you steady as he maneuvers you to face him. "Easy now."
"I'm fine," you insist. "Just some Braxton Hicks."
"Let's get you inside." With your hand in his, he's already leading you back towards the cottage. He holds you like you're fragile. A porcelain doll that will shatter at any moment. "I think some rest would do you good."
By the time you get back inside and you've shrugged your coat and boots off, the Braxton Hicks contractions have stopped. It takes little effort for John to convince you to take the rest of the day off to lie in bed and rest. You don't even bother messaging your team lead about you either. John butters you up with freshly brewed tea before pulling the covers over your body. Minutes later, you smell the faint aroma of smoke as he lights a fresh fire in the hearth, and you're reminded of the times you used to escape here as a kid when your mother was sick of you but your grandparents were always more than happy to take you in.
From a young age, this place has always been your sanctuary. You think that's part of the reason why you were so eager to accept such a dilapidating cottage when it was offered to you. Your grandmother is no longer around, but you still are, as are the memories of you huddling in your assigned room, curling up tight, and finally being able to cry in a place where emotion isn't a crime.
It's no small feat pushing the past out of your mind long enough to calm your brain into slumber, but all your hard work is wasted with a torturous dream. You're back in school again, wandering hallways that never seem to end. Every door you try to open is locked, but you can hear people inside. They're laughing. Whispering. You can't hear what they're saying, but you know it's about you.
Eventually, there's a teacher. Slacks and a flannel shirt—he's faced away from you and walking a fair distance down the hallway. You don't recall his name, so you just shout sir! sir! over and over until you're able to pick up the pace enough to catch up to him. He refuses to turn around and acknowledge you until you're tugging on his arm like a child begging a stranger for help finding their parents.
Revulsion soaks the features of his face as he stares at you, eyes wandering over your body until his brows raise. "Couldn't make it to the bathroom?"
The bed is wet when you wake up.
Everything sticks to you. Your clothes, the blankets, the mattress. When you sit up to look down at yourself, you realize there is… something all over you. You question for a moment if you've really wet yourself in your sleep like a child. Embarrassment gnaws at the tips of your ears as you attempt to convince yourself it's normal—you do have a growing baby sitting on top of your bladder, after all—but when you slip out of bed and stand up, there's more. It pours out of you, dripping down your legs, splattering onto the floor. No amount of holding it in will stop it. It spills out of you like pitiful apologies.
The realization of what it is hits you in unison with a contraction. It's strong. Stronger than your Braxton Hicks ever were. You bend forward with a gasp as your hands brace against the edge of the bed. It lasts so long you're not sure if it will ever end, but by the time it fades you're left breathless and trembling.
You suck in a sharp breath as your hands hold your stomach. "John!"
All it takes is one beckoning of his name before you hear his feet on the floor. His pace is quick. Worried. He pauses in the doorway and stares at you in your wet clothes with your sweaty brow. You see him connect the dots quicker than you could, and terrified realization soaks into the intense blue of his eyes.
"I think the baby's coming."
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Post-tbi!soap who, after the the months of recovery, never fully got his sense of location back. Oftentimes wandering off in the middle of a task, forgetting where he is and needing to be reminded. He used to end up in the middle of the road at night, knowing he was doing...something.
Vs
Clingy!reader who constantly has a hand on him to stop him wandering in the shops. You love listening to soap talk about his interests, you stay engaged and ask questions and in turn soap doesn't get lost. He doesn't end up lost in the dark at night because you're whining "johnny? Where are you going?" If he even gets up to piss, following behind sleepily.
Just...someone made for johnny. Johnny never finding your clingyness anything other than useful, you never finding his constantly wandering annoying.
summary: the lads make john a hinge profile against his will, and to everyone’s surprise, he matches with you within ninety seconds
cw: mdni, fem!reader, age gap (30/43), idk how hinge actually works tbh, john price the feminist, alcohol, insecurities, fluff, smut, oral f rec, piv (14.4k)
John has been irritable for months and it's getting worse.
He knows it the way you know a tooth is starting to rot from the inside, tongue prodding at it every hour.
On Wednesday, he reamed Johnny out for being three minutes late to the briefing. It was the kind of reaming that had everyone's eyes turned down into their coffees and files while Johnny stood in front at attention, toes squared, ears hot.
John went on and on, red-faced, telling him that his 'admin's a disgrace', and that he'd better 'get a fuckin' grip before you're explaining your timings to your old CO'.
Somewhere in the middle of it — around ‘disgrace’ — John heard himself.
He finished the dress-down anyway. Ending on a firm threat of a year-long inventory assignment.
It was rough enough to watch that when the room cleared out, Simon hung back. He stayed in his seat, leaning back with his arms folded, eyes following John as he aggressively organized his paperwork at the front of the room,squaring stacks that were already square.
"You need somethin', Riley?" John asked, never looking up.
Simon's mouth was twisted beneath his balaclava as he weighed his options. He wasn't especially eager to be John's second victim of the day, but it'd been miserable for weeks with no stop in sight. In the end, he decided to be straight—
"Y'need'a get laid, boss."
John's hands immediately froze.
That unyielding anger came up his chest right on schedule — insubordinate, out of line — and then couldn't quite find his footing in it because the truth was a trapdoor just under him.
His eyes flicked up and across the room, ears warming up just like Johnny's had an hour ago.
"Bloody ornery, you are," Simon went on. "'ave been."
Simon wasn't wrong, John knew that.
The work winds them all too tight — adrenaline that can't be spent, images that don't erase, choices made under duress that keep them questioning at three in the morning. And everyone's got a valve that lets the steam out. Johnny shouts his out at the football. Kyle has somewhere to be lately that he's cagey about, and Simon has whatever Simon has, no one asks.
And John drives home, shuts the door, and the house is quiet, his walls holding all the built-up pressure.
Ten months since his usual I'm-Home-Hookup found herself a steady bloke and stopped answering his calls. He'd told himself the whole time it was casual right up until it ended, when he learned it had actually been load-bearing.
And was that affecting his mood? Maybe.
His eyes narrowed on Simon and his jaw ticked at the hinge. He threw his chin toward the open door.
"Fuck off out've my briefin' room, Lieutenant."
Simon's chair scraped across the linoleum when he stood, sighing through the cloth over his face.
"I jus' think—"
"OUT."
The door clicked shut behind him, and John stood in the silence for a moment.
Then he squared the stacks again.
——
Johnny never volunteers to bring the beer, yet here he is at half seven with a box of glass bottles rattling on his shoulder, grinning under the porch light. Behind him, the headcount runs long by one. Three men when John only agreed to two. Kyle with a canvas bag full of crisps. Simon at the back, hands sunk in his pockets.
"Thought it was just you and Garrick?"
"Aye, well." Johnny shoulders past him into the hall, close enough that their shirts drag. "Simon heard there was football."
"Simon doesn't care about football," John retorts as the rest of them push their way inside.
"I care 'bout football," Simon lies through a simper no one can see, wiping his boots on the mat.
Unfortunately for John, his team is undoubtedly adept at what they've trained in and he doesn’t always catch when there’s fuckery afoot.
Under his nose, in his very own home, Johnny distracts him with talk about the match while Kyle lifts his phone from the side table just beside his elbow. Simon waits an appropriate amount of time before slipping away to the kitchen to guess the passcode, which he manages in one go.
"Gonna have to talk to him 'bout that…" Kyle mumbles as he swipes to the App Store.
"He textin' anyone?" Simon cranes his neck over Kyle's shoulder. "He used t’see tha’ one bird… wot was her name…?"
"Leah," Kyle answers flatly. "Laura?" he second-guesses as he thumbs in the passcode again to approve the install: Hinge Dating App. "M'not lookin' at his texts, mate. Be lucky he doesn't RTU us just for this. Plus, I think he said she started seeing some—"
"—y'know, Cap," Johnny's voice cuts through, a warning for the men in the kitchen. "I can get ye another beer, y'don't have…"
Simon and Kyle glance up from where they've leaned against the counter and freeze when John appears in the doorway, face screwed with suspicion. His eyes flick between the phone in Kyle's grasp and the faces lit behind it.
His initial thought is that the phone's got a nice, durable case, proper practical. His second thought is to start patting down his pockets with his free hand — which all turn up empty.
The room's gone still, a collective held breath to see which way the tension'll break.
"That's my phone."
"It is," Kyle agrees carefully.
Johnny appears at John's shoulder, squeezing past into the kitchen. "Cap, before you start—"
"When'd you nick it?" His eyes accurately settle on Kyle, the slickest of the bunch.
"Doesn't matter when, sir. We just—"
"It matters to me." John puts his empty beer bottle on the table and uses both hands now to pat down his pockets a second time, not quite believing his own team got the drop on him. "Professionally speakin',” he mumbles.
"Wot really needs addressin' is your passcode," Simon grumbles. "0-0-0-6?"
"Christ," Johnny snickers.
John chooses to ignore them and holds his hand out, palm up. But Kyle doesn't fork it over. Instead, he looks back at the screen and watches the progress ring around the icon close in on itself.
"What're we doin' right now?" John presses, stepping closer.
"Jus' take a seat, boss," Simon suggests, gesturing to the kitchen table just as Johnny yanks a chair out, beaming something mischievous.
John looks at the chair, then looks at Johnny.
"Think I'll stand."
"Suit yourself," Johnny spins the chair around and drops into it, arms folding over the back.
Kyle checks the screen one more time before turning it around. A new little white icon sits on John's home screen, Kyle points at it. John squints to read the little letters beneath it.
"What's Hinge?"
"It's a dating app," Kyle answers and places the phone on the table.
A dating app….
Grown adults sorting through each other like they're shopping. Swipe, tap, Add to Cart. He's heard the lads chat about it for years — the 'ghosting', the games — and always thought: thank god that's not me.
Under the simmering contempt, the idea of typing hello to a stranger who might simply never reply (left on read, whatever ungodly hour of the soul that phrase was invented in) shoots something cold through him.
There's a beat of hesitation before his eyes snap to Simon, the scowl on his face carrying the weight of Wednesday's interaction.
"This is you, then?"
"Team effort," Simon corrects without a flicker of shame.
"It's no' the dodgy kind of app, it's for relationships," Johnny explains. "Says so in their slogan: 'designed to be deleted'. You make a profile, upload a few pics, answer some—"
"I know how online dating works, MacTavish."
Johnny squints. "Do ye, though?"
"You've been rank for months, sir." Kyle tells it plainly. "Whole teams sayin' it."
John feels like he’s been put on a rinse cycle in the wash. His nostrils flare as he snuffs his irritation back down his chest lest he prove them right in his own kitchen.
"So that's what all this is? A Friday night welfare check?"
"It's no' a welfare check," Johnny defends poorly, voice cracking at a pitch too high.
"It's a bit of a welfare check," Kyle shrugs.
"Right." John reaches for his phone. "Well, thanks for the concern, lads. Truly. Warms the heart."
Kyle slides it just out of reach. "Just give it a shot, sir," he implores. "Try it for the weekend. If you still hate it, I'll delete it and we'll never bring it up again."
John's chin tucks to his chest and he glowers at him from under his deeply furrowed brow. "You'll delete it now," he orders, except these men have never listened to him off the field.
"I could," he agrees, wrestling a smirk. "And you can keep spending your Friday nights with us."
It's meant as a joke. It doesn't land as one.
Because John looks around at the three of them and knows in a few hours their engines will fade down the street and that hulking quiet will pour back in, the one he keeps calling peace.
So… he pulls out a chair.
Simon pushes off the counter and Johnny's grin pulls wider.
"Go on," John surrenders, falling into the seat with a sigh. He does not look at any of their faces because whatever's on them’s going to make him cross.
Chairs scrape and Kyle settles down at John’s arm, Simon looms over them from behind, all crowded around the one screen.
The basics go quick — name, age, pronouns. Kyle finds his rhythm working through the questions.
"Drinks? Socially. Smokes…?" Kyle seesaws his head a bit. "We'll say no."
"I smoke cigars," John protests.
"That's a personality trait, not a habit." Kyle scrolls. "Height?"
"Six-two," Johnny says immediately.
"He's six-foot," Simon corrects.
"Aye, and on the app he's six-two."
Kyle selects 6'. "Occupation?"
That one hangs in the air a bit longer than the rest, and John doesn't quite know why. His hands turn palm-up on the table with the question.
"Consultant," Simon offers.
"Civil servant," Kyle tries.
"Military," John answers irritably off the edge of a scoff.
Three sets of eyes come up off the phone — Johnny's eyebrows go high, Kyle's mouth opens to argue, Simon tilts his head just enough, as if to say: if you say so.
"It's not a state secret that I serve," John says, eyebrows pulling close with confusion.
Kyle types it despite whatever he's got hanging on the tip of his tongue. And in the little silence afterward, the obvious question finally comes to mind.
"What've you lot got on yours, then?"
The simple question sends a tidal wave of overlapping chatter and excuses over the table.
"Ah, well—" Johnny starts.
"I actually—" Kyle says, at the same time.
"Different app," Simon adds, under both of them.
"—see, it depends," Johnny goes on, trying to gain volume over the others, "I like to keep the profile fresh. Rotate the pics, the bio—"
"—don't have one," Kyle is saying over the top of him, "because me and Amara are— well, it's not official-official, but it's a thing, so—"
"Been usin' Feeld," Simon finishes.
When the wave recedes, the full picture comes into view: Johnny reinvents himself on a cycle, Kyle has Amara, mentioned now for the first time ever. And Simon—
"What's Feeld?" John asks.
"No," Kyle says before the question has its punctuation, quick and stern, head whipping back and forth. “Absolutely not. We'll talk about that another time."
"It's not for you," Simon adds.
"Right," he mumbles, taking a pull of his beer, settling back against the chair. He inhales and looks off at the window. "M'glad it's amateurs running my love life."
"Enthusiasts," Johnny corrects.
The rest goes quicker.
"What kind of connection?" Kyle reads. "Options are: Long-term. Short-term. Short-term, open to long. Long-term, open to short."
"Short, open to long," John answers without hesitation.
Johnny opens his mouth but Simon glares at him just as quickly through his ragged eyeholes, and he closes it without a word.
His profile photos have to come off the lads' phones since John's camera roll offers nothing but screenshots of maps, car parts, and three random pictures of the K9, Xena, from another unit on base (he’s been trying to snatch her for his own team for months).
He watches the photos of himself go by and it's a strange census, seeing a year of himself entirely through other people's eyes. Makes him queasy, so he takes another bitter gulp to wash the feeling out.
There's a short argument about the proper order the pictures should be presented, Johnny wins.
After, Kyle starts explaining what a good prompt does, how to choose one. He hardly gets any words out before John's holding his hand out the same way he did half an hour ago.
"I'll do these myself."
This time, Kyle hands the phone over.
The lads drift to the far end of the table to finally give John the space they've neglected to all night.
Fresh beers are cracked open and a bag of crisps demolished as they fold into their own conversations. The match they’ve been ignoring comes first, then Amara, whom Kyle spends five minutes refusing to elaborate on, and somewhere in there Simon mentions an oddities shop he’s been meaning to stop by.
John sits with his reading glasses on, typing slowly, brows low in concentration.
When he finally sets the phone down, all three of them quickly move behind him.
"So, their profile comes up on screen," Kyle reaches over to demonstrate. "Have a look, read the bio. If you wanna chat to her, tap the heart. If you don't, hit the X, and you'll never see her again. Simple."
The first woman is on a beach holding a cocktail the size of a fishbowl. X.
"Okaay," Kyle drawls, mouth pulling straight. "Sure. Was there a reason, or…"
"No."
The next woman is at a festival covered in glitter and feathers. X.
So is the one after. X.
A woman in her work scrubs. X.
A woman holding a child. X.
A woman in a bikini on a lake (his eyes linger). X.
It's not that they're not lovely. Some of them probably are. But every picture is a performance — arms out, teeth out, look how much fun I am. Advertisements.
"The fish," Johnny mourns as another goes down, a woman on a small boat holding a big trout up. "Cap, she was fishin'. You love fishin'!"
"Wasn't her fish," he grumbles under his breath.
"Whose fish d'you reckon, then?"
"Bloke she cropped out," Simon says, and John tips the neck of his beer toward him.
"Give me criteria," Kyle pleads, both hands on the back of John's chair, gripping with restraint. "I can work with criteria."
"He's calibratin'," Simon says. "Let 'im work it out."
Simon's giving him too much credit. He's not calibrating. He's not reading these women, he's not even really looking at them. Each X is just the whole premise being declined, proof accumulating that he was right about the app all along, and if the profiles run out, well, he tried. Right? The lads witnessed it. He can get back to his peace with a clear—
His thumb stops and hovers, then pulls back to the outer edge of the phone case.
Huh.
There you are.
Up a trail somewhere, hills of green grass rolling behind you, hood half-blown off, one hand trying to catch it. You're laughing at whoever's taking the picture, smile wide.
John's not sure he's ever seen eyes twinkle before, but that must be what yours are doing, shimmering even under overcast.
You're very pretty.
For the first time, John taps the profile open.
30. Executive Assistant. 4 Miles Away. Short-Term, Open to Long-Term.
Executive Assistant, so you likely work too much. That's familiar to him, something he understands inside-out.
There's a photo of you in office clothes at what looks like a retirement party, smile an edge more saccharine than the one on the hill.
Another of you criss-cross on the floor, a black and caramel cat stretched out and content in your lap, belly-up. Shirt low cut, cleavage to feast on. He is sixty percent gentleman about how long he looks at it.
And at the bottom:
The best way to ask me out is by: using words.
I recently discovered that: I'm better in person than I am on here.
John huffs an amusement through his nose. He spent more time on his profile than he thinks you spent on yours. Seems like you're tired of the same things he's already tired of, one night in.
Behind him, the lads have gone silent, holding their breath.
John taps the heart and his screen goes bright with a wash of confetti, both your photos ringed together:
IT'S A MATCH!
"Oh, shit, she already matched with you," Kyle cranes his neck closer to inspect.
"Gimme that." Johnny plucks the phone from John's hand. "No way," he scoffs. "Fuckin' fit. A bit young for you, Cap, aye?" He looks at John, then back at the screen like the two won't reconcile in his brain.
"Careful," John warns mildly.
Johnny hands the phone back, muttering something in Scots only Simon could translate.
John doesn't hear much of it anyway. He's already looking at your photo again.
Better in person.
Yeah. He'd bet you are.
"Right, sir," Kyle says. "Now we wait. Midday tomorrow the earliest. Message her any sooner and it reads keen."
"It'd be accurate," he deadpans.
"There's rules, Cap," Johnny says. "No messagin' straight away, no double-textin', keep a wee bit of mystery."
John turns in his chair with a scowl to look up at the three of them.
"So, you're tellin' me a woman says she's interested in you and you… make her wait?"
Silence.
"I mean, when you put it like that…"
"Yeah, s'a bit fuckin' rude, innit?" John derides, turning back around.
He's already typing, screen tipped away.
"Sir," Kyle pleads. "At least let us read it."
"This is a two person conversation, not a five piece."
He presses send and quickly pockets the phone.
——
Four miles away, a phone lights up…
——
Your windows are open to the last of a long evening, warm air breezing through the sheer curtains. You’re finally on the couch. Shower taken, its heat still damp in your skin. A glass of off-dry riesling teeters precariously on the arm, cold from the fridge and sweating through its stemless glass.
Twix is a puddled tortoiseshell furnace against your thigh, one paw twitching through a dream, her purr winding down as she drops deeper. And on the telly, Last Christmas is on. You've seen it a dozen times, that's why you leave it — it's mindless.
The second glass goes down easier than the first, tart on your tongue, blooming warm in your belly and over your cheeks.
Somewhere in the lull, your thumb opens Hinge, a reflex to being bored. You don't really expect anything from it anymore.
A man holding a fish, sunglasses on. X.
A man whose photos are all group shots. X.
A man who is 6'2" and it's his entire personality. X.
Your thumb knows the rhythm without you.
The next profile slides into view and you pause, thumb hovering.
He's handsome in that sort of rugged, classic way. His beard is salted at the edges, lines beside his eyes creased deep, cheeks faintly rosy. He's mid-laugh at what looks like a Christmas party, red and green tinsel drooping off the beams behind him; head slightly tipped, one heavy hand flat on the table. He's not cackling, you can tell it's more reserved, but it's probably still more than he usually offers.
John. 43. Military. Four miles away. Short-Term, Open to Long-Term.
The one thing you should know about me is: I'm gone a lot for work. But when I'm home, I'm home.
Most men bury the catch in the fine print, but he's leading with it.
You don't know yet whether that's honesty or efficiency. You suspect that with him they might be the same thing.
His second photo is of him on the tailgate of some enormous vehicle, fatigues taut over his thighs, thumbs hooked through his bulky khaki plate carrier, looking up from under the brim of his hat.
Two truths and a lie: I've never seen Star Wars. I have a lie-in every Sunday. I've had tea with a warlord.
The sky is pink with the morning in his third picture. He's thigh-deep in a lake, turned away from the camera entirely. (You're noticing it's a common theme that he does not look at the camera for any photo.) The sunlight catches the breadth of his back and shoulders, cotton molded around muscle.
Don't hate me if I: call instead of text. It's quicker.
You giggle just enough that Twix's ear rotates toward you in reproach.
It's kinda cute when older men put more effort into their profiles.
But the alarm is already going off somewhere in the back of your skull — too good, probably old photos, probably has a wife — it has never once failed to ring. But you're two glasses in, and the heart really costs nothing even if the conversation seems off.
You tap it, and put the phone facedown on your thigh.
On the telly, Emilia Clarke is busy falling for a man you happen to know has been dead the entire film. You mouth one of his lines along with him, not really invested, wine warm in your chest, Twix breathing slow against your leg.
Then your phone buzzes against you once, and you ignore it, because you have rules about lunging for male attention. But then it buzzes again, and, well, you just turn it over to have a look. Maybe it's your mum, you don't know!
HINGE: You and John matched!
HINGE: 1 New Message
You open it.
Evening. Not much good at using the app, but I really wanted to chat to you. How's your Friday night?
You hum to yourself curiously. Not an innuendo or emoji in sight.
i actually volunteer helping the elderly with technology, happy to walk you through it.
friday's been average. wine and a movie on the couch. how's yours?
You put the phone back down and focus on the film, but his reply comes within the minute.
Ouch. Friday's alright. The lads invited themselves round for the match. Still here, unfortunately.
you're messaging me with guests in the house? terrible host.
They invited themselves. Hosting rules don't apply.
What movie are you watching?
You glance at the telly where a dead man is mid-song and weigh lying about it.
You could be watching anything. You could pick something more interesting, something with a deep lesson, educational, historical, something niche to come off cool and worldly.
you're not allowed to judge me.
Judging is sort of my life's work, but I'll do my best.
You snort. Twix relocates to the far cushion in protest.
it's called 'last christmas'. i don't know why it's on in july, but i've probably seen it twelve times. it's good background noise.
The reply takes slightly longer this time. You picture him all big hands, small phone, and then stop picturing him, because that's how it starts.
Twelve times? Must be decent.
it's objectively not. the love interest is dead the entire film lol
Dead?
it's a twist. it's festive!
You and I have very different definitions for "festive". I've got a few questions. But I'll save them.
You smile.
so, your lake photo. did you catch anything that day?
Not a thing.
hours in freezing water for zero fish?!
The fish aren't the point.
do tell, what's the point?
The mist off the water. The quiet. The no one expecting anything from you.
It's the first real answer a man has given you on this app in, like, six months.
You feel oddly like you've been handed something and should keep your hands still so it doesn't spook.
that actually sounds really peaceful.
i've never been fishing, but i do love nature in the mornings. i have a trail by me that i like to trek early on weekends.
That the trail from your photo?
it is! my best friend actually made me go that day, i wasn't in the mood. complained the whole way.
Doesn't show.
Good photo of you.
Beautiful, actually.
You stare at the screen and feel warmth tickling your nape, sliding lower, molten and slow.
Every instinct you have reaches for deflection.
oh! thank you. the wind did most of the work lol
No it didn't.
— and he just takes the deflection off you, like being returned something you've dropped. You press the cool curve of the wine glass against your cheek and remind yourself, sternly, that this is a stranger on the internet.
well, for the record your photo's not bad either. handsome smile.
Somewhere past ten, you notice the conversation keeps not ending.
how long have you been on hinge?
It's my first night, actually.
first night???
Profile's about two hours old.
yikes, so i'm just the practice woman then, huh?
Practice implies I'm planning to do this again.
——
John's still at the kitchen table, reading glasses pushed up into his hair now, beer gone warm at his elbow. The lads have migrated to the living room doorway — close enough to monitor, far enough to pretend they aren't.
He knows they're watching, and he's been watched by better.
What he can't seem to manage is his fuckin' face — it keeps doing things beyond his control, and every time your reply comes he has to reel it back to neutral, and he can tell by the quality of the silence behind him that he's not reeling nearly fast enough.
"He's smilin' again," Johnny murmurs, elbowing Simon in the ribs.
"Shameless," John mumbles, without looking up. "All of you."
He's typing when the floor creaks jus to his left. When he glances up, Johnny has drifted to his shoulder under the pretense of collecting empties.
"Need another, Cap?"
"I need you three feet back, MacTavish," he replies, thumbs tapping away.
A minute later it's Kyle from the doorway, "If she asks about hobbies, don't lead with the cigars. They poll badly amongst females."
"'Females'?" John grimaces, face down, thumbs still at it. "Say it with me Garrick, 'women'."
Then Simon, who hasn't moved or spoken in twenty minutes, asks, "Wot's she sayin', then?"
John rolls his eyes and sets the phone face-down, pushing himself up out of the chair.
"Time to go, lads," he says with an obviously fake smile, gesturing his arm out towards his front door. "Goodnight."
"It's no' even eleven oclock!" Johnny complains.
"Then the night's still young. Go on, fuck off."
They go — bottles gathered, snacks cleaned up, Simon herding Johnny down the hall as he’s still negotiating.
Then their engines fade down the street, and the quiet pours back in, right on schedule. Except tonight it arrives and there's a phone lit on his kitchen table with your name on it, and the quiet — for the first time in a long while — has to wait.
He locks up, kills the TV, then drops into his armchair with the phone already unlocked.
did the football finish? who won?
He glances at the dead telly. Hasn't a clue.
Couldn't tell you.
omg lol you had ONE reason for guests tonight!
I got distracted.
by what? 😇
I think you know by what.
Nothing comes back for a minute. He pictures you on your couch, that cat beside you, deciding what to do with it — and it occurs to him, mildly horrifying, that he's enjoying this. The wait. The little emoji with the halo, transparently unrepentant. He finds himself smiling at the ceiling like there's something written on it.
anyway!
Anyway.
He'll allow it: retreat granted. There's no rush.
The cat in your photo. Yours?
yes! that’s twix. she's a menace.
Good name.
she prefers men that ignore her.
Then we'd get on fine. I'm very good at ignoring cats.
It goes on just like that: easy.
You ask if he's a morning person and learn he's up at five most days by choice; he learns you consider five the middle of the night.
He talks about the Brecon Beacons — the actual Beacons, the ones he loves, not the ones that nearly killed him at twenty-two. You tell him you've always wanted to go, and he catches himself already planning the route he'd take you. Then quickly chastises himself.
How's the average Friday held up?
certainly improved
Mine too.
He puts the phone on the arm of the chair and sits in his quiet house, and for once it doesn’t feel so desolate.
——
The following morning he's up at five. He starts drinking his coffee at the counter, looking out the window over the sink, the sorbet summer sky bleeding morning.
He thinks of you before he can stop himself. Asleep, presumably, five being the middle of the night and all. Then he takes the coffee out to his back step for some fresh air.
He wonders if he was any good with the messaging last night. It's the longest he's ever sat with his phone in his hand, period. Let alone chatting with someone. There's no debrief for it, that's the trouble. No one to tell him whether ‘I got distracted.’ read as charming or desperate.
He runs the entire two-hour exchange back over and over and finds no actionable errors, but remains unconvinced.
He goes for his run at six. The route climbs uphill around klick seven, and somewhere on the hill he thinks about your photo, your smile, your mouth. He wonders what you smell like, what you sound like when you're being sarcastic.
By noon he's under the Land Rover draining the old oil, and he catches himself pondering what you might do on a Saturday. Whether you slept in properly. Whether the cat allows it; he grew up with one himself and knows how demanding they can be when they're ready for a feeding.
He hasn't messaged yet and neither have you.
He couldn't say exactly why he's held off. Something the lads said about being keen, and rules, and mystery lodged somewhere he can't reach to dig it out. He's not normally a man that takes doctrine from Johnny MacTavish, and yet… here he is.
It's a stupid fuckin' rule.
The afternoon goes long and gets quiet in the old way.
The house at four o'clock has a particular acoustic he knows down to the plumbing, and today, for the first time, he notices himself noticing it. It never used to be so obvious. Years of Saturdays like this one and it took his phone going quiet for half a day to show him the loneliness so plainly.
By the evening he's got Chinese takeaway at the kitchen table, eating it straight from the carton, chopsticks shoveling fried noodles down his gullet while he does the crossword from the morning paper in his head.
That's when his phone lights up for the first time all day, buzzing three times in succession — he absolutely hates how quickly it's in his hand.
spent six hours wedding dress shopping with my best friend. i need a glass of wine and a lie down.
thought of you on the tube home
He reads the second message again.
Thought of you.
He’d been drafting the same admission since noon and something in his chest going catastrophically hot.
are you still up? i know sundown is bedtime for your generation.
And there's the sarcasm.
Outside the window, the sun is — he checks — still up. Barely. He's got that going for him, at least.
Just in time. Was about to take my dentures out.
Thought about you as well.
He types the second line fast before he can be a coward about it. If you can say it, he can say it. Fair's fair.
I do have a question now though. It's not your wedding we're shopping for, is it? That'd be proper inconvenient for me.
lol no! maid of honor. today was purely supervisory.
don't really see myself getting married anyway.
the dresses were stunning though!
He’s picking up on a pattern. Three messages arriving like one exhale — the vulnerable thing said flanked with distraction.
Nothing wrong with that.
Successful trip then? Or is there another six hours coming?
successful! she found it. there were tears and champagne.
what about you, how was your saturday?
He’s had a day spent purposefully not doing the one thing he wanted to do.
Quiet. Nothing worth typing.
hm. sounds like you should ring me then…
He looks at that one for a moment and blinks, the inside of his cheek finds itself between his teeth.
For all their blabbering, the lads did not warn him about this bit. Not that he can't speak on the phone, he prefers it. You're essentially quoting his profile back at him. But he's been thinking about something since roughly the fourth time you crossed his mind today, and a phone call isn't the ask he's been building up to.
Could do.
Truthfully, though. I was just working up the courage to ask you for a drink.
Courage. He's used that word in citations, for men who ran toward gunfire, heroes. Now he’s using it to describe the act of asking a woman on a date, and the genuinely undignified part is that it's regrettably accurate.
Your reply takes a minute. He watches the dots start and stop, and start again. God, he's been shot at with less suspense.
Then your message comes through and it's just a number. Ten digits. It buzzes in his hand once more.
for logistics.
He stares at it for a beat and then he's up out of his seat. Takeaway abandoned, at the fridge with his phone still in one hand, snapping the cap off a beer on the lip of the counter, and then he's out the back door into the garden where the evening's gone navy and the air’s still warm from the day.
He saves your number first. Then he stands there a moment, beer sweating in one hand, thumb over the call button in the other.
——
You’ve just tipped the bottle over your glass when the phone starts buzzing against the counter.
Unknown Number. Local.
“John?”
“Evenin’.”
Fuck.
His voice lands an octave lower than you were braced for. A honeyed gravel that seeps into your ear and slides thick over your spine, pooling somewhere behind your ribs.
You set the bottle down before you drop it.
“So you actually do ring,” you manage.
“Said so on the profile, I think.”
“I half thought it was a bit.”
“I don’t really do bits.”
“No,” you say through a grin, picking up your glass and drifting toward the couch. You drop your voice into a gravelly impression of him: “You’re a very serious man.”
The laugh that comes down the line is quiet — more breath than sound, warm at the bottom of it, like you’ve caught him somewhere he doesn’t usually go.
“That meant to be me?”
“It’s uncanny, I know.”
The line goes quiet a moment — the good kind, neither of you rushing to fill it — and in it you catch the sounds of his side: a whirl of breeze, the faint ring of a glass set down on iron. He’s outside. You picture a tidy yard with tall dark hedges, a big man pacing slowly with a beer.
“Am I interruptin’ the wine?”
“The wine and I are happy to share the time.”
“Good.” There's a pause that you can hear his smile in. “I have a beer out here. Seemed only fair we’re both suffering the same.”
“Are we having our drink right now? Is this it?”
“No,” he says immediately, unamused even — which is very amusing for you. “This one doesn’t count.”
The speed of his reply sends something fizzing under your sternum. You tuck your feet up under yourself and take a slow sip.
“No?” you tease.
“I had imagined I’d see your face.”
“Been imagining, have you?”
You are very glad he cannot see your face right now. Cheeks warm and strained, you press the cool of the wine glass briefly against them in turns
“Nothin’ mucky if that’s what you’re gettin’ at.”
“Mm, no, 'course not. You’ve been a proper gentleman. Haven’t even thrown me a cheeky pick-up line.”
“I could workshop somethin’ for you if you’d like.”
“No thanks,” you giggle into your glass. “It was a relief when I opened your first message and it wasn’t a riddles-three about your dick.”
You can hear his scoff and recoil on the other end.
“Is that what it’s come to?”
“Unfortunately.”
There’s a short silence you’d swear is him coming to terms with the modern world, and you bite down on a smile.
“Right,” he says, and there's a controlled shift in his voice. “My question...”
Your stomach does a free-fall, nauseating and fluttery, fifteen again on the Detonator at Thorpe Park.
“Mm?” you hum around a sip, deeply casual, a woman entirely unbothered, curled so tight around the phone that Twix doesn’t have a leg to lie on.
“There’s a pub about halfway between us, Lamb & Flag. I’d like to take you for that drink tomorrow. Will you come?”
Then you remember what tomorrow is and sigh, immediately irritated with your whole family.
“Ugh, I want to say yes,” you sulk. “But I’ve got Sunday dinner with my family tomorrow. My mum would hunt me for sport if I flaked.”
“Fair. Wouldn’t want that on my conscience.”
“I could do a weeknight? After work?”
There’s a pause on his end.
“I’d rather not promise you a weeknight,” he admits. “I rarely get away on time, and I’m not startin’ this by standin' you up.”
You go quiet for a beat, you were ready for the usual ‘ahh, well, we’ll figure something out’. But instead got a man mindful of your time; a unicorn, really.
“Also fair. And— and thoughtful.”
“Friday, then?” he tries hopefully, you catch the small lean in his voice.
“Friday’s perfect,” you agree. “It’s a date!”
“It is,” he agrees, smiling.
The conversation should end there but it doesn't.
You learn things no profile has a field for; that he talks slower than he types, that he hm's real low in his throat when he’s considering something, that when you make him laugh it rumbles, so rough at the bottom that you feel at the back of your knees.
Somewhere past the hour mark you stop scrutinizing the call for red flags and just talk, and you only notice you’ve stopped when Twix jumps onto the couch and you realize you’ve been lying down for a while, phone balanced on your ear like you’re seventeen.
Eventually, you yawn.
“Right,” he says, and you can hear him moving, standing up by the way he tries to muffle a stiff groan. “That’s my cue.”
“Aw, no! I’m fine, really.”
“It’s late, love. And you’ve got your family tomorrow.”
“True. And you’ve got… whatever it is old men do on Sundays.”
“Lie-in, according to my profile.”
“Ha!” you bark, vindicated alone in your living room, having forgot about his little 'two truths and a lie'. “That’s the lie, I bet. I don’t think you’ve ever had a lie-in in your life.”
A low sound of amusement rolls down the line. “Goodnight,” he says, declining to confirm.
“Night, John.”
You sit a minute in the amber shine of your lamp after the line goes dead, phone loose in your hand.
——
Sunday morning, you text him at 8:12 AM.
good morning. how was the lie-in?
Wouldn’t know. Been up since five.
the lie confirmed!
He doesn’t dignify it. You don’t expect him to. You grin at your phone while you wait for the kettle to boil.
Your mum will later describe you, over dinner, as ‘suspiciously cheerful’.
The day swallows you — the drive, the roast, your mum’s questions, your brother’s kids. It’s near ten when you’re finally home, shoes off, replying to the last thing he’d sent that morning.
survived. my mum sends her regards to whoever put me in a good mood. her words.
Regards received. Sleep well.
——
Monday morning, John’s at his desk with his coffee going cold because somewhere between the canteen and the walk to his office, his phone buzzed, and it was you and he hasn’t stopped looking at it.
good morning :) big meeting today. does this say “promote me” or “she tried”?
[ PHOTO ATTACHMENT ]
You, in your hallway mirror — chin tipped, black short-sleeve blouse with a wide collar exposing the smooth skin of your upper chest and collar, grey pencil skirt stretched over the curve of your hips and thighs, one knee bent like you’d just been lowering your foot from fitting on your heel.
His eyes are stuck on the soft-looking flesh just above and between your knees when a rap lands on his door and forces a cough from his throat.
Johnny eases it open with Kyle behind him holding a folder, Simon's behind them both, holding nothing, not even a pretense.
His phone goes face-down on the desk at a compromising speed, shifting to sit up straigher.
Simon’s eyes go to John’s hand over the phone, then to his face before he leans in the doorway with his arms folded.
“Mornin’, Cap. Good weekend?” Johnny asks, falling into the side chair in front of the desk with a theatrical groan.
“Fine.”
“Aye? Do anythin'?” He smiles, waggling his eyebrows. “Anyone?”
“You’ve got thirty seconds to develop a work reason for being in my office, Sergeant.”
It's an empty threat and everyone in the room knows it.
Kyle sets the (empty) folder down and steps back behind Johnny. “How’s it going, sir? Did you have any luck with Hinge?”
John could make them work for it. He’d planned to. But all three of them are standing in front of him trying so hard to look casual it’s a wonder none of them have pulled something.
"Have a date Friday. Drinks."
Johnny is ready to blast out of his seat, but Kyle shoves him back down by the shoulders, digging his fingers into the pressure points on either side of his neck until he relents with a hiss.
"That's great. Same woman or…?"
"The same."
“Good, good, good,” Johnny says, and means it — John can hear that he means it, he can also hear the restraint he's keeping from unloading shite advice.
“We'll stop buy Saturday for the debrief,” Simon says, already turning around, and Kyle picks the folder back up like it had a purpose all along, and they file out the way they came.
"I'm not debriefing you on my date. Don't come!" John calls to them half-heartedly, but the door's already shutting on top of his words.
He turns the phone back over.
Promote you, he types.
You look lovely.
Your reply comes before he’s picked his pen back up.
well now the meeting feels easy. thank you x
He gets on with his morning, but by noon he suspects he's looked at that damn photo a dozen times.
——
The rest of the week goes standard. Your Tuesday runs long and his Wednesday runs longer, and the messages carry throughout it all. His texts arrive before your morning alarm even sounds, your replies go mid-commute — nothing heavy, just remaining in each other's orbit of interest as Friday chugs slowly into view.
Thursday night, near nine, he rings you, having first texted to ask if he could, which you’re beginning to understand is just how he’s built. It’s a short call by your new standards with him. He only wanted to confirm you’re still on for the pub, but he had you grinning into your pillow until you fell asleep.
———
You leave work at five on the dot, and you’re in front of your open wardrobe by six.
The little black dress comes off the rail first. Goes back. Comes off again. Back. The floral one gets as far as your shoulders before you pull it off over your head and drop it on the bed, where Twix immediately sits on it.
The silky baby blue halter’s been hanging on the door since you bought it. You put it on like you hadn’t already decided and do the tie at the back of your neck twice before the bow sits flat and neat. You pull on some jeans and rummage the closet for your chunky heels.
You press some strawberry perfume to your throat in the mirror and try to comfort the nerve-ridden woman in the reflection.
“It’s just a pub,” you tell her.
She doesn’t seem convinced.
———
The pub is exactly the kind of place you imagine he'd frequent — quiet, all old mahogany and low brass lamps, no telly anywhere. You claim a stool, hook your heel over the rung, and decide not to order anything yet simply because it just feels polite to wait.
You're fifteen minutes early which means you're left alone with your anxieties.
The last of the sun lies across the bar top in warm stripes, and you trace one with a finger while you wait.
You’ve done this before, and it almost never goes how the phone promises. There was the guy whose photos were six years out of date. The one who spent both drinks talking about his ex and then sent a payment request for half the tab. The one who, two hours in, hadn’t asked you a single question about yourself. And John has been too good to be true for a week, and you know how that saying ends. Tonight is where you find out how, find out he really is just a man between deployments looking for entertainment and a shag.
It felt good, though. All week. Being excited about something. You’d forgotten the feeling.
You pick at the hangnail on your thumb until it stings.
You don’t have to wait much longer for him.
He casts a shadow when he comes through the door. Broad. Tall. Smart olive polo fighting for its stitching across his chest and where it grips into his biceps. He’s tidied his beard in comparison to his photos, hair less kempt in a purposeful way.
He scans the whole room before he finds you and stops looking anywhere else. He smiles tight and restrained, pleasant, but like he’s pacing himself, and by the time he crosses to you, your tongue has gone dry and whatever you’d planned to open with has shriveled away.
“Hey,” he says.
“Hi,” you smile.
He smells clean, a bit like pine and amber, and faintly like there’s tobacco somewhere on his collar.
“You’re early,” he adds, almost pleased.
“So are you.”
“I’m always early.” His eyes drop to the empty bar top in front of you, then come back. “You haven’t ordered?”
You shake your head once, legs shifting to cross. “I wanted— I was waiting for you.”
The lines beside his eyes deepen and he holds out his hand, says your name for the first time, and his hand swallows yours — big and dry and calloused across the palm where yours is soft — and you hold on a beat too long. He doesn’t mention it. You add that to the list of things you like about him, which is getting embarrassing for something four minutes old.
“What’ll you have?”
“Uhm, whatever you’re having,” you decide.
He signals the bartender with two fingers and opens his mouth — and there’s a brief second where he looks at you first, and you notice for the first time that his eyes are blue, and you get stuck, and it seems so does he. By the time he looks back, he’s lost the name of the beer he’s drunk here a dozen times.
“Two of the, uh— the local,” he manages.
You pretend not to notice. He knows you did.
He pulls out the stool beside you, and more of his cologne wafts around you as he sits, turned to face you, legs spread, one knee pointing between yours.
The pints arrive wet from the tap, and for a second neither of you says anything at all. You trace a bead of condensation down your glass.
“Funny, isn’t it,” you offer, sheepish. “We’ve talked every day for a week, and the second we’re actually in front of each other…” You trail off, cheeks warming, eyes fixed on the fizz jumping over the rim of your beer.
“You’re nervous?” he asks, a cheeky lilt on it.
“A bit, yeah. Aren’t you?”
“Not at all.”
You squint at him. “I don’t know if I buy that.”
“Hm.” He takes a sip that lasts a little too long, and the tips of his ears have gone pink.
Your cheeks are doing about the same. You drink your beer — cold, hop-bitter, helping — and let him have his lie. It’s a generous lie anyway. It’s a lie shaped like a man trying, and you’ve been handed far worse shapes.
“So,” you start. “I haven’t asked why you’re even on Hinge. You don’t seem the type.”
“I’m not,” he chuckles, and offers nothing beyond it.
You wait. He just sips his beer. You hike a brow.
“That’s it? That’s your answer?”
“Well, it wasn’t my idea. The lads put me on it.”
“The lads — your guys from work?”
“Yeah.”
“They what, talked you into it?”
“No.” He turns his glass a degree. “They nicked my phone and made the profile behind my back.”
“And what made them do that?”
He takes a moment with that one. He could give you a cover story — you can almost watch him weigh one — but then he doesn’t.
“Their assessment,” he laughs to himself, “was that I’d been… cranky. Needed gettin’ out of the house.”
“Cranky?” you repeat, delighted.
“Their exact words were a bit different.”
“Hm.” You look at him — at ease, half a smile living in his beard, one arm resting along the bar. “You don’t seem cranky to me.”
“Yeah, well. Guess they were right, then.”
Your neck goes hot and you have to look away from him. “Well,” you manage. “They do good work, your committee.”
He huffs into his pint, and lets you recover.
“Okay, next one, then. Military.” You tip your glass toward him. “What do you actually do?”
He sets his beer down and you can see him carefully choosing which door to open. “What d’you want to know?”
“I don’t know. What’s your day look like?”
“Depends on the day. Paperwork, mostly. Meetings.” A beat. “Sometimes we go away.”
“Away?”
“Away.”
“For how long?”
“As long as it takes.”
“Doing…?”
“Whatever they need me to,” he says easily. “S’not me being mysterious. I’d tell you if I could.”
“That must be so strange, though. Having this whole— like, most of your life you can’t talk about.”
“You get used to it.” Then, because you’re still looking at him expectantly, not filling the space the way people usually do: “There’s loads I can say. Ask me what six weeks of rain in a jungle smells like. Or what a month in the desert does to your skin.”
“What’s a month in the desert do to your skin?”
“Nothing good, love,” he answers, shifting to face you better. “The beard’s load-bearing.”
You laugh into your beer, and it makes the next one easier to ask.
“Do you like it? Like, the whole life of it?”
He goes quiet on that one. Longer than he’s gone quiet on anything else you’ve asked. You can see him thinking on it.
“It’s what I’m best at,” he says finally. And then, mostly to his glass: “It’s all I’ve known, really. Been doin’ it since sixteen.”
You turn that over. There’s a whole life folded up in that sentence and you notice you want to ask about all of it, which is not a thing you’ve wanted to do with a man in a very long time.
The second beers arrive, and the conversation stops keeping to lanes — his lads and your best friend, the wedding in October, the neighbor whose bins are apparently a whole saga. You’re midway through the story of your work feud when a birthday party arrives loud and glittering behind you, and John, without so much as glancing down, reaches down and hooks his hand under the edge of your stool, and pulls.
The whole thing drags six inches across the floor with you on it, your knee sliding neatly between his, close enough now that his voice drops to match the new distance. You’re looking up at him, pulse tapping somewhere that has your thighs pressing together.
“Go on,” he encourages. “She said what?”
It takes you a moment to find your place, but you go on.
The bar only gets louder from there, the birthday table multiplying, and when a booth opens up in the back corner, John tips his chin at it.
“Go grab that,” he says, turning back to the bar. “I’ll get another round. Want the same?”
“Actually—” and you hesitate out of nothing but habit, out of years of a man’s face going tight when you complicate an order, “—could I do a vodka cranberry this time? I could get the round—”
His brows furrow with something akin to bafflement, brief and genuine. “You can have whatever you’d like,” he says, and suddenly you feel silly, your hand crossing to grip your elbow.
“No—I know. I just—”
“Whatever you’d like,” he repeats, gentler. “And—” he grimaces, like what he’s about to say pains him deeply. “Don’t ever offer to pay on a date with me again. Properly wind me up, that will.”
“S-sorry,” you shake your head, like you can rattle the habit loose.
“None of that either,” his eyes have gone crinkled at the corners, warm all the way through, and he raps two knuckles soft on the bar top like the matter’s settled. “Vodka cranberry. Go, sit.”
“Actually— I’m gonna go freshen up quickly. Two minutes.”
And you go, biting down on a smile, ears hot — embarrassed and looked after all at once, which is apparently a combination that works on you.
The bathroom is cooler than the bar and a quiet that leaves your ears ringing. You reapply some lipgloss and wash your hands and look at yourself in the dirty mirror, buzzing warm at the collarbones, eyes shiny, mouth half-curved.
It’s going well.
It’s going suspiciously well.
And every time it’s gone well before, this is exactly when you started hunting for the catch. So you dry your hands on the rough paper towel and leave before you can start.
He’s in the booth when you come back, settled against the wall side, the last of the evening gone from the windows and the lamp above him glowing gold over the table. Your drink is waiting — pink, iced, a lime wedged on the rim — set neatly across the table at the seat opposite.
You look at the seat opposite.
Then you slide in beside him instead. Your thigh a heated inch from his, reaching across to relocate your drink.
You don’t look at him, but you can tell John’s a bit curious of the arrangement. His arm comes up and settles along the back of the booth behind you, and it oddly feels like it was always going to end up here, his thumb grazing the bare skin of your shoulder. He picks up his beer with the other hand.
“Comfortable?” he asks, low, and with entirely too much satisfaction.
“I am,” you say, and the first sip of the vodka cranberry is cold and tart and sweet all the way down, blooming behind your sternum right where his voice has been landing all night.
The booth is easier than the bar, somehow — closer, quieter, the birthday party more muted — and the talk drifts wherever it wants, his low laugh arriving against your shoulder through the arm behind you. At some point the lull comes; ice softening in your glass, his thumb resting an inch from your shoulder. And maybe it’s the vodka, or the arm, or the running list of things you like about him that you’d need both hands to count now—
“How long ago was your last relationship? Like a real one.”
He takes a deep breath before answering. “Honest answer?”
“Preferably,” you giggle softly, and he smiles — most of it lost in the beard, enough that you wonder if there are dimples under there.
“Longer than what sounds good out loud,” he admits through the pull of it.
“Say it out loud anyway.”
“I was thirty-two. So, almost ten years ago.”
“Ten.”
“Mm.”
“A whole decade.”
“You can stop countin’ the years to me at any time, love.”
“Sorry, sorry.” You’re grinning. He is too. “It’s just, quite the gap in romance.”
“It went quick,” he says, and it’s a joke, and it’s also not. “What about you?”
“Ended about a year ago, we were together four.”
“Mm.”
“It was fine. Amicable— mostly,” you shrug.
“Mostly,” he repeats — not pushing, just setting the word down where you can see he heard it.
“Mostly,” you confirm, and leave it there.
The ice ticks in your glass. And the next question’s been sitting in your chest, so you take it out while you’re brave.
“Can I ask something and you not be offended?”
“Startin’ well,” he says, nodding on for you to continue.
You settle further into the booth and your shoulders press against his warm arm behind you, his fingers brushing over your shoulder. You lean your head back, turned to his face.
“What’s changed? Between thirty-two and now that you’re trying dating?” You mean just to ask the question, but you find yourself rambling on. “Because if the honest answer is nothing, and this is just— a-a hookup with, like, really good manners, that’s fine. Genuinely. I’d just rather know now.”
“Fair,” he says. “Asked myself the same thing this week.”
“Yeah? And what was the answer?”
“I’m tired of the quiet,” he starts, pausing as his eyes drift away in thought. They come back to you just as quick. “Used to come home to it like a reward. Now it just feels… empty.”
Something in your chest slides sideways.
“So, no. Not a hookup,” he continues with a breath. “But I can’t promise you’d be happy with the alternative either. I can be gone longer than I’m home.” His thumb brushes along your shoulder, once, like an apology.
“Guess I wouldn’t know unless I gave it a go.”
You say it lightly, and the exhale he lets out has a smile riding on it — and something in his shoulders comes down, some held thing you didn’t notice until it let go.
“No,” he agrees, low. “You wouldn’t.”
You’re suddenly aware of the distance between you — or the lack of it. Somewhere between sitting down and the vodka you’ve ended up awfully close: near enough to count the grey threaded through his beard, to catch the beer on his breath, near enough that the light between you has stopped reaching the space. Near enough that you can feel the heat coming off him, and your heartrate has picked up on it before the rest of you has.
His eyes flick down to your mouth. Quick — half a second, there and back — but you catch it, and it lands low in your stomach and stays.
Neither of you leans back.
And the pub carries on behind you — glasses clinking, the birthday table shouting, a till drawer slamming — all of it arriving from somewhere far off and dreamlike.
You move closer. Barely. Imperceptible. Your pulse is in your ears now, drumming out the last of your sense—
“You know,” you say, quiet, pitched for the six inches between you and nobody else, “you can kiss me. If you’d like.”
“Oh, yeah?”
“Mhm,” you grin.
“Well,” he says, matching your volume, low enough that it lands somewhere below hearing, “I was going to be a gentleman about it. Wait til I walked you out.” His gaze drops to your mouth again, slower this time, no secret. “But if you’d rather have it here in the booth, I won’t argue.”
“I suppose I could be patient.”
“Mm,” he says, and doesn’t move.
Somewhere in the world, presumably, time is passing.
His jaw shifts.
“I’ll go pay the tab,” he decides.
And you’re both up and out of the booth quick, and you watch him stand at the bar with his back to you, shoulders set, and you press one cool knuckle to your own cheek and find it burning.
You two make it out the door.
The night’s gone hazy and July-thick, and you get maybe four steps down the side of the pub with his hand a light at the small of your back before you glance up at him and he glances down.
Whatever was left of patient dies right there on the pavement.
He moves you.
One hand finding your hip, the other your jaw, and then your back meets brick, warm through the thin of your blouse and against your bare shoulders, and his mouth is on yours.
Whatever mindful version he’d planned for the end of his gentlemanly walk out must have been spent in the booth — this is the interest. The kiss opens on a low rumble out of his chest, one you feel travel through his ribs into yours, and his tongue slides against yours, all beer and him, and you grip the front of his shirt with both fists just incase the wall behind you vanishes.
He kisses you thoroughly, his beard catching along your chin, a chafe you know you’ll feel tomorrow. A thigh slots half between yours, not pushing, not touching, but it’s not any less inviting. You could bare down on it, get the friction your body is craving, he’d let you, but you restrain yourself. His thumb strokes a slow line along your jaw in obscene contrast to what his mouth is doing — and it blooms down through you, fervid, liquescent.
He pulls back just far enough to breathe — forehead near yours, both of you loud with catching your breath — and when you open your eyes his are dark.
“Very gentlemanly,” you croon.
“I walked you out first, yeah?” he says, unrepentant.
You giggle against his mouth, and he claims it for himself with one more gentle kiss, and then he steps back a seemly distance, hand smoothing once down over his beard, shoulders resetting, breath evening out, everything going back in its place except his eyes.
“Walk me home?” you ask.
“I drove. I’ll give you a lift.”
You look up at him, all vodka-warm and enjoying yourself. “Well, just so you know, I share my location with my best friend and she knows exactly what pub I’m at, and has your name and photo, so—”
“Good,” he replies, no hesitation. “Smart girl. Keep it that way.” He finds his keys, fishing them out of his pocket. “I’m taking you straight home. You have my word.”
He draws an X over his heart, your lipgloss shining at the corner of his crooked mouth.
——
The car smells like-new — clean upholstery and faintly of engine oil, everything squared away, nothing rolling around in the footwells.
The drive is short. The radio murmurs. His hand rests easy on the gearstick a few inches from your knee — close enough that you spend two full streets aware of nothing else — and the streetlights slide over him in slow bars, catching the grey at his temple and the small satisfied set of his mouth.
The kiss is still thrumming under your skin like a struck glass, low in your belly, at the back of your knees — and you catch yourself doing the thing you swore off doing: imagining forward. Him in your doorway. Him in your kitchen on the weekend. Him coming home from wherever away is and it being your door he—
You look out the window. Four miles has never taken so long.
He pulls up outside your building and sets the handbrake, and the engine idles, and neither of you move.
The dashboard glow makes everything blue.
You want to ask him up. That's not the question; that got settled somewhere around the second kiss in the alley, possibly earlier, possibly around the moment he walked into the pub, or whatever. But there's the other thing you can't evict from your head: do you really want to sleep with him on the first date?
"So," you say.
"So…”
You look at him — streetlight in the grey of his beard, arm along the wheel, he’s in absolutely no hurry to resolve you.
"Did you have a good time tonight?"
His head turns. There's a beat where he just looks at you, and you watch him physically decide not to make a joke of it.
"Yes. Best night I've had in a while," he says.
"Would you—" and god, you're thirty years old and your heart is doing this anyway, "—want to see me again? Like this?"
"Was already plannin' to ask you to dinner." A small crease starts at the corner of his eye. "Was workin' out whether to do it now or ring you tomorrow, so I didn't seem overly—"
"Keen?"
"Keen," he confirms, gravely, like the word's been a burden to him all week.
And that lands warm and the relief does something reckless to your mouth, which is that it stops guarding it.
"Okay. Then I'm going to say something, but you can't look at me while I say it."
“Right.” He scrubs a hand over his twitching lips and looks out the windshield, obedient.
"I want to ask you up."
"Mm."
"And I'm having a whole debate about it."
"I can hear it," he says. "Been losin' to the engine for about a minute now."
"Just—,” you sigh, “—shut up." But you're smiling at the dashboard. "It's just— I spent all week wondering if this was a hookup thing for you. And you answered that, and I believe you, I do. But there's this small, paranoid part of me that's like, well, that's exactly what a man would say at the pub, isn't it? And then there's this other, stupider part that thinks if you come up, you'll—" you take a deep breath, your fingers hooking into each other on your lap, and make yourself finish it, "—think less of me. First date and all."
He's quiet for a second, lips pursing.
“Can I look at you now?” he tries.
“Yeah.”
"You want to know where I'm actually at?"
"Truly just desperate for a man to be honest so I know what headspace to put myself in."
“Alright.” He shifts to face you, wrist still hanging over the wheel. “I want to come up. Badly, if you want some extra honesty.”
The badly goes straight between your thighs.
“Okay,” you manage. “Noted.”
“I haven’t lied to you once tonight. And I’m takin’ you to dinner whether I come up or not.”
“And, like— you wouldn’t think—”
“Think less of you?” He frowns, like the math’s not mathing. “For doin’ the same thing I’d be doing? Together?”
“When you put it like that…”
“For what it’s worth, I’m sat here havin’ a version of the same debate. Been out of this a long time. Didn’t want you thinkin’ that’s all I came for. So if you’d rather I kiss you at the door and drive home, I’ll do that and consider it a perfect evening.”
And maybe it’s the ease of him, the total absence of pressure you’re always braced for on nights like this, that settles it for you.
“Would you like to come up?”
——
The stairwell smells of somebody's late dinner and warm dust, the day's heat still trapped in it, and you take the stairs ahead of him to the second floor.
John is a gentleman.
John has been a gentleman all night.
John gives himself the length of one flight of stairs off the clock — the sway of you in those jeans, the shift and give of you with every step, the smooth line of your bare shoulders under the halter's little bow — and by the landing he's a gentleman again, and if you felt his eyes like a brand on you, and by the half-smirk you throw over your shoulder you did, neither of you says a word about it.
Your flat smells like you — the perfume he got to know at the pub, but underneath it, clean laundry, a candle burned down sometime this week — and a blur of black-and-caramel bolts across the living room and vanishes down the hall before he can so much as get a look at her.
"That was Twix," you say, her paws still pattering away. "She'll start her background check and circle back."
"Sensible."
And then the two of you are standing in your living room with the whole car’s worth of honesty sitting in the middle of the floor, and you look at him, and look at the kitchen, and say:
"Do you want a drink? I have wine. Or, um. Tea? I might have a beer from—"
"I'm alright," his mouth pulls at one side.
"Water? I'm gonna have water."
"Then I'll have water," he says like he’s surrendering.
He watches you go — and he could laugh, not at you, but because he knows exactly what he’s looking at. The two of you agreed in plain English on why he’s standing here, and now you’re in your kitchen filling glasses neither of you want, and wiping down a counter that, from where he’s stood, was already clean.
So he gives you room. Settles against the arm of the couch, takes a slow lap of your shelf with his eyes — you and a woman he guesses is the October bride, you on a hike somewhere sunny, you and Twix bravely on the balcony — and he wants you the whole time, low and patient, in his back teeth, but doesn’t move on it.
Your pace. Your move.
You come back with the waters, and hand him his, and hold your own in both hands like you might drop it. He takes a sip, looks at you over the rim of it.
“You’re nervous,” he says.
“Not at all.”
“Mm.” He nods slowly, deeply unconvinced and taking a page from your own book. “Don’t know if I buy that.”
He watches it land, watches the laugh come up out of you before you can stop it, head tipping back, throat bare, and half your nerves seem to leave with it.
He likes that.
He sets his glass down. Then, gently, he takes yours out of your mid-fidget hands and sets it down too — he tips your chin up with one knuckle, and kisses you.
Easy-like, cold from the water, cranberry still faint on your tongue, your breath catches once against his mouth and then lets go. Your hands slide flat up his chest and stop over his heart — which is going quicker than he’d care to admit, and he feels the exact moment you find it out, the little hum of discovery you make.
When you pull back to look at him, whatever nerves were left in you are gone from your eyes, and they’re twinkly a lot like the first photo he ever saw of you.
You take his hand off your waist, lace it through yours, and guide him backward toward the short hall.
In your bedroom he finds the tie of your halter at the back of your neck and pauses with the ends between his fingers, silk warm from your body. One pull and it gives, the fabric sighing loose, and he follows it slide down with his eyes first, then his mouth — the slope of your throat, over your shoulder, then the soft skin below your ear that tastes of strawberry perfume and salt. His beard drags over your neck and a shiver flows through you so he does it again, slower. You shiver harder, fingers curling into the front of his polo.
Good.
You tug the hem of his shirt up and he reaches back, pulls it off over his head one-handed, and drops it somewhere he’ll look for later. He unhooks your bra just as easily, and when your palms spread into the coarse hair over his bare chest and down his toned stomach, the muscle jumps under your fingertips, he hears his own breath go rough.
“Okay,” you say, a little wonder in it. “Wow, yeah, that’s….”
“Mm?”
“Nothing. Just— I knew military, just didn’t realize… this much military.”
“Lodging a complaint?” he askes, amused.
“Definitely not.”
The rest goes gradually — his belt, your jeans peeled down warm thighs with his calloused palms flat against your skin the whole way, a hop and a giggle when the denim catches your ankle and he steadies you by the elbow — and then you’re bare in front of him, lamplight pooling gold along your shoulder, your hip, the soft curve of your stomach. He stops with his hands at your waist and looks.
“Say something,” you murmur, half a laugh, shy at last under the attention. “You’re oggling.”
“I am.” His thumbs press slow arcs into your hips. “Give me a minute. Been picturin’ this since Tuesday and I did you no justice.”
You pull him down onto the bed by way of an answer, and the mattress sinks with a soft complaint, and then it’s just skin — so much warm skin, soft everywhere he’s hard, giving under his hands, smelling of perfume and the clean sweat July dampens into everyone.
He stretches out alongside you, one heavy thigh over yours, and takes his time. The curve of your waist. The full weight of your breast, thumb dragging over your nipple until it peaks and your breath stutters. The inside of your thigh, where the skin is finest and the heat pools. You move under his touch the whole time, restless and rising, fingers in his hair, at his shoulders, and the small sounds you make land somewhere at the base of his neck and prickle there.
Then he shifts down the bed, kisses the soft of your stomach, the plush crease of your hip, and looks up the length of you.
“Can I?”
“You— yes,” you breathe, trembling feebly. “Yes, obviously, you don’t have to a—”
His mouth is on you before the sentence ends.
You’re sweet and slick against his tongue, already so wet the first slow lick slides easy, and the sound you make is high and caught somewhere low, thigh twitching against his ear, one hand flying to his hair. He hums — feels you feel it — and settles in. No rush. Long soft strokes of his tongue until your hips learn the rhythm and rise to meet it, then his lips close warm around your clit, sucking gently, and your whole body pulls tight.
“Oh my god— okay— okay—”
“Mm.”
“Don’t be smug—” and your voice climbs off the end of the sentence as he slides two thick fingers into you, curling them, tongue still working, and whatever the rest of that scolding was, he never learns it.
“Could do this all night, sweetheart,” he murmurs against you, and feels the words land in a shudder. Your breathing changes. Your thighs start trembling, your hand fists in the sheets — and he keeps the pace exactly the same until you’re pulling at him. Hair, arm, anything you can reach.
“John— John— come— I want you. Now,” you whine, “Please.”
He comes up the length of you slow, mouth mapping stomach and sternum and throat on the way, and settles over you on one forearm—
"I should've said this in the car," he starts, eyes on yours. "I don't have a condom. Wasn't assuming tonight would end up here."
"I don't have any either. I actually checked the drawer before I left tonight." You push his dampening hair back off his forehead. "I'm on the pill, and I trust you. But I'd still feel better if you pull out. Is that okay?"
He nods assuredly. "Then I'll pull out," he says flat and plain. "You have my word."
"You and your word—" but you're smiling, and then you're not smiling, because he's already moved and taken himself in hand and dragged the head of his cock through your folds, coating himself in you, and notched against your entrance, and the smile falls open into something much, much better.
He pushes in slow, watches your face the entire way — he couldn't look elsewhere if a grenade went off — your brows drawing up, your lips parting around a breath that doesn't finish, your nails biting little crescents into his forearms — and fuck, the feel of you: scalding, soaked, tight enough that he has to stop twice, jaw clenched, sweat sliding at his temple, feeding you his cock an inch at a time and pulling back, then giving you more; the slick easy give of you around him unspooling something in his stomach.
"Talk to me," he murmurs, gravel-low. "Alright?"
"Yes." Your voice has gone breathless and small and blissed. "You're— god—"
"Christ, you’re snug," he exhales shakily, eyes finding yours. “Relax for me, baby. Breathe.”
"I am breath—oh. Oh—shhit—"
John’s seated all the way, hips flush to your backside, and both of you go quiet — a shared beat of stillness, you fluttering around him hot and full, his body coming down, forehead dropping to yours, ten months of silence pulling a sound up out of his chest that he couldn't have stopped if he knew it was coming.
Then you shift your hips, experimental, a slow grind up against him, and that stillness is over.
He moves slowly; long level strokes dragging all the way out so you both feel every hot stretch of the return, your breasts pressing soft against his hairy chest. Your heels slide up the back of his thighs and he budges his hips closer, holding deep and pressing the head of his cock into your furthest wall. Your hands squeeze the meat between his shoulders and his neck as he pushes a small squeal out of you.
"Right there—right there—right there, don't—"
"I won’t," he murmurs against your jaw. “I won’t move.”
"—okay maybe move a little—"
He breathes something restrained through a smile. "Make your mind up, darling," he grunts.
“It’s hard to— mmm—think like this,” you half-moan against his cheek.
“Don’t think, then.”
It’s all your talking that undoes him more than anything, he realizes distantly. He’d forgotten there was a version of this with laughing in it; a version with a woman eagerly gripping him and grinning against his cheek in the second before a moan carries her voice away — and every time you say his name, breathed and broken, something in his chest cinches another notch tighter.
He draws back and drives home again, and whatever you’d been about to answer with comes out as a punched huff.
You don’t think.
He feels the difference in you immediately — your body dropping the manners, hips rising to meet him harder than he’s giving it, heels dragging him in by the thighs on every stroke, a low frustrated sound building in your throat when he keeps the same controlled pace. You’re not asking for anything. You’re taking it in inches, greedy and unaware of yourself, nails dragging down the small of his back, pulling—
“Harder?” he asks against your ear.
"Yes, please."
He hooks your knee up over his hip and opens you wider—“So polite.”—and gives it to you deeper, his weight behind it, your headboard cracking against the wall. You go loud and lovely underneath him, clutching, slick heat and plush skin and your nails scoring lines down his back that he hopes, viciously, will last long enough to admire.
He works a hand between your bodies, thumb finding your clit, riding the motion you’ve bkth created.
"That's— John— You’re gonna make me come," you sob.
"I know. I feel you. Squeezin' me like— Christ. Go on—fuck."
He watches it arrive before you do, a shiver running ahead of the wave; your spine arches up off the bed, your cunt clenches around him in long pulsing, aching, waves — it takes you under, and you pull him with you.
He holds you, murmuring filth and praise in equal measure against your ear—
How good—
How gorgeous—
You’re mine now, you know that? Hm?—
It’s watching you eagerly nod along with his babbling that finishes him. He lasts maybe ten more strokes on borrowed time, heat gathering alacritous and irrevocable at the base of his groin — and he rears back onto his knees, pulling out of you with a growl that tumbles from his throat, fist working his cock over, soaked with you, spilling hot across your stomach and hip in thick ropes, head hanging, shoulders heaving, your thighs still bracketing his knees.
When he lifts his head, you’re already looking at him.
Glowing down to your chest, lips parted and kiss-swollen, wearing him low on your stomach — and neither of you says anything. Neither of you looks away either. His chest is still heaving. Your knee presses in against his side, and the corner of your mouth starts to curl, and his does too, helpless about it.
He comes down on his side, careful of the mess he’s made of you, one arm heavy across the pillow above your head. The curtain breathes at the window beside the bed and the night comes in and cools the sweat on his back, and he can see your heartbeat going hard at your throat, the rise and fall of your stomach not yet settled. He gently fits his thumb against your pulse, just to feel it going.
He kisses you, your mouth lazy under his, and then your temple, and the crown of your head, and you make a low, boneless sound and turn your face into his hot neck, and the two of you just lie there breathing each other in, tangled and settling, your finger drawing slow shapes on his forearm.
"John?" Small, against his throat.
"Mm?"
"Would you mind grabbing me a cloth? Bathroom's just across the hall."
He's up before the sentence finishes, annoyed at his own carcass the whole three steps to the door, ten months out of practice and it shows, he used to know this part, the part where he takes care of you before you have to ask.
You bathroom is small and smells of your shampoo, fruity, herbal. He runs a flannel under the warm tap, wrings it out, catches his own eyes in the mirror over the sink — wrecked hair, beard ruined and shiny with your lipgloss. He turns, craning his neck spotting a blooming red scratch coming up nicely at his shoulder.
He comes back and cleans you up properly, kneeling on the edge of the bed, one hand steady at your hip while the warm cloth moves over your stomach — thorough about it, frowning slightly the way he does when he’s concentrating — and you watch him do it propped up on your elbows with an expression he can't quite read and doesn't need to. It's warm, whatever it is. And it’s aimed at him, so.
"You're staring," he says, not looking up.
"You're tidying me."
"Should've done it before you asked." He folds the cloth, sets it on the nightstand, and stretches out beside you again, this time gathering you into his chest. "Out of practice."
"I'll allow it," you say, magnanimous, settling your cheek against his pec. "The rest was very in-practice."
He huffs into your hair.
Your fingers trail idle through the hair on his chest, down over old pinked scars, and you ask him about them — whether the jagged line at his shoulder hurt, what caused the puckered one under his ribs — and he answers more honestly than he means to, your weight settling heavier against him as the adrenaline drains.
There's a soft thump from the hallway, then, and a moment later a small shape appears in the doorway — sits, tail wrapping her feet, and surveys the wreckage: the trail of clothes, the stranger man in the bed, you draped over his ribs.
She stares at John.
John stares back.
"We have an audience," he says.
You look over him to see your cat, "Twix, John. John, Twix."
Twix holds his gaze a moment longer, supremely unimpressed, then steps delicately over his discarded shirt and exits the way she came and he feels you giggling before he hears it, the shake of it against his chest.
"That went well," you say, overly pleased.
“Yeah?”
“Mhm.”
"Well, consider me chuffed."
Some comfortable minutes later he feels you surface a little out of the drowse, feels your breathing change, going careful; feels your face arrange itself against his skin before you speak.
"You don't have to stay, by the way." Light. Smooth as eroded stone, polished by use, he imagines. "If you'd sleep better in your own bed. No pressure either way."
And there it is — the same maneuver from your texts, the honest thing dressed up so you can't be caught caring — except this time he can feel your heartbeat while you run it, quick against his ribs, betraying the whole performance from inside.
He keeps his hand moving on your arm, slow, so you know nothing's landed wrong.
"I'll head home," he says. "Not because I want to," he clarifies.
“No?” you ask.
"Believe me. This is about the last place I want to leave." His hand doesn't stop, slow up, slow down, steadying you through it. "I'd like at least one proper dinner between us before I go makin' a habit of your bed."
You lift your head off his chest and look at him — hair wrecked, eyes searching his face for the trick — and he lets you look as long as you need to because there's no trick to be found. He meant it.
“Alright," you agree.
“Yeah?”
“Yes. Dinner sounds nice.”
"Mm," he hums, contented. He presses a kiss into your hair and untangles himself, face scrunched with visible reluctance, and dresses while you watch from the bed with the sheet gathered loose around you.
At the door he stops.
"C'mere."
You come to him in the sheet, and he kisses you properly, one hand cupping your face, thumb at your cheek. You go languid against him. He takes his time. Long past politeness. Long enough that leaving starts to look renegotiable, and he breaks away before he starts.
"G’night," he says, low, still holding your face.
"Goodnight."
"I'll ring you about dinner tomorrow."
——
The flat is quiet. But it's a different quiet than the one you left this morning and you stand in the middle of it grinning.
Twix reappears at the edge of the counter and stares.
“I don’t need the lecture, I’m grown,” you tell her and start walking back to the bedroom, you hear her little jump to the floor and her feather steps catching up with you, “I can have sex. I deserve it, even.” You drop into your bed with a sigh. “You’d understand if you still had ovaries.”
Broke: what is worldbuilding? Made in a lab to be as blandly inoffensive as possible. Time to randomly namedrope terms like 'nonbinary' and 'ace' while doing zero work actually incorporating them into the world or characters and have someone give a speech about how valid they are. Lines like 'I'm too ace for this' while never exploring the concept of asexuality or aromanticism and still having very central romance plotlines is common. I hate it here learn how to write realistic dialogue and fully realized characters I'm begging.
Woke: more ore less typical sci-fi and fantasy but It’s Queer Now. Might include in-universe queerphobia to be struggled against or may have queer identities be fully normalized. Can be done bad or well depending on the skill of the writer. A good way to explore our contemporary ideas of gender and sexuality or to have a bit of a power fantasy with lesbian princesses and trans knights. There will probably be a bisexual love triangle.
Bespoke: what is a gender. What is monogamy. What is polyamory. What is romance. What is platonic. Time to show you the most fucked up uncategorizable relationship you’ve ever seen. There may be weird ass metaphorical sex
AKA books that tackle gender, sexuality and relationships in ways that come off as deeply alien and non normative to our present day culture, frequently featuring actual aliens.
For details on the books, check under the readmore! My personal favorites are marked with an *
A note: as I'm generally more into sci-fi than fantasy, this list skews heavily toward the former. Feel free to make your own recommendations in the notes if you know of more titles!
If you want more book recs, check out my masterpost of rec lists!
Ancillary Justice by Ann Leckie*
Once, Breq was Justice of Toren, a starship whose artificial intelligence linked through the minds of a multitude of human ancillary bodies. Now, there is only Breq, a lone soldier seeking vengeance after a horrific act of betrayal cost her everything. As Breq gets closer to her goal, the conquering empire she once served begins to destabilize from the inside, and Breq herself has to question her priorities as new loyalties arise. Features female-as-neutral worldbuilding, as well as singular characters existing throughout many bodies.
Note: my favorite from this series is Translation State, which gets really weird about gender and sexuality and stands fairly well on its own, go read it!
The Black Tides of Heaven by Neon Yang
Novella series. In a world where children choose their gender when they're ready, twins Mokoya and Akeha once swore never to pick. But as they grow older, the two find themselves drawn in different directions, both in terms of gender and in what they want from their lives. Rebellion is brewing, and the twins' mother is looking to use them to her whims to retain power. Akeha, unwilling to be her pawn, resorts to leaving home and falling in with the rebels.
The Unraveling by Benjamin Rosenbaum*
On a distant planet in a distant future, everyone has multiple bodies that can be customized however they want, cybernetics have abolished nearly all privacy, and the gender binary is no longer about man or woman. Instead, there's vail and staid, for which biological sex is irrelevant. Fift should be focusing on the obligations of a staid, but is distracted by budding feelings for Shria, forbidden due to Shria being a vail. When their complicated relationship unexpectedly becomes the center of a growing revolution, they will both have to decide where their priorities lie.
Dawn by Octavia E. Butler*
After a devastating war leaves humanity on the brink of extinction, survivor Lilith finds herself waking up naked and alone in a strange room. She’s been rescued by the Oankali, who have arrived just in time to save the human race. But there’s a price to survival, and it might be humanity itself. Absolutely fucked up I love it I once had to drop the book mid read to stare at the ceiling and exclaim in horror at what was going on. Includes darker examinations of agency and consent, so enter with caution.
The Javelin Program by Derin Edala
Dr Aspen Greaves expected to be woken from decades of cryo sleep on humanity’s first deep space colony, but instead finds themself alone on a spaceship still years away from its goal. Surrounded by mysteries on a barely functioning ship, Aspen must make sure the still sleeping crew reach their new home, while also dealing with the many secrets hidden behind the Javelin Program. Nonbinary and aromantic lead, based on a society and norms very far removed from ours.
Gideon the Ninth by Tamsyn Muir*
Gideon, raised as a swordswoman by unfriendly nuns, would rather run away and make her own life, but her services are needed. The Reverend Daughter, Gideon’s childhood nemesis, has been invited to a trial to win a place as an immortal by the Emperor’s side, and she’s in need of a bodyguard. Listen, if you’re on tumblr I probably don’t need to explain this book to you. Trust me when I say it’s exactly as good as people claim. Humorous and spooky but also absolutely gut wrenching and clever with a lot of political commentary. There are also, indeed, lesbian necromancers in space.
Too Like the Lightning by Ada Palmer
Centuries in the future, humanity has deliberately engineered society to be as utopian as possible, politically, socially, sexually, religiously. But things begin to crumble as the shadow of impending war looms. Written in an enlightenment style and featuring questions of human nature and whether it’s possible to change it, and what price we’re prepared to pay for peace, this book is simultaneously very heavy and very funny, and written in a very unique style. While still human, the society presented often feels starkly alien.
Walking Practice by Dolki Min
Having crashed their space ship, a shapeshifting alien finds themself trapped on Earth. Suffering from isolation and loneliness, they have settled into a routine to survive. Using online dating services, they take on the shape of human men and women to hunt humans for food. Strange, gross, and gender weird, Walking Practice is a unique take on gender from a wholly alien perspective.
The Stars are Legion by Kameron Hurley
Zan wakes without memory, a passenger aboard one of the living world-ships of Legion, a fleet of decaying generations ships. Told she’s the salvation meant to free them from the fleet, Zan is flung head first into a brutal and bloody conflict. This book fucked me up when I read it. It’s weird, it’s gross, there’s So Much Viscera, there are literally no men, it has living spaceships and biotech but in the most horrific way imaginable, where humans are nothing but part of an ecosystem that cares little for their well-being. It’s an experience but not necessarily a pleasant one.
All Systems Red by Martha Wells*
After having hacked its own governor module, SecUnit uses its small amount of new freedom to secretly download and watch as much media it can between doing its job guarding humans. But when the scientists it’s been charged with keeping safe come under attack, it must make a choice about whether to continue keeping its freedom secret or risk it all to save them. The series features both novellas and full length novels, and balances humor with scathing social critique. There's also an excellent tv adaptation!
Drinking Sapphire Wine by Tanith Lee
Four-BEE is a utopian city, in which humans have no responsibilities, are cared for by machines, and few acts cause true consequences as even death has been conquered. Able to change bodies and gender nearly at will, living lives of luxury and hedonism, everything should be perfect; yet the narrator finds him/herself dissatisfied with his/her life. After an impulsive decision leads him/her to break one of the only remaining taboos, he/she is exiled from Four-BEE into the wholly uninhabited desert wilderness outside.
The Cloud Roads by Martha Wells
Moon doesn't know what he is. Having lost his family young he lives on the move, shifting shape to hide his true form. The only ones similar to him he's ever encountered are the vicious, bloodthirsty Fell, but he knows he cannot be one of them. When chance leads to a meeting with someone like him, he hopes his days of loneliness are over. But his new people stand against a dangerous enemy, and not all of them welcome Moon's help. Featuring a world with not a single human in sight, The Cloud Roads makes for a unique perspective.
When the Angels Left the Old Country by Sacha Lamb*
The angel Uriel and the demon Little Ash have been friends for centuries, living and studying together in a small Jewish community in Europe. But times are changing, and many of the community have left for a new life across the sea. When one of these emigrants go missing, Uriel and Little Ash decide to leave their peaceful life to go find and, if needed, save her. While set in our own past rather than a fictional world/time like other titles on this list, the relationships and identities of the two main characters often break our ideas of gender as well as platonic/romantic.
The Summer Prince by Alaya Dawn Johnson*
Young adult. Young artist June Costa lives in Palmares Tres, a beautiful, matriarchal city relying heavily on tradition, one of which is the Summer King. The most recent Summer King is Enki, a bold boy and fellow artist. With him at her side, June seeks to finally find fame and recognition through her art, breaking through the generational divide of her home. But growing close to Enki is dangerous, because he, like all Summer Kings, is destined to die. Set in a world in which bisexuality and polyamory are largely the norm.
Dreamsnake by Vonda N. McIntyre*
In a future ravaged by disaster, Snake is a traveling healer who uses the venom of her snakes to concoct medicines for all imaginable ills. The most valuable of them all is her dreamsnake, an alien creature whose bite can grant a painless death. When circumstances cause her to lose her dreamsnake, she must embark on a dangerous journey to obtain a new one so she can continue her work. Set in a world where polyamory and bisexuality are largely the norm.
Shadow Man by Melissa Scott
As an effect of an FTL drug, intersex births increased, resulting in five separate genders among humans: men, women, mems, fems, and herms. But on the planet Hara, people cling to the old two gender system, forcing intersex individuals to pick one of the two and generally refusing to recognize their existence and needs. As conflict on the planet broils, Warreven, a Haran advocate and herm, and Tatian, an off-worlder, find themselves dragged into a struggle for equality.
Leech by Hiron Ennes*
Unbeknownst to humanity, a sentient hive mind has taken over the entire medical profession to ensure the health of their host species. One of their doctors is sent to an isolated location where they’re cut off from the rest of the hive mind, only to realize they’re faced with a rivaling parasitic entity. Leech hands you only just enough information to get by, and whether its historical fantasy, an alternate timeline, or futuristic post apocalypse is hard to determine. It’s spooky and weird and wildly creative, and does some neat things with gender, because what does gender even mean when you're a hive mind bacteria inhabiting countless bodies?
Axiom's End by Lindsay Ellis
It’s 2007, and a leak has just confirmed that the US has reached alien contact. Cora wants nothing to do with it, but as her absent father is the whistleblower who dropped the news the media won’t leave her alone. Even worse, she soon finds herself meeting and being stalked by the alien presence itself as it tries to remain in hiding - and discovering that there is a much larger threat on the horizon. Features aliens with very different ideas of gender and relationships than humans, and a central focus is how a relationship between one of them and a human would look like.
Ammonite by Nicola Griffith
Centuries ago, the first settlement on the planet Jeep was hit by tragedy: a virus killed off all men, leaving behind a society of only women. Now, the planet has been rediscovered, its inhabitants having long forgotten about the rest of humanity. Anthropologist Marghe Taishan is sent to test out a potential vaccine. If the vaccine succeeds, Jeep and its people would no longer be in forced quarantine, but it would also open them up to exploitation.
Ethan of Athos by Lois McMaster Bujold
For Dr. Ethan Urquhart living on Athos, delivering babies looks a little different: they are "born" from uterine replicators, as Athos is a planet populated entirely by men. But now they're running out of the ovarian cultures that allow them to reproduce. To replace them, Ethan is one of the first of his people to be sent off planet into the wider universe - where there are women, rumored to be an evil and corruptive force.
The Left Hand of Darkness by Ursula K. Le Guin
Genly Ai is an emissary sent to the planet of Winter, meant to help facilitate Winter’s inclusion in a growing intergalactic civilization. But he’s unprepared for Winter’s citizens, who spend much of their time genderless or switching between genders, making for a culture wildly different from what Genly is used to.
Meet Me in Another Life by Catriona Silvey*
Thora and Santi are strangers, brought together by a coincidence and torn apart just as abruptly when tragedy strikes. But this is neither the first nor the last time they meet - again and again they encounter each other, as friends, lovers, enemies, family, every time recognizing in each other a familiarity no one else carries. But with every new life, a mysterious danger grows ever closer, forcing them to find out the truth of their connection. This is a puzzle-box of a story that goes some entirely unexpected places in a very wild ride, featuring a bisexual co-lead and a very hard to define main relationship.
A Door Into Ocean by Joan Slonczewski
On the moon Shora live the Sharers, a nation of women who reproduce via parthenogenesis and have developed highly advanced biological sciences. Leading wholly pacifist lives, the Sharers are threatened when humans from another planet come across their world and decide to develop it, no matter what the Sharers themselves think. The Sharer society is openly sapphic, though the main romance is m/f.
Dust by Elizabeth Bear
In a dying spaceship, orbiting an equally dying sun, noblewoman Perceval awaits her own gruesome death. Having been captured by an opposing house, her wings severed and life forfeit, Perceval’s execution is imminent - until a young servant charged with her care proves to be Perceval’s long lost sister. To stop a war between houses likely to doom them all, the two flee together across a crumbling, dangerous spaceship. At its core waits Jacob Dust, god and angel, all that remains of what the ship once was. And he wants Perceval. Sapphic and asexual characters, however be prepared for kinda fucked up relationships.
Halfway Human by Carolyn Ives Gilman*
When Val, expert in alien cultures, gets called in to help handle the young Tedla after a suicide attempt, she is let in on a secret decades in the making. Tedla is neither male nor female, an asexual person from an isolated planet where a genderless class of 'blands' are exploited as a work force. As knowledge of Tedla's presence begins to spread, so does the attention of various parties wanting to use it for their own ends, including its old masters. As Val works to unravel the history of how Tedla came to leave its world, the pressure builds - what is to become of Tedla? Content warning for themes such as suicidal ideation, slavery, and child sexual abuse.
Moonstar Odyssey by David Gerrold
On the planet of Satlik, humanity have been changed: children are born genderless, and have the ability to choose between male and female during puberty. As a child coming of age, young Jobe finds herself having a hard time choosing what she wants to be, a decision coming into shadow as global disaster looms near. Novella length, focused as much on building up the history and lore of Satlik as it is on the coming of age story. Also an early example of female pronouns being used as default and neutral!
Venus Plus X by Theodore Sturgeon*
Charlie Johns is just your average guy, so when he suddenly finds himself pulled into the strange, utopian future of Ledom, he's shocked. In Ledom, gender is a thing of the past, as is hunger and war. Confused and wanting to return home, Charlie Johns is promised that he will be returned, but first the people of Ledom want him to tour their society. Charlie Johns agrees, but the more he learns and the better things seem, the more suspicion grows: why is he really here? Published in 1960, Venus Plus X is frankly astoundingly progressive about the topic of gender.
Trouble on Triton by Samuel R. Delany
On the moon Triton hundreds of years in the future, life looks a little different from our world. The only place yet to be drawn into a war spanning the entire rest of the solar system, society on Titan is in many ways a utopia, where everyone can live however they want, no matter how strange their ideals. Yet despite this, martian immigrant Bron Helstron isn't happy. Unable to build meaningful relationships or figure out what he actually wants out of life, Bron is prepared to all but turn himself inside out to figure things out. Strange, surreal, and a bit out there, I'd recommend this if you want a story with a fairly loose plot and prose that will scramble your brain. Not a personal favorite, but an impressive work.
Every Day by David Levithan
Young adult. A is neither boy nor girl - in fact, A doesn't have a body of their own. Every day they wake up inhabiting a stranger's body, and spend a single day living their life before waking up as someone else the next day. They try to be respectful of their hosts' lives, not making decisions they wouldn't themselves make, but after meeting and falling for Rhiannon, the girlfriend of one of their hosts, things begin to change as A begins pursuing their own wants.
Woman on the Edge of Time by Marge Piercy
After being forcefully committed to an asylum, Connie Ramos' life is looking bleak. She's being coerced into experimental treatments meant to "cure" her, and no matter what she does no one will believe she's fit to be released. Her only escape are the mysterious visits by a time traveling envoy, who introduces her to a utopian future of sexual and racial equality. But this isn't the only possible future, and Connie herself may be a driving force in what shape the future will take. A very interesting work featuring a mostly gender neutral future, though it does at times feel more like a thought experiment than a narrative.
[images: photo collages of the covers of all the named books, first all of the books in one image and then in groups of three before the descriptions.]
The team has been trying to help Simon get better at flirting.
It started off with Johnny noticing how Simon’s gaze often lingered on you, the newest truck loader.
Then he blabbered it off to the entire team. So yeah— Simon may have banged his head against the wall in his quarters and slept that night thinking about choking Johnny.
But here he was, after a long day of being convinced to talk to you.
You had just finished unloading the last truck of the day and what better time to talk to you than now?
“You gotta be confident and bold with your words, L.T.” Kyle’s words.
“No, you have t’ be funny. Make ‘em laugh.” Johnny’s words.
“If all things fail, just ask ‘em for coffee.” John’s words.
Simon took in a deep breath and smiled (the best he could. He doesn’t smile often). You didn’t even catch it either; he was wearing his damn balaclava. “You just started working, yeah?” he asks, stuffing his hands into his vest. Confident, check.
You took off your gloves and patted your sweaty forehead with your arm, “mhm! About two-ish months ago,” you tell the older man, giving him a polite smile.
A quiet hum fell from Simon’s lips as he rocks on his heels a bit, “Once saw y’ trippin’ over a box,” Simon says bluntly. Funny, check.
You stared at him, blinking twice and half expecting him to finish his sentence.
He didn’t.
Instead, the two of you had a staring contest while Simon’s face burned behind the balaclava.
“You can trip on me,” Simon suddenly adds. Funny and bold… check?
Your brows knitted a bit, “what…?” you ask with an awkward laugh.
Fuck.
This wasn’t going how he imagined it to go. He imagined him coolly leaning against a wall or something while complimenting you.
Fuck, fuck, fuck.
“Do you have coffee?” Simon changes the topic, his entire face blowing up with steam.
Off to the side, John stared at his teammate with a heavy sigh and rubbed his temple. “Bloody idiot asked for coffee,” he mumbles.
Kyle shrugs a bit, “T’ be fair, you did say to ask for coffee,” he says, defending his lieutenant.
“Implying to ask for a coffee date,” John replies bluntly. “Fuckin’ disaster of a man.”
reading this deposition that just got dropped where someone sued musk and ohhhh my god it is this funniest thing ever . i can see why his lawyer tried to keep this confidential . they’re both maybe the biggest idiots . this is like ace attorney
genuinely first two pages he says that he thinks ben’s lawyer is the one who is actually suing him and admits he has no clue what the lawsuit is about .
I don't think Mark can ever top "INDEED, MR. JONES, INDEED" and "AND THAT IS HOW I KNOW YOU LIED TO ME" from the first Sandy Hook trial in Texas (not to be confused with Chris Mattei, the attorney in the Connecticut trial), but this part
MR. SPIRO: Do you give these lectures at all of your depositions?
MR. BANKSTON: I do, and you can watch them.
is ESPECIALLY hilarious to me having listened to multiple depositions Mark has had to take in the Sandy Hook case, where he has needed to lecture EVERY. SINGLE. ATTORNEY. at some point in the case about how they're violating Texas Rule XYZ, because they all, to a one, did something seriously ethically questionable during the deposition.
like, YOU CAN WATCH/LISTEN TO HIS DEPOS. HE DOES HAVE TO GIVE THOSE LECTURES EVERY TIME. IT'S NOT EVEN A JOKE.
until we're rotten; a AKOTSK AU (Ghost x Johnny X F!Reader)
Hedge knight Ghost attends a tourney in search of a new master after the death of his sire. When the games master turns him away Ghost must find another knight or nobleman to vouch for him and crosses paths with Ser MacTavish, the son of a lord, whose extravagance and debauchery is often overlooked due to his prowess on the field. Ghost doesn't know why but Ser MacTavish agrees to vouch him, even though the two have never met before. You are the daughter of a fallen noble family who has found very comfortable 'employment' in the service Ser MacTavish, but you worry he will soon lose interest in you and it seems like the solution to your problem has just arrived.
Oneshot
↓tags below the cut (will contain spoilers and may be updated at the time of posting)↓
mdni, prostitution, sex work, smut, light choking, baby trapping, female reader, plus size reader, breeding, mentions of contraceptives and abortion, violence, minor character death, mentions of patricide
k y'all, the move is imminent and I have two days to pack and clean and if I don't post about it ill never actually do it so, you're all coming with me on my tragic sojourn as I figure out how to cram all my shit into a suitcase and run my errands
ok laundry has been put in, I talked to my landlady, ive washed all my stuffed animals and heat set some autographed shirts and now I get to rotate the laundry and walk to the ups store
20K words, Simon’s hair has grown out, reader wears glasses, Simon doesn’t know how to dance, smut, the fluffiest fluff, angst, size kink, Simon is huge, pee mentioned, Simon is filthy but we all knew that. Tell me if I missed any tags.
He was four years old when he stole your crayons.
Not all of them. Just the good ones. The red one. The yellow one. The bright, sunflower-gold one that you'd been saving to colour the sun in the corner of your drawing, the way all four-year-olds drew the sun — a circle in the corner, rays shooting out like a child's idea of joy.
You looked at him across the low art table in that bright little preschool room that smelled of poster paint and digestive biscuits.
He was stocky even then.
Chubby-cheeked and heavy-set. A thick, sturdy little boy who sat with his legs wide and his fat fists curled around your crayons like he'd earned them.
He wasn't even looking at you.
He was colouring something — a car, maybe, or a blob that might have been a dog — and the yellow crayon moved in big, purposeful strokes across his paper.
You did not cry.
You considered it.
Then you leaned across the table and took them back.
He looked up.
Brown eyes. Even at four, they were startling — dark and serious and far too watchful for a boy his age.
He stared at you.
You stared back.
Then he slid the gold crayon back across the table to you, said nothing, and went back to his drawing.
His name was Simon.
You would not learn that until the register was called the following morning. But you remembered his eyes before you remembered his name.
— ✦ —
He broke your glasses in Year Two.
Not on purpose — or so you believed, for most of your life, until you were old enough to accept that
Simon Riley did very few things without purpose.
He knocked into you in the corridor outside the dining hall, your plastic NHS frames hitting the linoleum floor, one arm snapping clean off at the hinge.
You stood there, the world going soft and blurry at the edges the way it always did without them, and you felt the particular, humiliating sting of being unable to see properly — the vulnerability of it, the indignity.
Simon picked up the frames. Looked at them. Looked at you.
He didn't say sorry straight away. He examined the break with the seriousness of a boy who was already, at seven, very careful about what he said and when he said it. Then, "I'll carry your bag till they're fixed."
"You broke my glasses," you told him like he didn’t know.
"I know." He nodded.
"That's not the same as fixing them."
"No," he agreed. "But it's what I've got."
He carried your bag for three days. And when your mum brought the repaired frames in on the fourth morning, he handed the bag back without ceremony, turned, and went to join his mates by the football cage. No further apology. No acknowledgement that anything had occurred between you at all.
That afternoon, you kicked over his sandcastle in the playground.
He watched you do it. Didn't say a word.
You felt better.
And somehow, after that, you were friends.
— ✦ —
He couldn't read very well. You figured this out in Year Three, during the round-robin reading in class — when the teacher went along the rows and each child read a sentence aloud.
You noticed the way Simon's jaw set and his hands went flat on the desk the closer it got to his turn. The way his eyes moved across the page, laboured and slow, tracking words like they were things to be wrestled rather than known.
He got through his sentence. Barely. His face was blank when he sat back, the particular blankness he'd already learned to wear — that carefully constructed nothing that meant everything was fine when everything was not fine at all.
You didn't say anything about it. Not then. You were eight years old, not stupid.
What you did was start reading with him at break time. You presented it as something you needed — you told him you were practising for a reading competition and needed an audience.
Simon was not fooled. He was never fooled, not really.
But he sat down with you on the bench by the library door and listened while you read, and then slowly, carefully, you handed the book to him and asked what he thought happened next, and he had to read ahead to find out.
It took most of the school year. But by the summer he was reading chapter books. He never thanked you. He did start saving you a seat on the library bench every break time, and that was the same thing.
— ✦ —
He played football and rugby.
You read on the grass bank above the field.
It became a kind of institution — the ritual of your shared proximity without shared activity. Simon on the pitch, broad and determined and already bigger than the other boys by Year Five, already moving with that particular physicality that seemed less like playing and more like declaration.
And you on the bank above, your book open, your reading glasses (a better pair now, tortoiseshell) perched on your nose, half-reading and half watching without ever quite admitting to the watching.
He always knew you were there. He didn't do anything about it. But sometimes, when he scored, he'd look up at the bank first before he looked anywhere else.
You told yourself you were only there because the grass was nice and the light was good.
You were not a good liar, even then.
— ✦ —
The boy's name was Daniel Holt and he pushed you over in the playground in Year Five because you'd refused to give him the answers to the maths homework.
You'd said no three times and the third time he pushed you and you went down hard on your palms and your knees, the concrete was unforgiving.
You were crying before you'd fully registered what had happened. Not dramatically — small, shocked, indignant tears, the kind that arrive before the pain does.
Simon was there before a teacher was. You didn't even see where he came from. One moment the playground was its ordinary mid-morning noise, and the next Daniel Holt had a split lip and Simon Riley was standing over him with blood on his knuckles and a look on his face that was completely, utterly calm.
The calm was the frightening part. Even at ten.
He got three days at home for it. He spent the first afternoon sitting on your front step, eating crisps, because he knew you'd be furious with him and wanted to face it head-on.
You were furious. You told him he was an idiot. He told you Daniel Holt had it coming. You told him violence wasn't the answer. He told you Daniel Holt wasn't going to touch you again.
He was right. Daniel Holt never came near you again.
You didn't thank him either. You went inside and made him a sandwich, and that was the same thing.
— ✦ —
Secondary school arrived like a change in weather — everything slightly larger, slightly louder, the corridors longer and noisier, the stakes somehow higher and more ambiguous all at once. You arrived with a bag so heavy your shoulder ached within the first hour: your textbooks, yes, but also the extracurricular books you carried everywhere, the extra notepad you used for non-school thoughts, the six different highlighters you colour-coded by subject.
Simon took the bag from you on the third day without asking.
"I can carry it," you told him.
"I know," he said.
He slung it over his shoulder like it weighed nothing, which for him it probably didn't. He'd grown over the summer — not just taller, though he was that, but broader, thicker through the shoulders in a way that made him look like a man playing a boy, trying the shape of it on. He wore it well, even at eleven. He wore everything like he'd already decided what he was and was simply waiting for the world to catch up.
He carried your bag when it was heavy, and it was frequently heavy. He did it without comment and without making you feel small for needing it. That was the thing about Simon — he never made you feel small. He made other people feel small, sometimes, when they deserved it. But not you. Never you.
— ✦ —
The bruises were never from rugby.
You knew by the second year of secondary.
You were not naive — you had read enough, observed enough, understood enough about the world to recognise the shape of what was happening in Simon Riley's house even though he never said a word about it.
The bruises were in the wrong places for rugby. They appeared in the wrong season. They were around his ribs and his arms and once, memorably, along his jaw, and he came to school the Monday after the jaw bruise with that face — that blank, carefully constructed nothing face — and you sat next to him at lunch and said nothing at all.
You said nothing because there was nothing you could do. You were twelve. You were a girl with a book bag and highlighter pens and absolutely no power over the man who was hurting your best friend, and knowing that — the impotence of it, the helpless, hollow ache of caring about someone you could not protect — was the first truly adult pain you ever felt.
What you could do was this: you could make sure he had somewhere to go.
Your mother, who was perceptive in the quiet way that some mothers are, never asked questions when Simon turned up at the back door on a Sunday evening or a Wednesday after school.
She just set another plate.
Your house became a refuge without anyone naming it as such. Simon did his homework at your kitchen table, ate your mother's cooking, watched telly with your family, and slept on your sofa sometimes when the option was presented naturally enough that it didn't feel like charity.
— ✦ —
You got your period for the first time on a Tuesday in November, in Year Nine. In the school toilets, third period, when you were thirteen years old and the day had been entirely ordinary right up until it wasn't.
The particular cocktail of shock and pain and embarrassment and the specific existential bewilderment of being a person whose body was doing something enormous without prior adequate notice left you sitting on the closed toilet lid crying in a way you hadn't cried in years.
You got out your Nokia. That familiar brick of a phone, the keypad worn smooth at the number five. You typed Simon's number and pressed call before you'd properly decided to.
He picked up on the second ring. "Yeah."
"Simon." Your voice came out wrong. Too thin.
A beat. When he spoke again his voice had changed — quieter, more careful. "Where are you?"
"Girls' toilets. Near the science block."
"Right," he said. "Stay there."
He appeared outside the girls' toilets seven minutes later — you could hear him through the door, his voice low and flat, telling a Year Eight girl to go use the other ones — and then he was there, right there on the other side of the door, talking to you through it in that steady, even way he had when he wanted to be calm on your behalf.
"You're alright," he said. “Do you need me to go to the office?"
"No," you managed. "I need — I don't know what I need."
"I'll get you something from the vending machine," he said, that Manchester accent of his low and unhurried. "And I'll text your mum."
When you came out of the toilets twenty minutes later, looking wrung-out and clutching what the school nurse had provided, Simon was leaning against the wall. He looked at you for a moment — took you in, the way he always did, that comprehensive, assessing look — and then he stepped forward and kissed your cheek. Quick. Certain. His mouth warm and deliberate against your cheekbone.
"You're alright," he said again. He said it like a fact. Like he was making it true by saying it.
You cried a bit more, for different reasons, and he pretended not to notice.
— ✦ —
He was captain of the rugby team by Year Ten. It suited him — the leadership, the sense of purpose, the structure of it.
You went to his matches sometimes, wrapped in a scarf on the touchline, and watched him move across the pitch with that same quality you'd noticed on the primary school field: less like playing, more like declaration.
He was ferocious and focused and occasionally frightening, and the other boys deferred to him not just because he was bigger than them but because he had the kind of authority that doesn't need to be announced.
Afterwards he'd find you on the touchline, still carrying that quality — coiled, alert — and it would take him a few minutes to come back to himself. To come back to you.
"Good game," you'd say.
"Yeah," he'd say.
And then slowly, the set of his shoulders would ease, and he'd become Simon again. Your Simon. The one who stole your crayons and carried your bag and ate your mother's shepherd's pie like it was sacred.
— ✦ —
He could make you laugh. This was not a small thing.
Simon Riley was not, by general consensus, a funny person. He was serious and quiet and his face in repose looked like a man carrying a private weather system. But he had a dry, deadpan wit that he deployed rarely and precisely, and it landed, every time, like a key in a lock made specifically for it.
He knew how to make you laugh because he'd spent years learning you. The specific frequency of your humour. The things that made you dissolve into giggles rather than just smile. He deployed his wit with the same precision he deployed everything else, and the result was that when Simon Riley made you laugh — really laugh, the helpless, breathless kind — it felt like being given something he didn't give to anyone else.
Which, you would eventually understand, was accurate.
— ✦ —
His name was Ryan Marsh and he was your first kiss, in the park on a Friday evening in Year Ten, and it was fine. It was nice, even. Ryan was sweet and nervous and smelled of his older brother's aftershave and the kiss lasted approximately forty seconds.
Ryan Marsh had a broken nose the following Monday.
Simon maintained, with total conviction, that Ryan had walked into a door. Ryan, to his credit, corroborated this story completely.
You did not push the matter, partly because you had no concrete evidence and partly because some part of you — the part that read on the grass bank and watched the pitch and noticed when Simon looked up at the bank before he looked anywhere else — felt something that was not entirely uncomplicated about it.
You and Ryan Marsh did not have a second kiss. You told yourself it was because the chemistry hadn't been right.
You were getting a bit better at lying to yourself, by fourteen. But only a bit.
— ✦ —
GCSEs arrived the way all important things arrived — with more weight than you'd expected and less warning than you'd have liked.
Year Ten and Eleven were the years you restructured Simon's entire approach to studying, methodically and patiently, the same way you'd helped him learn to read, finding the approach that worked for how his mind moved.
Simon was not unintelligent.
He was, in fact, formidably sharp in ways that didn't translate easily to an exam paper: quick to read people, quick to understand systems, possessed of a spatial and strategic intelligence that you recognised and admired even as you taught him how to write it down in ways that the mark scheme would accept.
He sat with you at your kitchen table night after night — your mother quietly replenishing the tea,— and you explained things in the language that made sense to his brain rather than the language of the textbook.
He sat with you at lunch during school hours and glared at anyone who called you a nerd. The glaring was extremely effective. Simon Riley's face, by fifteen, was a significant deterrent.
His GCSE results, when they arrived, were good. Better than anyone who knew his circumstances might have expected from a boy who'd had so much working against him.
He rang you on the house phone when he opened the results envelope. He didn't say much. His voice, when he spoke, was different — something in it unguarded, the Manchester in it softer somehow, without the armour it usually carried.
"Couldn't have done it without you," he said.
"You did it," you told him firmly. "I just held the torch."
"Still needed the torch."
You smiled so hard your face ached. "Go celebrate, Simon."
"Yeah," he said. And then, quieter, "Thanks, sunshine."
— ✦ —
He was an apprentice at the butcher's on Renshaw Street after school — learning the trade with the same focused, physical competence he brought to everything else, solid and unhurried, his big hands learning new kinds of precision. You had a job at the bookshop two streets over.
On his lunch breaks you would walk over with a sandwich and a packet of crisps, and you'd sit on the low wall around the side of the shop while he ate and you talked about nothing in particular and everything in general.
He had sawdust on his boots and you'd have ink on your fingers from pricing stickers, and you'd sit in the thin afternoon light talking about books and people and where things might go from here, and it was the most ordinary, irreplaceable thing in the world.
You didn't know, then, that you were storing it up. You didn't know you were in the middle of something finite.
You were seventeen and you thought you had time.
— ✦ —
It was the eleventh of September, 2001.
You were at work when it happened — the bookshop had a small television in the back room, and you watched the footage with your hand pressed over your mouth and the world rearranging itself into a new shape around you.
Simon came to you that evening. He didn't knock — he had a spare key, had done for years — and you heard him come in and go into the kitchen and fill the kettle, the sound of him so familiar and domestic and real that something in your chest loosened a fraction.
He brought you tea. He sat on the sofa beside you and you watched the news together in silence, and at some point your head found his shoulder without either of you deciding it had.
"I'm going to join up," he said. Not asking. Telling.
You lifted your head from his shoulder. Frowned at him. "Join up what?"
"The military."
The word landed in the room and stayed there. You looked at his face — that flat, certain expression he wore when he'd already decided something — and you felt the ground shift slightly under you.
"Simon. You're seventeen."
"You can join at sixteen with parental consent," he said. Straightforward, as though he'd already looked into it. Which of course he had. "Seventeen without."
"That's—" You stopped. Started again. "You've thought about this before today."
"Yeah."
Of course he had. You could see it now, the shape of it — this was not a reaction to the footage on the television, not a hot, impulsive thing. This was something Simon had been building toward without telling you. The structure of it. The purpose. The particular kind of belonging that came from being part of something larger than yourself. You'd always known he'd go toward something like this. You'd just hoped, without ever quite admitting to the hoping, that it might be further away.
"You're not going to try to talk me out of it." Not a question.
"Would it work?"
He held your gaze. "No."
"Then no," you said. Your voice was very steady. You were proud of it. "I'm not."
He was quiet for a long moment. The television continued its awful repetition. Then his arm came around your shoulders, heavy and warm, and he pulled you in closer against his side.
You stayed like that until the tea went cold.
— ✦ —
The train station was grey and noisy with other leavings, other arrivals, other people in the middle of things.
Simon stood in front of you on the platform with his kit bag and his big, careful hands and the face he'd spent seventeen years learning to keep blank, and it occurred to you, not for the first time and not for the last, that you loved him.
That you had loved him in different quantities and different registers for most of your life. That you did not know how to say it and were not sure it would do either of you any good if you did.
So you didn't say it.
You went up on your toes and you hugged him — truly hugged him, arms around his neck, your face pressed against his jaw — and he held you back with both arms, the kit bag dropping to the platform, and he was so solid and warm and real that you memorised it.
"Don't be an idiot," you told him, muffled.
He made a sound that was almost a laugh. Almost. "Best I can do is try." The Manchester in his voice, low and warm and his.
"Simon."
"I know," he said quietly, against your temple. "I know, sunshine."
You stepped back. You held it together. He picked up his bag and he walked toward the platform and at the door of the train he turned, and looked at you standing there with your glasses and your coat and your hands pressed together in front of you, and for a second you saw something in his face that wasn't blank at all.
Then he was gone.
You cried on the way home. Proper, ugly crying, in the front seat of your mother's car, while she drove and said nothing and passed you a tissue.
You cried because you thought you might never see him again. Because the world had cracked open on a Tuesday in September and people were going toward the fracture and Simon Riley was one of them.
You cried because you never told him.
— ✦ —
He sent a birthday card every year.
They arrived with no return address and postmarks from places you'd never heard of, and sometimes they were late and sometimes they were so early you suspected he'd sent them weeks in advance in case he couldn't later.
They were always plain — Simon Riley was not a man who browsed the sentimental section — white or cream envelopes, the kind of card that was almost generic, and inside: his handwriting, which had improved vastly from the boy who'd struggled across the page in Year Three, and always the same thing. Your name at the top. Happy Birthday, sunshine. And then: S.
Just S.
Like he was still close enough that you'd know exactly who that meant. Like the initial was sufficient.
It was.
You sent his birthday gifts to a P.O. box he'd given you, wrapped carefully, the tag always: From your best friend. You didn't know if he received them all. You sent them anyway. It felt important to keep sending them — to maintain the thread, even when you couldn't see both ends of it.
— ✦ —
Thirty-four years old now.
You have no husband. You had come close, once — a man named Patrick who had been perfectly acceptable in every measurable way and who had wanted to marry you and had probably deserved someone who could give him more of herself than you could manage.
You had not been fair to Patrick. You knew that. You had been in love with someone else for most of your adult life, and even with the someone else absent and silent and possibly dead, there wasn't room for anyone else.
You have no children, though you wanted them. The timeline on that was becoming its own quiet ache, the kind you didn't prod too often.
You have a job that pays the bills and not much else — admin in an office building that smells of carpet cleaner and recycled air, the kind of work that requires enough of your brain to stop it from wandering but not enough to satisfy it.
You have an apartment that is functional and yours and that you have tried to make cozy, with books on every surface and plants that are mostly surviving and a kitchen you actually cook in.
It is not the house. It is not the house you told Simon about when you were sixteen and lying in his back garden on a summer evening, staring up at the sky.
No birthday card for five years now.
Five years of the particular, specific silence that was different from all the silences before, because the silences before had been interrupted. Annually, reliably, he had broken them.
Five years of nothing had the texture of conclusion. Of a chapter closing. And you had reached the point — slowly, painfully, with the kind of acceptance that doesn't feel like acceptance but feels like exhaustion — where you were fairly certain Simon Riley was dead.
Your heart ached for your best friend in the low, constant way of grief that has become so familiar it's almost structural.
You carried it the way you carried other things, quietly, with your spine straight.
Which is why you are sitting across from a man named — it didn't matter, it really didn't matter what his name was — on what your colleague Debbie had described as 'a perfectly nice date with a perfectly nice man' and trying to remember what it felt like to be interested in your own life.
The man sitting across from you was the complete opposite of Simon Riley.
He was trim and well-dressed and had the kind of face that was handsome in a way that required no effort to appreciate and inspired no particular feeling from you.
He had been talking for, by your reckoning, forty-seven minutes. In that time he had covered: his career (impressive, in his telling), his car (expensive, in his telling), his last holiday (exotic, in his telling), and his general philosophy on modern dating (nuanced, in his telling).
He had not asked about your job. He had not asked about your books or the one peeking out of your handbag; the one he'd glanced at and not commented on. He had not asked if your pasta was nice, which it was, actually, genuinely nice, and you'd have told him so if he'd asked. He had not asked you almost anything, come to think of it.
Simon Riley, who spoke perhaps a tenth as many words as this man, had always asked.
Simon Riley had always wanted to know. Not because it was polite. Because he actually, genuinely, in the particular way of people who care about very few things very deeply — wanted to know.
You excused yourself to use the bathroom and stood at the sink running cold water over your wrists and looking at your own reflection, and you thought: this is fine.
This is a perfectly nice evening with a perfectly nice man. This is what moving forward looks like. This is what being a person in the world, a person with a life and a future and reasonable expectations of company, looks like.
You dried your hands. You went back to the table. He had ordered himself another drink without asking if you wanted anything.
You finished your pasta and smiled at appropriate intervals and thought about Simon Riley and felt, as you so often felt, quietly furious at him for being gone.
— ✦ —
The birthday card arrived on a Thursday morning.
You almost missed it entirely — it was tucked between a pizza delivery leaflet and something from your energy supplier, the cream envelope almost camouflaged by the mundane. You shuffled through the post on autopilot and then stopped.
Your name, in handwriting you would have recognised anywhere, would have recognised in your sleep, had recognised in your bones for thirty years.
You sat down on the bottom stair. Your legs suddenly uneasy.
Your hands were not steady.
The envelope opened. The card was white. Plain. Almost generic.
Inside:
Happy Birthday, sunshine.
I'm sorry it's been so long.
I'll explain everything.
Come, if you want to.
If you can stand the sight of me.
Below that, an address. Three towns over. A postcode you didn't recognise.
And then, at the bottom, the way it had always been at the bottom: S.
You sat on the bottom stair for a very long time.
Then you got up, went to your room, and started thinking about what to wear.
— ✦ —
You plucked up the nerve to go on a Saturday.
The drive took forty minutes and you spent most of it trying to manage yourself — talking yourself through reasonable expectations (he is alive, that is enough, start there), warning yourself against things you could not control (the five years, the silence, the way your hands were doing that unsteady thing again), cataloguing everything practical (the address, the map).
The street was quiet. Semi-rural, the kind of neighbourhood that sits between things — between town and country, between the ordinary and the aspirational. The houses were spread out, set back from the road, each with its own front garden and its own character.
You parked. You looked at the address. You looked up.
And you stopped breathing.
It was a beautiful house.
Large, substantial and solid, the kind of house that had been built to last. White painted render, clean and bright in the afternoon light. A white picket fence surrounding the front garden, which was full of flowers. Roses climbing the gatepost. Lavender edging the path. Foxgloves and dahlias and great loose clusters of something purple you couldn't name from here. The kind of garden that had been planted with intention, tended with care, left to be a little wild in the best way.
A porch. And a porch swing, painted white, with a yellow cushion on it.
And flying from the corner of the roof, bright against the blue afternoon sky: the Union flag.
You sat very still in the driver's seat.
You were sixteen years old. It was a summer evening and you were lying in Simon's back garden on an old sleeping bag, looking up at the sky. He was beside you in the way he was always beside you — solid, quiet, taking up exactly the right amount of space. You'd been talking about the future the way teenagers do, in great floating hypotheticals that feel more like weather than plans.
"What kind of house?" he'd asked. He asked follow-up questions always, quietly, wanting the specifics. It was one of the things about him you loved.
And you'd described it. A big house, not ostentatious but real — space for books and for people and for a garden that did what it wanted within reason. A white fence, because you'd always liked them. A porch with somewhere to sit. A flag, because you were — despite everything — proud of where you were from.
Simon had been quiet for a long moment.
"Okay," he'd said. Just: okay.
You had thought he was humouring you.
You had not thought — you had not let yourself think — what it might mean, that he was going to do anything about it.
You got out of the car. Your legs were not entirely reliable. You held the gate and walked up the path — lavender brushing your hand where it grew close, the scent of it too perfect, almost staged — and you stopped at the foot of the porch steps.
The door opened.
He had to duck.
That was the first thing you noticed. The physical fact of him, the sheer size of him, his shoulders nearly touching the doorframe on both sides simultaneously, the automatic dip of his head as he stepped through onto the porch.
He straightened.
The afternoon light landed on him and you had to spend a moment recalibrating, because the last time you'd seen Simon Riley he had been seventeen years old with sawdust on his boots and a train ticket in his hand, and this man —
This man.
The white button-down shirt was simple, the sleeves rolled to the elbow, and from his left wrist to well past the roll of the sleeve his forearm was dark with ink — a sleeve of tattoos, intricate and considered. A whole geography of imagery that you couldn't read from here but would, you thought, take time to learn.
His right wrist carried a watch. His black slacks were fitted close enough that you could see the muscle of his thighs pulling the fabric with every shift of his weight, and his shoes — loafers, black with gold buckles, completely unexpected and somehow exactly right — were precise.
His hair. A dark sandy blonde, longer than military specification presumably allowed and slicked back from his face, which meant you could see all of it, his whole face; the angles that had sharpened from boy to man, the jaw, the set of his brow, and those eyes. Those brown eyes that had been watching you since you were four years old and had never, not once, looked at you with anything less than complete attention.
He was raking those eyes over you now. Slowly. With the same quality he'd always had — that comprehensive, unhurried assessment that somehow never felt like being measured — and his hands were in his pockets and he was standing there like that, on the porch he'd built or bought or arranged specifically around a description you'd given him at sixteen.
He looked like something out of a magazine and like Simon all at once.
You were going to murder him.
"Hi, sunshine."
His voice. Lower than you remembered, rougher, carrying all the years he'd lived since you last heard it. That Manchester accent — still there, unmistakably, that warm northern flatness underneath everything, the vowels shaped by a city, by a street, by a particular kind of upbringing that no amount of training had entirely smoothed out.
That nickname, in that voice, in that low, deliberate way he'd always said it: like you were his.
Like it was a prayer.
You opened your mouth. And you closed it. And you looked at him — this enormous, tattooed, stupidly handsome man who had stood on your mother's doorstep at twelve years old with bruises he didn't mention, who had kissed your cheek at thirteen and broken Ryan Marsh's nose at fourteen and waved goodbye from a train platform at seventeen and then sent you birthday cards from the edges of the world for a decade and then stopped for five years —
"Five years," you said. Your voice was very quiet.
Something moved in his face.
"I-,"
"I thought you were dead." You snapped cutting him off.
"I figured you would’ve."
"Simon."
"I know, sunshine." He said it the same way he'd always said things he couldn't argue with — not deflecting, not dismissing, just absorbing. The Manchester vowels in his voice like a hand on your shoulder. "I'll explain everything. I promise. All of it. Whatever you want to know."
You looked at him.
He looked at you.
The afternoon settled around the house, around the garden that was your garden in your own sixteen-year-old description, around the flag and the porch swing and the lavender and all of it, and the distance between you on the path and him on the porch steps was perhaps four feet and thirty years and five years of silence and a whole life of choosing not to say the one true thing.
"You built me the house?" you asked, whispering it. Like you were afraid to say it.
He was quiet for a moment. Then, "Bought it. Had the garden done the way you said."
"Simon." Your heart ached.
"You said lavender at the edges," he said. His voice was completely level. "You said a porch with somewhere to sit. You said you wanted to see the flag from the garden."
You pressed your hand to your mouth.
The rage was still there — it was not going anywhere quickly. The five years of it, the grief of it — but underneath it, something else. Something that had been there since you were four years old at a preschool art table, larger and quieter and more permanent than anything else you'd ever felt.
"You were sixteen," he said. As though this explained it. "You told me what you wanted. I just..." He stopped. Started again. "I wanted to be enough first. I wanted to have what you needed."
There was a long silence. A bee moved through the lavender. Somewhere a few streets away, a lawnmower hummed.
"Come inside," Simon said. "I'll make you tea. And I'll tell you everything."
You looked at him on the porch of the house he'd built you from a word, and you thought: you absolute idiot. You wonderful, impossible, infuriating man. You thought I'd stopped. You thought thirty years of this was something you could be enough for eventually, like it was a bar to clear, like there was a version of you I was waiting on instead of just —
Instead of just you. Always just you.
The lavender brushed your hand again. You walked up the steps and he looked down at you with those brown eyes that had never once left you.
"Hi, Simon," you said.
Something happened in his face. Something opened.
"Hi, sunshine," he said, his hand coming to the small of your back to guide you inside.
He made the tea.
You stood in the kitchen of a house that smelled of fresh paint and cedar and something faintly floral from the garden drifting through the open window over the sink, and you watched Simon Riley move around it like he'd always lived here — filling the kettle, finding the mugs without opening the wrong cupboard, knowing where the teabags were — and you thought: how long. How long has he been here, in this house he bought for you, learning where everything lives, waiting.
You sat at the kitchen table. It was a good table, heavy oak, the kind built to last and you ran your thumb along the grain of it and tried to arrange your feelings into some kind of order and failed.
Simon set the mug in front of you. Milk in last, the way you'd always taken it, which he knew because he'd made you approximately four thousand cups of tea over the course of your lives. He sat down across from you, his own mug between his big hands, and looked at you.
You looked back.
The kitchen light was warm and it caught the angles of his face. The jaw, the brow, the slight crook in his nose that was new, or newer, the result of something you didn't know about and weren't sure you wanted to.
He was watching you with that particular quality of attention he'd always had. Complete. Patient. Like you were the only thing in the room worth looking at.
"You're not wearing your glasses," he said.
You blinked. Of all the things. "No."
"Contacts?"
"For about ten years now, yes."
He was quiet for a moment, studying your face with that same unhurried attention, "I missed them."
"You missed my glasses?" You say with the deadpan tone you'd perfected over the years.
"Tortoiseshell ones," he said. "Used to push them up your nose when you were concentrating." He took a gulp of his tea, Adam's apple bobbing when he swallowed.
You stared at him. Eighteen years. Eighteen years of distance and war and God knows what else, and he missed your glasses. "Simon."
"Just saying."
"You are unbelievable." You scoff.
"The contacts suit you," he said, and the corner of his mouth moved — barely, almost nothing, but you'd spent your whole life reading that face and you caught it. "Everything suits you. But I liked the glasses."
"Stop it." You snap.
"Stop what?"
"Whatever that is," you said, and you pointed at his face, at the not-there-almost-smile, at the quality of his voice when he said everything suits you, at all of it. "You don't get to do that. You've been — Simon, you've been gone. You've been gone for eighteen years and for five of them, I thought you were dead." Your voice stayed steady, which surprised you. You'd expected it to crack on that. "So you don't get to walk out onto your porch looking like — like that — and tell me you missed my glasses and flirt at me like no time has passed."
He listened without interrupting. He always had — it was one of the things about him, the way he gave you the whole space of what you were saying before he entered it.
"You're right," he nodded.
"I know I'm right." Your spine straightened.
"I owe you an explanation."
"You owe me considerably more than that, Simon Riley, but yes. An explanation would be a start."
He wrapped both hands around his mug again and looked at you across the table and there was something in his face that was not the blank-nothing face, was not the armour he'd worn since he was twelve years old but something that was quieter and more exposed and a great deal more frightening because of it.
"Not here," he said.
You frowned. "What?"
"I don't want to do it like this. Sat in a kitchen." He glanced around the room briefly, as though orienting himself. "Come to dinner with me tomorrow night."
"What I—"
"The Grill on Merton Street."
You went very still.
The Grill on Merton Street. You hadn't been in years — not since you'd moved away from the area, not since things had shifted and the rituals of your old life had quietly been replaced by other things.
But you knew it. You knew every table in it. The way the light came through the front windows on a Sunday, the smell of it — roasted meat and old wood and the particular warmth of a place that had been feeding families for decades.
Your mother had loved it. Your father used to order the same thing every time and be pleased about it every time, and you and Simon had sat across from each other in the corner booth with the sticky laminated menus and kicked each other under the table and laughed.
"That's still open?" you managed.
"Had a look earlier this week," he said. "Still there. New owners but the same building. Same corner booth."
You looked at him. He looked at you. Outside, through the open window, a late bird was making itself known in the lavender.
"Fine," you said. "Dinner. Tomorrow. And you're going to tell me everything." you struck at him with a serious face.
"Everything," he agreed.
"I mean it, Simon. All of it."
"I know you do."
You drank your tea. It was exactly right. The temperature, the strength, the milk ratio and you hated him a little bit for that. For the fact that he still knew, that across seventeen years and God knows how many miles he still knew exactly how you took your tea, and he'd made it correctly on the first attempt without asking, and you were absolutely not going to cry about that.
You were not.
— ✦ —
You dressed carefully.
Not because you were trying to impress him.
You told yourself this firmly, standing in front of your wardrobe in the room you'd taken in the local B&B — you'd booked a night, not knowing how long this might take, not knowing what state you'd be in for the drive home afterwards — and you told yourself that you were simply dressing appropriately for a dinner at a decent restaurant.
That was all.
That was the entirety of it.
The dress was deep green. Fitted through the waist, falling to just below the knee, with a neckline that was elegant rather than dramatic.
You'd bought it for a work event two years ago and it had lived in your wardrobe since, waiting for an occasion that felt worth it. You put your hair up — not elaborately, just neatly, the kind of arrangement that looked effortless and had taken twenty minutes — and you wore the small gold earrings that had been your grandmother's. Low heels. The good handbag. A slick of red on your mouth that you almost wiped off twice before deciding to leave it.
You were not trying to impress him.
You were absolutely trying to impress him.
He was waiting outside The Grill when your taxi pulled up, standing on the pavement with his hands in his pockets. The air around him relaxed and easy. An anchored stillness, like a man who'd learned to wait and had made peace with it. He has the same dark slacks as yesterday, same loafers with the gold buckles, but the shirt tonight was black.
A deep, clean black that made his shoulders look approximately the width of a doorway, which was in fact an accurate assessment — and he'd left the top button undone. His hair was the same: pushed back, dark sandy blonde curling at the nape of his neck and catching the amber of the streetlights.
He saw you get out of the taxi.
He went very still. Completely, suddenly, entirely present in a way that landed on you like a hand against your sternum. Under your heartbeat.
You crossed the pavement toward him and his eyes moved over you — slowly, comprehensively, that same rake of attention he'd given you yesterday on the porch steps, only this time there was nothing restrained about what it did to your pulse.
He eyed you the same way he used to look at the extra cuts of slow roasted beef your mother added to his plate every time he joined you for a Sunday roast after church.
"Hi," you said.
"Hi, sunshine." His voice was low. The rough Manchester sending tingles down your spine.
He opened the door for you.
The Grill smelled exactly the same.
Roasted meat and warmed bread and old wood and something faintly of candle wax. It hit you the moment you stepped through the door and you had to stand still for just a second, just one second, to absorb the weight of it.
Your father's coat on the hook by the door. Your mother's reading glasses going into her bag as the menus arrived. Simon across from you, fourteen and fifteen and sixteen, his big hands wrapped around a Coke glass, his eyes on you under that careful brow.
The layout had shifted slightly — new owners, as Simon had said — but the bones of it were the same. The dark wood panelling. The low warm lighting. The tables set with proper linen and actual candles in glass holders. And in the back left corner was the booth.
Simon's hand was at the small of your back as the host led you through. A light touch, barely there, the kind of thing that could be merely courteous and was absolutely not merely courteous.
You said nothing about it.
You were almost at the booth when a voice said, "Well. I don't believe it."
You turned.
Margaret and Gerald Howarth.
Margaret had been your mother's friend since before you were born — a small, bright-eyed woman who had somehow barely aged in two decades. Her silver hair cut the same way it had always been, her husband a large, genial man beside her with a napkin already tucked into his collar. They'd been eating here since before you were born too, you suspected. Some people were simply woven into the furniture of a place.
"Margaret," you said, and you felt a genuine, warm rush of it. Of being seen by someone who had known you as a child, who had watched you grow up, who carried that particular knowledge of you that only people of a certain generation can hold. She was already rising halfway from her seat, her hand extended, and you took it and she covered it with her other one, the way she always had.
"We heard you were back in the area," she said — which was interesting, since you'd only arrived yesterday, but news apparently still moved at its old speed around here. Her bright eyes moved to Simon, and something in them softened with recognition and surprise in equal measure. "And Simon Riley. My goodness."
"Mrs Howarth." Simon's voice was respectful, quieter than usual, and you noticed — because you noticed everything about him — that he straightened fractionally. Not stiffly. Just the particular adjustment of a man in the presence of someone he'd known when he was young and unguarded.
"Look at the size of you," Gerald said, not unkindly, staring up at Simon with the frank appreciation of one large man for another. "What are they feeding you?"
"Gerald," Margaret scolded mildly.
"It's a compliment." He shrugged.
Simon almost smiled. "Good to see you, Mr Howarth."
Margaret was looking between the two of you with the expression of a woman who had been quietly observing people her entire life and drawing accurate conclusions from very little evidence. "Are you together?" she asked, with the particular directness that came with age and with having known you since you were in a pushchair.
"We're having dinner," you said carefully.
Margaret's expression said, quite clearly, that she had heard this and had also heard everything it was not saying. "Well," she said, patting your hand once more before releasing it, "it's lovely to see you both. You always did belong together, the pair of you. I said that to your mother once, do you know. I said those two—"
"It was lovely seeing you, Margaret," you said, with great warmth and only mild desperation.
She laughed, a bright, pleased sound and settled back into her seat.
As you turned to follow the host the rest of the way to the booth, you were almost certain you heard Gerald say, to his wife, "told you" in a tone of quiet marital satisfaction.
Simon was very carefully not reacting to any of this. You were very carefully not looking at him.
You saw two others you knew before you reached the booth.
Kim Ashworth, who had been in your form in Year Ten and who looked essentially the same as she had in school except that she had a baby on her hip and a husband trailing behind her with a changing bag.
She stopped mid-step when she saw you, did a small, delighted double take, said oh my God twice, and then looked at Simon in a way that was extremely uncomplicated in its appreciation before remembering the husband with the changing bag. There were promises exchanged to catch up properly, phone numbers that would probably not be used, genuine warmth on both sides.
And then at the bar, perched on a stool with a whisky, Dave Pearce — who had played alongside Simon on the secondary school rugby team and who greeted him with the particular vocabulary of men who knew each other at fifteen and have not changed as much as they think.
There was a brief, loud exchange that involved at least one shoulder-clap that could have knocked a smaller man sideways, and then Dave shook your hand too and told Simon he was punching. Which Simon received without expression and you tried your hardest not to laugh, biting your lip.
Finally the corner booth. You slid in. Simon folded himself into the seat across from you, the table scaled to ordinary human beings and therefore slightly absurd against the size of him, his knees bracketing it, his shoulders blocking the view of the room behind him entirely.
The menus came.
They were not laminated anymore — proper printed card, changed seasonally, the kind that meant the new owners had ambitions. But the roast was still on. The proper Sunday roast, the one your father used to order when you could afford to.
"Same corner," Simon said quietly.
"Same corner," you agreed.
He was looking at you across the table the way he used to look at you across this table, except that now his face was older and larger and had been to places that had clearly asked things of it. The look was different in its texture. Deeper, maybe. Older in the same way he was older. Like it had more weight behind it from all the years of being carried.
"You said everything," you reminded him. "All of it."
"I know."
"So." You gestured for him to start.
He set his menu down. Looked at you. And then he started talking.
He told it the way he told everything — without embellishment, without drama, in the flat, precise language of a man who had learned to communicate facts and trusted the facts to carry the weight without decoration.
He'd gone in at seventeen and he'd been good at it. Not surprising. He was built for the structure of it, for the clarity of having a purpose and a unit and a chain of things that made sense.
He'd moved up fast — faster than he let on in the cards he'd sent you, which had been careful, he explained, deliberately careful, because the more you knew the more you might worry. Which, you pointed out, had not been his decision to make. He didn't argue with that.
Task Force 141 came later. Years later, after deployments that he summarised in a sentence each and you understood enough from his face to know that each sentence was doing the work of much longer things.
He was a lieutenant now. He said it the way he said most things about himself, flatly, without vanity, presented as information. He had certain freedoms now that he hadn't had before, certain ability to make choices about where he went and when and what he did with the things the years had given him.
You both ordered your food.
"And the five years?" you asked, sipping your cocktail the waitress had brought over.
He was quiet for a moment, he stared at his San Miguel pint, the condensation sliding down the glass. Your food had arrived at some point during the waiting, while Simon collected his thoughts.
He picked up his fork and then set it down again.
"There was a man," Simon said.
Something about the way he said it made you put your fork down too.
"He ran drugs. Major operation, international — I won't go into all of it." He said this without flinching, looking at you steadily, not softening it. You'd always appreciated that about him — the way he treated your intelligence as a given. "After I escaped him, he decided to make it personal. He went after the people I—" He stopped. Chose the word carefully. "The people I was connected to."
The candle in the glass holder between you threw warm, unsteady light across his face.
"He killed them," Simon said. "My brother. Tommy's family." A pause that cost him something; you could see it cost him. "My Mother."
The restaurant continued around you — the murmur of other tables, the clink of cutlery, someone laughing softly near the bar — and you sat very still.
"Oh Simon," you whispered, you could feel the way your face formed the sympathy.
"I'm alright." He said it the way he'd always said it, the Manchester flat and absolute. The way that meant; don't make it bigger than I can hold right now. You knew that voice. You honoured it.
"He knew about you," Simon said and you froze. "That was the other thing. He'd done his research." His jaw shifted slightly. "As long as he was alive, you weren't safe. If I'd contacted you, properly contacted you, kept the thread going the way I wanted to, it would have given him a cleaner line. A more reliable way to reach me."
You understood the logic of it. You understood it clearly and immediately in the part of your brain that processed information. The other part — the part that had sat on the bottom stair with a birthday card after five years of silence, the part that had thought past tense — that part was going to take considerably longer.
"So you cut me off," you said. Not as an accusation. As a fact, laid down. You were starting to understand the shape of it.
"To keep you safe. Yes."
"Without telling me why." You sighed but you knew you were being unreasonable, but you hoped he would let you for a little longer.
"If I'd told you why, you'd have known there was a threat. And you'd have—" He stopped. The corner of his mouth moved, something that was not quite a smile and not quite not one. "You'd have done something about it. Gone looking. Made noise."
"I would not have—" You stopped, because you would have. You absolutely would have. You'd spent thirty years being completely unable to sit on the sidelines where Simon Riley was concerned, and the knowledge that someone was threatening him would have made you entirely unreasonable. "That's—" you huffed.
"Yeah," he said.
"You could have found a way—"
"There wasn't one. Not one that was safe." His voice was very level. "I went through every option, love. I promise you. Every one."
The word arrived quietly, without ceremony.
Love.
He'd never called you that — not in thirty years, not in all the time and all the familiarity of what you were to each other. He said it the way he said everything that mattered: without preamble, without dressing it up, laid down like the fact it was.
"And now?" you asked. Your voice was quite steady. Steadier than you felt.
"He's dead." No elaboration. None needed. The flat Manchester vowels carrying the weight of it cleanly, without mess. "And you're safe. And I—" He looked at you across the table, across the candle and the white linen. "I bought the house," he said. "I've spent a while making it what it is. Making if perfect. I saved up for years. The 141 pays well when you get to a certain level and I wasn't spending it on anything else."
"For years," you repeated, feeling a shiver rack up your spine and your toes go numb.
"Since I was about twenty." He said this without apparent embarrassment, as though it were the most natural thing in the world to spend fifteen years saving money to buy a woman a house from a description she'd given you at sixteen years old. "Took a while to find the right one that wasn’t too far from your parents. The lavender took three growing seasons to look like it did when you pulled up."
Three growing seasons.
He had planted the lavender three years ago. He had stood in a garden three towns from where you lived and planted lavender along a path because a sixteen-year-old girl had mentioned it lying on her back in his garden thirty years ago, and he had tended it for three years, and he had waited.
"Simon Riley," you said.
"It's got room for your books Sunshine, built the shelves myself." His lips quirked up at the corners at your flabbergasted expression.
"You are the most—" You stopped. Started again. "Do you have any idea what the past five years have felt like? Do you have any idea what I—" Your voice did the thing you'd been preventing it from doing, cracked at the edge of the sentence like a plate under too much weight. You stopped. Pressed your lips together. "I grieved you. I sat in my flat and I genuinely, actually grieved you and decided you were dead. I had — Simon, I had a plan for getting through it. I was managing it."
"I know."
"Don't say I know." you snapped sounding more like a bratty child than angry.
"I'm sorry." And this was different. This was not the automatic I know, the absorbing of your anger. This was something he said the way he said very few things — carefully, with full weight behind it. His eyes on yours across the table. "I'm sorry for the five years. I'm sorry I couldn't find another way. I'm sorry you were on your own with it." A pause. "I'm sorry it took me this long to have something worth coming back with."
"The house is not—" You stopped. "You didn't need to buy me a house, Simon. I didn't need—"
"I needed to," he said. Simply. "I needed to know I was coming back with something real. Something that wasn't just me turning up with nothing after all that time, asking you to — to accept—" He moved his hand across the table, and his fingers stopped just short of yours. Not touching. Close. "Asking you to take me as I was. I needed it to be enough. I needed there to be something I could give you that was—"
"Simon." Your voice was very quiet.
"I know it's not—"
"Simon." You turned your hand over on the table. Just that. The small, deliberate movement of turning your palm up.
He looked at it. Then he looked at you. Then, slowly, he put his hand in yours — his enormous, careful, tattooed hand. Not quite the one that had carried your bag through every corridor of secondary school and pulled you up off the pavement after Daniel Holt and held you on the platform at the train station, but this one now and his fingers closed around yours and he held on.
"I only ever wanted you," you said softly.
"Sunshine-"
"You were always worth it," you cut him off. And then, because it was time — because it had been time for approximately thirty years and you were done waiting for the right moment when the right moment had repeatedly failed to arrive — "You were always enough. You were always the thing I was — Simon, you have always been the only one I wanted. Exactly as you are."
He was very still.
"I didn't tell you on the platform," you said. "I should have. I've thought about it every day since."
"So have I," he said.
The candle between you flickered in some movement of air from the kitchen, and in the warm unsteady light his face was open in a way you had waited thirty years to see. His hand was warm and sure around yours, and from the other side of the restaurant you were almost certain you heard Margaret Howarth say something to Gerald in a satisfied undertone.
"You planted the lavender," you grinned.
"Three years ago." He finally smiles back at you, it was crooked and uneven and you loved it.
"You are," you said carefully, "the most ridiculous man I have ever known." You shook your head still grinning.
"Missed you too, sunshine," he smirked.
Dinner ended the way the best dinners end — not with a definitive conclusion but with a gradual, reluctant unwinding, the kind where both people keep finding one more thing to say, one more thread to pull, because the alternative is standing up and the evening becoming past tense.
You ordered dessert.
Neither of you particularly wanted it but you both ordered it, and you both knew why, and neither of you said so. The chocolate brownie was very good. Simon ate his methodically, the way he ate everything, and at one point looked up and caught you watching him and said nothing.
The candle between you had burned down to a stub by the time the bill came.
He paid. You protested on principle. He gave you a look that had not changed at all since he was fourteen years old — flat, certain, faintly amused — and handed the card to the waiter without further discussion.
"That's not—" you started.
"Next time," he said.
Next time. You let it sit there between you, warm and presumptuous and everything you wanted.
Outside, the evening had cooled.
The last of the summer still holding in the air, the kind of September evening that felt like a concession, like the year wasn't ready to be done.
The street was quiet for a Saturday, just a few couples moving between the restaurants and a group of lads outside the pub further down having a smoke. The amber of the streetlights made everything look like something worth remembering.
Simon stood beside you on the pavement, close enough that his arm brushed yours when he turned to look down the street, and you were very aware of the warmth of him and the black shirt and the lavender you couldn't smell from here but could somehow still feel in your hands.
"Walk with me a bit," he said. Not a question, not quite. He'd always done that — phrased invitations as though the outcome were already agreed, as though he simply assumed you'd say yes because you almost always did.
"Alright."
He fell into step beside you, and for a little while you just walked — past the wine bar with its fairy lights, past the old library that had become a gin distillery at some point in the last decade, past the post office that had been there since before either of you were born. You talked about small things. Easy things. The kind of conversation that runs alongside the real one underneath.
Then he stopped.
You stopped too.
Simon looked down at you. His hands were in his pockets. That brown gaze of his moved over your face in the way it had been moving over your face all evening — like he was cataloguing it, like he was making up for lost time in the looking.
"Dance with me," he said.
You blinked. "What?"
He tilted his head, "Come dancing with me."
You stared at him.
Simon Riley, who had sat against the wall at every school disco you'd ever attended, arms folded, watching everyone else with the expression of a man conducting a private risk assessment.
Simon Riley, who you had never, in thirty years of knowing him, seen voluntarily approach a dance floor.
"You don't dance," you said.
"No," he agreed. "But you do."
The simplicity of it landed somewhere very central.
You do.
As though that were reason enough. As though your enjoyment of a thing were sufficient justification for him to walk into it without hesitation.
Which, you supposed, when it came to Simon, it always had been.
"Alright," you said, for the second time in ten minutes.
His hand found the small of your back again, that same light, deliberate touch from inside the restaurant and he guided you down the street.
Simon said you weren't far, when you heard it.
The particular sound of a Domino's box. The slight crinkle of a carrier bag. And then your mother's voice, carrying across the quiet street in the way it always had — warm and clear and entirely without volume control.
"Oh honey! We thought - oh!"
"Oh fuck," you cursed.
You said it very quietly. Not quietly enough. Simon chuckled under his breath.
Your parents were coming along the pavement from the direction of the only car park around here — your father in his weekend coat, your mother in the blue one she'd had for fifteen years. A Domino's pizza box balanced in her arms and a carrier bag hanging from your father's hand.
Movie night. Of course. They still did it every other Saturday, had done since you were small, and of course they would do it tonight of all the Saturday nights in the entire calendar.
Your mother's face when she saw you was pure, unguarded delight — the face she always made when she encountered you unexpectedly, as though each time were still a pleasant surprise. Then her gaze moved, naturally and automatically, to the man standing beside you with his hand at the small of your back.
The delight didn't disappear. It did something more complicated.
"Oh honey," she said again, but differently this time. Softer. Her voice going somewhere else entirely. "Simon?"
The Domino's box dipped. Your father caught it with the reflexes of a man who had been catching things your mother nearly dropped for forty years.
Simon had gone still beside you. Not that controlled, present stillness he had, the one that wasn't tension but something adjacent to it. He was looking at your mother with an expression you couldn't fully read from the side, but you could see the line of his jaw, and it was careful.
"Mrs—" he started.
"Don't you Mrs me," your mother said. Her voice was not angry. That was the thing — you'd prepared yourself, in the split second between seeing them and now, for anger, or for the brisk, self-protective coolness she used sometimes when she'd been frightened. But it wasn't that. It was something that had tears in it, which was considerably worse to witness.
She handed the pizza box to your father without looking at him — he took it with the silent competence of long practice — and she crossed the pavement in four short steps and she put her arms around Simon Riley.
He was so much larger than her. He had always been larger than her, even at fifteen when he'd eaten her shepherd's pie at the kitchen table and been careful to seem like it was casual and not like he was starving. Even when she gave him seconds and he looked like he would beg for thirds.
But now it was almost absurd, the smallness of her against the width of him, and he stood there for just a fraction of a second — that fraction where you could see him recalibrating, receiving something he hadn't prepared for — and then his arms came around her and he held on.
Your mother was crying. Small, quiet sounds, the kind she made when she was trying not to. Her face was pressed against his chest and her hands gripped the back of his black shirt and she said, muffled and with great feeling, "You absolute boy."
Simon said nothing. His eyes, over the top of your mother's head, found yours.
You had to look away. The street was very interesting. The lamppost in particular.
You bit into your lip.
Your father appeared at your shoulder.
He was a quiet man, always had been. The kind of steady, observant presence that took things in without making a production of the taking in. He stood beside you with the pizza box over one arm and the carrier bag in the other hand and watched his wife hold the boy who had eaten at their table for a decade, and he said, very quietly, to you,
"Well. He's not dead then."
"No Dad," you managed. "He's not dead."
"Good," your father said.
As though this settled it. As though the entirety of the past five years of your grief and his, because he had grieved Simon too in his quiet way, in the way of a man who doesn't say things aloud but feels them thoroughly. He looked at Simon over the top of your mother's head and gave him a single, deliberate nod. The kind that meant; we'll talk. The kind that meant; I have things to say to you. The kind that also, underneath both of those, meant; I'm so glad son.
Simon received the nod with equal gravity, which was exactly right.
Your mother finally pulled back. She held Simon by the arms — or tried to, her hands not quite making it around the circumference of them — and looked up at him with red eyes and the particular expression of a woman who has a great deal to say and is choosing, for now, not to say most of it.
"You'll come for dinner," she said. Not a question. The same tone she'd used on him at fifteen and apparently intended to continue using indefinitely. "Sunday. Proper dinner. Not a restaurant. Mine."
"Yes," Simon said. Immediately. Without hesitation.
"Good." She released his arms and reached up and patted his cheek once, firmly, the way you might with someone who had done something frustrating and beloved in equal measure.
Then she turned to you, and her expression did something complicated and warm and knowing, and she didn't say any of the things she was clearly thinking, which you appreciated deeply.
What she said instead was: "Don't stay out too late. You're thirty-five, not seventeen."
"Mum." You scolded.
"I'm just saying." She shrugged.
"We're going dancing," you told her, with the energy of someone redirecting a conversation through sheer momentum.
Your mother looked at Simon. Simon looked at your mother. Something passed between them that was private and thirty years old and not yours to have.
"Of course you are," she said.
Your father passed the Domino's box back to your mother, and said, "Right then. We'll leave you to it." He looked at Simon one more time. "Sunday," he confirmed.
"Sunday," Simon said.
Your parents moved off down the pavement.
Your mother looked back once — just once — and her face when she did was the face you'd seen her wear at your primary school nativity and at your GCSE results and on the morning you'd gone to university; the particular face of a woman watching her child be happy and feeling the full, complicated, loving weight of it.
Then she turned back to your father and said something you couldn't hear, and his hand found her shoulder as they walked, and they rounded the corner and were gone.
You stood on the pavement in the September evening and breathed.
Beside you, Simon was also very carefully just standing there.
"She cried on me," he said, after a moment.
"Yes."
"Didn't expect that."
You turned to look at him. He was looking at the corner your parents had turned, and his face had the quality it sometimes had when something had reached him — not visibly, not dramatically, just in that particular stillness that meant something had got through.
"She cried about you," you told him. "When you stopped writing. Three years ago — there were several times, actually, but three years ago was the worst. She held me in her kitchen and we both—" You stopped. Managed the next part carefully. "She loves you too, Simon. She always did. You were at our table every other night for years."
He was quiet for a moment. Something moved in his jaw. "I know," he said. And this time the I know was different from all the other times he'd said it tonight — heavier, and private.
"You agreed to Sunday dinner," you giggled.
"Of course I agreed to Sunday dinner," he said knowing full well he would have been stupid not to and gotten an earful from your mother.
Simon offered you his hand.
Not at the small of your back this time. His hand, palm up, in the space between you. Old-fashioned and deliberate.
You put yours in it.
"Come on then," he said. "Let's go dancing."
There was, as it turned out, only one place to go dancing in this town on a Saturday night if you meant actual dancing — the kind with a proper floor and music with a real structure to it.
It was not a club.
It was not a bar with a cleared space near the speaker.
It was the old church hall on Callow Street, which had been hosting the Saturday Evening Social Dance since before either of you were born, and which Simon seemed to know about with the specificity of a man who had done his research.
"A dance hall," you said, standing outside it. Through the tall, thin windows the warm light was visible, and the sound — strings, a proper band, something with a waltz rhythm that made the windows hum faintly. "You're taking me to a dance hall."
"Only place with a floor."
"Simon, this is a — there will be pensioners in there." you said quietly.
"There'll be a dance floor," he looked down at you. "And you said yes." he shrugged but looked smug.
He pushed the door open and held it, and because you had in fact said yes, and because the music through the door sounded genuinely lovely, and because you were still holding his hand from the pavement, you went in.
The church hall smelled of floor polish and tea. Fairy lights were strung along the rafters — someone's addition, not the original fixtures, and they made the whole space amber and soft.
Round tables lined the edges, most of them occupied by couples in their sixties and seventies and eighties, a few younger faces dotted among them, everyone dressed with the particular care of people who still believed an evening out was worth dressing for.
On the small stage at the far end, a four-piece band was working through something in three-four time with the ease of musicians who had played together for years.
And at the edge of the floor, clipboard in hand, wearing the same expression of organised authority she'd worn every PE lesson for fifteen years was Mrs Valerie Croft.
She was smaller than you remembered. Or perhaps you were simply larger.
She'd retired at some point — the hair was fully silver now rather than streaked — but the posture was identical: spine straight, chin up, the bearing of a woman who had spent decades telling teenagers to stand properly and had eventually simply become the embodiment of the instruction.
She looked up from her clipboard as you approached and her eyes moved from you to Simon, and to her credit, she didn't miss a step.
"Well," she tilted her chin up to meet his eyes, "Riley."
"Miss," Simon said. Which was technically incorrect given that she had a ring on her finger and had for as long as you'd known her, but you suspected it was because he'd called her Miss in secondary school the way you had. "Mrs Croft. Sorry. We were passing and— " He paused, which was unlike him. "Is there any chance we could crash it?"
Mrs Croft looked at him. She looked at you. She looked at your joined hands with the expression of a woman who had supervised enough teenagers to recognise a development when she saw one.
"Can you behave yourselves?" she asked.
"Yes," you said nodding.
Simon said nothing.
Mrs Croft made a sound that was not quite a laugh but was adjacent to one. "Floor's open," she said. "Don't knock anyone over." And she turned back to her clipboard.
The first dance was not elegant.
Simon was, as he had always been and had openly admitted, not a dancer.
He was a man built for other kinds of movement — purposeful, directed, the kind that had somewhere to go. Dancing required a different relationship with your body, a willingness to be present in it without agenda, and that was not naturally his.
But he was trying. And Simon Riley trying at something he wasn't good at with complete, unhesitating commitment was one of your favourite things in the world.
He held you correctly — one hand at your waist, the other holding yours at the right height — because he had clearly looked this up at some point, which you were choosing not to think about too hard. His footwork was careful. Deliberate. Slightly behind the beat in the way of someone counting silently.
"You're counting," you told him trying your hardest not to laugh.
"Shut up."
"Simon, I can see your lips moving." you snorted.
"I said shut up."
You were laughing now. Properly, helplessly, the kind that came up from somewhere real — and he looked down at you with that face, that flat, long-suffering, completely fond face, and something in his eyes that was warm in a way that had nothing to do with patience and everything to do with the fact that your laugh had always been, apparently, one of his favourite sounds.
"You're doing fine," you told him, once you'd recovered.
"I'm doing terribly," he answered. "Keep going."
By the second dance, he was better.
By the third, he had found something. Some adjustment in the way he held you, the way his hand settled more fully at your waist, drawing you closer so the movement between you became less about individual steps and more about one shared thing. He was a quick study. He always had been, once he'd decided something was worth doing.
You became aware, gradually, of the room watching.
Not intrusively. Not all at once. But in the soft, peripheral way of a room full of people who have been in love for decades and recognise the particular weather of it when it walks through the door.
An older couple near the stage — she in pale blue, he in a suit that had been good once and was still cared for — had stopped talking to watch you.
A woman at one of the corner tables had her chin in her hand.
Mrs Croft, by the door, was very deliberately looking at her clipboard and failing to look only at her clipboard.
You didn't mind. You were too busy watching Simon watch you.
The band changed tempo at half past nine.
The waltz gave way to something with a different shape entirely — something that moved from the hips rather than the feet, a rhythm that was slower in its pulse and considerably less innocent in its intention.
A rumba.
You looked up at Simon.
He looked down at you.
"I don't know this one," he said.
"I'll show you." you breathed.
You took his hand and placed it lower at your waist, right above the curve of your ass. Deliberately watching his face when you did it, watching the shift in his expression, the way something in his eyes went very still and very focused. "Hip to hip," you told him. "Slower than you think. Let the music pull you."
He followed your lead with an attention that was frankly overwhelming in its completeness.
Simon Riley giving you his full, undivided, physical focus was not a small thing. He was so large and so present and he moved with you rather than against you, adjusting with every shift of your weight, and somewhere in the second minute of the song the counting stopped and something else replaced it.
He drew you closer. His hand at your hip pulled you in until there was no space left between you, until you could feel the warmth of him through the green of your dress and you were very aware of every point of contact, of the music and of the room full of people who had gone very quiet.
Then he turned you.
It was not technically correct. It was not what the dance required. But he turned you in a single, smooth movement that his body had decided on and yours simply followed, because that was what it did with him.
And then he dipped you.
The room tilted. His arm was across your back, solid and immovable, and you were suspended in the amber light with the music around you and your hand at his shoulder.
He lowered you — slowly, with complete control, no hesitation in the hold and then his face was close, very close, and his nose grazed the line of your throat making your breath hitch.
A slow, deliberate graze. The warmth of his breath against your pulse point. You felt it in places that had nothing to do with dancing, between your legs throbbing.
His hand — the one at your hip — slid down, just slightly, just enough, finding the outside of your thigh where the fabric of your dress lay, and he hooked your leg, slowly, around his hip. His fingers at the back of your thigh. Holding you there. His nose still at your throat.
The music resolved. Somewhere behind you, someone started clapping.
He brought you upright. Smoothly, slowly, until you were standing again and his hand was still at the back of your thigh. Your leg still around his hip and your faces were very close. Your heart was conducting itself in a way that had absolutely nothing to do with exertion.
You were panting. Slightly. Just slightly.
He was not panting. He was looking down at you with the almost-smile, the one that had always been rarer than gold and twice as valuable — and his eyes were warm and very dark and entirely, completely satisfied with themselves.
"You looked that up as well," you managed.
"No," he said.
"Simon—"
"That one," he said, "I just wanted to do."
From the table by the stage, the woman in pale blue was applauding with great enthusiasm. Her husband had two fingers in his mouth and was whistling.
Mrs Croft had given up entirely on the clipboard.
The taxi back was not a long ride.
It felt longer than it was, and shorter than you wanted.
You sat beside him in the back seat with his thigh against yours and the city moving past the windows and neither of you speaking. The silence had a texture to it that was thick and warm and anticipatory in a way that made the air feel heavy in your lungs.
His hand was on your knee. Just resting there, heavy and warm, the way he did everything — with complete, unapologetic certainty.
You did not move it.
The house appeared at the end of the lane with its white fence and its dark windows and the lavender silver in the moonlight.
You were out of the taxi before it had fully stopped and you were aware how eager this appeared and you didn't care.
Simon paid the driver and caught up with you in three strides because his legs were considerably longer than yours and always had been.
He got to the door first. Key in hand.
The door opened.
And you did not wait for him to step through it.
You took him by the front of his shirt, that black shirt, warm from his body, the fabric bunching in your fists and you lips were suddenly on his.
You walked him backwards through the doorway and you felt the moment his back met the wall just inside and you were already kissing him before he'd fully registered the sequence of events.
Your mouth on his. Your hands in the front of his shirt. Thirty years of it finding its way out all at once, without ceremony, without preamble, without any of the careful management you had been applying to yourself since you were four years old at a preschool art table.
He kissed you back.
He kissed you back the way he did everything — thoroughly, completely, with his full attention and no apparent interest in doing anything else ever again.
His hands came to your face, big and careful, tilting your jaw, and for a moment you were simply inside the realness of him and the warmth of him and the fact that he was here and alive and kissing you in the hallway of the house he'd bought for you.
He pulled back.
"Easy, sunshine," he said against your lips. Low. A little breathless, which you would be privately triumphant about later. The corner of his mouth pulled up in that crooked smile.
You became aware, in the slightly dazed way of someone returning from somewhere, that your hands were still in his shirt and his hands were still on your face and you were standing approximately two inches apart in his hallway.
You also became aware, in the refocusing of your vision, of his mouth.
Of the scar on his upper lip.
You didn't know how you hadn't noticed it before — through dinner, through the dancing, through all of it.
Perhaps you had simply not been this close before. Or perhaps you had been looking at so many things that you hadn't been looking at everything.
It was small, a thin pale line bisecting the left side of his upper lip, old enough to have faded to silver, the kind of scar that had been there for years and had been lived with so thoroughly that the face had absorbed it.
You lifted your thumb and touched it, gently. "How'd you get this?"
He went very still, alert and present and reading you.
You kissed it. Softly. Just that.
Something moved in his throat.
His hands shifted from your face to your waist, warm and settled, and he began to move you gently — backwards, one steady step at a time — turning you both away from the wall and deeper into the hallway. His foot found the door behind him and pushed it closed with a quiet, final click.
"If I tell you about that one," he said, his voice low and even above your head as he guided you past the entrance and toward the stairs, "I'll have to tell you about the rest."
He looked down at you as he said it, that look, the one that said you were the most interesting thing he had ever encountered. The one that made you feel simultaneously seen and slightly undone — and his expression had in it something that was fond and amused and entirely, devastatingly warm.
You kicked your heels off at the bottom of the stairs. They went somewhere behind you. You didn't look.
Your bag went next, dropped against the banister.
"The rest?" you repeated. Your voice came out slightly smaller than you intended. Your eyes, entirely without your permission, moved down the front of him — the black shirt, the breadth of his shoulders, his torso, his thick thighs, all of him — and back up again. Slowly.
He watched you do it. He said nothing.
You swallowed. "Tell me then."
His hand at your waist steered you up the first step, and then the second, and the stairs curved slightly toward the landing above, and at the top of the stairs he pushed open the door to a bedroom.
The room was large and furnished.
A bed, properly large, the kind that accommodated a man his size without complaint. Low lamps on either side casting the same amber warmth as the hall below. Dark wood floors, a window looking out toward the garden, the curtain shifting slightly in a crack of night air.
He kissed you, just inside the door you kissed him back and his hands were at your hips.
Then he pulled back with a groan. Both of you breathing slightly harder than was strictly accounted for by climbing one flight of stairs.
"I want to, sunshine," he said. His voice was very low. Restrained. His hands still on your body, holding you there, his thumbs moving in a small slow motion against the fabric of your dress that was doing nothing to help you think clearly. "I do. But I need to hear it from you first. Your permission. Clear words. I don't want to misunderstand you."
You opened your mouth.
And then your eyes moved, over his shoulder, to the dresser.
A skull mask looked back at you.
You closed your mouth. You looked at it. The mask, white and stark and precise but somehow both alien and completely, recognisably his. The balaclava beside it, folded neatly. And tactical gloves — enormous, black, reinforced, approximately the size of your head.
"That yours?" you asked.
Simon turned his head, following your gaze. He looked at the dresser, then back at you. "Yeah."
"What is it?"
"What I wear on missions."
"Oh," you said.
And then your brain did something entirely beyond your authority. It constructed, with great speed and considerable detail, an image: Simon, broad and enormous, in black tactical gear. Gloved hands. That mask. Hovering over you.
You swallowed.
The image did not leave. It simply settled in, warm and vivid and decidedly unhelpful.
"Sunshine."
His hand came to your face — his big, warm, ungloved hand, his actual hand, the one you knew — his thumb sweeping gently under your eye, bringing you back into the room and the amber lamplight and the present moment.
"Hmm?" you managed meeting his gaze.
His eyes moved over your face with the same comprehensive attention he always gave you.
"Your permission, love," he said. Quiet. Certain.
"Oh." You blinked. "Yes. Yes, you have it. Always."
The almost-smile. "Not for everything I want to do to you." His thumb was still moving, very gently, under your eye. "I'll ask. Multiple times."
You stared at him. "Multiple—"
"Times," he confirmed. His voice was entirely level. His eyes were not.
You pushed his shoulder and your cheeks burned.
He caught your hand as you pushed it and laughed, a low, real, full sound, the kind that you had spent most of your life engineering because it was so rare and so completely, unreasonably good.
You laughed too, properly, the helpless kind, and his forehead came down to rest against yours and you were both laughing in the amber light of his bedroom with the skull mask on the dresser and the lavender outside the window and thirty years behind you and everything in front.
The laughing settled.
Not all at once — it unwound gradually, the way laughter does when it's the real kind, leaving something warm and loose in its place.
His forehead was still against yours. His hands had moved from your face to your waist, both of them now, holding you the way he'd held you on the dance floor — with that complete, unhurried certainty, like you were something he'd been waiting to hold properly for a very long time and intended to do it right.
The amber light of the lamps lay across everything. Through the gap in the curtain, you could see the edge of the garden — the pale shapes of flowers, the dark of the lawn.
"Tell me about the rest," you said quietly.
He pulled back just enough to look at you. "The scars?"
"You said if you told me about the one on your lip you'd have to tell me about the rest." You reached up and touched the scar again — that thin, silver line — with the pad of your thumb. "So tell me about the rest."
He looked at you for a long moment. Then he reached up and began, without ceremony, to unbutton his shirt.
You were very still.
He did it the way he did everything — without drama, without performance, button by button from the collar down, and when he shrugged it from his shoulders and set it aside you understood, in a way you hadn't before, what eighteen years of that life had written on him.
He was enormous.
You'd known that in the abstract — had known it from the doorframe and the dance floor and the way rooms seemed to reorganise themselves around him — but this was different.
This was the specific, undeniable reality of his shoulders, the breadth of his chest, the muscle of his arms that carried the tattoo sleeve on the left, the ink wrapping from wrist to shoulder in dark, intricate patterns that in this light you still couldn't fully read but wanted to.
And the scars.
There were more than you'd expected.
Each one a different shape and age and story, written into the topography of him in pale and silver lines. A long one along his left ribs. Something older, fainter, across the top of his right shoulder. A circular scar below his collarbone on the left side that your medical knowledge was sufficient to identify and that made your chest constrict briefly and completely before you put that particular knowledge away for now.
He was watching your face as you looked. Careful. Giving you the time of it.
You stepped forward. You placed your hand flat against his sternum — his heart under your palm, steady and real — and you felt him exhale.
"The lip," you said.
"Kandahar. 2004. Caught the stock of a rifle." He said it the same way he'd told you everything tonight — flat, factual, trusting the fact to carry the weight. "Bit through my lip. Wasn't pretty for a while."
You moved your hand from his sternum to his ribs. Found the long scar there, traced it gently with your fingertips.
"That one."
"Knife. 2009. I moved the wrong way and the other man moved the right way." The shadow of something in his face that was not quite humour and not quite not. "Lesson learned."
Your hand moved to his shoulder. The older, fainter scar.
"Before the military," he said, before you asked. His voice changed, just fractionally. Flatter. Doing more work to stay level. "Not a mission."
You understood. You didn't ask further. You pressed your lips to it instead — gently, just that, your mouth against the old pale mark — and you felt the breath go out of him in a way that was different from all the others. Slower. Deeper.
"Sunshine," he said. Very quietly.
"The one below your collarbone," you said.
A pause. "That one's not a story for tonight."
You tilted your head back to look up at him. "Is it a story for eventually?"
His eyes on yours. Something in them that was considering, assessing, "Yeah," he said. "Eventually."
"Alright," you said. You meant it. You had waited thirty years; you could wait for the story of one scar.
His hand moved to your face. That same gesture from the hallway — his thumb at your cheek, slow and deliberate and he tilted your chin up and kissed you. Not urgently this time. Slowly. Deeply.
His hands found the zip at the side of your dress — careful, unhurried — and he looked at you, a clear question in it, and you nodded, and his hands were very steady and very gentle. Your dress went the way of your heels and your bag, somewhere behind you, unmissed.
He looked at you the way he had looked at you on the porch yesterday, and outside The Grill tonight, and across the restaurant table, and on the dance floor — with that complete, comprehensive attention.
Only now there was nothing restrained about what was in it. It was simply there, open and certain, and it was thirty years of something finally being allowed to be exactly what it was.
"Hi," you said. Which was absurd. Which made him laugh again, low and real.
"Hi, sunshine," he said. His hands at your waist. His forehead dropping to yours.
“Si I need to-“ you breathed in deep, “I um,” he pulled his head away from yours, looking into your eyes with those brilliant brown ones of his.
“What is it Sunshine?” He asked, his finger under your chin tilting your head up.
“I’m, I’ve never-“ you sigh, “I’ve told you so many things, I can’t believe I can’t even say this to you.”
“Do we need to slow down?” He asked, his voice softening.
“No. It’s not that. I mean I’m not a virgin if that’s what you’re thinking I just, no guy has ever-“ you sigh again, your eyes dropping from his.
Simon is quiet. He waits, the way he always waits — giving you the whole space of it, not rushing you toward the end of the sentence.
“Made it good,” you finally say, to his chest. “For me. It’s always just, fine. Maybe sometimes I get close but then it’s over. Not that there’s been loads of guys, maybe three.”
A beat.
You make yourself look up at him.
Something changes in his face.
You see the flare of it.
Anger.
Not toward you — you feel that immediately, the anger isn't at you, it moves through him and settles somewhere else entirely. His jaw shifts. His eyes, for just a moment, go somewhere dark and quiet.
"Every one of them," he says. Low. More to himself than to you.
"Simon—"
"Had you," he says. "And didn't—" He stops. The jaw again. His eyes squeeze shut. "Didn't pay attention."
"It's not—"
"It is." His eyes open. He looks at you, his hands moving to your hips, both of them, settling there with a weight that feels like anchoring, like he needs the contact as much as you do. The darkness has settled now, controlled, underneath everything else.
"And I wasn't here." Something moves through his expression — not guilt exactly, but something adjacent to it, something private and old. "Should've been your first, sunshine. Should've been there to—"
He stops himself. His forehead drops to yours.
"I've waited years for this," he says quietly. "I'm not rushing it. And I'm going to pay attention."
“Pay attention?” You ask breathless.
“To every sigh,” he kissed your cheek, “whimper and moan.” His lips moved down to your jaw. “To the way your hips move, the way your back arches, the way you’ll writhe under me, how I’ve imaged it every time I’ve gotten off for the last two decades.” He whispered the last bit into your ear, teeth tugging on your earlobe.
You gasp, “Simon.” Your cheeks burn.
“Oh don’t tell me you never thought about it.” He grins pulling back to look down at you.
You look at the floor sheepishly cause of course you have. Of course you’ve cum the hardest you ever have in your life only when thinking about Simon fucking you.
"Oh you have." He smirked titling his head.
“Shut up.” You push his shoulder and he laughs.
His hands leave your hips and then you're moving, his arms around you, and the edge of the bed meets the back of your knees.
Then his massive paws are in your hair and his lips are on your neck as your back meets the sheets. His weight heavy and solid on you. You could tell he was holding himself up so he didn’t squish you.
He leaned back on his heels, kneeling between your legs. You sighed in satisfaction when his fingers ran over your bare skin. His blunt nails scratching softly where your pelvic bone sits.
"So beautiful Sunshine," He grabs your hips and squeezes, "Fill my hands with you finally." Simon groans. A noise you've been picturing in your head. This and everything else that happens this evening, you truly believe, will be one of those times when reality is better than anything you have imagined.
Simon's brown eyes have always been intense, but right now the way he's looking down at you it's like he is someone else entirely. His eyes almost black with how much they have darkened.
"Simon." You tangle your fingers with his.
"Can I?" He asks. His hand, the one not in yours, trailing down your thigh and stopping on your mound. You clench around nothing when he pushes down, just a little bit of pressure that you feel in your clit and makes your hips buck.
You don't miss the way his lips do the almost smile thing. You nod furiously but he shakes his head.
"Need your words love." He raises a brow.
"Yes, yes Simon touch me." You breathe out, your chest feeling tight when he nods, moving his hand down to cup your cunt over your underwear.
And maybe its because you haven't had sex in three years, maybe its because you are touch starved or maybe its simply because its Simon, but your back arches and your moan is down right pornographic with a simple touch over your underwear.
"So responsive." He mumbles, his thumb rubbing circles over your clit through the fabric. "Get your tits out for me Sunshine, wanna see em." he grunts feeling your underwear getting wet.
Shakily you reach behind your back and unclip your bra. "Been thinking about them for years. What they look like, how they'll bounce when I fuck you." He groans as you pull the straps down your arms and fling the bra on the floor.
His eyes are on your chest, he doesn't blink. Then as if his system has rebooted, he blows air out of his cheeks and whistles low. "Fuck lovie, so pretty. You're a dream." Simon leans forward and wraps his lips around your breast, his tongue swirling around the nipple as his thumb continues circling your clit.
You moan, fingers tugging at his hair.
He comes off your breast with a pop making you whine and push at his shoulder. He grins pressing his thumb firmer against you, while sliding his other hand over your leg, index finger tracing over the small scar on you leg from when you fell off your bike after Simon broke your training wheels.
There was something comforting about this. Simon wasn't someone you had to explain yourself to, he already knew every version of you, he was simply adding this one to his list. This version, open and honest and begging the man you'd known for thirty years to make you cum on his fingers.
This didn't feel like a hook up, not like other guys have, but it felt like two people who have been each other's home for years and they're finally admitting it.
"Kiss me Simon." You're not even sure if what you said made sense with how much you were panting. But he leaned down to graze his lips along yours. Teasing and soft, despite the fast past he'd started to set with his thumb.
"Stop teasing." You huffed.
"Its my favourite pastime." He grinned hooking his fingers in your underwear, pulling them down and moving with them to settle between your legs.
You gasp, when his tongue slides from your asshole to your clit. "Simon!" His dark eyes are locked on yours as he swirls the tip of his his tongue around your entrance. Your toes curl, your head falling back onto the soft bed sheets.
A few occasions, you could count on one hand, had a guy you were with eaten you out and it was good but fuck, it didn't feel like this.
You felt like you were burning all over with each swipe of his tongue, each dip inside your entrance, each pattern he begins to circle over your clit.
He was learning you.
Simon groans against you, his breath hot, it made you dizzy. You feel everything, its too much to quick and your hips start to buck against his mouth.
Simon clearly had no intention of slowing down or stopping as he slides his arms around your thighs and splays his hands over the tops of them locking you in place.
It feels like fire, like molten lava pooling low in your abdomen the harder his tongue presses against you.
You don’t even recognise the sounds coming out of you, it’s as if every movement pulls a new one from you.
His thumb replaces his tongue and he rubs the bump in small circles until you can barely breathe. “Sound so pretty,” he murmurs just as your back arches and you moan loudly into the night air.
He is still speaking but you can’t hear anything he is saying, it’s all blurring together the way your vision is blurring. His thumb slides from your clit down until it’s pushing its way inside you. Your hips jerk away but his other hand is quick to hold you in place.
“No running.” Simon growls.
You cry out when his tongue comes back to torture you, lapping at you like he’s never had a drink and you're fresh water. Soon enough the rhythm he’s built has your hips rolling forward seeking more of whatever he has to give you.
Your hand reaches for his arm and squeezes hard the exact moment your vision turns white and your body shakes, dissolving into pleasure. It's like lightning pulsing through you. He works your through your orgasm, wringing every last wave of pleasure from you before he moves to your lips, kissing you.
“Did so good Sunshine. I’ve got you.” His arms wrap around you, your nipples grazing against the hair on his chest, that alone has you whimpering.
"Need more, want you inside me Simon. Please." You look into his eyes, your shyness gone with your orgasm.
"Okay Sunshine." Simon chuckles, the sound vibrating against you.
He pulls back and gets off the bed before he starts to unbuckle his belt. He pushes his black slacks down along with his underwear, his large, and he was so fucking big, cock already hard.
"Always wondered what you'd be like in bed," He tilts his head with a smirk, "If you'd like being in control. Or if you'd prefer me to lead," He knelt on the bed again, and oh my god Simon Riley, your best friend of thirty years and the love of your life was crawling up the bed towards you until his cock was flush with your entrance. "If you'd be needy and beg. Or if you'd bark orders at me." He slapped the head of his cock against your clit. "If you'd be loud or quiet."
"If you'd let me do whatever I wanted to you," his head titled back, eyes shut, "Fuck Sunshine, the things I've imagined doing to you," He looks down at you with the most intense gaze, pining you there on the bed, "Would you let me lovie? Do whatever I want to you?" He asks, pearly whites peaking out to sink into his bottom lip.
"Like what?" Your breath is so unsteady, so hitched and uneven you feel your cheeks heat even more than they have done at his words.
He grins, "Like what?" He chuckles pushing the head of his cock against your entrance, not in, but resting against it, "Wanna fuck you so hard you can't walk. Make love to you slow and so deep you'll feel me everywhere. Bend you over every surface in this house and make you cry on my cock-"
"Simon!" You gasp.
"Can I Sunshine?" He groans pushing in a little more and your eyes sting with tears at the stretch.
"Yes! Please yes!" He pushes in slowly. One of his hands coming next to you on the bed and the other gripping your hip. He keeps sliding in further, so slowly until its sheathed inside you.
Simon does not move. You can see the restraint within the way his teeth are gritted, his brows furrowed, sweat forming on his forehead.
“Fuck you feel amazing wrapped around me, so tight.” He groans.
You don’t have any words and even if you did, you doubt you would be able to say them. You have never felt so…full. So filled to the brim and unable to get a reprieve from it.
“M’gonna move, gotta move Sunshine,” Simon growls and the fullness disappears for a second before he’s pushing himself back in.
“Fuck you feel so good Si.” You shudder and stars appear in your vision when he moves forward and takes your legs with him folding you in half.
Simon Riley has you in fucking mating press and didn't even break the slow rhythm he's building. He continues this push and pull movement until it begins to flow, each movement begins where the other ends. The pattern making you sob, “Don’t stop!”
You can't function and its only now that you understand the phrase 'being fucked dumb', rocking your hips, trying desperately to keep up with each thrust, back arched so beautifully.
Simon lets his hand slip and curve around your jaw without thinking about it, "Taking me so well Sunshine." The feral look in his eyes sends a shiver up your spine.
"Too big." You sobbed, your hands grabbing at his large biceps as he thrusts harder. He could feel every ridge and curve of your sopping cunt.
"You can take it." He encouraged you, biting at your neck leaving marks in his wake and looking so damn happy whilst doing it.
You continued to moan and whimper, tears of pleasure falling down your face while Simon's huge body hovered over you. Protecting you from the outside world, in here, it was just you and him.
"Si..oh!" you cried out feeling him hit that rough spot inside your weeping, swollen cunt.
"There it is." He didn't mean to grin like a obsessed man in such an intimate moment but he couldn't help himself. He never can with you. Each thrust hits the one place no man ever seems to be able to find but Simon seemingly found with ease. A spot that makes a tightening begin like a coil, being wound with every drive of his hips.
Your sinful noises morph into higher pitched breathy little screams.
"I know lovie, I know." He cooed, holding you closer. His sweat glazed skin meeting yours as his large veiny hand slips under your head, his other arm curling around your waist.
You move your hips and he groans vulgar into the air, his hand gripping your hair and pulling your head back, a little to the side before he attacks your neck all messy. Smearing his lips across your throat, you don’t even recognise the sound that leaves your mouth.
He pulls away, his dark eyes flit to your squelching pussy, the noise attracting his attention pupils dilating, honing in on the way your cunt sucks his cock back in. He couldn’t pull away even if he wanted to and fuck he doesn’t, he wants nothing more than to stay in your pretty pussy forever.
“Simonfuckyespleaserighttheredontstop!” All the words and moans blend together until your mumbling nonsense trying your hardest to keep conscious, it’s difficult with the way he’s fucking into you so deliciously it’s making you delirious in the best way.
His big body towering over yours, big hands gripping you almost bruisingly. His thick muscular hairy thighs press against your skin compellingly, the sight before you, it's irresistible. All you have to do is look down to see his massive cock sliding in and out of you, a ring of white collecting at the base.
It's too much seeing him like this, feeling the sweet pleasure burn through you and yet Simon moves one of his hands off your head and presses a thumb to your swollen, aching clit.
You're done for.
You sob, so fucking loud you swear everyone in the world can hear it, hot tears flow down your cheeks staining them.
"That's it." The words wash over you with your orgasm, it swirls around you, clings to you, and pushes you down down down the rabbit hole of pleasure. Oversensitivity sets in making you whine at his touch, but you can't stop yourself from wanting more.
Your hips buck into his touch eliciting a dirty chuckle from him.
As Simon picks up his thrusts, he comes to the conclusion that he loves you like this, wants to see it everyday. You're so drunk, so delirious and he loves it. Loves the far away look in your eyes right before they roll back into your skull.
He shoves his face into your neck groaning, "Gonna cum Sunshine, need to. Where?" his thrusts pick up again, as if that were even possible.
"Cum inside me Simon, fill me up." You cry out.
Simon must have been right there as he cums the second you finish your sentence. Hot thick robes of cum pushing deep inside you. He rubs your clit faster and another smaller orgasm zips through you leaving you whimpering.
He stays in you, holding you until he goes soft. He moves your legs so they don't cramp. "Did so well for me Sunshine. I love you so much." He looks into your eyes as more tears spill down your cheeks.
"I love you Simon." you bring your fingers into his hair, pulling him closer to kiss you. The contrast between the way he just destroyed your guts and is now kissing you so softly, is astounding.
He is careful when he picks you up and walks into the ensuite bathroom to the right, flicking the light on and placing you on the toilet. "Gotta pee sunshine, don't want you getting you a uti." He says and you're so tired you don't even have the energy to be embarrassed.
Your eyes as still closed as you pee. Your hand moves to find the toilet paper but a warm flannel is being pressed against you, Simon's other hand on your knee to keep them open. You whine and push his hand away, "Simon that's icky." You frown at him opening your eyes to see him looking at you with a frown of his own.
"Nothing about you is icky Sunshine. I'm clearing up my mess, now move your hand." You do as told and it occurs to you, through your tired haze, while Simon gently wipes you clean that he must be used to clearing up mess with the job he does.
"All done. Want a shower or straight to sleep?" He asks.
"Sleep." You yawn making him smile at you.
He carries you back to the bed, lifting the duvet and settling you both underneath it.
The particular quality of afterwards settles in the room.
The warmth of it, the specific silence, the way the world outside the window continues to exist and you become aware of it again in layers. The sound of the garden. The distant sound of a car somewhere. The sound of him breathing.
You were lying with your head on his chest. His arm around you, heavy and warm. His heartbeat under your ear, steady and unhurried, the same heart that had been beating beside you in one form or another for thirty years.
His hand moved. Slowly, idly, up and down your back.
You watched the lamplight glow on the beside table. You thought about the lavender. You thought about the train station in 2001, and the birthday cards, and the bottom stair with the cream envelope, and Margaret Howarth saying you always did belong together with the satisfied certainty of someone who had known it before either of you did.
"Simon," you said.
"Yeah."
"You planted lavender for three years."
"You mentioned that already."
"I'm still processing it."
A low sound in his chest that was the rumble of a laugh contained. "Take your time Sunshine."
You propped yourself up and looked at him. His face in the lamplight — older, marked, those brown eyes that had been watching you since you were four years old, now watching you from a pillow in the house he'd bought you.
His expression was open in the way it had been open on the porch and at the restaurant table and in the dance hall, the way it had been open perhaps three times in thirty years before tonight and was now, apparently, simply his face when he looked at you.
You loved him so much.
You had loved him in different quantities and different registers for most of your life and now you loved him in this one too, this new one, and it was the same love and completely different and you thought you would be discovering its dimensions for a considerable amount of time.
"You should have told me," you said. "Years ago. Before the train."
"Yeah," he said. No argument.
"I would have said it back then too."
Something moved in his face. "I know," he said. And then, quieter, "I wasn't ready then. Wasn't enough yet."
"Simon—"
"I know what you're going to say."
"You were always—"
"I know," he said. "I believe you. Now." His hand came up to your face, tucking a strand of hair back, his thumb at your cheekbone. "Took me a while to get there. But I'm here."
"You're here," you agreed smiling.
"And you're here." his hand tangled itself in your hair.
"I'm here." you giggled.
He looked at you for a long moment. Then, "Stay with me."
Not a question, not quite — more like a hope said aloud. The rarest thing from him. He had carried so much silently for so long, and this one small thing cost him something, and you could see it, and you loved him for it.
"It's my house," you said cheeky and bright.
He blinked. Then that laugh again — the real one, the rare one — and your heart did what it always did when you earned it, that particular, irreplaceable lurch.
"Yeah Sunshine," he said. "It is."
You lay back down against his chest. His arm came around you. His heartbeat under your ear.
Outside, the lavender moved. The Union flag was still on the roof. The porch swing sat in the dark with its yellow cushion, waiting for morning.
"Sunshine," he said. Into your hair.
"Hmm."
"I love you."
You pressed your lips to his chest, above his heart.
"I love you too," you said. "I've loved you since you were that chubby four-year-old who stole my crayons."
A long pause.
"Chubby," he repeated.
"Stocky," you amended, grinning into his chest. "You were very stocky."
"I was four."
"You were a very solid four year old."
His arm tightened around you — not painfully, just firmly, the way of a man making a point through the medium of holding — and you laughed again, helplessly, into the warmth of him.
He made that sound, that low rumbling laugh that lived in his chest, and the lamp burned warm and low and outside the lavender moved in the dark.
Simon Riley.
Who stole your crayons at four and broke your glasses at seven and learned to read because of you and carried your bag through every corridor of secondary school and punched a boy for pushing you over and kissed your cheek in a toilet corridor and sat beside you through every lunch and glared at anyone who called you a nerd and came round to your kitchen table for years and went to war at seventeen and sent you cards from the edges of the world and planted lavender for three years and bought you the house you described at sixteen and came home.
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