Had the worst shift of my life . Shit was so bad I went nonverbal for the entire evening I don’t think I’ve done that in years, stress to the S T R E S S.
Anyways
Ghost, who finds you curled up in the closet when he gets back to the apartment. It’s his first leave in weeks, and he was excited to see you! Seeing your car in the parking deck, your keys in the bowl-
But you’re not anywhere in the apartment. He can’t hear you blasting music in the kitchen or bathroom, can’t hear the tv playing or you tapping away at your desktop. Some of your clothes- jacket, shoes, socks- are scattered on the floor, in a messy trail towards the linen closet. Simon twitches when he opens the door to see you tucked away between towels and winter blankets, like an animal in hibernation rather than a grown human being.
You barely even look up at him, not a word uttered from your lips. No blood at least, so his initial worry of someone attacking you was sated.
“Hide n’ seek, eh? Hard to do that when you leave a bread trail.” He jokes, watching the way you look right through him. Face puffy with dried tears, eyes swollen like you’d been crying for a while.
You look… small. Pitiful. Something tugs at his heart strings, maybe more than it should for his weird little roommate. But Simon doesn’t have the willpower to question it, instead tugging you out from the closet and settling you on the couch instead. The man stares down at you, trying to remember what you do to him when he’s still Ghost and not enough Simon.
Three blankets are wrapped around you, strategically till you’re cocooned in the soft fabric. Simon scrounges through the fridge, finds some leftovers that he heats up and hand feeds to you. Lifts water to your lips, even wipes your face off with a wet towel like you’ve done for him a dozen times before. He’s very pleased when you actually reach out for the first time all evening, using the same towel to wipe away the grit and eye black still smudged on his face.
You end up curling into his lap rather fast once your brain clicks on just enough, curled into his chest like a sad pup. Three blankets swaddle you again, Simon’s hands can’t stop brushing over your frame checking for physical damage. He wants to know what happened- what could’ve caused his roommate to become so overwhelmed they curled into the first dark space they could find.
It couldn’t be serious- you did the same for less, he remembers. You were sensitive- the most human person he’d known in a while, your emotions on your sleeve. He admired it, how you caved and pulled towards every whim- you could actually understand what you were feeling, how to help yourself and how to express it.
So much had happened to him that Simon was nothing but hollow stone most days, empty and echoing brief noise. Simon wasn’t really sure he’d be able to even cry the way you do.
He tucks your face tighter into his pec. Precious thing, you are.
Real. Full of life.
When you fall asleep on his chest, Simon doesn’t dare move.
thinking about simon riley coming home to his bratty missus after a long day.
you've had all day to stew in your own head, missing him, requiring attention that he is not around to give.
it's a recipe for disaster.
so when he steps through the door, instead of greeting him with a smile and a kiss on his scarred cheek you decide to be an absolute pain is his ass.
he's barely kicked his boots off when you're there, arms crossed, weight tilted onto one leg as you glare at him.
“took you long enough. dinner’s been ready for an hour and it’s probably cold now because you were faffing about.”
simon stares.
then sighs.
entirely familiar with this little game.
you're not actually arsed about the food, you just want to give him attitude for the sake of it.
he hangs up his jacket, slowly, deliberately, turning to face you with raised eyebrows. "watch yer tone, love."
you scoff, turn back to the kitchen, "or what, si?"
famous last words.
five minutes later you're still muttering under your breath as you set the table, deliberately placing down plates harder than quite necessary.
simon appears behind you without a sound, one hand gripping the back of your neck firmly - not enough to hurt but enough to make you freeze in place.
“problem?” he asks, voice dropped into something low and almost dangerous.
you try to shrug him off. “maybe i just wanted my husband home at a reasonable time instead of-”
he cuts you off by spinning you, crowding you back against the counter, free hand reaching up to grip your jaw, thumb pressing against your bottom lip.
“try again.” he says calmly. “with less fuckin' attitude this time.”
you glare up at him, eyes bright with that familiar mix of defiance and heat that he knows so well. for a minute he's convinced you're going to keep pushing, prodding, needling at him. but then your shoulders sag, just a fraction, bottom lip jutting out as you mumble, "…missed you."
simon rolls his eyes. "there we go. not that 'ard, was it love."
he leans down and kisses you, slowly, lips moving against yours in a rhythm that's oh so familiar, until the tension finally bleeds out of your body.
but because you're you? as he goes to pull away, you nip his bottom lip.
hard.
his eyes narrow. “right. that's fuckin' enough, love.”
before you can protest, he’s got you bent over the counter, one hand pressing between you shoulder blades while the other yanks your soft lounge shorts down your legs, dropping to his knees behind you as his hands grip your ass, spread you open for him.
there’s no teasing, no slow kisses up your thighs. simon dives in like a starving man, tongue dragging a hot, flat stripe from your clit to your slit before he seals his mouth over you.
a broken moan escapes you.
he eats you out like he’s pissed off about it - no finesse, just want and the need to shut you up. his tongue fucks into you, then pulls back to suck hard on your swollen clit until your knees buckle. one arm bands around your waist, holding you open and steady when your legs start to shake.
“fuck - si - s'too much -”
his lips curl into a grin against your soaking cunt. "should've thought about that before you started mouthin' off, love."
two fingers push inside without warning, curling immediately against that spot that makes your vision blur. he fucks them into you, slow, deep, whilst his tongue works your clit in tight little circles.
you’re dripping down his chin, trembling, shaking - every time you try to rock back against his face he tightens his grip and holds you still, forcing you to take exactly what he decides to give you.
"missed me so much you turn into a mouthy bitch the second i walk in." he murmurs, pulling his mouth away from your cunt just long enough to sink his teeth into the curve of your ass. "this what you needed, love? my tongue in your pretty little cunt to fix yer attitude?”
he doesn’t wait for a proper answer - just buries his face again, sucking your clit between his lips until your orgasm crashes over you like an all consuming wave. you clench around his fingers, a whine leaving your throat like you've lost the capacity for words, thighs trembling so hard you're sure your legs are going to collapse.
only when you’re limp and panting does he finally pull back, pressing one last open-mouthed kiss to your swollen folds, before rising to his feet. you hear the clink of his belt, the drag of his zipper, and your cunt flutters again in anticipation.
simon leans over you, chest to your back, one hand curling into your hair to turn your head so he can see your face.
“better?”
you swallow, "yeah." a pause and then, almost embarrassed, "love you, si."
a rare smirk tugs at the corner of his scarred mouth.
“good girl.”
he presses the flushed head of his cock against your soaked entrance and pushes in with one slow, deliberate thrust, stretching you open until you’re gasping again.
“dinner can wait.” he mutters into your ear as he bottoms out. “unless yer gonna start yer bloody complainin' again?”
⭐︎ warnings: nsfw, small town au, banter, neighborly enemies to lovers, pervert!bucky (stealing nude photographs), photographer!reader, fluff, sexual tension, public sex, dirty talk, degrading, breeding kink, overstimulation, oral (f receiving), size diff and kink
⭐︎ word count: 11.9k
⭐︎ a/n: thank you to my precious and dear friend @pinksplace for hosting this bwa stardew collab based on only one of the best games to exist. stardew valley. this is based on the character haley that you can romance in the game, so reader kinda has that mean, spoiled princess trope. I only ripped my hair out a million times writing this, so I hope you enjoy!
synopsis:
Living in Pelican Town wasn't all that bad compared to the city life you were used to. With the big farmhouse next door unoccupied, everything was quiet, peaceful, and scenic.
Then, Bucky Barnes moves in. Suddenly, you're waking up to the smell of manure, the squawking of chickens, and a farmer who's far too annoying—and far too hot—for his own good or your own comfort.
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Living in a small town, far from the city bustle you once called home, was a change that required a slow and steady adjustment for most people.
You were accustomed to walking across massive city blocks with a shopping center on every corner. You were used to breezy dresses and high heels, always meticulously grooming yourself nicely before ever stepping out of your apartment.
Now, the clean, organized world you knew has been replaced by dirt, soil, and animals.
Heels have given way to cowboy boots. The apartment with the skyline view has been traded for a modest cottage, its windows looking out over the silent and empty farmhouse next door.
Surprisingly, the change in scenery didn’t take long to adjust to. Since moving here, you’ve carved out a life in a quiet corner of town, tucked away from the rest of the townsfolk. With the vast, unoccupied land stretching out beside you, you often find yourself lounging in the grass to sunbathe or wandering out with your camera to capture the blooming apricot trees in the spring.
It is comfortable, quiet, and— much to your surprise—doesn’t feel like a downgrade from city life at all.
Until one day, you woke with a start to the sound of chickens squawking uncontrollably right outside your door.
Are Marnie’s chickens running loose again?
With a tired groan, you pushed yourself out of bed—your hair poking out in every direction and your eyes heavy with deep, dark circles. You shoved the curtains aside, letting a bright, burning ray of sunshine through the glass to hit you square in the face.
Wincing, you blinked several times to adjust, but it didn’t take long for your eyelids to fly wide open at what you saw just beyond your window.
The once empty farmhouse next door was now cluttered with boxes and crates. Animals that belonged on Marnie’s ranch were roaming freely over the fresh grass where you used to lay out a towel to sunbathe.
Now, it was likely being littered with pig shit.
And in the center of the chaos stood a man you didn’t recognize.
Sweat dampened his dark hair, sending loose strands draping over his face. He had his back to you—his white tank top and jeans stained dark from dirt and a hard day’s work.
You couldn’t wrap your head around it.
Was someone actually moving in?
Or had Marnie run out of space and decided to rent this spot out, ruining the peace and quiet you relished in this corner of town?
To make matters worse, he revved the engine of a lawnmower and got to work, polluting the air with noise.
Grabbing your slippers and hastily throwing on a cardigan to cover your nightgown, you stomped out of your cottage and marched over to the farmhouse fence.
“Hello!” you called out, pulling the cardigan tight across your chest. “What’s going on here—?”
The lawn mower’s engine roared even louder, drowning out your voice completely. The man continued to guide the machine in a slow, methodical line, his back still turned to you. The smell of freshly cut grass and gasoline filled the air, mingling with the… less pleasant scent of the roaming livestock.
“Excuse me!”
Nothing.
You stepped closer to the fence, cupping your hands around your mouth. “Hey! I’m talking to you!”
He reached the end of a row and made a sharp turn, but he didn’t look up. His eyes stayed on the ground. From your spot by the fence, you watched the sun dance across his muscles as he maneuvered the heavy machine, sweat glistening on his forearms.
You waited until he drifted closer to the fence line before shouting again.
“Hey! Farmer boy!”
The mower sputtered and stalled, and finally, your voice pierced through the noise.
He glanced up, pushing sweaty strands of hair out of his face. You stood just a few feet away, arms crossed tightly over your cardigan—the hem of your nightslip riding up ridiculously high on your thigh, your hair a mess of bed tangles and your face twisted grumpily.
The breath left Bucky’s lungs—and it wasn’t because of the blistering sun burning his skin, or the morning’s hard labor.
It was because he had a beautiful woman standing right in front of him — a woman who was a total sight for sore eyes.
Bucky let go of the mower, wiping his grimy hands on his stained jeans as he sauntered toward you. Meeting you at the fence, he flashed a charming smile, the corners of his blue eyes crinkling as he reached out a hand.
“Hi there, beautiful,” he greeted smoothly. “I’m Bucky.”
You didn’t move. Your eyes followed his face, to the dirt caked between his fingers and underneath his nails, and then back at his face.
“Beautiful?” you repeated, scrunching your face in what appears to be disgust.
Bucky’s brows furrowed just slightly, but he didn’t let the rejection deter him. He slowly lowered his hand.
Since he arrived early in the morning—well before the sun even rose—everyone in Pelican Town had been so kind and welcoming. Several of the folks had come by to help haul his luggage and boxes, even helping him get the chicken coop set up and the livestock moved in.
When Bucky inherited his parents’ old farm after they passed, he’d had his reservations about returning. But after those initial interactions with the townspeople, he started to think that maybe life out here wouldn’t be so bad after all.
His parents, Winnie and George, had always told him that the town they grew up in was filled with the most kindhearted people you would ever meet—a place where neighbors looked out for one another and never hesitated to lend a hand.
But now, here you were, and you wouldn’t even meet him halfway for a simple handshake.
“Sorry, ma’am,” Bucky huffed with that southern drawl he inherited from his parents. “Just callin’ it how I see it. Just as you called me ‘farmer boy.’”
You returned his petty jab with a roll of your eyes.
“What is going on here?” you motioned to the mess surrounding him. “Is there some big renovation being done? Are you turning the farmhouse into a ranch or something? This is private land, you know.”
Bucky couldn’t help but smile at the way your voice rose in anger just from his mere presence alone.
He rested both palms on his hips. “Why do you care?” He nodded his head toward you, prompting an answer.
You hiked a thumb over your shoulder. “Because I live right there, and all the noise you’re producing is going to be a problem.”
He glanced over your shoulder, letting out a soft hum. “Oh, so you’re my neighbor? How cute.” He looked back at you, a playful gleam dancing in his blue eyes. “You’re also the woman who’s been crossing the fence—snappin’ pictures of my trees and layin’ in my grass to sunbathe on my private land. Ain’t that right?”
Your shoulders tensed.
You didn’t know a thing about this man—yet he knew exactly what you had been up to before he took over the farm. You shifted on your feet awkwardly and defensively.
“H-how do you know that—?”
“It’s a small town, darlin’. And Marnie was tellin’ me all about it while she was helpin’ me with the chickens.” Bucky crossed his arms, his grin widening once he realized he’d won this little back and forth with you. “Wasn’t too happy when I first heard about it—but after findin’ out it was a pretty girl trespassin’, well, I don’t mind it one bit.”
Bucky watched as you purposefully avoided eye contact, your face scrunching in either embarrassment or pride—he couldn’t quite tell which.
“The people who owned this farmhouse left several years ago, even before I moved here. Their names were Winnie and George—”
“My parents,” Bucky interrupted, pointing a thumb at his chest. “I’m their son.”
Your eyes widened.
Living in a small town, you heard plenty of stories about the people who lived here now and those who had long ago. It hadn’t taken long for you to learn about Winnie and George—the married couple who once called Pelican Town home. They had a massive arrangement of animals and livestock, always hosting parties and events on their land.
When Winnie got pregnant, they had moved across the country to give their son a “better life.”
But apparently, that country charm couldn't keep them away forever, because their son was back. And based on the looks of it, he was here to stay for good.
You blinked, the name finally clicking. “Y-you’re James?”
“Sounds pretty comin’ off your lips.”
Agitation boiled in your blood as you stared back at his handsomely smug face. You couldn’t believe this was who you had to deal with now.
“Wow,” you drawled sarcastically, glaring him down. “Are you always this charming?”
“For you? I can be.” Bucky motioned to the rest of the farm with a sweeping gesture. “And you better get used to it—because I’m goin’ to be livin’ here from now on, right next to that cute little cottage of yours.”
Your jaw hung once his words registered in your mind.
Living here? That meant you had to deal with all the animals, the loud lawn mower, and that awful stench.
That also meant no more sunbathing in the wide, open grass. No more pictures of the trees and flowers that grew in Winnie and George’s yard—the ones you were planning on making a scrapbook of.
“Any way you can keep the noise down to a minimum?” you huffed, trying to smooth over your agitation.
Bucky saw right through you, and his grin only grew wider because of it. “What? A little noise is already ruinin’ your beauty sleep?”
And most importantly, it meant dealing with a dirty, farm boy neighbor who didn’t seem to care at all about being neighborly, or your own well being.
You were about to snap something snarky back, but he was already revving the mower's engine, not even looking your way anymore.
“Look, princess,” he shouted over the noise. “If you want to keep takin’ your silly pictures for your social media or sunbathin’ on my lawn, by all means.”
Social media?
What kind of woman did this man think you were?
He finally looked up at you again, flashing another one of those charming smiles.
“Just be careful not to step in pig shit.”
Since then, you and Bucky had been stuck in a constant back and forth.
Every morning, you woke to the sound of chickens squawking at the top of their lungs, followed immediately by the pungent scent of pig shit drifting through your window.
You complained to Bucky several times, but he always just wiped the sweat from his forehead and shrugged. “Guess I’ve gotten used to the smell. Doesn’t bother me none. Just light some incense and call it a day, would ya?”
On weekends, you would hang your damp laundry to dry in the sun, only for Bucky to decide that was the perfect time to leaf blow his gravel path. He would send a cloud of dust, dried hay, and dirt straight into your damp, clean dresses.
When you stomped out of the house in a rage, Bucky would just grin, nodding toward your laundry line and the pink lace that were strung up on it.
“Cute panties.”
Then out of sheer embarrassment, you would retreat back into your cottage without uttering a single word in defeat.
The breaking point came one evening when you were walking home from an errand run in town. One of Bucky’s goddamn cows had drifted astray and was currently munching on the sunflowers poking through your fences. You could put up with a lot of things, sure, but your precious flowers were where you drew the line.
You dropped your grocery bags on the porch and marched to the fence, your blood pressure spiking with every petal that vanished into that cow’s mouth.
“Hey, stop that! Shoo!” You flapped your arms wildly, trying to look as intimidating as possible. “Go on! Get back to your own side!”
The cow didn’t react. She simply blinked her long lashes at you, a half eaten sunflower stem hanging out of her mouth like a cigar. When you stepped closer to give her a firm nudge, she didn’t retreat. The cow let out a hum of what sounds like appreciation, leaning her massive head into your shoulder and nearly knocking you backward.
She wasn’t scared of you at all.
She was smitten.
“No! No cuddles! You’re a trespasser!” you hissed, trying to shove the heavy beast back toward the fence.
The cow responded by letting out a long, wet lick that started at your wrist and ended at your elbow. You shivered at the contact—you had just showered!
A low, gravelly chuckle erupted from the farmhouse porch, a sound you hadn’t heard over your own frantic shooing.
Bucky was leaning against the railing with a half peeled orange in his hand, a smug little smile tugging at his lips. He was enjoying this.
“Well, look at that,” he called out, his grin reaching his eyes. “Seems like my Bessie’s got a taste of my neighbor. I’m jealous.”
“Bucky, get your cow!” you shouted, trying to wipe the cow slobber off your arm. “She’s eating my sunflowers! These were for the festival!”
Rather than rushing to your rescue, Bucky took a bite of the citrus, juices spilling over his lips. He wiped his mouth with the back of his hand as his dirty boots stomped down the wooden steps, until he finally met you at the fence.
“Bessie ain’t doin’ any harm. She’s a good girl, ain’t she?” He smiled mid chew, his hand coming up to pet Bessie’s head as he started talking to the cow instead of you. “You got a good lick outta’ her, right? Is she as sweet as she looks?”
Your eyes went wide at the blatant comment. You scoffed, trying to ignore the sudden, drastic spike in your heartbeat.
“You need to take better care of your damn animals, Bucky.”
Bucky exagerrated a frown, tilting his head as he played stupid. “I take plenty of care over my sweet Bessie.”
You crossed your arms, glaring him down. “I mean keeping your animals on your property and leaving mine alone.”
“But Bessie didn’t even cross your fence.”
“She’s eating my sunflowers!” you reminded him, motioning dramatically toward your mangled plants.
Bucky snickered at your little outburst. He didn’t know what it was, but seeing you riled up over something as small as sunflowers was far too entertaining. Maybe it was the constant scent of soil and manure messing with his head, but his short yet frequent interactions with you had been more interesting than anything else in town since he had moved in.
“Alright, Bessie,” Bucky cooed to the cow.
He kept one hand on her head, gently urging her away from your garden. He gestured toward the mangled stems. “What’s this festival you’re savin’ these flowers for, anyway?”
“The Flower Dance,” you said, your brows furrowed as if he already should have known the answer.
“Explain it to me, princess.”
You ignored the pet name. “Every year in the spring, the town hosts a dance in the center of the square. The whole place is decorated with colorful banners and flowers, and Gus sets up a buffet spread of homemade food.”
Bucky rubbed his chin, looking amused. “And there’s dancin’, I presume?”
“Lots of it,” you continued. “People partner up for a waltz. The girls show up in nice dresses and flower crowns.”
“And what about the men?”
Your eyes raked over Bucky—taking in the dirt caked on his boots and the fresh scuffs on his jeans. “Still average looking, at best.”
It seemed no matter how many insults you hurled at him, he remained entirely unfazed. His smile only grew wider as he stepped closer, leaning over the fence until you were nearly nose to nose.
“So,” he drawled, voice growing deeper. “Do you have a partner?”
You blinked, thrown off guard by the question. “Excuse me?”
Bucky’s posture shifted slightly. He looked down, dragging a calloused finger along the top rail of your fence, tracing the grain of the wood as he searched for the right words. From where you stood, you could tell he was trying to maintain that ‘cool guy’ exterior, but his faint, boyish smile gave him away.
He shrugged casually, though he still didn’t meet your eyes.
“Well... I was just wonderin’...” he started. “Since I’m new in town and all, maybe you could show me the ropes of this ‘flower dance’ thing. Seems like a lot for a guy to take in on his own.”
You cocked an eyebrow at him suspiciously.
“Sounds like you already got it all figured out,” he said, finally looking up. That smug smile returned to the corners of his mouth. “And a guy like me... well, it’d be a dream to take a woman like you.”
You let out a short, scoffing laugh.
He had been taunting and poking fun at you since the day he moved in—and now he was inviting you to be his partner for the Flower Dance?
Was he pulling your leg?
Instead of entertaining him, you just rolled your eyes and turned back toward your house.
“Very funny.”
As you gathered the groceries from your steps, you added without looking over your shoulder, “Control your animals, Barnes.”
It was like Bucky was trying to get back at you for rejecting his invitation to the Flower Dance—because from that day onward, he had been nothing but an aggravating pest lingering just outside your cottage.
Instead of being a slighty annoying and impractical neighbor, Bucky took your rejection with a tip of his hat and a doubled effort to be the most inconvenient man alive.
He started a ‘fence repair’ project that involved loud hammering at six in the morning—shirtless. When you stomped out of your house in a rage, he only grinned.
“Sorry, sweets. But the world doesn’t stop movin’ just ‘cause a pretty girl wants to get some sleep.”
You retaliated by accidentally spraying your hose at his freshly painted fence before it had a chance to dry, followed by a fake giggle and a chirpy “oops!”
This relentless back and forth went on and on, until you found yourself pinned beneath your grandmother’s heirloom vanity on an unfortunate Friday afternoon—the day right before the Flower Dance festival.
This vanity was the one piece of furniture that had survived the move to Pelican Town, and the one thing you were trying to preserve.
While you were trying to shimmy it away from a leaky pipe in the wall, the antique wood groaned. With a suspicious sounding crack that made your heart drop, the back leg snapped, and the entire heavy structure tilted, the vanity’s ornate mirror swinging dangerously toward the floor.
You caught it just in time, wincing as your shoulder braced roughly against the heavy wood, but you were pinned.
If you moved, the mirror would shatter and the delicate wood would splinter beyond repair.
In that moment, you didn’t know what was worse—being pinned beneath a very heavy, very important vanity, or the fact that your window was propped open and the only man in sight who could help you was none other than Bucky fucking Barnes.
“Bucky!” you shouted toward the window.
He heard you—you knew it—because as he closed the mailbox, he gave a subtle glance over his shoulder before pretending he hadn’t heard a thing. He went right back to sorting through his mail.
“Bills, bills, bills,” Bucky clicked his tongue, loud enough for you to hear. He shook his head. “More bills.”
“Bucky, get over here!” you shouted louder, trying to shift your feet, but the movement only made the vanity creak ominously. “I need your help!”
Bucky finally turned around, that stupid, smug smile tugging at his lips at the sight of your struggle.
“You sure about that?” he taunted, crossing his arms over his chest. “I don’t know—you look pretty strong to me. I didn’t expect that kind of muscle out of a girl like you.”
“I’m being serious, Bucky—!” you gasped, the wood sliding through your sweaty palms. You tried adjusting your feet again, but your sandals gave little to no traction against the wooden floor. “It’s going to—it’s slipping!”
As you scrambled to fix your grip, the vanity slipped straight through your fingers. You shrieked, jumping to the side just in time to avoid having your feet crushed as the heavy furniture crashed to the ground.
The impact made the entire house shake. Shards of glass exploded, skidding across the floor like ice as pieces of the wood on the vanity splintered off.
Bucky, who had been taunting you just seconds ago, was already moving toward your door before you could even notice.
“Shit, shit,” he cursed under his breath. He shoved the front door open, barging through and tossing his mail aside.
“Fuck—are you okay?” Bucky rushed to your side, crouching beside you. His warm hands found your shoulders as he gently pried you away from the broken glass.
The worried tone in his voice went in one of your ears and out the other. All you could do was stare at the wreckage before you, the glass scattered everywhere a clear testament to how shattered you felt inside.
“That… that was my grandmother’s,” you said with a shaky breath. “It’s the last thing I have of hers.”
Bucky stood beside you, sensing the tension in your shoulders as his teeth caught his bottom lip. You could feel the guilt coming off him for not helping you sooner.
Slowly, you lifted your head to look at him, your eyes wide in disbelief. Bucky looked like he was bracing himself for a round of yelling—a smart move on his part.
“I asked you for help,” you started, voice trembling as the rage began to boil in your blood. “I asked you for help, Bucky! And all you did was stand there and watch me struggle!”
You stepped closer, the soles of your sandals crunching against the glass as you shoved a finger into his chest. “You’re an asshole, Bucky. You’ve been a pest and a jerk since the second you moved in, and now the one thing that’s actually important to me is broken because you wanted to play some stupid game!”
Bucky could only stare at you completely wide eyed, as the angry shakiness in your voice softened into something more broken and small.
Your face—once scrunched in a pissed off snarl—gave way to a slight wobble in your bottom lip that Bucky caught immediately.
Maybe he should’ve retorted. He should’ve told you it wasn’t entirely his fault. But the way the tears started to prick at the corners of your eyes, threatening to spill over any second, made his heart ache in ways he didn’t want to admit.
Before you could shove him a second time, his large, calloused hands came up, gently catching your wrist.
“Hey,” he said, his voice surprisingly calm. “Stop. Don’t move. You’re gonna cut your feet,” he warned, looking down at your sandals.
“What—?”
“Here.” Bucky’s hands nudged your shoulders, guiding you to the edge of your bed slowly and carefully. “Just stay here, okay?” he murmured, crouching in front of you until he was at eye level. His eyes bored into yours, a small attempt to soothe your panic. “Don’t move an inch until I get the glass up. I’m goin’ to get my kit. I have the tools to fix this.”
“You can’t fix this, Bucky,” you choked out, wiping a tear away with the back of your hand. “The wood snapped. The mirror is in a million pieces.”
Bucky reached out, his thumb catching the tear that you missed to wipe.
“I can,” he said, and for once, there wasn’t a trace of smugness in his tone. “I’ve got some aged mahogany in the barn that’ll match this grain near perfect. And I know a guy in town who can cut a new glass plate by morning.”
He stood up, looking down at the broken glass and then back at you. “I’m sorry, princess. I really am. I’ll make it right. Just stay put.”
For the first time, princess didn’t sound like a condescending, backhanded compliment.
So, you obeyed.
You sat on the edge of your mattress, sandals discarded on the floor and bare feet tucked safely away from the danger zone as you watched Bucky go to work. He was meticulous, sweeping your broom across the wood to make sure not a single drop of glass was left behind on the floorboards.
Once the floor was clear, he kept his focus on the broken leg and the empty, ragged frame where the mirror used to be.
“This vanity must be important to you, huh?”
You kept your eyes down, picking at the fabric of your quilt. “I’m not really in the mood for your taunts, Barnes.”
“Hey,” he huffed, glancing up at you. “I’m not tryin’ to play at you, darlin’. I promise.” He frowned, his tone softening as he took in the saddened expression on your face.
“I know what it’s like, tryin’ to preserve an heirloom. My parents—” he swallowed hard, keeping a brave face just for you, “a lot of the stuff they gave me didn’t make the move back to Pelican Town. Which is ironic, ‘cause this was their home from the very beginning, you know? It could’ve been just fine if they kept their stuff here.”
You blinked, sniffling as you looked at him. Aside from that slight glimpse of vulnerability when he’d asked you to the festival, this was the most he had ever shared about himself.
“I’m so sorry,” you said sympathetically, not really knowing what else to offer him in a moment like this.
Bucky offered a small, weary smile.
“Don’t be,” he groaned slightly as he knelt back down, opening the drawers of the vanity to carefully remove your belongings so he could get started on the repairs. “What’s all this?”
He started pulling out various bottles and products—makeup brushes and perfumes that looked far too expensive and meticulous for a girl to be bothered with in a town like this.
“Well, look at that,” Bucky let out a low whistle, turning a tube of designer lipstick over in his calloused palm. “What is this? Chanel? Dior?” He glanced up at you, that same spark returning to his eyes, though it was softer now—less of a bite and more of a tease. “Always wondered how a farm girl kept lookin’ like she just stepped off a runway in Zuzu City.”
“What’s wrong with a girl wanting to look her best?” you scoffed, feeling a little embarrassed.
Bucky grinned at the sound of you finally getting your spark back.
He reached back into the vanity, pulling out a small scrapbook. As he moved it, a handful of photographs slipped from between the pages and fluttered onto the floor.
Your eyes flew wide as the photographs hit the floor—some of them landing face up, while others landed face down.
You scrambled off the bed, trying to snatch the photos, but Bucky was already sweeping them up. He stood, holding them high and well out of your reach.
“Wait—don’t!”
“Oh?” Bucky’s brow arched, as he playfully tilted his head at you. “What do we have here?”
“Bucky, stop playing around! Give them to me—!”
Bucky’s arm stayed locked high above his head, a deep chuckle vibrating in his chest as he flipped through the pages. The first few were random blurbs—bits of a poetry phase you had gone through that had lasted all of a week.
“Roses are red, violets are blue—? You write poetry?” he questioned, making your face burn with embarrassment.
“It was a phase! Just shut up and hand it over—”
He ignored you, continuing to flip through the book until his expression suddenly softened. His thumb brushed over the edge of a Polaroid taped to one of the pages with pink, polka-dotted washi tape.
“This is…” he breathed, his voice trailing off as he took in the photo of the apricot tree on his own lawn. He stared at the way the sun peaked through the branches, highlighting the orangey-pink fruit. “The tree on my lawn—my mom’s apricot tree. She grew that from a sapling.”
He continued flipping through the pages, his blue eyes trailing over each one carefully. He took in the way you arranged the different prints—candid shots of the townsfolk, the horses at Marnie’s farm, colorful cocktails from Gus’s saloon, and flowers. Lots of them. Flowers he recognized from both your lawn and his.
“You know… when the people in town mentioned you were a photographer, I just assumed you were an influencer,” he admitted. He gave you a lopsided grin, his gaze dropping back to the book. “Some… social media vermin.”
You scoffed, crossing your arms and raising a brow. “A vermin?”
Bucky grinned. “Yeah—I mean, you’re a good lookin’ woman, with all your fancy designer clothes and stuff—” he waved his free hand while the other held the book aloft. “I figured you’d be into all the selfies and modelin’ crap.”
“Well,” you huffed, trying to mask your bashfulness. “Sorry to disappoint you.”
“Disappointment is the farthest thing from what I’m feelin’, little doll,” he mused. He took in the photographs and the various little doodles of flowers in the corners of the pages, tucked neatly around the polaroids. “These are beautiful.”
You boasted about plenty of things—the clothes you wore, the bags you carried, the way you styled your hair. But photography and scrapbooking were more personal. It was the hobby that had helped you during the transition from the city to the farm. Some might deem it corny, but away from the expectations of social media—where strangers were updated through sugar-coated photos on a digital screen—you had turned photography into something private. Something more you.
“I…” you started, struggling to handle the look of adoration on Bucky’s face. “Thank you, Bucky. That’s very sweet of you.”
After taking in every page, he closed the scrapbook and handed it back. His attention shifted to the glossy prints dangling from his fingers, and he began sorting through them with a boyish grin.
“And these are the photos you’re goin’ to add to the book later, I take it—?”
Bucky stopped short the second his eyes landed on the next shot. Most were the same snaps of trees and the town, but there was one that made his breath hitch and his pants suddenly tight.
“It’s a little project I’m working on,” you explained, completely clueless and still a bit bashful. “A page dedicated to the different seasons. The trees are always changing, and the town looks completely different from spring to winter.”
Bucky stayed quiet, his shoulders tensing as his eyes remained glued to the photograph. He cleared his throat, his adam’s apple bobbing.
“I… see,” he said, his voice suddenly low and raspy.
Your brows furrowed. You couldn’t understand why he was so focused on that photo specifically. Curiosity getting the best of you, you tilted your head to peek at what he was looking at—and your heart dropped into your stomach.
Staring back at you was a selfie you had taken on your instant camera. You were sprawled across your bed, hair fanned out across the pillows. Your chest was exposed bare, one arm draped over your breasts, though if someone looked close enough, they could see the shaded curve of an areola peeking just past your forearm. Your body was angled to accentuate your curves, revealing the soft skin of your thighs and hips in nothing but a pair of lace panties.
Face burning a million degrees, you snatched the photo out of Bucky’s hands.
“Don’t look at that!” you shrieked, spinning away from him.
All Bucky could do was stand there—frozen, bewildered, and hard as fuck.
He could hear your frantic heartbeat from where he stood. And with your back turned, it was painfully obvious you didn’t want to talk about it.
“Right. Sorry,” he cleared his throat again, though he didn’t sound sorry at all. He turned toward the door. “I’m gonna—uh, grab my tools and start workin’ on this vanity, okay? I’ll be back!”
Before you could say a word, his boots were already rushing out the door.
He eventually returned with his tools and set to work on the vanity. While he worked, you tried to keep yourself busy, maintaining a respectful distance at all times.
From your open bedroom door, where he was crouched on the floor, Bucky still had a clear view of you in the kitchen making lemonade. You told him it was your way of saying “thank you,” but he knew the truth.
You were just trying to put as much space between you as possible after that photo.
But right now, the last thing he wanted was for you to be far away.
That image of you was scorched into the back of his mind, taking up permanent residence. Laid completely bare, hair fanned out, wearing nothing but those lace panties and an expression that screamed, “fuck me, Bucky!” — it was enough to drive him crazy.
As he watched you move around the kitchen in the little sundress that had made his mouth water the first day he laid eyes on you, a million thoughts raced through his mind just as fast as the blood was rushing to his dick.
Why had you taken a picture like that?
Who was it for?
Was there someone you were dating—someone you were sending those prints to?
Suddenly, a bitter spike of jealousy flared in his gut. The idea of you taking photos like that just to mail them off to some soft handed city boy prick made him want to burn the whole town down. His movements grew jerky and annoyed as he worked. The wood felt awkward in his grip, and his tools kept slipping.
“Shit,” he cursed, grabbing your attention.
You glanced over your shoulder, a glass of freshly squeezed lemonade in your hand. “Everything okay? Need any help?”
“Just peachy,” Bucky mumbled.
As he heard your footsteps drawing closer, he tried to adjust himself, willing away the erection that was vulgarly pressing through his pants.
“Why don’t you take a break and have some lemonade, then?” You held the glass out to him, a small smile tugging at your glossy lips—a view that didn’t help Bucky’s situation in the slightest. “Before the ice melts.”
Bucky’s gaze traveled from your lips down to your hands. They were pretty—small and soft as they curled around the tall glass. Even your fingertips were perfectly manicured.
You were being far too kind, offering him a drink while he crouched there on your floor, his mind dark and filthy as he imagined how those fingers would look slicked with his cum instead of condensation.
“Sure,” Bucky grunted, straining as he stood up. “A lemonade sounds good.”
The two of you stepped out onto the front porch for some fresh air, taking in the way the sun poked through the branches. Next door, the chickens were squawking and the birds chirping, but the domestic sounds did nothing to help the awkward silence between you.
You kept your gaze straight ahead on the grass and flowers, but you could feel Bucky’s stare lingering on the side of your face.
“So…” he started, and you mentally braced yourself for whatever was coming next. “That photo—”
“Oh, God,” you sighed, squeezing your eyes shut out of embarrassment. “Don’t start.”
Bucky raised his glass, letting out a huff of a laugh—though it didn’t sound humorous at all. It was just filler noise to cover his nerves.
“Well—it’s, uh... it’s a good picture,” he mumbled, staring at the ice cubes melting in his glass. “You look good in it.”
You felt like you wanted to shrivel up and let the wind carry you away. You avoided his gaze, turning your head to hide your burning cheeks. “You’re such an idiot.”
“All I’m sayin’ is,” he continued, mumbling even quieter as that jealousy bled through his voice,“whoever is gettin’ those kind of photos from you is a lucky man.”
You blinked, finally glancing at him.
“Lucky man?” You noticed the way his cheeks were flushed pink. “There is no man.”
Bucky froze with the glass halfway to his lips, his blue eyes snapping to yours. “No man?” he repeated, like he needed the reassurance.
“No,” you shrugged casually, giving him a small smile. “I just take those photos for myself. I spent years worried about how other people perceived me. When I moved here, I wanted to see myself for me. It makes me feel confident. Seeing myself like that is kind of empowering, you know? It’s for my eyes only.”
You let out a shaky breath, the embarrassment still very much there—but no longer because you were seen half naked. Now, it was because of how corny your explanation sounded out loud.
You glanced at Bucky out of the corner of your eye, trying to gauge his reaction, but he looked so deep in thought that you couldn’t make out a single one.
“For your eyes only, huh?” Bucky hummed.
When you gave him that little nod, Bucky knew he was doomed.
The jealousy that had been sitting like a pit in his stomach was drowned out in a damned instant the minute you said ‘no man.’ That meant he was the only one who saw that photo of you—that sweet, vulnerable side where you laid bare, warm and inviting. Bucky loved the fact that there was no man, and no one else after you.
To him, that just meant you were already his.
“Go to the Flower Dance with me,” he asked suddenly.
You huffed a lighthearted laugh. “This again?”
Bucky turned to face you fully now, eyes boring into yours so intently it was like he was giving you a silent warning not to even bother looking away.
“Let me take you to the Flower Dance. Let me be your partner. Let me dance with you.”
“Bucky, you can’t be serious—”
“I was serious the first time I asked you, and I’m even more so now,” he said, his brows furrowing as his voice deepened. “Dance with me.”
You bit your lip, hesitating.
When he noticed your silence, he stepped closer, standing over you until he was looking down at you completely.
“Consider it a thank you for fixin’ up your vanity.”
“Thank you? You made me struggle and didn’t help me the first time!” you countered, but Bucky didn’t budge. He didn’t fight back or laugh.
He was dead serious.
He wanted you to go to the Flower Dance with him as your date—and you had a very strong feeling he wasn’t going to take ‘no’ for an answer.
“Fine,” you reluctantly agreed, despite a smile tugging at your lips. “But just remember—it’s a thank you for fixing my vanity.”
Bucky grinned, finding himself very, very happy with your response.
To you, agreeing to the Flower Dance was just a fair trade—a thank you for his labor and a way to settle the score over your grandmother’s vanity.
But as Bucky watched you walk back into the house, his hand drifted to his pocket, letting his fingers brush gently against the glossy edge of the photograph—your photograph— tucked deep inside.
Having that naked, intimate piece of you hidden away against his thigh—a secret kept just for him—was a reward far better than anything else you could have given him.
He knew he was being greedy by stealing the photo and taking you to the Flower Dance, but he didn’t care. The photo was enough to drive him crazy tonight, but dancing with you tomorrow was the cherry on top.
It was Saturday morning—the day of the Flower Dance—and Bucky had been restless since dawn, and even more so the night before.
He lost track of how many times he had jerked off since he stole that photo. One time was right after he finished fixing your vanity. He had retreated to his farmhouse, slammed the door shut, and before he even kicked off his boots, he had his pants unzipped and cock in hand.
Another time was in the shower, then again right before he fell asleep, and… once or twice more as the clock ticked closer to the start of the festival.
It was shameless, almost pathetic, but when you were dealing with animals and manual labor all day, you had to relieve the stress somehow. And nothing relieved it quite like the memory of you sprawled across those pillows with those sweet tits pressed together.
As you made your way to the town square, you found yourself walking with a pep in your step. Your heels clicked against the pavement, and your sundress swayed at your hips with every stride.
You had taken lots of care to look better than usual today. You had woken up early just to have enough time for your hair and makeup, trying on three different dresses just to see which one made you look the best. You even found yourself wondering what Bucky was wearing—hoping, subconsciously, that your dress might actually match his outfit.
Fuck.
You were actually looking forward to see him and dance with him.
Your heart was beating far too fast for your chest. You could already imagine it—Bucky, finally rid of his grimy farm clothes and wearing a proper outfit, or his heavy boots stepping all over your sandals because he didn’t have a clue how to dance.
You found yourself grinning to yourself up until you made it to the bustle of the community square. Gus had his food spread out on a table beneath a canopy, potted flowers that were grown by the townsfolk were scattered about, and colorful banners were decorated across the lightpoles.
“What’s got you smilin’ to yourself for?” a familiar, deep gravelly voice interrupted you, stopping you in your tracks.
It was Bucky, wearing a nicely ironed button up tucked into his khaki pants that were held up by a nice, brown leather belt. Your smile faltered slightly—not because he looked terrible, but because he looked good.
Too fucking good.
He tilted his head, hands tucked deep into his pockets. “Hey, where did that smile go?”
“I… nothing,” you cleared your throat, hands primly behind your back as you took him in. “You look… good.”
You suddenly felt small as you watched Bucky’s eyes trace over you—taking in the way you did your hair and your makeup, down to the short hem of your dress. You watched as he caught his bottom lip between his teeth.
“That might’ve been the nicest thing you’ve ever said to me,” he joked before nodding to you. “You look beautiful.” He glanced around before taking a step closer, leaning down so only you could hear. “Kind of makes me a bit jealous knowin’ other people can see how pretty you are.”
Your face warmed, and Bucky expected you to back away from his boldness—but you stepped closer, batting your lashes at him in a way that drove him fucking crazy.
“Yeah, but they’re not the ones dancing with me, are they?”
With all the pent up frustration building inside him, that little taunt of yours felt like an open invitation to grab you and do whatever he wanted.
But instead, his tongue ran over his teeth as he grinned, amused by your comment. He extended a hand toward you.
“The dance is ’bouta start soon. Come on.”
Despite this being his first time ever experiencing a Flower Dance, he took initiative as if he had been doing this longer than you had. The live band propped up on the stage began to play, the acoustic guitars picking the same catchy tune you knew by heart from all the years you had attended before.
Women and men gathered hand in hand to get into position. Bucky led you to the very center of the crowd, standing tall in front of you. He guided your hand to his shoulder before resting his own large palm firmly against your hip.
You couldn’t help but chuckle at his sudden burst of confidence. “Wow, Bucky Barnes. Don’t tell me you actually know how to dance?”
“Course I do,” he huffed. “Just ‘cause I’m covered in dirt all day doesn’t mean I don’t know how to take a lady for a dance. Don’t sound so surprised.”
He pulled you in closer, and you looked up at him, your eyes wide and soft with a sheepish smile to match.
“You wouldn’t let me fall, right?” you teased, your voice barely sounding over the guitars.
“Never,” he promised, his grip on your waist tightening to prove it to you. “Not a single speck of dirt on that pretty little head of yours. I’ve got you.”
The music started, and as you two danced, you noticed how Bucky was pulling you closer and closer with each step.
His hand stayed tight at your waist before moving to your lower back, then back to your hips with a small, firm squeeze. The hand that held yours gripped tighter, reeling you in even more with every move.
As he spun you back into his chest, you felt the hitch in his breathing. You leaned back slightly, looking up at him.
“You okay, Bucky?” you teased with a smile. “You’re looking a little... stiff.”
God, those eyes and those glossy fucking lips.
Bucky let out a visible shudder before forcing a nod. “Dancin’ with a very pretty girl in my arms—it’s natural for me to be a little nervous, isn’t it?”
He spun you again, your short sundress flaring out like a ballerina—and he caught a quick glimpse of your bare thigh. Just barely. He wanted more.
He drew you in until your forehead was resting against his collarbone. He leaned his head down, his nose grazing the skin of your temple as he took a deep, shaky inhale of your scent—shampoo, vanilla, and the warmth of your skin from the sunlight. You smelled so good, and each inhale was doing serious damage to his self-control.
From his height, his gaze fell directly into the neckline of your dress. He had a direct, unobstructed view of the swell of your breasts, the fabric of your sundress moving against your curves with every breath you took.
It was the photograph come to life, only now he could actually touch you… just not in the complete ways he wanted to.
His hand on your back slid lower, his palms suddenly clammy as he pressed your hips tight against his. You gasped softly, your step faltering for a split second as you felt him.
A thick, heavy, warm bulge was straining against his khakis, pressing right into the notch of your thighs.
Bucky’s jaw was clenched so tight it looked painful, his eyes were somewhere over your shoulder as he tried to maintain a shred of dignity. He thought he was being subtle—that you were too caught up in the festival to notice how inappropriately turned on he was.
He was wrong.
Deciding to play a much dirtier game, you took matters into your own hands. He spun you around again, but instead of facing him, you tucked yourself right back into the curve of his body.
Your back hit his chest, and your ass ground firmly against his cock.
Bucky let out a shuddering groan that tickled against the back of your neck as he felt the curve of your ass press harder into his bulge.
Before he could even think about pulling away to save face, you reached over and grabbed his hands. Your fingers slid over his knuckles, guiding his large, calloused palms down until they were over your hips. You kept your hands over his, forcing him to feel the way your curves fit perfectly against his body.
“Shit,” he cursed, and you grinned.
Everyone else was too preoccupied with their own dancing to even notice Bucky’s predicament, so you continued swaying your hips against him to the music.
Every rub of your ass against his cock was like adding oil to the flames. Bucky’s nose nuzzled the side of your head, and you could hear his breathing get more labored the more you ground against him.
“Still nervous you’re dancing with a pretty girl?” you taunted. You felt him twitch against you in response.
He groaned, his lips so close to your ear that you could feel his hot breath. “You know exactly what you’re doin’.”
“And what exactly am I doing, Bucky?”
“You’re bein’ a goddamn tease.”
Your smile grew wider. “But you’re not exactly pushing me away, are you?”
His grip on your hips tightened enough to bunch the fabric of your dress around your waist. He hiked the skirt up higher, his hot palms gliding just beneath the hem to tickle your outer thighs — then higher, towards the sensitive skin of your inner leg.
You gasped softly when you felt his thumb graze against your clothed cunt.
“Keep tauntin’ me,” he growled against your ear, “and I’m goin’ to flip up this tiny skirt and fuck you right here in the middle of the square—where everyone can see.”
Your eyes traced over the crowd. Everyone was all smiles, too caught up in the joy of the festival to even notice the two perverts feeling each other up in the middle of it all.
“Then do it,” you challenged.
“You goddamn slut.” Bucky huffed a laugh against the back of your neck— no humor in it at all. “No. I’m too jealous for that. I wouldn’t want anyone else seein’ my girl like that.”
Your breath hitched. His girl?
“That’s funny.” You looked up over your shoulder at him, your eyes wide as you faked your innocence. “I don’t remember ever being your girl.”
Bucky’s cock twitched hard against your ass, and you knew right then that you won.
“Not my girl?” Bucky scoffed, spinning you around so you were forced to look him in the eye.
“You’ve been my girl from the minute I stepped foot back in Pelican Town. From the moment I laid eyes on you—I’d already decided you were mine. And you agreeing to dance with me today just confirmed it all.”
He ground his hips against yours, letting you feel his heavy bulge press against your inner thigh.
“If you don’t believe you’re my girl, then I’m just gonna have to prove it to you.”
You weren’t able to get a single word in as Bucky’s hand wrapped tight around yours.
He led you away from the crowd, pushing through with polite and gentle ‘excuse me’s that went completely against how roughly he was holding you.
He took you towards the shadows at the side of the saloon.
It was a narrow, unassuming alley, hidden from the main square by overgrown shrubbery and stacked wooden crates.
“Bucky,” you looked around breathlessly and no one was near, “what are you doing?”
He didn’t answer.
He shoved you back against the cool brick wall. He didn’t wait, and he didn’t waste his time asking, either.
His hands were already at the hem of your sundress, bunching the fabric in his fists and hiking it up until the cool spring air hit your hips.
Your eyes went wide, your heart fighting against your chest as you watched him fall to his knees.
You knew you should’ve stopped him.
You should’ve told him this was inappropriate—that anyone could walk in on you two right now.
But as he knelt there, his eyes boring hungrily into your thighs and his tongue darting out to lick his lips the second his fingertips found the waistband of your panties, you couldn’t find the breath to argue.
How could you possibly deny a predator his well-earned prey?
Bucky tugged your panties down your thighs and past your legs, tossing them aside. His hand rubbed up and down your thigh before hiking your leg over his shoulder, his hot touch making you shudder and grow even wetter as he stared at you intimately.
“God, look at you,” he groaned, palming himself. “What a fucking sight. All the men you danced with before I moved back into town didn’t get to see this side of you, did they?”
You only stared at him. When you didn’t answer, he gripped your ankle, making you wince.
“Answer me.”
“No,” you shook your head, swallowing hard. “Only you.”
“That’s what I like to hear,” he hummed, pleased. He leaned in, trailing soft, wet kisses along your inner thigh. “Dancin’ like a saint in front of the mayor, in front of all the townsfolk, just to be drippin’ wet for me like a goddamn whore.”
He leaned in, his hot breath ghosting over your sensitive folds, making you hitch a breath.
He looked up at you from between your legs, and you swore you could’ve melted right there at the sight of him. His eyes were completely blown out, staring at you in ways that should’ve made you afraid.
“I'm gonna taste every fuckin’ drop you made for me while you were rubbin’ that pretty ass against my cock. I’m gonna eat you until you’re beggin’ me to stop, and even then, I ain’t stoppin’.”
“Bucky… —ah!” your hand flew over your mouth once Bucky buried his face between your legs.
With your short dress bunched messily around your waist, Bucky’s tongue—hot and wet—swiped upward against your cunt, making you moan against your palm. He kept flicking his tongue up and down against the sensitive skin, and your fingers tangled into his hair, giving it a firm tug that made him groan against you.
“S-someone might... walk in on us—” a whimper broke from your lips as Bucky tilted his head, his tongue moving against your weeping cunt.
His hands slid up past your thighs to grab your ass, kneading and squeezing as he ate you out behind the saloon.
The mention of someone catching you only made his cock harder in his pants. He moaned against your slit, his tongue lapping at your juices as he licked and suckled on your sensitive pussy. The tip of his tongue found your clit again, flicking at it and leaving vulgar suckling noises in the quiet alley.
His finger poked at your wet and vulnerable entrance, sliding in easily as he fucked your clit with his tongue.
“Oh my god, Bucky—!” you cried out.
You were shaking, your back scraping against the brick as Bucky ate you out shamelessly.
As his tongue danced on your most sensitive spots and his finger fucked you in rhythm with his mouth, your hips began to buck uncontrollably against his face, and Bucky let out a muffled growl.
“S-slow down—fuck, I’m gonna cum—” you whimpered behind your hand.
He hummed in satisfaction, the vibration making your pussy tingle as his fingers dug into the soft flesh of your ass to hold you steady while he licked every last drop of you. Your back arched off the wall and you tried to squirm away to save face, but Bucky wouldn’t let you.
One hand stayed tight on your thigh and the other squeezed your ass, all while his face was tucked deep against your pussy, soaking in everything you had to give him.
“Fu—fuck, Bucky…” you whimpered as he slowly released your leg from his shoulder.
He leaned back on his heels, looking up at you, and the sight made your breath hitch. Bucky gave you a devilish little grin, his chin and lips gleaming with the wet sheen of your juices.
Between his legs, his bulge was straining against his khakis—a damp spot darkening his lap where his pre-cum had soaked right through.
You looked around frantically—coast still clear—before tugging your skirt down and adjusting the straps on your shoulders. “We… we should go. The rest of the town’ll be looking for us—”
Bucky pushed himself up from the ground, his large body blocking your path as his hands went to his waist. He began to tug at the fastenings of his belt.
“Where do you think you’re goin’?” he rasped in a low growl. “I’m not even close to done with you.”
You swallowed hard, staring up at him as you caught your breath from your release. “Bucky, we can’t. Someone will catch us—”
“No,” Bucky hissed, unzipping his pants and tugging them down. “Not until I get to cum—you’re not goin’ anywhere.”
He stepped closer, nudging his leg between your thighs as his hands found the hem of your skirt again. His hand trailed up, dragging the fabric up around your waist as he pinned you back against the wall.
Bucky’s hand wrapped around his shaft, and as your eyes trailed down—you let out a soft gasp.
He was big, thick, and pulsing in his hand. His tip caressed your clit, and he began jerking himself off against your warmth. He let out jagged breaths, his hand trailing down your thigh before hiking it up and over his hip.
“Ah—Bucky!” you cried out, holding onto his shoulders for support.
“Stay right here,” he commanded, his hands gripping your ass to hoist you higher against the wall. “Wrap those legs tighter.”
His cock dragged across your slit, his tip catching your entrance and making you gasp. He nudged his tip against your opening, testing the tension, and let out a shaky, ragged breath.
“So tight...” he rasped, the words sounding almost painful. “But you’re so wet for me, sweetheart. I could just slip right in.”
“Bucky, wait—you’re too big,” you whispered, your hands bracing against his shoulders.
You could already feel him stretching you, even just at the entrance. “I don’t think it’s gonna fit—and we can’t do this in public, someone is going to—”
Before you could finish, Bucky’s palm clamped firmly over your mouth to silence you. His eyes were dark, focused entirely on where your pussy hugged his tip.
“Shut up,” he hissed, his tone leaving no room for argument. “I can’t wait. The sooner I fuck you, the sooner we can get outta here.”
With a slow tilt of his hips, he began sinking himself inside you.
You let out a muffled, pitchy moan against his palm, your eyes rolling back as the sensation of him filling you made you see stars.
He was stretching you apart, claiming every inch of your body as he pushed deeper and deeper, until his hips finally pressed against yours.
He stayed there for a moment, buried to the hilt, his forehead dropping to rest against the crook of your neck as he let out a groan. “Fuuck, shit—”
He was so deep, his cock stretching your walls as his body pinned you so firmly to the brick that you couldn’t move even if you wanted to.
“There,” he growled against your skin, his hand still tight over your mouth as he watched the pleasure wash over your face. “Fits perfectly.”
Despite his words, his face was twisted and his jaw was clenched from how tightly your body was squeezing him.
As he started rocking his hips, his cock sliding in and out of your wet cunt, it took everything in him not to fuck you hard against the wall right then and there.
He knew you were still trying to adjust to his size, watching the way your face twisted as you tried to be a good girl for him.
He couldn’t believe it—the girl of his dreams, the girl from the very photograph he’d jerked off to from the night before until now—you were actually right here, taking his big cock inside your tight little pussy.
“A-are you okay?” he managed to muster, his voice rough as he stared at you with lustful, hazy eyes.
You whimpered before giving him a small, frantic nod.
He took that as his invitation to fuck you harder.
“God, you’re so fuckin’ tight—can barely move.”
He started to move faster, his cock sinking deep into your pussy and pulling out before slamming back in. His grip on your thigh was tight as he held you up.
“So goddamn wet too, sweetheart.”
“B-bucky… ahh—we can’t.”
“Can’t?”
He kept folding your leg over, trying to adjust you so he could sink even deeper, but the tension in your body wouldn’t let him. The angle was awkward. The wall was too cold, and he couldn’t get deep enough to satisfy the ache in his balls.
He wanted more.
He wanted to break you.
With a frustrated snarl, he pulled out of you roughly—the sudden loss of him making you cry out.
Before you could even catch your breath, Bucky grabbed your hips and spun you around, slamming your chest and face back against the cool brick.
“Hands on the wall,” he commanded cruely.
He bunched your sundress up around your waist, baring your ass to the cool air of the alley. He stepped back into you, his cock heavy and sprung, and grabbed your hair, tugging your head back so he could whisper against your skin.
“Since you’re so worried about someone walkin’ in,” he hissed, his hands gripping your hips so hard his fingers left marks, “I’m gonna make sure they get a real good view if they do.”
He lined himself up with your entrance again—his hot tip making you gasp.
Your cunt was still gaping from his fucking earlier, allowing him to slide in easily without much resistance this time.
As he sheathed himself inside you in one thrust, you let out a muffled cry, your fingers scraping against the wall to hold yourself up while he began to fuck you hard from behind.
“Fuck—love it when you’re screamin’ for me,” he groaned in pleasure.
Every wet slap of his balls against your ass echoed in the narrow alley.
He reached around, one hand squeezing your breast through your dress while the other stayed buried in your hair, keeping you pinned in place.
His eyes took in the way your ass bounced against his cock, the soft flesh jiggling with every move. He lifted the hem of your skirt higher to get a better view of your smooth skin rocking against his hips.
“You know, maybe you should just come live with me,” he rasped, his breath hot against your ear as he slammed into you again.
The thought seemed to fuel him, his thrusts getting deeper and harder. “It’d be so damn cute seein’ you walk around the house all barefoot and bred.”
What was he saying?
His filthy words felt more intense than the rough movements of his cock. He groaned, his teeth grazing your shoulder.
“That old farmhouse is big and lonely, sweetheart. Way too quiet,” he whispered. “It was my parents’ dream for me to start a family there. To have a house full of kids runnin’ around the farm, tendin’ to the animals.”
He pulled back nearly all the way out before thrusting back all the way in, making your knees buckle.
“I think you’d look real good carryin’ the Barnes name. Real good with a belly full of my babies while I work the fields. What do you think? Think you could handle being a farm wife?”
“B-Bucky,” you huffed a nervous laugh as his cock filled you completely. “What are you saying? Don’t be—hmpf—ridiculous...”
“Oh, come on, don’t be shy now,” he teased. “You can sunbathe on my lawn and take all the pretty pictures of the trees and animals for your scrapbook.”
His tongue darted out to lick the shell of your ear, his heavy balls continuing to slap against you as his cock hit your sweet spot over and over.
“And I’ll buy you all the lingerie so you can pose all cute in front of your little camera again,” he delivered a hard thrust that made you whimper and cry. “Take those sexy photographs that I can keep—maybe you can make a scrapbook out of those, too. Just for me.”
Your face burned with humiliation.
Here you were, being treated like a total slut by Bucky Barnes out in the open, and yet the thing that made you too flustered to even form a sentence was him bringing up your photograph.
“G-god...” you stammered. “Don’t bring that up!” you hissed, overcome with embarrassment.
Bucky just chuckled. “I have that picture, you know?”
Your pussy fluttered and clenched around his cock at his words—the tightness making him groan. You snapped your head around, face flustered.
“W-what!” you choked out. “You stole it?”
He could feel how much the idea turned you on, your body betraying your embarrassment by becoming even wetter and tighter as you realized he’d liked that photo enough to steal it for himself.
“Don’t exaggerate, doll,” he rasped, his hand tightening in your hair to pull your head back so he could see the shame written on your face. “I’ve spent all night staring at it. Staring at the way you were lookin’ at the camera, imaginin’ you were looking at me instead.”
His hips pushed against yours, forcing you to take another deep inch of his cock.
“I can’t even tell you how many times I’ve sat on the edge of my bed, jerkin’ myself off until I was shaking, just thinkin’ about what it would feel like to have the real thing under me.”
He groaned, his pace becoming more uneven and frantic as the dirty confessions spilled from his lips.
“Every time I closed my eyes, I was picturin’ you—my own fucking neighbor—just like this. Bent over, taking every inch of me while you cried my name.”
The way you were whimpering and fluttering around his cock meant that you were enjoying every sinful confession he was blurting out.
You had already came, your body sensitive and weak, but Bucky was fucking you right through it.
“B-Buck… I can’t—I’m sensitive—” you whined, knees wobbly.
He tossed his head back, feeling his balls drawing tight as your pussy milked him.
“Fuuuck,” he groaned, kneading your hips. “I want to cum inside. Wanna make my ma and pa proud—”
Bucky leaned down until his breath was tickling your ear again. “Please? Will you let me cum inside, sweetheart?” He pressed a soft kiss to your cheek. “I promise you—I’ll give you the good life, I’ll give it to you reaally good.”
You felt your breath get stuck in your throat.
He was asking for permission?
Your body tightened beneath him.
You were so close from cumming beneath him a second time, and the way his hips stuttered against yours was a sign that he was just mere seconds away from filling you up.
“Been dreamin’ of fillin’ you up with my seed since I saw that dirty little picture of you. Please, sweetheart. Just give me what I want.”
Footsteps crunching the grass sounded near you—too close—and the thrill of getting caught despite yourself made you finally let go.
“Bucky, fuck—I’m cumming—!” you cried out, but Bucky’s hand clamped over your mouth, stifling your moans as you rocked your hips back against his cock.
You rode the orgasm out while Bucky’s face twisted in a pleasure so intense—it was damn near painful.
“Fuck. Fuck. Please, baby, I can’t—” he gasped, stilling his hips to keep from breeding you. “Please—let me cum inside—”
You couldn’t believe that for all the filthy words he was spouting earlier, how in control and dominant he was, he was still asking for permission.
“Please, fuck—can’t hold it in. You feel too good—”
“Just cum inside, Bucky!”
He didn’t need to be told twice.
Bucky cried out a broken moan against the side of your neck, his hips twitching as he buried himself so deep it made your eyes roll back.
The first hot jet of his seed hit your womb, filling you so deep it made your toes curl in your heels. He gripped you tight, his whole body turning stiff as he pumped himself empty inside you.
He groaned, a long, broken sound that tickled your spine as he fought for his breath.
“God… like that—just like that… every last drop ‘til I’m empty, sweetheart.”
The footsteps outside the alley grew louder, then faded as the stranger passed by, oblivious to the vulgar scene unfolding just a few feet away.
Bucky stayed exactly where he was for a moment, his chest rising and falling against your back as he breathed your scent in. He was still twitching inside you, his cock heavy and pulsing as it leaked into your womb.
“There we go” he soothed, pushing the sweaty strands of hair away from your temples to look at you. “Lookin’ every bit of my girl.”
He kissed the temple of your forehead before slowly pulling out, the sudden loss of his warmth leaving you feeling cold and empty.
“Keep your legs together,” he murmured possessively, bringing the hem of your skirt back down to cover your slick thighs. “Not a single drop goes to waste. Keep it there ‘til it takes.”
He reached out gently, smoothing your hair and straightening the strap of your sundress until you looked at least somewhat presentable again.
He brushed the dust from the brick off your shoulders, his eyes softening at the sight of your debaunched face. The makeup you spent so much time working on this morning was now a smeared mess of his doing.
And somehow, to him, you looked even prettier.
“There,” he said, wiping the stray lipstick on your chin. “Let’s get back and enjoy the rest of the festival.”
He turned to fix himself, tucking himself back in as he adjusted his jeans and buckled his belt.
You watched him, still a little dazed and shaky legged, until he bent down to pick up your lace panties from the dirty floor of the alley. You reached out, expecting him to hand them back to you, but he didn’t.
“Lace?” he huffed a laugh, shaking his head. “You were askin’ for it.”
He folded them neatly and tucked them into his back pocket. He caught your confused look and flashed a boyish, almost innocent looking grin that looked far different from how he looked at you earlier.
“Bucky?”
“Right next to that precious photo I ‘stole,’” he intertwined your fingers with his, pressing a soft kiss to your lips as he led you out of the alleyway.
“For my growing collection.”
if you've made it this far, as always thank you so much for taking the time to read my work. interactions are always appreciated, I love reading every bit of them! again, please be sure to check out the stardew valley inspired masterlist if you haven't already!
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Hey! I stumbled across your page and read a few things! I love your work!! I was wondering if I could have an alastor x reader where Alastor is readers husband, however after his 7 year sabbatical, everything was left in question. When he came back it was awkward, and his arrival brought in interesting characters..one of them being Lucifer. And basically Lucifer is his charming self (not really flirting, just getting along with reader) but alastor isn’t taking it that way..he courts reader all over again and BOOM. NSFW ensues where he admits in a state of vulnerability that he felt jealous and yeah. THANK YOU SORRY FOR THE LONG ASK
Firstly, I’m touched you love my work!! 💜 Tysm it means a lot!
Secondly, I LOVE this idea! Alastor being a little insecure and admitting during lovemaking that he is makes reader question, and I think would try and comfort him and tell him that everything is fine!
Lastly, as with all of my writes, I want this to be well-detailed and not rushed, so with that and the other projects/asks I’m working on, it should be 2 weeks max (I’m estimating), but should be out before then. Don’t feel bad about long asks! Every ask of every shape and size are important to me 💜 I’ll get something in progress!
Stay tuned~!
(Apologies if anything doesn’t make sense/I missed something, it’s about 1 in the morning over here)
Synopsis: A fit of jealously and rage sweeps over Alastor after his untimely return seven years after he disappeared. When your beloved husband returns, he finds you talking with Lucifer, mistaking it for Lucifer hitting on you. Due to this, Alastor makes constant attempts to “win you over.”
Word Count: 5.4k
Tags: nsfw, smut, p in v, creampie, oral sex (f!receiving), sinner!reader, fem!reader, angst, jealousy, tension, sexual tension
Warnings: NSFW (MINORS DNI), Possessive sex, sexual themes
A/N: Thank you to @rattybimbo for the lovely idea! I LOVE Alastor I can’t get enough of the kinky ideas or wanting to absolutely be destroyed by him :) Oh! And @sorenflyinn asked me to tag them? So here you go! Eat up :3
(Apologies this took so long!)
NSFW under the cut!
The exterminations caused fear to rise in Hell. Those who escaped the angels were lucky to live, and this included Overlords. With Alastor, he was a target for Heaven’s extermination army. If they rid of influence, then they would be able to lower the chance of an uprising against Heaven.
Now, just before the next, Alastor had to leave? It didn’t make sense to you, but it definitely stung, and that you knew for certain.
“My dear,” said Alastor, caressing your cheek. “I have to go away for a while. A sabbatical, if you will.”
“Why can’t I come with you?” You looked up at him with teary eyes, burying your face in his chest while you hugged him. “I don’t want you to go…”
It tore him to see you so distressed. Alastor never wanted to leave, he loved you dearly. If it wasn’t for Rosie, he would have no reason to leave. But because of the extermination about to commence and with his rise of popularity, he had to go into hiding and stay off the air.
It plagued you. He gently held you, kissing the top of your head.
“My rose, I will return. I will be gone for a long time, but I don’t want this to disturb you. I will send letters. Promise me you won’t leave..”
“I’m your wife, for christ sake!” You looked up at him, brushing away your tears. “What makes you think I would leave?”
You cried softly, and it tore him apart. “At least eat with me one last time before you go, Alastor…”
He nodded, cupping your face in his hands and kissing your temple. “Of course, Chéri.”
He would be complaining to Rosie about this. Why couldn’t his dear wife come with him? Why did he have to bury himself in solidarity? All of this rubbed him the wrong way. He hated answering to a higher power. He wanted his freedom to spend the rest of his afterlife with his lovely wife, and that’s it.
He made you jambalaya, spending his last moments with you talking and trying to keep the mood light to try and distract from the depressing atmosphere hanging overhead. He poured you a glass of wine, toasting you to a promise of return. After that, he climbed into bed with you, holding you as you began to fall asleep.
He was gone the next morning.
You spent seven years alone. Isolated.
Occasionally, once or twice a year, Alastor managed to get a letter to you, telling about how much he missed you, and that he couldn’t wait to reunite with you again. It warmed your heart, but also made you devastated, only reminding you of the distance between you and your beloved.
You and Alastor had only been married for two years. And just before your third anniversary, he was torn from you. Where was he? Where was he being kept? Well, at least he wasn’t in danger.
It had now been a year, so now it was the day of your fourth anniversary.
“Happy… four years, Alastor.”
At the table you sat alone, the room illuminated by four candles on a cake you had purchased at a bakery nearby. You just stared, tears falling. You cried softly at the table, distraught over the silence of your husband and his absence.
A year and a half alone. Frightened. Untouched. Isolated and alone in your home without the warmth of your husband.
It was killing you. The radio which played the jazz you both danced to sat untouched, collecting dust. It was taking everything in you not to slip into something dangerous, as you knew if you did, you wouldn’t be able to escape. You would have trapped yourself in a cage of your own making.
Finally, after seven long gruesome years alone, you had enough. You were loyal, but you needed something to do. Every day in your house alone was going to drive you mad.
“I need something to do.”
To your luck, you had heard of this ‘Happy Hotel,’ and though you weren’t looking for a ticket for redemption, you thought a job might suffice.
“Finally, something to get me out of the house.”
You drove your car down to this ‘Happy Hotel,’ a flyer in hand. You had seen the news and the performance, and now you had some more information about for this... hotel, if you could even call it that. (The performance on 666 News was not endearing, to say the least.)
Arriving, with three knocks you waited at the door. When the door opened, there stood the Princess of Hell herself, Charlie Morningstar.
“Hello! Welcome to the Happy Hotel! I’m Charlie!”
“Pleasure.” You shook her hand. “May I come in now?”
“Yes! Yes yes, of course!” The princess bounced up and down with pure excitement, opening the door wide for you.
Upon entering, there were two other unnamed people, who Charlie introduced as Vaggie, her girlfriend, and Angel Dust, the hotel’s first guest, and famous porn star.
Charlie approached you again, happy to have another sinner interested. “So! Miss L/N, right? Are you interested in redeeming yourself to get to Heaven?”
“Actually,” you started, watching her smile falter a little. “I am here as I heard about your little hotel and saw the broadcast, and thought you could use more helping hands. It seems you lack staff, so I thought I could offer myself.”
Vaggie, the princess’ girlfriend, came over to you, narrowing her eyes suspiciously. You were an Overlord, what could you possibly want except trouble?
“What kind of job? Or is that just some form of you saying you want to make a deal?”
Charlie pulled Vaggie aside. “Lighten up, Vaggie, you’ll scare her away!”
Vaggie looked at her taller lover, sighing.
“Charlie,” Vaggie started, laying a hand on Charlie’s shoulder, “Overlords only want trouble, you know that.”
Charlie nodded. “Mhm.”
Vaggie continued. “So she could be looking to cause trouble!”
Out of earshot, you were striking up a conversation with Angel, talking about life in hell, his role, and more.
Charlie looked back at you then back at Vaggie. “Well, have faith! Let’s give her a chance, she could mean well for the hotel!”
Vaggie closed her eyes, nodding. “Sure. After all, Overlords have influence. If word gets out about her at the hotel, it might draw in sinners looking to redeem!”
Charlie bounced excitedly and hugged Vaggie, who hugged back with affection and a soft smile.
Charlie then came back over to you, nodding firmly.
“Okay, Miss L/N! You’re hired!”
You smiled with a soft nod. “Ah, wonderful. Just allow me to help with whatever you need, Princess!”
When she nodded and left, you slumped into the couch, sighing and thinking to yourself.
“Perfect. Now I have something to do. I just have to wait for Alastor to come back, whenever that may be—”
A knock came from the front doors to the hotel, which caught Charlie’s attention. She approached the door warily, the temperature seeming to drop the closer she got to the door.
When she got to the door, she opened it, craning her neck to see a tall, creepy man. His eyes opened and he smiled wide, hands folded behind his back.
“HEL—!”
Charlie slammed the door and reopened it.
“—LO!”
She thought to herself, in shock.
“Hey Vaggie?”
“Whattt?”
“The Radio Demon is at the door!”
Vaggie shot up and you did too.
“What?!”
“What should I do?!” Charlie pulled at her face.
Vaggie thought. “Well, don’t let him in!”
But you thought in your mind.
‘Yes. Please let him in. That’s my husband. I want to see him. But what the hell is he doing back so soon? And without telling me?’
Charlie looked at the door again, opening it.
“May I speak now?”
She crossed her arms. “You may—”
He abruptly outstretched his hand. “Alastor! Pleasure to be meeting you sweetheart! QUITE a pleasure!” He let himself in. “Excuse my sudden visit but I saw your fiasco on a picture show, and I just couldn’t resist! What a performance!! Why I haven’t been that entertained since— Y/N?!”
He seemed shocked to see you. Shocked, at a loss for words, he felt it all. You stood, coming over to him and holding him tight, and he gently pulled you off after hugging you.
“WHERE WERE YOU?! YOU SAID YOU’D COME HOME!”
He was taken aback by your anger that you felt rightfully so. He looked down at you.
“My dear, I swung by the house and you weren’t there! I was going to announce my coming home, but I assumed you must have been out running errands! I’m terribly sorry.”
He hugged you.
Charlie was confused, and so were Vaggie and Angel. Charlie came over.
“Soooo… you two know each other?”
Vaggie seemed confused, lowering her spear. “The Radio Demon has a.. what?”
You smiled. “Wife.”
“Wife?!” Exclaimed all three in unison, surprised.
Alastor nodded. “This is my lovely wife, Y/N. We have been married for.. my apologies, dear, how long has it been?”
“Nine years.”
“Nine years. I can’t believe I missed it.”
You looked up at him. “We have seven anniversaries, fourteen birthdays, seven Valentine’s Days, seven Halloweens, and seven Christmases to catch up on. You’ve missed everything.”
He held your hand. “Don’t worry, my dear. I’ll make sure that I catch up on everything with you. I’ll see you at home then?”
You nodded, giving him a hug before leaving the hotel, listening to his dialogue between him and Charlie about the hotel fade into the background.
Driving your car, you made it home, parking it in the driveway. You loved your home that you shared with Alastor, you felt so lucky he gave you such a gift to share with you. And now, you were waiting—once again—for his return.
*ੈ✩‧₊˚༺☆༻*ੈ✩‧₊˚
After providing Charlie with help and more staff for the hotel—and after a little brawl with an overlord wanna-be—Alastor returned home to you, the love of his life, prepared for whatever you may feel towards him.
He opened the door with his keys, walking in and closing the door behind him.
“My dear, I’m home~!!”
You emerged from the kitchen, in the middle of making supper.
“There you are, Alastor!” You furiously tugged off your apron and oven mitts. “For seven years and a day I’ve been waiting for you to come home! Do you have any idea—”
He shut you up with a gentle kiss, pulling you into a hug and getting you to return the kiss, hook, line, and sinker. You gently pet his ear, pulling away.
Alastor raised your chin so you could look at him, his gaze somber.
“You have every right to be upset, my love. I’ve been an absent husband, and I have failed to be there for you. I love you dearly, and if it were up to me, I would stay with you to protect you during the harsh times. But unfortunately for you and for me, I’m under lock and key.”
He hugged you and rubbed your back.
“Can you forgive me?”
After a pause, you held him tight, crying into his shoulder. “I’m just so glad you’re safe… I was so worried for so long…”
He held you gently, embracing you tightly.
“Of course I forgive you, I’m just worried about you.”
“I’m glad. I’m lucky to have you.”
He kissed the top of your head, gently petting your hair.
“Now, I made a meal. Will you come join me for supper?”
“Always, my dear.”
Alastor helped set the table, and you served you and him meatloaf. He always loved your cooking.
As you sat at the table, both of you ate your meal together. The candles were lit, napkins in your lap, just enjoying your first meal together since he left.
ੈ✩‧₊˚༺☆༻*ੈ✩‧₊˚
About a week later, you had spent so much time catching up Alastor on your life, things that had happened in the past seven years. You spent time with him catching up on all your special days over the course of so many years, enjoying each moment with him. You told him how just before his arrival you offered to work at the Happy Hotel—now Hazbin hotel—and now you were working there, and so was Alastor.
After such an eventful week, you two thought to stay in the Hazbin Hotel for your jobs.
It has been a week since the exterminations, and the hotel was in good shape. You and Alastor worked around the hotel during the day, you often helping with chores. You didn’t have a specific description assigned to you, so you helped however you could.
However, over time, you took on advertisement for the hotel. Since Alastor expressed his distaste for modern entertainment, you took it upon yourself to handle televised advertisements for the hotel.
Busy in your study scheduling another advertisement to air, you caught word from the lobby that Lucifer himself was going to be coming to the hotel soon! Oh, and that was exciting for you. You always wanted to meet the King of Hell, and as an Overlord, you wanted to make a great impression.
You then spent that evening practicing how you would introduce yourself.
ੈ✩‧₊˚༺☆༻*ੈ✩‧₊˚
Awaking with Alastor the next morning, you helped each other bathe and dress, coming downstairs for breakfast. Afterwards, everyone at the hotel began preparing for Lucifer’s arrival. Angel did his makeup, Niffty made cookies, and you and Alastor helped with tidying up little messes and hanging little decorations for Lucifer’s arrival here and there.
Alastor turned to you with a grin. “What lovely work, my dear!” There was applause over his radio, and you chuckled, grinning back up at him.
“Not so bad yourself, ‘My Deer.’”
Your pun made Alastor delightfully chuckle.
Charlie rushed to the door. “OKAY everyone!! It’s showtime~!!”
She opened the door and there stood the.. rather short king, but quite the spectacle nonetheless!
“Charlie!!” The King hugged his daughter, rambling on about how good it was to see her.
Afterwards, Charlie began to introduce everyone in the hotel. Vaggie, Niffty, Husk, Angel, and Sir Pentious.
After catching sight of the bar, Alastor appeared behind Lucifer to introduce himself.
“Alastor! Pleasure to be meeting you, quite the pleasure!” You caught view of how he wiped his hand on his jacket. “It’s nice to finally put a face to the name!”
He made a pinching motion with his fingers to show how short Lucifer was.
“I must say, you are much shorter in real life!”
“Who is this? Who is this now— are you the bellhop?”
“Haha! No! I am the host of the hotel. You might have heard of me from my radio broadcast.” He leaned on his cane with a more strained smile.
Lucifer thought. “Nope! I guess that's why Charlie called it the Has-been Hotel! Ha ha ha!”
Alastor glared. “Ha ha ha! It was actually my idea.”
Lucifer glared back. “Ha ha ha! Well, it's not very clever!”
With a strained grin, Alastor looked down at him. “Ha ha! Fuck you.”
Charlie stepped in immediately to prevent anything from happening.
“Okay! Okay, anyway. Dad, there’s someone else I want you to meet.”
She came over to you and placed a hand on your shoulder, to which you took as cue to smile pleasantly.
“And this is Miss L/N, who is responsible for our media representation!”
You smiled and shook Lucifer’s hand.
“The pleasure is mine, Your Highness. Please! Call me Y/N.”
He nodded and let go of your hand. “Ah! Media representation! Which is…?”
You elaborated with a smile. “I make sure that I broadcast televised advertisements of the hotel to give it good representation during commercial breaks! I hope you might have seen one of my segments to market this hotel!”
Lucifer nodded. “I managed to catch one of them on television! That was your work? Wow! I felt captivated! If I was a sinner, I definitely would have been sold. Fine work, young lady.”
Alastor was watching from afar of your pleasant interaction with Lucifer, and static increased over his radio, his smile grew tense, and his grip on his staff only tightened more. He looked like he might pop a vessel.
He hated Lucifer with every fiber of his being, and it began to cloud his judgment. Was he trying to steal you? Was he trying to seduce you? Oh, how it ruffled his feathers.
If not for directly in front of the small audience of the hotel’s patrons, he might do something brash or cause a scene. He growled lowly, now angry.
You nodded at Lucifer’s compliment, continuing your segment. “Miss Charlie’s dream is rather peculiar, and it is such an honor to advertise for her dream of redeeming sinners!”
Lucifer beamed. “I’m glad that my daughter has someone like you to represent her dreams!”
Charlie nodded. “Without her help, Dad, we wouldn’t have been able to get the word out there! Posters, televised ads, she does a lot!”
You nodded with a soft chuckle, and Alastor only disappeared, frustrated.
“How dare that short bastard try to charm her! Doesn’t he know she belongs to me? Or should I put him in his place?”
Alastor schemed for hours in his radio tower pacing back and forth. To his frustration, Lucifer wasn’t helping at all.
Over the course of a couple weeks, Lucifer decided to move in, and you two talked way too often for Alastor’s liking. He was growing frustrated seeing how well you got along with that damn snake.
You felt confused, as Alastor seemed distant towards you, and was away more shut up in his tower. You tried to ask him, but he brushed it off. You decided to give him some space.
“Lousy— I’ll show him. I’ll show him to stay away. He won’t get to her, I’ll make sure of it!”
The more he schemed as the days went by, the more clouded his judgement became. He needed to show Lucifer who you belonged to. You two had been married almost a decade and this lousy king tries to come in and ruin things? Oh Alastor wasn’t having it.
He would show him.
ੈ✩‧₊˚༺☆༻*ੈ✩‧₊˚
The next day, Alastor approached you in the morning.
“Y/N, dear,” he cooed, a grin spreading across his face, “would you like to go out to dinner tonight?”
“I- yes Alastor! I would love to.”
Just having Alastor in his presence infuriated Lucifer. He sneered and changed his tune as soon as Alastor left.
“That dumb, red loudspeaker. Tsk. Anyhow, Y/N, how do you feel about ducks?”
“Oh how I love ducks! They’re such adorable creatures.”
Just watching you have pleasant conversation with Lucifer only pushed Alastor to continue his plan further. At some point his shadow tried to stop him, but Alastor only brushed him off.
“Not now, old friend,” said Alastor, brushing him off, “I have to show him who she belongs to.”
His shadow knew this was a terrible idea. It tried to warn you, but was always blocked by Alastor. He didn’t want you to suspect a thing. He would win you back fair and square.
The following day after your dinner date, Alastor continued to plan dates with you in a maddened state. He talked with you and spent lots of time with you in the lobby, deliberately trying to get between you and Lucifer. He wasn’t as low as to say lies to cause a problem, but he was petty and selfish enough to let this prick who you belonged to.
Lucifer, however, was making no move whatsoever to try and win you over. He thought you were a great person and you were a thrill to be around, but he was a married man, with an absent wife he was loyal to. Why would he just flirt with some random sinner?
He knew you had a ring on your finger, but brought no attention to it, until one day Alastor tried to court you again.
You were so unbelievably confused. This was the fourth week! It was like before your marriage all over again.
Lucifer laughed with you on the sofa, trying to redirect the conversation.
“So, I’ve noticed your ring! It’s lovely.”
“Oh! Yes. This lovely thing.” You looked at your ring with love in your eyes. “He is such a lovely man.”
Knowing you were talking about him, Alastor’s ego swelled. His plan was working! That bastard will soon stop his efforts, or so Alastor was hoping.
“How long have you been married?”
“Nine lovely years.”
“I hope to meet him one day. Or her! Or... even them! Wow! I love seeing people happy.”
“And happy we are!” Alastor strode over, placing a hand on your shoulder, making Lucifer grimace.
Lucifer grimaced. “You’re married to him?! What could you possible see in that deer man?!”
You snapped. “Alright that is ENOUGH! Alastor, a word?”
You dragged him over to a hallway, furious.
“Alastor, just what is the matter with you?! I’m embarrassed by your behavior! What is your problem? I can talk to Lucifer, or is your anger towards him so fucking deep that even I, an individual, am barred from talking to him?! You need to fix yourself!!”
He growled, dragging you down the hall to your bedroom.
He opened the door and pinned you to the back of it as soon as it shut, kissing you heavily.
“Alastor—”
He kissed you deeply, groaning as you returned it. The kiss grew heated, needy, and deeper. His hips pressed into yours and you threw your leg over his hip, moaning into the kiss.
Alastor rolled his hips into yours, erection pressing against your pencil skirt.
“This is what you do to me.”
Alastor threw you onto your shared, plush bed, drinking in the sight of you.
He growled, his arousal straining against his pants.
“Alastor, what is this all about?”
“Nothing. I need you. Right now.”
“Oh.”
He crawled onto the bed, caging you in. He came down to your neck, sucking and kissing, leaving hickeys. He gently nipped your neck too.
“A-ah— Alastor…”
Hearing your moans only increased his arousal. He moved down your neck to your collarbones, looking up at you. With a nod from you, he growled and tore off your blouse, kissing down your chest in the valley of your breasts.
“Please, Alastor…”
He captured your lips in a kiss again, groaning as you wrapped your arms over his shoulders.
“I need you badly, Chéri…”
“Then take from me. Make me feel good.”
You kissed his forehead, brushing hair from his face. He gently rubbed the top of your hips.
“Mine.”
He tossed his shirt and smiled wickedly down at you.
You whined, arousal gathering between your thighs. You stripped your clothes off, tossing them along with Al’s onto the floor.
Alastor kissed the inside of your thighs, loving the sounds you made.
“Ohhh… A-Alastor…”
His tongue licked a stripe up your slit. He looked up at you, watching as your face contorted and brows knit together. You growled and tangled your hand in his hair, lying back against the pillows.
“You’re so wet.”
He sucked your sensitive bud, making you moan louder and whine.
“P-please Al I need to cum-! Ah…”
“Good girl.”
He pushed two fingers into your wet cunt, curling them. You arched your spine, only tugging on his hair more.
“Alastorrrrr…”
He worked his fingers more, pumping them in and out of your pussy. He slowly worked them faster and faster to push you over the edge, enjoying hearing you as your moans got higher in pitch.
“Alastor-! I— ah- I’m gonna—!”
“Cum for me, Mon Amour.”
With that you came hard with a cry of ecstasy, making a mess all over his face and nose. Panting, you looked down at him, ruffling his hair. You laid back against the pillows, catching your breath.
“That was amazing.. mm..”
He pulled you on top of him, lying back against the pillows and hooking his arms under your knees, holding you flushed to him as he spread you wide.
“Alastor?”
“You’re mine right now.”
He gently spread your lips with his fingers, sinking them in to make you groan.
“Alastor… ahh-”
He thrust up into you, both of you moaning in unison.
“You’re so wet.”
He set a slow pace, hitting the back of your cunt each time, and soon enough he set a fast, needy pace.
“Ah- ah- Alastor—!”
Hearing your cries made him thrust faster and deeper.
“Y/N— merde..”
He thrust up into your cunt over and over, grunting in your ear and panting.
“Say it. Say that you belong to me.”
Panting, your mind was becoming more and more clouded with pleasure.
“I- I’m yours…”
“Say that you belong to me.”
“Yes- I- ah— I’m yours!!”
The pleasure only continued to build.
“Mine mine mine…”
He continued to thrust into you, panting.
“I’m close, Chéri.”
Your moaned got higher in pitch and louder, and with a final thrust, Alastor pushed you both over the edge, making you see stars. He laid his head on your shoulder, panting.
After a minute, Alastor pulled out with a groan, his seed spilling from you. He propped you up against the headboard of the bed, sitting next to you.
He moved to rest his head on your chest, looking up at you. His ears were pinned and his smile was small and strained. You tilted your head and pulled up the blanket.
“Alastor dear, what is the matter?”
He buried his face in your chest, softly crying. His ears were pinned all the way back. His state surprised you, and you gently pet his hair.
“Shhh… Alastor, why are you crying?”
He looked up at you, ashamed.
“I was jealous. Jealous of you talking to Lucifer.” He brushed away his tears.
“Oh, so that’s what this is about.” Your eyes narrowed.
He continued. “I was threatened by him, insecure. I was weak. I thought he was trying to take you from me…”
You held him close. “No no no, Alastor! Not at all!”
You pet his hair and brushed it out of his face. “Me and Lucifer had no emotional connection like that. We talked, yes, but it was because he was pleasant to be around.”
You cupped his cheeks, petting his ears and hair again, kissing the top of your forehead.
“You’re sorely mistaken if you think I’m going anywhere, my love. I love you for you.”
He smiled gently, resting his head on your chest, the thump of your heart filling his ears.
“Thank you, Mon Chéri.”
You kissed the top of his head.
He sat up and held your face, kissing you like you would disappear in an instant. You wrapped your hands under his arms, holding his back. Your hand gently trailed up his spine and held the back of his head, the kisses turning salty from his tears. He reached for your hand and intertwined his with yours, gripping it tight. He brought it to his lips, kissing your delicate hand, treating you like a flower.
“I love you, Mon Amour,” he said, kissing your hand again, “you mean everything to me.”
“And you mean everything to me, Alastor.”
“I need more of you…”
He kissed you again, pulling your legs over his hips, cock at your entrance. He kissed down your neck, hearing you moan softly. He thrust in, sucking your neck as you moaned loudly and gripped his shoulder.
“That’s it, Mon Cher~ fuck, you take me so good…”
He rested his forehead against yours, holding onto your thighs as he thrust deep into you. Not as animalistic as the last round, but needy and desperate.
You moaned softly as he thrust deep, nails digging into his back. He growled into your ear, panting as he continued chasing his high.
“That’s it- Alastor- A-Alastor—”
His thrusts became erratic. He buried his face in your neck.
“Alastor please- I- I’m close-!!! Ahh!!!”
As you cried in ecstasy, Alastor spilled his spend into you, collapsing on top of you.
Alastor kissed the top of your head. “You did amazing.”
You gently smiled, looking up at him with love.
“We should clean up.”
“And clean up we shall.”
After you both caught your breath, Alastor picked you up and carried you into the bathroom, starting the shower.
Whilst waiting for the shower water to warm up, Alastor handed you a towel and you got one for him. You sat in his lap on the edge of the bath tub, resting your face in his neck.
“You look exhausted, love.” Alastor brushed your hair.
“Mmhmm… you wore me out, Al…”
“Oh dear. Exhausted you from intercourse. Whatever will I do?” He softly chuckled.
You breathed in his scent, gently nuzzling his neck.
Steam started to fill the room and Alastor picked you up and you wrapped your legs around his hips. Getting into the shower with you, he helped you down and sat with you, pulling you close.
“Let me help you wash up, darling.”
Grabbing the soap from above, Alastor gently lathered his hands in soap, caressing your skin. You groaned softly, enjoying his touch.
“Al, I’m a little sore. Could you please massage my thighs?”
“Of course.”
He used a firm grip to massage your muscles.
“Is that better?”
“Yes, it is. Thanks.”
You took the soap from him and lathered his body in suds, taking his shampoo to wash his hair.
In your care, Alastor smiled softly, feeling lucky to have such a gorgeous woman like you to take care of him. Considering how he was absent for so long, and you loved him no matter what, he felt very lucky.
He gently grabbed your wrist.
You looked at him with concern. “Al? What’s wrong?”
“My dear,” he started, sighing, “I apologize for my behavior earlier. What I did was wrong. I was jealous of you, and I let my judgement be clouded. I know you’re better than that, not to leave me for the King of Hell.”
He gently held your hand.
“You have every right to be cross with me, my love. Cross, hurt, upset, anything.”
He gently kissed your knuckles, then the inside of your wrist.
“I humbly ask for your forgiveness, my love.”
You gently held his head, kissing his forehead.
“Thank you, Alastor. I know that you were feeling absurd things, and I’m baffled, yes, but I forgive you. You are—well, not human anymore, but ‘human’—and jealousy becoming of you is normal, albeit baffling. But I love you nonetheless, you silly man.”
You kissed him gently, his ears gently lowering. Holding your face, he kissed you back, one hand cupping your cheek and another pulling you to him by your spine.
“I love you too, dearest.”
Alastor helped wash your hair too, and after resting for a while, you and Alastor got out of the shower, turning off the water and bundling yourselves in towels.
At the sink, you brushed your teeth with him and turned on the hair dryer, using it to dry out Alastor’s hair and then your own. You noticed he seemed to be… distant.
At the sight of dullness in his eyes, you feigned a gasp, gently laying a hand on his chest.
“Alastor! You’re naked!”
He looked down at you.
“Dear, I know I’m—”
You gently shushed him.
“No, love. You’re naked.”
“Oh.”
With a sly grin you gently started to tickle him, watching him start to laugh and beg you for mercy.
“I’m gonna get you!!”
You continued to tickle him, and he tickled you back, making you giggle cutely.
“Al please! Mercy! Mercy!!”
“Merci? Is that a thank you? You want more?”
He continued tickling you, making you laugh.
“Please Al! Mercy!”
He pulled back, holding you close. You kissed his nose and laid your head on his chest.
“You’re never fully dressed without a smile, Al.”
“Thank you, my love.”
He gently kissed you, embracing you gently.
You looked up at him. “Why don’t we put on pajamas?”
He smiled gently. “You read my mind.”
You both fetched your satin sleepwear, climbing back into bed. He turned off the lamp in your shared room, holding you in bed.
“Sleep well, Mon Amour.”
Both of you fell asleep soundly soon after that, now back to normal.
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.
You got me crying at the club. Holy shit. This deserves all the kudos I can give. Very well written. I love the emotion and thought put into it. The depiction of Simon’s character is just beautiful. 100/10. No further notes. Well done author.
Simon considers himself a quiet person, only talking when it's necessary or when his opinion is asked. He is used to shouting at the group of goddamn soldiers who think they can do whatever the hell they want during training. That was until he met you—someone even quieter than him. You are a sergeant whose voice is usually heard only by the Captain. It isn't that you have a condition that prevents you from speaking; you are just naturally quiet, always listening, smiling, and paying close attention during meetings. Simon admires that. He admires how patient you are with everyone.
But today? Simon is sitting on the couch in the common room, reading a book he pulled off the shelf, when he hears it.
"GOD DAMMIT! WHAT THE ACTUAL FUCK? ARE YOU CRAZY, SOLDIER?"
A voice echoes from the hall. Who the hell would shout like that? Simon looks up just as you storm into the common room. Your face is flushed red with anger, your jaw is clenched, and your knuckles are white from the tension.
"These people are fucking useless!" you snap. "They can't even follow basic instructions. How am I supposed to have any patience with them when they’re absolute fucking plonkers?"
Oh, you are mad. Really mad.
Simon is instantly hard. He has never heard you like this before, and for some strange reason, he loves the way you look right now—livid because some shitty bastards couldn't follow rules. He takes in the sight of you: your hair messy from where you've been running your hands through it, your breathing heavy and ragged.
"Hard day?" he asks quietly.
"Hard? A bloody nightmare."
You look at him, and Simon feels his cock tighten and ache against his cargo pants. He shifts on the couch, trying to adjust himself so you won't notice the bulge.
Only God is a witness to how many times Simon has jerked off at night, his fist wrapped around his cock, stroking up and down while thinking of you. He thinks of how beautiful you looked, all mad and frustrated, wishing he were the one who could fuck that attitude right out of you.
Two posts in a row? Holy moly 👹
I'm on vacation so I have absolutely nothing to do with my life. 🥳 hope you like it, now you can ask for any question or request on my profile!
hi! i love love love your writing! i’m craving jealous ghost and—this might be ultra-specific— but how do you think he would react to finding one of those for-charity-sexy -firefighter calendar’s in reader’s possession? thank you! <3
Nonnieeee! Thank you for requesting and for your kind words <3 This one's for you.
Ghost would be so bitchy about it.
The thing was, you bought those calendars every year. Not because you were desperately thirsting over random men in uniforms, but because it was a silly tradition you’d somehow picked up. One year it had been priests, the year before that rugby players, and now it was time for hot firefighters.
And honestly? The money went to charity, so it was beneficial for both sides.
Or at least that’s what you thought.
Simon was off deployment, and you were sure he wouldn’t be back until Sunday. So when it was Friday and he suddenly slid into bed beside you in the middle of the night, tangling his limbs with yours, you were half asleep and barely registering it when he kissed your neck and whispered, “M’ back, love. Go back to sleep.” In that rough, raspy voice.
You had your best welcome-back sex, followed by morning cuddles, and now you were in the kitchen barefoot, wearing Simon’s old t-shirt, cutting fresh sourdough bread while he waited for the kettle to boil.
He still looked half asleep, leaning one hip against the counter, arms folded over his chest, just watching you. And, yeah he was so sexy just standing there, you thought without even trying to stop yourself.
He had messy bedhead from the way you’d pulled harder than intended on his blonde strands, a couple days’ worth of stubble on his face, hickeys scattered over his neck and chest, and those faded black sweatpants, fuck.
After months of training, he was so built it looked like someone had carved him out of stone. Honestly, you loved it but you also couldn't wait for the “dad bod era” your food gave him, and the lazier version of him that only ever existed when he was fully at ease with you.
You were reaching for the butter when the doorbell rang.
“Si, can you please get that? I think it’s delivery.” You stepped closer, pecking his biceps before grabbing the butter knife.
“Course, swee’heart.” He gave your thigh a quick pat, pushed off the counter with a grunt, and headed to the door.
You heard it open, a brief exchange of words, then silence as the door shut again. A moment later, Simon returned holding a package, turning it over in his hands.
“What did you order this time, huh?” he asked curiously.
“Dunno. Open it.” You took a bite of buttery bread and moaned at the taste melting on your tongue.
That was your mistake.
Because when he finally got the box open and pulled out the contents, you immediately knew you were fucked.
It was that damn calendar you ordered and completely forgot about.
“Huh. What’s this, love?” He pulled it free from the wrapping, and you nearly choked on your bread. The first page was a man not entirely unlike Simon himself. He was tattooed, big, half-dressed, smiling like he had no idea he was about to ruin your life.
And the kitten in his arms was so small it was almost hard to notice. Still, the abs were…yeah, pleasant to the eyes.
“Um.” You stopped chewing.
The kettle clicked, and you reached for it a little too quickly, pretending to be useful.
He closed the calendar and leaned back against the counter, arms crossing over his chest again. Slow. Controlled. But his eyes stayed on you without blinking even once.
“What, Simon? It’s just a calendar.” You shrugged, trying to sound casual, but the urge to laugh was already creeping in at how serious he looked. It was kind of adorable.
His jaw ticked.
“A calendar. I can see that, sweetheart. But there are naked men inside.” His hazel eyes stayed locked on yours.
You finished your bread, licking your lips from the salt.“Yeah. It’s for charity, actually. And they're not naked, Here, made you tea.” You held his favourite mug of steaming Earl Grey under his nose.
“Fuckin’ hell, love. You actually bought this?” he muttered, amused despite himself.
You hummed, handing him the mug. He took it automatically.
“I buy them every year. It’s for charity, and it’s nice to do nice things, Si.”
“I think our garage needs a calendar,” he said mildly. “Could hang it there.”
Then he took a sip of tea and, without another word, walked into the living room and sat down on the sofa like the conversation was over.
Oh, there it was.
You were so stupid.
He was jealous!
A grin slowly spread across your face. You followed him and dropped down beside him with a heavy thud.
“You’re not jealous, right?” you started, already knowing where this was going.
“Of what? Paper?” he scoffed, not looking at you, his gaze was somewhere between window and the wall.
You took his mug and set it on the table. Before he could reach for it again (because he was such a brat), you quickly straddled his lap and grabbed his cheeks, squeezing them lightly.
“You’re jealous.”
His big, calloused hands landed on your hips, gripping you firmly. “No.”
“Yeah, you are.”
You leaned into his neck, pressing a few kisses along his pulse point. Goosebumps rose under your lips, and you smiled against his skin.
“You know I love you, Si?”
“Mhm.” He grumbled, eyes narrowing slightly as he studied you, suspiciously.
You snorted with laughter before you could stop yourself, burying your face briefly against his shoulder.
"Gosh, I have a jelaous man!"
He squeezed you to his chest, barely living space between you.
"I'm not staring at naked firefighter everyday for a year, love. That's where I draw the line."
"Yeah, whatever you say." You rolled your eyes sarcastically, thinking bout how you're going to convince him.
Your hand slid slowly down his stomach to the happy trail, and you felt the exact moment his muscles tensed under your touch. Just when your fingers reached the waistband, he wrapped his hand around yours.
"Don't test me." His thumb pressed lightly into your wrist, slowly guiding your hand away from where it had been, but not letting go completely.
"But you're ruining all the fun." You pouted.
"Oh you want fun? A'ight I'll show you fun." You squirmed when he threw you from his lap onto your back and hungrily kissed you while clasping your hands above your head and making you spread your thighs so that his one could fit between. Let's just say he really was jealous with the way he was fucking you next.
Also, you couldn't really say you were surprised when, a month later, you found a brand new calendar hanging in your kitchen with every single picture featuring Simon. Someone from work (probably Johnny) had taken photos of him in various places around the base, striking all sorts of poses. Some shots were definitely spicier than others, but overall, there it was, proudly displayed on your wall.
After that morning together, he had actually moved your precious calendar out to the garage and hung it on the wall there instead. And once again, you were the one who ended up agreeing to it, not the other way around.
Fuck, you were too easy.
So now you stood in the kitchen glaring at the photo of Simon holding ak-47 like it was his dick.
"You like it?"
The voice was a low, jagged sound right behind your ear. You hadn't heard him move, but suddenly he was there, his chest a solid, warm wall against your back. He wrapped his arms around you, his hands large and calloused, sliding to grip your waist with a pressure that was almost bruising, but not unpleasant.
"I mean, yeah. I like military men much more than firefighters anyway..." you took an innocent sip of your coffee when you felt his chest shake with a silent laugh.
"Mm. That's what i thought." He patted your bare butt, stepping away.
summary: A buck had one primary duty to his doe, and that was to provide her with fawn, fawn, fawn.
themes: breeding kink, rough sex, vampire!reader, dirty talk
word count: 415
☆ popular with my readers
From the very moment that you presented him with your false doe ears and fluffy little tail, Alastor had been balls deep inside of you. Pushing your back up against the wall this time, he dug his fingers into your thighs as he held you up high enough for him to fuck you. With each violent thrust of his hips, the room shook, and your mascara-stained face grew even messier with tears of ecstasy. He pressed his mouth to your lipstick streaked one, fucking your throat with his long, slithering tongue as you whined and whimpered just like a doe in heat.
Alastor pulled away with a ragged pant, keeping his face close as he stared at you. Angling his hips up harder, sharper, he felt your nails dig into his shoulders so hard that you pierced skin. He laughed in response to the sudden trickles of blood rolling down his shoulder blades, staring lovingly at you, his cute little vampire doe, as you obediently took it.
“Good girl,” he said amidst his heavy breaths. “Good fucking girl.”
You dug your teeth into your lower lip, your eyebrows forming a sloped arch as you gave him the most endearingly pleading expression he had seen on you in a long time. He gave you a pleased growl before extending his forked black tongue down to your neck, licking you all the way up to your chin before repeating it again. You called his name, leaning your head back as something interesting began to happen between your legs.
“I’m cumming,” you wailed, your grip on him growing even tighter. “Al, I’m cumming again—nnh!”
He immediately began to laugh, a hot rush of excitement beating away at his rib cage as he watched his pretty doe babble absolute nonsense atop of his plunging dick. Licking your cheek encouragingly, he pushed himself even closer, turning his thrusts more shallow, but keeping his cock pressed in deep. The squelching of your wet cunt grew louder and louder, and with a desperate rush of thrusts, Alastor felt himself grow blindingly close.
“My pretty little doe,” he said, pressing the bridge of his nose to yours. “I’ll fill you up with a fawn this time.”
Grabbing the back of his head, you brought his lips to yours again. In just a few moments, he would be able to give you everything—.
Bam, bam, bam!
“Alastor! You guys are fucking so hard that the hotel’s about to come crashing down! Fucking stop it!”
this is an excerpt from my 6k fic mating season. if you liked it, please consider reading the full and leaving a kudos! (˶>⩊<˶) ♡
masterlist | ask | ao3
a bit of a self-indulgent post but i love the concept that alastor would be peacefully playing the piano in your shared home while you're cleaning up the kitchen. and then when you're done, he gestures for you to come to him with a crook of his finger. when you do, he'll place a hand on your hip, coaxing you to perch on his thigh.
while you're sitting there with him, he'll ask you about what you had done all day while he was off at the radio station. throughout the conversation, he'll absentmindedly play different tunes; dexterous, gifted fingers gliding across the keys with such grace.
every now and then his lips will press to your temple or to your cheekbone, sharp nose nudging your skin in a near-playful manner. and then at some point that will lead to him sitting in his armchair by the fireplace, you sitting on the floor before him as he plays with your hair, listening to you ramble on with gossip about a conversation you overheard between two old ladies at the market.
on today’s list of “things that i don’t think human! alastor would actually allow, but it would be really hot if he did”, i present you:
resting on your knees as he delivers his radio show to the people of new orleans. your hands grasp at alastor’s thighs as he sits comfortably in his radio booth, doing his best to maintain his smooth, care-free tone as you take his cock into your mouth while hundreds, if not thousands of loyal listeners cluelessly follow along.
he does remarkably well, his cadence only faltering once- when you bring him to release. alastor inhales sharply, a brief, irrepressible groan escaping his lips as he spills down your throat. he covers it up with a cough and clears his throat, fingers tugging at your hair as he blames the sudden lapse on a mild seasonal cold.
You can say with certainty that you've never seen Simon this drunk before.
The drunk text you got from Soap was a step away from being complete gibberish, but you were able to understand that he was telling you it was probably a good idea to come pick up your boyfriend.
You had no idea what to expect, but when you show up at the pub, Simon is slumped in the booth and the smell of booze is so strong you worry about any open flame sparking up around him. The moment he sees you he nearly tumbles out of his seat altogether from how violently he reaches out to you.
"Oi, lovie," he says, his accent thick with the alcohol. His big, clumsy hands land on you far heavier than they ever would sober. "There's my bird, my fu-" his voice catches in his throat for a moment from either a hiccup, burp, or nausea, "fuckin' baby."
"Yes, Simon, hello. I think it's time to go home." You glance over at Soap who's barely any better off than the giant man actively trying to crawl into your lap while you still stand. The sergeant just smothers a poorly hidden laugh behind his hands.
"'m drunk," Simon says like he's telling you a secret.
"I can tell."
"Don't divorce me, luv," he mumbles with such a hangdog look on his face it takes you a moment to realize what he said.
"Well, we'd first have to be married to do that."
"Wo'?"
"What do you mean 'what?'"
"We're no' married?" he says, looking genuinely distraught.
"No, baby." The dawning look of horror has you biting back a smile, not wanting to laugh directly in his face.
"But you're my wife."
You splutter. "Since when?"
"Fuckin' always."
"That's news to me. You want me to be your wife?"
"Yeah!" he hollers before immediately catching himself and looking up at you with those big, watery, brown eyes of his. "Sorry fer yellin'. I love you."
You lose the battle and can't help the laugh that punches out of your chest. Your hands cup his scarred, flushed face.
"I love you too, you silly, silly man. Come on, time to go home. You're not going to feel very good tomorrow."
Through a precarious balancing act you manage to get him more or less upright and on his feet all while your sweet boy mumbles to himself, "Wha', i's just yer my bloody wife, yeah? 'S my girl."
Fat Reader crying because theyre insecure about their weight, and when Simon, the man Reader's been pining on for months confesses to them, they think its a cheap joke, and degrade themselves, saying "You can't even pick me up!"
Simon somehow gets Reader's number (Reader did NOT give it) and sends a video of Simon hip thrusting double Reader's weight with sweet groans, the outline of his bulge straining, clearly imagining Reader was on top of him.
Fat Reader crying because theyre insecure about their weight, and when Simon, the man Reader's been pining on for months confesses to them, they think its a cheap joke, and degrade themselves, saying "You can't even pick me up!"
Simon somehow gets Reader's number (Reader did NOT give it) and sends a video of Simon hip thrusting double Reader's weight with sweet groans, the outline of his bulge straining, clearly imagining Reader was on top of him.
Simon was used to your dramatics. He expected tears, or at least a dramatic tackle hug. That’s usually how it went after deployments — you’d practically launch yourself at him the second he stepped through the apartment door, cling to him like he’d vanish again if you let go for even a second. He’d gotten used to it. Quietly liked it more than he’d ever admit.
So when he unlocked the apartment door after three months away and heard—
“OH MY GOD, NO, YOU IDIOT, DON’T PUT HIM ON THE FLOOR—”
He stopped dead.
The flat smelled faintly of vanilla candles and instant ramen. The TV flickered brightly in the dark living room. And there you were. Curled up on the couch in one of his hoodies, blue light glasses sliding down your nose, completely locked in on your laptop screen. You hadn’t even noticed him.
Simon blinked slowly.
“…Love?”
You gasped so violently he thought you’d finally seen him. Instead, you slapped your keyboard.
“NO, NO, NO— FEED HIM. FEED THE BABY YOU IDIOT!”
Simon stared. Then your head finally whipped around, your face lit up instantly.
“SIMON!”
There it was.
He barely had time to drop his duffel bag before you scrambled over the couch and threw yourself at him. He caught you automatically, arms wrapping around your waist as you buried your face into his chest.
“There’s my girl..” he rumbled quietly.
“I missed you.” you mumbled into his chest.
“Missed you too.”
You pulled back enough to look at him properly, hands immediately grabbing his face like you needed to make sure he was real.
Then—
“Okay wait, hold on, I need to pause my game.”
Simon actually laughed.
A real laugh.
“You serious?”
“Yes! The baby’s gonna starve!”
“The—”
You slipped from his arms and darted back toward the couch. Simon followed slowly, exhausted and amused all at once, shrugging off his jacket while watching you click furiously at the screen.
And then he saw it.
A Sim version of you.
And beside you—
A Sim version of him.
Blonde, military haircut.
Broad shoulders.
Black clothes.
Even..his mask.
Simon stared at the screen in disbelief.
“…Is that me?”
You looked entirely unapologetic.
“Yeah.”
“You made me in this game?”
“Well obviously.”
He watched little Sim Simon stand in a kitchen while Sim You yelled at him in gibberish over a burning stove.
“…Why am I setting the kitchen on fire?”
“Because your cooking skill is literally level one.”
“I can cook.”
“In real life, yes. Sim Simon? Absolutely not.”
He huffed quietly through his nose. Then his eyes narrowed at the screen. There was a little pink relationship bar nearly maxed out.
A house.
Photos.
A tiny virtual child waddling through the kitchen.
Simon leaned closer.
“…We’ve got a kid?”
“Oh, yeah. Two actually.”
“Two?”
“The first one was an accident.”
Simon barked out another laugh, shaking his head.
“You’ve lost your mind while I’ve been gone.”
“Probably.”
You grinned at him before returning to your game. And Simon just… watched for a second. Watched you ramble excitedly about expansion packs and building furniture and how long it took to make his tattoos accurate.
Watched the way your eyes lit up.
God.
He missed this, missed you.
Then Sim You walked up to Sim Him on-screen and kissed him dramatically while romantic music chimed from the speakers.
Simon raised an eyebrow.
“…Right.”
You froze.
Very slowly, you turned your laptop slightly away from him.
“No.”
“What?”
“Don’t look at that.”
Now he was interested.
Simon leaned over the back of the couch, large hand braced beside your head as he peered down at the screen despite your protests.
“Why not?”
“Because it’s embarrassing!”
“Mm.”
His eyes tracked the screen carefully.
Then—
His gaze landed on the bed.
Rose petals.
Flirty moodlets.
And the very obvious “WooHoo” interaction option.
Simon went silent.
You went rigid.
“…Don’t.”
He looked at you slowly.
Then back at the screen.
Then at you again.
A dangerous little glint appeared in his eyes.
“You makin’ us shag in a video game, sweetheart?”
Your face immediately burst into flames.
“It’s not like that!”
“Mmhm.”
“It’s gameplay!”
“You do this often?”
“SIMON.”
He was absolutely enjoying this now.
You tried hiding your face behind your hands while he leaned down closer, voice dropping low and teasing near your ear.
“So.”
A pause.
“Am I any good?”
You made the single most offended noise he’d ever heard.
“Oh my GOD.”
Simon laughed again — properly this time — watching you dissolve into mortified squeaking beside him.
Then he reached over, shut the laptop gently, and lifted you off the couch.
“C’mon.” he murmured against your hair. “Think you’ll prefer the real thing over the game anyway.”
Your face somehow got even hotter.
And Simon decided very quickly that maybe this new sims addiction wasn’t so bad after all.
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a/n: saw a tiktok about the sims and HAD to write this..(I have writers block so bad it isn’t funny, plus I think I’m getting strep wow!)
thinking about cowboy!simon riley and his favorite girl. thinking about how he just saw you one day, walking down the little dirt path of his farm, talking to the cows and their babies like they could truly understand you. it was then simon knew he needed to have you, such a sweet little thing.
taught you everything you needed to know about the farm as soon as he got you. because simon knew that you’d be his, was just a matter of when you figured it out.
in a matter of months you knew how to tend to the animals, especially the horses, it was like you could speak a language to them that simon never knew how to. quickly; you became their favorite person. even simon’s favorite horse, the one he’s had since a foal! broke that wild horse in himself and everything. yet the strong beast became a baby whenever you stepped into the barn.
but who could ever deny the imagine of you on a warm afternoon, sun setting behind you, absolutely glowing in the golden sun light. a little wicker basket in hand full of mixed seeds, leading the little chickens and ducks back to their coops.
it was the only thing simon ever needed in his life.
and at the end of the day, when you were all ready for bed and the logs in the fireplace turned to nothing but burning embers; he finally got to settle down with you in his arms. grabbing a nice cold beer from the fridge, you walked into the living room; slippers scuffing on the ground as you went. it was a routine, your routine. and a home of your own.
nights like this were very calm, intimate and soft between you two. until simon grabbed the beer from you, cracking it open on his huge belt buckle right in front of you. really, how could he? when you were already in your bedtime stuff? how rude could simon get?
the reaction it got from you never changed. made you ravenous, like you just wanted to climb on top of simon and ride him in your skimpy nightgown. keep riding him well after he came, making the both of you a mess with his seed, fucking yourself on his frothy cock until he was begging you to stop. after all; you were his pretty girl, right? you should be able to take all you wanted from him.
so— you did. got right down on your knees between his, letting him slouch as much as he wanted, beer in hand as he watched you through heavy lidded eyes. let you satisfy your fixation with having a cock in your mouth, moaning at the heaviness as soon as he slapped it on your tongue.
for the rest of those hours of relaxation before bed, you happily sat between simon’s knees, letting him caress you in any way he wanted as you warmed him with your mouth; drooling down your chin and onto your chest. kept him nice and hard until you both got to bed, where he easily sank into your needy cunt, trying not to thrust into you warm walls while you got comfortable against him.
and because he loved you so fuckin’ much and couldn’t possibly hold himself back, especially while he was asleep, you always woke up with your pussy full of cum— running through your folds and down your thigh. a reminder that he wanted you much more carnally than he let on;
a reminder to come running out into the field as soon as you woke up so simon can fill you back up again in the field of your favorite flowers.
reblogs, likes and comments are much appreciated !!
