what happens when joel miller meets his star-crossed lover?
big love to @mrsmando and @5oh5 for cheering me on with this one, and @bageldaddy for being my eyes, my ears, and - only sometimes - my brain.
pairing: joel miller x fem!reader
summary: it's the summer of two thousand eight. after two weeks following his little brother cross-country on the back of a harley, joel follows him through the doors of a dive bar - where fate delivers him to you.
warnings: story is inserted into canon, so cordyceps outbreak happens, sarah dies (off-page), joel dissociates, doomed love, lots of mention of fate, alcohol consumption, reader is a smoker, cursing, drunken one-night stand, oral sex, unprotected piv, joel's cock is massive, a lot of angst, a lot of fluff, a lil smut to tie it all together. enjoy!
word count: 9.8k
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Palm lines.
It’s the first thing he thinks as soon as she stops moving in his arms. The second her little whimpers cease, the moment her chest stops heaving and her eyes glaze over. Suddenly, Joel’s little girl weighs more than he can bear.
Palm lines. And he has no fucking idea why.
He closes his eyes and there you are. The whir of the ceiling fan, the tinkling of bracelets loose on your wrist. You have sorta earth hands, you told him. Or, well – they could be water, if you look at ‘em this way. I don’t really know. I’m still learning.
You told him that air hands were long, spindly. And Sarah was always a lanky kid – tallest on the soccer team, head and shoulders above the other girls by the third grade. Her hands, he thinks, must be air. They must be.
Her fingers are still twisted around his right now. Lifeless, slippery with the blood still wet and quickly cooling.
Joel cradles her, squeezing so hard that he wonders whether he might be able to fuse their bodies together. Lock them in some white-knuckle grip so that he never has to let go of her – never has to leave this hill covered in dirt and blood.
His palms are ruined; a maroon river carving its way down his heart line, dirt deep in the groove of his life line. Why does he even fucking remember what they’re called?
Why the fuck are you what he’s thinking about, right now?
“Tommy,” he says, opening his eyes again. “We gotta…we gotta get to…”
She’s limp, draped over his thighs as though she’s nothing more than a stretch of crimson curtain. He looks down at her and begs her to come back, begs her to open her eyes and look up at him again.
But the night is passing and she’s still not breathing. Dawn is breaking and Joel’s daughter is dead.
He sucks in a shattered breath. “…to San Angelo, Tommy.”
The younger Miller stuffs his gun into the back of his jeans and paces over, soles coated thick in shit and grass. “I hear you, Joel.”
“You ain’t listenin’ to me, I –”
“I’m listenin’ fine, Joel.” Tommy hooks his hands under his niece’s arms. “Now, help me lift her. We can’t…” his voice strains, fighting the death grip his brother has on the girl, “…we can’t leave her here.”
Joel’s frozen to the spot; sinking further and further into the earth. Staring at his open hands, the stains like rust on his palms. He says to San Angelo again, and Tommy snaps.
“Jesus, Joel, enough! I’ve heard enough goddamn it! I see your hands, now – we gotta fuckin’ bury Sarah.”
Your fate line, your nail tickled, and Joel held his hand steady, It can change, if something big is coming.
Somethin’ big? he asked. A little younger, a lot more naïve. Still a healthy dose of belief in the world, an echo of the god-fearing faith that raised him.
His hand felt so light, cradled in two of yours. He half hoped he’d never have to let go – just lie there with you forever. Your legs tangled with his, the sheets disturbed; the room injected with amber from the streetlights outside.
You nodded. A big shift, or something.
And he scoffed. He actually scoffed, right there and then. Incredulous. The hell kinda big shift is comin’ our way? he asked, laughing.
You just smiled back, shrugging. You were so fucking casual, that whole night. It would’ve unnerved him, if he hadn’t been so swept off by the sparkle in your eye, the glowing cherry of your cigarette.
Guess we just gotta wait ‘n see.
It’s August thirtieth, two thousand eight.
Almost five thousand miles on the back of a Harley, and Joel just wants to go home.
He arches his aching back, palms flat against the crests of his hips, and blinks in the light from the food mart in front of him. Twenty-six, he thinks to himself, only twenty-fuckin’-six.
It’s ninety degrees out. An uncomfortable heat, for a man who feels ten years older than he really is. For a man who hasn’t had a decent shower in almost two weeks. For a man who’s spent the last six hours tailing the brake lights of his little brother’s bike.
The sweat gathers sticky between his shoulder blades, prickles along the nape of his neck. There’s dust spattered down his bare arms and buried in the grooves of his knuckles.
He’s tired. He’s tired, he’s dirty, and goddamn, he wishes he was back home.
He holds a hand up to shield his eyes from the sun, the yellow sky melting to a purple haze. Squinting, he follows the soar of two swallows overhead, looping through the sky, until he’s rubbing the image from his eyes with the back of his wrist.
He’s gotta remember to call Sarah before she goes to bed.
The door opens with the tinkle of a brass bell older and rustier than Joel feels. A swaggering figure splits the glow from the store in two – a figure with a pack of Marlboros in one hand and an already half-empty bottle of water in the other.
Tommy holds them both out to Joel, who swipes the water with a scowl.
“Ain’t killed you yet, brother,” Tommy scoffs, stuffing the cigarettes into his back pocket. He swings a frayed-denim leg over the seat of his Harley.
Joel drains the bottle, panting as he crushes the plastic in one fist. “Damn near tryin’,” he mutters, tossing it in the trash. He runs his tongue across his bottom lip.
“Where are we?” Tommy asks. He glances over his shoulder, staring from the cracked roads to the telephone wires overhead. A Syclone pulls into the lot; a dehydrated squeal as it rolls to a halt.
“San Angelo,” Joel says. “Only a few more hours to go.” He settles on his own bike, pulling his leather jacket over his shoulders. “We passed a Super 8 coming into town, if you feel like restin’ up. Or – we leave now, be home around midnight.”
Tommy chuckles. “What’s the rush? We ain’t gotta be anywhere anytime soon.”
And Joel agrees – for the most part.
His mom is watching Sarah while they’re gone, and he reckons she’s hardly missing him. Too smart for her own good, Joel’s realizing: plotting and scheming her way into staying up past her bedtime, drinking Pepsi at dinner, watching Curtis and Viper – and swearing that her dad lets her do it all, too.
But, still. He misses his kid.
It’s the most they’ve ever been apart – time or distance. The longest he hasn’t had her climbing up his back or hanging off his arm. The least he’s been called Dad since he was eighteen years old.
He just…misses his kid.
He sighs, drumming his fingers on the body of the bike. “Tommy, I gotta get back home to Sarah.”
“Look,” Tommy says, and Joel knows that the argument is lost already, “By the time we got back, she’d be asleep anyways. Let’s leave in the morning – first thing, I swear – and we’ll be home in time for breakfast. Deal?”
They stare at one another, a stand-off in the parking lot. Both waiting for the other to break. The swallows gather on the roof of the store, basking in the weak wash of flickering fluorescents.
“Come on, brother,” Tommy pleads, “It’s one more night.” He lifts his helmet, punching it over his mop of shaggy hair, and kicks the bike to life.
Joel growls to himself, watching it drift over to the side of the road.
He considers heading to the Super 8 alone, grabbing a room only to shower and get some food, then hitting the road and leaving his little brother in the dust. Waiting for him to stumble through the door tomorrow morning – tired, groggy, probably hungover – while Joel, fresh as a daisy, drizzles syrup over Sarah’s pancakes and pours her orange juice.
He’s a pragmatic man. He’s a grown-up. Scares away the ghosts and ghouls and monsters of his daughter’s nightmares. Shushes her back to sleep in the crook of his arm, tiptoes as lightly as he can out of her room so as not to wake her.
Things like God, like the universe, things like horoscopes and laws of attraction…for the most part, Joel can do without them. Has done his whole life.
But then – the glow of indigo overhead, and the mysterious shadows lurking behind the buildings. The birdsong tittering in his ears, the twinkle of the sun in Tommy’s helmet – something distant in the dusty sphere.
Something, someone, winking at him from far away.
Something a little heavier than the breeze nudges at his spine, and Joel’s arms lift – fitting his own helmet over his head. He swings the heel of his boot into his kickstand and revs the bike, Harley roaring as it joins Tommy’s out on the boulevard.
Murphy’s is a small, green bar on the corner of an intersection. All peeled paint lettering and buzzing fluorescents – the y burnt out and pulsing.
Joel doesn’t think Tommy picked it for any reason other than the huge Lone Star mural on the side of the goddamn building, the way he tosses his thumb to it as they park up. A squint smirk on his face, muttering something like ‘s good to be home, big brother, as they hook helmets over handlebars.
Tommy leads Joel inside, their boots tacky on the wooden floor. Walls paneled by aged frames and sun-bleached photographs; air hanging thick with a smell like vinegar. The babble of slurred conversation is pierced by the sharp crack of pool balls breaking.
Metal-plate belt buckles snaked through strained jeans; low eyes which shift to size-up the two strangers. They all turn back to their fingerprinted glasses when Joel and Tommy settle into an empty booth.
It feels hotter in here than it is outside, stuffier. A thick humidity which clings to Joel’s bones, humming like the string lights draped from beams above his head.
Tommy reclines between the creaking leather cushion and the wall. He pokes at a yellowing poster of some Western, hums to himself, and then looks across the table.
Joel’s eyes loop once around the room before they meet his brother’s. “What?” he asks.
“First round is yours, old man.”
“Oh, is it, now?” He cocks an eyebrow. “Thought this was your idea?”
A weedy grin stretches across Tommy’s lips. He needs to fucking shave, Joel thinks. Whiskers poking from around his small mouth like pine needles. “’s my birthday trip,” he reasons.
And can Joel argue with that? Does he have the fucking energy? Will it get him out of here and back to Austin any quicker?
“Goddamn it,” he grumbles. He pushes himself to his feet, heels of his palms against the tacky wood.
He wanders over to the bar, tugging on the front of his tee to unstick it from his damp chest. Slots in beside an ivory cowboy hat with a pair of jeaned legs. The man fixes his bolo tie and watches Joel’s hand as he flags the bartender down.
And then he feels it.
You.
Then he feels you.
First, the weight of you – crashing some into his back. He shunts forward from the suddenness of it, knocking his ribs against the bar, and lifts a hand to brace himself on the ledge.
And then – heat, like an iron. Like every hair and freckle on your skin is branded into his the second you come into contact with him. A feeling like the roll of a wave against his spine, a hand hooked around his forearm when he begins to turn.
“Shit,” you hiss, steadying yourself on the curve of his shoulder. You glance down at your feet, clicking between your black boots. “I’m sorry, that was…that was my bad.”
“’s alright,” Joel says instantly. He holds his arm still until you let go and he sidesteps – though only a little. He watches, dumbstruck, as you rest your elbows on the bar and lean forward. His eyes linger on your back, trailing the crisscross straps wrapped tight over your spine.
You squint up at the menu pinned above shelves of crystal bottles. Your eyes move back and forth across the chalkboard, slowly descending until they’re meeting his in the speckled mirror opposite – a sweet smile growing on your lips.
It runs like whiskey through Joel’s veins: warm and dangerous.
And the way his head spins, the way the world blurs for a moment into one swipe of color around you; the way your cooing laugh echoes between his ears long after he’s heard it –
Joel’s already intoxicated.
He’s still staring when you pull back and motion to the bar. “You can go first, by the way,” you say, waving a hand. “I wasn’t cuttin’ in line. Just trying to read the drinks.”
“I’ll wait,” he replies, remembering how to be polite, how to be charming. Old cogs long out of use jerking to life inside him again. “Can’t read any of ‘em, either, anyways.”
It draws from you that same little laugh, a puff of air from your nostrils. You nod, biting your bottom lip.
He’s quickly forgetting why he’s stood in this room, why he’s in this city. He’d probably forget his own fucking name if you asked him right now what it was.
“’nother drink, darlin’?” a low voice interrupts, and you’re turning away.
Joel’s eyes follow you – a moth chasing something golden and radiant – as you face the wiggle of a snow-white mustache poking from beneath the brim of that ivory cowboy hat.
You shake your head, lifting two fingers with a bill slipped between them. “I’m good, thanks, George. Maybe next round.” You wave to the kid behind the bar – some name that Joel’s too fucking mindless to hear. Too distracted by the glint in your eye, the sparkle of your crescent moon earrings in the light.
If only he knew this feeling. If only he could put a name to it. As familiar as the sun and yet, brand new like dawn. His stomach swirls in a fleet of butterflies – as though he’s fifteen again, bumping elbows with his high school crush.
You nudge him, thumb pointing in the direction of the bartender.
Joel shakes his head. “Ladies first,” he says, heart skipping when you hold his stare.
“Nuh-uh,” you shake your head, “Told you I ain’t jumping in.”
He asks the guy for two beers, barely taking his eyes off you. “Alright,” he leans in, lowering his voice, “Then let me buy you a drink. Make up for gettin’ in your way just then.”
You prop your chin on your knuckles, grinning as you push your twenty around the wooden bar top, dodging pooled rings of alcohol like it’s an arcade game. “I don’t do that,” you say, eyes tracing the slick trail left by the bill.
“Do what?”
“Accept drinks from strange men in bars.”
His tongue presses against the back of his teeth, the taste of humor honey-sweet. “Yeah? ‘n how long have you known…” he nods to the – what is he, sixty? Sixty-five? – year-old on your right, “…George?”
Your gaze lifts, eyes wide. Apparently as impressed by Joel’s confidence as he is himself. “We’re actually in a very serious relationship. Marriage proposal imminent.”
“Damn,” he mutters as the bartender reappears with two Coors, “And here I thought I had half a chance.”
You hum to yourself, studying him. Looking from his jaw across the span of his shoulders, his wide-knuckled hands and then back to his lips. Curious and wary, judging the strange animal stood before you.
And he knows he’s weathered from the weeks on the road, and all the years before that. Dirt under his nails and the light sheen of sun on his forehead. The flecks of gray through his thick, brown beard.
You take a deep breath, eyes twinkling, and tell him, “I’m here with my friend.”
“Ain’t that lucky?” Joel glances at Tommy. “I’m here with my brother.”
You look across to the dirty blond, sat tilting a glass candle in his hand. “He single?”
Joel nods. “Is she?”
You nod.
“Alright. You wanna come sit with us?”
Your smirk answers his question. You take the beers, rings clinking off the glass. “Rum,” you call over your shoulder, wandering off, “I drink rum.”
Joel’s gaze lowers to the sway of your hips. “Rum it is,” he says, turning back to the bar.
“So…a cross-country bike trip, and you wound up in San Angelo?”
You’re on your fourth drink, the first one Joel hasn’t paid for – and he only allowed it because it’s a Diet Coke (and maybe you got to the bar first, held his wrists with one hand so he couldn’t stop you from slapping your own money down).
“Yep,” Joel replies, pinching the lime from his drink and dropping it onto a napkin. “Just passin’ through. Shower, sleep, then head on home.”
“Where’s that, then? Home?”
“Austin.”
“Austin,” you pout, “Nice.”
Joel smirks, licking citrus from his fingertips. “Is it?”
“I’ve never been to Austin,” Brooke chirps, fiddling with the umbrella in her piña colada. She twirls the paper canopy and glances up to Tommy.
He snaps out of his slack-jawed gaze when he realizes what she’s implying. “Oh – yeah, well…” his head wobbles as he stutters, “…you two ever come down that way, we’d be happy to, uh…show ya ‘round, huh, Joel?”
Joel doesn’t reply, staring back at his brother with the same amused expression you are.
You’ve been an inch apart all evening – doused in the dive bar darkness, the shrouded conversations and muffled TV static. The tip of your nose and curve of your shoulders lit only by the luminous signs dotting the walls.
Tommy and Brooke are already deep in conversation again about the best car Tommy ever owned. Joel watches as your eyes flit between the pair, entertained by the way they trip over each other’s sentences. Your cheeks lift when Brooke lays a hand over Tommy’s, and he squeezes her fingers back.
Where did you come from? Joel’s thinking. He takes a swig of his whiskey, feeling your eyes on him. As he lowers his glass, you lift yours. When he turns in his seat towards you, you’re already facing him, back against the wainscotting. He smiles, and so do you.
Every movement feels choreographed, some merry dance only you two know. You’re in your own little world.
Where did you come from, again, and where have you been my entire fucking life?
“So, what about you?” Joel asks instead, swallowing – all warm-bellied and brave. “You grow up here?”
You shake your head, taking another sip. “Nope. Just liked it enough to hang up my coat for a few months. I grew up in Phoenix.”
“You travel a lot?”
“I’ve been around. This is the longest I’ve stayed in one place since I was a kid.”
He thinks of home: of Austin and its silver-snake river, burnt-orange jerseys and the pleated bunting lining Sixth Street. He thinks of late nights on lawn chairs, nursing a beer and shooting the shit with his brother. Keeping their voices lower than the buzz of the cicadas, looking more at the dusky sky than at each other.
“You don’t ever get tired of it?” Joel asks. “Of moving around so much?”
You scoff, breath clouding the inside of your glass. “Three weeks on a motorcycle starting to get to you, huh?”
He breathes a laugh, loose again. The cicadas fade from his ears.
Your head tilts in a shrug. “I don’t know. I guess the universe keeps on surprising me.”
Joel doesn’t do this. At least, he hasn’t done this since he was a teenager – crate of beer under his arm and a chest full of courage. He’s long forgotten the feeling of heat blooming in his cheeks, the twitch of his heart anytime you look at him.
But fuck, if there isn’t something about you. Something in the way you move, the way you look at him. Something in the way you play with your straw, knocking ice cubes around and chewing on the plastic once you’ve drained the glass.
Something – though it’s a little too early and Joel’s a little too tipsy to tell just what. He tries to remember that he’s pragmatic. A grown-up. He chases away the monsters in his daughter’s –
“Oh, shit,” Joel says suddenly, scrambling to pull his cell from his pocket. It’s nine thirty. He was supposed to – “I forgot…”
A miserable tone from his Motorola cuts him short. The screen flashes an empty battery before fading to black. He jams a thumb into the keypad a couple more times, cursing at the winking symbol.
“Someone you gotta call?” you ask.
He meets your eye and winces. “Yeah, I’m…I said I’d call an hour ago.”
“You wanna use mine?” You twist around, fishing in your purse for your own. “We can go outside.”
“No, no, it’s…it’s alright, I’m sure she won’t mind, she –”
You shake your head. “Shut up. Come on, let’s go. I could use some fresh air, anyways. Be back in a minute,” you tell Brooke – who nods and turns straight back to Tommy.
Joel extends his hand to help you out of the booth, then follows you to the door. The cool air tugs every nerve in his body to attention, pin-sharp when he steps out of that lazy heat. Under the emerald glow of the Murphy’s sign, he settles his glass on a window ledge. “Next round’s on me, alright?”
You roll your eyes, pushing the phone against his chest. “Just call, Joel.”
One last apologetic glance, and then he’s dialing. He makes to wander along the curb, the tone already pulsing in his ear, when he notices –
“You ain’t brought a jacket?”
You’re sitting on the ledge, clutching your elbows. Swatting midges from the light you’re bathed in, charms on your bracelets jingling. “Hm?”
He tuts. “A jacket. Here.” He shrugs his own off, sitting it around your frame. It’s warm from the bar and from Joel’s body heat, and you sink into it – letting the dark leather drown you as you rummage through your purse again.
“Nice,” Joel’s eyes narrow, “Fresh air.”
You hum into your hands, flicking your lighter. The cigarette trembles when you murmur, “We all got our skeletons, I guess.”
He turns on his heel when a familiar voice picks up.
“Hey, hey, M–Yeah, sorry it’s late…Yeah, we got held up. My phone died, so I’m using…Is she still–? Can I–? Oh, Sarah. Hi, baby.”
His little girl begins chattering down the line immediately, telling Joel everything she’s been up to since they last spoke this morning.
“…and then, Emily thought I was one of the Armadillos – I don’t even know how, ‘cause they play in red, remember Dad? – but she did, and she slide tackled me so bad that Coach Thomson had to sub in Akari for me so I could ice my ankle. Grandma was kinda mad about it, but she took me to Burger King after to cheer me up, and…”
Joel wanders back and forth, smiling to himself and scuffing the heel of his boot along the concrete – barely able to squeeze more than two words between her chirping. It’s all, Yeah, baby? and Wow, sweetheart; all uhuhs and mhms until she finally quietens, excitement plateauing again.
“Alright, well. You know what time it is, right?”
“Yeah,” Sarah groans. She knows it all too well.
Bedtime.
“…But you didn’t call when you said you would, Daddy, and it’s Saturday, it’s –”
“I know, baby, I know. I’m sorry. Just…somethin’ came up. But I’ll see you tomorrow, right? We’ll be back before you know it.”
“Where’s Uncle Tommy? Can I talk to him?”
Joel turns to face the bar. “He, uh…I’m not with him right now, sweetheart. I’ll tell him you asked after him, though.”
Sarah concedes, and then begins asking questions Joel knows she’s only asking to stay on the line a little longer – to stay awake a little later. But still, he answers each one – humoring her and, at the same time, letting himself listen to her voice just a little more before he has to let her go.
He thinks of scooping her up in the morning; thinks of being slumped on the couch after dinner with her head on his stomach – fast asleep with whatever movie she chose droning on in the background.
Despite the thousands of miles and close to two weeks between them – she makes him feel closer to home. She always does.
When Sarah asks where he is, he glances your way. Clocks your flat expression, the half-burnt cigarette hanging from your fingers.
You flick ash to the ground. Eyes unreadable beneath low brows, a tiny crease between them that Joel’s only just seeing for the first time.
“Uh…” he clears his throat, “…just a little – a little north of you, baby. Home first thing, I promise.”
He tells her he loves her and she says it back, and he tells her to sleep well and she says that back, too. And then he’s hanging up – Alright, see you soon, bye, Sarah, bye-bye, byebyebye – and pressing his thumb into the red button.
He wanders back over to you – ears flat like a guilty dog, though he isn’t quite sure why. He mumbles a quiet thanks as he passes the phone back, then stuffs his hands in his pockets.
You lean back, ankles crossed, studying him. Swirling what’s left of the cigarette in your fingers – the smoke lifting like a winding snake to the dark sky. “So,” you pout, “What are you doing flirting with me, if you got a wife and kid back home?”
His jaw ticks, a hand coming up to scratch his beard. “I don’t have a wife,” he says.
You stare blankly, filter back against your lips. “Okay, then – a girlfriend. Does she know you’re out tonight with us?”
He shakes his head. “No wife, no girlfriend. I don’t have an anything.”
“But you have a kid.”
Joel nods once, tongue in his cheek. “Uhuh.”
And then the penny seems to drop. A small oh; your jaw slack and eyes wide. The cigarette smolders between your fingers. “Fuck,” you whisper, “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to…”
“No, hey,” Joel steps closer, “You didn’t know. It’s alright.”
He straightens the jacket on your shoulders. When you finally look at each other again, you snort.
“Sorry,” you repeat, shaking your head. “Is she okay? Your daughter – is she…?”
“Sarah,” Joel says. “She’s…she’s fine. Thanks.”
You look down, stubbing your cigarette against the brick. Voice quiet, you ask, “Her mom’s not around anymore?”
Relief settles in his chest: you’re softening to him again.
Joel slots onto the ledge at your side. Shoulder to shoulder. He reaches behind and lifts his drink. “Not since she was a year old.”
Your mouth pulls in a wince. “Jesus. That’s rough.”
He doesn’t reply. He doesn’t have to – you’re not asking him to explain – and he doesn’t want to, either.
You’re not stupid – you’ve seen enough of the world to hear what he’s really saying. The darkest, dustiest corners of it – all the places no one ever wants to look.
You don’t seem disturbed, barely even moved by the reality that…well, shit happens. People leave, families break; a two-car driveway is suddenly taken up by just a pick-up truck and a little pink bike with tassels.
He figures you get it. You don’t need to know how can that be? – you just…know that it can.
“So, uh…” you look up at him again, “…my apartment is, like, five minutes away if you wanna…you know. You can charge your phone, can shower – if it’s bugging you that much.”
Joel’s eyebrows lift. “Oh, really?”
You simper, eyes thin. “Really.”
“Charge my phone ‘n shower?” He stands, palm flat against the wall above your head, and leans in. His face is inches from yours.
You look up, mirroring his expression. “Yes,” your voice curls in a half-truth, “What’s the big deal?”
“What a goddamn line,” Joel says, smirking. “How long you been sittin’ on that one for?”
His blood thrums faster, harder, louder in his veins when you stand up, hands on your hips.
“It’s not a line, I’m serious –”
“I didn’t take you as the type, baby, I really didn’t – but if that’s how you wanna play this, then –”
He feels you before he sees you moving, like he’s stood at that bar all over again. Your hands on his jaw, your chest pressed to his. Your lips – soft as satin, with a tinge of sweet rum and smoke – against his.
Joel barely misses a beat. He closes his eyes and lifts a hand to the back of your head, kissing you back. It’s dizzying, the taste and feel of you so close; the wet of your tongue on his. The little scratches of your nails in his beard, the moans caught in your throat.
Dizzying – and fucking perfect.
You break apart and lean in to each other, catching your breath. Joel’s hands slip beneath the heavy leather of his jacket onto your waist.
“Unless…” you whisper, pulling away from him, “…you don’t want to. In which case, I’ll just…” You twirl back towards the door, batting your eyelashes.
Joel smiles. He catches your wrist and reels you back into his body. “I want to,” he breathes, kissing you again. “I want to.”
“Let’s go.”
You make it to your apartment door, fumbling with your keys – and Joel’s hands are glued to your waist.
You miss the lock over and over as he kisses your neck, grazing the skin with his teeth. Anything to satiate the hunger quickly taking over, the tightening in his jeans.
He pulls you against his hips – rough denim grinding into the curve of your ass. He can smell your flowery perfume, a strange melding of peony and menthol sharp in his nostrils.
It’s the hungriest he’s ever felt, he thinks – a starved animal pinning his prey to her flecked apartment door. He pauses, bottom lip damp against your neck; breathing a liquor-laced laugh over your skin.
You jam the key into the lock. The door finally shunts open and you spill inside, dragging Joel with you.
Your place is dark. Angled strips of streetlight thrown high up the bare walls and across the ceiling, splintered by tilted shades. The spill of a blanket draped over an empty couch; a pair of sneakers left on the rug. Joel’s knees brush by a houseplant guarding the door – heavy leaves which pfft when they sway out of his way.
It’s half-decorated. Temporary. Caught somewhere between home and away. Little fragments pieced together into something the shape of home: a mosaic vase that scatters light across the surface of the coffee table; a beaded curtain pinned around the closet doorway.
Like you’re a little magpie, collecting trinkets of silver and gold until your nest feels like yours. Bags dropped long enough to keep a Monstera plant alive, not to put nails in the wall for the frames propped against the skirting board.
You shrug Joel’s jacket off, dropping it over the back of the couch. When you spin back around to him, he lifts your chin with two fingers and presses his lips to yours. You lead him down the hallway, tumbling into your room.
He follows you over to your bed, collapsing onto a tousled mess of sheets with his hips between yours. The hem of your dress rides up your thighs, bunching around your hips and revealing a flash of pink lace underneath.
The world around him seems to sober up for a second, sharpens into focus. It begins to seep in: the realization that he has you – some girl he met no more than two hours ago in a bar – pinned to your mattress. A slick gathering in your underwear and a weight building in his.
Right now, he should be sinking into squealing bedsprings in a Super 8. Bathing in the flicker of a television set twenty years too old. He should be showered and rested – ready to head home at sunrise, if not sooner.
But then something led him to you, and – well.
There’s no fucking helping him now, is there?
Joel’s fingers hook around your panties. He pulls down, leaving a trail of kisses along your bare leg, until that same pink lace is dripping from your ankle.
His eyes flash up to yours, love-drunk and sparkling. He pushes your knees apart, watching your velvet folds open for him, and – oh, he thinks, staring at the glistening arousal smeared around your cunt. Such a slick little mess for him already.
“Goddamn, darlin’,” he licks his lips, “She’s so pretty.”
You hum, hands lowering. Your fingers separate, spreading your pussy for him. Your middle finger swirls around your clit, dips along your seam. And the n, silky and shining, you lift your hand again and slip your fingers into your mouth.
“Tastes even better than she looks,” you murmur, dappling your fingertip along your bottom lip.
Joel growls. He pushes down on your thighs, ignoring your little yelp, and drags the tip of his tongue through your slit.
“Oh, shit,” you gasp, back arching. Your fingers knot in his hair, twisting and tightening. “Shitshitshit.”
“Mhm,” he hums against you, tongue pushing inside.
Fuck, you’re just so perfect: so soft and warm and fucking dripping for him. He laps at your sweet center, wet already spreading all over his mouth and beard.
A dampness blooms in his boxers. He’s throbbing, fucking aching the longer he goes untouched. He grinds against the mattress, denim rough against his solid erection.
He lifts his chin, panting – satisfied by the way you squirm under the weight of him. “You like that, huh?” he asks, a sodden kiss to your mound. “Fuckin’ love it.”
He spits a thick bead of saliva, watching it dribble down your folds to your ass. His tongue swipes it back up, circling your clit, all slippery and swollen.
“Fuck, Joel,” you moan, tugging on his hair. Your legs spasm, hips lifting.
He loves the sound of his name when you say it. Broken in two, a lilt to it as it rolls from your tongue and down his spine. Like it’s yours as much as it is his, now.
He sucks hard on your clit, his tongue flicking. And he can tell you’re close; can feel your hips starting to lose rhythm, see your back desperately arching higher and higher.
Joel groans, pushing up to hover over you. He cups between your legs, dabbing two thick fingers at your entrance, and pushes in.
Your pussy draws him in knuckle-deep. Your chest lifts, the loose neckline of your dress exposing more and more. You grab your breast, pinching your nipple – a roll of pebbled flesh between your fingertips.
He lowers his lips to your ear – watching as you toy with yourself. “Come on, baby,” he grits his teeth, “Give me one. Let me feel this pretty cunt.”
Your head rolls back into the pillow; a high sob as your orgasm crests. Clamping tight around him; a warm flood down his fingers.
Joel kisses you as you come. You look so pretty, he thinks, with ecstasy behind your eyes and his fingers between your legs.
Christ, he wants to be inside you so badly. Wants to feel your cunt do all this around his cock instead.
The blood rushes between his hips.
His fingers slip in and out, bringing you back around. Joel’s lips are on your neck, murmuring, “Good girl, that’s my girl,” as you resurface.
Your eyes open again – glossy, glazed with the aftershock of your high. “Fuck,” you breathe, playing with the hem of his shirt.
He pulls his fingers out and sucks them clean. Whips the tee over his head in one motion; another kiss tucked under your chin as you peel your dress from your body. He tosses it to the floor.
Still dazed, your body still trembling, you ask, “Do you have a condom?” All dreamy and distant, your hands trailing along his belt.
Joel pauses. Tilts his head, frowning. “I’m on a road trip with my brother, baby – the hell would I bring condoms for?”
You roll your eyes, sighing. It’s the cutest thing Joel thinks he’s ever seen. You thread the belt through the loops of his jeans. “In case you meet a really cool girl at a bar and wanna take her home, maybe?”
He lifts his eyebrows, impressed. He slips his salty tongue over yours again.
You moan at the taste. “It’s just I’m…I’m all out.”
His belt drops to the floor; buckle clinking against hardwood.
“Well, shit,” Joel whispers.
It’s not exactly a scenario he predicted, setting off from Austin. Meeting you wasn’t on the bucket list for the trip. It’s another three, four, probably five things to add to the list of shit he doesn’t do, shouldn’t do, wouldn’t fucking do if it hadn’t been for you.
No, Joel thinks, groaning as you palm the solid shape of him – he didn’t bring a goddamn condom. Jesus, the most he has in his pockets right now is fifteen bucks and a stick of gum.
You unzip his pants, shrugging the denim loose. “We can just do it…without,” you offer.
Joel stares down at you. “You sure?”
You nod, biting your lip. “Just pull out, right?”
“Just pull out…” he echoes. Your hands are cold on his heated skin, but he’s not about to fucking stop you.
You tug his underwear down with his jeans, following the darkening hair from his navel down. Another quiet pull out passes your lips – your voice dissolving when you spot the thick base of his dick.
Joel’s shaft springs free, heavy against the inside of his thigh.
“Holy shit.” You push yourself up on your elbows, eyes flooding black.
His tongue runs along the bottom of his teeth. He thrusts forward into your hand, a glassy drop of precome dribbling from his slit.
Your thumb swipes across his flushed tip, fingers wrapping around his width. You roll his balls in your other palm, massaging and squeezing just the right amount.
“Easy, easy,” Joel whispers. Too much, too soon. He can’t come yet, not until he feels your fluttering cunt around his cock.
Instead, you reach up – snaking an arm around his neck. You pull him back down, his naked body flush against yours, and hike a knee over his hip.
He grinds into you, his cock nudging between your legs. They fall apart for him – pliant and keen, like petals unfolding. He covers himself in your slick, his tip catching below your clit.
“Pl-ease,” you whine, scratching at his shoulders.
Joel nips at your damp neck. “Please, what?” he taunts.
Your breath is hot against his cheek – a stifling request which curls up in the shell of his ear. “F-fuck me.”
And his hips roll into yours.
“Jesus f…” your face buries into his chest, “…you’re…you’re so fucking big, Joel, I can’t –”
He nudges between your walls, groaning into your skin. You’re even tighter around his cock, even cozier. “I know,” he pants, “I know. Take it, baby, know you can take it.”
You stretch around him, opening up the deeper he pushes. “Fuckfuckfuck,” you pant, the thick hair at his base finally brushing against your clit. “Fuck, Joel.”
“Look at me,” he taps your jaw, “Hey. Look at me. Breathe.”
You exhale, hot and shaky across his lips.
“Good, that’s good.” Joel nods. He holds you by the waist, lets you adjust to his size.
He pulls back, your cunt clamping around him. Halfway out, and then in again. Feeling you open up, inch by inch, until he builds a steady rhythm.
“Jesus, baby, she’s so…” he moans, “…she’s so goddamn tight.”
You drape an arm over his shoulders, a hissing pain where your nails dig into his skin. Yelping each time he bottoms out, your leaking cunt wrapped snug around him. “So – goddamn – big,” you whine, a ruined smile on your lips.
He slams his body into yours again, watching the way your tits bounce. Nipples hard, skin tacky and shining with sweat. Your pussy pinches, and he starts to unravel.
Fuck the road trip, Joel thinks, fuck all of it. This is where he should be: in the middle of your bed, burrowed deep between your legs. This is the only place he wants to fucking be, right now.
So he fucks you harder; the headboard hammering against the wall. A fistful of the pillow, his knuckles whitening. He guides his cock when he slips out – a filthy sound as your clutch sucks him back in.
“Fuck,” he growls, gripping your hips so hard he worries he might bruise you. His thrusts become sloppy – quick and desperate.
“So close,” you gasp. You’re squeezing him so tight that he sees stars. “I’m gonna – I’m…”
Perfect, Joel thinks, watching you bloom. You’re so fucking perfect.
He coaxes you through it. Slows enough to feel you come around his cock, your warmth as it gushes all over him. “That’s it, baby, I got you. Shit, you’re gonna make me come.”
He pulls out just in time to coat your stomach; a throaty groan as he comes. He pumps his shaft, covering from your sternum to the plush of your tummy. It dribbles down your waist, spurts between your breasts.
He collapses over you, pressing his forehead to yours. His dick, soaked and softening, smears the ejaculate across your skin.
You giggle, leaving sticky kisses along his beard.
“You okay?” he asks, breathless.
You nod, and his tongue dabs at the inside of your lips. You taste like sex and sweat – sweet and salt.
Joel shifts to the edge of the bed. He feels you follow, your lips featherlight on the curve of his shoulder.
You make to stand – going to clean yourself up, he reckons, your tummy dripping with his semen – and he locks a hand around your bare thigh.
“Stay,” he says, voice low and rough – sex still smoldering. “Let me get you a towel.”
You smile, resting your chin on his shoulder. Your fingers link around the other side of his waist. “I’ll get it. Just relax.”
And for a minute or two, you stay like that. Hooked onto one another, tired eyes closing over, breathing in rhythm. Your cheek on his shoulder, your knee brushing against his tummy.
It’s simple; quiet and still. Joel feels like half a person – the other half tracing her chipped nails along his bare thigh. Eyelashes fluttering, teeth holding back a grin that she thinks might give her away.
Eventually, you move. Shimmy yourself down the mattress, swipe a crinkled tee from the ottoman – and slink off to the bathroom.
Joel lies back against the headboard, body sticky hot. He watches the shadow of your figure stretch across the open door. His eyes drift upwards to the looping ceiling fan – only half as dizzying as the sound of your humming in the next room.
And just when he starts to think he might be fucking missing you, you reappear in the doorway. Leant against the frame, some worn band tee hanging from your shoulders. Arms crossed; smiling back at him.
A rush of words floods to the tip of his tongue. You look beautiful. Your makeup’s smudged, chains of your necklace twisted; your shirt is frayed and splotched with faded stains – and you’re the most beautiful thing he’s ever laid eyes on.
He holds his arms out and you prance over.
You crawl over his figure, kissing your way up to his lips, and then turn in his lap. Cradled against his broad chest, your head nuzzling into the dark threads of hair between his pecs. You clasp one of his hands in two of yours.
“Offer’s still there for a shower, if you want it,” you whisper, kissing the pads of his fingers.
Joel tilts his head, mumbling against your temple, “Will you be in there with me?”
You answer something shaped like a tease, just as sharp with wit – but he’s too busy watching your nails trace his open palm. Too distracted by the sweet scent of your skin: a fresh burst of fruit, singed with the edge of tobacco.
“What do you do for work?” you ask.
He makes some sort of sleepy sound – a grunt, a hm? into your skull. “Oh, uh – I’m a contractor,” he says.
Your chin lifts. “That why your palms are all…?” Your thumb strokes light as lace against his worn skin.
“Probably,” Joel admits. He draws shapes on your thigh with his free hand.
“Do you sand the wood with your bare hands, or somethin’?”
Joel scoffs. “Alright, alright. You liked my hands plenty, twenty minutes ago.”
Your cheeks lift, a low hum caught in your throat. You angle your head to let his lips trail along your shoulder, pressing into the hinge of your jaw. A dark nail following the landscape of Joel’s skin – each score and divot, the callused pads at the bottom of each finger.
“You have sorta…earth hands, I think.”
It sits in the air for a few seconds before Joel turns to you. “What?”
“Earth hands. Or, well – I guess they could be water, if you look at ‘em this way.” You open up his hand, fingers stretched. “I don’t really know. I’m still learning.”
He looks down at you. Feels the now-steady pulse of your heart on his sternum. “Learnin’…hands?”
You snort. “Palm reading, Joel.”
His brows draw tight. He licks the inside of his whiskey-stained cheek. “You’re into all that hippie sh…stuff?”
You knock your knuckles against his chest, still staring at his hands. The hills and their valleys, the ravine-like lines; the worn skin and hatch marks.
“Let’s see…Your heart line,” you whisper – more to yourself than Joel, but he’s listening all the same. “It’s pretty deep, which means the relationships you’ve had have been…important. But it’s kinda…it tails off right here, see? It’s broken. So…I guess they didn’t end too good.”
Joel raises an eyebrow – playful, encouraging your timid smile. Keep figuring me out, he thinks, stoking the curious flame behind your eyes. “Alright,” he says, “Now tell me something you didn’t already know about me.”
You gawk, holding his wrist up. “You don’t see that? The way it breaks up? I’m not bullshitting you, Joel, it’s –”
“Naw, I see it,” he nods, squinting a little at his palm, “Just – tell me more. What’s all these other lines mean?”
“Well,” you adjust between his hips, “you got your life line right here. Short, which means –”
“Don’t tell me that part.”
“No,” you roll your eyes, “It just means you’re independent. You never needed much from anyone. And it runs past this mount – these are called mounts – right here. Venus: all to do with love and sexuality.”
Joel holds your open palm next to his, comparing them. He takes less than a second’s look, lines his lips to your ear and says, “Seem like a pretty good match to me.”
You wriggle when he tickles your ribcage, trying to twist out of his grasp. You’re laughing again – the same laugh he’s been hearing all damn night. The same giggle that’s had his stomach somersaulting since he first heard it.
The room seems to light with it, this glow he feels from you – as if you’re the sun. Spent and still half-drunk; lazing with a stranger in the middle of her bed. Tracing the lines and scars on his palm, telling him how logical and grounded he’s supposed to be.
As if the world orbits around you – everything you touch turning to molten gold. And for what feels like the hundredth time tonight, Joel looks at you and wonders: Where the hell did you come from?
You hold your hand against his, folding your fingers perfectly together. The evidence of your night flaking from Joel’s knuckles; sweat still simmering on the nape of his neck.
He hasn’t done this for years. Hasn’t felt this gentle aftermath. It’s usually a rush, a hastened zip and clink of his pants. An awkward dance, plucking clothes from the bedroom floor and pacing back to his truck.
It’s never like this. Talking and laughing, holding and kissing. Questions about his parents and yours; his biggest dream as a kid, or the time you broke your arm falling out of a tree.
He tells you stories about growing up with Tommy; tells you Sarah’s favorite flavor of cake. He tells you about the time they tried to make it for a school bake sale, forgot to turn the oven off, and almost burned the damn kitchen down.
You snicker and tell him that never would’ve happened if you were there.
Yeah, well, Joel smiles, I wish you were.
He notices you’re drifting off, despite your slurred protests and your weak grip on his wrist. He pulls you under the covers, curving his body around yours, praying that the quickening drum of his heartbeat won’t wake you.
His nose nuzzles into the curve of your skull, his hands link in front of your tummy. And he wonders whether his body was made with yours in mind.
He glances out at the sky – light starting to bleed from the horizon – and wills the turn of the sun to slow. Only a little; just let him stay here a little while longer.
Just a little while.
Dawn forces her way in eventually – more unwelcome than ever before.
There’s a throb between his temples which swells to life when the light floods past his pupils. “Jesus Christ,” he grumbles, face turning back into the pillow. He gives you a gentle squeeze and then pushes up from the mattress.
You roll to the middle of the bed, still sound asleep. The sun spills golden all over the valleys and crests of your body. The bedsheets carve pathways up to your hips, dipping at your waist.
Last night, there was something so mystical about you – so otherworldly. Joel felt himself drawn towards you like a compass needle shooting north, the second he felt your weight crash against his spine.
A figure behind a cloud of smoke, like the mountaintops disappearing into a thick mist. And now, blood drained of alcohol, you’re just you.
Your shirt is twisted around your shoulders. Your lips puffy, mumbling to yourself in your doze. Makeup smudged like chalk under your eyes, and still – just as beautiful. Just as radiant as you were ten hours ago.
Joel rubs his eyes, sitting on the edge of the bed. He blinks down at his bare feet, the morning sharpening into focus. As he lifts his phone from the nightstand, the cable drops – hitting the wooden floor with a snap.
He pauses, shoulders hunched. Hears you stir over his shoulder, and turns around.
The earth of your body shifts beneath cotton hills, clouds of sleep clearing from behind your eyes. “Hey,” you whisper, voice pretty and broken.
A little bird in the palm of his hand – that magpie curled up in her nest of gems and trinkets.
“Hey.” He leans down and kisses your cheek. “Sorry, darlin’, I didn’t mean to wake you.”
You wrap your arms around his wrist, tugging. “Are…are you…leaving?”
Joel feels a pang in his chest, and he doesn’t know why. He takes a deep breath. Your scent fills his lungs and steadies his heart. “I…” he sniffs, “…I gotta go home, baby.”
You give a slow and heavy nod. “S-Sarah…”
He strokes your head with his thumb. “Yeah. Shh, go back to sleep. It’s still early.”
He glances at his phone – it’s just after six. He knows Tommy will be waiting for him, parked outside the Super 8 and wondering where the hell Joel is. He knows Sarah will be, too – sat by the living room window, listening for the rumble of their bikes.
And still, he thinks – How do I fucking leave you? Leave this?
He shouldn’t even be entertaining the thought. He has a kid waiting for him back home; soccer practice, packed lunches, homework and bedtime stories. He has work to do, bills to pay, a roof to keep over their heads. It’s all waiting in Austin, two hundred miles away.
As though you can see the question flipping in his mind, you pull him closer. A weak finger in the palm of his hand, drawing circles. Your bleary gaze meets his, and you whisper, “In the next life.”
Joel smiles. Twelve hours ago, he’d have laughed at the idea of it. Now, he’s not so sure. He kisses your knuckles, muttering, “Promise.”
Another wave of sleep washes over you, and you’re gone again.
Joel pushes himself from the bed, reaching for his clothes. His back twinges as he stretches, pulling his T-shirt over his shoulders. He steps into his jeans; pinches his belt between two fingers and lifts it from the floor.
He leans over and tilts your shades the opposite way, dulling your bedroom. He unplugs the charger, neatly winds the cord, and sits it on your nightstand. He fixes his side of the sheets: folds them over the mattress, tucks them in at your back.
With a deep breath, he makes for the door.
His jaw turns, eyes still low. Your dress is in a heap at the foot of the bed; a tube of lip gloss lying next to it. He looks up, following the landscape of sheets – the slope from your ankle to your hip. Your hunched shoulders, your cheek smushed into the pillow.
If he looks too long, he’ll never leave.
The image burns golden into his eyes. He hopes for half a heartbeat that you’ll wake again and pull him back into bed. Kiss him all over, whisper something sharp and sweet in his ear. Touch him and graze him and wrap yourself around him – anchoring him right here and now.
But you don’t.
And Joel slips out of the room.
Jackson stirs to life over his shoulder.
A white lump in the snow-covered valley, the settlement seems so far away now. Tommy sets off up ahead, leading the way to the outpost. The blizzard is picking up – it almost swallows the silhouette of him whole.
Joel had tried to warn him: the weather would be too bad to see five feet in front of them, never mind any infected. But Tommy argued with the same determination that dragged the pair of them into that dive bar thirty years ago, and Joel didn’t have half the energy nor the will to argue back.
He’s thinking about you. He always is.
Your searing gaze over the rim of your glass; the weight of you against his chest. The tickling of your nail on his palm, severing each line and changing him forever. You and your palm lines.
You were just learning to read them. Joel didn’t know a thing about any of it, and he told you so. You took his hand in yours and said, Here. Let me see.
He runs a thumb down his fate line, swaying in time with his horse. And he shakes his head with a little smile – he still remembers which one is fate and which is heart.
He still remembers all of it. He has earth hands. All salt and soil and solid as stone. His earth hands have gotten him this far, right? Twenty-five years and he’s still here. Gray and grown; stiff joints and sewn-up scars.
His head line has channeled more strangers’ blood than Joel can count. Mounts that’ve stopped breath in the throat of any man who crossed him. He doesn’t think you’d recognize his hands anymore, if your fingertips traced over them again. Broken and bruised and bloody.
And he doesn’t think he’d want you to – doesn’t want you to meet the shadow of the man you knew back then. He’d prefer you remember that same brown-eyed, soft-touched stranger with enough charm and naivety to survive anything. No need for bone-breaking fists or bloodstained hands.
Where are you, he wonders?
The answer knots deep in his stomach: the same old rope twisting into the same old shape. A fist of anger, of guilt. Some terrible cocktail of both, spilling poison through his veins.
He’s terrified to wonder what might’ve happened if he had ever made it back there. What he might’ve found in your apartment – what he might not.
Where would you have gone, that day? Would you have fled, or would you have stayed?
You were smart, he knows that much. He saw the cogs of your mind turning right in front of him, standing opposite each other in that bar. Barely thirty seconds in and he could’ve sworn you had him all figured out.
But – oh, Jesus, you were kind. Open and willing to help a stranger with a dead phone and a tired smile. Would that kindness still glow as bright against the flicker of a world on fire?
A lone hawk swoops down before him, shooting straight between the pines. Joel slips his glove back over his freezing hand.
He thinks about you every day. Every fucking day, and it never eases. Never loosens. It keeps him up some nights – the truth he’s too afraid to look square in the face.
You live now in the back of his mind like a little ghost. His little ghost – still floating around that dusty city; the warm light of life and innocence still bright in your eyes.
Tommy glances over his shoulder. He gestures ahead as if to say, Would you take a look at this goddamn storm?
And Yeah, Joel thinks, I’m lookin’, brother.
All he wants is to go home. Jackson, Austin, the bedroom of your apartment in San Angelo. Just let me go back.
He blinks, and the snow melts to cracked asphalt under a lilac sunset. Tommy’s holding handlebars instead of reins. The horses’ hot puffs of breath darken to clouds of smoke, choking from the exhaust pipes of the Harleys.
You’re somewhere on the other side of town, waiting for him in the faint glow of a jukebox. Sipping what’s left of your rum and Coke, fishing a twenty from your purse for the next round.
Just let me go back home.
He tugs on his horse’s reins and pulls off after his brother.
summary: Joel’s got you, as always, as ever, and you have to try.
Or, Joel is not trying to fix you, but you want to do better anyway.
warnings: internalized shame, self-hatred and self-deprecation, body image issues and feelings of disgust, emotional constipation from reader and joel but they're both trying very hard, reader is distant and aloof, implied past sexual assault, smut [fingering, piv, praise], anxiety and uncertainty, two people in love and trying to figure things out
a/n: all right! no one call my therapist! hope you enjoy and if you relate I love you.
The wood of the counter bites into your middle, rough unfinished plywood scraping against your skin.
Joel sinks into you slowly, hand braced against the top of your spine, cupping the curve of your shoulder in the bowl of his palm. The other is anchored on your hip, pulling you back into him.
The house is quiet, breathing slowly, breeze through a downstairs window, floorboards creaking beneath shifting feet.
His hands tighten on your skin as he bottoms out with a thready, patient groan. “Goddamn, sweetheart.”
“Joel,” you whisper, letting your weight sink onto your elbows, chest pressed flat against the counter, peering back at him over your shoulder. Sweat beads on your forehead and the nape of your neck.
He moves his hand from your shoulder to your cheek, thumb tracing along your cheekbone to your parted lips. You glance away from his gaze and close your eyes, pressing your forehead against the wood.
Joel is so warm; wrapped around you it’s almost uncomfortable in the new heat of the coming summer season. Warm light falls over you, a lavender sky painted in the corner of the window, sunset approaching, sending shadows skittering across his spare bedroom turned workshop.
He folds himself over you, presses his mouth to the hinge of your jaw, the sensitive spot just below your ear. The scent of his skin is musky, deep—like pine and leather, like sweat that has left his skin tacky and supple against yours. You moan and let your eyes flutter closed, cheek pressed against the workbench counter.
A big, warm hand sweeps over your hip and down the back of your thigh, tugging you that much closer. Trapped between him and the counter, you can hardly breathe. His weight is crushing and comforting all in one.
When his fingers press between your legs, your pussy flutters, white hot pleasure snapping up your spine, sucking desperately at him.
“There’s my girl,” he says, voice gruff and terribly low in your ear. “Lemme hear you.”
His thrusts are slow and deep, steady.
It’s always like this with him, the guiding pressure of his hands, the weight of his body against your back.
It’s the only way you can stand to let him have you, without facing him, without the possibility of seeing yourself, reflected in his eyes, or caught in the glass of a mirror or the glare of a dark window; without being spread on your back, forced to look down at your own body. Even if you keep your eyes on his face, the roll of your stomach, the swell of your breasts, are always looming at the edge of your vision.
You’ve always hated looking at yourself.
The thought of owning a body, of the thickness of your thighs, the pleasure pulled like taffy from between your legs, belonging to you, fills you with an uneasiness you have never been able to explain. It doesn’t feel like yours, a disconnectedness from yourself that vibrates alongside your bones. It feels wrong to look at yourself, connect your thoughts to the body you inhabit.
And when you do, you don’t like what you see. The spread of your thighs, the curve of your stomach, the width of your hips and the way your breasts sit. Worse, are the scars, the adolescent stretch marks that never faded, the hair you haven’t been able to shave or wax in years. Bruises and bumps and malformed skin where injuries healed badly.
Maybe part of you is resentful of your body, for sustaining the injuries, taking the abuse, and continuing on. If you aren’t at war with your body, you’re angry with your mind, for the blank spots in your memory and the way it disconnects from your body, refuses to connect with the world around you.
Even touching yourself is hard. And when you do masturbate it’s with the lights out, blanket tucked beneath your chin, blindly reaching.
So, you do it like this, carefully maneuvering, positioning so that you are never faced with seeing yourself. Joel fucking you from behind, his hands fitted around your waist, reaching around you, or in the dark.
Joel is always good to you, and though you sense it bothers him, he doesn’t say anything about it. His hands are calloused and familiar, heavy on your hips and waist; unusually careful with you, and slow.
He’s so pretty and easy to touch, and makes quiet noises that crest into something louder only when he’s inside you.
Joel’s fingers dig into your thigh; he kicks your legs wider.
“Jesus,” he mutters against your shoulder and then straightens, holding you hard again, hand fisted over the back of your neck.
It may as well be a little prayer.
Then he says your name, and it’s even quieter than the prayer, and a thousand times more reverent.
He’s cautious and slow and deliberate. He holds you tight and you wish you could turn and thread your fingers through his hair, fold your hands against the back of his head.
You used to only like rough sex, because it didn’t give you the space to think. Now, you dream of looking into Joel’s eyes and you aren’t sure you ever liked sex before, or if it were a distraction from yourself.
It’s pathetic and weak, but true.
He will want more than this, more than you. He will grow resentful of you. He will want someone who can look him in the eyes.
The distance is important, for you and for him.
He fucks you hard and slow, each thrust measured and intense.
“Lemme feel it, darlin’,” he demands, hand sliding from your cunt to your belly, pulling you into him. “Feel so good wrapped around me.”
He presses his mouth to the back of your neck, his weight heavy and comforting. With him inside you, around you.
Joel’s hips stutter, his grip tightens, a groan pressed low and sweet against your ear. “Let go for me.”
There is one twisted moment of pleasure and then blissfully blank peace; your thoughts are the calm surface of a lake.
The feeling lingers for a second before it falls away and you’re left with the shame and discomfort of being trapped within your own skin, of having come. You lift yourself away from the workbench and push him away as gently as you can.
“I should go,” you murmur, yanking your panties and jeans back into place. You don’t look at him, you don’t look at your fingers buttoning your jeans. Your chest feels tight.
His belt clinks slowly and when you finally turn, his brow is furrowed. “Sun ain’t even down yet.”
“I need to go home. We have to be up early. Patrol.”
“You wanna stay for dinner or—”
“No.”
He blinks. “Okay.”
“I just need to go.” You edge toward the door.
“Okay.” He watches you. “I’ll see you in the mornin’.”
.
.
.
“You eat something this mornin’?”
“I’m fine.”
“That ain’t really what I asked.”
You glance up at Joel, standing shoulder to shoulder with you in the stables, thermos of something warm, but not coffee because he drank the last of it a few mornings ago, steaming in his hand. The morning is chilly but not cold, and he’s looking at you closely. There’s something floral in the air and something unasked in his eyes.
“I answered. I’m fine.”
He rolls his eyes and pushes the thermos into your hands, taking the reins of both your horses and leading them out of the stables and towards the main gate, muttering something about stubbornness beneath his breath as he goes.
“I don’t want this.”
“Just hold onto it for me, darlin’.”
So you hold onto it and follow him out of the stables, watching the knotted curl of his fingers around the reins, the gentle stroke of his palm over their necks.
He hands them off and steadies your elbow when you mount, even though you don’t need help. He doesn’t mention it when you keep the thermos, but you catch the self satisfied expression on his face when you drink from it.
The first hour is quiet. Joel rides ahead of you, his body swaying in the saddle, at ease on the back of a horse in a way you never will be. You do fine, but it doesn’t come naturally to you, just a little too stiff in the limbs, a little too aware of your body.
“So,” he says, when you’re only a couple minutes away from the first lookout, “we gonna talk about it or not?”
“About what?”
He slows until you’re riding side by side, late spring sunshine peeking through thick evergreen leaves. “Last night.”
“I don’t know what you mean,” you dismiss.
“Yeah, you do.” He glances away when you meet his eyes.
Joel’s throat bobs.
Nervous, maybe, with the sun slatting over his chest, weaving between green. You aren’t sure what to say to the accusation, neither of you are the type to confront feelings with words.
The silence grows legs and runs away from you. You need to say something, you must.
The anxiety around his eyes causes something weak and soft to catch in your chest, a weight that sits uncomfortably close to the base of your throat. “It’s not you.”
“Feels like it,” he grunts, guff but not angry.
“No.” You shake your head and nudge your horse ahead of his, heart leaping against your ribs because no is not enough. It would not be enough for you; why would it reassure him?
You dismount and do your rounds in silence, signing the logbook for both of you, before the silence, your voicelessness, starts to gnaw at you.
“It’s really not,” you say, to the pen in your hand, the still open book, your name and his separated by a little slash.
His footsteps draw near, one hand circling your wrist to pull the pen from your grip. You resist the urge to turn in his arms. If you see his eyes, all your words will wash away. “All right. I believe you.”
“You deserve better. You deserve someone else.”
Someone without fishhooks in their heart, scarred over wounds from repeated reelings.
“Just explain it to me.”
Easier said than done, when you can’t explain it to yourself.
He chuckles, but the sound is dry and hurt. “I mean, hell, sweetheart, I’ve never felt like a piece of meat before.”
You breathe out heavily and push yourself back into his arms, spine curving against his stomach.
He’s not.
He’s more than a culled carcass, more than a rib bone to pick your teeth with.
“I don’t want you to feel like that.”
More silence. The sound of his breathing against your back, the accordion contraction of loved lungs. “It’s me,” you repeat. “I-I don’t know how to say it.”
“Try for me,” he says, something encouraging but desperate in his voice. The cheek scrapes against yours. “Just somethin’. I need you to talk to me.”
You swallow and try, because his arms feel like a lullaby and not like a cage. “I don’t want to see myself. Or, see you see me.”
He digests that for a moment too long, and the quiet begins to feel oppressive. “We should go,” you strain against his forearms crossed over his chest. “We’re behind.”
Joel’s arms tighten. “We ain’t. We got time. You mean with me?”
“Joel.”
He says your name back in the same stern tone.
You shake your head and shift to gather his hands in yours, press them to your chest, count the grain in the wood of the desk beneath the log book. “No. I want to look at you. I’d watch you all the time if I could. It’s me. I’m disgusting.”
The words crowd and escape in faltering lines, soldiers felled on a battlefield. It comes out jumbled and unclear. The revulsion, the shame; the need and want that felt distorted and wrong but that you ache for anyway, that always ultimately back to the shame and disgust and aversion and horror.
“You know we don’t—”
“Yeah, Joel, I know. It really is me. And it’s not fair. I understand if you don’t want to continue—”
Continue what?
There is no label. Not that it really matters. You belong and that’s what has always mattered. Maybe it isn’t enough, maybe you’ve been terrible to him.
You have sex and refuse to stay at his house and don’t look at him when you want to, definitely don’t want him to see you or to see yourself. What would you call that? No wonder he feels like carrion with you.
Vulture on a post, teeth licked clean.
“I understand if you don’t want me.”
Understand if he doesn’t want your sharp points pressing into the soft of his open palms.
He squeezes your body, ther pressures nice before he releases you and turns you in his arms. “That’s not what I was gettin’ at.”
“Okay.”
There’s sunshine behind his head, yellow and slow moving. You keep your eyes on his, gazes locked and unwavering. “You’re lookin’ at me fine now.”
“We didn’t just have sex.”
“Is that what it is?”
You frown, mouth twisting to the side, and look away. “I like having sex with you. I like making you feel good. I don’t like seeing myself. I don’t like knowing you can see me.” It doesn’t make sense to you, how could it ever make sense to him? You shake your head, “Even just knowing I’m naked in front of you is enough, even if I can’t see myself.”
“What happened?”
“I don’t remember,” you breathe out. “Or some of it, I do. I don’t know. I want you, and then I feel bad. I feel wrong and sick and I leave and—”
He shakes his head. “Don’t have to keep goin’. I get it.”
“I’ve been like this ever since I can remember,” you keep going anyway. “I’m not going to change.”
He strokes your arm. “That’s all right.”
“Is it?”
It’s comforting that he takes a moment to think about it, that he doesn’t just tell you what you want to hear. “Yeah, now I understand it.”
“But I want you,” you say. “You understand that, too?”
“Yep.”
“Joel.”
“I do, darlin’.”
“It’s not you.”
“I hear you.”
You nod, and let him lead you back outside, to the horses, the gleam of the revolver in his hand comforting as you push through the gap in the wall back into the noon sun.
The rest of the day is easier, normal, tension loosened and unspooled.
He kisses you and holds you and it makes you cry. “You mean somethin’ to me,” he says.
You repeat the words and hope it’s enough.
.
.
.
Embarrassment like candy coated shame.
“We don’t have to,” he says.
“Are you trying to fix me?” you ask.
“I want you to like it.”
“I do like it.”
“I ain’t trying to fix you.” He shakes his head. “Nothin’ to fix.”
But there is.
And what if this is just how you are? You tell him about the shame of your fingers between your legs, the regret and disgust, how dirty you feel. He’s beginning to understand you, and you try to stay, try to sit with your shame at the desire in your stomach.
“If you don’t want me to, I won’t.”
“It’s never that I don’t want you to. It’s after.”
Joel slides his hand between your legs, threads his arm around your waist, tugging your ass flush against his hips when you lay like spoons tucked together in a drawer. “You sure?”
Sometimes, it feels as though he’s the only thing you’ve ever been sure about, secure in. “Mm.”
“All right.”
“I’m not glass, Joel.”
He grunts, the laughter a knotted tangle in his chest against your spine. “Trust me, I know.” His broad hand flattens and shifts upwards, along your sternum and between your tits. He cups the flesh of one breast in his calloused palm, squeezing and kneading softly until you breathe out sharply. “There now. Relax, baby.”
A shiver rakes up your spine, nipples stiffening against his warm hand with the whispered chill, the sharp pinch of his fingers against the bud.
You close your eyes and try to let your body melt back into the soft shell of his body. This is the easy part, letting him touch you, tuck pleasure into your hands, feathered through your fingers, shifting the turbulent landscape of your thoughts to the edges of your consciousness.
His other hand is still cupped against your pussy, middle fingers pushing between your lips, brushing your clit but only barely through the thin fabric of your underwear.
The touch is slow and deliberate and steady.
When you whine and roll your hips against his hand, he kisses the back of your neck. “Tell me.”
“Joel.” His name is a whine in your throat.
For a moment you think he might tell you to open your eyes, but he pushes his hand beneath the hem of your underwear. He pushes your thighs apart, coos at the slick pooling between your legs, one finger pushed inside you.
He’s good at it, touching you, pulling ugly sounds from your mouth, thready nylon chords that twist around his fingers and wrists.
You curl your hand around his wrist and push him closer, grinding against his wrist. Joel kisses the back of your neck again, the humid warmth gathering on your skin. “You’re already close,” he says as he adds a second, stroking your walls, stretching your pussy with his fingers thicker than you own.
There’s a teasing lilt beneath his voice that makes you whine.
“That’s good,” he coos. “Real good.”
You shudder and hum.
The messy spread of his thumb pulls you apart, slides over your clit until you moan, clawing at his veined forearm, jaw clicking with the effort to stay silent.
He pulls your shirt up and an uncertain thought clicks in your mind. It’s an uncomfortable slotting, a misfired gun. Everything stops for a moment, unsteady and frigid. “I got you,” he says, voice low and graveled in your ear. “You’re all right.”
Nausea, thickly carpeted in the back of your throat, burgeons with the uncertainty. You know now that he notices, and, worse, he knows what it means.
“You’re all right,” he soothes again. “You just think about how good you’re gonna feel on my cock.”
A shiver traces a finger down your spine, pooling warm and thick in your belly. You squeeze your eyes shut, force yourself to focus on his hands, between your legs, squeezing your chest, the wet press of his scratchy mouth behind your ear, along your jaw.
The thoughts unspool and float away, and, even knowing that they will return with a vengeance and bite you with sharply pearled teeth, you let them.
Joel’s got you, as always, as ever, and you have to try.
You turn your head just enough to meet his eyes. His gaze shifts to yours away from the caress of his hands against your skin, the reflection of you buried deep in his irises. His hair is graying, sticking to the sweat on his temple.
“Is that all?”
He moves his hand to stroke your cheek with the backs of his fingers. “Don’t get smart.”
You laugh, just a little, and keep your eyes on his. “I’m sorry,” you say, but not for being snarky with him, but for the rest of it. Sorry there’s something wrong with it, that he noticed it, that he has to deal with it
“Hey, now,” he murmurs, voice gentled, a distant roll of thunder, a soft hushing of a spooked animal. “You just focus right here.”
You nestle your forehead against the scuff of his jaw when he moves his hand again. The thread looped around your belly tightens again when his hands resume their exploration, stretching your pussy around his fingers, thumb rubbing messy, tight circles into your clit, nipples pinched between thumb and forefinger.
You breathe out heavily against his skin, bristles of his beard digging into your temple. “Joel.”
“I know,” he coos, something desperate in his voice. “C’mon, darlin’. I got you.”
His mouth against the crown of your head, the socket of your eye.
Your orgasm shakes out of you like oranges from a tree, shuttering and rattling against your bones, body curling inward, hand slipping around his wrist to buck your hips against his fingers. His fingers are longer than yours and thicker, thrusting harder, massaging the soft inner walls in a way only Joel ever has.
You’re still trembling when he retracts his fingers and pushes you gently onto your belly, the click of his belt, the warmth of his body against your back.
He rubs his cock along your slit, tilting your hips up, hand beneath one knee, pushing it up toward your hip, spreading you open, giving him room to reach around you and keep touching you.
There is no time to be caught up in the web of your own misgivings, your terrible, testing shame, as he pushes into you, slow and easy, letting you feel every veined inch of him sliding home.
Praise in his voice, low words delivered against your hairline and the shell of your ear, makes embarrassment colonize in warmth beneath your skin. The shame remains suspended on the periphery of your awareness, suspended in amber and entirely unreachable for the moment.
Easy to turn your gaze from.
You reach for Joel, lock your fingers around his when he anchors his hand against the mattress beside your head. His fingers are slick between your own, his wrist damp with sweat when you press a kiss against his skin, lost in the heavy weight of his body over yours, the static of your mind muted.
You shudder when he makes you come a second time, coaxing it out of you with fingers slid between your thighs.
“There’s my girl. You got another one?”
He’s cutting off the spiral at the knees, not letting the tremulous fear well to the base of your spine. It feels far away.
“I want you to come.”
“You sure?”
“Mm.”
“Where?” He grunts, thrusting sloppily, mouth against your shoulder.
“Wherever you want.”
He slams into you, body curling up the bed, pressure building inside you again that will bluster into nothingness, a snowstorm of desire and pleasure. Maybe undeserved, dirty and not yours to have.
Joel pulls out, ropes of warmth on the curve of your ass and base of your spine, empty cunt pulsing around nothing, a weak third act. He grunts in your ear, hand at the base of your skull, holding you down, the slick sound of his hand around his cock.
The pressure of his hand keeps the rolling thoughts at bay, the heavy scent of him flowering around you, musky and warm, leather and oil and sweat.
He encourages you onto your back and wraps his body around yours, pulling you into his arms, words of gentle praise. Still, you are uncomfortably aware of yourself, the squish of your breasts against his chest, the ache between your thighs, that loosens the wrappings of your shame, the dirt beneath your skin. You feel dirty and wrong, and keep your eyes firmly shut against the vision of your skin.
The thoughts aren’t as sharp as they once were, teeth dulled on the weatherbeaten stone of Joel’s insistence that it’s all right to feel good, that he likes making you feel good. He’s tracing the skin that feels disgust with awe.
With his body over yours, chin braced on his shoulder, you can open your eyes. Joel’s bedroom glows with evening light, buttery orange, flames on the horizon. You stroke his spine, listen to the grounding sound of his heart. “You all right?”
Summary: One would think this road ends in something virtuous—a greenness so dazzling it hurt the eyes—and not the sort of man waiting in his far out removed solitude.
He was the experienced one, you the innocent. It should have been different. Maybe it should’ve felt different. And yet, there was something in him that made you feel very much the conquering one, you the baptizing one.
Rating: Explicit 18+
Content Warnings: Post outbreak; Jackson Joel Miller; Dom/sub undertones; Rough Sex; Impact Play; Face Slapping; Spanking; PIV sex; Ass Play; Oral Sex (m!receiving); Come Eating; Throat Fucking; Unprotected Sex; Potentially Toxic Dynamics? (haha?); Complicated Feelings; Brief mention of virginity loss; Brief blood mention; They Love Each Other in Their Own Weird Way, Ok?; Older Man/Younger Woman; Idk What This Is, I Don't Expect You to Either;
A/N: miss you guys, sorry for the disappearing act <3
Word Count: 3.1K
Read on AO3
Notes On a Virtuous Affair
Sunlight spills over everything, and the pastoral green leads you to him.
One would think this road ends in something virtuous—a greenness so dazzling it hurt the eyes—and not the sort of man waiting in his far out removed solitude.
But there’s an incongruity afoot here that only you appreciate.
The secret lies in that there’s a riddle woven through the three miles you pilgrim to see him weekly. The first, a boon, the green lush wasteland, if a thing that’s alive can be wasted. The second, an honesty, I’ll venture this distance for him. The third, a precursor, when your muscles start to tingle, your thighs, hot and itchy, nape, coated in a taste of salt. Your feet crunch along the gravel and dirt, protected by the soft leathered boots inherited from Lucy who’d died last Monday. A good start to the week, with new boots, and a thoughtful gift she’d left you, your friend, when your own shoes were so worn from all the walking you do for him. The end of the world changes death, finds good things within it.
The sun warms the bridge of your nose, and you tip your face up to the too-bright light, trying your hardest to look straight at the intensity of it. He’s very much like this too. Why would you look directly at the sun if not for the hurting it brings? Your palms splayed forward at your sides, the breeze moving through your fingers, and the world is all around you alive in this apocalypse.
Jackson is left further and further behind as you move towards him, and what no one understands, not even Joel Miller himself, is that there is something virtuous about this affair.
-
“I’m gonna fuck your mouth now,” he says down at you, bare as the day you were born and kneeling before his clothed and towering height. Nothing but the heavy hanging length of his cock is naked for you, the first you’d ever seen in your whole life. If he had his way, the only one you’d ever see for the rest of it. The wide head is slick and glossy, the way it bobs obscenely from his open jeans looking like the weight of it would hurt, the way it juts from the bed of hair at this groin like a threat to you.
You know now, after all his focused training, that it only hurts him when you don’t tend to it as he needs, that it’s only a threat when you fail to do the same. He’s shown you the rules of hurting, in all these months you’ve come your three promised miles to him time after time. Shown you how it comes easy, that of hurting someone you love. A running in place sort of thing. You know all the steps that will come, the exact spot you’ll tread in. The way to propel yourself forward to finally leave that same place, avoid it, if you want.
“Open wider. Won’t fit like that,” he clicks his tongue, voice a burr as he grips his throbbing flesh and with the other too big hand, also like a seeming threat, but not, he gives you a quick, softly stinging slap to the high of your cheekbone. The sound, fast and snapping like his disapproving tongue. You swallow a moan, looking up at him with that look in your eyes you know disturbs him, adoration, letting the hinges of your jaw go loose, saliva pooling beneath the cover of your tongue. “Don’t you want me?” He asks.
And you blink once, moan crossing the bridge to a laugh if your mouth wasn’t stretched wide as it’ll go. He sees it though, skipping water in your eyes and gives that half smile, the mean one, the one that says he has all the answers in the world, knows all the things there are to know, that one you like best. Good girl, and his voice makes no sound, only the shape of the words on his mouth. You haven’t been good enough yet to hear the real thing of them out loud. This tells you that you must apply yourself to the task at hand, making him come.
One heavy tap to the flat of your tongue sticking out for him first, and then he’s slicking that fat head against the surface, giving you the first real taste, salt and musk trickle down the back of your throat and you moan again, eyes screwing shut tight, cunt aching something fierce. Leaking just like the tip of his cock leaks too.
That’s the thing about this thing, the one you see very well and Joel still fails to. The two of you, as disparate as you might seem, are the same in all the basic but most important ways. Too much in common for him to look at in the eye comfortably and still do the things you do.
“Open your throat. Get me hard.” In your head, he calls you baby. In reality, only sometimes, when you’re extra good, does that happen. But in your imagination, where it matters more, he doesn't ask nice, but you are his baby.
He slides back, back, hits the end of your throat, pulls out against the wet heat of your tongue. You keep your jaw wide until you feel him harden entirely, until he stretches his neck back, tendons jumping stark, clench of his jaw fluttering with a choked groan. “Suck me,” your permission to savor him like you need to.
Hands pressed firmly to your bare knees, not digging at your soft wet like you’d like, or pawing at him as you’d like even more, you close your lips around him, cheeks hollowed and suck hard, tonguing at his slit on the pull back so that he’s bearing his teeth at you in a growl and shoving forward again hard, a snarl as the cinch of your tight throat strangles the head of his cock on every one of your swallows. Your eyes water, but he pets softly at the same spot he’d stung earlier with his slap.
A game you used to play with your siblings, who could slap one another harder until the other gave out. It’d taken a while for you to come to the realization, but eventually, you’d realized the memory of it in your mind as it exists now wasn’t innocent the way it should’ve been. That there had been something you’d liked about it in a strange way—that hurting. That the first time you’d asked Joel to play the same game with you, you’d wanted him to slap you other places just as hard until you gave out also.
The games were part of the thing. His own strange rules, like the way you couldn’t touch him sometimes—you dig your bitten down nails into the soft skin of your inner thighs—only when he said it was okay was it allowed. The way you were never allowed to touch your cunt unless he said so also. He had weird things about him, turned strange by the dangerous ways of life. Like the solitude, the house out and away, the begging you had to do for him to have you.
Sameness.
He wraps his fist in your hair, more sting, “Gonna fill your belly with my come, yeah?” His thrusts pick up pace, pulling your head back as far as your neck allows so that he can fuck your throat in full, jaw hanging wide, and you’re just the wet and willing hole you know he sometimes wishes you could always stay as.
The thick cock against your tongue throbs once, twice and then he’s spilling hot and heavy down your open throat, sweet salt against the back of your tongue while you try and breathe through his strangling, tears spilling.
When he pulls back, slipping wet and heavy from your mouth you fall forward onto your palms, breathing fast, almost hyperventilating, stinging with the forced will to remain obedient. Your spine burns beneath your skin and your sore jaw hangs unwillingly open, sloppy mouth dripping a string of semen between your splayed palms.
He crouches before you, dripping cock like your mouth, milked to heavy softness hangs long and sated between his thighs. And he pets your crown, the vulnerable shell of your ear, whole body on fire so that every inch of skin hurts without his touch, hurts worse with it.
“Good girl,” he says now with voice.
-
The walk seems longer some days. A thousand miles plus an eon instead of merely three. Especially on the days you’re more desperate than usual. The ones when your stomach feels full of sugar for him and the memory taste of his cock is already aching in your molars. Those days your steps are hurried, look in your eyes frenzied to get to him, to escape the things you leave behind. A too full house, your sister’s squalling, teething baby, your little brothers, and too many mouths to feed and not attention to be had, not enough mother for everyone to get loved.
There’s reasons for this game between the two of you, you’d had to come out and find your attention somewhere else.
Your love too.
And if it comes with a sting sometimes, well, so had your mother’s. You like it like this now.
The first time he’d touched your cunt: show me that pretty pussy, baby, and he’d had you from that very first sweet word, you gonna let me finger it? You’d spread wide, leaked into the cup of his palm like a whore, you’d needed to make sure he was for keeping from the first try, you see. So you’d done all he’d said, taken four fingers and only cried a little bit but whined a lot. Been all, hurts, Joel, high pitched and dragging his name out on a puppy whimper.
He’d given you that first lesson in hurt the very first time: Yeah? Supposed to. A real mean man. And then made you gush into that very cupped palm so that he could drink of your sweetness.
He was the experienced one, you the innocent. It should have been different. Maybe it should’ve felt different. And yet, there was something in him that made you feel very much the conquering one, you the baptizing one.
The third mile comes to an end, the precursor, over, his house in view. It’s all quiet and slumbering and the long grass pulls you forward with its wind blown sway. The wide door to his shed is propped open, half finished rocking chair up on the workbench that sways with the intruding gust. The grass whispers behind you, the dark woods across the field moan, and he’s nowhere while the Tetons loom in the distance.
You drag your fingers along the slats of his house as you pass, everything is so quiet, like he’d never been here. Like he’d gone and left you the way he’s promised he’d never do. Your belly feels bloated with heat, heart turned into four incongruous chambers that no longer beat in tune, memories of him rioting between each thump. Your cunt goes soft and drooling in your panties as your fear beats higher and higher, and you come to the mouth of the shed, peering into the cool darkness of this little place where he makes his beautiful things. The things that go into people’s homes to be used by people’s families to be stored in people’s memories.
The gleam of the sun does not cross the threshold, and you brace your palms on either side of the wide door, the air thrums and he’s not here—yet—you slide the toe of Lucy’s old boot across the border of sunlight into sanctuary and peek your closed-eyed face into the shade right before you’re taken bodily to the ground by his heavy weight. Palms catching splinters, his strong chest heaves into the line of your spine, strong arm at your waist to pull your breath from your lungs and your legs from under you.
He forces you belly first to the ground, other hand circling your throat in the imitation of a strangle lest you lose yourself and decide to struggle for the first time ever. But you dig your fingernails into the dirt, scratching for purchase in preparation of what’s about to come, all the fight going out of you; body, half in shadow, half in sunlight. Your bones feel salt bleached. An over abundance of sodium in the blood that renders you catatonic for him.
He nuzzles soft at your nape while his hand shoves under your dress, ripping your underwear down your legs so that the elastic cuts into your tender skin to hurt. All incongruous movement, this man is.
“Didn’t your daddy ever tell you not to go creepin’ ‘round strange men’s homes?” His voice is so deep, drawled, broken up into different notes of lust and anger and temerity. All the strange things that make Joel Miller up.
Yeah, you sigh into the dirt. “Told me exactly how it’d go for me if I did.”
You hitch your rump up then, presenting your cunt for fucking. The breeze doesn’t do half to soothe the throbbing wet. The sort of ache that’ll only be fixed by something heavy inside the hurting place. The sound of his belt quiets the disparate chambers, the beat in your ears of rushing blood is uniform now, there’ll be a wet spot in the shape of you in the dirt when he’s through. You lift your hips higher, knees scraped rough as you spread wider, face pressed to the ground and your fingers are well and burrowed in their little gouges now.
He smacks the heft of it against you asshole, spits and presses a little. He likes to scare you sometimes. Nooo, Joel, all whining stutter, but with your back arching deeper like a little babied liar; you don’t mind where he puts it, only that he puts it somewhere.
“Hush,” he soothes all nice, spanks your ass once all not— “Gonna teach you a lesson.” And shoves inside, bumping against your womb on the first try, stretching your hole too wide, too quick. And there’s no prep, no qualm. No need to hesitate when you own a thing. You swallow your animal cry, ah ah ah, you want to hear how good you’ve been out loud. He grips your hips tight enough to bruise which is what you know he wants and fucks hard and fast, each swing whistles with ownership.
He fucks you in the dirt like an animal, and this affair is virtuous.
He teaches you the truth about hurting, about ownership, about so many things that only a man like Joel Miller could teach a girl like you. And all the while he tells you that you’re too pretty to take such an ugly fucking.
The way he works your cunt, hungry, balls swinging wet so that they sting like his slaps, tip battering hard so that it aches like gratitude.
These are the things three miles give you. A whole man to teach you about the whole world.
The slick squelch of your overwhelmed cunt sounds loud, no more disparate heartbeat, no more green grassed whispers. Only the sound of his grunting above you like an animal remains. “You’re the perfect little cunt. You know that, baby?” There it is, you sigh. Start to tremble around him like that, like his good baby that you are, desperate flutters, little gash being fucked into obedience like you need. Your overwhelmed pants make little dirt dream clouds before your eyes as you start to come for him, crying his name, crying your love, crying that you’re so, so thankful.
“Don’t stop, Joel. Not yet.” And he loves it when you beg, loves it when your cunt pulls tight like a knot.
“Not yet,” he promises because he might be a real mean man, but he loves you like separating salt from blood.
Complicated and precise.
When he’s through with you, there’s sunlight spilling over everything again. It’s journey goes on and on, and his semen drips from your cunt now. He turns gentle, thrusting still, making sure it’s fucked deep, pulsing in time with your own throb. Rhythms merge between the two of you.
His rules are strange, his claims over you equally mysterious. He won’t say things out loud, won’t let you touch any real part of him, but his strange truths ring loud anyways, and when your heart isn’t disjointed, you hear him perfectly well.
When he lays you out bare and trembling across his messy bed, the groaned pains of his age and rutting in the dirt like an animal sound from him as he drapes himself alongside you. Large and hairy, feet hanging off the end of the bed, entirely real with one knee propped up so that his thick cock lays heavy and soft over the swell of his belly. Your heart beats soft and overfull now.
You watch the sun set across the planes of his chest and bask in the blue dark as the night draws breath around you. The work of meting out obedience to little girls who come searching for it is toiling, and you watch him melt into sleep, but right before he’s just gone away from you, with a single finger petting at the jut of the old broken bone in his shoulder, your whispered plea: Will you give me a falseness? You don’t call it a lie. This is a virtuous thing, after all.
Lies aren’t allowed in this house.
He breathes a deep sigh, and you watch the fan of his long lashes sweep open, staring up at the shadowed rafters of his home. You swear you can see each and every individual whisker in his thick beard, dark and gray dispersed throughout. You see every single detail.
He’d told you once there were ghosts here, in this house, and you’d learned later it wasn’t a lie. This became more and more obvious the more you got to know him.
He stares up at them now.
When he’d taken your virginity, when it’d left you the way you’d always imagined it would, covered in tears and blood and semen, you’d made that promise to each other. That you wouldn't lie, that he’d have all of you, that you’d not touch all of him. The ghost lay beside you in the damp bed of your lost innocence that day. It’d been just so ever since and over many miles of three you’d come to appreciate the realities of it. Who could be more connected than two people who always tell each other their truths exactly as they are?
“Give me a falseness,” you say again, not a lie.
“A good kind or a bad kind?”
You flip a mind’s coin, wish you could see the exact ghosts he sees— “Bad.”
He turns to look at you, this half smile he wears is your second favorite one now, the honest one, and it’s all there for you to see. All the disparate chambers of Joel, just like your heart beating in your ears. You suppose the ghosts don’t matter then.
“I don’t love you.”
And you nod solemn. Bad, like a whisper, like your game.
You smile back, the one you know he likes best, the one that looks like his.
Summary: do murder and mutilation count if you're just a girl and bad men deserve it?
-OR-
joel miller as the unhealthy coping mechanism and/or muse.
Rating: Explicit 18+
Content Warnings: qz boston au; graphic depictions of violence; attempted sexual assault; murder; blood&gore; discussions of sexual assault; assault attempt is NOT perpetrated by joel; morally grey fmc; brief use of misogynistic language; consensual! but not safe or sane; obsessive behavior; rough sex; use of restraints during sex (m!receiving); unhealthy relationships; somnophilia; vaginal sex; anal sex; power dynamics; mentor/protege, kinda sorta; dead dove: do not eat
A/N: heyyyyyy, happy father's day or whatever.
see end notes if you want a brief overview of the TWs before reading.
Word Count: 5.3K
Read on AO3
The first time I saw him kill someone, he was saving me.
Bare-bruised knuckles against split-slick flesh, over and over until there was brain matter splattered against the concrete. When he’d pulled his fist back for the last time, a pause to make sure the body was well and truly dead, it shook like he was afraid of what he’d done. Or, that’s what I told myself, anyway. That he’d frightened himself.
One of us needed to be disturbed by his brutality, after all.
If it’d frightened him, it meant he was good. Decent. Just another lick of proof.
A knife had been pulled from his waist and slipped quick and shucking into the body’s temple. I’d never seen something like that so up close before. It’d startled me at first, the jut of the knife. I had the sudden thought, don’t kill it, please, do not kill it. But then it was done, and I was glad for it.
And when I’d rushed back to my damp box room only to find slick lust against clinging cotton, I’d known it hadn’t been me, the frightened one.
She calls it an attempted break in, later, because she’s never liked the word rape.
Who does, of course? Caught unawares—she was new at this, after all, the business of smuggling or watching out for her own life—she’d been unprepared, fumbling a second too long with her gun before they were on her. Unpracticed in watching the blind spots, the dark corners. Didn’t know what to listen for and how a creaking door isn't always just that. An easy fist to the gut and a heavy boot crushing her hand and temple, her head painfully crooked, neck stretched and forced to stare one of the grunts in the eye as they all wrestled her to the ground. He was ugly and drooling, and if she focused on the memory of it, past the slimy cold claws and huffing breath touching her body everywhere, she could remember the saliva pooling at the corners of his mouth while she was touched against her will.
There had been six of them, against one girl. Which, aside from the act at hand, was just plain cowardly. One could’ve had her easy, she wasn’t very good at defending herself just yet. But now, maybe, she thinks she’d needed the incident to inspire her application to the strengthening of her body. And it’d worked afterwards, anyway. There was that.
And then there was him.
Now that was a man adept at making his body do the things he needed it to do.
Maybe he didn’t know the Pandora’s box he’d been opening when he’d done it. When he’d snatched that worm from between her legs, and had gone and gone and beaten until the face had caved in and his knuckles were split; an unsanitary mingling of blood. Maybe he wouldn’t have stepped in if he’d known what it was he’d open inside of her after that.
She thinks—later, though—what an unfair approximation of his character that’d been. He would’ve always stepped in.
It could’ve been called admiration, afterwards. By some.
He called it obsession. Obnoxious. Child’s fantasy. She called it a gateway, the whole thing, the men and their hands and his killing. The moment.
She’d become obsessed with picking apart the minutes she’d lain on the floor of that dark and damp warehouse until the fingers in her mind bled. How cold the concrete against her back had been where her shirt had ridden up, the gravel burn of torn skin and the sandpaper feel of foreign hands. The way they’d said she wanted it. The certainty within herself that she hadn’t, and how disgusted she’d been. And then, other things. Like how close it’d come to happening and how abruptly he had just made it stop. The quickness of it all. How it hadn’t really happened but it had. How it planted things inside of her chest cavity that weren’t there before.
Most of all, the sight of him killing the man. The nucleus of the memory. How the surface of the face had become sunken little by little. The nose concaved into the mouth, forehead like a bowl until the white of bone jut forward and cut his knuckles. How all the rest of them hadn’t even tried to fight him because they knew him by reputation alone, scared enough to run fast. How a human could become so frightening, his mere actions spoke his name in silence.
And then his hand with a tremor, extending towards her.
“I know you’re scared, but you’re okay,” is what he’d said when he was done with it.
How could he have known, though, if that were the truth or not?
But then her body had felt totally numb, almost perfect, completely fine. The only thing hurting, the inside of her throat where she’d screamed her animal screams.
Maybe she was not so afraid, not so hurt. He’d shown her something— What was there to be afraid of now? —How to kill.
First, you hunt for his name—
After, he'd led you back towards the QZ—careful to keep his distance from the wounded animal— when the quick skip of a large stag had come out of the forest brush to startle you both. It’s gait heavy and thumping, skipping in a zig zag, good at running away to avoid capture. He hadn’t said anything more after, and his abject silence had somehow been more unsettling than the fleeing animal or the brutal mauling of a human skull. He’d turned right back around and gone once you were safely delivered. Be more careful next time, he’d said, just as quick as he’d come. An abruptness of a sort that makes one well aware of how significant a person can be. Whole world tilting sort of thing because you’d turned to watch him go, and known he could not go away forever, that he’d be important still, that you needed to know more.
Joel Miller, that’s what they say his name is. Stay away, they add, too.
And there’s a woman, Tess. You go after her first. Slotting behind her in line for ration cards, can’t fucking stand the stench of these bootleg chemicals anymore, after a sanitation shift. She provides nothing more than a quick flash of a sideways glance, but when you see her at the commissary a few days later, going for the last box of overpriced tampons, falsely gracious in letting her take them, there’s recognition in her face, the willingness to chat now, too.
His Tess, she’s the one that gives up his name first.
It’s the second thing you ask, if they're together. Unabashed in your prying, masked as silly, girlish inquiry. Someone once, a long time ago, had taught you how to be a good liar. And you lie and lie and lie to the woman, and it’s a little embarrassing to see how easily she believes the earnestness on your face. You tell her about a boyfriend, who does sort of exist, but only when there’s an itch to be scratched and you’re in need of an easy fuck. What’s the use in love at the end of the world? Nothing but a guaranteed death.
You’d always thought to avoid the artifice of it at all costs. No need to drag around an iron lung in your chest, life was already rotten enough.
From there on, it’s easy. To ingratiate yourself with Tess, to slot yourself into their complicated little life. A third pair of hands can’t ever be a bad thing, or at least that’s what she tells Joel when he’s angry at your presence. You think he doesn’t like the reminder your face brings, of that ugly almost-moment. But after that first and singular time, you’re sure to never, ever let something like that take you by surprise again. Quick on your feet and good with knives if not your fists, you’re useful with the added bonus of a smaller mouth to feed and you learn quick, too. They both have a lot to teach you. Little protegé. You make sure not to ask for much, especially not when your eye is set on much larger game.
There is something, though, that does take you by surprise, in the weeks that follow. Which turns out to be nothing more than how easy the whole thing is—sowing discord between the pair of them. Perhaps it was less your own finesse, and more that Tess had already grown tired of him. How he didn’t feel exactly how she felt, love or whatever, maybe. Or how they were both just a little too type A for long lasting camaraderie. Maybe it was just that the whole world was dead and nothing is forever anymore, all partnerships, even those forged in blood and fear, eventually run their course.
Likely, though, it was nothing more than the regular human greed that ruins most things—both of them in want of someone to order around, and you, with the inclination to only obey one of them when you so chose to.
A lie here, an omission there, their house falls to pieces like it’s made of cards. No one seems to pay much attention to the spider in the cracks. Or at least that’s what you want to think. And when it’s only you left then, with a warm shoulder for him to console himself with, there are no real fangs to sink into his skin, but you imagine they’re there.
You have to show him you’re grateful, you reason, for saving you. Or you have to punish him, maybe. He’d opened a wound inside of you. Something delightfully festering that had maybe always been there, but that he’d ripped open by the mere act of saving a girl he didn’t know from something she didn’t want. Really, it was that he’d been the only man to ever do something good for you and not ask for payment afterwards.
And it’s easy to wear down such a lonely, broken creature. You see that in Joel eventually. He wants something so badly, he just doesn’t know what.
He fucks your mouth first. Real mean and rough-like. Something you’d offered as a little stress relief. He’d said he didn’t want to have full on sex because you’d end up getting attached, and he wasn’t looking for some young thing that couldn’t take a hint. He said he was unavailable, even though Tess hadn’t spoken to him in weeks. She looked at you with suspicion now when she saw you in the streets, like she knew what you’d done, what your intentions had been from that very first random meet in the rations line.
He said he didn’t really like you. But he’s a bad liar, and none of that really deters your persistence. Eventually, none of that stopped you from finding yourself bent over the kitchen table of some long-gone family’s abandoned home, his hips slapping wet and hurting against your ass, only a few weeks later.
In his defense, he really did try to keep to his word.
Joel Miller is an honest man, after all. Even if he is a killer.
In repayment of your debt, you teach him how to lie in a way that matters, a believable way.
You volley your little lessons back and forth. Where the best spots are to pilfer for things in long ago picked-over places. A good slight of hand to make a pull from deep in someone’s coat. How to shoot someone in the head without missing. How to breathe through your nose while a cock is lodged in your throat. Enough truth sewn through your lies to make your story believable. How to throw a knife at an angle that won’t veer. How to take a fucking without crying or complaining. The FEDRA soldier on Tuesdays and Thursdays posted on the East facing gate that’ll look the other way if you say or do the right things for him. How to make dessert without sugar or flour or milk and have it turn out actually good despite the fact. How to pretend. How to kill. How to get what you want.
He doesn’t notice at first, when you start to hunt them. Going out on runs together, coming home dirty and sweaty and tired but amped enough to fuck and then fall into an exhausted stupor, sweaty limbs intertwined; it keeps him distracted for long enough.
But people start to talk, after the third one goes missing and is later found chopped up and scattered in pieces. A well known gang through the QZ, the deaths start to cause a stir.
He starts looking at you funny after that one. Something like hesitancy in his touch, a subtle but cautious pause before he speaks. He tries to lie, to play it off, but you’re the one that taught him how to do that. Doesn’t he know it won’t work on the source? Men are always so stupid.
You kill them slow because the moment happened so fast. Taking your time to savor the way it feels to force each one of them out of their lives. You’re inventive about it, experimenting on how to approach each one differently. Reasoning that you remember the almost-ness of it so brilliantly because it happened so fast, and that if you take a more leisurely approach with your get-back, it’ll leave your mind quickly.
When there is only one man left, of the group of six, Joel starts to ignore you. When you come round, knocking on his door, trying to corner him when he’s getting off his shifts, the subtle brush offs, a heavy hand to your shoulder that tries to assuage you of his coldness. But you feel it and you don’t find it very fair, the fact he’d be frightened off by the very thing he wrought in you.
You’re only doing what he showed you to do at that very moment of your almost hurt.
It could be that he’s worried about attracting the wrong attention. The fact that you’re already on probation, an aside you’re not interested in dwelling on, for disorderly conduct, followed by an attack on a soldier several months back. It doesn’t really help your cause. You reason that he has a smuggling enterprise to keep going and the wrong attention could ruin things for him. You reason that you probably should not be going on a murder spree when you’ve already got eyes on you. But what must be done, must be done. And you do not like being ignored.
There is something else, though, that you have over him, that you introduced him to besides the art of lying, and that’s a great fuck.
Something more difficult for him to ignore or forget, than your words in the street are.
He’s sort of a coward about it. Sneaking in on you in the dead of night when you’re asleep and unable to force him into things he pretends not to want. Like he’s afraid to face you. Like he’s afraid of the questions you might ask and the answers he might give. Foolish of him to think distance might keep him safe.
One late afternoon, your face hot and sweaty with anger after you watch him actively turn the opposite way, ignoring you when you try to catch his eye, “Why are you ignoring me?” Because you want it said out loud, you kind of want him to acknowledge that he knows what you’ve been doing, even.
Do you want me? Do you like me? Could you love me?
Maybe he’s tricked you into believing in things you didn’t before. Who knows.
He’s getting off a shift, sweaty, too, dirty and grimy, that musk male scent of hard labor and a long day in need of a woman to soften it all.
“Not ignoring you,” he lies like you’d taught him, wiping his grimy hands down with an ever grimier rag, pushing dirt around needlessly.
“Oh, right,” you laugh. “You can sneak into my bed at night, but you can’t look me in the eye in the street. That it now, Joel?”
He looks around at your raised voice, wary of others listening in on your tiff. And the once over he gives you is mean, cold and condescending like a father readying to scold his unruly child for embarrassing him.
“Listen,” he sighs and you bristle, “We gotta talk—”
“Yeah, we do,” you cut him off. “You’re being kind of a pussy.”
“Watch your mouth, kid.”
That makes you cackle, head thrown back. “Kid. Not so much a kid when you’re balls deep inside of me, are you?” The words are ugly and you catch a woman hovering nearby out of the corner of your eye, her small shocked gasp and quick scurry away as you spit your obscenities.
His mouth tightens in displeasure and he takes you roughly by the elbow, yanking you down the street towards your room. “Don’t be disgusting,” he scolds, yanking your harder, whiplash to your neck. You try to dig your heels into the asphalt, reminded of your inability to fight off men who want to force you to do things you don’t want to do.
“Maybe that’s just me. Disgusting.” Your stubby nails trying to gouge at the skin of his wrist do nothing.
Maybe if it was possible to be rotten and still be loved, then you might be convinced to believe after all. But he’s doing a piss poor job of it so far. The both of you are, actually. This really is like you’re carrying around an iron lung. Feels terrible. And when he whips around abruptly, finally on the sorry stoop of your front door, he looks truly angry at you in a way you don’t think you’ve seen him look before.
“You’re killing them.”
That look, it almost makes you want to be sorry. To say, I’m bitter now, I want to be sweet again. I feel like a ruiner. Some strange emotion wells up in your throat, behind your eyes. Almost.
“Yes.”
Maybe it’s accusation mixed with worry mixed with fright, you don’t know. Because when the anger leaves his eyes and he drops your arm as if stung, it feels bad in a distinctly unpleasant way. He must see something sinister in your glassy eyes, to bring it forward.
Why can’t he see that this is all his doing, opening this thing inside of you and showing you how to do it as easy as a bare handed kill?
“The FEDRA goons’ll catch on, you’re not bein’ careful, and you’ll get caught ‘nd that won't be something I'll be able to get you out of. You’re out of control.”
“Not yet, I’m not.”
He shakes his head, disappointed look down his nose at you. “I won’t stick around to watch the crash out.” Very fatherly-like. You’d laugh in his face if you didn’t also want to cry in his arms just now, so you bare your teeth at him in an angry growl, and he’s the one to laugh in your face instead. Imagine an anger so weak it’s funny.
“Maybe we’re the same, Joel. Have you considered that? Maybe that’s what bothers you about it. That we’re too alike for your own comfort.”
“You only see what you want to see, that’s why bad things come your way.”
“That’s a mean thing to say, Joel Miller.”
“You’re bein’ fuckin’ crazy, not careful. I’m not stickin’ around to watch you hurt yourself. You understand me?” He’s really working himself up, red in the face. Real upset with a finger thrust into your nose that’s making you more emotional than you even think you really feel. But he’s got you all twisted up inside, obsessed and murderous and thinking you might believe yourself in love when you were so sure that wasn’t even possible. “Thinkin’ you’re so fuckin’ smart, so sly. I see you.” He thrusts his finger at your face, gets real close and personal. “I know what you are, you little mess.”
You have to force sound up through the knot in your throat, your voice cracks anyways, you swipe an angry hand at an escaped tear. “I’m just doing what you taught me. You can help me, if you want. If you’re jealous you’re missing out on all the fun.”
The look he gives you, eyes full of furious heat like he could throttle you. You can feel his panting breath against your mouth and those angry eyes flash to your lips for a second, and you know he wants to kiss you, too. Can’t even help himself. You taught him how to lie, how to trick his way into what he wants better than he already knew how. Showed him a good fuck. There’s things Joel’s obsessed with now, too, even if he doesn’t want to admit it. And it’s not such an easy thing to brush off as a weakness, an obsession, when the object of its desire is right in front of you and just as panting angry.
When he storms off in a huff, you make sure your mocking laugh is loud enough to follow.
He comes when it’s midnight dark outside, not like a ghost because Joel could never be something as ineffable. Whatever it is that can be worse than a ghost, though, that’s what he crawls into your bed as, you decide.
The night is dark. It is quiet. The air is still. If something bad were to happen, this would be the perfect moment.
You hang suspended in your dreamscape, not awake and not gone to sleep completely. The feel of his weight moving over you on hands and knees could be light as nothing the way you float on that edge. But the heat he radiates is unmistakable when he pulls the light sheet away from your damp body, and you can feel the bare heat of his naked thigh brush against the inside of your knee when he nudges your legs apart.
A coward is worse than a ghost.
He moves your limp body as he needs, spreading your thighs and hitching your hips.
“S’alright, just open your legs for me…yeah, baby, yeah. Lemme in, don’t need to be awake, just take it.” There’s the wet tuck of the wide head, “Here ya go, darlin’. Nice and easy.” Skin so hot it scalds, but so, so soft, too. The forward nudge, the slick slide because you were dreaming of this already, went to sleep wishing for it, so it’s tight and gripping but wet.
This is how one confuses lust with love. And you think: I want…I want. And I want it from him and he has to give it to me.
His thumb rubs along the stretch of your cunt around his cock as he sneaks his way inside your body, so sleepy, such a good girl, coaxing the taut skin to do what he’s demanding, gathering slick beneath the pad of his thumb to slide up the curve beneath your cheeks to press at your other hole, insistent on intruding even further.
You whine pitifully, still trapped in that half-dream place and he gruffs soft and chuffing in his chest, half braying buck, half soft, easily manipulated thing.
“You like this, baby,” he tells your half asleep form. “Like it when I use you like this.”
He’s got one arm bent over your head to cup the top of your skull, applying gentle pressure to press your body back into accepting his cock, and when he’s slid full into the hilt, fingers of his other hand hitching one knee higher to make more room for his bulk, he pauses and holds still to breathe into your neck. That’s what gets you to wake up completely. The concentrated scent of his body so close, the hot wash of his breath against your throat, the smell of his clean sweat blended with heat. Your own cold sweat blooms along the line of your vertebrae, and you can feel the thump of his aorta in his belly against the small of your back and deep in your cunt against your cervix, that thump thump thump. You wish you could reach in and take hold of that lifeline, grasp in your hand that which keeps him alive for you and guard it for him in thanks for his keeping you alive, too.
“So good, stay right there, just like that. Don’t move, baby, need this right now.”
He presses a very gentle kiss to your jaw, and then starts to thrust. You like that he’s always gentle when he sneaks up on you like this. That he’s always very careful about fucking you awake, ever aware of the fact that he’s taking something.
You moan softly for him, the feel of the wide head moving against the front wall of your cunt, rubbing against the sensitive spot there. The catch and tug at the ring of your entrance when he pulls his hips all the way back to slide in long and stretching next.
“That feels good, doesn’t it? Feels good to just lay there and take it. My little hole to fuck and fill whenever I want.”
You start to pant, quick and panicked, needing to get there already. You want it so bad. He presses in as deeply as he can go, tip to womb, grinding and you start to come, so hard it’s painful, like your insides are all stretched and wrong and bruised, and then suddenly pulls out of your belly with a wet, tight suction.
It forces a strangled little scream from your throat— “Come inside me, no, no, please, please, Joel. ”
“No.” —Your entire body spasms painfully and half-fulfilled.
“Don’t be mean to me. I can’t take it, not tonight, please— No, no, don’t, Joel—” Before he’s forcing that thick mushroom head into your ass, stinging and unprepared, and jacking the greater half of his cock to spend into your tight hole, his palm wrapped around your hip, fingertips pressed to the pulse in your groin to force you back onto his spurting erection. The sound he makes, loud, unrestrained groan with his hot, wet mouth pressed against your ear, the feel of his tongue licking at the sensitive dip below, and the unbearable heat of his semen bleeding into your belly, it makes your cunt spasm again, milking hungry at nothing.
Angry, greedy, starving tears slip from your eyes when he pulls out of your stinging ass. He doesn’t even frown when he sees your splotchy, tear streaked face, only licks them clean away like they’re exactly what he expected to slake himself with in the aftermath.
He’s a heavy sleeper when he’s in your bed. One of the silent reassurances because you know he wouldn’t be able to truly rest, to find real sleep beside you, if he didn’t trust you completely.
You straddle his waist, the soft thickness of his cock tucked between your bodies, and admire your handwork. The broad musculature of his chest, the thick vein, dark beneath his skin, running along his shoulder, highlighted by the intruding moonlight. You press the hard muscle beneath it, watching as the blue thread disappears for a moment and then bleeds dark again. When you grip his face, his lashes flutter for a moment, and then it’s just his stupid, animal eyes, helpless to your grace, following you even when you terrify him.
“I told you not to be mean to me,” you tell him, digging your nails into his cheeks. He looks at you blankly for a second longer, taking stock of his body, and then his head tilts up, up, following the line of his arms to where his hands are tied together at the bedpost.
The look he swings back your way, crooked brow and all, is condescending enough you take hold of his hardening cock between your bodies, tugging his hips off the mattress so he’s whimpering, hardening further immediately.
“What’re you up to, baby?” He pants, head falling back between his lifted shoulders, groaning when you squeeze the reddened head tightly.
“My turn to play,” you murmur, sitting back to admire the thick bulge of his biceps as he strains against the ties, his reddening chest.
“Fuck—that’s fuckin’ good,” Joel moans as you twist your fist around him, tugging his sac with your other hand, spitting to lubricate your fist moving up and down his length. He moans louder, your name, and his legs shift restlessly behind you, tipping you forward on your knees with the movement. You squeeze his balls tighter, trying to find your balance and he whines. There’s a tiny bead of sweat at the delicious notch of his throat that you taste with the tip of your tongue. Sweet and salty, both at the same time.
“Fuck, fuck, that’s enough now.” He widens his knees bent behind you, trying to dislodge your balance further, and you hear the creak of the headboard as he strains further against his binds, the muscles in his arms bulging obscenely. Your heart beats a panicked flutter of excitement. “That’s enough, you’re going to make me fuckin’ come—fuck.”
“I told you not to be mean to me tonight. I asked you to come inside me and you wouldn’t. You’re mean, Joel Miller, and I don’t like it.”
You shuffle your knees wider, and he looks down at you with glassy, delirious eyes, his erection throbbing almost violently in your grip.
“You’re bein’ a real bad girl right now.”
“I want you to love me,” you tell him, notching him at the mouth of your sex.
“I won’t.”
“I’ll make you.”
You press down on him until his thighs are against your bottom, both of you groaning ferociously at the tight fit caused by the angle you're bent forward at on top of him. Looping your arms around his neck, yanking his head back with your fingers in his hair.
“Fucking kiss me,” he demands, and you press your mouth hard to his, tasting his tongue. Tightening around him, you bear down, molding your chest to his. I’ll make you, I’ll make you, you tell him and he eats at your mouth, growling with the force of his strength when he rips the restraints free of the headboard to wrap one freed arm around your waist, pulling your hips still and lifted so he can pound up into you as hard as he wants until you’re both falling into your orgasm together, gasping mouth against gasping mouth.
When he’s finally caught his breath, he tells you, “If anyone could, it’d probably be you.”
The last of the six takes a long time to catch. Like a bad, sneaky rat that’s learned all the tricks. She takes too long, and he gets another girl, and what he does, it isn’t just an almost, not even just a breaking in. She’s forced to say the whole hateful word out loud. It’s all very brutal, makes her stomach hurt. Makes her cry and feel guilty and then relieved, terrified and then horrible again.
So when she finally catches him, she makes it really count, real slow.
“You gotta hold the knife like this. Forty-five degree angle, cock your wrist and press firm. But controlled. Don’t wanna go too deep, though, and knick the liver or he’ll bleed out right quick like a stuck pig. Real messy.” Joel’s instructions are clear, precise. “Yeah, good, like that. A little deeper.” The blood spurts, it is very red—arterial, too deep—the body bays like a dying thing.
“Thank you.” He knows what she means.
“Sure.”
She looks at him and he stares back at her.
“I told you I’d make you. Didn’t I?”
“You did.” His eyes are deep and soft. “Now focus,” he tips his chin at the dying body, “We’re almost done.”
Later, when Joel steps out of the old, abandoned house, her work cleared away not to be found, he sees that there is a large, dead stag just by the door, seemingly come out of nowhere—caught now.
End Notes: FMC is attacked and a sexual assault is attempted, she is pinned down and groped (body parts not specified) but Joel stops her attackers before it can be taken further. If you would like to skip ahead the description of assault starts from "She calls it an attempted break in..." and ends at "First, you hunt for his name."
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