hi! my name’s jen and i’m a 22 yr old US-based queer black writer/editor.
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i write for nearly all of jack o’connell’s characters so feel free to request any
i do dabble in real people fiction (rpf), you can always dm or request to see if i write for that person
fandoms i write for currently;
sinners (2025), game of thrones (hbo), hotd (hbo), succession (hbo), the north water (book & show), skins uk gen 2 (show), star wars (films & tv)
tw // cw // !! disclaimers !!
this blog will occasionally feature elements/discussions of smut, various types of abuse, dubcon, noncon, and other difficult subjects. If you are sensitive to such content or a minor—proceed with caution/dni.
headers, dividers credits to: @pixopix @strangergraphics @saradika-graphics @drinkthesky
screencaps credits: @scrprints kissthemgoodbye
character masterlists
❀ james cook
❀ kendall roy
❀ paddy mayne
❀ patrick sumner
❀ remmick
❀ roman roy
other
cassian andor - “so come on, mess me up” ⟡
jack o’connell (actor) - “can’t wait (to get next to you)” ⟡
a/n: s/o to the remmick loser discord (and @iceemochaa, ily) for encouraging this debauchery. y’all rock my world <3
Cook hadn’t exactly been the most subtle when it came to his newfound fascination but you struggled to think of an instance where the word ‘subtle’ and the young man ever coincided. He had tried numerous times during, though much to his dismay—you either batted his hands away or tapped out with a few smacks on his forearm. But he (finally) got what he wanted after an evening in, bingeing your favorite true crime series that wound up with the two of you entangled in your queen-sized bed. Cook had his bicep locked around your waist and was overstimulating you with his fingers to the point of tears. You squirmed and writhed and giggled and hiccuped, every noise being a result of his efforts to break you.
“C-Cook, f-fuck! Fuck!”
His forearm pinned you to the mattress, but also created an unbearable pressure as he bore a fair amount of his weight onto your lower belly.
“Yeah? Yeah? Like that?’ he bated with gritted teeth, “Hm?”
The squelching noises coming from between your thighs was obscene. Fortunately, you had secured your flat to yourselves, otherwise your roommate or any other house guests lurking outside your bedroom door would no doubt be privy to your and Cook’s activities. Between your squealing, Cook’s goading and your sloppy fucking cunt—the act was symphonic.
His fingers drove into you at a determined and specific angle. They were stiff, not like the usual ‘come hither’ style motion he relied on to get you off the majority of the time. He knew your body. He knew all the maneuvers that made you clench and throb and ache. It was all an intentional choice on his part. Cook had picked this mundane Friday night to experiment on you. Pity that you had apparently missed the memo.
Gripping the length of his arm with your nails, biting into the solid flesh, you attempt to pry him out of you.
“Somethin’ wrong?” he asks, out of breath.
You grimace, shaking your head. Your brain was soup and your words dribbled from your lips.
“N-N-No…mmph…feels like ‘m gonna pee,” you squeak.
Any other partner in your past would’ve halted their movements out of disgust and for some, out of concern. They would’ve withdrawn their fingers from your sopping wet hole and waited dotingly as the worrisome sensation left your body so the both of you could continue.
Not Cook. Not James fucking Cook.
He instead nods his head attentively at your words, slack jawed, now putting his shoulder into his motions. He slides into you even firmer and faster, aiming for a spot in you that you had teased and prodded only once or twice before.
“F-F-Fuck, Cook! I-I I mean it…shit…you’re so…,” your words trail off as you throw your head back onto the pillow behind you, “Fuck you!”
You contort and twist, cursing whatever it is that he clearly seizes within you. That he desires so bad, he’s yet to stop grinding against the bed. You still chase his hand with your revolving hips, gyrating against his wrist like you were stuck on it. In a way, you were. Cook made it a point to pin you to the mattress by your hip with his free hand. He was no Hercules but you in the back of your mind marveled at his ability to keep you in place so effortlessly.
“C-Cook, the b-bed…,” you try to reason.
His eyes stay glued to your glossy cunt, hypnotized by the warm wetness he keeps coaxing out of you.
“Don’t care…don’t care…don’t fuckin’ care,” he groans, lost in it.
Tears form in the corner of your eyes, beading until they run in two steady threads along your cheeks. The sensation in your core was raw like he was batting at an exposed nerve. It was almost starting to hurt until that looming sensation of something familiar but now in a much different setting eclipses. Like a reflex, Cook rips his two fingers out of you. With them comes a crystalline gush of fluid from your opening. It trickles over the cusp of your ass and streams down where your thighs meet your hips. Your moans have turned into brassy rasps you hardly even recognize. Cook on the other hand looks momentarily shocked but increasingly feral.
“Yes, yes! That’s a good girl! That’s it, that’s it! That’s fuckin’ it!” he growls.
Suddenly, he leans in and takes a rough, flattened hand to your clit, making brisk swiping motions that turn the gush into a deluge. It gets on his chin, the tip of his tongue that he flicks out to catch a taste, the collar of his t-shirt, and of course, the fluid has saturated the edge of your comforter where you lay. The swiping becomes firm, harsh slaps which keep the fluid splashing in every direction. Your clit throbs with ache, becoming more and more red from the abuse. Instinctively, your knees close inward, trying to shield yourself from his touch. Cook does not take this well. His slaps get sharper and meaner.
“Don’t you—dirty bitch, don’t you fuckin’ try to turn away from me,” he snarls, “Just take it, just take it like the slag y’wanna be f’me. C’mon,”
Eventually, the flood between your legs runs dry and rather than your legs closing together out of overstimulation, they collapse from sheer exhaustion. Cook breathlessly leans back on his knees, smug and pleased with the outcome. You should be embarrassed. You don’t know what just came over your body. You have an idea but you can’t be certain. Your hands, which had flown over your eyes towards the end, fall away from your face. You shudder and twitch, nerves still shot from the act. His soft baby blue eyes find yours in the bleariness of your tears and sweat.
“W-W-What…what was…was it…y’know?” you croak.
“And if it was…?”
“Then you’re sick,”
“...guess I am.” he grins devilishly, sucking your mess from his digits.
{thank you for reading!! now taking requests and ideas for future fics! check my fandom list in my pinned post for more info!}
you were only supposed to mind his appointments and type his reports, not dig up the fact that your quiet english employer is a cashiered army doctor from a cursed whaling voyage… and definitely not push him hard enough that he snaps and takes it out on you. (wc : 18k)
゛notes ⸝⸝.ᐟ⋆ based on this request ! jen, genuinely thank you for this idea 😩 i actually rewatched the north water while i was writing this (like repeatedly—almost 4 times). i also got the book so i’m happy to start that ! ignore any historical inaccuracies/dialogue misuse please… also, for the sake of the interview bit, reader's first language isn't english or german ( js vibe).
゛ contents ⸝⸝.ᐟ⋆ secretary!reader. rough / angry sex. boss–secretary power imbalance. post-canon!patrick. mentions of laudanum / opium use. implied violence / death at sea. obsession and invasive curiosity from reader. manhandling. desk sex. very light spanking. light hand on throat. unprotected p in v. creampie. messy sex. patrick cries after sex (yep). guilt / low self-worth. emotional vulnerability. mdni 18+
The advertisement had been brief, almost terse, as if whoever wrote it disliked the idea of asking for help:
Secretary required for medical practice. Must read and write English and German, possess neat hand, and maintain discretion. References preferred.
You read it twice in the window of the newspaper office, breath fogging the glass.
The winter light on the street was thin and grey; tram bells clanged somewhere up the avenue, and coal smoke lay over the city in a low, stubborn halo. Behind the reflection of your own face, the words stood stark and promising. English and German. Neat hand. Discretion.
You had all three.
So you went.
The address led you to a respectable building on a quieter street, a few turns away from the noisier thoroughfares. Not quite a grand boulevard, not quite a back alley; a place for people with modest means and tidy reputations. The brass plate beside the door read in crisp, newly-etched lettering:
Dr. Patrick Sumner
Arzt
Someone had polished it recently. You could see your own gloved hand when you reached for the bell.
A narrow-eyed porter answered and looked you up and down, taking in your coat, your boots, the way you held your shoulders. He did not quite sneer, but you had played this game long enough to recognize the little shift in his mouth that meant he was weighing your worth like a parcel on a scale.
“Regarding the advertisement,” you said before he could ask. “For the secretary.”
He hesitated, then stepped back.
“You may wait in the front room,” he said. “Doctor is with a patient.”
The waiting room was small but clean. Two stiff-backed chairs stood against the wall, a narrow table between them holding a vase with three sorry-looking carnations and a German newspaper folded to the society pages. A boiler ticked faintly in the corner, its warmth slow to reach the edges of the room.
The air smelled faintly of carbolic and wool, with an undercurrent of something metallic that made you think of a butcher’s shop after closing.
You took off your gloves finger by finger, tucking them into your pocket, and sat.
The muffled murmur of a voice carried through the door to the inner office, low and steady, threaded with another voice higher and strained.
You could not catch the words, only the cadence: question, answer, instruction, reassurance. The tone people trusted even when they did not trust their own bodies.
You hadn’t expected a foreign doctor.
The name on the plate had hinted at it, though; English, perhaps, or Irish. Men like that were either very good or very bad at reinventing themselves abroad. The advertisement’s demand for English as well as German suggested he had not entirely left his old life behind, whatever it was.
The latch clicked. The inner door opened.
For a moment, all you saw was the patient—a stooped man with a cough that shook him from shoulders to boots, clutching his hat in one hand and the other pressed to his chest.
He shuffled past you toward the outer door, murmuring a thick-accented thanks, eyes fixed on the floor as if ashamed of the air he took up.
Behind him came the doctor.
He was broader than you expected, and younger. Not young exactly, not fresh, but not yet worn to the thinness you had seen in some older physicians who had spent their entire lives in crowded wards.
His dark hair had been combed with brisk efficiency, though a few strands, some grey, had already slipped free at his temple. His shirt cuffs were spotless; his waistcoat was buttoned, his cravat tied with unassuming care. The lamplight caught on the faint sheen of fatigue at his brow.
He looked first at the patient to make sure he did not stumble, one hand half-extended as if ready to catch him, then at you.
The pause stretched hardly longer than a blink, but you felt the weight of it. The measuring. The question. His eyes were pale in a way that surprised you, grey-blue under straight dark brows, their tiredness doing nothing to blunt the keenness of his gaze.
“Miss?” he said.
“Regarding the advertisement,” you repeated, rising to your feet. “You sought a secretary, Doctor Sumner.”
Something moved behind his expression—recognition of the words he himself had written and sent into the world, perhaps, to see who they might draw.
He nodded, once. “Yes. Of course. Come in.”
He stepped back to hold the inner door open for you. As you passed, you caught a closer sense of him: soap and starch, a faint echo of tobacco, and under that the ghosts of less civilized scents that clung no matter how well a man scrubbed.
You took in the office in a swift glance as you entered. The desk broad, well-made, worn at the edges by years of other hands. The shelves, half-filled with medical texts in German and English, a few older volumes with English titles worn to ghosts on their spines. Glass-fronted cabinets with neatly arranged instruments that winked in the light. A single framed print on the wall, something pastoral and unremarkable, as if someone had chosen it deliberately for how little it said.
He gestured toward the chair opposite his desk.
“Please,” he said. “Sit.”
He rounded the desk, the movements efficient, and lowered himself into the chair on the other side.
For a moment the only sound was the faint tapping of his fingertips against the blotter, as though he were reminding himself of the proper order of things: interview, questions, decision.
“You speak English,” he observed. “Your accent is good.”
“My father insisted upon it,” you replied. “He said where I'm from was not the whole world.”
“Wise man.”
“He is dead,” you said, not unkindly. “But he was.”
A faint, almost imperceptible twitch at the corner of his mouth. Not quite a smile; more like an acknowledgment that you had matched his tone and returned it with your own.
“I am sorry,” he said, with the automatic politeness of someone who has had to say such words enough times that they no longer know what else to offer. “How is your German?”
You switched languages mid-breath, answering him in crisp Hochdeutsch, then sliding easily into the local Berlin inflection that softened certain consonants.
You explained where you had been born, where you had gone to school, the offices you had worked in, the ledgers and letters you had handled. You told him of the insurance company that had folded last year, the solicitor’s clerk who had tried to pay you in promises instead of coin, the aunt who had taught you to keep your handwriting small, neat, and quick.
His gaze did not wander once while you spoke. He watched you with the unblinking focus of a man listening for symptoms beneath the surface of someone’s words.
“And your references?” he asked when you paused.
You slid the folded pages from your bag and laid them on the blotter. He took them with careful fingers, smoothing each sheet before reading.
You had seen men skim such letters in less than a minute, looking only for the shape of praise, not the substance. He read every line.
“Diligent… accurate… discreet,” he murmured, translating softly from German as he went. “Exceptionally quick at figures… temperament could be more docile.”
You lifted your chin.
“He did not say that to my face,” you said.
“He would not,” Patrick replied without looking up. “Men who expect docility rarely do. This one—” he tapped the line “—was written by Herr Weiss?”
You nodded. “He prefers women who nod and smile and say ‘yes, Herr Weiss’ and nothing else. I prefer employers who do not fall asleep into their soup at noon.”
That earned you a more visible flicker in his expression. It passed for amusement, or something near it.
“I do not eat soup at noon,” he said. “So perhaps we shall suit one another better.”
“It would be difficult to suit me less.”
He set the letters down, aligning their edges with unnecessary precision. His gaze lifted to you again, lingering a moment longer this time, not in rudeness exactly, but with the thoughtful reserve of a man deciding whether to ask something he is not sure is his business.
“Are you married?” he asked.
The question sat oddly in the room, plain and abrupt after the rhythm your conversation had found. You shook your head.
“No.”
His eyes dropped briefly to the papers in front of him, then rose again.
“Well,” he said, with a formality that did little to soften the awkwardness of it, “you are young. You still have time.”
You looked at him for a beat, unsure whether he meant it kindly or merely as one repeats something the world says often enough that it begins to sound like sense.
“I suppose,” you said.
A small silence followed. It was not a comfortable one, though not quite unpleasant either; only faintly peculiar, as if the question had revealed a seam in him he had not intended to show. Patrick cleared his throat softly and returned the letters to the desk, restoring them to their tidy stack before continuing.
“You understand that this practice is new,” he said. “I have only recently come to Berlin. We are still establishing ourselves. The work will not always be steady. Some weeks will be very busy, others quiet. I cannot promise a fortune.”
“I am not asking for a fortune,” you answered. “Only for regular wages and work that will not rot my brain entirely.”
His brows lifted, faintly.
“You find medical administration stimulating?”
“I find not starving stimulating,” you said. “And I am very good at not letting mistakes slip past me. Most doctors I have met need someone to tidy in their wake.”
That drew a real reaction, subtle but unmistakable: a small stiffening in the line of his shoulders, the barest narrowing of his eyes.
You had touched something there, though you were not yet sure what.
“Most doctors,” he repeated slowly. “How many have you met?”
“Enough to know that they are all men,” you replied, “and that they all think their time is worth more than anyone else’s, and that most of them write as if their pen were a knife. I can read it, and I can make it legible.”
He let out a breath through his nose, somewhere between resignation and reluctant amusement.
“Very well,” he said. “I shall endeavor not to disgrace my profession’s reputation among you further.”
“You would have to work harder,” you said, and saw again that fleeting look—half startlement, half something darker that tugged at the corners of his mouth before he set his features back into their proper arrangement.
Silence settled for a moment, filled with the distant clang of a tram bell outside and the muffled thud of carriage wheels on slush. He steepled his fingers, studying you over the tips.
“There are certain… requirements,” he went on. “You will handle patient records. You will read correspondence intended for me. You will see names, conditions, histories. Some of them will belong to people of influence. Their privacy must be absolute.”
“Of course.”
“Discretion is not merely politeness here, Miss. It can be a matter of—” He hesitated, looking for a word, then chose, “—survival.”
The way he said it made you think he was not speaking only of patients.
“You will find I am very good at not repeating what I know,” you said. “Unless it is necessary.”
“Nebulous word, necessary,” he answered. “Who decides what falls under it?”
You let your gaze flick deliberately from his face to the letters on the desk, to the shelves behind him, then back.
“Whoever is paying me,” you said. “And, perhaps, myself.”
For the first time, his stare sharpened in a way that was not purely professional. It carried curiosity now, and something wary beneath it, as if he had recognized within you a familiar breed of stubbornness.
“I see,” he said softly. “You will wish to know certain things, then. To decide for yourself. Is that it?”
“I like to understand where I work,” you said. “Whom I work for.”
It was almost nothing, the shift you saw then, but you had a good eye for such things. The smallest tightening around his mouth; the very faintest line appearing between his brows. As if the words “whom I work for” had struck a place he would prefer remain untouched.
“I am a physician,” he said, just a shade too quickly. “I studied in England. I have practiced in London and elsewhere. My qualifications are in order. My patients are improving. For the purposes of your position, that is all that need concern you.”
“Elsewhere,” you repeated. “A very generous description.”
He did not answer that. His gaze drifted away for a fleeting second, to the window where pale daylight pressed against the glass, then back.
“Can you begin tomorrow?” he asked.
You had expected another question, another test. The directness of it startled you almost as much as his earlier moment of imprecision had. Your heart, which had been keeping a brisk, steady pace, stumbled once before righting itself.
“Yes,” you said. “I can.”
“Good.” He rose, you followed suit. “We begin at eight. You will see to the files, the ledger, and any letters that have arrived. I will explain the rest when you are here. Speak to the porter about the hours and wages on your way out.”
You smoothed your skirt, gathering your gloves once more.
“Doctor Sumner,” you said as you slipped them on, “do you want me to call you Doktor or Doctor?”
His mouth twitched again, as if caught between two languages.
“Doctor is sufficient,” he said.
“Then you may call me by my surname as well,” you replied. “If we are to keep up appearances.”
“Appearances,” he echoed, with a gravity that made the word feel heavier in the air. “Yes. We must keep those up.”
He walked you as far as the waiting room door. From there, you could see your breath already misting faintly on the other side of the glass entrance, the shadows lengthening on the street.
You paused with your hand on the latch.
“Until tomorrow, Doctor,” you said.
His gaze rested on you for a heartbeat, cool and steady, though you sensed something moving under its surface.
“Until tomorrow,” he answered.
You stepped out into the winter street with the new job settled in your pocket and his voice settled uninvited somewhere in your head, threading through your thoughts as you walked back past the shops and the stalls and the people who did not know there was a foreign doctor on a modest Berlin street whose past had been folded up and tucked away like a letter in a drawer.
You did not yet know what he had done. You only knew that his eyes looked like someone who had seen a horizon with nothing beyond it, and had lived long enough to walk away.
You also knew that no man who guarded his history so fiercely could possibly be as spotless as his references claimed.
That, more than the wages, more than the warm room and the steady hours, was what made you sure you would return.
The days that followed did not so much begin as slide into place.
You learned the habit of his footsteps before you learned half the streets between your boarding room and the practice.
He arrived before you on most mornings, the faint print of damp on the tiled floor leading to his office, coat already hung, lamps already lit against the grudging dawn.
The street outside would still be shaking off sleep, carts rattling over cobblestones, milk boys shouting half-heartedly, but in his rooms there was only the scratch of his pen and the soft hiss of the boiler.
The porter handed you a key on your second day.
“For when I am late and you are not,” Patrick said, as if that were a likely reversal. “There is no need to wait in the cold.”
You did wait in the cold once or twice, just to see what it did to him.
The first time you arrived after he did, cheeks numbed, lungs stinging from the air, he looked up and his eyes swept over the damp edge of your hem, the way you held your arms in against yourself as you wrestled your gloves off.
“You should wear thicker stockings,” he said, turning back to his paperwork.
“You could start paying me more,” you answered, setting your bag down on your little desk. “Then I might.”
For a moment you thought he would pointedly ignore you. Instead he dipped his pen, wrote another line, and said, without looking up, “If you take ill, you will be no use at all. I would prefer not to have to train a second secretary in as many months.”
“That sounds very nearly like concern,” you replied, rolling a sheet of paper into the typewriter.
“It is self-interest,” he said. “Do not mistake it.”
You did not. You did, however, notice that on the following week, when you hung your coat in its accustomed place, there was a small paper-wrapped parcel waiting on your chair: woollen stockings, plain but thick, the type sold by the dry goods merchant three streets over.
He did not mention them. Neither did you. You simply wore them, and pretended the extra warmth did not feel like a concession you had won.
You learned his handwriting the way one might learn a foreign script.
At first it was a tangle of loops and angles, impatient strokes that cut through letters or left them half-formed.
By the end of the week you could decipher his reports with scarcely a pause, fingers flying over the keys as you translated his scrawl into orderly lines.
“I have seen worse,” you told him one afternoon, when he apologized—stiffly, awkwardly—for the state of a particularly hurried note scribbled between patients. “I worked for a lawyer once who wrote as if the ink were trying to escape the page.”
“He is not alone in that,” Patrick said dryly. “Medical schools ought to add penmanship to the curriculum.”
“And manners,” you added.
He sent you a flat look that held the ghost of some deeper humor.
“Have you applied to teach there?”
You met his glance over the top of the page.
“I am already improving one doctor,” you said. “The faculty would be too much work.”
He did not laugh, but his mouth did that small, reluctant shift again, the movement so brief that if you had not been watching for it you might have missed it.
You learned the rhythm of the days.
Patients in the morning, a brief lull when he closed his door and you heard the steady murmur of his voice reading journals or letters from abroad, then another wave of people in the late afternoon.
Women with headaches and unspoken terrors, men with coughs that rattled their ribs, children with fevers that painted pink flags on their cheeks.
There were the respectable sorts—the wives of shopkeepers, the clerks with ink-stained fingers—and there were those whose clothes did not match their stories, whose hands bore calluses that spoke of lives he never asked them to confess.
He was not the same with all of them.
You saw it first with a sailor.
The man had walked in with a limp and a scar down one side of his throat, red and stretched, as if it had been made by something that did not care whether the knife cut clean. He smelled faintly of tar and stale sweat and something offshore you could not name. When he sat down, the chair creaked under his weight.
“Been told you’re foreign,” he said in crude German, squinting at Patrick. “Thought you might know how to fix what your folks broke.”
Something passed behind Patrick’s eyes, fast and hard. He smoothed it away with deliberate effort.
“Sit,” he said, voice even. “Tell me where it hurts.”
Later, when the man had gone and the waiting room had emptied, you brought in the chart to be filed.
Patrick was standing at the window, one hand braced on the sill, staring out at nothing you could see.
“Is everything all right, Doctor?” you asked lightly, though something in the line of his shoulders made your own spine tighten in answer.
He did not turn at once. “Fine,” he said, after a moment that lasted longer than it should have. “It is cold. That is all.”
You did not remark on the fact that his hand on the window frame was white at the knuckles, or that he seemed to be holding himself as if expecting a blow.
Instead you asked, in the same pleasant tone you used when inquiring about ink supplies, “Shall I post your letter to London this evening? The one to the Society.”
His gaze cut to you then, sharp and abrupt, as if he had forgotten that anyone else inhabited the room.
You saw it again—that quick flash of calculation, the weighing of what you knew, what you might guess, what you could prove.
“Yes,” he said. “Thank you.”
You learned his silences, too. Some were mild, only the pauses of a man thinking before he spoke. Others were jagged, the quiet of a cliff edge. Those came when you touched a nerve.
“So you studied in London,” you said one slow afternoon as you typed up an essay he had written for a journal, something about fevers in confined quarters.
“Yes.”
“On your own or with a patron?”
“On my own.”
“That must have been difficult,” you ventured. “I imagine there were not many—”
“There were enough,” he said.
You paused with your fingers hovering over the keys.
“Enough what?”
“Enough difficulties.” The words came out clipped. “Type the sentence, if you please.”
You did, but you stored the reaction away.
London was a room you would return to; you could see the locked door in his face.
You discovered, to your surprise, that he took very little for granted from you.
He did not assume you knew how to file his notes; he showed you the system, then stepped back and let you adjust it when you pointed out three redundancies. He did not thrust letters at you with a muttered “answer this”; he told you the gist of the reply he wished to make, and allowed you to shape the language, correcting only where necessary.
“You are straightforward,” he commented once, scanning a letter you had drafted in his name.
“I do not see the profit in being anything else,” you replied.
“Most people do,” he said. “You are an anomaly.”
“Anomalies are useful,” you said. “They show where the pattern breaks.”
“That is not always a comfort,” he murmured, half to himself.
You saw him angry once, though not at you.
A supplier had sent inferior bandages, the weave too loose, the cotton too thin.
You found the parcel in the morning post and left it on the side table until he had finished with his first patient. When he opened it and saw what lay inside, a change came over him as swiftly as if someone had turned the temperature of the room.
“These will not do,” he said, voice stripped of its usual weary civility.
“They look adequate,” you said, more to taste the reaction than because you believed it. “Surely they are better than nothing.”
“Nothing,” he said curtly, “would at least not give the illusion of protection. These will unravel at the first strain.”
He reached into the box, seized a roll, and pulled. The bandage tore with shameful ease. The sight made something low in your chest tighten. Not only at the thought of poor materials but at the way his hand moved, abrupt and precise, as if used to testing the strength of things that might fail.
He dictated a letter to the supplier that afternoon with a scathing clarity you had not yet heard in him. His words were not loud, but they cut.
“You wish me to send this?” you asked when you had finished typing, lips twitching despite yourself at the phrasing.
“I wish him to understand that I will not have my patients’ wounds wrapped in rags,” he said. “Nor my practice associated with charlatans. Yes, send it.”
“You have a talent for insult,” you observed. “Dressed up very prettily in professional language.”
“Insult is cheap,” he said. “Truth costs more.”
“You pay in blood or reputation?”
“Both,” he said, and for a heartbeat he seemed to forget you were there.
There were smaller moments, too, less dramatic, that etched themselves into you perhaps more deeply.
Once, when a child with scarlet fever had been carried in by a frantic mother, Patrick had worked for two hours without pause, the set of his mouth grim as he cooled the boy’s skin and coaxed medicine between his teeth.
You had seen doctors more distant than him, hiding whatever they felt behind professional detachment.
He did not detach this time. He folded everything in instead, drawing his concern so tight it might have cut him from the inside.
When the crisis passed and the boy’s breathing eased, the mother burst into tears in the middle of the waiting room, clasping Patrick’s hands and pressing them to her lips. He stood, stiff and embarrassed, then gently freed himself and directed her toward the chair.
“Thank her,” he said when she had gone, and you stared.
“For what?” you asked.
“For paying,” he said. “For trusting. For existing. I do not know. People like to be thanked.”
The admission was so bald that you laughed, then covered it quickly with a hand.
“I shall write her a note,” you said. “In your name. You may sign it and pretend you thought of it yourself.”
“I would be lost without your guidance,” he said, so dry that it took you a moment to decide whether he meant it as a jest. You chose to take it as one and wrote the letter anyway.
You began, inevitably, to test the borders of his patience.
When you noticed that he avoided leaning back in his chair fully, you asked one day, “Is the upholstery to your disliking, Doctor, or are you simply unused to being at ease?”
“Chairs are more treacherous than they look,” he said without missing a beat, eyes on his notes. “One grows wary.”
“That sounds like the voice of experience.”
“You are very fond of implying I have lived some rich, scandalous life,” he remarked. “You will be disappointed to learn how dull it has been.”
“And yet here you are,” you said, “a foreign doctor in Berlin with no wife, no family, no stories that you will admit to. It hardly screams dullness.”
“Some stories are not suitable for offices,” he said quietly.
“Then you should not leave them lying about for the imagination to trip over,” you answered, and felt the tension flare in the air between you as surely as if someone had struck flint.
He gave you tasks and you did them, quickly, accurately.
You brought him tea when his hands shook after a difficult case, pretending not to see the tremor. You ironed the creases out of his correspondence with London and Hull and places whose names he did not let you read, though you saw the postmarks when the letters arrived. You filed his reports, stamped the dates, sealed envelopes, minded the waiting room when the porter had to step away.
On the fourth week, he came in later than usual, collar askew, hair damp as if he had washed it in too much haste. His eyes were red at the rims, not from drink—you had seen enough men drink to know the signs—but from a night that had not included adequate sleep.
“You are late,” you observed, before you could think better of it.
“You are early,” he countered.
“I am exactly on time.”
“Then the clock is wrong,” he said, setting his bag down with more force than necessary.
You watched him strip off his gloves, fingers stiff. A faint bruise bloomed just under his jaw, half-hidden by his collar. Your gaze snagged on it; your mind leapt.
“Rough night?” you asked, tone almost casual.
His jaw flexed.
“I slipped,” he said.
“On someone’s fist?” you said. “Or did a staircase take offense at you?”
His eyes cut to you, and for an instant there was nothing weary in them, nothing civilized. It was a flash, a bare slice of something raw and coiled and ready to do harm.
“Do you find it entertaining,” he asked, voice low, “to gnaw at every scrap I do not freely give you?”
You felt the pulse at your throat stumble, then recover. Every instinct suggested you should lower your eyes, murmur an apology, retreat. Another, stubborn as a stone in a shoe, suggested otherwise.
“I find it difficult not to notice when a man who claims his life is dull arrives with fresh bruises,” you said evenly. “If you wished to be dull, you should try to hide the evidence better.”
The silence that followed had edges.
Then, unexpectedly, his mouth tilted in something very nearly like a smile, though it did not reach his eyes.
“Duly noted,” he said. “I shall try to be more boring for you in future.”
“I will believe that when I see it,” you replied.
You did see, over time, how much effort it cost him to pass for respectable.
You saw it in the way he measured his words in front of patients with money, how he took care to speak formally with matrons who could ruin a practice with gossip over coffee. You saw it in the way he damped his accent down when he dictated letters to certain societies, how he straightened his cuffs until the linen cut into his wrists.
Once, after a particularly long evening surgery on a dockworker whose leg he had fought to save, you came back into the office to find him still at the basin, sleeves rolled past his elbows, scrubbing his hands as if the skin itself offended him.
“Doctor,” you said softly. “He will live.”
“For now,” he answered, not looking up. “I cannot keep him from the river forever.”
You stared at the water reddened in the basin, the way it swirled down the drain. He had already washed the worst away, but the smell lingered, rich and iron-heavy, beneath the antiseptic.
“You are very thorough,” you said. “Another man might have sent him to the hospital and gone home to bed.”
“I have no bed that calls to me,” he said. “Hospitals do what they can; I do what I must. There is a difference.”
“And what is that difference?”
“Responsibility,” he said simply.
The word sat between you with more weight than it should have.
In all of this, you nurtured your own quiet curiosity, feeding it on scraps.
You asked innocently about his references, watching which names he allowed to rest on his tongue and which he swallowed back. You commented on English weather with feigned ignorance, just to see whether his eyes softened or hardened when he spoke of it. You mentioned ships passing on the Spree, their masts cutting the sky like black lines, and marked the way he went very still for a moment, as if he were listening for something far away.
Nothing in those early days was overtly scandalous. There were no slammed doors, no shouted arguments, no scenes. Only glances that lingered too long, questions that cut too close, silences that threatened to spill into something else.
You told yourself you were only amusing yourself, that a little prodding would do him no harm. You told yourself you were too sensible to become fascinated by a man whose past was stitched together from evasions.
Still, when you lay in your narrow bed at night and stared up at the cracked ceiling, it was difficult to push aside the image of his hands braced on the edge of his desk, knuckles white, or the way his voice roughened nearly imperceptibly when you suggested that perhaps he was not nearly as respectable as he pretended to be.
You had not yet pushed him far enough to prove it.
You would.
You did.
At first it was only little things, done in the spare minutes between patients, when the typewriter was quiet and the clock ticked loud in the small office.
You re-read his references.
They had impressed you on that first day because they existed at all; most men in his position would have relied on charm and a firm handshake, not a neat portfolio of letters stamped and sealed.
Now, with weeks of watching him behind you, you looked at them with a different eye.
The English letters were brief and careful. Dr. Patrick Sumner has been known to us these past years as a competent and diligent practitioner, one read, the paper heavy with the faint scent of old smoke.
The signature at the bottom belonged to a London physician whose name you had seen once in a medical journal on his shelf. The words were arranged politely, all very proper. You could almost hear them spoken in a drawing room while glasses were filled and no one said exactly what they meant.
Another spoke of his work “in Hull and other postings,” with no specifics, only a vague mention of “service at sea” that could have meant anything from a naval commission to tending sick sailors on a river barge.
You ran your fingertip along the line, frowning, and imagined a ship in your mind’s eye, fog and ice and something worse.
His German references were fresher, and thinner.
A professor from the medical faculty vouched for the soundness of his examinations but admitted they had not known him long. A colleague from a clinic on the other side of the city praised his “industry and seriousness” and said nothing at all about friendship.
They all agreed on one thing: he worked hard. They disagreed, or said nothing, about where, exactly, he had been before they met him.
You did not have the luxury of endless idle inquiry. Wages had to be earned, ledgers balanced, appointments kept.
Yet whenever the stack of letters dwindled or the door to the waiting room stayed shut a little longer than expected, you found your eyes returning to the small collection of clues he had allowed you.
You began a list, as you might for a puzzle or a set of household accounts.
On a scrap of foolscap you kept tucked at the back of your drawer, you wrote:
Hull – mentioned once, then avoided.
London – truth, but not whole truth.
At sea – “service,” “river,” “ships,” never explained.
Whale oil – flinched at smell.
Gunshot scars? – shoulder? leg? must confirm.
Left-handed with bottle, right-handed with scalpel.
Beneath those, a question in darker ink: What happened north?
You did not know that there was a north to think of, not in fact, only in the way his gaze sometimes seemed to travel in that direction when the weather turned and the air in Berlin bit sharper than usual.
On those mornings you found him at the window with his hand unconsciously pressed against the glass, as if testing its strength, and you felt the hairs rise along your arms under your sleeves.
You had no intention of being reckless. Curiosity was a luxury women like you could rarely afford without cost. Still, there were ways to learn things without stepping too far out of bounds.
You started with the simple matter of addresses.
One afternoon, when he left a stack of correspondence on your desk to be sorted, you noticed that one of the English envelopes bore a return address from Hull. The name printed in the corner was familiar—Baxter & Sons, Shipping and Provisioning—in heavy, slightly faded ink.
You had seen it before in his file of references, on an old letter that vouched for Dr. Patrick Sumner in careful phrases. The paper there had been different, thicker, older, but the name was the same, right down to the little flourish on the final r.
You turned the envelope once between your fingers, feeling the cheapness of the stock. The lettering of the address itself—Herr Doktor Patrick Sumner, Berlin—was unmistakably his: that lean rightward slant, the way he pinched his ts narrow. Only the printed corner mark belonged to Baxter & Sons.
At the end of the day, on your errand to post the practice’s letters, you slid the Hull envelope across the counter with the others and leaned in while the clerk weighed them.
She was a young woman with a sharp chin and an excellent memory for names; you had watched her sort whole crates of envelopes by street and district without once checking the ledger.
“Have you had many letters from this firm?” you asked, tone light. “Baxter & Sons, Hull?”
She glanced down, lips moving briefly as she read, then frowned.
“Not lately,” she said. “We used to see that name now and then. Old stock, I think. Closed some years ago. There was a bankruptcy, a death, if I remember. One hears things.”
“No one there now?” you asked, adjusting the angle of one of Patrick’s Berlin envelopes as if that were your main concern.
“Address is still on the books,” she said, licking a stamp. “But if they are sending letters from it, they are sending them from ghosts. Why?”
“No reason,” you said, offering a small smile. “I only thought I had heard the name before.”
Back at your desk, when the lamps were lit and Patrick had retreated to the examination room, you slid open his reference file and drew out the Baxter letter.
The paper was older, edges softened by handling, the ink browned with time. The letterhead matched the envelope exactly: Baxter & Sons, Shipping and Provisioning, Hull, the same little ornamental scroll around the name.
The handwriting that followed, however, was not the same as on the envelope. The reference itself—Dr. Sumner has served with distinction—was written in a rounder, more deliberate script, one that had tried very hard to look like a High-born, English gentleman’s hand and not quite succeeded. Certain strokes tugged sideways, certain curves pinched together in a way you now recognized.
You had spent weeks watching him sign prescriptions and ledger entries. You knew how his pen moved when he was being careful.
You laid the letter on the blotter and studied the closing line. Yours, faithfully, and beneath it Baxter in that same not-quite-convincing hand, the ink a little darker there, as if the writer had gone over it twice.
He had spoken, in that fabricated voice, of Patrick’s “reliability aboard ship” and “experience with men injured in difficult climates.” He had mentioned “service rendered in extremity” and “qualities of endurance.” The phrases were tailored to impress a committee, to suggest hardiness and experience without naming anything that might be questioned.
Nowhere did he mention dates. Nowhere did he give specifics that might be checked. Nowhere did he say I continue in practice here or you may write to me with inquiries, the way honest referees often did.
You ran your finger along the forged signature once, feeling the faint indent the pen had left in the paper.
Baxter was not a doctor. Baxter was not alive. Baxter, as far as Berlin was concerned, existed only as a printed name on old letterhead and as lines Patrick had put into his mouth.
He had invented, out of a dead firm, a man willing to swear that Patrick Sumner was exactly the sort of respectable physician Berlin thought it needed.
You folded the letter and slid it back into its place, your heart beating a shade faster than it had moments before.
You wondered, not what Baxter had seen him do, but what he had done that made it safer to borrow the authority of the dead than to let the living speak for him.
You took to arranging his day’s letters in such a way that you could note the places they came from. London recurred, of course, as did Berlin’s own districts. Once in a while a name from further afield appeared—Manchester, Aberdeen, a northern port you recognized only because you had once traced a ship’s passage on a map for an insurance clerk.
You did not open any letter not addressed to the practice.
That would have been too much, even for you.
You did, however, read every scrap that bore the clinic’s name, and filed away the mentions of him you found there: we are glad to hear you are settling in, pleased to learn your health is improved, trust your new circumstances are more salubrious than the last.
More salubrious than what, none of them said.
It was not all letters and absent histories. You watched him.
You observed how his accent thickened when he was tired, vowels drawing longer, consonants softening, the English creeping in around the edges of his careful German. You noticed that he never sat with his back to an open window. You saw the way he checked the lock on the front door twice most evenings, fingers turning the key, then turning it again as if to reassure himself that the barrier would hold.
You began to test him in small ways that had nothing to do with direct questions.
One chilly morning, as you warmed your hands around a cup of tea in the office, you remarked, “Berlin complains bitterly about winter, but it could be worse. My aunt knew a man once who sailed near Greenland. He said the cold there could crack your teeth in your head if you breathed too deep.”
Patrick’s pen halted for a fraction of a beat above the page.
“Then your aunt knew a foolish man,” he said without looking up. “Teeth do not crack so easily.”
“You have been there, then.” You took a deliberate sip, watching him over the rim. “Near Greenland. Or somewhere like it.”
“I have read,” he replied, “as any educated man might. Do not mistake book-pages for biography.”
“Perhaps,” you said gently, “the mistake is believing you have only ever read about such things.”
He finished his sentence, set the pen down, and folded his hands on the blotter.
“If you are determined to make yourself a nuisance,” he said, “you will at least be efficient about it. Fetch the patient list for this afternoon.”
You fetched it, but you carried the taste of the exchange with you for the rest of the day.
There had been a hairline fracture in his denial, a hair’s span of extra breath taken before he spoke. Enough to suggest that the words on the page and the shape of his memories overlapped more closely than he cared to admit.
You experimented with topics.
Ships drew him taut as a bowstring. When a patient from the docks came in smelling of pitch and sea-salt, his gentleness wrapped tighter, grimmer.
You once remarked, when the man had gone, that you could see the fascination sailing held for some, all that horizon, all that room to run.
“You romanticize,” he said, too sharply.
“Do I?” You turned in your chair, eyebrow lifting. “I simply repeat what others say.”
“They are liars,” he said.
“Liars about the sea?”
“Liars about what it takes,” he answered. “About what it costs.”
You did not push further that day. You only added another line to your paper: Hates ships. Has been on one.
On another evening, as you shut the windows against a particularly bitter wind, you remarked, “It is remarkable how a city holds heat even in winter. All that brick and stone. Even when it is cold, it is not… empty.”
Patrick glanced up from his journal.
“You speak as if you have compared it with somewhere that was.”
“Have you not?” you asked. “You have been in cities all your life?”
His mouth tightened.
“Not all,” he conceded.
“Then where else?” You leaned one hip against your small desk, hands folded, making your inquisitiveness look as casual as possible. “If I am to know what addresses to put on letters, I ought to know the ones you consider home.”
He closed the journal with unnecessary care, as if containing something that might otherwise spill.
“Home,” he said, and the word sounded foreign on his tongue. “A flexible concept. Hull. London. Berlin now.”
“Only those?”
“Is that not enough for you?”
“For a man of your age and experience?” you said. “Hardly.”
He looked at you then with a flatness that told you you had touched something sharp.
For a moment you thought he would tell you to pack your things, to take your cleverness and your doubts and leave him to his patients and his ghosts.
Instead, he said, in a tone like cold water poured over coals, “You will address letters to the rooms in London and to the practice here. That will suffice.”
You curtsied a fraction, mocking and respectful at once.
“As you wish, Doctor.”
You were not foolish enough to go prying in his lodgings, or to follow him when he left the practice.
That path led to trouble far greater than any answered question could justify.
But the city had ears, and mouths, and you knew how to listen.
The porter, for instance, had been there longer than Patrick had.
Men like that saw everything and believed nothing unless they could count it in coins.
One evening, as you both lingered by the coat rack while Patrick finished with his last patient, you remarked that the doctor seemed settled now, that he must have arrived with a great deal of confidence to set up without any family nearby.
The porter snorted softly, adjusting his cap.
“He came with a bag and a box of books,” the man said. “Looked as if the train had chewed him and spat him out. Rented the rooms upstairs by the week. I thought he would last a month. Then the letters started coming, and the patients, and here we are.”
“Letters from where?” you asked, as if only curious about the postage.
“England, mostly.” The porter shrugged. “Some from further north. Strange stamps. Your English doctor knows people, that is certain. Or owes them.”
“Owes?” you echoed.
“If a man’s eyes look like that,” the porter said, “he has debts. Whether anyone comes to collect is another question.”
You turned that over in your mind as you walked home, boots slipping a little in the slush.
Debts could mean anything: money, favors, guilt.
You thought of Patrick’s careful letters, his precise hands, the thin grooves at the corners of his mouth that spoke of too many sleepless nights.
At a cheap café you sometimes patronized on your free afternoons, you overheard, by chance, a pair of medical students discussing a “foreign doctor in Mitte” over their beer.
“Took the examination twice,” one said, laughing. “Imagine that. As if one round of questions from old Gammel were not torture enough.”
“Still,” the other replied, “he passed, and they say he has references from London. Some whaling doctor, I heard, which must have been an education. Blood and blubber, what more could a man want. No wonder he looks half-dead all the time.”
You stirred your coffee and looked down into its dark surface, hiding the flicker that passed across your face.
Whaling. North. Ships. Hull. Blubber. You added each of those to your list in your head before you ever had a chance to put pen to paper.
Back at the practice, you carried on being exactly what you were supposed to be: brisk, efficient, annoyingly attentive.
You reminded him of appointments, corrected a date on a chart he had mis-written, pointed out a discrepancy in the ledger that meant a supplier had overcharged.
“Are you determined to make yourself indispensable,” he asked once, dry as dust, “or is it accidental?”
“I would not wish to be easily replaced,” you said. “Who else would tell you when you have made an error?”
“Most people would have the sense not to,” he said.
“Then you have been surrounded by flatterers,” you answered. “I am a corrective.”
To all of this you added, in ink, under your previous question:
What happened north that a man spends this much effort building walls around it?
You did not yet have an answer.
You knew only that each time you pushed, even lightly, you felt the structure of his composure creak a little, as if there were something vast and heavy leaning against it from the inside, pressing to get out.
It’s Tuesday, which feels wrong somehow. Tuesdays should be for dull work and middling weather, not for tipping something off balance.
The day has gone long.
A child with a stubborn fever kept him an hour past his last scheduled patient, and then a woman came in at the end with a pain she could not name, clutching at her ribs as if she feared something inside her might break through the skin.
By the time he has seen her, written her prescription, soothed her anxieties enough that she could put her gloves back on without shaking, the street outside is already soaked in dusk.
You have stayed because you always stay on days like this. There is always more to type, more to file, more to straighten in his wake. The lamps are burning low, their wicks trimmed short to eke out the oil; the shadows on the wall have lengthened into blurred, unfamiliar shapes.
He closes the door on the last patient with a careful hand and lets his shoulders sag for a moment once it has clicked shut.
You see it from your little desk, that brief surrender when he thinks no one is looking. Then he notices you still at the typewriter, fingers curled around the carriage return lever, and his posture draws tight again like a pulled stitch.
“You should have gone home an hour ago,” he says, crossing the room to his desk and shrugging out of his coat. His voice is roughened by the day, the edges sanded down by too many words.
“So should you,” you say. “But then who would write all your reports?”
“That is what tomorrow exists for.”
“Tomorrow already has a list.”
You tap the stack of half-finished notes at your elbow. He follows the motion with his eyes and exhales, something between a sigh and a humourless laugh.
“Very well,” he concedes. “We will ruin both of our evenings at once.”
You keep working, the clack of the keys and the soft slide of paper filling the quiet.
He moves about the office tidying in his particular way—cap on the ink bottle, ledgers squared, instruments in their cabinet aligned with fastidious care.
You hear the faint clink of glass as he straightens a jar, the low creak of the floorboards as he crosses to the window to check the catch.
It’s only when you begin to gather the finished pages that you realize how late it has become.
The clock on the wall marks the hour with a dull, tired clunk. Outside, the street noise has thinned to occasional wheels on stone and the distant shout of someone closing up shop.
You slide the last sheet from the typewriter and smooth it with your palm.
“That is all for tonight,” you announce.
“Leave the rest,” he says. “We will manage.”
You stack the papers neatly, aligning each edge.
As you do, your gaze catches on the corner of his desk where his reference file sits, its folder slightly askew from where he must have consulted it earlier.
The knowledge of what you found in it the other day—toothless Baxter, conjured out of a dead firm and a forged hand—presses at the back of your tongue.
You have not mentioned it. Part of you had intended never to do so. Another part, the part that writes lists on foolscap and cannot leave puzzles half-solved, has been waiting for the right angle.
Perhaps it is the lateness, or the lamplight that makes his face look more bare than usual, lines carved deeper at the corners of his mouth. Perhaps it is the way he has been unusually quiet all afternoon, moving through his tasks with mechanical precision. Whatever the cause, when you open your mouth next, discretion does not come out.
“You are very good at arranging appearances,” you say lightly, sliding the stack of reports across his blotter. “Even your references are neat. Almost too neat.”
He glances up from the ledger he has been closing.
“Is that praise,” he asks, “or suspicion?”
“You never did say how you came by your letter from Baxter & Sons,” you continue, as if turning over a trivial curiosity. “I happened upon the name at the post. Interesting firm. Or rather, not a firm anymore.”
His hand stills on the ledger cover.
“Is that so,” he says. His tone has gone very flat.
“The clerk remembered them.” You move a little closer, hand resting on the back of the spare chair as if that is the thing that drew you. “Provisioners near the quay in Hull. Closed some time ago. Bankruptcy, tragedy, no one quite sure. Yet here they are, writing handsome letters on your behalf as if nothing has changed at all.”
The silence that follows feels thick, as if the air has gained weight.
He doesn’t answer at once. Instead he finishes the action he began, shutting the ledger and setting the pen down with exaggerated care. Only then does he lift his head fully to look at you.
“You have been making enquiries,” he says.
“You told me discretion was a matter of survival,” you reply. “I thought it wise to understand whose names are attached to this practice. Lest someone come knocking and discover we are employing ghosts.”
“That letter is in order,” he says, low. “It satisfied the authorities. It satisfied the Society. It is all it needs to be.”
“It satisfied people who do not live in this city,” you counter. “It does not satisfy me.”
His jaw tightens—a muscle jumps there, a small, betraying movement.
“And what would satisfy you?” he asks. “A sworn deposition from the dead? A notarized account of every step I have taken since birth?”
“A truth that is not stitched out of corpses and old letterhead would be a start,” you say, sharper than you intended.
The scrape of his chair is sudden in the quiet room, loud enough to make your heart leap once in your chest. He stands, not quickly, but with a deliberation that makes the movement feel heavier.
“When you were engaged here,” he says, coming around the desk, “the conditions were clear. You would be paid for your work. You would maintain discretion. You would not pry into matters that do not concern you.”
“You said discretion about patients,” you remind him, pulse beginning to pick up as he closes the distance between you. “You said nothing about overlooking forged references.”
He stops in front of you, close enough that you can see the faint reddening at the edges of his eyes. The lamplight throws the hollows beneath his cheekbones into sharper relief.
“That letter does you no harm,” he says. “It keeps this practice open. It keeps you in work. Whatever offense it gives your moral sensibilities, you may set it aside.”
“And what does it keep from view?” you ask, stepping into the danger because you cannot help yourself now. “What is it hiding that could not bear the light if the letter were honest?”
“Enough.”
His hand moves, and for a brief, braced fraction of a second you think he will seize your arm. The thought drives a thin line of heat down your spine, part fear, part something knottier.
But he does not touch you. His fingers close instead around the back of the chair you have been using as a prop, knuckles whitening as he grips it hard enough that the wood creaks faintly.
“I have told you before,” he says, voice low, “you know nothing about what you are speaking of.”
“Then explain it,” you say, stubborn. “Tell me why you would rather put words in the mouth of a dead shipping clerk than let a living man of medicine vouch for you. Tell me why you think no one will notice the dates do not line up. You are not stupid, Doctor. So what are you?”
His eyes flash.
For a moment there is no weary courtesy in them at all, no practiced patience. There is only something feral and grey and exhausted with being cornered. It hits you like a gust off cold water.
“Careful,” he says.
The word is low, almost soft. It lands in the space between you like a hand on the back of your neck.
“Why,” you ask quietly, refusing to drop your gaze, “are you afraid I will say something you do not already say to yourself?”
His grip on the chair tightens. You hear a faint crack—whether of wood or of some taut thread in him, you cannot tell.
“You amuse yourself,” he says, “in prodding at wounds you do not understand. You stand in a warm room in Berlin and play at detective with other people’s survival. You have never watched blood steam on ice in air so cold it flays your lungs. You have never had to choose which man lives long enough to damn you when you sleep. You know nothing of what it takes to crawl back from that and put on a clean shirt for the benefit of clerks.”
The words come sharper, faster, as if some valve has slipped. His accent thickens around them. It’s not the polished speech he uses with patients but something rougher underneath.
You swallow, throat suddenly tight. The images he throws at you are harsh, but what grips you is not the description; it is the way his mouth shapes the last line—crawl back—as if he still feels stone under his hands.
“So there is something to crawl back from,” you say, softer now, more certain. “Thank you for confirming it.”
He makes a sound under his breath that is not quite a laugh.
“You twist everything,” he says. “Do you have any idea how dangerous that curiosity of yours is?”
“I know it unsettles you,” you reply. “Which suggests I am not entirely wrong.”
His expression shifts, anger refracting into something more complicated—frustration, yes, but also a weary kind of despair.
“You will stop this,” he says, and now he does let go of the chair to lift his hand between you, palm up, as if making an offer or issuing a plea. “You will come to this office, you will do the work you are paid for, and you will leave the rest. Or you will find employment elsewhere. There is nothing in my past that will improve your life to know, and there is much that could threaten it.”
The threat is not directed at you; you hear that clearly. It hangs over the sentence like a shadow, aimed at some group you cannot name. Men he has wronged, men who would like to wrong him. Authorities who would not trouble to distinguish.
“You underestimate me,” you say, because backing down now would mean accepting that warning.
“I do not underestimate you at all,” he says. “Quite the contrary. If you were stupid, I would not be having this conversation. You would not have noticed the letterhead. You would not have heard the lies breathe. You would file what you are given and sleep at night.”
His hand drops. For the first time you notice that his fingers are trembling, almost imperceptibly, as if the effort of holding himself together has begun to exhaust his reserves.
“Is that what you do?” you ask, unable to help yourself. “Sleep at night?”
He closes his eyes briefly, lashes a dark fringe against his pale skin, then opens them again. When he speaks, his voice has gone quieter.
“If you continue,” he says, “you will push me past civility. I do not wish that. Neither should you.”
The words land in your body as much as in your ears. There is a note beneath them you have not heard from him before, something that is not anger alone. Heat stirs low in your belly, unwanted and undeniable, answering to some edge in his tone you cannot pretend to mistake.
“I am not afraid of the truth,” you say, though your pulse is beating hard in your throat.
He leans in then, only a fraction, enough that you can see the tiny scar just at his hairline, the place where something once split the skin. His eyes are very clear.
“And I am not afraid of losing your good opinion,” he answers. “I have survived worse than the displeasure of one clever girl. But I am trying, very hard, to be the man I have written in those references. Do you understand?”
It is the first time he has admitted it so plainly—that the version of himself on paper is an aspiration, not a record.
Something in your chest shifts.
“You could start,” you say quietly, “by being honest with at least one person in this city.”
His jaw works, as if he is grinding down words he cannot bear to let out.
For a heartbeat you think he might do it, that he might reach past the anger and pull something raw and true into the open. Then whatever battle is taking place behind his eyes concludes on the side of retreat.
“This conversation is over,” he says. “Go home. It is late.”
“And if I do not?”
“Then I will blow out the lamps and let you sit in the dark,” he says, with a flash of sharp, almost cruel humor. “Perhaps the company will suit you.”
You want to say more. You want to push him until that careful mask cracks entirely. Instead, you step back. The room feels suddenly small; the smell of coal and old antiseptic presses close.
“As you wish, Doctor,” you say.
You fetch your coat, your gloves, your hat. You feel his gaze on you as you pull them on, a mixture of censure and concern, perhaps, or calculation, or an unwilling fascination that mirrors your own.
At the door, hand on the latch, you pause and look back over your shoulder.
“Baxter is not the only ghost in this practice,” you say. “You know that, do you not?”
His lips press into a thin line.
“Go home,” he repeats.
On the street, the night air bites at your cheeks. Snow has started again, fine and dry, dusting the pavement and the shoulders of your coat.
You pull the fabric closer around you and walk, heart still beating too fast, replaying the sound of his voice when he spoke of blood on ice and teeth cracking in the cold.
He had warned you away.
He had also shown you, more clearly than ever, that there is something there worth finding.
After that night in the office—the one where you pressed too close to his forgery and he warned you to stop—you move around each other more carefully.
He’s cooler with you in the days that follow. Not cruel, not overtly; Patrick does not slam doors or raise his voice.
His punishment is absence.
He keeps conversations to the barest professional minimum, speaks to you through notes and memos more than words.
When you make a small jest, the sort that would once have earned a flick of his mouth, he lets it fall between you untouched.
If he means to freeze you out, he miscalculates.
You grew up in rooms colder than this.
You respond with faultless efficiency. Every report is timely, every letter perfectly phrased. You anticipate his needs before he names them, set the instruments out before he asks, refill the medicine bottles without comment.
You do not apologize. You do not back down. You simply refuse to vanish.
The stalemate begins to crack not with some grand gesture, but with a cut.
It happens on a busy morning when the practice is overflowed with patients.
A woman’s child has vomited all over the exam room floor, the porter has been called away to help in the stairwell, and Patrick, already thin with strain, reaches too quickly for a tray of scalpels.
You hear the clatter from the waiting room. By the time you reach the doorway, the instruments have been righted, but there is a dark streak on the side of the tray and a brighter one along his palm.
“You should have left that to the porter,” you say, leaning on the jamb.
“He was not here,” he answers shortly.
Blood runs along his thumb in a neat line, pattering onto the floor.
“Sit down,” you say.
“I am fine.” He reaches for a cloth.
The cloth brushes the cut; blood wells fresher. His mouth pulls taut.
“Sit,” you repeat, more firmly. “Before you bleed over the next patient.”
For a moment it looks as though he will refuse out of sheer pride. Then, with a small, exhausted exhale, he gives in and lowers himself to the chair by the window.
You fetch the little tin of carbolic and a clean bandage from the cupboard. When you take his hand, his fingers are warm and still faintly damp from the water he splashed over them.
“Careless,” you murmur, more to the wound than to him.
“I was distracted,” he says.
“By what?”
He looks at you, and something in that gaze suggests a litany too long to name. He does not answer. You do not press. You dab the cut with antiseptic, ignoring the way his hand flinches under yours.
“Hold still,” you say. “You stitch other people without mercy.”
“Stitching myself is more efficient,” he replies under his breath.
“Not when you use the wrong hand.”
You wind the bandage, feeling the steady beat of his pulse beneath your fingers. When your eyes flick up, you find his already on your face.
The room has gone very quiet around the two of you, the bustle outside the door dimmed to a distant hum.
“This is unnecessary,” he says.
“So are forged references,” you answer mildly. “Yet here we are.”
A breath-hitch that might be annoyance, might be the ghost of a laugh.
You tie the bandage off, neat and snug, and do not immediately let go. His hand is heavier than you expected. He looks down at where your fingers encircle his wrist, the white of the bandage stark against his skin.
“Thank you,” he says at last, the words stiff but sincere.
After that, the ice thaws an inch.
He still avoids anything resembling confession, but he stops treating you as if you have grown a second head.
When you venture a small comment about a patient—“He will pretend he did not hear your instructions about diet” or “She will not take the draught as prescribed”—he listens instead of shutting you down. Once or twice, he even concedes that you are right.
“Your judgment is sound,” he says one evening, reading a note you have written in the margin of a report. “I had not considered that factor.”
“I doubt that,” you say.
“I had not considered it fully,” he amends.
You learn that he hates storms in a way that goes beyond ordinary discomfort.
One night, rain comes with a fury that rattles the windowpanes, wind shoving at the glass as if it wants to be let in.
The last patient leaves in a rush, clutching his hat to his head, muttering about flooded gutters. You go to latch the windows more tightly, fingers working the iron catch.
When you glance back, Patrick has stilled.
He stands in the center of the room, shoulders drawn in, eyes fixed on nothing in particular. A flash of lightning throws him into sharp relief for a brief instant; the thunder that follows makes him start as if struck.
“Are you all right?” you ask.
“Yes.”
The answer is too fast, too flat.
“Storms bother you,” you say, more observation than question.
He swallows. “They are… distracting,” he concedes. “One remembers other noises.”
You think of a ship’s timbers groaning. Ice grinding. Gun shots.
“You could wait it out here,” you say, keeping your tone practical. “There is no sense walking back to your rooms while the streets are rivers. I can make tea.”
He hesitates, then nods once.
So you sit in the little inner office while rain drums on, two cups of weak black tea steaming between you.
You talk about nothing of consequence: the difficulty of procuring decent paper at a reasonable price, the way Berliners complain about the cold as if they have never seen a winter before, the ridiculousness of a patient who insists on three opinions and then ignores all of them.
Several times, his gaze goes distant at a particularly loud crack of thunder. Each time, you draw him back with some trivial remark.
“Of the two of us,” you say lightly at one point, “I am the one whose roof leaks. I should be the one glowering at the sky.”
His mouth tips.
“Perhaps we can divide the labor,” he says. “You may glower, and I will endure.”
It’s not much. But it is something: an admission that he is enduring, that the noise chews at him.
You file it away.
There is a morning when you catch him sleeping at his desk.
You arrive earlier than usual, the sky outside still pale with the late winter dawn. The porter has not yet lit the stove; your breath ghosts in front of you as you shrug out of your coat.
His office door stands slightly ajar. You tap once and push it open.
He’s slumped in his chair, head tipped back against the wood, mouth parted slightly. One hand rests on his chest, the other hangs loosely over the arm of the chair. On the desk before him lies an open book in English, its pages splayed, a pair of spectacles he rarely uses set beside it.
It takes you a moment to realize he is not simply resting his eyes; he is deep asleep. The kind that arrives not by invitation but by ambush, seizing a body when it has been refused too long.
A sensible person would leave him. Instead, you step quietly into the room. The lamp on his desk is still burning, flame turned low. You adjust it, trimming the wick, then glance back at him.
Without the usual tension in his face, he looks younger. Not soft—there is too much carved into him for that—but less armoured. A small line between his brows suggests the dreams are not entirely kind.
You take the coat from the stand, the one that always smells faintly of tobacco and the street, and drape it over him. His shoulders twitch, his hand jerks, but he does not wake. His breathing evens again.
“Sleep,” you whisper, more to the room than to him. “For once, just sleep.”
You close the door quietly on your way out and go to make coffee strong enough for two.
After that, he’s less surprised when you anticipate his needs.
He comes in one afternoon rubbing his temple and finds the ledger and pen already laid out, ink refilled, blotter cleared. He pauses, then nods to you.
“Thank you,” he says. “You are… efficient.”
“I have my moments,” you answer.
He begins, slowly, to offer you his own.
Snatches at first. A remark, as you both walk down the stairs one evening, about the smell of the docks in winter being better than in summer, “when the rot rises.” A comment about Indian heat—“It is not just hot, it is thick”—that slips out before he tightens his jaw.
In between, there are touches, small and careful, that do not quite trespass and do not quite stay innocent.
Your hand brushing his as you both reach for the same stack of notes. His fingers steadying your elbow when you slip on the wet tiles near the entrance. The time you stand too close behind him as you spell out a foreign name in a journal, your breath on his neck making him still just long enough for you to notice.
Each contact adds a new line to the map between you.
You do not stop digging. You only change your tools.
His gaze lingers on you a fraction longer than usual when he wishes you good night.
You stay later and later, not always by design. There is always more to do, some chart to finish, some cabinet to lock. Sometimes you leave at the same time and walk part of the way home together, your steps muffled in the snow.
“Berlin suits you,” you say once, watching his breath fog.
“Berlin tolerates me,” he answers.
“Is that not the same thing?”
“No,” he says. “But it is enough.”
You file that away as well: his sense of what he is allowed, what he is owed.
He has warned you, and for a few days you tell yourself you will be wise, that you will treat his past as you treat a patient’s sealed file—handled carefully, only when required. You do your work, you keep your place, you let his silences sit.
It does not last.
Curiosity, once it has tasted blood, does not starve quietly.
You start with the obvious: if the present is fabricated, some record of the real version must exist somewhere. Men like him do not simply appear. They are made, and the world keeps receipts.
On your next free afternoon, you take yourself to the university library instead of the café.
The reading room is dry and dust-heavy, its tall windows begrudging slivers of winter light. German students bend over their books, murmuring Latin to themselves. You present your letter of introduction from the practice—it is easy enough to obtain; Patrick is not the only one who can forge when necessary—and ask, in your best formal German, for any recent English medical registers and the London papers.
The clerk raises an eyebrow but shrugs and leads you to a shelf where the English volumes squat in neat, foreign rows. You run your finger along the spines. Medical Directory for England, Scotland, and Wales. 1856. 1857.
You pull one down and find the S’s.
There he is. Sumner, Patrick, M.B. The letters march in tidy black print. Qualifications from London, appointments listed in small type. Assistant surgeon attached to a regiment whose name means nothing to you beyond its number. Below that, a terse note in smaller font, added later in a different hand.
Cashiered. See Gazette, 18—
You feel your heart jump once, a misfire in your ribs.
You’ve lived long enough around soldiers and their widows to know what that word means. Not honorably discharged. Not quietly retired. Thrown out. Stripped. Spat back into the world with a stain that does not wash.
You make a careful copy of the entry in your notebook, hand steady despite the way your pulse flutters. Then you ask, as casually as you can manage, whether the library keeps English government notices.
The clerk, who has seen odder requests from foreign students, directs you to a series of bound gazettes. The pages smell of old ink and coal dust and something else—panic, perhaps, or that might just be your own breath.
You find the date. It takes longer than you expect; the cramped print swallows names whole. But then there it is, squeezed between promotions and mundane appointments.
Assistant Surgeon Patrick Sumner, found guilty by court-martial of conduct unbecoming an officer and a gentleman, is hereby cashiered from Her Majesty’s service.
No particulars. No explanation. No detail that would satisfy anyone asking what, exactly, he did that was so unbecoming.
You sit with your fingers pressed to the paper for a long moment, letting the words settle. So: he was army. India, you think, remembering a half-formed remark he once made about heat that never lifts even at night. Not a passing fancy but a career, or the start of one, cut short.
Cashiered.
You picture him in a uniform that does not suit him as well as his current sober suit, shoulders squared under braiding, eyes younger but already tired. You imagine some tribunal reading charges out in a dry voice while he stands before them, stripped not only of rank but of the fiction that he is anything other than what they think he is.
You leave the library with ink on your fingers and his name written twice in your notebook, once as the directory spells it, once in your own hand, underlined.
The next thread comes not from paper but from mouths.
Berlin has a way of collecting Englishmen. Some are there on business, some on study, some, like your employer, for reasons that are less easily named.
On a Sunday afternoon you find yourself in a cramped beer hall near the river where foreign students like to sit and mangle each other’s languages.
You have come, apparently, to practice your English with a girl from Manchester who wants to perfect her German swears. The table next to you is occupied by two men in tweed, one of them already flushed with drink.
“… told you, didn’t I?” he’s saying, his words slurring together. “Ran into Baines in London before I came out. Said there was a chap, name something like Sumter—I think—that he knew from the regiment. Bad business.”
You still, cup halfway to your mouth. The name is too close not to be who you think it is.
“Bad business in what way?” his companion asks. “Lost a limb? Deserted?”
“Worse.” The drunk one leans in conspiratorially, though his volume does not decrease. “Whole mess with the funds, some native business. They hushed the ugly bits, of course, not for his sake but for the regiment’s. Couldn’t have it all coming out in the papers. Cashiered him fast as you please. Last Baines heard, he was on some whaler, of all things.”
“Whaler?” the friend repeats, laughing. “Doctors travel in strange company.”
“Ship was called the Volunteer, I think,” the drunk says. “Or something like it. Left Hull for the ice. Baines said he thought the man must have gone mad to sign on for that after India. Heat to cold. Out of the frying pan, eh? There was talk the voyage didn’t go well. Lot of gossip. No one knows quite what happened, only that not many came back, if any at all, and any who must've had to be ruined men.”
Your hand tightens on your cup, knuckles straining under the skin.
The Volunteer. Hull. Whaler.
You watch the foam in your beer settle as the men drift on to other topics, their conversation snagging on politics and women and the price of coal. You do not look at them again. You do not trust yourself not to stare.
Back at your room that night, you write the new words in your list.
Army surgeon – India. Cashiered. Funds?
Whaler – Volunteer, Hull. Few to no survivors. “Ruined men.”
You underline ruined twice.
The picture sharpens. It’s still drawn in ink and rumors, but the lines begin to connect.
A young man in uniform, too clever for the dull grind of regimental medicine, turning cleverness to theft, or at least being accused of such. A court-martial. A disgrace. Then a whaling ship in the north, ice and blood and something worse, the last hail-Mary scramble of a life already off its axis.
No wonder he has had to build himself a new man out of forged letters.
You test pieces of it against him like pressed flowers against a living plant, seeing what matches.
One afternoon, when the waiting room is empty and the kettle is singing softly on the stove, you mention India as if it were an idle subject.
“I read a story the other day,” you say, setting a cup of tea on his desk. “About a soldier who served in India and said he still wakes thinking he is there, even years after coming home.”
Patrick’s hand, reaching for the cup, stops for a fraction of a heartbeat.
“India is sticky,” he says. “It clings. In clothes, in lungs, in dreams. Some men never get it out of them entirely.”
“You speak as if from experience,” you remark, watching him over the rim of your own cup.
“I speak,” he says, “as a man who has read more than one story.”
You let it pass, but only on the surface. Inside, you add another faint line, connecting his too-quick answer to the gazette’s terse notice.
On another day, you take the long way back from an errand and walk down by the river where the barges tie up. There is a tavern there that smells of tar and fish and cheap beer, frequented by sailors and dockers. You are not foolish enough to go inside alone, but you linger near the door long enough to overhear fragments as men go in and out, their words carried on smoke and laughter.
“… was on a Greenlander once,” one man is saying as he stubs out a cigarette. “Not as far north as the Volunteer went, mind you, but bad enough. Heard some tales about that voyage, though. Black, they say. Ship never right from the day she left Hull.”
“Was that the boat with the English doctor gone half-touched?” his companion asks.
“Something like that,” the first man grunts. “Baines—different Baines from the one at the hall—said there was a surgeon aboard who’d already been put out of the army. Said he was cursed, the lot of them. Came back wrong.”
You step away then, before they can look up and see you hovering.
The river smells of rot and iron and distant snow. You close your eyes briefly and picture a ship trapped in a white world, surrounded by nothing but ice and the things that live beneath it.
Volunteer.
In the days that follow, you notice more. Now that you know to look, it is easier to see.
A scar along his shoulder when his shirt gapes unexpectedly as he reaches for a book on the higher shelf—pale and ragged, not from a neat surgeon’s cut but something more violent. The way he goes still as stone when a patient mentions an army posting. The odd mix in his manner with men who bear themselves like former soldiers: a familiarity that speaks of shared training, overlaid with a distance that says he no longer counts himself among them.
In the library again, you find, tucked in a corner of an English shipping list, a brief notice from a few years back.
The Volunteer, Hull, returned from northern waters after an unsuccessful season. Loss of several hands reported. Rumors of difficulties at the ice refuted by the owners.
Rumors. Difficulties. Words that smooth over rot.
You sit there, the book heavy in your lap, and imagine him on that ship, not yet the man you know but the seed of him. Court-martial behind him, disgrace a fresh scar, laudanum perhaps in his pockets, walking onto a deck that smells of whale oil and old wood, thinking he will outrun himself in the fog and the cold.
Back in the practice, you watch him deal with blood.
Once, when a man comes in with a mangled hand from a factory machine, fingers crushed and split, Patrick sets his jaw and works with a focus so intense it seems to narrow the world to the table and the wound.
You have seen surgeons flinch before they hide it. He does not flinch. He leans in. Only afterwards, when the man is bandaged and sent away with instructions and a bottle of medication, do you see him step into the little washroom and brace his hands on either side of the basin for a moment longer than strictly needed.
“Was that worse than a whale’s eye,” you ask from the doorway, unable to stop yourself, “or about the same?”
He looks up sharply, water beading on his lashes.
“Where do you hear these things?” he asks, the question nakedly annoyed.
“Men talk,” you say. “They drink and they talk about ships that went too far north and came back less than they left. About doctors on those ships. About cashiers and courts and ruined men who somehow make their way to Berlin afterwards.”
He straightens slowly, wipes his hands on a towel, and turns to face you fully. The fatigue in his face is no longer just from the surgery; it is the deep-down kind that comes from digging out graves you had tried to leave undisturbed.
“There are a great many ruined men in Europe,” he says. “You will wear yourself out trying to catalogue them all.”
“I am only interested in one,” you say.
His gaze holds yours for a long moment. You see the calculation there again, the old instinct that weighs whether you are a danger. You also see, just for a flicker, the shadow of someone standing on ice under an endless sky, listening for cracks.
“You know just enough to be burned by it,” he says at last. “And not nearly enough to understand.”
“Whose fault is that?” you ask. “You have written your own story in such careful lines that there is no room for anything human between them.”
“Sometimes,” he says, quietly, “the human parts are the worst.”
You add that to your mental ledger as well.
You do not confront him outright. You do not say, I saw your name in the Gazette or I know you were thrown out. You do not say, They talk of the Volunteer like a ship cursed, and they speak of its surgeon in the same breath. You are not ready to lay all your cards down. He is certainly not ready to lay down his.
Instead you keep gathering.
The time you pass a newsvendor and see an old paper in the pile, its date smudged but legible. A column about conditions in India, mentioning in passing a scandal with army doctors and missing treasures. No names given, but the echo is enough.
The day he drops a small vial of laudanum and it shatters on the tiles, the smell rising like a ghost. His reaction is swift and quiet; he cleans it, disposes of the glass, but his fingers tremble just enough that you pretend not to see.
The evening he comes in later than usual, hair damp with melted snow, eyes red-rimmed in a way that does not quite look like lack of sleep.
Piece by piece, a shape emerges.
Patrick Sumner, army surgeon. Patrick Sumner, court-martialed. Patrick Sumner, ship’s doctor on the Volunteer, voyage whispered about in beer halls and at student tables, details warped by distance and the love of a good horror story. Patrick Sumner, now reinvented as a quiet, respectable physician in a Berlin street, propped up by forged references from the dead and polite letters from the living who prefer not to look too closely.
You keep all of it in your head, in your hidden notes, in the way you hold yourself around him.
The lamps burn low, wicks pinched to make the oil last. Outside has sunk into that muffled hour when the street sounds come in as if through wool. You have loosened your collar, pushed your sleeves up a fraction. Ink stains your fingers. The typewriter sits silent now; you have already fed it enough sheets for one day.
Patrick is at his desk, the last of the day’s files open in front of him. His waistcoat is unbuttoned, shirt creased at the elbows, tie tugged slightly askew. He looks tired, but not in the soft way most men do after a long day. He looks like someone who has kept himself upright through sheer refusal and is now trying to decide whether to allow gravity a say.
“You can leave that,” he says, nodding toward the pile you are squaring. “It will wait.”
“So will my bed,” you answer, aligning a corner with unnecessary neatness. “It is not going anywhere.”
“That is precisely the point,” he mutters.
You slip the last folder into place on the shelf behind you and wipe your fingertips with your handkerchief, pretending that is all that keeps you there. Your heart is a steady thump in your chest, but there is a lift to it, an edge.
You did not mean to do this tonight, not in any precise way. There was no grand plan, no marked date in your head. But you have the weight of the notebook in your bag, the memory of thin print and muttered bar-room talk, and here he is in front of you, worn and raw and real. There will not be a better moment.
You turn back to him and say, in a voice that sounds conversational even to your own ears, “I met your name in a book the other day.”
He looks up, pen pausing above the line he is drawing.
“In what context,” he asks, guarded already.
“A directory,” you say. “One of those thorough English volumes that list every doctor in service. There you were among them. Sumner, Patrick, M.B. Manchester, London, a regiment number… and a note that you no doubt hoped no one would ever bother to read.”
His jaw tightens very slightly. “And yet you did.”
“I am thorough,” you say. “It mentioned that you had been removed from Her Majesty’s service. Not retired. Not honorably discharged. Cashiered.”
The word lands like a coin on stone between you.
He sets the pen down with care. “You have been snooping in foreign records. Congratulations. You have learned that your employer is not respectable.”
“Oh, I did not need a book to tell me that,” you reply. “The book simply gave me the proper word for it.”
The chair makes a low sound against the floor when it moves back as he stands.
“Is this your aim?” he asks, circling the desk with that measured prowl you have begun to recognize. “To collect labels for me until you have enough to satisfy your curiosity?”
“I like a complete set,” you say. “Cashiered in India. Then a whaling ship.”
His eyes flash for the first time, something sharp cutting through the flatness.
“The Volunteer,” you continue, because you have decided that if you are going to press, you might as well press all the way. “Out of Hull. Men in beer halls still trade stories about that voyage. About bodies on ice and seals screaming and sailors who supposedly came back less useful than the carcasses they cut up.”
He’s very still now, only his breathing giving him away.
“You have been listening to drunks,” he says. “An impeccable source.”
“Drunks, directories, gazettes.” You count them off on your ink-stained fingers. “For a man who insists his life is dull, you have left an impressive trail of wreckage.”
He steps closer, until the desk is between you in name only.
“What precisely do you want from this recital,” he asks, voice low. “Shall I applaud your research? Shall I tell you you have been very clever, that you have managed to stitch together a little of what men whispered about me in places I no longer belong?”
“I want,” you say, “for you to stop pretending that the only version of you that exists is the one you wrote in those letters.”
His mouth twists. “And what good would that do you?”
You meet his gaze steadily.
“It would mean I am not working for a lie I cannot see,” you say. “It would mean when I sit at that typewriter putting your name at the bottom of letters, I know whose name it actually is. It would mean when I hear someone say there was a doctor on the Volunteer who survived when better men did not, I do not have to wonder whether I am watching him wash his hands in the next room.”
He makes a harsh sound, more exhale than laugh.
“Better men,” he repeats. “You imagine there were better men on that ship.”
“There were certainly other men,” you say. “The talk in the taverns suggests not many of them came back. You did. And then you forged a dead firm’s letter to vouch for you because no living soul would do it.”
His temper edges in, tone roughening. “You have a very high opinion of your own safety,” he says. “Throwing those names about in rooms that have windows.”
“We are alone,” you point out. “Unless you have ghosts tucked in your cabinets along with the scalpels.”
You see the moment something in him snaps out of its groove.
He moves around the corner of the desk, not in a rush, but with an intent that sends a hot thread running straight through you. You could step back; you do not. He comes to a halt in front of you.
“You think this is a game,” he says softly. “You come here with your little facts, your scraps of gossip, and you set them on the table like cards. You prod at things you do not understand. For what? To see me flinch?”
“No,” you say, and your voice sounds a shade rougher than you intended. “To see you stop lying to my face.”
He looks at you for a long moment, then down at your mouth, then back up.
“What would you like me to say?” he asks. “That I stole what was not mine? That I walked men into death and crawled out over them? That I have done things in cold and heat both that would curdle the little curiosity you cling to so tightly?”
Your heart kicks. “Yes,” you say. “Say it. Own it. Stop hiding behind polite German phrases and contrived references and ask yourself why you feel the need to play at being gentle when we both know there is nothing gentle about you.”
Something dark and hungry flickers over his face before he can choke it down.
“You truly do not know when to stop,” he murmurs.
“Then stop me,” you say.
His hand catches your jaw, fingers strong and unyielding, tilting your face up. You gasp, more from the suddenness than any real pain, and your hands go automatically to his wrist. His grip is not cruel, but there is nothing tentative in it, either. There is a throbbing line of heat down your spine that has very little to do with anger.
“Is this what you wanted,” he asks, thumb pressing into the soft place just in front of your ear. “You dig and dig until something ugly shows its teeth, and then you stand there looking surprised.”
“I am not surprised,” you manage.
You hold his gaze, feel the question in his fingers, the storm building in the set of his shoulders. You lick your lips, the smallest flick of tongue, and see his eyes track the movement.
His mouth is on yours before you can drag in another breath.
It is not gentle. His lips crash against yours with weeks of swallowed temper behind them, teeth clipping your lower lip, breath hot and harsh.
For the first heartbeat you do not yield. Your palms come up against his chest in a startled, instinctive brace, fingers fisting in the linen of his shirt as if you might shove him back and force a measure of sense into the moment. You turn your face just enough to break the seal of his mouth, breath catching sharp between you.
He does not let you get far.
His hand slides from your jaw to the back of your neck, broad palm cradling the base of your skull with a possessive firmness that stops just short of pain. The hold there steadies you, pins you, asks nothing softly.
The fight goes out of your hands before it leaves your body. Your grip on his shirt changes from resistance to clutching, and when he kisses you again, harder this time, you give way under it.
Your mouth moves beneath his, opening when his tongue pushes in, meeting him there at last, matching the pressure with one of your own.
A groan vibrates against your mouth—his or yours, you cannot tell.
When he lets go of your jaw it is only to get his hands on you elsewhere. One stays at the back of your neck, holding you where he wants you, the other drags down over your shoulder, thumb brushing the swell of your breast through your dress. He squeezes, testing, fingers digging into soft flesh until your breath stutters.
You break the kiss only because you have to, head tipping back, air coming in sharp little pulls. He takes the opportunity to bend his head to your throat, lips and teeth scraping along the thin skin there. The first scrape of his teeth makes your knees go loose.
“Patrick—” slips out before you can catch it, less accusation than plea.
He murmurs something filthy against your pulse, words hot and damp.
His hand at your breast moves, thumb hooking under the buttons that march down the front of your bodice. He yanks. Two buttons pop, one skittering to the floor.
You gasp, half scandalized, half thrilled.
“It took you long enough,” you manage, swallowing a shaky laugh.
He huffs against your throat, not quite amusement, more disbelief.
“You are insufferable,” he says. “Standing there with ink on your fingers and my history in your head, looking at me like that.”
“Like what,” you breathe.
His hand slides into your loosened bodice, fingers finding bare skin, cupping your breast fully now. His palm is hot, callused. When he drags his thumb over your nipple, it tightens under his touch, a direct line of sensation straight to your belly.
“Like you’ve been imagining this while you were supposed to be typing,” he says.
Your own hands finally stop clutching at his wrists and begin to roam. You bunch your fingers in his shirtfront, feeling the muscles there tense under the linen. You slide one hand down, over the flat of his stomach, lower, to the waistband of his trousers.
You undo the buttons with quick, clumsy fingers, the way you might open a drawer you have no business looking into. Beneath, you find him already hard, straining against the fabric. When you curl your hand around him through the last layer, he swears softly into your skin.
“Oh,” you say, and you cannot help the little curl of satisfaction in your voice. “You have been thinking about this, then. All those late nights at your desk, Doctor.”
His hand closes around your wrist, not to push you away, but to feel your grip as you squeeze harder.
“Little clerk with her hand on her employer’s cock,” he mutters, almost to himself. “God help me.”
He reaches down, forcing your fingers aside. For a second you think he will drag your hand away entirely. Instead he fumbles his fly open, frees himself, and then pushes your hand back around him bare.
The heat of him in your palm makes your mouth go dry. He’s thick and heavy, pulsing against your skin as you stroke, slick already at the tip. You swipe your thumb there and he grunts, hips jerking.
“Is this how you imagined it,” you taunt, voice low. “Me on my knees in your nice clean office, taking what you pretend you do not want?”
His thumb digs harder into the tendon of your wrist.
“You will not be on your knees,” he says. “I have spent too long looking down on you behind that desk. Turn around.”
You hesitate only long enough to let him see that you are choosing it. Then you do as he says.
The edge of his desk bites into the front of your thighs as you press against it. Papers slide under your hands, crackling. He gathers your skirts in both fists, hauling them up, up, until the cool air hits your stockings and the bare skin above them.
“Of course,” he says under his breath. “Of course you would wear these while you sit there giving me orders.”
“You bought them,” you remind him, fingers clutching at the far edge of the desk as he drags the fabric higher still. “If you dislike them, Doctor, you have only yourself to blame.”
He curses again, rougher this time. His hands find the tops of your stockings, thumbs stroking along that band of skin where garter ends and thigh begins.
He hooks his fingers into your drawers and yanks them down. They snag at your knees; you kick them aside, pulse pounding so hard you can feel it behind your eyes.
Patrick pauses behind you, just long enough to make you crazy, taking in the view he has been denied all these weeks.
“Smug little thing,” he says quietly. “Do you get wet digging through men’s filth, or has it just been me?”
You throw him a look over your shoulder, hair coming loose, breath fast.
“Find out,” you say.
His hand slides between your thighs, fingers finding you already slick, lips swollen and sensitive. The low sound he makes when he feels it is half groan half laugh.
“Oh, you have been waiting,” he says. “Dragging me over the coals and all the while—”
He slides two fingers through your folds, pressing where you are soft and open, then circles your clit. Your hips buck, an involuntary jerk against the desk.
“Patrick—”
“That’s it,” he mutters. “Say my name when you are doing something worthwhile with that mouth.”
You try to glare at him over your shoulder, but it dissolves into a gasp when he pushes one finger into you, the angle shallow, testing. He is not gentle—not cruel either. He moves with intent, and soon, another finger joins the first, stretching you, dragging against the ache inside you that has been building for weeks.
You rock back onto his hand, shameless.
“You talk so much,” he says, fingers pumping. “Let us see how long you last when there is something other than questions to occupy you.”
“You’re—your arrogance is astonishing,” you gasp. “Cashiered from one profession and still manages to be insufferable in another—”
He pulls his hand away abruptly. You whine, an undignified, desperate sound.
“Say please,” he says.
You grip the desk harder, panting. Pride and need war in your chest for a few ridiculous heartbeats.
“Go to hell,” you say.
His hand comes down on the curve of your ass, a sharp crack that sends a line of fire spreading outward. You yelp, swearing, heat blooming under his palm.
“You have earned that,” he says. “Standing there waving my sins in my face until I have no choice but to put you where you clearly wanted to be.”
“You are the one who—”
The second smack lands lower, over the fuller part of you, making your legs wobble. He soothes the sting with his palm, massaging, thumb straying down between your cheeks in a way that makes your breath catch.
“Last chance,” he says, voice gone hoarse. “Ask me.”
You squeeze your eyes shut, forehead lowering briefly to the cool wood of the desk.
“Please,” you say finally, the word dragged out of you. “Patrick. Please.”
He lets out a rough sound that might be a curse, might be your name, and his grip shifts from your hips to your waist.
“Turn around,” he snaps.
You barely have time to straighten before he hauls you bodily, hands firm at your sides, spinning you to face him. The room tilts for a moment, then the edge of the desk bites into the backs of your thighs. He pushes, and you go with it, palms splaying behind you for balance as he lifts you onto the blotter, papers crumpling under your weight.
“Here,” he mutters, crowding in, forcing your knees apart with his hips. “I want to see you when you ask for me like that.”
Your skirts are already bunched up from before; he shoves them higher with a vicious efficiency, baring you to the lamplight and his gaze. Cool air licks at your thighs, at the wet heat between them. You feel obscenely open on the polished wood, stockings rolled and biting into the soft flesh below your knees.
He steps between your legs and drags you to the very edge, dragging you forward until your cunt is snug against him, until there is nowhere else for you to go. One of his hands clamps around the back of your neck, steadying you, thumb pressed against your pulse; the other slides down, fingers splaying over your inner thigh, pushing it higher.
“Look at you,” he says, and his voice is ruined, scraped raw. “Ink on your fingers, my secrets in your mouth, and your legs spread on my desk.”
You glare up at him because you cannot think of anything else to do, breath coming fast. He answers by tightening his hand at your neck, pinning you in place.
“Say it again,” he orders. “Say please. Look at me when you do it.”
You swallow, lips slick, heart pounding against the heel of his hand.
“Please,” you whisper, meeting his eyes. “Patrick. I want—”
His mouth returns to yours, swallowing the rest of the sentence.
While his mouth takes yours apart, his hand leaves your neck and drops between you. He catches the back of your knees, dragging your legs wider, forcing them up until your heels hitch against the edge of the desk. You’re half-lying back, half-held upright by his grip on you, the angle helpless.
“Hold on,” he tells you.
You grab the sides of the desk until your fingers ache.
The first press of him against you knocks the air from your lungs. He doesn’t bother with careful nudging; he lines himself up and drives in with one hard thrust, forcing his way past the resistance of your body. The stretch burns in the best, worst way, your cunt opening around him as he sinks deep.
A strangled sound tears out of you, much too loud in the small office.
“Fuck,” he groans, head dropping for a second, eyes squeezing shut. “You—Christ.”
He is big and unrelenting, filling you to the hilt, hips flush to the inside of your thighs. It feels as if he’s wedged up against your spine, deep enough that your whole body is tuned to where you’re wrapped around him.
“Patrick,” you gasp, fingers scrabbling for purchase, desk biting into your back where you’ve slid.
He pulls back and slams in again, no gentleness in it. The sound of him hitting you—skin on skin, the wet, filthy slap of it—rings off the walls. He sets a pace that is ferocious from the start, hips snapping forward, using the grip on your legs to drag you onto him harder.
Each thrust drives a sharp little cry out of you, your body jolting, the edge of the desk digging into your lower back as he pounds into you.
You feel utterly taken, pinned open wide while he uses you, the angle letting him fuck deep and fast, everything inside you stretched around him.
“This what you wanted?” he bites out between thrusts. “You dig and dig until I snap and now—”
Another brutal stroke, and your head falls back, a gasp torn from your throat.
“—now you get exactly what you’ve been asking for.”
He punctuates the words with his hips, driving every syllable into you. The desk shudders under the assault; pens and papers go skittering to the floor. One of his hands drops from your leg to your waist, fingers clamping down hard enough you know you will wear his grip for days.
You cling to him and the desk both, pulled back and forth on his cock, helpless to do anything except take it.
“You look so sweet at that little typewriter,” he grinds out. “All neat and disciplined. And all the while, this—”
He shifts his angle, dragging against a place inside you that makes stars explode behind your eyes.
“—this is what you were built for.”
“Don’t stop,” you gasp, past caring how you sound. You can hear yourself, breathless and wrecked, but you don’t recognize your own voice.
He laughs, a short, disbelieving bark.
“Stopping is not the problem,” he says. “The problem is not ruining you completely.”
His free hand slides up between your breasts, shoving your bodice aside more fully, rough fingers closing around your breast, thumb scraping over your nipple. The double sensation—him slamming into you from below, his hand squeezing your breast, calluses catching on sensitive skin—tips something precarious inside you.
Your thighs twitch, wanting to close around him, but he holds them open, forearms braced under your knees now, using the leverage to fuck into you even harder. You can feel how wet you are, how every thrust drives a slick heat up your spine.
“Look at me,” he grunts.
Your head snaps forward, eyes dragging up to meet his.
His hair has fallen out of its careful order, damp at his temple. His cheeks are flushed, jaw clenched, eyes blown wide and black with lust and something uglier, something like relief twisted into it. He looks wild, nothing like the contained man your patients see.
“All this time,” he says, punctuating each phrase with a deep thrust that makes you yelp, “you sitting in my office, poking at things that could get you killed… and you had no idea this was the safer part of me.”
His rhythm turns vicious, almost punishing. The desk thumps against the floor with every snap of his hips, and you’re past thinking now, fingers digging crescent moons into the wood. Every nerve you have is trained on where he’s driving into you, over and over, deep and fast and filthy.
You feel your climax barreling toward you with frightening speed, all the nights of wanting and imagining and not touching yourself enough to take the edge off pooling into this one brutal, relentless rhythm.
“Patrick—” you choke. “I am going to—”
“Do it,” he orders, cutting you off. His his hips somehow pick up speed.
Your whole body bows, back arching off the wood, a cry ripped out of you that might carry to the street if anyone happens to be passing. Your cunt clamps around him in tight, pulsing waves, everything clenching unbearably hard. There's a heat crashing through you so fiercely you forget how to breathe for a moment.
He swears, a filthy, strangled sound, as you squeeze around him.
“Oh, you’re—Christ,” he grits out. “That’s it. Milk me then.”
He doesn’t slow, doesn’t give you time to come down. He fucks you through it, into it, dragging every last spasm out of your body. The overstimulation borders on unbearable, your nerves sparking, but it keeps you pinned in that white-hot place until you’re shaking.
His fingers bruise into your hips again, yanking you flush to him as he rams in as deep as he can go. He holds there, buried to the root, a torn-off groan spilling against your open mouth as his cock kicks inside you.
You feel the hot flood of him spilling into you, thick and heavy, pulsing in deep surges that your over-sensitized body drinks in helplessly.
He stays like that, locked against you, breath harsh and uneven, forehead pressed to yours, as if neither of you quite trusts your legs.
For a moment there is nothing except the sound of your breathing and the faint hiss of the lamps. Then he draws in a long, ragged breath and eases his grip on your thighs. You feel him start to soften inside you, each slow pulse sending a fresh, lewd trickle of warmth slipping out, wetting the tender skin between your thighs and the wood under you.
He pulls back, finally, cock sliding out of you with a slow drag that makes you shudder. You feel the loss sharply, empty and stretched, his spend leaking out in a heavy, sticky spill that you know is going to stain everything it touches.
Your legs are trembling; your stockings are crooked. Your bodice gapes where he popped the buttons, breast tender where his fingers have been. Papers under your palms are wrinkled and damp at the corners; a droplet of something—ink, sweat, you—spatters the blotter.
You drag in a breath, then another, trying to find words that haven’t been knocked out of you.
Across from you, Patrick takes a step back, just far enough that he isn’t pressed between your knees anymore. His trousers are still open, shirt askew, hair disordered. His chest rises and falls sharply, fingers flexing once at his sides as if he isn’t sure what to do with his hands now they’re not on you.
His gaze drops to the slick mess between your thighs, to the slow roll of his cum slipping out of you onto his desk, and something in his expression twists.
The lamplight throws all his sharp angles into relief, hollows under his eyes, the long line of his neck, the jump of muscle at his jaw.
His gaze keeps slipping—down to the state he has left you in, back up to your face, away again. Shame moves over his features like a cloud across a too-bright sky. It is an odd thing to see on him, raw and unguarded, now that the heat has burned out of his temper.
“You should—” he begins, then stops. His voice sounds roughened, scraped bare. “You should fix your dress.”
There is something almost absurd about the remark, after what he has done to you.
You huff a laugh that is more exhale than amusement and reach clumsily for your bodice, fingers clumsy at the torn line of buttons. You get one fastened and give up on the rest, breath still uneven.
When you look up again, his eyes are on your hands. The sight of you fumbling at your clothes, trying to restore some semblance of order to yourself on his ink-stained desk, seems to land in him like a blow.
He moves before you can read the decision on his face.
Two strides and he is there again, between your knees, crowding your space. You stiffen on instinct, but he is not reaching for your hips this time, not for your throat.
His hands come down, one on either side of you, palms planting on the desk, arms braced so he can lean in without tipping you backward.
You feel the heat of his body close again, but it's different now. There's no thrust in it, no forward drive. He bows his head, shoulders hunching.
Then he lowers his face into the curve of your neck.
He misses, slightly, cheek bumping your jaw, breath catching as if he has misjudged the distance. His beard scrapes your skin as he adjusts, pressing his forehead and nose into the place where your shoulder meets your throat, burying himself there as if the lamplight is too much for him.
At first you think he is simply trying to catch his breath, that the weight of him is only exhaustion. His heartbeat is a hard, restless thump against your chest, ribs expanding against your ribs.
Your hands, which had been hovering awkwardly in front of you, land without thinking on his shoulders, then slide up into his hair, still damp at the temple.
“Patrick,” you say softly, not sure whether it is a question or a warning.
He inhales against your skin, a long, shaky pull of air that seems to rattle all the way down. You feel it more than hear it, the way his chest shudders. His fingers curl against the wood beside your hips, knuckles going pale. For a moment he holds himself rigid, as if by sheer will he can make the next part not happen.
Then something gives. A flicker, like a tremor at the edge of your awareness. His shoulders jerk once, almost imperceptibly. You feel the breath he lets out against your neck, and this time there's a brokenness in it, a sound half-swallowed.
He tries to choke it back; you can feel the effort. The muscles along his spine go taut under your hands, as if he is bracing for impact. But the pressure inside him has nowhere to go now that he has loosened his grip on it, and you are too close not to notice when it finally spills.
The next breath he drags in hitches sharply, catching at the top as if there is something lodged in his chest. When he exhales, a small, helpless sound slips out of him, muffled against your skin. His fingers claw at the desk, nails digging into the scarred surface. The entire frame of him trembles, once, twice.
You realize, with a slow, strange shock, that he is crying.
Not loudly. Not with the grand, racking sobs you have seen from widows in waiting rooms. It comes like everything else in him does—tight, contained, trying desperately to be dignified in a situation that does not allow for dignity.
His breath stutters against your throat, damp heat blooming where his mouth presses. Another shiver runs through him, then another, the movements slight but unmistakable. The sound in his chest is thin and raw, that particular ruin a body makes when tears are being forced past teeth that do not want to let them through.
You simply sit there and hold him, hands sliding more securely into his hair, fingers combing through the dark strands at the nape of his neck.
He leans into it without seeming to mean to, head angling closer, nose crushed against your collarbone now, as if he could burrow under your skin.
“… should not have—” he manages, words scraping out in a low rasp. “Should never have touched you.”
“That seems a bit late to fret over,” you murmur, because you do not know how else to respond to an apology delivered with his face pressed into your neck.
He huffs a broken sound that might be a laugh if there were any humor in it. His shoulders shake again. You feel something wet and hot seep into the hollow just above your collar—the salt of it mingling with the sweat already cooling there—and for a moment your throat tightens, unwanted sympathy slipping in under the door of your irritation.
“You do not understand,” he says, voice muffled. “You have no idea what you are tying yourself to, sitting here with me. You should have left it alone. You should have left me alone.”
The words are harsh, but there is no force behind them, no push to actually dislodge you. If anything, his grip on the desk tightens, anchoring himself in place. The ruin in his tone undercuts the sting; it sounds less like a rejection than a confession.
“You say that,” you answer quietly, “and yet here you are. Crying into my neck.”
“Do not,” he says, breath snagging. “Do not make light of this.”
“I am not.” You ease one hand down, off his neck and onto his back, palm spanning the tense muscle there. He feels smaller like this, head bowed, shoulders hunched, the height he carries himself with folded in. “I am making it bearable.”
He trembles again, a whole-body shiver this time. For a passing second he presses closer, as if he could crawl through your ribs and hide. The idea that this man, who only minutes ago had you spread on his desk, driving into you with fury and heat, could also be this—small, frightened, leaking tears into your skin—unsettles something deep in you.
“If they knew,” he murmurs against you, words catching, “what I have done. What I was. You would not be sitting here, looking at me as if I am—”
His breath hitches, the next words swallowed along with another thin, shaky sound. He’s grinding his teeth; you can feel the tension of it in his jaw where it presses to you. He does not want to say it. He does not want to make it real by naming it.
“As if you are what?” you ask, gentler than you intended.
He shakes his head, a tiny, miserable movement. Tears soak another line into your throat.
“Human,” he says at last, the word almost soundless. “As if I am still that.”
Your hand on his back tightens.
“You are wretched,” you say, because softness feels like it would shatter him, “and stubborn, and arrogant, and you lie badly on paper. But you are not empty.”
He laughs then, a short, ruined thing that turns into a choked breath halfway through. Another shudder moves through him; another quiet, unwilling tear hits your skin. You do not shush him. You do not tell him it is all right. You know better than to offer absolutions you are not qualified to give.
You just sit there, half-undressed on his desk, legs still draped around his hips, and let him press his face into the curve of your neck while whatever has been gnawing at him finally finds a way out.
After a while, the shaking eases. His breathing evens out bit by bit, though every so often you feel a little aftershock move through him, some memory catching on the edges of his ribs. He does not lift his head. You are not sure he will be able to look you in the eye once he does.
You’re the one who moves first, eventually.
Your fingers slide up into his hair again, combing it back from his forehead, nails scratching lightly over his scalp. His shoulders loosen another fraction. You tilt your head to the side, resting your cheek against his temple, closing your own eyes for a moment.
“This,” you say quietly, after a long stretch of lamp-hiss and breathing, “is not going back in whatever box you had it in. You know that, do you not?”
His answer is slow in coming. When it arrives, it is a whisper, rough and resigned.
“I know.”
“Good,” you say. “Then we will start from that.”
He lets out a breath that feels, for the first time, less like drowning and more like the first cough after being dragged from cold water.
He’s still pressed against you, face hidden, hands braced, a man who has just fucked you senseless on his own desk and then folded in on himself like a paper figure that has tasted fire.
There will be time later for anger, for questions, for all the sharp words you have not yet spent.
For now, you keep your grip on him steady and let him be exactly what he is in this moment: a ruin trying, foolishly and stubbornly, to hold itself together against your throat.
"young people, swollen with passion, denied spirits by this senseless prohibition, park along this lonely stretch to contemplate that most mysterious of mathematical equations... how one plus one becomes one." "they come out here to do math?" "you've been too sheltered, my belladonnic beauty."
INTERVIEW WITH THE VAMPIRE — 1.04. The Ruthless Pursuit of Blood With All a Child's Demanding.
So the other day someone in the discord server mentioned how they wish more Tumblr fics were cross-posted to AO3 because Tumblr can be…chaotic. The app refreshes mid-read. Tags get clogged. Amazing fics disappear into the abyss. You miss something and never find it again.
And after thinking about it for a while, I think I have a solution.
We’re going to build a Jack Fandom Digital Library.
All characters.
Reader inserts (fem, male, gn, poc, chubby, etc).
OC x canon.
AO3 and Tumblr links.
Every trope. Every kink. Every POV.
A searchable, curated space where people can easily discover fic based on what they’re actually in the mood for.
Want:
Remmick x reader?
Dark Cook?
Soft Lion?
Mafia AU?
Hurt/comfort?
Breeding kink?
Slow burn?
3k oneshot or 50k epic?
Imagine having one organized place to find it.
Not only would this solve the “lost fic” issue, but it could also help with engagement by:
Highlighting underrated stories
Promoting authors
Making it easier for readers to discover new writers
Keeping the fandom alive and active
This will ultimately be a shared Tumblr blog with multiple contributors and select admins (to limit password sharing and keep things secure). Think of it as a fully categorized archive.
This is a HUGE undertaking. I cannot do this alone.
I already have 6 people who’ve expressed interest in helping (bless you angels), but if anyone else wants to be part of building this from the ground up, let me know and I’ll add you to the private planning channel on discord!!
This is ambitious. It’ll take time. But imagine how nice it’ll be to have a real digital library for the Jack fandom.
If you’ve ever wanted easier fic discovery, better engagement, and a centralized archive, this is it.
warnings: afab reader, stepbrother/stepsister, forbidden sex, taboo, her and cook are juniors during the nightclub flashback so some underage, canon typical drugs & alcohol use, dubcon - cook is persistent/obsessed with you, intoxicated dry humping, petting, making out, ruth (cook’s mom) is her own warning, talks of divorce/infidelity, verbal degradation kink, daddy kink, eating p from the back, rimming (f receiving), doggy/prone bone position, squirting, spanking, excessive divider usage
a/n: inspired by @spikedfearn’s excellent stepbro!cook v day fic.
Quite frankly, you had been relieved. Not when your dad had been formally served the divorce papers. Not when your mum fled the country to embark on an early retirement getaway cruise with her longtime co-worker (and you suspect—longtime lover).
But when your father a year later presented you with his new girlfriend and she wasn’t some tanned, blonde sugarbaby wannabe who could pass as your classmate. She instead was a middle-aged, curvy redhead whose crimson locks surely came out of a box.
Her name was Ruth. And she was insatiable.
After a dinner outing or two and a walkthrough of one of her latest scintillating art installations, you came to the conclusion that she might be okay. That you could tolerate her presence for your supposed last few years living at home before you left the nest to establish yourself as an adult at uni.
You did find it a bit odd that the only photo she had on her phone to boast of her biological two sons were from ten years ago. She assured you ‘they were not that little’ now.
“Oh, yeah. Paddy’s just turned eight and the other, James,” she’d said with some level of begrudgingness, “He’s your age. Few months shy of seventeen, I reckon. He’s already out of the house, that one,”
You would eventually learn that this was not by choice.
“You might already know him, honey bunches,” your dad grins, “He goes to Roundview like you. Name ring a bell at all?”
You remember rolling your eyes.
“Daddy, d’you know how many Jameses there are at my college? There’s a lot. James H., Jimmy C., James B.,”
And you were hardly the social type to begin with.
“Mm, well, he usually goes by his cockhole dad’s last name,”
“Byatt?” you chime in, assuming Ruth had yet to change her surname.
“No,” she went, “Cook.”
To which, you inhaled your spit at a velocity that could be considered lethal, choking and sputtering on nothing but air. You convinced yourself you’d just heard Ruth wrong. The alternative option was James “Daddy-Sized” Cook being your prospective stepbrother and you could not even begin to entertain that possibility. It sent a chill down your spine and yet, had you looking damn near feverish with the flush that had taken your cheeks and the beads of sweat near your hairline.
“Know him at all, sweets?” your dad asks.
You stammer out an unintelligible response. Your father hardly registers you leaving the table due to the cupid’s arrow protruding out of his sweater vest. His thumb caressed the back of Ruth’s hand as they exchanged amorous glances, eyes full of yearning.
You don’t recall the last time you saw your dad this content. Part of it made you wanna hurl, especially with this new information that came to light, but part of it also made you want to sob. You’d known how brutal these past two years had been for him; nearly thirty years of marriage gone up in smoke. Who were you to deprive him of this reprieve? Maybe this was just part of growing up, that’s how you rationalized it in your head.
And would continue to for the next twelve months of your life.
“Honey! Come take this up to Ruth’s studio!” your father calls out from the driveway.
You scoffed at his request, standing at the landing of the stairs, watching on as the movers hauled box after box into your main living area.
Ruth’s studio, in fact, had been your mum’s arts and crafts room. It was now being repurposed which you had no objection to. You and your mum had gone no-contact following the separation and you were spurned by the occasional reminders of her you still found lying around the house. She’d made a thorough, speedy exit but even the unflinching perfectionist she was—she had left a handful of keepsakes behind. Smaller objects that maybe once held some type of significance, some kind of meaning.
You hardly knew what to make of anything anymore.
“John said I get the loft, fair and square!” Paddy jeers.
“Oh, yeah, did he?”
Cook wrangles his baby brother away from his rolling suitcase and puts him in a noogie. Paddy squeals in laughter at this, trying to playfully get away from Cook’s hold. More than anything, you can tell the young boy is just over the moon with Cook being back in his life.
Out of breath, Cook clocks you on the staircase and you freeze momentarily. His goofy, crooked grin settles and he instead gazes up at you with some kind of unplaceable expression. You pivot on your heel and retreat up the stairs, walking down the long narrow hallway that leads to all of your bedrooms, some new and some old.
Eyeing each family photograph hung on the alabaster walls with scrutiny, you try to pick yourself out in each one. In one, it’s your mum, dad and you on holiday in Switzerland; you were thirteen then, about to ascend on a ski lift, poles in hand.
In another, you’re on your dad’s lap, you can’t be more than four or five. It was when he took you out fishing with your grandfather on his boat. You’re missing more than a couple of teeth, your life vest is crooked, and your eyes are almost entirely obscured by your dad’s bucket hat that he let you wear. It obviously was far too large for your teeny tiny head. Your nose crinkles at the cuteness and you lightly caress the glass the photo sits behind with your fingertips.
“That you?” a low voice says to the right of you.
You jump and rip your hand away from the wall, taking a light layer of dust with your fingers. Cook’s head is tilted, hands respectfully clasped behind his back as if he were mindfully enjoying an oil painting at The Louvre.
“...had to think real hard and long ‘bout that one, did ‘ya?,” you sigh, “...yes, yes, it’s me,”
“It’s cute,” he goes, giving a slight smile.
“Don’t be weird,”
“Be weird how? I’m just…familiarizin’ myself with the space,”
“Can you familiarize…like…further back? Away from here? Ooh, maybe by the lantern right there,” you point out the window to the street, “That’s plenty far enough,”
“Y’know, I’m sensin’ a bit of resistance from you, babes,” he clicks his tongue, “Maybe it’s somethin’ we gotta sort out in some kinda family therapy. Know a good shrink?”
You huff a breath of air.
“Please, all of the therapy in the world couldn’t cure whatever fucked-up thing you got goin’ on in that head of yours…” you begin to stride off towards the stairs but stop yourself.
Cook’s interest is suddenly piqued.
“...and stop calling me that. Weirdo.”
You skip down the stairs finally to help out your dad. Cook watches on, hands in his pockets, admiring his surroundings. His interest is piqued even more when he spots a door at the end of the hallway with a hot pink keep out sign decal adhered to it. The door is open just a crack and in the sliver, he can make out the pink and purple familiar dressings of a teenage girl’s room. His eyebrow wrenches upwards and he purses his lips so as to not say anything, even though there’s nobody else around.
“Cook! Shithead! Come give us a hand, fuck’s sake!” a haggard Ruth screeches from the first floor.
It takes every fiber of his being to resist the ungodly urge to pilfer through all of your things, to smell your perfumes, to get his hands on any dainty little article of clothing he could and jam them all into his pant pockets. But he sighs. And he clenches his fists and relaxes and returns to the stairs, taking one last fleeting look at your room. Ignoring the growing hardness straining against his briefs.
“Fuck me.” he mutters to himself.
Having grown up an only child for the majority of your life, you were half-excited over, half-dreading the reality of living with two brothers. But the reality was the Cook brothers were majorly self-sufficient, possibly due to them having raised themselves. Paddy walked himself to the bus stop unassisted. Cook would show up to college hours late, from whatever shithole he passed out in the night before. After hours, Paddy was usually diligently doing schoolwork or at a mate’s house. Cook was to be found at the same kind of venues you’d encountered him at in the wild before; nightclubs, pubs, and the like.
You wondered if he remembered. You prayed that he didn’t.
You did, however.
The sweaty, dank-smelling crowd of youngsters, the blue and red moving head lights swirl all around the room, lathering him in lilac and you in lavender. Whatever pill your girlfriend gave you during the prelash at her place had finally kicked in, your jaw stiff and your pulse racing.
And then everything was pink and a blur, as if your body was being enveloped in some warm magenta, You dragged your painted nails along the exposed flesh of your chest, tingling claw marks left in their wake. You hoped he didn’t recognize you from class. In the uneven lighting and under the influence of whatever he had necked, snorted or smoked—you doubted he would.
Although he seemed more cogent than you, more in control. Perhaps all of his relentless partying had given him some level of tolerance or more likely, in the same vein of his loud prurient persona, it was all just a front.
As for your own heightened state, you did happen to be more of a homebody though you were by no means straight-edge. You only relented in tagging along with your girlfriend and her superficial pals because it was her birthday. That and she’d begged you endlessly for over a week to join.
Behind the lids of your eyes, you’re not even able to hide from the cruel, pulsating lights. Your limbs hang slack and your mouth is agape, sighing blissfully. Suddenly, there’s a sturdy firm mass that has manifested behind you.
You stopped swaying as quickly and ease into it. His chin dripping with sweat hovers over your shoulder and two warm hands affix themselves to your hips. They only begin to truly grip onto your sides when you roll your ass back into his clothed crotch. His grunt is barely audible over the thumping electronic music. You recognize him by his scent alone, his overapplied Diesel Only The Brave cologne mixed with his natural musk was fatal in a confident masculine sort of way.
A series of high-pitched whines leaves your permanently open mouth, though they too are muffled by the DJ’s rousing set. Your hair is tied up but has become more and more unruly as the night has gone on. Still, it made the small sensitive little spot behind your neck where your hair meets skin readily accessible. His slick lips ghost over the area and the column of your neck and the shell of your ear.
“So fuckin’ good like this,” you think he says but you aren’t sure.
His fingertips find the mesh hem of your cocktail dress. Your own hands have begun to dig into his jean pants, sealing him against you, not letting him pull away. His greedy hands begin to slowly, painfully pull the fabric up over the thick of your thighs. The resistance of your flesh causes the skirt to catch a little here and there. You couldn’t be upset about that though. If Cook had his way, he would’ve torn the dress off of you entirely, leaving you bare for all the clubgoers to see.
In fact, he’d possessively place his hand around your neck, not squeezing but not in a loose grip either. Like he does now. The index and middle finger of his other hand would dip in between your thighs. Like they do now.
And between gritted teeth, he’d ask in a searing tone; “Who owns you, huh?”
Before you can answer, your girlfriend snatches you from his embrace and slaps him sharply across the cheek. She lobs curses and threats at him, taking you by the forearm and pulling you away from the main dancefloor. The whole thing is a swirl of shouting and lights that you can barely recall the next morning in your bed.
You wake up cold, almost feverish, the last of your high leaving your system. Evidently, Maya got you to your bedroom and let you fall onto the mattress, lying over your blankets, party dress and heels still on. As you begin to stir, you feel a dull pinch at two very specific points on your hips.
Confused and bleary, you pull your dress up high enough to inspect the area. You lift it over the black bikini panties lined with hot pink lace you’d worn last night with the intention of having them ripped off of you. Eyeing your hipbones, you can make out burgundy marks clearly left behind from someone's harsh grip on you. But the bruises eventually fade as does your disjointed memory of the night.
Still, the lingering notion of being even briefly taken advantage of by him—by Cook—hardly disturbed you.
The opposite.
It sent you racing upstairs to your bedroom following dinner with your family night after night—door locked shut, yourself sprawled out on your mattress, hand in between your legs, feverishly rubbing yourself to the thought of Cook taking you. At school. At a club. In the front seat of your mum’s Peugeot. In the same bed you’d spent weeks getting yourself off to him in.
It didn’t matter.
So long as it ended with your hair in his fist, his spit in your mouth, and your cunt being impaled on his cock over and over again.
Your very own goddamn stepbrother.
The thought should very well make you ill, after all this time. But it hardly does.
Instead, it makes you throb and want and yearn for more.
Family dinners were now a new kind of awkward, painful, and miserable all in one. Ruth had convinced your father to take up vegetarianism and this new palate change extended to everyone else in the family, even the boys. You were always hit or miss when it came to eating meat and typically only stuck to fish. Your mum’s savory parmesan crusted tilapia came to mind, making your stomach growl at the dinner table. Now you were face-to-misshapen-face with the stuffed portobello mushroom Ruth tried to reinvent as a “Wellington”.
It was an affront to the culinary world.
You opted to instead nibble on the side of couscous that at the very least was edible, even if it lacked any real discernable flavor. Cook leans back in his chair, arms folded and legs bouncing a mile a minute. Paddy follows suit.
“...nice of you to properly join us for dinner, Jimmy,” Ruth chides, breaking the silence.
“I wholeheartedly agree with your mother. Besides, what else should a lad your age be gettin’ up to on a school night?” your dad says, merrily.
You burst out in laughter, shocking the rest of the table and even yourself. Ruth gives you a mild glare. Cook lightly smirks at the mere sound of your giggling, even if it's seemingly at his expense.
“...oh, I dunno, Daddy. There’s quite a whole lotta mischief ‘a lad his age’ could be gettin’ into,” you say, coyly, “Speaking of which, what’s got you on HDC, Jimmy? Tryna lay low from the police or have you just been barred from every club in the city?”
Cook sits up at this, arching his eyebrow in a challenging manner. He eyes you up and down briefly, making you suddenly feel exposed in your modest blouse.
“...nah,” he utters, “Studyin’,”
You cackle at this, bustling over in your seat. Your dad and Ruth exchange looks with each other.
“Now you must really be takin’ the piss. Studying, you said? Studying what? Which kinds of mephedrone will get you munted the quickest? I take it you must be a hands-on learner in that case,”
Cook snorts, eyeing his fingers distantly. He watches the veins and tendons in his hands bulge and relax with each flex and squeeze.
“Oh, yeah, real hands-on. Love to get a nice firm grasp of what it is I’m learnin’,” he says, charged, “Y’should know. Innit all you ever do?”
“You mean, what I’m meant to be doing? What we both are meant to be doing? School? That majorly important thing that matters. That should matter to you,”
He groans out a labored sigh, slumping back in his seat once more. Cook tussles the back of his hair in annoyance. You go to take a drink from your glass of hemp milk, looking away from him. You don’t see the smile creeping in from the corner of his mouth.
“...never thought I’d have a little sister as tight as you,” he mumbles, snidely.
You gag on your drink and it splashes back into your face. Paddy laughs at this, having had some trouble following along with your and Cook’s argument. Your dad looks to Ruth for guidance and she huffs in disbelief. Then he acts.
“...go to your rooms, the both of you,” your dad demands.
“But dad–”
“Now!”
You lurch up from the table, not caring to push in your chair. With a surge of emotions bubbling up in your chest, you flee to your bedroom where you know you can sob and scream into your pillow peace. Cook trails up the stairs not far behind you, hands in his pockets and looking incredibly nonchalant. You want to let loose a whole string of expletives and maybe even bash his head in with a rock but pride refuses to let you look back at him.
“Y’know…,” he says, lowly, just as you reach the doorframe of your bedroom, “Ain’t a day goes by…that I’m not thinkin’ ‘bout that night,”
Your throat becomes sandpaper, your tongue struggles to aid you in forming words.
“I-I-I don’t—”
“You do. You absolutely do. Y’just wanna play dumb, pretend it never happened…and that’s all fine and good. Surprised y’even remember it at all, you were so far gone,” he says in a dangerous tone.
You meet him in the middle of the hallway, eyes welling and shame evident all over your face. Your eyes momentarily flick to the picture of you and your dad fishing but then the all-too familiar sensation of his lips grazing along your ear consumes you
“D’you even remember how wet you were?” he says.
You shove him away roughly, tears spilling down your cheeks. You slug him a couple more times in the chest and he takes it, seemingly allowing you to get out whatever it is you’ve been bottling up inside for the past year-and-a-half. Eventually he tires of your assault and grips both of your wrists. You thrash against his hold, being mindful not to struggle or shout too loud as to not alert your families downstairs.
“Alright, babes…alright, then,” he breathes.
You refuse to meet his gaze, continuing to jerk away but your attempts grow less and less frequent as you wear yourself out. You don’t willingly go into his arms but you do allow himself to pull you into some kind of facsimile of a hug. The two of you hadn’t been that close since that fateful night.
“Tha’s a girl, tha’s a good girl.” he murmurs, softly against your temple.
His lips press to your forehead but he doesn’t give you an actual peck. In this charade, Cook has released your hands and wrapped you in a protective bear hug. Like something a relative might give you, a sibling—a brother, even. His arms stay locked around your shoulders for a spell, bolstering the fleeting feeling that ‘maybe this will be fine and we can just be stepsiblings and things will be alright and we won’t ever have to talk about that night again’.
It’s a long moment of you processing this idea and making peace with it before the secure feeling of his arms are replaced by the wandering touch of his hands. They smooth down your sides, still a reassuring touch that doesn’t feel suggestive, if not a tad invasive. But then they traverse further down to your waist. They dip a little lower, giving your hips a brief squeeze.
This distinctly resembles the touch of a boyfriend or a drunken clubgoer you decided to dance up on. But not a stepbrother.
Not your stepbrother.
Your heart is racing faster than you thought possible and you feel it in the back of your throat. He can no doubt feel your rapid pulse when his hand finds itself encased around your throat. Taking the hand around your neck and the one still at your hip, Cook draws you in even closer. The last traces of resistance leave your body and your lips collide into his in a quick kiss that you whip your head away from.
This is fine. Maybe a bit unorthodox but I’ve seen families give quick kisses on the lips before.
This is your rationale.
Then the outline of his cock is prodding against your clothed lower half.
“C-Cook, c-c’mon—” you protest.
He presses his groin into you tightly when he captures your mouth in a kiss full of tongue and spit and too much want to be familial.
“There it is,” he hisses into your open mouth.
Laaving your tongue with his, his wet kisses trail along your jaw and your neck and the taste of your salt and skin is so much richer than he could’ve possibly imagined. His breaths hardly sound human anymore, laced with something darker, more animalistic. He grasps you so tightly, you’re certain deep down he’s petrified he’ll never have you like this again.
“W-We can’t” you whisper, hastily against his chin, “T-They’re down there,”
He pulls away, breathless and unbothered, eyes tracing every feature they can take in. Your weak observation in regards to your families does little to sway him and he merely smiles at the prospect.
“Yes, they are,”
His fingers begin to tickle your belt buckle.
“J-James—“
“It’s James, now? I thought it was Jimmy, I thought it was weirdo, huh? Yeah, baby?”
“Ja–C-Cook. You are my broth-s-stepbrother,”
“Oh, yeah, you let that slip, didn’t you? Brother. Sounds wronger though, innit? ‘Sides, nobody actually says the ‘step’, do they?”
“Cook—“
Cook begins to palm you up at the front of your jeans. You want to whine, you want to bat your eyes up at him and beg him for more until he gets so stiff, he has to tuck it beneath his waistband. But that’d involve giving him what he wants.
And you’ve decided that categorically is the exact opposite of what you want to do.
The sound of the kitchen sink faucet turning on downstairs startles you and you instinctually shove him away so hard, he’s left stumbling backwards, cheeks rosy and perfect. His ever-toothy, ever-imperfect smile makes your knees practically buckle. Fortunately, you make it to the refuge of your bedroom before he gets to see himself have this small victory over you. Your impending tears have noticeably waned and the shudder in your breath has subsided.
Perhaps this was all just a strange dream brought on by Ruth’s garish food.
It became rather blatant to you in the oncoming weeks that Cook was developing a mild obsession with you. However, he was both too proud to admit it and smart enough to know that “wanting to shag his stepsis” lacked the wide appeal porno made it out to have. As such, he was wise to not mention it to Fredds or JJ and avoided giving you too much attention at college.
At home though, all bets were off.
He came to the startling realization that when he was not out getting pissed at every pub and bar in town, that you were always at home—in his mind, waiting for him—diligently working on your schoolwork like a good little student. This resulted in him turning down more outings or falling back on what soon would turn into his favorite lie—“he had a date”.
This ‘date’ was sometimes awkwardly loitering in your doorway as you flung pillows at him to shoo him away. This ‘date’ was securing the bathroom right after you’d had one of your long, hot showers, to bask in the steamy mixed scent of your shampoo and your body wash like it was a sauna. This ‘date’ meant leering over your shoulder anytime your smartphone dinged with a text notification, ensuring it wasn’t any boys phoning you up.
As persistent as the young man was, part of it had to be a lack of maturity or a true significant male figure in his upbringing to model his own conduct after.
You too were cursed with your own form of stubbornness, which came in the way in which you were perceived. Cook had a reputation that fell somewhere between ladykiller and unneutered alleycat. Your own girlfriends had relayed horror stories to you from the girls in their classes whom he tried to court. Many of which he managed to bed.
“He called it ‘daddy-sized’ on his birthday. What a total skeeze.”
They tried to warn you when you confided in them about Ruth and your dad. Only Maya seemed to remember your and Cook’s ‘exchange’ at the nightclub. It wasn’t so much grounds for embarrassment but grounds for scrutiny.
Especially when your father proposed to Ruth and then proposed she and the boys move in not long after.
The tidbit of gossip that Maya was sitting on seemed to speak itself into existence; “Miss Goodie-Two-Shoes-Bookworm was bumpin’ and grindin’ on her stepbrother at the club–he was knuckles deep in his lil sis’s fanny—swear it.” Details would be omitted in service of the more juicy, the more fucked-up narrative. But you knew as good as she did that little embellishment would be required. So you maintained a healthy, mutually beneficial relationship with your girlfriend and were mindful to not get on her bad side.
Or the consequences would reap themselves.
“This was not an easy decision to make, honey bunches,” your dad said gravely, hands clasped in front of him.
Ruth sat right next to him, arm interlocked with his. Her face showed regret but a false one. Your dad’s saddened expression seemed a tad more genuine. One night, they sat you and Cook down at the dinner table, positioned directly across from them. Paddy was absent so you could surmise there were no more vile experimental dishes to ingest. Even Cook, who you would briefly look over to, seemed tense. Your stomach was doing somersaults, back handsprings and a headstand all at once. Any more waiting for them to say their piece and you feared you might be sick.
“...due to your constant sniping at one another and the utter lack of maturity you have both been exhibiting as of late…you will not be joining us on holiday for Paddy’s birthday,” Ruth fesses.
A tangible weight is eased off of your and Cook’s shoulders. You pretended that your dad and Ruth’s decision truly gave you pause, grousing and folding your arms in shame. Cook let out a hefty, overdramatic sigh. You figured at least part of him was disappointed he wasn’t going to have this extra quality time with Paddy but you could practically feel the anticipation radiate off of him.
“Which means you will not leave the house, you will not invite guests, and you will behave. We leave Friday and won’t be back until Monday,” your dad says, “Maybe by then, the two of you will have things sorted out.”
Early Friday evening, after school, your dad, Ruth and Paddy departed. Your dad gave you a tender hug and kiss, Ruth a kindred glance, and Paddy a waist-high hug. That night neither you nor Cook leave your bedrooms. Save for Cook who orders takeout only for himself. The whole of Saturday, you devote to studying and a lengthy phone call with a slightly older friend from Oxford who’d just begun her studies there.
It was maybe around two or three in the afternoon that a gentle knock came upon your door. You already know who it is and you’re decent and even if you weren’t—you know it really wouldn’t matter. Still, you rip yourself away from your desk and fling yourself stomach-first onto your bed, feet up swaying back and forth in a girlishly, innocent way. You whip out your phone and pretend to be texting somebody.
“Come in!” you say, just after clearing your throat.
Cook unceremoniously turns the knob and swings the door open, catching it to prop it open just enough. Then he just looks at you vacantly.
“...can I help you, weirdo?” you ask, frowning.
“Whatcha doin’?” he gestures to your phone.
“Texting. It’s the new thing these days,”
“Texting who?”
You’re taken aback by his forwardness as well as his bluntness.
“In what version of reality is that any concern of yours?” you scoff.
“A boy?”
“Yeah, actually. His name’s Harry, he’s fit, he’s in a band—what the fuck are you on about! For all I know, dad sent you as some drone to make sure I wasn’t acting like a total slag while he was away,”
He further descends into your room, hand on the knob of your bedpost. Cook pauses, turning to face you. His face briefly flickers with concern.
“Nothing,” you sigh, deeply, “Just…I’m his only daughter…and hopefully the only one he’s ever going to have. But for that reason, he’s…protective, y’know. Says I’m not allowed to date until I’m grown. Whatever the fuck that means.”
He paces about your bedroom, looking at all of your heirlooms and posters and items that are so distinctly you. It makes him smile, seeing your belongings up close after all this time.
“...I think you’re grown,” he goes.
This makes you chortle, your gaze returning back to your phone.
“I’m sure you do, Cook,”
He slowly creeps towards your dresser, snatching the Magic 8 ball resting on it in the blink of an eye. You lurch up from your mattress, phone bouncing off of your bed.
“Get your grubby hands off my shit!”
As if you were about to tear it out of his hands, he shakes it maniacally, rapidly, non-stop. You become quickly concerned he may accidentally wind up breaking something of actual value so you try to intervene.
“Nah, nah! Let’s see what it has to say!”
“Cook!”
He fends you off, raising the ball up out of your reach as he continues to shake it. You roll your eyes, crossing your arms petulantly. He slows his movements to see what the ball has to say, genuine curiosity taking over.
“...it is certain,” he reads with wide, ghastly eyes.
His eyebrows soon scrunch up, trying to make sense of the contextless words.
“You daft idiot…you’re supposed to ask a question first, then shake it up,”
Cook thinks to himself for a brief moment, tongue out cartoonishly. You suppress a laugh, looking on as the gears turn in his head.
“...Mysterious Magic 8 Ball,” he says, “...will I make my little sis gag on it?”
In a stark rage, you go darting for his neck and he drops the ball. It rolls under your dresser and you groan in annoyance, letting your butt fall onto your bed.
“Just get out. Fuck’s sake,”
“Not happenin’,”
“And why not?”
“Because…you’re my little sister…so it’s my job to make you whinge. And moan. And complain. Always,” he says, gently, “Especially the moanin’ part,”
His eyes soften when you let out a quiet snort sound. Cook sits beside you, his weight making the mattress dip slightly. He couldn’t look away from you even if he tried.
“I meant it, love,” Cook purrs, “...when I said…that I’m always thinkin’ ‘bout it…’bout you. Do you think? She…that she remembers me?”
“She who?” you furrow your brows.
Your heart leaps into your throat when he leans into your orbit, his hand moving to rest on top of your clothed cunt. You gasp, gripping his wrist instantly.
“Ach-ach, no. Just–just let me treat her good, yeah?” he whispers, into your ear, “I’ll make it so good for you, sis. Promise it,”
You allow yourself to be eased back fully, head resting gently on your pillow. It makes you feel as if you’re about to be tucked in and a sweet, bubbly feeling comes over you but you belay it. His lips find yours and you're whimpering embarrassingly fast. You bite your lip to stifle the sound.
“Oh, darling…y’don’t gotta hide those noises from me. I’m your big brother, you can tell me anythin’,” Cook says, almost sounding possessed.
Your shorts are roughly tugged off of you and you nearly squeal at the sudden, brisk movement. Cook goes for your panties next, bending down to first stuff his face deep in the soft clothed plush of your mound. He inhales so deeply, it makes you shudder. Your hands push at his head, overwhelmed by the presence of a boy’s head in between your thighs.
“That’s a sweet little cunt, baby. Can tell and I ain’t even had a taste of her yet. Turn over. On your belly,”
You try to hide your confused expression but he sees your face change.
“Trust me, trust your big brother, ‘kay? Turn over for me, babes,”
You scoff as you gingerly turn over so you’re flat on your tummy.
“Hips up.”
You pert your ass out so he has better access, but it's still not enough for him. Cook takes the flat of his palm and forcefully makes you arch for him.
“That’s a girl.”
You can hardly process the swift feeling of fabric sweeping down over your ass and the cool air of your room gracing your slickness, you’re exposed and the sensation is replaced by his wet, hot mouth. His tongue is everywhere. Your slit, the opening of your pussy, in between your cheeks, even flicking over your tight asshole. It’s as if he wants to devour you whole. His fingers, which he wets with his spit briefly, are prying you apart. He wants to see every bit of you that you’ve been so intent on hiding from him.
“Lookit you…lookit this fuckin’ pretty cunt starin’ back at me,”
You can’t control the throbbing spasms he witnesses, your pink holes clenching and opening around nothing at all. He strokes the tip of his finger through the wetness, trailing it up to your tighter puckered hole. It also cinches tightly in response to the unfamiliar sensations it's met with.
“Sh-sh-shh. Relax…relax, baby,” he shushes, biting the fat of your ass cheek.
You whine at the feeling of teeth meeting flesh. Your hand blindly starts to wag behind you, pressing on his forehead to get him to stop.
“C-Cook, p-please,” you sob.
“Oh, what now, love? What’s got you whingein’ now? Is it these fingers?”
“I-I didn’t…I h-haven’t shaved, okay?” you squeak, pressing your face into your pillow.
Cook pauses, taken aback that you even had the audacity to say such a thing.
“That it? That’s why you’ve been holdin’ out on me? Not ‘cause I’m your stepbrother or our parents room is just down the corridor. But ‘cause you haven’t shaved?”
Your legs thrash against the mattress as you attempt to kick him in jest. He cackles, armed with his signature feral grin. Then Cook hooks his arms beneath your hips and seals himself to your cunt. The way he’s always wanted to, the way he’s fucked his fist so many nights imagining.
The salty-sweet tang of your cunt and the way it’d stick to his tongue, flavor not leaving his mouth no matter what. As you writhe and twist against the headlock he has your lower half in, he begins moving his head in a way that leaves yours spinning. Viciously almost, Cook begins to shake his head side to side quickly, slurping up your juices in the process. The cool, airy sensation mixed with the jiggling of your ass it causes is a mind-numbing combination. A sound you hardly recognize exits your lips—something between a moan and a plea.
“Fuck,” he growls, in the gaps of air his relentless motions grant him.
He smacks your ass several times and you shriek, no family nearby to alert of your sins.
“H-Harder,” you whine, “Please, C-Cook,”
He laughs sickeningly, endlessly amused by your wanton, uninhibited need on display.
“S’you’re that type of slut, innit? Kind who fancies some smacks on their arse while their cunt gets licked? Huh?”
Your thighs give way and your previous arching position that gave Cook such easy access is lost. Your tummy falls onto the mattress, making you let out a grunt.
“Did I say you could move?”
You lift your head up weakly, looking back at him with shyness. You pout and flutter your lashes, whining as you try to stick up your hips more, offering your cunt as a distraction.
He smacks your ass even harder, genuinely making you yelp.
“Did I say you could fuckin’ move, you slut?” Cook says, through gritted teeth.
“N-No…no…,”
“No, what?”
“...hm?”
SMACK! Your eyes are wound tight as you bear the sharp red stinging he keeps inflicting upon your ass, over and over. You try to get away from his touch and strain against his hold.
“No, what, slut?” he goes, “...Oh, c’mon. Think real long and hard ‘bout it, love...Who’s not here right now? Who’s not here to stop us?”
Brain fuzzy from pleasure and pain and the surrealness of the present, you wrack your memory trying to think of what he’s getting at. And then it clicks in your head. And you feel a pang in your chest of guilt. Of shame.
“...d-ad-dad…m-my…dad?”
“...uh-huh…there’s my smart sis. Such a clever girl,” he condescends, “All together now…who y’gonna be a good slut for?,”
“...D-dad-dy…?” you whimper out.
SMACK! He beams at your submission, prideful he not only managed to wear you down after these many months but at the fact that he’s got you crying for him and he hasn’t even gotten you off yet. Or given you his cock.
“That’s it, that’s my girl. That’s my good ‘lil sis,” he praises, kisses your right ass cheek.
He scrambles up the bed, straddling your thighs while he unbuckles his pants and shoves them down. Cook keeps a hand firm on the small of your back, urging you not to move. Not to back out now. You look back at him, worrying your lip with your teeth when you see his considerable length he’d been hiding in those trousers of his.
“Yeah? See somethin’ you like? Hungry for cock still, after all this time? Poor baby, poor ‘lil thing,” he pities, giving you an over-exaggerated pout.
After ripping off his shirt, Cook jerks his wet uncut cock vigorously, the wet sounds leaving you keening back against him.
“Beg, c’mon. C’mon, bitch. You can beg. Been slaggin’ me off for the past however many months. Actin’ like you’re better than me jus’ ‘cause you’d rather pretend. Pretend you ain’t mine,” Cook husks, thumb running down your spine, “Beg me now,”
You shiver at the sensation, continuing to squirm underneath him.
“...D-Daddy?” you sniffle.
“Yes, babes?”
“I-I…I need…I need you to fuck me. P-Please,”
He acts as if he didn’t hear you clearly. His torso encompasses your entire body as he leans over you, one hand propping himself up on the mattress next to your head.
“Sorry, sweet thing. Did you say somethin’? Coulda sworn ‘ya did. But maybe I was wrong. Hm? Maybe I was just fuckin’ wrong. Like you,” Cook says, lowly.
Before you can so much as blink, Cook has slammed himself into your pussy–all the way to the hilt. You yelp in response to the intrusion, the unbearable feeling of being stretched all the way so quick. The wind’s practically been taken from your lungs, your hands claw at your sheets for purchase—anything to ground yourself. For as much of a talker as he is and had been, Cook went suddenly quiet.
In reality, he was in utter disbelief and shock that he was inside of you—his stepsister. It was a fantasy come to life, something straight out of the cheesy internet porn he got off to night after night. It always was to a model that looked like you or shared your body type. He’d driven himself mad fantasizing about this exact scene for so long. And now here he was, splitting his little sister open on her cute pink duvet. Fingernails embedded into the fat of your hips, he stays seated fully in you, savoring every ridge and pulse of your walls.
“F-fuck…didn’t know…y-you’d f-feel this good,” he groans, lost in his own pleasure, “Fuck,”
“...w-wait, a-a condom…,” you murmur, hand gripping his forearm.
“Fuck a condom,” he grunts under his breath, “I need this.”
He begins pumping in you and his thrusts are firm and potent. Cook fucks you like the secret for all of his life’s problems and his inner turmoil is buried within the depths of your cunt. As if he rams up against the wall of tissue the very tip of his cock is met with on the tail end of each thrust—he might understand just what the hell it is he’s doing at this very moment. Cook doesn’t know, Cook never knows. He only ever does what feels best for him at any given moment, consequences be damned.
You wail into your pillow and cruelly, Cook rips it away from your bed, it flying into some unseen corner of the room. You paw for leverage further up on the mattress to prop yourself up and are met with the sensation of Cook’s right hand gripping the side of your throat. He uses the column of your neck to jolt your body even harder against him.
It borders on being uncomfortable and you croak out his name, timidly. Hearing the strain in your voice that takes a different tone than your previous cries, he relents, easing you back onto the bed. He strokes the back of your head, fingers ensnaring themselves in your locks gently. Cook’s thrusts soften and turn into flagrant rolls of his hips. His movements have taken on a more tender sort of grinding motion. His pudgy cockhead begins to glide beautifully along your weak spot, stoking a treacherously familiar sensation.
“Like this, babe? You like that? Hm?” he groans, mouth next to your ear, “Feel so good,”
His hands tilt up your chin and encase your jaw in a loose hold. Cook looks you up and down with lidded eyes and a slack jaw, like he can’t believe what he’s seeing.
“Stick out that tongue, babes,”
You whimper, shyly, and he grazes his lower teeth along the shell of your ear.
“C’mon. Been doin’ so good. Just be good a ‘lil longer, ‘kay? Yeah? I wanna suck on that pretty tongue. Open your mouth, open that mouth,”
Turning your head to the side, you gingerly loll your pink tongue out and he makes good on his promise, sloppily taking it into his mouth. He swirls it around his own and sucks on it messily. A line of spit falls from your mouths onto your sheets below.
“Now, suck on Daddy’s tongue while I make you cum, yeah?”
He removes a hand from your jaw to reach under your tummy, pressing deeply on the soft skin there. Cook frenches you as he digs his cock deeper and sweeter into you. You almost feel like you have to pee, breaking away from his spit-slick lips to protest.
“I-ah-C-Cook,”
“Uh-huh?”
“I-It feels…it feels…d-different,”
“Good different?”
You’re not sure you know how to respond.
“I-I don’t know, I-I dunno,” you cry.
“Mm, let’s find out together then? Hm? Wanna find out with Daddy? Wanna make Daddy proud? Just a little longer…just hold it for me a little longer, yeah? You can do it, you can do it, baby,” he encourages.
You could tell by how staunch his thrusts were becoming and how his body was growing rigid in certain places that he was getting close. The fingers still lingering on your jaw began to tremble and the veins on the side of his forehead—already flushed with red from exertion—were growing more prominent.
He presses harder on your tummy and in a split-second of panic, your hand meets his. The combined pressure of both of your palms proves to be too much and it's then that the dam within you breaks. You gush around his length, spasming so tightly around him, he can’t help but be sucked in over and over again.
As your walls stroke him to his own climax, Cook collapses on top of you unexpectedly, groaning like he’d just been shot. He claps his hips against your ass several more times, the sounds of flesh meeting flesh now far wetter than they were before. You’ve nearly fallen face-first into your mattress, your whole body buzzing with the aftershocks of your orgasm.
After a spell, Cook lifts himself from you, looking down where both of your bodies meet to assess the ‘damage’. It takes the form of a sizable dark stain on your pink bedsheets directly underneath you and a frothy ring around the base of his cock that clicks when he pries his softening dick from your exhausted pussy.
He rolls onto his back staring up at the popcorn ceiling that you as a child adorned with glow-in-the-dark adhesive stars. It makes Cook smile—genuinely smile—and he turns over to look at you, with admiration. Your face is sweaty and your baby hairs are matted to your forehead. Your face is puffy with tears that were coaxed out of you during the act. Your eyelids slowly lift and find him gazing at you in awe, pupils dilated and cheeks rosy.
“H-Hey. Hey, you,”
You arch an eyebrow begrudgingly, not wanting to entertain any more of his antics at the present. His eyes flick up to the ceiling and he whistles breathily, directing your gaze to above you both.
“Make a wish.” Cook murmurs, cheekily.
You roll your eyes in the exact way he was anticipating you to, in the precise way that he adores. You drape your relaxed hand across his face, caging his features. His eyes peek through the gaps between your fingers. He crosses them, knowing you can still see him underneath. To which, you snort, although you lament giving him the satisfaction of making you laugh.
Somehow that was more of a blow to your pride than him, your stepbrother, making you cum harder than you ever had in your life. The reality of just what that meant would come at a later hour and it would no doubt gut you and leave you wracked with guilt.
But for now, you and him stayed there, inching closer and closer to sleep on your bed, blissed out and ignorant to what lies ahead but knowing for certain deep down—that it wasn’t anything the two of you couldn’t handle.
End.
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