The sun's dropping low by the time you two head back, Beatrice and Dante (y'all's horses) walking easy side by side, and you've gone quiet for longer than you mean to. You're not looking at the trail. You're looking at J — the line of his shoulders, the way his hands sit loose on the reins, that damn stubborn set of his jaw — and you've lost the thread of whatever you were supposed to be paying attention to entirely. The road? The skyline?
"You're starin'."
You startle, and he doesn't even turn his head, just a slow, knowing tilt of it, like he's been waiting for you notice you've been caught red-handed for a while now.
"Nothin' wrong with enjoyin' the scenery," you manage.
"Mm-hm. That where your eyes were. The scenery."
You don't answer fast enough, and that's answer enough for him.
"Careful now," he says, low, almost lazy with it. "Keep lookin' at 'the scenery' like that and we're gonna be a lot longer gettin' back than we ought to."
Your face goes hot straight up to your ears.
"I wasn't—"
"You were." His voice has that edge to it now, the one that means he's enjoying this more than he should. "Whatever's runnin' through that head of yours right now — and don't tell me nothin's runnin', I can see it on your face plain as day — you keep on lettin' it run."
Your mind is doing exactly that — running, tripping over itself, throwing up a dozen half-formed fantasies you'd never actually say out loud. You part your lips in an attempt, but nothing comes out but the shape of your warm breath in the cool evening air.
Schlatt watches you fail to find a single word, and he actually laughs — entirely too pleased with himself.
"Aw. Poor thing." His tone is pure honey and mockery in equal parts. "Can't even get the words out."
J reaches over, unhurried, and takes your chin between two fingers, tilting your face toward his so you can't look away even if you wanted to.
"That's alright." His voice drops, softer at the edges even as his grin stays wicked. "Sweet thing like you don't need words. I already thought of everything runnin' through that head — every last bit of it and more."
That does it. Your whole body goes hot and tight at once, mortification and need tangled up so bad you can't tell them apart anymore, and before you can think better of it you're pulling back out of his hold, digging your heels in and giving Beatrice her head, bolting ahead in an embarrassed huff.
Behind you, his laugh carries clean across the field.
"You can outrun me all you want, darlin'," he calls after you, not bothering to chase, "but you can't outrun what's in your own head!"
i love the shape of his nose so so so much it just fits his face so well omg and it's like sharp and like arrow shaped?? if that makes sense, but also i really love the way it looks from specifically when he's facing slightly right and down? obviously, he looks good from every angle, but there is something about the way this angle hits his face that is just...so right. we get a little bit of jawline, the nose, his profile, the hair...maybe it's also just the angle we see of him The Most, so i'm just conditioned to like it as my favorite angle idk idk
i am also quite a big fan of the angles we get literally whenever he's tipping his head back to drink something. highly entertaining to me personally...................................every time i see schlatt drinking in a video/stream i get so hyped for the screenshots that come out of it lol
anyway. here's a fic about his nose bc. i can't hold myself back. and you all are my fellow maniacs so. this blog is literally the only place i can put this kind of stuff so shhhh this is my safe space
— vue
✧ ✧ ✧
╭﹐✦˚₊· 𖤐 scent-imental ⋆.ೃ࿔:･ ╮
imagine: applewood smoke, bourbon barrels, and somehow ending up more obsessed with his nose than the whisky
╰﹒♡₊˚๑ *✧﹒✦ ࣪ ˖ ┊
word count: ~5.5K (?)
﹒₊✦ a/n: this one's just soft — no angst, no drama, just two idiots at a bar racking up a bill ✧ do you guys have a preference whether i have my fics all lowercase or is regular sentence case okay?? idk i feel like just switching up based on vibes...
warnings: fluff, banter, established relationship, tipsy tasting notes, one (1) nose kink (???) discovery
enjoy!!!! ૮₍ ˃ ⤙ ˂ ₎ა
✧ ✧ ✧
the place had been schlatt's idea.
you'd barely made it halfway through your first paycheck celebration before he'd shoved his phone in your face, pointing enthusiastically at a video of a bartender filling a glass with smoke before pouring whisky into it.
"it looks stupid," he'd declared.
"it does."
"we should go."
so, naturally, here you were.
it was nicer than either of you had expected. not pretentious—thank god—but quiet in the comfortable sort of way. warm lights, old wood, low music. the kind of bar where nobody seemed interested in talking over one another, content to let the glasses clink and the jazz music in the background do most of the work.
"i've decided," schlatt says, interrupting the ambiance. "that if this doesn't change my life, i'm asking for a refund."
you laughed. "for the drink?"
"for the experience."
"you sound like a seventy-year-old man, schlatt."
"i feel like a seventy-year-old man after seeing the price."
"you bought them, though."
"i know." he sighed dramatically, patting his wallet through his back pocket as though checking it was still alive. "but if it's good... i'll do it again. a stupid amount of times. every night for a month, probably."
"you absolutely will. i'm gonna have to physically restrain you from coming back tomorrow."
"you wouldn't be able to. i'd run you over so easily."
"with your body or with your car?"
"does it really matter? you're ending up flattened on the sidewalk either way, baby."
you reached over, nudging his shoulder until he looked at you. "i know your credit card information, you know."
"..."
"and your banker."
schlatt frowned. "...you do not know my banker."
"i will call stacy."
schlatt gasps. "no! how do you know my banker!?"
you cackle deviously. "i have my ways, babe."
"...fine," schlatt relented with an exaggerated sigh. "every night for a week, then."
"no."
"every friday."
"no."
"the first friday of every month."
you folded your arms. "no."
his face pinched into the sort of deeply offended expression.
"you don't sound like you support my hobbies, toots."
"your hobby can't cost thirty dollars a glass, big guy."
"it absolutely can."
"it absolutely cannot."
"i am self made! i'm rich, baby! all i have to do is believe in myself and do a little work and i could afford anything in this life."
"you believing in yourself is exactly what worries me. that feels like a first step to an elaborate, evil scheme that i, as your partner, should shut down before it starts."
the bartender returned just then, the silver handle of the cloche pinched neatly between two fingers.
"i'll let the smoke settle just a touch longer," he said, smiling politely. "it'll round everything out."
"see?" schlatt said, immediately turning toward him. "he's on my side."
the bartender glanced between the two of you with the careful expression of someone realizing he'd accidentally wandered into the middle of a conversation.
"...about the whisky?"
"about my financial decisions."
a slight pause. then, with all the professionalism in the world, the bartender nodded once.
you stared at the bartender, tutting disapprovingly. "...you're an enabler."
"i prefer 'hospitable,'" he responded smoothly.
schlatt looked unbearably smug.
"oh, this is dangerous," you mutter to yourself, rubbing your temples.
"you practically did this to yourself," schlatt taunted.
"i did?"
"you let me bring us here."
"i…guess i did?"
"you let me order the expensive drink for us."
"i—"
"and now you're trying to take it away from me."
"take it away? i'm trying to save our wallets," you say, narrowing your eyes. "i think the whisky smell has already gone to your head."
"it smells expensive."
"it smells like smoke."
"it smells like possibility."
"more like the possibility of debt," you snorted, shaking your head just as the bartender finally lifted the cloche.
a ribbon of fragrant smoke escaped between the three of you, curling lazily toward the ceiling before disappearing somewhere above the lights.
for a moment, neither of you reached for your glasses. you simply watched it drift away.
"...okay," schlatt admitted quietly.
you looked over at him.
"...that was pretty cool."
you'd been right.
it was a little stupid.
very theatrical.
it was also, unfortunately for both of your wallets, really, really cool.
"...yeah," you admitted. "kinda."
the bartender stepped away with a quiet, "enjoy."
schlatt reached for his drink first.
you'd seen him drink whisky before, usually at home after dinner or while the two of you were halfway through a movie neither of you were actually paying attention to. there was always a little ritual to it—not because he took himself too seriously, but because he genuinely enjoyed it. the swirl of the glass. a quiet breath through his nose. the first sip taken slowly, almost thoughtfully, like he was letting himself settle into it before deciding what he thought.
you watched him do the same thing now.
he lifted the tumbler just beneath his nose, eyes drifting shut for a second as he breathed in.
"...applewood," he murmured after a moment.
you blinked.
"you can actually tell?"
"a little."
"a little?"
he smiled into the glass before opening his eyes again.
"i mean..." his shoulders rose in a small shrug. "they did smoke it with applewood two minutes ago."
you couldn't help laughing.
"oh."
"so that one wasn't exactly detective work."
"i was about to be really impressed."
"you still should be." the corner of his mouth twitched. "go on. join me."
you looked down at your own glass. "i have absolutely no idea what i'm doing."
"i know."
you rolled your eyes, but there wasn't much conviction behind it. "so... what do i do?"
"it's not a test." he leaned comfortably against the bar, his voice dropping into something quieter, slower. "just don't shoot it back all at once."
"that was my entire plan."
he gives a small chuckle. "just smell it first."
"...what am i smelling?"
"whatever you smell."
"that's incredibly unhelpful."
"it is," he admitted. "whisky people love making it sound harder than it is."
that was one of your favorite things about listening to him talk about the hobbies he cared about. he always sounded enthusiastic, never interested in proving that he knew more than you did. if anything, he seemed happiest when he got to watch someone else discover why he liked something in the first place.
you humored him anyway, lifting the glass until the rim hovered beneath your nose.
the scent caught you by surprise.
not just smoke. something sweeter underneath it. warm, almost comforting. like vanilla left too close to a fireplace.
"huh."
"what?"
"i..." you frowned. "i don't know."
"well, you're obviously smelling something."
"well, i mean..." you breathed in again, slower this time. "it smells... familiar."
schlatt watched you over the rim of his own glass, waiting with the quiet patience of someone who genuinely wanted to hear your answer. for a moment, you searched for something clever to say. surely there was a right way to describe whisky—some combination of words that sounded like you actually knew what you were doing. then you caught yourself. schlatt wasn't quizzing you, and he certainly wasn't waiting to be impressed.
"...it smells like fall. like a really nice autumn campsite with the fire going and marshmallows roasting."
"mmm." his smile softened. "that's a weirdly nice way of putting it."
you couldn't help smiling.
"so..." you turned the glass slowly between your hands. "do i finally get to drink it now?"
"i suppose."
"how generous of you."
"i know." he lifted his own glass. "cheers?"
you bumped the rims together with a quiet clink.
"to my first paycheck at my new big job," you said.
"and to you," schlatt replied simply.
you smiled into your glass. "...thanks."
his expression softened for just a second before he nodded toward the drink in your hands.
you took a careful sip.
the warmth reached your tongue first, followed almost immediately by the smoke you'd already picked up on. it lingered for a moment before giving way to something sweeter, smoother than you were expecting, and by the time you swallowed you found yourself instinctively chasing the flavor with another tiny sip before you could stop yourself.
"...oh."
schlatt laughed quietly. "good?"
you looked down into the amber liquid as though it might explain itself.
"i don't think i was expecting..." you searched for the words, rolling the taste around in your mind for another second. "...i don't know."
he waited.
"it doesn't taste like alcohol."
"it definitely does."
"it does," you corrected with a small laugh. "but not at first."
"that's the dangerous part."
"i thought the dangerous part was the price."
"that too."
you took another sip, slower this time. "...i get it."
"hm?"
"i get why people like this."
his eyebrows lifted just a touch.
"you do?"
"i don't know if i'd spend thirty dollars on it every week."
"i would."
"i know you would."
"but..." you glanced back at the glass. "...i kind of understand why you wanted to bring me here."
for a moment, he didn't answer. he only watched you over the rim of his own drink, looking strangely pleased with himself.
"what?"
"nothing."
"no, that's a face."
"what face?"
"the one that says, 'i was right, but i'm trying very hard not to say it out loud.'"
a grin tugged at the corner of his mouth.
"i wasn't going to say anything."
"you absolutely were."
"i was going to wait until the second glass."
you laughed, reaching over to nudge his shoulder with yours.
"i walked right into that one."
"you did."
"i'll never financially recover from this."
"no," he agreed thoughtfully, lifting his glass again. "probably not."
✧✧✧
the first glass disappeared more quickly than either of you had expected.
not because either of you were drinking particularly fast, but because conversation had a habit of making time collapse in on itself. one story became another. work gave way to old roommates, old roommates somehow led to the disastrous camping trip you'd taken two summers ago, and before long the bartender was collecting two empty tumblers with a knowing smile.
"so?" he asked, already reaching for the shelf behind him. "worth the production?"
schlatt answered before you could.
"unfortunately."
the bartender laughed. "i've heard that answer before."
"i hate being predictable," schlatt sighs, shaking his head.
"no, you don't," you cut in quickly.
"...you're right."
you smiled into your sleeve as the bartender disappeared again, leaving the two of you alone for another quiet stretch of conversation.
outside, the windows had gone dark.
you hadn't even noticed.
✧✧✧
the second whisky arrived without fanfare.
no smoke this time. no glass dome. just two clean pours of something deep amber that caught the golden light of the bar, like tiny liquid fireplaces and their last embers all aglow.
"this one's finished in bourbon barrels," schlatt explained, almost absentmindedly. "should be a little sweeter."
"you say that like it should mean something to me."
"it doesn't?"
"it sounds impressive, i guess?"
"i really think you'll like this one, honey. i'm pretty sure i've had it before, but i can't be too sure because it could've been a long while ago."
you eyed him suspiciously. "then how can you be 'really sure' i'll like this one?"
"because i'm confident."
"confidence has never once stopped you from being wrong."
"...that's fair."
you laughed, lifting the glass beneath your nose before taking another careful breath.
this one was different.
still warm. still rich. but the smoke had stepped politely out of the way, leaving behind something softer. honey, maybe. caramel. you weren't entirely sure.
"it's..." you frowned. "i know there's another food hiding in there."
schlatt waited patiently.
"...pancakes."
he blinked. "...pancakes?"
"with maple syrup."
for a second, you worried you'd completely embarrassed yourself.
then he smiled. "i can see that."
"you can?"
"i probably would've just said brown sugar."
"that's basically pancake adjacent."
"basically. not really, but for adjacent, yeah, i'll give it to you."
satisfied with your extremely scientific conclusion, you finally took a sip.
it tasted... comfortable. the kind of drink that made you instinctively settle a little deeper into your chair.
without thinking, your knee found schlatt's beneath the bar again.
he didn't move away.
neither did you.
✧✧✧
by the time the second glasses were empty, you'd stopped paying much attention to the room around you.
the bartender drifted in and out of conversations with practiced ease, checking in every so often without hovering. the couple tucked into the corner had long since left, replaced by two friends sharing a charcuterie board near the windows. somewhere behind the bar, another bottle was uncorked with a soft pop that disappeared beneath the music.
you rested your chin in your hand.
"i think..."
schlatt looked up.
"...i understand whisky now."
he smiled.
"do you?"
"no."
that earned a laugh.
"but i understand why you like it."
he tilted his head slightly.
"what do you mean?"
you shrugged one shoulder.
"it makes you slow down."
his eyebrows lifted.
"you always slow down when you drink it."
you reached over, absentmindedly smoothing a wrinkle from the cuff of his sleeve before you even realized what you were doing.
"you stop checking your phone."
your hand lingered for only a second before falling back into your lap.
"you stop thinking about work."
a small pause.
"and you talk more."
schlatt was quiet for a moment.
"...hm." he looked down at his empty glass. "i never really noticed."
something warm settled between the two of you. the easy understanding that came from spending enough time beside someone to notice the little things they'd never think to notice about themselves.
the bartender wandered back over, collecting the empty glasses with one hand.
"so," he said, "are we brave enough for one more?"
you looked at schlatt. he looked back at you.
there was a question there.
not can we afford it?
not should we?
simply...
are you still having a good time?
you smiled before he could ask it aloud.
"i think one more."
the bartender's answering grin was immediate. "i was hoping you'd say that."
✧✧✧
the third glass found its place in front of you with little more than a quiet nod from the bartender.
by then, there wasn't much left to explain.
the two of you had settled into an easy rhythm over the last couple of hours—schlatt asking the occasional question about a bottle he'd never tried, the bartender offering a recommendation or two, you listening somewhere in the middle, content to let them speak a language you only half understood.
it was nice.
not because of the whisky, though that certainly wasn't hurting.
just... nice.
the kind of evening that reminded you how little the destination mattered when you liked the company.
you took another careful sip.
it was different again. richer, maybe. a little darker than the last one. whatever sweetness you'd found before had given way to something deeper, though trying to chase tasting notes now felt a little like trying to remember the end of a dream after you'd already woken up.
you set the glass back down with a quiet hum.
"i think i've reached the limit of my vocabulary."
schlatt looked over. "no more notes of marshmallow or pancakes?"
a smile tugged at your mouth. "i think we've exhausted my flavor-thinking brain."
"hm." he swirled the amber liquid around his own glass, watching it catch the light. "probably for the best."
you rested your cheek against your hand, watching him instead.
he really did slow down with whisky.
you'd mentioned it earlier almost as a passing observation, but now that you'd said it aloud, you couldn't stop noticing it. the stories he told became a little less hurried. he let silences settle without rushing to fill them. even the way he held the glass seemed deliberate, turning it absentmindedly between his fingers whenever he paused to think.
it suited him.
conversation drifted on without asking much of either of you. there were stories you'd heard before, though you didn't mind hearing them again. you found yourself interrupting less, content to listen while your fingers idly traced lazy circles through the condensation left behind on the polished wood.
every now and then, schlatt's hand would brush yours reaching for his glass.
sometimes he'd leave it there for a second before pulling away again.
neither of you seemed to notice anymore.
or maybe you both did.
it was difficult to tell where habit ended and affection began after long enough together.
when the bartender returned, it wasn't with another recommendation this time, only a small smile as he gathered the empty glasses.
"last call for the tasting menu."
you looked down at the final sip still waiting in your own glass before giving an almost apologetic shake of your head.
"i think i'm tapping out."
"i figured," he said warmly, taking the empty coaster from beneath your drink. his attention shifted to schlatt. "what about you?"
schlatt glanced at you first.
you smiled. such a gentleman.
"you can have one more, schlatt."
"you sure?"
you nodded, shrugging. "i'm stealing a sip anyway."
a quiet laugh escaped him. "i guess that's only fair if i'm drinking without you."
the bartender disappeared once more, leaving you with the last of your whisky while schlatt's final pour was prepared somewhere behind the shelves.
✧✧✧
the bartender set the fresh pour in front of schlatt before collecting the empty glasses.
"last one," he said. "…this one's on me."
schlatt looked up, surprised. "you serious?"
"you two have been fun."
he smiled then—not the practiced smile he'd worn all evening, but something easier.
"and," he admitted, nodding toward schlatt, "it doesn't hurt that you're kinda cute."
you turned your head so slowly it was almost theatrical. "...excuse me? three drinks in and now is the time that you decide to hit on my man?"
schlatt, meanwhile, looked delighted. "i knew there was something going on between us."
the bartender laughed. "oh, don't let it go to your head."
"too late," schlatt shoots back.
the bartender laughs at that, then glances toward the clock hanging above the bottles behind him. "i have to leave now because my shift ended ten minutes ago, and if i stick around any longer i'm going to end up listening to you two flirt until midnight. but i seriously loved serving you guys tonight."
"we've been flirting?" schlatt whispers questioningly.
"you've been doing nothing but flirting."
schlatt looked at you. you looked back at him.
"...have we?" you echo schlatt's sentiment. "i thought we were just talking."
the bartender laughed so hard he had to shake his head.
"have a good night, you two."
with that, he collected the empty coasters, offered one last wave over his shoulder, and disappeared through the door behind the bar.
for a moment, neither of you did anything but watch him go.
the final drink simply sat between you, untouched, the amber catching the light whenever someone walked past.
then, the moment schlatt's hand finally reached for it—
you beat him by half a second, your fingers closing around the glass first.
his hand landed on empty wood.
"...really?"
"i called first sip."
"you absolutely did not call the first sip."
"i definitely thought it first."
"mm, yeah, you definitely thought of having the first sip after thinking that you were done drinking…" he chuckled under his breath, withdrawing his hand as you took the smallest sip imaginable.
it was... different.
complete. not a foundation for other flavors…no. smoke would have taken away from the spiciness. it was a darker whiskey and while you're not sure if that's artificial, it feels heavier, more mature and has a deeper flavor. like it's matured and reached a point in its life where it is satisfied…which leaves you satisfied after just one sip.
you sat with the taste for another second before handing the glass back to him.
"i think..." you searched for the word. "it tastes finished. there's nothing i would add or take away."
schlatt grinned at you, taking the glass and swirling it a bit before taking his own sip and humming. "mm. i agree with you. it's good. really good. it's probably…expensive as fuck. thank god we got it on the house, right?"
"ugh, true. thank goodness for how hot you are."
schlatt chuckles, taking another small sip, turning the glass thoughtfully between his fingers before setting it back onto the polished wood with a quiet clink.
"...yeah," he murmured after a moment, eyes drifting back over to yours. "apparently."
outside, headlights drifted lazily across the front windows before disappearing again. somewhere toward the back of the bar, someone laughed, a distant sound that faded almost as quickly as it had arrived.
you rested your elbow on the counter, absentmindedly turning your body a little more toward him.
schlatt drifted into another story as naturally as breathing. you weren't even sure what had prompted it this time. something about a trip he'd taken years ago, a stranger he'd met for all of five minutes, and somehow the entire thing became entertaining simply because he was the one telling it. his hands moved as much as his voice, sketching pieces of the memory into the air between you whenever he reached a part he particularly wanted to emphasize.
you'd always liked that about him. he never seemed to realize how expressive he was.
you found yourself smiling before he'd reached the punchline.
he noticed, of course.
"...what?"
"hm?"
"you're smiling at me."
"i am?"
"mhmm. what for?"
you opened your mouth.
nothing came out.
there wasn't really an answer.
just...
before the thought had finished forming, your hand had already lifted from the bar.
your fingertip settled lightly against the bridge of his nose.
it was warm.
without any more consideration than that, you traced the line of it slowly downward, following the gentle slope until your finger reached the end.
...
boop.
the silence that followed was immediate.
schlatt's glass remained suspended halfway to his mouth, forgotten entirely as he stared at you with an expression somewhere between confusion and complete disbelief.
you blinked back at him.
only then did your brain finally catch up with your hand.
"..."
oh.
schlatt stared at you.
you stared right back.
his whisky hovered forgotten halfway to his mouth.
"..."
"..."
a sound escaped him.
then—
"hah—" he lost it. the laugh tore out of him so suddenly that he had to abandon the glass back onto the bar with a hurried clink, one hand flying to his mouth as his whole body folded forward.
"...oh my god." the words came out somewhere between horror and realization. your hand flew back to yourself as though only now remembering it had been attached to your body this entire time.
schlatt looked up just long enough to meet your eyes.
that was a mistake.
the moment he saw your expression—equal parts confused, embarrassed, and trying so hard to figure out what possessed you—he absolutely lost it.
"hahaha—!" he doubled over again, one hand braced against the edge of the bar while the other covered his mouth in a completely hopeless attempt to contain himself. "oh my god!"
"nooo, don't laugh!" your own laughter escaped in one sudden burst, your forehead dropping onto the cool wood of the bar as your shoulders began shaking just as badly.
"i don't even—" another laugh stole the rest of the sentence. "what just happened?"
"you—" schlatt couldn't answer. every time he looked at you he started laughing all over again, reduced to pointing vaguely in your direction before another cackle interrupted whatever he'd been trying to say. "hahahaha!"
your face disappeared into the crook of your arm. "oh my god, shut up."
"you just—"
he made an utterly useless gesture down the front of his own face.
"..."
"..."
that tiny, pathetic little booping motion. the two of you broke all over again. it took an embarrassingly long time before either of you could sit upright.
schlatt wiped beneath one eye, breathing hard as he tried—and failed—to compose himself.
"...jesus christ." his voice came out rough around the edges from laughing so hard.
you laughed quietly into your sleeve, still shaking your head.
by the time it finally settled, the room had slipped back into its gentle rhythm. glasses clinked somewhere farther down the bar. someone pushed through the front door, letting a breath of cool evening air wander inside before it disappeared again.
schlatt reached for his whisky once more, though he didn't drink it immediately.
he was still smiling.
"so..." he murmured, turning the glass idly between his fingers. "you wanna tell me what that was about?"
you rested your chin against your hand, watching the amber swirl around the inside of the tumbler.
"i..."
the answer should have been easy.
instead, you found yourself looking at him again.
at the soft curl of his hair where it had fallen across his forehead. the laugh lines that hadn't quite disappeared yet. the warmth still lingering in his cheeks from laughing so hard.
and then...
your eyes landed there again.
squarely in the middle of his face.
"...huh."
schlatt followed your gaze instinctively before his expression shifted into immediate suspicion.
"...what."
"i think..." you smiled to yourself, almost amused by your own realization. "i think i just really like your nose."
for a moment, schlatt simply stared. of all the compliments he'd expected to hear in his lifetime that one had never once crossed his mind.
his hand came up almost instinctively, fingertips brushing self-consciously across the bridge of his nose before he caught himself.
"...you 'really like' my nose?"
you looked at him with complete sincerity.
"yeah." another little laugh escaped you, helpless and warm. "it's a really nice nose. suits your face, does it's job well. i like it."
"i don't know what to do with that information, honey."
"mm," you shrug. "you don't have to do anything. just…wanted to let you know."
schlatt studied you for another moment. not with confusion anymore. but with a particular expression you knew all too well: the one that meant he'd had an idea.
"...c'mere."
you laughed softly. "what?"
"just..." he set his glass aside and turned on the stool until he was facing you completely. one hand found your knee, the other reaching up almost absentmindedly until his fingertips settled beneath your jaw. "...c'mere."
there wasn't much point arguing. you leaned in.
"what are you—"
"i've gotta see something."
"that's ominous."
"it is."
somewhere in the back of your mind, you assumed this was where the kiss would finally happen. it seemed the natural conclusion to the evening.
instead, his fingers found your jaw, taking your face into his hand to steady you, when usually, it would be threading through your hair or curling behind your neck to control when the kiss stopped — to keep your lips pressed impossibly close for as long as he wanted.
but no. this time, his thumb rested beneath your chin while the rest of his hand cradled the curve of your face. what was he up to? your heart fluttered at the casual familiarity and gentleness of it all.
his gaze lingered on your face for another moment before he leaned in the rest of the way.
your eyes slipped shut instinctively.
but the kiss never came.
something warm brushed the outer corner of your eye.
your breath caught.
it took your brain a moment to understand what you were feeling.
not lips.
his nose.
it drifted across your skin with almost impossible gentleness, following the curve beneath your eye before gliding slowly toward your cheek. the contact was featherlight, barely there, and yet somehow all you could focus on. every tiny movement mapped itself across your awareness as though the whisky had stripped away every distraction, leaving only the warmth of him.
his breath followed a heartbeat later. it fanned across your cheek with every quiet, warm exhale, and when his mouth curved into what you could only assume was another smile, the corner of his lips grazed your skin so fleetingly that you couldn't decide whether it had actually happened or not.
"...schlatt…" the word left you softer than you'd intended.
"hm?"
the sound rumbled gently against your cheek, close enough that it sent a pleasant shiver racing down your neck.
"what are you doing?"
"i thought..." his voice was almost thoughtful. "...i'd see what all the fuss was about."
another slow pass.
his nose traced the line of your cheek until it found your own, the bridge of it slipping alongside yours with a patience that bordered on teasing. he wasn't hurrying toward anything. if anything, he seemed content to simply exist there, letting the warmth of his skin and the quiet rhythm of his breathing do all the work.
this was absurd.
utterly ridiculous.
and yet your heart had somehow decided this was the most intimate thing he'd ever done.
you blinked your eyes open just a little.
he'd left his own half-lidded, his lashes casting soft shadows across his cheeks. from this close, you could see the tiny crease at the corner of his mouth where he was still trying not to smile.
god.
he was insufferably pretty sometimes.
"you're making fun of me, aren't you?" you whispered.
"i might be."
he didn't kiss you.
instead, he leaned in until your foreheads were almost touching, his nose slipping gently alongside yours. the bridge of it traced the length of your own in one slow, deliberate stroke, all the way down until the tips met.
he lingered.
then, with the smallest smile, he rubbed the tip of his nose against yours in two tiny, playful passes.
back.
and forth.
affectionate.
catlike.
"but..." another gentle brush of nose on nose. "...i think i get it."
"what?"
"i've never really thought about noses before."
his smile widened just enough that you felt it again against your cheek.
"but yours..." his gaze flickered lazily between your eyes. "...is awfully cute."
you stared at him.
then, despite yourself, you laughed.
"oh, you are so full of shit."
"i am not."
"you absolutely are."
"i'm offended."
"you've never looked at my nose a day in your life."
"no." his thumb swept idly beneath your jaw, the smile finally softening into something quieter. "i hadn't."
the admission settled between you.
"i guess..." his eyes drifted over your face again, slower this time. "i never had much reason to."
you weren't sure whether it was the whisky or the way he was looking at you, but something in your chest squeezed painfully.
"...and?"
"and..." he smiled to himself. "you've convinced me."
your noses brushed once more.
"...it's a nice nose."
you snorted. "no, seriously."
"i am serious."
"you are making fun of me."
"i started out making fun of you," he laughed softly. "i don't think i am anymore."
a comfortable silence settled around you again.
the music had become little more than a pleasant hum somewhere behind you. outside, another pair of headlights swept across the windows before melting back into the night. the whisky sat forgotten between you.
his thumb drifted from your jaw down your neck.
"so..." he murmured.
"so?"
he didn't answer this time.
his hand tightened at the base of your neck, just enough to keep you in place, and when he leaned in there was nothing unhurried about it. the easy, teasing patience from a moment ago had evaporated — like something in him had finally stopped holding back.
you met him halfway, faster than you meant to.
your noses bumped together — not hard, just enough to stop the kiss before it ever quite happened.
a short, breathless laugh escaped you both, both of you in complete disbelief.
"...really?" schlatt huffed, forehead dropping against yours. "now?"
"i didn't do it on purpose!"
"you have the worst timing."
"me? you're the one who—"
"shh." he was already smiling, but there was an edge to it now, something that hadn't been there the first time this happened. he shifted, tilting his head to correct the angle, and this time there was no careful patience in it. "hang on."
the obstacle (his nose) slipped neatly past yours, and then his mouth found yours properly — firm, certain, like he'd simply decided the joke was over.
the kiss wasn't slow now. it was searching, urgent, like the whole evening had been leading here and he'd just run out of patience for the wait. his hand slid from your jaw into your hair, and you felt the small, low sound he made when your fingers fisted in the front of his shirt and pulled him in.
when you finally broke apart, it was only because you needed air. foreheads pressed together, both of you breathing harder than the moment should have warranted.
"that's not what i thought was gonna happen when i said 'hang on.'"
"devastating for you."
"...and you."
"true," you laughed, and he laughed too, the sound settling something loose and warm in your chest. his nose bumped yours again, gentler this time. maybe something that will become a habit for both of you.
"...still my favorite part," you whispered.
"i was really hoping you'd say me."
"i did." you tapped the tip of his nose one more time, the same gentle little motion from before. "but also this."
i literally cannot wait until schlatt releases his jazz standards album lololol omgggggg like can you imagine what songs might be on it bc i freaking can
dream a little dream of me (i don't know if this will make it on there but i really really want it to, i just cannot imagine him singing this for some reason?? but i wanna hear it)
L.O.V.E. (a true classic, he could make it very playful)
it don't mean a thing (another superbly fun song to sing, also scatting!!!!!!!!!!!!)
the girl from ipanema (it's so fun!!!! would get stuck in everyone's heads immediately and would have so many replays)
they can't take that away from me (would fit his voice perfectly imo)
my funny valentine (AHHHHH SAD SCHLATT SINGING/YEARNING)
fly me to the moon (this has to fucking make it istfg,, we have been begging for this song)
the theme from new york, new york (it better be on that fucking album. literally his entirely personality hello??)
and i really really really really really want:
what a wonderful world (fits his voice, fits the vibes, he could go very low, which he likes to do lolol)
la vie en rose (this is literally just a completely selfish ask, i love this song)
cry me a river (it's romantic, it's sad, it's dramatic, pleasseeeeee)
i legitimately cannot fucking wait you guys AGHHHHHH I LOVE JAZZ !!
guys if i show you some of the pics i got from the live show you won't freak out right??? promise me you won't go crazy okay?? this is our little secret shhhhhhhhhhh
not a request!! but a huuuge thank you, your writing is so sweet that even the filthy things (hehe) get soft and it's such an easy read that I found myself devouring all of it!! you feed the delulu girls, love you for that
AWWW THANK YOU!!! i appreciate that so much lovie <3333 it's better to be delulu together than alone, that's what i always say
(i've never said that but you didn't hear that from me)
i love love love ur works so much!!! can i pls pls request a slightly angsty transmasc!reader gets misgendered at work and just has a general shitty day with dysphoria, gets home to big to be thoroughly reminded he is in fact a boy ;););)
i love a smut and angst mix:,) love you vue thank you!!!!!!!<333
╭﹐✦˚₊· 𖤐 * remind me again ⋆.ೃ࿔*:･ ╮
imagine: why do people always think they know you better than you know yourself?
╰﹒♡₊˚๑ *✧﹒✦ ࣪ ˖ ┊
✦ written with a transmasc!reader in mind ✦ (but all are welcome to enjoy ♡)
﹒₊✦ a/n: i think that every fourth of july somehow always makes people more conservative and homophobic,,, so i thought this was a good prompt to address that BS!!
The store's a mess by nine a.m. Fourth of July weekend means the whole front section is stacked with charcoal bags and coolers and those cheap collapsible canopies, and half the pallets haven't even made it to the shelves yet, just sitting in the main aisle with a forklift parked next to them.
Your register's the one closest to the doors, station four, and it still smells like this morning's floor cleaner under the AC. You're in your work polo, the navy one with the store logo stitched small over the pocket, leaving it untucked from your pants because the AC in this building never actually works right and it's already muggy by ten. Name tag clipped crooked, like always. You fixed your hair before your shift, put a little product to keep it out of your face, and you'd felt good about it in the bathroom mirror at home. That feeling doesn't last long once you're standing under this stupid fluorescent light for an hour.
This morning had been good, though. You'd woken up to Schlatt already up on one elbow next to you, scrolling his phone, hair still messy from sleep, and by the time you had gotten ready for work and made it to the kitchen he had a full breakfast going. Eggs, way too much bacon, a little paper flag stuck in a stack of pancakes.
"Happy birthday, America," he'd said, sliding the plate over. He was still in the gray sweatpants he sleeps in, no shirt, hair sticking up on one side.
"You bought a little flag for this?"
"I bought a whole pack of them. There's more in the drawer." He'd kissed the side of your head on his way to get the coffee pot, pouring himself a mug of it. "Fire pit's already set up out back. I got the good hot dogs, not those expensive ones. Plus, I got some spicy sausages we can sizzle up, too."
You'd eaten breakfast standing at the counter, watching him move around the kitchen barefoot, and for those twenty minutes the day ahead of you didn't feel like anything yet.
"Excuse me. Can somebody ring me up?"
A man's already standing at your register when you turn around, cart loaded with sparklers, a case of beer, two bags of charcoal. He's maybe fifty, red in the face from the heat outside, a faded polo of his own tucked into cargo shorts.
"Sorry about that, sir, go ahead and set it up here."
He doesn't answer, just starts unloading the cart onto the belt harder than he needs to. You start scanning. The beer first, then the charcoal, then the sparklers, one at a time, the barcode scanner beeping each time it catches.
"Big plans for the weekend?" he asks, not really looking at you, just filling the silence while the total climbs on the little screen above the register.
"Yeah, actually. Doing a fire pit thing tonight."
"Nice, nice." He glances at you then, actually looks, and you watch it happen, the half-second where his eyes catch on your throat, then your voice, like he's trying to place something that isn't adding up for him. "You work here full time, hon?"
"Part time. Just for the summer."
"Smart. Good to have something lined up before school starts back."
"I'm not in school," you say, and then, because the sentence's already half out, you finish it. "I go by he/him, by the way. Just so you know for next time."
He blinks. Doesn't say anything for a second. Then: "Oh. No offense, but you sound pretty—" he gestures at his own throat, vague, like he doesn't want to finish the thought out loud in the middle of a store. "Soft. Didn't mean nothing by it."
"None taken." You keep scanning. There's nothing else really to say to that.
"My nephew's one of you, too," he says, like this is the part where you're supposed to bond. "Good kid. Still goes by Stephanie around his grandma, though. Whatever's easier, right?"
"That's his call, I guess." Beep. Beep.
He swipes his card before you've even hit total. "Anyway. Have a good one, miss."
Right to your face. Not an accident this time. You just told him, thirty seconds ago, and he said it anyway, like the information didn't take at all.
"…Yep," you say, because your voice isn't going to argue with him about it, and he's already grabbing his bags and walking off before you can decide if you wanted it to.
You stand there a second with your hand still on the register. The AC kicks on somewhere overhead, a low rattling hum, and you can smell hot asphalt drifting in every time the automatic doors slide open.
✧ ✧ ✧
It keeps happening in smaller ways the rest of the shift.
A woman with two kids hanging off her cart looks at the length of your line and says, "is this the ladies' line, or can I just get in it," like it's a joke, like your register has a QUEERS ONLY sign on it. You give her a sideways smile because it's easier than going around the counter and slapping her in the face.
There's a lull around one, no line at either register, and Priya rolls her chair over from next to yours, propping her feet up on the bottom shelf of her station.
"I cannot feel my toes," she says. "Genuinely. Clinically. I think they've left my body."
"Should've worn the compression socks like Gary keeps telling everyone to."
"Gary can wear the compression socks. I'm not doing that to myself in July." She digs a granola bar out of her apron pocket, breaks off half, and holds it out to you without asking if you want it, which you do. "You got plans tonight? Fireworks or whatever?"
"Fire pit at my place. The neighbors almost always put off fireworks in our roundabout. My boyfriend's been prepping for it all day. Ugh, I can't wait to get out of here and get back to him."
"Ugh, girl same. You guys sound so cute. Bring me back a picture if the fireworks are good, mine are gonna suck, my neighbor's kid does like, three bottle rockets and calls it a night." She stretches her legs out, wincing.
You go still for a second, not fully processing it at first, and then processing it too much. Girl. She's said it easy, folded into the sentence like it doesn't mean anything specific, the way some people say guys to a room full of people who aren't all guys. You genuinely can't tell if that's what it was. If it's just a Priya word, tossed at anyone in earshot regardless of who they are, or if it landed on you specifically because some part of her still filed you there. As a Female.
You don't ask. You could. She'd probably take it fine if you did, she's never once made you feel small on purpose, not in the four months you've worked next to her. But you don't actually know if there's anything to correct, and asking might just be you being oversensitive after a day that's already worn you down to nothing, looking for something to be upset about because you've got the leftover feeling of it and nowhere else to put it.
"Yeah," you say instead, not even sure what you're agreeing to.
She doesn't notice the pause. Already back on her phone, showing you a video of her dog trying and failing to catch a piece of ice.
Your manager, Gary, walks the front of the store twice during your shift, hands clasped behind his back like he's inspecting troops, and both times calls out "good job, ladies" to you and the other cashiers. Not even aimed at you specifically. Just swept over all registers at once, general, unbothered.
By your three o'clock break you've lost count. That's the part that eats at you, sitting down in the break room finally, trying to actually number out how many times it happened today and realizing you can't, because somewhere around the fourth one your brain stopped keeping them separate and just started stacking them into one long blur.
The break room's got two vending machines, one of them out of order with a sign taped to the front, and a table with a wobbly leg someone's propped up with a folded napkin. You sit down across from the napkin-leg table and pull your phone out.
grumpy: hot dog count update. i bought a second pack. we are prepared
grumpy: jambo knocked a sparkler off the counter and now redacted won't go near it. great work jambo
You actually smile at that. First real one all day.
you: lolollll tell him he's a menace
grumpy: no point
grumpy: he already knows. he has no remorse
grumpy: you good? shift almost done?
You look at that for a second. It'd be easy to just say it now. Bad day. Got misgendered like six times. But you don't want to hand it over yet, not in pieces over text, not before your shift's even done. You want tonight to still just be the fire pit and the hot dogs, untouched by any of this yet.
you: two hours left. i'm good
you: in the break room just chillaxing
grumpy: …...liar
grumpy: but ok……..we'll talk latr
grumpy: see you soon
You look at liar a second too long before you lock your phone and head back out.
✧ ✧ ✧
The last two hours go the way the end of a bad shift always goes, one customer bleeding into the next, the same handful of comments landing over and over until you've gone a little numb to any one of them specifically. Your face stays pleasant. Your voice stays friendly. By close your jaw actually aches from holding a smile that stopped being real a few hours ago. Even the good interactions couldn't make up for how many thorough rounds of beatings your spirit has gone through.
You clock out at the little screen by the break room, grab your backpack from your locker, and walk out through the automatic doors into air that's still thick with heat even with the sun starting to go down. Schlatt's truck is rumbling near the entrance, headlights on.
He's got the windows down and you can see he's resting his head on the wheel looking at his phone. When you climb in he's in a plain white t-shirt, dark jeans, hair pushed back off his face like he ran a hand through it and gave up. He immediately raises his head to look over at you and grins.
"There he is. How's it feel being gainfully employed on America's birthday."
"Exhausting." You pull the door shut, and the AC in the truck actually works, cold air hitting you right away. "I want a hot dog and I want it immediately."
"Woww, we're already so needy? All you did was stand behind a register, baby - I don't know if you deserve a hot dog."
"Oh, you wanna get into this, Schlatt? You wanna start this?? You mow the lawn like it's a hobby, baby, that's not the same as an eight hour shift dealing with the shit I go through."
"Hey, at least I do physical labor."
"It's twenty minutes twice a week. How much labor could it really be considered?"
He laughs at that, a real laugh, and you feel some of the tightness in your shoulders let go just hearing it. He pulls out of the lot with one hand on the wheel, the other reaching over to rest on your knee, and for a few minutes you let the back and forth carry you, let yourself believe that you can just fold up today small enough that it doesn't follow you home.
He doesn't buy it, though. You can tell by the way he keeps glancing over at you and slowing down at yellow lights instead of just speeding up and driving through them like usual.
"You're quiet," he says, a few blocks out.
"I'm always quiet after work."
"Different quiet than usual." He says it easy, eyes back on the road, not pushing. "Not asking you to talk about it right now. Just…I'm here. For when it needs to be heard."
You don't say anything back to that, but something about being caught, without him making a whole thing of it, loosens something in your chest half a degree.
✧ ✧ ✧
By the time you pull into the driveway the sky's gone that deep orange it only does a couple times a year, and Schlatt's already got the fire pit going out back, a cooler parked next to two mismatched lawn chairs, and an unopened pack of sparklers sitting on the little metal side table. He rushes over to the grill to start putting patties on the grate and load glizzies onto metal skewers.
"Sit," he says, handing you a skewered hot dog, kneeling to build up the fire a bit more. "Since you've been apparently standing all day. Sitting's mandatory now."
You sit. He eventually builds up the fire to a blazing roar, a comforting heat waving off of it. Schlatt adds a couple more perfectly placed pieces of wood to keep the smoke up and out of your faces, and the slight pyromaniac look in his eyes as he messes with the fire scares you a little. He sees your worried expression, chuckling a bit.
"Come on, handsome… you're safe." He presses a kiss to your temple, guiding your sweaty hand holding the skewered dog over the flames. "At least from the fire."
You shiver at that, deciding to focus on cooking your hot dog evenly over attempting to respond to that.
A few minutes later, Schlatt places a plate of mini-sliders and toppings onto the table, then drops into the chair next to you with a whiskey and a glass. Both of you quietly sweat in the heat of the fire and the air, and for a while you just cook hot dogs and eat sliders, watching the light go orange, then purple, listening to somebody a few streets over already setting off fireworks early.
"Two-fifty years old," Schlatt says eventually, gesturing at the sky with his beer. "Still can't get healthcare right. But sure, let's light stuff on fire about it."
"That's strangely not very patriotic of you, Schlatt." You pop open a glass of some boozy lemonade thing you found in the cooler. Take a sip…ooh. Surprisingly tasty.
"I contain multitudes. Country's a goddamn mess, but…hot dogs are good and I found you. I like doing this with you. Take the wins where you can get 'em, I guess." He knocks his glass lightly against yours.
You make a small sound that's almost a laugh, and for a second it's just this — the fire, the beer, the smell of somebody else's charcoal grill drifting over from down the block.
"…Today sucked," you say, before you've really decided to say it.
Schlatt doesn't sit up straighter or lean in with a look on his face like he's about to fix something. He just takes another drink and says, "Yeah? What happened?"
So you tell him. The guy at the register — 'hon', 'smart girl', 'miss', right to your face after you'd already told him different. The line joke. Priya's 'girl, same'. Gary's 'good job, ladies', swept over everyone, like he was some drill sergeant dressing down his platoon.
His jaw tightens somewhere around the register guy, and by the time you get to the nephew who still goes by Stephanie for his grandma, he's just shaking his head and furrowing his brows deeper with each instance.
"That guy sounds like a fucking tool. You don't accidentally become that much of a dick."
"He wasn't even trying to be a dick about it though. That's the part that gets me. He just didn't care enough to actually hear it. Hear me. And just make the easy fix! Or just not mentioning any gendered language at all?! He could have just fucking said 'have a nice day' or 'bye'."
"Fuck." He sets his beer down in the grass and turns to actually look at you, firelight on one side of his face. He's got a little bit of relish on his thumb from his own hot dog, and he wipes it off on his jeans without looking. "See, if somebody's an asshole on purpose? Fine. At least then they're honest about it." He gestures vaguely with one hand. "This is worse. Guy couldn't even be bothered to spend half a second treating you like a person."
"Yeah." Your throat's doing that tight thing again, but out here it feels different, less like something you're fighting. "I told him. I actually said it out loud. And it just didn't do anything."
"Nah." He shakes his head. "You said something about it explicitly. He ignored it. Those're two different things."
You don't have an answer for that, so you just watch the fire for a bit, and he lets you, doesn't fill the quiet, just reaches over and finds your hand in the dark.
"I don't..." He sighs through his nose. "I don't get what the hell those people were looking at today."
You glance over.
"It's just..." He rubs the back of his neck. "When I look at you, there's nothing to 'figure out'. There's nothing to think about differently or wrap my head around or remind myself. You're just you. And you're mine."
The fire pops, sends up a little spray of sparks, and something in your chest actually unclenches, all the way, for the first time since this morning.
"Can we do the sparklers," you say, "before I start crying in the backyard."
"Yeah. Absolutely." He's already up, tearing into the pack, lighting two off the edge of the fire pit and handing you one. "Cry after. Sparklers first. Think that's the law or OSHA or somethin' dumb like that."
You giggle at that, sniffling back your tears. For a few minutes it's just light trailing through the dark, Schlatt drawing something dumb in the air that you pretend not to see, both of you moving around the yard until the sparklers burn down and you're a little out of breath from laughing at nothing in particular.
When you sit back down, you actually feel steady since you left for work this morning.
"Thank you," you say. "For all of this."
"Anytime." He reaches over, thumb along your jaw. "Want to head in?"
"Yeah."
✧ ✧ ✧
Inside, the house is cool and dim after the heat of the yard, just the hall light on. Schlatt doesn't rush toward the bedroom, just walks with a hand at the small of your back, unhurried.
"C'mere."
You step into him without thinking, forehead finding the space beneath his jaw. He smells like charcoal smoke and syrup and, underneath all of it, just him.
"Long day," you mumble.
"Long day," he agrees, rubbing a slow hand up and down your back.
You stay like that for a while.
"...Thank you."
"For what?"
"Tonight."
He hums. "You don't gotta thank me for loving you."
You make a face against his shirt. "You're so corny."
"Maybe a little. But you love it."
You tip your head back enough to look at him. "...Why are you so good at this?"
"At what?"
"Making me feel better."
"I just hate seeing you sad." He offers a half-grin. "Besides..." He scratches at the back of his neck. "I've been trying to get your attention back all day."
You blink.
"You've been somewhere else since you got off from work." He shrugs. "Can't blame you." His thumb brushes your cheek. "...But I miss you when you're stuck in your head like that."
You kiss him before you can think of anything to say.
Slow. Warm. It feels a lot like the fire that you both had just put out a couple minutes ago.
He smiles into it, holding the back of your head, his thumb rubbing against your neck before letting you go with a small sigh.
"There he is. You…feeling better?"
"Mm."
"Good." He kisses you again, stamping it on your lips like a stapler. "'Cause I've been trying real hard not to make out with you since you were pulling that little face at the fire."
"Since the fire? That's basically since we've gotten home."
"Actually..." He pretends to think about it. "A little before the fire."
"The car ride home?!"
"Can you blame me?"
You snort at that, laughing as he walks you back to the bed but sits down first, pulling you into his lap instead of laying you back right away, so you're straddling him, his hands settling at your hips over the fabric of your work pants, which you're still wearing, you realize, distantly, his hands slipping under the polo where it remains un-tucked from the workday.
"C'mon." He gives your hip a little squeeze. "Use your words."
"Schlatt…"
"That's my name, babe. But what you want me to do to you?"
"I guess…today was shit, right? And the people were shitty…I just. I want you…you always make me feel better. Always make me remember who I am…and I think I just need to be reminded again."
"Yeah." He nods once. "I can do that."
He kisses you again, deeper, hands working your polo up and off between one kiss and the next, then pulls back just to look at you for a second, chest bare now, in the low light from the hallway still spilling in through the cracked door.
He kisses you again, slower this time, your shirt disappearing somewhere behind you before he pulls back just enough to look at you.
"...Y'know..." He shakes his head with a quiet laugh.
"What?"
"...I still can't believe I get to look at you every day."
You duck your head a little, and he tips your chin back up with one finger.
"Hey…I'm talkin' to you. Look at me when I say stuff like that."
You meet his eyes. He's got a little bit of stubble along his jaw that leads into his messily trimmed chops, and his hair's still a mess from earlier, and something about the plainness of him, unshaved and a little sunburned across the nose from a day in the yard, makes the want in your chest grow.
"Don't."
"Don't what?"
"Say stuff like that."
"...Why?"
"Because then I have to figure out how to respond."
He smiles to himself. "You don't."
"...No?"
"No." His thumb brushes your cheek. "Just believe me."
He kisses down your throat as he says it, unhurried, and works the rest of your clothes off piece by piece, not rushing any of it, mouth following his hands the whole way down, kissing down your chest and stomach, your hips and thighs before slipping off his own shirt in one motion.
He lays you back against the sheets once you're both undressed, settling over you, and instead of moving straight into anything he just kisses you again, slow, hands smoothing down your chest and sides, thumbs grazing over your top surgery scars with comforting familiarity.
"Tell me if I'm going too fast," he murmurs against your ear.
"Not fast enough, old man."
"...Keep talkin'." A grin spreads across his face. "See how that works out for you."
"Probably better than I think."
He kisses down your body slow, teasing you, pausing at every place that makes you catch your breath, murmuring low the whole way down — so good, mine, fuck, you're so hot — that you're gasping and twitching by the time his mouth finally gets where you need it.
"You're so loud already," he says, delighted, glancing up. "We just started."
"Shut up."
"But I love your little noises, babe…let's see if I can make you make more of 'em for me."
He settles between your legs and doesn't waste time being precious about it as his warm and wet mouth is on you in an instant, his tongue teasing you languidly as he looks up at you from between your thighs, and it isn't long before your hand's fisted in his hair and you're gasping his name at the ceiling.
"Schlatt, I'm close, I—"
He pulls back, just enough. "Not yet. Not like this. Want you coming around me."
"Schlatt—"
"I asked you to tell me if I was going too fast because I wanted to take my time with you, baby."
"Well, I appreciate the sentiment but I…fuck, I wanna cum so bad."
"We'll get there, handsome, don't worry."
He crawls back up over you, and you can taste yourself on his mouth when he kisses you, and it only winds you up even tighter. He settles between your legs, reaches down to line himself up, then pauses, forehead against yours.
"You ready?"
"Yes. Please."
He pushes in slow, trying to give you the full stretch of it, but this time you use your legs to pull him in by his hips, taking him in faster than either of you are used to.
"Oh, fuck—" he groans, hips stuttering from the sudden tightness. "Shit, you're so—"
"Schlatt, I told you how bad I wanna cum. If you can't give me the pace I want, I'll force it out of you."
You roll your hips up to meet him and he makes a strangled sound, nodding fast, rolling his hips back into you at a slightly faster pace, one hand braced by your head, the other sliding under your knee.
"Mm, shit, look at what a good boy you're being, listening to orders…why don't you go a little faster, huh?"
Schlatt groans quietly, quickly picking up the pace even more, leaning down towards your chest to lick at your chest and scars, kissing at your neck and shoulders, but you know what he's doing. Hiding. You take a hand, using it to pull his face right back up to yours by the chin.
"Hey. Look at me when I'm talking to you, okay? I need to make sure you're hearing me when I say stuff like that."
Schlatt blinks, his face flushed red, eyes darting between yours. "Fuck, I'm so lucky. You feel so fucking good…"
"Maybe you just wanted to go slow because you know you wouldn't last, pretty boy," you tease, biting your lip at how deliciously good it feels to have his hips drive into yours, your legs tangled behind him to keep him close.
"Maybe…" Schlatt's voice is so gruff, but his face just speaks to how close he is. Your preening probably isn't helping, judging from his fast and uneven pace. God, he's so cute when he's like this — suddenly so much smaller and quieter than you, even when he's trying to take care of you.
"I'm really close," you tell him.
"Me too." His hips drive harder into you and he hides his face in the crook of his neck so his whines and grunts are yours to hear, and yours to hear alone. "Wanna hear you come for me…wanna hear you come all over my cock…"
"Shit, Schlatt, I'm gonna—" you groan, hands digging into his shoulders as you finally hit your peak, pleasure and satisfaction rocking through you like a wave against a rock. You don't hold back the whine of his name, and that only triggers him. He follows right after, burying in deep inside you and shaking through it, your name repeated like a mantra through the heady bliss.
Neither of you moves for a while. Just breathing, his forehead against your clavicle now instead of your shoulder, his hand still loose around yours somewhere in the sheets.
"Mm," he grumbles eventually, lifting his head, kissing your jaw, then your cheek, then your mouth, soft now, nothing urgent left in it.
"'Mm' yourself," you croak back, smiling against his lips.
By the time he settles back beside you, the room's gone quiet again, pulling you in against his chest, one arm slung over you like it's just where you belong by default.
He kisses your forehead. "...Did I do okay?"
You nod against him, smiling. "...Yeah. More than okay."
"Yeah?"
"Mhmm...I feel like me again."
Schlatt is quiet for a moment, just threading his fingers through your hair, humming a tune you don't recognize.
"Good," he whispers, thumb stroking the nape of your neck. "I'm here to remind you, if someone makes you feel off again…okay? Don't let 'em shake you."
Outside, a few last fireworks go off somewhere down the street, small and far off, and the fire pit's probably down to embers by now. None of today's actually gone anywhere. It'll probably be there again next shift, some new version of it, somebody else who doesn't listen the first time either.
But right now, in the quiet of your own bedroom, none of that has to matter yet.
I would like to humbly request a pegging fic, if thats alright? Do you think the big man would have exerience with it, or would it be a new experience to him?👀
╭﹒✦₊˚ fair is fair ⋆｡°✩ ╮
imagine: four years ago, your husband made a promise in the middle of being very, very horny. tonight, you finally decide to collect.
✦﹒₊ ╰﹒♡₊˚❀༉‧₊˚. ┊
✦ written with a gender neutral reader in mind (it's pegging so it's a little femme coded, but nothing is like...explicitly stated/described) ✦
(all are welcome to enjoy ♡)
a/n: okayyy hello my love!! so i really tried to fulfill the request within the confines of how i characterize schlatt, bc i think that he would only do this with someone he super duper trusts?? and even then, it would take a lot of convincing?? lolol also. i need everyone to understand that the mental image of this giant man trying to maintain his dignity while face-down in candlelight fundamentally altered my brain chemistry. so thank you.
warnings: MDNI !! (18+) · established marriage · schlatt and reader have kids · pegging · role reversal · soft dom!reader · prostate stimulation · praise + teasing · multiple orgasms · emotional vulnerability · oral (reader!receiving) · size difference · aftercare · safewords/check-ins · reader and schlatt being disgustingly green flags
(っ˘ω˘ς ) enjoy the emotional support pegging ♡
✧✧✧
You have forty-five minutes between the last bedroom door clicking shut and Schlatt finding you.
In that time, you light every candle — the tall ones on the dresser, the little ones on the windowsill, the tea lights in the ceramic holders you bought at the farmer's market two summers ago and never found a reason to use. You put flowers on the nightstand. You turn the good sheets down and set the vanilla wax melting. You change into the robe and sit on the edge of the bed and try, mostly, to talk yourself out of being nervous.
Because you are nervous. You have been planning this for four years and now that the kids are down and the candles are lit, it's very real and very close and your hands are not entirely steady when you press them flat on your thighs.
You want this. That doesn't make it less terrifying.
The door opens at eight twenty-three.
He comes in talking — something about what the little one said during the last book, one hand already working the top button of his flannel — and stops mid-sentence the second he registers the room.
"Oh," he says.
"Hi handsome."
He takes in the room, slow. The flannel is half-unbuttoned at the collar, his hair pushed back from his face, and he'd originally had a tired look that he only allows to show around you, which has quickly turned into surprise and adoration. He steps fully through the door and kicks it shut behind him (quietly, as to not wake the kids).
"Hey," he says, differently.
"Hi," you say again, and your voice comes out exactly as nervous as you feel, which you did not plan.
His head tilts. "You good?"
"Yes. Come here."
You hold out your hand to him, and he eagerly takes it, dropping onto the bed beside you with a creak of the mattress — he's a lot of weight — and his other hand goes to your knee automatically, warm and familiar. His eyes lingering on all his favorite features on his favorite person, the way a child would subconsiously rub at the velvet ears of their comfort plushie.
"What do you want tonight?" he asks.
"A good night with you," you say. You turn toward him. "And there are things you've been bringing up. That I keep saying maybe to."
The shift in him is immediate. "Yeah? Is there…anything in particular?"
"Well, we haven't done anal in a while."
The sound that comes out is embarrassingly eager, but he tries his best to stop himself. He clears his throat. "Yeah. Obviously. That's great, finally, it's been months." He stops trying to be cool about it. "Okay, yes. Tonight. You're not gonna regret this. I'm gonna take my time, do it right. I've been thinking about it, sweetheart, you have no idea. The things I'm gonna do to you, you're going to be absolutely wrecked—"
"You're going to feel every bit of it," you say.
"That's the whole plan—"
"Every single bit," you say. "You especially."
He stops. He's still smiling, but his eyebrows are furrowing in confusion. "...Meaning."
"Do you remember about four years ago? Right before the first time we ever tried it? The conversation we had?"
"Sure," he says. He sounds a lot like he doesn't actually remember.
"What do you remember about it?"
He thinks. "You said yes?"
"And I said something else first."
He thinks harder. "You said to go slow?"
"Before that."
He stares at you. His hand is still on your knee but it has gone very still. His eyes drift to the middle distance, and you watch him try to pull it up in his mind's eye, and watch the memory take shape , and watch him not love it.
"I said, whatever I let you do to me, I get to do to you."
Silence.
"And you said," you continue, "'anything, whatever you want, sure, yes, all of it, please just say yes, baby, I really wanna fuck you in the ass.'"
He opens his mouth.
"Whattttttt….no. No, but I-I was excited," he explains. He stands up. He takes two steps away from the bed and turns back around and looks at you. "I was genuinely — you know how much I like it. It's a thing for me. A significant thing. If you had told me right then that the condition was I had to wrestle a bear, I would have agreed. Immediately. And then thought about how to deal with the bear situation later."
"But you didn't think about it later."
He looks at the ceiling. He looks at you. "No," he says, reluctantly. "I did not."
"So."
He runs a hand through his hair. "So you've been sitting on this promise I made for this long?"
"Waiting for the right time."
He looks around the room — the candles, the flowers — and back at you. "The right time," he repeats.
"With the right setup," you say. You stand up and cross to him and put your hand flat on his chest and tilt your chin up to look at him. He's very tall from this close, always has been. "I want to do this with you. And before you start listing reasons—"
"I have several."
You kiss him.
He makes a muffled sound of protest that lasts approximately one second before his hands find your waist and he kisses you back, and he tastes familiar and warm and when you press into him you feel exactly how into this he still is despite everything. He pulls you closer and the kiss goes longer and deeper, one hand coming up to the back of your neck, a low hum in the back of his throat at how fulfilling it is to kiss you like this after a busy couple of weeks with having no sex at all.
When you finally pull back, you're both a little breathless. He's looking down at you.
"…I have conditions," he says, quieter now.
"Name them and it's yours."
"You stop when I say. No questions."
"Of course, baby."
"You don't bring it up after unless I bring it up."
"Easy."
"And." He's looking at your face, searching for the right words. "If it's too much for you, or you end up not being as into it, be honest and tell me and we can stop and re-think our night."
"It won't be too much," you say. "But I will let you know. You let me know, too. I want this to be fun for both of us."
He breathes out. He looks at the room, all of it, the care you put into it, and something in him decides.
"Okay," he says. "Yeah. Alright."
You break into a pleased grin.
"Don't," he says.
"I'm not doing anything."
"You have a look," he says, starting to unbutton the rest of his flannel. "You've had it this whole time."
"What does it mean?"
He drops the flannel somewhere. He points at you. "It's just weird for you to be this excited for something that I'm…not. And I don't like it." He's still half-grumbling when he says, "That robe…needs to come off, honey."
You stand, reaching for the tie.
He watches. He stops getting undressed entirely, fingers stopping just under the waistband of his pants. He decides to sit watch the show, and you smile as you pull the tie loose and let the robe slip down. His eyes go to the lingerie first — the lace, the way it sits against your chest and stomach — and then down.
And then stop.
The harness sits over the lace as if it was a part of it. Black straps, adjusted and fitted, the ring at the front empty and waiting.
He's very still.
"That," he says, pointing again. "That's a harness."
"It is."
He looks at it. He looks at you. He looks at the harness. He puts his hands on his hips. He is doing an enormous amount of processing.
"…You sure we have to do this?"
"We don't have to do this. You're allowed to say no, Schlatt."
"But you seem so…into this idea. That look on your face is so…you're looking at me like…"
"Like I want you? Because I do."
You step closer. He's sitting and you're standing and from this angle you're looking down at him, and his hands find your hips when you come into range, automatic, pulling you in between his knees. He's looking up at you with an expression you don't have a name for, something between his usual and something rawer underneath it.
"I've never had anything back there," he says. "Not once."
"I know."
"Not ever."
"I know." You put your hand on his jaw, and he leans into it slightly without meaning to. "I hadn't either. You were my first time. You remember?"
His jaw tightens under your hand.
"You talked me through the whole thing," you say. "You went so slow. You kept checking in." You hold his gaze. "I know what it's like to be scared of something and do it anyway because you trust someone." Your thumb moves against his cheek. "Trust me."
He's quiet for a long moment. He looks at you.
"Okay," he says, and this time it's a real yes — not resigned, not talked into it. Just him, choosing.
You kiss him again, slower, and he makes a low sound into it and pulls you closer and you feel the specificity of the comforting weight of your marriage — the particular way he kisses you with such devotion, the way his hands hold you with such familiarity, the exhale when he finally lets the tension go.
When you pull back, he drops his head to your stomach. You run your hand through his hair.
"You're going to be fine," you tell him.
"I know," he mutters. "I'm fine. I'm gonna be completely fine." A beat. "I'm a little scared."
"I know." You press your mouth to the top of his head. "Come on."
He gets himself sorted — goes to the bathroom to throw some water in his face, takes off the rest of his clothes when he's back — while you get what you need from the nightstand. He settles face-down on the bed, forearms under the pillow, head to the side, and you sit beside him.
You have never seen him like this before. He almost looks like he's about to go to sleep, but there's a tension that's making his back arch with a bit of purpose.
Eight years of being married to the big guy, and you have never seen him face-down and waiting, taking up most of the width of the mattress with his shoulders, his back long and solid and entirely exposed. He looks different. Larger in some ways and much more fragile in others, and something about that combination makes your chest do something complicated. You're nervous. You're excited. You want to do this right so badly that your hands are still not entirely steady.
You reach over and give his ass a firm smack.
He makes an indignant noise. "What the hell?"
"Sorry," you say, not sorry. "It was right there. And your butt is so big, Schlatt. Not half as big as your head, but…"
He cranes around to look at you. "Are you kidding me right now?"
"Occupational hazard of being married." You school your expression. He narrows his eyes.
"I'm in a very vulnerable position, love," he says pointedly.
"I'm aware, love. I'm taking this very seriously."
"That was not serious."
"That was affection," you say. "Settle down, grumpy pants."
He mutters something into the pillow and puts his head back down, and you press your lips together to hold in the smile and get yourself together. You're generous with the lube as your spread his cheeks — more than you think you need — and when the cap clicks he flinches.
"Baby!"
"I haven't put anything in yet! Calm down, you big baby…okay. I'm gonna get you warmed up now, okay?"
"Warmed up?"
"Yeah, I'm gonna use my fingers for a bit. You didn't think I'd put a cock inside you with no prep, did you?"
"Obviously," he says, obviously lying, and then you press against his hole, barely — just the outside, just warm pressure, nothing more — and he says "OKAY" very loudly into the pillow.
You pause. "I haven't even gotten inside you yet, baby."
"I KNOW THAT," he says, also very loudly, into the pillow. "I know you haven't done anything. I'm just. Very aware of the situation. Can you give me a second."
"Take your time."
He breathes. Loud, deliberate, I-am-handling-this breathing. His shoulders come down from around his ears. You keep your hand warm on his lower back, and you find that something about this angle — him under your hands, the span of his shoulders dwarfing your reach, the specific vulnerability underneath the tension — is making the butterflies in your stomach fly a little lower.
"Okay," he says, more quietly. "Okay. Go."
One finger, slow.
He grips the sheets. "Alright. Yeah. Okay."
"Good?" you manage.
"It's weird," he says, and at least he sounds human again. "It's a lot of…pressure? Is it supposed to feel like that?"
"Does it hurt?"
"No?"
"Good. Then yes, it's supposed to feel like that. A little weird, a bit of pressure and fullness…"
"Okay." He breathes. "Keep going."
You move slowly, watching the way his back rises and falls, the way his shoulders shift. He makes small whimpering sounds, breathy exhales and shaky inhales and you find that you are paying attention to every single one in a way that you didn't entirely anticipate. You were prepared to focus on him. You weren't prepared for how much you would feel watching it.
You ask about a second finger.
"Yeah," he says, after a pause that tells you he needed a second to decide. "Yeah. Use more."
You use one more. He hisses sharply when you add it, his hand slamming flat on the mattress, and the sound of it makes your stomach flip in a way that has nothing to do with concern.
"Holy shit," he says, involuntarily. Then: "Okay. Okay. That's a lot."
"You're doing so well," you say, and mean it, and feel faintly ridiculous for how warm it makes you.
"I'm not doing anything, I'm just lying here." He breaks off when you move, slow, and makes a sound that is considerably less managed than the ones before. "Okay. Okay, that's actually fine. A little…yeah..."
You try a different angle. He breaks out in a broken gasp.
"Holy…"
"Oh…" you moan. You go back to that spot, tapping it, and he twitches, his gasps higher-pitched and deliciously needy.
His whole body jolts. The sound he makes is sharp and surprised and nothing like anything before, and his hips press hard into the mattress.
"What the hell was that," he says, into the pillow. He sounds genuinely unmoored. "I felt that everywhere."
"I found something," you say, with more composure than you feel, because your heart rate has absolutely spiked.
"What? What did you find?"
"Your P-spot, or whatever. Your prostate. That you've got."
"What spot? What does that even—"
You do it again. His leg kicks out like a reflex.
"Oh my god," he says. "What is that, how are you doing that, do it again—"
"Yeah?"
"Yes, do it again, exactly like that—" He goes quiet when you do. The sound he makes is so rough and broken that it turns over something hot in your chest. "What is that," he says, almost to himself. "Why does that feel like that?"
"Just feel it," you say, because you don't have a better answer.
"B-Baby…fuck…"
You keep going. You work him slowly and watch him come apart — his hips moving against the mattress in small circles he's stopped trying to control, his knuckles white in the sheets, his words dissolving. He's stopped talking in sentences. He's stopped being able to.
"You look so good right now," you tell him, because it's true and you want to say it. "Going to pieces for me like this. You're fucking melting for me, aren't you, honey. I bet you can't even hear me you're feeling so good."
He makes a whimpering sound of acknowledgement — like he can hear you, but "hates" your teasing.
"All that attitude," you say, "and look at you now. You gonna cum for me?"
"I don't know— It doesn't feel like it normally does— Fuck, am I…shit—"
He cries out a muffled and urgent whine into the pillow, and then the tension in him crests and breaks and releases in a long slow wave, and he makes a sound you will never forget — low and wrecked and long.
You keep your fingers curled, but still your movements,
After a long moment: "Holy shit, did I just ruin these sheets?" His voice has gone completely scratchy and ragged. He clears his throat as best he can, lifting his hips a bit with some effort.
"Nope!" you say, running a hand underneath him.
He checks. "I didn't cum?"
"You didn't ejaculate," you correct. "You can have an orgasm without spilling any cum, even if you are definitely stickier than before…it's not as much as you usually cum, no."
Silence.
"I didn't know that could happen," he says simply, a bit in awe.
"It's real, baby."
"I thought that was something people made up. But now…it felt different. Like it was going through my whole body."
"It's very real and sexy as fuck."
"Huh," he chuckles a bit under his breath. "Okay. Maybe…we take a break?"
"Of course."
"How about you, love? Are you…is this doing anything for you?"
"Um. Yes? Absolutely. Why wouldn't I be turned on all the way up to 100 right now?"
"Are you serious? Come here," he says, quieter. His hand reaches for you.
You take his hand and let him pull you in. When you're close enough, he opens the pushes open the fabric of the untied robe, and underneath is the harness and the lingerie and nothing else, and you watch his expression do several things very quickly as he pushes past the leather to find you.
His hand moves to the inside of the fabric. His eyes close for half a second.
"Fucking really? "
"I told you…seeing you like that because of me? It's hot…"
"How about we hit pause on all this and lemme take care of you real quick?"
"No," you say immediately, forcing yourself to have no hesitation, lest you give into temptation.
"What? I'm just going to—"
"J." You catch his wrist, firm. "We're not done yet. I know you, and as much as I'd like to match orgasms with you, I have a goal, and I'm not going to let you pussyfoot around it."
"That is not fair though, babe."
"I know it isn't. Later. I promise."
He stares at you. "You're seriously going to make me wait to have a taste of you?"
"Yes, I am. I am putting off my well-deserved orgasms because of how badly I want to have you under me, taking my cock." You look at him steadily. "Okay?"
He laughs at your resoluteness, sighing and putting his hands up in surrender. "Fine," he says. "Okay. Fine."
You get up to get the toy.
It clicks into the ring of the harness — the toy you picked carefully, realistic, made to match your skin, proportioned right. Nothing that should be considered intimidating to anyone but a virgin. You straighten up and Schlatt has been watching you, and when you look at him he's sitting on the edge of the bed and his expression has done something new.
He looks at the toy. He looks at you wearing it. He swings his legs off the bed and stands, and crosses the room toward you — all six-foot-three of him, which at close range is always a fact — and then, without explanation, he sinks to his knees in front of you.
Your brain stutters.
He's at your hip level from the floor. He looks at the toy and then at your face and then at the toy, and you have no idea what he's about to do, and then he puts his hand on your hip and turns his face to press his mouth to your inner thigh, hot and open, and you make a sound before you can stop it.
"Okay," you breathe.
He mouths at your thigh for a moment — his grip on your hip firm, keeping you still — and then he pulls back and looks at the toy and looks at you, and there's something in his face that's curious and a little helpless and very warm.
He takes the base in one hand to keep it steady.
"J," you say.
"What."
"You don't have to—"
"I really…need to taste you, babe," he says, and puts the strap in his mouth.
You stop breathing.
He takes his time with it. He's figured out the angle and the grip and he's looking up at you from under his lashes while he does it, and you are watching your partner — your husband who has never done this in their life, and to your knowledge, never sucked dick — give the strap actual, genuine attention, and you are not remotely prepared for how the visual of it attacks your psyche and shoots down your spine. Your hand goes to his hair, gripping, and he moans around it — low and vibrating — and your hips move forward involuntarily.
"God," you manage. "Suck my cock, baby…"
He pulls back to breathe, and his grip on your hip tightens, and he goes back in and you press your hand harder in his hair and feel him hum. He works at it with a focus that suggests he has stopped thinking about the fact that this strap is not really your cock. To him, it's all you, and he's somehow convincing you, too. He's figured out a rhythm. His eyes are closed now, and your hand is tight in his hair, and the room is warm and candlelit and this is happening, this is really happening.
He pulls off slowly. Looks up at you. His mouth is red and his hair is a mess where you've been gripping it and he looks exactly like that looks.
"Did you actually enjoy that?" you ask, a little hoarse.
"More than I expected to," he says, like it surprises him. He stands, unfolding to his full height, and the toy is at his thigh from up here, which is its own kind of reminder of exactly how big he is. "I wish you could feel it like how I feel it when you've done me."
"So do I," you say, with a feeling that is very sincere.
He exhales. His hand is still on your hip. He drops his forehead to yours, briefly, and you both stand there for a moment in the warm room.
"I want to keep going," he says.
"Yeah? You think you're ready?"
"Yeah," he says, with a little more confidence he had thirty minutes ago. "Come on. Let's go."
He gets himself situated — face-down again, forearms under the pillow — and you take a moment to look at him from this angle: broad shoulders, long back, his hips in front of you. Your hands on him are small. Your reach across his back is limited. You are going to have to be up on your knees behind him and the difference in scale will be obvious, and something about that makes you feel something bright and hot and certain.
"I'm going to start here," you tell him, getting positioned, "and I'm going to want to flip you over at some point. Different angle."
"What angle."
"You'll find out." You lean forward to his ear. "You look so good," you tell him, low. "I've been wanting this for so long."
His breath hitches.
You get more lube — the right amount, which is, more than probably necessary — and you circle the tip of the toy against him without pushing, just letting him feel the shape of it, the size. He goes still, and you can almost feel his pupils dilating.
"How does that feel?" you ask.
"Nerve-wracking," he says.
"Just the outside," you say. "Just teasing you a bit, honey."
"I don't want you to tease me, baby…I—I want you."
You try to ignore the hot streak of lust that pulses through you at those words. You grip him by the hips tighter, using your thumb to move the fat of his cheeks out of the way.
"Deep breath."
He breathes. His back expands and contracts. You press forward, barely — just the tip, just inside the first resistance — and he makes a sharp, helpless sound and his hand grips the mattress.
"Slow," he says. "I'm serious. Slow."
"I've got you," you say. "I'm not moving."
He breathes through it. You stay still. You wait him out with your hand warm on his lower back, and after a moment the bracing in his shoulders slowly, slowly eases.
"Okay," he says. "More."
You go slow. Each inch deliberate, pausing when he needs it, watching his back for every tell. He's loud — not screaming, but he's stopped pretending he's not making noise. Hissed exhales. Quiet curses. Once, a low and involuntary "oh fuck me" that he doesn't acknowledge and you don't comment on.
When you're all the way in, you stop.
"Color," you say, because this warrants it.
"Yellow," he says immediately. "Give me a second."
You hold completely still. Your hand moves slow on his spine.
"I've got you," you say. "Take your time."
He breathes. The tension in his legs comes down. "Okay," he says. "Green. Move. Slow."
You move. The sounds he makes go from strained to something different — lower, rougher, less about getting through something and more about slipping into the pleasure of it.
His grip in the sheets loosens and retightens. You find an angle that makes him press his face harder into the pillow, unable to do anything but moan and whine, and you stay there.
"Going dumb for my cock already?" you ask.
He makes an indignant noise that dissolves into something else when you press deeper.
"Big boy Schlatt with the silver tongue," you say, keeping the rhythm, "can't even form a sentence when he's getting dicked down good."
"I can form sentences just fine," he says, and then you find the angle again and he makes a sound that is the direct opposite of a sentence.
"What a good boy," you say, "when you're not being difficult about it."
He says something muffled and fervent into the pillow that you take as agreement.
You build it. You take your time. You watch his back, his hands, the line of his spine, and you can feel how much of him there is beneath your hands, how small you are relative to all of it, and how completely you have him like this.
"I want you to ask me," you say, easing the pace just slightly. "Before I let you come. If I let you. I want to hear you ask."
He groans. "Are you serious."
"Very."
"I'm not going to—"
"Ask me," you say pleasantly, and find the angle, and stay there.
He makes a short, sharp sound of desperation. His hips push back.
"Ask me," you say again, your hips rolling like a tidal wave.
"Please," he says, rough and raw and nothing like his usual voice. "Please, don't stop, please—"
"Please what," you say. "Specifically."
"Please let me come," he says, his voice cracking on the last word. "Please, I need to come, baby, I'm so fucking close, I just need to— please, please, please—"
"Good boy," you groan. "Cum for me."
He comes loud — genuinely, embarrassingly loud, a long broken groan that he doesn't try to muffle, his back arching hard and his whole body shaking. You hold him with both hands on his hips and keep your pace, only slowing when he holds up a hand and starts snapping — his non-verbal yellow flag.
You slow to a stop, pulling out.
You stay where you are and breathe.
"Holy shit," he says, into the pillow.
"Language," you murmer.
He doesn't even have the energy to talk back.
You ease back, careful, and reach for an extra pillow. "Can I flip you?"
He lifts his head. Looks at you, flushed and wrecked. "More? Oh my god, babe. I don't know."
"Come on, please? I had to wait so long to fuck you and you think I want to end the night with you having only two orgasms?"
"Only two of the most earth-shattering orgasms that I've ever had in my goddamned life?"
"But I really wanna give you at least one more. With a different angle that will be even better than what I've already given you, handsome. I think this one's going to be even better."
He holds your gaze for a moment, reading you. He sighs, nodding.
You tuck the pillow under his hips when he rolls over, tilting his pelvis up slightly, and you kneel between his legs. From here, the geometry is specific: you're smaller than him in every dimension, his legs are long and flank your sides, and to lean over him you have to angle your whole body forward. His face is far above your eye level. He's looking down his own chest at you. You're looking up at him.
His arm is resting at his side and you take it, curling your fingers with his — your weight behind it, pinning him — and reach between you with your other hand.
He's hard, of course. Fully, completely, heavy and warm when you wrap your fingers around him, and he makes a grumble from somewhere low in his chest.
"So good for me, baby. Just one more. I just wanted to see your face when I break you this time. So why don't you be so good for me and look at me?"
His eyes meet yours. Dark and needy, dilated and glassy. So cute.
"Hi sweetface," you whsiper.
"Hi," he manages, his cheeks flushing a deeper shade than before. "You gonna fuck me?"
"Already have. Will I do it again? Absolutely. You ready for me?"
"Yeah, think so…"
With that, you push forward, and the angle from here — with the pillow, with the tilt — is completely different, and you feel it in your hips before he reacts, and then he reacts. His mouth opens. His eyes go wide. His whole body goes taut.
"Oh," he says, and stops there, because that's all there is.
"There it is," you say.
You move your hand on his length in rhythm with your hips, and his head drops back and the sound he makes rumbles through the whole room. You work him steady and watch his face — the way it keeps changing, the way his jaw goes slack, the way he keeps looking down at you and his eyes go soft and then lose focus and come back and go soft again.
"That's it, handsome," you say. "Just feel it."
"I'm feeling it," he says, and his voice is barely there. "I'm feeling a lot of you."
"Well you like me. So you must be feeling pretty fucking close, huh? Glad I kept you to your promise?"
He makes a sound that is not a denial.
"You're so cute like this, Schlatt. Trembling and spread open just for me…while I fuck you exactly how you needed."
He shudders, the hand that you have him pinned by tightening around your grip.
You don't stop. You give him everything — steady and warm and focused entirely on him — and you feel the wave build again. His arm under your hand goes tight. His breathing goes ragged and short. He's trying to hold on and you don't make him.
"Come on," you say. "Let me hear you. Don't keep those delicious little moans inside."
And he does come louder than before — a genuine broken cry that he doesn't muffle at all, his whole body locking and then shaking, your name somewhere in the middle of it. His cock spurts in your hands like a small fountain, his cum sticky and thick in your fingers. His hand grips your arm hard. You work him through every second of it, your hand and your hips, until his grip loosens and his body goes heavy and his breath comes in long, unsteady pulls.
You ease off him, moving up beside him.
He doesn't speak. His eyes are closed, and his breathing is deep and heavy, having the specific quality of being on another plane of existence — and you don't panic, you just stay close.
"I'm here, honey," you murmer against him. "Take your time."
You get yourself untangled from the harness while you're beside him, set it aside, and pull the blanket up over both of you. You get water from the nightstand and put it in his hand, and when he doesn't move immediately, you wrap his fingers around it.
"Drink," you say. "You're probably dehydrated as fuck."
He drinks. Slowly.
You stay there with your hand on his chest, feeling his heartbeat slow from quick to steady. You talk to him in the quiet — nothing important, just your voice, telling him he did so well, that you've got him, that he can take all the time he needs.
After a while, he says, "I love you."
"I love you too, Schlatt."
His hand finds yours on his chest and holds it.
"You okay?" you ask.
"Yeah," he says. More present now. He turns his head and looks at you. Some of him is coming back — the color in his face, the focus in his eyes. He exhales. "That was a lot."
"Good a lot?"
He rolls his eyes playfully. "Don't fish."
"I'm not fishing."
"You're fishing." His thumb moves against the back of your hand. "You were nervous earlier. At the beginning."
"A little."
"You didn't say."
"I didn't want to make it about me," you say.
He looks at you. "It was about both of us," he says. "This whole thing was for both of us." His jaw shifts. "The way you watched me tonight. Knew when to slow down, when to push, when to just stay still."
"…I learned from the best."
"You took really great care of me…so can I finally return the favor?"
You look at him.
"You've been very patient," he says. "And I've been taking up a lot of the evening."
"You have," you agree.
"So." He waits.
You look at him for a moment — your partner, your husband, flushed and soft and looking at you like you're something he wants to take care of — and you nod.
Schlatt is infuriatingly good at getting you off. At some point in the night, you had totally forgotten about your own desire and would have been fulfilled with everything you were able to achieve. Lord knows that he does a lot of the work already when it comes to working in the bedroom. But, contrary to what people might say…marriage is not 50/50. It is 100/100, and even through his exhaustion, your sweet husband pushes through to try and bring even a fraction of the pleasure you've worked to give him tonight by manhandling you against his thigh.
His hands are large — large enough that the span of one covers significant ground — and he kisses at your face and neck and chest while he works you up, greedily grabbing at your hips and the fat of your ass, forcing you to grind and bump against his wide thigh at the pace he wants you to go, and at one point, you find you're making sounds that are a lot like the sounds he was making twenty minutes ago.
"Color," he says, as you're moments from reaching your precipice, dry as anything.
"Shut up," you say, breathless, putting your hand against his mouth as you grind yourself to climax. He laughs under your hand, kissing your palm as he watches you melt into whimpers and satisfied moans.
You stay tangled together in the warm room. The candles have burned low. The vanilla is still there, constant. Somewhere down the hall, your daughter is probably kicking in her sleep. Your son will be up at seven wanting a hot breakfast all ready for him. There are a hundred things tomorrow.
Tonight though, it's just you two.
"Fair is fair," you say.
His chest rises under your cheek in a huff. His hand moves slow on your back.
"Fair is fair," he says, and holds you while the candles burn down.
I need you to know that "Built for it" is genuinely my number one fic of ALLLLL TIIIIIIIME. It's also so refreshing seeing black creators in the space, it's genuinely inspired me to start writing. If I could pretty please request some more feral breeding kink stuff bc I'm a freak abt that. Maybe black reader too if you'd be interested... I know that white boy wouldn't play about his chocolate queen 🙂↕️
╭﹐✦˚₊· zero percent chance (?) ⋆.ೃ࿔:･ ╮
imagine: you and your boyfriend just got some pretty sad news. but...fake it till you're making it, you know? that's his motto.
✦﹒₊ ╰﹒♡₊˚๑✧ ﹒ ✦࣪˖ ┊
✦ written with a black fem!reader in mind ✦
(but all are welcome to enjoy ♡)
a/n: andddd back to the smut!! i was very excited to take this request because HEHEHE i get to indulge in some of my fav kinks. thank you for such a sweet message alexis - reading that my writing inspired you to start writing too means a hell of a lot to me :')) i finished up with my thesis and now i just gotta get through finals week...but today i'm going to be getting drunk on a boat with some of my friends and wanted to give you guys a little hit of dopamine too <3
warnings: MDNI (18+) !! · black!reader · lowkey switch!schlatt · body worship · established relationship · infertility-adjacent themes (low probability of natural conception) · breeding kink · hint of lactation kink · oral sex (f!receiving) · size kink · overstimulation · excessive cum, leaking · cockwarming · implied somnophilia, but no depiction
(っ´ཀ`)っ have fun ya freaks!!
✧✧✧
Cleanser, toner, body oil, shea butter — in that order, no exceptions, the way your mother taught you at thirteen. You've done it every night since. You did it the night before your college thesis was due. You did it the night your grandmother died. You did it a few days ago, before you and Schlatt sat in the parking lot of the fertility clinic for forty-five minutes before either of you said anything, and then came home and cooked and ate chicken curry and rice at the table in near-silence, and then you came upstairs and did your routine, because it's the one thing that stays the same.
Tonight the lamp on the dresser throws its low gold over everything, and you're at the vanity working shea butter into your arms and trying, mostly, not to think.
You're naked from the shower, curls loose and enormous from the wash, damp at the roots and springing free around your face and shoulders. The lamp catches the shea butter on your deep brown skin and you look warm and lit from inside, and you make yourself look at your body. Your mother also said: take up space. Look at yourself like you love yourself, and then one day you really will. You look at your full lips, the curl of your lashes, the curve of your shoulders and your hips.
You look at your stomach, and take a moment to blink away tears.
You're so focused on your routine that you don't hear Schlatt until he's in the doorway.
He's changed out of his work clothes into that in-between state you've always found endearing: soft charcoal trousers and the brown leather belt still buckled through the loops, a worn gray henley pushed up past his forearms. He's a big man — broad through the shoulders and chest, solid through the stomach, the kind of build that takes up a doorframe without meaning to. His dark hair is pushed back from his forehead, wavy on top, curling where it's grown out. The gold frames of his aviators catch the lamplight.
You look at his reflection. He's looking at your face.
"Hey, love," he says.
"Hey, baby." You keep working the butter into your arm. "…I'm fine. If that's what you're here for."
"Mm. Not exactly." He comes into the room, stops behind you. Close enough that you can see him properly in the mirror — the quiet concern behind the glasses, the way his jaw sits.
"I really am fine," you repeat. "The routine helps."
"I know it does." He reaches up, gently, and tucks a loose curl back from your face. His fingers are warm. "Can I help? With your back?"
You hand him the jar.
His hands press broad and warm to your shoulder blades — big hands, big enough that the span of each covers most of your back — and he works the shea butter in slowly. Long strokes, thumbs tracing your spine. For a while, neither of you says anything.
Then, quietly: "The doctor said low probability. Not impossible."
"I know what she said, Schlatt," you whisper back. "I was there."
"I know, I know." His hands slow at your waist, spreading wide over the flare of your hips. "I'm just thinking about that word. Impossible. She didn't say that."
"Schlatt—"
"She didn't say that," he says again, gently. His hands trace back up your sides. "And tonight I want to — I want to give you a night, a night like tonight, like the odds are in our favor. Like we're certain it will happen." He meets your eyes in the mirror. "I want to pretend, with you. If you'll let me."
Something moves through your chest. You look at your own reflection — your face, your curls, the lamp behind you — and you think about the parking lot and the silence and his hand not letting go of yours the whole drive home.
"...Pretend?" you ask.
"For tonight." Quiet. "No talk about percentages."
"That's your pitch?"
"…I did have a better one."
"Can I hear that one?"
He pauses. "I can't remember any of it now."
"Schlatt."
"I had the whole thing ready. In the car. It was genuinely good." He sounds so mournful about it. He might even be pulling out the fake tears and faux sniffles. "You're standing there looking like that and it's just — gone."
A small laugh escapes you, helpless.
"There she is," he murmers, soft. "My smiley girl."
You look down. The smile fades a little. "It just hurts. Hoping like that and then—"
"I know." Still steady. "I don't want to make it about the process or timing or positions. I don't want to think about doctors appointments or fertility specialists and their tips and tricks. I just want to let tonight be tonight. I want you."
"...Okay," you say. "Tonight is tonight."
He presses his lips to the top of your head.
"Yeah?"
"Yeah." You set the jar on the vanity. Turn around. He's right there, close, and his hands settle at your hips automatically. You tip your chin up to find his face. The glasses have slid down his nose. You reach up and push them back.
He looks down at you, his head tilted to the left, his pupils all dilated. His thumbs press soft circles into the sides of your waist.
"You're so beautiful," he says.
"Knees," you tell him.
He drops. Straight to the carpet, no hesitation, his big hands coming to your thighs, and he looks up at you from the floor. He reaches up and turns the vanity chair toward him. You lower yourself into it, the cushion soft beneath you, and he closes the distance on his knees.
He presses his mouth to the inside of your knee. Warm, unhurried. His eyes come straight back to your face.
"Schlatt," you say, a hint of a whine already in it.
"Shh." His mouth moves to your inner thigh. "I wanna savor this."
"You can savor it faster."
He laughs against your skin, low, and the warmth of it makes you shiver. "No I can't."
Another kiss. Higher. And another. The hair of his forearms presses warm against the inside of your thigh as he leans in and you feel his breath, two full seconds of warm breath against your skin, and then his mouth, and the sound that comes out of you is a sharp, bitten-off oh—
His tongue presses flat and slow at first. Learning. Then it finds the specific angle that makes your hips jolt and you gasp, "— there —" and he stays right there, exactly there, and doesn't move from it.
Your hand goes into his hair immediately, the dark wavy mess of it, and you pull, hard. He groans against you, muffled and low, and grips your thighs as they try to close around his head. But his hands are insistent that they stay wide.
"Schlatt—"
He hums. A silent what? as he continues to make you crumble.
"You—" The sentence dissolves. Your hips roll forward and he lets them, angles to meet you, and you lose whatever you were going to say entirely. "God—"
Another hum. Longer this time. Pleased.
"Don't—" you manage, pulling his hair again, harder, your knuckles whitening. "Don't you dare be smug about this right now!"
He laughs against you, low and muffled, and the vibration of it makes your thighs shake and your grip on the chair cushion tighten until your fingers ache.
"Oh my God—"
He makes a deep and grumbling sound that you feel more than hear, and works you slower, like he's got all night, like he's not the one on his knees.
"Please," you breathe.
He looks up at you.
Right in the middle of it — tilts his head back to find your face, dark eyes finding yours from below — and he holds your gaze and doesn't stop and you look back at him and whatever you were holding onto gives way entirely.
"Schlatt — I'm—"
He knows. His hands hold your thighs open and he keeps his rhythm and you come apart — his name in pieces in your mouth, your back arching hard away from the chair cushion. He works you through every wave of it and only goes still when you're pulling at his hair with both hands and whimpering because it's too much, too much, and he lifts his head and presses his lips gently to your inner thigh.
"Good girl," he murmurs. "Good fucking girl…"
"Shut up," you breathe, still shaking.
He rises on his knees, high enough to reach you in the chair, and takes your jaw in both hands and kisses you — warm and unhurried. You taste yourself on his mouth and pull him closer anyway. He makes a low sound against you, pleased with himself, which he has every right to be and you will not be telling him that.
You break the kiss enough to look at him. His hair is a complete disaster. He looks entirely unbothered.
You slide off the vanity chair.
You end up sitting beside him on the carpet, shoulder to shoulder, backs against the front of the chair. He tips his head briefly to rest against yours and you let him, just for a moment. The lamp above you. The quiet.
Then you reach over and press your palm flat against the front of his trousers.
His breath punches in. "Hey—"
"Be quiet," you say.
You feel the belt buckle cold against your knuckles and the soft warm fabric beneath your palm and him underneath that — already half-hard, the weight of him even through the cloth. Heavy. You press slow and feel his jaw go tight.
"Babe—"
"Shh," you say.
You keep your palm flat and drag it upward, slow, feeling him out through the fabric — the length of him, the thickness, the way he twitches when your palm drags over the head. He exhales hard through his nose. His hand finds your thigh and grips but doesn't stop you. You do it again, same pace, same pressure, and this time he makes a low sound that makes him sound like a whale singing.
"Okay," he says.
"Okay?" You curl your fingers around him as best you can through the fabric and squeeze, gentle, and watch his whole face go slack.
"Okay as in — that's—" He swallows. His hips shift into your hand. "That's good. That's really—"
You work him slow and thorough, feeling him get fully hard under your palm, heavy and insistent through the soft fabric, and he's gripping your thigh now like it's the only thing keeping him in his body. His head tips back. Another sound, quiet and involuntary.
"God," he breathes. "Okay, wait—"
"I'm not even doing anything, honey," you say pleasantly.
"You're doing — you're doing a lot, actually, toots—" His breath hitches when you squeeze again. "Okay. Okay, slow down. I've been — I'm trying to save my…my orgasm."
You go still.
"...Save it," you repeat.
"For the—" He gestures vaguely toward the bed. "The baby-making. You know."
You look at him. He looks back at you, genuinely flushed, completely serious about this.
"You've been saving it," you say slowly. "For the baby-making."
"Why did you say it like that—"
"How long have you been saving your cum for me, Schlatt?"
"That's not — that's not relevant—"
A smile starts at the corner of your mouth. You look down at your hand. Back up at him.
"Do you mean, you've been saving it for just a couple hours?"
"No," he says immediately, almost ashamed that he wants more credit.
"Since yesterday?"
"I don't like this face you're making," His eyes narrow. "Don't. I know exactly what you're thinking and don't."
"Hey, wait, we haven't had sex all week. Have you been…saving it since then?"
You look at his face, grabbing his chin with your index finger and thumb and look at his face.
He looks — God, he looks absolutely pathetic in the best possible way.
His cheeks are flushed pink all the way to his ears, his glasses slightly fogged at the edges, his bottom lip caught between his teeth like he's physically trying to hold something in. His eyes are dark and a little desperate and very, very frantic as he looks at you, your face, your hand on his crotch, his hand on your thigh.
In your understanding of his thoughts — there are two equally urgent things happening in his brain right now and they are at complete war with each other. He wants to come. He also wants to be inside you when he does. He wants both of these things immediately and he cannot have both immediately and it is clearly causing him genuine distress.
"How long," you repeat. You lean over to him down his jaw, the chops tickling your nose.
He closes his eyes. "...Since Monday."
It's Friday.
"Schlatt," you say, and you don't know if you're scandalized or impressed or both.
Either way, you tighten your grip.
"Babe—"
The sound he makes is embarrassingly gratifying. His whole body goes taut and his hand slaps down over yours — not pulling it away, just holding it there, like he genuinely cannot decide.
"If you make me—" he starts.
"Mm?" You move your hand again, slow and deliberate.
"I swear to God—" His head drops back. "Stop—"
"You stop stopping me."
"I'm serious—" but his hips have shifted into your palm and his grip on your hand has gone from stopping you to just holding on, and you can feel exactly how close he is, how hard he's trying to hold the line, and you are absolutely not going to make this easy for him—
He picks you up.
Both hands, clean off the floor, and you're over his shoulder before you've finished the thought, your hands grabbing the back of his henley.
"Schlatt!"
A hard palm comes down on your bare backside — sharp and decisive — and you yelp.
"That's what you get," he says, carrying you toward the bed with great purpose.
"I didn't do anything!"
"You were about to make me come in my pants, baby." His voice has dropped an entire register from thirty seconds ago. No more flushing, no more fogged glasses. He sounds like himself again — certain, low, the version of him that knows exactly where this is going. "Been saving that since Monday for a reason."
"You can't punish me for something I was going to—"
"I absolutely can." He gives your backside another firm pat, more punctuation than punishment. "And you know what else?"
"What," you say, from upside down.
"You're going to be very grateful I stopped you." A beat. "In about twenty minutes."
You open your mouth.
"Don't," he says pleasantly, "argue with me about this."
He drops you onto the mattress.
You bounce. You can't help but laugh — startled, helpless laughter — and he's standing at the foot of the bed looking down at you with that grin on his face, wide and a little smug, and you love it and you'll never tell him how much.
"You threw me," you whine. "Careful with the merchandise…"
"You're fine." He tilts his head, looking at you sprawled across his sheets, and something shifts in his face. He looks at you like you are way more than fine.
"What?" you say.
"Nothing." He reaches back and pulls his henley over his head in one motion and drops it somewhere behind him. "Just…you."
Your giggles go quiet.
He's something to look at in the lamplight, Schlatt. Broad through the chest and shoulders, dark hair across his sternum and stomach, and the chain swings once against his skin and catches gold. He's solid everywhere, heavy-looking. He gets the belt loose — leather through the buckle — and then the trousers, and you look at all of it. You take your time.
He's thick. Even soft he'd been heavy in your hand through the fabric; hard, he's something else — the kind of thing that always needs time to adjust. He doesn't look away from your face while you look.
"Done?" he says.
"Not even close," you say, licking your lips. Should have done a BJ while you had the chance…your mouth is salivating at the thought of licking the drop of pre that has gathered on the tip.
He comes back to you — one knee on the mattress, getting over you slow — and his mouth finds your throat, the hollow of it. The hair of his chest grazes your skin and you press your palm flat against it, the warmth and density of it under your hand, and he makes a low sound. He works down your sternum, lips pressing warm, his big hands spreading wide over your waist and hips.
He traces your bottom lip with his thumb, slow, watching his own hand. Fixated. He always does this with your mouth — gets fixated on it — and you tip your chin up and let him look.
"Tell me if it's too much," he says.
"It won't be," you say. "Come on."
He lines up, looks at your face, and pushes in slow.
The breath goes clean out of you. Like your lungs have been stepped on.
He stops. "Still with me?"
"Don't you dare stop," you murmer, trying to breathe. "Keep going."
He keeps going. The stretch of him is something you have to consciously breathe through every time — the width of him, filling you incrementally, the deep ache of it as your body works to accommodate all of him. He waits when he bottoms out, forearms bracketed either side of your head, the hair of his chest warm against your breasts. Both of you just breathing.
"Move," you say, when you've got the breath for it. "Please."
His rhythm starts careful and reads you and then your hips tilt up toward him and it changes — deeper, and his hand slides between your bodies, thumb finding your clit, and the sound you make is sharp and comes from somewhere low.
"There she is," he murmurs.
"Don't stop, Schlatt. I swear..."
"I'm not stopping, baby. Couldn't make me pull out if you tried. You know why?" His thumb holds steady and his pace settles into something deliberate, and he watches your face from close up, his breath warm against your cheek. "'Cause 'm going to get you knocked up," he says.
Your head turns to the side. "Wha—"
"Tonight." His thumb moves and your hips jerk. "I'm going to fill you up and it's going to take."
"The chances are so small," you breathe. "Schlatt, there's no point—"
"They're not zero," he says. Simple. Certain. His pace doesn't break. "That's all I need. Not zero is enough." He presses deeper and you make a sound with no protest in it. "Tell me it's not what you want."
Your mouth opens.
Nothing.
"I can feel you," he says, quiet, right against your ear. "When I said that. Knocked up. Pregnant. Full of my seed, heavy with my child. Fuck, I can that needy little hole fluttering around me. You want it."
"It hurts," you say, honestly, your voice going unsteady. "To hope like that, it—"
"I know." He pulls back enough to look at your face — really look — his thumb gentling. "I know it does. But you're allowed to want it. You're allowed to have tonight." He holds your gaze. "Let me give you this."
Something breaks open in your chest.
"Say it again," you hear yourself say. "Please."
He does.
"I'm going to get you pregnant," he says, low and wrecked and steady all at once. "Your belly's going to be round with my baby. You're going to be so full, so beautiful — I'm going to fill you up every night until it takes, and then I'm going to take such good care of you." His rhythm deepens. "Your body's going to change for me. You'll feel me for days, every time you move. I want you on your back with your legs open and sore from me—" His thumb works and you choke on a breath. "Want your tits full of milk for our baby — I want every part of you—"
"Yes," you say, and you've stopped trying to be anywhere but right here, your ankles crossing behind him. "Yes, don't stop, say it again—"
"Mine," he grits out. "Every part of you is mine. Say it."
"Yours," you say. "I'm yours, I want it, please—"
He gives it to you.
His hips go harder, his thumb unrelenting, and you dig your nails into his shoulders and stop managing any of the sounds coming out of you. He groans low into your neck at each one like they're feeding something animal in him. You're close, building fast, your whole body pulling toward it—
"Come on," he grits. "Let me feel you."
You come hard enough that your vision goes white at the edges, his name torn apart in your throat, and he follows immediately — drives in deep and holds there shuddering, and you feel him in hot pulses, filling you up — so much of it, more than you expect, more than fits, and you feel it spilling even as he's still going, running warm down the inside of your thigh before he's even finished.
He stays.
His forehead drops to your shoulder. Both of you breathing.
After a long moment he shifts, pulls out — and you both feel what happens when he does. The warmth of him, running down the inside of your thigh, spreading across the sheets beneath you.
He looks down.
His jaw tightens.
He gets two fingers against you, pushes them inside, slow and deliberate, eyes tracking his own hand. Pressing back everything that's spilling out, working it back into you with a focus that looks almost involuntary, like he's running on something deeper than thought.
"Schlatt," you manage. "It doesn't work—"
"Shh," he says. Not unkind. Just busy.
You watch his face while he does it — the set of his jaw, the furrow of his brow, the way he looks like a man who cannot stand to see a single drop of what he saved for days, wasted — and something warm and sinister turns over in your chest.
"You're insane," you say softly.
"Yeah," he agrees, not stopping. "For you."
When he's satisfied, he replaces his fingers with himself — pressing back in slow, and you gasp at the oversensitivity of it.
"Too much?" he asks.
"No," you say. "No, I want — stay."
He stays. Deep and still, and he reaches up to push a curl from your face. His fingers warm against your cheek.
"You okay?" he says.
"Yeah," you say, and mean it completely. "I really am."
He presses his lips to your forehead. Then he shifts his weight and gets his hands on your hips and turns you over, and from here — on your hands and knees, him kneeling behind you — it's immediately deeper. Fuller. You're already so sensitized that the first full press of him makes you drop your head and grip the sheets.
He gathers your curls in one fist at the back of your head — gentle but certain — and holds.
"Good?" he asks.
"Yes," you say. "Move. Please."
He moves.
No patience left in it from either of you. His hips set a rhythm that's harder than before, his free hand coming around to your clit, and you're already overstimulated enough that the first contact makes you jerk forward. The fist in your curls keeps you exactly where he wants you.
"Mmm," he grumbles, low. "That's right, baby…fuck back into me. Let me see that ass shake."
You bounce back against him, the obscene sound of your ass hitting his pelvis becoming a metronome. He builds the pressure steady — his thumb working, his pace deep and unrelenting — and you've completely given up being quiet. You're already full of him from before, and you can feel that too, the obscene slick of it, and when he drives forward you feel everything.
"That's it," he grits, his rhythm going ragged at the edges. "That's my girl. You're so — you're perfect, you're so good, fuck, you shaking, baby?"
"Don't stop," you tell him. "Don't stop, I'm so close—"
"I've got you," he says. "I've got you. Come on."
You come for the third time, your elbows nearly going out from under you, his name wrecked in your mouth, and he drives in hard and holds — deep, as deep as he can get — and the sound he makes is low and rough and doesn't end quickly. You feel him filling you up in long, shuddering pulses, and he stays pressed flush against you, hips grinding forward in small insistent circles like he's trying to get every last bit as far in as it'll go.
"Stay still," he grits, hands locked on your hips, keeping you exactly where he wants you. "Don't move."
You don't move. You both stay there, breathing. His forehead drops to the back of your shoulder. Slowly, carefully, like he's defusing something, he eases you both down to the mattress — sideways, his chest against your back, one arm hooked around your waist. He doesn't pull out.
He stays where he is, tucked against you, and after a moment he says, very casually, into the back of your neck:
"Can I just — sleep like this tonight?"
"...Like what."
"Like this," he says. "Inside you. Just. All night."
You're quiet for a second.
"So nothing—"
"Leaks out, yeah." He sounds completely unashamed. "Seems practical."
"That's not—" you start, and then stop, because you were going to say that's not how it works and you've already had that argument tonight and you're tired. "...Fine," you say. "Okay."
He makes a small satisfied sound and pulls you closer and you feel him, still there, and it should be ridiculous and it is a little ridiculous and you also don't actually want him to move.
A moment passes.
"Hey," you say.
"Mm."
"You don't have to — save up anymore. Like you did this week." You keep your eyes closed. "If you wake up and you want to — I don't know." Your voice drops. "I wouldn't mind. Being woken up like that."
Silence.
You feel him go very still behind you.
"Say that again," he says.
"I'm not saying it again."
"No, genuinely—"
"Goodnight, Schlatt."
"Holy shit."
"Goodnight."
"No, I just — wow." He presses his face into your hair. "I love you so much."
"I know," you say. "Go to sleep."
He doesn't go to sleep immediately. You can feel him smiling against the back of your head, stupidly happy, and you close your eyes and let him be stupidly happy about it because honestly, so are you.
I’m genuinely curious about people’s opinions on this. Why do people put “don’t interact if you’re not *insert specific gender I wrote this fic for*” in their fics?
Like I understand the, “minors dni”, but like, I write fics and specify the gender I write about, but if you fall outside of that gender and wanna read it and mentally change the pronouns or whatever go nuts! I do that too sometimes with stuff I read! I don’t think it’s inherently like a fetishising, or harmful thing?
I get asking people to not request certain pronouns if you exclusively write for some. But telling people “SHE/HER’s do not engage” is so interesting to me. Cause like to me, engaging means liking, reblogging and commenting, which are all super nice things!
Is there a reason people ask this? I understand having spaces that are specifically for you and your audience but I feel like you can respectfully engage with a fic even if you’re not within the gender of the reader yk?
fully agreed -- i'm a cis she/they, but if the smut is hot af, i'm the type of reader who can imagine myself as any gender <3
i can't imagine writing something for a specific audience and then trying to stop people outside of that intended audience,,,, from enjoying your work also??? in general i write for female readers. when i don't i put a little message that says the target audience, but welcomes everyone to enjoy it.
like, art might be made to be a commentary towards one thing, but people will always take your work and apply it to different scenarios. that's the way any sort of public work gets treated! that doesn't erase the intended audience/purpose of the work though, imo.
Could we get a SFW Schlatt × transmasc!reader fic? It's always bugged me how 99% of trans rep in fanfics is NSFW and most of it is pre-transition too. Not judging anyone, but it would be nice to see something else for a change. Just some fluff would be great. Thanks!
╭﹐✦˚₊· fifty-two weeks of you ⋆.ೃ࿔:･ ╮
imagine: a one year anniversary alone with your boyfriend – presents, stories, smores and hot-tubs…you can't wait for the years to come.
┊ ˖࣪ ✦﹒✧* ๑˚₊♡﹒╰ ﹒₊✦
✦ written with a transmasc!reader in mind ✦
(but all are welcome to enjoy ♡)
a/n: a little fluff !!!!!! just very comfy vibes — highly suggest listening to some like, woodsy-type ambiance? this is a very chill ficlet
warnings: top surgery scars (~eight months recovered) · established relationship · gift giving · grumpy x sunshine (sort of) · they u-hauled tbh · connor is a coward and a liar · fluff with no conflict whatsoever and i'm not sorry
enjoy! u lil gummy bears ฅ՞•ﻌ•՞ฅ
✧✧✧
The cabin smells like pine resin and the ghost of last night's fire, and you've been lying awake for exactly thirteen minutes — you know because you've been watching the red numbers on the bedside clock tick over with the focused intensity of someone who is absolutely not anxious about what day it is.
It's fine. You're fine. It's just an anniversary.
One year.
You stare at the ceiling. The wood grain up there is knotted and whorled, and over the course of the week you've identified at least four faces in it, one of which looks unsettlingly like your ninth grade math teacher. You've been meaning to tell Schlatt about this and keep forgetting because something more interesting always distracts you.
A lot of things happen when Schlatt is around. That's one of the better discoveries of the last year.
He's asleep beside you in the specific and deeply committed way that Schlatt sleeps, which is to say he has colonized approximately seventy percent of the available mattress and seems to be at peace with this situation. One arm is thrown over his eyes. His mouth is slightly open. His hair is the perfect mixture of fluffy and soft bed-head…over the course of this week alone, you've taken three covert photos of for personal reasons.
You watch him for a moment.
You've been doing that a lot this week…just watching. Storing things up like a museum. The way he looks reading in the afternoon light with his reading glasses on, which he owns and wears and will apparently discuss openly now, a development that took six months and which you celebrated privately and extravagantly. The way he moves around a kitchen, all that size and certainty, managing somehow to be simultaneously in the way and extremely useful. The way he laughs when something actually hits his funny bone — loud and sudden and a little helpless, that he tries to cut off and usually can't. He sounds like a witch who just made the potion for everlasting life.
One year of that laugh, you think. One year of being the person who gets to make it happen.
You still can't fully account for your own luck.
You slide out of bed carefully. He doesn't stir. You go over to your suitcase, pulling on a sweatshirt that you stole from him a while ago — the wrecked grey one that hits mid-thigh on you and that he complains about you stealing in a tone of voice that has never once indicated he actually wants it back — and pad out to the main room in your socks.
The gifts are on the table.
Yours, which you'd arranged last night with the stealth of someone defusing a bomb: the sweater folded inside tissue paper, tied with twhiskey because you're better at making things than packaging them. The album underneath, wrapped in brown kraft paper with his name written in your best calligraphy.
And his.
You stop. Is this what he had put down last night? You had been really tired, but surely you would've remembered something as neatly packaged as this.
You'd expected something wrapped. Something in a box with a bow, clean lines, the kind of gift presentation that suggests a personal shopper or at minimum a store that offers gift wrapping. Schlatt is, among other things, a man who has taste and the resources to act on it, and you've been mentally bracing for something impressive and expensive that will make you feel slightly guilty about the handmade situation.
What's on the table is a large bag. Dark green, thick paper, real ribbon on the handles. The tissue paper inside is arranged with a precision that should not be possible from someone who also cannot locate his own keys on a daily basis. There's a card tucked into the ribbon with your name on it in his handwriting, which is normally borderline illegible and here is slow and careful, like he thought about each letter.
You stand in front of it for a long moment.
Then you put the kettle on, because some things require tea first.
The mugs have organized themselves over the week — his on the left, yours on the right. It simply became fact by the third morning the way a lot of things with Schlatt simply become true before you've had a chance to discuss them. You're leaning against the counter watching the trees go from dark to lighter-dark through the window when you hear the floorboard.
There's one just inside the bedroom door with a very specific two-part creak — low then slightly higher — that has become, over the course of this week, the sound of him waking up and moving through the world. It goes now. Then footsteps. Then he appears in the doorway in his grey t-shirt and the sweatpants with the fraying drawstring that have survived three separate conversations about whether it was time to replace them.
His hair is extraordinarily messy now that he's vertical.
He looks at you. Then at the table. Then back at you, with the expression of a man processing several things simultaneously and choosing to begin with none of them.
"You were up," he says. Morning voice, lower than usual, slightly rough at the edges.
"So were you," you say, nodding at the green bag.
Amusement flickers across his face. He crosses to the table and drops into a chair and you bring him his mug, which he accepts with both hands, then doesn't take a sip at all, instead setting it down.
You sit across from him.
The table between you has a coffee ring from some previous renter and a small groove near the edge your thumb has been finding all week. Outside, mourning doves coo softly over the sound of the rushing water near your getaway cabin. The light is coming up soft and grey-gold.
"Happy anniversary," you say.
He looks up from his mug.
And there it is — for just a second, he's unguarded, letting the emotion and importance of the day run over him like a train, before he quickly reassembles himself to begin the day.
"Yeah," he says. Then, quieter, like it's just for the room: "Happy anniversary." A beat. He looks back down at his mug. Clears his throat. "You're wearing my sweatshirt, handsome."
"I am."
"That's mine."
"Mm."
"I've been looking for that."
"Have you."
"For weeks," he says, and finally takes a long sip of tea, and you bite down on your smile.
✧✧✧
You make him open his first.
"You should let me go first," Schlatt says, nodding toward the green bag. "Then you can open yours."
"Schlatt."
"Logistically it makes more sense to—"
"You're not going to be able to pay attention to anything I open if you're sitting there thinking about the bag," you say. "So. Open it."
He looks at you. Looks at the bag. He hasn't identified a flaw in your reasoning and for fast enough to deploy it.
"Fine," he says.
He reaches for the brown kraft paper covered present first, admiring his name written in calligraphy, turning it over in his hands once before pulling the paper away. The album is cloth-covered, deep burgundy, thick cream pages. He looks at the cover for a moment, running his thumb along the spine, and then opens it.
Goes still.
The first photo is from early October — a Sunday outdoor market, two months into whatever you were then, still figuring out the shape of it. Schlatt had been standing at a table of secondhand books with his back mostly to you, head bent, turning something over in his hands with the focused expression he gets when he's actually interested in something. You'd had your phone out before you'd made a conscious decision about it.
You'd taken pictures of him all year. Quietly, a little stalker-ish, but how big of a stalker can you be when he's your boyfriend? Forty-seven pictures, printed twice because the first batch came out gritty in a wweird unaesthetic way. They're all here — every one of them, arranged in order, the whole year laid out in the specific way that you see him.
Schlatt, reading. Schlatt laughing at something off-frame with his whole face, unguarded. Schlatt asleep on your couch in February with his reading glasses still on, a book face-down on his chest, during the hard week when neither of you had enough hours in the day and you'd both just — run out of steam simultaneously. Schlatt in the kitchen, side-lit, chopping something behind the counter. Schlatt looking out a window when you had your date at a skyscraper. Schlatt looking at you — in a few of them, caught mid-turn, unaware you'd gotten the shot, with an expression on his face that makes something in your chest go very warm every time you look at it.
He turns pages slowly.
You watch his face.
He goes through the October ones, the November ones. Something happens around his eyes at the December photo — Christmas, a party neither of you had wanted to go to, and Schlatt making a face at you across the room that had nearly made you choke on your drink, and you'd gotten it, the exact face, perfectly framed. He spends a long time on a photo from June — himself in the afternoon light on the back porch, head tipped back, eyes closed, looking more relaxed and happy than he usually does — and his thumb moves against the page. Against the photo. Just slightly. Back and forth.
He reaches the last page.
Just your handwriting. A few lines:
You've been taking pictures of me all year. So I thought I should take some pictures of you, too. My favorite photographer. I thought you should finally see what I see when I look at you.
And below, smaller:
Thank you for letting me look. Thank you for all the memories this year.
He closes the album.
His hand rests flat on the cover. He doesn't say anything. His jaw is set in the particular way that means something is happening that he's keeping contained, and his eyes are down, and the cabin is very quiet around you both.
You pick up your tea. Give him a moment.
"Schlatt," you say, gently.
"I'm fine," he says. To the album.
"Are you sure?"
"It's just a lot of—" He stops. Clears his throat. "You took all of these."
"I did."
"Without telling me."
"You do the same thing."
He looks up at that. His eyes are very dark and very steady, and there is something behind them that he's not quite ready to say out loud yet, and you don't push.
"The one from June," he says, finally.
"The porch one."
"I don't remember you being out there..."
"I know," you say. "That's why I took it. You looked so perfect, I had to sneak up on you to take it."
He looks at you for a long moment. A muscle in his jaw moves. He glances back down at the album, then back at you, and something in his expression shifts — then settles. Like a pebble torn up by the current finding a new spot in the river to slot into.
"There's another present?" he asks. Gruff. Redirecting. "Where's that one?"
"We can talk about this mo—"
"The other gift," he says, with the decisiveness of a man retreating to safer emotional ground.
You roll your eyes with a small grin, get up and slide it over to him.
He takes it and unwraps it with slightly more impatience than he'd given the album — tissue paper shoved aside — until it unfolds across his hands. Heathered grey-green, the color of the trees on overcast afternoons. Heavy, soft, the kind of thing that gets better with every wash. You had to re-do the collar three times. Schlatt doesn't have a lot of crocheted clothes, and his head is just so damn big.
He holds it up. Looks at you over it.
"You made this? There's no tag."
"I did."
"Like. From scratch? With your hands."
"That's the definition—"
"Do you know how long this takes?" He turns it over, examining the seams, the collar, the cuffs. "My aunt used to crochet. She made one sweater every two years and treated it like some sort of religious event."
"It took a while," you admit. "But I definitely didn't need two years. I'm…"
"You're very talented," he finishes. He holds it against his chest — checking the size, puts the sleeves against his arms, his cheeks flushed and his grin soft. Something about how quietly excited he is to recieve it, unable to act nonchalant like he usually tries to do makes you have to look at your tea for a second. He folds it, setting it down carefully on the table. Looks at it. Looks at you.
"Okay," he says quietly. "Your turn."
✧✧✧
The bag is heavier than it looks.
You pull out the tissue paper first, which has been arranged in layers like Schlatt was packing something fragile and precious and wanted zero margin for error, and then your hands find fabric and you pull it out and it unfolds as it comes, spreading across your lap, and you go quiet.
It's a quilt.
But it's not a simple storebought one. Dozens of different fabrics pieced together — different textures, patterns, weights, all of them somehow coherent, somehow working, like someone thought for a very long time about how each piece would sit next to the others. You turn it slowly in your hands and keep finding things. A square of soft dark flannel. A cream linen. A small rust-and-gold plaid. A panel of something with a tiny geometric print that makes your brain snag because you know that print, you know that—
You look up.
"Schlatt," you say.
"Before you say anything—"
"Is this from my college tote bag?"
"It's the same pattern," he says carefully. "I found a fabric supplier."
You look back down. There's a square near the center — chambray blue, soft in the particular way that only comes from something being washed so many times it's forgotten how to be stiff. Your hands know the weight of it before your brain catches up.
You had a hoodie with this fabric not too long ago.
You'd worn it almost every single day for three years. Not because it was special to look at — it wasn't, it was just a hoodie, plain and faded and nothing remarkable — but because of the way it felt on. The way you felt in it. It had been the first thing you'd reach for every morning without thinking, the thing that made getting dressed feel like something easy and right. On the days when nothing else cooperated, when the mirror was unkind and strangers would use the wrong pronouns, the hoodie was always there to hide your chest, cover your hair, cry into the sleeves.
The day after your surgery, you'd woken up and it was gone.
Not lost in the dryer. Not borrowed by Schlatt. Just — gone. Like it done what it came to do, and quietly let itself out. You'd looked for it for about two hours and then stopped, because something about looking for it felt wrong, felt like trying to hold onto the scaffolding after the building was already standing.
You'd told Schlatt about it once. Late, both of you mostly asleep, in that loose half-conscious place where things come out easier than they would in daylight. I miss it sometimes, you'd said. Not who I was before. Just — how soft it was.
He hadn't said much. Just made a quiet sound that meant I hear you.
You'd thought he'd forgotten.
"Schlatt," you say. Your voice has gone strangely warbly.
"Before you say anything—" he starts.
"Is this—" You run your thumb across the square. The exact weight. The exact give. You would bet at least a hundred bucks that this was actually the hoodie. "Where did you get this?"
He is quiet for a moment.
"Thrift store," he says.
You look up.
"There were," he says, with the careful delivery, "a lot of thrift stores. Over a few months. I had a general sense of what I was looking for." A pause. "It took a while to find the right one."
The image of Schlatt — Schlatt, who irons his shirts, who has strong opinions about thread count, who once described a restaurant as "too casual" because they didn't have tablecloths — standing in a thrift store on a random afternoon, methodically working through a rack of secondhand chambray, without telling you or asking you for help, for months —
"You went to multiple thrift stores," you say.
"The first few weren't right," he says. "They just didn't feel like the way you had described."
"Schlatt."
"But I knew what I was looking for," he says, simply. "It just took a while to find it."
You look back down at the square. Maybe it's the same hoodie. Maybe it isn't. Maybe that doesn't matter — maybe what matters is that he somehow knew. That without you having to explain all of it, all the weight and the history and the specific thing that hoodie had been for you, he knew. He went looking. He found something that felt right and he put it in the center.
"I thought you were going to get me a watch," you say, mostly to yourself.
He blinks. "A watch."
"Or something tech. I had a whole speech prepared about how I was going to love it very graciously even though—"
"A watch," he says again, like the word has personally offended him. "What would you even do with a watch."
"Tell the time, Schlatt—"
"You have a phone," he says. "Everyone has a phone. A watch." He shakes his head. "You've been working on things with your hands since before I met you. You've got that whole—" he gestures vaguely in the direction of your life, "—making things, helping people, building stuff. You came home last month with calluses from that one wood project and you were so happy about it."
"Well, I am very happy about this," you hum, smiling.
"I'm glad," he says. He looks at the quilt in your lap. "You deserved something that someone put real time into. That's all."
The cabin is very quiet.
"Schlatt," you say. "'Someone put real time into'? Did you–"
"It's weighted," he says. "Which I also thought you'd appreciate."
"I do appreciate that, but did you or did you not—"
"Do you like the edges? I didn't want to go for tassels—"
"Schlatt! Did you make this yourself?"
A pause. A very specific pause.
"...I was involved in the process," he says carefully.
"Schlatt."
"Significantly involved," he adds.
"That's not what I asked."
He looks at the wall. "Come on, open the rest of it—"
"There's more?"
"Bottom of the bag," he says, grateful for a subject change, and you reach in and find a small card tucked into the tissue paper right at the bottom, and when you open it there's a name — LittleDivasCreations — and a note in his handwriting: she did the sewing. I did everything else.
You look up at him.
"Everything else," you repeat.
"The fabrics," he says. "All of them. That was me." He meets your eyes steadily. "I knew what I wanted it to feel like.But I…I'll be honest, honey, I am not going to ever get into sewing or quilting or whatever the fuck it's called. That ship has long since sailed. But I am—" he gestures vaguely, "—a very enthusiastic patron of the arts and your happiness."
Something in your chest does a slow, enormous lift. Like a ballerina being effortlessly raised towards a spotlight.
You reach over and grab the front of his t-shirt.
He looks down at your fist in his shirt and then back up at you, and before he can say anything you've pulled him in and you're kissing him, properly, your free hand coming up to his jaw, and he makes a surprised sound against your mouth that dissolves almost immediately into something warmer. His hand finds your waist, even in this strange seated kiss. He kisses you back the way he does everything — unhurried, like he's got nowhere else to be and can't imagine why he would leave anywhere but where he is now.
When you pull back he's looking at you with that expression. The one you're sure he doesn't know he has.
"Hi," you say.
"Hey," he says. A little rough. Your eyes linger on his wet lip before you blink back up to look at him and offer a smile, to which he groans, knowing you're teasing him.
You turn back to the quilt in your lap and pull it up around both your shoulders, shuffling closer until you're pressed into his side, his arm coming around you automatically, warm and solid. He tucks you in against him and rests his cheek on top of your head.
"It's a good blanket," you say.
"Yeah," he says. "It is."
You feel him press a kiss to your hair. Quick, almost absent, like breathing.
"Thank you," you say.
"Don't mention it."
"I'm going to mention it constantly."
"Figures," he says.
✧✧✧
Breakfast is a collaborative effort in the sense that you cook and Schlatt stands close enough to be a mild obstruction and hands you things before you reach for them, which is either very intuitive or means he's been watching you cook for long enough to memorize your patterns, and you're not going to examine which one is correct too closely because you should probably be focusing on cooking.
He refills your mug without asking. He passes you the spatula. At one point he comes up behind you while you're stirring something and rests his chin on top of your head and just — stays there, his whole weight settling, and you lean back into it slightly, and neither of you say anything.
"There are four faces in the ceiling," you say.
"What?"
"The wood grain. In the bedroom." You gesture vaguely upward. "Four faces. One of them looks like my ninth grade math teacher."
Schlatt is quiet for a moment. "Which one?"
"Mr. Kowalski. Sort of disapproving, slightly asymmetrical—"
Schlatt walks away from you for a moment, as you continue to mumble the details about what your old teacher looks like. You switch to a whisk, and hear the creak of the bed. Looking back, you see Schlatt laying on your side of the bed.
"I see him," Schlatt says immediately. "Right near the edge of the wall."
"Yes. That's been bothering me all week."
"Geez, babe. We could have switched sides."
"Nah. I might find someone worse on your side."
He laughs and rejoins you, "helping" until you finally finish. You eat at the table with the quilt draped over your lap. Schlatt eats across from you and notices the quilt and bites into a forkful of his breakfast with a very rumbly hum, which is the closest he gets to that makes me happy.
After breakfast he says "walk?" and you say "obviously" and you both dress for cold.
✧✧✧
The trail behind the cabin loops out through the pines and along the ridge, and on day three you'd found a spot where the treeline breaks and you can see the whole valley laid out below — the river, the fields, the far hills going blue with distance. It had taken your breath away. Schlatt had looked at it for a long moment, hands in his pockets, and soaked it all in.
Today the frost is still on the ground in the shade. Your breath makes clouds. Schlatt walks with his hands in his pockets and his shoulder a constant gentle pressure against yours, and the trail is mostly clear but where it dips down toward the creek it gets rocky and slick, and at the worst bit you reach back without thinking and he takes your hand without being asked, and you haul him over the slippery patch and holds on for longer than strictly necessary afterward.
"Story," you say, once you're back on flat ground.
"What?"
"Tell me something. You've been quiet for too long, big man."
"I'm enjoying the ambiance," he says.
"Mm. I like your voice better than any ambiance."
He sighs through his nose, cheeks flushed at that. Looks around at the woods — the pines, the dark spaces between them, the way the light comes through in long slants. Something crosses his face. A thought arriving.
"Okay," he says. "So. You know Connor."
"Your friend Connor."
"My friend Connor," he confirms. "Who, about two years ago, decided to take camping seriously. Like, really seriously. Bought the gear. All of it. The good tent, the sleeping bag rated for temperatures that don't exist in this state, the little — " he makes a gesture, "—camp stove thing. The full situation."
"Very committed."
"Very committed," Schlatt agrees. "So he drives out to those woods. You know the ones, off Route 9, past the old orchard? State park adjacent."
You keep your face neutral. "Mm."
"Takes his gear out, sets up camp, very proud of himself. This is like, October, late afternoon. He's out there doing his thing." Schlatt pauses. "And then."
"And then."
"He sees someone coming out of the trees."
You glance sideways at him. "Coming out of the trees."
"Just emerging," Schlatt says. "From the treeline. Moving with what Connor described as, and I'm quoting here, 'a kind of horrible purpose.'"
"Horrible purpose?" you repeat.
"His words. And apparently this person looks—" Schlatt pauses, and when he continues he's not really quoting Connor anymore, he's just in it, "—rough. Like, fucking god awful. Jacket caked in dirt, shirt all snagged and pulled from the branches, hair completely gone to hell. And the thing that got Connor wasn't any of that. It was the eyes. Because this person wasn't panicked. They were just calm. Completely, utterly calm. The kind of calm you only get after you've stopped fighting off the crazy."
"The acceptance phase," you say.
"Right. And then—" Schlatt looks at you, "—they smile. This big, full smile. Out of nowhere. Just absolutely delighted to see him." He shakes his head. "Connor said it was the most frightening thing he'd ever witnessed. A filthy, branch-snagged, dead-eyed stranger emerging from the trees and smiling at him like Christmas had come early."
You walk in silence for a moment.
The woods are very quiet around you both. A branch cracks somewhere in the trees — just the cold, just the wind — and Schlatt glances toward it with absolutely no self-awareness about the atmosphere he's created.
"So what did Connor do?" you ask, trying to break the air of scare.
"What did Connor do?" Schlatt repeats. "Connor, who has a four-hundred dollar tent and enough freeze-dried meals for a week. Connor, who drove out there specifically to prove he could handle himself in the outdoors."
"What did Connor do, Schlatt?"
"He ran," Schlatt says, his mouth quirking. "Packed nothing. Left the camp stove. Just went. Didn't stop until he hit the parking lot, then got in his car and drove." A pause. "He told me about it two days later and he was still shaken up."
You are quiet for a moment.
The old orchard. Route 9. October…two years ago.
"Schlatt," you say slowly.
"He said it haunted him," Schlatt continues, warming to it now. "Like, genuinely. Said there was something about the way this person moved—"
"Schlatt."
"—like they weren't lost, like they had come for him specifically—"
"Schlatt." You stop walking.
He stops. Looks at you. "Yes, babe?"
"The woods off Route 9," you say. "Past the orchard."
"Yeah."
"Two years ago? October?"
"...Yeah?" he says, more carefully this time.
"I ran out of gas," you say. "On Route 9. I'd taken the back way home from my friend's place and I just — completely ran out. And my phone was at four percent so I couldn't get a map to load properly and I thought I remembered a gas station if I cut through the park—" you pause, "—I had been walking for about forty-five minutes when I came out of the trees."
Schlatt stares at you.
"I was so thirsty," you say. "I just wanted to ask someone if they knew how far the station was. And there was this guy with a very impressive tent camping who looked like he knew these woods well, and I started walking toward him, and he just—"
"…Ran?" Schlatt says faintly.
"Sprinted," you say. "Left his camp stove on. I actually turned it off for him before I kept walking." A pause. "Took me another twenty minutes to find the road."
Schlatt is very still.
"A horrible purpose," you say.
He closes his eyes briefly.
"I was trying to look friendly," you say. "I smiled."
"Connor said the smile was the worst part," Schlatt says, in a voice completely without affect.
You burst out laughing. Full, genuine, slightly helpless — you have to put a hand on his arm to stay upright. He stands there enduring it with the expression of a man dismantling a mythology he has been building for two years.
"He told this story at my birthday party," Schlatt says, to the trees. "In March. I let him tell it at my birthday."
"How did it end? In the party version?"
"He said he drove home and looked up local missing persons cases," Schlatt says.
You laugh harder.
"He told me he thought about it for weeks," Schlatt says. "He said it changed him. As a person."
"Schlatt," you say, wiping your eyes, "I was dehydrated and lost. I was wearing that old green jacket. The one with the broken zipper."
"The haunted figure in the woods," Schlatt says quietly, "was wearing a jacket with a broken zipper."
"I'd had a really long day."
He looks at you for a long moment. Then he presses his mouth together. Looks away. Looks back.
"You smiled at him," he says.
"I was trying to be approachable!"
"Connor said—" he stops. "Connor said he'd never seen anything like it."
"I just wanted directions!"
And then Schlatt cackles — the one that takes him by surprise — and you grab his hand because the path is uneven here and also because you want to, and he lets you, and you walk the rest of the trail like that, his hand warm around yours, occasionally one of you saying horrible purpose or local missing persons and setting the other one off again.
"I have to tell Connor," Schlatt says, when you're almost back at the cabin.
"Please don't."
"He deserves to know."
"He absolutely does not," you say. "Let him have this."
Schlatt considers. "He's going to figure it out eventually. When he meets you properly."
"And when that happens," you say, "we let it occur to him naturally."
Schlatt looks at you.
"And we say nothing," you add.
A slow smile. "Nothing," he agrees.
✧✧✧
The s'mores are Schlatt's idea, which he announces after dinner with a surge of energy and excitement coursing through him so fast you can see it glimmering in the warmth of his brown eyes.
"We have marshmallows," he says, appearing in the kitchen doorway.
"Do we?"
"Pantry. Previous renters left supplies." He holds up the bag. "Chocolate. Graham crackers. We have a fire pit."
"We also have a perfectly good bottle of whiskey that we were going to open—"
"S'mores," Schlatt says, with finality. "And then whiskey. You can't have whiskey without earning it."
"That does not sound like a good food combo—"
"It will be," he says, already heading for the back door. "I'm building the fire."
He builds the fire with a focused intensity, crouching over the pit and arranging wood with the expression of someone solving a spatial puzzle. You sit in one of the low camp chairs and pull your jacket tighter and watch him, the cold air sharp against your face, your breath coming out in visible clouds.
"You're staring," he says, without looking up.
"I'm observing," you say. "You're very focused on that fire."
"Fire requires focus," he says. "This is load-bearing wood placement. If you do it wrong the whole thing collapses in on itself and you get smoke more than an actual flame."
"Well, we need fire if we're going to be doing this marshmallow thing," you say.
"Exactly."
The fire grows for a few minutes as he tends to it, and once it's reached a good height, he settles into the chair next to yours, close enough that your knees are nearly touching. He takes a marshmallow, puts it on his skewer, and holds it with exacting patience just above the embers, rotating it slowly.
You put your marshmallow directly in the flame.
"No," Schlatt says.
"Yes," you say.
"You're burning it."
"I know."
"You're doing that on purpose."
"I like it burnt," you say. "I like the gooiness."
He looks at you with the expression of a man confronting something genuinely difficult. "The whole point," he says, slowly, "is that the outside goes crunchy and the inside goes—"
"The whole point," you say, "is that I like it my way."
Your marshmallow catches fire. You blow it out. It's blackened and slightly collapsed and perfect. You construct your s'more with it and take a bite and it's exactly what you wanted, smoky and sweet and slightly charred, and you make a sound of satisfaction.
Schlatt's marshmallow comes off the skewer perfect — genuinely, objectively perfect, golden all the way around, soft when he presses it between the chocolate and the cracker, a structural marvel. He bites into it. He chews. He looks satisfied.
You wait approximately four seconds.
"Can I try yours?"
"No," he says.
"Just a bite—"
"Make another one."
"But yours looks so—"
"Make another one the right way this time—"
"I'll make one my way and then I just want one bite of yours to compare—"
"You're going to eat the whole thing," he says, flatly.
"I'm not going to eat the whole thing," you say, and he hands it over with the deep sigh of a man who knew exactly how this was going to go, and you eat basically all of it.
"This is what I was telling you about," he says, watching you. "The outside, right? Soft? And the inside is—"
"Really good," you admit.
"Yes," he says. "Because of the technique I'm using, babe. They're almost too perfect to eat."
"And yet," you say, "I'm the one eating it."
He makes a short sound. Almost a laugh. A half groan. Gets another marshmallow.
The fire settles into itself, red and low and steady. Above the trees the stars are coming out — first one, then five, then more than you can count, the sky going that deep clear black that only happens far from the city. More smores are made. By the time you've had your third, the cold is proper now, the kind with teeth, but the fire pushes back against it and your chairs are close enough to share the warmth.
Schlatt makes another s'more, this time monitoring with one eye on you.
"I'm not going to take it this time," you say.
"History suggests otherwise, schnookums."
"I already had one of yours, honey bunches of oats."
"You had one of yours and two and a half of mine," he says. "By my count that's—"
"I'm full," you say.
He eyes you. Makes the s'more. Finally gets to eat it unbothered.
"Apparently there is a right kind of chocolate for these things," Schlatt says. "Darker, higher cocoa. The cheap stuff doesn't melt right properly anymore." He holds up the bar they'd found in the pantry. "This is the right kind. Previous renters had taste."
You smile, leaning over and put your head on his shoulder. This strange and funny man who doesn't remember the joys of using shitty, cheap Hersheys chocolate on a smore. You have to admit though, this expensive chocolate made your pretty shitty smore pretty fucking good.
He goes very still for half a second. Then his arm comes up and around you, pulling you in against his side, solid and warm, and his chin drops to the top of your head.
You sit like that while the fire dies down, your legs stretched toward the heat, the stars doing their extravagant expansion overhead. He tells you about his old group of friends who went camping one time, how young and stupid he was, and you laugh into his shoulder, and he laughs too, and the cold isn't cold when you're this close.
✧✧✧
The hot tub is around the side of the cabin, half-sheltered by the wooden lattice, and the steam coming off it in the night air looks like something from a film about fairy tales.
You go first while Schlatt locks up the house. Even though this place is isolated...you can never guarantee anything.
You pull your shirt off in the cold and climb in and the heat is almost shocking — a full-body exhale, your muscles releasing all at once, the cold air against your face and shoulders and chest while the rest of you is wrapped in something that feels like relief. You sink until the water is at your collarbone and look up at the sky.
Your chest is yours. Has been yours for eight months now.
Eight months isn't very long, in the grand scheme of things. Long enough that it's stopped feeling new, most days. Long enough that you don't feel self-consious every time you pull a shirt over your head.
The scars are still a bit thin at the edges, still obvious, and your hands find them sometimes without you meaning to — but they've become a part of you. Your journey.
Schlatt was there for before and after. He stayed through the beginning, middle and is still with you for the future, and he never once made you feel like a person who deserved to be stuck somewhere that wasn't right. You were just a person who he loved. His boyfriend of one year.
You sink a little lower into the water. The cold air is sharp on your face and shoulders, but the steam rising up from the water washes it away almost immediately.
Schlatt comes out.
He's carrying two glasses of the whiskey you'd opened after dinner. He sets them on the edge of the tub, climbs in with a sharp intake of breath at the temperature, and sinks down across from you.
He hands you a glass.
"Cheers," you say.
"Cheers," he says, and you clink and drink, and the whiskey is spicy and chilled going down.
He looks at you.
Just looks, the way he does when there's no audience and no reason to perform anything. His eyes move over your face, your shoulders, the water's surface. Something in his expression is very settled and at peace.
"You're staring again," you say.
"Anniversary rules," he says. "I get to stare."
"You say that like there's a rulebook."
"There is," he says. "I wrote it."
"When?"
"Just now. Rule one: I get to stare. Rule two—" He considers. "I get to have the rest of the chocolate we were thinking about giving to the next people who stay here."
"That's not an anniversary rule, that's just you wanting chocolate on our trip back home."
"Rule three," he continues, unperturbed, "we can't sit in silence while in here."
"Hm. Okay, easy enough." You lean your head back against the edge of the tub. The stars above are extraordinary — dense and close, the way they never are at home. "Tell me a story about us."
"Another story?"
"Tell me something I don't know," you say. "And yes, another. I like hearing the way you tell them."
He considers. The water moves between you.
"When you came over with the tide pen," he starts.
You laugh, surprised. "That's the story you're going with? When we met? That's a little cheesy, Schlatt."
"I'm just…I still think about it," he says, flushing. "When you came over with the tide pen, you didn't even say anything to me. You just — appeared out of fuckin' nowhere. Grabbed my arm and started walking."
"You were about to say something you couldn't take back."
"It would've been fine."
"Schlatt. You were not fine. Your head looked like it was going to explode"
"I was handling it. I'm very good at handling my anger."
"You were going to make that poor drunk man cry at his own stag night," you say. "I was doing everyone a favor by breaking you guys up before someone ended up with a broken rib."
He's quiet for a second, not denying your assumption. "Anyway. You had a tide pen, and I still can't believe that you did. We never would have met otherwise."
"I always have a tide pen. So we probably would have met eventually."
"Did it have to be at a bachelorette party, though? A tide pen at a bachelorette party?"
"Yes! Especially at a bachelorette party," you say. "Do you know what happens at bachelorette parties?"
He looks at you. "I feel like I'm only just starting to understand that you just — walk around prepared to deal with situations."
"Someone has to."
"Yeah," he says, and something in his voice has shifted, gone quieter. "I know. That's—" he stops. "That's the thing. You made me take my shirt off in a bar bathroom and fixed it, you fixed the stain so easily, and you didn't make it weird and you handed it back to me, and left. And I just stood there for a while. Not sure what to do with myself."
"I remember, vaguely, you saying thank you."
"Eventually."
"After like thirty seconds of just staring, yeah."
"I was…processing my feelings. You made it easy. To stop a fight, to fix a shirt, to make me fall for you. You continue to make it easy."
"Schlatt." You move through the water toward him — he watches you come, going still — and you settle in beside him, your side against his, your shoulder under his arm. The water shifts and resettles. You can feel him breathe.
His arm comes around you. His hand wraps around your far shoulder, warm and solid, and he pulls you in just slightly, adjusting, like he's finding the right configuration.
"You're such a sap, sometimes," you whisper.
"Maybe if you can stop me from feeling so sentimental, I'll learn to stop," he responds easily, to the top of your head.
You sit there. The steam rises around you. Tomorrow you'll pack up this cabin and drive home with the quilt in the backseat and the album in his backpack, and after that there will be just — life, regular life, the project you're going to start and the work you're going to do and the ordinary mornings.
"Schlatt," you say.
"Mm."
You tilt your head up. He looks down. Your faces are very close in the steam and the dark.
"I love you," you say.
He looks at you for a long moment. His arm tightens around your shoulders. Something in his face goes very quiet and very open, all the way down.
"I love you more," he murmers. Low. Rumbly. "I've been—" he stops. Tries again. "Trying to say that out loud more often."
"I know," you say. "But I feel it, you know? In all the things you do and all the ways you put up with me and my shenanigans."
"Wouldn't live life any differently, honestly." He pulls you closer.
"Next year," you start, feeling the warmth of the water startung to make you sleepy. "Somewhere warmer, maybe?"
"Absolutely not," he says immediately. "I cannot stand the heat, handsome. We could take a beach day, but I can't handle a week in the tropics with all the bugs, the giant sun…ugh. No."
"Schlatt," you say, laughing now, "We would have so much fun, though! Ice cream and swimming and tanning and canonballing into a pool to claim it back from all the teens."
"Eh…no. I'm good with being alone. Alone with you, in a hot tub surrounded by stars. Seeing you without a shirt is uh...an added bonus."
"…I love you, you goof," you laugh, capturing the soft warmth that drips over your heart. "So much."
He goes quiet, cheeks pink from both you and the heat of the water.
"Yeah," he says, after a moment, laughing slightly. "Me too. Way more than I say so, I hope you know."
His hand finds yours under the water. Your fingers, his fingers. He holds on.
"I do."
A warm breeze rushes by, cutting through the song of cicadas and crickets chirping. Tomorrow you'll go home with a quilt, a photo album, a homemade sweater, and a year that has been, without question or competition, the best of your life so far.
"Fifty-two weeks," you say.
His thumb moves across your knuckles. Once. Twice. Slow.
╭﹐✦˚₊· the door between us ⋆.ೃ࿔:･ ╮
imagine: he comes home with good news and finds you already breaking. he doesn't look at the mess. he just opens his arms.
┊ ˖࣪ ✦﹒✧* ๑˚₊♡﹒╰ ﹒₊✦
a/n: this is a quick little drabble for the people who've sat on cold bathroom floors and told themselves they were fine. for everyone who's ever needed someone to stand on the other side of a door and just wait. you don't have to be okay tonight. you just have to still be here. this fic is a love letter to people on both sides of the door. ♡
warnings:⚠️ please take care of yourself before reading · self-harm depictions (cutting) · suicidal ideation · mental health crisis · negative self-talk & intrusive thoughts · wound care / bandaging · hurt/comfort· GN!reader
take care of yourself bby ilyssssm <3 also pls lemme know if i need to add any tags to this to prevent you (or others) from being triggered
✧✧✧
The tile is cold in here. You sway a bit on your feet, shifting your weight from left to right as you look at yourself dumbly in the mirror. Immediately, your eye focuses in on all the scars from acne that was picked off, ingrown hairs on your neck and chin that keep coming back, your teeth covered in plaque from you staying in bed instead of brushing your teeth for the last two days.
You sigh, your back sliding down the tiled wall so that your legs could splay out, knees bent and feet resting on the door of the dark brown cabinet. Your skin gets goosebumps climbing up your back from the sudden dip in temperature poking at your thighs, even through your grey sweatpants –– which all made you think of your thighs.
And once you start thinking about your thighs, you start thinking about everything else.
Your stomach. The soft part of your arms. The way you'd avoided looking down in the shower this morning — actually bothered to shower this morning, which felt like it should count for something, except it doesn't, because the bad thoughts don't negotiate, the good ones don't give credit, they just —
Look at you.
You exhale through your nose. Slow. Controlled. It's fine, it's fine, itsfine…
You've been doing that for two days now. Lying down on the ground and breathing, that is. That, or the process of staying in bed until the afternoon light shifted from yellow to orange and back to grey without you having done a single thing under it except watch it go past over and over again. You'd told yourself it was rest and that you were being kind to yourself. You'd told yourself a lot of nice things…parroting a lot of stuff you've heard from therapy, but it never sticking in your head.
Your brain was working against itself – and as much as you were kind, your brain returned with cruelty.
You're not resting. You're rotting. There's a difference.
You press the back of your head against the tile.
He's going to come home and look at you and wonder what he's doing here. He does already. You can see it — in the half-second before he says something, where his face just — doesn't. Where he has to pick an expression and put it on. You make him work for it. You make everyone work for it.
"Stop," you say out loud, to nobody. Your voice is embarrassingly thin.
You can't even do that right.
It had started the way it always does — quietly. A low hum underneath everything. A kind of gravitational pull toward the medicine cabinet that you'd been successfully ignoring for three weeks, four days. You know because you counted. You count the way other people count calories or steps, ticking it over in the back of your head like a clock — three weeks, four days, three weeks, four days — like if you say it enough times it becomes something to be proud of.
It doesn't feel like something to be proud of right now.
The medicine cabinet is right there. You can see it from here — the little silver latch, the smudged mirror front. You know exactly what shelf it's on. You know because you put it there, back behind the box of cold medicine and the expired melatonin, told yourself that putting it further back would make it harder. Like distance could argue with a thought that's already made up its mind.
Three weeks and four days is a long time to be tired.
"It is," you agree. Quietly. To the thought.
And that's when you know you're already losing, because you stopped arguing and started agreeing, and the next part goes very fast.
You're not thinking anymore. Your body just — moves. Climbs to its feet. Opens the cabinet. Pushes past the cold medicine, the melatonin. Your fingers know the shape of it better than you want them to.
You sit back down on the tile with it in your hand.
You push your sleeve up.
The scars there are old ones, most of them — white and flat and healed into the skin like they belong to strange evil scientist's test subject, except they don't, they belong to you. You trace the edge of one with your thumb. The thought is very quiet now. Almost gentle.
There. See? That's all this is. That's all you need.
The first one is shallow. More of a sting than anything. Your breath comes out in a long, shaking stream — and in the exhaling, something does loosen within you. Something heavy and coiled and loud gets a little less quiet. Your shoulders drop. The back of your head finds the tile again.
See?
Quiet.
You close your eyes.
And then —
The front door opens.
✧✧✧
You go completely rigid.
The sound of the jangly rattle of his keys, the little worn carabiner he's had since before you met him hits you like a live wire straight to the sternum. The door swings wide and thump, his shoes hit the mat, and you hear the rustle of a bag, and you are still sitting on the bathroom floor with your sleeve pushed up and—
"Okay, so."
His voice carries down the hall, easy and loose and completely, horrifyingly unaware. Fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck he's early—
"You know how I've been saying the onion volcano at Mikura's is mid?"
Move.
"Because it is. It's objectively, embarrassingly mid, and I will not hear arguments—"
You're already scrambling. Your hands are shaking — both of them, badly — and you grab at the toilet paper roll, pressing a wad of it to your arm. Your sleeve won't come back down all the way with your hand underneath it and you yank it anyway, too hard, and it hurts and there's already blood coming through the thin cotton and you need to put the —
put it away, put it away—
"—so I'm driving home, right, and I pass this place — Kenji's, have you seen it? Little strip mall thing — and I doubled back because the sign had a flame on it, and babe, they have a full teppanyaki section—"
You shove yourself up to the sink. Turn on the tap. Try to run your arm under it. Your reflection looks back at you and it is very bad: your face is wrinkling and paling like old paper, your pupils are dilated like crazy and somewhere in the part of your chest that processes things like consequences and oh god you realize you are making a sound.
A high, cracked, involuntary sound. Somewhere between a gasp and a sob.
You press your free hand over your mouth. Too late.
The footsteps in the hallway slow.
Stop.
"…Hey."
His voice is different now. The warmth still there, but pulled taut over something else. Something careful.
"You in there?"
Your hand is still over your mouth. You breathe through your nose. In. Out.
"Yeah." It comes out all wrong and even you aren't convinced. You sound like a toy with a broken voice box, all scratchy and fake.
A pause.
"You okay?"
"I'm fine." You look at your reflection because you can't look away. "I'll — I'm fine. I'll be out in a second."
Silence.
Then, soft. Two knuckles against the door. Nothing demanding.
"Can you open the door for me?"
"Schlatt—"
"I'm not going to do anything. I just want to see you."
"I swear that I'm okay, I just need a second."
"You don't sound okay."
"I will be." Your voice breaks clean in the middle of it. You hate that. You squeeze your eyes shut. Why does it hurt to blink? Why does it hurt to breathe? Why is he here, he's going to stop you from doing this, you should be able to do whatever you want... "Please just — go back out there. I'll clean up and I'll come out and I'll be fine, just—"
"I'm not going anywhere."
The simplicity of it floors you. No argument, no negotiation.
"You don't know what—" You stop. Swallow. "I don't want you to see me like this."
"I know." A beat. "I want to anyway."
Something in your ribs does something complicated.
"You already deal with so much," you say, and your voice has gone strange — very quiet, very even. "And I'm supposed to be — I should be fine. I'm supposed to be fine by now. I have no reason not to be fine—"
"Hey."
"—and every time you come home I can feel you looking at me and trying to figure out if it's a good day or a bad day before you even put your bag down, and I hate that I make you do that—"
"Hey." Firmer, now. Not unkind. "I hear you."
"—and I'm so tired of being like this." The words are coming faster now, barely room between them. "I'm so tired of it being so loud all the time and I just — I needed it to stop for a minute. I just needed a minute, and I know, I know that's not — I know it's not—"
"I know," he says. Through the door. Low and level. Like his forehead is leaning against the wood of the door and he's holding himself there with one hand on the handle and the other trying to move through the barrier. "I know what the noise sounds like, babe. You've been running the sink for a while now."
You stop.
The tap is still running. The water is very cold over your arm. You reach out and turn it off, and the quiet it leaves behind is enormous.
"Will you open the door for me?" he says. Just that. No pressure behind it — the question sitting open, like he'll wait as long as it takes.
You look at the handle.
Your hands are still shaking.
"…Okay," you say.
You hear him exhale.
You reach out. Turn the lock.
✧✧✧
The door swings open, and he's standing there in the hall, still in his jacket, one hand braced on the doorframe, keys already shoved in his pocket like he put them away specifically so his hands would be free.
And he looks at your face first.
Not your arm. Not the sink. Not the tissue you've got pressed against your sleeve or the way the front of your shirt has gone wrinkled from where you've been clutching it. He looks at your face, and whatever he finds there — whatever is written all over you right now in a language you don't have words for — makes something in his jaw clench a little bit.
Concern. He feels concerned — you're making it bad, you're making it worse, you should have never opened this door, you should've—
He steps forward.
And then his arms come around you, all the way, his hand at the back of your head and the other flat and warm between your shoulder blades, pulling you into him like that's just where you go. Like that's just physics.
"Come on." His voice in your hair. Low. "Come out here. Come on."
He walks you down the hall. One arm stays around your shoulders the whole way and he eases you down onto the couch like he's thought about where to put you. Like he's been thinking about it since he heard your voice through the door.
He sits beside you. Close. His knee solid against yours.
"Let me see," he says.
You peel the sleeve back.
He looks. One long, steady look. His jaw tightens slightly, releases — and then he nods. Just once. His hand comes up, cupping your arm from underneath, tilting it toward the lamp on the side table. You can see him talking to himself in his head, but it's too inward to see what he's actually saying.
"Okay," he says. His voice is even. "That's manageable."
And there is something in the word manageable that doesn't minimize the situation — it makes it seem…practical. Manageable like homework or cleaning. But then that makes you think about chores that you haven't found the energy to do, maybe you're the chore, maybe manageable isn't a good word because actually you're the thing that needs managing—
He gets up. Comes back with the first aid kit. Sits back down so close his thigh is warm against yours.
"This'll sting."
"…I know." You kind of want it to.
He works quietly. Antiseptic first, then gauze, then tape, smooth and careful, his hands bigger than yours and steadier than they have any right to be. When he smooths the last piece of tape flat he holds your arm for a second, both of his hands bracketing the bandage like he's checking his own work. You didn't flinch for any of it.
Then he looks up.
"It wasn't — I wasn't trying to—" you start.
"I know," he says.
"I don't want to die." The words feel important to clarify. "I just wanted it to be quiet."
"I know," he says again. And then, quieter: "I know what that feels like."
You look at him.
"I've been there," he says. Matter of fact and honest. "Not the same way, every time — but the same place. Where the noise gets so loud that you'd do pretty much anything to get it to stop for five minutes." He holds your eyes. "It's terrible to feel like you're carrying everything, and you know what would make it stop. But it also sucks to feel like you can't do the thing to make it stop because that makes everyone around you concerned."
Your throat tightens. "How did you—" You stop. Try again. "What made you stop? When it was bad."
He's quiet for a moment. His thumb moves against your arm, just above the bandage. Back and forth. Slow.
"Different things, at different times," he says. "For a long time it was just getting to the next thing. Next hour. Next day." A beat. "And then it was you."
The words land somewhere very deep and very tender and you look away fast because if you don't you're going to come apart completely.
"Schlatt—"
"I'm not saying it to put that on you," he says, and his voice is careful — he's thought about how to say this, you realize. He's thought about it for longer than just tonight. "I'm not saying it so you feel like you owe me anything. I'm saying it because it's the truth, and I think you need to hear something true right now." He shifts slightly, turning toward you on the couch. "Coming home to you is the best part of my day. Watching you laugh. Showing you stupid things. Telling you about a guy in a strip mall doing the most unhinged onion-based theatre I've ever witnessed at a work lunch—" the corner of his mouth does something soft, barely a smile, "—that's what I want. That's what keeps me going. And I need you to still be here for it."
A tear tracks down your face before you register it happening. You wipe it away roughly with the back of your hand.
"I didn't want to be a burden," you say. Small.
"You're not a burden." Flat and certain – like his heart was speaking straight out of his chest instead of his mouth. "You're my person."
"I make things harder—"
"Sometimes things are hard," he says. "That's not the same as you making them that way." He reaches out. His hand finds your jaw — big, warm, tilting your face toward his slowly, giving you time to decide whether you want it. You do. You turn toward him. "Next time," he says. "Before it gets here. I know it moves fast sometimes. I know you can't always catch it. But if you can — you call me. You text me anything. One word. One letter. A period, I don't care. I'll know."
"I didn't want to interrupt your day."
"You are my day." Oh, this man…how does this poetry just swim so easily through and out of him? "You come first, do you understand me? Not the errands, not whatever else I'm doing. You."
You look at Schlatt for a long moment. The lamp on the side table is warm and low, and outside the window the evening has gone fully dark, and here in this circle of light he is looking at you like you are the centrepiece of the room.
Like you are not something to be managed or fixed or endured.
Like you are someone he chose, and keeps choosing, and will choose again tomorrow.
Something in you — something that has been braced for a very long time — goes soft.
"Okay," you say.
"Yeah?"
"Yeah."
He opens his arms.
You go into them slowly, cautiously, your body leaning awkardly and falling into him, getting it wrong somehow. But his arms close around you fully, catching you, and he pulls you in against his chest, one hand at the back of your head, your bandaged arm tucked carefully against him. His chin comes down over your hair.
Neither of you says anything for a while.
His heartbeat is steady under your ear. He's so calm…not panicked or scared.
"Tell me about the onion volcano," you say eventually. Muffled against his shirt.
He stills. Then a short breath — almost a laugh. "You sure? It's kinda crazy."
"Yeah."
He settles back against the cushions, adjusting his hold on you so you're more comfortable. His thumb starts moving against your arm again — that same slow, grounding stroke, above the bandage. When he speaks, his voice is easy. Warm. It curls around you like a fireplace.
"Okay so. This guy. Absolute showman, full commitment. He builds the thing up — and I mean the construction is already impressive — stacks it perfectly. Then he lights it, and I'm expecting the usual, right, little flame, polite applause—" he pauses for effect, "—this man had a column of fire. thought he was gonna stop at five, six layers, right? Wrong. They brought out this giant ass onion and that thing was at least twenty layers built on top of each other. And then the fire that came out? The fire department is going to be having a field day when they find out how high that fire goes. It's a wonder no one has stuck their arm in there yet, thinking it's fake.
"That….is crazy."
"I would never lie about onion theatre."
You huff — and it comes out almost like a laugh. Small and rusty, like something that hasn't been used in a couple of days, which is accurate. You feel him notice it. The way he goes just slightly stiller for a second, the way his hold adjusts — tightening around you, just barely. Like he wants to keep that sound close.
"There was a kid at the next table," he continues, voice unhurried. "Maybe seven, eight years old. Completely losing his mind. Like — hands on the table, standing up a little in his seat—"
"They let him stand?"
"His mom was too busy filming to notice. And honestly? Valid. I was filming too."
You pull back slightly. Look up at him. "You filmed it?"
He blinks down at you. "Obviously I filmed it. You think I'm going to witness something like that and not document it?"
"Show me."
He shifts, reaching for his phone on the cushion behind him — not letting go of you, maneuvering with you instead, which is somehow the part that gets you. That he doesn't let go. He pulls the video up, angles the screen toward you, and there it is. Shaky phone footage, warm orange restaurant light, and a column of fire rising out of an onion structure that has absolutely no business being that architectural.
You watch the kid in the corner of the frame completely lose his mind, the fire in his eyes and blown back hair only adding to the effect.
"Oh my god," you laugh.
"I know."
"That kid is going to remember that for the rest of his life."
" I'm going to remember that for the rest of my life." He locks his phone, tosses it back onto the cushion. His arm settles around you again, easy, like it belongs there, because it does. You've always thought that. Even on the bad days. Maybe especially then. "We're going. Next week. I already looked up the reservation situation."
"Yeah?"
"Non-negotiable. You're going to sit across from me and watch a man commit fully to the onion arts and you're going to love every second of it."
How can you struggle the way that you do when you have him to put everything at ease? You feel your heart get so full. The way good things feel when you've been empty long enough to forget there was another option.
"Schlatt."
"Mm."
You shift against him, tilting your head up so you can see his face properly. He looks down at you. The lamplight catches the line of his jaw, his mutton chops, the dark of his eyes. All of it worn and familiar and yours.
"Thank you," you say. "For coming in."
Something moves across his expression. He reaches up, brushes the hair back from your forehead with two fingers. Like he's brushing a hand along your cracked porcelain exterior, so gentle, so slow.
"Always," he says.
"I mean it. You didn't have to—"
"Yes I did." Not unkind. Just true, the way he says things when he wants to make sure they land. "And I'd do it every time. Every single time. So let me."
You look at him for a long moment. He looks back. Neither of you in any hurry to be anywhere else.
"Okay," you say softly. "I will try. To let you."
"Thanks, honey."
He makes a sound — not quite a laugh, not quite a sigh. Something warm that lives between the two. His hand comes up, cradling the side of your face, his thumb moving along your cheekbone like he's just checking. Like he just wants to feel that you're here and real and still.
And then he tilts forward, slow enough that you see it coming, slow enough that it's a question.
You answer it by closing the distance yourself.
He kisses you gently. Just that. Soft and unhurried, his thumb resting still against your cheek, his other arm keeping you tucked against him like his favorite teddy bear. The kiss is warm and present and steady, the same way he's been all night. The same way he always manages to be when it counts the most.
When he pulls back it's only barely. His forehead comes down to rest against yours.
"You're still here," he murmurs. Reminding himself, it seems.
Your eyes close.
"Yeah," you say. "I'm still here."
His thumb strokes once, slow, across your cheek. His breath is warm and even against your face, and you stay like that for a moment — foreheads together, the lamp low behind you, the city doing its usual indifferent thing outside the window.
You are tired. You are bandaged. You are not fixed — you know that, and so does he, and neither of you is pretending otherwise. Tomorrow will come with its own weight, and the noise will find you again, and there will be hard days ahead that neither of you can see the shape of yet.
But tonight you are here.
And he is here.
And his arms are around you, and somewhere on his phone there is a video of a kid watching twenty layers of onion catch fire in a strip mall restaurant, and next week you are going to sit next to your man and watch a chef perform the most unhinged onion-based theatre either of you has ever witnessed, and he is already looking forward to watching your face when it happens. To see if the fire lights up your eyes.
Tomorrow, you think. You'll figure out tomorrow.
For now you just breathe, tucked into the warmth of him, and let yourself stay.
✧✧✧
you are not a burden for struggling. you are someone who deserves to be held.
if you're in crisis, please reach out — you deserve real support.
