Lately, you’ve been thinking about having a baby.
Or: the fertility clinic au
Part 1
masterlist
It must be the mother of all quarter-life crises for you to be as torn up about this as you are.
(‘Mother of all’—what an apt phrase for a time like this.)
Two of your friends have babies and suddenly it’s all you can think about. Chubby cheeks and wrinkly fingers; diaper bags stuffed to the brim and shrill baby screams piercing through the house.
You try to help them out as best you can in those first few months, coming over with dinner wrapped in foil and snacks in Tupperware for the exhausted parents, offering to help run errands or tidy up the place while they try to catch up on sleep. The picture perfect friend.
You never thought it’d hit you like this until it does. Baby fever à la max. Even the word ‘fever’ undersells it—the feeling that overtakes you is like a blazing inferno, burning away every other want or desire apart from the one currently tearing you asunder.
It’s all you can think about from that point on. Babies, babies, babies. The milky smell of their heads, the flexible cartilage of their noses, their pudgy, wrinkly yawns and soft sighs. You make excuses to visit, offering to babysit whenever they look like they could use a night out, your agenda so transparent that anyone with eyes could see it.
All you can think when you look at them is that your life has been looking a lot like a house of cards these days: all style and no substance.
They get in your head, alright. That ominous they; not a specific person or group, just a nebulous, widespread opinion permeating far too many corners of your world. All that fearmongering about babymaking windows and that talk of rapidly vanishing fecundity—your eyes nearly bulge out of your head when you come across a TikTok of a thirty-six year old calling her eggs geriatric—and by the end of it, you swear you can hear your biological clock booming between your ears, one swinging gong after another.
You’re able to keep the beast at bay for a bit by tricking yourself into thinking that it’s just in your head. Just one of those things. You’re getting older—of course at some point you’d start to worry about the things you never got a chance to do. FOMO. Regrets blooming into full-blown crises. It’s only natural that it would start to get to you eventually.
Trying to convince yourself of that is not enough to shake the damn urgency from your blood though. You’re like a dog with a bone, too many late nights spent scrolling through parenting forums and conception tips, neither of which are of much use to you as a childless, partnerless person not currently trying for a baby. What does it matter to you if smoking reduces your chances of getting pregnant by forty percent? You don’t even smoke.
You might actually want to have a baby though. Mindblowing after all this time, to think that maybe it wasn’t just a fleeting fancy.
Mindblowing, then abruptly terrifying.
Your present situation is a bit dire. It’s been several years since you last had a partner, none you ever would’ve ever considered having a baby with. Absurd—worse than absurd even. And despite everything, despite the self-imposed countdown ticking away in your head and the stress causing your spine to curl in a half-inch more every single day, you are, thankfully, not desperate enough to reach out to any of them.
So you try. For a short period of time, you make a real, concerted effort to find a partner, going on three dates in a week, each more appalling than the last. It’s the last one that breaks you, your date not only unbearably dismissive to the waitstaff but also entirely uninterested in discussing anything about your life, completely preoccupied with recounting the minutiae of his own life story.
A swing and a miss. You made an effort at least, put yourself out there. Tried to do things the old-fashioned way.
It’s the twenty-first century though, for goodness’ sakes; there are more ways to start a family than just the tried-and-true method.
And that’s how you wind up here, at a fertility clinic on a Tuesday afternoon, PTO plugged into your work calendar with a secretive little “Appointment” reason left for being out of office. It’s no office-busybody’s business though. They don’t need to know about the increasingly debilitating need to have a baby that’s been overtaking you these past few months.
It would clear a lot of things up, but it still isn’t anyone’s business.
The waiting room is a simple, unadorned roost of a room, the walls lined with plastic eggshell-like chairs for all the eggs soon to be hatched. An oddly sterile space for the purpose it serves. It would be a little uncomfortable if it weren’t like every other waiting room in existence, minus any snivelling sick people.
There are other people besides you. Or rather, there were people. People that have already come and gone, not quite so anxious as to turn up an hour early for their two o’clock appointment, their stomachs grumbling from skipping lunch.
And so after the third couple goes in for their appointment with the specialist, you’re left on your own for a bit until a new person walks in.
A man this time, all by his lonesome.
And boy is he a specimen so fine that you can’t help but hope that he’s come to make a deposit. If they let you pick your donor based on build and gait alone, you think you’d have your man right here. You can barely drag your eyes away from him, glued to the rounded muscle of his back, gliding over the curve of his shoulders and up the thick of his neck.
After a brief conversation with the receptionist to check in, he drums his fingers across the counter and takes a seat on one of the little egg chairs along the wall facing yours.
Where he then proceeds to lift his head and lock eyes with you.
In retrospect, you wish you could describe it as a magical moment, but in reality, you just freeze in place, embarrassed at being caught staring. He’s a decently handsome enough man to be good fodder for any later self-care. Square-jawed and bearded.
Good hairline for his age, which you don’t want to take a crack at guessing, but if you had to, it would have to be somewhere around his mid-forties. Maybe late. But it touches him in just the right way, evident in the lines on his forehead and the pull of the skin around his eyes, his beard just ever so slightly flecked with the barest hints of grey.
The writing on the threadbare shirt he has on, almost hidden beneath the plaid shirt layered over it, is barely legible after countless washes. You can almost see straight through it. If you pinched the fabric between your fingers, you think your nails would poke right through. You could rip it right off him, get a better look at the dense pecs that you can just barely make out through his shirt.
You swallow, that thought catching you off guard.
Despite your own embarrassment, his gaze holds steady. Some people aren’t born with shame as a built-in foghorn. Some people look out into the world and genuinely believe it is theirs to conquer, raised on a diet of self-confidence and boldness, free-range audacity.
He’s bold enough, in fact, to rise to his feet and cross to the other side of the waiting room, taking a seat right beside you. He sits down beside you like you're old friends, like there's nothing strange about a man sitting beside a veritable stranger in a completely empty room.
It’s such a bold move that you don’t even know what to say at first, head turned towards him in the chair next to you now with some dumb expression on your face, gobsmacked.
“Can I help you?” you hear yourself ask, years of socialization coming to the rescue. Thank god the gears start turning in your head after that brief second of bewilderment.
“Not at all.” And what a voice too, as if his looks weren’t enough. All unintentional deep-chested purr, leonine English rumbling out of the depths of him, Northern accent to top it off. “Just thought I might introduce myself. Be polite, seeing as how we’re both here for the same reason.”
Unless he ran ahead of a wife still on her way up the elevator, you don’t think that’s the case. You glance around him just to double check the door. “Are we?”
“Maybe a pick-up instead of a drop-off in your case,” he concedes, a droll little note curled up in his voice. “But that’s not so different when the end result’s the same.”
You swallow and force an awkward smile, ignoring the way your heart speeds up. “Yeah, I guess so. Anyway, nice to meet you, um, circumstances aside.” You hold out a hand, which he doesn’t hesitate to take.
“Nothing wrong with the circumstances, but pleasure to meet you too, love.”
His palm feels huge around yours, a warm, firm grip that only yields a few moments later when you have to make an effort to pull your hand away, holding on for the fleetingest of seconds, long enough for a spark of anxiety to shoot through your chest.
You hope that’s the end of it when he finally lets go of your hand. Not because you don’t want to chat up an incredibly attractive stranger, but because you couldn’t imagine the timing being worse.
He, however, seems to have no qualms with carrying on. “Has it taken yet or are you shopping for donors today?”
It’s a horribly invasive question, but you answer it anyway, all buttoned-up and ginger. “Um. No, I’m just here for a consultation. There’ll probably be a lot of paperwork before, um…before we get started.”
“A lot of nonsense for something I reckon we could get done a lot easier together.”
It doesn’t register until it does. Then you just have to look at him and blink, confused.
“Excuse me?” you ask.
He cocks an eyebrow. “I haven’t got this wrong, have I? You said you’re here for a baby?”
“Uh, yes, that’s—that’s what I just said.”
“And I’m here to help someone like you have a baby. Seems like we’d be making both of our lives easier if we just skipped all the red tape and saved you the expense.”
“‘Save me the expense’?” you repeat, stunned.
“Won’t cost anything the natural way.”
You know what he’s insinuating, but you can’t believe it. You actually can’t believe that this man—a stranger, handsome as he might be, good-looking as he might be, husband-envy-inspiring as he might be—would openly proposition you in the waiting room of a fertility clinic. Offer to get you pregnant ‘the natural way’, as if it were a cold drink on a hot day. A side of fries with your order.
“I—I’m sorry, but that’s incredibly inappropriate,” you eventually wheeze out.
That gets a laugh out of him, one of those amused huffs that erupts out of him like a bear flicking a bee off its snout. “Can’t be cagey about this sort of thing, love. You have to be direct when you want to get things done.”
“You do know we’re in public, right?”
“I’d be happy to take this somewhere private.”
The heat under your cheeks might actually result in a physical burn. “I…think I’m going to find somewhere else to sit.”
“Ah, don’t worry about that, love, I’m gonna head out anyway.” A satisfied smile tugs at his mouth. “I think I got what I actually came for.”
Your frown deepens. “You haven’t even been called in yet.”
“Not what I meant.”
Before you can ask what he means, he shifts in his seat, leaning closer to you for just a second, but long enough for your heart to suddenly go wild and your pupils to go big as dinner plates.
“Here,” he grunts, lifting a hip to pull his wallet out of his back pocket, flicking it open and plucking out a business card. He flips your hand over and puts it down on your palm. “That’s my number. When you’re done here, give me a call. I’m sure we can come up with something better than this.”
He taps the card in your hand with a finger. It ricochets through you, the tap rippling up your arm and chest, nearly rocking you back in your seat. Everything he does must be punctuated with the same echoing weight.
He nods to you on his way out, a secretive smile on his lips, just the barest hint of a lift that you might’ve missed had you not been staring at his face. All you can do is stare though, still absolutely floored, practically speechless as you watch him leave.
And then you’re alone again, in an entirely different headspace than when you first sat down.
“John Price?” the receptionist calls out from behind the desk suddenly, but with the man gone, there’s no one else in the waiting room apart from you. “Mr. John Price?”
You blink, stun-locked. You can’t have been the reason he decided to back out of his appointment at the last minute. He must’ve decided to bail at the last minute before throwing a Hail Mary in an attempt to get laid.
That has to be it. He wouldn’t leave because of a brief interaction with you.
The waiting room feels a lot emptier without him now that he’s gone, as if by being made aware of his presence, everything has been indelibly altered. Changed. Slightly less interesting somehow.
You hover somewhere between bewilderment and affront until a flicker of giddiness steals in. Tamp that back down. He's gone, and with him the impossible audacity of what just came out of his mouth. You stare at the door that he just disappeared through, lips parting around a reply you'll never get to deliver, then let out a sharp, disbelieving scoff. The gall.
And yet, despite yourself, you can't quite smother the giddiness bubbling low in the pit of your stomach. Your fingers curl around the business card in your hand.
Eventually it’s your turn. You almost miss the sound of your own name until a lady in purple scrubs repeats it, sending you shooting to your feet. You follow her as she leads you down a hall and towards an open office just as clean and spartan as the waiting room. All there is in her office is a desk, a bookshelf, and a mobile ultrasound machine. Practically empty for all intents and purposes.
Ok lady, you think, sitting down across from her, what’s it gonna take to put a baby in me?
“Four thousand dollars,” she says matter-of-factly, the earlier part of your conversation long forgotten after hearing the price.
That just about knocks all the wind out of you. “Oh,” you bleat, the prospect of ever getting pregnant suddenly a sad and distant dream.
“Per cycle,” she further clarifies, much to your dismay, sliding a couple pamphlets your way. “We’re always hopeful that it’ll take on the first cycle, but we typically see about three to four cycles of IUI before conception occurs.”
IUI—intrauterine insemination. The sperm they have to shove up inside you to try and knock you up. At four thousand dollars a pop.
“There’s no…first time discount?”
“Excuse me?”
“Like the, um…like the home buyer’s loan.”
She seems vaguely apologetic when she shakes her head at least, though that doesn’t really ease the sting. “No, unfortunately. Most of our customers are first time parents, so—”
It wouldn’t make much business sense. “Yeah, no, I get it.”
You do your best to pay attention to the rest of the conversation and ask the right questions, but the sticker shock makes it hard to focus. At some point, the consultation must end because she sends you off with a folder full of pamphlets and QR codes to scan, and a follow-up appointment booked two weeks out for a blood test and a pelvic ultrasound.
No music on the drive home, just silence to let the events of the day marinate.
You know it’s likely just this clinic. It’s not like there aren’t other, probably cheaper clinics. But it’s the principle of the matter, the one factor that you hadn’t considered in this whole endeavour—you’d assumed, obviously, that raising a child in and of itself wouldn’t be cheap, but you hadn't even contemplated that the run-up to actually getting pregnant might be so cost prohibitive.
If you even get pregnant. You exhale in a rush, the thought hitting you like a sledgehammer. God, you might not even get pregnant. You might go through the whole treatment, waste thousands of dollars, and go half-crazy begging the universe to let you get knocked up, and it might not even take.
Dinner is a glass of white wine and burrito straight from the freezer, in no mood to cook or clean even a single dish. You should be cutting down on your alcohol consumption in anticipation of fertility treatments, but that’ll be a task for a later, less devastated you. You’ll rinse the hot sauce off your plate when you’re done eating and leave it in the sink for tomorrow morning.
It’s not how you wanted the day to end. You were hoping to come home invigorated and inspired, already prepping for the next steps in the process. Instead it feels like you’ve taken a massive step back.
Occasionally you like to look up flights to other countries just to imagine what it might be like to get away from your life for a bit, but the ticket price always brings you back down to reality.
This isn’t like that though; this isn’t some temporary flight of fancy or some pie in the sky that you’ll spend decades chasing down in your dreams, hoping for just a single bite or even just a whiff. This is something you actually, genuinely want. A baby. Something you can take with you into the future, something you can build your life around.
There’s got to be another way.
It’s a physical weight in your front pocket. You can feel it now, burning a hole in your hip. When you pull it out, the name John Price is printed on the card in a crisp, typewriter font, his phone number and occupation printed in the same sized font just beneath it.
You stare at the card long enough for your eyes to go dry. Blink. Breathe out, reluctance giving way to acceptance, as tentative as it might be. It certainly wouldn’t be the strangest thing to ever happen. A fun night with a good-looking man, with the added benefit of getting a baby out of it, no strings attached. Not the most irresponsible decision anyone has ever made. Some people join the army, after all.
A shiver runs up your spine when you remember the way he worded it though. Sweat on your upper lip that you have to lick off, the salt sinking into the ridges of your tongue. You don’t think he meant turkey basters and plastic cups by getting it done ‘the natural way’. You saw the way he looked at you.
You could do it for a baby. Let him—and here, you have to squeeze your eyes shut and cover them with your fists—let him do what he has to do to get you pregnant. Cut out the middle man and just let him fit the heavy weight of his body over yours and pry your legs apart to let him sink between your—
It always hurts in that big, bright way, like a thousand sticks of dynamite blowing a tunnel open through a mountain, giving you a way to pass to the other side. Like whispering the same wish over and over again until your lips go numb and your voice goes hoarse, your plea still unheard after all these years.
Perhaps it would hurt less to desire if you could fill that hole every once in a while. If you could wet your tongue with the taste of satisfaction, of a want fulfilled, of the opportunity to say to someone, “Oh, look what I got” or “Look at what all my work has amounted to.”
That’s never been the case though, has it? Never been lucky enough for a wish to come true. You work like a dog for the barest scraps of what you know you’re worth (what you know and what every day seems less and less true).
Vacations that you never had enough money to take, jobs that never came to fruition, mistakes that couldn’t be undone, memories that you could never remake, friendships that grew apart or that never materialized altogether.
It’s not all doom and gloom. You have a good job and a decent network of friends and acquaintances, parties you attend on occasion and warm nights at home curled up in bed. You have a roof over your head. There's more than enough in your life to be grateful for.
But the wanting never goes away. That, you have in spades. That, you have in heaps and bounds. That multiplies itself tenfold.
And it happens that way with your heart too.
There’s a coffee shop down the street from your office with a decent amount of seating and an app to order your drink ahead of time, and every day at around two, you order your coffee ahead of time and walk over to pick it up, rain or shine.
It’s always busy to some degree when you walk in, a handful of people waiting by the counter and a short line at the register snaking around the merchandise display. The whirr of the coffee grinder hums in the background, just a touch louder than the music, always filling the café with the rich, pleasing scent of freshly ground coffee.
The same chairs are always filled by the same people. Plenty of them you’ve even grown to recognize over time—students bent over thick textbooks, elderly men creasing newspapers in ink-stained hands, and laptop screens glowing with blank Word documents, scarcely a sentence added in the time it took to order and finish their coffee.
You recognize most of the takeaway regulars as well.
They’re harder to remember at first. Quick to come and quick to go. Hard to commit their faces to memory. But some give you no choice—some boisterously loud or ostentatious in dress, eye-catching enough to hook you like a fish, drag your attention down river with them.
Then, to him.
He, like you, comes in every day around two for his afternoon coffee. He, unlike you, comes striding in full-chested, confidence nipping at his heels, no world-weariness weighing him down.
Hard not to notice him. Of course you notice him. He takes up space like a living sun, all bright smiles and radiant energy, handsome in the way that, when men are, they draw people in like moths. You feel no better than a moth sometimes, particularly in his presence.
Tea-coloured eyes. What you notice at first is that there’s a beautiful man waiting for his coffee next to you, a tall man with the sculpted physique of an athlete, all long limbs and broad shoulders tapering into a lean frame, and what you notice next are those tea-coloured eyes, honeying under the sun.
You stare so long that you only realize how dry your eyes have gone when the door swings shut behind him.
It’s no wonder then, that you latch onto his presence like so, a little flutter in your chest on your way to the coffee shop every time after that first time, hoping that you’ll cross paths again.
And you do. Cross paths again, that is. Only a few times those first couple of weeks, and then seemingly all the time, the two of you always in at the same time.
That isn’t unusual. There are plenty of other familiar faces picking up their afternoon coffees at the same time as you, people that you recognize at the mobile ordering station and laptop stickers that you’ve come to memorize, the same people sitting at the same seats. People like routine; you’re no different. Neither is he.
It comes over you like an ague, a desperate, eager thing, quiet enough at first when you’ve only seen him in bits and pieces, not studied him at length yet, but it—
It grows.
It grows like a vine in your chest, weaving around your heart and squeezing until you can feel it with every beat.
You don’t entirely blame yourself. How could you? You swear you’ve never seen anyone even half as good-looking as him—broad-shouldered and lean, perfect smile, perfect teeth. Haircut always fresh, his edges neat. He squints with the force of his smile, always effusive with his gratitude and praise, so earnest in his kindness that it makes your teeth ache.
He’s objectively a handsome man. Perhaps the handsomest man you’ve ever seen. What else could you do but go a bit crazy?
Want may not be a strong enough word for what you’re experiencing. It’s more of a torsion of the soul. A desperate, yearning ache that both releases and constricts when he walks into the café to order his coffee.
You don’t know what to do with yourself when he doesn’t show up at the same time as you. Your schedules are so in sync that you’ve grown to expect him, fattened and spoiled by the timeliness of his presence. But he doesn’t owe it to you to show up, and there are days when he doesn’t, held up for some reason, or maybe simply not in the mood for a coffee.
You practically drag your feet on the walk back to the office, a sorry sight. Pathetically despondent. You hardly know what to do with yourself the rest of the afternoon, oscillating between dejection and self-reproach. It’s pathetic that the mere absence of your crush would reduce you to such a state, hardly able to concentrate on your work because the stranger that you’ve become infatuated with wasn’t at the coffee shop where you see him for a total of twenty seconds every other day.
Forgive yourself though. Nothing you’ve ever wanted has come without pain.
What you don’t expect is for him to finally notice you.
It happens on a day when you cross paths rather than arriving at the same time, him leaving the coffee shop as you’re about to enter. Your heart skips a beat when you look up and see him staring down at you, both of you taken by surprise when you go to pull the door open and he’s already pushing on the other side.
“Traffic jam,” he laughs when you both lean left and then right at the same time, trying to let the other go around. “Here, I’ve got you.”
He extends an arm to hold the door wide open and angles his body to let you pass through. You thank him as you pass, your heart pounding against your ribs. His gaze follows you as you step inside, and you nearly jump when his voice calls a farewell after you, leaving through the same door.
You stand near the doorway for far too long, other customers coming in and going around you, cutting you annoyed looks on their way to the cash. Your drink must already be waiting for you on the counter and still you can’t move. It takes someone actually stumbling into you to jolt you back into the present.
That wasn’t part of the plan. It’s thrilling, initially, a rush so overwhelming, so kaleidoscopic, that you ride it all the way back to the office and all the way home, replaying the memory again and again in your head until even you start to tire of belabouring it.
And still you roll around in bed that night thinking about it, heart racing even hours after your short little conversation, picturing it over again in your mind—the crinkle of the corners of his eyes, the smile nearly pulling across his face, all white teeth and soft, supple lips.
The only problem is—
Now he knows who you are.
You don’t expect him to remember you after such a quick encounter. He’s not the one that’s been pining these past few weeks. He’s not the one that’s been beating himself up for crushing on a stranger.
But he does remember you. And not only does he remember you, but he looks for you the next time he’s in.
It’s one of those days when you get there first, coffee already ordered and paid for by the time he walks in, in dark trousers and a quarter-zip today, and filling them both out nicely, the sweater clinging to the muscles of his arms. You expect him to head straight for the cash like he normally does, blessedly and lamentably unaware of your presence.
Instead, your breath hitches when his eyes drift across the café and settle on you, a spark of recognition glinting in them.
His gaze immobilizes you, stronger than any paralytic. It’s what holds you in place as he approaches, the distance between you halved in an instant, and then fully collapsed, the gorgeous man in front of you doing what Zeno’s Achilles never could.
“Hey stranger, no dance today, huh?” he asks, clearly addressing you.
You don’t know what to say. This is your worst case scenario, your category five emergency. In the weeks you’ve spent crushing on him from afar, you hadn’t considered the possibility of him ever noticing you in return.
“Sorry?” you croak.
He gestures with his thumb towards the door. “From the other day, remember?”
You don’t know how you’ll make it through this interaction without making a fool of yourself. “Right. Haha. I guess the dance floor’s closed today.”
You could throw up on the spot. Of all the abysmal conversation rejoinders there have ever been in the history of humanity, the one you just offered must rank comfortably near the top.
For whatever reason though, whether divine intervention or something more dastardly, he chuckles, amused. He seems to like talking to you. Seems to like you even. That only becomes clearer when he approaches you the next day, and then the day after that, and then every day when you stop by at two p.m. for your afternoon coffee, your coffees now handed out together by the barista, as if you had ordered them that way.
The small talk alone almost makes you consider switching to a different coffee shop. It’s too much pressure. You feel sick with anxiety at the thought of him figuring you out.
And he will figure you out. You haven’t exactly played it subtle.
Then he gets your number. Somehow. And your name too, pried so easily from you that you don’t even notice, like freeing a pearl from a clam; barely a flick of his wrist and you offer it up without a second thought, embarrassingly malleable.
You get his too. Kyle Garrick. He spells it for you as he watches you save his number into your phone from over your shoulder, so close to you that your fingers fumble with the keypad, mistyping it almost four times before getting it right.
Kyle doesn’t seem to care that you can barely seem to string together a sentence in front of him. If anything, it seems to endear him to you.
His attraction makes itself apparent in tender words and a new penchant for touch, a hand always reaching out for you.
At first, it’s nothing more than the casual brush of his fingers against yours as he picks up your coffee from the bar and passes it to you, no different than a handshake or a high five. Ostensibly perfunctory. But that too changes over time. A fleeting touch becomes a hand at the small of your back as he guides you to a table for a quick chat before heading back to work, fingers squeezing your shoulder when he laughs at a joke you didn’t realize you made, and quick hugs that grow a little longer each time.
Maybe. Or maybe you’re imagining it.
“So when are you gonna let me take you out for real?”
That snaps you out of the daydream, reality crashing down with such force that it leaves your ears ringing. His words leave you dumbfounded, gaping up at him in that stupid way that you can’t seem to suppress.
“For real?” you repeat.
“On a date,” Kyle clarifies, as if the word alone weren’t enough to wreck you.
“Oh.”
You tell him yes because the word no evaporates from your vocabulary. By the time it returns, he’s already gone, disappearing into the world (likely an office building around the corner from yours, but it might as well be Timbuktu).
This isn’t what was supposed to happen. You were supposed to pine in agony until you died.
It’s everything you ever wanted, and yet, you couldn’t want it less in the moment, terrified for some reason that you can’t quite articulate. You count down the days with growing apprehension, jitters giving way to a full-body sweat.
You’ll break it off at a later date. That thought comforts you to a point. At some point, there will be a moment for you to bail entirely.
The problem is the longer you say nothing, the harder it is to say anything at all. Already guilt stays your tongue when all you want to do is tell him that you can’t do this anymore. You need to leave—go anywhere else, run home and lock the door behind you, never go back to the coffee shop again.
But there’s a text in your phone telling you the time and place, and every time you look at it, it leaves you feeling off-kilter. Sea legs without leaving dry land.
What is it about you that you feel the need to run as soon as you get too close? What about this isn’t what you want? Do you even know what you want?
Of course you know what you want. You want love and affection.
But having is not wanting. Wanting is safe. It’s the having that’s dangerous.
You contemplate cancelling on him about a dozen times until suddenly it’s too late, the man in question standing in the lobby of your building to pick you up. He must know someone in the building because he’s deep in conversation when you spot him, his head turning to meet yours at the same time, as if even in conversation, he wouldn’t allow himself to be distracted enough to miss you. Your heart squeezes when he wraps it up in the same breath, crossing the lobby to meet you.
Dinner is a restaurant in a different part of town, one you’ve seldom spent time in before, trendy in the way that would unnerve you were it not for the abrupt realization that to everyone else, this is simply a familiar part of town.
To some, the restaurant must be familiar as well. There might even be regulars. To you however, the small, dimly lit room with the booths on one side and the chairs lining the bar at the other, an eclectic assortment of framed photos and decorative porcelain plates on the wall beside you, is lovely, uncharted territory.
Over dinner, Kyle peppers you with question after question until your head spins, each answer that leaves your lips betraying some nervous tendency towards clandestinity. You have to keep some things to yourself. You have to keep some things private.
You have to shut your mouth before you—
“A long time,” you reply without thinking, the whole world blowing open when you admit it. You hadn't even consciously registered the question before answering. When was your last date?
Kyle doesn’t seem phased by it though, warm smile somehow warmer than the blood boiling under your skin. “I must be one lucky man then.”
He sweet talks you into agreeing to a drink after dinner, probably sensing the nervous animal in you, the fear about to take flight.
You assume he means a drink at a bar until you’re standing in the kitchen of your apartment, Kyle standing behind the island with a bottle of wine in one hand, uncorking it with practiced ease. When it pops out, you flinch.
What a strange thing, to lose time like that. You lose it again after he pours you both a glass, coming to on the couch with his arm around your shoulders, pinned between him and the side of the couch.
He turned the television on, you notice distantly, staring at it through your glass, red wine sloshing from side to side. It’s not a program either of you would care to pay much attention to, possibly by design.
“Do you have, um…any plans tomorrow?” you ask, swallowing when he drags his fingers over the bare skin of your upper arm.
“Nope,” he answers, playing with the sleeve of your shirt now.
You can hear it coming from a mile away. He makes it too obvious with his fingers trailing over your skin and the heat of his gaze searing into the side of your face.
The sky outside your window is black, the moon only a sliver of its usual brilliance, but your living room is bright, turning the window into a mirror reflecting the two of you, the picture of a couple in repose.
You watch his reflection lean over yours in the window, his lips grazing your double’s ears, your breath catching when his touch yours as well. “If I give you an inch, you’re going to run a mile, aren’t you?” he murmurs.
There’s a lump in your throat when you swallow. “No,” you lie.
He must see right through you though. Must see the creature inside you about to succumb to its instincts.
He must be good at chess, you think to yourself, staring down at him with a stupid look on your face as he lowers himself to lie flat on the bed between your legs, spreading your thighs wide enough to wedge his shoulders between them. Any game of strategy.
If you never give your opponent a moment to breathe, they can’t gather themselves enough to retreat.
That thought crumbles to dust when he makes you watch him lick the first stripe up the seam of your pussy, crudely spreading your lips with his tongue. Nothing more substantial materializes after that.
He eats pussy like he hasn’t had enough to eat. Lips and tongue and hollowed cheeks when he sucks your clit into his mouth and your back nearly arches right off the bed, twisted into such a complex shape that you almost don’t know how to unravel yourself. Fingers grasping at his head, his ears; rasping over the coils of his hair, fingers committing the texture to memory.
Your thighs tremble and squeeze, pried open again and again every time you try to shut him out. The muscles in his arms barely even bulge with the effort it takes to keep your thighs spread.
You are wound up in ways that would be a challenge to anyone, but Kyle doesn’t seem to care. He just holds you down and forces you to come on his tongue, rolling it over your clit until you actually start crying. Big, belting caterwauls. His poor baby, he croons.
When have you been someone’s ‘poor baby’? Someone’s darling, sweetheart, honey, that’s it, I’ve got you, that felt good, didn’t it? God, you’re so pretty, I can’t believe you let me—
He flicks his tongue over your sensitive clit and you yelp, reaching down to slide your hand between his mouth and your swollen sex only for him to lace your fingers together and pull your hand to the side and lick it again.
“It’s still sensitive,” you complain, and he lifts a brow, unmoved by your bellyaching.
“So what, you got twitchy little orgasm legs, that means I’m not allowed to lick your pussy anymore?”
“No,” you hiss, embarrassment warming the blood already pooled under your cheeks.
Warm hands rest on either side of your face as he eases his cock in for the first time, holding your gaze in place as sinks in to the root. All you can do is squeeze your eyes shut.
They don’t stay shut for long. He pries them open without words, without touch, every ounce of his ardor poured into you and lifting your own to the surface.
Sweat drips from his forehead onto yours. The sweat makes his hands slip up and down your face with the force of his thrusts, fingers tugging on your lips and pulling them apart, sliding over your gums and teeth.
“You are the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen,” Kyle pants, sweat dripping off his forehead and onto yours, eyes darker than you’ve ever seen them, glassy and feverish.
“Don’t—don’t say that,” you gasp.
He dips his head down to press his forehead against yours. “You can’t tell me that. You can’t tell me what to do.”
Whatever this is, it’s nothing like anything you’ve experienced before. Proper lovemaking. Real kisses with passion, with fervor, with delight; the messiness contained between you, in the sweat rolling down your back and soaking into the sheets, the saliva dripping from his mouth into yours, the squelch of his shaft splitting you over and over, never giving you a second to catch your breath.
Coming a second, no, third time is painful, like a thing wrested unwillingly from you, and you fall back on the bed windburned. Kyle follows you down, hips bucking into yours faster and faster, his own end nearly on his heels.
He comes with a grunt, without warning; a sudden surge of heat and warmth, his fingers biting into your cheeks where he holds your face in his hands, his lip curling up into a snarl that you swear you can almost hear, and—
You expect it to be over after that. For him to roll out of bed and pull on his pants, maybe give you a courtesy kiss for a job well done before leaving you to stew in the mire of another rejection, the small win eclipsed by the enormity of losing him.
What you don’t expect is for him to lay down beside you and pull you into him. Kyle laughs softly when he notices your stiffness, jostling you slightly in an attempt to coax you into relaxing.
“That’s right, baby,” he chuckles a touch breathlessly, pressing a kiss to the bridge of your nose before relaxing back down. “I’m not going anywhere.”
Coffee the next day is different than usual. Early for one, the sun still a syrupy morning gold, not yet the starchy afternoon white, and in a different location than usual, the coffee machine on your kitchen counter hissing through its second cup of the day.
Kyle maneuvers around your apartment too naturally, a stark contrast to the way you scurry from the bedroom to the bathroom like a stowaway. He’s entirely at home in your space though, helping himself to coffee and breakfast, only glancing at you for permission, the slightest cock of his head and arch of his brow, and you fold under the pressure instantly.
When you try to skirt around him, he wraps an arm around your waist and pulls you into his side, the touch of his lips against your chest shocking you still, electrical impulses still skittering under your skin.
“I can feel your heart racing,” Kyle teases, caramel-smooth voice sending a low vibration through your chest.
And why shouldn’t he? Your heart is racing after all. “I’m nervous.”
“I know you are, baby,” he murmurs. “This is hard for you, isn’t it?”
It is. A few too many years on your own have turned you to stone, the slightest touch almost too much to handle. You’ve long learned to expect anything you touch to shock you.
“Want me to make this easier on you?” he asks gently. You’re not sure what he means by that, but you have an inkling.
And wouldn’t it be nice to not have to worry? To not have to second guess what you really want or what you should do?
You nod.
“Okay, honey. Then you don’t have to do it. No telling me to go away. I’ve got it from here.”
When Kyle takes your phone from your hand, you don’t stop him, even typing in your password for him when he turns it towards you, watching over his shoulder as he shares your location with his phone.
You exhale shakily, the tightness in your shoulders easing. There he goes with that oyster shucker again, opening you up.
So be it. What use is there in protecting something that’s already his?
He comes into your life like nothing less than divine intervention.
A fender bender, of all things. It’s a bad day and you’re distracted, too busy thinking about your dad calling to tell you that he lost ten thousand from his retirement fund when the stock he’d invested in crashed and how you’re supposed to help him out of this mess, and the roads are slick with that last snowfall of early spring, still unsalted even hours after the snow started.
So when you slam on the brakes at the last second after noticing the car in front of you stopped at a red light, your car slips on the ice and slides forward, hitting the back of the stopped car and sending it forward a foot. It’s quick and sudden, and though you stepped on the brakes early enough to avoid a worse collision, your head snaps forward with the jolt and the seatbelt yanks you back violently, winding you.
Your hands go tight around the wheel, eyes so wide that they nearly pop out of your head as you stare at the car directly in front of you. All of the dread in the world pools in your mouth and then down your throat when you swallow, heart galloping in your chest. You almost can’t believe it for a second.
Then the car in front of you—a big, fuck-you SUV that only worsens your anxiety because of all cars to hit, it had to be someone with a fancy, brand new car that probably has a lawyer on speed dial—puts their hazards on and the driver’s side doors opens and reality snaps like a rubberband back into you. With shaky hands, you put your car into park and put your hazards on as well.
“Oh shit,” you whisper under your breath. An understatement.
A tall man in a brown parka steps out of the car and stares at you through the windshield, a stern expression on his face. He has a beanie pulled down over his head and a full beard, and for a second, the mental image of a bear emerging out of its den flickers in your imagination, all snow-dusted and irritable.
He’s grizzled and older than you. The only consolation is that he doesn’t match the image of the driver that you had in your head—no seven thousand dollar suit or bluetooth earpiece; instead, he seems like the kind of man who’d drive an old pickup or a schooner, wearing an Aran sweater and a skipper's cap, with a pipe hanging from the corner of his mouth. He seems out of place in the middle of the road in your small town.
But he is real, and even though you watch him march over to you, you flinch when he raps on the window with his knuckles.
“Roll the window down,” he instructs, voice muffled through the glass, and you do because the command cuts through the buzzing in your ear. When you do, he reaches into your car with one hand and pops the lock, then takes a step back to open the door. You’d freak out if the situation were different, but you must be in shock because all you can do is stare at him dumbly as he leans into the car and undoes your seatbelt. “C’mon, sweetheart. Out.”
It doesn’t take much coaxing to get you to step out of the car. All he has to do is step back and you get out, knees nearly buckling, like jelly under you. He holds your elbow to steady you. Your elbow feels delicate and tiny in the width of his palm.
“You alright, sweetheart?” he asks, looking all over your face.
You want to answer him, but all you can do is whimper, “I’m so sorry.”
“Hey, none of that. It was an accident. You alright though? Anything hurt?”
“Uh…I don’t…I don’t know.” It hasn’t really sunk in yet, you think. Maybe tomorrow you’ll be sore all over, but right now you feel fine. On the verge of shaking out of your skin, teeth nearly clattering together, but more or less okay.
“Nothing too bad then. Wanna give me your insurance so we can deal with this, sweetheart?”
“Oh. Yeah. Sorry. Let me just—” You move to reach back into your car to fetch your purse, but he stops you, insisting on getting it for you.
And you let him, docile like a doll, watching as he leans into your car and across the seats to grab your purse, big frame looking comically large in your little car. Looking like he’d barely fit in the front seat if he tried to get in.
He comes back out with your little purse in hand and opens it, handing you your wallet and purse by its strap. Your fingers are still shaking when you pull out your insurance information and hand it to him. Everything feels surreal and muted, and the tears are going to flow at any minute now if you don’t get a handle on it.
He must notice because a knuckle fits under your chin and lifts your head up. “Hey, what’s wrong?
“No, no,” you say, reaching up to swipe your fingers over your eyes. “I’m just—I’m really embarrassed. I’ve never been in an accident before.”
“Nothing to be embarrassed about.” His voice is much softer now, pitched low in the way handlers talk to spooked animals. He puts his thumb to your chin, holding you in place. “No one got hurt. Could’ve been worse than it was, and we’ve both got insurance, so what’s done is done. I don’t look mad, do I?”
Trapped between his thumb and knuckle, you can only give a slight shake of your head. “No.”
“Then let’s just take it one step at a time and no tears. Okay?”
You sniff. “Okay.”
“Okay. I’m going to call the insurance, so you get back in the car and sit tight, alright?”
You nod.
“Good girl,” he says, a hint of praise in his voice. “Put the heat on too. It’s too cold for that jacket.”
That makes you go warm all over, flustered and tongue-tied. Thankfully, he doesn’t seem to expect a response out of you. The only thing he expects you to do is get back in the car and turn the heat back on, the warm air billowing into your face when he leans in to crank it up all the way.
Though most of the sound is muffled from inside the car, you turn down the heat and crack the window open slightly to hear him give his name to his insurance company. John Price. Even his name evokes the image of him somewhere else in the world, settled into the nooks and crannies of history.
John handles everything for you while you sit in the car like he told you to, settling everything with the insurance companies and calling for a tow truck right after that. You don’t realize that, of course, until the tow truck pulls up in front of his car and he comes back to usher you out of your car.
“How am I supposed to get home?” you croak. The tow truck driver hitches your car to the bed of the lift and pulls it up, your little car looking pathetic all alone up there.
“I’ll drive you home then bring mine in later.”
“Why can’t I drive my car to the garage too?” You’re petulant now that you’ve learned that he won’t bite, and you know it’s petulance because you don’t actually put up much of a fight to get your car taken off the tow truck.
That petulance trembles when his expression grows stern again. “You’re getting it checked by a mechanic before you get behind the wheel again,” he tells you in no uncertain terms, eyes daring you to contradict him.
You don’t. It’s hard to argue with someone so adamant on your wellbeing. A mechanic in later days will tell John, with you by his side, that your car was mostly fine apart from some slight damage to the bumper, but that you made the right call to bring it in just in case the frame cracked during the accident.
John’s arm will be around your waist at the time and he’ll pull you tighter into his side when the mechanic says that. And what do you do but go with it, curling into his side like it’s natural. You’ll have already fucked him by then anyway. It’ll be no less forward than letting him take you for coffee and then back home, following you up to your apartment and into your bed.
Now though, you let him usher you into the passenger seat of his car and shut the door behind you, the wind cutting off abruptly. It only comes back when the door opens on his side.
You rattle off your address and watch bemusedly as he programs it into his GPS and hits save. You don’t have the temerity to question him, to poke a hole in the bubble of familiarity ballooning around the two of you. The real world seems far away in his car, like you’re in limbo, the rules different here somehow.
“How about a coffee?” he asks at the next light, putting his hand on your thigh and shaking when you don’t respond right away. “Does a hot drink sound good right about now?”
“I guess?” you say. In truth, it sounds great, but you’re losing the thread of this conversation, your old preoccupations getting further and further away from you.
John gives your thigh a squeeze, lingering for a beat before pulling away. “Good. It’ll be a nice little pick me up before we go home. My treat.”
also love the idea that Simon has never eaten anyone out before because he thinks that's too intimate, so the first time he tongues his bird's cunt, she has to practically force him to do it because he always refuses to. knows logically that there's nothing wrong with it, and he's practically in love with his girl (or the closest he'll ever be able to get to love; some approximation of obsession and covetousness, the feeling that she's irreplaceable and all his), but it just takes him awhile to get over the hurdle of a lifetime of casual, surprisingly cold sexual encounters.
but once the seal is finally broken, and Simon realizes how much he likes it, he's always diving face first into her pussy whenever they're alone. tongues her pearl until she squirts on his face. licks his own come out of her whenever they fuck because she tastes like some holy mix of the two of them, her juices and his come. refuses to give her his cock until he's gotten his mouth on her first, softened her up with his tongue and fingers. sometimes gets carried away and ignores her hands scratching at his shorn scalp and trying to push his face away from her pussy because she just came for a third time on his tongue. only relents when she goes limp and he blinks, sluggishly thinking that they need to change the sheets.
Lately, you’ve been thinking about having a baby.
Or: the fertility clinic au
Part 2
masterlist
You walk around town like it’s written on your forehead that you’re about to let some strange man get you pregnant.
It might as well be a scarlet letter pinned to your breast. A sign taped to the back of your shirt. Kick me. I’m letting some guy knock me up. Or better yet, I’m with stupid, with the arrow pointed up at you.
Obviously that’s not true. You’ve done a good job at keeping this under wraps for the most part, not even your closest friends hearing about the man that propositioned you in the fertility clinic waiting room. You might've had half a mind to call one of them about it on the drive home, but by then you’d already filed it away as future gossip material, imagining bringing it up at drinks to the shock and delight of your friends.
Then night falls, and you grow weak.
You wake up with post-text message clarity the next morning, but there’s little you can do to backtrack now. You gave the man your name and number. You spoke to him on the phone about it, albeit briefly. Sure you could call John again and tell him that you thought it over a little more and decided against it, but then—
“It’s gonna cost four thousand dollars.”
Your coworker lets out a hissed breath, wincing. “That’s not cheap.”
It’s a pea-soupy summer morning, all hot and humid with the sky tinted a yellowish colour from forest fires up in the country, the hazy light seeping in through the windows in the office kitchen. Not a cloud in sight. You wouldn't call it a particularly pleasant morning, with the weather as overcast as your mood, but it could always be worse.
She’s the first person outside of a few close friends that you’ve told about going to the clinic at all, but she reacts exactly as you thought she would. It’s both affirming and annoying; it’s not so bad hearing from someone else that four thousand dollars is a bit pricey for a single person, but part of you wishes she’d try to convince you to go through with it. You need someone to push you in a direction—in any direction.
You nod, mouth screwed into a grimace. “And that’s only for a single try. I think she said it would be closer to, like, twelve thousand dollars altogether.”
“So are you gonna do it? Or are you gonna keep looking around?”
“I have another appointment next week,” you half-answer, getting cagey all of a sudden.
The truth is, that appointment isn’t the only thing you’ve got on the books. There’s another dot in your calendar for a few days before, one that seems to glow ominously when you stare at the date as it slowly approaches, lumbering forward one ground-shaking step at a time.
You wonder how long you can go without telling anyone. Theoretically, you could keep up this ruse for the rest of your life, pretend you always went through with the treatment. Lie through your teeth when your friends ask you if you know anything about the donor. No, they didn’t tell me anything, I just picked a profile with a good medical record and family history.
Don’t think about how you live in the same city. Don’t think about the likelihood of running into him around town with the baby in tow.
You shake your head. Those are concerns that you can foist off onto a future version of you. All the current you needs to worry about is making this all a reality.
You don’t know what to wear out to dinner with him. It’s both a date and not, more of a prelude to the later events of the night. Part of you wonders if you should just text him your address and tell him to skip the preamble and come on over.
The only reason you don’t is because a little voice at the back of your mind insists that you at least do your due diligence and screen him a little more over dinner. You can always back out at the last minute if a few too many red flags pop up.
(You tell yourself that as if a strange man offering to knock you up within five minutes of meeting weren’t a big enough red flag on its own.)
John meets you at the restaurant looking every bit as handsome as the day you met him, once again nearly taking your breath away. A little more buttoned up this time though, actually quite dashing in a proper dress shirt and suit jacket, even his shoes polished.
You have a second to think about calling it off. A second to consider turning tail and getting as far away as possible. Maybe, with enough time, you could scrape together the money for IUI. You could wait a year, or take out a loan with your bank, or pray for a decent enough raise to manage it on your own.
But then, as the time before, he turns his head and locks eyes with you.
It would probably be a good idea to take a picture of him, maybe even a picture of his ID, and send it over to one or two of your friends, on the off chance that he turns out to be a dangerous man, but you don’t need to be inundated by a barrage of text messages and phone calls from your friends trying to talk you out of it. You’ve made up your mind.
Walnut and burgundy furnishings decorate the large room, and the amber glow of candlelight and antique wall sconces saturates the restaurant in a dark, sensual bloom. A server guides John and you to a table right in the middle of the room, a better table than you might’ve hoped to get on your own. You eye him sideways when he pulls your chair out for you.
His demeanour is so relaxed that if you didn’t already know the purpose of this dinner, you could be forgiven for assuming that you were out on a real date. John certainly acts the part.
“You know, we didn’t have to do this,” you start awkwardly, eyes gliding over the room to look at all the other well-dressed patrons, some presumably out on actual dates.
“Call me old-fashioned, but I was taught that dinner comes before the rest of the evening.”
“I just mean you didn’t have to. I would’ve been fine just…” getting right down to business, you leave unsaid, hoping that he doesn’t make you spell it out.
“We’re two civilized adults. I thought we might get to know each other first.”
“Well, what do you want to know about me?”
“This is as much for me as it is for you—don’t you want to know anything about the father of your children?”
You wish he’d keep his voice down. He isn’t wrong though; it would be a good idea for you to take his candidature more seriously, actually ask him questions about himself and his parentage. He already emailed you a recent STI panel and bloodwork results, both done through the fertility clinic back when he was still keen on donating, but it wouldn’t hurt to learn a little more about him.
“Alright. How old are you?”
“Forty-six.”
You nod, pleased with yourself for guessing it right. “What do you do for work?”
“Just some work for the government,” he says, brushing the question off. “What else?”
That piques your interest though. “Oh, come on. What are you, M16 or something?”
“No, nothing like that,” John laughs, genuinely amused enough for you to believe him.
You roll your eyes when he doesn’t elaborate any further though. “Fine, leave me in the dark. Anything else you want to know about me?”
“Where are you in your cycle?” he asks, blunt as a hammer.
A classic spit take moment. It’s a good thing you haven’t ordered a drink yet.
“I think it’s, uh…it’s coming soon actually. Um. Next week or so.”
He chews on that for a second, mulling over the timing. “That’s fine. We should still be able to make it work.”
There he goes again, making comments that leave you fish-mouthed and stunned, jaw slack with disbelief. Never able to conjure up a good enough retort.
When the server comes by to take your drink orders, both of you still deliberating over your food, John orders a beer for himself and a mocktail for you, not even bothering to consult you about it.
“No alcohol,” he reminds you before you have a chance to ask.
To be fair, the spicy blackberry-basil concoction that the server comes back with a few minutes later is a refreshing burst of fruit and fresh herbs, but that doesn’t excuse the overstep. You ignore it only because you know there’s no use getting worked up when you’ve already made your mind up. It’s a peccadillo in the grand scheme of things considering what he’s doing for you.
Conversation flows surprisingly well over dinner, but at the back of your mind, you can’t stop thinking about how at the end of the night, he’s going to take you home and fuck you. It creeps back in whenever you let your guard down for a split second.
So, do you have any hobbies? (In three hours, this man is going to strip you naked and have sex with you)
Do you have any siblings? Any twins running in the family? (In two hours, this man is going to climb on top of you and fuck you until he puts a baby in you)
It’s a lot to keep in your head at the same time.
“How long have you been thinking about doing this?” John asks apropos of nothing, the earlier thread of your conversation evaporating on the spot.
“I mean, I’ve wanted to have kids for a long time, but actually planning to have them…maybe a couple months?”
“Why now? Why not wait a little longer? Wait for someone to start a family with?”
You’re not sure why he’d ask you that, why it would matter. It’s none of his business, quite frankly. You almost want to tell him that, let yourself get righteous, get angry, but you find you can’t fully commit to the anger. It wouldn’t change anything. You aren’t being forced to answer him.
“I could ask you the same thing.”
“I’m not much of a family man myself. ‘Least not when I was younger, when it counted. Never had the time nor the inclination. Work took me all over—it just wouldn’t have been fair if I had a wife or kids waiting around for me. But since it didn’t seem like having a family was in the cards for me, I thought it would be a waste of good genetics.”
“Oh.” It’s arrogant, but it’s as good an answer as any.
He waits a beat then lifts an eyebrow when you don’t reciprocate. “So? Why didn’t you wait?”
“I did try, but there wasn’t much out there, and I wanted a baby more than I wanted to be with someone, so…”
Leave him to fill in the blanks. He met you at the culmination of that longing after all, even changed the course of it, disrupted your plans to place himself at the centre of them.
At the centre for a time, you remind yourself. Not forever.
After that, he keeps the conversation light, only delving into superficial topics to help pass the time. You excuse yourself after finishing your meal to go to the bathroom, and come back to two coffees laid out on the table with sugar and cream in pretty porcelain cups laid out between them. John must have ordered for you again in your absence. Good thing you like coffee.
The bill is also there, discretely tucked under John’s napkin, and that makes your stomach flip, realizing that only a coffee now sits between you and the end of this night.
Then, at a certain point, when all that’s left in your cup is the dregs, sugar spoon bone dry on your plate, John gives you a look from across the table that says it’s time for you both to go.
Well, here we go, you think a little hysterically as you push back your chair to stand, nearly jumping out of your skin when his hand comes down on your back.
At your car, you sway back and forth on your heels. “You can, uh…follow behind me, if that works.”
“Why don’t you give me your address and I’ll meet you there?”
You bite your lip, pretending to deliberate, then acquiesce.
Let him think he’s pulling one on you. You’re bringing him home instead of the other way around because you don’t want to have any memory of a man’s bed when you think about your pregnancy journey. If it’s going to be you alone, then it should be about you alone. Your decision to go out and pick a man to father your baby.
His participation will be a short blip in your life. A minor footnote. You’ll remember it in bursts throughout the rest of your life: staring at a carton of cream in the dairy aisle of the local grocery store; garden spade buried hilt-deep in a plot of soil, blue bigleaf hydrangea in a pot beside you, sweat dripping down the bow of your lips; your baby’s face, for the rest of your natural life.
In your foyer, his hands glide around your hips, pulling you into his chest, and you realize abruptly that ‘short’ might not have been the most accurate interpretation of what’s about to happen.
(Honey, you’ve got a storm coming)
“This off first,” John rasps, pulling the bottom of your shirt up and over your head, blinding you for a split second before he yanks it over your arms.
“Getting right to it, huh?” you joke nervously.
“This is what you wanted, isn’t it?” he asks, staring down at you assessingly, as if staring into your soul. That cuts the humour from the moment. Vacuums it from the room, leaving behind only the crackling, blistering heat of his gaze and his intentions.
“Yes,” you whisper. Neither of you mention the tremble in your voice and how unsure you sound.
It doesn’t stop him from undressing you though. Bra pulled down under your breasts, pushing your tits up into his face like an invitation, one he accepts without question, pulling your nipples into his mouth one by one, hands on your hips to hold you in place when you try to squirm away. Not that it’s bad—it’s amazingly good after all, toe-curlingly good to have a man run his tongue over your areolas and suck each sensitive nipple to a stiff peak, until you’re on the verge of coming—but it’s a lot, a lot that you have to wrap your head around, your bra pinched off shortly after that and underwear next.
Your touch is hesitant at first, fingers barely gliding down his arms and fisting in the fabric of his shirt to jerk it up, but he makes it easy for you to get lost in it, your nerves fizzling out in the heat and fervor.
You don’t even notice that John has walked you backwards into the bedroom until he pushes you down onto the bed, the mattress bouncing under you. “One second, love—need to get all of this off myself.”
You watch transfixed as the suit jacket comes off first, shrugged off and discarded. He undoes only a few buttons before wrenching it over his head, eyes on you the whole time, his stare never breaking. Scalding hot.
That’s how you know that despite all his lofty words, this isn’t some favour he’s doing you. He wants this just as badly—wants it with a vigour that you don’t even know if you’ll be able to handle, aware that you are just flesh and blood. There’s a prickle at the back of your mind, a whisper reminding you that nobody knows that he’s here, that he’s a hot-blooded man about to slake his lust with your body.
Then he slides the elastic waistband of his boxers down his thighs and your mind goes blank when you see the flushed, heavy shaft droop between his legs.
The two of you work together to shove a pillow under your hips, John fetching it from the top of the bed and you lifting your hips to give him easier access. You don’t have to ask why.
Nestled between your thighs, John looks up at you with heavy-lidded eyes and says, “Let’s get you all softened up to start, alright, love?”
The first touch of his lips to your sex sends a lightning bolt up your spine, and then it’s practically an open mouth kiss. Tongue running up the seam of your lips, pushing into the clenched hole at the centre, the bristles of his beard scraping up the insides of your thighs and the thin skin of your labia.
It’s good, but it’s taking too long and your heart is a rabbiting mess and you can barely think or see straight, so you tangle your fingers in his hair and try to push his head away. “That’s okay, John, I just wanna—oh fuck, can you please just put it in?”
“No, baby, it’s good if you come first,” he murmurs. “Helps it take.”
That floods your system with a frenetic, crazed exhilaration. Baby fever bubbling and boiling, frothing spilling over the top like a pot left on the stovetop for too long.
You gasp when he tucks a couple fingers into your hole to stretch you out, a perfunctory, almost clinical motion. Just enough to loosen you up for him, unmindful of the way you squirm and whine, rolling your hips to get him to go faster. He does not.
It doesn’t take much effort on his part after that to get you to come, too worked up and wound up, core squeezing his fingers like a vice until he gives your clit a suck and you squeal, oh, too much, breath ripping through your chest.
They’re wet when he pulls them out, and he dries them off by rubbing them on your belly.
The shadow of his body draws over yours as he climbs on top of you. It’s as physical as it is visual though, John’s hands always on some part of your body, dragging up your legs and over your arms, fingers spreading over your belly before he runs a hand up between your breasts and over your throat, lingering there just long enough to close around your throat and hold for a second, then skating up to cup your jaw.
And then he’s all big body on top of you, coaxing your legs around his hips, one hand squishing your cheeks when he bends down to kiss you. You can taste yourself on his lips, the tongue pushing into your mouth musky with the flavour of your cum. You’d protest if you could, but you can’t, his mouth slanted over yours and demanding.
“C’mere,” he mumbles against your lips when he draws you in for another kiss, sawing his cock up and down between your folds, coating his length with your juices, until it’s there suddenly, breaching you.
You have to grab him, loop your arms around his shoulders and squeeze to ground yourself. It’s a lot to take in. He’s a lot to take in.
“I know, love, I know,” John murmurs soothingly. “Deep breaths, okay?”
You listen to him, letting a shaky breath out. It helps you relax. Barely, but enough to ease the strain a bit.
He nuzzles his nose into your temple, his breath fanning out against your ear. “A little more, love, alright? You gonna be brave for me?”
“Oh—just get on with it,” you gasp when he eases in another inch, and John laughs in your ear.
It feels genuinely romantic like this. Your arms wrapped around his neck and his hips slowly rocking into you, whispering sweet nothings like, there we go, you’ve got it, that feel good, love? When he fits his hand around the back of your neck and lifts your head up for a kiss, you swear you see stars.
The kiss is too much. Too intimate. You wish you would’ve set that boundary ahead of time. It feels pointless now, trapped under the heavy weight of his body and impaled on his member, sucked into it, lips slotting and melting over each other, his tongue running over yours. He’s a good kisser at least, practiced from a lifetime of it. No awkward schoolboy tonguing.
Too good. You wonder distantly how many other women he’s slept with (probably more than you have any business knowing). If he’s ever gotten anyone else pregnant. Your nails dig into his back instinctively at the thought and he gasps a wet and guttural sound, hips bucking harder.
He gets rough enough to loosen a bolt of fear in your chest. All of a sudden, it becomes bright and clear in your mind. There’s a grunting, sweating man over you, all two hundred plus pounds of him laid out on top of you, with no protection between you. Raw cock plunging into your pussy. You can barely get a full breath in.
“Fuck, I’m close,” John grunts, and your eyes flick down instinctively, trying to see past the dense mass of hair on his chest towards the length of his cock sliding into you. He’s pressed too close though. When he catches you looking away from him, he clamps his hand around your face again, forcing your gaze back up. “No, none of that. Eyes on me.”
You think you must gasp. Some horrified sound must escape you because you can feel the aftereffect of it, the big hollow where it used to be.
His other arm wedges under your back to pull you closer to him, thighs spreading to brace his weight against the mattress before driving into you harder, deeper, the big, concentrated energy of him inescapable.
You can sense it the second before he’s about to come, his eyebrows digging in and his jaw going tight, the vein in his forehead prominent.
“Christ, you’re gonna take it, aren’t you?” he snarls. “All this fucking cum.”
On the next stroke in, you dig an ankle into the muscle of his ass and squeeze your inner muscles around his length, grinning hazily to yourself when that makes him shout.
And then, oh, he surges in and you feel it, hear it, sense it all around you, his fingers from the hand wedged under your back digging hard into the side of your breast. Hips forcefully pumping into you and pushing his cum in deep, your own orgasm lost somewhere in there, a small, forgettable part of it all.
Eventually, he stops moving over you, letting his cock slip out of you on the next stroke out. You hiss when he does, clenching up involuntarily. With nothing plugging it inside though, his cum leaks out, dripping down the crack of your ass and onto the pillow under your hips.
John’s hot breath fans over your face as he pants, slowly winding down as well, the red flush in his cheeks still stark, though gradually fading. It’s only in the cooldown that you realize how claustrophobic it is being trapped under him, the sheer weight and heat of his body flush with yours becoming more and more uncomfortable, almost unbearably so.
When he slumps off to one side, you can finally breathe again, the air rushing into your lungs. There’s sweat in your skin and tears in the corners of your eyes, everything tacky and humid, the frantic beat of your heart only beginning to slow down. The stiffness in your shoulders only dawns on you after a few minutes like that, and you push yourself up onto your elbows just to try to work some of it out.
“No, don’t get up, love. We’re just gonna lie here for a bit,” he instructs, pushing your shoulder back down. “Better chance of my boys getting the job done if we keep it all in you.”
Of course he just wants to make sure that it takes. That way, you don’t have to do this again. “Oh yeah. I, uh, I didn’t think about that.”
He doesn’t just mean lie there, of course, though your body would like nothing more than to sink into the plush embrace of sleep. Instead he means keeping your hips propped up on the pillow now saturated with cum, and curling you into his side, separating your thighs again to palm your cunt, sliding his fingers through the wet.
It’s a goopy, sticky mess that John plunges his fingers into, pushing it back up inside of you and shushing you when you whimper, a little gaped from his cock but sore to the touch.
For much longer than you anticipated, he lies there on his side beside you and keeps two fingers pushed up inside you, blocking any cum from leaking out.
“How long do we have to do this for?” you ask, voice all high and tight in your throat.
John hums, unconcerned. “Ten, fifteen minutes.”
True to his word, he keeps you there for the full fifteen minutes. Only the sound of your breathing fills the room, quiet otherwise aside from the enormously large weight of his presence, too familiar now with the private corners of your world.
He doesn’t warn you before idly circling your clit with thumb. You jerk, nearly biting through your lip. “John!”
“Relax, honey, I’m just making you come again.”
“I know that, John—ah, ah, ah—”
A leg hooks over yours, his thigh heavy enough to keep you pinned without even much strength behind it. His fingers don’t so much as twitch inside of you, buried to the fattest knuckle while his thumb circles the tight bud of your clit over and over again until you—
You haven’t finished the thought by the time he draws his fingers out, pearlescent strings of cum webbed between them. He hums approvingly when he sees that, pulling your thighs further apart to admire his work. “Gorgeous. That ought to do it for now.”
Your heart skips a beat and you stare up at him, exhausted, the sweat on the back of your neck now cold.
fig. 1. hand in dog mouth | Johnny 'Soap' MacTavish x Reader
MASTERLIST · AO3
The first time he smells her from inside the woman's locker room, it brings him to a halt. The human voice in his head grows dimmer and dimmer until it ceases to make a sound.
or: the forced mating omegaverse au
tags: Size Difference, Size Kink, Omegaverse, Explicit Sexual Content, AFAB Reader, Stalking, Kidnapping, Heavy Noncon/Dubcon Elements
“Fuckin’ gym isnae giei’ me a free month even though ah have tae drive tae practically the other side o’ the country tae get a decent pump in.”
“Mate, I can’t understand you when you get all worked up,” Gaz sighs on the other end of the phone, probably pinching the bridge of his nose. A lot of their conversations end up that way, one of them quickly losing patience with the other until the call abruptly ends.
Johnny drops his gym bag in the back and slams the car door shut, rounding to the other side to get in on the driver’s side.
“Ah said, they aren’y refunding me fer the month even though the other location is on the other side o’ town. That’s a half hour back ‘n forth,” he gripes. The call switches to bluetooth a couple seconds after starting the car, Gaz’s exasperated voice coming from the speaker instead of his cell.
“Don’t you already get a discount?”
“That’s jus’ fer bein’ a vet. This is completely different. It’s gonna be closed fer a month fer renovations. Ah cannae do this fer a whole month.”
“Hey, I know where you live. Aren’t there other gyms around that you could go to instead?”
“Are ye out o’ yer fuckin’ mind, Gaz? Ah’m no’ payin’ ten quid fer a fuckin’ day pass when ah already pay out the nose fer a membership.”
“No need to get mad at me, mate, I’m just giving you suggestions.”
“Well, keep them tae yerself if they’re all that bad.”
“Okay, this has been a great chat. I hope you blow a tire on the way there and try calling me for help so I can ignore it.”
The call ends with a loud beep and Johnny barks out a laugh as he reverses out of his spot, looping out of the lot and onto the main road.
He takes the highway because most of the slush and snow has long been cleaned off, though his wipers pump back and forth furiously to keep the snow flurries from sticking to the windshield. That already sets the tone for his evening. He nearly gets in an accident twice on the way there, everyone losing their ability to drive the second the weather is even slightly bad.
He should just be lucky his gym even has another branch. They could’ve left him high and dry for the month, forced him to go to one the other gyms in his neighborhood that don’t offer the same range of weights and veteran’s discount.
Worse, he could’ve been left with no choice but to use Gaz’s guest pass to his exorbitantly overpriced luxury gym downtown. Even the thought makes Johnny shudder. It could always be worse.
It’s so much more than just the drive that he hates about the other location. Like the first time he came here months ago when an appointment on the other side of town made him think it would be more convenient to pop in rather than heading back home for his workout, the parking lot is packed when he arrives, and he has to circle the lot twice before a spot frees up.
The gym is similarly packed when Johnny walks in, and his mood darkens as he scans the weight section for a free bench. None in sight. Just meathead after meathead lining the far wall, huffing and puffing with each rep, dumbbells scattered around.
Headphones slipped on and music loud enough to make his ears ring, he heads to the treadmills instead. Better to just start his workout like usual and hope for the best.
The air stinks of sweat and hormones, alpha pheromones wafting through the gym and leaving not a corner untouched. It’s one of the reasons he prefers the location closer to his place—convenience aside, his location is mainly frequented by betas and omegas, the odd alpha not having much of an impact on the overall vibe.
It’s not that he doesn’t have plenty of alpha friends (Gaz being just one of them), it’s just that sometimes he likes being the biggest, meanest thing in the room. Keeps him in line. Keeps him from being the stupid shit he is ninety-nine percent of the time, as Gaz would say. He likes to be the only one posturing.
So he doesn’t relish being forced to work out with a million carbon copies of himself. It’s nothing Johnny isn’t used to at least—a decade in the military and a lifetime of contact sport before that had been enough of an education in coexisting with other alphas—but it leaves him on edge, muscles bunching up until his shoulders are nearly up to his ears.
Running loosens him up. Distracts him from the urge to sink his teeth into something tender and shake until it bleeds.
A brisk walk to a light jog to a full on sprint. Tongue suctioned to the roof of his mouth, sharpened canines throbbing. The most natural state in the world—legs pumping under him faster and faster, the faint memory of bare feet on a cold forest floor turning over loose soil with every stride. The steady pound of his feet against the ground rumbling through him.
It’s a pale imitation of the real deal, but the taste of salt and rust on the back of his tongue keep him grounded. The beast in his chest rumbles its approval.
When a bench finally frees up, Johnny has to dash across the gym when he sees another alpha nearby eyeing his spot. He reaches the bench a few seconds before the other man though, slinging his sweat-drenched towel across the seat to claim it as his. The alpha hovers for a tense second, face screwed up in anger and nostrils flared like he might put up a fight for it.
Do it, Johnny almost growls, teeth itching. Try it and see what happens.
Lucky for both of them that the other alpha knows when to cut his losses. He shoulder checks another alpha as he stomps back to the leg press machine and nearly starts a whole other fight, but that’s none of Johnny’s business.
He cringes when he finally looks down at the bench only to find someone’s back outlined in sweat. Entitled shitheads at this gym can’t even be bothered to clean up after themselves.
The noxious miasma of alpha stench would make his eyes water if he weren’t so used to it. Pungent and sharp, like gargling brine.
A month can’t go by quick enough.
He leaves feeling worse than when he came in. Shoulders tight with tension and irritation crackling through him. Doesn’t even bother throwing a halfhearted see you later to the front desk workers on his way out. The height of rudeness. Not even rude so much as just not him; Johnny likes to talk, he likes to be friendly with the staff. It speaks to the anger riding high in his blood that he can’t even pretend.
To make it worse, his car is covered in snow when he makes it back, forcing him to spend an extra five minutes cleaning the shit off before he can finally leave.
It’s untenable. He can mind his ego for a paycheck, but on his own time his patience curls up into a ball in his chest and goes to sleep. It’s not a question of if he’ll lose his temper but when. Inevitable. His pugnacity has always been his downfall; his Achilles’ heel. Always cutting himself down on a sharp tooth.
The rosary beads dangling from the rearview window sway with the car when he takes a tight turn.
“Ah ken,” Johnny mumbles to himself, silver cross glinting under the stoplight. “Ah can do a month. Ah can keep it together.”
The next couple of times are just as bad. It’s always crowded during his preferred usual time and it always stinks, like the staff know they’re fighting a losing battle trying to keep the place clean so they don’t even try.
The sorry fuckin’ state of this place, Johnny thinks in revulsion, sneering down at yet another machine damp with sweat from the guy before him. It takes him a minute to wrestle down the impulse to chase after the other alpha and drag him back by his hair before shoving him face down into the puddle of sweat on the seat he left for someone else to clean up.
Only the threat of being permanently banned keeps his temper in check. That can only last for so long though.
It’s gotten to the point where he seriously considers taking Gaz up on his offer to come with him to the gym downtown. He’s a danger to himself and others here; a walking time bomb rapidly ticking down. Each day, something new tests the limits of his patience, like when he comes in one crowded afternoon only to find all of the lockers taken, the locker room stuffed to the brim with alphas and a few straggler betas.
He sits in his car with the heat on for an hour until the gym clears out, steaming enough to fog up the windows. Nearly turns right back around when he enters the locker room to find it absolutely demolished—damp towels strewn about, shower water all over the floor, and stinking to high heavens of sweat, body odour, and piss.
There’s still a dent in one of the lockers from the brief loss of his temper. He doesn’t cop to it, but he makes a point to only use the lockers on the other side of the room from then on.
He’s desperate enough to join Gaz at his fancy downtown gym all of one time, but the facilities there are so serene and sterile that his skin crawls the moment he walks in. Soothing spa music echoes through the three-story gym (no, wellness centre, the staff correct him at the check-in desk, and Gaz has to kick his bad knee to keep Johnny from howling) and verdant green plants grow from pots placed around the facility.
Like working out in the jungle, he thinks sardonically.
“How can ye even concentrate here?” he asks, aghast, staring at the group of limber, flexible bodies stretching and straining in a group yoga class behind a nearby glass wall. He licks his lips.
Gaz rolls his eyes. “It’s not that bad.”
“Ah’m no’ gonna get kicked out for breathing too loud, am ah?”
“If anything, you’re gonna get kicked out for public indecency,” Gaz sneers, looking down pointedly at Johnny’s open hand inching towards his crotch. “Can you chill out, mate?”
“It’s no’ my fault! They’re arching their backs ‘n pushing their tits out. Ah shouldnae have to look at that when ah’m tryin’ tae work out.”
“Would it kill you to not run your mouth off for five fucking minutes?”
Johnny mimes zipping his lips and then follows Gaz downstairs to the locker room, where the wall-length granite sink and infrared sauna make his eyes nearly bug out of his head.
To no one’s surprise, he doesn’t go back. Gaz doesn’t ask him again either.
An appointment one day pushes his schedule back a couple hours and he shows up later than usual, his teeth clenched tight the whole drive over because he expects the worst. Double the occupants, double the meatheads.
But when he pulls into a near empty lot, the knot of tension in his chest loosens. Only a handful of cars, and most of them are parked near the take-out place at the other end of the complex.
It’s practically a wasteland when Johnny walks in. A few people here and there, but otherwise deserted. Only a single person posted near the free weights.
Even the locker room is more palatable. Freshly cleaned and stocked with new towels. All of the showers have been scrubbed down and dried, the curtains tucked behind the holdbacks and waiting for someone to use them. It’s like walking into a brand new gym.
“Yeah, this is kind of the sweet spot,” a staff member tells him when he rocks up to the desk to ask about it. “We get a lot of alphas that come here right after five, so when it empties out around nine, we have the cleaning staff come in to sanitize everything.”
“Well shit,” he laughs, pushing back from the desk and lacing his hands behind his head. “Guess yer gonna see me more often.”
True to his word, he starts showing up later and later, the streetlights plump and gold when he swerves into the parking lot and parks in the middle of two spots purely because he can. There’s a new bounce to his gait, a pep in his step.
It fucks up Johnny’s schedule for a bit, but it’s well worth getting home well after midnight if it means that he gets the gym to himself. No one to complain when he groans and pants through each rep, sweat dripping from his face and body onto the floor, weights slammed against the mat with a loud thud every time he finishes a set.
(In truth, he’s no better than the alphas that plague the gym during the evening hours, but he’s long made peace with being a hypocrite.)
For a moment, it seems like life will at least be bearable until the month is over and he can go back to training at his regular gym. All he has to do is wait it out.
When it first catches his nose, he splinters down the middle.
It happens when Johnny’s on his way out for the night, muscles warm and only slightly sore, the kind of soreness that’ll dissipate by the time he flops into bed. It’s later than usual—closer to one than twelve, and he’ll feel it in the morning when he’s forced to get up at his usual hour—but there’s hardly anyone else in the gym and for that, it’s worth it.
The strap of his gym bag digs into his shoulder as he tosses a hand up on his way, saying goodbye to the beta manning the front desk on his own. A shame that he’s stuck on his own all night. It would drive Johnny crazy to be stuck at work with no one to talk to—it’s one of the reasons that he followed Gaz into private security when they both got out of the service.
He turns around, about to step out of the gym, when a peculiar smell tries to sneak past him. A slippery thing, silverfish quick and just as conspicuous.
He catches it though. Hunting dog with a purebred snout, he sniffs it the second it wafts under his nose and goes ramrod straight, egress forgotten.
The door to the women's locker room is closed, but he can smell the faint traces of the omega’s scent clinging to it. She must have touched it on her way out. Must have placed her palm against the door and shoved. The alpha beneath his skin that wears his face stills as well, everything vanishing into the singular nature of the scent emanating from the locker room door.
In twenty-nine years, he’s never felt so—
(unmoored, untethered
sinking into it like a stone, not coming apart but unraveling altogether—)
He breathes in again and it’s fainter now, but he can still smell it. Candy pink frosting, so sweet that his teeth hurt and his dick throbs. Juicy like a ripe peach waiting for his teeth. It wafts from the women’s locker room, so subtle that it’s clear that whoever it belonged to is long gone. He must have just missed her, an hour separating them at most.
It’s like nothing he’s ever smelt before. No omega in heat has ever made his head spin like this, every inch of him attuned to a single scent. Even slick on his tongue has never made him feel like this, rut thundering through his bones and snapping him into a new shape.
The hunger shifts from his throat to his stomach, settling in deep. And the beast under his skin that wears his face opens its maw, ropey strands of spittle stringing between its teeth.
“Hey man, you good?”
Johnny blinks, looking over his shoulder to find the guy at the front desk frowning at him. It snaps him out of whatever spell he’d been under. His alpha recedes beneath his skin again, hungering but quieter.
“Uh…” he clears his throat, pulling the strap of his bag back up onto his shoulder from where it slipped down. Gives the guy a thumbs up. “Yeah. Sorry—lost my train o’ thought.”
The employee stares at him for a beat before mumbling, “Okay…” under his breath and looking back down at the computer.
Johnny stares at the door for another few seconds before finally leaving.
He sweats all the way home. Worries, wonder, and woes. Blinks and suddenly his exit is next, another car behind him honking when he changes lanes abruptly without signalling. Haud yer wheesht, he thinks and flips the other driver off for good measure.
At home, he paces the length of his house thinking about that omega’s scent until it’s time for bed. Then he tosses and turns until his sleep grows profound and swallows him whole like Jonah. Into the belly of the beast. Nothing to do but let it spit him back out like a peachstone.
Then morning comes and his jaw clicks when he yawns and his bad knee hurts.
But worse than the snow pelting his windshield on the drive to work and worse than the cold stinging his face when he parks and stops for his morning coffee is the memory of that smell.
It’s not as if he doesn’t have any experience with omegas. Despite growing up under the thumb of four alpha sisters, Johnny’s been popular with omegas his whole life. His history with them is an assortment of sordid trysts and quick flings, good enough to scratch an itch but not enough to make him want to bite and keep.
Sticky, messy, syrupy ruts spent buried between an omega’s soft thighs, gorging himself on slick and pussy; nudging his cock against pillowy lips and then thrusting down their throat, hand palming the base of their skull to hold them in place.
It’s always been like that though. One and done; a couple days at most to work through the worst of his rut and then out the door, a messy kiss for the road before whistling his way home. Johnny’s good for that. A romp in the hay, a roll in the sack. Generous with his fingers and mouth and cock.
He’s never craved an omega like this though, never fevered like he fevers now. Itched like his skin was turned inside out in his sleep.
Waking up in the middle of the night panting, the covers under him drenched with sweat and his knot throbbing in his hand, already swollen and aching. Fisting his cock until he has no choice but to roll over and bury his teeth into his pillow, humping the mattress frantically until he comes, eyes watering with the force of his orgasm.
No tonic for this ailment. It simmers in his blood, infatuation decocting into full blown obsession.
Brontide as leitmotif and it rumbles in his ears.
Wandering through the city punch-drunk, always waiting for it to catch his nose somewhere else. In line at a salad bar, always a head taller than everyone else (which he’s still getting used to, which is still a strange new fact of civilian life); at a local venue with Gaz for a concert, scenting the air for any sign of them; seated at the back of the coffee shop across the street from the gym, eyes trained on the door.
Waiting. Always waiting.
And, hungering like a starved dog.
Saliva pooling in his mouth when he thinks of what it’ll be like when he finally has them under him, desperate and cloying and wet.
Other omegas smell sickly to him now, off somehow. A facsimile of what he knows is out there waiting for him. He’s not down for a quick fuck anymore. A hand on his chest and doe eyes blinking up at him makes him shudder now, grimacing down at the omega trying to compete for his attention when out there there’s—
His omega.
Just for him. Made to take his knot and clench around it and squeal when he pumps them full—
Hishishishishishis.
So he shrugs her hand off and sends her on her way.
Johnny spends weeks trying to line up their schedules—his and that elusive omega’s whose scent still permeates the gym even though he never actually sees them in the flesh—to no avail. Even though he’s there waiting at the gym nearly every day, they must stagger their visits. Worse, they seem to come at irregular hours; some days, Johnny shows up and though he can smell the omega’s scent, it’s flat, stale. Like they’ve been gone for hours, ages. Only the oil from their hands still embedded in the dumbbells on the rack.
He doesn’t even care if anyone’s watching when he brings one up to his nose and breathes in.
Then abruptly, the scent disappears, and with it, his soundness of mind.
A week gasping for air, flopping belly up. Breathing in nothing, not even the old, stale scent of his omega because they’re gone suddenly without warning. The first couple of days are manageable only because he doesn’t notice it at first, used to his omega taking a couple days off at a time to rest and recover, but then two days stretch into three. And then into four.
Johnny’s long thought of himself as wild and self-reliant, not accountable to anyone or anything apart from himself. It takes four days to obliterate that notion.
On the fourth day, he wakes up and his agony crawls out of his mouth on spindly legs.
It follows him to work and back, an ache between his shoulder blades and a gnawing, wretched hunger for something he can’t have because it’s beyond his grasp. Smoke now, lost in the ether. He drives across town before and after work, hoping that they’ll suddenly reappear and set his mind at ease, but the gym only smells of alpha funk and his own souring mood.
Too long without it. He’s nothing but a shell of himself in its absence, without the scent of his omega to calm him down, and it makes Johnny realize that he wasn’t doing well on his own before but just barely surviving. Barely keeping his head above water.
Ghost hauls him out of a bar by the scruff of his neck on Saturday night when he almost starts a fight, and only sinking his canines into the other alpha’s forearm calms him down. He slumps forward in the bigger man’s hold and whines when Ghost strokes a hand down his back and murmurs something vaguely soothing in his ear, his words muffled by the mask. He even lets Ghost drag him back home and curls up on his couch until a balled sock hits his head and he slinks into Ghost’s bedroom, dragging his feet the whole way.
His longing is excruciating. Pathetic. Like a dog with its own empty bowl in its mouth begging for scraps.
Gaz still calls every day because they’ve been joined at the hip since they first met almost a decade ago and it’s not long before he picks up on the shaky note in Johnny’s voice, stilted conversations becoming wholly incomprehensible. Even Price calls him towards the end of the week to ask if he’s doing alright. No, sir. Yes, sir. Ah’m fine, sir.
“Was it Gaz who snitched?” Johnny gripes, cutting a side-eyed glare at the alpha on the bench next to him curling sixty pound weights and groaning like he’s getting sucked off at the same time. Still no sign of his omega.
“Well, it wasn’t Simon.”
That makes him snort. Last time he tells that traitor a goddamn thing about his life.
Absence does not make the heart grow fonder. It makes the world seem fetid and bland, and he looks out at it through dull eyes, anger kindling inside. Makes his stomach cramp like there’s nothing in it. It takes the sheen out of an oil spill, leaving only the mess and rot behind.
And then suddenly it’s back like nothing happened, stopping him in his tracks as he walks into the gym. They must have gone out of town for the week, on vacation or visiting family, something so trivial that he’d laugh if his innards weren’t char and ash. If his alpha weren’t half-feral, blotting out his thoughts for hours at a time, all instinct and anger and teeth taking over until he regains clarity and the sky is dark.
It nearly brings him to his knees when he walks into the gym and the smell of his omega blooms bright and nacreous. The gym staff eye him with growing uncertainty, but he’s hardly the most concerning customer at a big box gym (last week someone locked themselves in one of the bathroom stalls with a knife), so they leave him to his own devices when he’s finally able to move again.
His omega isn’t there, of course. Johnny can tell from a quick glance around the gym and a sniff of the air. But they were, and that’s all that matters.
Their reappearance sharpens his resolve. Runs it against a whetstone, his time of waiting coming to an end. He rolls his shoulders back and puffs his chest out in anticipation. It can’t come soon enough.
Nothing stays silent for long when a wolf is watching from the shadows. Eventually it has to make a sound.
It’s quiet in the gym at two a.m. (a far cry from his usual time, but the hunt demands sacrifice), only the sound of a single treadmill whirring and shoes hitting the belt disturbing the near silence.
Johnny smells you the second he walks in. It punches him right in the chest when he inhales and the ripe, sticky scent of his omega flows into his lungs. Mouth watering on instinct. Rutilant eyed, he tilts his head wolf-like and stares down towards the other side of the gym where a pretty thing fiddles with the settings on the treadmill, settling into a light jog.
He’s buried under an avalanche of want so powerful and so swift that it collapses him down to base instinct. Thoughts disconnected and hazy, blooming like a bruise in his head.
Shouldnae be here, he wants to croon in your ear while he holds you down, almost swaying on his feet at the thought. Should be back in my bed at home takin’ my dick so deep in yer gorgeous cunt that ye can taste my cum on the back of yer tongue—
The employee manning the front desk doesn’t even look up when Johnny scans his pass and pushes through the turnstile, flipping to the next page of the magazine open in front of him.
It’s better that way. Johnny doesn’t know what he’d do if someone tried to stop him or get in his way.
The gym is deserted at this time of night, only the single treadmill in use and someone that passes him on their way out, a gust of wind at Johnny’s back signalling their departure. Everything always works out in his favour. He suffers for it, but God rewards him for his patience.
He takes a seat on the closest available training machine and doesn’t even pretend to use it. Johnny’s never been much of a performer anyway. Instead, he drops his gym bag down on the floor beside the chest press machine and leans forward, elbows resting against his knees.
He’s lucky that you’re too concentrated on your workout to feel the heat of his stare. Your phone rests on its side in front of you, an episode of a show playing to distract you while you run. Earphones in to block out the noise. He knows Ghost would tell him to correct that. Can’t have his omega distracted while alphas lurk nearby waiting to dig their teeth into the supple lump of flesh sitting tantalizing just below the collar of your shirt—
A bead of sweat runs down his temple and his dick twitches in his sweats.
There are cuffs in his gym bag. Tools of the trade. It’s not as innocent as he lets himself think, but they’re there in case things go sideways. Sideways like if you take one look at him and run the other way when you notice the way his half-lidded eyes barely blink as he stares at you.
And he can’t have that. Not now that he’s found you.
His patience is unwavering when the circumstances call for it. It’s a skill he picked up in the service, learning to channel all of the frenetic energy coursing through him into a tight point at the back of his mind, compressing it all down to a singularity that later he’ll allow to expand and burn itself out like a dying star.
Not now though. Now he sits and he watches and he waits.
He stares at your ass while you run, crossfaded on his alpha’s slabbering hunger and his own need to wrench those leggings down your hips. When he has the luxury of time, he’ll tie you to his bed by your wrists and ankles, belly down to make it easier on him, and sink his teeth into the flesh of your ass until it’s tender to the touch, until even ghosting his hand over your ass makes you squirm and weep.
Even the thought has a growl rumbling at the back of his throat.
You’re not a very fast runner, but you’re quick enough. Like a rabbit, Johnny thinks and nearly laughs at his own joke. A distracted one at that, too concerned with what’s in front of you to notice what’s lurking right behind.
No matter. He sits and he waits.
Eventually, the treadmill starts to slow down, and with it, you. Panting to catch your breath. Fingers trembling when you pause the video on your phone and scrub a towel down your face to wipe off the sweat.
And for once the entire gym smells of nothing but a honeyed sweetness. Spun sugar and strawberry Angel Delight. Intoxicating and heady. It permeates the building, dragging him deeper into a drugged haze, dulling his senses, plugging his ears with cotton until the only thing he can hear is the sound of your rabbit-quick heartbeat going bump-bump-bump in your chest.
You must have been finishing your workout with a light jog because when the treadmill comes to a complete stop, you take another second to catch your breath and then step off to the side, draping your towel around the back of your neck and heading for the locker room.
Johnny feels himself rise to his feet but there’s no consciousness behind it. No intent beyond primordial reflex, prey drive kicking in when you try getting away. He forgets about everything else—the employee at the front desk, his gym bag next to him. His knees don’t even crack for once, the movement fluid, and when he follows you towards the locker room, his feet hardly make a sound.
It’s to his advantage that you haven’t noticed him yet, but he’ll deal with that soon enough. The locked room door swings shut behind you and there’s a second where he hesitates, better thoughts creeping past his alpha to whisper in his ear that he doesn’t have to do it this way. He’s never had trouble with an omega before—why use force now?
And then he hears a locker slam shut on the other side and instinct takes over.
You’re half-undressed in the middle of the locker room when he walks in, clad only in your panties and bra, and his world narrows down to that moment. Everything in his life has led him to this. Like a red sea parting; the universe suddenly giving him a sign, beckoning him forth.
The door swings shut behind him and your ears twitch at the noise.
He’s done this before in another life. Three strides and he slips right up behind you, arms winding around your front to pull you into his chest and covering your mouth with his hand. You freeze for a split second before going haywire, flailing in his hold, his hand muffling your screams.
“Shh, it’s just me, doe,” Johnny shushes you, arms constricting around you. Relishing the feeling of your body against his, warmer and softer than he imagined.
You shriek behind his hand, twisting in his hold and trying with all your might to break free. Simple thoughts for simple creatures. Even when you try to bite his hand, Johnny only coos, cock swelling at the feeling of your tongue on his skin. The little kittenish licks just rile him up. He likes it less when you try to headbutt him, narrowly missing his nose when you throw your head back.
When he dips his nose into the crook of your neck, he can’t help the growl that slips out of him.
“Enough o’ tha’,” Johnny growls, words reverberating with his annoyance.
The sound makes you still, prey instincts as sharp as his. Smart girl. You know when not to push your luck. He’s bigger and stronger, and his teeth are precariously close to your mating gland, which sits nestled in the crook of your neck.
He breathes in. Your scent is strongest there, at the base of your neck. A delicate layer of skin and then underneath it, your blood sings. Whispers praises high and sweet to him. A shuddering breath out.
You mumble something behind his hand. Tremble violently, your nails digging into his forearm with a biting sting.
He shushes you again. “No’ here, baby—gotta take ye somewhere more private.”
He pays no mind to the way you resume your screaming behind his hand as drags you deeper into the locker room and away from the door. Hardly needs to use any of his real strength, only a fraction of it. The fight you put up would almost be endearing, would almost make him go thatta girl and nip at the tip of your nose, if not for the way it triggers his instincts, an innate urge to dominate you into submission.
It isn’t hard to wrestle you to the floor in the showers. Like play fighting, all bark and whine and keen, teeth snapping an inch from his nose until he pins you under him, snarling right in your face until you submit. That gets you to stop making a fuss. The last thing he wants is to deal with a front desk employee trying to play the hero by pulling him off you. Not that anyone could. He’d rather this not end in bloodshed.
“Tha’s better,” Johnny growls. “Jus’ be nice, a’right?”
You shiver at his words, eyes wide and petrified, darting all over his face. Even tinged with your fear, how could he not preen under your gaze now that you’re getting a proper look at him? He knows what he looks like—rugged and strong, mohawk recently cleaned up and beard freshly trimmed. Not a behemoth like Ghost, but big for an alpha, broad shouldered and beefy.
Big for an alpha in a couple different ways, he leers.
“Don’t hurt me,” you whimper, and that breaks his heart. How could he ever? How could he ever look at something as perfect as you and want to ruin it? His chest aches at the thought.
“No, baby,” he whines, nuzzling his nose into the side of your face. “Ah would never, baby, never. Dinnae be scared. Ah’m no’ gonna hurt you, doe.”
He drags his nose down the length of your head, running his tongue over the rounded corner of your jaw. Your sweat tastes of wet roses and tart jam. Still intoxicating, but wrong, sour and sodden with fear. It makes his skin itch and his shoulders tense. You shouldn’t be scared of him; his omega should never be scared of him.
“Ye cannae smell it, doe?” he asks, pressing a soft kiss into your neck, lingering there so he can feel your pulse flutter against his lips. “Ah can… Cannae smell a damn thing else when yer around. S’all ah can think about.”
“What are you talking about?” you whisper, so frightened that you can barely squeeze the words out, fear choking you. He can’t stand it. The thought that you might find him dangerous makes his throat burn, agony ripping his chest open and yanking his insides out.
He braces himself up on his forearms and forces his hand under your head, lifting your head up off the tile floor.
“How do ah smell, doe?” Johnny rasps, shoving your face into his neck and holding you there until you have no choice but to inhale. He feels the way you shudder when you do, hands spasming against his chest. “Smells good, doesn’t it? Just breathe it in, doe.”
You do, shakily. Then a deeper inhale, filling your lungs with his scent.
“I—oh god—” you groan, your hands suddenly fisting in Johnny’s shirt and dragging him closer.
“Jesus,” he curses through clenched teeth, dizzy with lust. He goes with it, laying more of his body weight on top of you, hind brain taking over.
A long, deep inhale. Your nose digs into his neck. “What is that?” you whine.
“S’the best thing in the fuckin’ world.” An understatement. Johnny’s eyelids fall shut when your tongue pokes out to lightly graze his neck.
So much pent up emotion and anguish and want only for it suddenly—
stop.
Motion succumbing to instinct, to fate. Everything else is collateral damage when fate gets in the way.
Your hands fisted in his shirt, scent ripening, fear replaced with something else—still sharp, but charged. Hesitant because you shouldn’t want this—it shouldn’t even be a thought in your head to indulge the strange man who wrestled you to the floor and forced you to scent him, but then you get a good whiff of him and that thought shakes like television static, like a mirage, like a glass surface wobbling right before it breaks—
When he pulls back, the world is different.
You’re glassy eyed, so pliant now that he could do anything to you, anything at all. And then his eyes dip lower.
He cups your neck with a clammy hand and strokes a finger over the lovely gland at the crook of your neck. It’s warm to the touch.
“Look a’ this,” he breathes, awed. Your hand flies to his wrist, fingers barely able to wrap around it.
“D-don’t touch it,” you choke out, swallowing harshly. It has to be sensitive. Still, Johnny can’t keep from stroking his finger over it again, soaking up the way his touch makes you shiver. Poor thing, gone so long without your alpha’s touch.
“Ah cannae help it, doe,” Johnny whispers. He switches to his thumb, rubbing the pad of it over your gland until you whine and squirm, eyebrows drawn tight together. “Does it hurt, baby? Do ye need me tae make it better?”
You whine, trying to weakly bat his hand away. “N-no, that’s for my alpha—”
“Aye, tha’s right.” His eyes gleam fulgurite under the fluorescent lights. “Fer yer alpha.”
He digs his thumb in harder until your mouth opens on a silent cry.
His alpha drools a messy puddle beneath his skin, jowls sagging. It stares without blinking.
It’s different than lust or bloodthirst. Darker; deep-seated. He’s never felt this way before, and, if his gut feeling proves true, he never will again. It’s like looking down a vast, dark hall, and seeing only one way out.
A damp shower room floor in a locker room is no place for him to take his omega for the first time, but he couldn’t lift himself off you if he tried. His muscles feel far too heavy, like lead weights dragging him down, the gravity stronger here somehow.
“Let’s get this off,” he murmurs, sitting back on his haunches.
“Wait—wait, not here, alpha, please—”
Your protests fall on deaf ears. He wrenches your bra over your head, mindful not to let the back of your head smack against the tile floor. “Gentle, gentle—there we go. Tha’s a good girl.”
Your panties come next, stripped off and tossed elsewhere. His lips follow the path of his hands, sucking kisses into your hips and thighs until your fingers thread into his hair and yank. He yelps, scalp tingling with pain.
“Do tha’ again, doe,” Johnny purrs, shuddering when you do. Eyes rolling back in his head.
His world tilts on its axis when he forces your legs apart and stares at the perfect slice of heaven between your thighs.
“Doe.” Voice broken, shredded. Running his thumb up the seam of your lips and moaning when your hole clenches at his touch and a drop of slick leaks out. “Oh, doe…she’s so…”
Too awestruck for words. Language is beyond his grasp, too inadequate for the feelings coursing through him. Lacklustre, diaphanous thing. There’s no way to describe the feeling of leaning forward and touching his lips to yours, angling his head to give her a proper kiss, one with tongue and feeling. She kisses him back just as passionately.
The taste of you is incomparable. He can’t believe he ever thought there was a world where he could subsist on just the smell of you. Impossible now that he’s had you on his tongue. He runs it up the seam of your pussy, the flat of his tongue spread wide to catch every honeyed dewdrop clinging to your skin, sucking each fold into his mouth to be extra thorough. The pearl sitting nice and pretty at the top gets a wet kiss for waiting so long for his touch.
He pulls back for a second to catch his breath. “So pretty, baby,” Johnny whines, pulling the hood of your clit up with his thumb and sucking her into his mouth.
“Oh my god—”
He buries his face into your cunt, the bridge of his nose wedged against your clit and making you howl. He doesn’t budge even when you practically wrench his hair out by the roots, too committed to making your pussy squirt all over his face. Not an easy task with the way you keep trying to push him away from your cunt, but Johnny’s always risen to any challenge.
You howl when he wedges his tongue in as deep as it’ll go, thighs clamping around his head. Not a bad way to go, Johnny thinks in a daze, chin wet with your juices and nose nuzzling your sensitive little clit, making your whole body jolt. He can tell you’re close by the way your thighs spasm and your scent goes marzipan sweet, so lush and rich that his swollen cock leaks in his sweatpants.
It’s easy to get lost in your pleasure; Johnny feels it like it’s his own, his low back aching with the force of your impending orgasm. He misses your clit too much to let her get lonely though, so he lets go of your hip to push a couple fingers into your hole instead of his tongue.
“C’mon, doe, lemme see ye come,” he whines into your pussy, thrusting all three fingers into your hole, half-lidded eyes with blown out pupils watching the way your pussy gobbles them up. “Just like tha’—oh, there we go, baby, oh my god, come on, yes—lemme have it, doe—”
Your release is wet on his hand and all over his face. Little pussy still milking his fingers, the prettiest thing he’s ever seen.
A hush falls over the room, the moment almost devotional. He thinks you might be crying, but it’s hard to tell because the blood in his ears is too loud and his hand is wet with your come and he wants nothing more than to do it all over again until you can’t even talk.
He rises to his feet in a daze, a deep red flush high on his cheekbones. His shirt comes off first, pulled over the back of his head and tossed behind him; his sweats are similarly discarded, tugged down and kicked away until you’re staring up at him in all his hairy, naked glory, cock flush with blood and heavy, drooping away from his stomach.
He laughs when he notices where your gaze has dropped. “Like what ye see?”
“I don’t know about this—” you start, but he pays your words no mind.
“C’mere,” he growls, suppressing the urge to wince when he drops to his knees again.
Johnny hooks an arm under your low back, hoisting your hips up until your ass rests against his thighs, making your back arch. It thrusts your tits up towards his face and he nearly goes cross-eyed staring down at your cute little nipples. They look lonely too.
He gets distracted again, forgetting about sinking his cock in your cunt in favour of hunching over to get his mouth on your tits. Sucks one until it's hard and pebbled against his tongue and circles his tongue over the soft areola skin, completely forgetting about your other breast. It’s hard to pull himself off.
You yelp when he bites down, not hard enough to hurt, but deliberate enough to tick you off.
“That’s too rough!” you hiss, grabbing him by the hair again.
“Sorry,” Johnny gasps. He nuzzles between your breasts, practically purring. “Ah’m so sorry, doe, ah couldnae help myself…”
Puppyish, he leans up to bunt his head under your chin, shuddering when your fingers loosen and hesitantly scratch his head.
“…Okay…” you murmur, overwhelmed. He ignores you, too content with nuzzling into your neck while you run your nails over his scalp.
Being this close to you after weeks of nothing is almost enough. The air reeks with your scent. If it weren’t for the ugly, festering ache in his belly, he’d be tempted to skip straight to this. Roll onto his back and pull you onto his chest, press his nose to the crown of your head and breathe in until it lulls him right to sleep. Maybe get a good belly scratch at the same time.
Then he inhales and the scent of your come on his chin makes his spine go stiff. Drool leaks from the corner of his mouth.
It can’t wait anymore. The thing under his skin shakes with hunger, its greed a ravenous, frothing appetite that goes mindless when it waits for its food. Do it. Do it now.
He braces a hand against the tile floor to lift himself up and pets your cheek with his free hand. “Ah’m gonna put it in now, okay, doe?”
And he means it too, stomach cramping with eager anticipation, knot already filling up at the base of his dick—still small enough to pop it into your hole, but not for much longer—because it’s everything he’s dreamt of since he first caught your scent in the air.
That must not be the case for you.
When you twist onto your belly and try to scramble away, he stares dumbly for a second before seeing red. Johnny crawls after you, dragging you back by your ankle when you get a bit too far away and flipping you over again. You hiss when the back of your head smashes against the floor, hands reaching up to cradle it instinctively.
You get it snarled right in your face, his anger erupting out of him like a geyser, like a dense fog rolling down from the mountains and spreading to everything below. “Ye dinnae fuckin’ move.”
“I-I’m sorry,” you breathe.
Even consumed by rage, he can smell your terror. Putrid, not the soft sweetness of your usual scent. There’s pain there too, and it makes his muscles tense like he’s ready to spring. It’s what brings his alpha to the surface, the scorch of anger cooling slowly as you lie there trembling.
It doesn’t feel good, but he can’t—he can’t let you go.
His hands flutter over your face, squeezing your cheeks and leaning down to plant kiss after soft kiss on your lips. “Doe, please, ye cannae do tha’…ah wanna be gentle, but ah cannae control myself if ye—” Johnny can’t bring himself to say it, the image too painful to contemplate. There’s no reason on Earth that his omega should be trying to run away from him.
“O-okay, alpha…I…I’ll be good.”
His self-control is hairstring thin. “Yer just nervous, right? Tha’ why ye tried tae run?”
“I-I’m just nervous, alpha.” It’s a neat trick, repeating his words back to him in order to calm him down. It works.
His chest deflates as he kneels there over you. Johnny stares into your eyes a few seconds longer, a subtle reminder not to fucking move, before he sits up again, rolling his shoulders back and tugging your lower half in again.
This time when he notches the head of his cock against your entrance, you whisper oh god oh god oh god to yourself but you don’t try to run. It must seem inevitable—no way to fight him off or talk him out of it because there’s a film over his eyes that reflects nothing back.
And then he slowly sinks his cock into you, your hole stretching around the mushroomed head. His jaw rolls on a shaky exhale.
Something in him cracks wide open and—
something ugly slithers out.
“Oh fuck,” he moans, voice cracking. His cock sinks in another inch, warm, wet heat sucking him in. “Jesus, doe, ah cannae fuckin’ breathe—”
You flex your hips at his words, ankles digging into the divots above his arse and pulling him in until he suddenly bottoms out, cock stuffed to the root in the warmest, snuggest cunt he’s ever felt. It nearly makes him go mad; he gets so close to it that his face goes numb, the blood pounding in his ears. He curls over you, a string of curses slipping out of his mouth.
You’re there when Johnny opens his eyes again, damp hair haloing you.
“I’m sorry,” you whisper, a tear slipping past your waterline and dribbling down your face. “I don’t know what’s wrong with me—”
“It’s okay, doe.” His hands run up and down your sides, soothing you. “S’just instinct. Ye cannae help it any more than ah can.”
Your walls squeeze around his shaft, nerves making you tense up, and Johnny groans, his hand curling into a fist by your head. It takes every iota of his being not to come right then, buried to the hilt in your pussy with your ankles digging into his low back. He nearly does when you whine at him to move.
“Okay, baby,” he breathes.
Johnny tries to be gentle at first. Makes a conscious effort to rock into you with slow, smooth strokes, distracting you with a deep, wet kiss. Lips gliding together, sucking your bottom lip into his mouth only to graze it with his teeth, heat rushing through him when you tremble. Coaxing your tongue into his mouth and then sucking on it.
His control starts to slip when he tries to pull out and your ankles dig into his back, pulling him back in. The force of his next thrust makes your body shift, sliding up the wet floor. Too much. Be gentle. But he can’t—the pressure in his core gets worse the longer he fucks you, an eagerness to reach his end building and building. All he can do is chase it. Bite at its heels.
“Yer so pretty,” he rasps, petting your face with shaky hands and bucking his hips into yours until you can’t hold back your pretty little moans. “Pretty, pretty doe. Ah’ve got ye, love.”
A few more like that, pounding into you until you squeak like a toy and he laughs, breathless and full of mirth. Buoyant. Revelling in the sound of you coming apart under him, all fractured pleas and kiss-swollen lips.
Perfect angel, all sweetness and moans and cream coating his cock, gleaming under the fluorescent lights every time he pulls out.
There’s a white ring at the base of his dick from the mess of your combined fluids. Johnny nearly passes out when he notices.
His bad knee aches from digging into the tile floor. He’ll feel it in the morning when he wakes up with bruises on his elbows and shins, muscles stiff and twinging when he moves, but it’s a price he’ll happily pay to keep his pretty doe on her back with her legs spread.
Any lingering guilt about fucking you on the gross shower room floor evaporates the more you pant and the wetter you get because, he rationalizes, on some level you must want him just as bad. Not with the same fervour, not a bone bright ache that sucks you dry and spits you out like a peach pit, but close enough that you aren’t pushing him away anymore.
He ignores the weak pressure on his shoulders. Pries your hands off so he can pin your wrists together over your head.
“Been lookin’ fer ye fer so long,” Johnny croons. He ruts into you clumsily, losing any semblance of finesse. “Smelt ye weeks ago ‘n knew…knew ah had tae have ye.”
Your eyes fly open, stunned. “Weeks?” you gasp.
“Thought ah’d lose my fuckin’ mind lookin’ fer ye.” His breath comes out ragged. “Couldnae sleep or eat or do anythin’ except jerk my cock raw. Should’ve saved it all up fer ye, but…” his laughter is a deep, brassy thing. “…ye’ll still get a fair share.”
“You’re disgusting,” you moan, and that makes him laugh even more, rutting into you like a beast.
“Christ, doe, keep runnin’ that mouth.”
“You’re a—”
dumb, nasty dog
sick in the head, fucking me with that big, fat dick—
He grunts and his lip pulls back in a mean, crooked grin.
It’s never been like this before. Like someone drilled a hole in the side of his head and filled it up with you. You’re in every crevice of his mind and body, mycorrhizal tendril spreading through him.
“Ah’m gonna ruin yer pretty cunt, doe,” Johnny rasps, neck soaked with sweat and eyes burning hot, pupils blown so wide only a glimmer of blue remains. “Get her nice ‘n soaked with my come.”
“Alpha—” you keen, for lack of anything else to call him and it makes his vision go blank.
That’s the only truth that matters to him. Like a divine calling—his omega begging for him, asking for more more more. It’s as close to love as he’s ever gotten; as close to heaven as he ever will.
Diving headfirst into oblivion. He clamps his hands around your waist to hold you in place and fucks into you with renewed vigour, losing himself in the pleasure. Any coherent thought evaporates, reduced to mindless instinct. His beast and him are indistinguishable; two sides of the same coin; he looms over you Janus-faced, a god of beginnings and endings.
He breathes out heavily through his nose, teeth gritting together and lips pulled into a flat line. So close to it, knot catching more with every thrust, almost too big to pull out.
The smack of his hips against yours fill his ears, drowning out your pleading and keening. Seismic motions churning beneath the tile floor keep a steady pulse. The lewd squelch of your pussy nearly drives him mad—slick running down your thighs, pooling onto the floor beneath you, this place irrevocably changed because of your mating—
If only you’d squirt on his dick too, he could die happy. Scream out alpha, alpha, alpha until you shudder and come.
And you do eventually—milk his dick filthy sweet and cling onto him for dear life, nails scoring red lines into the flesh of his back. His muscles bunching under your touch.
“Fuck, doe,” Johnny chokes, near tears himself. His perfect girl coming all over his cock, eyes rolling back in your head like it’s never been like this for you before. “Tha’s right, tha’s right—such a good fuckin’ girl—oh, baby—”
You need him. No other alpha can take care of you he would. It’s not enough that he fuck you, not enough that he make you come, not enough that he see you through your next heat, he has to—
Take it all for himself, every last fuckin’ inch of you his.
He bears down on you, scooping his arms under your back until there’s no space between you, chests pressed together.
His eyes zero in on it. The nodule of flesh at the crook of your neck. And his teeth itch like they’ve never itched before, too large for his mouth.
“Alpha—” you sob, squirming in his hold. “Alpha—too tight—”
He can’t respond. Mouth full of drool and teeth, fucking you harder than you should be fucked, cockhead trying to kiss your cervix with every thrust. He’d crawl inside of you if he could. His thrusts only slow when his knot finally catches, the pressure making you sob when he tries to pull out and he can’t, stuck inside you. Lazy grinds of his hips now, getting as deep as possible.
It’s a shock to his system so profound that he can’t stop shaking. His first knot—better than a ring, more binding than a marriage contract. The most basic, ancient covenant. Irrevocable.
And—it feels—
Indescribable. His thoughts leak from his ears like tar. Eager, fevered. Eyes fixed on your mating gland, dropping his head to get a better view. Better up close, so close that his teeth graze it every time he pants, so sharp that one wrong move and they’ll slice right through, one twitch and it’s game over—
You mewl and arch your chest, inadvertently thrusting your neck up too, so his canine drags across your gland—
mine mine mine mine mine mine
The beast under his skin has a name and it’s—
mine mine mine mine mine mine
(and his teeth just slipped, he’ll say when you ask)
Ah dinnae mean tae, doe, honest—
But ah’ll take care of ye—
You’ll never understand it, but there’s a beast that lives under his skin and it—
—yearns, craves, hungers, howls like its belly is still empty even after all this time, constantly aching no matter how much it’s fed—
Sometimes Johnny wonders if it’s like this for other alphas. Whether they crave their mates with the same intensity, the same burning need smoldering in their veins. He asks Price once and gets an answer that neither confirms nor denies.
All Johnny knows is that your legs shake when you follow him out of the gym, the employee behind the front desk not meeting his eyes. Better that he not. There’s still blood and come on his chin, his grey sweats stained at the crotch. You’re no better, shirtless under your puffy jacket, hat jammed on a bit too low on your head because he had to be the one to put you back together after taking you apart.
And though he’s sheepish on the drive home—because what’s his is yours now, and what’s yours is his—your car still back in the parking lot until he can get someone to pick it up in the morning, he wears guilt like sheep’s clothing. It doesn’t fit quite right.
“We’ll get ye a nice wedding gift tomorrow,” he placates when you huff, thumbing your swollen bottom lip at the next stoplight. It’s tempting to lean in and suck it into his mouth, even now.
“I’m gonna max out your fucking credit cards,” you mumble, scowling at him. Still, you wrap your lips around his thumb when he slips it into your mouth.
You cup your hand over your punctured mating gland in lieu of a bandage.
Johnny cackles. Man plans and God laughs.
In the distance, thunder rumbles and your head turns towards the sound that only you and he can hear.
It doesn't take long to settle into the rhythm of your new summer job.
Or: the babysitter x single dad au
Part 1 | masterlist
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“I’m not looking for a babysitter that can only come by every now and then,” he says sternly and pauses for emphasis, brows furrowing to convey the seriousness of the situation. “I’ve got a busy schedule and his mom isn’t in the picture. I need a real commitment.”
You sit across from him wringing your hands under the kitchen table, wondering again what it is you’re doing here. Babysitting has never been your schtick; you’re somewhere in between too old to do it as a casual gig for extra cash and too young and inexperienced to be considered for a full-time position.
Yet, it seems like that’s what he’s looking for, based on the information he’s told you and your general impression from having been in his house for less than twenty minutes. The house is a mess—toys strewn across the baby’s bedroom and the living room, dishes crusted with day old food sitting in the sink, the bookshelf in his study covered in a fine layer of dust that tells you that this man spends so little time in his own house that it’s become something of a requiem to single fatherhood.
“So, a nanny?” you ask.
He hems and haws over that for a bit. “Bit too fancy for my tastes, but that’s more like it. It won’t just be watching the baby—I need someone who can help out around the house as well. ‘Used to run a tight ship before him, but cleaning’s not been my highest priority these days. Sure you’ve picked up on that.” He says the last part wryly, lips curling up into a crooked grin under his mustache.
“Well…” You trail off while glancing at the mess in the living room out of the corner of your eye, toys and blocks scattered over the playmat. Your own smile is sheepish.
“I work odd hours, so I’ll be gone a lot; you’ll probably have a few late nights here, but I pay well. Think that’s something you can handle?”
A polite refusal sits on the tip of your tongue until you swallow it back, suddenly conscious again of the dwindling funds in your bank account. It’s not that you don’t think you could handle the job. You’ve babysat before (only preteens, you correct yourself internally, but surely there are some transferable skills there). And, eclipsing all of your arguments in favour of walking out the door right now, is the very salient and pressing need for an actual income.
“You’re military, you said?” you croak out instead.
He nods, hums. “Bit of a glorified desk job these days. They don’t put the old timers out in the field. Still, keeps me busy.”
You frown at that. “You’re not that old.”
That gets him to cock an eyebrow. “Love, I’m over twice your age, easy. I’m plenty old for a first time father on top of that; should’ve already been an old hand at this, but I’ve been married to the job for too long.”
You don’t ask if the baby was an accident or how it came to be that he chose to raise the baby on his own rather than try to work something out with the mother or give him up altogether. It seems uncouth. Rude. It’s none of your business and, more to the point, hardly relevant to the job. It’s just your own insatiable need to pry and know every little detail raising its head to sniff the air.
“Well, I think—” You chew on your words and then backtrack. “—I can handle the job. I live nearby, so I can be here whenever you need me. If you need references, I can—”
“No need,” he cuts you off, waving a hand in front of him. “I’m a good judge of character. If you wanna help put the baby to bed, we can talk salary and I’ll go over my schedule this week with you.”
The chair scrapes against the tile floor when he stands up, pushing it out from under him. Standing, he towers over you, a big, fit man despite his protests to the contrary. Hardly out of his prime. You’d put him at forty-five at the latest, and still a work horse of a man at that; broad like a draft horse, like he flips tires and runs marathons for fun. When you push out your chair and stand as well, you’re still forced to look up at him.
“Sure can, Mister…—?” You realize with a slight start that you only remember his first name, though it hardly feels appropriate to call him by that given the fact that he’s about to become your boss. Already is your boss.
“Price. But John works just fine,” he corrects, his smile warm, almost paternalistic.
You ignore the flash of heat up your spine and the way your belly constricts when he reaches across the table to shake your hand. His big, calloused palm dwarfs yours, fingers easily overlapping. You might as well be shaking a mitt.
“Well, thanks for the job, John,” you say with a smile of your own, ignoring the way yours strains at the end, anxiety already gnawing a hole through the lining of your stomach that your stomach acid will now most certainly leak through. “I won’t let you down.”
“I know you won’t, sweetheart.”
His words seem like a bellwether for something that you can’t yet articulate or even anticipate. Regardless, they make you swallow reflexively when you start salivating out of nowhere. You should probably quit on the spot actually, just out of principle alone, but again you remember the gut-churning sensation of checking your bank balance in the middle of the grocery store the other day before putting half of the contents of your cart back onto the shelf beside you.
You follow him into the playroom instead, where a fuzzy headed infant gasps up at his daddy, blinking big lovestruck eyes up at him. Your own heart feels like a melted caramel in your chest when John picks his son up, eyes crinkling with affection. The baby is so tiny in his arms.
Any thought of being a good person evaporates from your mind. As if you ever had a chance.
You don’t know how he found you. Through a friend of a friend of a friend’s dad’s coworker, maybe. Word of mouth. Watercooler conversation and a heaping cup of gossip.
“Did you hear the Captain’s looking for a babysitter?”
“For what? To bang?”
“No, dipshit. He knocked some broad up and she left him with the baby.”
“No kidding. The Captain?”
“Didn’t I just fuckin’ say that?”
“Price, you mean? Captain Price?”
“Are you fuckin’ deaf? Yeah—Price.”
“Christ. Godspeed to him. A baby. Goddamn.”
“Give it a rest, it happens all the time. That’s why you always wrap it up. Anyway, you know of anyone that’d be up for it?”
And then somehow, your name gets mentioned. Much to your relief. Job opportunities don’t knock on your door all that often, and when John finally gets around to telling you your hourly rate, you almost burst into hysterical giggles in front of him. It’s more than you expected. More than you deserve, if you’re being honest. You’re retroactively grateful that he didn’t ask you to name your rate because you wouldn’t have dared propose something anywhere close to what he offers.
It’s a straightforward gig. John doesn’t work the typical nine-to-five, so you show up at the times he made you write down on that first day in his living room after your interview and you leave whenever he comes home. The first week is fairly true to the schedule he laid out for you. He’s only late by around half an hour one evening, but that was another condition that he made you well aware of prior to giving you the job.
You know better than to put up a fuss. You’re already learning on the job as it is; with your anxiety at a ten at all times, you appreciate the extra half hour to keep googling baby-specific information. What to do during tummy time. The benefits of baby massage. How to change a diaper. You’re learning all sorts of things these days.
To your credit, he could’ve done worse. The day after John hires you, you sign up for an intensive babysitting course over the weekend and read the online manual front to back. Your CPR certificate is still valid, but you book a refresher course as well just to be on the safe side. It’s a bit unbearable to watch the funds drain out of your account before you’ve even had a chance to earn your first paycheck, but it’s worth it for the burgeoning confidence that you bring on your first day.
Babies are fun to be around, you realize, much to your own delight. Babysitting—or rather, nannying, but John still introduces you to the neighbours as his babysitter, plus nannying requires a host of additional accreditations that you simply just do not have—might not have been a job that you ever expected yourself to like, but you find yourself kind of morose at the end of each day when you have to say goodbye to baby, and even going so far as to turn in early when you get home so you’ll be ready bright and early the next morning.
Babies also smell better than anything you’ve ever smelt in your life. You could huff the top of this little guy’s head morning, noon, and night. Milky and clean; it barely takes a few days to become addicted to the smell of his little head. When he’s cradled in your arms, you can’t help but press your nose to the top of his head and take a deep inhale, eyes fluttering shut. It’s some good shit.
You keep a journal filled with notes to relay to John when he comes home at the end of the night and keep your phone close to you during babytime to film any important moments that John might’ve otherwise missed.
“He started babbling today,” you tell John the second he walks through the door, the video already pulled up on your phone. You haven’t felt this excited in ages. “Look.”
He’s still in his fatigues and everything, but he humours you and takes the baby when you pass him over, cooing and tickling his belly until the baby squeals and babbles again for him.
“See?” you gush, mooning over him. You don’t have the presence of mind to be self-conscious in the moment.
“Yeah,” John remarks, lifting his son up to blow a raspberry into his belly and grinning at his ensuing peals of laughter. “Ain’t that something.”
If the smile in his voice has anything to do with you, you don’t pick up on it.
On top of everything, John turns out to be a really good boss. Despite his gruff, intimidating exterior, he’s remarkably kind and patient with you. He doesn’t nag you for missing a spot when cleaning the bathroom. He doesn’t scold you the day your car breaks down and you’re forced to take the nearest bus to his place, tacking on an extra twenty minutes to your commute, even though that means that he’s invariably late for work. When you accidentally use scouring powder on the inside of his Le Creuset Dutch oven and scratch off the enamel, he gently talks you out of a sobbing fit, seemingly unbothered by the state of his scratched up crockery.
He shrugs when you bring it up. “It’s got a lifetime warranty anyway. I’ll bring it into the shop over the weekend. No use getting upset about it.”
Unflappable. That’s the word for it. It’s like as long as he’s able to come home to the baby and you in one piece, nothing else matters, and that sense of calm permeates the whole house; for the first time in a long time, you don’t feel like you have to walk on eggshells around someone.
Your only qualm—and it’s hardly even a qualm, to be honest, more of just an observation—is that John is more of a physical person than you are.
When he wants to move you, he does—two big hands clamped around your waist and only a fraction of his strength to move you away from the stove so he can take over cooking while you check on the baby, your mouth hanging open, aghast. Fuming at his nerve. The gall of him to manhandle you.
You don’t hold it against him though. You haven’t spent much time around groups of men, but you’ve seen military movies before and it seems like the status quo for men to grab and push each other around. If anything, he’s gentle with you.
It’s just that—and again, John’s the first adult man you’ve spent any one-on-one time with, what with it just being the two of you and the baby in his house, so your frame of reference is microscopic—you’re not completely sure whether it’s appropriate for your boss to be so touchy.
You don’t mean to insinuate that he’s being inappropriate. It’s just that—and again you have to catch yourself before you go making assertions about people because John is honestly such a nice man and he’s done nothing but treat you fairly and made you feel safe and welcome, but…—sometimes he insists on you staying over for dinner after he comes home from work and doesn’t take no for an answer.
You’re never in any rush to leave. There’s not exactly anything waiting for you in your dingy little apartment. So when he asks you to stay, you have no good reason to refuse. It’s nice to get a free meal as well. With the way John gives you unfettered access to the fridge and pantry, you hardly need to buy groceries at all these days. You feel a little guilty about that, but you know what it’s like to go hungry.
Maybe that’s why you stay for supper the first time he asks a couple weeks into you working for him. You’re subconsciously mortified that you’ll eat his food when he’s not gone but not when he offers it to you.
At least dinner feels like something you’ve been given rather than just taking, taking, taking.
Not to mention you’ve developed something of a rapport. There’s always something to talk about with John: the baby, his work, a show you watched on TV after putting the baby down for a nap, the new big Tesco four blocks from your place, his late teens before joining the military (“back when you weren’t even a thought in your mum’s head,” he jokes, cutting into his steak and something in your brain pops and fritzes out like the static between radio stations).
The first few suppers are sporadic and never long enough to make you feel like you’ve overstayed your welcome. In all honesty, they’re the few bright spots in an otherwise dull life. Outside of your job and the infrequent dinners, you’re estranged from your family and you’ve only got a few close friends in town that you see maybe once or twice a month. Nothing to write home about. Some Friday nights, the yoga studio near your flat has a five pound community class that you pop in for, but those are infrequent too.
Then there’s the odd night where he shoos you into the living room to put on a movie while he cleans up after dinner. You stare absentmindedly at his forearms when he rolls up his sleeves and then jump when you find him staring at you expectantly over his shoulder.
“Go put something on,” John tells you, a warning look in his eye. “Don’t make me repeat myself.”
“Sorry,” you whisper before slipping off into the living room.
You can’t relax on the couch while you wait. You flinch when he finally joins you, sitting down on the other side of the couch suddenly. You hadn’t even heard him coming; he’s light on his feet for such a big man.
The buddy cop comedy you picked barely distracts you from the fact that your boss is sitting on the other side of the couch. You spend the whole two hour run time so nervous that you’re afraid you’ll buzz right out of your skin.
For absolutely no reason, of course, because all John does is make light conversation with you throughout the movie. Conversation that you respond to in curt, choked whispers. When he walks you to the door after the movie, all you can focus on is how utterly embarrassed you are for being so weird.
Your dreams that night come frantic and heady. Humid under the blanket. The phantom feeling of a body heavier than yours weighing down one side of the couch and you sliding towards it gradually, unable to even cling onto the arm of the couch to keep from falling into his lap.
Then hands on your belly, cupping and holding. Thick fingers with hairy knuckles. A warm, tobacco smell wafting under your nose, sweet like tonka bean and smoke. Nothing you can do to keep them from travelling down your stomach and thighs and spreading your legs wide, big hands curving around your inner thighs until—
You wake up panting, fingers pressed against your clit in your sleep. It takes nothing to bring yourself over the edge, dark blue eyes swimming on the precipice of your conscious mind.
“Sleep well?” John asks you the next morning when you show up on his doorstep, handing you the baby before you’ve even said so much as a word. You hold the baby to your chest like a makeshift shield. Anything to put some distance between you and the man who has now taken to starring in your dreams.
“Not bad,” you squeak.
You flinch when he guides you in with a hand on your back and shuts the door behind you. Your cunt pulses when his fingers press firm against the small of your back, hand bigger than you remembered from your dream.
As if you were ever going to end up anywhere but here.