Offer Me His Hunger: Chapter 11
Summary: Johnny gets retired, almost entirely against his will. And he’s loathe to admit it, but the boredom is driving him out of his mind. That is, until, he meets the woman next door. And her baby.
CW: Mild/Moderate dark themes, mentions of violence, implications of violence, (possibly) NSFW, obsession, stalking, mild descent into insanity?, ostensibly toxic behaviour. 18+!!
Masterlist
A/N: the fact this took me four attempts to write is the reason this took forever. I am no longer committing to a schedule we get here when we get here. Hopefully a long chapter makes up for it?
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Everywhere is cold. You’ve gotten used to needing to layer up socks so that your feet don’t feel like they’re going to fall off the moment you roll out of bed. Aidan isn’t a fan of the bundling up, but you’d rather him be a little uncomfortable than frozen. Your flat usually warms up throughout the day, but early in the morning you might as well be living in the Arctic.
It might even be warmer in the Arctic.
The mornings go slow when you can’t keep your hands steady to butter toast or flick the kettle on, and you have to hopscotch from rug to rug because you can’t bear to stand on the laminate. Being exhausted doesn’t help either, not when you’re up every other hour because Aidan’s wailing or, if he isn’t, it’s because you’re worried he might freeze through the night.
His crib is as close to the radiator as it can be. It’s the one radiator you bother to keep running. Partly because the others make the pipes rattle worse than they already do, and partly because you can’t really afford to run more than one at a time. The one in the bedroom is relatively quiet, and it keeps Aidan warm.
The office is cold too. The front desk is right in front of a window that they always keep open, and the place is never quiet. The door opens and a breeze sweeps in, and any heat you might have accumulated dies with it. They have heaters in the main offices, where all the solicitors work, but they’ve yet to extend that courtesy to you.
In truth, you doubt they ever will.
Instead, you spend a suspicious amount of time in the womens toilets because they have the radiators running in there and taps with running hot water. It’s practically a paid vacation, taken in five minute slots every hour or so. No one asks anymore, not since the last time some arsey solicitor tried to pull you up on it and you made an awkward scene out of it being a ‘postpartum’ thing (it’s not, but it made them uncomfortable enough to stop asking).
Johnny keeps his car warm too. He’s made a habit of picking you up and dropping you off now, and he always has the heaters on. It must eat its way through the fuel tank but you’ve given up trying to compensate him for it.
You take warmth where you can get it. In small bursts, mostly. If you had too much of it all at once, you’d miss it when it was gone. It’s easier to have a little of something you really want, than to have it entirely and feel it’s absence so…wholly, when you no longer do.
The morning is dragging. Divorce law is only fun when it’s stupid; couples arguing over who gets the vintage couch or who winds up keeping their third home. Most of the time, it’s miserable. Mortifying, even, when ex-wives-to-be have three or four young kids hanging off of her every limb while her bastard husband tries to screw her out of alimony, and all you can do is offer tea. Juice for the bairns.
It’s miserable and cold, and you’ve got five different tasks to do–all of them above your paygrade–and you honestly think getting your head hacked off with a blunt saw might be less painless. You’d probably enjoy it more. At least that has a foreseeable end.
Standing outside of a meeting room in too-small heels and tights that make your arse itch seemingly doesn’t. You’re not in the meeting. Technically you should be, but they see you as more of an assistant than a paralegal. You probably should’ve clicked on when the paralegal before you clapped you on the shoulder and told you ‘good luck’ after they’d cleared up their desk.
No, instead of sitting in on the meeting and hearing everything you need to hear firsthand, you get to read it off of their chicken-scratch notes while you type it up into something actually legible. Maybe you’ll get to pop in if someone needs a coffee, or a new notepad and pen. Sometimes if the computer crashes and the old gits can’t figure out how to get powerpoint working again.
You swear they only advertised the job for a paralegal because they needed to rope some poor desperate numpty into doing all the labour they couldn’t be arsed to hire the appropriate staff for. Someone desperate enough to apply for every job on the first five pages of indeed and accept the first one to say ‘hired’ down the phone.
Lesson learned, you suppose. Don’t go jobseeking when you’re skint and sad. Which, granted, is how you are most days, so that seems like a nonstarter.
Either way, you’re stuck. Whether it’s in an office doing work you’re not really qualified to do for just above minimum wage, or dragging yourself into the jobcentre every week or so just to keep claiming off of the dole. Stuck.
The concept rattles around your head, as you lean against the wall just outside the meeting room. Half-press your ear to the door, listening to them laugh and wondering if they’re really doing any work at all. It leaves a heavy feeling in your bones, being stuck. It’s not who you used to be.
It’s more like being half the person you used to be. Working a job that’s only half as decent as your last, living in a shithole that’s nowhere near half as good as your old house. The other half of you is back home, buried beneath the factories and the portside you used to kick around in after hours.
You could always go back. You know you could. Push aside the floorboards and wipe off the dust and dig it all back up again.
But you hate the feeling of dirt under your fingernails, the way it sticks even after you’ve spent hours picking it out. It wouldn’t be worth it, all for a part of you that you left behind for a reason.
You turn your head too eagerly when the door to the meeting room clicks open. Straighten up, smooth out, plaster a smile on your face like you’re expecting anything else but to be told they need more tea.
A tray of empty mugs is thrust in your general direction. Not really at you, the solicitor doesn’t even say anything. Has his head poked back into the meeting room, body half-angled out towards you while the mugs clatter on the tray.
He only turns to look at you when you’ve failed to take the tray in good time, and even then he doesn’t say anything. Just creases his brow and frowns, rattles the tray at you. Paralegal or waitress, that is the question, you think. It’s fucking dismal.
Even so, in spite of the urge to flip the tray back at him and stot your size-too-small heels into the back of his skull, you wind up in the kitchenette watching the kettle boil and trying to remember whose mug is whose and how each of them take their tea. Milk, sugar, steeped for however many minutes.
You wish the walls were soundproof. Their prattle can be heard through the office, across the hallway, and into the kitchenette. It’s little more than incoherent mumbles by the time it reaches your ears, but it grates on you all the same. The sound of them, or maybe the fact that you’re not in there with them. That it isn’t some other poor idiot making tea while you’re doing work that doesn’t singe off the ends of your neurons with every other minute.
But it is you. You’re the idiot in heels that don’t fit and trousers that have a teeny tiny hole at the inseam because you keep forgetting to go out and buy a new pair; spend too long waiting to get paid that, by the time you do, you’ve got something more important to buy in any case so even if you did remember it really wouldn’t matter in any case.
The cups almost fall off the tray when you carry them back through to the office. They grumble about the little bit of spillage on the plastic, but that’s about all you get out of them before you’re shooed away back to your desk. The front desk, really, but they call it your desk to make you feel better about it.
You keep your phone under a bunch of papers. You’re not meant to, meant to keep it with your bag and coat in the staff room, but you don’t see why you should. And if the nursery rings, it’s not a phone call you want to miss. Besides, the rest of them break rules all the time. You doubt it should really matter if you do.
Papers vibrate across the desk. Your nose scrunches as you watch a few flutter onto the carpet, and you quickly reach down to sweep them up before more follow. The screen of your phone lights up beneath the papers that are left atop of it, and you pull it out from underneath them just as the screen goes dark again.
A red circle bubbles above your phone app. Twelve missed calls. Your fingers twitch around the phonecase; thumb lingering on the off-button. You’ve got a hundred and one things that are bound to give you a headache today, you don’t need unwanted phone calls from an unwanted caller to top it all off.
The power slider flickers on at the top of your screen right as the call comes through. You’re expecting to see an unknown number, a hidden caller ID. You’re fully prepared to shut off your phone for the next hour or so, and hope the nursery would have the sense to ring the office number you wrote down on the papers if anything happens.
It’s not an unknown number. The ID photo is one you recognise, because it’s a terrible front-facing photo that Johnny took of himself with your phone when you nipped off to the bathroom the first time he came around to yours. He looks ridiculous in it, but he whined on until you agreed to set it as his photo.
“Hello?” You say as you pick the phone up, tucking your shoulder up to your ear as you try to reorganise the reception desk a little.
“Christ, ye don’t half take ye time picking up.” Johnny huffs through the phone. “Been trying to get ahold of ye for the last half hour.”
“Mm, that’s because I’m at work, Johnny.” You remind him. “I can’t pick up my phone when I’m working.”
“Right, well, sorry.” He responds. He sounds a little out of breath. “But I’m not ringing ye just for a friendly chat. Got a bit of an issue, but I need ye not to panic, alright?”
“What do you mean, an issue?” You ask, pushing a stack of papers into a filing drawer. “And why’re you telling me not to panic? What’s happened? I’m not in the mood for games so if you could just get to the point that’d be-”
He groans and cuts you off. “I told ye not to panic. A couple of pipes have gone bust. Some of the flats have been flooded.”
“Some of them?” You echo slowly. You know where he’s going with it. You don’t need him to say it. Don’t even really want him to. You lean onto the desk, twisting one hand around the handle of one of the drawers.
“Landlord’s turned off the electricity to the flat, but I can come pick ye up from work. Reckon there’s been a bit damage and ye’ll probably want to get some stuff out before it gets any worse.”
You pull the phone away from your ear, thumb hovering over the hang up button. It’s not Johnny’s fault but you struggle against the urge to scream at him anyhow. Not even really at him. Just because he’s there and he’d hear it.
“Bonnie? ‘S alright, y’know. We’ll sort it out. Just give the word and I’ll bomb over and pick ye up. Don’t think it’s as bad as you’re thinking.” He tries to reassure you. It doesn’t do much good.
“Sure. Whenever you can. Thanks, Johnny.” You reply, your throat dry as you bring the phone back up to your ear.
You hang up before he can say anything else. He means well, you know, but you’re not sure you can keep your composure when he’s trying to talk nice to you down the phone. You left the washer to run when you left the house this morning. You do it all the time; it takes one thing off of your list for when you get home, and usually the clothes have partway dried themselves out by the time you stick them on the line you’ve strung throughout the bathroom.
It would be a waste of time to try and interrupt the meeting to tell the bosses you were going home. You leave a note on your desk instead. Might be the only thing they’d pay attention to, God knows they hardly do to you. By the time Johnny sends you a text telling you that he’s outside the office building, you don’t really think you’d have time to explain everything to them in any case.
Boy racer. Either he was already halfway on his way, or he put his foot to the floor and hoped that the roads were quiet. He doesn’t give a straight answer when you ask. Shrugs and tells you that it’s not important. He was more focused on getting you back home to sort everything out.
On the drive back, he asks about your day. If you’ve eaten yet. He always tends to ask that. You tell him, truthfully, that food won't sit well on your stomach at the moment. He seems to let himself agree, but doesn’t waste a minute before he tells you that you might feel differently after you’ve sorted things out.
Things. The topic is sort of being skirted around. Even if most of your stuff is fine, undamaged, there’s no way you’re getting back into your flat tonight. And if most of your stuff is fine, you have nowhere to put it. Storage costs an arm and a leg, and if you have to find somewhere temporary to stay no way you’ll be able to afford it. You’re not even sure you’ll even be able to afford somewhere else to stay.
You’re assuming, hoping, that the landlord will suspend rent payments until the pipes are fixed. But he’s an arsehole on his best days, and there’s no saying how long he’ll take to get around to fixing the pipes. He doesn’t seem financially desperate, considering he’s got a whole building worth of flats funnelling scam-levels of rent into his pockets.
None of that helps you calm down. You’re picking at your skin, tapping your foot against the side of the car door, fiddling with the radio stations. If Johnny minds, he doesn’t say anything.
There are already removal vans parked up outside the lobby of the building when Johnny parks up. Someone is quick on the ball, clearly. It irks you, that some people have the capability to just up and go whenever they like.
Johnny herds you up the stairs, hand firmly placed in the middle of your back. He’s close. His fingers are almost at your waist, and you can feel the brush of him against you as he leans in.
“Landlords having a bit of a fit,” he mutters as you make it up the last flight that reaches your floor, “just go grab what ye need, and I’ll sort him out alright?”
The door to your flat is open when you get there, the landlord pacing outside. He doesn’t so much as apologise for the inconvenience. For the fact that it’s his shitty housekeeping that caused the pipes to burst in the first place. From what Johnny’s told you before, people have been complaining to him about the state of the flats for months before you even got there.
Johnny gently pushes you past him, and starts tearing into him instead. You pause at the door for a second. Johnny’s finger is jabbing into the man's chest, and he’s glaring down at him. Hardly the type to temper his volume, it’s not hard to hear every insult Johnny’s slinging at him; from calling him a bleeding idiot to an ignorant, backwards twat. It cheers you up, a little.
The state of your flat doesn’t. The hallway is fine, not much wrong there. But pipes have burst from the kitchen across to the bedroom, and the floors are swimming in a thin layer of murky looking water. At least the high heels keep your feet from getting wet. The same can’t be said for much else.
Even if your rugs were salvageable, you’re not sure you’d want them. After the cost of the cleaning service, and knowing what could be in the water, you’d rather just chuck them into a removal bin and be done with it. You kept bags in safe spaces, though. On top of the wardrobe is where you stuffed most of them.
Granted, Johnny was right. It’s not as bad as you were thinking. You manage to get all of your clothes into bags, and Aiden’s too. His blankets, teddies, a few of his toys that aren’t in toy baskets on the floor. Pictures off of the walls, toiletries. You hoist the full bags up on the bed. Can’t exactly put them on the floor, after all.
You’re sitting cross-legged on the bed when Johnny calls in. Scrolling through cheap hotels on your phone. Most of them are still far out of your price range. It’s not exactly looking promising. Having stuffed most of what you need into a bag, the realisation that you’re going to have to uproot everything once again with nothing but the bare essentials has goosebumps rippling up your arms.
“Ye sorted everything, then?” Johnny asks, casually strolling into the bedroom despite the water squelching beneath his trainers. “Got what ye need and that?”
“Yeah, think so.” You mumble back, glancing up at him before flicking back to your phone. “What I can carry, anyways.”
The bed dips beneath him as he sits down, pushing a few bags to the top of the bed so he doesn’t squash anything. It’s very courteous of him, all things considered. You swipe past another page of too expensive hotel rooms. You’ve tried to filter them as cheap as you can, but even the cheapest one’s aren't all that budget friendly.
At the time, you couldn’t afford to be picky with the tenancy agreement. There’s no clause in your contract that demands that your landlord give you anywhere else to stay, and even if there was, you highly doubt that he’d honour it. He’s slimy and opportunistic like that. He didn’t even want to replace the old panes in the windows when you’d asked, despite them being far out of regulation.
“Gave him a stern talking to.” Johnny says lightly. “He’s a right twat. Even old Malcolm’s taking a few shots at him now.”
“I heard.” You reply. “Guessing you’ve had problems with him before?”
“Aye, but I’m not bothered about that.” He says with a shrug. “Bothered about you. Shouldnae let you and the bairn live in a place with... dodgy fucking pipes.”
The concern sits with you. You know better than to turn down help where you can get it, and Johnny’s been the only person you’ve actually been able to rely on since you left home. That’s not to say you’re not cautious but…you’re less cautious than you told yourself you would be.
“Not ideal, is it?” You laugh. It’s lacking in any conviction. You feel closer to crying, than anything else, but there’s not much difference between the sound so long as he doesn’t look at the set of your face. “No point in whingeing about it now though. Got to find somewhere to stay before everywhere’s booked out, or I have to call my dad to come pick me up.”
Admittedly, you feel a little guilty about the immediate repulsion you feel about the idea of having to call your dad to come and bring you home. Only a little, because you know he’d bring your mam with him and probably your ex too for good measure. They always seemed to like him more than they like you. Even the notion of having to go home to them makes you sick.
You’re homesick sometimes, sure, but not for them.
“Why don’t ye just stay with me?” Johnny inquires. He leans back on your bed. Already making himself comfy. “I’ve got space. ‘S not homey or anything but…don’t want ye putting yerself out…and the bairn might not take to being moved so far away. ‘M only a couple of doors down. Doubt he’d even notice the difference.”
“Come again?” You blink.
“Jus’ move in with me.” He repeats, on his side and pressing his thumb over yours to turn your phone screen off. “Not like it’ll be forever. Saves money, and means I can still help ye get the kid to nursery and everything. Can’t stay in a hotel for however long it’s going to take for the landlord to clean this mess up.”
It makes sense. He’s making sense. If you moved far out enough. Aidan would have to go to a different nursery. If you wound up needing to go back home, you’d need to find a new job- or never hear the end of it from your parents. The council waitlists for temporary housing takes forever, and you’re not sure you’d be considered urgent enough to be fast tracked.
Aidan’s cot sits right beside your bed. Stripped bare, everything folded into a carry bag and placed on your bed. It’s in all the books. Babies need stability. Babies need routine, familiarity. Uprooting them can harm them. Even if you’d hesitate, wouldn’t jump at Johnny’s offer (and it’s a tempting one), it’s not about you. Aidan needs somewhere to stay. Somewhere that isn’t a cheap hotel or a house filled with the perpetual shrieking criticism of your family.
“Look, I’ll shift ye bags over for tonight. If ye don’t like it, if ye want somewhere else, I’ll lend ye a hand finding somewhere.” He continues. “But at least stay for the night. We need to go pick the bairn up soon anyways. Worry ‘bout the hard stuff later. Just wanna help ye, lassie, and I don’t fancy ye staying in some shitehole because ye don’t wanna ask for help. Told ye I’d be here if ye needed anything, didn’t I?” He’s saying a lot, and you’re hardly saying anything. Johnny’s offering his house up to you, his home, and you’re barely even looking at him. It feels a little pressurising. You’re sure he doesn’t mean it that way, he’s only ever tried to be nice to you, but it’s an offer you’d usually like to have time to think on. It’s not his fault you have no time, though, and he’s already slinging bags up over his shoulders.
“Just…we’ll see how the night goes.” You concede, but he’s almost out of view by the time you manage to wrangle the words out of your mouth.
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