your description of maxi's physicality has me fanning myself omfg
;adhga;hgf thank you for your patience in my answering this, Cecil 🖤 tbh I have been turning him over in my mind literally since the beginning of April when you sent me this ask :'D
and it's just under the wire, but here it is for the last day of pride!!
∠( ᐛ 」∠)_
for those who might have missed it, Cecil is referring to this tag dump here from shortly after I saw The Mortuary Assistant:
I've talked about it a little bit in his dating headcanons and our strange duet too, but it's not something I've gotten to really think about on its own. which is a shame, because it's absolutely one of my favorite features on him~
(some discussion of body image issues and disordered eating below just fyi
...followed by some pretty blatant smut involving body worship, switches being switch-y, dry humping, semi-premature ejaculation, it's fine don't worry about it)
so I've talked about Maxi growing up a closeted queer guy in the South a lot. bc Greymoon had no existing queer scene when any of the Morvants were growing up, and the closest was New Orleans (which was too far for him to get to on any regular basis without Vincent noticing his absences), he had this persistent back-of-his-mind fear that he was never going to find any kind of love where he could be Out and honest about who he was to someone else. and since he thought he'd have to keep the necromancer bit secret forever, the idea of hiding being queer too just seemed unbearable. (he's seen what happens when you live your life in the closet forever through his father. it's yet another family cycle he doesn't want to perpetuate.)
as a young man he got far too into his own head thinking that his isolation and his 'lack of experience' were going to permanently mark him as undesirable to any other queer person (esp. queer men) he actually met. so, in true early-twenties fashion of thinking in extremes, he thought that as long as he was physically desirable, that would be enough to hopefully allow other people to overlook the other parts of himself he hated his coming from an isolated area in a red state. because he's a skinnier guy with (in my head) a voice on the higher side of what's heard as masculine, he equated looking desirable to leaning towards the twink side of the spectrum -- and unfortunately internalized some really unhealthy beauty standards from the early 2000s. (if I had to label him, he's not really a twink, but just more on the effeminate side of things. not quite hairy enough to be an otter, but close-ish? maybe a fox, which is apparently an otter in their 40s, idk. he's a fox to me no matter what though, eyyyy ∠( ᐛ 」∠)_ *ba dum tssh*)
point is, he spent a lot of his early twenties grieving Rora and his mother and missing Hector surviving off black coffee and cigarettes in the mornings and whiskey and cigarettes in the evenings. he'd convinced himself both to abandon his beloved cafe au lait with two sugars (a mistake he will never make again), and that a hollow feeling in his stomach meant he was somehow focused, sharp, disciplined... even when it really just made him irritable and low-energy, like it does with literally everyone. it wasn't quite an ED, but it was dancing very, very close to the edge.
it took him until the end of his Bad Spell to start eating like a normal person again. rebuilding his relationship to food was a big part of his life after giving up on completing his Chain ritual, where (due to events in Oaxaca with Hector that are still not completely clear to me) he had a lightning bolt come-to-reason "I have to change my entire life or I'm going to off myself" epiphany. after he came back to Greymoon and re-opened the mortuary, he had a couple years where he read a lot of books on emotional intelligence and dealing with trauma, picked up cooking again (and remembered how much he loved it), and tried to figure out how to re-enter the community and purposefully set himself apart as someone who wanted to be a contributing member, compared to all of Vincent's hostile bullshit from the previous fifty years. it was truthfully a lot of trial and error, and not everything stuck he also had an approximate two days where he even tried jogging and promptly went "fuck this, actually," and also learned he wasn't great at meditating but he basically tried to build himself a life where, even if he was going to be alone until he died, doing what all the men before him had done for generations, he could stand seeing himself in the mirror every day. he did genuinely take joy and pride in being able to help people navigate the worst days of their lives, and to give back where he could even if it would never undo all the harm he had already done, and he knew it couldn't.
and then you came along, and suddenly everything was beautiful.
he's truly comfortable for the first time in god knows when. maybe ever. he's happy, consistently, day in and day out. he loves you, and somehow you love him too, and he at last has an outlet where he can indulge a lifelong burning desire to love someone through taking care of them, giving them what they need before they realize they need it, being a space of calm consistency and safety. emotionally, despite the looming threat of They Who in the background, he's doing amazing.
his peace with his body is... a little more tentative.
he had at least reached body neutrality before he met you. he was grateful for his hands and what they could do (musically or embalming-wise), he found his eyes and his hair acceptable, and he was most fond of his necromantic powers: the strength they gave him; the fact that he could do removal calls basically alone and do whatever heavy lifting the services needed, short of carrying the casket alone; the way that he never really seemed to get sick (or at least not for very long); the way that his wounds from his remaining night work always seemed to heal enough, if not completely, in time for looking presentable for a 9 AM wake; the extra glow his connection to flesh gave his restorations. his general physicality, he was... fine with. he looked okay. he felt he looked basically like his conception of himself, which was all he could ask, really. would he like to get a little more flamboyant with it, wear eyeliner and dark nail polish more often? yes. was it a little annoying, wanting to keep his hair long-ish but always having to slick it back to meet old-fashioned standards of 'business appropriate'? definitely. was he still very shy about the thick scar tissue on his chest? you betcha. but he figured, everything worked, and he was in good health despite the hell he'd wrought on his system by picking up his dad's bad habits for years, so he was going to be content with it being able to do what he needed it to do.
which is interesting, given how much he likes a full-figured/fat body on other people. he's always found someone with some extra pounds attractive, because it contrasted so sharply with his own body, and they were just... soft, under his hands or his hip bones, the flesh giving ever so nicely when he thrusts against it, especially the way your stomach jiggles when he's really wrecking you. they were warm in a way he wasn't. there was so much more there that was alive, and he couldn't help but think it was beautiful. if you have stretch marks, his fingers trace them whenever he sees them, almost without realizing it, because he finds them enchanting. they're like lightning. they're evidence of growth, of change. he can't help but find that lovely, given his past. he sometimes wishes his own growth and change was more visible somehow, but all he has is the scar on his chest to tell the story. and full thighs have always been his favorite thing on another person, bar none. Rora and Hex have the typical T&A preferences covered (Rora T/pecs and Hex A, respectively), but you walk out in a pair of shorts, and Maxi's eyes don't stray the entire time you're moving. you're worried about 'thunder thighs?' the man is restraining himself from salivating. there's a reason, when the two of you are naked and alone, he takes his dear sweet time kissing and nipping at the soft inner skin near their apex. it's his version of heaven.
but his own stomach? he cannot figure out for the life of him why you like it so much.
he first started noticing it when he hit his late 30s, and just grumbled about it to himself, figuring it was his metabolism finally slowing down. when the two of you get together, and especially after the October Arc, when he starts eating well again and getting a full night's sleep by your side? his shirts get a little tighter still, and he has to ignore the very loud little voice from his twenties at the back of his brain whispering lies about its 'unsightliness,' that he's getting lax, undisciplined. he makes a point when getting dressed in the morning to not spend too long examining his side profile, or he'll be mentally examining his angles all day when he should be focused on a memorial service or a burial or a restoration. he logically chalks it up to being comfortable in a relationship, and just a part of the privilege of getting older, but still. it bothers him. the rest of his frame isn't rail-skinny, and he wouldn't say it's sharp-angled. it's just sinewy. so his stomach not conforming to that is... frustrating, to say the least.
So when you corner him in his office during a quiet moment on a slow day, which he more than gladly reciprocates, he loses focus on your tongue in his mouth for a second when your palms slide over it through the fabric of his vest and dress shirt. You make quick work of the buttons and pull his undershirt loose to reveal his bare skin, then run your hands up it, your nails moving through the coarse hair to trace the way it curves, and he inhales softly through his teeth --
"Sorry, baby," you mumble, putting just enough space between your lips to speak. Your eyes are half-lidded, and he's cursing himself for distracting you. "Was that too hard?"
"No, not at all." He shakes his head slightly, kissing you again reassuringly. "I'm fine, sugar."
You make a noise of contentment, and the two of you resume: him hastily undoing the fly of your jeans and sliding his hands between your hips and the waistband, your palms sliding again over the globe of his stomach. He assumes they'll move upwards, towards his chest --
Only for you to squeeze gently at the flesh that hangs ever so slightly over his hipbones, your thumbs rolling playfully on either side of his navel.
Without thinking, he takes half a step back towards his desk, warning sounds clanging in his brain that only just register above his massively overwhelming urge to keep kissing you. You misread this in your own enthusiasm and follow his steps to end up pinning him against the furniture with your hips, your nails digging slightly into his stomach again.
"Ugh, I know, I'm sorry," Maxi sighs in frustration --
Right as you murmur against his mouth, "This is so hot."
Both of you freeze, pulling fractionally away from one another to see their full expression, but not enough to break the embrace. There's a beat of silence where each of you is clearly trying to process what you just heard, your expressions mutually confused.
"...What do you mean, 'sorry'?" You frown.
"Wait, what's hot?" Maxi blinks.
You stare at him as if this were obvious. "...You, honey."
Maxi blinks again. "...What, this?" He looks down at where your hips have him pinned against his desk, one thigh ever-so-slightly beginning to push between his, then back up at you. "Hell, I thought we did this all the time, but if this is a Thing, I'm all in. If you give me a sec, I'll clear off the top if you wanna hold me down." He jerks his chin gamely at the papers neatly stacked on said desk next to his work desktop, cursor blinking expectantly in a middle cell of the monthly expenditure spreadsheet you'd clearly interrupted.
A soft laugh escapes you at just how eager he is to furnish a fantasy. The repressed theater kid in your beloved adores the opportunity to set a scene, whether he realizes it or not. "No, that's... not what I meant." You kiss the corner of his mouth. "But thank you, sweetheart."
"Oh?" Maxi glances between the desk and your positions again, clearly trying to figure out what he's missing. He looks back up at you after a moment, thinking he has it. "I could hold you down?" he offers, his signature crooked smile adorably hopeful.
"We'll come back to who's holding whom down, Maxi." You kiss him fully, your hands coming up to cup his face, and for a moment he's distracted again, his hands squeezing your hips and his thumbs brushing through your flesh to find your hipbones underneath. The two of you stay like this for a minute more, lost in the taste of one another, your fingers curling into his hair, before you pull back just enough for him to lean forward and try to chase you.
"Why did you apologize to me in the middle of us making out?" you prompt again, whispering with him only an inch away.
He freezes for a second as he's leaning in to kiss you again, and you watch his eyes move from your lips to meet your gaze, and then quickly elsewhere. The slightest flush creeps into his cheeks.
"Uh. I..." Maxi can't hold your eye contact, which is a sign unto itself. Normally when you're both in the same room, the man stares at you like he thinks you'll disappear as soon as he looks away. This goes double for when he's kissing you; like there's some part of him that still suspects this is all a dream that will end at any moment. "I just. Hm." He swallows audibly, and as he scans the room over your shoulder, you almost feel like he's looking for an explanation.
You let go of his face, one hand coming down to tilt his chin so he's forced to bring his gaze back to you.
His eyelids flutter at this, enjoying being slightly manhandled... until your free hand tentatively rests over the curve of his stomach. The contented look evaporates, and the flush on his face increases. Almost reversing his earlier reaction, he keeps his eyes locked on yours, as if unwilling to look down.
"What's wrong, Maxi?" you half-ask, half-soothe.
His gaze strays again, his lips flattening against each other into a line. "It's nothing," he near-mumbles, the 'g' silenced as always. "At least," he rolls his eyes, exasperated with himself. "It shouldn't be anything."
You try a different tactic. "Normally you like when I touch you, handsome." You tilt your head. "Do you not want me to touch you somewhere...?"
"It's not you," he says immediately, his eyes snapping back to yours. He shakes his head, not enough to unsettle your grasp, but enough that you can tell he's being firm. "Not at all, darlin', I swear."
"Then be honest with me." You demand it in a voice that you know he associates with orders, not requests, your thumb stroking along his jawline where you were holding his chin in place.
He huffs through his nose in amusement. "That's not fair. This is a flagrant misuse of an order." He smirks, still leaning into your touch like a house cat.
"If this is what it takes to get you to communicate a boundary," you continue in said voice, fighting to keep a straight face all the same. "Then I'll use it however I need to."
"Alright, fine. If that's how we're playing now." Maxi's body language shifts abruptly, drawing himself to his full height -- which is definitely taller than you. He gently but firmly grasps the wrist connected to the hand you were using to hold his face, and, with a careful bit of footwork, switches the two of you so you're the one with the backs of your thighs pressed against the antique wood finish, his knee gently parting them enough for you to be aware of it.
He leans down, effectively cornering you with his poker face in place. "Did you finish the whole water bottle that I left on your desk for you this morning? Like you promised?" he asks, in a cold, steely version of his drawl that always sends a shiver down your spine. "Or do I need to spit it into your mouth and make you swallow?"
You repress the sharp stab of want this brings as best you can in this moment, lifting your chin in a challenge. "You're dodging my question." You raise an eyebrow. "Aren't you?"
Maxi's facade flickers, and he traps his lower lip in his teeth just long enough for you to see. "...You staying hydrated is a serious concern of mine," he counters at last, returning to his poised state.
"I'll sit on your face while I chug whatever's left of it, if you tell me what's bothering you," you offer, your voice deadpan.
His cool remove drops immediately at the notion, the tip of his tongue tracing his lips in a way that nearly makes you giggle with how obvious his want is.
While he's thinking this through, you shift your hips so you're sitting on his desk, then reach up and pull him down further by his semi-loosened tie. You trap his leg between your thighs when he stumbles, his hands falling to the desktop on either side of your hips to catch himself.
"But I only do that for nice necromancers--" you begin, reasserting your power.
"I'm nice," Maxi near-pouts, looking up at you through his hair falling over his eyes.
"...Who are upfront with me if we need to change how we play," you finish, giving him a pointed look.
He groans, reaching under his glasses to run a hand over his face before he sets it on the desk again. "It's not a change," he mumbles, looking away. "Hell, it's not even a boundary. Or a yellow light," he adds immediately, as you open your mouth to ask the question. He looks down at his leg trapped in your thighs, and when you run your heel up the back of his calf, tauntingly, he sighs in frustration.
"One more time," you command, watching him look up again. "Why did you apologize to me when you have nothing to apologize for?"
Maxi frowns, choosing his words. "...You're gonna think it's stupid, because it is, and that I'm bein' conceited, because I am," he says at last. "And I fully admit to all of that."
You blink, dropping the play-sternness. "I would never think something that's bothering you is stupid, baby," you say, concerned. You reach over, setting your hand on top of one of his. "Maxi, talk to me."
"But I think it's stupid!" he says, looking back to you with something that's a nervous attempt at a laugh. "I think it's ridiculous. Especially at my age, when I should know better. Hell, when a lot of people should know better. It's very... shallow."
"That doesn't mean it can't still bother you," you say. You tilt your head, catching his eye when he tries to look away again. "You'd never say that about something that was bothering me, would you?"
"That's different," Maxi says, his face suddenly serious.
"To you.” You smile and squeeze his hand in yours. "Everything that bothers me is serious and real to you, because if something's bothering me, you show me you love me by listening to me and wanting to take care of me. Right?"
Maxi eyes you, certain he's about to have this turned back on him somehow in a way that requires him to consider his own needs. Which is his least favorite thing in the entire world, next to listening to Seth Sunday monologue at him. "...Right," he agrees at last, unable to deny it.
"So if you tell me what's going on, I get to listen," you say. "And I get to show you that I love you, even if I can't fix what's bothering you right away. And that's what I want most: to show you I love you." You tilt your head, eyes wide and innocent. "And the love of my life and death would never deny me what I want most. Would you, Maxi?"
Maxi frowns again, caught and he knows it. "...Fine," he sighs.
He gestures politely at your thighs, and you release his leg from their grasp, allowing him to slip around you so he can sit in his desk chair. You turn on the desktop to follow him, careful to avoid knocking anything over.
Maxi folds his arms when he's seated, partially covering his torso. "...I apologized," he begins. "Because your hand was on my stomach." He swallows. "And it just... I don't know. Feels like I have more of one, lately? And I don't." He sighs again, looking askance. "I'm not... fond of... that. And I would hate for you to not be fond of that, either. Which is not a thing I would ever think about you," he says quickly, his eyes finding yours. He moves forward in the desk chair so he's sitting directly in front of your knees, his hands beseeching on your thighs as he looks up at you. "I love yours, gorgeous, you know that. Your body is a goddamn gift; I'll say it until I'm blue in the face, and then I'll reanimate and say it some more. There's not a part of you I can keep my hands off of." His hands stroke upwards as he speaks, eyes fervent, earnest.
You can't completely hide the pleasurable shiver as he does so, parting your knees just enough for him to slide between them. He wastes no time doing so, taking each one reverently in hand and guiding them so they're on either side of his torso, over his open shirt and vest.
"You're beautiful," he says, a touch of dreaminess to it as he stares up at you. "You're alive, and soft, and exquisite. I love how you look. How you feel.” His hands stroke the backs of your thighs, and you have to try not to squirm as the sensation sends sparks through you.
But then his gaze drops back to himself, and the smile extinguishes. “…Mine just reminds me I'm about to be firmly middle-aged, datin' someone a decade younger, and hopin' they're still, you know. Into it, when we're both growin' old together. Some of us faster than others," he tries to joke, but he says it with an undeniable grimace. "And that the twink death that I spent twenty years avoidin' just snuck up on me anyway." He looks up at you, spreading his fingers and giving you half-hearted jazz hands. "See? I told you it was ridiculous. And vain." He looks impatient with himself again. "But that's the truth. It has nothin’ to do with you, I promise. Okay?”
You watch his hands fall back to his lap with a defeated air. "Put your hands back up," you order, the voice back in place.
Maxi looks up at you, blinking bemusedly at this switch, but lifts them to about shoulder-level as he's told.
You move from the desk to standing in front of his chair, finishing his earlier work of sliding your jeans off your hips and down, then shedding your shirt so you're just in your underwear and your binder. When you look back to Maxi, his hands are right where you told them to be, but his slightly parted lips and the way his fingers flex against his palms give away how he's having to restrain himself from reaching out to touch you.
A smile cracks through your facade at the sight, and you move carefully, straddling his lap in his office chair. Maxi makes a soft noise of delight, supporting your hips with an iron grip to keep you safely against him.
You position yourself so he has to look up into your face, and he does so. "You're right," you agree, putting your hands to either side of his head against the leather. "That was ridiculous. To me," you add. “Your feelings about your body are your own, baby. I don’t want to disrespect them.” You lean down to kiss one cheek, then another. “But I was specifically saying your stomach hot to begin with."
Maxi balks slightly. "You... were?"
You bite your lip, nodding. "Oh, yes." You settle back so your hips are lined up with his, and as he traces his hands up and down your sides, you feel him getting hard underneath you. When you grind experimentally against the beginning of his bulge, he muffles a moan as his cheeks flush.
"...You don't mind?" he says when he trusts his voice again. It’s quiet, as if afraid he'll be wrong if he says it at a normal volume.
"Why on earth would I mind?" You slide his dress shirt and vest off his shoulders to the floor, then pull at the hem of his undershirt. He only lifts his hands from you to let you take it off him entirely, so his torso is bare at last. You run your fingers down the soft flesh, rocking your hips again as you do.
Maxi swallows audibly, his arms encircling your waist. "Because I didn't... Have as much of one, when you met me," he says slowly. When your nails dig slightly into his stomach, scraping down towards his belt, his grip on your hips threatens to bruise.
"Like I'm really going to get turned off by the physical evidence my partner is comfortable?" You roll your hips once more, and the friction even through the fabric between you sparks at your clit. "That he's happy with me, in the life we're building together?"
Maxi's breathing is shallowing out, his pupils dilating as he pushes back against you and causes your breath to hitch. "Yeah?"
“Of course, baby.” You reach between the two of you, undoing the fly of his suit trousers. Carefully, you shift his cock through his underwear so it rests against his stomach, and he shivers as you touch him, gasping softly.
When you rock again against it, your cunt beginning to soak through your own underwear, you achieve your goal of grinding against his stomach as well. Your hand tangles in his hair, pulling until he moans. “Why wouldn’t I love what makes me feel at home?” You ask innocently, and you can feel him throb underneath you.
"Fuck, sugar," he hisses through his teeth, and while you see him cast the briefest glance towards his office door - did either of you remember to lock it? - you roll your hips again and he bites his own lip, the thought quickly forgotten.
"You think I’d be put off by the proof of us surviving together?” You pick up your pace, your nails leaving marks on his bare shoulders where you’re gripping to stay steady. You can’t help but smile as his eyes roll back, pulling you harder against him rather than his hands simply resting on your hips . “After everything we’ve lived through? Everything we’ve done?” You put your mouth next to his ear, kissing the skin just before it. “I’ve spilled blood for you, remember?” you whisper.
Maxi’s cock twitches as he moans, his hips bucking with a new sort of desperation at the reminder.
You drop your hands from Maxi’s shoulders to his stomach, your nails scraping down the soft flesh and through the hair down towards his hip bones, and he writhes underneath you. You can’t be sure whether it’s your slick or his pre having soaked through his boxers, but searing fluid glistens on the skin of his abdomen.
Your hips pick up their pace, your skin impossibly warm as you chase what’s coiling tighter at the center of you. When Maxi leans in to kiss you, it’s open mouthed and messy, his hand gripping the back of your neck as you feel the head of his cock catch against your clit through your underwear. At the friction, you bite back a gasp, and he makes a sound of audible frustration.
“I want you,” he moans into your mouth, and the way you can feel him positively throbbing makes your face flush with renewed heat. “Please, baby, just let me do this properly, come on—”
“Aren’t you still on the clock?” you tease, but he rattles this as his other hand pushes against your back until you’re arching against him. “I-ah. I was trying to keep you semi-decent—”
Maxi pulls back to look at you, pupils blown and lips slightly swollen, his hair a mess from your hands, and the skeptical look he gives you makes you burst into giggles.
“The fuck you were,” he mutters, smirking. He wraps an arm around your waist, trapping you against him, and the way he thrusts up makes your laughter turn into a gasp. “You come in here,” he drawls, punctuating with another roll of his hips that makes your veins go electric. “Get me all distracted.” Another, and your breathing shallows into panting. “Look so sweet like this.” One more, and you’re whining, perilously close to an edge. “And you want to tell me there’s anything decent about it?”
“More.” The word escapes you before you’re even really conscious of it. Any wherewithal to tease him is gone; all you can think about is how close he has you, your insides pulled taut and your thighs beginning to shake slightly. “Maxi, please, I wanna—”
The smirk disappears as soon as you plead, his eyes sharpening with purpose. “I got you.” He squeezes the back of your neck, manhandling you somewhat so your clit is perfectly aligned with the head of his cock. “I got you, baby.” His free hand moves to your hips, pulling yours against him as he rocks into you. “C’mere, let me take care of you.”
Your hands slide down to his stomach, your nails clawing lightly over his skin again as he grinds against you, determined. You feel his fingers hook into the waistband of your underwear, pulling it downwards so with each thrust, your cunt is more exposed, thoroughly soaking his underwear and the soft underside of his stomach.
When he pushes against you, the warm flesh causing your clit to catch on his leaking head, you come with a senseless plea of his name that echos off the office walls.
In the midst of your high, you bite your lip because you can’t get yourself to stop whining as you rut mindlessly against him. As soon your eyes meet his, desperation etched all over your face, he moans low in his chest, and you feel the molten bloom of heat as he comes in his boxers.
“F-Fuck,” he chokes, his face pinking up in embarrassment, and his cock spasms against your folds, still coming. He pulls you against his bare torso, biting down at the junction between your neck and your shoulder to muffle a whine of his own, and you feel him shudder for what feels like ages against your oversensitive, still-sparking clit until he’s totally spent.
You both eventually still, intertwined, trying to catch your respective breath. You run one hand through his hair, and the other scrapes your nails feather-light down the back of his neck. “God damn,” you pant softly, as soon as you’re capable of speech. “Thank you, Maxi.” You kiss his temple, then nuzzle into his hair with the tip of your nose.
“Of course, angel,” he answers, still not sitting up from your shoulder. You can feel just how unusually warm for him his face still is, how hard he must be blushing.
You muffle a laugh, stroking his hair still. “You okay, handsome?”
“Fabulous,” he deadpans against your skin, and you finally crack, giggling.
“Maxi,” you coo, kissing his temple, his ear, whatever you can reach. “What’s wrong? Why are you hiding?”
Maxi groans in frustration, his breath a hot puff against your skin. “Do you have any idea how long it’s been since I came in my own pants?” He sits up just enough for you to see his eyes glinting through is hair, and you can only giggle more at what you can make out of his annoyed expression. “In my own office, no less?” He makes a noise of disgust, nuzzling back into your shoulder. “I live here now,” he announces, his voice muffled by your collarbone. “Just for a couple months, until I can look you in the eye again.”
“Honey, what do you have to be embarrassed about?” You slide your arms under his to encircle his torso, leaning your cheek on his shoulder in turn. “It’s just me. You know I love you.”
“You are never ‘just’ to me,” he mumbles, shifting so his forehead is resting against your collarbone. “I’ve gone my whole life managing to avoid makin’ a mess of myself in front of anyone, least of all the person I love most. I thought I could keep it together, but then you…” he trails off. “And you looked so…” His voice strains a little, and he leaves a biting kiss in your collarbone, like he can’t help but want a taste. “I couldn’t help it,” he adds under his breath, a vulnerability to it.
Your face heats, and you’re suddenly too aware of how you’re still straddling his lap. “First of all, that’s only the most flattering thing anyone’s ever told me.” You kiss his shoulder, then sit up, gently prying the two of you apart enough that you can lean to meet his eye. “Second of all…” you coo, waiting for him to meet your eye. When he finally looks up, you smirk. “I thought that was hot.”
He blinks behind his glasses, still a touch fogged from your activities. “For real?” His brow furrows. “That?”
“I think all of you is hot, remember?” Your hands slide again to his stomach, lovingly tracing the red marks already starting to bloom from your nails. “But the person I love most, ruining his clothes because he loves how I look when he makes me come?” They slide lower still, finding where you’d soaked the lower portion of the hair trailing down into his waistband, and you see Maxi’s stomach twitch as his breath hitches. When you look back up at him, his eyes are wide, slightly dazed. “Yeah. Hot.” You grin.
“…Noted,” he says, just a little bit of lag to it, and you can practically hear his brain whirring like an overheated laptop. His hand finds your hip, fingers somewhat apologetically rubbing where there will be some mild bruises tomorrow. “…Thank you, baby,” he says at last.
You blink in turn. “Sure.” You shift in his lap, wrapping your arms around his neck. “…For what again?”
He chuckles. “Just… for gettin’ me out of my head.” He slides his hands from your hips to your waist, hugging it. “Remindin’ me that you’re…” He hesitates, choosing his words. “More real,” he says at last. Off your confused look, he gestures vaguely with one hand, trying to explain. “You’ve always been able to love the parts of me I don’t like,” he says quietly. “Even when that’s all I can see.” He kisses your forehead, and there’s something almost shy to it. “You’re more real than the voice in my brain that won’t let me focus on anything else. Does that make sense?”
You blink again, about to melt. “Maxi. Baby.” You lean up, kissing the corner of his mouth. “I’m never not going to love all of you, okay? No matter how old we’re both lucky enough to get, or however else we change.” You intertwine your hand with one of his, squeezing. “Because I know you feel the same way about me. I’m as certain of that as I am my own death.” You smile at how soft his gaze becomes. “There’s nothing you ever have to feel embarrassed about with me, because I know you’d never let me feel that way. Okay?”
Maxi smiles, and brings the back of your hand to his lips. “Yeah. Okay.”
A knocking at the office door makes you both jump.
“Guëy, there’s a guest upstairs,” Hector says, sounding bored. “Some guy walking in for a pre-need. It’s all you.”
“Shit.” Maxi looks from the door to you, then down at what few clothes he’s still wearing. “Uh, I’ll be right there, just, uh— tell ‘em it’ll be a minute?” He looks at you again, his face a silent plea as he nods towards the little closet at the far side of the room.
You nod and slide off his lap, trying to cross the room on silent but swift feet.
“…Dude, you okay?” Hector’s voice is actually a little concerned. “You sound weird.”
The doorknob only has to turn a fraction for you and Maxi to let out a joint yelp: “No!”
“Okay, damn, I’ll go fuck mys—” Hector stops mid-sentence, as if realizing what he heard. “…Final?” he asks, as though not sure he wants the answer.
You look at Maxi, unsure, only for him to shrug, also not sure what would be worse.
“…Hey Hex,” you say at last, trying to sound casual. “We’ll. Uh. Be out in a sec?”
There’s a brief pause.
“…Y’all are some freaks,” Hector sighs at last. “But I knew that.”
His footsteps retreat, across the embalming room and then back up the stairs, and you and Maxi both let out a sigh of relief.
After he ends up going upstairs in his spare suit, you sneak into the kitchen only after the agreed-upon amount of time, both your soiled clothes wrapped in his embalming scrubs for you to smuggle into the laundry room.
You both start keeping a spare outfit in the office closet after that. Maxi is much less critical of his side profile whenever he changes.
thank you again for your patience, for real!! I had a whole scene written for this and then a couple weeks ago I was just like "mmmm no, actually, I wanna do this all again" so here we are. :'D I hope it was worth the wait!! 🖤
(Or: you've decided to ignore the red flags underneath the kudzu.)
(...though I guess they're just kind of canon, since he's... my OC. huh. 🤔 welp.
anyway!! people were kind enough to ask for these when I first posted him way back in 2021, oh my god, so I thought I'd update these too! ᕕ( ᐛ )ᕗ some discussion of nsft below~)
“And I said ‘I feel so lonely,’ and he said, ‘Lie down and tell me about it.’“ - Anne Carson
Maxi is, as you’ve likely already guessed, a gentleman, no matter what gender the person is he’s dating.
He will not let you touch a doorknob or car door handle. ever. It’s like he thinks it’s bad luck if you have to open your own door.
That’s probably the first way to tell he likes you, is if he starts opening your doors whenever you’re around.
Or being especially interested in how your day went, like even the boring stuff, he will listen interestedly and nod and smile and it will all be Genuine
Or if you have family that you like, he will ask after them. constantly.
Or pets, even!! he loves animals, especially cats, but he won’t adopt any because he doesn’t want them to feel uncomfortable in a House where people are always coming and going (in more ways than one.)
Plus, people have certain superstitions about cats and the dead depending on their faith tradition and he would rather keep the parlor a neutral space for all.
(He’s also not over what happened to his favorite cat, Magnolia, when he was younger. But that’s a story for another time.)
The minute he knows someone’s favorite flower, he never forgets. it’s an acquired skill in his line of business, of course, but that’s probably how he’ll ask you out is by bringing a bouquet by your place and asking how you feel about dinner some night
Because he will do that shit in person!! And it will be an event!! He will wait until he knows you’re home and comfortable how does he know? let’s not get into that right now and then he’ll swing by and it will be very much on purpose.
It might take him a minute to get the words out, because when he’s not in Funeral Director mode he tends to overthink the social aspect of things a bit more. But gosh darnit he came over there for a reason and he will ask you out if it kills him!!
If you take the initiative and ask him out, it might actually kill him.
Well, no, but he will be deeply flustered at first - not in a negative way, just in a way where he’s v used to having Strong Feelings for people but not so much where he thinks they would be reciprocated
He’s much more used to other people in his family being the ones who get all the attention, but that’s a story for another time
Point is!! it will bowl him over but he will be delighted to accept your invitation once his tongue starts working again
This man is always on time and, like, almost always in a suit
Mostly it’s for work, of course, but it’s also just the shell he feels most comfortable putting on in public
So the nice thing is you can almost always expect him to look fantastic when you go out together, and he will be more than happy to drive
…There is a chance he’ll be picking you up in the hearse, though. Or “the coach” as people refer to it more often these days.
“There’s no one back there, I promise,” he says, with a slightly sheepish smile. “I just didn’t have time to switch, I didn’t want to risk being late.”
…The nice thing about the hearse, though, is that it’s... rather spacious back there. if you know what I mean.
But that’s going to take a hot second, bc our dude very much has trust issues. We’ll get there.
For Reasons, he does not let himself be vulnerable often with other people.
Part of it is professional instinct: he’s in a business where it’s other people’s job to cry, and he will handle the nitty-gritty details so they don’t have to think about it on the worst day of their life.
(Part of it is because being visibly weak just caused more yelling when he was little, or didn’t do him any good otherwise, so he trained himself to tamp that down pretty quick)
part of it is he’s got too many secrets buried in his backyard to just open up to anyone
The first date will likely be something simple: a picnic and a bottle of wine at sunset in one of his favorite cemeteries. he knows all the best ones, with the more... secluded spots. so you feel a little less like anyone could just overhear your conversation while they’re visiting their dearly departed.
This man is going to ask you about your hopes and dreams, y’all. he legit wants to know.
He’ll also ask you about your favorite things - books, movies, music, artists, hobbies - so he can figure out date two.
Maxi is always two steps ahead for everything, including courting someone
(Yes he will use that term even though it’s 2025. It’s a deliberate process and he takes it very seriously!!)
If you want to wander through the tombstones with him later and look around, he’ll definitely quietly check if you’re cool holding hands.
He has surprisingly soft hands for what he does. They’re a bit disconcertingly cool, but it’s not bad, given the weather
Plus his nails are always perfectly kept. There’s no room for bitten nails in his line of work.
Good strong grip but we’re not gonna think about that too much rn
He will absolutely try to kiss you when he takes you home, and bless him, it will be a little awkward
(If you wanna make out he’s not about to say no, but he won’t let it go any further than that on date one. That’s more a Him thing than a You thing, obvi.)
The second date will be either a concert or a museum exhibit, if there’s one he feels like would appeal to your interests.
Or he’d be happy to take you to his favorite bookstore, if he thinks you’d appreciate the experience
If he shows up with no jacket, just a button-down with the sleeves rolled up and a couple top buttons open, that is a good-ass sign. it means he really likes you.
(He’ll still bring you flowers, though <3)
You’re In (hacker voice) when he asks if you just want to watch a movie at his place
(He will actually want to watch the movie with you more likely than not, so it’s not quite like it sounds. He will do his best to explain this, blushing madly the whole time when he asks you.)
That man has a homemade queso recipe he’s very proud of and he’ll be happy to make it for you, along with popcorn and all the other necessary snacks of course
If he opens the door and he’s wearing a black or grey henley, little bit of chest hair showing, and his hair isn’t perfectly in place? oh shit. it’s for real.
Maxi is always a tidy dresser, even when he’s casual, so something like that and some black joggers means he feels really comfortable with you.
He has maybe two hoodies, because Louisiana weather doesn’t get cold very often, but he’ll be delighted to let you wear anything of his should you request it.
He likes just about any kind of movies, but his favorites are horror and romcoms.
If it’s a horror movie, you can expect him to get a little talkative during any part with gore; he’ll start talking about whether or not it’s realistic, though he might not realize he’s doing it right away
“Joints just don’t work like that, I’m sorry. Nice work on that veining, though.”
“You know, when someone gets strangled to death, it’s supposed to taste acidic as it’s happening? It’s fascinating, really...”
“Good lord, that’s some hellacious blood pressure for it to spray like that from a little old nick.”
“Honestly, if you had to saw your foot off, you’d be better off cutting on the other side of the ankle—”
He will absolutely stop at one point to see if he’s annoying you or grossing you out
If you don’t mind, he will happily continue chattering on, explaining how the actual anatomy works in vivid and excruciating detail
(If you want to hold onto him during the scary parts, that’s absolutely fine. He will be more than happy to hold right back.)
He’s actually fairly cuddly, if you can get him to that point. But if he’s in the henley-wearing stage, you can sit in that boy’s lap and he wouldn’t mind, he’d just reach for the popcorn around you and hold you there so you don’t slide off.
Truth be told, under the customer service face, he is the most cuddly, tactile, touch-starved motherfucker. Once he has permission to touch, he is almost always touching you somehow, even if it’s just his leg against yours when you’re sitting next to each other, or his fingertips brushing yours. He just wants to know you’re there.
If he gets kind of quiet every so often and glances over his shoulder, or down a dark hallway, or has a concerned look on his face as he looks out the window to his back yard, don’t worry your little head about it.
If it sounds like something is whispering from the basement stairs, don’t worry about that, either.
(How does he even have a basement in Louisiana? “Funny story, actually,” he’ll tell you, as he quickly steers you away from the embalming room door. Turns out his House is a historic oddity. No one, not even some of the physicists and geologists from LSU, even, can tell you how that basement embalming room exists. But it does, and he spends a lot of time there for his day job.)
“The A/C system is ancient in here,” he says with a shrug if you ask him about any strange sounds, smiling crookedly. “I’ve been meaning to get it replaced forever, I’m just waitin’ until the off-season so they don’t charge me an arm and a leg.”
not that he doesn’t have plenty of arms and legs to spare, eyyyy
At one point, if he gets up to refill the popcorn, you might hear him whispering to someone in the kitchen.
There’s no one else there, mind you. At least, no one you can’ see.
…But okay, say none of this is enough to scare you off, and you wanna jump his bones.
Like I said, the boy’s going to take it slow, be very careful about it. he doesn’t want you to feel rushed or pressured, and he’s going to make very certain it’s actually something you want
You might have to shove your tongue in his mouth to get him to get the picture, but when he’s on board, he’s On Board
If it’s your first time together, he’s taking you to his actual bed. He’s a romantic, he’s doing this properly, dammit, and he wants it to be special.
His room should be fairly neat, with antique furniture polished to a shine, tasteful dark curtains to block out the sunlight, soft lamplight if not outright candles. Little collection of cologne bottles on his dresser, y’know, as his main vice. A bookshelf with framed photos on top in the corner. His bed is perfectly made and smells like the sheets are fresh out of the laundry.
Just don’t look under the bed for any reason. I mean Any reason.
So... Maxi’s not a jacked dude. Most of the muscle he has is on the lean side, hidden under dress shirts and jackets. He’s also still soft in the stomach area, he knows this, and he can be a little shy about it.
He’s even more shy about the scar over his heart; thick white tissue, a perfect line going down and to the left. It’s not jagged, almost surgical, like someone was trying to open his chest. He was, but he doesn’t like to talk about it.
But when he holds your thighs apart? That man is like a gator. That grip is iron and you’re not going anywhere if your life depended on it.
His tongue will absolutely make you see your faith tradition’s version of the pearly gates, Valhalla, what have you. You got a heaven-type place? Great, you’re going there for a while, bon voyage.
One great thing about a boyfriend who knows human anatomy inside and out? He puts that knowledge to use for your enjoyment on a regular basis.
Another is that there’s literally nothing about the human body that grosses him out. He’s seen it all, and he’s seen it when it’s been sitting in a car for two weeks in a Louisiana June
Not that he’s thinking about that when he’s with you. He’s not into the dead That Way.
that’s just unprofessional and disrespectful, not to mention unsanitary, and also, do other people not hear them talking? they’re still there, you know, they have feelings and autonomy and dignity and deserve respect just like everyone else...
Well, most of them. The ones that were assholes in life can choke on their own gravedirt. But he’s still not touching them with a ten foot pole.
I mean more that he will always think you’re a work of art, and that any of the embarrassing human body things that can happen during sex aren’t going to phase him a bit, so feel free to relax and take the pressure off yourself. He wants you to be comfortable if you’re going to be so vulnerable with him. He doesn’t take that lightly.
Period sex, can’t finish with a partner, finish too early, erectile dysfunction, whatever. if you’re down, he’s down and he won’t bat an eye.
You have any particular parts of sex you just can’t do or are sensitive about? perfectly fine by him, there’s plenty left for him to work with
If you wanted to choke him or slap him around a bit, he’d likely blush and thank you for it.
If you wanted to be choked and/or slapped, he’s willing to do so, but you’re going to need to have the safeword/limits conversation beforehand when you’re both clear-headed, because he doesn’t do that without thorough expectations of what you want and what you don’t in place.
Once you have that established, though, you’re good to go. He’s always interested in trying something new.
…Did I mention he’s secretly packing? Bc he absolutely is.
One minute you’ve got this quiet polite southern boy and the next you have an incubus with an accent.
He’ll be careful with it - he doesn’t want to hurt you, he’s a gentleman
...Unless you want it to hurt, in which case, prepare not to be able to walk right the next morning
He’s also damn good with knots and rope. if you indicate such an interest, he has the really nice expensive soft rope in his nightstand drawer for just such occasions!!
He knows how not to leave bruises - he’ll happily spare you any public awkwardness the next day - but if you want bruises/bite marks of any kind, then he’s happy to provide
Though sometimes, when he bites your shoulder, there might be a split two seconds where you’re not entirely sure if he’s going to let go without some blood in his mouth
What can I say, he gets excited.
But if y’all get down, he’ll make sure you come first, and then several times after
Like maybe to the point that you’re overstimulated and overwhelmed
If you cry a little (in a good way), he will absolutely check in with you, but in the moment, there’s a non-zero chance he won’t try to taste the salt on your skin from your tears.
…Just expect him to insist that you stay the night after.
The gator-strength comes in again when you find out he’s both a dead sleeper and a cuddler to boot.
Heaven help you if you have to get up to pee in the middle of the night.
Don’t stare down the hallway any longer than you need to, and definitely don’t look in the mirror when the light is off
if you come back and it seems like he’s only pretending to sleep, you’re right. Just stay still and he’ll fall back asleep again when he’s sure you’re not going walking around the house.
But in the morning, he’ll happily make you honey biscuits and cafe au lait!
If it’s a saturday he’ll try beignets, but he needs to have a clear schedule that morning so he can keep an eye on them bc they can go wrong so quickly in his kitchen
If you have to work later, there’s also not-small chance he’ll pack you a lunch.
“Y’know. I just thought, in case you didn’t feel like pickin’ one up on your way in,” he says, pretending to be very casual, like he accidentally just makes random lunches without thinking about it all the time.
…There’s absolutely a sticky note in the bag with a bad grave-related dad joke.
Had fun last night! :) Hope your day goes well, call and tell me about it later if you feel like it <3
…If you guys get to the point of being significant to each other, expect him to take this very seriously. Not like, marriage seriously, if you don’t want that. But it’s not often he finds people he feels like he can be truly comfortable around, and he’ll make it obvious that you’re important to him as long as you’re together.
the only odd things (that you know of):
Sometimes, as meticulous as he is about hygiene, he stills smells like embalming fluid. he will do his best to cover the smell with cologne without going overboard, but there’s only so much he can do.
His schedule can be pretty packed sometimes, and he tends to get kind of stressed when he has multiple services in a row, so he might not be the most attentive.
If there are nights where you can’t get ahold of him, just be patient. He’s not seeing anyone else - he wouldn’t dare, he adores you and he’s old-fashioned that way - but he just has some... business, to take care of. Just wait. He’ll come back, all apologies for missing your calls and texts. He just had to drive down to Grand Isle or over to Port Arthur to deal with this supply problem before a viewing in the morning, but he’s here now, and he’s all ears as to whatever’s bothering you.
Why does he smell like fresh dirt, or the soot from crematorium? “Well, you know how it is, sugar, I got involved in some night work.” he says quickly, waving a hand.
They bury people at night? “It’s fairly common in the industry,” he nods. “Especially for people who can’t afford a proper one. Hell, if you google Hart Isle in New York - but anyway, what’s wrong, darlin’?”
If it’s someone who’s been a problem for you multiple times, well. the next time you see them, they’ll be weirdly nice to you. like. really, really nice.
And if someone, god forbid, made you cry? You’d never see them again.
Neither would anyone else.
“Odd how that happens out of the blue sometimes. Wonder if they moved out of a flood zone, insurance has been a nightmare lately,” he says earnestly, shrugging as you tell him about this weird new development. “Did the rest of your day go okay though?”
Also, the man cannot dance. Like, cannot. But gosh if he won’t try when you ask him. It’s endearing, really.
Not really dating-related, but just for fun:
He has a signed copy of The Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood and Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistle Stop Cafe, which might not mean anything to anyone except for me. But he has them!!!
The man will absolutely cry watching Steel Magnolias. He just will. Sally Field’s monologue gets him every time, he is powerless against it.
If you get him drunk enough, that man will do karaoke, and he will Commit to the Bit. (Don’t tell him I posted this.)
He had the briefest career in high school theater, and was almost the lead in The Glass Menagerie his junior year, until his father Vincent found out and forbade him from having anything to do with it. (And then his twin sister died and his best friend/cousin moved out of the country and everything went to hell and he was sincerely convinced for years that he was never allowed to be happy ever in his life.)
Always bakes a fresh batch of cookies whenever he knows he has an appointment coming in that day, whether it’s a pre-need or someone who just lost someone else. He firmly believes grief goes down better with sugar, butter, and flour.
Likewise, he never leaves home without at least one travel pack of tissues. You know the ones. He just likes to be prepared for unexpected tears.
Has an absurd grudge against the “if I die young” song bc as soon as it came out, that was all he heard whenever a young lady of a certain age died for like a year, straight. If he never has to hear it again, it’ll be too soon. “Hell’s bells, it’s not even that good, it’s just maudlin!” (Part II, however… well. You’ll see.)
(Thanks to everyone reading this again with fresh eyes -- I thought it was time to give this a new coat of paint. It was fun, and it'll help establish things for part II! :3
If you read this far, I hope you get your favorite Halloween candy early 🖤)
[Part I of Morvant Mortuary Vol. 1 2025-2026 Rewrite
slasher/necromancer OC x plus size non-binary reader, 18+]
[summary: you are a recent transplant to the tiny, middle-of-nowhere town of Greymoon, Louisiana. your boyfriend is the town's lone mortician, Maxi Morvant -- a little weird, but sweet as can be, and utterly devoted to you. when one of your chronic migraines threatens to ruin your evening plans, he suggests some alternative measures to distract you.
warnings: morbid humor about embalming practices; reader has a vulva; use of a vibrator to overstimulation; oral sex; period sex; penetrative sex; implied blood kink; praise kink; brief instance of daddy kink. some implied stalker-y behavior; discussion of death of a relative. sex during a migraine probably doesn't usually help, but I'm the chronic migraine-haver here and I get to write the coping mechanism. reader uses they/them, no use of y/n, mentions of skin and hair left as neutral as possible.
this is going to be a horror story, horrific things will happen, please be advised and use your own discretion.
notes: we're doing this again, but this time better and to the left. /jk
a story I wrote years ago, now polished, edited, and rewritten with the full knowledge of who my OCs actually are (and who they're going to be). shared here because I missed having the x reader version of it up even while I work on the other version, but I wanted to shine it up and do it justice.
the whole thing is still one of my favorite things I've ever written. I love my necromancers, Greymoon, all of it. but I especially love getting to share it with my friends who have been here with us all along. 🖤 thank you to each and every one of y'all who has been kind enough to hang around these past few years; I have never been more grateful for anything in the world. I appreciate your time, your thoughts, but especially your friendship.
and if people happen to read this for the first time this year: hi! thanks for your time; you're about to get to know me and my love of the horror genre way too well lmao.
I hope you enjoy it~ 🖤]
You were holed up in your bed again with a migraine on a beautiful evening at the end of summer, and you were more than a little annoyed about it.
After waking up with it this morning, you’d spent the day inside, moving to whatever room was the darkest as the sun moved across the sky. You hadn’t been able summon the will to change out of your ensemble of a ratty band t-shirt and track shorts, and you were due to see Maxi for your usual movie night later. You’d established a bit of a routine after Maxi had a ‘late’ funeral (though in Greymoon, this translated to early evening): if he came over to your place, he chose the movie, and vice versa if you went to his. He was supposed to join you here this evening, and had already proposed a romance: The Notebook, much to your surprise. You’d both seen it, of course, but you’d never seen it with each other, and that was enough for the pair of you to count as ‘new.’ He’d suggested it when he’d brought you lunch on your break the other day, as he’d also taken to doing recently, because he apparently pulled out all the stops at being the sweetest man you’d ever met.
“Okay, I’m down,” you’d said, laughing and shaking your head when he brought it up. “But I’m going to make fun of it, I’m just warning you now.”
“That’s fine, just don’t make fun of me if I cry,” Maxi’d retorted playfully, and you’d only laughed more, unable to help yourself at his grin. Maxi was a weird one for a plethora of reasons, but his genuine affection for sappy romcoms was possibly one of your favorites.
However, despite trying all your usual remedies — caffeine, painkillers, CBD — it was all to no avail. You were pouting now with your head shoved into a pillow in your dim bedroom, where you’d been for the last few hours. It really wasn’t fair; you’d been skipping your placebo week in your pill packet since you’d first figured out that was a thing you could do and it wouldn’t kill you - but to still have the PMS symptoms that went with it seemed more than a little cruel.
As you were laying there feeling sorry for yourself, your phone buzzed cheerfully against the surface of your thrifted nightstand, causing it to rattle just the tiniest bit on its unsteady feet.
Doing some quick math — if you’d been laying here as long as you thought you’d been laying there, plus the angle of the sun through your curtains — you had a pretty good guess who it was from.
<[hi there beautiful x how’re we feeling? :)]
Yep. There he was, like clockwork. You smiled to yourself a little despite the throbbing in your temple, unlocking your screen — which was, not coincidentally, a photo of the two of you sticking your tongues out next to a giant headstone that bore the surname ‘Tongue’ - to respond.
[still shitty. xp sorry! raincheck on the notebook? <3]>
A moment later, your phone buzzed again, this time in a repeated pattern. You swiped to accept the call, putting him on speaker and setting it on the pillow next to your head. “Hey, baby. How’d the viewing go?”
“Oh, fine. Standard affair for some sweet little nana, bless her heart.” Maxi’s honeyed drawl filled your phone, and you could hear the distinctive sound of the hearse’s motor in the background. You were pretty sure Maxi was the last person in the South who used heart blessing genuinely and not to be an asshole. Not that he couldn’t be, of course; he was just usually much sneakier about it, with his Customer Service grin still perfectly in place. “Had to gently explain to the grandkids that no, she wasn’t going to open her eyes anymore. Or at least, you’d hope not, with the glue I used,” he added with his characteristic half-snort, half-giggle.
“Please tell me you didn’t actually say that,” you asked, covering your eyes with your hand. Maxi was a wonder: a polite, cheerful consummate professional — but also unfailingly honest about some of the grittier details of his work. He’d grown up around it; all the grim realities of the mortal flesh were second nature to him, and you understood that, but still. Even you had needed some air the day he’d explained just how many things needed plugged after death.
“No, darlin’, of course not,” Maxi chuckled. “Can’t have them getting ideas with glue sticks, after all.”
“Baby,” you sighed, rolling your eyes but still amused. “Do you really wonder why the school board keeps rejecting your proposal for a field trip to the mortuary?”
“I just think it would be informative and enlightening!” Maxi protested, his accent automatically shaving off his ‘g’s from the ends of things, and you laughed. “You’ve heard me say it a million times, hon, people would be a lot better off if they were exposed to death early! It’s natural!”
“Sure, babe, but I think first grade is a little young for that.”
“Aw, hell, I went down to the basement the first time when I was six, and I turned out…” Maxi trailed off, and you frowned for a moment, sitting up as if you could see him.
You couldn’t help but notice that he could get a little quiet sometimes, talking about when he was little. You’d heard around town when you’d first moved here (as small as it was) that his dad had been ‘a real piece of work,’ but you really didn’t have much else to go on other than that. He didn’t seem to like to discuss it, unless he was answering a question you asked directly, and even then, it was still pretty light on details for someone as social as him.
After a moment, he cleared his throat. “I’m just saying, “ he went on like nothing had happened. “Maybe if they got a glimpse of it early, they wouldn’t turn out to be thirty-somethings who took a phone call in the middle of the eulogy.”
“Shut up.” Your eyebrows rocketed up your forehead, and you fell back to your mattress again. “You have to be kidding me.” If Maxi had one pet peeve — well, okay, two along with people who stiffed waitstaff — it was people being rude at funerals.
“Nope!” Maxi chirped, but you could hear the fake smile in his voice. “Got right up and walked out when his phone went off at full volume during the son’s eulogy. Had the audacity to say that we could ‘keep going, don’t worry about it,’” he went on, in what you could only assume was supposed to be a scathing impression of something like a NorCal accent. Maxi’s own was so thick sometimes when he was annoyed that it was hard to tell when he was mocking someone specific. “I think it was a nephew or something. And then!” he added. “Didn’t even stay after! Or sign the guestbook! Walked right past the crying grandkids like it was nothing, talking about he had to go meet someone about a boat!”
“Oh my god.” You rolled over on your stomach like this was hot gossip. “What a jackass.”
“I know!” Maxi grumbled, and you had to fight a chuckle. Your baby was nothing if not a stickler for funeral etiquette. “I mean, I’m a perfect stranger! They don’t know me from a hole in the ground! If I can manage to express the proper sympathies for a woman I’ve only had in my basement for twenty four hours, it’s not that goddamn hard.” He sighed long and slow, with the sound of his fingers drumming for a moment on the steering wheel, and you could tell he was reigning himself in. “Anyway. I made a note to follow up with the family later,” he said with a note of finality.
This was part of Maxi’s whole shtick, as far as you knew. He had a thing about following up with families who’d had mourners being exceptionally rude, which you’d learned since meeting him was apparently a growing epidemic. You didn’t know what following up meant, per se, but you got the vibe he made it up to them somehow. He was sweet that way.
“But how are you feeling?” he asked, his voice all concern. “Any better?”
“Ugh, no. My body still hates me,” you sighed, rolling onto your side and pressing the offending temple into a pillow. “It’s not fair.”
“Oh, darlin’, it doesn’t hate you. It could never hate you, it loves you too much,” Maxi cooed, and you felt yourself melt a little.
It had taken some getting used to, having a partner who talked about bodies like they were separate entities. But when you literally knew them inside out like he did, it just kind of happened. Now it was soothing, when it wasn’t a little odd.
“It’s just a misunderstanding with your nerves, that’s all.” He paused, thinking. “Do you still want me to come over? I might know a trick or two to get around it, but if you just want alone time, that’s okay too.”
As miserable as you felt, you missed your boyfriend who hugged like a gator in a death roll. You could tell in his question he missed you too, clearly hoping for a yes.
“You can, but I’m gonna be really dull,” you warned him. “I’m just going to want to lay in the dark and listen to crime podcasts.”
You could hear the soft laugh on Maxi’s end; he didn’t understand why it helped your brain turn off to listen to the case details of unsolved homicides, but he humored you nonetheless. “Fine, baby. If I have to cuddle you through more stories about cops being utterly fucking incompetent, I will.”
“My hero.” You grinned. “Where are you, anyway?”
A pair of headlights ghosted their way over the wall in your darkening room opposite your window, and you heard the engine cut out on his side of the line. “…Your driveway,” Maxi admitted sheepishly, and you laughed. He’d never turned to go home from the church at all, he’d just driven straight here.
“Awful presumptuous of you, Mr. Morvant,” you teased.
“What can I say,” Maxi teased back, and you could hear the car door close outside. “I’m an optimist.”
“Key’s where it was last time. Get in here,” you ordered playfully, hanging up.
You heard your front door open and close, and Maxi carefully placing his shoes by the mat. By the time he made it back to your room, his jacket and tie were gone as well, and he was rolling the sleeves of his white dress shirt up to his elbows.
You gave him a wolf whistle just to see him turn pink around the ears. “Hey there, handsome. Come here often?”
“Hey yourself,” Maxi mumbled shyly, easing himself down onto your bed and kissing your forehead.
For a man who looked like him, you had no idea why he still wasn’t used to people pointing out the fact that he was hot. You’d thought he’d know, by now, but alas.
He leaned back to take you in, his hand gliding comfortingly over your shoulders. “Still feeling gross, darlin’?”
“Mm. If you could explain to my nerves what exactly this misunderstanding is, I’d appreciate it,” you said, one eye closed.
He smelled like lilies today, and you figured the family must have gone with the traditional arrangements. Just under that was the cold, clinical chemical smell of the embalming room; you weren’t totally used to it yet, but now it was almost weirdly comforting. Almost.
“…We-ell.” Maxi sat up again with a thoughtful expression.
You propped yourself up slightly, curious. “‘Well’ what?”
Maxi pursed his lips, looking around your room and tapping his fingers on his knee. “The nerves on that side of your forehead are inflamed due to a hormonal trigger,” he said slowly. He wasn’t explaining this to you, as you obviously knew how this worked - hell, you’d been putting up with this for more than half your life now. He was saying it more to himself, like figuring out a word problem. “…The best thing I can think to do is overwhelm it with an entirely different stimulus, one that will hopefully trigger enough dopamine to at least cut the pain down.”
“And that would be?” you asked, raising an eyebrow.
When Maxi met your eyes again, his were suddenly dark in a way that made heat flare across your cheeks. Granted, they were always dark: a deep brown that at times, in the light, bordered somehow on burgundy. But when he looked at you like this, they were near-perfect pieces of night set into his skull.
“Well, if you feel bad,” he said quietly. “Give me a chance to make you feel good, hmm?”
Oh, right. Maxi knew he was hot. He just chose to deploy it strategically. And damn, was it effective.
“Um…” You bit your lip, thinking it over. “I might be a little sensitive for some stuff right now.” As in, you weren’t sure him wrecking you was something your already overwhelmed system could handle, as fun as it normally was.
“Oh, it doesn’t have to be me specifically.” Maxi shrugged. “We just need something that works.” He tilted his head, considering, before he reached towards the lower cabinet door on your nightstand. “May I?”
You blinked. You hadn’t really had a boyfriend before whom you were comfortable seeing your collection of vibrators - other sex toys, sure, but in the past it just felt like most dudes would rather stick with more… mutually interactive objects. But Maxi was someone who literally never seemed phased by anything about the human body, always approaching new developments with that same casual shrug and ‘fine by me’ attitude you found so endearing.
“…Sure,” you said, shrugging yourself. At least you knew you weren’t about to be judged for whatever was in there.
Maxi slid off your bed onto his knees, opening the cabinet and checking inside. “Perfect.” He grinned. He was looking through the assorted shapes and sizes there like this was something he’d done numerous times, examining the contours of each with an appraising eye before looking at you. “Got a favorite, sugar?”
“…The black silicone one,” you mumbled, pointing vaguely in the direction of where you’d left it last. You didn’t know why this felt so revealing; you were an adult who knew and had a conscious relationship with their body, it was a totally normal thing to have these and to have a preferred one. It wasn’t like Maxi cared you had them, he was too secure for that. Hell, he was the one who’d gone to pick one out in the first place —
You paused, looking back to him. “Wait, how’d you know where those were?”
Maxi froze for half a second as he was inspecting the vibrator in question, something unreadable flickering over his face before he answered. “Lucky guess,” he said casually, still looking over the toy. “If you’re gonna use them, it makes sense for them to be close to your bed, no?”
“True,” you agreed. He just seemed to have a knack for where things in your house were, even when you’d first started dating; you figured he was just really intuitive that way. Working with people who spent most of the time crying probably meant you had to get pretty good at figuring things out by context, or something.
Experimentally, Maxi turned the toy on, flipping through its settings before holding it against the pad of his thumb experimentally. “They say if you want to test one of these accurately, you hold it against the tip of your nose,” he said. He glanced at you with his familiar smile. “But you ever tried standing in the middle of a sex shop with a vibrator on your nose?” He raised an eyebrow. “You get some awful funny looks.”
You giggled at this image, and Maxi’s eyes lit up at the sound of your laugh. “Do you frequent those often, Monsieur Morvant?”
“Baby,” Maxi purred, and he leaned towards you, kissing the tip of your nose. “I wear button-ups, I’m not buttoned up. At least,” he paused, his smile turning somewhat shy again. “…Not with the right person.”
You felt your cheeks sear with heat so suddenly, you wondered if Maxi could feel the temperature from where he sat with his lips an inch from yours. You met his eyes, watching them shift from yours down to your mouth and back again.
“Damn,” you said quietly, and Maxi’s gaze snapped back, suddenly concerned. “You just really make that little smile of yours work for you, huh?” You smiled in turn, watching him turn pink again. “You get anything you want with that around here?”
“Um. It helps sometimes.” He shrugged, bashful again before he cleared his throat. “Now,” he said, voice low and hushed. “Let me take care of you, hmm?”
You nodded, feeling your shoulders relax. “Okay,” you said, a little more breathlessly than you meant to, and Maxi laughed softly through his nose.
“Lie back, gorgeous,” he murmured, moving so he was sitting down by your waist towards the middle of your mattress.
As you moved to rest against your pillows, you shivered slightly as Maxi’s fingertips brushed your skin and hooked under the waistband of your soft shorts.
“May I?”
You nodded, biting your lip, and Maxi pulled them down your thighs in a fluid motion when you lifted your hips slightly. You couldn’t stop another shiver as his right hand ghosted over your thigh, pulling it apart from the other with a deceitfully gentle grip.
“Good…?” Maxi paused, glancing at you with a slight upturn at the end like he was waiting to fill in a blank.
“Hm? …Oh.” You smiled once you put together what it was he was asking. You’d mentioned to Maxi maybe all of once, when you were first getting to know him, that sometimes certain terms vibed with you and sometimes they didn’t, and since that single conversation, he’d made a point of checking what you wanted whenever the two of you were together. He was sweet that way, with an attention to detail that would’ve been almost spooky if he didn’t always use it for something thoughtful. “…Honestly, I’m not really feeling either today?”
“I can work with that,” he said softly. “Now, keep being good for me and spread.” His fingers tracing lines up and down your inner thighs, and you complied readily.
You felt yourself squirm slightly as he took your free thigh in his other hand, leaning between the two and surprising you when he licked a broad, hot stripe up your slit.
“Maxi!” you hissed hard through your teeth, flinching against your mattress at the unexpected sensation.
“Easy, darlin’.” He glanced at you over the frames of his glasses. “This is just getting you ready, that’s all.” He rubbed your thighs with his thumbs, planting a soft kiss on your stomach. “Poor thing’s so sensitive.” You could swear you saw the smallest hint of a smirk as he slid down again, his hands locking into place on your upper thighs and squeezing slightly. “Just relax, I got you.”
You let yourself lie back against your pillows again, trying not to twitch as hard when he laved another wet stripe through you, the warmth of his tongue like the hottest part of the summer. You heard the smallest moan from him on the third swipe, and when he finally came up again, you saw him lick away the slightest tinge of blood from his lower lip.
“…Couldn’t help myself,” he said quietly, his smile with something a little… darker to it, now.
“You fucking vampire,” you laughed self-consciously, falling back against the pillows again and covering your eyes with your arm. “Was that what you were after, you weirdo?”
Maxi chuckled, but that too was different somehow, and you glanced out from under said arm as he kissed your inner thigh and then your knee. “You know I’ll never say no to a taste of you, sugar. Now then.”
You heard the vibrator whirr softly to life, and you uncovered your eyes entirely to see Maxi testing it again against the base of his palm.
“I’m startin’ with this on high because we’re trying for some quicker relief, but you tell me what you need, okay?” He looked to you for eye contact, as always. Maxi was nothing if not deliberate, everywhere.
You nodded, giving him a smile at how seriously he was taking this. “Okay.”
“Look at you, being so well-behaved,” he said, his smile its usual self again. “Now, relax for me.” With a carefulness to the gesture, he pressed the vibrator carefully to your clit, watching your face.
Your hips moved against his hand, but reliably, he held you in place, his grip like iron. Jesus, you never would’ve suspected he could hold you down like this when you’d first met him, cleaning headstones that day in the cemetery near his House. But when you considered how often he probably had to quite literally lift dead weight — and then again, how often he was asked to step in as a pallbearer — it kind of made a grim sort of sense.
“Oh fuck, right there,” you hissed again, moving your hips to get the vibrator in that spot that had just caused sparks to shoot down your nerve endings.
“Wanna show me, darlin’?” Maxi said quietly.
You reached down with your free hand, covering his and helping him position it exactly where you wanted it. You kept him there, pushing it down with yours to add pressure, until he laughed low in his throat and leaned down to kiss your knuckles.
“I got it from here, I promise.” He held the vibrator perfectly still as you let go, albeit reluctantly. When he was sure you were comfortable, he shifted so he could lean down next to your hips, tracing the skin with the tip of his nose. “God, aren’t you a sight.”
You felt him press a slightly open-mouthed kiss to the stretch marks on your thighs, his tongue tracing one even as you felt your leg spasming slightly under his mouth.
“Fuck, Maxi, I’m really close already,” you managed, the pressure causing your hips to twitch hard under his careful application. It had only been a few minutes by this point, but between your favorite toy on its highest setting, and your favorite boy being… well, himself, it was enough.
“Good, that’s it,” he crooned, pushing down just a little more so you had to bite down hard on your lip. “Come on, gorgeous, let go for me.”
You came with a soft moan against the pressure, squirming as best you could as he held you down. Even through your aftershocks, he held it there, waiting until your hand gripped his. “Let up, baby.”
Maxi lifted it away from you, but didn’t turn it off, sitting up so he could look down into your eyes. “Anything?”
You were panting slightly, and a laugh bubbled through as you tried to catch your breath. “For some reason that’s a lot more fun when it’s not just me holding it, I don’t know why.” You paused, rubbing your temple slightly. “And… kind of?”
“Hmm.” Maxi watched you with a thoughtful purse of his lips. “We’re probably gonna have to give it a little more than that, I think.”
“Oh god, that’s just the worst news,” you joked, rolling your eyes. “Twist my arm, why don’t you?”
“Sorry.” Maxi winked at you. “Didn’t bring the right rope for that tonight.” He waited until you were laughing again before surprising you by setting the toy right back on your clit, causing you to gasp and grab his wrist.
“Fuck!” You were suddenly aware of exactly how sensitive you were, your current symptoms plus the lingering heat of your previous orgasm combining to have you writhing hard against your mattress. “Fuck, Maxi, that’s so much—“
“You’re okay, sugar,” Maxi soothed, propping himself next to you with his free hand so he could kiss your forehead. “I got you, you just ride it out for me.”
You were whimpering already, biting down into your lip so hard you thought it would bleed. Everything felt like exposed wire against a chainlink fence, your nerves sparking at their ends as the overstimulation began to set in. Something at the core of you twisted tighter still, and your breath felt short in your lungs.
“Maxi, baby, god…” Your hand flew up to clutch at his wrist, nearly lightheaded.
“Come on,” Maxi whispered, stretching out next to you on the mattress so he could kiss your neck, biting gently in places to make you squirm more. “Be good for me, you can give me another. Let me see you come, you know I love to watch you when you do.”
At this, your second broke over you, and you bucked hard against the vibrator, your hips spasming at the rush of warmth that seemed to hijack your whole system. You could feel your cunt positively dripping onto your sheets, your face flushed from both the sensation and how vulnerable you felt.
Maxi didn’t let up with the vibrator at all through the aftermath, and you felt yourself choke out a small groan of a sob, tears beginning to gather at the corner of your eyes. “Holy shit, that’s- that’s so much, I can’t—“
“Ssh, yes you can, baby,” Maxi soothed, and one of his legs curled over your twitching bare thigh, pinning it against the mattress.
You turned your head to look at him lying on the pillow next to you, and felt another spike of heat when you saw his expression: dark eyes seemingly fathomless, watching your face with a mix of hunger and curiosity. He leaned towards you, capturing your lips and threatening to overwhelm you a completely different way even as you flinched from the merciless sensation at your clit.
You gave a broken sound like a sob again when he pressed it down just a fraction more, and he only kissed you all the more fiercely, as if trying to swallow the sound.
Pulling away for a second, he removed his glasses, now thoroughly fogged and somewhat crooked from the friction between the two of you. He dropped them off the edge of the mattress, seemingly unconcerned. He came back for more, half pulling you underneath him as he kissed you again, and all you could taste was him, somehow sweet in your mouth.
He let go of your lower lip after nipping it hard enough with his teeth that you made a sound like a wince, and when he pulled away, there was the slightest trace of blood again. He looked at you with a raw darkness to his hunger, now, before he buried his face against your neck, his teeth rasping softly at your pulse point.
You reached up, one hand tangling in his now absolutely disheveled hair and the other gripping the fabric of his dress shirt, feeling like you were just trying to ground yourself in something before you couldn’t think anymore. This was the Maxi that you had learned over time was in there, somewhere. He only ever seemed to come out here, with you shaking and whining underneath him, but it was a part of him that felt sometimes like you were standing on the edge of a black hole. Like the essence of Want concentrated, like he had found something sustaining after going without for ages, and there were moments you’d swear to god the man was about to devour you. You didn’t know if it was something in someone constantly surrounded by death reacting to such a visceral sign of life, but the thing that scared you about this wasn’t feeling like he could consume you: it was that part of you kind of wanted him to.
You’d spent so long feeling like you’d had to hold everything together, keep your head above water, that the idea of someone else wanting to take you over so completely was almost… a relief. And it was hard not to feel safe with someone as vigilant, as thoughtful as Maxi; he spent so much time constantly thinking about and caring for other people, you were more than fine if he found something he needed so viciously in you.
But this train of thought was obliterated when Maxi bit down right on a spot he knew you liked, and between that and the vibrator becoming nearly punishing against your clit, you were gasping like you were drowning, your hand clawing so hard down the back of Maxi’s shirt you were worried you’d rip it.
“Good,” he gasped, breaking bruising contact with your skin. “Come on, darlin’, c’mon, one more, come for me and tell me how you feel.”
“Maxi, fuck, I’m gonna break,” you sobbed, tears definitely starting to spill now. “Fuck, it’s too much, I can’t, I can’t do this—“
“Yes you can,” Maxi murmured, his voice low and frantic as he kissed the tears off your cheeks. “Give it to me, gorgeous, make a mess and tell me how much you want it, fuck, you’re so pretty, I just want to keep you like this forever…”
Maxi’s loss of coherence in your ear was just enough to send you over, his free hand reaching across you both to hold you down as your back arched sharply off your bed. “Fuck, Daddy, it’s too much, I can’t—“ Your words faded into a strangled cry that echoed off the walls of your room as you felt a rush of warm slick coat the tops of your thighs, your whole body shuddering hard against the white-hot sensation that eclipsed everything else.
When you fell back to the mattress, panting and shaking, it took you a moment for your eyes to focus again, and you turned sharply to hide your face in Maxi’s shirt.
“Good.” Maxi lifted the vibrator away, turning it off before he set it aside to pull you against him. He was running his hand over your hair, pushing it away from your face as you fought to catch your breath, and whispering praises as he kissed your bruised neck and your cheeks. “You did so well for me, you make such a beautiful wreck, baby, it’s breathtaking…”
You were still panting against his chest, waiting for your thighs to stop shaking but unable to bring them together because of just how sensitive your still-spasming cunt was.
Maxi dutifully pulled you on top his chest now, holding you there and kissing the top of your head as he waited for you to come down. “…Better?” he asked, and you could hear the smile in his voice as you finally evened out.
“Fucking god, Maxi,” you laughed, rolling so you were fully laying on top of him. “Jesus, babe, were you trying to get me to black out? I’m pretty sure I blacked out.”
You paused, thinking through what just happened and suddenly realizing exactly what you said. “…Oh fuck me, I really did black out,” you mumbled, immediately rolling off him curling nearly into a ball to hide your face. “…Sorry? About that? Was that weird?”
You timidly looked up just enough to see Maxi lying there, looking off to the side like you’d just asked him to do advanced calculus in his head — not like it was unpleasant, but like it was going to take him a second. “…No?” he said slowly, looking back to you. “I mean, really, no,” he added quickly when you groaned, covering your face with your hands.
“Fucking hell, I knew it would be weird, I’m sorry—“ you mumbled all in a rush, putting more space between the two of you. You wondered briefly if you rolled off your bed and under it, whether he’d just go away if you refused to ever come out again. He had to go home at some point, right? It’s not like he could cancel a viewing because the person he was dating had decided to become a bedframe hermit, after all.
“No — Hey, come here, baby,” he laughed, reaching over to pull you back as you tried to curl into a fetal position on your mattress. “Honey, nothing with you is weird. It’s really not, I promise.” He moved so he was propped over you on both elbows, kissing your hands were they were hiding your face. “Come on, darlin’, come out and talk to me. It’s really okay. I’ve just- aww,” he cooed, seeing you tear up slightly with embarrassment when you at last removed your hands. “What’re you getting so upset about, sweetheart? It’s fine.” He smiled, pulling you stubbornly back against him and kissing your face with obnoxious emphatic smooching sounds until you cracked and giggled, albeit shyly.
He leaned back, taking you in with a relieved sigh. “There you are,” he said, and the way he ran his hand over your side and squeezed your hip felt like an act of seeing that filled your chest with a new kind of warmth. “As I was saying, before you tried to turn into an armadillo on me — neat trick, by the way.” He winked at you. “If it’s something you like, I’m then I’m willin’ to give it a go. I’ve just… never been called that, before, ever,” he admitted with a shrug. He paused, thinking it over some more, before giving you a look of exaggerated suspicion. “Is this an age thing?”
“No, Maxi, don’t be ridiculous.” You rolled your eyes as he chuckled. There was about a decade and change between the two of you, but you both felt the same about so many things, it was really only noticeable when one of you made a reference that went over the other person’s head.
“I…” You bit your lip, now the one feeling sheepish again. “I’ve actually never used it, with anyone else. Um, before.” You shrugged, smiling a little but still not quite able to meet his eyes. “I just… I don’t know, I feel… safe, with you?” Your hands found his chest, fiddling with the fabric of his shirt. “Like… like you mean it, when you say you want to take care of me. Not that you’d have to, obviously, I know that’s a lot. I just. I don’t… get that, um, often.” At last, finally desperate to see if any of this made sense, you met his eyes. “…Is that okay?”
Maxi’s eyes were, again, startlingly dark, but it was his expression of such blatant need that made you inhale sharply in surprise.
“Yes.” It came out like a hiss through his teeth. “Yes, darlin’, that’s absolutely okay. Jesus, is it ever okay.” He wrapped an arm around your torso and crushed you to him with another bruising, edge-of-consuming kiss, his hand tightening into a fist in the back of your ratty t-shirt.
When you wound your arms around his neck as you kissed back, fitting yourself to him, you could feel his desperately hard length through the fabric of his dress pants.
He pulled back just a moment as you brushed your thigh purposefully against it, gasping quietly. “Sorry — I know you weren’t feeling well, you don’t have to—“ he said quickly, his words practically tripping out of his mouth in his hurry.
You shook your head, sucking hard on his lower lip for a moment and shutting him up. “No, I want it,” you reassured him softly, reaching down and cupping the bulge there just enough to make him fight back a groan. “…Give it to me?” you asked, widening your eyes innocently.
Maxi exhaled like you’d just kneed him in the stomach. “Baby, you can’t be looking at me like that, I will lose my damn mind,” he muttered, shaking his head but nonetheless sitting up and ditching his belt as soon as he could get it unfastened. He started undressing himself, but you sat up, unbuttoning his shirt with a deft hand. You pushed it back off his shoulders, then the two of you stripped away the white tank top underneath without a second’s hesitation. He only paused to pull you against his skin, savoring the contact as he traced the tip of his nose up the side of your neck.
One of his hands reached down, tentatively brushing the ripped hem of your shirt. “Can I take this off you?” he whispered, studying your face. “I just wanna see you - but I understand if it’s a bad chest day, you can say no.”
“It’s fine,” you reassured him, kissing the corner of his mouth. “They’re just sore.”
“I’ll be careful,” Maxi promised, and he lifted the cloth off you so gently that you knew he’d keep it. He held you to him again, kissing your newly exposed clavicle, and you shivered at the contrast between his mouth and the cool air of your room.
Your fingers traced absently over the scar on Maxi’s chest; it was a fairly wide, perfectly white strip of raised tissue that ran diagonally over where his heart would be beneath the muscle, and had surprised you in its intensity when you’d first seen it. He was much less shy about it now, compared to when he could barely meet your eyes the first time, and after you’d started spending the night on a regular basis, he seemed to doze off a bit quicker when you kept your palm against it as you both were falling asleep.
In this moment, however, your fingertips seemed to spur him on, and he pulled his trousers and underwear off with haste before he pinned you by your shoulders against your mattress.
“You’re sure?” he asked again. His eyes were practically onyx as he looked you over, hands shaking just enough to be noticeable as he held you there.
You couldn’t help but smirk, your hands reaching up to settle on top of both of his. “You’ve taken such good care of me today,” you murmured, leaning up to kiss a line up his jaw. “I want to do the same for you, babe.”
You made a small noise of surprise as Maxi immediately fell to your throat again, sucking hard at the crook of your neck and shoulder before moving lower, his kisses turning ghostly when he reached your chest. You savored the affection, the kisses and kitten licks to the parts of you he knew at times caused you the greatest anxiety, but when he looked up at you again, hair falling into his eyes now, his eyes somehow seemed different yet again.
You weren’t sure what had changed in the light, but the burgundy of his pupils seemed even more prominent than before. Almost veering into outright red.
“Darlin’,” he said, his voice rough in a new, unfamiliar way. “You have no idea just how well you do that.”
Before you could question this, he locked his lips on yours again, this kiss messy and warm but harsh enough that you felt the bloody nip on your lip from earlier start to bleed anew, tasting it between your tongues. Maxi’s hips were against yours, his cock already dripping and needy against your thigh, and you reached between the pair of you to guide him to your entrance.
“C’mon, Maxi,” you murmured, and that was invitation enough. His hand found one of yours, intertwining your fingers and pinning it hard to the mattress as he slid into you in a fluid motion. This was enough to draw a surprised breath from both of you; normally, you needed to be eased into, something that took a few minutes of gentle assurances and pausing, but in your current still-wrecked state, this felt effortless.
Maxi full-on moaned, hiding his face for a moment as you felt him flex hard inside you as you adjusted around him. “Jesus, baby,” he managed eventually, voice shaking just slightly. He tentatively moved his hips against yours, testing, and you found yourself able to take him further than you normally could at first. Encouraged, he started moving against you in earnest, keeping one of your hands interlocked with his. His other moved for now to grip one of the rungs of your iron bed frame, holding fast as you moved your hips against his as the two of you fell into a pattern.
“Good, that’s my baby, god, you feel fuckin’ fantastic…” He was already losing his train of thought, and you weren’t much better off, your free hand trying to find purchase on his back and ending up leaving long red marks when you felt every inch him against your still-sensitive walls. After three rounds with your favorite vibrator, you were a bit tapped on your faculties for speech, biting down into your lip as a particularly high whine came from deep in your chest when he brushed the sensitive spot inside you. It felt like your nerves were on fire again, your breath becoming staccato once more as Maxi’s hips snapped hard against yours.
He was flush against your chest and stomach, barely leaving room for you to move as you felt the stretch of every thrust. You felt him let go of your bed frame, his free hand moving instead now to gently place itself over your neck. You shivered at his long, tapered fingers, hands that could play the piano as easily as they could stitch closed a mouth, eye, or fatal wound, and you swore you saw just the slightest hint of a smile from him when you did.
He was watching your face again, always careful, but gave the smallest questioning squeeze. You nodded with a soft, breathless noise of assent, your hand leaving his back to cover this one and emphasize this permission. When he put the slightest pressure on your throat with his thumb and index finger, you audibly moaned, tilting your head back to give him better access. When he squeezed more, you felt your eyes roll back slightly.
“God, you’re so soft,” Maxi murmured, and you felt his thumb trace up and down the side of your neck. “You’re so delicate, darlin’, and you don’t even know, you have no idea how gentle I have to be with you, keep you safe…” He made a strained frustrated noise, his thrusts sharper now as his hips started to stutter.
“I trust you,” you mumbled. Your hand found his hair again and pulled so he fell once more to the crook of your neck, seemingly his favorite place to seek shelter in you. Or rather, one of them, as you fought back another moan at a sharp thrust. “I trust you, Maxi, I feel safe with you, remember?” You turned, pressing a kiss to his now damp temple.
Maxi let out a soft noise, half a gasp and half a whine, and you knew he was close. “You’re gonna make me come if you keep talking like that,” he said, his breath warm against your skin. “You can give me one more, can’t you?”
All these sensations were still sharp and overwhelming to your already-rocked system, and even now, the heat pooling in your cunt threatened to burn away any other feeling. “Baby, I don’t know,” you whimpered, gasping slightly as Maxi moved to better brush against the spot inside you. “Fuck, I really don’t know if I can, it’s been too much—“
“Yes, you can.” Maxi kissed from your jaw over your cheek, finally kissing the corner of your mouth and squeezing your hand. “C’mon, sugar, come on my cock for me and let me feel you.” He kissed you once more, ravenous, and tenderly tightening his hold on either side of your neck. “Be good, and do as you’re told.”
“Maxi, fuck—!” That was it, you were gone. You came harder than you had yet around him, losing yourself in the rush of heat and slick with a strangled sob and practically yanking his hair. Your body arched hard against his torso, against the hand at your throat, and the solidness of him grounded you when it felt like your whole body was going to tear itself asunder in the overflow of feeling.
Maxi’s hand only left yours to catch you against him, holding you there as he pressed his forehead to yours. It was only a few more stuttering thrusts later, amidst your aftermath, that he joined you over the edge. He gave a growling groan as his filled you with his own heat, fingernails leaving marks in your skin where they rested.
The two of you were a panting, sweaty tangle, Maxi somehow managing to kiss you breathless when you were still trying to come back to earth. “You angel, jesus, darlin’, you’re gorgeous, look at you, you did so well for me.” His praise was a soft, effusive whisper, one hand ghosting over the marks you’d accumulated with a feather-light touch while the other held you solidly against him. “You okay, beautiful?”
“Yeah,” you breathed, nodding as you leaned against his shoulder, your hand finding the scar on his chest again. Beneath it, you felt his heart hammering as hard as yours, and for some reason you were comforted by this. “…Yeah,” you repeated, your voice somewhat steadier. You swallowed, still feeling like you were trying to catch your breath. “Just don’t expect me to, like, remember anything important for a little while, okay?” You smiled as Maxi laughed, kissing your forehead.
“So I shouldn’t tell you any secret family recipes, or exactly how much I adore you, got it.” He winked, and you laughed this time, your arms winding around his neck so you could press your forehead to his.
“Jesus, honey.” You giggled, kissing each of the little moles that formed a constellation across his face. “Could you not be perfect for maybe five minutes?”
Maxi chuckled, but there was something to it you couldn’t place. When you pulled back to try to look at him, he just moved his hand to the back of your head and leaned forward to kiss your forehead. You accepted the gesture, and even let him tuck you under his chin as he stroked your bare back in silence for a few, thoughtful moments.
“…Maxi?” you asked finally, at last leaning back enough to break his grasp. “Still with me, handsome?”
Maxi nodded, smiling a bit absently as he seemed to come out of some sort of thought. “Yeah. Sorry, you’re just… you’re really sweet, when you say stuff like that,” he said, and there was just the tiniest tinge of sheepishness to his voice.
You blinked, tilting your head. “Did I… make you uncomfortable? I’m sorry—“
“No,” Maxi said quickly, holding up a hand. “Nothing to apologize for, darlin’, I just… uh.” He shrugged. “Not used to that, I guess,” he laughed nervously.
“What, not even when you’re giving everyone’s ornery old relatives the perfect send-off?” you teased, lightly nudging his shoulder. “You’re golden at everything you do here. I don’t see how you haven’t been snapped up way before I moved in.”
Maxi shrugged again almost reflexively, running a hand through his hair to get it out of his face. “Yeah, well. Small towns,” he said, barely managing a smile. He was oddly quiet, leaning over the side of your bed so he could find where he set his glasses. The silence remained when he put them back on, adjusting them even after they were in place.
“…Yeah, well,” you repeated at last. You leaned forward to take his face in your hands, making a point to look him in the eye. “Lucky me.” You gave him a reassuring smile, and kissed the end of his nose.
He sat there for a moment, looking at you with an expression that seemed… anxious, given the high you were both still riding. He hesitated a moment, adjusting his frames on his nose before he took a breath. “I just—“ He hesitated, running his tongue over his teeth as he tried to find the words. “…I don’t want to disappoint you.” His tone was serious, and it took you by surprise. “I’ve done that before — a lot,” he added, looking away for a moment. “And I… I don’t know, I… like you too much, for that.” The words once again tumbled over each other in a rush out of his mouth.
“Maxi, baby.” You felt your brow furrow in concern, still keeping your hands on his jaw. “…I know this is, um. Maybe… new? For me, anyway, in terms of its, uh. Intensity,” you said, stumbling a bit as you looked away yourself. “But…” You took a breath. “Don’t worry about that, okay? Like, you’re still human, I know that. So am I.” You smiled, tilting your head so you could catch his eye as he looked down. “If shit happens, we’ll work it out. But I’m not worried about that, with you,” you added, your smile suddenly shy with the truth of this. “I’m really not. You’ve been one of the most reliable, thoughtful people I’ve met since I got here — and, humanness aside…” You paused, choosing your words. “I don’t think you’d ever hurt me. Not on purpose.” You shook your head. “So just… be with me now, okay? We’ll figure out whatever we need to, but not before it happens.”
Maxi stared at you through this, and there was again something in his gaze you couldn’t quite explain, but the hesitancy didn’t seem to totally leave his expression. “…Okay,” he said finally, nodding somewhat. He cleared his throat, obviously trying to shake something off. “Okay. Yeah.”
He leaned forward, kissing your forehead and then your cheek, and you still couldn’t totally decide whose anxiety he was trying to assuage.
After a moment, he pulled away, his fingers drumming briefly where they rested on your thigh. “…Did you eat at all, today?” he asked at last, suddenly back to his usual self.
You rolled your eyes playfully. “As much as I could on this stomach, yeah.” You thought it over. “…You want to just order something in and take a whack at The Notebook?”
Maxi laughed. “Now, darlin’, I don’t want to suffer again on my account.”
“Nah, I’ll watch it with you,” you teased. “It’s not suffering if it’s with you. Especially not after… well.” You nodded towards your now thoroughly rumpled bedsheets, feeling your face heat up once again.
“Well, if that’s all it took, you shoulda said so.” Maxi winked at you, making you giggle. “Here, first thing’s first.” He kissed you again, surprising you with the heat of it before he got up and headed towards your bathroom. “Don’t go nowhere.”
“Twist my arm, Monsieur,” you called after him, before you fell back on your pillows again with a small contented sigh.
Fuck. You were in this deep. This morbid weirdo with the constant death-related dad jokes had your whole heart, and you seemed more than a little okay with it.
As you heard the tap running in the next room, you paused, picking up on something else close by. Looking to the floor, you saw where Maxi’s phone had slid out of the pocket of his slacks in his haste to take them off.
It was vibrating, a number with an unfamiliar, out-of-country area code showing up on his screen. Where there should have been a name saved, there was something else.: H. Do not answer.
You were frowning at it, wondering whether or not to inspect it further, before you turned to look back to the door — and about jumped out of your skin, finding Maxi looming just behind you with a damp washcloth. “Jesus, Maxi,” you breathed, putting a hand briefly to your chest. “You’ve got some ghost feet, or something.”
“Funeral steps,” Maxi said with an apologetic shrug. “Gotta move in silence when you’re trying to avert disaster during the hymns.” He nodded towards the edge of the bed, and you moved towards it obligingly, your cheeks heating again as he knelt in front of you to clean you up.
“I’m sorry, babe, I promise I wasn’t trying to snoop,” you said, glancing sheepishly towards the floor again. “I just heard it buzzing, and I wasn’t sure if it was going to be a pick-up again.” You had learned firsthand just how quickly Maxi needed to be on call when there was another decedent needing to be taken to the mortuary, even in a town as small as Greymoon. Things had even gotten to the point where he trusted you enough to ask if you wanted to ride along; he always handled the heavy lifting and dealing with the distraught relatives, of course. But he seemed to appreciate having a living soul along with him, the two of you talking about the family, the deceased, and just life and death in general on the rides to and from the House. He’d acted like this was such a pleasant change, sometimes, you’d wondered how many times he’d ferried another dearly departed along with only his thoughts for company.
“Hm?” Maxi paused, glancing over at his phone — and frowned in clear consternation when he saw the missed call notification. For an instant, his hand hovered half-heartedly towards it… before his fingers curled back into his palm.
He sighed, and there was some impatience to it as he looked away. “It’s nothin’,” he said quietly, returning his attention and delicate touch to you before taking care of himself. “It’s just…” He hesitated, as if weighing his options. “I have this cousin down in… Mexico City, I think I heard last.” The pause that followed had a tinge of melancholy to it, his eyes on the floor. “We don’t talk anymore. Haven’t for years.”
You blinked, taken aback. “I thought…” You hesitated, not wanting to kick a hornet’s nest but also still confused. “I thought you said you didn’t have any family.”
“I don’t,” he reassured you, meeting your eyes again. “I really don’t on this side of the border. My mom’s folk didn’t move down here when she got married, so I’ve never really met them. And my dad’s side is all dead now.” He shrugged, looking away again. You saw his fingers briefly drum on his own knee. “It’s just me left, here.”
You bit your lip for a moment, not entirely sure what you were walking into here. “…So I’m guessing you don’t want me to invite him over for dinner?”
“Absolutely not.” Maxi’s gaze was suddenly sharper than you’d ever seen it. “I — Sorry, baby,” he added quickly, wincing when he saw the surprised look you couldn’t help. “It’s… it’s just complicated,” he sighed. He pulled his boxers back on before he sat down on the edge of your bed and fell backwards onto your mattress, staring sightlessly at your ceiling.
You shifted to grab the clothes you’d spent the day curled up in and took your time putting them back on, determined to ice over the traces of hurt in your chest so there’d be none left when you spoke. “…So, are we not at the part of things where we’re meeting each’s others, uh, people, or…?” You kept your eyes on your knees. This was not unfamiliar with people you’d dated before, but something about the idea with Maxi, who’d been nothing but sweet and genuine since you’d been going out… the disappointment threatened to cave in your chest. “Because that’s fine, of course. Obviously,” you added, your tone studiedly casual. “I’d just like to know, so I don’t mention anything to anyone I’m not supposed to.” You plastered on a closed-mouthed smile, trying to seem chill and flexible, charming and coy and Good at This. “We can keep things quiet. That can be… fun.” You tasted bile even as you said it. You wondered, silently, if you managed a wink when he looked at you next, could you manage to make it look flirtatious? Or would it just come off like your eye was twitching?
It took him a second to process that, seemingly having to surface from his own thoughts. “…Wait, what d’you mean— Oh, darlin’, no.” Maxi sat up again like a shot, seizing your hands in his. “It’s not like that, I swear it’s not. Please, look at me. Please?” He sounded aghast at the mere possibility, squeezing your hands gently until you at last looked up and your fake smile fell away.
“It’s not that at all, or anything close,” he said, shaking his head furiously. “It’s got nothin’ to do with you, I swear. It’s just… he and I fell out a long time ago,” he admitted at last. “A decade, at least. You don’t need to meet him, I don’t want you anywhere near him. He just turned out to be… bad news.” His jaw tensed. “Hell, I only kept his number because, y’know, ‘blood is blood,’ or somethin’.” He let go with one hand only to gestured dismissively, clearly quoting something he’d been told a million times. “Our dads were twins; we… grew up together. Him and me and my sister.” His voice was hushed as he spoke, and for a brief second, his lips pressed together like he was trying to keep them steady.
You blinked, your chest aching now for an entirely different reason. While you’d known Maxi’s sister had passed when he was a teenager, and that he lived alone after both his parents passed in his twenties, he’d really never talked about his family beyond answering your early questions. You’d respected that thus far, wanting to be mindful of his privacy, but you were suddenly aware of how much pain just might be lurking under that quiet.
You interlaced your fingers with the hand still holding yours, squeezing in lieu of the hug you desperately wanted to give him.
He glanced down at his phone again. “If for some god-forsaken reason I have to see him, then I’m just meeting him somewhere out of town. Even then, it’s not like we’re going to stick around and chat, either.” He looked back to you, eyes pleading. “I’m not keeping you from anybody, baby, I swear. Hell, if I still had family around, I’d never be able to shut up about you.” He smiled, the soft earnest one that you’d come to adore, and he stroked your cheek with a ghostly touch. “But if there’s anyone I definitely don’t want you to meet, it’s him. And it’s only because I’m afraid you’ll run screamin’ if you do.”
You rolled your eyes even as the tightness in your chest dissipated, lifting Maxi’s hand to kiss the back of it gently before holding it against your sternum. “Maxi, honey, he can’t be that bad. Like, I have some pretty terrible cousins, don’t get me wrong,” you added. “But still. I don’t want you to feel like you have protect me from anything — and definitely not your family.” You nudged him gently with your thigh. “I’ve already proven I’m not squeamish with a lot of stuff, right?” you teased.
“…Yeah. Right,” Maxi mumbled, his gaze falling back to his phone for a beat.
Finally, he glanced up at you again, smiling. “Anyway. We never agreed on dinner.”
“Oh, yeah, we didn’t.” You stood up, then paused where you were, wincing. “Oh, fuck, babe,” you muttered, laughing shyly. “I might need another minute.”
“Here, hold on.” Maxi stood up next to you, then swept you up into a bridal carry as you laughed in surprised delight — you couldn’t remember the last time someone had carried you somewhere, and definitely not this effortlessly.
He grinned, kissing your temple. “Now - where to, sugar?”
“Just my couch,” you said. You leaned against his chest, fishing your phone out of your pocket. “I’ll start checking the usual places’ delivery times.”
“Works for me.” Maxi carried you carefully through your house, never seeming to hesitate as he maneuvered through your small hallways. Like your bedroom earlier, he’d always navigated your house, even during his first time over, with a familiarity that was almost uncanny. You figured it probably wasn’t the only house built like this, especially in a town this small; how often did he come and go each day out of other people’s homes, usually at the most delicate moments of their lives? It must all seem intuitive, after a while.
At last, the two of you made it to your living room, and Maxi set you down so he could flop unceremoniously onto your couch. He then immediately pulled you down on top of him, holding you between his legs with your back against his chest.
“Thank you, baby,” you said, turning to kiss him appreciatively before you turned to your phone once more. “You feel like anything in particular?”
“Somethin’ appropriately greasy to go with the schlocky movie, I think,” he said with mock thoughtfulness, kissing behind your ear as you giggled.
He paused, and you thought he was reading over your shoulder, until you realized he was staring at the bookshelf in the corner of your living room. “…So, who’s that?”
You looked up sharply, thinking someone had gotten in while you were stuck in bed, but saw nothing there. It took you a moment of searching your shelves before you realized he was talking about the small silver container on one at tour eye-level. “Damn, baby, good eye,” you said, glancing over your shoulder at him. “That’s my great aunt… well, her ashes. You know what I mean.” You shifted slightly where you sat. “She was almost a second mom, when I was growing up. She’d been like an older sister to my actual mom, then helped take care of me. I spent all my breaks and holidays in college at her and my gran’s house.” You smiled, remembering many sleepy afternoons and nights spent baking for the hell of it. “…She actually passed right after I got into my Masters program, at the tail end of what was probably, like… my worst ever depression spell. Episode. Whatever.” You bit your lower lip, remembering getting to share the news with her in the hospital.
How, despite her exhaustion, she’d still managed to glow with joy alongside you, holding your hand while you cried with relief.
“It’s weird, and probably a little selfish of me to think so, but it almost felt like she was waiting around to make sure I got my feet back under me again. You know?” You weren’t worried about him thinking you were weird. If anyone would understand your own grief-driven logic, it was Maxi.
“Sure,” Maxi said, nodding like this was a perfectly normal thing. “She’s moved around with you since then, I see.”
“Yeah.” You smiled a little. “I don’t know, it just feels nice to have family around sometimes, even if they’re not… really there.”
“No, I get it,” Maxi kissed your shoulder. “I get it completely.”
“I knew you would,” you said, relaxing back against his chest.
As you were still looking through menu options on your phone, you could feel him rest his chin on your shoulder where he’d just kissed it, apparently still staring at your bookshelf. Out of the corner of your eye on your other side, you saw, for a moment, the tiniest flicker of movement… was he waving at someone?
You turned just enough to sneak a peek out of your peripheral vision — only to find Maxi’s hand merely absently swaying next to you, in a slower version of the finger-drumming he did when he was thinking.
“…I know we did it last week, but do you wanna try that Italian place again?” he asked at last, getting your attention. “I don’t know about you,” he added, kissing the back of your neck to make you shiver. “But I’ve worked up an appetite.”
“Yeah, sounds good,” you agreed. You nestled yourself against him, picking the right place and absently punching in your delivery order.
Your focus elsewhere, you felt his arms cross over your chest, hugging you loosely. He leaned his cheek against the back of your head, and stared out your window into the growing cool blue of the dusk. Maxi was an odd one with his occasional long silences, but then again, you couldn’t remember the last time you’d ever been so comfortable with someone that words just weren’t necessary.
Really, aside from his grim family business, he was honestly too good to be true.
Lost in your respective thoughts, neither of you gave much thought to the clouds seeming to gather where the sky was already growing dark, nor the single bolt of heat lightning that flashed to the ground out of nowhere.
That was still miles away.
For now.
(if you read this far, you're a sweetheart, and I hope all your headache meds work immediately forever 🖤)
(a Bisexual Slasher OC x Plus Size!Nonbinary!Queer!Reader horror series, 18+)
a masterlist for what was originally "The October Arc" but has become a much longer ongoing project 🖤 links will be added and updated as chapters/character pages are posted.
chapters:
I. tear you apart (18+) (Enter Maxi.)
II. hunt you down (eat you alive) (18+)
III. a voicemail on maxi’s phone (Enter Hector.)
IV. jane doe (Enter Rora.)
V. (can't outrun) what runs in the family
VI. lovesong
VII. bad moon rising (Enter Seth Sunday.)
VIII. bury us alive
IX. the only thing that's real
X. and the dead start to dance in their masquerade (Enter Leon.)
XI. a gps route on hector's phone
XII. spellbound
XIII. and absolutely no one's dead
no use of y/n, reader notes and more specific warnings underneath the cut.
reader notes: reader is primarily a queer, plus-size non-binary/genderqueer person. when I first wrote this a few years ago, they used she/they pronouns interchangeably, but in this version, I've made the choice to use exclusively 'they/them' pronouns. other characters may still use femme-esque nicknames in places, though I'm in the process of changing those too. there are discussions of PMS symptoms/menstruation, be advised. all mentions of skin and hair are kept as neutral as possible so any reader can have a seamless experience in regards to those, and any recommended tweaks are appreciated. reader's body size is usually only referred to in pleasurable/intimate contrast with other characters, no body negativity present. reader does at points have discussions of isolation/depression/suicidal ideation (based on my own experiences), so discretion is advised.
warnings:
sexuality related: explicit sexual content; explicit horror content; mention of established light D/s dynamics and daddy kink in a relationship (both partners are switches); blood kink, knife kink, spit kink; fluidswapping/eating; sex without protection; penetrative sex; oral sex (enby and cis male receiving); period sex; stalking/possessiveness as a kink; facesitting (enby receiving); marking; rough sex; dub-con at one point (one participant is possessed); lots of sex in cemeteries, churches, and other frowned-upon places.
violence/harm related: discussions of homophobia and being closeted in the US South; graphic violence and murder; brief discussions of an attempted reader-targeted drugging/date rape from an antagonist; brief sexism, homophobia, and transphobia from an antagonist; reader wields a knife and stabs other characters; descriptions of decayed/rotting flesh; depictions of embalming and other processes involving bodies of the deceased; depictions of necromancy, sacrifice, and demons that eat flesh; violence from a partner (while they're possessed); discussions of abusive family dynamics; discussions of past partner/familial homicide.
general heads up: discussion of gender experimentation and presentation play; mentions of death by aneurysm; mentions of family alcoholism; brief vomiting mention; brief depictions of drinking alcohol and being intoxicated; discussion of grief; discussion of losing a relative to cancer; discussion of pet murder/depictions of reanimated pet (dark humor); discussion of child death.
this has been one of my favorite stories I've ever written, and I'm so excited to get to repost it with some much-needed updates, now that it's years later and I understand the characters immeasurably better than I did the first time through.
if you read this far, we already like you a lot 🖤 maybe consider giving your local queer horror writer some more reach with a reblog? ∠( ᐛ 」∠)_
[Part IV of Morvant Mortuary Vol. 1 2025-2026 Rewrite
slasher/necromancer OC x plus size non-binary reader]
[summary: an even worse kind of family reunion is when the family member in question shouldn't be able to come back at all.
warnings: graphic descriptions of a dead bodies that have been fucked up in various ways. mentions of terrible parent/child dynamics. reader briefly mentioned but not enough to warrant description. all things considered, possibly one of the tamer entries in the whole shebang! ∠( ᐛ 」∠)_
notes: I meant to have this up so much earlier, but work has just been eating me alive lately, and not in the fun sexy way.
but you know what, the actual events of the October Arc are meant to be kind of break-neck in their pacing, so!!! we're just gonna say we were aiming for realism. :'D
welcome back to the stage Rora Morvant, the Ressurectionist, a woman I want to stab me ✨]
The body on the steel prep table was nearly perfect, in all the ways that counted.
It was the right age, for starters. On top of that, it was somehow unmarred by disease or accident, as would usually be the case for someone so young. The toe tag from the parish coroner claimed its cause of death was simply exposure — but if its former occupant had been living rough, it clearly hadn’t been for very long, to look at the state of the corpse.
It could’ve also been just some poor dumb cunt that got drunkenly lost in the dark of the bayou, stumbling in to never find her way out again alive.
The lingering presence wasn’t about to look a gift from the universe like this in the mouth, so to speak. Although, from the way the somewhat desiccated lips peeled back from the gray gums, she could see the teeth weren’t bad either. The presence was grateful; she would have had a hard enough time restoring flesh in her diminished state, but bone would’ve been right out of the question.
Luckily, it wouldn’t be an issue for much longer.
Today was going to be the day after all.
Because, not only was she lucky in terms of the body — an already miraculous stroke of fortune — she was lucky in that the man who had once been her sniveling older brother was slipping.
Maybe it was from the latest mortal that caused him to deny his true nature, and his pathetic compulsion to follow them around like a lovesick puppy. Maybe it was due to the tinny vibrations of another, achingly familiar voice she’d heard the other night; one that she hadn’t heard in this House in over a decade, that compelled her to squeeze herself through the scraping, grating weaknesses in the salt barrier around her old bedroom to follow it, stinging and raw, up the staircase just for a listen. (If she’d still had a heart to speak of, it would’ve broken a little when she’d realized it was only a recording, and not the actual breath from his lungs.)
Either way, in Maxi’s haste to leave the House today — probably to insist on escorting the human somewhere, so paranoid he’d been lately — he’d forgotten to renew the salt in the embalming room.
And today, with the body lying prone in the dim sepulchral cool on a steel table, there was just enough room in the ring for her to be able to make her way through.
She was gazing down in hushed awe at the slightly decayed face, having the worst time trying not to levitate in her own excitement. This was real. It was happening. She would accomplish what no Morvant had done since the earliest ancestors, the original acceptors of The Covenant — the ones who had transcended to join the demonic choir in the bottom layers of the House — and in doing so, stake her immediate and obvious claim a the true heir to her family’s necromantic legacy.
After all, between Maxi losing what little spine he managed to develop, and Hector getting stalled by his own sloppy mistakes, why shouldn’t it be her? She’d always been the most studious, the most driven of the three. She had been the clear choice from the beginning, even if her father had been too set in his outdated foolishness to see it. Even if her mother refused to acknowledge the possibility that maybe she was meant for more than just carrying on the bloodline.
Decades of rage sluiced messily forward, and with it the sensations of her previous failure — sliding from her own physical body on a wave of ectoplasm, the feeling of her brother’s clammy hands clinging to her cooling shoulders, his tears splashing onto her ruined cheeks, her mother’s bellicose wailing — overwhelmed her, causing her to fuzz around the edges and lose sense of where she ended and the House began. She fought to focus, trying to set her feet solidly on the tile beneath her, shutting her eyes against time trying to tear her in two: one half here, the other years upon years ago, on the mercilessly solid floor of the bathroom between her and her brother’s rooms. She forced herself to stay grounded, stay as whole as she could, in a House that had refused to let her stay in one piece since she died.
For any other soul, this level of concentration and conviction would have been impossible. But she had been studying, all these years. Seated at the foot of the withered husk on the bone altar, she had listened to the endless whispering, the tongueless humming.
Out of her first loss, she would find triumph that no one in the family had ever known, would never have been competent enough to know.
She was ready.
With a quiet, precise grinding, the grate above the metal chute in the floor began to slide loose.
On the steel table, something more than electrical impulses in cold muscle prompted the Jane Doe to sit up - for the first time since she had stopped breathing.
In the chamber underneath the foundation of the House (the one that shouldn’t exist this close to a bayou, that shouldn’t be structurally possible), something began jerkily stirring behind a marble slab in the family mausoleum.
One where the name on the plaque had become eclipsed behind the slow creep of moss:
Aurore Marie Morvant.
When Maxi walked in from an afternoon of keeping you company at your house (and trying not to reach for the scalpel in his vest pocket at every creak of your floorboards or settling of the wood), he found the usual spectral cacophony of the House, for once… completely silent.
As though hundreds of years’ worth of the dead and murdered had abruptly held their collective breath, the very air heavy enough with a sense of Wrong to nearly make him gag.
Something that, in the face of constant decay — both natural and at his own hand — hadn’t happened for years.
Standing stock-still, Maxi pulled the scalpel free with his left hand, his right one clenching and unclenching at his side as he scanned as much as he could from the back door.
A strange flickering on the tiled kitchen floor revealed that not only was the door to the basement stairs open — something he definitely had locked before he left — the fluorescent lights were on, albeit… unsteadily. Like another kind of energy was overpowering the circuits.
The hair standing up at the back of his neck left no doubt that it was something necromantic.
Fuck. All his efforts to protect you — from what he was, from what he was meant to be, from the reality of his life — and he knew immediately from the way his gut twisted that it was all about to have been for naught.
The silence of the House continued to press insistently on his ears, and his nervous swallow did nothing to relieve the pressure building.
“Hector?” He called at last. “…Hex?” The name felt strange on his lips, the questioning lilt on the latter less an inquiry and more a feeling of pronouncing something incorrectly. Like he’d forgotten how, after so many years.
The only response was a sourceless breeze that swung the basement door open wider, nearly banging into the wall behind it.
If the scent of skin ruined by water and heat wasn’t enough to confirm something was absolutely wrong, the familiar droning overture of tongueless humming caused his heart to race until it physically hurt.
Bolting down the stairs two at a time, he found the salt in front of the embalming room door ever-so-slightly scattered; something disrupting his solid, carefully drawn line across the threshold floor like it had been pushed through.
His head swiveling as he stepped inside, he knew immediately that the room was freezing for reasons well beyond industrial refrigeration. The skin of his hands and palms abruptly crawled and itched in a way he hadn’t felt in years, since the last time he’d been around another indebted to They Who Provide. As his gaze found the now-bare embalming table, only stray traces of fluid remained to tell of the young woman’s body that had lain there, the shroud that covered it also absent.
Too close by, a set of footprints in a dull, oxidized red, lead in a haphazard gait to the steel hatch in the floor.
The hatch that had definitely not been open when he left.
With the presence of mind to grab a flashlight from a drawer, he descended to the chambers underneath — the ones that definitely should not exist.
The first thing within the scope of the light was the wall of his interred relatives. Between the plaque engraved for his mother, and the one to the left that already had his name and birth year carved into it, there was a cracked, gaping hole. Like something had somehow broken through solid marble from the inside, the nameplate dented on the floor amidst the rubble.
He turned from the empty tomb towards the altar at the front of the room, realizing there was still a low sound of something… slithering?
He couldn’t help but flinch as the light illuminated something across the room: a heap still in ragged grave cloth. The beam — slightly shaking as it lingered — revealed a small, delicate corpse in a once-white dress; obviously some decades old, hair clinging just barely to the remnants of a scalp and skin stretched like parchment over bones.
Except for the face. The face had been pulled clean off the skull.
“What the fuck.” He only just managed to keep his voice at a low whisper, despite the force of the sentiment.
At the sound of a sigh, his flashlight shot upwards to his father’s face, his empty eye sockets staring down from where the remnants of his torso had been pinned to the wall above an aged sepulcher of black, gleaming marble.
Vincent Morvant was mostly undisturbed in his restraints, the movement of the thing inside his bones barely perceptible unless you were looking for it.
But his face, rather than pointed upward in the eternal anguish customary to one made into the family figurehead, was very definitely pointed at something under the sepulcher, just out of the weak light of the few candles that were meant to remain eternally lit.
Something that looked like a body twitching and spasming under a sheet.
“Oh, goddamnit,” Maxi muttered. “Not today, whatever this is. I already have enough to deal with.”
There was a sound from under the cloth, a noise. He recognized it with a start as the sound of air passing through already decayed vocal chords.
There was a pause, a hacking cough, and another wheeze — before, finally, he heard it:
“Rude.”
The thing sat up, the white cloth falling away to reveal… whatever the fuck was happening to its face.
Maxi had seen a lot in his embalming career, but watching the leathery skin of his dead sister meld to the flesh of a fresh corpse was enough to even make him wince.
“You wanna tell me who the fuck you are?” he snapped, trying to sound more poised than he actually felt right now.
“Aw, Maxi,” said the voice, and it still didn’t sound quite right: like two people talking in unison, a girl in her late teens and a woman in her late thirties. The body from under the sheet wheezed again and made a dry rattling sound, as if trying to reconcile the two before it spoke once more. “Don’t tell me you aren’t excited to be a twin again.”
“My sister’s dead, pull the other one,” he deadpanned, but his left eye twitched.
The thing laughed, and it chilled him how close the sound was to one he hadn’t heard in twenty years.
“Death is relative,” the thing that looked and sounded like his sister said, pulling the sheet up over the fresh Y-incision. As her face finally settled into place over her borrowed skull, she attempted something like a twitchy imitation of a smile, the veins at the corners of her mouth discolored and bruising. “You of all people know that.”
He shrugged, poker face still in place. “You could be any damn fool who managed to wriggle into a body. Just ‘cause you stole some girl’s face don’t mean you’re— her.” He frowned as he stumbled over saying her name, unable to get it to leave his tongue.
And ‘any damn fool’ was doing some very heavy lifting, considering the sheer amount of power and skill it took.
The living were easy to possess: all the necessary machinations were still in place. Possessing the dead meant starting a lot of things over from scratch.
The revenant laughed again, the laugh closer now to what he remembered, like it was improving through iterations. “Fine. I’ll play nice.” She pulled her knees to her chest, tilting her head with a grin like a knife. “Tell me what you want me to say to prove it. Ask me anything at all.”
He stared at her, mind going immediately blank. How could an entire childhood be summed up in a question? What answer could confirm decades of scabbed knees and shared toys and whispered secrets?
“Oh! I know.” The revenant sat up further, almost eager. “You know what the last thing I heard was? Bleeding out on that cold bathroom floor, your hands doing jack shit to staunch the flow?”
Maxi felt his jaw drop slightly, the breath sucked from his lungs.
It leaned forward, eyes glittering in the dark. “When she wasn’t making a scene and carrying on like always, our mother said it should have been you.”
For a moment, the two just stared at each other — her silence gleeful, his stretching past dread and into cold realization.
If the thing in this body wasn’t his sister, then she was the damn closest imitation he’d ever seen.
“Look. I don’t know what the fuck you think you are,” he said aloud, not willing to crack in front of her. “But you—“
He never got to finish that threat, that ultimatum, whatever it might have been. Because a low rasp from somewhere else in the room, a third set of lungs desperate for air, made them both turn back towards the pinned figurehead.
The thing that used to be their father was smiling down at the corpse from upstairs, flakes of skin falling away from what was left of the preserved face. It took a while for the wheeze to turn into a word, but when Maxi recognized it, his blood ran cold:
“Rrrroraaaaa.”
Maxi turned from Vincent’s corpse to the now very apparently alive Jane Doe, the one who now looked like the woman his twin had never got to be.
It took a lot to make him feel physically sick, but this was the closest he had felt in a while.
Rora Morvant tossed her hair triumphantly over her shoulder; a gesture he’d seen a million times, now with locks belonging to a stranger. “You were saying?”
(she is my beautiful perfect princess and I love her 😍
ghost!Hector Morvant-Casares x grieving queer!non-binary!plus-sized!Reader)
part I: the party
[summary: you're a newcomer to the tiny town of Greymoon, Louisiana. you moved here in a haze of indecisiveness and impatience, looking for somewhere affordable that wouldn't remind you at all of the place you used to call home --
of the person you're grieving; the sun of your personal solar system, burned out far too soon.
at the behest of your new co-worker/friend, you attend a party to try to get to know people. try to pretend you aren't just a husk of a human being. but then the local coroner's son pulls out the Hand, and in your attempt to find some relief from the hollow ache inside of you, you're accidentally thrust into a necromantic conflict spanning centuries.
the ghost of a medium is haunting you, begging you to help warn his only living relatives of what's coming to finish off their family...
but you like how he makes you feel whenever he's under your skin.
warnings: alcohol as coping mechanism for grief; graphic descriptions of fatal wounds; possession as a metaphor for substance abuse.
notes: reader as always is queer (bisexual but not specified aloud), non-binary/genderqueer using 'they' pronouns, and plus size. skin and hair mentions are kept as neutral as possible for a seamless experience. no use of y/n as always
mostly reposting this bc I loved writing it and missed having it on my blog, but also because... well. recent events have me tapping into a vein again, and maybe I can do something with it here.
also, I am fully planning on reader getting weird with Hex's ghost while possessed, so. just fyi if that's not your thing.
okay, here we go!]
You were sitting alone with a lukewarm drink in your hands in someone’s remodeled garage, at a party on the edge of town — your first since you moved to Greymoon, in a wayward attempt to flee the grief that had eaten your life until it was completely hollowed out.
You were with a new friend - acquaintance - someone from your new job, trying your best to pretend you weren’t a walking open wound. You weren’t sure how convincing you really were, to be honest; you’d spent a good part of the gathering sitting on a beat-up, threadbare old couch, watching people circulate the room and gossip while others played a spirited game of beer pong. You hadn’t played since your college days, but the party itself — despite being mostly people your own age — seemed to have kind of a college vibe to it altogether. You felt like the only stranger in the room as people milled around you effortlessly, everyone seeming to know everyone else for ages. You must’ve heard a million inside jokes so far, with how many conversations seemed to stop making sense if you eavesdropped for too long.
Actually, being the only stranger might not have been an exaggeration. Every so often, you felt the crawl of eyes across your skin when people thought you weren’t looking, or when you took another long sip of your drink. You might have been the topic of a few conversations even now, having moved to town three months ago. Greymoon was small enough that it didn’t seem to get newcomers regularly.
Though, the way people kept looking at you like they expected something bad to happen, you couldn’t imagine people moved here very often.
You looked down at your outfit, trying to keep your face outwardly blank. You didn’t think your clothes stuck out too much, even for the quiet part of Louisiana — hell, some of the people here were wearing less than you. It was a house party, after all. When you were pretty sure you didn’t have anyone looking at you, you quickly gave the shoulder of your top a sniff. These clothes were clean, and you’d even managed a shower before you’d been picked up after work. Was it the makeup you were wearing, or maybe what you weren’t? Your hair?
Or, maybe you made for kind of a disappointing stranger. You’d walked in here with your coworker, and after she’d pointedly shoved a drink in your hand, you had awkwardly followed her around a little as she worked the room before finally dismissing yourself to go sit on this couch in the back corner. You’d told her you were only going to be a minute, you just wanted to take things in, get the vibe of the place.
That had been… nearly an hour ago, according to your phone.
A thud to your right startled you, heralding a body falling onto the adjacent couch cushion.
“So are you just gonna sit here all night and pretend you’re not here,” said your coworker, Imari. “Or are you actually going to get up and make me not regret inviting you?”
Imari was gorgeous, with black skin like glass, lipstick that was somehow perfect at any point in her shift, and clever dark eyes that more often than not glittered like she had a private joke. She was too good for a town this small, and until you’d gotten to know each other, when she told you about taking care of her ailing grandmother, it was a mystery to you why she hadn’t left for somewhere that could appreciate her properly. While she could often be dry and sometimes cutting, she was the first person in town who had been genuinely kind to you, and tried to pierce the shell of awkward silence you’d taken to hiding yourself in.
You gave her your best attempt at a half-smile. “Ugh, yeah. I’m sorry-”
“Don’t,” she said, shoving you lightly in the shoulder. “Don’t say sorry, that’s not what I’m asking for. I invited you so your sadsack self could get out of your house, and people could stop thinking I’m crazy when I tell them you’re actually funny. But you have to get up and talk to them for that to happen.” She glanced pointedly from you to the surrounding crowds. “They’re not gonna bite you, I swear. And if they want to, just make them ask first.”
You actually laughed, and Imari smiled. “See, that’s half your problem,” she said, relaxing further into the cushion next to you. “That’s the first time you’ve smiled all night.”
Honestly, if you were at a different point in your life, you would’ve had a giant crush on her already. You hadn’t realized she’d been paying attention to you, she’d been so busy talking to everyone she knew — which was seemingly everyone in the room. Your eyes fell to your drink again, hoping she didn’t see it all over your face. “No, you’re right,” you said quietly. “What’s the point of coming to a party if I don’t even try, yeah?” You glanced back at her as you took a sip from the red plastic cup you’d been clutching this whole time, trying to drown your nerves. “Thanks again for inviting me. That was really nice of you.”
“Don’t thank me yet.” Imari ‘tsk’ed, taking a drink from her own cup. “Give it a bit. I bet you someone’s gonna do something real stupid, knowing this crowd.”
“Is that why you brought me along? To bear witness?” You were still smiling. Huh. It’d been a while since you felt like doing that.
“Partially the company, partially so you wouldn’t think I was bullshitting you on Monday.” Imari nudged you playfully. “In a place this small, crazy bubbles up whenever it sees an opportunity.”
You looked around the room, idly taking in the faces of the people chatting, drinking, some managing to dance despite the cramped space. “…Can I ask a stupid question?”
“Sure, anyone can.” She smirked at her own joke. “Shoot.”
“Whose house are we even at?”
She paused. “…You know what, fair enough.” She moved so she was sitting shoulder to shoulder with you, squinting slightly as she scoped the crowd. “You see that guy right there, with the sides cut out of his shirt like it’s still 2006?” She pointed with her chin to a beefy blonde white guy who had just stabbed the side of a tall boy can, and was now chugging for all he was worth.
“…Sure do, yeah,” you said, watching him crush the can with a loud whoop to his waiting buddies.
She laughed, seeing your expression. “He only looks annoying as fuck, I swear, he’s actually alright. That’s Bubba. We’re in his daddy’s basement; he moved back home from Atlanta about six months ago, when he got laid off. Rent, y’know?”
You winced sympathetically. “Sure, yeah.” Your brow furrowed nonetheless, certain this guy was like… thirty-something. “…Does he ever get to not be ‘Bubba’?”
“Even if he didn’t live here, he still works as a coroner’s apprentice, and his daddy’s the coroner,” Imari said, shaking her head. “So… no, probably not.”
“Damn.” You took another sip of your drink. “And I thought I had problems.”
Imari let out a surprised giggle, her eyes alight, and you managed to smile at yourself. When was the last time you had made a joke?
Maybe there was hope for you after all.
But then Bubba broke away from his crew with a grin like a little kid with a secret, grabbing a shape in a faded purple Southern Comfort bottle bag off a shelf before unveiling it on the table with a flourish:
The Hand.
Sitting there on the grimy table, it looked… surprisingly mundane, despite the way a hush fell over the room.
It was coated in plaster that had once been white, dinginess having settled in as a patina amidst under layers and layers of scribbled missives in multiple languages. You could recognize some; a lot names, mostly. Maybe people who'd been here, or people they wanted to talk to.
There were other things you recognized too -- short messages: 'I want to see you.' 'Open your eyes.' 'Don't leave me.' 'Speak to me.' Evidence of all the other parties just like this one that it must have seen, all the people who must have reached out to complete the silent entreaty of its outstretched grasp.
'El diablo esta conmigo.' The devil is with me.
'L'enfer est vide.' Hell is empty...
You took another sip of your drink, refusing to finish that quote even in your mind. You'd heard rumors of what this thing was supposed to do, but you never actually thought you'd get to see it up close.
You’d seen it pop up in a few photos of people who knew people that you’ve just met, accompanied by strange reels - both of which had a tendency to disappear, pulled down almost immediately after. Videos of people with pitch black eyes as they held the Hand seemingly out of their minds: speaking in languages they don’t know, screaming words that don’t make sense, shrieking and raving at the top of their lungs as their body writhed with god knows what —
They almost looked... possessed.
But in those rictus grins that split their faces until the skin tore, the laughter high and mad and shrill in crowded rooms, you saw a glimmer of something that you hadn’t felt in forever.
They looked happy. Euphorically giddy. Like they’d never known what sadness was.
So when the party’s host looked expectantly at the knot of guests gathered around the chipped coffee table, their phones already out to film, but no one with the gumption to be the one in the chair, you surprised even yourself when you didn’t immediately return your gaze to your plastic red cup.
“It’s legit,” he said, wiggling his eyebrows at the waiting crowd. He was... cute-ish, in a homespun sort of way, you guessed: he had the muscles of a high school football star-turned-college benchwarmer, with bright brown eyes and cornsilk hair in a cut that would’ve looked like an e-boy’s... if his shirt didn't also have a faded Bass Pro Shops logo across the front. “The real deal. Story goes its the embalmed hand of a medium -- y'know, those guys that talk to ghosts?" He looked around eagerly for his guests' reactions, and you couldn't tell if he was wetting his lips from excitement or a touch of anxiety. "If you use it right, it'll let you talk to them, too." He preened a little as the crowd broke into curious murmurs, clearly proud of himself. "Snuck it outta the coroner’s office myself.”
“Aw, come on now, Bubba, you work there. Be honest,” called Imari. She tossed some of her locs over her shoulder, giving you a smirk before she looked back to the man standing in front of y'all. “Did you really sneak it out, or did you just stuff it down your pants when he put it on the evidence shelf?”
The crowd tittered, and Bubba rolled his eyes, trying to keep his showman's bravado in place. “Whatever, Mari,” he said, with all the familiarity of two people who’ve known each other since grade school. He leveled his gaze at her, raising an eyebrow. “You gonna do it, or are you just all talk?”
“And end up online screaming and spitting all over myself? Absolutely not, thank you very much.” Imari rolled her eyes in turn, settling in back in at your side.
“You heard it here, y'all! Imari Reeves is all talk.” Bubba stuck his tongue out at her, trying to look rakish but not quite able to pull it off. “Who isn’t, huh? We got anyone here with the balls?”
"Who the hell is that crazy?" she whispered to you.
You could barely manage a grimace, your eyes back on the layers of writing and thinking again about what you'd seen.
The grins. The eyes.
'Et tous les démons sons ici.'
And all the devils are here.
You didn't even notice yourself inhale, your lips dry, until a sound escaped unexpectedly between them:
“I’ll go.”
There was a pause as everyone turned to look at you. From Bubba's face alone, you almost thought he hadn't realized you could talk.
You felt Imari balk at your side, pulling back to try to look at you, but you didn’t turn to make eye contact or seek assurance. This was not something you want to see reflected back at you in someone else’s face.
This was you being stupid. Reckless.
But if you could feel even a fraction less of the empty ache that had come to inhabit the space behind your chest, you’d take it.
You got up right as Imari leaned towards you, looking concerned, and you barely registered as Bubba and a burly friend of his strapped you down to the wooden kitchen chair with multiple belts.
Your gaze was fixed on the Hand, still sitting on the rickety table and looking for all the world like an art piece. A conversation starter you’d buy at a local craft fair on the weekend, like the kind you used to go to with—
You cut off the thought, and when the guys finally step[ed aside, you nearly slammed your elbow on the table like you were about to arm wrestle the thing. “How do I do it?”
“You get ninety seconds. Just ninety, because otherwise they get too comfortable." Beckett made eye contact with a few of the people moving in for a closer look, before he leaned down next to you, the two of you suddenly close. Though you weren't touching, he gave off a surprising amount of heat, and his cologne wasn't unpleasant. More... nostalgic, in a college dorm sort of way. "You reach out,” he said softly, the whole room so quiet that his voice still fills the space “And hold it. Like you're shaking hands with it, you know? Ask it for what you want - say, ‘Talk to Me.’
“And then, when you see them,” he continued, and out of the corner of your eye, you caught him looking around for effect. “You say the magic words: ‘I let you in.’”
At this, the very air seemed to change, becoming… thicker, somehow. Heavier.
Like more bodies were pressing in around you than are actually in the room.
“…And then I feel it?” you asked, licking your lips nervously. Fuck talking to a ghost. You were no stranger to dead people, you knew enough of those.
You just wanted what came after. You just wanted the obscene-looking magic to take over your brain for a little while, to let you out of your own body. Let you just be… something else, for a while.
Maybe nothing at all.
Beckett looked over your shoulder, giving the crowd in front of you another showman’s grin. “You’ll feel somethin’, alright.”
Before the group finished tittering again, you caught another glance of Imari, her doe-ish black eyes watching you with a mix of anxiety and confusion. There was no impatience there now. It was all soft compassion. Like she was seeing you for the first time.
You had to look away before it could break through the numb shell around you. The one that put you in this chair. As kind as she was, compassion - pity - was not what you wanted to feel now. You needed something, anything else.
“Ready?” Beckett asked, his thumb hovering over the button to start the timer on his phone.
It was only for ninety seconds. If you hated it, then that was it. You'd never have to do it again.
But at least, for those ninety seconds, it would be something new.
You swallowed hard, looking back to the Hand.
Before Beckett had even given the signal, you seized the cold porcelain Hand in your sweaty palm.
“Talk to me.”
There was a rushing in your ears that drowned out Beckett scrambling to start the timer, people hurriedly hitting ‘record’ on their phones and whispering giddily to one another as they crowded in closer.
You realized without warning, without even a shimmer of a change, that you weren't holding the Hand anymore. You were holding the hand of someone sitting across from you, as though you'd meant to take theirs in the first place.
The other chair's new occupant was a thin girl in a tattered lace dress, with pale skin that seems almost... blue. At first you thought it was just the lighting down here, the shadows at play, but no. As you looked at her arm, at the hand holding yours, her nailbeds were blue too, and the skin at her knuckles as well.
'Hypoxia,' said the part of your brain that used to be smart. 'Oxygen deprivation.' You knew you were staring, but you couldn't help it; for it to be this obvious, she would have come close to - no, actually, must have suffocated.
When you looked back to her, taking in the frail figure before you, you realized with a jolt that she couldn't have been any older than eighteen. Her black hair hung heavily about her shoulders, obscuring her face. You could hear her trying to breathe underneath it, but it was wheezy, wet and stuttering, like too much air was getting in somehow. The hair at chest level was matted with still-wet clotting blood, seemingly from a deep laceration across her breast, where her heart would conceivably be...
But then she gasped a broken breath, and shifted her hair away from her face.
The wet sound, you realized, was coming from a hole torn through her skin - as though by acid, or some sort of gunshot wound - through the bottom of her mouth. Her tongue kept slipping thickly from the exposed mandible of her skull down towards her neck, which was also collapsing under the corrosive weight of whatever was still eating through her esophagus. You could still hear the faintest hissing sound as her flesh seemed to be eternally dissolving. Blood and saliva mingled in a thick pink river, staining the neck of her dress where you couldn't see before.
Now that her face was exposed, she looked up from her lap -- and locked eyes with you, as if realizing for the first time that you could see her.
When she lunged towards you across the table, you realized hers are the deepest shade of green you have ever seen.
She tried to speak — to scream, really — and the sound that came from somewhere at the edges of her gaping wound was muffled, squelching, but still upsettingly human-sounding.
You thought you could make out the bare semblance of a word. Her tongue didn't work, flopping uselessly outside of where her jaw should be, and there were no lips to give it shape. But her eyes filled in the context of what she's trying to say almost effortlessly:
"Please."
Immediately, you let go of her hand, somewhere on the verge of vomiting or screaming yourself.
The girl in the chair was gone.
Where her hand was, there was only the Hand, once again looking for all the world a weird find from a curio shop or someone's cousin's etsy store.
In her place, you stared once more at the mortified faces of the other party-goers.
They did not lower their lit, recording phones.
Only Imari didn't have one out, but her hands were otherwise occupied: covering her mouth in shock and horror as she stares at you, eyes silently screaming.
You whipped around to see Beckett, who was gawping at you with his mouth open like a fish. “Did you see her?” You were panting, your mouth suddenly too hot and too wet as your stomach twisted in on itself.
Beckett only shook his head, still stunned. “…No,” he said, when he finally remembered to speak. “No one sees the ghost but the holder. What did you see? Who?" He leaned closer, showmanship forgotten for pure curiosity.
“A girl. She was... her face." You went to gesture to your jaw with your hand, unable to speak the words, but it was unsteady. You were shivering.
You forcibly tried to shake your head as if to clear it, but when your eyes squeezed closed, it was like she was etched on the insides of your lids.
Her ruined mouth. Her eyes. Pleading for something you can't give.
"Is that it?” You opened your eyes to look back to Beckett, and then to the Hand, swallowing hard against the gag threatening at the back of your throat. That was barely anything. You wanted what you'd seen that mindless ecstasy, floating in a sea of chemicals in your brain and god knows what else. “Is it over?”
Beckett blinked at you like he was certain you’d lost it. “Nah,” he said, trying to get back into his party persona. He gave you an unsteady grin that just looked like a wince with teeth. “You didn’t say the second part. You just got a peek, that’s all.”
Imari started to rise cautiously from the couch, uncertain but taking the chance. “Look, it's getting late, and we closed today. Let's just--"
You beat her to the end of her sentence, grasping the Hand again. “Talk to me.”
The girl that had sat across from you is gone, but any relief you felt was cut short by the sight of the new person holding your hand.
A man. Older than you by a decade, you’d estimate. Or at least, he was.
He was bent nearly double in the chair, curling into himself, with brown hair hanging in lank, greasy clumps around his face. The hoodie he was wearing was black, but still gave off a shine from soaked patches scattered across his torso — blood, gleaming like an oil slick all over. Like he’d been drenched in it, when he finally took his last.
When he took a sudden, gasping inhale, like he’s just come up from underwater, your skin threatened to crawl off your body.
He jerked up, and you startled again — both from the motion (too quick, angled oddly) and from the face suddenly staring back at you through the hair.
Your stomach twisted in sympathetic pain, seeing the clearly broken bridge of a once-elegant nose, deep purple bruises blooming around both his eyes. If you imagined away the blood and the swelling, he might have been handsome, once.
But of everything you'd seen tonight, his eyes were perhaps the most… unreal thing about this encounter, seeming to be lit from within. They were glowing a color of purple that no human eye could possibly be.
When he opened his mouth to speak, blood spattered the floor, thick and nearly black. A stomach wound, the smart part of you said distantly. Something deep for the blood to be that dark. Maybe the hoodie was hiding stab wounds, something in his gut.
“Sunday’s still looking for me,” he groaned, his eyes unfocused. “He’s not gonna stop until he’s found all of us, until we’re all dead. More than dead. Escúchame.” He jerked closer to you across the table, and you flinched away from his pleading stare. “You gotta listen to me, bonita. You find my cousin, okay?” He licked his busted lips, blood congealing between his teeth as he hissed in pain. “You gotta warn him, warn my mom. He’s coming for all of them—“
He shuddered, racked with spasms of pain and curling again around a specific part of his body. You heard the muffled sound of more blood splashing against the floor. Despite your best instincts, the buried logical part of your brain screaming for you not to, you leaned slowly downwards to look under the table.
One of his hands was holding yours on the table: clammy, trembling, covered with sweat and missing a few fingernails, like they'd been ripped out. But it took you a minute to realize that there is no corresponding hand down below.
Instead you saw a ragged, torn hoodie sleeve that had been clumsily tied off with a ziptie, soaked through with blood that continued to drip into a steadily-growing puddle of red.
A tourniquet. Someone was trying to keep him alive, staunch blood flow, but it didn't work.
His hand being amputated must have been the thing that did him in. No one could have survived as much as he was bleeding over an extended period of time.
But why his hand? And what did they do with it?
"H-hey. Háblame, ángel."
Your gaze snapped back up to find him trying to lean even further across the table, staring at you and clearly in a pain you couldn’t begin to imagine.
For being dead, his eyes still managed to somehow look on the verge of manic.
"Escucha bien, okay? I need your help. You're the only one who can tell them what's happening, you can still save them. Please, ayúdame, I'm begging you." His eyes seemed to gleam an even brighter purple, and for a moment, you could've sworn they were wet with unshed tears. "It's too late for me, but I'll do anything, give you anything, if you can just get to them, please--"
Your mouth fell open, your lips stumbling to form words before you could speak again:
“...I let you in.”
You didn't know exactly what happened next, but all you saw was darkness.
You were finally - finally - weightless.
[I always felt kind of guilty about that Rora cameo, ngl. :'D but I feel worse about reader being so dead inside that they're just like 'yeah okay hold please' to Hector's plea!! and it only gets worse!!! Imari is actually a cameo from the manuscript version, but no one's seen that yet, so it only counts for me lmao
If you read this far, I hope whoever you're looking for sends you a sign <3]
summary: early in your relationship, Maxi has a hard time focusing on his embalming work after an evening with you. he finds relief, but he's not proud of how.
warnings: discussion of binders and body dysphoria; discussion of being queer in the small-town south; mentions of biphobia; demon possession (sorta); period sex/blood kink; oral (both enby and cis male receiving); light stalking; blatant voyeurism; discussions of fatal wounds and embalming process; penetration with toys; vaginismus/resistance kink, dead dove do not eat with all of this.
general: reader is non-binary and queer (bisexual, but they don't use that word specifically so fudge however). reader is fat/plus size/curvy whatever you want to call it. maxi uses fem-ish petnames for reader. any tweaks to make skin/hair more seamless are appreciated. no use of y/n, as always.
the nice thing about getting to go back and repost my old fics is not only that I get to revisit them, but also that I get to revamp them to match how I write now rather than how I wrote then. 🖤
for this one, my main focus was making Maxi's coming out moment more explicit, because I really thought he deserved it. I wanted it to get more time and emphasis compared to the first write-through, because I was worried the reader moved on kind of quickly in the last version, and I wanted to celebrate him a little. 🖤 I also thought it added to the jarring feeling of the Reaper in the back of his head, comparatively.
special shoutout to @darkhairedmenrule -- I saw your tags about how you missed Maxi, and that inspired me to post this one next. cheers to you, buddy 🖤
Maxi was pretty sure he shouldn’t be thinking of you on top of him last night while he was preparing to embalm the forty-something woman on his table.
No, in fact, he was certain he shouldn’t.
Despite the multiple layers of PPE he was wearing - his usual scrubs, gloves, and mask, and then a plastic splashguard over that - he still caught himself feeling oddly vulnerable in front of the decedent.
He was used to empty, staring eyes, he’d been used to them for more than half his life. But something about Mrs. Berthelot-Yang’s hollow gaze today made him feel like he was the one with just a sheet for modesty’s sake, rather than the other way around. He kept dropping things, leaving them in his office or on the wrong counters, forgetting what he was doing in the middle of filling out paperwork - he couldn’t help but feel like he was fumbling in an entirely different sense, whereas last night couldn’t have felt easier.
But damn, if you didn’t seem to have him utterly bewitched, and you’d only been going out for a month.
Well, okay, three weeks, six days, thirteen hours, give or take fifteen minutes. …But who was counting, anyway? Certainly not him, nope.
There was something about you he was having a hard time putting his finger on, but since that kismet day in the cemetery, he’d found his mind wandering back to you at the most inexplicable moments. He couldn’t hear the afternoon rain pelting his windows without remembering your smile in the passenger seat of his hearse, giggling even when you were soaked. He couldn’t just lay on his couch in the grip of insomnia and watch a shitty horror movie without remembering your soft, clean scent when you were sitting next to him at the theater, and how he’d wondered if the cherry slush would’ve been any sweeter if he’d tasted it on your tongue.
And now, despite the purposeful chill of the prep room, he swore he could still felt the heat of your mostly-bare form pressed against his, when it had taken everything in him not to devour you on the spot.
He’d been careful with you. He’d been so goddamn achingly careful with you, wanting to take this slow. He wanted to make sure he took his time, didn’t scare you off, didn’t lose your interest before he got the chance to...
He blinked out of his trance when he realized he was still standing over Mrs. Berthelot-Yang with the trocar still in his hands, staring at her violently bruised and scraped bare abdomen. Motorcycle crash on the highway. Even with a helmet, she hadn’t been any match for the concrete barrier she’d swerved into in her attempt to move around a semi that had thrown on its brakes. The devastated wife was delivering her clothes tomorrow for her viewing this weekend.
“I’m so sorry, ma’am,” he sighed, shaking his head in exasperation and feeling himself blush. “I don’t know where my head’s at today, I swear.” That was a lie. He knew exactly where his head was at.
He heard a ghostly chuckle from the very edge of the salt that bordered the edges of the room — not the sharp, cruel ones of some of the House’s permanent residents, but something soft. Almost knowing. He glanced up to see the faintest flicker of movement near the door, as though a figure had just poked their head in the room and pulled it quickly back out again.
There was sudden wafting of a warm, light scent of jasmine and vanilla… a perfume. Her favorite, her wife had told him through tears in the client parlor upstairs - and Maxi couldn’t help but smile a little to himself as he relaxed. It was always a relief to have an understanding guest of honor.
Or, well, as much as they could be, under the circumstances.
“Thank you for bein’ patient with me,” he said, carefully lining up the sharp tip of the instrument with a spot just beside her navel. “Now, this is gonna look nasty, but I promise it’ll be all right again in just a sec—“
The tip slid through the soft flesh like butter, and he let the trocar do its work before carefully angling it again to perforate the other end of the cavity. With a couple more easy jabs, he set it aside, watching the new wounds attentively before he set to preparing to close what needed closing.
But even as his hands went through the same motions as they had for close to two decades, his mind wandered immediately back to you, and the curiously strong pull you’d had on him already. He couldn’t explain it to himself, but he felt like if he slept with you and you ghosted, it would drive him insane for ages afterwards. He’d had friends with benefits before, sure, but they were usually more of an obstacle to work around with his… other nocturnal activities, than something he ended up entertaining for long.
And he wanted more with you, he already knew that. He wanted so much more, so soon, and he was trying his damnedest to be cool about it, but god if you didn’t make it difficult in the best way. How you liked his morbid jokes, and he genuinely laughed at yours, how you didn’t mind his odd hours or his tendency to ramble about various histories of death and decay at the drop of the hat. How curious you seemed about his work, and your compassion for the families he dealt with. How he loved the way you talked about your own day, even if it was something as simple as your side gig, and the care you took with it even when it was frustrating you. He just liked you. All of you.
And he’d been so close to finally getting all of you last night, when the two of you had stumbled into your bedroom after you’d invited him over —
He maybe should’ve guessed something new was afoot when you’d wanted to change plans from actually going out to just staying in for a quiet evening at your place, but he’d been happy just to get to spend time with you, so he hadn’t thought about it too much. It had genuinely started as the two of you goofing around with some multiplayer horror title over pizza, but when you’d teasingly tried to distract him by kissing his neck like you usually did, you lingered there just a touch longer than normal. There was a bit of teeth to it, a heat that the two of you had skirted but hadn’t quite explored yet.
Needless to say, he’d immediately dropped his controller to pull you into his lap. You hadn’t protested - to the contrary, you’d straddled his thighs with yours, your hand pulling his tie like a leash to close any distance left.
— Even through the rubber gloves he was wearing now, he swore he could still feel the silk of your skin like fire against his palms. He shook his head again, the trocar wounds closed and now trying to thread the needle so he could sew the dear lady’s mouth closed through the frenulum and up through the septum. But he felt his face burn under his mask as he remembered just how you’d sighed when he’d run his hands up your sides under your top.
Like you were relieved. Like you’d been waiting for him to touch you, almost as much as he’d wanted to.
If you had any idea how hard it had been for him to let you go, especially once he heard that sound, you would’ve called the cops—
“Son of a bitch,” he growled, putting the musculature needle down just a little too hard on the steel table top when he couldn’t get his hands to stop shaking.
He was instinctively reaching to pinch the bridge of his nose under his glasses when his hand ran smack into the plastic face shield instead. Frustrated, his swore under his breath, about to fling the offending garment across the room when he heard another gentle laugh from the doorway. He hesitated, then carefully exhaled his frustration in a practiced sigh through his nose, before turning to look over his shoulder.
“Well,” he mumbled, the tension leaving his shoulders. “I’m glad one of us is havin’ fun with this.”
He could see a gentle swirl of white floating in the doorway, like steam out of a shower. For a moment, the swirl changed direction, as though something like a waving hand had interrupted its floating through space.
With this small encouragement, he turned back to the waiting guest, taking another cleansing deep breath. “Get it together, Morvant, christ,” he muttered, cracking his neck on both sides before trying again. You had him acting like an amateur in his own House.
This time, he hooked the needle through the needed places as easily as writing his own name.
He still frowned even as he neatly stitched the lips closed, hearing the faintest echo of his father in his head. Not the torso half-corpse chained to the wall downstairs, thank Everything Below. But the version that still loomed large in the crevices of his brain, that still snidely muttered about his every move if he performed his duties less than perfectly.
Mooning over a mortal. Jesus, his father would’ve taken the belt to him for that. Again.
Once he was satisfied with how her mouth lay, he picked up the wax he’d be using to fill some of the rougher contusions on Mrs. Berthelot-Yang’s face. With a careful angling of a flat blade to get it out of the jar, he rolled it across the side of his latex-gloved hand, letting it warm itself into something malleable.
You would’ve been worth his father’s wrath, he caught himself thinking. He didn’t know quite how he was so confident yet — the unbearable soon-ness of it haunted him again, as he sized up the empty hole the glass shards had left in her cheek — but as he did so, he felt you, flush against him like you were there in the room.
He’d gotten greedy last night, he knew that, but you’d been right there and so soft, he couldn’t resist. He clenched his free hand through his glove as he remembered the scent of your neck, the lightest hint of some delicious fragrance as he’d taken small, covetous bites of your flesh just to feel you writhe in his grip.
He’d paused his sampling of your skin at the neckline of your shirt, sitting back to watch you open your eyes he stopped. “…Can I take this off you?” His hands were still up at your back, holding you close, but he indicated what he meant in the way he passed them over the fabric. The two of you had a tendency to be all over each other in stolen private moments during the brief time you’d been going out: at the House, in the hearse, on his favorite bench in the cemetery. But these had been careful explorations despite your shared enthusiasm, mostly over clothes due to him never being quite sure who - or what - might be lurking nearby. Now, there was no threat of a paranormal pest, or his spectral sister’s looming eyes from the shadows.
It was just you and him, alone at last.
He was too close to you not to see the tiniest hesitation on your part - your teeth briefly grazing your lower lip - before you nodded, your coy smile back in place. “…I’d like to keep what’s under it on, though,” you admitted, your voice soft in how close you were to him. “Is that… Okay?”
“Anythin’s fine by me,” he murmured somewhat hazily, nodding as his hands slid down your sides to your thin top. “Whatever makes you feel comfortable, gorgeous.” He savored the feeling of his fingers sliding under the fabric and finding the warmth of your bare skin, curling around its hem, before he glanced up at you one more time to double check.
You nodded again, your eyes bright with anticipation, and that was all it took for him to yank the flimsy fabric over your head.
Maxi sat back slightly, taking in your mostly-bare torso — your soft stomach was adorably sweet, just as he’d imagined. He admired your clavicle, the way it was set into your shoulders, the way your skin looked with all the small marks collected over a life. You were a miracle, a work of art, just like he’d dreamed. He took you in almost ravenously, wanting to memorize every freckle, mole, spot. The small galaxy that was you.
You shifted in his lap, your arms drawing in slightly over the dark garment covering your breasts. He couldn’t help but move his attention there as well, pausing in his awe-struck inspection. That… wasn’t a bra. At least, not one he was familiar with. He was flustered internally for a moment; he knew he hadn’t dated around in a while, but did they really start making them a whole different way when he wasn’t paying attention? He swore he’d just put a regular one on a nice little octogenarian at work the other day; was that considered outmoded now? An antique?
“…It’s a half-binder,” you said softly, snapping his attention abruptly back to your face. His heart jumped into his throat when he saw you looking shyly down at your thighs, anticipation replaced with more hesitancy. “It’s. Um— It’s for when—“
“Oh, no, that’s not—“ Maxi stumbled and nearly bit his own tongue, cursing himself for interrupting you. But he was desperate for you to understand how much he was only looking at you with wonder, not with second thoughts. He wanted to curl into himself in agony at the mere thought of you having such a notion.
But the way you looked immediately back to him made him think you were almost more nervous than he was, rather than annoyed, and he felt a flash of protective fondness at the expression on your face.
“I— It’s okay,” he soothed, nodding. He reached up to your face, his thumb stroking your cheek as he kissed your jaw line. “It’s fine,” he reassured you again, smiling at you. “That’s all okay, darlin’. I only looked concerned because… well,” he paused, feeling his own face warm slightly. “I thought they’d gone and changed how they made bras on me, s’all.”
Your uncertainty was punctured by your surprised laugh, and he immediately felt relieved at the return of your smile, even as he rubbed the back of his neck. He didn’t want to do anything that would make you think he was less than… capable, of taking care of you. But he was only being honest.
“No,” you said, kissing the corner of his mouth. “You’re sweet. No, this is a different thing.” You shook your head. “It’s… um.” The shyness crept back into your face, and as much as he wanted to reassure you again, he made himself wait for what you wanted to say. “…Okay, so,” you said slowly, letting out a breath that shook a little around the edges. “Sometimes, um. I have some presentation issues around my…” You paused like there was something stuck in your throat, instead gesturing to your chest under your binder. “And I don’t… really want to have them there. Or out. Or, like…” Your hand clawed for a moment in frustration as you tried to explain. “I just don’t want them to be a focus?” you managed at last, a sigh on the heel of your words.
“I don’t know, sometimes I’m fine with them! I mean— Obviously,” you gestured shyly to Maxi, who immediately recalled every time he’d pulled down your neckline to nip at the top of your breasts greedily, on his couch during a bad movie, or against the wall of a crypt during a cemetery walk.
“I’m… very familiar, yes,” he agreed, smiling even as he felt the heat in his cheeks.
Your smile in return reassured him, and he watched the tension in you ease. You reached up, running your fingers through his hair, and he had to fight not to shiver pleasurably at the contact.
“I just… today was a bad chest day, is all.” You bit your lip again, clearly still somewhat nervous about this. “And I was just, um. I thought we might… and if I-I flinched, or something, I didn’t want you to think… it was you something you did. Because it’s not. It never would be.“ You looked down at your thighs again as you trailed off, your hands sliding to his shoulders. “It’s just - this thing my brain does sometimes, and I don’t always know when.”
Maxi was trying too hard not to get stuck on the fact that you had implied you’d never flinch from him, from his touch, his heart fluttering like a trapped bird in his chest with muffled excitement. He had been trying to slow down just how hard he’d been falling for you lately, but you weren’t making it easy. You didn’t know, you didn’t know, he reminded himself sternly. He couldn’t take it entirely at face value if he knew what he was hiding from you, and you didn’t.
And ideally, he thought to himself, you never… would. Not completely, anyway.
Because there’s no way you’d stay if you knew what he really was, was there?
Realizing he’d been still too long, been too quiet, his hands went to your hips and squeezed affectionately. “Hey.” He waited until you met his eyes to roll his shoulders in a slow, lazy shrug, smiling up at you. “I’m just happy to be here with you like this,” he said, his tone hushed again as he ran his hands up your bare sides. “Really. That’s all. Whatever you don’t wanna do, or— don’t want me to touch,” His hands stopped a respectful couple of finger widths away from your binder. “We don’t have to, at all. Okay?” He shifted, closing the distance between you so you were almost nose to nose… before he paused again. His lips flattened into a line without realizing, his eyes wandering off to the side as he realized what he wanted desperately to tell you in this moment.
It wasn’t The Necromancy Thing, but it something he didn’t discuss often, that was for damn sure.
“You’re sure?”
He looked immediately back to you, and realized you’d been watching his face. Your eyes were careful, searching - veiled, he noticed with a hint of panic. You must’ve thought his hesitation was about you, when nothing could be further from the truth.
“Yes,” he said immediately, nodding vigorously. “Yes, angel, absolutely.” He tapped his fingers where they rested on your skin. “Your boundaries are yours. I’m not about to want anythin’ you tell me you don’t, I swear.” He smiled at you again, feeling a little nervous now. “I was just… you got me thinkin’, is all.”
You blinked, your eyes lightening a little bit as you leaned back slightly to take him in. “Oh yeah?”
Maxi nodded, wetting his lips out of nervous habit. “I…” He hummed quietly, trying to figure out how to word this, exactly. He cleared his throat before looking back to you. “…You, um.” He swallowed.
How long had it been since he’d done this? Years? It sure felt like years.
But you were waiting patiently, with that particular little smile of yours that you got when he talked.
When was the last time someone had smiled when he was speaking, he wondered.
“…When we first met, that day in the cemetery,” he finally said, forcing himself to meet your eyes. “I saw your, um. Your pride pins. On your bag, and all. And then, of course, you told me you use ‘they,' and it got me thinkin’ about…” he paused again, the words still not quite right. “So I just wanted to… not that it’s the same, of course, but I wanted to… What I mean is… God,” he sighed in frustration, his head falling backwards against the couch to stare at your ceiling. “Why is this hard.”
“…I could state the obvious,” you deadpanned, shifting as you straddled his lap still.
There was a pause as Maxi looked down at your thighs, then back to your face. “I see your point.”
There was a brief second of silence, and the both of you dissolved into giggles, the tension at last broken.
“What are you trying to say, Maxi?” you’d asked when you’d both got it out of your system, tilting your head the other way to catch his eyes again.
Maxi sighed, setting his hands on your hips as if to ground himself. “What I’m tryin’ to say,” he said quietly, forcing it out now. “Is that… me too?”
You blinked, your brow crinkling delicately. “…You ‘too’?”
Maxi groaned, running one hand under his glasses over his face. “You’re gonna have to forgive me, Darlin’, old habits die hard.” He gave you an apologetic smile. “I have to be a little more careful about, y’know… who knows, and all,” he said, gesturing vaguely around the room to indicate Greymoon as a whole. He swallowed again, not sure why his heart was racing, why his palms felt like they were going to sweat. You of all people were someone he knew he could tell this to and be safe. So why did this still scare him?
“I, um. I’m… bi, too. I’ve known since I was… what, twelve? Thirteen?” He felt himself flushing furiously, watching your face for any dimming, any twitch of uncertainty. People reacted differently to bi men. Like there was something about him that was dubious — tainted, suddenly. Though he knew you wouldn’t do that to him, the anxiety was well-learned. “…If I could signal, y’know, and not get shit for it with my… my job, and all, I would. Maybe a pin, or some nail polish, or… somethin’ little, I don’t know. I’ve always wanted to.” His eyes fell to the floor, sheepish. “But this town is so fuckin’ small, and everyone knew my family my whole life,” he said quietly. “It just wasn’t worth the grief, y’know?” He let out a quick, unsteady exhale. “Shit was lonely enough already.”
He remembered himself and where he was, his eyes snapping to yours. “I don’t mean to— to make things about me,” he said quickly, his words tripping over themselves. “But because I really want you to know, there’s nothin’ you could do, or change about yourself, or how you present, or anythin’, that would make me… not attracted to you,” he explained. His voice was hushed, like he was trying not to spook you. “Does that make sense?”
Your eyes were bright as you beamed at him, clearly relieved — and, if he dared let himself believe it, even elated. “Yes,” you said, nodding excitedly. “Yes, it totally makes sense.” You leaned in, cupping his face in your hands. “I fucking knew it,” you added in a delighted whisper, before raining kisses down over his face.
Maxi laughed, both relieved himself and a little euphoric. “You’re just sayin’ that.” He felt warmth pooling in his chest at the idea that something about his most private self had rung true to you, somehow, even after years of hiding. He pulled you flush to his torso, eliminating the already minimal space between you.
“I’m— not!” you said between kisses, peppering his forehead and his jaw for the sake of making him laugh again. Finally, you leaned back to look at him as your arms wrapped around his bare shoulders. “Babe,” you said at last, looking him dead in the eye. “I can recognize one of our own, even if they’re hiding it under a damn good suit and some hair gel.” You looked him over exaggeratedly before kissing him on the cheek again, then leaning to whisper in his ear. “But you kind of gave it away when you told me you liked Vincent Price and musicals, not gonna lie.”
Maxi felt himself grinning even as he rolled his eyes. “Yeah, okay, I’ll give you that.” He leaned forward to jokingly kiss you all over in turn, but you caught his lips with yours before he could make it there, and everything slowed down again. It was warm against your skin, the fabric of your binder feeling like comfort. Trust. His shoulders, for the first time in ages, felt lighter and looser somehow. Kissing you tasted like coming home, and he felt you smile against his mouth as he leaned into you.
In that moment, Maxi was suddenly intensely aware of the feeling of something… else, looking out through his eyes at you.
Something that wanted you - to drink the light from your eyes until there was nothing left - with such a desperate ferocity, he could swear the scream was audible inside his own skull.
Startled by this unbidden urge, he broke this shared kiss abruptly, pressing a messy kiss to your pulse in your throat. External sensation tended to help shut the Reaper up or drown it out, and you gave him plenty of that: the softness of your skin, the scent you wore in your hair, the surprised noise from low in your chest that turned into a barely-muffled moan. He lingered there, drawing it out, feeling you squirm on his lap as your hands found his hair again and tried to tug him upward. He winced only slightly, seemingly determined to leave his unmistakable mark on the precious column of your neck, but internally he was running a panicked inventory. After decades of being aware of the Reaper, the demon that had made him its home, he thought he’d gotten a good handle on just what could set it off. Sure, it had made noises about liking you, especially the more you hung around. It had done that with everyone he’d dated, as inescapable as it was. It was a jealous, territorial sumbitch, but so was he, deep down, so he couldn’t really blame it.
But that fascination, that need… what the fuck was that? Demanding as his darker self was, it had never been that… specific. Blood, flesh, souls, the usual maudlin bullshit, sure, he was used to it railing and howling and carrying on as it called for what it believed was its Due. Sometimes for sleepless nights on end, when he was younger and trying to fight his true nature.
But wanting you? Specifically, to watch the life drain from your face? To feel your flesh grow cold under his palms?
He had the unavoidable mental image of a face that wasn’t his running a tongue over too-sharp teeth in his mouth, and he couldn’t fight a shudder.
Before he could really figure out what had triggered the spike of aggression, however, you’d turned the tables, yanking slightly on his hair so you could capture his lips when he reluctantly let go of your throat. Your hands moved to unbutton the dress shirt he’d worn having come straight from closing up, and he felt you pause when you got so far down, then the twist of your smile against his mouth as your hand found his shirt stays still on once you unbuttoned his slacks.
“Aw, Maxi - for me?” As much as you were trying to tease, he could hear how you sounded slightly breathless, your fingers shy as they skimmed over the elastic.
His face positively burned, and he wondered if you could feel its warmth, as close as you were. “Well,” he mumbled, suddenly unable to quite meet your gaze. “You mentioned that you, um. Didn’t mind, last time—“
“No,’ you corrected, and he looked up immediately.
You were fighting a grin as you toyed with the one on his left thigh, before your eyes flicked back to his. “I said I thought they were hot, remember?” You gave him a coy smirk. “That’s different.”
He had to remind himself to swallow just then, the Reaper well and truly quiet as his brain was too overloaded to process much else besides your expression and your fingers tracing along the inside of his thighs. With some maneuvering, you had his shirt open a moment later, your hands roving over the coarse hair on his torso.
Something else he couldn’t help but adore about you, besides the enchantingly warm squish of your figure against him, was the way you seemed just as taken with him as he did with you in that aspect. Lord knew why - he knew he was that slightly confusing mix of lean with a soft stomach, and he still didn’t know how to feel about that even now - but it was also the way you didn’t seem to flinch at any of his scars. Namely and especially the thick line of tissue over his heart, where his father had beat him to the punch and drawn first blood all those years ago, and where he’d painstakingly re-opened it not long after, trying a particularly dark bit of magic in attempt to dull his own pain.
As he’d held you in his arms, feeling your warm palm ghost over it with all the sweetness in the world, he was so bitterly glad that it had backfired - and not as badly as it had for his late sister.
“I want you.” You’d said it so softly, your lips brushing his, that it nearly broke him. “Please?”
“I’m yours.” He’d answered as automatically as breathing, and for a second he’d felt at least a fraction of the blood rush back to his face, realizing just how… eager, he must have sounded. But you’d only laughed in that way that left him weak every time, and when he’d shifted underneath you to kiss you harder, it had hitched into the sweetest breathy moan when his cock pressed against the core of you through the cotton shorts you’d worn.
“Goddamn, Maxi,” you’d whispered, pulling away to glance down between the two of you. It was everything he could do not to let himself smirk.
You’d turned it right back on him though when your eyes met his again with what was unmistakably hunger. “You gonna wreck me with that, babe, or just make me suck on it?”
He’d heard the soft hissing inhale through his teeth before he even realized it was him, his hand gently settling over your throat. Even as he held it like it was made of glass, he still felt himself freeze, realizing he hadn’t asked you first. He watched your eyes, nervously retracting his hand just slightly to hover above your skin — only to relax when he saw the entertained glint there, and the way you tilted your chin back to grant him access.
He replaced his hand delicately, his thumb lovingly tracing the vein he knew lay just underneath your skin from years of filling others with formaldehyde. “You’ve got a hell of a mouth on you, sugar,” he’d murmured darkly, unable to help himself. “If you’re not careful, you’re gonna give me ideas.”
This was apparently the right thing to say, because you’d shoved your neck further into his palm as you’d kissed him furiously, grinding your cunt against his length as you did so.
He’d had to will himself to keep at least a modicum of self-control, both hands falling to your hips and pulling you harder against him to hear you gasp. As he felt the faintest trace of heat and slick through the thin garment of your underwear, his grip turned to steel, fighting the urge to yank away the meaningless little fabric between the pair of you and push into you to give you what you wanted — what he wanted, if he was being honest, just to feel you clench around him in any capacity. When he heard your gasp change to a soft, tremulous moan as you moved again, it took everything in him to force himself to let go of your waist.
“Your room.” He’d blurted it before he realized quite what he was doing, and you’d blinked at him, your eyes already sweetly hazy. “…Please,” he added, swallowing slightly. “I want to-- I need to do this right.” He pressed a soft kiss to your jawline, hoping he hadn’t just made a fool of himself. “I wanna do this like you deserve.” If this was going to go how he thought, he wanted to make sure it mattered. That even if it was all he ever got, he could say he’d gotten to really savor all of you while he’d had it ever so briefly in his grasp.
Your laugh was shaky but real, and you tilted your head to kiss him again (and, unbeknownst to you, muffle his sigh of relief). “You fucking angel, you’re so sweet,” you’d murmured, kissing his mouth and his cheek and the tip of his nose in quick succession. “C’mon.” You’d stepped backwards onto your floor, grabbing his hands to pull him up with you, and the two of you had only run into a chair and one wall when you couldn’t be bothered to look up from refusing to let go of the other person.
Maxi had been over to your house enough times that it wasn’t too odd how well he could pick his way through your living room, and then your hallway. Luckily, by the time he was walking you backwards to your bed, you were too busy nipping his lower lip and gripping the back of his neck to notice just how well he could navigate across your somewhat messy floor, sidestepping you carefully around things he logically shouldn’t have already known were there.
But he’d gotten very well acquainted with your floor in the last couple of weeks. And the space under your bed, which if he was being honest, was more comfortable than most, if only for the rug underneath and the lack of perilous storage boxes he’d have to contort himself to fit around. It would’ve been downright homey, comparatively, if he wasn’t constantly in danger of knocking his head on your bed frame if he sat up too quickly.
In that moment, he’d been beyond thrilled to be with you on top of your mattress as the two of you fell towards it. He was more than happy to be pinned beneath your full hips, his hands caressing your sides, and feeling you push yourself against his cock already leaking into his clothes as you sought any sort of friction between the two of you. This was more than agreeable. If you wanted to ride him until he couldn’t remember his own name, that would be divine. There would be plenty of time after to fuck you into your mattress until you ruined your sheets, he had all night.
Your fingers had finally hooked into the open waistband of his slacks when suddenly you hissed a curse under your breath, withdrawing so abruptly he was left bewilderedly blinking at your ceiling for a moment.
“Gorgeous?” He sat up to see where you’d pulled back, your expression at once stricken and frustrated. “What’s wrong- you okay?” He felt himself snap out of his own blissful trance, looking you over for any immediate obvious cause of distress. “…Is it somethin’ I did?” He swore he’d just been laying here savoring the taste of your tongue - did he miss something obvious? Had he been careless, distracted? The latter had made him panic even more, wondering if the dark presence inside him had somehow made itself known when he had his guard down.
“No,” you shook your head quickly, pressing your lips together in a slightly aggravated line. “No, baby, it’s not you.” You sighed heavily, sitting back and crossing your legs as you looked… embarrassed? You bit your own lower lip hard for a moment, clearly annoyed with something, before you glanced at him from under your lashes. “…My uterus has the worst fucking timing, is all.” You have him a rueful grimace, wincing slightly as you did so.
Maxi felt himself exhale a laugh in relief, his fear immediately abating. “Oh, babydoll - is that all? Hell, I don’t care.” He shrugged, his shoulders suddenly immeasurably light compared to a second ago. “Or — wait, shit, hold on.” He caught himself a second too late, blushing slightly at his own phrasing and quickly running his palm over his face under his glasses. Smooth, dumbass. “I mean,” he said, showing you his palms apologetically. “That I don’t mind. But obviously,” he gestured to you. “I don’t wanna do anything that would make you… uncomfortable.” He gave you a smile meant to be genuinely soothing, but only relaxed when he saw you let out a breath you’d seemed to be holding.
“Ugh, I’m so sorry.” You rolled your eyes, falling on your back next to him with an exaggerated sigh. He immediately stretched out next to you, determined to be as close to you as possible while he had the chance. You were always a vision, to him, but stripped down like this, you were something he wanted to treasure. “I tend to be really… sore, later, after my first day. Like, ‘hurts to sit down’ sore, sometimes.” You rolled onto your side, and your fingertip traced a soft line down his chest and stomach that stopped just above the exposed fabric of his boxers. He suppressed a visible shiver as best he could, but it was a struggle. “And based on what you’re packing, babe,” you said, your eyes flicking downward before meeting his and causing him to forget to breathe for a moment. “I don’t think I’m going to be quite able to handle it all tonight. Which sucks,” you added, with an embarrassed giggle. “Because if I’m being totally honest with you, I was really looking forward to it.” You have him a small, shy smile that still felt somehow conspiratorial.
Jesus, you were going to kill him. He was going to die right there in your bed from the sheer thought that you’d wanted him as much as he’d pined after you.
He took a breath as subtly as he could, trying not to give away that you’d about knocked it all out of him. “Don’t worry about it.” He reached over, lightly moving some of your hair away from your eyes. “Again, I don’t want to do anythin’ you don’t want to do. Right now, later, whenever.” He smiled, admiring your bare stomach and thighs in the soft light of your bedroom window, how the beginnings of the blue hour reflected just a certain way off your skin. You were already lovely from his place in the dark, but out here with you? Where you’d wanted him to see you? “You’ve got me as long as you want me.” His eyes had met yours again, taking in how those shone as well, how he wished he could see them in this light more often.
“But I really do want you, though,” you said with just a hint of a whine, and when you leaned in to kiss him again, it was everything he could do not to roll and pin you down so he could kiss you everywhere, slowly and deliberately. You moved closer to him on your mattress, your hand skimming lower over clothes that now felt far too tight. “Can I… help with this, at all?” —
Maxi swore softly to himself as he mis-aligned the apple of the decedent’s cheek again, impatiently picking up the clay and re-rolling it into what it would’ve looked like if half of it hadn’t been ground off onto the hot concrete of the highway once the visor of the helmet had been smashed out.
“I swear I can do this,” he said over his shoulder, still smelling the hint of perfume. “I’m just… havin’ a day, is all. You know how it is.”
He paused, looking back down at the face he was working on restoring and feeling slightly mortified with himself. “I mean, of course you do. Of course. I’m so sorry, that was thoughtless of me. I’m - I’m just gonna shut up now,” he muttered, furiously re-rolling the clay in his hands to try to change the texture.
When he felt the tiniest ‘thump’ against his shoulder blade, like a heavy palm lightly clapping him on the back, he about jumped out of his skin.
— As cool as you were trying to be about it, he could hear just the slightest hesitancy in your voice still, and he could’ve died at the idea you thought he would still say no to you.
“I…” His face felt almost drunkenly warm as he tried desperately to get his brain to work with him here, overwhelmed with just how long he’d ached for you to touch him at all, the warmth of your flesh threatening to scorch his normally cool skin. “I don’t want you to feel like you have to? I—“ He forgot what words were for a second as he felt your hand move again, your fingertips skimming the skin above the waistband between the pair of you. “I’d wanna be able to reciprocate, somehow,” he managed, forcing himself to meet your eyes again. “However, um—“ Oh, you’d been positively teasing him then, sliding his trousers down as slowly as possible while you watched his face. Your expression was sweet, your lips parted just slightly as if in innocent curiosity, but he could still see that light in your eyes that told him you knew exactly what you were doing. “However you feel comfortable,” he said, buying himself time by gently taking your hand in his. “I don’t want this to just be about me.” He couldn’t have imagined anything more agonizing than you touching him and him not being able to touch you. It just wasn’t how he was built. He kissed the back of your hand, and the wickedness in your eyes liquefied into something soft. “Please?”
You bit your lip thoughtfully, considering. He knew what it was to be vulnerable with someone new - to be even more vulnerable than you’d maybe expected, in your case. He gazed at you earnestly, hoping you would see that he was already devoted, there was nothing about your body that could scare him, because it was yours, and at this rate, he was as good as.
“…Okay,” you said at last, and he couldn’t help but beam when you smiled a little at his enthusiasm. “But only whatever you’re cool with. Don’t feel like you have to reciprocate in exactly the same way, if you don’t want to.”
“Try me.” Maxi said, quirking a brow in a playful challenge.
“Oh, I intend to,” you murmured, kissing the corner of his mouth before dipping lower to trace the scar over his heart with the white-hot tip of your tongue.
Maxi fought to keep his surprised inhale from being too obvious as you did so, feeling his already present blush turn into a full flush down his neck and shoulders. He’d been with other people, sure, but he couldn’t remember the last time anyone had seemed to… savor that part of him, quite like you were.
But of course you’d caught that. You looked up quickly, meeting his eyes with a furrow of concern. “Sorry,” you said softly, your eyes flicking between his and his scar. “I- Should I not—?”
“It’s fine,” he reassured you, kissing your cheek hastily. “You’re fine, sugar, I’m just… not used to that, s’all.” His fingertips ghosted down the line of your jaw, watching your brows ease apart. “…People tend to avoid it,” he explained quietly, the corner of his mouth lifting in a half-smile and a shrug of his shoulder.
You blinked. “Oh.” You glanced sheepishly down again. “I should’ve asked first, I know, I just—“ You lifted a hand, your fingers ghosting over the ridge of tissue you’d just claimed with your tongue, and Maxi found himself not only enjoying the feeling, but leaning into it as much as he dared. “…I just figured, it’s you,” you murmured, your eyes finding his again. “And I-“ You broke off, teeth grazing your lip self-consciously like you were fighting a laugh at yourself. “I want that too.”
Maxi sat up with an abruptness that drew a small squeak from you, lifting you so you were straddling his lap now. One hand tangled in your hair as he kissed you hard, the other hand squeezing your hip with a need he was sure gave away just how desperate he was for you —
He slammed down the clay knife a little harder than he meant to on the steel table surface, cussing up a storm under his breath as he failed for a third time to get it shaped exactly how he needed it over the partially exposed gums. “Come on,” he growled, not sure if he was more annoyed with his lack of focus or embarrassed at just how completely you’d invaded his every sense, leaving him stumbling like an apprentice on their first day.
Probably even moreso, given just how long he’d been helping shape flesh back into faces before he was of legal age.
“I’m so sorry,” he said again, straightening up and folding his gloved hands behind his head. He turned away, unable to quite face the woman he was making a fool of himself in front of on his on table. “I swear, this has never happened before, really. I’m absolutely gonna have you lookin’ right as rain for your viewin’, I promise, I’m just… feelin’ a bit off, today.” He gave a long, slow exhale, one that shook just a little bit around the edges. He had to focus. He had to try. It wasn’t like he hadn’t done this hundreds of times.
But you — you were something new. He’d never had to work with someone like you in his head, before.
And it seemed to be having the worst time trying to hold his infatuation and his professionalism in the same amount of space.
— His brain immediately returned to how you’d kissed him back with just as much eagerness, your teeth nipping his lower lip, and when his tongue had filled your mouth, you sucked on it in a way that went straight to the base of his spine.
“PleasecanItaketheseoffyou?” he’d asked in a single breath as he broke away, his fingers hooking impatiently into the cotton lounge shorts you were still wearing.
You looked shy again. “Um. I’m not…“ You stumbled, choosing your words. “I’m not wearing a lot underneath,” you mumbled. “I thought I still had a day or so, and I wouldn’t want to—“ You gestured loosely at the white dress shirt he still had barely hanging about his shoulders, more off than on at this point.
Maxi pressed another messy kiss to the side of your neck, emboldened and secretly thrilled by the idea that you’d been planning ahead for this. That you’d wanted to, been hoping for it maybe as much as he had. “I don’t mind,” he said against your skin, and he felt your head fall back slightly as he kissed down to the crook of your shoulder. “I swear to god I don’t mind, there’s no part of this I don’t mind, I promise you—“
“Okay,” you half-breathed, half-giggled in his ear, and you got your knees under you to hover over his waist just as he pulled down, finding the black mesh waiting for him underneath.
“Baby.” He nearly whined at the sight, his hands moving covetously over the curve of your ass as he admired you. “Fuck, you’re pretty. You always are, of course,” he added quickly, looking up at you where you were still perched up over him on your knees. “Of course I knew that, but— fuck,” he repeated, his hands moving up your plush hips and your soft sides adoringly. “You’re gonna be the death of me.”
You giggled in a way that went right to his chest. “Calm down, Monsieur, you’ve already got me naked,” you teased, still looking a bit shy.
He hooked his arms around your waist, pulling your stomach flush to his chest where he was somewhat pinned under you. “I mean it,” he whispered, and he watched your face, the self-conscious half-smile falling away at what must be the sheer dark intensity of his gaze. “You have no idea how much I want you. Just like this.”
He was sure his eyes would have changed, the way he was looking at you. He couldn’t always feel it when they did, but the yowling ache of Want inside him as he looked at you like this, for him — you had to have to seen it. There’s no way you could have seen him and missed it, the way he wanted you all to himself, folded into his arms against the dark that threatened to swallow him up when he thought of being parted from you.
He knew it was scary, especially so soon. It scared him too, in a way. He wouldn’t have blamed you if you’d unwound yourself from his grasp right then and thrown him out.
…But, miracle of miracles, you hadn’t.
You’d watched his eyes with a tilt of your head, transfixed by what, he wasn’t totally sure. But your stare was curious - and, eventually, oddly familiar. He saw it then, that flicker of pure Want, not quite as sharp or dark as his own. But it had been there as you looked down at him, your hands lightly carding through his hair… before one set of fingers tangled in it, scraping ever so lightly at his scalp.
That dark presence in him - something that had no business being so close to you, especially not this quickly - crowed in triumph in a way it hadn’t in a long, long time.
You leaned down, catching his lips in yours, and he met you with a kiss that bordered on ravenous. He couldn’t help the sound that escaped him when you gave another careful, experimental tug at his hair — which blossomed into a full moan when you’d pulled harder, eliminating what space there’d been still between you.
“Tell me what you want,” he demanded as you broke away, the pair of you panting as though you were starved for air. “What can I do for you?”
“…Those all the way off,” you said softly, nodding down at his open slacks as your tongue traced your lips - which, he’d noticed, had begun to look just the tiniest bit swollen with his attentions.
He let go of you only long enough to fumble with them and the accompanying underwear, unable to help a smirk when your own hands had dropped to help him when you decided he wasn’t quite moving fast enough for you. He’d been appreciative of every display of your enthusiasm so far, but the need he’d felt crackling between the pair of you at that moment had been undeniable.
Maxi slid them off with your help, immediately pulling you back against him as soon as they rustled to your bedroom floor. He was trying to keep his breathing level as he felt you finally skim your palm lightly over his cock, and he couldn’t help but glance down to see you sizing it up.
“Damn, Maxi,” you murmured, glancing back to watch his face as you took it fully in hand.
He bit down hard on his lip as you spread the drops that were already waiting there over the head, trying not to be so obvious in how much he’d been wanting you to touch him.
“Were you planning on making sure I couldn’t walk tomorrow?”
He opened his mouth to answer, only to have the words tangle into something somewhat incoherent when he watched you move down his abdomen to lick a long, hot stripe towards his hips.
The pressure at the base of his spine was taking over the rest of his brain, and all he wanted was the heat of you around him, wishing he could do exactly as you said.
“Depends on what you wanted, pretty,” he managed through his teeth, feeling his fingers dig into his own palms.
“Oh yeah?” You glanced up at him, moving so your torso was perched gently on his thighs. You ran a fingertip lightly up the inside of one, smirking a little as he obviously squirmed.
Maxi forced himself to nod. “I swear I could— be careful,” he said, trying to keep his voice from shaking as he watched you lick your own palm lasciviously. “I wouldn’t hurt you, I promise—“
“Unless I wanted you to?”
He knew you felt him spasm in your palm in response. It was too obvious. He said nothing, looking from where his cock was aching, leaking in your hand to your eyes, where you were watching his face with such a dark glitter to them that he had to fight to keep his hips still in response.
“…Okay,” you said slowly, your smile enigmatic. “Good to know.”
Oh, shit. He was a goner now.
You didn’t say much else, your hand gliding up his shaft and gripping just enough to make him inhale raggedly. You gave him a couple of experimental strokes, watching still —
Before your mouth was around him, and he had to fight to keep his shit together.
“Fuck.” His hands tangled hard into your bedspread, trying to keep himself grounded through this onslaught. He’d kissed you a million times by now - he couldn’t help himself when you were around - and just like then, you were slow, deliberate. Taking your time with him because you seemed to like keeping him right on the line of agony and bliss.
He felt the softest puff of air, like a suppressed laugh, and when he looked down he felt everything inside him seize at the way you were watching him, your eyes mischievous as he saw a thread of saliva trace its way from your lower lip down his shaft.
He fell back against your pillow with a moan, forcing himself to look away so he could keep from totally embarrassing himself with you. You had no right to look that perfect with your mouth on him like that. His fist knitted tighter into your comforter, until he felt the soft touch of your hand on his - looking down, he let you gently pull his hand away from your bed and set it in your hair, holding it there for a second as if to reassure him before your hand returned to pinning his hips to your mattress.
Tentatively, he curled his hand in your hair, not wanting to pull hard enough to hurt. He relished the feeling of its familiar texture, something he’d come to love in the time the two of you had spent on the couch with your head on his shoulder. He was just willing himself to be gentle when he heard the quietest noise, and it was only when he felt a shift in your mouth that he realized you’d taken him deeper.
He pulled hard on your hair reflexively, gasping at the change, at the soft sound of you fighting to take him into your throat. “Fuck, angel, you don’t have to...” He looked down at you, and the slight glaze of tears at the corner of your eyes made him forget himself so entirely, he felt his hips thrust forward before he could stop himself.
If you hadn’t been ready for him, he would’ve hated himself for being so careless with you. But you met his worried eyes with something of a challenge, your tongue tracing the underside of his shaft invitingly, and something dark in him delighted at the mirror it seemed to find in you.
Experimentally, Maxi thrust up again, and when he could feel you fighting to control your breath, he wound his fingers tighter in your hair and pulled.
Your moan couldn’t have been more exquisite, and Maxi at last let himself give in.
He wasn’t a monster - his thrusts were tempered, short, but he lost himself in the feeling of you around him: the warmth of your mouth, the soft ragged puffs of your breath, the spit that dripped from your lips. With the lovely wreck you made, and the way he felt you carefully take the rest of him in your hand to make sure no part was neglected, he found himself falling apart fairly soon.
“Darlin’,” he whined, glancing down at you through the now lightly fogged lenses of his glasses. “I can’t take this, I’m— I’m close, I have to—“
It was the way your eyes locked on his and the subtle shake of your head that finally sent him over. The sharp, clear gaze you gave him, the way you made it clear he was doing this your way. That this was something of his that you wanted for yourself.
He came with a shaky groan of your name, feeling the tiniest bit guilty he did so alone, but unwilling to deny how much he loved watching you as he did.
When you finally sat back, gasping, he sat up and immediately crushed his lips to yours like a man possessed, his hands gently cupping your face. He could taste just a trace of himself still on your tongue, and everything that just happened crashed over him at once, turning his kiss nearly feral.
Even through catching your breath, you giggled again at his eagerness, and he knew immediately he would fight a pissed-off alligator for you if it ever came to that. Two alligators. Possessed ones. There was nothing in the world he wouldn’t face for that sound.
“So you enjoyed yourself then,” you teased, leaning over to kiss him on the cheek. “I’d hoped so.”
“You were divine,” he mumbled, leaning down to kiss your bare neck like a man called to worship. “I mean - I already thought so,” he added. “But that was…” He felt his brain go pleasantly blank again, distracted by whatever scent you were wearing on your skin.
You smiled under his praise, but there was the tiniest hint of relief in your eyes. “I’ve been wanting to do that for ages, to be honest.” You leaned forward, kissing the end of his nose as he blinked at you in surprise. “I knew you’d be hot when you weren’t totally together. Not that you’re not hot when you’re put together,” you continued, seeing his eyebrows begin to knit together. “I mean, I’ve been wanting you to rail me in those suits of yours forever, obviously.” You waved a hand as if this were, in fact, obvious, despite Maxi having a very distinct hiccup of brain activity at the mere thought.
“But you’re always so… poised, Maxi,” you said, your hands lovingly coming to rest on his now-bare chest. “I know you have to be, with everything that can go wrong with what you do,” you went on, and he had to keep his face neutral at just how close to the truth that came. “But I’ve been… curious,” you leaned forward, your lips an inch from his as you searched his eyes. “About what I’d see when you finally let go for me.”
Maxi watched you apprehensively as you reached up and ruffled the hair that sweat had undone. You fixated on it slowly sliding over one of his lenses, where it was naturally inclined to lay when he didn’t attack it with hair gel and a comb every day, and after a moment, you sat back with a smirk. “I have to say, baby, I really like it.”
You weren’t totally prepared for when he moved forward suddenly, capturing you in a kiss while flipping you beneath him. He delighted at the soft moan around his tongue in your mouth, only pulling back to hover over you when you were both absolutely out of breath.
“If I wanted to make you come so hard you can’t think straight,” he whispered, dark eyes boring into yours. “What’s the best way I could do that right now?”
He watched the coquettish set of your face dissolve into a mixture of surprise from his phrasing and - what he was far more excited by - open, undeniable need. Your teeth grazed your lower lip hard, but he got the feeling that you weren’t having to think about it. No, this seemed more like you were hesitating.
“Try me,” he repeated, more insistent now. He kissed the corner of your mouth, then kissed you properly, coaxing you into something more heated. He lingered until he felt you relax a bit, opening up to him, before he pulled back just enough to speak. “I mean it, anythin’.”
Your guard was down, because he saw your eyes move briefly towards where his hips were resting against yours, your back arching very slightly to rock gently against his hipbone in search of any sort of contact. But they snapped back to his immediately, widening when you must’ve realized you’d given yourself away.
“You a hundred percent do not have to reciprocate,” you blurted, your words tripping off your tongue in your hurry. “Especially not, like, today,” you added with an apologetic wince. “Obviously. I’m not about to ask you to— well.“ You looked askance, embarrassed. “Not our, um. Our first… time, and all.”
Maxi snorted, smiling wryly. “Babydoll. C’mon, now.” He propped himself up on an elbow, cocking his head to look at you. “What, did you think I was gonna try to dodge that every month? Twiddle my thumbs ’til it was over?”
You met his eyes again, yours wide - and Maxi realized he’d tilted his hand, hinting at anything remotely close to a future together this soon. He opened his mouth to backtrack, kicking himself for being so presumptuous… when you looked off to the side again, giving a tiny shrug.
“I didn’t want to assume or anything,” you said, smiling shyly. “Some people just aren’t into it.”
He managed to disguise a sigh of relief as a chuckle, realizing you weren’t automatically discouraging the idea of a… repeat engagement. Hell, that you didn’t even seem to be that put off by the thought of him sticking around.
“Well. I appreciate your lookin’ out,” he said, tilting his head further to meet your eyes. “But trust me when I say there’s nothin’ about you I’m not into.”
You laughed, disbelieving, but there was a curiosity in your eyes that, when he saw it, he couldn’t look away from. “Define ‘into’ here, babe.”
Maxi sat up a little more, skimming your torso with a rakish glance. “Put it this way,” he drawled, leaning down to kiss just underneath the elastic of your top. “When you do what I do, there isn’t much about the human body you don’t learn to appreciate, in its own way.”
He ran the broad swathe of his tongue down the curve of your stomach as he moved lower, causing you to inhale through your teeth and squirm slightly. He trapped your plush hips in his hands, fingers nimbly spreading and adjusting to hold you down against your mattress. His thumbs worked their way under the waist of the pretty sheer underwear you’d worn - for him, his insides twisted with eagerness at the thought - down over the skin, as though he were unveiling you.
“There’s nothin’ I don’t find more beautiful than somethin’ alive just bein’ allowed to be itself.” He kissed your lower abdomen with parted lips, his teeth grazing lightly below your navel just to hear your gentle sound of surprise, to feel you try to move against his palms… and find you couldn’t break his grip. He couldn’t help but sneak a peek at your face, or help the grin that was just a touch too sharp when your eyes were already hazy and huge. “…And it’d be a sin,” he added quietly. “For you to feel like you had anythin’ to be shy about.” He held your gaze as he shifted his hands to your thighs, letting you watch as he pulled them a little wider, his fingers sinking into the plush flesh.
He waited for a response from you - the barest nod, given with only a short dazed lag - before he settled his torso between them, his thumbs tracing the velvet of your skin. He planted an open-mouthed kiss to the inside of each, just adjacent to your cunt, with all the slow measured movements of a ritual. He took the opportunity to adjust his grip again, his right hand shifting slightly upward to mitigate the jolt of your hips, his left staying anchored to your thigh as he continued to rub circles there.
He didn’t know what his eyes were doing when he looked at you a last time, but he could feel the Reaper poised just behind their sockets, unable to resist the proximity of something so vulnerable and precious. He didn’t bother to try to knock it back; it liked this too. Too much to ruin it for both of them.
He’d let it watch, it didn’t matter.
Pleasing you would be something that would strictly fall to him. He’d make sure of that.
His eyes wandered downwards, seeing you were already visibly wet - something that sent another searing jolt through him - and there, as though a sign, the beginning bloom of red.
When he swiped his tongue brazenly up your slit, pushing into your folds, the moan you let go from your chest hit him at the same time as the unmistakable taste of blood.
He fell on you like a man starved, pulling your thighs even wider to spread you for him. He felt suddenly insatiable, taken in by your heat, the way you shivered on his tongue, and couldn’t help but cant your hips just slightly upwards to allow himself better access.
You made a sound of surprise that turned into a hitched sigh, your thighs pushing slightly against the side of his face and his palm as though to keep him there, and he felt himself grin wickedly as he continued giving you exactly what he’d wanted to since that first encounter in the cemetery.
In the midst of the familiar human essence, the iron across his palate, there was something that left the vague impression of… sweetness. He chased it, lingering on your clit to lave the flat of his tongue there like a wave. He heard your moan twist into a whine, and he couldn’t resist the urge to echo it, his cheekbone scraping the inside of your thigh as he unashamedly lapped at your core. Your slick spreading across his mouth and further up left him wanting, and as his hands clenched at your body with need, yours fell to his hair.
He couldn’t help the moan at the feeling of your nails against his scalp, the way he was sure you didn’t realize just how hard you were pulling. He had to fight to keep his eyes from rolling back as you tugged hard, your hips pushing against his mouth for more. He didn’t know which got him to start rutting lightly against your mattress, the little licks of pain or the way he was tempted to just let you grind against his jaw until you were done with him.
“F-fuck,” you groaned, your first actual word in a while, and it came from somewhere low in your chest. This was beyond the breathy noises of a first time, what people thought the other person wanted to hear. There was a rawness as your groan became something strangled, your voice breaking, and when your heel very lightly came to rest on his back, his nails sank into your skin before he could stop himself.
“Fuck, Maxi, I’m—!” You punctuated that sentence with a keening cry as you came apart, and he held his tongue steady against your clit when your hips spasmed against his face. Your heel dug further into his back, and your hands knotted in his hair as evidence of your orgasm coated his tastebuds. He drove his own hips hard against your bed as you shuddered, already inescapably aware that he wouldn’t know peace again until he could have you making a mess on his cock too.
But this was more than enough, for now. He would’ve been happy to do this until the day he died - and then to be resurrected, at your whim, for this express eternal purpose. His name sounded so much more pleasant from your mouth, especially when you sounded on the verge of tears with sensation, your throbbing cunt indecisive as to whether it wanted more or if it couldn’t take anything else.
He only let up when he felt your fingers go slack in his hair, your foot hitting the mattress with a soft little thud. When he pushed himself up to catch his breath, you were gazing sightlessly at the ceiling, your eyes like a starless night as your own chest heaved.
The blood he could feel congealing around his mouth only exacerbated the sudden overwhelming urge he felt to cage you in his arms and never let you go again, to meet everything else that sought your attention with a murderous glare and hands that itched for cold steel.
“Mine,” the Reaper hissed in the back of his skull, and for once, he had found himself in total agreement.
- Fuck. This wasn’t working. If even open wounds weren’t enough to dull the heat he felt spreading through his veins, he didn’t know what would. “Christ, M’sorry,” he muttered sheepishly to the woman on his table, hastily throwing down the clay knife as it felt like his skin was going to combust inside his protective gear. “I’m so sorry, ma’am, I’ll fix everythin’, I swear I’ll make it up to you, I’m—“ He couldn’t even finish the sentence as he pulled the sheet over Mrs. Berthelot-Yang for her dignity’s sake, then bolted out the door of the prep room towards the door to the hearse’s loading bay.
A full-throated peal of laughter rang out as he left, echoing off the stainless steel on the walls.
He slammed through the exit door, barely noticing the pouring afternoon rain as he scrabbled free of his gloves first, ripping the black latex in the process, before yanking off the splash guard and tossing it over his shoulder and back inside. He was already panting as he ditched the mask underneath, then clawed off the protective coat over his dark scrubs and throwing it behind him as well. Only then did he let himself lean over to put his hands on his knees, letting the somehow still warm rain run through his hair and over his face as he tried to figure out how to deal with the throbbing ache that drove him to literal distraction. If work wouldn’t do it - especially a hard restoration like this one - he wasn’t left with a lot of options.
One tempted him in particular. One he’d been trying to avoid, to be honest. It wasn’t something he liked to do, and it was definitely something he didn’t want to get in the habit of doing whenever a… similar situation occurred.
But as evening loomed on the edges of the afternoon, he couldn’t see himself with a lot of other options.
If he wasn’t in such a state, he would’ve admitted to himself that it was probably troubling how he could’ve made the drive to your house blindfolded by now. How it was probably even more troubling that there was starting to be a spot in the bushes in the empty lot, just down the street from your place, where he hid the old Mustang. Or how he’d already had a change of clothes in the back seat for just such an occasion, and he stripped out of his wet scrubs making as little eye contact as possible with the smugly smirking figure of his uncle in the rearview mirror.
He followed the little not-path that was starting to form between the lot and the old oak trees that encircled your house, carefully ducking as needed to avoid any sight lines to the neighbor’s place across the street, avoiding the thorn bushes he’d learned were there the hard way, and carefully stepping around what rodent warrens he’d come across -
And at last, ended up exactly outside your bedroom window.
Your light was on, but your curtains were closed. He checked his phone, scrolling to his last text message from you - before lunch, if he remembered correctly. Amidst a flurry of bad jokes and some random dancing skeleton .gifs, you’d told him you had been feeling kind of gross today, and were planning on taking it easy.
So you were definitely home, then.
He peered through the small crack he could find in your blackout curtains, scanning your room and finding it still charmingly messy, but blessedly empty. Your bedcovers were rumpled, but there was no sign of you.
He hadn’t seen any light from your front windows when he’d driven by, though - so you weren’t watching TV on your couch. But where were you, then, if not here?
Slowly, he cracked the window, listening to what sounds he could catch so he could try to tell. Sure enough, he heard strains of music, loud, but distant - further in the house.
So no headache then, he thought with a touch of cheer. Good, you always seemed so miserable when you had one of those. You were endlessly restless on your mattress when you were, like you could never get comfortable.
He took the faraway music as his cue to crack the window wide enough to slide in, bending over to fit through in as little space as possible. It was a careful step over the window seat (something he was rather envious of, if he was honest) to your carpeted bedroom floor, and he immediately removed his shoes, not wanting to track any dirt — both out of respect for your space, and his own desire to remain hidden.
From there, he dropped into a crouch to hide behind the silhouette of your bed in the middle of the room, carefully lowering the window as he himself sank to the floor. Once he was sure it was secure, he fell over on his side and rolled in one motion under your bed -
And came to a stop right before he ran face-first into your box of clean bedsheets. Perfect, he noted, you hadn’t moved anything in the few days since he’d been by. He’d carefully arranged everything under your bed so he was concealed from the vantage of the doorway, but had enough room to stretch comfortably and avoid a dreaded leg cramp. There was even just enough space to stash his shoes down by his feet, safely out of sight and nowhere where they could leave a mess.
He curled into his familiar space, resting his head on the hoodie you’d left down here once the weather had turned warm. He wasn’t even sure if you’d noticed it gradually sliding off your bed - genuinely, without any manipulations on his part - but after multiple nights of being tossed about in your fitful slumber, it had finally hit the floor when you’d rolled over, and he’d snatched it up immediately to repurpose it for himself.
It was an old lesson he’d learned early: never waste a good opportunity. Not only did it make lying here easier, it had the lovely bonus of smelling like your soap, too.
…But that scent was a little stronger than usual, if he wasn’t mistaken. He sniffed your hoodie again, confused - it wasn’t like you’d found it to wash it, recently. When that wasn’t it, he kept still, trying to figure out what was happening to create this change. Your room wasn’t a place that changed drastically, and definitely not under your bed, so anything that caught his notice was definitely worth assessing as a potential hazard.
However, it took him all of a minute to realize the music he’d heard was coming from your bathroom, accompanied by the sound of water rushing through the pipes in your walls. You were just having a shower. Was it cramps, then? Heat might relieve those, or it could just be general exhaustion. Bodies were tricky things when they were alive; he’d just have to wait and see what was ailing you.
He took a moment in the stillness to pull his phone out of his pocket and turn off vibrations along with sound, putting it completely on mute. He couldn’t risk him responding to one of your texts giving him away - wouldn’t that just be awkward.
As he did so, he caught another layer of sound amidst the water and the music, and he froze in place instinctively, trying to identify it. It was a voice — yours, he realized.
After another moment still, he realized you were singing.
His heart was fit to burst; he’d never heard you sing before. It wasn’t professional, by any means, but it was just so… adorable. Genuine. You were no songbird, but neither was he. And he would’ve listened to this for hours, just to hear you sound so happy and at peace.
The song itself was familiar too, although the instruments weren’t quite right - a cover, maybe? He scooted as close to the far side of your bed as he dared, trying to make out the lyrics through the wall and the water. You’d stopped singing, your part apparently ended, and the voice had changed:
“—Sing once again with me,
Our strange duet...”
Maxi sat bolt upright in his excitement - or tried to, before he smacked his forehead hard into your bed frame. He immediately lay back down, cursing himself quietly and touching the tender spot that he was sure was going to bruise. Pulling his fingertips away, he was grateful not to see any blood, at least. But he was definitely going to have to not slick his hair back for a little bit, lest he attract unwanted attention.
But you rather liked it when he did that, he remembered you saying so. He squirmed a little where he lay at the idea of your fingers running through his hair, playing with it, the ache in him only slightly assuaged by being so close to you (after being tempered somewhat by having to walk through the rain in the growing dark, on top of that).
But the song was definitely a Phantom cover. He was surprised it had taken him so long to place it, but he was willing to chalk it up to the water and the less-than-spectacular acoustics of being stuffed under your bed. But it had just gotten to Christine’s part again, and he could hear you trying to keep up as she swept into her grand finale. You were admittedly nowhere near the singer’s range, but it was obvious you were having fun. When her final note sounded, he could hear you laughing at your own attempt to match it that came out more of a squeak at the end, and he thought his heart would melt out his mouth and dribble all over your floor. He couldn’t believe he’d never thought to ask you if you liked the show, when he knew the two of you had discussed the book before. He was already reaching for his phone to google when the next touring company would be in town when he heard the water shut off.
He froze even though you were still in the next room, listening hard. You’d turned the music down as well, the playlist having shuffled to something else - another singer he liked, he noticed with glee, making a note to ask you about it later - and he could still hear you faintly through the walls, singing at a much more subdued level to match the quieter melody.
He heard the clattering of your various skincare products as you moved around, before the music moved as well, leaking into the hall as you opened the door and stepped back into your room.
Only wearing a huge t-shirt and (he could barely glimpse them) a pair of underwear, you seemed to move on a cloud of steam and something sweet. The whole room was filled with the scent of your favorite products now, and he relished being able to just lay there and drink it in.
He watched your bare feet pad around your room, your nails freshly painted your favorite color, and surmised you must have been trying to treat yourself to a spa day. You had said you’d been feeling less than your best, so this might have been your way of trying to take care of yourself.
He had to resist the urge to check the date, make a note for next time - he knew he was weird, sure, but there were lines even he was willing to respect. He’d have to trust you to tell him if you wanted his assistance with… something like this. He could respect your discretion if that wasn’t the case; your relationship with your body was your own.
But still. He’d at least make sure to ‘just happen to have’ some extra of your favorite snacks in his kitchen. It wouldn’t stand out too much, he supposed.
At last, you fell over onto your bed, and he heard you sigh contentedly as you relaxed onto your mattress. He resisted the urge to echo it aloud, instead just stretching out as much as he could manage to pretend he was resting alongside you. This wasn’t perfect, but it was definitely better than trying to white-knuckle through things at the Mortuary alone. At least you were here. At least the overwhelming feeling of… everything, had subsided somewhat now that he was with you.
He heard something move from your nightstand, and a moment later, he saw an empty wine glass come into view as you set it on the floor. You stayed leaning off your mattress, opening the door to your nightstand, and he moved backwards as much as he dared, trying to make sure you wouldn’t happen to notice him if you happened to glance underneath your bed. But you seemed fixated on whatever was in the cabinet. He couldn’t help but be a little curious -- he hadn’t gotten to see what you’d kept in there before, and it wasn’t like he had the opportunity to ask when he was here last night.
He heard your impatient sigh, then you moving to the right side of your mattress before settling your feet back onto the floor. A moment later, his heart - previously melted - resolidified and jumped into his throat as he saw your knees follow suit, and you were crouched in front of the cabinet you were still digging through.
Shit. Shit, shit, shit. There was no excuse for being under here, especially this early on, and double especially since you didn’t Know.
He held his breath without realizing, pulling as slowly into himself as he could manage. It wasn’t like you had a direct line of sight under here, but it also wasn’t like you wouldn’t see him as soon as you bothered to look.
He had no deity or entity to pray to for this: the good ones wouldn’t dare grant his request, and he didn’t need the bad ones knowing how he felt about you. So he just held his breath and hoped, watching you rifle through a collection of —
…Oh.
He watched you set what was very definitely a vibrator on your lap, then a second toy: long, made of dark silicone, it looked like. You picked up and held a couple similar ones of different sizes after that, clearly trying to decide something between them.
He knew he would’ve been scarlet if anyone could see him, the ache from earlier returning tenfold in an instant. So that’s what you kept in there. How… educational.
You were holding the dildo in your hands, and he felt one of his own slide up to cover his mouth, while the other slid a touch more… south.
Your fingers were perfect, and once again, he found himself wishing you would touch him now, as you had last night.
…In very different circumstances than right now, obviously. But still.
You were tracing the shaft with your thumb, humming thoughtfully to yourself. “Close enough,” you mumbled. “Or close as I’m going to get, anyway.” He heard you laugh to yourself, sounding a little embarrassed. “Yeah, super normal date conversation. ’Hi, Maxi, maybe-strange request, but can I just measure your dick for a sec? Why? Oh, y’know, just wanted to commission something custom off the internet so I could fuck myself stupid while thinking about you, even though we’ve only been going out for a month, no big deal.’ God, I’m such a fucking weirdo,“ Your laugh sounded somewhere between ruefully amused and mortified.
Maxi’s fingers dug into his cheeks as his palm clamped hard over his mouth, barely cognizant of possibly earning another bruise. His brain felt like it was on fire, his sweats suddenly uncomfortably, impossibly tight.
You… what? You were doing what? Regularly enough that you wanted a what?
If he could’ve moved either of his hands, he would’ve pinched himself to make sure this was real, and not some pleasant fever dream from accidentally huffing embalming fluid again. But one remained firmly latched onto his face, determined not to give himself away and ruin this, while the other was already desperately rubbing over his cock straining hard against his clothes.
You pulled out a bottle of lube before you closed the cabinet, disappearing back up onto your bed. He like a fox would track a rabbit, aware of every little slip of your skin against fabric, every slight motion of your legs —
Then the familiar sound of your gasp, soft and fluttering. Unexaggerated, wholly yours.
You writhed on the mattress directly over him, and he could tell you were just warming yourself up. His face seared against his palm as he heard the growing sound of your wetness, you moaning quietly as you touched yourself, trying to relax.
Slowly, his left hand slipped under the waistband of his sweats, finding a slickness of his own already leaking from his sensitive tip. He bit down slightly on his right hand, determined not to make a sound as he spread it with a painful slowness over his shaft. As much as he dared, he tried to match the pattern of your movements, wishing it was him with you for real — as much as he was deathly curious about the version of him with you in your head.
He heard a quiet, choked sound from you not long at all after: a muffled moan, you biting your lip as you brought yourself to your first orgasm. You let out an unsteady exhale, and he heard you adjust, reaching for something you’d set down on the other side of your bed.
He had to hold his left hand still as he heard the pop of the plastic cap on the lube, the further hushed sounds of you spreading it along the proxy shaft, before finally you fell back again with a soft ‘thud’.
“Okay,” you murmured quietly to yourself. “Let’s see if I can manage not to totally embarrass myself with another person.”
Maxi was all too aware of his physical body being anchored to the floor, resisting the aching urge to crawl out of the dark and onto your mattress to kiss those fears away. He could never find you wanting, not in a million years, he could prove it to you right now if you just knew he was there, if it wouldn’t scare you —
But behind his eye sockets, he was aware of something looming: a dark, preening arrogance that he couldn’t totally separate from himself. You thought you couldn’t take him.
The Reaper wanted to see you struggle to try, shy and flustered, to see the embarrassed tears that might result if you couldn’t, to feel your body strain and writhe against him because you just couldn’t keep his shaft in you.
The part of his brain that was still wholly his wanted to soothe any such tears, reassure you with coos and murmurs about just how good you were, how well you were doing. It didn’t matter if you needed time, or if you just couldn’t, he’d still be satisfied just to be near you; didn’t you know he’d do anything for you, just to make you feel good? Like you made him feel without even touching him?
But there was the tiniest part of him that wanted to lick those tears rather than kiss them away, and savor them instead.
His train of thought was entirely interrupted by your sudden gasp, and your quiet groan. “Fuck,” you whimpered, and he could hear you writhing slightly, your feet sliding as you struggled to get comfortable. “Fuck, okay. Okay, it’s fine, I just need…” He heard your head hit the pillow with a sigh, and his body was a taut exposed wire.
He couldn’t help but fractionally tighten his grip on himself as he heard you panting softly, making a small, muffled noise as he heard you try to take the toy deeper, accompanied by the occasional slick sound of something moving in you. He felt his cock twitch in his hand at the noise, wishing desperately that you were adjusting around him instead.
A breathy whisper of his name sang across his nerves like a bow over strings, followed by a quiet whine. “I’m trying,” you pleaded to the imaginary version of him with you, already sounding a little frayed and overwhelmed. “You’re just… a lot.”
Christ, you really were going to kill him. Carefully, painstakingly, he timed the movements of his hand over his cock to what he could make out from the sounds of yours - his hand hoping to even slightly capture the way you would squeeze around him, the achingly slow pace of pushing into you and pulling out again, trying to offer you some relief while still trying to satisfy gnawing need building at the base of his spine.
“I can,” you murmured to him and not-him, your voice shaking a little. “I can, I promise, just… I need a minute.” He heard a groan muffled by you biting your lip, trying to push the toy further. “There’s just so much of you, Maxi.”
He bit his own lip so hard it could bleed, trying his damnedest not to react to that out loud. You thought he was a lot. You’d seen him — you’d had him in your mouth, for christ’s sake, so it’s not like you were exaggerating, but still. You were already anticipating not only fucking him, but wanting to take him fully, and in that moment he thought his own anticipation might burn through his skin from the inside out. He wanted to be in you, for real, now.
Then he heard a soft cry, followed by another thud of your head against your pillow, the scrabbling of your feet against your sheets as your back arched. “There,” you moaned, and his eyes threatened to roll back in his skull yet again. “See? I- oh, fuck, I told you I could.”
And then, slowly, he heard you begin to fuck yourself in earnest.
He bit fully down onto his own palm, matching your pace now, hoping your own slick sounds and now-desperate whines would cover the sounds of him trying to jerk himself off as silently as possible. He wanted to be on you, his chest pressed against yours, feeling your sweat and your heart racing under your bones and your warm panting on his neck as he fucked you properly, gave you everything you were begging for just a foot away. He wanted to pin you down and fuck you until you forgot your own name, until he only knew his own from the way it fell off your lips and onto his. He felt your pace pick up in his own grip as you got closer, and the way his whole body tightened, he desperately wanted to fill you with his own cum, to feel it slide down your thighs as he stubbornly fucked it into you, just to know that you wanted him inside you.
“Please, please, Maxi, don’t stop,” you whined above him, and he tasted his own blood as his teeth finally split the skin of his hand. He wished it was your neck, your shoulder, those lips of yours -- he’d kiss it better in a second, he’d apologize immediately for marking your precious skin, but he was so hungry to feel you with him, for real, that he longed for even the warmth of your wounds on his mouth.
Just when he thought he couldn’t take anymore of this, the closest thing to heaven and hell at the same time, he heard you come with a last cracked moan of his name. He shattered immediately, spilling his own load from a day of obsessing over and repressing the memories of you inside his clothes, and utterly ruining them in the process. He flushed even more furiously, the heat spreading down his chest from both the ecstasy of relief at last, and embarrassment for coming in his pants like a freshman. He fucked into his hand while he listened to your panting until he went fully soft, bordering on the ache of overstimulation but trying to satisfy the gaping hole that came from not actually being able to pull you against him, to descend together in each other’s tangled, sweaty limbs.
For a moment, the two of you just lay there in silence - you still trying to catch your breath, him still biting into the flesh of his hand, not trusting himself not to moan the minute he pulled it away. He wanted to kiss you, to tell you that you were perfect, that you took him like you were made for him - or that you would, when the time was right, he was sure of it. But not until you were feeling better, not until you wanted to, until you chose.
“…Holy fuck,” you mumbled above him, sounding somewhat hazy, and he instead had to fight his usual giggle-snort. How were you this cute, he wondered, it wasn’t even fair.
He heard you shift slowly, reaching for something else on your nightstand; he winced, secretly hoping it wasn’t the lube again. After a long day of agony, he wasn’t sure he could go another round as enthusiastically as you.
But instead, he heard a muted, familiar tapping. In his scattered haze, it took him a minute to place it — until he saw your arm dangling over the side of your mattress, your phone still clutched in your hand as you waited for a text to send.
He caught his name on the screen before you pulled your arm up again, and hurriedly, he rummaged in his pocket to pull out his own just as the notification of a new message appeared.
<[Thinking of you, handsome <3 Hope work isn’t giving you too much trouble today?]
That you were texting him immediately and so innocuously, after vividly imagining him fucking you senseless, made his insides twist again and the flush return to his skin. Did you do this often? His head spun from the idea; how many messages had he read that he’d thought were only sweet little missives, while you were actually glistening and debauched?
Maxi released his palm from his teeth a centimeter of skin at a time, bringing up his second hand to write back only when he was sure he wouldn’t moan aloud. What could he even say?
[Aw, miss you pretty. <3 Work’s been… work haha. Feeling better?]>
That was as close as he could think to summarizing the situation, anyway. And he was reasonably sure ‘hey look down here :)’ wouldn’t be very well received, even if he was starting to become aware of your own more… interesting tendencies.
He glanced up at the bottom of your mattress as he waited for his own message to send, pondering this. He knew the two of you were still in the early stages, but he was now deeply curious what other strange urges you were hiding in that sweet little head of yours. Besides apparently liking his dick enough to want a memento of your own - something that, if he wasn’t already still flushed, would’ve made him turn scarlet all over again. He was awash in heat from the tips of his ears to his navel, at this rate.
He heard your phone buzz, and his heart leapt at your quiet little excited noise. He heard you roll over on your mattress and was half-tempted to peek and see if you were kicking your feet in the air, as much as you made him want to do the same. But he resisted and kept himself out of sight.
A second of fast typing later, your response appeared:
<[So much better omg. Sorry about work though :/ Do you maybe want to hang out tomorrow? We could watch a bad movie and drink about it.]
‘Yes!!,’ Maxi sent immediately. He winced at his own eagerness, then quickly added:
[Whenever works for you, if you feel up to it! No pressure if you start feeling bad again.]>
He heard you roll back over onto your back, giggling to yourself. He restrained a sigh of relief. At least you thought he was cute, and not desperate.
Another response popped up on his screen:
<[Oh I’m definitely better, no worries. <3 My place, maybe seven-ish if that’s okay?]
And then, as he was typing a confirmation, another:
<[And don’t sweat needing to drive home or anything btw. I have a spare toothbrush and stuff lol]
Maxi resisted the urge to punch the air, both because it would send his fist straight into your box spring, and because he was far too old for doing that without feeling ridiculous. But he definitely wanted to, in the moment.
[Haha sure. I’ll see you then angel <3]>
You didn’t need to know he’d loved everything he’d seen so far.
Or at least, he would tell you later.
Much later.
if you've read this far, I hope your next date is also really into musicals (positive) <3
age: in his 40s (9/9/82) (virgo, if he believed in that sort of thing)
birthplace: his family’s ancestral House in greymoon, louisiana (his mother’s family, while not from the state, can trace their lineage all the way back to the Spaniards; his father’s people are of cajun stock who managed to drag themselves up out of the bayou.)
height: 5′10′’
current location: wherever you are and just out of sight. usually still in greymoon, louisiana.
favorite book: other voices, other rooms - truman capote
hobbies: while running the Mortuary tends to keep him pretty busy not to mention his odd hour nightwork, he does tend to enjoy a few different things in his spare time. Maxi’s a connoisseur of horror movies, good and bad, and will happily talk your ear off about the accuracy of the gore/wound special effects -- though he’s also a sucker for romcoms when the mood strikes. He occasionally can be caught playing video games (also horror-related), collects rare books when he comes across a desired volume, and has been known to play the piano semi-passably at two or three in the morning after a few drinks. He loves going to New Orleans for concerts, live theater, and museums, and stays the hell away from Baton Rouge on game weekends. He’s also a cheerful walking encyclopedia of death and funerary practices throughout history, including various plagues and epidemics that swept through Louisiana over the centuries. He loves animals (once having dreamed of being a vet before Death ruled his world so completely), and can often be seen leaving appropriate snacks out for the graveyard critters when he’s restoring older tombstones and mausoleums in the cemetery next door.
occupation: current sole proprietor and funeral director/mortician at the family business, Morvant Mortuary
“What can I say? It grew on me, after a while.” He smiles, and it’s sweet, unassuming (but there’s still something too dark about those eyes of his - a brown so deep, it teeters nearly into burgundy). “It might not be… what I had in mind for myself, originally,” he says, and his eyes fall to his perfectly shined shoes. “But it’s fulfillin’, gettin’ to help take care of people on their worst days. Give them the rest the deserve. We don’t talk about that nearly enough in this country, honestly, and we can trace that back to when we started phasin’ out home funerals; funnily enough–” He pauses, and laughs - a particular half giggle, half snort. It’s a nice sound (though there’s something under it, something that feels like it could tip into a mad cackle under the right circumstances). “But look at me, goin’ on. I’m sorry, I tend to do that about my line of work.” His eyes flicker back to you behind his glasses (and the focus is a little too keen, too watchful to be only polite interest). “Now. Tell me about your ideal funeral.”
[face claim: usually Daniel Brühl in glasses and a suit, but that's been shifting a bit lately to a face that's more from my head.
his 8-track.]
a history, of sorts:
Maxi wasn’t the oldest child in his family — his cousin Hector beat him by just under a year — and he was an only child for a mere six pain-filled hours before his sister Aurore arrived that same day. Still, he was his father’s eldest and only son, and that was how he was treated growing up: he became dutiful, anxious, with an impeccable attention to detail even at a young age (he had to be, given the Morvant family’s notorious inherited temper). It seemed only natural he would follow in his father Vincent’s footsteps to take over the business his family built when they immigrated here, serving the town of his birth for over a hundred years now.
…Vincent forgot to ask Maxi how he felt about this plan, however.
While he went through the motions from elementary to high school, smiling through perfectly posed family photos (the only thing perfect about the family) and making perfect grades, he was planning his escape. To somewhere. Anywhere. To see the world, he hoped. The town he grew up in was enough for people like his parents and his uncle, but he would not be one of the people who ended up trapped here, living and dying within a stone’s throw of the same graveyard where everyone he’d ever known was buried (or would come to be). He was taken with art and literature, wanting to see the great treasures of history his European-Creole forebears used to speak of in rapturous tones.
Then, at eighteen, Maxi became his parents’ only child. But that’s a story for another time.
Maxi’s mother, Mathilde, didn’t handle grief well. A hothouse flower of a woman even before the death of her youngest, she withered away within the house Maxi grew up in. (rumor had it she never left the House again after the funeral that day.) It fell to Maxi to try to take care of her, making meals carried into her room that went wholly uneaten, bringing her vases of flowers from her formerly prized garden before they all died out, trying to keep the curtains open only to have her shriek at the tiniest speck of sunlight.
Maxi learned too quickly the futility of trying to keep things alive. Especially when they didn’t want to be.
Vincent, not a man for expressing his grief, turned further into the business, now more determined than ever to pass the mantle to his oldest to make sure he left behind some sort of tangible legacy. (Maxi learned too quickly that he was not enough.) There would be no going away to university, there would just be the minimum associate’s degree at the Greymoon Community College. He would apprentice under his father, pass the state exam as soon as he turned twenty-one, and take over as funeral director when Vincent was good and ready to retire.
Maxi contemplated running - one night, he even made it so far as the abandoned house on the Knox family’s property on the edge of town, where he tried to hunker down.
He doesn’t talk about what he saw there, ever. But whatever it was, it convinced him to come back. Just for a little while. (Just long enough to see this through.) He enrolled in GMCC, he got the associate’s degree in record time, and he began his training. Just as a good son would.
Mathilde died the day before Maxi’s twentieth birthday. He helped embalm his mother as part of his apprenticeship. He chose the hymns, the flowers, the photo for the portrait at the front of the chapel. It was said by everyone who attended - the neighbors, Mathilde’s former sewing circle, the Junior League, the Greymoon Historical Society, and anyone else who couldn’t resist a good snoop - to be a beautiful service. People exclaimed to one another that poor, sainted Mathilde - who had been wasting away for two years, who had made it no secret that she’d been simply waiting for her body to give out - looked to be at rest at last. Peaceful, even, after such strife at the end.
The entire time, Vincent stood at the back of the church, arms folded with a constant scowl on his face.
There was… an altercation, at the Morvant house that night. No one knows for sure what they heard. Knock on any door in town, and they’ll all tell you the same thing: someone heard yelling between the last two Morvant men, the cracking of Mathilde’s wedding china hurled across the room, a guttural scream accompanied by what sounded like howling, manic laughter, though no one would dare admit that aloud, and the slamming of a door. Then… nothing. Crickets sang away into the late summer night, and everyone went about their business.
The next day, Vincent was found dead at his own dining room table of a broken heart, and poor little Maxi was left all alone in the world.
What followed the next few weeks was the most awkward standoff in the town’s history, possibly even the state’s: this sweet, polite, soft-spoken young man with perfect manners, and the parish sheriff who knew damn well Vincent Morvant didn’t die of no broken heart. He came by the house almost daily for the week after the murder, and every time, Maxi would be waiting with a plate of his great-grandmother’s famous cookies (an old German recipe) and a full pitcher of homemade lemonade. When the coroner finally declared there was no trace of anything untoward in old Vincent’s guts, not even his favored bourbon, the Sheriff about threw a fit right there on Maxi’s front porch. Maxi smiled and waved as he shut the door, but before he did, he told the old man that if he wasn’t coming by the plan a funeral, he’d need to come back with a warrant.
Given that Maxi was the only qualified person in his part of the parish, and no one wanted to send their meemaw the next town over when it was her time to go on and receive her Eternal Reward, he was fast-tracked through the state exam. He passed it on his twenty-first birthday, exactly.
The next day, however, this proved all for naught: the family hearse was out of the driveway, and that boy was gone for five whole years.
The House stood empty, sheets over the furniture, with a cleaning service being wired money every so often to go in and clear away any truly troublesome cobwebs or dust bunnies. Keen-eyed neighbors noticed that it was a different crew every time, however… apparently, whatever they were being paid, it wasn’t worth it for most people to go back into that House twice. You could watch the ones that took smoke breaks stand there on the wide front porch, or near the garage door, with an uneasy shifting and a nervous glance over their shoulder every few minutes or so. If you were brave enough to walk over and ask one about it, they’d smile and laugh, insist they were being silly… but something about the House just didn’t feel right. (And not just because it was the last place lots of folks had spent their last night above ground.)
For the longest time, on windy nights, people could swear you could hear groaning coming from the loading and unloading door from the “business” half of the House in the back. It was just the wind, though. Of course.
Without warning, Maxi slipped back into town one night, and opened the family mortuary right back up the next morning like nothing happened. It’s been running steady ever since, and now people from other towns bring Maxi their meemaws and other assorted family dead, having heard for miles around how dignified and magnificent all his services are — no matter who the deceased was, or if their family had money.
…The only odd thing, in all of this, is that sometimes - just sometimes, mind you - people who attend the funerals tend to… go missing, not long after. Usually adult male relatives of the deceased: a troublesome cousin, a cantankerous father, a boorish brother. (Not to mention the unfortunate spate of pretty girls and boys that have up and disappeared across multiple parishes during what would come to be called his “Bad Spell” - but no one can prove they’re connected, of course.) It’s become a bit of a rumor that the Morvant business, for all Maxi’s empathy and efficiency, might just be cursed.
If you ask Maxi about this, he’ll give you a smile - a slightly pained one - and suggest perhaps it’s the same curse that took his dear father, saints rest him, all those years ago. And how could you argue with someone whose own family wasn’t immune to… whatever this was?
But he’s such a sweet man, everyone in the town will tell you so. He hosts every funeral and wake himself, and he takes such care of the grieving families, it’s like the deceased is one of his own. He’s not one for the church, and for being so handsome, he’s most usually found in the company of a book or a stray critter in the cemetery.
…Until you come into town, and the whole world as he knows it shifts on its axis.
(art commissioned from @/roachcult here on tumblr.)
[it occurred to me that the last time I posted the October Arc, I had had this up beforehand -- oops! better late than never.
if you read all this again, you're still a sweetheart. 🖤]
