hi! im toad, or maggie (idc.) she/her. 24. i write cod x reader and sometimes (most of the time) they’re dark and sometimes they’re not! i try to tag everything appropriately, but if i miss anything don’t hesitate to tell me and it’ll be fixed.
ask me things. request things. message me. dump thoughts. if i dont reply it’s because im nervous but i read every one and love them
minors dni! i write and reblog nsfw, noncon, dubcon, graphic violence, religious themes, and more heinous stuff.
You've thought about Price's mouth everyday for four months.
Not obsessively. Or... no, that's a lie. Obsessively, but in the involuntary way the brain latches onto a detail and will not release. The texture of his lips under yours. The way his chest had refused to move on its own, and you had put both hands to his sternum and pushed like you were trying to reach something buried deep inside of him. The count in your head- one and two and three and- and the absolute, animal terror of those seconds where he was just weight. Just absence shaped like a man.
You had brought him back.
You have not been the same since.
His office door is open. That's normal for him. Door open to the corridor unless there's a briefing or someone catching hell. You pause in the frame without announcing yourself, long enough to take him in: him at his desk, hunched slightly over something on the screen, the lamp casting him in an amber glow. The overhead is off. He hasn't noticed you.
You should knock. Say his name. Do any of the many reasonable things someone does when they enter someone's space.
You don't.
You cross to him quietly- not sneaking but not announcing yourself either- until you're close enough to smell the wool of his jumper, close enough to see the silver threading through the short hairs at the back of his skull. You watch his movements. The slight rise and fall. The small shift of weight as he reaches for something on the desk.
You weren't doing that, you think and do not say. For a minute and forty five seconds you weren't doing anything at all.
"Can I ask you something," you say instead.
He doesn't startle. You've noticed that about him. He registers people before they expect to be registered, like some part of him is always tracking. He tips his head back just slightly in acknowledgment.
"Ask," he says.
You press your lips together. You heart pounds against your rips. "Do you trust me?"
A pause- not hesitation, you think. But the stillness of a man choosing his words carefully. Then:
"Yes."
No qualifier. No of course or within reason or that depends what you're-. Just the word, clean and flat and entirely sure of itself. The same voice he uses to give orders. The same voice you've heard go soft exactly twice in the many years you've known him.
You close your eyes briefly.
Then you lift your hand and sit it over his eyes.
Your palm covers them both: the left, the right, the fine skin of his brow, wrinkles from the corner of his eyes expanding into his temple. You can feel him breathe. He goes very still under your hand, the way prey goes still, except that isn't right. Price has never been prey in his life. He's choosing this stillness, holding just for you.
He doesn't reach up. Doesn't ask.
You find his mouth with yours the way you found it four months ago, in the dark, kneeling over him on concrete with your hands shaking and your lungs full of something cold. Except... this time his lips are warm.
That's the first thing that you notice. Just the warmth of him. You had forgotten or maybe you had never let yourself remember it properly, the way the mind protects itself from the things it can't afford to want. But his mouth is warm and present and you feel something in your chest that has been held very tightly for four months begin, incrementally, to release.
You don't rush it. You can't. This is too careful of a thing to rush.
His lips are slightly chapped, you can feel the faint drag of it, the realness of it, and something about that detail makes your eyes sting behind their closed lids because he is real, he is here, he is warm and breathing and his heart is beating entirely on its own. You press in just a little more, closer, like you're trying to verify it through contact. Like you need to know he's solid all the way through.
He makes a sound, very low, barely there at all, more a shift in the quality of his stillness, and this his lips part for you. Slow. So slow you feel each small movement of it, careful and deliberate, the way he does everything. Like a door being opened by something who knows what's on the other side and has decided, having considered it fully, to open it anyway.
You taste coffee and tobacco and something faintly sweet, and you think oh, the way you think oh when something you have been bracing against turns out to be something else entirely.
Both of his hands come up. One finds the wrist of the hand covering his eyes, and wraps around it loosely, not pulling, not directing. Just... there. Just present. His thumb settles against the thin skin on the inside of your wrist where your pulse is doing something mortifying and rapid and you wonder if he can feel it, and you suspect that he can, and you find that you don't mind.
The other hand finds your face.
It's tentative at first, just his fingertips at your jaw, the lightest possible contact, like he's asking a question before he commits to saying it out loud. Then his palm settles over your cheek, broad and scorching and rough, and he tilts you, just barely, into him. The movement splits you open somewhere quiet.
You had put your hands on him four months ago with the desperate force of something trying to keep another person alive. You and pushed and counted and breathed into him and felt nothing except the terror of the task. You had not let yourself feel anything else until it was over and he was breathing on his own and someone was pulling you back and you were sitting on the ground with your knees wet and your hands shaking, and you had looked at your own palms like they belonged to someone else.
You are not shaking now.
Your hand is still curved over his eyes. He is still holding onto your wrist. His other hand is still cupped against your cheek, and you are leaning into it without meaning to.
You pull back the smallest distance. An inch. Maybe less and you stay like that. Your hand over his eyes, his over your wrist, the lamp the only light, the corridor outside quiet. His breathing comes out slow and steady. Yours is less steady.
"Okay," You say, eventually. To no one. To the four months of it.
His thumb moves against your pulse point once.
"Yeah," Price says. Low and rough and soft all at once, like okay is the only word big enough for what he means, and also not nearly big enough at all. "Okay."
a shy man with a big cock who guides it into you with his hand, softly moaning as you squeeze around him. stays inside of you for a moment, unmoving, because he is so grateful to be in you. thanks you and proceeds to fuck you like a feral animal
hi! i just wanted to say that hare liver/turtle dove is genuinely a masterpiece. i read it days ago and have been thinking about it ever since. it was such a treat and your prose is fucking beautiful. you should really, really, really be proud. it was so gorgeous. thank you so much for it. i hope you have a great day!!!
THANK YOU this is such a nice thing to say and i’m glad you liked it :)) i hope you have a great day too!!
oh my goodness ive had talking to ghosts & running from ghosts bookmarked as a routine re-read (literally even have them downloaded to my kindle as epubs to re-read when im on the plane... fav of all time for sure) i did not realize you were on tumblr! just read hare liver/turtle dove and thought 'wow i need more this was amazing' and omg what a wonderful surprise!! just wanted to share appreciation... have a wonderful day/night! :) :)
HI!! thank you so much i’m glad you enjoy the fics!!! i hope you have a wonderful day/night too :)))
cw: afab reader, reader can visibly blush, breeding, cucking, scratching, size difference, simon thinks about eating you a lot :)
medieval!au based on this post of mine. your lord husband is letting you down and simon knows he can do something about it
Simon remembers the first time he saw you.
How could he not? You were a stranger in a strange land.
A flower from the south, grown up in warm soil and rich sun. Looking like you lived on fruit and honey, and Simon bet you smelled like it, too. Blackberry jam, and sweet cream, and nectar, he'd reckon. It was the first thought that passed through his head—that he'd like to smell you. Wanted to shove his ruined nose into that soft part in the hollow of your neck, where you were warm and delicate and he could feel your pulse thrumming just beneath, and inhale. He had to get close to anything to get a scent—his nose was mostly scar tissue, burned and singed from coke smoke over and over throughout the years—but he had wanted it.
You stepped out of your vulgar carriage, a little bird, bright and smiling in the bitter, sodden morning, and he had wanted it.
He doesn't know why. Hours in the forge leave him plenty of time to mull thoughts like warmed, spiced wine, but he hasn't yet figured out his taste for sweet things. Finespun things. Things he could crush in his hands like eggshells. He only knew that the sweet things never liked him much. Sweet things were frightened of the large, scowling thing making iron sing among the flames.
Until you.
You looked him in the eye. Smiled at him that day when he stood in the receiving line in the courtyard. You had a flash of teeth for everyone, it was true, but often even those generous with their smiles could never quite find one for Simon. They got lost somewhere, swallowed by his imposing frame. And maybe you didn't know to be afraid, maybe you'd never learned to be wary of mutts in your fair, tempered home, but Simon thought it was something else:
Curiosity. Interest in the beasts bred in the north—because your lord husband certainly wasn't an example of one.
The first son of a first son with a great old name and a castle. His family had lived within its walls for four hundred years, building and defending it in the name of some faraway king Simon couldn't give two shits about, and your mooncalf lord was going to run it all into the mud. He was a dull axe, meek and mollycoddled. Played at war to take the spines of other, greater men. A bare branch, too, Simon figured.
You'd learn all that when he returned from his latest campaign.
Married in absentia for your father's wealth of fighting men, you'd meet your new husband for the first time a month after your arrival. For now, you're alone, a warmblood getting used to the frost. It's no wonder you wander into Simon's forge.
Three days into your residence at the keep, your maids have you dressed for the winter. All wrapped up in a dull-coloured cloak. Hiding you beneath thick fur and delicate embroidery—as if anything could dull what you hold within you. The waifs are too flighty to follow you into Simon's workshop. The smell, the heat, the man within—all of them offend their delicate sensibilities in one way or another. Not you, though. You run to the bellows with no mind paid to the bull hammering metal beside them.
Simon only stops his work when you clear your pretty throat.
"What is your name, ser?" you ask. You're a daisy blooming in the winter muck. Or a weed, sprouting stubbornly where it doesn't belong. Wilting petals sucking sunlight in a smithy.
The only light here is from the fireglow; all else is choked. Coal smoulders in the hearth, belching sulphur and tar into the dense, stifling air. Breezes are throttled the moment they pass the threshold, so there's nothing to kick up the ash and soot—they lie in a blanket over the vices and punches, chisels and swages. Anything in Simon's forge doesn't stay clean for long. Even you, satin eve. Linger, and you'll melt into the walls with all the rest.
"Not a ser, little bird. Just a blacksmith," he says.
He had been mending a mail hauberk ruined in your lord's last battle. Some bannerman had a terrible day, and it was Simon's job to set the chain back right so another soldier could have one more. He sets the armour aside, and the loops of steel shimmer like stars in the firelight. You demand his full attention, and Simon wants to see what you'll do with it.
"My lady," you say, tone polite and proper. You run him a cunning once-over, top to toe, and Simon wonders what you see.
"Not no lady, neither."
"No, blacksmith, I'm a lady—the lady of your liege lord," you remind him with a smirk. As if he needed it. You look the part enough—clean and soft, highborn, grown up never scraping a knee, no doubt. But there's mischief twinkling in your eyes, like a child looking at a stream they want to ruin their boots in.
Simon doesn't know if he wants to stamp out that mischief or if there's something else he'd like to do with it.
He'll have to get closer to find out.
"And what does the lady of my liege lord want?"
"Your name." You're puckish and enjoying it, a smiling imp playing in the tick of your mouth. Even as your neck cranes to look up at him.
He rounds the heavy anvil to stand in front of you. Simon knows he's a big man. Can't forget when he's looking at the tops of people's heads all the time. And he's reminded, often and loudly, by highborns who think their sigils and names make them large. If I were your size, I'd rule the fucking kingdom, they say, and they're right. Simon probably could be a knight if he wanted. A ser. Fight hard enough for a lord who would give him a holdfast and a wife of his own. But he prefers the forge, prefers bending iron to his will to being bent to a lord's.
And if he were some perfumed knight, you wouldn't be here, looking up at him with intrigue.
Mud-madness, maybe. Maybe you want to know what it's like in the dirt.
"Riley," Simon says. He gives you his last, a secret joke just for him.
He's stepped into your space, something that would get him flogged if there were anyone around to see. But it's dark, and warm, and lonely in his poor hovel, and he likes how a little bit of your bravery is sapped away with him so close. Likes to see the uncertainty bleed into the curve of your brow with every notch your fine spine bends.
"Riley the blacksmith." You run a delicate finger on the flat side of a blade Simon was working on earlier, pressing prints into the cooled iron where it rests on the table beside you both. You're pretending now, pretending you're not afraid. But you can't look at him, and Simon can see your chest rise and fall.
"You'll forge a new sword for my husband," you continue. "I've brought good steel from my home for you to use."
"Not some jewelry?" he asks.
You hum. "I have enough jewelry."
"Didn't mean for you."
That gets your eyes back on him. You're affronted at the insult to your perfect lord. You draw yourself to your full height, taking back the measures you shrank. It's still lengths below Simon, and you know it. Simon sees the exact moment you realize just how tall you'd have to grow to match him, so you put another kind of distance between you and him. You glide to the other side of his work table, and when you speak, it's harsh and proud. "No jewelry. A sword, a longsword."
"Why?"
Chin tipped high, shoulders squared; a bead of sweat rolls down your temple. "Because I want for it."
"Used to getting what you want, little bird?" Simon follows your path, but when he steps, you step, and it's a dance. Not the measured steps you were surely taught as a girl, not the proper trips of light to plucked strings. It's a different sort of dance, and it doesn't help you. The only thing it does is get his blood hot.
If it's a chase you're after, you'll get it.
"Yes," you say.
Simon likes how your throat looks when you swallow.
"You don't know what you want," he tells you.
He could show you. In his mind's eye, Simon sees the woods outside the keep. He hears your soft footsteps thumping on the forest floor and the sounds you'd make when he catches you. Can almost smell the frozen leaves tangling in your hair, and the prey-sweat on your skin, and his jaw tingles.
"I do." You circle the table, never letting Simon get within arm's reach. Smart bird, but you sound as petulant as a child.
"And what's that?" he asks.
A table between you and him, and you think it is enough. That's the problem with highborns—they never think the lowbreds are half as bloodthirsty as they are. They think they are the teeth. Think their rank is armour. But what's a title in the mud, and even a worm will turn. That table could be across the room in a second, if Simon had the mind. You stir some creature in him, your furtive steps like the beating of wings. It rises from his chest like bile, that urge to hold you down, stop your movings and twitchings with his weight, feel your muscles flex below him.
Like a hound on a coursing—only what runs is hunted.
"A happy husband," you tell him, and Simon can't remember what the conversation was. He's busy keeping his feet planted, even as you step into the doorway and his every instinct begs him to act. He hadn't even realized you'd circled all the way back to the entrance to his forge, where the cold and daylight await.
"And a sword. By the end of the month, Riley, for his return."
Your scent sits in the air like poppy oil long after you've left.
You come back the next week, a winter rose tucked behind your ear and flakes of snow dusting your crown.
You're a bright thing, too full of life for this unwelcoming keep. Simon keeps thinking you'll wither, that one of these days he'll see you round a corner and you'll be sallow and wet like the rest of the north, but you keep surprising him. He eats his fill of you in glimpses, flutters of your cloak through the keyhole of his doorway, traipsing through the snow with your litter of gamines at your heels. You haunt his nights, his dreams, walking the scorched halls of his mind like a shade of witness, and in them, too, you run.
Simon wakes every dawn before you're caught. Always just around the next bend, soft soles padding on the stone.
Seeing you, then, measures from his wingspan and unaware of the danger dripping drool at your feet, Simon feels of consequence. Feels like a whispered name of a fable, too treacherous to say too loudly, or something may hear. Infamy, that's where Simon's thoughts lead him. Or into the loop of a noose.
Where you got that rose, though, he'd like to know. Crystal ropes of ice line the petal edges. A precious beauty frozen in time, black as liver blood. When he asks, you pluck it from your ear and hide your smirk behind it. "I met a handsome fairy in the wood, and he said he would give me a secret if I gave him a kiss. All I received was this rose," you tell him. Grinning like this is the start of a fun game, like you're the Good Neighbour between the iron oaks.
In your southern home, perhaps, The Folk are just stories. Here, in the unyielding North, people don't have the luxury to laugh at tales. If you're born in the snow, you don't take bargains with a light heart.
"Trading kisses, eh?" Simon grunts. Coke smoke and steam billow around him as he quenches a blade in a pail of water. Metal screams and hisses as it chokes for breath. "What do you want, then? A pair of earrings? I could give you a necklace you'd like."
You come to his side, straining around his torso to watch the steel drown. You're nothing, just nothing beside his great frame. He could bend you as easily as red iron, but your teeth flash with alloyed courage.
"Is that your usual payment, Riley?"
"Give me a kiss, little bird, and you'll get more than a necklace."
Sheltered, highborn lady, whistling in the dark. You don't even know what he's saying. You may have a shade of an idea, words sipped from distant whispers not meant for your ears, but it's like the light that slips through coloured glass. Insubstantial, just a facsimile of the real thing. You're here to catch rays to see what they feel like. To know.
Because you came back—like a moth to a flame, you came back alone to singe your wings—and you don't call for the guards when he drifts into your space. Simon wonders how far he can push you, and how quickly. Cool a blade too fast, and the core bows. Warps. Its edge turns to brittle glass, itching to chip and crack. Heat it too fast, and the steel tempers and softens. Becomes just another useless lump of metal.
He wants you boiling when you come to him, and you will come to him.
You've caught his scent just as much as he's caught yours. Like a doe snuck into his territory, you tease his edges—not wise enough to realize just how threadbare his control is.
For now, he'll let you feel the warmth sitting, perpetually, just underneath his skin. Let you feel your own size as he looms over you. Some birds like their men grizzly, like towering beasts with hard fists and mean jaws—you love it. Simon can see it in the twitch of your chin, the draw of your pupils, the hard spots of heat on your cheeks. Bad luck that you're married to your dim, fallow reed. Frightfully bad luck.
"There you go again," Simon whispers. The tips of his boots touch your fine shoes. Your delicate hands wring together in front of your belly.
"Pardon?"
So mannered, so decent, even as Simon can see your thoughts swimming around your empty head like water wraiths. Just the promise of a kiss below the murk, or a wet grave. He could pluck the pictures from your mind, roll them around his mouth like spit-stones, and he knows what he would taste. Interest, and imaginations, and lilac honey. Sweat and dew. Clotted cream. So virtuous, even as your lips hang slack, and he can see the pink, wet muscle of your twitching tongue.
"You blush when you look up at me," Simon tells you. Lets some scorn, some mockery, flavour the words as they burrow into your ear. "You even know what you're blushin' over?"
Your hand flies to your cheek, cooling away the flush with dancing fingers. An indignant huff puffs from your mouth, and Simon is sure you'd stomp your foot if you had less of a hold on yourself. It almost makes him smile. Do it, he thinks. Give him a reason to take you over his knee. Welts on your ass and three fingers in your cunt would wipe that whiny look off your face, he's sure.
He doubts anyone's ever taught you that lesson—doubts you even know just how hard lessons can be learned—but he wouldn't mind being the first.
"I do know," you puff.
"Know what, little bird?" There's a sparrow, just there, embroidered on your heavy wool cloak. The hours it must have taken to thread it carefully between the weave, the years of practise to accomplish a stitch with such beauty, precision. And Simon could ruin it. Ruin it in a moment. The urge bites at him as he reaches forward to pet the fine fabric between his fingers.
A risk if he's ever taken one. Simon likes his hands. They're rather important to him.
"Why ladies blush." Your voice is just a promise.
"Do you, now?" You're looking at your hem balled in Simon's heavy fist, at the scrapes on his knuckles so close to your belly where you're warm and heaving with breath. "Good little ladies like yourself blush at pretty highborns with flowers in their hair. Why're you blushin' at me?"
You're looking at him like a traveller near a bluff, aware of the drop, feeling the call. One tug, and you would fall into him.
He doesn't get the chance, though. At least, not yet.
The spell breaks, your lady's maid calling your name from the snow, and you take flight—spinning when he, for just a moment, doesn't let your cloak slip from his grasp. Simon knows it's no matter. Your winter rose rests on the cobblestone at his feet, already withering in the heat and choking air. You'll visit him in his dreams again, and maybe he'll see what will happen when you're snared.
Some rabbits chew their foot off. What will you do?
Your milklivered lord comes home clean as spring, and brings disappointment with him.
You try to hide it, but Simon knows. Plucked and preened, you greet him in the courtyard as you were greeted a month before, and present to him the sword Simon forged. The sword with the bloodgutter shaped to the exact curve of your lips, Simon's sickness hammered into the folded iron. The sword your lord can hardly hold upright as his thin arm trembles. Chagrin dusts your tepid smile when his frail hand cups your chin. When he wraps you in his hold, and so much of you is left exposed to the chill.
He's weak, another thing Simon can crush in his palm, but that one, he hates.
And the disappointments only grow, only follow you—dragging behind you like a limp mule slowing down the retinue. Better to cull the lame thing, put everyone out of their misery, but you, the dutiful wife, do try. The servants say you read to him by the hearth in the evenings, and tug him on gentle walks through the wood, and they whisper about the noises he makes as he sweats over you every night. And you glow and simper in the mornings, but he can't keep you happy.
Simplest thing in the world to breed a bird, and your lord is failing.
He's letting you wilt. When more months go by without an heir in your belly, the folk start to whisper. They think there must be something wrong with you. The women make you eat comfrey and daisy, and carve words into the butter you lathe on your bread. They stir hare's egg powder into the tea you choke down. You plant parsley alone in the dawn light, nails cracking in the hard, cold soil, and if you aren't growing soon, you'll be sent away. Back to your father, who may not receive you, or to a lone and quiet convent to dwindle into old age.
Or worse. Much worse can befall a woman who doesn't give her husband a child. You're in a different sort of trap, now.
Simon knows it's not your fault, but he seems to be the only one who does. So he waits—lingers in your periphery for you to work it out for yourself—and it's the dead of night when you come back to him at last. Your lord has just left on another campaign for his king, and you're shivering and washed with the snowfall, standing in Simon's forge. Winter-dimmed, strained in the face and hard around the mouth, but the blustering bellows dance warm, orange light over your skin.
It's what you've needed. Some heat. Should've come to Simon weeks ago. He can press some warmth back into you.
You open your mouth to speak, but Simon hasn't forgotten your last conversation, and it's time you listened to him. "It's because you like blushin' at me, isn't it?" he asks, coming to you where you stand by his work table. "Like lookin' at me. Wonderin' how it would be to have me in your bed and not that tallow-faced lord of yours."
"He's not—"
"He is. Can't even put a baby in your belly." The keep is dark and quiet in the distance. Only the mice are awake. Even though you don't scream when Simon bullies one paw beneath your cloak, planting his palm on your soft stomach, he doubts anyone would hear if you did. "I can do it, little bird. I can give you a pup, and it won't take me no season either."
You grip his forearm like you're going to push him off, but when your nails sink into the scars and mottled flesh there, you hesitate. Something mercenary sits in your gaze, something hard-won and hewn in ice. No more mischief, just purpose.
Simon's a venal man. What's another ware to be sold?
"I need a son," you say at last. Jaw set, shoulders tight.
Simon was never one who needed to be told twice, and he's held long enough. You squeak when he lifts you, hefting you with hands around your ribcage to be set on his worktable, but don't protest when he undoes the clasp of your cloak. Shoves it off your shoulders to find the thin shift beneath. Diaphanous, flimsy—your nipples pebble through the linen. You were probably tossing in bed thinking about this, of coming to him in your night things, wondering what he'll do with you.
Brave thing. You're a conscript yet. Simon can't blame you for your means to an end, and this is as sweet a bargain as he's ever struck.
You run trembling hands over his shoulders, as if picturing a child with his build. "A son, blacksmith," you repeat, as if you can speak it into being.
But that's Simon's job—you only need to lie there and let him.
"I'll give you one. I'll give you three."
Propped in front of him like a dinner plate, eyes round as the moon, gone is your stiff upper lip. Maybe you thought you'd take it like a soldier—get the job done like farm animals and be back to your soft bed within minutes. You don't know, though, what you owe him. What you've done to him in his thoughts. Simon has a score to settle in your flesh, and a hunger in his belly he intends to sate in your sweat. Made him wait, you did. He's going to savour it.
He slips between your legs, bending down and down to bump your chin with his own. You know your pact. He wants his payment.
The kiss you give him is hesitant, cold lips on a warm, scarred mouth. His melted flesh pulls his lips into a permanent sneer, but you don't seem to mind. It's your tongue, first, which presses into his teeth. Your jaw, first, to pop open, expecting. You taste like the first spring day—snow-melt and sunshine, new grass and dripping, shining, icicles—and you hold him like you're going to blow away in the wind. Tugging at him, his clothes, like you're skinning a deer. Folding stripped flesh over itself to get to the warm, wet muscles beneath, still filled with the blood that made them run.
Your shift is insubstantial, so delicate that Simon could shred it like wet paper—so he does. Rips it down the front in one, great sheer to lay bare the body below that he had been thinking of for months. Months. Wondering what you hid beneath your many layers of wool, how your breath would catch when Simon grabbed heavy handfuls of your curves, picturing sooty handprints marring your pretty dress.
You break the kiss to complain, some indignant protest that falls on deaf ears because Simon isn't listening.
He's looking, swallowing the sight of you so he can never forget the way it felt slipping down his throat. The swell of your breasts, the soft roll of your stomach, the plush give of your thighs, knees knocked wide around his hips. Simon's longed for this painting. His muscles cramped with it.
How dare that lord of yours let you walk the halls of the keep. If you were Simon's, really his, you wouldn't be allowed. He would take you to the woods, the vast, unending forests of the North, where no one could ever find you, and he'd tie you to the bed. Make sure the only thing on your mind is the next time his cock will be seated inside you. Drip honey in your mouth and fill your womb with his seed again, and again, and again.
He has half a mind to do it. Take you. Bring you to a place where you could run for lengths and never come close to another heart beating between the trees.
You're halfway to letting him, he thinks. Dropped back into some primal part of your mind as he lays you back, tools clattering to the floor, and latches his mouth to the soft velvet of your breasts. Everything he does, you react as if it is the first time, and Simon wonders. Wonders if he could mark the warm curves of you, sink his teeth in, take a bite and swallow, and if your lord would ever notice.
Limp, pidgeonhearted lord. Wasting you.
He wouldn't waste you. Thoughts catch like fingers on cliff edges, cock swelling, achingly hard, at you so sweet and fictal looking up at him. He'd crack his ribs open, tuck you there, if he could. Make you sip the air from his lungs, breathe when he breathed. Your years of careful comportment, of being hidden in high towers, crumbling in his palm like white ash.
Simon's never wanted anything like this. His stomach aches. He feels washed away, uprooted, by the want—vicious and cruel, rearing now after months of suffocation.
The want to raze and build anew.
Simon has a bed, somewhere—a threadbare nest tucked in some corner—but he likes you where you are, laid out on his table like another thing to be forged, moulded into whatever he sees fit. You move how he wants, pliable as liquid metal, as sweat blossoms in the dips and wells of your body. He could make you, but you let him. You only falter when he parts your legs and dips his head between them, looking like a filly. New to the world on weak knees. Eyes wide, confused, as he kisses your thighs. You rest your hands protectively in a knot below your navel.
It's a near thing, holding back the sleeping creature within himself. The one that howls to devour, claim, own. But things can be owned in other ways—forever changed, tied to him. Something, finally, for himself. Made to keep.
The first brush of lips against your cunt has you squirming, and he has to hold you down. "Is this … necessary?" you ask.
Simon hooks your legs over his shoulders, opening you up more to him, and his mouth waters. He can feel his cheeks tingling as saliva collects, and he can smell you. Finally close enough to really know. Loam, and lye soap, and the tang of dandelion milk. Gooseflesh blooms in the wake of his searching nose.
"Yes," he tells you.
"No wonder I'm not withchild yet, my husband has never—oh." A needless sentence, aborted with a bleat as his mouth descends.
Even though you run from him. You're prim and proper about it, hiding sighs behind a furrowed brow and the flit of your fingers. Simon doesn't want the Lady; he wants what he knows is beneath, but he knows he's going to enjoy teasing it out of you. You're jumpy, writhing and twitching, swallowing soft hums and hiccups as Simon parts you with his tongue. Sipping nectar from the source, kitten-licks around your pulsing entrance until he finds the sensitive bud at the apex of you and wraps his lips around it.
Soon, other wetness joins his spit, and your hands leave their knot to scratch against Simon's scalp. Gripping his hair at the root, pushing his face into your bucking hips, and it tastes like victory. Your lord is off conquering a strip of land no one cares about, and Simon is here conquering his wife. Simon can feel the rumble in his own chest as he groans into you.
He pulls back, chin wet, to watch his finger disappear inside you, practically sucking him in as you whine. He'd give up breath to keep tasting you, to keep your velvet heat under his tongue and feel you pulsing as you're wrung out, but he has to see. Has to witness the crescent of dirt under his nail, the dark lines in his knuckle sinking in. Watch your stomach as it jumps, and your pretty face twisting up. Your walls flutter around him, giving in to his prodding, his petting, until he can slide another inside. And because he's greedy, Simon's tongue follows too. Muscle against muscle, he could drown in you.
Live forever on only this. On your trembling thighs and plaintive cries, nuzzling his ruined nose against your clit until you shout.
Supine, you thrash, limp limbs tensing and releasing like the crash of waves. Like you're scrabbing for purchase in the dark, and only Simon is there to lead you. "Wait—stop," you mewl, voice high and reedy, and Simon halts—barely. He doesn't ask why, doesn't trust his voice to be anything but a growl, and he doesn't want to frighten you. Not yet. Not when you're teetering on the edge of where he's taking you.
Tears rim your glossed eyes when you catch his gaze down the line of your body. "I don't know what's—I feel—"
Rage and male pride swirl in his chest, a potion he could get drunk on. Ire-honeyed mead his fists could siphon out. Sweet, sweet bird. Poor, mistreated highborn. Simon'll give you a dozen, a score, until you're spent and dazed. Until your eyes can't focus, and the only thing you can say is his name.
"Told you this was necessary, didn't I?" he asks.
You nod, a pout Simon wants to chew off tugging at your lips.
"Then stop whinin'."
You hold his hand through your release, lacing your fingers in his and holding them, locked, to your chest. Your eyes are closed as if in concentration, and Simon can feel your heartbeat against his wrist, thumping in time with your pitiful laments. They pour from your throat as if hooked out, spiralling upward in rungs like a silver-keen melody. It's winsome, how you curl against him, shoulders bowing inward, fingers scrabbling at the singed hair of his forearm. How you clench down on his fingers, still petting inside you, gummy walls pulsing as your muscles tense. Tight as a bowstring, horse tendons dried and twisted, until you're loosed, limp and panting.
Simon's decision is made. It drives into place like a rosehead in his nape, clouted in with your lips on his knuckles. Wrought-iron against bone, muscles making room for rusted metal. Can't pull nails without a fight, not once they've been clenched.
You scrunch your face up when he kisses you afterward, pressing your own taste back into you. He expects you to shy away again. To fawn, coltish and faltering. But you're on him the moment he pulls away, chasing him, sitting up from the table to follow the heat of his torso like you're an early-spring lamb. His tunic, you shove halfway up his chest without a care for the ties, and your nails follow. Clean, shaped things that leave lines in their wake, coaxing Simon's blood to the surface—a red bloom on pale flesh and stark, pink scars. Old burns still holding flame inside him.
Perfect, kept teeth sink into the plush of his chest as you tug at his trousers, paw at him, hard and leaking, straining against the fabric, like you can't wait another moment
—and you're his. Another man's wife, traded to him for swords and arms to wield them, but you belong to Simon. From the moment you smiled at him in the courtyard, you did. And not you nor any man could stop him. You mark bites into his skin like you could chew him living, and Simon thinks about making off with you like a monster in the night. Not Beowulf, but Grendel. But no one is nailing his arm to any wall, not when it can slip around the curve of your back and bring you close to him.
You come readily into his hold, trembling legs locking around his hips, fingers letting blood at the back of his neck, as you're carried. Anywhere. Any flat surface Simon can find so he can sit, can hold you fast in his lap and feel you tense atop his thighs. Let you work yourself full of him as the fire spits.
He doesn't know where he lands. Somewhere hay-filled and dusty. He can't stop relishing the feel of you, better than he could've ever conjured in his rotten mutt mind. So fragile, so soft—your ribs give when he presses his palms into them. A thing to protect, or shatter like overheated glass. Because blood-heavy, aching in anticipation, Simon wants to be cruel. Wants to let free the leash, the vice clamped somewhere in his stomach, and see what crawls out the back of his throat. Pour it into you, let your wrangle or succumb. Plant an ugly seed and watch it sprout.
Simon likes the thought of your lord finding out. Of him stitching it together like piecemeal and coming in the night. Likes the thought of grinding his jaw into the anvil. Making his skull into a fine cup.
You buck clumsily in his lap, hunting for friction. Grinding a wet spot into his trousers because he hasn't even freed himself yet. You cease at a growled command and wait so nicely for Simon to pull himself free and line up, even if your brows furrow at the sight of him.
"It will fit?" you ask. It's vulgar, the sight of him—mean and thick and dripping white globs of seed as his fist tightens around the base of himself—next to you. Shaking thighs and supple flesh, spit and slick dripping down your legs as you hover above. "Riley?"
"Yes, little bird."
"It's only … You're much larger than—"
"M'not him, am I?" He wraps his other paw around your nape, bending your neck to make you stare down between your bodies. The two of you watch together as you slowly sink down on him, the angry, red flesh and veins like bruises pushing inside, just past the lip of his crown. You're too tense to allow anything more, strangling him already; he can hardly breathe. "Look."
Your hands grasp at his shoulders, fingers clawing at the flesh and meat there. Can't do that to your lord, Simon thinks. Your husband is made of bones and twine. He can't take the bruises you want to mould into muscle, can't fill you so full you can't even swallow. Simon can just picture him wheezing over you in your marriage bed, you silent and smiling. Nowhere near the creature Simon's made—the lap dog panting in his hold.
You need him.
Need him to protect you, someone to cover your whole body with his own until you're not even there. Until nothing can find you. Your lord can't make you safe like that. Simon can.
You suck in gulping breaths like a gaping fish as you lower yourself, squeezing him in steadily. It's velvet heat and mouthwatering pressure all around him that make his thoughts dart like wide-eyed hares. Your forehead slides against his, slick with sweat and the mixed putty of settling ash, and he can taste your lungs on his lips. You grind back and forth as you work him in—too fast. Too fervid and impatient, you constrict around him, forcing him in with hurt twisting your pout into a grimace.
"Careful," Simon warns. He moves his grip to your hips to guide you, sliding you up and down his length in slow, shallow dips as you hiccup. "Like this. That's it."
Teaching you how to take him, making you ease him inside because you're too eager to check yourself, choking down pain just to get him in, in—it cracks open something wretched in Simon. It spills like spoiled egg yolk through his chest, dripping through the rungs of his ribcage to dry and split. He wants to pop out every one of your teeth like willow buds and hold them in his cheek. Wants to bite your knuckles into his mouth and feel the bones grind together. He wants. He wants.
You, eyes fastened to the joining of your bodies and none the wiser, spill a warm whine over his mouth. Protesting the pace, you scratch your grievances into his skin.
"Slow at first," he tells you, nipping at the curve of your jaw to quell the ache in his own. "Just this time, little bird."
"No," you complain, pettish and sullen. Sour in your urgency, piqued in your restlessness. "I want—"
"Patience," he murmurs, but he can hear the strain in his own voice. Simon's been patient for months. You can weather a palmful of minutes. It's only a blink of time to get you used to his size. Simon's ox-built in all countenance, so it's steady, patient work, but your muscles give to him eventually. Suddenly, he's seated inside you, fully sheathed and struggling for control.
You're a vice around him, battened down like a garrote. He feels smothered, having to clamp down his insides so he doesn't do something awful.
"Can I move?" you plead, ignorant of the maelstrom happening inside his head, his stomach. You plant sweet kisses on his cheeks, the corner of his mouth, supplicating for movement. Supplicating to be eaten.
Simon rolls your flesh under his palms, hobbling his desire with thin-spun thread. "You think of this when he's inside you? Think about if it were me?" he demands, unable to keep the cruelty behind the ladder of his teeth. "I'll show you."
He starts off blunted, keeping his clip deliriously slow, letting you languish in the feel of him dragging inside you—but that can only go on so long. You cry for him to speed up, to fill you harder, and deeper, more savage, more bruising, and Simon obliges.
And Simon tells himself that this—snapping his hips into you, the head of him grinding against the plug of your womb, bullying himself inside again and again as your eyes roll, hands spasm—is for you. That he's freeing the snare, not tying a new one round your twitching ankle. But it's for him. Because maybe Simon likes sweet things because of the opportunity they promise, the chance of ruin. Nothing sweet lives in the world for long, not without interference, and you have so many lights Simon could snuff out
—or fuel. He could make you burn only for him.
A selfish sort of preservation, like a lover's hands kept in milky jars of vinegar.
His back aches with the strain, that old injury born of being bent over anvils for all his life flaring now as he pistons upward, but he's chasing. His own release and yours, hunting oaths and promises and the feel of you coming apart around him. He tucks you against himself, forearms squeezing your torso into his to lock you in place, but also because he cannot fight the instinct that's telling him to hide you away somewhere warm and dark and that might as well be somewhere beside his liver.
Your skin slides against his, your arms, so much smaller than his own, crushed between your chests so all you can do is huff and squeak as he drives out and in and out again. Rude, crudish squelching sounds dance in tandem with your high cries. Simon shoves your head into the crook of his neck, wanting you close to his pulse hammering there, and tilts the angle of his hips so that your sensitive bud grazes his abdomen with every thrust.
His name is a stunted cry whimpered out between heaving breaths as you clench, but it's not the pulse of your walls constricting around him, or the tender way your muscles run taut as you come, that sets his own release spinning. It's the thought of spilling inside you, filling you full and some part of himself taking root there. Of you, raised on silver and grace and careful comportment, letting yourself be bred by a lowborn smith with only the dirt to call his own. Because only he can—and you want only him to.
A lifetime of prudent rearing, unravelled in seconds. You've left the door open
—and a wolf wandered in.
Simon's body draws tight as his hips stutter, settling finally for just badgering the head of himself against your womb as he floods it with his seed. You thrash in his hold, bucking like an ill-tempered mare, at once running and grinding back on him in your own throes. You shake in his hold like a needle clinging to a pine, simpering out your afterglow into the humid heat of his neck. You're both left panting and sticky, the air in the forge suddenly suffocating.
You try to pry yourself from his arms, to sip cool air instead of the steam between you, but Simon grips you fast. "Can't spill a drop, little bird. You're going to sit here until it takes."
You whine, but settle, nuzzling at the strong cut of his jaw in a sated, satisfied way that makes his chest puff up.
You're very good, listening at last. Sitting there with Simon licking the soot and sweat off your skin until, eventually, he grows hard again, still inside you. So Simon flips you over so you're tucked beneath him and he can finally know what your muscles feel like straining below his, and know how you sound begging him to go slow, please. And he does—take his time, this go. Drives into you slow and hard until drool and tears slip down the side of your face, and you're begging him instead to fill you again.
You pay with a froth-spit kiss, and take your own price with eight red scratches up the curve of his back.
Simon wraps your cloak around your shoulders for you, fastening the cotton tight together up to your chin, and tells you to move quickly and silently when you return to your rooms. He tells you he will burn your shift, but you leave without ensuring it. Instead, Simon folds the tatters carefully and holds the linen to his nose as he closes his eyes—inhaling steady mouthfuls, looking forward to a dreamless sleep. Ragweed pollen, and sunwarmed skin, and the chimney tar he knows he crushed into you like powdered marigold.
He'll keep the shift.
Rage brews in his stomach at the thought of your lord returning, of him putting his spider hands on you, rubbing smooth palms over your growing belly and demanding the world proclaim what a splendid job he did. Simon tamps down the violence clawing at his throat—saves it for later, storing it in the cold cellar of his fists.
Yes, he'll keep the shift.
How else will Simon prove to the little lord that you're not his anymore?
IN THE BELLY OF THE RED AMERICAN WEST, FATHER JOHN PRICE COMES NOT TO SEND PEACE, BUT A SWORD.
(pt. 4 of this. also on ao3. enjoy!)
My dear,
I cannot help but agree with your sentiments—another day without you feels a day wasted. I look forward to my arrival as much as you do, so I can at last see your face. If it is as beautiful as your words are sweet, then I am a lucky man indeed.
Hunting Sydney's out here has been fruitless, so Shep appointed me in the hopes of catching the few who may have run off into the desert. Having a friend with a gavel never hurts. I'll get them, be sure of it, sugar. Don't you worry your pretty head over it.
Expect me on the first day of the coming month. I'm on my way to you as fast as I can be.
Thinking of you,
U.S Marshal Philip Graves
Father John started wearing his revolver around town.
A Peacemaker, a single-action six-shooter that warmed in his slick palms and put the mighty fear in all who witnessed. Peacemaker, as if peace were a state brought about by action, violence breeding concord, instead of a harmony of earth and ephemeral. As if peace were a thing the Father could wrangle from the air until it turned purple and gasping. As if peace were a possibility, as the sand mice hid in their burrows.
He'd never carried it before. No, his lead had always been the thick fists of his pack. But then, it was as essential to his outfit as his collar.
He'd ride his proud, gleaming appaloosa through the dust, shoulders rolling in the seat, and curtains would close around the town, for no one was thankful for him then. Not in your ghost home, not in that solemn place which had become akin to the abandoned mining hollows. Haunting the silver road creeping west. Boom towns gone belly up, thin skin to the sky, sunburnt and blistering as they were bleached. Father John stalked the twilight like a lone ranger moving cattle, creating substance on all he laid his eyes on.
You felt it, felt that magic of his, because when he was not looking at you, you knew you were shadow.
Father John sent Mama away.
Dropped an earworm and a smile, and she was gone. Didn't even tell you where she'd gone to. Sent off like a fox between the brush.
She didn't listen when you told her you could see the hawks circling above.
Father John let Mister MacTavish into the apartment above the taproom.
You had no clue where they had stayed before then, but he moved his men in before Mama's dust settled. And sometimes, you would come in from the long day and Mister MacTavish would be set at the kitchen table, hair combed and dirt picked from beneath his nails, and he would tell you to sit with him. Sometimes, a lone rosemallow would be resting on a dinner plate, and he'd watch in quiet and frightful fascination as you, under his fevered instruction, plucked it petal by petal and ate of it. And the wilted, yellow skin would stick to your tongue and throat.
And sometimes, Mister Garrick would come upon you, trembling in your seat and sweat pasting to the flower to your fingertips, and he would forget what you had asked of him once. Instead of requesting your assistance outside, he would tuck the stripped and bitten stem behind your ear and smile, and tell you how such beauty befit a lady like yourself.
And you would thank him. And you'd thank Mister MacTavish. And dusk would leach the colour from the room.
And sometimes, you'd find clots of blood in the wash basin in the mournful dark of night.
Father John was in your dreams, snuck in like distant relative come home.
He stood as a lone figure in the center of a great fire, in a town of men eating gold. And the men ate each other, too, and multiplied until they were thick-nerved and weak, and not a soul around had a hair on their head. And boats in the water wriggled like maggots flocking to flesh, shoving for their place in line, pulsing gullets open, waiting, for the skirts. And they chewed on the blue silk until it went gummy, wet threads cacconing around glistening leaves of tobacco. And thieves and gamblers rolled down the hills and were sucked beneath soft earth like the strained stomach of a pregnant woman. And trumpets sang in yellow-glass windows. And sailors stumbled, sea-legged, on the cobblestone, with rope wrapped around their sun-worn necks. And the bears danced.
And Father John plucked the tinny keys of a piano with no back, and all listened, and all knew the words, and all followed the steps on broken toes, and all, all, were happy.
And the bears danced.
Father John called you into Daddy's office one solemn evening, low voice tumbling through the hallways.
You never were allowed inside the room, not since he'd died. Mama didn't take to you touching his things. On Sundays, you used to find her throwing the curtains open, dusting the room. Or sometimes, late into the night, you'd hear her humming leaking from beneath the door. That she was gone, then, meant the room sat still and dormant—or so you thought.
You found it dark and musty when you entered. Hollow and sleepy. Just lung-air and the inky night crawling along the walls. The Father hogged the lampshine from his perch on Daddy's great old desk, sucking up the light and spitting shadows out from under his thick limbs. As if he were in a play, and the amber ring of a spotlight shone only for him in the center of the room. Just his bottom rested on the cherry wood. One of his boots was kicked up against the side beneath him, presenting you with the strained fabric of his knee.
He moved when the door latch clicked home at your back. Stood and slid to reveal Mister Garrick seated in your Daddy's chair, grinning as kind as he would if he'd run into you on the street. The man greeted you with a nod and a graceful "Evening, miss," but did not stand as you approached.
The Father nipped a knuckle beneath your chin before gesturing to the desk. "Sit right there, sweetheart—right there. Up you go."
You followed his order, even though you found it odd. Hopped onto the desk with your front facing him. Twisting to find Mister Garrick over your shoulder, you found him smiling politely, but it felt heavy there in that room. Felt like the way the air got dense and hot before the showers mourned over the mountains, those distant, boiling storms that never did make it over the peaks. If you had stuck your tongue out, you'd have tasted ozone and lightning, and the whiskey the men had been nursing before you'd come in.
When Father John stepped in front of you, he was looming as the horizon, meridian in the thunder of his cracked, grey eyes. Smelled like smoke and dust, and gave off heat like nothing else. You could feel the afternoon sun where his thighs rested against your knees. He leaned forward to place a chaste peck on your lips. Innocent. Just affection. Just love. The kiss of a shepherd—how many times had you received one before then? A good Father loved his children, his flock, and he showed them. The Father's warm mouth against yours was as familiar as it was comforting. Made you feel good and sweet inside. Chewy, like a caramel treat.
There was a curious tilt in his brow when he pulled away, assessment threading over his forehead.
The next kiss lasted longer.
It lingered, teetering on impropriety and then careening neck-first into his when his lips started moving. Whickers tickled your nose; his coarse beard chafed against your skin. There was pressure such as he had never wielded before, pushing against your teeth, and it made your chest feel funny. Churned your blood, thick and balmy, through your kicking heart. A wet and strong thing swept over your lower lip, and you gasped as if you'd stepped into a cold creek, pulled back from the Father and put your fingers to your mouth.
It was his tongue. You could taste the sting of liquor where you sucked your lip between your teeth.
Behind you, Mister Garrick laughed. You sat up straight. You had almost forgotten he was in the room. As if he were a fat fly in the corner.
Father John rested his hands on the desk beside your hips, and with just this movement, you were swallowed. Your vision was ate up by a mammoth frame and a voice like a pit of coals. "Nothing wrong with it, bug," he explained. "Give me another."
He did not wait for your concurrence. Instead, he dipped his neck to meet your mouth where it waited, and it was new. A strong nose nudging beside yours and settling into the planes of your face. His warm breath flooding your lungs. The scrape of dry lips growing slick with spit. The Father took your jaw in his tungsten grasp and squeezed until your mouth popped open, muscles giving for him and him alone. His tongue again followed, muscled and wet and baffling. Saliva mixed, sweet-dirt and bone like a humid, dunnage warehouse, but it was confusion that dragged along your gums.
Confusion and shame. Shame at the stoking within you. You had no word for the heat, for the syrup bleeding from a hook deep in your belly, but you knew, somewhere, that it was wrong. Knew that you'd only ever seen two people do this in the dark corners of the taproom before Mama would shuffle you away, and that she would mumble, violent under her breath, about carrion and buzzards and sinew laid bare.
But Mama wasn't there no more, and Father John had told you it was all right.
Spun dizzy and rummy, you thought that this must have been what alcohol felt like in your stomach. Nice in its acidity, untethering as it burned. Like a singed rope falling shrivelled and black when brought to flame. Heat rested high on your cheeks and low in your soul like a root fire, and Father John was dripping boiled sugar down your throat. You chased the sweetness as he broke away, and it was embarrassment that flooded you next. 'Wanton' howled through the hallways of your mind—a rude word soaked into you from the time you were scraping your knees. It was wrong. Wrong, wrong, wrong.
"Are you testing me?" you asked with your eyes scrunched, as if not seeing the Father meant he couldn't see you. As if temptation didn't exist in the dark, as if even the Son wasn't tested.
"Yes," came the reply, and it sank your heart. "But you just do as I say, and you'll pass."
Father John was calm when you looked at him once more. Steadfast and immovable, a Joshua tree in your turmoil. You remembered just how the yuccas had earned their noble name: God-fearing travellers had looked upon the plant and saw good Joshua raising his arms to the sky, supplicant to the open blue, leading them West through the treachery of the desert. Saw a prophet guiding them through arid heat, in need of something to trust.
You trusted the Father, trusted him to be exactly what he was, and he ground your acceptance between his molars. Chewed the grin and spat it out.
"There we are," he praised. He nipped your nightgown between his thumbs and forefingers and tugged. "We'll take this off you, now."
The refusal sat heavy on your tongue—a limp, flopping thing. It would land like a dead fish if released, false declination that it was. False in the way a door refusing a dust-devil is false. Father John shimmied the thin cotton to the apex of your thighs, then waited. The fabric caught between your bottom and the desk, and to bring the gown further, you had to lift yourself from the wood.
It meant complicity, and it was what Father John was hunting. Movement was agreement, and such agreement was submission.
You shifted your weight for him, elbows lifting, and just then, something twisted in the midnight corner. It caught your attention like the impression of a figure beneath your covers, like the dip and warmth of a mattress you'd left at daybreak. Across the room, dappled in both shadow and moonlight, a hulking creature writhed in the dark. Father John slipped the cotton over your head as your neck turned, and your eyes adjusted slowly when it was gone:
What was one form became two, wreathed together in a writhing tangle of limbs. Mister Riley, heavy and milk-white in the moon glow, constricted around a squirming Mister MacTacish. Riley's behemoth forearm caged the shorter man's collar, his other paw scalped into his dirty line of hair, and he was whispering, whispering something close into his ear. Mouth against that shell of flesh, tones low and hurried spilling from scarred lips and tumbling, lost, into the thick air. Mister MacTavish's eyes of ice shone cruel and crazed as they carved across your exposed skin, and you knew if the other man did not have hold of him, he would cross the room in only steps.
"Just Johnny, bug," Father John said, teasing your attention back to him. "Simon's got him. Don't worry."
Nerves climbed the ladder of your spine. The ghost of a humid, calloused grip tightened around your wrist. For the first time of the evening, you felt afraid. So afraid that your nakedness was an afterthought to you, even if it was not to the Father. In the distance, you saw him wash away—saw revealed the animal kept behind brittle lock and key, and this animal lapped up your pebbling skin as if it were spring water and absinthe. Freshness and vinegar he could wring from you like a soaked cloth and let run down his chin until limp and empty. A waiting cup he could fill as he pleased.
All eyes in the room were felt as if they were fingers on your flesh, but none were so heavy as the Father's. Your face was forced back to his, and you were folded in. Gauzed in the embrace inherent within, like the promise of a warm throat to hold you as you were swallowed. He kissed you one last time, languid and lazy, before pushing at your shoulders to lie you flat. Notches of bone dug into the splintering wood of the poor, tired desk, stretching you like a lamb on a dias, and you wondered if this was how Isaac had felt.
Wondered if Isaac, too, felt the faith and obedience settle like a woollen blanket over him.
You could not see the Misters Riley and MacTavish any longer, but they could be heard in the scratching of boots in the struggle and the dulcet whispers of a man trying to reason with a dog. Craning your neck backward revealed an upside-down Mister Garrick with a grin just for you, and you brought your knees instinctively up to your chest. Hiding was not an option, however, the Father deemed. He snatched your legs from the air before they could reach, bracketing them around his waist to bully into the open, inviting yaw.
The span of his frame was immense. The most private part of you kissed air and light for the first time, and you felt flayed. Skinned, perhaps, as tendon and pelt were stripped from muscle. Better a knife, you thought, for this sacrifice. Better a blade than the Father's slack-jawed devouring.
"Oh, sweetheart," he said. For his own ears. As if he were the only person in the room. "He couldn't've made me anything prettier."
When his hands began their pioneer trails along your body, you were grateful. His blazing touch thrust your mind into a hazy place apart from yourself, somewhere you did not have to think about Mister MacTacish wrangled in the shadows, nor of Mister Garrick shifting in his seat behind you. This world you inhabited needed only to be the feeling of Father John's slow exploration of his offering.
Because you knew what this was. Farm animals came to mind. The ark of Noah, two-by-two to escape the floods. In the quiet of the night, however, as you twisted under thin sheets and thoughts skipped like lightning bugs, you never conjured this:
Damp fingers kneading flesh like marbled slabs of prime. Digits locked, interstitial, between rib bones. Being squeezed and moulded like hot dough just to feel the give of flesh against palm. Or the sweep of a great hand expanding across your lower belly, heel to fingertip, assessing the precise way it swallowed you up. Trailing and kneading—you felt distinctly like a cut at auction, smacked on a bloodied table to be bid on before the flies got at you.
Slumbering beneath it all, a trickster grinned in the humiliation.
Power, perhaps, in the expansion of the flame which stewed in your stomach. Absolute feeling, heady as smog, shepherded blood and brimstone up to your chest like you were running. Like it was a cool dawn and you were sprinting, heart ratcheting, to the horizon as the coyotes sang. Straining for breath. Alive, outpacing the great chaser.
Father John saw it, for he was studying you. He drank your reactions and your twitchings in turn, letting each one clink against his teeth like liquor-ice. As he traversed, he named the slopes and valleys of you, dirt-honey words finding sentience and purchase on his foul tongue. He preached obscenities as if they were sermon—named and his lips followed, as if his mouth could not stand the words resting on your skin. He drank back titles with every broken blood vessel, every swipe of tongue on the delicate buds of your breasts, the dip of your navel, until at last it was only flesh, and you barely remained.
But when his fingers eventually trailed downwards, slipping against the heat of your inner thighs, you could not help it. You jumped, arms flailing, as he laughed. Vile humour skittered across his thunderous features, but when he spoke, it was gentle. "That's alright. S'alright. You hold Kyle's hand—just like that."
Mister Garrick was already snagging your grip in his. His palms were dry but soft as he stretched your arms back. "We're teaching Mister MacTavish manners," he said. Leaned down close to your ear. The blade of his jaw cut against your temple, and his warm breath smelled of agave, and smoke, and sweet taffy. He continued: "Teaching him how to treat a lady with the proper respect and not—" A barbed grin around perfect, white teeth. "Well…"
Father John cut in. "Nothing's gonna happen to you, bug. Not with the sheriff and me here. And Simon."
Where to look, you didn't know.
Mister Garrick's shiny, new star resting proud on his chest? Mister Riley's shadowed hand spilling around the cuff of a throat, the other noosed in the waist of his trousers? Or Mister MacTavish, the carrion-bird who only wanted to see your bones glisten white at high-noon?
On the Father, you found the answer to be. The only true threat in the room, in any room. Don't fear the canines, fear that hand that holds the leash. He capitalized on your distraction and snuck a scratching middle finger into the seam of you, and sipped the reaction like oyster brine.
You'd have jumped off the table if the new sheriff were not holding you fast. A pendulum of anxiety and molasses-made desire—the kind of saccharine sweetness of spoil the fruit flies liked—swung inside you as the Father worked. Sweat glazed his brow, sticking his peppered hair to his forehead. No collar that night, you noted. The muscles of his chest strained and rippled as he gathered dew on his fingertips and inspected it in the light of the oil lamp. Then he brought the digit into his mouth, popped it between his lips and groaned like it was the first flood of lemonade on a dog day. Like he'd toiled under the hot sky only for a taste when the sun dipped.
Mister Garrick, unmoved from his stooped vigil over your head, ran plush lips over your hairline. "Spare her some blushes, boss."
Father John instead reached to push the same finger into your mouth. "Here," he said. Tang exploded on your tongue, loamy and wrong as his hold hooked over your teeth. "Nothing to be precious about."
It was an assault on two fronts. One set of fingers probed your mouth, pet along your tongue and mapped the cage of your teeth. A sloppy, poking exploration of a land he was already acquainted with, and you gagged around it. The other set deftly spread your slick folds open for the Father to gaze at, two digits rubbing on either side of your sensitive bud. The sensation was calamitous—fizzling sparks of light jolting through your muscles to claw into the very core of you.
A man touching you was so profoundly different than yourself. A man's touch was heavy, you found. Uncaring in its battle to wring pleasure. Circles were harsh, quick and indifferent, because all they wanted were your whines. Waves and waves of feeling like the tide on the shoreline were the goal, and your mind sank beneath them. You became sensation alone. A hunter, too, given in. Father John scraped dirty nails along the back of your throat when he finally sank a finger into the tight clutch of you, and the stretch burned. Intrustion and violation; the Father's fingers brought befoulment in their practiced pleasure, brought buzzards.
And you let him. Too far gone for fight.
"Look at you," Father John cooed. Bent over you like a wolf off its haunches, he demanded every inch of vision and attention. He puffed like a steam engine, his shirt plastered to the meat of his torso.
"It's okay to like it," Mister Garrick followed.
The Father cracked his neck. "You're not doing anything but what I tell you." One finger became two, stretching and petting, and it was too much, far too much, coupled with his other pressing down on your tongue. Drool dripped from the corner of your mouth, a sticky path trailing down your cheek to pool below your ear. Wild thing, obscene thing. A pot left to simmer far too long.
"Can I taste?" Mister Garrick asked, and was not asking you. Father John grunted his assent and, still with your hands fastened in his grip, Mister Garrick bowed his spine to lick your drool from your skin—a wide, wet path to collect the spit on his velvetine tongue. As if you were a round of cold cream, salt and sugar and ice, melting in the day. He didn't stop when he met your mouth, following instead the path inside so he could taste everything awaiting him in there as well: the Father's petting fingers and the flat top of your tongue.
It was odd, that kiss from the upside. More of a reminder than anything. The new sheriff was there, too, gentle and tasting like you.
The circus, once, had come to town.
All lights and music and the smell of buttery, sweet treats. As night fell, the ring-master—clad in his funny stripes and too-tall hat—had herded the carnival-goers out of his tent and pointed to the horizon where flames brewed, and the sky had exploded. Fizzling stars burst like summer berries in carrening arcs across the yawn, blue and red and pink and purple. Sounding like powder shots, shaking the air itself—a catastrophe of colour and wonder. Magic, you thought, it must have been. Fireworks, they were called.
They coiled inside you, then.
Rolled into a spinning ball and lit, shot off. Crackling light that bubbled like the wine that sparkled and burned like it, too. You were hand-cranked, tensioned to a snapping point, then someone let the line rip from their grip and suddenly you were whipping through the air. You wept animal noises around Father John, around Mister Garrick's steady tongue, until both were ripped from your mouth. The Father had his paw clawed in the other man's hair and was holding him steady above you.
"Enough," he said. "Can't hear her." And he said this even though your mewls fell on deaf ears with no modicum of mercy. His fingers dipped in and out of you, his thumb circling, circling. It was too much, and you could not speak a word of cessation. Mister Garrick released your hands to pet your hair from your brow, and your hands flung to the Father. Not stopping; not encouraging. Holding on. Grasping at the firm, working muscles of his sweating arms.
On the heels of explosion, you began to build once more.
A snake writhes a while longer when staked. Rattlesnake death in the desert. It was this image that came to you as Father John kept his punishing pace. Coiling, bowing, you turned your face into Mister Garrick's cool, waiting palm. Voices slipped through the gauze and kicked up dust next to the barreling thoughts in your mind.
"See, Johnny? See how sweet they get? Just have to treat 'em right."
"They need a delicate hand, Mister MacTavish."
"There she is—look, I'm getting another."
By the time the white had flooded from your eyes, and they could focus once more, Father John had begun unbuttoning his black slacks. Without allowing a moment's reprieve, he pulled himself free—thick and long and dark. Pulsing red, angry and mean. Ugly. Filled veins weaved along the length from the fat, mushroomed head down to the dark thatch of hair at its root. The father stretched tall to his full, impressive height, towering like a lone Saguaro on the plain, and your hands fell to the desk.
"You just lie still," he said. Said it suddenly like a warning, as if something bad would happen, outside of himself, if he was unheeded. Huffing like a tempered longhorn, he ran his hand along the scruff of his beard like a landhunter considering a purchase. His fist cuffed at the base of his hard length, leaking clouded milk from its head to drip, hot and sticky, onto your stomach. At length, he pushed the air from his lungs and moved, thrusting his hips further against the back of your thighs to rest himself atop your belly.
The tip reached your navel, and you had to look away.
You could look no longer at the hunger slowly devouring away the man you knew, carving out a new visage in the rolling marble of his flesh. You wanted very suddenly to be back on the stairs of the church, dust settling on your knuckles with the Father's steady breaths above you. You meant to drift there, to lie cradled in the dreams of your mind and Mister Garrick's long fingers in your hair, when a great crashing resounded through the room.
Mister Riley had Mister MacTavish on the floor, caged beneath his Phillistine body like a battling sow. Mister MacTavish's neck was strained, blood-flushed and twisting, and on his face was a guttural pain. A leashed madness, coralled only by the strong arms of the other man squeezing his torso to the floor. Some creature locked in battle with itself, straining and restraining, one lion on the other side of iron bars from a bleating, bloody thing.
Father John in one graceful movement slipped the pistol from its holster on his side and slammed it onto the desk, and all froze.
"Hold that mutt, Riley," he commanded, voice like a tree trunk splitting in half. "Or I'll put him down."
Mister MacTavish's eyes were kept on you as if they had hooks in them, arsenic-white around madness-blue, even as Mister Riley snaked an arm beneath their bodies. The muscles in his bicep bunched, curled and rose and came back down again and again, and Mister MacTavish groaned. You could not see nor imagine what was happening in those damp shadows, but again, your distraction was punished.
With a swift, confident shift of his body, Father John pushed into you.
Just the head of him, just a kiss of skin, but the Father's head fell back like the heavens spoke his name. Eyes closed, neck bobbing as the spit slipped down it. Dirty lines in flesh tugging over chords and muscles, scruff shifting in the light. Free of the Father's grasp, Mister Garrick sat forward in his seat to better see the point of connection, and let his jaw hang limp and slack as if it were himself slowly inching into you. "How's it feel?" he asked, corner of his mouth twitching.
—Like you were a rope of taffy, heated and stretched. Boiled sugar pulled until chewy and opaque.
"Sir?" Mister Garrick prompted, desperate for the answer.
Father John collapsed over you as if his strings were cut, bending your spine to crunch you into the cherry wood. It seated him further inside until hips were flush with thighs, and you couldn't breathe around it. His great weight too heavy, his demand too steep. Everything you had fell short of him, but compliance would be wrung from your rags. "Fucking good," the Father growled against your throat.
—Like pain.
You searched, and, as you had always, somewhere, known, there was only the Father to siphon comfort from. A barbed-wire solace, but a succour, a love, never-ending. You would close your eyes, and Father John Price would be there—for rise or for ruin.
You wrapped shaking arms around his shoulders, and lengths of high ground slipped from under your feet like rockfall. The sweat pooled on his neck slicked across your nose when you turned your face into him there, salt and tobacco, dripping hickory, that oil of annointment soaking into your skin. "Father John," you whispered. "It hurts."
"Where, sweetheart? Here?"
Without pulling away, the Father sneaked a hand between your bodies to push low on your stomach. Moved his hips in tandem to feel the bulge of himself there—and you were carved. Scooped and mined like a well of iron and black coal. Sculpted anew not in His image, but the Father's.
"Won't for long, miss," said Mister Garrick.
Like all faith, you were left no choice but to believe.
Father John began to move, to buck his hips back and cant them forward, easy and measured, to let you grow used to the feeling. All it did was kick the can down the road, for used did not come, and you were sure it never would. The hot drag of solid flesh against your own, inside you, hewing space with no mercy for the chips whittled away—it would never cease being rapture. Surely never. The taste of the Father would never unfurl from the back of your throat.
"I'm sorry, bug. I'm so sorry," Father John confessed as his arms hooked under the backs of your knees. Folded you like a linen sheet to cow his body over yours, every thrust accompanied by an apology. Not a call for absolution, however. The Father didn't ask for forgiveness.
You tried to find an excuse for it all, and you realized that there was none.
Realized that Father John just might have been the only true penitent in town—gobbling up the sights of pain, of firsts and lasts, because then they would exist in him forever; he their sole owner and steward. That he was a man of the cloth, not out of devotion, but necessity. John Price didn't turn to the Lord to quell the beast; no, he let the beast live in him so it did not live in others. Fed it so he would not be destroyed, starved, along with it. Paid the price of consequence in your flesh so that his may live forever. Giving a rib for the sins of all. The Father lived those sins, and the sins of everyone, and crushed them between his teeth just to be the one to swallow them.
So no one else had to. Eating sins for the dead.
For you—he did it for you. An excuse was not needed.
Right before the end, Father John asked if you loved him. Made you say it to him again and again as he bucked, crushing you in his arms like the hard shell of a pinacate, almost crawling onto the desk in his fervour. On his tongue you tasted rosemallow and ash, and the devotion slipped into his mouth as easy as cold liver. It hung between his teeth like strips of red meat, dangling for all to see and pick clean. And warmth spilled inside you as the tears fell, and a cold talon wrapped around your limp and dangling ankle, another reminder as the grunts of men filled the room.
And afterward Father John kissed the wetness from your cheeks and sat you in his lap in a cooling wash tub, hand collared gently around your throat as the others packed, and told you a story—a story of judges and shipyards and a city in flames, of debts to be settled, of the righteous justice he held in his hands.
And his low, warm words swept you into a doze of content, and you heard the twinkling of keys in the purlieu of the dawn.
In the red mouth of a morning and month, a fire is set and spread like a disease. The dry timber of the town catches, and all are purged for the sky to see and judge. The pack, strangers to that place as all wolves are strangers to comfort, leaves the town with a pup in tow, stowed in a saddle. The pup does not look back, fearing salt.
Tugged behind the pack, skipping in the orange dust, stumbling as he is pulled, is a man with yellow hair and rope around his wrists. On his chest is a silver star, and he knows the pack well. His eyes plead for the pup to free him from this misery, but the pup is not looking at him.
The pup looks instead at the open horizon, and it can see all the way to the distant lands where snow falls and oceans crash. The pup can think, here. And the pup looks at the arms wrapped around it. At the brutal hands on the pommel, creaking against the leather—muddy but clean, purged of all. And the pup feels the Father at its back, all encompassing, all knowing, hot flesh rubbing against its spine.
The pup doesn't know where it is being taken, but Sodom burns.
All the pup needs to know is what the Father tells it, because the Father loves it
18+ | dubcon. size difference. bully!dom and the crybaby!sub he kidnaps. bullying. rough sex. painful sex. size difference. loss of virginity.
You like to think you would know better than to follow a strange man home from the bar—
(or you should, at least. plenty of self-proclaimed girls-girls on tiktok, with nude matte lipstick and adidas snapbacks, have thoroughly educated you about the horrors of going home with men from the bar—if you're too drunk to drive, then you're too drunk to consent, bestie—)
but three—maybe six, seven (you lost count after they all started tasting the same)—sour cherry margaritas later, all of that tiktok wisdom promptly goes out the window when a big man with a terrible attitude (mean, really—he's so fucking mean; calling you stupid and dumb and who let you come here alone, baby? where are your fuckin' parents) crowds you against the peeling wall outside of the washrooms, hand heavy, hot, on your thigh, thick, veiny forearm braced against the wall above your head, each move sending a rainshower of flaking paint down over you, and asks you to come home with him.
Well—
Asking is a bit generous when what he really does is press his knuckle against the gusset of your panties and bear his teeth at the dampness he feels, barking out something that sounds less like a please do this and more like an or else. A you're coming with me—now (or else). And, as his fingers slide against the pretty silk of your panties, a bitten out: been needin' to sink my cock into somethin' sweet all week.
And it would be hot if you were in bed, reading the words in the soft blue light of your Kindle, but the way he says it sounds too ominous. Too dangerous. Like a boxer in desperate need of exercising his anger out on a punching bag—or your dad when things didn't go his way and you knew his fist was three seconds away from being buried into the cheap drywall of your apartment. Something angry. Writ in fury.
He says i need your pussy the same way people say i need to fuckin' punch somethin'.
But it's only when he's shoving you against the wall of his condo—a place much nicer than the dilapidated basement with nothing except a dirty mattress covered in suspicious stains you'd expected—that it occurs to you that you've never actually said yes. Don't even really remember him asking for consent at all during the short walk (or pull, rather: as soon as he seemed to make up his mind that he'd much rather be spending his time bullying his cock into your pussy instead of bullying you for your terrible choices outside of a bathroom that reeked of old vomit, cigarettes, and stale piss, he'd dragged you out of the bodega) to his car, parked illegally outside. Or at all during the short drive to his condo where he'd spent the time with his hand buried between your thighs, toying with your swollen clit through the lace of your panties, and you—mortifyingly enough—seemed to oscillate between drunk, slurred moans and openly weeping about your shitty night after being stood up by a tinder hookup, of all things—
You scored this really great job, you remember babbling out as he sinks his teeth into your neck—the pinching, awful sort of pain makes you gasp, makes you try to pull away, but there's nowhere to go when he's stupidly big, and his bicep alone is probably wider than your head. Trapped between the wall and a thick body; his knee kicking out until your thighs spread over the top of his—the width making your hips ache from the stretch, and you have to wonder how thigh-riding could ever be a real thing outside of smutty romance novels when you're already getting a cramp by just this much.
And he's just as mean then (did i ask? shut up and spread your legs wider for me—) as he is now (gettin' fuckin' snot all over my scrubs, crybaby), but the sight of his pristine condo cuts through the haze of too many bad decisions in one night, and it's only when you're thrown on a bed, but can still see your panties on the floor in the hallway (right next to the crumpled pile of your clothes, his trousers), does everything start to feel a little too real. Like something you might regret later. A bad decision playing out in real time—
But he's not stopping. And you can't stop panting his name long enough to say no.
Everything condensed into some amalgamation of panic and want: like being seconds from a disaster you know is going to happen, but you can't stop watching it unfold. Except your car crash is the sight of a cock being pulled out of black boxers—a cock that looks nothing like they do in porn: it's too thick, too heavy. It droops, hanging between his thighs when he lets go of it to wrench your clenched thighs apart until your hips ache anew, and it feels like your pelvis is about to be snapped.
Pre-cum beads at the tip of his fat, engorged head—the ugliest shade of purple you've ever seen, like a bruise; like something made to hurt, to ache—and dribbles down between your knees in a long, milky strand.
Everything inside of you seems to recoil at the sight of it—of that thing, that hideous monstrosity—dangling between his thighs. A warble echoes in the quiet room, sounds like a hurt mouse, and it's only in the twitch of his jaw, the slow tilt at the corner of his mouth, lips pulling up into a crooked smirk, do you realise the noise from you.
But beyond the queasy horror, the dread, is the stark realisation that, as he grips the base and shuffles forward to crowd you against pillows that have no business being so soft and comfortable in comparison the horrorshow oozing thick, milky droplets of cum, he's actually going to try to stick that thing inside of you. And, like he knows what is about to form on your numb lips, he bends down, taking your mouth in a blistering kiss—one that's more of an eating, a devouring: all teeth and tongue and deep, throaty growls used against you in a way that hurts more than it soothes—swallowing your protests as easy as he had the tentative i, i don't know that spilled out after he asked if your cunt was ready for him before dragging you into the bedroom.
Ignored—like everything else from the moment you caught that dark, brooding stare from the table near the entrance when you stood up on fawnlike legs, half-hoping to hobble into the bathroom and drown the embarrassment of being stood up by a man who spent the last week wearing you down until you said yes in the grey-tinged toilet water. Ignored, like the nervous looks you sent over your shoulder when you caught him downing his drink in a quick, heavy swallow—the shift of his throat, the flex of muscles working; shadows under his adams apple bobbing under the gauzy, warm glow of golden lights—with his eyes wide open, something that made your mouth go dry, your stomach churn; like watching a predator gulp down a torn off piece of meat. Predatory. The unease that skirted like a knife along the insides of your belly when he brought the glass down, cleared his throat, and stood up—all without taking those dark, piercing eyes off of you once. Ignored, like the stutter in your step when your body tried to react to two different instincts at once: stay put and run.
(that, too, ignored.)
It's on the tip of your tongue—both his teeth and the word wait—but he scrapes it off as easily as he parts your thighs, wedging the thick spread of his waist between when you try to snap them shut.
It feels like being pried open. Held down. You spare a silent thought, a keening apology, to all of the poor butterflies whose wings you pinched between clumsy, chubby fingers—too busy marveling at the beauty of their patterns to notice the way they flailed and kicked, unable to escape the grubby hand of a child, innocently unaware of its own cruelty, as he bears down above you, wrenching you open further. Trying to squeeze inside a space too small for him to fit.
But something has to give.
And as his cockhead bumps against your spread cunt—bruisingly hard, notching against you in a way that hurts—you know, without a doubt, that it'll be you.
(and really—how could it not be when he has almost double the muscle, the strength, behind his insistent pushes than you, with your comically small hands against the broad stretch of his chest, do with yours.)
It's a battering ram to a paper door, and you feel the give like a pop. A sharp, sudden ache in the pit of your belly as that fat, oozing head catches on the sensitive rim of your unfathomably wet hole, sinking in until the tip disappears inside of you. The glands swallowed by your swollen folds.
It's almost too horrifying to look at, and nothing at all like the porn in you've seen—zoomed in images of smooth, pale cocks; a soft, wet cunt stretching around it—or the things you've thought about. Imagined. a hard, heavy thing inside of you, thicker than the width of your finger. Longer, too. A fullness.
That's how it's always described, isn't it? Something filling. didn't know how empty i was until he was inside of me, filling me up... A delicious stretch. A good sort of hurt.
You don't feel empty at all when he grunts, pushing just that much more of his cock inside of you. You feel—
Like an open wound. Something ripped open. Torn flesh. It hurts too much for you to think about anything except the ache of it. That terrible, too full feeling in the pit of your stomach as he keeps working his hips in these insistent, merciless rolls. Breath humid, too warm on your cheeks, your temple, as he bears down over you, grunting all these ugly, awful things out between clenched teeth—things like fuck, you're too tight, gonna strangle my cock, loosen up, that's it, just like that, let me in, you know you want it, baby; gotta break in this baby cunt, don't i? never had a cock this big, huh? cunts too small for my cock, but you're gonna take it anyway, aren't you? gonna take all of it. every fuckin' inch. but i haven't even popped my fuckin' head in yet. yeah, keep crying, honey: i wanna see all those pretty fuckin' tears—
He's unrelenting. Won't give any quarter, any respite—even when you're whimpering for mercy, begging him to stop because it hurts, Brendan, it hurts so much, but you can tell from the way his eyes seem to spark in the midnight black of the room that he likes that. Likes knowing he's hurting you on the stretch of his cock. Bears down on you harder for it, giving you all of his weight until you're crushed into the mattress, smothered beneath his bulk. Everything narrowed down to the ache between your thighs, where all that you are is just a too sore, too small cunt being pried open by something as thick, as big, as your wrist.
His hands slide beneath your knees, pulling them open further before he drags them up. It changes the angle. Let's him sink just a little deeper—like a knife cutting through tendon, muscle. A white hot, pulsing pain that gets worse when he bends down, forcing your knees against your shoulders, drilling into the wide, spread split of your bared, aching cunt—seething against your jaw, let me in, fucking... let me in—until something breaks. Something gives way, and then he's sinking deeper on a low, throaty groan, pushing until his balls slap against the curve of your ass, and—
"there we go—balls deep in crybaby's pretty little pussy, huh?"
—the look on face, something hungry and primal, an animal, eclipsed in the heavy, heady greed of a man, shifts. morphs. Something like shock, like surprise, flickers across his expression, shuddering over the pointed slope of his nose, the harsh, tense line of his lips, still twisted in mocking amusement. A lock of hair falls limp across his forehead, shaken loose from the slicked back style he'd worn it in when he leans back on his haunches, lifting off of your body. He tips his chin down at the same time your reeling mind catches up with the tickle sliding down the crease of your ass.
His jaw clenches tight. A muscle jumps, ticking beneath his skin as he looks—keeps looking: dark, lidded eyes locked on the spot where he's buried inside of you, drilling into the sight where you split around the thick of him; your swollen, puffy lips stretched obscenely around his cock as buries to the hilt inside of you, grinding his hips in this heavy, aching rolls until the base of his cock is swallowed up by you, leaving nothing visible except a messy spill of wry curls sticking to your folds, dusting across your mound.
He grunts again. something dark, biting. A low, snarl that makes the nape of your neck prickle—
"Poor baby," he rasps, sounding angry. Aounding savage. Beastly. His hips work, then; jerking in tight, choppy pumps. Grinding the head of his cock into you, bullying it into something just behind your navel that pulses, aching like fingers pressed into a fresh bruise. A bone-deep hurt. A pain that makes you keen, vision blurring around the edges until he's just a smeared, hazy shadow snarling down at you.
And it's only when the pain tips into too much, when the eight (maybe mine) sour cherry margaritas catch up to you in a dizzying rush, tipping the world into a haze of drunken delirium, that you think—maybe—you made a mistake. That you might have bitten off more than you can chew.
But as the sob builds in the back of your throat, a wailing cry drumming against the walls of its esophageal prison, you catch the predatory glint of teeth before he bends down, dragging them over the skin of your jaw, scraping against flesh.
A dangerous shadow crests over the smooth topography of his face; a dawning—a dark glint, something hungry, full of flint—just before he reels back, sliding out of your sore cunt until only the fat head keeps you stretched open.
His fingers dig into your calves tight before he adjusts his hold, pinning your knee to the broad expanse of his warm, sweat-slicked chest. Letting the other slide down your leg, trailing across the back of your knee, tickling soft, sensitive skin with the scrape of a dry knuckle—his eyes, that single strand of oiled hair cutting across one of them, devouring everything in his slow, careful journey—before dragging them over your thigh, and falling, finally, to your sore, hot cunt.
Rough, calloused fingers scrape across your folds, sliding from your throbbing clit to your swollen, taut rim stretched around the thick of him, pausing there as your breath hitches in the back of your throat. Caught between a whimper and a plea when he presses down on tender flesh, letting out a deep groan when your hole clenches tight around his head, squeezing. Flexing. Somehow so fucking eager despite the pain, the burn of being forced open so wide around something so unforgiving. Just as hungry when the muscles in his stomach tense, shifting under the milky spill of moonlight through the open window. The bulk of him, the sheer expanse, doing strange things to your head, to that sore, bruised spot behind your navel. A pull; this grabbing, greedy thing—
"Fuck," he grunts, jaw ticking again as he slides his finger over your clit, feeling the flutter, the pulsing twitch of your cunt around him. His stomach shifting again; muscles flexing. It's the only warning you get before he rocks forward, sinking that fat, thick cock back into your cunt—like a knife sliding to the hilt, knicking bone. "No wonder your cunts so goddamn tight—"
It's mean, the way he says it. A cruel line slanting over his lips, teeth gleaming in the pale glow. Twisted, goading, and—
Surprised, maybe. but just for a moment. A brief second—and then he's grinning, wolfish and mean, pressing into you with his teeth bared and his muscles straining.
"Never had a cock this big before, huh, crybaby?" huh? go on, then, go on and cry about it—
And you do.
You wake up in an unfamiliar bed, nestled in thick cotton sheets that smell of sweat, sex, and loam. And beneath that, something deep, masculine—charred oakmoss, crushed black pepper, smoked leather, vetiver, damp moss, and suede—and dizzyingly familiar.
The night before is tangled in your periphery like a bad dream—your panties laying in the hallway. Clothes a discarded heap over his floor.
The him in question buzzing in the back of your head like a distant memory, a throb. Something sticky and wet between your thighs. Cum, you think. Cum, and—
It's smeared across his sheets: a deep, dark red stain the same colour as sour cherries. Fitting, you think, since that's what they call it, right? What the older man you'd been talking to for a few days called it, when you told him.
gonna let me pop that cherry, babygirl?
It was gross then, and it's gross now, thinking about it—feeling it. The ache between your thighs, in the core of you. Sore, sensitive. Hurting—like something was popped, split open. Or wrenched, more like. Pried. forced. But—
not really.
The slickness, too—which, you suppose, is more cum than blood because he didn't use a condom; didn't even bring it up—is gross. Uncomfortable. Too—too wet. Too sticky. Too...full. The sensation when you sit up, move, and can feel it dribble out—oozing—is somehow worse than the pain. The embarrassment of losing your virginity to a stranger. Then being stood up by the man who was supposed to do it instead. Then being one at your age. Caring, even, because it's just a social construct. An immaterial thing. Pointless and stupid and—
and real.
Very real. You're sitting in the aftermath of a bad choice (of another bad choice). Can feel it smeared over your thighs. Across the sheets. And there's so much of it that it makes you a little sick to look at because he didn't just pop it, did he? No he—
He butchered it.
It's stupid. You're alone in a bed with blood sheets and cum-stained thighs—feeling like a child pretending to be an adult. Thirteen going on thirty except the man waiting to catch you when you stumble in heels that don't fit isn't Mark Ruffalo but—
a stranger.
His name is drenched in sour cherry margaritas. Park, you think, feeling your head pulse. Your stomach churn. Park, he'd said. Just Park. A man who was mean, and rude, and didn't bother pretending like he was going to wait for a yes. A man who took. Takes—
You shiver, teeth chattering. Wishing suddenly you were in your own bed. But you blame it on the chill creeping in through the window where dawn waits; a bleak smear of soft lavender and turpentine across a pale blue sky. In the hazy yellow of mid-morning—early still, your alarm hasn't gone off yet—the penthouse looks bigger than it did last night. Sleek and modern. Parquet floors in a dark, rich brown. Cream coloured walls. The sparse furniture is practical. The epitome of a rich man's bachelor pad.
And with your discount panties and chipped nail polish, you realise, suddenly, that you don't belong. Don't fit. Not here—where Pittsburgh is greener than you've ever seen it, more lush and vibrant and full of trees than it is where your single bedroom apartment is cradled between crumbling bricks and dilapidated storefronts. It's a jarring dichotomy—one you want nothing more than to run from.
And so you do.
Twisting out of the cotton sheets without looking back. Hand bracing against the sleek end table as you stand, glancing around at the rest of the bedroom now that you can see it clearer in the mid-morning spill of a hazy sunrise.
All dressed up in—in Anthropologie Home, something in the back of your head fills in. Five hundred dollars for eight pieces of wood that barely reach your knees. The rest of the catalogue is already branded in your head because you baulked at the price tag of the Isla Fluted Wood collection when you saw it. Twenty four hundred (a piece) for the three dressers he has lining the walls. A two thousand dollar rug. Two hundred dollar curtains.
(three grand for the bed he fucked you in. two hundred just for the sheets you stained with blood. another three for the bedding.)
It makes you a little sick, stomach churning. Pinching in nausea. Discomfort. A feeling that grows worse when you stand on shaking legs, wincing on that first step—half from an ache in your belly, and the rest from the feel of unpolished toes touching the too soft area rug beneath your cold feet.
There's a sharp pain—one that feels too much like an open wound.
you're torn, you think, and fight the urge to reach down to feel, press shaking fingers to ripped skin. Soothe the sting. The bonedeep ache that blooms when you move. Fighting the thickening sense of shame, regret (really—how could you be so stupid?) when you hobble on sore thighs, desperate to escape. To leave—
unnoticed.
because you're not sure what you'd even say to him. thanks? how could you? your shame sits in your throat, a burning lump of coal that you can't seem to swallow around.
you're an adult—more of an adult now your friends back home might joke—and you made you a choice. A dumb one. It was just—stress, you think. Moving to a different state to finish school, struggling through the motions of keeping your head above water. And then—
got laid last weekend. kinda sucked, but whatever. he was hot.
your old coworkers at the cafe you worked part-time—only twenty and somehow more adult than you ever felt—brought it up. it like, totally helps destress, yknow? and maybe you were a little lonely. A little scared of the city you were dropped into and told to survive—somehow. Loneliness and stress and embarrassment curdling in your belly until you downloaded tinder. who cares, you thought. who fucking cares.
It doesn't matter. It's just sex. just—de-stressing. A one-night stand. A mistake.
You're already over it, aren't you?
But you still think you'd break down and cry if you saw him—if he saw you like this. Sore and sorrowful. Mouth pinched tight, jaw clenched. The worry in your eyes that if you unhinged it for just a second, you'd throw up all over his expensive rug.
You're spared the experience, slumping against the wall when you hear the hum of the shower. Light spills out beneath one of the doors you missed in the hallway, painting it a soft, gold glow. Your panties sit in the middle, illuminated by the light.
A furious pulse behind your navel kicks up when you bend down to swipe them off the floor. Holding your breath as you gingerly pull them on over sweat-slicked, cum-stained, blood-smeared skin. Gross. But—
but not.
Because you think you liked it last night. When the muscles in his arms began to twitch, when he bore down over you with a sweaty, flushed face, lips turned up into a snarl, and growled m'gonna fuckin' cum, gonna cum in this pussy, fuckin'—beg me not to cum inside your pussy, crybaby, beg me not to knock you up—
You didn't even think about that. The man you were supposed to meet wanted to do the same, didn't he? gonna pop that cherry and cum inside that sweet little cunt. but it was just—just play. He'd sent you his test results, co-signed by a colleague he worked with. clean bill of health, baby. Then, a day before he was supposed to show: you shouldn't let dirty old men fuck you bare, sweetheart. i'll bring condoms.
With a stranger’s cum leaking into the gusset of your panties, belly—and cunt—aching like an open wound, you wish, suddenly, that he'd actually shown up. That your night was spent being pampered, like a goddamn princess by daddy—gonna spoil my sugarbaby rotten, instead of being ripped apart by an animal.
One you hope never to see again as you grab your purse off the ledge above a glass partition separating the mudroom from the kitchen, and make a hurried escape out of his penthouse.
(but life has a way of snapping its jaws around what you wish for until what you get leaks down its maw instead—)
The clock reads half-past five when you slip your phone out of your bag to call a taxi.
You have a few notifications from tinder. A message. A new match. A superlike. hey gorgeous, how you doin'? but nothing from the man who stood you up.
But—
whatever, right? It's not like it matters anymore. It's just a boxed ticked off your list, and another that'll be checked in three and half hours. A few more down the line—student loans starting to be paid off (by yourself, even if the goal of meeting the man from tinder was to snag a sugardaddy who’d pay for your things instead), buy cute furniture from somewhere that isn't Walmart or Ikea, move out of your shithole apartment and into somewhere nice. it doesn't matter. You’ll do it all on your own.
You delete tinder just as the taxi turns the corner, meandering past the silent street where the bodega sits, quiet and lifeless, in the pale, lazy dawn of downtown Pittsburgh.
next time you date, you think, breathing through the ache in your stomach, between your thighs; you'll meet someone at work instead. Face to face. No chance of being stood up again.
Or going home with the wrong man.
The orthopedic ward is strangely quiet.
A fact you'd noticed when they first brought you down, dressed in a new, starched pair of blue scrubs. shiny badge gleaming in the fluorescent light—a new hire. The hospital's own orthopedic technologist. But it's not your place, really, to question why everyone seems so subdued. So hushed.
Not yet, anyway. Not when you're only an hour into your new job and about to meet the orthopedic surgeon you'll be working closely with. A man who, from the wayward glances and barely concealed grimaces from the other staff, doesn't seem like a man you want to piss off.
but—
It'll be fine.
The mistake from last night has been washed down the rusting drain of your shower, leaving nothing behind by an ache and a squirming sense of regret—and elation. Despite the experience, fucking—or maybe just fucking Park—was good for you. A first step into getting over your hangups and finally dipping your toes into the adult world (one that want confined to a college dorm, a college classroom, tests, and boys with too much body axe and don't waste it on one of these losers, baby, save it for someone who matters). With your new job, one that promises to finally let you start paying off your student loans, you could, maybe, breathe for the first time in four years.
Despite it all, despite the mix-up, things were starting to look up—
(something you wish you did, too;)
—but you don't see the broad chest, the flash of blue, until it's too late, and you end up nose-first into a man who is technically your boss. Meeting on a blinding pain rocketing through your skull—a yelp, a grunt (a low, biting Jesus Christ—) in lieu of a handshake. Greetings exchanged in another curse, a flurry of motion, and the sickening feeling of something hot, sticky dripping down your nostrils and onto starched blue—
bleeding on the man too—as if you haven't lost enough blood in the last twenty-four hours. A thrum of morbid humour making you huff on a reedy giggle, sticky and wet.
"s'rry," you slur, eyes stinging. Flooding with tears. "m's'rry—"
Another curse is bitten out into your crown. A weight—warm and firm—encases the scruff of your neck, forcing your head down. Blunt, rough fingers pinch the bridge of your nose. The pressure soothing the ache between your eyes as unseen hands grab at you—
"doesn't feel broken—despite your attempt otherwise. But c'mon. Let's get you checked out—"
You really can't handle this. The twofold embarrassment. The double hit—
but you're pulled into a room before you can make another escape. Pressed into a firm, broad chest. Protests shushed when they spill out of your sticky, blood stained lips. Things like why are you touching me like this, and hey, wait drowned in the thick, iron tang of blood. Humiliation, too, because where do you even begin trying to salvage some face after this?
A fireable offense, you're sure—for being a goddamn idiot. Left floundering, crying in front of your boss, as he dabs tissue around your nose. Prodding at sore flesh. You can't even look up, can't even begin to fathom what you're supposed to say—
"Well, you sure like making an impression, don't you, crybaby?"
crybaby. Every muscle in your body pulls tight. Only one man has called you that more times in less than twenty-four hours than anyone else in your whole life. Through the buzz of motion (are you okay? what happened? do you need anything, Dr Park—) the sound of his clicks into place. The words rough—even now, in the middle of a hospital. Goading. lemme see the damage, crybaby, c'mon—
You pry your sticky lashes open, glance up, silently hoping that you're wrong. That men in Pittsburgh are just mean. Rude. Like manhandling and calling weeping, terrified girls crybaby—
Up close, under the glaring, fluorescent lights, he's ridiculously intimidating. Broad. boxy. Utterly void of all warmth. They called him the shark when you asked about him. When you scanned your badge for the first time and turned to the woman leading you to the ward and said:
hey, what's he like?
and she blinked. who? oh, you mean Park the shark?
You can see it. The arrowhead shape of his nose. The list of his eyes—dark, gleaming; slightly beady under the cheap spill of the harsh light. His mouth, too—
cruel. flat.
His eyes narrow, lips slanting into something that might be derision, but skirts closer to sadism. A wicked sort of amusement at your expense. At meeting you here.
and—
and a hunger—
one you try not to think about.
"Couldn't just leave your blood smeared all over my cock and my sheets, huh? Had to get it all over my scrubs, too, didn't you?"
bold way to stake your claim, crybaby—
You flinch. "wh—what? i don't—" a nightmare, maybe. A dream. You reach down to pinch yourself. He scoffs when he sees it. Rolls his eyes.
"Oh, you're wide awake, don't worry. Cryin' all over yourself—" he leans in, then, and to anyone else looking, they'd just assume he was looking for damage. Assessing. Watching you with a clinical keenness and not the devastating hunger, the anger, draped over his brow that only you can see. Can feel. His fury simmering in the air until you can taste it, wet pennies, in the back of your throat. "Just like you were crying all over my cock last night."
and then you ran away. The accusation sits in the air, heavy and inescapable. You're not sure how to answer it. How to justify what you did, or why, even, you feel the need to.
"I'm—I, I thought you'd want me to be gone when you got up," you lie. Partly. A half-truth that makes him scoff. "I didn't know—"
"Took you home, didn't I?" he sneers—like it means something. "Took you home, fucked you, popped—"
You're tired of that phrase. "Don't!" your hand snaps up, lashing across his mouth, eyes-wide. burning with tears. "That's not—don't say that."
He growls against your hand—the only warning you get before his teeth sink into the meat of your palm. Words slurring around through his teeth: "I took you home, fucked your cunt—" he says fucked, but it sounds like punched. Ruined. "And you were gone when I got outta the shower, weren't you? I didn't say you could leave."
You're not sure what to say to that. What could be said. So you stay silent, unsure. Still sore and bruised and—
Bleeding on him. Your fingers, sticky with your blood, leave smears across his sharp cheekbones. His jaw. A tick throbbing beneath the tip of your finger as he bites down on your flesh again, and you know he's holding back, tempering himself. Can feel it, too.
Your flesh pulls between his teeth when you pry your hand off his maw, smarting from the bite marks he left buried in the meat of your palm. more blood, you note, staring down at the vessels he split, the way the bead up, pooling beneath your skin. Fingers, tacky with drying blood, fold over the impression of his teeth, snapping it shut in your fist.
he watches through heavy, angry eyes; gaze volleying between the trickle of dried blood smeared over your nose and lips, and the tight ball of your fist in your lap. Lips tugging into a quiet smirk. A little tip of his stained maw—more of that mordant amusement; the gaping grin of a saw-tooth shark.
"It wasn't supposed to be you," you murmur, feeling mean. Miserable. "I was supposed to meet—"
The list of his mouth flattens into a scowl. "I know—" the look on his face—the flash of irritation, the slip and fall of that cruel amusement—is almost worth the flash of blood-stained teeth, the biting squeeze of his hands—one still wrapped around your nape, the other squeezing the meat of your thigh. but it's waylaid by the slant of his mouth pressing hot, hungry, against yours. An eating more than a kiss—a punch with teeth and tongue instead of bone and cartilage; bruising. Claiming. It hurts—disturbs the sting in your nose, the cut in your nostrils.
Your fingers dig into the thick, hard stretch of his shoulders, pushing. A whimpering, wet stop spilling out against his canines; a noise he groans into, greedy.
hungry.
Something that glues in the black of his eyes when he pulls back, digging the pointed tip of his nose into the sore bridge of yours. A cruel, merciless tease. A punishment, maybe; for leaving him. Denying him—
"I know," he huffs against your kiss-bitten lips, eyes lidded. Heavy. Blunt nails digging into your flesh. Another hurt to add to the growing pile. "I know. But that doesn't matter, does it?"
It's only in that bold, raw growl that rattles your teeth that you realise the severity of what you got yourself into. A foreshadow in the smouldering heat of his heat gaze. The pinch of his fingers burrowing into your skin, possessive; a portend. Bruises in tender meat, spackled under your skin like loose tea leaves.
You could reach down, touch the flesh that aches, clutched in his knifelike hands; read it—fingers pressed against braille. Divining tasseography: the madness of his design, crushed into ash, laid bare as it smears across the palm of your hand.
But you don't.
Not yet.
The worry will come later—when you feel pieces of yourself, your resolve, being scraped off, stuck under his blunt nails. Dragged away. Tossed. Sloughed off in chunks, in pieces, because what you'll learn, what you'll always know, is that Park is not so much a man made to put things back together again, but rather one who perfected the art of taking them apart. Knows, intimately, how everything fits. So much so that reassembling the pieces is second nature to him—
Second. But never first.
No. First is a butcher who knows nothing of romance except the sweet whisper of knife kissing skin. A cartographer who knows the world, knows people, only in bisecting lines; cut marks buried in meat and bone.
You're not an exception to the rule—not even close—but you make him want to dip his fingers into topography all the same.
And—
You said you'd date a coworker, didn't you? And from the look in his eye—rapacious, brutal; wanting—you doubt you’d ever get a chance with anyone else, anyway.
A fact, a new truism born from history you can discern, that he reinforces when he leans in, mouthing along your neck, lapping at the blood drying on your chin, and growls:
“i’m not blind.” “of saline, genius.” dr park x reader brain worm
you know. he knows you know. you don’t know why he has to be so mean about it, about everything, all the time. don’t know why you even talk in his presence, when all that follows is derision. you’re a bleating sheep, though. a panicked thing making noise on the off chance mercy would be given.
(maybe even praise—no, not praise. maybe the stiff nod he gives the other doctors. maybe you would finally say something smart enough and you would get an eyebrow raise. even silence would be better than the comments—
—the comments.
obviously and thanks tips when you’re just trying to be helpful.
land the plane when he asks you something directly. levels you with that cutting, cold stare. and you fumble. stumble over a long winded explanation. give too much. loop back on yourself until you’re not sure what he asked in the first place.
i can explain it to you. i can’t understand it for you when you ask a clarifying question. begging to be taught, to learn. from him. from the best.)
it would be so much easier if you could just shut up. but dr park doesn’t like it when you’re quiet either. stay silent too long and he’ll needle you out, demanding answers that you hiccup through. avoid him, and there he’ll be. cornering you in supply rooms. hunting you down in the maze of hallways as if he smelled your blood in the water.
even when you finished your ortho rotation, he’d find you wherever you were.
it was an indespensible condition, when he came to the er for a consult, that you were to be in the room. sine qua non. he’d ask about the patient, and you’d defer with shaking hands to your attending. i don’t want them to tell me. i want you to tell me. tell me. tell me how it feels. tell me why. a man used to laying sinew bare, naming flesh, ligaments, and knowing. how it all worked, fit together like a great puzzle. dr park was a man who got his information from the end of a scalpel.
that’s what he did. cut you through. flayed you until you were begging for him to run pleased palms over the warm, wet muscles beneath. you’d name every group, pluck the chords like catgut strings, if he would only nod. just nod.
it’s no wonder you follow him to his car. desperate. on a string. something excited to be chewed and swallowed because it’s all born in the mouth, isn’t it? approval, acceptance, respect. the same place the ruthlessness came from, the ridicule and the scorn. lungs, esophagus, tongue, lips. no wonder you let him drive you, ripping the dead skin from around your ruined nails, to his house. his clean, clinical house. bright white lights. red smoothies stacked neatly in the fridge, labelled for the days of the week.
no wonder you strip down for him as he watches from the couch. exacting. unyielding. let him tell you what article to take off, how and in what order, in the same tone of voice he used to list procedural steps. no wonder you crawl over his white rug to the place between his spread legs. come here. no hands. use your mouth. figure it out. show me your teeth. no wonder you strain your jaw, muscles popping, trying to fit him all in. trying to swallow him all down. make it good. make him shift or fidget or make a sound. any sound. anything but the sharp silence, the twist of his arrogant mouth, the cool pools of his eyes.
and later, in his lap—thighs screaming as the tears fall. the only hands on you being your own, every action performed under his instruction and his instruction alone. how does it feel. why. tell me. he watches you move with the same air as he would have inspecting a detached limb. analytical. precise. thick arms spread like wings on the back of the couch as you seat him fully inside. sweating, sniffling, clumsy mess.
park doesn’t like you quiet, but he hates when you can’t form a sentence. can’t understand you. say it again. louder. stop mumbling.
not moving a muscle to help you. you want to prove yourself? prove yourself.
(and you would. you will. you will. tooth and nail, you will. bite marks in your trapezius, a perfect array of incisors, you will.)
he sends you on your way with a hum and a scowl. cab fare and a morning after pill he retrieves from a glass dish in his bathroom drawer. tells you that next time, he expects better. more effort, killer. how you got through med school with that work ethic, i’ll never know.
your scrubs snag on the torn skin of your shoulder in the cab home.
being a poor, frazzled med student just trying to survive rotations and getting ceremoniously thrown at the shark—a man with more mythology behind him than anyone else on staff, and none of it good—and someone who seems to have it out for you from day one. and sure, maybe you talk too much—a nervous habit—but it doesn't seem like it's enough to justify the scathing glare you can feel.
one that digs in through layers of vulnerable flesh: a surgeons knife cleaving into fat, tendon, muscle, and bone until nothing is left but a lump of barely masticated anxiety lodging itself in what remains of your throat. choked up in front of him—something you're sure he knows, can scent in the water like blood—and offered no reprieve as he aims that flaying stare at the tremble of your bottom lip and asks questions you should know the answer to, but can't seem to get out through the muck stuck in the hollow of your throat. a gaping, teary eyed rookie in the face of a man who parts halls like a shark sluicing through schools of fish—a sick match up that culminates in a brutal bite to your jugular as he demands an answer you can't force out. left bleeding out in the operating room in the resounding echo of a mocking remark—pretty quiet for someone who had a lot to say five minutes ago, huh? or maybe you just like wasting my time—
you don't get his vitriol or what you, in particular, did to piss him off. but he becomes a battering ram to your ego. a man you can't seem to win over or find some semblance of common ground no matter how hard you try—and you do try. so much so, that it almost becomes an obsession. driven into a primal state of flight or flight: get his approval no matter the cost or die of humiliation trying—the latter of which seems to be the only viable outcome as the three weeks beneath him become what can only be described as a humiliation ritual. a psychological experiment—his voice starts to sound like dinner bells: tears welling in your eyes the moment he appears in your periphery. primed, like a dog, to weep on command whenever he's around. and that, in itself, becoming another sort of hell when his voices carries through the room when he catches sight of them: come on, crybaby, save the waterworks for someone who cares.
(crybaby becomes a nickname you can't shake, one he won't let you—but when the other med students, ones eagerly lapping at the jowels of the beast that decided you were the morsel it wanted and not them—try to tap into the mockery, he snaps at them. goes off on anyone else who uses it in his presence, like bullying you was just for him and him alone—)
but despite the harsh treatment, which while brutal, blistering, it's often waylaid by the devastating competency of his lessons. the reason why he's able to get away with a shocking lack of decorum, and why everyone around him seems to go soft at the knees, bowing out in order to stay out of his way (and in these terse moments, Garcia's poignant wisdom always seem to come back and haunt you with a viciousness only matched by the waspish doctor she tried warning you about: some advice, crybaby? just stay the fuck outta his way and let him do his job. maybe stop whimpering long enough to listen to what he's saying—might learn a thing or two) reveals itself within minutes of meeting him. he's sharp tongued and surly, but it's undeniable that he's an expert in his field. jowels dripping with both ire and proficiency—two facets he wields with an unshakeable deftness. it almost makes the punishment worth it in the end—
almost.
but for as much as there is an acute sense of awe in being beneath him, the abject misery of failing short of success in leaving a modicum of a good impression (or even just impressing the imposing man) is enough to leave you bereft at the end your rotation. reeling, almost, because for as much as you like to fill empty space with empty words, everyone else seems to like you well enough, and your ego (which really should be non-existent after three weeks under that horrible glower) is sufficiently bruised enough for you to feel some sense of desperation—like a kicked dog that doesn't know what it did to make someone so angry.
and like a kicked dog, you just can't help yourself when you come crawling back a day after your rotation ended, knocking on his office door with the words you rehearsed in the mirror for five hours running through your head—
not that it matters much because the moment he's in front of you, all of it is drowned out by the sound of the bell ringing in your ears.
"what? got something to say to me, or are you just gonna pout at me all night, crybaby—"
and he's not wrong. tears are already brimming in your eyes. all you can do is there and gape at him as he huffs and shuffles you inside. too busy trying to stifle the hitch in your throat to notice him turn the lock. too caught up in the size of him like this, in an office that feels comically too small to fit him in it, much less you. and it's not like you weren't aware of how big he is. the brooding eyes and the glower are usually noticed secondary to the absurd size of him cutting through a room with an unmatched sense of urgency. biceps you laid awake at night thinking about. easily coming to the conclusion that even with both of your hands wrapped around the thick of his arm, your fingers wouldn't meet. but still.
you've never really been alone with him, have you? and something about the way he's staring down at you, gaze slipping to trace the tears running down your numb cheeks, makes you feel like every bit of the dumb dog you are, one with too much prove and no way of knowing how—
—or maybe, he says after the tear he's been feasting on falls into the collar of your scrubs. something ugly cuts through the pallid brown of his eyes—a spark that makes your you stomach twist into knots as he looms over your head, looking down the barrel of his nose at you.
"maybe you just wanted my attention—"
dogs are good at picking up new tricks, especially ones so eager to please, and when he curls his hand around the meat of your throat, the baleful glare from before is peeled back into something a little less hateful, a little more base; a grunt slipping out when your eyes flood once again, the reason for his singular anger made apparent when he drags you closer and you can feel his cock thicken against your belly, twitching when the tears roll down your stinging, sticky cheeks. he bends down until his mouth is flush against the corner of your eye, picking up your tears with a groan—the agony of a starving man. bearing his teeth against your skin as the sound of his stomach echoes in the throaty rasp of scathing words:
is that why you keep showin' me those pretty tears, huh?
(and after being thrown to the shark like a sacrificial lamb, is it really a surprise when you show up to your next rotation with a slight limp and chain tucked into your collar that reads crybaby)
ahah getting into a play fight with Soap and wrestling him around on the ground, and you can feel the moment he starts using a bit of his strength so you go to tap out, only his eyes are glazed over now and he isn't responding to your repeated 'okay that's enough's because he's too busy pinning your wrists above your head and shoving your legs apart
something something ever since that one consult you happened to be in the room for, dr park keeps visiting the er for no reason. he just appears without warning, like he manifests out of thin air, scaring the daylights out of you every time. he's outside the break room when you sneak away for lunch, across the ambulance bay when you step out for a breather, sipping coffee and watching you, but he never says a word.
people start to take notice, and the jokes follow quick—because apparently, when you're not around, he's impossible to get ahold of.
it earns you a nickname. sharkbait.
because whenever someone needs dr park, they make you ask.
i knew the SECOND dr park came on screen he was going to go triple platinum. if ur competent, mean, and look like you’re going to hang someone on a meat hook this fandom is going to collect you like an infinity stone
