Trying to find my niche in life, one day at a time
@tropicflamingo
DMC, Resident Evil, ATSV/Miguel, Moon Knight and currently CoD
30's. Hopeful and struggling digital artist. Rusty fanfic writer trying to find ther groove again.
Ghost's reaction to Filipino parties (self-indulgent because I'm Filo🇵🇭) /Ghost with a Filo!S/O who dragged him in one of their family parties—
Impressed with the amount of food on the table. One of your titas look at his plate and feels as if he was too shy to get more, she tells him not to be shy, and to take more food because he was "huge". You'll have to tell him that titos and titas would appreciate it if he took more. He's probably going to say something like, "Your family got enough food to feed the whole army, love". And by the time the desserts were pulled out, he's already full.
Lechon— unlike others who cringe at the sight of lechon, Ghost would probably act more nonchalant about it (he was a butcher at some point), but would probably be a little shocked that even the face/head/tail would be eaten. You ask him to try the ears. And he does. Shocked that it wasn't as bad as he thought it would be.
Probably loves red horse. The flavor feels a little stronger than the usual beer from the pub but he likes it. You ask him to drink it after tasting a spoonful of sisig? He loves it even more.
Impressed by the fact that most people can sing. Karaoke is taken seriously. Your titos, titas, and cousins try to make him sing, but he didn't want to. He insists he's fine just listening to everybody. Probably loves it when the titos sing something from guns n roses or queen.
Would have little flashbacks seeing your little cousins play with pabitin. He's basically seeing how you probably mostly spent your childhood in this party. Maybe if he spent a little joy like this in his childhood, he would be able to be a little more happy like how you are.
Probably a little shock once the titas hand him at least 5-6 tupperwares of food 😂 "I already ate too much earlier and they still want us to bring some home?" You tell him to not refuse, they might think that you don't like their food. Ghost just nods, carrying the 5 tupperwares toppled against each other. "I guess this food is enough for the whole week, aye?"
Overall? He's probably a little overstimulated from all the fiasco (karaoke ft. your cousins would probably try to ask him to carry them, or even try to play with him), but he comes home full with even more food for the next few days. you ask him to rate the whole party? He'd say: "Around 8/10 love. The food was amazing, just wish your cousins weren't hugging on my legs asking to be carried. Felt like attending a concert with free buffet too"
Thanks for reading :33 these are my 5 am thoughts btw
❝ Don't you feel like crying? Well, here I am, baby.
Come on, cry to me. ❞
You stopped him before he could say it. It took a bleeding heart to shout it for you.
— pairing: Kyle Garrick × fem!medic!Reader
— cw: 18+ | friends to lovers; mutual pining; angst; hurt/comfort; graphic depictions of battlefield medicine/injuries; smut; fluff; wc: 6k
author's note: Inspired by "Cry to Me" by Solomon Burke (and that one scene in Dirty Dancing…)
You meet Kyle Garrick on one of the worst days of his life.
That's an exaggeration—he'd tell you so himself later, with that easy grin and a dismissive wave—but in the moment, lying on a stretcher with a piece of shrapnel the size of a two-pence coin lodged in his left shoulder and a look on his face like he's more annoyed than injured, it certainly seems like a contender.
"Don't move," you tell him, snapping on a fresh pair of gloves as the medivac shudders and banks.
"Wasn't planning on it," he replies through gritted teeth, and then, because apparently, he's incapable of not being charming even while slowly bleeding out.
"You always this bossy, or am I special?"
"Just for the ones who are too stupid to duck."
He laughs a short, startled bark that immediately turns into a groan when the movement jostles his shoulder too much, so you press your palm flat against his chest and push him back down firmly.
"Don't bloody move, Sergeant."
He groans in pain and obeys. "Yes, ma'am."
Then his eyes find yours; warm, hazelnut brown, and sharp with pain but alert, and he holds your gaze for a beat longer than necessary until you look away first.
And you start working on his wound, cleaning it with a gentleness that you usually have no time to spare.
That's how it starts.
The friendship builds the way military friendships do, namely in proximity and repetition, in shared meals and overlapping schedules and the intimacy of being two people who exist in the same small ecosystem of a forward operating base.
You're not 141—not technically.
You're attached to the medical unit that supports their operations, one of a handful of combat medics who rotate through depending on the mission profile. But somehow, Kyle Garrick's name keeps appearing on the ops you're assigned to, and somehow, he keeps finding his way to your table in the mess until the space next to you becomes his space without anyone deciding it should be.
He brings you tea. Not regularly or performatively, but on the mornings after bad nights, the kind where you've been elbow-deep in someone's chest cavity for hours and the adrenaline crash leaves you hollowed out and shaking at four a.m. And he doesn't say anything about it. Just appears with two mugs, sits down, and talks about something mundane like football scores, a podcast he's been listening to, and the ongoing sad saga of Soap trying to grow a moustache, until the tremor in your hands eases and you can hold the mug without spilling.
You learn Kyle in fragments.
He's from London—Battersea, specifically, which he brings up with a particular local pride. That he reads more than anyone else on the team and never talks about it unless you ask, and that he can cook, properly cook, not just the sad bachelor reheating that passes for cuisine among most of the men on base. And that he calls his mum every Sunday without fail, even from a FOB in the middle of nowhere, even if the connection is shit and they spend half the call saying, “You're breaking up,” at each other.
However, the fact that he looks at you differently than he looks at anyone else, that he keeps to himself.
But you notice it anyway, the way you notice a change in a patient's vitals before any machine can tell you—gradually, then all at once.
How his eyes track you across a room; how his voice shifts when he talks to you—softer, lower, a register reserved exclusively for your frequency, and the way his hand lands on the small of your back when you're walking through a crowded corridor and stays there a beat too long, warm through your shirt. And neither of you mentions it.
Then again, you don't mention a lot of things.
The rule is established on a Tuesday night in a shipping container that serves as a break room, four months into whatever this is.
You're sitting on the floor with your back against a supply crate, sharing a bag of crisps and a companionable silence. Kyle is beside you; close enough that his shoulder presses against yours and you can feel the warmth radiating off his body while you're watching him read something on his phone.
The blue light catches the profile of his face, and the thought that surfaces in your chest is so sudden and so clear that it knocks the breath out of you momentarily.
I could love you so easily it terrifies me.
Kyle looks up, catches your expression, and whatever you let slip onto your face in that unguarded second makes something in his eyes shift and crack open. He turns towards you, and you can practically see the words forming on his lips, can feel the entire trajectory of what's about to happen.
"Don't."
He stops, closes his mouth. Your heart stutters.
"Don't say it, Kyle."
Silence follows. Not uncomfortable or confused. Kyle knows exactly what you're asking. His jaw works, his eyes search your face, and you watch him weigh the cost of obedience against the cost of defiance.
"Why?" he asks eventually.
Because if you say it, I'll have to fucking feel it and it will distract me and I can't fucking allow that. I can't do my fucking job if I'm worrying about whether you're coming back to me. Because I've watched women lose men in this line of work and I've seen what it fucking does to them and I can't. I fucking can't, Kyle.
Your face stays neutral and then you don't say any of that; you merely look at him, and despite your charade, he reads it on your face the way he is trained to read hidden clues.
"Okay," he breathes and his shoulders slump some, but you have to ignore it.
And that's it. Okay.
He goes back to his phone. His shoulder stays pressed against yours. The bag of crisps sits between you, and after a minute, his hand dips in and retrieves one, and the crunch of it in the silence is so absurdly normal that you almost laugh.
Kyle never says it.
He doesn't need to, because it's in every cup of tea, every quiet walk, every time his eyes find you across a crowded room and stay. It's said in the space he keeps beside him that is always yours; in the way he says your name and makes it sound like the answer to a question he's been carrying for years.
Kyle looks at you like you're the sun, and he never says a word, and you keep pretending you’re not the one burning.
The op goes sideways at 0344 hrs, and you're not even supposed to be this close to the action.
The medical station is set up two hundred metres back from the primary assault position, behind a concrete barrier wall that provides decent cover and a clear line to the extraction point.
You've done this before—dozens of times, probably more. All the waiting, the radio chatter, the controlled calm of a medical team standing by while operators do what operators do.
Then the radio crackles with a voice you don't recognise, young and tight with panic, calling for a medic, and you're moving before the call sign finishes.
The rookie's name is Leon. Lance Corporal. Twenty-two, maybe twenty-three; you don't ask, because asking how old they are makes it worse when it goes bad. He's lying on his side behind a low wall, and there's blood—too much blood, dark and arterial, soaking through his fatigues and pooling beneath him on the packed dirt.
You drop to your knees beside him, and your hands are already moving; pulling your gloves on and shears out, eyes flickering and assessing while your voice does the thing it always does, shifting into that calm, steady register that has nothing to do with how you feel and everything to do with what he needs.
"Leon, I'm here. You're alright. I've got you."
"Hey—h-hey, Doc—" He's talking. Talking is good. It means conscious, means his airway is free, and that means precious time. His voice is thin and reedy, in shock, but he's trying to grin, and the sight of it—this young man, someone’s boy, grinning up at you with blood on his teeth—makes something behind your sternum compress.
"Y're pretty," he slurs. "Has anyone—has anyone told y-you that?"
You pull your gloves on, snapping them in place. "Save it, Casanova. I need you to stay still."
"'M just saying—" He coughs, winces, keeps going because they always keep going. "If I'd known the medic was this fit,” he tries to lift his hand to gesture, but drops it with a guttural groan, “I would've—would've gotten shot sooner."
"Hilarious. Now don't move."
You're cutting his fatigues open, working fast, locating the source of the bleeding. Lower abdomen, right side, bad but not the worst you've seen. And when his hand suddenly does come up, it’s to catch your wrist in a weak grip.
He’s trembling, but insistent.
"C-careful," he sputters, and his eyes, so wide and glassy, scared beneath the bravado, flicker down to his chest. "Careful with—be careful with my heart."
You pause to look at him.
His hand releases your wrist and pats clumsily at his breast until it finds his chest pocket, just above the body armour line, and you can see the edge of it poking out. A photograph. A Polaroid, slightly bent and stained, tucked against his chest like a talisman.
"My girl," he mumbles, and his grin softens into something private and unbearably young. "That's—that's m-my girl in there. Don't let it—Don't get blood on it, aye? She'll—she'll kill me—"
Your hands don't stop. They never truly stop. You reach into his pocket with two fingers, extract the Polaroid, and tuck it safely into your own vest without looking at it, because if you look at it, you'll see a face, and if you see a face, you'll think about someone waiting at home for a phone call, and if you think about that it will stay with you.
"Safe with me," you assure him, and your voice doesn't waver, because it can't.
"Cheers, Doc." His eyes are drifting. "You're—You're proper lovely, y’know that? My mum would—my mum—"
"Stay with me, Corporal. Eyes open. On me."
You work efficiently; packing the wound, applying pressure, calling for the stretcher team, and relaying vitals in the clipped shorthand of someone who has done this too many times. All while Leon keeps talking about his girlfriend, his mum, and the puppy he's going to get when he's out, and you let him, because the talking means he's alive and the noise means you don't have to think.
You hand him off to the stretcher team eleven minutes after you reached him. He'll live. The wound is ugly but the bleed is controlled and he'll make it to the surgical team and he'll live, and you stand up and your gloves are soaked and there's blood on your knees and the Polaroid is still in your vest pocket, pressed against your chest.
Be careful with my heart.
You walk behind the barrier wall. You make it four steps before your legs give out.
It's not the blood. You can handle the blood. It's not the fear, you manage the fear, that's the job.
It's the fucking Polaroid.
It's this kid—this stupid, brave, terrified kid—lying in the dirt with his insides trying to escape and his only concern being a photograph of a girl who's probably sitting in a flat somewhere right now, watching telly, not knowing, not feeling it yet, the way she will when the call comes, the way she'll carry it for the rest of her life even though he'll live, because now she'll know how close she came to a world without him in it.
And you think about Kyle.
The looks you share and rules you’ve set; the metaphorical photograph you've been carrying in your own chest pocket.
What if it was him on that stretcher? What if it was his blood on your gloves?
What if the last thing he said to you was your name and he never got to say the rest because you told him not to?
Your breath hitches while your vision blurs. And your hands, usually so steady and reliable, are trembling so badly you must press them flat against the concrete wall to keep them still.
"Hey."
You flinch at Kyle's sudden voice behind you. He must have come to find you first after falling back with his comrades. Always seeking you out, even in the middle of a warzone.
You hear his boots on the gravel, the careful approach, and you know without turning around that his face will be open and concerned, and you cannot look at it right now.
"Don't."
The word comes out sharp, like a warning shot fired from a position that's already been overrun.
His footsteps stop.
"Don't—come closer. Don't—I'm fine, Kyle, I'm—"
Your voice breaks on his name, shatters like glass in your mouth, and the silence that follows is awful and filled with everything you've been refusing to say for months.
Kyle doesn't come closer, but he doesn't leave, either. You can hear his long exhale as he waits at a distance of three feet behind you.
And you press your forehead against the concrete wall, not crying but swallowing against the lump in your throat, because if you start you know you won't be able to stop.
Instead, you breathe, counting, pulling yourself together because this is hardly the place. And then you straighten up, strip off your soiled gloves, stuff them in the waste bag at your hip, and walk past him without meeting his eyes.
"I'm fine," you say again.
Kyle doesn't answer, but you feel his gaze on your back all the way to the medical station, infuriatingly warm and steady.
Two days later, they’re stateside again.
It's half-nine in the evening and Kyle is sitting on his sofa in his flat, wearing grey joggers and a t-shirt, not doing any of the things he normally does to decompress after deployment. He's just sitting, one arm along the back of the sofa, staring at nothing, turning a thought repeatedly in his head like a stone in his palm.
The radio is on. It's always on nowadays. The flat is too quiet without it, the silence too close to the kind of silence you sit in on a rooftop at two a.m. waiting for a target to emerge. It’s set on some station that plays a mix of old soul and R&B that he doesn't actively listen to but lets wash over him like white noise.
His phone buzzes with a message from Soap.
kid's stable. docs say full recovery. told him you said cheers.
And Kyle types back: Good. Thanks.
Three dots. Soap is typing. Kyle watches them pulse.
you alright mate?
Yeah. Why?
didnt seem alright on the flight back. neither did she.
Kyle stares at the screen while the cursor keeps blinking in the empty reply field.
whats going on between you 2?
He could answer that, type the ugly truth, and tell his best mate that he loves her and she won't let him say it and two days ago she nearly broke in front of him and he had to stand there and watch, but the words look kind of wrong on a screen. Impersonal. They look wrong everywhere Kyle has come to realize lately. They've been sitting inside his chest for so long they've calcified, become part of the architecture, load-bearing walls he can't remove without the whole structure coming down.
Nothing, he replies and sets the phone face-down on the cushion beside him.
And it's so far from nothing that the word feels like a lie in a foreign language, technically incorrect but functionally necessary.
He thinks about the wall, and you pressed against it; your forehead bowed against concrete, your hands shaking for the first time since he's known you. You looked like a woman who was coming apart at the seams, and something is burning behind his chest to know why, because it’s not about that young soldier. Partially, maybe.
And then Kyle ponders about the fact that you walked past him afterwards and said, “I'm fine,” in a voice that was the exact opposite of fine, and he let you go, because that's the deal. That's the bloody rule. You drew the line months ago, he is staying behind it like an obedient little soldier, and he watched you walk away and he didn’t follow.
And he's so fucking tired of not following, but it seems to be the only way to even keep you around.
Kyle drops his head back against the sofa and closes his eyes. The radio murmurs something slow and warm into the dim flat, and the candle on the coffee table that you gifted him some time ago flickers in the draft from the cracked window.
He should sleep, eat something, and call his mum, who will hear it in his voice immediately and ask what's wrong and he'll say nothing again, and she won't believe him, but she'll let it go.
Instead, he sits in the semi-dark and the candlelight and the quiet music and he thinks about you, the way he's been thinking about you for too damn long. Since that day he found himself with a bullet hole on a stretcher, looking up at you for the first time like he was seeing an angel.
His phone buzzes again, but he doesn’t check it.
A few seconds later, there is a knock at his front door. Soft, almost reserved, like the person isn’t sure if they want the door to be opened.
Kyle's eyes open and his heart does something hopeful before he gets up and crosses the flat, floorboards warm under his bare feet. And when he reaches for the door handle, unlocking and opening the door, you’re suddenly standing on his doorstep, looking like you haven't slept.
You're in civvies, hair undone in a way he's rarely seen with shadows under your eyes and a tightness around your mouth that he recognises as the last line of defence before something collapses entirely.
Your head tips back to meet his gaze and his eyes lock on yours while the radio plays softly behind him, and the candlelight throws warm amber across the hallway, and the summer air drifts through the cracked window carrying the smell of cut grass and distant rain.
"I don't know how to do this," you admit suddenly, and your voice is so small that he barely recognizes it from the usual commanding and steady tone you use in the field.
And Kyle doesn't speak, because he doesn’t trust himself not to break this fragile moment, so he holds your gaze for one long, careful moment, and steps aside to give you the option.
The door opens wider. The warmth of his flat presses out towards you; cedar candle, the low murmur of the radio, the quiet of a space that belongs to someone who keeps it tidy because chaos fills enough of his life elsewhere, and you look at the open doorway, then back at him, standing beside it, ever the patient friend who says nothing because you told him to.
You walk inside, passing him tentatively.
The flat is warmer than the night outside, dimmer. The overhead light is off; just the candle on the coffee table and another on the kitchen counter, casting everything in a soft, amber glow that smooths the edges of the furniture and catches in Kyle's eyes when he turns to face you.
"Tea?" he asks, already moving towards the kitchen, because this is what he does. This is the language he speaks when words aren't enough. Acts of quiet service, offered without ceremony.
"I don't want tea."
He stops; his back is to you, and you can see the line of his shoulders through his t-shirt, the tension he's holding there carefully the way he holds everything, and he turns around slowly.
"Okay," he says. "What do you want then?"
The question is simple and open, contains no pressure and no presumption, and it nearly undoes you on the spot, because Kyle Garrick has been asking you this question in a hundred different ways for over a year and this is the first time you're going to answer it honestly.
"I don't want to talk about what happened."
"Alright."
"I don't want to," you inhale, make a vague gesture which makes it clear that you’re currently just winging it like he is, "debrief, or process, or—"
Kyle nods, his brows set in focus. "Alright."
"I want—" Your voice catches as you look at him properly, standing in his kitchen in joggers and bare feet, candlelight warm on his skin, watching you with those steady brown eyes that have never, looked at you with anything less than complete, unwavering attention, and the thing inside you that's been holding, holding, holding for months finally gives.
Your shoulders sag as you deflate in surrender. "Kyle… I want you."
Those words fall into the space between you, and the radio fills the silence that follows—some song fading out, a beat of static, and then the opening notes of something slow and aching, a voice you recognise, deep and rich and full of longing.
…When your baby leaves you all alone…
Kyle's expression doesn't change; doesn't light up in triumph or crack into relief. He just looks at you, and his eyes are so warm, so full, that you understand, suddenly, what it must have cost him—all those months of silence, of holding the shape of this feeling without being allowed to name it.
…And nobody calls you on the phone…
You cross the kitchen towards him, drawn in like a magnet who has finally been let go, until you're standing close enough to feel the heat radiating off his chest and see the way his breathing has changed to something deeper and deliberately controlled.
Your hands come up slowly, like you're approaching an animal that might startle, except the only thing that might startle here is you. Your fingers brush the sides of his neck, trail up to his stubbled jaw, and your arms loop loosely around his neck, your wrists crossing behind his head.
…Don't you feel like crying? Well, here I am, baby…
Kyle's hands find your waist; tentative like a question at first, and then settling, his palms warm and solid against the fabric of your jumper, thumbs pressing gently against your ribs.
You sway together. It's not a dance, not really—there's no rhythm to it, no form, just two bodies finding each other in a dim kitchen and moving because standing still feels impossible. Then his forehead tips down to meet yours, and your noses brush, and you breathe the same air, and the song washes over both of you like warm water.
…Come on, cry to me…
"Be careful with my heart," you whisper.
His hands tighten on your waist, a fractional compression, like a held breath.
"Always," he replies, and his voice is rough and low, barely more than an exhale, and he means it the way he means everything he was allowed to say to you—completely, without reservation and caveat.
You allow yourself to kiss him.
And it's not the desperate, hungry collision you expected—not the dam breaking and the flood taking you both. It's slow, careful. His lips meet yours softly, like he's memorising the shape of you in case you change your mind again, and then his hand slides up from your waist to the side of your neck, his thumb against your jaw, tilting your head just slightly, and he deepens it; more present and intentional. The kind of kiss that tells you he has been thinking about exactly this for a very long time and he isn’t going to rush a single second of it.
You melt into him. Your fingers brush over the short hair at the back of his head and his arm wraps around your lower back, pulling you flush against him, and the sound he makes vibrates against your lips and settles somewhere deep in your chest.
"Kyle—"
"I know, babygirl." His mouth moves to your jaw, your neck, pressing slow, open kisses against the skin there. "I know."
He doesn't say the thing he wasn’t allowed to say before. Even now, even with your body finally pressed against his like this, he doesn't say it yet, because you told him not to, and he's a man who keeps his word, even when keeping it is killing him inside.
"You can say it," you whisper against his temple frantically as if you might be running out of time now. "Kyle. You can say it."
He pulls back, studies you, and the expression on his face, the sheer, unbearable relief of someone who's been holding a breath for over a year, makes your eyes sting.
But Kyle doesn't say it with words.
He says it by lifting you with his hands under your thighs and carrying you down the short hallway to his bedroom, where the window is cracked open and the cream curtains shift in the warm summer breeze and the sheets on his bed are clean, cool, and tucked into the corners with military precision like everything else in his flat.
He lays you down like you're precious; someone he's been trusted with and intends to deserve.
"Tell me if it's too much," he murmurs, kneeling over you, and his hands are trembling as he reaches for the hem of your jumper.
You blink up at him, heart fluttering with sweet anticipation. "It's not too much."
And his eyes soften at your reaction when he notices your pulse thudding in your neck. "Tell me anyway."
He pulls the jumper over your head slowly, his eyes travel over you, drinking you in, and the weight of his attention is heavier and warmer than any touch.
"You're—" he starts, stops and shakes his head like he cannot quite fathom what he is seeing, and a breath that might be a laugh escapes him. "Christ."
"Eloquent."
"Shut up." He's smiling now, that private, soft smile that he only ever gives to you, and he dips his head and presses his mouth to the hollow of your throat while you arch into it, your hands gripping his broad shoulders.
He undresses you slowly, treating every piece of clothing removed with the same care, the same deliberate attention; his mouth following his hands, pressing kisses to your collarbone, the curve of your shoulder, the inside of your wrist. When he pulls his own shirt over his head, you reach for him immediately, clammy palms flat against his chest, feeling the steady thud of his heart beneath heated skin.
"Kyle." Your voice is barely there. "Please."
He settles between your thighs, and the solid weight of him makes something deep and yearning in your chest crack open and spill over at last.
His mouth finds yours again, slow and thorough and devastating; his tongue sliding against yours as his hand trails down between your bodies, his fingers brushing against your cotton panties where you're already wet and wanting, and the sound you make into his mouth is small and desperate, and nothing like the woman who holds men together on battlefields.
"I've got you," he murmurs, and his fingers move over the damp fabric; slow circles, gentle pressure, learning you slowly until your back arches and your face is hot.
Then his fingers hook under the edge of your waistband to slide your panties off and leave you bare.
When your legs part wider for him, Kyle nuzzles the crease at the apex of your thigh, inhaling your scent deeply while a shudder ripples through his body.
"You smell incredible," he groans shamelessly, and before you can get flustered, his tongue flicks out to taste your swollen clit and the keen you let out makes him curse again. "Fuck. And you taste even better."
Your eyes roll back when Kyle starts licking you in earnest; sucking your clit between his supple lips, flickering his tongue against the sensitive pearl and slipping one, then two fingers inside until your hips buck and you come beneath his tongue with a moan that dissolves into a drawn-out sigh.
"Kyle," you mewl needily, and he understands immediately.
The aching and yearning, and the knowledge that you’re finally allowed to get and take what you have been craving for so long. It’s as exhilarating as it is dizzying.
He presses the softest kiss to the tuft of hair on your mound before crawling up your body with a look of purest devotion and hunger in his eyes that causes your breath to stutter.
You sit up to help him slide his joggers off, and when you realize that he was going commando all this time, your lashes flutter at the sight of his cock. Long, uncut, and thick, slightly curved upward, a vein throbbing along the underside of his shaft, with velvety skin and his fat tip flushed mauve.
"Bloody hell, Kyle."
He ducks his head, looking sheepish. "What?"
Reaching out, you grasp his length carefully, keeping one hand on his hip, and give him a few slow strokes that make his defined abs clench and his head tip back with a hiss.
A clear pearl of precum beads at the slit and your mouth waters.
"You’re so beautiful," you whisper in awe, thumb swiping over his tip reverently.
Now he is the one getting flustered, and the only thing keeping him from coming undone then and there is taking over control again.
"Not nearly as beautiful as you, love," he murmurs, pushing you back onto the mattress.
You make a choked sound and hide your face in one of his pillows, but he pulls it away and the smile he flashes then, boyish and delighted, sears itself into your memory.
Kyle caresses your waist and feels the goosebumps pebbled on your skin, and when he squeezes a pillow under your lower back, you lift your hips for him. His cock twitches, a drop of pre dribbles onto your thigh.
"Can I? I’m clean." His chest is heaving, his pupils blown as he drinks you in underneath him; all lax, beautiful and trembling while he rubs his thumb over your puffy folds, spreading them to see your pretty, wet hole.
You nod jaggedly, spreading your legs for him, heels digging into the mattress.
"I need words, love," he tells you, rubbing your clit maddeningly slow and watching your pussy clench around nothing. "Fuck, babygirl."
"Yes, Kyle! Fuck, please—" Your voice pitches and cracks, body wound tight, and when he kneels between your thighs, gripping his cock at the root, he finally pushes inside you, and the world stops spinning.
He does it slow, agonisingly and exquisitely so; working all eight inches into your needy cunt with one hand braced next to your head, the other holding your thigh while his forehead presses against yours; his breath ragged against your mouth, lips brushing yours in a barely there kiss.
The feeling of him is overwhelming at first; the stretch and the fullness, and the rightness of it all. And your hands grip his back, fingers flexing against the muscles, while your legs go slack for him, inviting him deeper, because close isn’t close enough now.
"Fuck—" The word punches out of him, bitten off and breathless, and his hips still for a moment, cock buried deep, his whole body taut with the effort of not moving. "You feel—God—"
"Move," you whisper. "Please move."
Always obeying you, he moves. Long, slow strokes that drag the curve of his cock against every nerve ending, his hips rolling into yours with an unhurried rhythm that matches the pace of the song still drifting faintly from the kitchen. His hand cradles the back of your head, fingers curling into your hair, and he watches your face with an expression that is so open and so tender that you have to close your eyes against it.
"No," he says softly. "Look at me."
You open your eyes. His face is still close, and you observe how his lips part with each thrust, and his brow furrows with both concentration and restraint, his eyes bright and dark and full of everything he's never said.
"Yes," he breathes, "just like that."
You come apart again; still not the shattering, violent kind of orgasm, but the kind that builds like a tide, rising and cresting until your body tightens around him in long, rolling waves as his name falls from your lips like a plea or confession, like the answer to a question you've been afraid to ask.
"That's it," he murmurs, his pace never faltering, carrying you through it with the same steadiness he has been carrying everything so far. "That's it, baby. I've got you. 'M, fuck, right here."
Then his eyes flutter shut when his own release follows yours as you squeeze and convulse around his cock mercilessly. A shudder that starts in his spine and rolls through his entire body, his hips pressing deep, breath hitching as he bites his bottom lip and buries his face in the curve of your neck with a groan so raw that you nearly come again.
He stays nestled inside you, shifts his weight to keep from crushing your body into the mattress, even while his own body is quaking with the onslaught of oxytocin; mouth against your shoulder, hand still in your hair, heartbeat pounding against your chest.
The breeze moves through the curtains. The flat smells like cedar candle and summer air and him. The scent you've been breathing in for over a year and pretending it didn't make you feel safe.
"I love you," he says and it sounds like a breath of relief.
Not triumphant but truth. Stated plainly, simply, the way you state a fact—the sky is up, the ground is down. I love you.
A tear slips from the corner of your eye and runs down your temple, disappearing into your hair. Then another and another. Quiet, soundless tears that come from somewhere so deep you didn't know it existed until you were guts deep in a young soldier, saving his life while he spoke about his love waiting back home.
Kyle lifts his head and sees the tears. And he doesn't panic, he simply brushes his thumb across your temple, catching the wetness, and presses his lips to the damp trail it leaves behind.
"I know," he whispers. "It’s been a lot. For both of us."
You close your eyes and let it come. The crying you've been holding in your chest like a clenched fist for months—years, maybe, longer than Kyle, longer than the rule, all the way back to the first time you knelt in the dirt beside a bleeding stranger and realised that this was your life now, and it would cost you, and you would pay the price and pay it and pay it and never let anyone see the bill.
Kyle holds you through it.
…Here I am, baby. Come on, cry to me….
Eventually, the tears slow and your breath evens. His hand moves over your hair in long, rhythmic strokes, and the radio in the kitchen has gone soft—a late-night DJ speaking in a low murmur between songs—and the candle has burned down to a warm glow.
"Stay. Here… with me."
It’s an offer, the same way everything he's ever given you has been an offer. Open-handed and without strings; yours if you want it, though you know he would crumble if you’d decline.
You press your face into his neck and breathe him in.
sinew | kyle garrick x reader au | gifted to anonymous for their donation to Anishinabek Nation 7th Generation Charity
prompt | new love after loss
cw/tags: cis-female reader, hurt/comfort, mourning/grief (no major descriptions), widowed reader, sfw
author's note: as a part of this initiative, a few of us call of duty writers are writing fanfic as gifts for donations raised to help Indigenous communities in Canada affected by wildfires. if you're interested in donating money and getting a fic gift, please follow the link! at the time of this post, we have 22 commission slots open.
Your late husband is just as married to his work as he was to you, and when he passes away the years he poured into that organization results in a methodical care package train of meals and gift cards from his office.
Just when you think it will become unsustainable and surely the effort will run dry as these things tend to, someone from his office — usually one of the other men, Simon or Kyle or Johnny — will run something by to get you through the week. You've cried more times from their generosity and no matter how much you try to refuse it, they refuse to listen. It's a tight hug, wrapped in thick muscles and a strong heartbeat against your temple, and a "John would haunt me in my dreams if we didn't care of his missus" that made you cry harder.
—
Simon keeps you fed with tea, comfortable with the long silences. Johnny fills them, bless his heart. A hand on your knee or shoulder, squeezing, eyes piercing yours through the thick fog of grief. Kyle does puzzles with you. He now keeps one laid out on your kitchen table, his side and your side. When he comes over, he tucks at least an hour into it, even if you don't always feel like sitting there with him.
—
You watch him one Sunday morning, sitting with the radio on, listening to his fingers twist against the puzzle pieces, his fingertip bumping against the ridges. It's three months past now, and you cry less and stare more, but he stays. Putters around your kitchen, putting it to rights, ignoring your use of paper plates or juice boxes because some things feel like too much work.
You fit your piece in and then go lie down on the couch, knowing he'll stand to flick off the kitchen light, crouch slightly to turn off the standing living room lamp, and will settle a quilt over your body and over his legs slightly. He'll take the remote from your open palm and put on some British crime procedural show he loves and you can't follow and within the hour, you'll be asleep.
—
Over time, Simon and Johnny stop coming in. Always a peck on the cheek and warm words with the meal drop-off, but they're getting too busy with work and their own lives. Can't be a year past their beloved boss's death and they're still popping in and visiting his widow every week.
But Kyle comes. A quiet and calm body across from the table.
—
You go on your first date since John died. It ends in sex. You don't cry. You laugh on the drive home and tell Kyle over a puzzle the next day.
You pretend not to see the flicker in his dark gaze and the tight wrinkle between his eyes.
—
"I feel like everyone's just waiting for me to settle down right away. It's so weird. I think they think I won't be sad anymore, or like it'll make them feel better about me."
"You've been on lots of dates. Nobody catchin' your eye?"
"Sure, loads. To talk to, maybe kiss, maybe even…you know. But I don't want to see them again. It's just new and different and weird and that feels…I don't know. Safer, I guess."
"Makes sense. Well, if you do find someone that sticks around longer than date two, feel free to tell me sling my hook."
—
You go for a hike with your sister and she brings it up as nonchalantly as a rocket launcher. You get defensive.
—
One night at a bar with Kyle and his friends, you watch a hot woman try to hit on him. His smile's wide, a beacon that could launch a thousand ships, but his eyes aren't crinkled. He bends down a little to hear her better, laughs warmly, but it's not reaching the dark soulful gaze that finds yours over her head. A little smile your way — realer than the big one. A simmer of electricity buzzing in the dark.
"Did you get that woman's number?"
"Which one?"
"Either."
"Nah. Not my type."
It feels too dangerous to ask the obvious next question.
—
The food deliveries stop.
—
Then, you're wandering through your garden one July evening two weeks later with a glass of red wine, plucking weeds with your free hand, when a familiar truck pulls up. Kyle hops out, alone, and beams you a big smile, his eyes crinkling in the late summer sun. You expect him to open the passenger door and grab packages, but he just strides comfortably and loosely up the brick path. Stands where the dahlias brush open against his thighs, and sticks his hands in his pockets.
"Hey, you," you smile.
"Hiya. I got something to tell you."
"Oh…okay?" Your stomach twists.
"I don't want to just deliver your food anymore; I want to make it for you. Or with you. I don't want to come by for a long visit and chat and get up in the night to drive home. I want to wake up and do a puzzle with you. Fall asleep with you and bring you to bed. I don't wanna listen to you talk about dates; I want to to take you on them myself."
You pad on the sun-warmed stepping stones, overgrown with clover, toward him.
"I want to take care of you. Make your life a little easier in some way."
You wind your way up the brick path to the front porch. You keep the wine glass in your hand as you sit on the porch swing. Kyle watches you. You motion for him to come up. He sits beside you on the swing, setting the motion of it off crooked as you both set your feet down to right the angle.
"Think you'll be able to fall in love with me?"
"What?" His voice sounds strangled.
You laugh, and a tear escapes down your cheek hot and fast, unexpected. "Yeah. I had a feeling. I think it'll be easy for me, too."
soap x f!reader | a gift for @brethart and @ohtomatoes for their donation to the Anishinabek Nation 7th Generation Charity | if you would like to donate and get a gift you can check this info post to figure out how
prompt: reader is sitting next to 141 at a hockey game and they are shown on the kiss cam, and whoever she is sitting next to kisses her.
cw: for reader being a little tipsy, otherwise it's wholesome first kiss fluff.
It's your favorite story: a hockey game, too many drinks, a rowdy crowd chanting and cheering, and a chance encounter.
Johnny hadn't been there when you arrived, when you'd sat in your ticketed seat and snuggled close to your friend, sipping overpriced beer and discussing which player was your favorite. You barely felt it when he took his seat, but you could hear him cheering.
He was the kind of fan you've always loved sitting next to, the one that knows exactly the right time to start a chant and never seems to manspread too far into your space. You were too busy discussing which player looked the best pressed up against the glass to feel him looking at you, and you didn't even spare him a glance when you got up to refill your drink during half.
Honestly if you and your bestie hadn't stolen to the bar to have a shot before heading back to your seats with your beer, you may not have even stopped joking with her long enough to coo at him to let you through. Even then it's not that you get a good look at him, as much as you notice how tall he is. Tall and broad shouldered, with biceps you could sink your teeth into.
Too bad you notice how handsome he is almost as quickly as you notice he's wearing the opposing team's sweater. It very nearly ruins him, but you like the lopsided smile he throws you as he stands to let you pass —you like the way it softens the blue of his eyes— too much to let something like that stop you.
"You're rooting for the wrong team," you grin, alcohol bubbling in your blood just on the right side of tipsy. Just enough liquid courage to tease the cute guy in the seat next to you as you sit down.
His smile widens and you feel a reflection of the motion on your own face. No ego on this one, no hurt feelings from a little flirting, just a fond look and an indulgent smile. It makes your heart patter in your chest.
"Maybe you should come over tae my side, already sittin' next tae me, could share the sweater." He pats his lap and you roll your eyes.
You turn back to your friend, leaning close to giggle against her as she begs you not to spill the drinks.
"He's trying to be cute," you whisper loud enough for him to hear.
"I am cute!"
You grin, feel your cheeks crease with the force of it. He is cute. You like cute, and your friend is giving you a look that says 'don't you dare,' which means you absolutely should dare.
"We're having a private conversation," you turn to tell him, just as your face lights up the center ice screen a bright red heart tracing its way around you and him. The crowd around you erupts and you start to turn to see what the commotion is.
Johnny sees it before you do, his eyes and hands faster than yours; you just barely register 'wait that's me' before he's grabbing you and then the world narrows in to a single perfect point.
Big warm hands slide over your cheeks, cupping your jaw to turn you back towards him, pressing ever so lightly to tip you. His nose bumps yours even with the directing —perfectly imperfect as every first kiss should be— and you giggle, feeling the pull of his smile as his lips press against yours. Softly, just enough that you could pull away if you wanted to; you really don't want to.
You throw your arms around him and make him kiss you properly, pushing in to feel the chap of his lips and the slight exhale as he leans into you. Relief relaxes his shoulders and you melt into each other.
Then his lips part and, oh. Something sparks, lighting up warm in your chest, and tingling down the tips of your fingers. The slide of his lips fits so deliciously well against your own, unhurried and indulgent. Pressing and parting again and again, following wherever you want to lead. Another soft smile when your teeth catch his lip. Distantly you hear the crowd cheer a second time, but he doesn't pull back. He kisses you, and kisses you, and kisses you.
Warm and giddy: your fingers twisting in his jersey; his big hands sliding to cup your neck; the peak of his tongue, there and gone when you open a little too wide, disturbing the perfect dance you'd fallen into. The crowd cheers a third time, and you pull away to stare at the screen.
Are you still on the kiss cam? Don't they have anyone else to cut to?
"Are you two finally coming up for air?" Your friend asks.
Oh no, you're not still on the cam, they cut back to you. You're the "someone better" that they have to cut to.
"Oh my god," you groan.
"Ah think Ahm in love with you," Johnny says, you glance back at his kiss reddened lips and dreamy eyes. He looks good like this, and you swoop in for another kiss, which he eagerly reaches for.
Until your best friend yanks you back by the neck of your sweater and you make a rather undignified choked sound that kills the kiss cam.
"Vibe killer," you hiss at her. She makes a face and you stick your tongue out at her.
"You don't even know the guy's name." She reasons. It's a good reason, but easily remedied. You look at kiss cam guy.
"Ahm Johnny," he supplies.
"That's Johnny," you pass it along just to watch your friend roll her eyes. She's not mad, but you know well enough that one of you has to be responsible or neither of you will get home.
"Ok, well, don't blame me if you end up on Youtube," She tells you, settling back in to watch the game.
"Yeah, yeah, I'll remember you when I'm famous." You tell her. She snorts and steals your beer to top up her own.
You don't care, more worried about snagging Johnny's phone to punch in your number with a little kiss next to your name than ending up online.
Which you do. "Kiss cam make out" goes semi-viral, with thousands of people watching your movie moment. You only know because Johnny shamelessly sends you the video alongside the dinner reservation details for your first date.
(Years later your best-friend-turned-maid-of-honor plays it during your and Johnny's wedding, but that's a different story.)
Sort of a part 2 to this I suppose? I just had some more thoughts... @cherelapine
Imagine that you and John can eventually return home after almost a year of being wholly committed to your part as "the married couple next door". The information you gathered about this terrorist (most of it came from his wife who had very loose lips) was enough to get him and the group he worked with arrested.
When the two of you finally arrived back on base, though, the shift was instant.
Obviously everyone knew that you and John would most likely be somewhat closer than you were before you left. Soap, Gaz, and Ghost had been briefed to just act like they usually would around you until your dynamic shifted back to normal.
But they weren't expecting that when you got off the heli that you would be holding hands... and still wearing the wedding rings you were given.
You settled back into routine quickly, just now you do everything together.
Training, eating, sleeping, briefings, paperwork, hell you even shower together.
They really tried to ignore it. Figured that you would eventually go back to normal. But no.
"You want a cuppa, baby?" You asked, not even turning around from the recroom kitchenette.
"Please, love."
You made your way back to the couches where everyone was sitting with two steaming hot mugs of tea in your hands, handed one to John who took it with a nod of his head, his ring clinking against the ceramic, and then promptly lowered yourself onto his lap. He didn't bat an eye at the sudden display of affection. No, he just wrapped his arm around you, fingers digging into your waist, and planted a kiss on your shoulder.
The others had to try act like the petnames and displays of affection were normal. You had basically been married for a year, they understood that. But it was like you had been together for years. They figured they would have to address it at some point.
The only thing preventing them from saying anything? Every night they could hear from Johns room the sound of the wood of his bed slamming into the wall, echoing around the entire barracks. They could hear your moans. Pathetic little mewls and pleads, sometimes even cries. The walls were so thin sometimes they swore they could hear the wet sound of Johns cock pistoning in and out of you, even over the sound of your moans and his grunts.
They all jerked off to the sounds every night.
They couldn't address it because they were afraid you would stop...
Kyle "Gaz" Garrick x f!reader | a gift to @massivescissorsthingperson for their donation to Mikinakoos Children's Fund, Ontario Indigenous Women's Empowerment Fund, Anishinabek Nation 7th Generation Charity |
Prompt: it's your classic case of mistaken identity, turns out there is more than one Kyle in London wearing cargo pants and a fuckass hat.
cw: drinking, mentions of blacking out, kidnapping but like what rapunzel does to flynn in tangled-> (thanks kore), kyle is tied up
Stupid fuckass hat.
Kyle wakes to the sound of muttered curses. His head is fuzzy, with a rhythmic pounding and a dryness in his mouth he knows well from past hangovers. Only, typically, he wakes up in his own bed and his hands and feet aren't bound. The ropes are tight, but tied haphazardly, he could easily free himself but the bed beneath him squeaks any time he moves. Each time the muttering in the other room stops and then, after a beat, starts again, feet pacing back and forth.
It's dark, artificial and absolute. His eyes are covered by what feels suspiciously like a plush eye-mask. It smells faintly of lavender. Or maybe it's the pillow. Or the blankets tucked around him.
How did he get here?
Kyle thinks about the night before, the loud pub, his mates from London all rowdy over the footie match that was on the TV. There had been a constant flow of pints and shots and pretty pretty birds stopping by just to say hi. Kyle didn't usually entertain that kind of attention, he was on leave, could be called back at any time, he didn't need to hurt some woman's heart with his choice of career.
But there was someone who caught his eye.
You.
You had come into the pub and taken a seat at the far end of the bar nursing a drink while looking at something on your phone before looking around the bar as if searching for something, or someone.
You had run into him by chance, both of you queued up for the bathroom. You had complimented his hat, said it was patriotic, asked if he served. He had waved you off with a laugh. But he hadn't missed the way you eyed the hat, then his boots and his jacket. None of it was regulation, but he supposes there might have been something vaguely military about it.
He had approached you, slipped into the empty seat next to you and asked what you were drinking. You looked surprised to see him again, even more when he offered to get you a drink. You told him you had been stood up. You had seemed nervous, told him pretty boys at the pub didn't typically buy you drinks. He had thought it was a shame and was drunk enough to tell you so.
It gets fuzzy from there. Had he left with you? Had he left with his mates? Had someone picked him up off the street? Recognized him? Had you been with him?
Stupid fuckass hat.
That same phrase again, the voice panicked and frustrated. He wants to think he recognizes it, that he will get some answers to his questions but his brain is fuzzy and his left arm is starting to fall asleep from the way he's laying on it. And is his captor baking? It smells strongly of sugar, butter and something chocolaty.
When the door finally opens he's ready for it. His feet are free, his hands still tied and numb, but he's listened long enough to know his captor is alone and in the habit of singing along to the songs on the radio in between bouts of cursing.
"Oh, you're a—"
Kyle leaps out of the bed, the room must not have been very big because his shoulder hits a soft stomach, the person lets out a shocked oof as they fall to the floor.
It is you.
You scramble away from him, the eye mask pulling off in the scuffle. You are not dressed like any captor he has met before, typically they don't wear satiny robes and house slippers. Nor do they bake while they have a man tied up in the other room. Well, maybe not the terrorist types he typically deals with.
"Fuck, are you okay? I didn't mean to, I mean, fuck." You drop your head back against the wall.
"Didn't mean to what? Tie me up?"
Kyle wiggles until he can sit up. He's in desperate need of paracetamol and water, and to get his hands free.
"No, I mean, yes because I did tie you up, which feels totally illegal and I'm so sorry, but, shit, would you believe me if I said I thought you were someone else?"
You had tied him up on accident?
Kyle can't help but laugh, it pulls uncomfortably on his arms yet he doesn't stop. His RTI training had prepared him for getting captured but he always imagined it would be by trained professionals, that he would wake up in a chair with guns trained on him. Maybe some light waterboarding, threats to his body, his friends, his family.
"Can you untie me?"
It's a simple enough request.
"I could," you start and then eye him uncertainly, "but could you maybe agree to not kill me? I mean, at minimum it would be great if you didn't call the cops?"
"Fucking hell, kill you?" he asks, shocked because what about him last night or when he had been unconscious had screamed killer to you.
You leap up, not bothering to help him and return, looking sheepish and holding his hat, his wallet with both his ID and his military ID — which you would have seen if you had been snooping— the knife that Ghost had gotten him last Christmas, and his phone which lights up repeatedly with messages.
"I have tea and cookies and there is a cake in the oven and I can make you a cup of coffee if you prefer, just..." you trail off, standing in the doorway with his things.
"Fine, okay? I won't call the cops, just untie me."
Your unease quickly melts away into a smile. Far too naive, far too trusting for someone who had panicked and tied him up in fear he might kill you.
Your kitchen is tidy despite the chaotic way you move around it, first grilling him on his tea preference, then making him a plate with far more sweets than he could ever eat (Ghost would be in heaven if someone tied him up and fed him sweets). You're babbling as you go, something about an ex-boyfriend and a friend and you had been out of town. None of it was making sense and the paracetamol you had given him had yet to do its job.
"Sit down and tell it t'me slower."
You sit obediently, your own cup of tea is only lukewarm now but you sip at it gingerly before turning to Kyle.
"I was away on a work assignment, my friend started dating this total loser, Kyle. Kind of bloke who walks around in camo, has the stupid blacked out flag hat, the stolen valor type. Well he cheats on her, then starts harassing her, following her around to her favorite places and we tried telling the police about it but they didn't give a shit, so I thought I would scare him."
"Scare him?"
"Look, it wasn't a very well thought out plan, was it? You weren't supposed to blackout, we didn't even drink that much. You weren't even the right Kyle!"
"So your plan was to lure back the military obsessed stalker ex to your flat? And what? Scare him straight?"
It's ballsy, he'll give you that.
"No. Yes? Maybe, but when I realized you weren't him you were so far gone. Bloody hell are you heavy, and then I got you here and kept panicking. A knife? Really?"
"And the ex? Evil Kyle."
"Already bothering her at the cafe this morning. Fuck, I am so dumb."
You look as though you want the floor to swallow you, the embarrassment is clear on your face, in the way you bite at your lip.
Kyle's phone lights up again, there's no name on the caller id, but he recognizes the number.
"I gotta take this call, but after you can convince me not to press chargers by telling me about what else you can bake."
Your face brightens, the barest hint of a smile at the corners of your lips, your eyes widening and the frown marks between your brows smoothing out in surprise.
"Okay, yeah sure, you can take it in my room. I promise I won't try to poison you or anything."
Kyle has multiple missed calls and texts, when he calls back the number he isn't at all surprised to hear Ghost's voice on the other end, gruff and bored with his own leave.
"Thought I was goin' t'ave t'send out search an' rescue," he says instead of hello.
"You free?"
"Got a bottle o'whiskey an' a date with my 'and later, why?"
"Cancel the date, got a job for you. Goin' to break a few laws and maybe a few bones."
"Aww, didja meet someone? Too busy fuckin' t'answer my calls?"
"You could say I was tied up."
Simon laughs, "kinky, Garrick, I like it."
AN: if you missed it, a few other writer are doing this in order to raise money to help the Indigenous communities in Canada that have been impacted by fires. Please consider donating, or spreading awareness by reblogging!
cw: explicit sexual content, dubcon elements, serial dater Kyle Garrick, fake dating in a way, stalking, emotional manipulation, implied violence
Kyle is off his game.
It’s an unfamiliar position, one he resents himself for slipping into at all.
If he thinks on it too long, the kiss of a blunt, rubber blade presses at the side of his neck, right over the pulse. Ghost’s voice echoes in his ear, not bothering to hide his satisfaction over catching Price’s favorite and the record ‘older and, “—that’s ‘ow you die, Sergeant.”
He drags a hand over his neck and rolls it. The ache in his jaw pulses all the way up to his head. So does the next memory of sitting at Price’s desk, staring down three failed recce exercises. Pretending not to notice Ghost pleased as punch on the far wall.
Pretending not to notice the new gold ring on the old man’s finger.
“You’re hangin’ on by the skin of your teeth, Gaz. It’s not like you.”
Six months’ deployment will do that to a man. ‘Course, it didn’t do that to Soap or Ghost or Cap—but him. It reeks of failure. A lapse he should’ve been able to muscle through, and could, if he had a little more time. Kyle said as much, but the way Price regarded him said that the call had already been made. Paperwork stamped and filed away out of reach.
“Eight weeks leave. Approved, starting tomorrow. Go home, Gaz. Rest. Relax. Do not let me see or hear from you before your eight weeks are up, understood?”
Kyle had nodded, molars almost dust. What sticks out now as he plays it back is how Price rubbed at his ring and the faraway look in his eye as he added—
“Find a girl to pass the time with.”
Everything after that blurs. He couldn’t say how the meeting ended, only that two days later, he stood in the doorway of the cold, barely-lived-in city flat with a chip on his shoulder and no idea of how to grind it down.
Typically, when he has nothing better to do, Kyle runs.
He runs himself ragged outside, on the track or at the gym, at all hours. Sleep eludes him. It’s no good to lay in the dark, watching the ceiling and the headlights that sneak in through the curtains. The silence gets to him. There’s no chatter or stomping outside his door. No one telling him when to get up, where to go, what to do to fill the hours of the day. So running is how he copes.
He doesn’t track the time or distance. He goes by feel, specifically, the burn. How long before it blooms in his calves and then migrates to his lungs and throat, until it feels like they’re lined with fiberglass. He runs until all he can hear is the stock algo playlist du jour in his ears.
When he finally stops, it’s because his body at last turns on him and he doesn’t want to limp home. He folds over on the pavement, hands braced on his knees, hamstrings snarling at how close he came to ruining them anyway.
It’s never enough.
He drags himself home, taking the long way to wear down what’s left, but the rest of the day is there when he gets back. Long, idle hours with nothing to fill them. He needs a mission. He needs a boost.
So, he takes his Captain’s advice. He finds a girl.
Well. He finds girls.
The first is all nerves, with mile-long legs in heels.
Her arms wrap around him in the hallway of her building. She makes a small sound when he gathers her up against her door. Surprise, then ardor. Giggly when he bends her over the plaswood kitchen table. Afterward, she prattles on about going for breakfast in the morning, and insistently paws at him while he dresses. He gets her name wrong on the way out and she corrects him instantly, lips puckered around a pouty scowl of regret. He forgets it by the time he reaches the station.
The second is louder and five times needier. She clings to his bicep, afraid he’ll vanish if she lets go. He works her up in the last cubicle of the men’s toilet, her head tipped back against the marked-up wall while he marks up her neck in return. When he pauses, hand up her skirt, he sees hearts in her eyes. It extinguishes what he wants then and there. He unlatches the door before it can go any further, and she asks if they’re leaving. The wounded look she gives him rolls off his shoulders as she follows him out, all but sprinting back to her friends.
Objectively, he has fun, all this messing around, but it doesn’t stick.
By morning, it’s gone. In its place, the sense that he’s mislaid something important without ever knowing where he set it down or what it was, exactly. But by the end of the week, he’s got matches aplenty on different apps. Proof, as if he needs it, that he draws the eye.
That if he really wanted to, he could.
He takes to ending his morning runs with coffee.
Same spot, same order. Back to the wall, earbuds out, watching throngs of people stream past on their way to work. He itches for more, but no. This is what he’s been ordered to do.
Across the way, a couple lifts a pram in tandem over the curb, working effortlessly as partners. A two-person team. The wife bends to check on the kid, her full arse on display. He sips without thinking and scalds the roof of his mouth, nearly pitching the steaming cup into the street on reflex.
He hisses through his teeth and reaches for his phone instead.
For the first time in ages, he opens Instagram. The account he made a decade ago and never used. His work is not exactly conducive to having a life, much less documenting one. He scrolls anyway, checking in on old classmates and cousins. Spying their engagements, promotions, and toddling children in coordinated outfits. Milestones, one after another. Evidence of forward motion.
He pauses on a photo of a former footie teammate—arm slung around his wife, both glowing and smiling on a beach somewhere. His ringed hand rests on the curve of her belly.
He lingers on that detail long enough for the screen to go black.
Eight weeks is long enough to fuck off somewhere warm. Book a flight, find a beach. Find a bird and pretend he could be a man who belongs in pictures like that. The sun warming his back, an arm curled around him like he’s the center of a world.
The thought fizzles. He’s seen the inside of enough planes this year alone.
He’s stuck on the blank screen when a pair of shoes steps into his line of sight.
Polished burgundy leather. Fancy.
His gaze tracks upward to stockinged legs that disappear beneath a skirt. The rest is wrapped in a buttoned coat.
Then he reaches the face, and it catches him off guard. Open and welcoming. Your cheeks lift in a tentative smile, lips stained a shade of red that suits you perfectly. Your eyes are warm and bright with an energy he burned through several streets back.
You hesitate, indecision writ plain in your drawn-up shoulders. The worry of your fingers pinching a card.
“Excuse me, hi. I don’t mean to bother you, but do you have a minute?”
You’re younger than him. Not by a decade, maybe, but in his line of work, even four or five years is a gulf of experience. You don’t read as especially confident. He reckons you’re breaking it in like those expensive shoes on your feet. Your manicured fingers tremble as you offer your card, and his attention snags on the tiny, intricate designs decorating them.
You give him a name. It burrows right in.
“—I run a boutique matchmaking service, well, not run, as in by myself, exactly, but, well, I’m building my client base—”
He takes the card, and your relief is immediate, as if you’d cleared the highest hurdle. The cardstock is thin. A cheap, creamy white, with a heart and arrow logo that looks like it came free with the template. Your name and a website sit below the words Made to Last Matchmaking.
He blinks, attention snapping back, realizing he’s missed the meat of your pitch while he was busy deciding exactly what, if anything, to do with you.
“—dating can be so difficult in this day and age, and I’m working to revitalize the old fashioned way of meeting people face-to-face, outside of those lousy, impersonal apps. Now, obviously, I don’t know if you’re single, but, well, do you have any trouble meeting people? I’m offering steep discounts—”
His mouth twists with delayed offense. One look and you decided he’s lacking. That he has another problem to fix.
He looks from the card back to your face, brow furrowing. “I don’t need help.”
Your smile falters, but you recover quickly and snap back into place. “Of course. I just thought I’d ask.”
“What about me gave you the idea?”
That gives you pause. You must know you’ve stepped in it.
“You seem like someone who might be too busy to find someone, or…particular.”
Particular. He scoffs.
Kyle reclines, hooking one arm over the back of the café chair, and catches them—your eyes. The quick dart from the sweat cooling on his biceps to where his thighs strain the hems of his shorts, then away again. Kyle doesn’t call you out, but a thoroughly smug pleasure unfurls in his chest. He isn’t ignorant of his looks, never has been.
Pretty eyes, pretty hair, and a smile he knows how to use. Down to the scar on his cheek, which he lets do some of the talking when he flirts and talks around what he does for a living. Beyond what God saw fit to give him, he has a spendy vintage watch on his wrist and the activewear he’s in now is performance-grade. He can’t afford cheap on his salary.
And maybe that’s the real reason you approached. So he could be the feather in your cap.
He can see it: his face splashed on the front page of your website, in a carousel of success stories. Handsome, young, reasonably well-to-do. His first name above a tidy testimonial he’d be required to supply as a satisfied client. Exaggerated enough to sell and proof of concept.
He knows he’s a catch by any metric that matters.
But particular? That, he won’t touch.
“Not that it’s any of your business, but I’ve got a date this weekend.”
You press your pretty lips together and rub. He wants to know what kind of lipstick holds that well. You give him a tight smile in a look that says you’ve realized the conversation’s a dead end, but have to back out of it politely.
“Really? Lucky girl.” You adjust the strap of your purse, puffing up a touch, birdlike. A vexed dove. One small, dismissive flutter of your hand toward his cup of coffee. “Sorry for taking up some of your busy morning.”
Then you’re gone with a crisp turn on heel, pumps practically thundering as you rejoin the crowds. He watches until you meld into the mob completely, then reads your card again. He glares at the embossed letters and bends it between two fingers, shoving it into his pocket.
Only then does he tip back to prop up his feet on the empty chair across from him. His sprawl bumps the café table, and his cup wobbles in slow motion before it dumps straight into his lap.
The coffee’s cooled enough, but it drenches him completely. A half-second later, the cup hits the pavement and shatters, and a dozen passerby turn in his direction.
Perfect.
At home, he texts and inveigles the girl from the cubicle into a date.
It doesn’t stop his surveying at the gym, tracking the pretty birds that flit past his stations. No one holds his attention.
On his way out, he stops for an overpriced juice. As the cashier hands it over, he catches her nails—painted a plain, forgettable milky white.
Just like that, his thoughts veer off where they don’t belong.
He wonders if you’ve found any takers yet.
Cubicle Girl cancels minutes after he sits down. A wall of text along the lines of I talked to my friends and you’re stringing along a nice girl.
It puts him back at square one, but he won’t stay there for long. He’s got a phone and bar full of options.
There’s no rush. It’s Friday. The place is packed, bar to dance floor. The air is thick with body spray and perfumes, the souring musk of sweat, liquor, and vape pens. The seat beside him will remain empty as long as he wants it to.
By drink two, he’s attracted a warm-blooded stray who has wandered off from her group. One compliment about her smile, and she’s more than happy to join him. She’s in town for a conference and wouldn’t you know it, she’d love recommendations from a local. Never mind he’s only home a handful weeks out of the year, and doesn’t recognize half the block anymore. He plays along, chatting her up until he’s certain she’s about to invite him back to her hotel.
Until she drops she’s sharing lodgings with her colleagues.
He thinks of Soap, who doesn’t mind an audience. Kyle has never understood the appeal.
His place is out of the question. When he spends months at a time sharing close quarters with Soap and Ghost, he keeps his space his.
Kyle doesn’t push it when she announces her party is moving on, or when she stalls, suggesting they meet up next time she’s in town. He dismisses the idea, and tells her to enjoy the rest of her trip. He does not give her his number.
Alone again, he reclaims his spot at the bar, ignoring the peals of high-pitched laughter and cheery voices all around him. It all eats at him more than it should, especially when his thoughts drift back to the girl on the street and the cheap business card.
He thinks about the way you saw him and decided he needed help. Him.
If the matches and messages blowing up his phone aren’t enough proof that he knows what he’s doing, what is? He hasn’t needed help in this department since he enlisted. No wingman, certainly no coaching. He knows exactly what he brings to the table. It’s not arrogance if it’s true, and for him, it usually is.
Still. He has to give you this, if only in the privacy of his own head. A reluctant and begrudging concession—there is more that he wants, that until recently, he’d had little patience for, and no interest in entertaining beyond the abstract.
It’s Price’s fault, the greedy bastard. Cap had only shared the one picture of his new missus, and even that had been heavily influenced by drink. Stupefying, really, how Price swore him to secrecy with all that color in his puffed-up cheeks. He’d herded Kyle out onto the pavement beyond that dingy pub, one bear-like mitt locked tight around his phone while the other cupped protectively over the screen to shield it from prying eyes, cigar pinched between his teeth like he was guarding yet another state secret instead of showing off a pretty woman.
“Beautiful, isn’t she? Skittish. Got some bad habits we’re still tryin’ t’break, but toothache sweet.”
The photo itself had been nothing, mundane and domestic, yet it’s burned into his skull.
Price with his arm around her shoulders, his hand fisted in the chain of a small heart necklace at her throat. Her shy face. And the look on Price’s? Kyle’s never seen him smile like that—never thought Price could make a woman smile like that, either. That’s what stuck.
Because he wants it for himself.
And if a man like Price—irascible, immovable, inflexible—can lasso a piece of heaven and pin it down long enough to plant a flag in it, then there’s no reason he can’t do the same.
He knocks back the rest of his drink and resentfully writes the night off as a wash. He signals to the bartender for his tab, and a hand lands on the bar beside him.
The nails are a familiar vibrant shade he remembers admiring. His cheek twitches with a smile, but he squashes it. Good thing, too, because the first thing out of your mouth is,
“Your date running late?”
Fucking hell.
You hover, angled toward the bar, one hip cocked slightly while you peer down at him. The slope of your face sits half in shadow while the lighting catches on the brownish-mauve stain of your lips and the smears of glitter on your eyelids.
Then you turn to flag the bartender down and neon spills across you, filling in the rest. Greens, blues, and pinks—refracted color sliding over your skin like the inside of a kaleidoscope. A strobe light from the dance floor lights up your face, three concentric circles pulse over your features. Your eyes shine, glossy with however long you’ve been drinking, as you set an empty glass on the bar.
Kyle can’t look away. His heart lurches.
“She canceled. Something came up.”
“Nooo,” You smirk as you fold onto your elbow, cheek settling into the bridge of your curled fingers. “That’s a shame.”
He chuckles under his breath and scratches his brow, using it as cover for another peek.
Tonight you’re in a silk velvet skirt the color of moss, gold where the lights touch it, in a halo for your hips, and a black top that leaves your arms bare and dips low. A thin gold necklace rests against the sheen of sweat gathering at the tops of your breasts, drawing attention exactly where it ought to.
Who exactly are you when you’re not trying to set all the single men and women in the city up for a living?
“Hardly.”
“Clearly. Her loss, I bet.”
“Absolutely.” He leans back in his seat. “You stalking me, by the way? That determined to land me?”
“As if. No, I’m here—thank you,” you pause mid-sentence to accept your cocktail from the bartender. Kyle taps his card against the reader before you can reach for your purse. Your smile turns wry. “Thanks. I’m here for a hen party.”
You take a half-step closer and twist, revealing a garish button pinned to your top. The silhouette of a hot pink hen with swooping lettering Team Bride. He laughs, then he gets a lungful. Juniper gin and jasmine perfume. He’d like to lean in and bury his nose in your neck for another whiff, lick the sweat off from below your ear to see if it tastes the same. Cross-reference it with the sheen on your tits.
“Client’s?”
“In a way. It’s for a friend I set up with an old coworker three years ago.”
“So you’ve always been a meddler?”
“I’ve got a knack for it.”
“Better remember that when I win back your favor.”
“That implies you had it.”
He lays a hand dramatically over his heart. “And here I was thinking paying for your drink might make up for the other day.”
“That’ll take more than one cocktail, I think.”
“Are you trying to guilt me into buying a round for the entire party?”
“Maybe.” You smile coyly behind your glass. “But you were considerably less charming last we met.”
“Yeah, well, I hadn’t realized who I was talking to.”
“Wow.”
“If I get drinks, do you think the bride-to-be would mind if I crashed for a bit?” he grins, surprising even himself, but he can’t help it.
Normally, he wouldn’t be caught dead at a hen party. Been there, done that, it’s either too much of a good thing or a bloody hazard—hauling Soap out of a pub before he pounces on some poor, unsuspecting girl. And yet, because it’s you? He’ll make an exception. Play nice, charm your friends, let them interrogate him if it means another hour or two of puzzling you out.
Your nose scrunches with a laugh. “Not this time, stranger.”
You squeeze his shoulder as you say it, as a warm and friendly gesture. All it really does is superheat the alcohol in his bloodstream. Makes him think about what those fingers would feel like clawing at his back.
“It’s Kyle,” he manages, clamping one hand down on his thigh. “My name?”
That earns him a brief once-over.
“Not this time, Kyle.”
It takes effort to keep his arse planted instead of tailing after you when you head back to your friends. A whole flock of women crowded around a table near the back, all wearing that same pink button save for the bride in white.
It’s his turn to drag out his departure, sticking around longer than he should for a man with no drink in hand. And Christ, he should probably just walk up and ask you out properly, like a sane man would.
But he already cocked that up at the café. His ego too busy sneering at your pitch to notice the woman giving it and the opportunity. Now, seeing you again while he’s fresh off back-to-back false starts, it’s difficult to separate how much of this is pure want and how much is pride rearing its head. Because by the looks of it, you might actually be too good for him.
Convenient, that Price’s voice should surface in his head.
“I’m tellin’ you, Gaz. You see something you want, you take it.”
He runs his tongue along his teeth, deciding to get out before he does something stupid just then. He’s perfectly capable of waiting until he gets home for that.
Kyle finds your card beneath a menu for Ola’s and mulls it over for all of three seconds before pulling up the website.
It’s not quite as shameless as he originally imagined, but the site is awash with photos of happy couples. He scrolls past a manifesto on love, an overly romantic mythos about soulmates for the tender-hearted, and for those less-inclined, hard statistics. The reviews he knew would be there encourage visitors like him to Take a chance, tempt Cupid’s aim.
Instagram next. Boutique, just like you said. The company account only has a couple hundred followers. Near the beginning is a photo of you beside another woman who must be your co-founder. It doesn’t take long to find you in the followers list. Your personal account is public. Bold, considering how you’d been earlier.
Curated, but not contrived, and chock full of colorful squares. Stray cats, graffiti, uni throwbacks, plates at restaurants—then he reaches a series of posts from a girl’s trip!!! beach holiday, dated a year ago.
(Where was I? he wonders, Getting shot at, probably.)
The crown jewel of the collection is you.
Stretched out on your stomach on a towel, a book open and tented in front. A beer bottle stuck into the sand within reach. You’re looking back over your shoulder at whoever took the photo, hand lifted to shield your eyes from the sun, smiling wide.
A persimmon silk scarf wraps around your hair. The straps of your swimsuit press into your shoulders, taut over your arse, and dig in enough to flash a crescent of a cheek dusted in sand.
The caption’s simple: beach bum
He exhales through his nose.
Yeah. I’ll say.
He takes you to bed with him like that. Your smile and arse beaming down at him in the dark, his fist working furiously beneath the sheets.
He imagines what kind of internal struggle you’d put up, with him staring you down. Would you be self-loathing? Shy, embarrassed? Would you be in disbelief as you spread your legs, or apologetic that you ever doubted him as his cock slid home in your warm cunt?
He shudders, cursing into the dark, staring at the pixels of your arse until his retinas fry. He’d take you on your hands and knees, just to watch it bounce.
His orgasm comes quick at the thought, messy strings of cum splashing up his abs. He groans as he squeezes himself on the upstroke, going until there’s nothing left but a puddle on his skin.
If you were here, he’d tell you to lick it up. Gather it on the tip of one of those nails and suck it off.
His cock twitches at that and he groans in discomfort, but he finds himself swiping through your photos again, beginning and end.
You, at your first proper job, a sneaky selfie in the lift. You, holding a friend’s new labrador puppy. You, on holiday in Madrid with your parents. Notably absent from all of it—a partner.
Secondary fantasy follows the first.
You, on that beach towel again, except this time with him stretched out beside you. Him, nudging at your hip until you roll onto your back for a kiss. Sand sticking to warm, sweaty skin. The curve of a pregnant belly beneath his palm.
It should embarrass him, but it does the opposite.
He stays up late combing through the scraps the internet offers up. Your university’s blog to your extended family’s businesses. Abandoned accounts you probably forgot were public. A sprawling Pinterest account from half a decade ago, dated in taste but deliciously informative: places you dreamed of visiting, the wedding aesthetic of the time, and other evidence of the hopelessly romantic life you’ve imagined. All these breadcrumbs left behind without realizing someone might follow them. It’s basic recon.
Once he’s seen enough and the decision’s made, the rest comes easy. Here’s his worthy pursuit. The opposite of Price’s orders, but once the old man learns the details, he’ll understand. Might even be proud.
Twice now, you’ve come within reach. If that isn’t the universe conspiring in his favor, what is? Fate insists upon putting you in his path—he’ll draw Cupid’s bloody bow himself.
“So, Mr. Garrick, what made you change your mind?”
Today you are in plum. Monochrome, the top a shade lighter than the trousers it’s tucked into. Stylish glasses perch atop your nose and he can’t tell if they’re prescription or decorative.
You are far too professional and clothed for his liking.
“Just ‘Kyle’. Our conversation got me thinking, is all.”
“How so?”
“I did some self-reflecting,” Half a lie. He certainly reflected when he wiped his belly in the mirror last night. “And I think you’re right. I’m particular.”
The pinch of your lips when you suppress a smirk nearly takes him.
“It’s not necessarily a bad thing. Being selective is important. Most people just don’t stop to assess themselves honestly, and consider how to engage with or present themselves to other people.”
Kyle filled out the inquiry form in bed, expecting a wait. Instead, you’d carved time out immediately. A casual coffee chat to ensure he knew what he was getting into and more paperwork to formally onboard him into your little operation.
He didn’t know what to fully expect, only that it brought him into your orbit and gave him the opportunity to start luring you down from the sky. He didn’t think you’d be so upfront.
“How I present myself. What, you think I need a new look? New haircut?”
You smile slyly and glance down at your notes. “No, I think we both know that isn’t the problem, but according to you, you haven’t had a serious relationship in years. You listed work as the primary obstacle, which, fair enough, but I know plenty of married soldiers.”
Not many like him, he wants to argue, but you aren’t wrong, either. There are operators who manage to build lives between deployments, but they don’t do what he does. They only play at it.
You tilt your head, and he gets the distinct impression you’ve stopped reading from whatever internal script guides these things.
“And between us? I don’t actually think work is the real problem.”
Defensiveness flares on first instinct. He could shut this down. Deflect and charm you sideways, or turn it all into a joke. Instead, he keeps his face agreeable, because snapping at you would be shortsighted.
“Suppose that’s why I’m here, hm? So, what’s next?”
That restores your smile.
You launch into your explanation of the entire process. Intake and compatibility assessments and vetting.
He mostly listens, but the lion’s share of his attention falls to your mouth. The short pauses you take to collect your thoughts. The shine of your lipstick and how this one leaves a print on your cup.
“I actually have someone in mind for you.”
His brows shoot up mid-sip. “Oh?”
You nod, pleased with yourself. “Potentially. It’ll take one or two days before I can set you up. Background check, first.”
Kyle nearly laughs into his coffee. Kate and her connections scrubbed his records years ago. All you’ll find is the good soldier Kyle Garrick.
The meeting winds down not long after. Your phone buzzes and you frown at the screen.
“Oof,” you wince, gathering your things. “Afraid I need to take this and be on my way.”
He rises as you do, leaning closer when you offer your hand. What do you know, fits perfect.
“I’m looking forward to working with you, Kyle.”
He gives your hand a little squeeze before letting it go. “Likewise.”
He’s approved within days.
You forward the results and his first match. Kyle skims the details while breakfast burns on the stove.
Camille is an orthopedic surgeon, an avid outdoorswoman, and a fellow runner. Ambitious, disciplined, and a good person on paper. In another life, she might’ve suited him. Unfortunately for her, he’s already met you.
He meets her at a restaurant she’s been wanting to try for months, and he tries sabotaging the evening from the start. He arrives fifteen minutes late, shirt visibly wrinkled, and prolongedly whinges about paying nearly thirty quid for grilled octopus.
She takes it all in stride.
She’s unflappable. She gives as good as she gets, too, parrying every attempt he makes to scuttle the date.
Doubt creeps in when their plates are cleared. Maybe he’s overestimated his ability to tank things, and you’re actually good enough at this to make him forget why he signed up in the first place. Then football comes up, and he mentions Liverpool. A side effect of spending months on end with Price.
The warmth drains out of her face. Honestly, it’s comedic. She breaks and saw limbs every day, and this is what disgusts her.
By dessert, she’s monosyllabic. The guilt for having wasted her time is there and gone as he pays, reasoning that now she has something to report-worthy for you. She’ll probably ask that you screen for club loyalties, and the next poor bastard you pair her with can sit beside her nursing United’s losses for the rest of their lives together.
Every date comes with a debrief with feedback from both parties. He rings you while Camille disappears into the back of a taxi alone.
“Well?”
“Sadly,” he says gravely, “We had irreconcilable differences.”
“Oh? What happened?”
“She supports Manchester United.”
“You’re joking.”
“‘Fraid not.”
“Football? Really?”
Kyle smiles to himself, looking toward the ground as he nudges a pebble with his foot. “What can I say?”
Your sigh crackles warmly down the line. “Okay. You’ll try again.”
Dates two, three, and four follow in quick succession.
The women continue to be perfectly pleasant. He continues to kneecap things.
Date two sours when he talks in circles until she gives up trying to pry anything meaningful out of him. Date three doesn’t last when she asks him for his birth time, and he tells her astrology is fake.
Date four is tough, because she’s funny and clever. She works in publishing and takes pride in her tracking her reading. It pains him to lie, especially with the stack of books waiting for him back at his quarters on base, but he tells her he doesn’t read for fun, and doesn’t see the appeal.
When they part for the night, she’s kind enough to tell him they’d work better as friends.
So when you text him the morning after date four, asking if he can pop by for a quick check-in, he knows it’s all on course.
You share your office with your co-founder, your desks side by side and decorated with small tokens. One framed photograph draws his eye. The trip to Istanbul last spring to visit your cousin. Beside it, a photostrip from the bar down the street from your flat. In the corner, a vase with no flowers. He’ll fix that later.
You’re gorgeous, though the puffiness beneath your eyes leaves you looking frazzled, like you’ve slept poorly all week. The sleeves of your cardigan are shoved unevenly to your elbows, the front buttons misaligned. You greet him as you organize a stack of papers.
“So this is more of a progress report.”
You slide the papers across the desk—they’re feedback forms, neatly transcribed in your handwriting.
He skims. Most of it trends positive.
Attractive. Funny. Intelligent. Easy to talk to. Confident.
Then come the circled sections.
Off-putting comments. A little condescending. It felt like he lost interest halfway through? Hit a wall. Emotionally constipated. Cracks jokes at inappropriate moments.
Kyle bites the inside of his cheek to keep from smiling.
You tap the pages. “As you can see, there’s a pattern. You start strong. Your dates like you. Everything’s grand until you either disengage or, frankly, kill the conversation.”
“Maybe I’m just boring.”
“You are not boring, but there’s a difference between being charming and being emotionally available.”
His teeth will leave a permanent indent in his cheek by the time you’re done here. You frown, seemingly mistaking his silence for offense, but truly, he isn’t. Every one of those dates went exactly as he intended. He’d been as unavailable as he needed to be to end up here.
“Kyle, look, I think you–”
Your phone buzzes suddenly on your desk. The name Daniel flashes across the screen.
“For the love of…” you mutter under your breath. Your thumb comes down hard on decline, and you stare at the screen for a beat. You flip it face down, then plow on without apology. “As I was saying…I think you’re throwing the dates.”
There that is—but what was that? Who was that?
“Throwing them? What makes you say that?” he asks innocently.
“That’s what I’m trying to figure out.”
Your phone lights up with a voicemail notification. It sits upon a stack of countless others, and you ignore those too. Makes him wonder if this Daniel’s why you haven’t slept. Shit landlord, maybe? Another, needier client?
“Maybe I haven’t taken out the right person yet.”
“Mmhm, and not one of those lovely women qualified. Curious. Well,” You clasp your hands atop your desk. “I called you in because I think it’s time we discussed–”
Your phone starts vibrating again. Persistent bastard.
The glare you shoot at your phone is downright venomous. You finally snatch it up, shut it off, and then bury it with a shove into your purse. Both hands come up to your temples and massage circles as you worry your bottom lip between your teeth. A sigh forcefully hisses out. When the irritation ebbs, it leaves behind pure exhaustion in every part of your pretty face.
Kyle leans back into your line of sight. “Unhappy customer?”
“No. That’d be simpler.” You turn fully to him, rubbing at your forehead next. “My boyfriend.”
“Boyfriend?”
The world about falls out from underneath him. Nothing he found suggested a boyfriend. It’s a glaring gap in his intelligence. Ghost would have a field day.
Unless, this Daniel was—
“Sort of. My ex.” Bingo. “It’s complicated.”
The weariness with which you say it stirs up ugly feelings. He imagines the kind of man who keeps calling after being ignored and what he’d look like bleeding from the mouth.
His jaw hurts again.
“Yeah, looks like he’s rung you about a hundred times. He bother you like that often?”
“No, not usually. It’s just, well yesterday, I…” You stop yourself with a light slap to your forehead. “We’re not here to talk about my love life.”
The universe intervenes on your behalf with the swing of the office door.
Your co-founder appears carrying coffees, stopping short when she sees him. “Oh, sorry. Didn’t know we had a guest. I’ll, um….”
You shoot to your feet. “It’s alright. We’re done here. Kyle? I’ll see you out.”
He lets you hustle him out, the two of you nearly knocking shoulders as you hurry down the hall, shrugging into your coats as you go.
Outside, you stand with him at the bottom of the steps, crossing your arms tight across your chest as the wind sends leaves tumbling down the street.
“So, okay, back to what I was saying before that.”
You return to the bullet points of the check-in, as if you can shove the entire Daniel-not-boyfriend situation back into Pandora’s box. You go on about intentionality and all the ways he can supposedly work on himself. He doesn’t interrupt, because this new development with your ex changes things, and he needs to factor it in.
Ten minutes ago, Daniel hadn’t existed. Now the loathsome oaf sits squarely in his path like a dead policeman. Or, more apt, a sinkhole.
Kyle watches you suppress a yawn mid-sentence and he’s irritated all over again.
You’re sweet. Clever. Earnest to a fault. He would wager that you’ve given this man several chances, and what have you got in return? Apparently many sleepless nights and no flowers to show for them.
Fortunately, Kyle is more than capable of changing tack.
“Maybe you could coach me.”
The suggestion derails whatever you were about to say next. You blink, eyebrows lifting up and up and up.
“Coach you?”
“Yeah. Maybe you’re right and I’m rusty.”
You laugh nervously. “Kyle. That’s not—I don’t think—that’s not what I do. I’m not a dating coach, that’s more her thing.” You point a thumb back toward the office windows where your partner’s probably halfway through her latte by now. “I could set up a meeting?”
Kyle tries to look disappointed and your expression breaks a little. A sliver, but that’s all he needs. Once he finds an opening, he knows how to force the rest of himself through it.
“I don’t want her. I want you.”
You let him pick the place and he’s glad you did.
It’s the sort of posh restaurant he’d catch endless hell for if the rest of the 141 ever found out he brought a date to it. Olive tile lines the wall behind the bar, and every table is made from rich sapele wood. Glowing fixtures posted few and far between, while smaller tables like yours make do with candlelight. Smoke and scorched citrus drift out every time the kitchen door swings open, turning hopeful heads when someone in a white apron sweeps past with plates.
Your nails drum while you take the place in with quick, furtive glances. Your attention flocks to the loaded shelves behind the bar then to a waiter balancing a tray full of oysters nested in ice.
You haven’t outright said you’re impressed, but he assumes.
The moment your wine glass is filled, though, you snap right back to attention.
“So, Kyle, is it as awkward for you as it is for me that this was arranged?”
Right. The roleplay. You’d mentioned it in your texts.
It took some cajoling to get you here. Out there on the blustery walk outside your office, imploring you to sit down with him over a nice meal to help him figure out where, oh where, he’s been going wrong. You said three times that this was unofficial, a favor rather than a formal extension of the matchmaking package, and therefore absolutely could not appear in any review.
Kyle agreed to all of it, because he knew it would be worth it.
And now you’re here, pretending this is purely educational while he thinks about how the fuck your ex botched things with you.
He hadn’t spent the intervening days idle. He found the worm lurking on the follower list of a friend. One query led to another, then a brief chat with an old contact still working for the Met, through which he uncovered a nasty little trail. Several small disasters follow Daniel. Nothing dramatic enough to make the evening news, but enough to paint a picture—one he doesn’t want you in.
Multiple CCJs and thousands of pounds in gambling debts. Assault within the last year. Three employers in eighteen months with behavior cited as reason for dismissal.
You spend your days vetting strangers for other people, yet what care do you take for yourself?
“Not at all. We all need a little push sometimes.”
“Really?”
“‘Course. I suspect even you need one from time to time.”
You huff quietly through your nose, but the conversation comes easier after that.
First comes family.
He gives the broad strokes. That cannot change too soon, even if he has plans for you that stretch farther into the future. With the spotless records you’ve already pulled, you should be satisfied. He talks about his mums, their troupe of rescue cats. About his last trip out of the country, where he fell down a flight of steps in Minsk and walked away only mildly concussed.
(He leaves out how that happened. That his target tried throwing him down them, and how the man ended up going headfirst beneath Kyle’s tumbling weight, and never got back up afterward.)
In return, you tell him about your siblings. Your old job in marketing and how you pivoted. About university, too, and how half your social circle ended up dating because you kept introducing people. You weren’t lying about your aptitude.
The waiter comes and goes. Somewhere between dishes, the conversation loses its scaffolding entirely. You lean across the table, eyes glittering. Laughter sweet as honey and bubbly as champagne.
For a fake date, it certainly feels real.
And for him, it’s as simple as flipping a switch. All that effort spent sabotaging his dates redirected. He doesn’t waste time now that he has you to himself. Every detail goes into the ever-thickening file he’s been compiling on you.
“You know, you’re easier to talk to than anyone else you’ve set me up with.”
You snort. “That’s because this is practice. I’m not trying to impress you.”
“Too late.”
“Mm, I believe ‘joking at inappropriate moments’ was feedback you received.”
Kyle grins. “I’m dead serious. Best date in years.”
Before you can roll your eyes, he reaches and settles his hand over yours. Your gaze drops to where you touch, then returns to his face with an uneasy look.
“This is practice,” you repeat.
“Doesn’t have to be.” He drags his thumb over the back of your knuckles. “See, I’ve been listening to everything you’ve said about chemistry and all that. Think we’ve got it.”
“Kyle.”
“You’ve had a good time, right? Be honest.”
You worry your lip instead of answering. Your gaze bounces from your drink, to the candle, to the dining room beyond his shoulder. Anywhere but his face.
When it finally returns, you admit it with a sigh. “Yes, alright, I’ve had a good time.”
The satisfaction that sparks in his chest is wholly disproportionate in its strength. He has to resist smiling too broadly, galvanized by your concession.
“Right. And if you were your own client?” He gestures between the two of you. “Would you set us up?”
“That’s beside the point.”
“Is it? Look, I know you’ve got that ex of yours, or whatever you want to call him,” he adds when your brow furrows. “He’s a piece of work.” The kindest thing he could say after what he’s found. “Walk me through it. One more drink and let’s see if we can’t sort it.”
Your fingers twitch beneath his.
It’s funny, really. In the field, getting answers is often ugly business. Fear, exhaustion, pain, truth serum. Most people who find themselves seated across from him are either terrified civilians trapped in a mess far bigger than themselves, or enemy combatants determined to die before informing.
You are neither. You’re a pretty girl with wine in her belly. Nervous, certainly, but you haven’t tucked tail. You could have fled at any time. Could’ve smacked him and told him to piss off.
Force was never going to work on you. It would’ve driven you off. Not that he minds a chase, but it would be unnecessary. Given enough room, you’ll arrive at the conclusion he wants all on your own. That’s the beauty of it. It’s masterclass. He is, after all, good at what he does. Always has been.
When the waiter sidles up, you ask for a refill.
It all spills out after that. You and Dan have a history. You technically go all the way back to primary school. Thick as thieves for years. You, a shy and bully-prone girl. Him, your pigtail-pulling protector, happy to terrorize everyone else if they left you alone.
In secondary, without much fanfare, he became your boyfriend. In the years that followed, your on-again, off-again man.
When he was good, he was easy to love. He’d stay up until four in the morning to help you study for exams. He knew your coffee order. He’d show up with your favorite takeaway when you were ill. Charmed complete strangers into hour-long chats when you went out. Picked you up all the way in Swindon once when you got a flat. He could be warm and thoughtful in these fleeting moments, enough to make you picture your life together in five, ten years.
Then the tide would inevitably turn.
He’d remember your anniversary but forget your birthday. Borrow your car without telling you and return it empty. Lose job after job because someone else was always the problem. Borrow money and never repay it.
The good and bad came in waves, and you’d become a champion swimmer. You kept hoping he’d grow up, and that the version you fell for would eventually turn up and stick. But the money—the mounting pile of debts and the broken promises attached to them—proved to be the final straw. You couldn’t keep pretending the good outweighed everything else.
Nowadays, your family hates him. His name taboo amongst your friends. Every time the relationship implodes, everyone celebrates. And like clockwork, weeks later, he worms his way back into your life, hat in hand, talking about the good old days.
As if Kyle needed any more reason to loathe the man.
You insist you’ve been better as starting the company changed things. You promised your partner you wouldn’t let Daniel drag you backwards, and for the most part you’ve kept that promise.
It’s just that he keeps testing you.
“He showed up at my flat last week.”
“What’d he want?”
“What do you think?” Fair. “He said he’d had a rough week and needed to talk.”
Daniel didn’t appreciate being told no, and within eight hours, you’d received eighty calls and a hundred plus texts—even after you blocked him.
The more you talk, the more tired you sound. By the time the bill arrives, you’re quiet.
Neither of you speak much more until you’re outside. Your chin stays tucked, all embarrassed now that your dirty laundry has been aired. You search this way and that for an opportune exit.
He won’t allow it. Every date comes with a debrief, after all.
He steers you toward the corner with a hand on your back. People pass, heads bowed against the wind, and music spills nearby from an open pub door. You stop beside a cut-through and begin fastening the remaining buttons of your coat, staring intently at your fingers.
“I’m sorry for dumping all that on you. Now that I’ve said it out loud, it sounds pathetic.”
“Pathetic?” He scoffs. “No. He’s skint, can’t keep a job, and thinks terrorizing you is a winning strategy. Pretty sure we know who the pathetic one here is.”
Despite yourself, a laugh escapes, but you still won’t look at him. “He wasn’t always like this.”
“Oh, they never are, are they?”
The corner of your mouth quirks. For the first time since Daniel’s name entered the conversation, you look relieved.
Kyle steps closer. “You know, for a matchmaker, you’ve got terrible taste in men.”
You tip your face up at last. “Yeah? What does that make you?”
It is, though you don’t know it, a trick question. He has done terrible things. He will continue to do terrible things. The world keeps providing reasons. The blood on his hands is there to stay.
He’s spent weeks in pursuit. Hunting, if he were being honest, though that hardly seems accurate when you’ve given him only opportunities the whole way. He’s never had to offer you an exit—not that he would. Maybe what he’s done makes him a terrible man, but watching your eyes flit to his mouth and back again, he doesn’t think it matters all that much.
He doesn’t preempt whatever objection is rattling around in your head. All he can think of is closing the space between your mouths.
Your throat clears.
“I should get home.” In a blink, you straighten and step around him, phone already in hand. “This was fun.”
Seven words to take the wind out of his sails. Aren’t you playing hard to get, taking things slow.
He lets you pass. The impulse to pull you into the dark alley to change your mind and speed things along rears its head. Ghost’s influence, most like.
“So you admit it. Does it mean you’d like to do it again?”
You make him wait until your ride is accepted before you look up almost bashfully from underneath your lashes. “It’s probably a wildly stupid decision, but...”
And another seven words for the urge to recede. A few more days won’t kill him.
“I can’t keep your money if I’m the one dating you. I’ll refund it.”
“Nah, keep it. You did exactly what I hired you for,” You walked right into it. “Found me a match.”
A smile tugs at your mouth. “We’ll see.”
“We will.”
Kyle relieves the ache of returning home alone with a long shower.
He finishes with a grunt, stomach and abs twinging with a side-stitch. His spend drips down the tile and swirls into the drain. With it, several options for how to approach his last loose end, most of which would land him in hot water.
(If he was stupid enough to get himself caught.)
Every idea falls short. Daniel’s a parasite who keeps crawling back. A cockroach. He could call in another favor with the Met, pad the man’s colorful file, make life more inconvenient for a while, but that won’t cut it.
He has his address. It would take him less than an hour to knock on the man’s door for a chat.
Yet, for all Daniel’s run-ins with the law, he’s exactly the sort to go crying to the police. Kyle has no desire to explain things to Price, let alone why he’s spent mandated leave paying social calls to a bird’s ex-boyfriend. Worse still, he’d also go crying to you, and that’d squander weeks of work.
He has to outsource.
Price is out, for obvious reasons. Soap would get too involved as he always does. Nik’s disappeared into one of his periods of radio silence. It leaves him with one unsavory choice.
He doesn’t want Ghost to know about you yet. He has a habit for collecting things people would rather keep quiet and saving them for a rainy day. Kyle, far less talkative than Soap, has always been one of his favorite marks. Unfortunately, he’s also the exact man for the job.
He sends the text when he goes to bed, and the reply is there when he wakes.
ETA 36.
Well into his morning run, his phone buzzes.
A selfie. Your co-founder, grinning over a box filled with cardamom buns and chocolatines, thumbs raised in emphatic approval.
Another. You, cradling the bouquet he had delivered to your office. A sunrise-colored bunch of snapdragons, peonies, and paper moons. Your smile peeks out from behind the petals.
Thank you for the treats xx
His runner’s high hits like never before.
One last point of due diligence: a visit to the halfwit.
Kyle tracks him down to a sticky-floored Grosvenor that’s seen better days, an apt comparison to the man himself. Daniel’s as unremarkable in the flesh as he is in his socials and police records, hunched over a poker table with a pint at his elbow and a shrinking stack of chips in front of him.
He only half pays attention to the slot machine he’s claimed. The flashing lights and chirping speakers drown out most of the table talk, but the louder notes of Daniels’s complaints carry.
A bored-looking woman hovers at his shoulder, nursing the dregs of a cocktail, chipped nails tapping idly while her attention wanders. He slaps his cards onto the felt after another losing hand, gesticulating at his companion while the dealer calmly pushes the pot toward the winner. He curses, knocks back his drink, and grudgingly buys back into the game, but not before awkwardly trying and failing to coax the woman down for a kiss. She turns her head without so much as looking at him.
Beyond him, posted beside the cashier’s cage, two broad-shouldered men speak amongst themselves, occasionally nodding toward Daniel’s table.
Kyle watches him unravel all over again when the next hand is dealt.
He decides then and there there’s no need to get any closer or learn anything more. Simply clapping eyes on the lout is enough. He’s not worth the risk.
Besides, Ghost’ll leave a more lasting impression.
Ghost has the rear of the pub to himself.
Last booth, back to the wall, one thick leg swung wide and extended out into the open floor waiting to trip someone. Two empty pint glasses at the edge of the table. He’s probably scared off any wandering staff. Kyle takes him a third.
“Could’ve texted you were here early, LT.”
“Needed the ‘me’ time. Soap’s insufferable without you to throw at ‘im.”
Kyle snorts. “Cap suspect anythin’?”
“‘e knows better than to pry when I take personal time,” he pulls the pint closer. “So, you fuckin’ stir crazy? What’s this about needin’ some bastard’s legs broken?”
That wasn’t what Kyle had sent. He’d mentioned an ‘old friend’ who needed setting straight, that he couldn’t be recognized, and that the job called for Ghost’s brand of finesse. Promised he’d owe Ghost a favor. He sticks to his story, offering no more detail than necessary.
“Mm. Called me ‘ere to do your dirty work. Wonder what Price’d say about his star pupil dishin’ out a little clandestine ‘urt?” Ghost tugs his mask aside for a drink, smirking. “Lemme see ‘er.”
Kyle bristles. “What?”
“The girl.” Ghost jerks his chin. “If I’m gonna get my ‘ands dirty for some bird, I wanna see.”
“This isn’t for—”
“Sure it isn’t. Y’asked me to slip off base, off the books, to rough up some schoolyard bully? Fuck if it ain’t for a woman. So let’s see ‘er.”
There’s no point in arguing. Kyle pulls up the selfie from that morning, and slides his phone over.
A man wandering to the toilet slows, neck craning to eavesdrop and steal a look, and Kyle glares to hurry him on his way.
“This ‘er?”
Kyle looks back at Ghost.
The look in his eyes sends a shiver down Kyle’s spine. Ghost’s pupils have fattened, his thick brow lower in focus. The big man’s gone completely still save for his chest, expanding like bellows in a deep, ragged inhale. His free hand migrates below the table to shamelessly adjust himself.
Kyle glances down at the screen and unclenches his fist with relief. Ghost has swiped one too far. He’s staring at the photo of the co-owner. Poor girl.
“Not her. Go back one.”
Ghost doesn’t do that right away, opting to airdrop himself the photo first, then swiping back. When your face pops up, he doesn’t nod or comment, and Kyle is absolutely fine with that. The last thing either him or you need is his approval. Once his phone is back in hand, he forwards everything he’s compiled on Daniel.
“And that’s him.”
A chuckle rumbles from across the table as Ghost skims the text. He turns the cracked screen to show the unimpressive mugshot that Kyle’s Met contact had forwarded. “S’rare for me to be the more ‘andsome one. She blind?”
“Watch it.”
Ghost just laughs. Kyle could save his life twice over, and he’d still dodge paying a compliment.
The discussion of what to do with Daniel is short. No killing, no permanent damage— physical at least—unless he decides to bother you again.
“Garrick,” Ghost leers down at the ring-shaped crack in his phone’s screen, its epicenter right around your friend’s face. “Favor for a favor.”
Kyle’s gaze slides right off the picture. Plausible deniability.
“‘Course.”
You pick this time. An intimate spot, where you get the best table.
(You know the head chef, you explain. Introduced her to her wife, a former coworker.)
Tonight you’re dressed in that deep burgundy shade again. A full-bodied red to make his mouth water. You’re brighter than you’ve been, though for the first quarter hour, you’re obviously nervous. There’s no pretense of coaching or protocol to fall back on. Knee bouncing, nails drumming.
Over the entrée, you don’t use Daniel’s name, apparently having adopted your friend’s taboo, and add that he never took you to a dinner like this—excluding your practice date. It’s brand new territory, being on the receiving end of effort. An advantage he won’t waste.
Everything he’s learned about you finally earns its keep. This is the home stretch. With only a handful of weeks left before his return to base, he wants to spend as much time as possible with you firmly nailed down.
The conversation threads from travel to music to books. He mentions cities he’s visited because he knows they were on your bucket list at one point. Namedrops authors whose books he’s seen in the background of your posts. Drops seeds he knows will make you bring up your family.
Kyle spends the meal waiting for the other shoe to drop, searching for a sign that you have any inkling of what he’s done, what he’s doing, but it never comes.
By the time you stumble out of the restaurant, you’re warmed by an endless supply of complimentary prosecco. Behind you, the staff have stacked the chairs and stools, all the candles but the one at your table snuffed. You slip both hands around the crook of his arm and lean in, painted lips curling into a smile that tells him you’ve lost complete track of your troubles. That alone would have been enough, but then you ask, slightly slurring—“What d’you say to a nightcap?”
Kyle can’t remember the last time he’s had company.
He watches you like a hawk from the door, toeing off his shoes and hanging your jacket as you amble further into his flat. Your fingers trail over the table before your attention meanders to the photographs on the wall.
In the periods of limbo such as this, the leaves he spends here as opposed to his mum’s, this place feels fake. Set dressing—sparse and unornamented, what is here are remnants of the man before the task force. Before Piccadilly and Price. Might as well be fossilized in amber or lidded like a time capsule. There’s been no sense in changing much.
You turn, surveying, and he can’t help but wonder what blanks you’re filling in. Whatever picture you’ve painted, he’ll spend the rest of his life speculating how close it is to the real thing. Is Kyle a terrible man? You don’t know. You never will. You’ll never learn that at this very moment, your ex is having the worst night of his life because Kyle arranged it. You won’t know that you’re standing in his home because he spent weeks laying the bricks in the road that led here.
Still, he would like you to know him as a good man. So if you find his space lacking, he will make room. He’ll let you breathe life into every empty corner.
You do the song and dance. Kyle offers the perfunctory drink, the one you ostensibly came back to his for. You turn it down, so instead he meets you at the mouth of the hall.
Though, as he closes the distance, he reckons you could’ve done with one last ounce of liquid courage. You sobered up too much in the car.
His hands land on your hips, bunching up the wine-red linen as he draws you the slightest step closer. Your eyes go big. The first part of the beginning of his name slips out, a soft and uncertain K, as you look utterly at a loss for what comes next now that you’re this close. Your faces hover an inch apart, but he diverts, dipping his head to skip his lips up the line of your neck to the spot beneath your ear. You melt, fingers curling in his shirt, and emboldened, he follows your jaw back down to your mouth, pausing long enough to let you meet him halfway.
He means for the first kiss to be sweet and exploratory, erring on the side of caution given who has had you before. That changes when everything from his navel down twitches at the softness of your lips.
He snakes a hand up to direct your head by the nape, tilting it up further to deepen the kiss almost immediately. His tongue eagerly swipes into your warm and so-far welcoming mouth. He licks behind your teeth and the roof of your mouth, his slow-growing hunger tested by the taste. He hums as you clutch at his shoulders, and when he pulls back, your grip loosens.
“You alright, angel?”
You swallow, smile wobbly. “Yeah.”
“C’mere, then.”
Seconds and thirds of your tongue stretch the time it takes to reach his room. Clothes fall by the wayside, namely your pretty dress, but his shirt goes too. While your hands skim up the carved planes of his stomach and chest, his fiddle with the hook of your bra. It pops open and catches his foot briefly on the descent before he shakes it off. The kissing comes to a pause when your legs hit the edge of his bed. You topple backwards and he lets you.
You land with a quiet oof and rise quick to your elbows, but stop when you see him looming over you.
Your expression flickers. One feeling gets overtaken by the next between blinks. A hint of embarrassment to a swell of delight to an uncharacteristic shyness. Underneath them all is want. Stark enough to survive every passing squirm.
Once upon a time he imagined you maybe hating this. Had he been hasty and pounced too soon, under poorer circumstances, you almost certainly would have. But this way? You’ve been aching for it, haven’t you? Sweet, love-lorn girl. Probably touched yourself after carrying that bouquet home. Did you think of him later, when ducking to smell the peonies, only for your brain to misfire and conjure your scent instead? God, he fucking hopes so.
You track his hands as he works off his belt and trousers, breath hitching when he finally drops a knee to crawl over you. Once he’s in range, you tug him down for a kiss.
Yeah, you’ve been wanting it.
The minutes pass by like this—languid kisses, heavy petting, and sweet nothings. For someone presumably so pent up, you’re savoring.
His fingers pet the skin below your navel then hook over the waistband of your knickers. Your hips buck, jutting against the leg he’s slotted between yours. He chuckles against your lips then moves to mouth at other expanses of skin.
You fidget as he merely holds onto the fabric. He gets caught up in the hills and valleys, leisurely touring your tits and stomach. He waits until you’re distracted by him dragging his teeth over the curve of a breast to twist and push his fingers into your panties.
“Fuck, baby.”
You say his name, but the sound’s pure fuzz before it ever reaches his ears. He drags his fingers through your warmth and shows them to you. Sticky, tacky, wet.
“All worked up, huh? All for me?” He answers his own question with a nod and you echo it a moment later.
He licks his fingers first, then pushes them into your mouth.
You nod a second time unprompted, and the sight of your kiss-swollen lips wrapped around his fingers makes his cock pulse.
After you suck them clean, he trails them back down.
His fingers slip back between your folds, teasing your entrance every few passes until he feels your thighs jerk. It takes very little for one to sink in and little more to add another. He’s lazy with it, slowly sliding them in and out, the whole of his hand stretching the cotton it’s trapped inside. He’d like to peel your panties off and take a proper look, but he’s glued to your face.
“Kyle, please,” you pant, claws digging in where you can reach. Pinpricks on his forearm and shoulder.
“Yeah? You like that, angel?”
Words fail you when the heel of his hand presses to your clit. Sensitive like the rest of you. He rubs it in tandem with the fingers stuffed inside, rubbing incessantly at a spot that’s got you shivering.
“Think you do, oh, I really think you do—feel that? You needed this, didn’t you?”
He knew it wouldn’t take much, but the speed at which you hurtle to the brink prompts ink-blots to appear at the edges of his vision. He’s drunk on it. Can’t get enough of it—your pitchy and shallow breaths, your needy pussy, all your scratching—and he hasn’t even gotten his cock in you yet.
You come with a cry, a couple tears rolling down your cheeks, cunt pulsing around his knuckles.
Through the aftershocks, you weakly paw at him, but he only lethargically pets between your folds. He kisses your temple and neck, grinning against your jaw when you mumble about his cock. You blindly reach for it, eyes welded shut and beaded with tears. You’re so good to think of him, but he can wait. He can still taste prosecco.
He migrates down the bed, using your lagging coherency to get your ruined panties off and tucked into the mattress. It isn’t until his arms hook under your thighs that you realize what he’s doing. You try to close up, but that’s what his shoulders are for.
“Kyle, wait, it’s too much—”
Yet after one long swipe, he knows it’s not enough. ‘Least not for him.
He kisses with an open mouth, using more spit and pushing it through your already sopping folds tongue-first. He latches on to your crying clit, sucking and rolling his tongue until you’re shaking more violently than before, so worked up neither of you can tell if the hands on his head are pushing him away or pulling him in.
Your hole clenches around his tongue when you come for the second time. The orchard-sweet taste of wine gushes over his tongue again.
He’s slower with his retreat this time, shoving his boxers off and indulging himself. He stamps his nose to the fat and hair above your cunt for a whiff before he climbs up to brush the tears from your cheeks.
You’re stunned, out of breath and words. You jolt some when he leans down to kiss your tear tracks, cock dragging over the crease of your thigh and leaving a trail.
“I, um, wow, I’ve never…” You eke out as you wipe your forehead. “Back-to-back like that.”
“What else haven’t you done?” He lifts your hand to kiss the divot of your wrist, pressing a sly smile to it.
You push at his chin as if shooing him away, but breathlessly laugh.
He is teasing, but your lack of an answer leaves a blank space for his imagination to fill. He’ll find whatever lines you drew for your ex and test them for himself. After all, according to you, these things loop back to compatibility. Sometimes it just takes the right partner.
He smooths his palms up your legs.
You’re primed for him, prepped by hands and mouth, your spit and cum-slick cunt gleaming up at him—a homing beacon calling him in. You watch him in awe like he’s the man with the golden touch. He’s never felt so god-like between a woman’s legs before, and he’s had a few.
He lifts his cock off the warm cradle of your thigh. He brushes the tip of it over your clit and licks his lips at how your whole body shivers.
This is a courtship some might wrinkle their noses at and say it’s too short a runway to be sure. Others’ll politely talk around it and call it a whirlwind romance. Doesn’t matter a whit to him. Not with how easy it is for him to sink inside you. Proof has a wet-hot grip.
He drops over you, leaning down on a forearm to swallow the noises you make as he bottoms out. One soft plea escapes.
“Oh, Kyle, please—”
Somewhere in the world, a starting gun fires.
Like that first kiss, maybe these first seconds inside you ought to unfold slowly. A little more tenderness to cement the fact that this is it for the both of you. That bit of goodwill and sense shrivels when he pulls out a couple inches and sees your pupils dilate.
You see something you want, you take it.
He holds on long enough to give you a sporting chance. A few minutes of gentle rocking and smooth, shallow strokes. All it is a wind-up though, he knows it, and he’s sure you do too when your eyes and mouth open wide when he pulls out. He pushes one of your legs open and toward your chest to watch your skin stretch taut around him.
He drives the breath out of you with that first earnest thrust. You won’t get a lungful until he’s done.
Your hands fly to his biceps, slick palms scrabbling at their swell as he gets going.
Gorgeous, is all he can think. An angel spread out in his bed, tits bouncing in time with his thrusts. Sweat shines along your neck. He stoops to lap it up, moving from your throat to the tears beading under your eyes, answering another indulgence he seems incapable of denying himself. If providence saw fit to lay you at his feet—it would be a shame to ignore whatever impulses that follow.
His face returns to the junction of your shoulder and neck, eyes shutting so all he hears are the punchy noises he knocks out of you. His thrusts turn shallow, furious. Your hands jump to his back, nails scraping down his skin and setting off a chain of tremors in his spine. He groans and shudders as he pushes up, peeling himself off of you.
His cock slips out as he readjusts. A shiny gloss paints its length, droplets of pre-cum dribbling onto your waiting cunt. It’s a head rush seeing a pretty girl like this. Fucking obscene.
“Fuck, angel,” he rasps as he feeds his cock back into your twitching hole. “You are something else.”
You’re far past coherency. Distilled to needy moans and whimpers that struggle to even make it out around his thrusts. His hands plaster to your hips, pulling you to meet him when it’s clear you’re past keeping up with him, too.
“Kyle,” you gasp as he zeroes in on a spot that makes your nails sink into him.
“I know—I know—”
You’re both so close, circling each other and racing to the finish.
You bite your bottom lip, back bowing off his bed, until the whole line of your body draws taut before coming hard. Thought finally abandons him, warm static filling his head and ears, complete tunnel-vision on the cunt strangling his cock and his own release hot on its heels.
He drags your hips up, sweaty palms on sweaty skin, and buries himself in as deep as he can go. A long, hissed-out fuck skating through his teeth as he empties himself into you.
It’s everything he’s wanted and more, this. Vindication twice over and then some.
He groans as he pulls out, watching his cum leak and pool between your folds. One last weak jerk and a stringy tag of it lays a trail down your crack.
A delirious, half-drunk mumble guides him back up the bed to where he tucks into your side like a good man. A hand ghosting over your quivering stomach to your face, stroking your cheek languorously along until you’re planet-side.
You don’t wake up much after that, not even when he cleans you up. He watches you breathe deeply, body and mind fully relaxed into a prosecco and orgasm-induced sleep.
Your ex problem, hopefully a hundred kilometers away and moving.
Kyle’s still awake when your phone lights up sometime after two.
Careful not to wake you, he reaches across your warm body and lifts it from the nightstand. It takes two attempts to guess your passcode—your mum’s birthday, very cute—and one new text awaits.
An unknown number with a long, winding apology riddled with typos. More excuses he plainly expects you to believe that boils down to something’s come up, a job opportunity overseas, and don’t expect to hear from him anytime soon.
Kyle considers deleting it, but it’s better if you have some measure of closure. Out of sight, out of mind and all.
He finds a text waiting on his phone as well.
All it is is another photograph. Daniel in a queue outside a coach bound for Dover, black-eyed and snot-faced. A plastic bag stuffed with clothes with a toothbrush protruding from a hole in the bottom. His face turned, looking over his shoulder, but missing the camera completely.
As tempting as it is to keep it as a token, that’s the message he opts to delete. No loose ends.
In the morning, while he’s making breakfast, you tell him you’re going to pop by the chemist on the way home.
You don’t want a baby yet, new business and all, and you want to see where this goes. Fair enough. He’s in no rush because he already knows where this’ll go, but then the thought wells up, dark and thick as oil: the look on the old man’s face if he manages to knock you up before the new Missus Price.
His mind runs with it, beyond the horizon of what exists and into the future.
A strip of coastline, both of you hiding out under an umbrella. Sand sticking to your damp skin. Your hand in his, a ring glittering in the light as you admire it.
A cold afternoon in the city, him knotting your scarf and buttoning your coat over the bump of your belly.
You, standing in the doorway of your home, puppeting his baby’s arm in a wave, cooing Hi daddy, we missed you, daddy.
He can see it all so clearly.
But he’s staring down the tail-end of leave, so he simply kisses your cheek and tells you to forward the receipt.
He’ll start making plans for phase two of his grand plan tomorrow. For now, he’s got you where he wants you. That’s more than enough for him.
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