28, lover and yearner. Everything is slow burn bc i’m having emotional issues. Fanfic blog for the Pitt, Criminal minds, and more to come. Intend to write smut again someday but idk when. MDNI plz
Jack Abbot x Alt! Medical Laboratory Scientist Reader
List of readers piercings: both eyebrows, stretched septum, stretched ears, many earrings, nostrils, philtrum, vertical labret, forehead dermal, dahlias(introduced in story)
Jack Abbot x Alt! Medical Laboratory Scientist Reader
List of readers piercings: both eyebrows, stretched septum, stretched ears, many earrings, nostrils, philtrum, vertical labret, forehead dermal, dahlias(introduced in story)
MDNI 18+ only!!! They’re fucking in this one I’m fr
<< backward •master post•
The hotel room was quiet except for the low hum of the heat and the occasional sound of a car door in the parking lot. Jefferson sat on the dresser in his little scarf, keeping watch. You had spent the evening wandering the expo floor together and Jack had been right there with you, asking questions, letting you lead him around. Now the door was closed, the heavy curtains drawn, and only the bedside lamps cast a warm low glow.
Jack stood near the bed, watching you with that steady, unguarded look he only ever gave when it was just the two of you. He’d already shrugged out of his jacket, throwing it in the chair. His leg was still on, but you could tell from the way he shifted his weight that he was ready to be done with it for the night. You could also tell that was the last thing on his mind.
You crossed the room slowly and stopped in front of him, standing slightly on your toes to press your lips to his. The kissing started sweet, slow presses of lips, but it quickly grew warmer, deeper. His hands settled on your waist, warm and heavy and waiting, as your mouths moved together with building need.
“Jack,” you whispered against his lips.
He didn’t slow down, just made a soft questioning sound and kissed you again, hungry but still gentle.
“Jack… you know I want you. You gotta know.”
He nodded into the kiss, his breath warm and shaky against your mouth. Of course he knew. His hands flexed on your waist like he was holding himself back from pulling you closer too fast.
“Then can we… please?”
Jack pulled back just enough to rest his forehead against yours. His eyes were dark and full of so much emotion it made your chest ache. Want, trust, a little nervousness, and something deeper that looked a lot like love. “Yeah,” he breathed, voice rough. “God, yes. I’ve wanted this for so long. Please.”
You kissed the corner of his mouth, then his cheek, then the edge of his jaw. You brushed your thumb along his jawline. “We can stop anytime,” you said softly. “I just want to be close to you tonight.”
Jack’s eyes fluttered shut for a second, leaning into your touch. “I don’t want to stop,” he murmured, voice low and earnest. “I trust you. It’s just… been a long time since I’ve let anyone this close. Since I’ve wanted anyone this much.” He opened his eyes again, meeting yours with quiet intensity. “I keep thinking about all those nights in the lab. You handing me terrible coffee and letting me just… be there with you. And now we’re here. I don’t want to mess this up.”
“You won’t,” you whispered, smiling gently against his lips. “We’ve been slow for months. Tonight we get to be us. No rush. Just us.”
He let out a shaky breath that sounded almost like a laugh, relieved and full of affection. “Okay,” he said, the word soft and certain. “Just us.”
You guided him to sit on the edge of the bed and watched him remove the prosthetic with careful, practiced movements. He let you watch, eyes soft and vulnerable in the low lamplight. You’d seen him without it before, but never like this. Never in this quiet hotel room, never with the weight of everything you were about to share hanging between you. Your fingers traced the old scars with quiet reverence, mapping the places where pain and strength lived side by side. You pressed slow, lingering kisses up his thigh, pouring affection into every touch, every brush of your lips against skin that had carried him through so much.
When you stood again, Jack reached for you immediately, his hands sure but his breath a little unsteady. He pulled you down into his lap to straddle him, as your full weight settled warm and solid against him, a low involuntary groan escaped his throat, rough and heartfelt, vibrating through his chest into yours.
“God,” he breathed, forehead dropping to your shoulder for a moment, arms wrapping around your waist like he needed to hold on. “You feel… real. Like this is actually happening.” The emotion in his voice was thick, a deep aching want that made your heart clench. He’d waited so long, been so patient, and now here you were, bare skin to bare skin in the quiet dark.
“It is happening Jack.”
Clothes came off gradually, your shirt first. His hands were all over you, warm and reverent, touching everything everywhere with the kind of careful hunger that spoke of months of quiet longing. He stroked your back, your sides, the curve of your waist, like he was trying to memorize you. Then he paused, gaze dropping to your breasts and the glinting silver of your nipple piercings catching the lamplight. He went still for a second, just staring, then let out another soft, appreciative breath that bordered on another groan.
You smiled, brushing your fingers through his hair. “Surprised?”
He huffed a small laugh, the sound warm and tender, cheeks flushing with a mix of arousal and shy emotion. “I should have guessed,” he admitted, voice thick. “With all the others… still. They’re so beautiful on you. /You’re/ so beautiful.” His thumbs brushed reverently just beneath the piercings, eyes shining with something deeper than just desire. “I don’t know if I’ll ever get used to how much of you you’re trusting me with.”
He leaned in and pressed a slow, open-mouthed kiss to the skin beside one pierced nipple, then the other, before gently sucking one into his mouth, tongue flicking softly over the metal with tender focus. The emotion in his touch was like a physical force. It made your heart swell more than you thought possible. Eventually you eased him back to lay on the bed, pushing him down until you were skin to skin. His hands roamed your back and sides with quiet wonder while you kissed him deeply, tongues sliding slow and lazy. You could feel the slight tremble in his body, the way he was letting himself be completely open with you. You shifted higher in his lap, letting him help slide your skirt up, gathering the soft black fabric in his hands with careful reverence. The trust in that small act, him holding the hem like it was something precious, made your chest tighten. When his eyes landed on the VCH and Christina piercings between your legs, he visibly startled, breath catching audibly in his throat. Fascinated, a little wide-eyed, and endearingly timid, like he’d just been given something sacred he wasn’t sure he was worthy of yet. His hand hovered, not quite touching, thumb brushing the sensitive crease of your thigh instead as if afraid to presume. You caught his wrist gently, guiding his hand closer.
“Touch them,” you whispered, voice soft and reassuring, thumb stroking over his pulse point. “They feel good. I want you to. I want /you/ to.”
Jack swallowed hard, eyes flicking up to yours. The look he gave you was raw with a vulnerability that made your heart ache. “All of you,” he murmured, voice thick and wondering, almost reverent. “I can’t believe I get to have all of you like this.” There was a quiet crack in his voice, the weight of months of slow-burn longing and careful patience finally breaking open. He traced one finger carefully along the cool silver of the jewelry, then another, learning you with gentle, curious touches that quickly turned worshipful. His exploration was slow and attentive, following every hitch in your breath and the subtle guidance of your hand on his. You felt him growing harder beneath you, his cock thickening and pressing insistently against your inner thigh where you straddled him hot, heavy, and unmistakably eager. The evidence of how much this affected him, how much /you/affected him, sent a fresh wave of heat and tenderness through you.
He leaned up to kiss you again, deeper this time, almost desperate in its tenderness, as his fingers continued their careful exploration. The fascination on his face mingled with raw arousal and deep affection, made warmth bloom low in your belly, fierce and bright.
You took your time with him too. Kissing down his chest, learning every scar, letting him hold and touch you. When you reached his cock, you took him in your mouth slowly, savoring the heavy, velvet weight of him. Jack’s head fell back against the pillow with a broken sound.
“Fuck… darling-” His hand found your hair, not guiding, just holding on. You worked him with long, tender strokes of your tongue until his thighs were shaking.
When you moved back up, you straddled his hips again. “I want to ride you,” you whispered against his lips. “Want to take care of you tonight.”
His eyes fluttered open, dark and trusting. “Yeah. Okay.”
You reached between you, lined him up, and sank down inch by inch. The stretch was perfect. Both of you moaned as you settled fully onto him. For a long moment you stayed still, just feeling him inside you, chests pressed together, foreheads touching, breathing each other in. The emotion was thick between you. Trust built slowly, in quiet basement nights, phone calls and quiet caring, all finally coming together.
Then you began to move slowly, rolling rocks of your hips. Jack’s hands gripped your thighs, holding on as he let you lead. His head tipped back, lips parted, eyes half-lidded and shining with feeling as he watched you. “You feel perfect,” he breathed, voice cracking slightly. One hand found your breast again, playing gently with the nipple piercing, the other stayed between your bodies, rubbing careful circles over your clit, rolling the piercing back and forth. The pleasure built gradually, sweetly, wrapped in so much tenderness it almost hurt. You came first, clenching around him with a soft cry, burying your face in his neck as waves of emotion crashed over you. Jack followed right after, arms wrapping tight around you as he spilled inside you with a low, wrecked groan, holding you like he never wanted to let go.
You stayed connected for a long time afterward, trading slow, lazy kisses, hearts pounding against each other. But Jack didn’t seem ready to stop. His hands kept stroking your back, your sides, and eventually he rolled you gently onto your back, settling between your legs with a look of pure, earnest want on his face.
“I want to taste you,” he said quietly, voice husky and vulnerable. His cheeks were flushed, eyes dark with need. “Been thinking about it for months. Can I… please? I want to.”
The raw honesty in his voice made heat flare through you again. You nodded, threading your fingers through his hair. Jack exhaled shakily, like you’d just given him a gift, and kissed his way down your body with reverent care. He lingered at your nipples again, then lower, until his shoulders were settled between your thighs. He started slow and gentle with soft kisses along your inner thighs, then careful licks over your folds, exploring the piercings with fascinated, tender fascination. Every so often he’d glance up at you, checking in, his eyes full of emotion as he flicked them in his mouth.
“You’re so wet… so perfect,” he murmured against you, voice muffled and awed. He found a rhythm that made your back arch, tongue circling your clit and teasing the jewelry in ways that had you moaning his name. He was eager but never rushed—submissive in the way he followed every sound and shift of your hips, completely focused on your pleasure. One hand rested on your stomach, thumb stroking soothingly, while the other held your thigh open. The second orgasm hit you harder, deeper, your fingers tightening in his hair as you trembled under his mouth. Jack stayed with you through all of it, tasting you gently through the aftershocks until you were boneless and breathless. He finally crawled back up, face flushed and shining, and pulled you into his arms. You could feel how much it meant to him, how deeply he needed to give you this.
“Thank you,” he whispered against your temple, voice thick. “For letting me have you like this. For trusting me.”
You kissed him softly, tasting yourself on his lips, and held him close. “We’ve got all night. And the rest of the weekend.”
He smiled, soft and sleepy and full of quiet joy, and pulled the blankets up over both of you. Jefferson kept watch as you drifted off wrapped around each other. His head on your chest, your fingers in his hair, the left side of the bed finally, perfectly occupied.
You woke before the alarm, before the sun, before any reasonable hour to be awake on a day off. You didn’t mind.
It was the excited kind of waking up, the body refusing to waste the day in sleep, surfacing on its own into the dark with the immediate clean awareness that today was the day. The expo. The drive. Two days of exactly the things you loved, in exactly the place you loved them, and this year you weren’t going alone. This was the part your body had woken up early about
Jack wasn’t due for hours.
You got up anyway. Your overnight bag was already packed. It had been packed for two days, because you were the kind of person who packed early and checked it twice, and there was nothing left to do on that front, which meant the hours stretched ahead of you empty and yours.
You made coffee and put music on, the apartment filling with it. And then you did the thing that was privately one of your favorite feelings in the entire world.
You got ready. Slowly. Exactly how you wanted to. Nothing was too much today. There was no version of getting ready for work that felt like this. Work was the muted version, the contained version, the self turned down to a volume the basement could hold. This was another thing entirely. This was assembling yourself at full volume with nowhere you had to dial it back for. Hair down, washed and worked through until it fell exactly right. A long black skirt, the good one, the one that moved when you walked. Layers on top, structured and deliberate. And then the jewelry, and some of the biggest earrings you owned, the ones that were almost too much, that you never had a reason to wear and were wearing anyway. The rings stacked along your fingers. The dark makeup built up with care, unhurried, no clock running.
You looked at yourself in the mirror when you were most of the way there.
There you were.
You had always loved this, the quiet private ritual, and it had always been a thing you did alone and for no one, an audience of one in a bedroom mirror. Your phone buzzed on the dresser.
Are you up? Planning on getting coffee on the way.
You smiled at the screen.
And then, on an impulse you turned back to the mirror and took a photo. Not posed, exactly. Just you, in your apartment, becoming yourself, the version most people never got to see.
You sent it. His reply came fast.
Beautiful.
Then, a second later.
I’ll be there in an hour.
You set the phone down and looked at the word for a moment. Beautiful, sent without hesitation, without qualification, in response to a half-ready mirror photo in the morning. You’d spent years getting ready like this for no one. It turned out it was even better getting ready like this for someone who, when you sent him the unfinished proof of it, just said beautiful and meant it and got in his car.
You finished your makeup, putting on your black lipstick last, dramatic and sharp. You were ready, fully gloriously yourself, with twenty minutes to spare and a man on his way with coffee, and you stood in your apartment in the early morning light and let yourself feel exactly as excited as you were.
He buzzed up at 6:55.
You came down with your overnight bag over your shoulder, and he was leaning against his car at the curb in the cold morning, two coffees on the roof of the car, and he watched you come down the front steps with an expression that you caught the full arc of his early morning emotions. The way his face changed when he saw you, the whole assembled volume of you, the skirt moving and the earrings swinging. He didn’t say anything for a second. You reached him, rose onto your toes, and kissed his cheek in greeting. The black lipstick left a clear, dark imprint against his skin. Jack’s breath caught, and a slow, pleased smile spread across his face.
“The photo didn’t do it justice,” he said, voice low and warm. “And the photo was already-” He stopped, shook his head slightly, eyes tracing over you again. “You look incredible.”
You laughed softly and reached up to wipe the lipstick mark from his cheek with your thumb. “Sorry, I got you.”
He caught your wrist gently before you could finish, eyes sparkling with quiet delight. “Don’t. Leave it.”
“Jack-”
“I mean it.” He turned his head just enough to press a quick kiss to your palm. “I like it, now we match.”
You felt warmth bloom in your chest at the simple, heartfelt stubbornness of it. He looked so pleased with himself, standing there in the cold morning light with your black lipstick on his cheek like a badge.
“You’re ridiculous,” you murmured fondly.
“Ridiculously lucky,” he corrected, and handed you your coffee. He opened your door for you, gentle and firm as he ushered you in.
There was something in the passenger cup holder. You looked down. It was the little resin pumpkin, riding along with an expression of profound existential uncertainty, dressed in a tiny knit scarf. You looked up at Jack as he got in the driver’s side.
“You brought Jefferson,” you said.
“I told you he’d never traveled.” He started the car, entirely unbothered, deeply pleased. “It’s his first trip. He’s nervous. I made him a scarf.”
“You made him that?”
“It’s cold out. He has no body heat. It’s basic pumpkin care.”
You looked at the tiny scarfed pumpkin, and then at Jack, who had clearly knitted or otherwise acquired a scarf for a resin pumpkin specifically to surprise you on a trip morning. You felt the laugh come up and out of you, real and helpless, the kind that he watched arrive every time like it was something he was collecting.
“Three hours,” you said. “We have a three-hour drive and you’ve already peaked.”
“I have not peaked. I have so much more.” He pulled out from the curb, the city dark and waking around you, the coffee warm in your hands. The day yours and his and ahead of you both. “Wait until you hear my taxidermy questions. I’ve been saving them. I wrote some down.”
“You didn’t have to write them down.”
“I take this very seriously. You’re showing me your thing. I’m going to be good at your thing.” He glanced over at you at a red light, the streetlight catching his face, the warmth in it entirely unhidden. “Also you look unbelievable and I’m going to be distracted by it for three hours, just so you’re aware. Driving’s going to be a real challenge.”
“Eyes on the road, Jack.”
“Doing my best.”
The light turned green.
And he drove you out of the waking city toward the thing you loved, with terrible road coffee and a scarfed pumpkin and three hours of saved-up taxidermy questions, and you sat in the passenger seat at full volume, fully yourself, going somewhere you’d always gone alone, and not alone. Watching the city give way to highway was one of your favorite feelings.
This was new, though.
The someone in the driver’s seat.
You might love it just as much.
The city thinned out around you mile by mile, the buildings going low and then sparse and then gone, Jefferson rode in your lap. The coffee was terrible gas station coffee, which was the correct way for a road trip, and you drank it anyway. Jack drove steady and unhurried, one hand loose on the wheel, and somewhere in the first half hour the conversation found its rhythm. An easy drift it always found, except there was three hours of it ahead instead of seven minutes, and that abundance changed the texture of it. There was no break to get back from. No bay, no queue, no page waiting. Just the road and the two of you and all the time in the world.
He did, in fact, have the taxidermy questions written down. He produced his phone at a red light in some small town you passed through,and they were genuinely good questions, real ones. You answered them. You told him what you knew, and he listened the way he listened to everything, completely, asking follow-ups, and you realized somewhere around the second hour that you were talking more than you’d talked in possibly years, the words coming easy.
“You light up,” he said at one point. Not interrupting. Just observing, warm. “When you talk about weird stuff. Your whole face.”
“I do not.”
“You absolutely do. It’s the same thing that happens when you’re crossmatching. The certainty. You go all the way on.” He glanced over. “I like watching it. I don’t get to see it much. The work version sure, but not this. The thing you do for no reason except that you love it.”
You looked out the windshield for a moment.
“I don’t usually have anyone to show it to,” you said.
“I know.” A pause. “I’m aware that I’m getting the tour of something most people don’t get the tour of. I’m not taking it lightly.”
“I know you’re not.”
The fields went by. A hawk on a fence post. The peace of a long drive with someone you didn’t have to perform anything for.
“Can I ask you something?” you said, after a while.
“Always.”
“Have you ever been to anything like this? Be honest.”
“Honestly? No.” He smiled. “I’ve been to a lot of places. Field hospitals. Three continents. A truly upsetting number of medical conferences in airport-adjacent Marriotts. But this is brand new.” He glanced at you. “I like that it’s yours. It’s exciting for me to be the one following someone around going ‘what’s that, explain that to me.’ Genuinely. It’s a nice change of altitude.”
You filed that away, the small honest thing in it that you already knew. That he liked, sometimes, not being the steady authority, that there was relief in being led somewhere by someone he trusted.
“You’re going to embarrass yourself in front of the bone vendors,” you said. “Just so you’re prepared.”
“Probably. I’ve made my peace with it. I’m bringing Jefferson in. We’ll embarrass ourselves together. United front.”
“You are not bringing the pumpkin into the expo.”
“He’s come all this way.”
“Jack.”
“We’ll see,” he said, which was not a concession, and you let it go. Arguing about whether the pumpkin would attend was, you were realizing, exactly the kind of stupid wonderful thing you’d never once had on the drive up before, in all the years of driving up alone.
The hotel was unremarkable in the best way, a clean mid-range place a few minutes from the convention center, just a building that existed entirely to be slept in between more interesting things. Jack handled check in, with the quiet satisfaction of a man finally allowed to do a logistical kindness. You rode the elevator up with your bags and Jefferson tucked under his arm.
The room was a normal room. You’d checked. You’d been ready to be annoyed about an upgrade. But it was just a room, two queen beds, a window with a view of the parking lot, the anonymous comfort of a hotel, and you stood in the doorway for a second taking it in.
“Two beds,” you observed.
“They didn’t have a king when I booked.” He set his bag down, set Jefferson on the dresser facing the window so the pumpkin could, you supposed, see the view. Then he glanced at the two beds, and back at you, easy, no presumption in it. “We can share. If you want. Or take one each, your call.”
You looked at the two beds, and then at him.
“We can share,” you said, with the same plain certainty you’d used to invite him in the first place. “I didn’t bring you three hours to sleep in a separate bed.”
Something warm moved through his expression.
“Okay,” he said simply.
“Which bed do you want us to sleep in?”
He thought about it for a moment, longer than the question seemed to need, some private calculation running behind his eyes.
“Left,” he said.
“Left it is.”
You didn’t ask why it took thought. You’d learned that about him, the way certain small ordinary choices had whole histories behind them that he wasn’t always ready to lay out, and that the kindest thing was to simply let him have the choice and not the interrogation. He’d tell you about the left side sometime, maybe, the way he’d tell you about the rest of it. Sometime. When it didn’t cost much.
You set your overnight bag on right side bed and watched him settle the small details of a shared hotel room with the two of you in it, putting his own bag next to yours. He moved Jefferson an inch so he had a better angle on the parking lot, and the ordinariness of it, the simple domestic fact of it, sat in as something close to enormous.
You’d dropped bags in a lot of hotel rooms before expos. Alone, every time.
You’d never once stood in one and felt the quiet rightness of it, the sense of a life that had widened to hold a second person in all the small places it used to only hold one.
“There,” Jack said, giving the room a final survey, Jefferson positioned, bags down. He looked up at you, the morning light coming through the parking-lot window, his face open and happy and entirely here. “Okay. Bags are dropped. Jefferson has a view.” He held out his hand, palm up, the offering, the gesture you’d both worn smooth over months. “Take me to your weird expo. I’ve been waiting all morning.”
You looked at his open hand.
Then you took it.
“Come on,” you said. “Try not to embarrass me in front of the bone people.”
“No promises,” he said, delighted, and you led him out the door and toward the thing you loved, your hand in his, fully yourself, not alone.
remember that dream you told em about with the boat 👀
can you plz write something like that?
Oh do I ever. Jack would never get you stuck on a boat, but Dennis sure would.
Nsfw under the cut MDNI
The small fishing boat bobbed in the darkening cove, the engine long since silent after Dennis had somehow managed to tangle the propeller in a rogue fishing net earlier that afternoon. You’d both laughed about it at first. His cheeks flushing pink as he’d stripped down to his boxers and dove in to cut it free. But then the sun had set before he could get the motor running again, and now you were well and truly stranded until morning.
“I’m so sorry,” Dennis murmured for the tenth time, rubbing the back of his neck as he lit the little battery lantern in the cramped cabin below deck. His voice was soft, earnest, that gentle Southern lilt you loved wrapping around every apology. “I swear I checked the charts. I just wanted to take you out somewhere quiet, just us. Not… this.”
You smiled, stepping close enough to brush your fingers over his jaw. “It’s okay, Den. Really. It’s kind of romantic, in a ‘we might get eaten by crabs’ way.”
He laughed, low and sheepish, pulling you into a hug. His arms were strong and warm around you, the scent of salt and his sweat clinging to his skin. “C’mere. Let’s try to get some sleep. Tide should be better in the morning, and we can go home.”
The narrow bunk was barely big enough for both of you, but neither of you minded. Dennis lay down first, then tugged you in so your back pressed to his chest, big spoon, just like always. He draped one heavy arm over your waist to hold you tight, his knees tucked behind yours, and pressed a lingering kiss to the nape of your neck.
“Night, baby,” he whispered, breath warm against your skin. “Love you.”
You drifted off like that, lulled by the gentle sway of the water and the steady rhythm of his breathing.
Hours later, you woke to a different kind of motion. The waves had picked up, rocking the boat in slow, rolling swells that made the hull creak softly. At first you only registered the warmth of Dennis still curled tightly around you, his body heat seeping through the thin blanket and your clothes. But with every dip and rise of the boat, his hips shifted forward, pressing the growing hardness of his cock more firmly against the curve of your ass.
You bit your lip, suddenly wide awake. The friction was maddeningly rhythmic, the waves doing the work for you both. Each swell ground him against you, slow and insistent, the thin fabric of your shorts and his boxers doing almost nothing to dull the heat.
Dennis stirred behind you with a sleepy, involuntary groan. His arm tightened around your waist, fingers flexing against your stomach as another wave pushed him forward again.
“Fuck… sorry,” he mumbled, voice rough with sleep and something darker. “Boat’s… movin’ a lot.”
You could hear the apology in his tone, but his body betrayed him. His cock was fully hard now, thick and throbbing against you with every rock of the hull. You arched back into him deliberately, chasing the delicious pressure.
“Don’t be sorry,” you whispered, reaching back to slide your hand over his hip, encouraging him. “Feels good.”
He exhaled shakily, burying his face in your neck. “Yeah? God, you feel so warm…” His hips rolled with the next wave, more intentional this time, dragging his length along the cleft of your ass in a slow grind that made you both gasp.
The motion of the sea kept the pace for you lazy and relentless. Dennis’s hand slipped under your shirt, palm hot against your bare skin as he caressed upward to cup your breast, thumb brushing over your nipple until it peaked. Every swell of the boat pushed him tighter against you, the friction turning slick as pre-cum dampened the front of his boxers.
“Want you so bad right now,” he breathed, voice trembling with restraint even as his cock nudged insistently between your thighs from behind. “Tell me it’s okay, baby. Please.”
“It’s okay,” you moaned, pushing back against him. “Please, Dennis.”
He didn’t need more encouragement. With a low, broken whine he tugged your shorts and panties down just enough, then shoved his own boxers out of the way. The head of his cock slid through your slick folds hot, silky, and already soaked from how wet you’d gotten. He let out a shaky, needy groan that bordered on a whimper.
“Oh fuck, baby…” His voice cracked as the next wave rocked the boat, pushing him forward so he sank into you in one smooth, deep glide. You groaned at the stretch, clenching tight around his thick length, and Dennis’s arm locked around your waist like he was afraid you might disappear.
“Shit. Shit, you’re so tight,” he whined against your ear, hips jerking helplessly with the motion of the waves. “Feels so good, I I can’t. Ahh~ The boat keeps pushing me deeper, I’m sorry, I just, fuck. I need you so bad.”
He was panting hard, pressing sloppy, open-mouthed kisses and little nips along your neck and shoulder as the rolling swells forced shallow, rhythmic thrusts into you. Every wave made him grind in a little harder, a little needier.
“Please, please don’t stop clenching like that,” he begged softly, voice trembling. “You’re pulling me in every time it moves. I’m losing my mind, baby. I love you, I love you so much, I~ oh god~”
You reached back, tangling your fingers in his hair as the pleasure built in waves of its own matching the ocean outside. The confined space made everything more intense. The heat of his body spooned so tightly around yours, the wet sound of him sliding in and out, the way his free hand slipped between your legs to circle your clit with desperate, loving strokes. The boat pitched harder as the swells grew stronger, and Dennis thrust deeper with each roll of the hull. The thick head of his cock dragged perfectly against your g-spot on every thrust, sending sharp, electric jolts of pleasure sparking through your core. You gasped, back arching hard against his chest as the relentless motion forced him to grind right where you needed him most.
“Oh god~ Dennis~” Your voice broke into a needy moan, thighs trembling as the pleasure coiled tighter and tighter in your belly. Every wave rocked him forward again, stroking that sensitive spot with perfect, unyielding pressure while his fingers kept circling your swollen clit in tight, slippery strokes. Heat flooded through you, your walls fluttering and clenching around his thick length as the orgasm built fast and overwhelming.
“Baby, you feel so good,” Dennis whined desperately against your ear, voice cracking. “You’re squeezing me so tight. I can feel you getting close, please, please come for me. I need it, I need to feel you~”
The next big swell slammed him even deeper, grinding hard into you, and that was it. Pleasure crashed over you like a breaking wave. You cried out sharply, body seizing as your orgasm ripped through you. Intense, pulsing waves that made your walls clamp down rhythmically around his cock, soaking him with fresh wetness. Your thighs shook uncontrollably, toes curling, every muscle tightening as blinding ecstasy flooded your senses. The rocking of the boat only prolonged it, drawing out every shuddering contraction.
Dennis cursed brokenly behind you, the feeling of you coming so hard around him pushing him over the edge. “Fuck baby, I’m, I’m coming. Fuck.” He buried himself to the hilt with a needy, whimpering groan of your name, spilling inside you in hot, thick pulsing spurts. His hips jerked erratically with the motion of the sea, milking every last drop as he held you flush against him, trembling and panting through his own release.
For a long moment there was only the sound of your ragged breathing, the creak of the boat, and the slap of water against the hull. Dennis stayed buried deep inside you, kissing your shoulder, the side of your neck, and anywhere his lips could reach, murmuring soft, love-drunk praises between each press of his mouth as the aftershocks continued to ripple through your body.
“Best apology sex I’ve ever had,” he murmured, a soft, breathless laugh in his voice. “Still sorry about the net, though.”
You smiled, squeezing around him just to hear him hiss. “Stay stuck with me a little longer, then.”
He tightened his arms around you, the gentle rocking of the waves lulling you both back toward sleep, warm and connected in the dark.
One day, a while after they first meet and they actually have some down time to ask random, unnecessary questions, Rocky asks fem reader what the attachments are that he can see on her upper torso and/or between her legs. Turns out reader has nipple and/or clit piercings, and thanks to Rocky, that fact has just been broadcasted 👀 .... Maybe even triggers some curiosity in a certain someone 👀👀👀?
I didn't mean for this to be so long but I guess I can't write a drabble LOL thank you for the request!!
Piercings ~ ryland grace x reader
1.5k words, suggestive touching but no smut
----------------
A few weeks cohabitating with your new alien companion passed relatively easily, building his language library and plotting to save two worlds, you know, normal stuff. A lot of time was spent sitting around thinking, brainstorming and running calculations and trying to hold on to the hope that you were the right people for this mission.
You and Ryland sit on opposite sides of the table in the lab, Rocky sitting between you behind his xenonite walls. It’s been quiet for a few minutes, Ryland scribbling on a whiteboard and erasing everything, just to write it all again. You were reading through some files you found in a box marked “important,” figuring that someone put that label there for a reason.
Finally, Rocky’s robotic voice sounds from the laptop open on a bench, “why friend have metal in ears, question?” You turn to him, ignoring the confused face Ryland makes, and pull your hair over your shoulder. A few small studs adorn your ears, Stratt sent you to space with plastic retainers in, but let you bring the titanium pieces to wear when you woke up. “They’re jewelry,” you explain casually, “little decorations we wear.”
Ryland leans forward to see, apparently not having noticed in the haze of your overwhelming mission. “Like celebration clothing, question?” Rocky asks, tapping a foot on the ground. “Sort of, we do have nicer pieces for events, but these are very plain.” You tug at your lobe a little, playing with the stud.
You think the conversation is over, so you turn back to your work, glancing at Ryland to see that his head is already down, hand moving quickly across his whiteboard again.
“Two bars on your front also decoration, question?”
You close your eyes, realizing just how much he was able to see through. You open again to see Ryland looking at you with his eyebrows raised, eyes flicking around your face and ears, trying to spot the jewelry he missed. Heat rises to your face, your hand covering your mouth for a moment before you turn back to Rocky.
“Yeah, uh- yeah, those are also decorations,” you hope that’s a good enough answer but you know it’s not going to satisfy his curiosity.
“Even if not visible, question?”
You nod, flashing him a tight smile, and shuffle through the papers in your folder. “Why, question?” Yep, you knew that was coming. You take a deep breath, knowing that Ryland is watching you closely, dissecting everything you say with a frown on his face. “Sometimes,” you start, “we get jewelry that’s just for us to see. It helps with confidence and stuff…” How eloquent, you think to yourself.
Rocky seems to accept that answer, but when you spare a glance at Ryland you catch him staring at your breasts. He makes a choked sound and goes red, averting his eyes quickly. It pulls a laugh from you, maybe you should have expected that kind of reaction from him, maybe he was a little more sheltered on earth than you thought.
He puts his hand up, muttering a quiet, “sorry, sorry,” under his breath.
~~
A few days pass uneventfully, Ryland was a little more awkward than normal but other than that you think you escaped that conversation unscathed. Until you walk into the lab and he whips around in his chair and clears his throat.
“Can I… Can I ask you something completely unprofessional?” He asks meekly, like he knows he’s pushing a boundary but he just can’t help it. You frown and nod, taking a seat across from him. He takes a deep breath, blowing it out slowly like he needs it to build courage. “I was just thinking about that conversation you had with Rocky, about your earrings…”
Ah, of course. He loses steam, suddenly realizing what he’s about to ask so impulsively. “Do you… do you have your…” a little hand gesture against his own chest trying to say what his mouth won’t.
“My nipples pierced?” You smile when he balks, “yes, I do.”
He holds eye contact, it’s clear he’s practicing restraint though, because his eyes dip just a little before shooting back to yours. He’s bright red, looking like a deer in headlights. “Really?” He sounds… excited? That’s interesting.
You nod with a hum, giving him your full attention. “Go ahead, Grace, ask your questions,” you lay the invite out on the table, giving him permission to be curious.
“Can I see them?”
Okay, you didn’t expect that. It’s your turn to balk, your mouth dropping open and a breath catching in your throat. He’s looking at you expectantly, face the perfect picture of innocence. “I - you - what?” You stammer out, trying to wrangle your surprise down long enough to hear him out.
“I’ve never seen any in person,” he gives a shy little smile, “just wondering what they look like up close.”
You don’t think your brows can get any higher, you search his face for any ulterior motive. “You said I could be unprofessional,” he adds with his hands raised.
He lets you think, lets you wrestle with the fact that you’re the only two people in space, knows that he’ll see them eventually just by the forced proximity you’re both stuck in. Finally, you nod.
His eyes go wide, not expecting you to agree so easily. You wave him over, patting the stool next to yours with a wide grin. “Come on, if I’m your education on this, you might as well be closer,” you laugh when he jumps up and all but runs to the seat.
You unzip your jumpsuit enough to slide your arms out, pulling the straps of your tanktop and bra down. You feel warm under his gaze, embarrassed already and you’re not even showing anything. He sits patiently, eyes excited and teeth digging into his lip. You swear you’ve never seen a man so thrilled to just look.
With a deep breath, you pull the fabric down so it bunches around your stomach, baring your breasts to him. His eyes go impossibly wider, his breathing speeding up as he takes in the sight. Look, you didn’t get them pierced to never show them off, that was like the whole point of having it done. But the way he tilts his head, studying the barbells framed by your plush skin, makes your stomach flip.
His fingers drum on the table, a quiet, “god,” falling from his lips. You laugh, “you’ve gotta say more than that,” you feel a little like an experiment under his microscope.
Finally, “do they hurt ever?” You shake your head, “they’ve been healed for years.” A short nod from him, then, “they really suit you.” He glances up at your face, smirk pulling at one side of his lips. You see his hand fist in his pants, see how he fights against the fabric to hold himself back, to maintain some semblance of professionalism.
You let out a small giggle, watching his eyes fly right back to your chest, watching how you move. “You’ve never seen any in person?” You ask quietly. He shakes his head, biting his lip again. “Go ahead, you can touch ‘em,” and you’re not sure where that came from but the look on his face tells you it was the right thing to say.
He searches your eyes quickly, finding you open and free of resistance, and slowly lifts his hand to cup your breast. Your breath hitches at how cold his fingers are, but then he strokes a thumb over your piercing and suddenly you feel incredibly warm. His other hand joins, nimble fingers holding the barbells and pulling lightly.
You make a sound, it’s quiet and completely involuntary, but it makes him grin. “Sensitive,” he whispers, “are they more sensitive after being pierced?” Ever the scientist, you think. “Not more, just… different.” Your answer satisfies him, his fingers brushing your skin softly before he pulls away.
His tongue darts out to wet his lips and you briefly wonder how it would feel against your nipples, if he’d like how the metal felt when he licked over the jewelry. Finally, he smiles at you, hands retreating to the safety of his lap. “Pretty,” he whispers, “the piercings are nice too,” he winks with a smirk, laughing when you glare at him and pull your top back up.
You push his shoulder, shoving him off his chair and shooing him to the other side of the table. He retreats easily, clearly having gotten what he wanted. “Well, was it everything you expected?” You ask lightly, glad for the easy comfort that settles over the room.
He twists his face in thought, like he’s puzzling over a new experiment. He nods, “I have some theories I’d like to test one day, but we can work up to it.”
Your jaw drops before you can stop it, “oh, you plan on seeing them again?”
The tips of his ears are bright red, but he plows on anyway. “Only if you let me,” and he leans back in his chair, closing his eyes with a sigh. “But I’m happy to just dream about them for a while.” And he laughs when you throw a stress ball at his head.
----------
i've been thinking about getting mine pierced for years, should I do it in my final year in my 20's? is this the kind of thing we do before we turn 30 for the sake of being hot?
You’d had the tab open on your phone for nine days. The expo ran the third weekend of January, a two-day oddities and curiosities fair in a city three hours’ drive away, an event that drew vendors and collectors from across the region. Taxidermy and medical antiques and bone art and a hundred other things. You’d gone twice before. Alone, both times, like you did most things you loved and loved them fully, and had never once thought to want company for.
You wanted company for this one.
You wanted Jack’s company.
That was the thing you’d been turning over for nine days. Not whether you wanted to go, you always went. But whether you wanted to ask him, and underneath that, the older harder question of whether you were a person who asked for things like this at all. A weekend. A drive. A hotel room booked for two. Letting him into the part of your life that had always deliberately been yours alone. It was a bigger us than either of you had named out loud. And you would be the one naming it. The old version of you would have gone alone and told him about it afterward, if at all. You weren’t entirely that version anymore. You’d been finding that out for months.
He came down at one with the good coffee.
You let him settle into his spot. Let the conversation do its usual easy drift. You logged orders and he told you about the bay and you waited for a lull that felt right, and several lulls came and went while you failed to take them, your hands steady on the keyboard and the rest of you not quite.
He noticed. Of course he noticed.
“You’ve got a thing,” he said, around the third missed lull. Not pushing. Just observing, the way he observed everything. “You’ve been working up to a thing for about twenty minutes.”
You stopped typing.
“Yeah, I do.” You admitted.
“Okay.” He set his coffee down, gave you his full attention, unhurried. “I’m listening.”
You turned in your chair to face him properly, which felt important, which felt like the kind of thing you should do facing someone instead of sideways at a monitor. It’s what Jack would do.
“There’s an expo,” you said. “Third weekend of January. Oddities and stuff. You know, taxidermy, antiques, bone work, jewelry, the whole deal. It’s three hours away. I go every year since I moved here.” You heard yourself speeding up and made yourself slow down. “I’ve always gone alone. I’m good at going alone.”
“I know you are,” he said quietly.
“But I-” You stopped. Started again, because the next part was the actual part, and you weren’t going to deliver it sideways. “I want you to come with me. I usually drive up Saturday, get a hotel, do both days, drive back Sunday.” You held his eyes. “I want to take you.”
It came out steadier than you felt.
Jack was quiet for a moment, and you watched something move across his face. Not hesitation, you realized. The opposite. The specific stillness of a man receiving something he understood the full weight of. Because he did understand it, of course. He knew you. He knew what your solitude was made of and what it had cost to build and what it meant that you were holding the door of it open and asking him to walk through. He knew this wasn’t a casual weekend invitation. He knew exactly how big the thing you’d just done was.
“You’ve gone alone every year,” he said slowly.
“Every year.”
“And you’re asking me to come.”
“I want you to come.”
He looked at you, and his expression had gone to the warm undone place that appeared when you handed him something he hadn’t expected and didn’t have a prepared face for.
“Yeah,” he said. “Obviously yes. Of course yes.” Then, because he was Jack, and because he could see you were still braced from the asking and wanted to give you somewhere soft to land. “I have so many questions about the taxidermy, you don’t even know. Is it ethically sourced? Is there a wrong answer to that question? Am I allowed to be a little afraid of it?”
The breath went out of you, the braced thing releasing, and you laughed.
“It’s mostly ethically sourced. There’s nuance, so you’re going to have to make peace with it.”
“I’ll make peace with it.” He picked his coffee back up, but his eyes stayed on you, soft. “You really go by yourself?”
“I really do.”
“And this year you don’t want to.”
“This year I want you there,” you corrected gently, because there was a difference, and you’d thought about the difference for nine days. “It’s not that alone got bad. I built alone on purpose and it’s still good.” You turned your septum ring slightly with a fingertip. “I just, found something I’d rather not do by myself. That’s new. I wanted you to know it’s new.”
Jack was very still again.
“Thank you,” he said. Quiet. The way he said the things that mattered most, the same thank you he’d given you in your bed, for the door, for the handing-over. “For asking me. I know what it cost. I know you don’t ask.”
“I’m learning to ask.”
“You’re getting good at it.” A pause, and then the warmth tipped over into something lighter, the smile arriving.
“For the record, I would have come if you’d asked me to a parking lot. The bar for me joining you somewhere is extremely low. You could have led with literally anything.”
“I wanted to lead with the truth.”
“I know,” he said. “That’s the part that got me.”
You looked at each other across the lab, the refrigerators humming, the coffee cooling, a weekend three weeks out now sitting real between you.
“The hotel,” he said. Then, immediately, reaching for his phone. “Let me. I’ll book it. Which one were you looking at?”
“I’ve already got it pulled up, I like to stay in the same place-”
“Then send me the link, I’ll book it.”
You looked at him. “I invited you. I’m booking the room. I can pay for it.”
“Let me pay for it, you did the inviting.” He was already scrolling, the man did not slow down. “Let me do the easy part. Send me the link.”
“It’s my trip. I go every year. I have a whole system-”
“And I want to pay for it. Let me.” He looked up, entirely pleased with this logic. “It’s only fair.”
“That’s not how fair works.”
“It’s exactly how fair works. You’re providing the company. I’m providing a room with a bed in it. It’s the least I can do and I would like to do the least, please, let me do the least.”
“Jack-”
“I have been trying to find a way to pay for something for you for months,” he said, and there it was, the real thing under the bit, plain and a little exasperated and completely sincere. “You Venmo’d me for the soup. The soup, which I brought you during a medical event. I have never once been allowed to do a single financially generous thing in this entire relationship and I am asking you, as a Christmas-adjacent gift to me, to let me book the hotel room.”
You opened your mouth.
Relationship.
Closed it.
He had you, a little, and you could tell he knew he had you, and he had the grace not to look too triumphant about it.
“It’s one room,” you said.
“It’s one room.”
“You’re not allowed to upgrade it to something ridiculous.”
“I make no promises about-”
“Jack.”
“Fine. A normal room. A reasonable, non-ridiculous room.” He held his hand out, palm up, the same gesture you’d both used a dozen times now, the offering. “Send me the link.”
You looked at his open hand, and took it.
You unlocked your phone, pulled up the tab you’d had open for nine days, and sent it to him.
“There,” you said. “Don’t make it weird.”
“I would never,” he said, already pulling his phone out to see the text, already a little too happy.
“I’ll book it after work,” he said, putting his phone back in his pocket. “Saturday and Sunday. We’re going.”
“One room,” you confirmed, your voice even, your chest doing something enormous. He grinned.
“I’ll bring Jefferson. He’s never traveled. It’s time he saw the world.”
“You are not bringing the pumpkin.”
“He’ll fit right in, that’s the beautiful part.”
“That thing is your baby now, huh?.”
“Think about it,” he said, delighted. You did think about it, and the worst part was you could see it, the little lopsided pumpkin riding shotgun three hours up the highway, and you bit down on a smile and turned back to your screen and let him keep going. The cord of his enthusiasm stretched between you the rest of his break. You’d asked. He’d said yes. The door was open and he’d walked through it easy, just like he belonged there.
He sent you the screenshot that night. He had booked it.
Thinking of Alt!reader getting injured in the basement and having to go to the surface to get treatment and Jack is protective of her with the nightcrawlers but also happy to show them off a bit
Kicking my feet rn
Send more ideas
The vial broke dramatically, one of this thing’s that you realize is happening too late to stop. You were moving too fast, that was the truth of it. Mid-pour on a routine sample with your mind half on the next three orders in the queue, and the glass was older than it should have been, a hairline flaw you’d never have seen, and it gave under your grip with a small sharp crack and then your palm was open and there was a line across it welling red before the pain even registered.
You swore loudly to the empty lab.
Then you assessed it, because you didn’t panic at blood, you worked in it. You got to the sink, got it under water, got a clean gauze pad pressed to it from the kit, and looked at the cut with the detached clinical eye of someone evaluating a problem.
It was deep.
Cleaner than a jagged tear, the specific neat way of good glass, but deep. The edges not did not want to sit closed, the kind of cut that you knew, with a sinking certainty, was not going to be handled with a butterfly closure and stubbornness.
It needed stitches.
Which meant it needed to go upstairs.
You stood at the sink holding gauze to your hand and felt the dread settle in, because going upstairs meant being a patient, being the one on the table, being fussed over and processed and looked at. You had spent your entire adult life arranging things so you were never ever the one being looked at like that.
There was no way around it. You taped the gauze down hard, put orders on hold, and took the elevator up.
The ER was running its low-tide rhythm. You found a nurse near the central station, not one of the ones you knew, just whoever was closest. You held up your wrapped hand with the efficiency of someone trying to make this as small and fast as possible.
“Hi, I work downstairs. Caught a broken vial, it’s deep, I think it needs a couple stitches. Can someone just-”
“Sit, hon, let me look.” She steered you to an empty bay, peeled the gauze back, made the small assessing sound of someone who’d seen ten thousand of these. “Yeah. Few sutures. Nothing dramatic. Let me grab-”
And then, from somewhere behind her, fast, before you’d even fully sat down.
“I’ve got it.”
You knew the voice before you turned.
Jack came around the curtain at a pace that was not quite hurried and was absolutely not casual either, and you understood instantly what had happened. Someone had seen you and went to get Jack, and he had dropped whatever he was doing and come.
The nurse looked between the two of you, clocked something in his face, and developed the small knowing smile of a person who had heard the gossip and was now watching it confirmed in real time.
“All yours, Dr. Abbot,” she said, and left.
You looked at him.
“You didn’t have to come,” you said. It came out faster than you meant it, a little embarrassed, your hand cradled in your lap. The discomfort of being seen like this, small and bleeding and on the wrong side of the ground. “It’s a couple stitches. Any of them could’ve done it. You’re busy, I didn’t page you, I didn’t want to make a-”
“I know I didn’t have to,” he said, already pulling the stool over, already reaching for gloves, his voice easy and warm and entirely unbothered by your protesting. “Let me see.”
“Jack-”
“Hand,” he said. Gentle. The direction voice. The one he never argued with when you used it.
You gave him your hand.
He took it carefully, turned it palm-up under the light, and the whole quality of him changed. Not away from the warmth, but folding the warmth into something focused, the ER attending and the man who loved you becoming the same person bent over your hand with total attention.
“Okay,” he said, examining the cut, his thumb steady at the edge of your wrist.
“This is clean. Good clean glass, ironically. Two, maybe three sutures. You did this exactly right, by the way, pressure, elevation, you kept it clean. Textbook.” He glanced up at you, the corner of his mouth moving. “I’d hire you.”
“I know what I’m doing. I’m aware of how blood works.”
“Mm. And yet here we are, and you’re trying to apologize for bleeding.” He started setting up, unhurried, narrating without making it a lecture, the way good doctors did to keep a patient anchored. “I’m going to clean it, numb it, close it. The lidocaine’s the worst part and the worst part is mild. You’ve had worse done to you for fun.” A pointed glance at your septum. “On purpose. With a needle.”
“That’s different.”
“Is it?”
You huffed, and he smiled. Something in you started, against your will, to settle.
He cleaned the cut with a focus that should have been clinical and somehow wasn’t, his hands careful in a way that went past competent into tender, and you watched him work and felt the embarrassment loosen its grip by degrees, because there was nothing in his face that was processing you, nothing that was handling a case. He was just taking care of you. Specifically you. And he was you realized watching him, enjoying it.
“You’re enjoying this,” you accused.
“I’m enjoying this enormously,” he admitted, not looking up, swabbing the area with betadine. His knees pressed lightly into your thigh as he scooted closer.
“You spend all this time taking care of me. I almost never get to do it back. You don’t let me.” He readied the lidocaine. “And now you’re stuck on my table with a hand that needs closing and you literally cannot stop me from taking care of you. It’s the best night I’ve had in weeks. Small pinch.”
The needle went in, a small bright sting of the numbing, then the spreading dull of it. You breathed through it, and he watched your face the whole time, not the wound, your face. Gauging it, his free hand resting steadying against yours.
“There,” he said softly, when it was done. “Worst part’s over.”
“You looked at my face the whole time.”
“I always look at the face,” he said. “The face tells you everything. The wound stays there.” A pause, quieter, as he waited for the numbing to take. “Yours especially. You hide a lot of things but never in your face. I learned that months ago, across a counter.”
You were quiet.
He tested the edge of the cut with a forceps, watched you not flinch, nodded. “Numb. Good. Hold still for me, you’re good at holding still.”
Fuck
And then he closed your hand, three neat sutures, his own hands perfectly steady and warm. His focus was total, and you sat on the table in the quiet bay and watched the man you loved stitch you back together with a tenderness he was making no effort to hide. The last of the embarrassment dissolved, replaced by something warmer and more disarming, an old unfamiliar feeling of being taken care of by someone who wanted nothing for it but the chance to do it.
“You’re good at this,” you said quietly, watching his hands.
“I’m good at the parts of it that are this.” He tied off the last suture, clipped it, the small precise motion. “The bay’s mostly worse. People who don’t make it, people I can’t fix. This-” he smoothed a clean bandage over your palm, gentle, deliberate. “This I can fix. Three stitches and you’re fine and I got to be the one who did it. This is the good part of the whole job. Most of the time I don’t get the good part.” He looked up at you. “Tonight I got the good part.”
Your heart fluttered, the anxiety filing turned to some else. Something warmer.
“You done?” you asked, because the other thing was too much to look at directly.
“Almost.” He turned your hand over in both of his, checking his work. And then with no clinical pretext whatsoever, the doctor version of him dissolving, he lifted it and pressed his mouth to the inside of your wrist, just above the bandage, soft and unhurried.
“Now I’m done,” he said.
You looked at him, your bandaged hand in both of his, the bay quiet around you, three in the morning, the place you’d dreaded being and the person who’d turned it into this.
“You didn’t have to come,” you said again. But it came out completely differently this time. Soft, no protest left in it, something closer to wonder.
“I know,” he said. “That’s not why I came.” He kept your hand in his, his thumb tracing the unhurt edge of it. “Keep it dry for a couple days. Come find me if it starts to throb, I’ll check the dressing. And-” the warmth tipping into the grin- “for the record, you’re a terrible patient and I’d like you to come back every shift.”
“I’m not going to keep injuring myself so you can play doctor.”
“I’m not asking you to. I’m asking you to let me take care of you sometimes when you’re not bleeding, too.” He said it lightly, but it wasn’t light, and you both knew it. “Same skill. Lower stakes. Think about it.”
You looked at your bandaged hand in his.
“Okay,” you said.
The real okay. The one you never argued with, handed back to him for once.
Something moved behind his eyes, soft and pleased and entirely unguarded.
“Go back to your crypt,” he said gently, helping you off the table.
“Carefully. One-handed. Page me if anything’s wrong.”
“Go save lives, doctor.”
He kissed the top of your head, and let you go, and you took the elevator back down to the basement with three neat stitches in your palm and the print of his mouth still warm on the inside of your wrist, and you did not, for once, mind at all having been taken care of.
Christmas in the basement looked like this. Two folding chairs you’d liberated from the storage room, a roll of paper towels, two plates of cafeteria holiday roast, which was exactly as bad as advertised. A horrible grey approximation of a meal that you had both eaten anyway because complaining about it was half the fun. The lab humming its steady hum around you. The overhead intercom mercifully quiet. Outside, somewhere above, the city doing Christmas. Down here, just the refrigerators and the fluorescent light and the small ceramic black cat on your desk wearing, for the occasion, a tiny paper hat Jack had made it without asking.
It was, by any external measure, a deeply unromantic setting.
It was the best Christmas you’d had in years, and you suspected the same was true for him, and neither of you had said so out loud because some things didn’t need saying if you both already knew.
He’d come down at midnight. Your shift, his shift, the building emptied to its skeleton crew, the specific hush of a hospital on a holiday. You’d eaten the terrible roast and he’d told you a story about a Christmas deployment that was somehow both horrifying and very funny, and the night had settled into something warm and unhurried. Then, around one, he set a small wrapped box on the counter between you.
“So,” he said.
You looked at it. “Jack.”
“It’s small. Don’t get excited. Or. Get maybe a normal, proportionate amount of excited.”
He was nervous. You could see it, the specific energy he got when he’d decided something mattered and wasn’t sure he’d landed it, his hands not quite still, his eyes on the box instead of you.
You picked it up. Unwrapped it carefully, the way you did everything. You were more than the normal amount of excited.
Inside was a small box, and inside that, nestled in dark tissue, was a septum ring.
It was beautiful. A nice one, a heavy clicker, the metal dark. Set along the front of it, small and deliberate, a line of tiny deep-red stones that caught the light when you turned it, glinting like something alive. It was perfect, exactly your aesthetic. Not a guess at it. Exactly right. The gauge looked right. The style was something you would have chosen for yourself and hadn’t, the dark and the red and the precision of it, a piece that belonged in your collection like it had always been meant to be there.
You went quiet.
“It’s the right size,” Jack said, quickly, into your silence, the nerves spilling now. “I’m pretty sure. I wasn’t going to guess and get it wrong, and-” He stopped. Exhaled. “I had help. I need to tell you that part. I asked Danny.”
You looked up.
“You asked Danny?”
“I asked Danny,” he confirmed, with the grim dignity of a man making a full confession. “I cornered him after a shift and made him look online with me. He has strong opinions about ‘captive beads.’ He vetoed three of my choices. The stones were his idea. He said, and I’m quoting, you’d want something with a little blood in it.” A pause. “He was very pleased with himself.”
You laughed, and it came out thick, because your eyes had gone hot.
“So Danny was a big help.”
“That’s the situation, yes.”
“You bought me a ring with red in it because Danny said it should have blood.”
“Garnets, technically. Danny was very specific about-” He stopped, registered your face. “Are you-”
“I’m fine,” you said, in the voice that meant you were not at all fine, in the best possible way. Garnets were your mother’s birthstone. You save that to talk about later.
“Nobody’s ever gotten it right before. People buy me - they would buy me what they think a person like me would want. Dark and spiky and almost right.” You turned the ring in the light, the garnets catching. “You got it right, Jack.”
“I paid attention,” he said simply, like that explained everything, which it did.
You made him wait while you gave him his, because you were not going to be the only one undone tonight. Two things, both wrapped badly, because you were good with your hands in every way except this one.
He opened the small one first.
A little resin pumpkin. Lopsided on purpose, an expression of profound existential uncertainty hand-painted onto its face, sitting in his palm no bigger than a plum. He looked at it for a long moment.
“It’s my pumpkin,” he said quietly.
“It is. The gourd thing was never going to work out, we both knew it. This one’s permanent. Doesn’t rot, doesn’t need a front step, comes inside in the winter.” You shrugged, going for casual and not entirely making it. “Now you’ve got one all year.”
His thumb moved over the tiny painted face, and something happened in his expression that he didn’t bother to hide.
“Open the other one,” you said, before it could get to either of you.
He did.
The vinyl slid out of the paper and he went still. The Firefly soundtrack. The original score, on vinyl, the real pressing, the one you’d had to do some looking to find. You had checked carefully to make sure he didn’t have it.
“You checked my collection,” he said.
“I did check. I had a four-minute window.”
He looked up at you, and his face had gone to the unguarded place that you loved, the one underneath all the others, the Firefly nerd and the grieving man and the careful doctor all set aside, just Jack, holding a record and a tiny pumpkin, being known precisely by someone who had paid as much attention to him as he’d paid to her.
“This is the best Christmas I’ve had in-” He stopped. Didn’t finish it. Didn’t have to. You knew the shape of that sentence, you had your own version of it.
“Yeah,” you said softly. “Me too.”
It was you who broke the moment, because it needed breaking before it became something neither of you could hold in two folding chairs in a basement, and because you’d been thinking about it since you opened the box.
You picked the septum ring back up.
“Help me put it in,” you said.
Jack blinked. “Now?”
“Now. I want to wear it. It’s Christmas.” You held it out to him. “Come on. You bought it, you can help.”
“I don’t - I’ve never put one in. I don’t want to hurt you.”
“You won’t. You take the old one out, you put the new one in. You’re a Doctor, Jack.”
“Emergency medicine, that’s a very different-“
“Jack.”
He set the record down with great care, like it was made of something more fragile than vinyl, and stood, and came to stand in front of you where you sat in the folding chair, and the energy in the room changed.
It went quiet. Close.
He reached up and tilted your chin gently with two fingers, the way you’d tilted his more than once, and you felt the deliberateness come into him, the focus he brought to things that mattered, his face very near yours in the fluorescent light. You removed your old ring yourself, that part you didn’t make him do. And then handed him the new one, warm now from your hand, and held still.
His fingers were careful. Gentle, unhurried, the same hands you’d watched work a thousand times, steady even now, even this close, even with whatever was moving behind his eyes. He was close enough that you could feel his breath, close enough to see the old indent on his left hand as he worked, the matching twin to your own.
“Like this?” he murmured.
“Little higher. There. Yeah.”
The clicker seated with a small soft click, and he drew his hands back an inch, just enough to look, his fingers still resting lightly at your jaw, and his eyes moved over your face. The garnets catching the light, the dahlias, all of it and you, with an expression that had stopped performing anything at all.
“There,” he said, very quietly. “Look at that. Pretty.” You didn’t move. Neither did he. His hand was warm at your jaw and the ring was cool and heavy in your face and the lab hummed around the two of you, and the moment had gone entirely still and entirely charged, the kind of close where the next thing was obvious and neither of you was in any hurry to get to it because the getting-there was the good part.
“Merry Christmas darling,” he said, against the small space between you.
“Merry Christmas, Jack.”
He kissed you. Soft and certain at first, like an exhale after holding your breath for too long. His lips were warm, gentle, tasting faintly of the terrible cafeteria coffee you’d both been drinking with your roast. You leaned into it, one hand coming up to rest against his chest, feeling the steady beat of his heart under your palm. He made a quiet sound in the back of his throat and tilted his head, deepening the kiss with slow, unhurried care. There was nothing hurried about it. No rush, no performance, the two of you in this quiet bubble, mouths moving together like they’d been waiting for this exact moment.
His fingers slid from your jaw into your hair, cradling the back of your head as if you were something precious and breakable. You smiled against his lips and he answered it with a soft huff of laughter that turned into another kiss, slower this time, sweeter, the lights feel softer and the hum of the refrigerators fade into the background.
When you finally parted, it was only by a breath. Foreheads resting together, noses brushing, his thumb tracing the line of your new septum ring with something like wonder.
“It looks even better on you than I imagined,” he murmured, voice low and a little rough.
You brushed your thumb across his bottom lip, still tingling from his kiss.
“Best Christmas I’ve had in years,” you whispered.
“Yeah,” he said pressing one last lingering kiss to your mouth. Soft, reverent, full of promise.
“Me too.”
Neither of you had to say the rest. Some things didn’t need saying.
Jack Abbot x Alt! Medical Laboratory Scientist Reader
List of readers piercings: both eyebrows, stretched septum, stretched ears, many earrings, nostrils, philtrum, vertical labret, forehead dermal, dahlias(introduced in story)
It was the middle of December, and the hospital had started preparing itself for the season. Someone had put a string of lights around the nurses’ station upstairs, and there was a plastic wreath on the door of the staff lounge, and the cafeteria had begun serving a thing it was calling holiday roast with the specific institutional optimism of a place trying very hard. Down in the lab, the only acknowledgment was the black cat on your desk, which had a gift bow on its head.
Jack came down at 1 a.m. with the good coffee. He settled into his spot against the counter while you worked, the comfortable routine you’d built and rebuilt a hundred times. The conversation moved the way it always did, easy and circuitous, until it arrived somewhere.
“You working Christmas Eve?” he asked.
“Yeah.”
“And Christmas?”
“Working.” You logged a result. “I always work the holidays. I volunteer for them, actually. Trade them away to people who want them.”
He was quiet for a moment.
“People who have somewhere to be,” he said.
“That’s the usual reason people want Christmas off, yeah.”
You said it lightly, without weight, the practiced flatness of a fact you’d made your peace with so long ago it didn’t even register as a wound anymore. You had worked the holidays for years. The hospital was quiet and strange on Christmas, and you liked the quiet and strange. There was nobody waiting for you to be anywhere, and that had stopped being a sad thing and become simply a true thing somewhere along the way.
You glanced up. Jack was looking at you with an expression you recognized, a careful one, the one that meant he was deciding whether to say something.
“What?” You asked.
“I work them too,” he said. “The holidays. Every year.” A pause. “Same reason.”
You looked at him. You had the notion he didn’t know how right he was.
“No family to be anywhere for,” he said, plainly, the way he said true things. “Or, there’s family. We just don’t. It’s complicated in the way it gets. At this point it’s easier to just take the shifts and let the people with kids go home.” He turned his coffee cup slowly in his hands. “I’ve worked the last two Christmases. Maybe three.”
Something settled quietly between you, the recognition of two people discovering they’d been doing the same lonely thing in the same building before they’d ever spoken.
“We’ve probably both been here,” you said. “Same Christmas. You upstairs, me down here.”
“Almost certainly.” A faint smile. “Passing coolers back and forth and not knowing.”
You looked at him for a moment, at his hands around the coffee cup. You’d noticed that indent a long time ago. The lab light caught his hands a certain way sometimes, and there it was on his left hand, at the base of the ring finger. Faint, old, a permanent ghost of something worn for years and then taken off, the skin remembering a band that wasn’t there anymore. You’d clocked it the way you clocked everything, filed it, and never once brought it up, because some marks announced their own privacy and you had a great deal of respect for a closed door. You knew that mark. You had your own, fainter now but still there on your left hand if you looked for it. A similar ghost, years deep. You knew precisely what left a shape like that, and how long a finger had to hold something before it kept it. You had assumed, the way a person assumes, that it was a marriage that had ended. A divorce. The matching shape of your own history. But you’d had time to watch him now. And the thing about a divorce was that it left a particular residue. Jack had none of that. Whatever the indent was, it didn’t live in him like a grievance.
It lived in him like a grief.
You didn’t think about it. You just reached over, the way you reached for his hand now without negotiating it, and ran your thumb gently over the old mark. He went still. Not scared, just a small pause, a quality coming into him, the coffee cup going motionless in his other hand. You felt the conversation arrive somewhere it hadn’t planned to go, and you understood in the same instant that you had been wrong about the shape of it. This wasn’t a door someone had walked out of. It was a door that had closed because there was no longer anyone on the other side. You didn’t pull your hand back. You didn’t ask. You just kept your thumb resting lightly over the indent, and with your other hand you did something you didn’t fully decide to do, the same instinct that had put a cardigan over his shoulders the roof so long ago. You reached up and took the loose earbud from where it sat against your collarbone, and you guided his fingers to it, pressed the small familiar shape of it into his hand, the way he’d taken it from you a dozen times, a thing to hold, a thing that was yours, an anchor handed over without a word. He looked at it in his palm. Then at you. He didn’t put it in his ear. His jaw worked once, along with his thoughts. Seconding how much he wanted to hand over with no preparation.
“It was a long time ago,” he said finally. Quietly. The voice of a man going carefully around the edge of something rather than into it. And in the way he said it. A long time ago, not we split a long time ago, it was not anything with two living people in it. You heard the rest of the shape confirm itself, the soft terrible difference between a marriage that ended and a marriage that was simply, permanently over.
You didn’t say I’m sorry. He hadn’t told you anything to be sorry about, not in words, and reaching past what he’d actually offered would have been its own kind of grabbing.
“You don’t have to,” you said instead.
“I know.” He turned the earbud over in his fingers, the small mechanical motion of it. “I will. Sometime. It’s just.” He stopped. “It’s the one I haven’t put down yet. Out of the whole bag.” A pause. “It’s the heaviest thing in it.”
You understood that completely. You had your own heaviest thing. You’d handed him the door to it in your bed weeks ago and shown him only the door. He had stood in front of it and said thank you and not gone through, because he was the kind of person who knew the difference between a door being shown and a door being opened. You could be that kind of person too. You were learning it from him.
“Okay,” you said simply. “It’ll keep. It’s not going anywhere, and neither am I.”
Something moved through his face, the relief of not being pushed sitting alongside something quieter and sadder underneath it, the weight of a man carrying something he wasn’t ready to hand over and didn’t want held against him for keeping.
You kept your thumb on his finger a moment longer. Then you let his hand go, gently, leaving the earbud in it.
The conversation needed to move, and you knew how to move it, so you did, lightly, giving him an exit that wasn’t a retreat. Offering him a little of your own weight, so the asking went both directions.
“I was married, you know,” you said, easy, like you were just trading. “For what it’s worth. So I’m not asking you anything I haven’t got my own version of.”
He looked up. Grateful, you thought, for the company in it if not a little surprised.
“Oh,” he said. “How long were you and your husband-”
“Wife,” you said.
It came out level, no charge on it, just the correction handed over plainly. An old automatic reflex that still lived on your cells, built up over years.
Jack paused. To his enormous credit, his face did almost nothing. A small recalibration, a single beat of the new information settling into place. Then a nod, easy and unbothered, accepting it the way he accepted everything you gave him.
“How long were you married?” he asked instead, the question smoothly amended, no fuss, no follow-up where the follow-up wanted to be.
“Six years.”
“Okay,” he said, and let it sit there, and didn’t reach for anything else.
But you saw it. The small thing he did, the thing you’d watched him do a dozen times with a dozen pieces of information, a question received and set carefully aside for later, for a night when it wouldn’t cost you anything to answer it. He wanted to know more. Of course he did. Wife. A whole shape of you he hadn’t had until ten seconds ago. He didn’t ask. He was much too smart to ask right now, and much too kind.
He just filed it, and you watched him file it, and something in you was warmed rather than unsettled by the watching, because a question filed for later was a question that trusted there would be a later. He wasn’t grabbing. He was waiting. He had built half of everything between you out of waiting.
“You’ll tell me about her sometime,” he said. Not a question. A patience, stated.
“Sometime,” you agreed. “When it doesn’t cost as much.” You looked at him, at the old indent, at the earbud in his hand. “Same deal as yours.”
“Same deal,” he said quietly, and you both understood you’d just traded two doors, neither opened, both promised.
He held the earbud out to you.
You shook your head. “Keep it for the rest of your break.”
He huffed a small laugh, and put it in his ear, the cord stretching loosely between you the way it had a hundred times, and you went back to your screen, and he leaned against the counter with your music in his left ear and the old indent on his left hand, and the two of you sat in the quiet you’d built. Two people who worked every Christmas, each holding the heaviest thing in their bag and not yet ready to set it down, and entirely unhurried about it.
“Hey,” he said, after a while.
“Mm.”
“Christmas. Since we’re both here anyway.” A pause, careful, hopeful. “Want to be here together? I’ll come down. Bring terrible cafeteria holiday roast. We’ll have a Christmas in the basement.”
You looked at him, the earbud in his ear, the coffee, the man who worked every holiday for the same reason you did.
“Yeah,” you said. “Okay.”
His whole face did the thing.
“Yeah?”
“Don’t make it weird, Jack.”
“I would never,” he said, already making it weird, already delighted. And then, because the lab was quiet and the night was long and you’d just agreed to spend the loneliest day of the year together on purpose, you leaned across the small space between the counter and his shoulder and kissed him.
Soft. Warm.
Unhurried, the best things between you had always been, his hand coming up to rest light at the side of your face, the earbud cord still stretched gently between you, two people who’d each spent years working Christmas alone in the same building and were, this year, not going to. He made a small sound against your mouth, something quiet and content, and you felt him smile into it. When you pulled back, his forehead rested against yours for a moment.
“Merry early Christmas,” he murmured.
“It’s not Christmas yet, Jack.”
“I’m getting a head start.”
You huffed a laugh, and didn’t move away, and stayed there in the warm small space with him for a while longer, the cord between you, the heaviest things in both your bags set quietly down on the floor for the night, unhurried, neither of you had anywhere you’d rather be.
I have a mile long note of all the Robby things I’ve written, but no matter how it starts it always turns to intense angst. Probably Noah Wyle’s fault some how.
like he knows it soothes you before bed & gets you extra comfy, so he does it every night(or whenever you’re having anxiety) without a second thought!
and he doesn’t just scratch the same place over & over until it’s raw— no, that’s lazy, and jack abbot is never half-assed when it comes to you.
lightly scratching your back, your arms & thighs, giving you little kisses while he cuddles you closer under his left arm as you lay on your tummy. whispering “you’re gonna be so cozy, gonna sleep so good tonight baby. mmm, is that nice? you all snuggly?”
The emergency department was unusually quiet. Not truly quiet, it never was. Monitors still beeped, phones still rang. Someone somewhere was always asking for something. But compared to the chaos of a few hours ago, it felt almost peaceful. You were taking advantage of it, a stack of discharge paperwork sat beside your keyboard. Your attention was fixed firmly on the screen. At least until a familiar voice appeared beside you.
“So I think the vending machine stole five dollars from me.”
You didn’t look up.
“Good afternoon, Doctor Whitaker.”
“I don’t think that’s an appropriate response to theft.”
Now you smiled.
“Did it actually steal five dollars?”
“No.”
A pause.
“Two dollars.”
You glanced over. He was standing beside your desk holding a coffee cup that appeared to be completely empty. His hair was slightly messier than it had been that morning. His scrubs were wrinkled, his eyes looked tired. More tired than usual. Which was saying something.
“Tragic.”
“I know.”
“You’ll recover.”
“I don’t know if I will.”
You snorted. Dennis looked pleased with himself. Then, without asking, he dropped into the empty chair beside your desk. You noticed, you just didn’t comment on it. Because at some point it had become normal. Dennis wandered over, Dennis sat down, Dennis talked. Usually while you worked. Sometimes while he should probably be doing something else.
“How many patients today?” you asked.
“Too many.”
“Helpful.”
“You’re welcome.”
You shook your head and returned to your paperwork. For a few minutes the conversation continued. Easy, comfortable. Dennis talking about a difficult consult. You listening with half your attention while typing. The kind of conversation that required no effort from either of you. Then, gradually, something changed. His voice slowed. The pauses between responses grew longer. You asked a question and waited.
And waited.
And waited.
“…Dennis?”
“Hm?”
You looked over.
His eyes were closed.
Not completely, just like he was trying very hard to convince himself he was still awake.
“You falling asleep?”
“No.”
Immediate. Automatic. You raised an eyebrow. His eyes remained closed.
“Uh-huh.”
“I’m awake.”
“You sure?”
“Very.”
A beat.
Then his head tipped slightly toward his shoulder. You watched the moment he lost. One second he was attempting to stay awake, the next he was simply asleep.
Just like that.
The sight of it caught you off guard. Dennis never stopped moving. Never stopped worrying. Never stopped carrying ten different responsibilities on his shoulders. And yet here he was. Asleep in a chair beside your desk, like it was the most natural thing in the world. Like his body had finally decided it was safe enough to rest. Your chest tightened unexpectedly. Softly, nothing harsh. You looked back at your computer, then back at him. His head had tilted at an angle that was going to hurt later. A lock of hair had fallen across his forehead. The exhaustion never really left his face. Even asleep. But some of the tension had. For once, he looked peaceful. You found yourself smiling.
Adorable.
There was that word again. You should really stop thinking it.
A few minutes passed. Then ten.
You answered emails. Finished documentation. Took a phone call. Dennis remained exactly where he was. Completely asleep, occasionally shifting. Never waking. The department flowed around him. Nurses walked by. Someone laughed. A stretcher rolled down the hallway. Nobody disturbed him. At some point people had apparently decided protecting Dennis Whitaker’s rare moments of sleep was a shared responsibility. You understood the feeling. Then a familiar voice echoed from down the hall.
“Whitaker!”
Nothing.
Doctor Robby sounded unimpressed.
“Whitaker!”
Still nothing.
You looked down the corridor. Doctor Robby looked ready to come find him himself. That would end badly. With a sigh, you turned back toward the sleeping resident. For a moment you simply watched him.
Then you reached out.
Carefully. Your fingers slipped into his hair. Soft. Warmer than you expected. You stroked once. Twice. Gentle enough not to startle him.
“Dennis.”
Nothing. You smiled despite yourself.
“Dennis.”
His brow furrowed. Slowly, reluctantly, his eyes opened.
For a second he looked directly at you. Confused, sleepy, unusually vulnerable. Then awareness returned. Along with embarrassment.
“Oh my God.”
You laughed.
“Good afternoon.”
“I wasn’t asleep.”
“You absolutely were.”
“I was resting my eyes.”
“You were unconscious.”
His face immediately disappeared into his hands.
“Oh no.”
“You’ve been out for fifteen minutes.”
“Shit.”
The horror in his voice nearly made you lose composure.
“Doctor Robby’s looking for you.”
His head snapped up.
“Oh no.”
“That’s pretty much what I thought.”
Dennis stood so quickly the chair nearly rolled away. You caught it before it escaped.
“Thank you.”
The words came quietly, almost shy.
You looked up. His gaze lingered for half a second longer than necessary. Something warm passing between you.
Then,
“Whitaker!”
Dennis winced.
You laughed. And he smiled. The sleepy and genuine smile reserved for moments when he forgot to be self-conscious. Then he hurried down the hallway. You watched him go. Only for a second. Then you turned back to your computer.
Ignoring the fact that your hand still remembered the feeling of his hair.
