Dating the Moon Knight system. Physical touch!
Jake touches you constantly and thinks nothing of it. A hand on your lower back to move you out of a doorway, a thumb hooked through your belt loop while he's talking to someone else, fingers at the back of your neck when he leans over you to reach something. None of it is announced. He doesn't ask, and it took you a while to realize he isn't asking because it doesn't occur to him that this is a question — you're his, the body is his, contact is just how he keeps track of where everything is.
Steven: A bit of warning would be nice. Occasionally.
Jake: You want a form? Sign here, I'll put my arm around you.
Marc: He's not going to stop doing it.
Steven: I know. I'm not actually asking him to.
He moves you instead of asking you to move. He picks you up off the counter, he steers you through crowds by the shoulders, he lifts your legs into his lap and puts them there like furniture he's rearranging. He is also the only one who touches you while he's angry — not at you, just angry, the way he gets — and it took you a long time to understand that it isn't a threat, it's the opposite. Jake doesn't withdraw. Withdrawal is what everyone else in his life did.
He does something with your hands that isn't quite handholding. He takes one and turns it over, runs his thumb across your knuckles, checks your rings, presses into your palm like he's reading it. He'll do this for several minutes while watching TV and then hand it back to you without comment.
He fixes you the way he fixes the oven — collar straightened, hair tucked, something wiped off your cheek with his thumb, all without warning and all with total confidence he's improving the situation. He dances with you in the kitchen when he's cooking, badly and on purpose, and he laughs when you complain.
🌙🌙🌙
Marc touches you with a reason. There is always a reason. A hand on your shoulder to guide you, a grip on your wrist to keep you from stepping into the street, a palm flat between your shoulder blades in a crowd. He'll walk on the outside of the sidewalk without ever mentioning it. He checks you over after anything goes wrong — hands on your arms, turning you slightly, eyes moving over you for damage. This is affection. It took you an embarrassingly long time to learn that this is affection.
He is not good at being touched without seeing it coming. You learned early not to come up behind him, learned to make noise on the stairs, learned to put your hand somewhere he can see it first. He noticed that you'd learned it and hated that he made it necessary, and said nothing about it for weeks, and then one night said, quietly, that you didn't have to be careful with him. You told him you were going to be careful with him anyway. He didn't argue.
Marc: I don't need to be handled.
Marc: ...it's fine. Do what you want.
He holds your hand like he's braced for it to end — not laced fingers, the whole hand wrapped in his, firm, like something being kept from floating off. And the best is when he's exhausted enough to stop managing it. Head in your lap on the couch, face turned in toward your stomach, letting you run your fingers through his hair without a single word about it. Forehead pressed to yours in a hallway for ten seconds before he goes to do something stupid. He falls asleep with one hand on you somewhere — ankle, hip, wrist — and you don't think he knows he does it.
He doesn't hide the scars, but he doesn't like being looked at, either. So you don't look. You just put your hand on them the same way you'd put it anywhere else, no commentary, no sympathy face. The first time you did that, he went very still, and then he let you.
🌙🌙🌙
Which leaves Steven, who is starving for it and asks permission for all of it. Can I — is this all right — sorry, sorry, is this okay? You have told him roughly nine hundred times that he does not have to ask. He agrees completely and then asks again the next day. You've made peace with it.
His hands are busy when he talks. He'll grab your forearm mid-sentence about Ammit, let go, gesture wildly, take your hand again, all without breaking his train of thought for even a second. He bumps your shoulder with his when you walk. He holds your hand in both of his like it's something on loan from a museum.
Where Steven excels is hugs. Full-body, arms all the way around, chin hooked over your shoulder, and a small swaying motion he isn't aware of. He does not let go first. Ever. You have tested this — you have stood in the kitchen for a genuinely unreasonable length of time out of scientific curiosity — and Steven Grant will simply keep hugging you until the building comes down.
He reads out loud with your head in his lap and plays with your hair while he does it, absently, badly, occasionally getting his fingers stuck. He interrupts himself to tell you facts. You don't stop him.
Steven: You'd tell me, though? If it was ever too much?
Steven: Right. Yes. Sorry. It's just — I've got a lot of it saved up, haven't I.
One last thing. You learned to keep your hand exactly where it is through a switch. Don't pull back, don't check, just stay. Whoever surfaces finds you already touching them, and none of the three has ever once moved your hand away.
💜💜💜
P.S. do these count as fanfics? They kind of do, right?
theartofmadeline
gummygunk
jimmyeatworldofficial
