◇ set in the same universe as The Perfect Older Brother — post-canon, after the events of the main story
angst level: ★★☆☆☆
comfort level: ★★★★☆
⋆｡°✩ a quiet day. rain outside the window. watermelon. apple shampoo. and the weight of everything left unsaid. ⋆｡°✩
── ･ ｡ﾟ☆: .☽ . :☆ﾟ. ──
I sat and watched the rain outside the window. A bowl of sliced watermelon rested on my lap. The first months of summer were always rainy. I thoughtfully brought a piece to my lips and took a bite.
"Sweet?"
A familiar voice sounded behind me. I turned my head and gave him an indifferent look from bottom to top. Caleb stood there in his home clothes — a blue t-shirt and white pants. I forced myself to look at his face — more precisely, at his eyes. They held, as always, care and tenderness.
"Mm," I said, turning back to the window and reaching for the next piece.
Juice dripped from my wrist to my elbow. I sighed in irritation.
"Weren't you supposed to be on a mission?"
I shoved the piece into my mouth and started chewing, annoyed.
"Actually," he paused, "it's already over."
I was slightly surprised and glanced at the calendar.
"How time flies..." I muttered under my breath. "So you're on leave?"
"Yep."
He smirked, tilting his head slightly to the side, eyes narrowing.
I just sighed in displeasure and tried to stand up, but my legs had fallen asleep, and I plopped back down. I set the bowl on the floor nearby and, with a grunt, straightened my legs.
"Ha-ha."
He chuckled softly and came closer. Crouching down, he hesitantly reached for my legs. I measured him with a disgruntled look.
"What are you up to?"
"I just want to help. If I massage your legs, they'll wake up faster."
I didn't particularly like the idea, but I did want to stand up, so I let Caleb do it.
"Fine."
When his hands carefully touched my leg and began to knead, I shyly looked away. Just a couple of minutes later, I felt my legs again and bent them at the knees.
"Phew... Thanks..."
"No problem."
Caleb smiled at me and took the bowl from the floor, then headed to the kitchen. I followed him with my eyes. Finally getting up, I went after him. Reaching the sink, I washed my hands free of watermelon juice. I brought my palms to my face. They smelled like apples. I smirked and turned to him. He was chopping vegetables.
"Hey, do you buy everything apple-scented?"
Caleb looked up at me, slightly puzzled.
"Do I?"
His voice sounded uncertain.
I raised an eyebrow.
"Yes."
I looked around in search of proof.
"You almost always buy apples for the house." I pointed at the bowl of apples. "Apple soap, the cushions on your couch also have apples on them... Mm... I wouldn't be surprised if your shampoo is apple-scented too."
Caleb chuckled, hiding his smile behind the back of the hand holding the knife.
"Yes, maybe you're right. But you're not far behind me, are you?"
I silently stared at him for a couple of seconds and changed the subject.
"Cooking alone again... Let me at least chop the vegetables." I walked up to him, intending to take the knife from his hands. "By the way, what are you making?"
Caleb pulled his hand back. Not a trace of his previous smile remained.
"Curry."
I stepped back.
"Can't I even help anymore?"
He guiltily lowered his gaze and placed the knife on the cutting board.
"No, of course... Of course you can. Sorry..."
He turned away and went to the stove to set the meat to simmer. While it was cooking, he quickly and deftly chopped potatoes. Realizing I'd been staring at his back too long, I continued cutting the carrot he had started, and the onion. Since it was curry, there was no need to chop finely. But still, I worked slower than him. Having finished, I straightened my back with a grunt and saw him looking at me.
"What? Did I do something wrong again?"
Caleb blinked a couple of times and shook his head.
"No, it's all correct. You're just very slow."
He smirked and took the cutting board with the chopped vegetables, tossing them into the pot. The oil sizzled beneath them immediately. I watched him with slight displeasure, but didn't argue. Truth was truth.
While Caleb was busy at the stove cooking rice, I finished clearing the table and headed to the living room. It was quite dark there, even though it was close to noon. I glanced at the window again. Dark clouds still hung over the city, and the rain beat against the glass, producing a pleasant sound for my ears.
Not knowing what to do with myself, I sat on the couch and pulled out my phone, deciding to scroll through social media and play some games.
But an hour later, Caleb had finished cooking and set the table, then called me for lunch. I immediately put the phone aside and headed to the kitchen. We ate in complete silence. It was even a bit awkward. I'd long grown unaccustomed to eating with someone. Especially with Caleb. After that incident with the Fleet...
I shook my head, chasing the thoughts away. I didn't want to remember that humiliation. Of course, Caleb noticed my strange behavior.
"Something wrong? Is the curry not good?"
He looked at me with such concern that my heart clenched.
"No, everything's fine. The food turned out very tasty... as always. Just silly thoughts creeping into my head."
I quickly got up from the table, grabbing my empty plate.
"Are you done? I'll wash the dishes."
He followed me with his eyes.
"Yes... I'm done," he said slowly.
When I reached for his plate, he stopped my wrist.
"No need, I'll wash them myself."
"No," I said firmly. "You already made dinner, I'll wash the dishes, it's no big loss."
I took his plate away from him and shooed him out of the kitchen.
"Go rest and stop hovering before my eyes!"
I gathered all the dirty dishes that had piled up during cooking and headed to the sink. For a while, I felt a gaze on me, but when I turned around, Caleb was already sitting in the living room, flipping through TV channels.
Finally done with the dishes, I cleared the table again and wiped down the countertops. I was about to leave, but decided to dry the dishes and put them away in the cupboard.
When I came out into the living room, Caleb was already lying on the couch, quietly snoring. I smirked into my palm.
"I'll do it myself, I'll do it myself..." I muttered under my breath and reached for the remote, intending to turn off the TV.
But my attention was caught by familiar characters on the screen, and I remained standing. After a couple of minutes, I looked around for a place to sit. At first I didn't notice, but then I saw: Caleb was watching me from under his lashes. I flinched slightly, then frowned.
"Well, since you're awake..."
I grabbed his legs and bent them to free up some space for myself. Caleb yawned, sitting up and lowering his feet to the carpet. I watched him from the corner of my eye, still clutching the remote. When he stretched once more, his t-shirt rode up. I reached out and pulled it down. He flinched, immediately lowering his arms, and looked at me puzzled. I turned back to the TV, continuing to watch the characters on the screen.
I felt him lean back against the couch. I glanced at him one more time — and lost myself completely in the cartoon.
I don't know how much time passed, but Caleb pulled me out of my world by waving a hand in front of my face. I was surprised to see him so close.
"Are you hungry? Will you have dinner?"
I rubbed my tired eyes and sighed.
"What, is it that late already?"
Caleb smiled softly.
"Come on, I've already set the table."
He turned and walked to the kitchen. I got up and followed him.
"Wait... That was a question with no choice if you've already set the table..."
"And you never refuse food."
I stayed silent, but then replied:
"Yes, you're right. But aren't you glad?"
We sat at the table.
"Glad. Very glad."
He smirked, glancing at me. I felt a bit uneasy under his gaze and resumed eating.
"It's been a while since I've seen you so absorbed in watching TV. Usually you're on your computer or phone."
I set aside my empty plate and leaned back in my chair, sighing with fullness.
"Well... Usually there's nothing interesting on TV... So yeah."
I awkwardly cleared my throat and, after sitting a little longer, got up from the table, once again intending to wash the dishes. But Caleb stopped me.
"No need... This time I'll do it myself."
I gave him a slightly displeased look, tilting my head to the side.
"Come on, it's no trouble for me. Do you really want to spend your leave like this? Why not take advantage of my help and rest?" I sighed heavily, lowering my gaze. "I'm not doing anything anyway..."
My voice came out quieter than I would have liked. Of course, it was guilt. Every time he takes care of me, I feel uneasy. At this rate, I'll get completely lazy with him. Of course, it's nice when someone takes care of you. But seeing how much he works and still takes care of me... it makes me feel awful. I can't even hate him.
"How can you not understand..."
Caleb came closer, looming over me. I awkwardly raised my eyes to him.
"I like taking care of you. And I'd like you to keep letting me do it."
I looked at him in silence, unable to answer, and shyly averted my gaze, biting my lip. Unable to hold out, I just nodded and left him in the kitchen. Caleb followed me with his eyes.
The living room was completely dark now. I tried to focus on the cartoon on the TV, but thoughts kept crowding my head, making it impossible. I groaned in disappointment and immediately caught myself, glancing toward the kitchen. Caleb was still washing the dishes. I breathed a sigh of relief, listening to the sound of water.
Of course I liked that he took care of me. And I can't forbid a person from doing what he likes. But I want to be useful too.
I tiredly ran my hands over my face.
"Tired?"
I flinched when the voice sounded behind me. Had I really let myself be seen in such a vulnerable state yet again? I cleared my throat.
"Don't be silly. I haven't even done anything to be tired..."
Caleb said nothing. He walked around the couch and sat on the opposite side — not too far, but not too close either. I leaned back against the couch and pretended to watch TV.
Caleb quietly spoke:
"If you do everything yourself, then there's no point in me. And I want to keep on having a place in your life."
He leaned closer, his hand resting on the couch beside mine. I looked at him in surprise. I didn't know where to look — his face was too close.
"Please..." he said in a trembling voice. "Please, stay with me."
I felt something clench in my chest, cutting off my breath. I lowered my gaze to my hands, clenching them into fists. Taking a deep breath, I answered quietly:
"I'll stay."
I felt him exhale in relief and lower his head onto my shoulder. His hair tickled my cheek. Turning my head slightly, I caught the scent of his shampoo and couldn't hold back a smile.
"So your shampoo really is apple-scented..."
He let out a weak chuckle too and slowly raised his head, kissing my cheek. My eyes flew wide open in surprise, and I placed my hand over the spot where the kiss had been. My cheeks flushed red.
Caleb laughed and pressed his cheek to my shoulder.
"Brings back memories, doesn't it?"
I lowered my hand, letting him hold it.
"You mean that day when you kissed my cheek at your graduation under the tree?"
Even though I couldn't see his face, I knew he was smiling widely.
"So you remember?"
I sighed, rolling my eyes.
"Did you just roll your eyes?"
"When did that happen?"
Caleb looked at me again with a sly expression. My gaze involuntarily dropped to his lips. I remembered that day again. Now I understand: I've always been under his spell. I remember everything. Would a person who doesn't care ignore such a gesture or remember it? Right now, I felt like a complete fool.
It seemed Caleb noticed my pensive expression and spoke with concern:
"Something wrong?"
I shook my head, smiled faintly, touched his cheek, and leaning in, kissed the corner of his lips. It lasted only a couple of seconds. I felt Caleb's breath hitch — he was looking at me with surprised eyes. Seeing that expression, I was surprised in return.
"Sorry... I-I..."
I nervously pulled away, trying to justify myself, but he only laughed. I exhaled in relief, closing my tired eyes. He leaned closer and kissed the corner of my lips in return — his cheeks were just as flushed. Then he rested his head on my shoulder again, hugging my arm. I smiled faintly and laid my head on his.
For @gardenialily’s writing event here 💕💕 (I hope this is OK. Its my first time writing for an event 😊😊)
Words: Careful. Card. Memory.
Also a birthday gift for @remnantsofgildedcages. HB pretty girl! 💕
Cw: Smut. 🔞 MDNI🔞
The soft, low tone chime of his personal tablet barely registered against the backdrop of the morning office hum, but Caleb’s eyes flicked to the screen anyway. It was a reflex born of his line of work—always monitoring, always tracking.
Usually, it was a briefing update or a system log. But the notification sitting on his lock screen made him freeze entirely, his pen hovering a fraction of an inch above the paperwork on his desk.
Transaction Alert: Skyhaven Central Bank.
Authorized User: [Your Name]
Merchant: L'Étoile Boutique
Caleb stared at it. For a second, his brain, usually so quick to calculate and react, simply stalled.
He had given you that black card four months ago. He remembers the exact look on your face—the stubborn tilt of your chin, the way you tried to hand it right back, insisting you didn't need his charity. He’d had to press it into your palm, wrapping his larger fingers over yours, telling you it wasn't charity, it was security. It was his. And by extension, yours.
Since then? Nothing. Not a coffee, not a grocery run, not a single cent. Until today.
A low coil of heat unraveled in the pit of his stomach, heavy and sudden. He leaned back in his leather chair, the paperwork completely forgotten as he swiped the notification open to look at the details.
L'Étoile. He knew the place. It wasn't just a boutique, it was an exclusive, high end atelier known for custom evening wear. The kind of dresses that clung like a second skin, made of silk that practically begged to be slid off a woman's shoulders.
The timing wasn't a coincidence. The Skyhaven Gala was this weekend, and he had asked you to be his plus one days ago. You hadn't answered, but this... this was the confirmation he was desperate for.
You were actually going. And you were letting him dress you for it.
Caleb ran a thumb over the edge of his jaw, a smile tugging at the corner of his lips. The thought of you standing in that boutique, picking out something beautiful, and handing over his card to pay for it sent a rush of addictive adrenaline straight through his veins. You were finally letting him take care of you. You were finally accepting the hold he wanted to have on you.
His mind immediately betrayed him, painting entirely inappropriate pictures for a Thursday morning at his desk. He imagined you in the dressing room, the smooth fabric of a formal gown slipping over your hips. He imagined the deep, plunging back of a dress, exposing the soft skin he wanted to press his mouth against. He imagined walking into that Gala with his hand anchored firmly at the small of your back, letting every elite in Skyhaven know exactly who you belonged to.
The heat in his gut tightened, turning into a restless, demanding hunger. Caleb picked up his personal phone, his fingers moving deliberately across the screen. He couldn't just let this pass. He needed you to know that he saw it.
He deleted his first three drafts. They were too forward, too loud about the possessive grip tightening in his chest. He needed to play it cool. He was a patient man, after all. He had waited months for you to use the card, he could wait a little longer for the rest.
He typed out a short, simple message.
Caleb: Just saw a notification from L'Étoile. Good choice. I can't wait to see what you picked out.
🍎 🍏 🍎 🍏 🍎 🍏 🍎 🍏 🍎 🍏 🍎 🍏 🍎 🍏 🍎 🍏
You stood in front of the full length mirror in his bedroom, adjusting the drape of the fabric over your hips.
The dress was breathtaking. It was the kind of luxury you’d never allow yourself to even look at, let alone wear—heavy, liquid silk that pooled around your feet and clung to every curve.
When you had first seen it at L'Étoile, you’d stood in front of it for ten minutes, paralyzed. You had your hand in your purse, fingers brushing against the black card he had forced into your hands months ago. “For emergencies,” he’d said “Or for anything you want. Just use it.”
But you hadn't. You couldn't. You had to be careful.
Using his money felt like crossing a line you couldn't uncross. You were already so deeply, desperately in love with him, a secret you guarded with everything you had. Because Caleb was always the perfect gentleman. He was attentive, protective, and constantly there for you—but sometimes, that care felt dangerously close to the way an older brother might protect a younger sibling. He treated you like something fragile, something to be kept safe.
You had nearly choked when you read the price, but the thought of Caleb seeing you in it—the foolish hope that maybe, just maybe, this dress would finally make him see you as a woman—had won.
When you’d sent him a picture of the dress on the hanger, your heart had been in your throat. His reply had come a few minutes later:
Caleb: Beautiful. You’re going to look perfect.
It was a nice text. A good text. But it was exactly the kind of text a supportive friend or family member would send. It didn't have the heat you were craving. It didn't give away a single hint of what he was actually thinking.
A heavy sigh escaped your lips as you touched the delicate strap of the dress. Today was huge for him and because of his tight schedule, he had to get ready at work, leaving you to dress at his place alone.
The sound of the front door’s electronic lock chiming cut through the silence.
Your breath hitched. He wasn't supposed to be back. He was supposed to meet you there, or send a car.
A moment later, heavy, familiar footsteps echoed down the hallway, stopping right outside the cracked bedroom door.
"Hey," Caleb’s deep voice called out "I changed my mind."
The door was pushed open.
Caleb stood in the threshold, already dressed in his formal gala uniform. The crisp lines of the dark jacket, the sharp tailoring emphasizing the broad span of his shoulders, and the silver accents made him look entirely commanding. Imposing.
But the moment his eyes landed on you, all of that military discipline vanished.
He froze. His hand, which had been reaching up to loosen the high, stiff collar of his shirt, dropped slowly to his side.
The silence stretched between you, thick and suddenly heavy with suffocating tension. Caleb didn't move. He didn't say 'you look nice.' He didn't smile his usual easy, comforting smile. Instead, his dark eyes darkened further, raking over you from the exposed skin of your collarbones, down the sleek, expensive lines of the silk, all the way to the floor, before snapping back up to lock onto your face.
There was nothing brotherly about the way he was looking at you right now.
Within seconds, he regained his composure, tightening his jaw as the mask slipped back on. "You look beautiful, as always," he said, eyes lingering just a moment too long. "I'll wait for you in the living room."
There it went again. That agonizing feeling of being kept at a distance. You swallowed the lump in your throat, finished your makeup, and walked out.
The ride to the gala was quiet. Caleb kept his eyes on the road, answering your attempts at conversation with polite, clipped murmurs, but the moment you stepped out of his car he anchored you to him.
As you walked through the grand, crystal lit ballroom, you could feel the weight of dozens of eyes on you. Other men noticed you immediately. Lingering glances followed you across the marble floor, and Caleb knew every single one of them. Whenever a younger officer or an elite stepped up to talk to you, Caleb’s hand would find the small of your back, his grip tightening just enough to guide you away, his voice smooth and perfectly diplomatic as he excused the two of you.
An hour into the night, Caleb was pulled into a conversation with a high ranking officer. Seeing him occupied, you quietly murmured that you were going to grab a drink and slipped away toward the grand ice sculpture bar.
"I was wondering when he’d let you out of his sight," a smooth, unfamiliar voice said beside you.
You turned to find a young man in an expensive tailored suit, looking at you with an appreciative smile. "I'm Julian. I couldn't help but notice you the second you walked in. Tell me, are you here with Colonel Xia, or—"
Before Julian could finish, the air pressure seemed to drop.
Without a single word of warning, a large, warm hand wrapped firmly around your waist, his fingers pressing deep into the silk of your dress. The sudden heat of Caleb’s chest brushed against your bare shoulder.
"She's with me," Caleb’s voice cut through the air, laced with a quiet authority that made Julian’s confident smile instantly falter.
"Colonel," Julian stammered, raising his glass defensively. "Just making conversation."
"We were just leaving for the floor," Caleb replied, his eyes holding a gaze so unyielding it felt like a physical threat. With a seamless sweep of his arm, Caleb turned you around and guided you directly into the center of the crowded ballroom.
When he pulled you into his arms it wasn't the gentle, respectful distance he usually kept. He pulled you in tight. His right hand clamped against the small of your back, pulling your hips flush against his. He looked incredibly tense, his shoulders rigid, it looked as if this important day for him was not going his way at all.
"Caleb," you whispered, looking up at him, your breath hitching at the sheer proximity. "Are you okay? Is the event not going well?"
He didn't answer right away, guiding you through a flawless turn. His eyes dropped back down to yours, the hard line of his mouth softening just a fraction.
"I'm fine," he murmured, his voice still carrying a rough edge. He looked at you, really looked at you, and the tension in his shoulders seemed to bleed out into a weary, heavy sigh. "You just... you reminded me of something tonight."
"What?" you asked, tilting your head.
A faint, nostalgic shadow of a smile touched his lips. "Do you remember your high school prom?"
You blinked, surprised. "My prom? Yeah, of course."
"Do you remember that boutique downtown? The one with the emerald green dress in the window that you used to stare at every day after school?"
A genuine laugh escaped you, the tension breaking. "Oh my god, yes. I wept over that dress. It was way too expensive, and I knew grandma couldn't afford it. I was devastated." you smiled at the memory. "But then, a week before the dance, it just showed up on our porch. I still don't know how Grandma got the money. She always refused to tell me."
Caleb stopped guiding you for a fraction of a second before he resumed the slow, swaying rhythm.
"She didn't get the money," Caleb said softly.
You paused, staring up at him. "What do you mean?"
"Grandma didn't buy that dress, I did."
Your steps faltered entirely, and Caleb had to catch your weight, anchoring your body firmly against his so you wouldn't stumble on the dance floor. "You? But... you didn't have that kind of money."
"I picked up extra shifts at the mechanics. Worked some night gigs," he said, his voice dropping into a whisper. "You wanted it. You cried because you couldn't have it. There was no way in hell I was going to let you go to that dance in anything less than what you wanted."
Your breath trapped itself in your throat. The silk of your current dress suddenly felt hot against your skin. The dots connected in your head—the way he had always taken care of you, the way he had worked himself to the bone just to give you what you wanted.
You looked up at him, your eyes searching his, desperate for him to finally bridge the gap, to say the words you had been dying to hear. The tension between you was vibrating, so thick it felt like the entire ballroom had vanished around you. His thumb traced a deliberate line across your hip, his eyes burning into yours.
But Caleb just swallowed hard and didn't say another word about how he felt. He just held you, turning you back into the rhythm of the dance, leaving you completely breathless and suspended in the space between what you were and what you desperately wanted to be.
🍏🍎🍏🍎🍏🍎🍏🍎🍏🍎🍏🍎🍏🍎🍏🍎🍏🍎🍏
The front door of his home clicked shut, sealing out the noise of Skyhaven and leaving you both wrapped in a ringing silence. It was late. The adrenaline of the gala was fading, replaced by a heavy exhaustion that only made the unspoken tension between you feel twice as loud.
Caleb slipped off his shoes first, his movements practiced and calm. The moment you leaned down to fumble with the delicate buckle of your own heel, he was already moving.
Before you could even protest, Caleb was down on one knee in front of you.
He didn't say a word. He just tapped his thigh, a commanding gesture for you to rest your foot there so he could help. He had done this a bunch of times over the years but tonight the intimacy of it felt completely different. When his warm fingers brushed against your ankle, carefully working the strap free, your heart hammered violently against your ribs.
The moment the second shoe slipped off, you muttered a breathless thank you, peeled off your coat, and practically fled down the hallway toward the kitchen.
You needed a barrier. You needed a distraction. You grabbed a glass, filled it from the tap, and drank it slowly, staring into the dark marble of the countertop. Your hands were shaking so badly the water rippled. You didn't know what to do with yourself, especially because you could hear his slow, deliberate footsteps following you.
He didn't stay at the doorway. He walked right into the kitchen until he was standing directly behind you.
He didn't say anything at first. He just stood there, watching the tight line of your shoulders, the way your fingers white knuckled the glass, and, most damning of all, the frantic, tiny pulse fluttering under the delicate skin of your neck. It completely betrayed you.
The moment he stepped a fraction closer, he saw your breathing stutter, then change completely, turning shallow and fast.
He could see the effort it was taking for you to pretend to be calm, how your eyes stared straight ahead as if you could somehow ignore him. He noticed the way you pressed your lips together, trying to stay completely silent because you knew—you knew—that a single word, a single sigh broken by his name, would completely ruin this whole innocent act you'd been playing all night.
But you had no idea. You didn't know that was exactly what he liked the most.
The act.
Caleb loved your pretty, stubborn control. He loved your careful face, the way you fought so hard to keep the boundaries up between you, thinking you were hiding it from him. You thought he was blind to it. You thought he didn't notice the way you looked at him when he turned away, or the way you flushed whenever he touched you.
He noticed everything. He had been noticing for years, cataloging every micro expression, every nervous breath, waiting with disciplined patience for the day you would finally break.
"Still thirsty?" Caleb spoke so close to your ear that the warmth of his breath sent a violent shiver straight down your spine. He didn't reach out to touch you yet, but the gravity of his weight behind you felt like a physical hold. "Or are you just hiding from me?"
You had a chance to step away. The kitchen was wide enough. The hallway was right there. You could have turned around, made a joke, laughed it off like you always did to keep the peace.
But you didn't move an inch.
And that was your first confession. Not with words, but with silence.
This was the part that made you dangerous. You liked being read by him. You liked the thrill of him stripping away all your defenses without you having to say a single word. You liked the way his attention felt like a physical hand on you—heavy, warm, and demanding—long before he even actually touched you. And Caleb? He liked watching you try to hold onto the last frayed threads of your innocence while your body practically begged him to tear them down.
His control was the dirtiest part of all.
It wasn't the hunger. Any man could hunger for you, any man could look at you in that expensive silk dress and want to rip it off your body. But Caleb’s control was entirely different. It was a weapon. Because here he was—a man standing too close, a man fully capable of ruining you right here against the kitchen counter—and he chose patience.
He was a man who knew exactly how to make you tremble, who knew he had won the moment you refused to step away, but decided to make you wait for it first.
He let out a slow, quiet breath that hit your neck like gasoline on a fire.
The heavy glide of his palm against your waist was almost a relief, but it brought no release. He wasn't trapping you. He wasn't pinning you against the cold marble of the counter. His hand was just holding the moment still. Holding it exactly where it was, long enough for you to fully understand what you were choosing.
Because Caleb didn't want fear. He didn't want confusion, or the blurry edge of an impulse you'd regret tomorrow. He didn't want a single thing your body didn't willingly surrender to him. He wanted the absolute truth.
"Say yes."
The command is barely a whisper against your ear, but it carries the weight of an ultimatum. He wants to hear it from your mouth. Honest, and stripped of all the careful facades you’d both been hiding behind for years.
You swallow, your throat dry, your chest heaving against the suffocating weight of his presence. You turn your head just enough, eyes meeting his.
"Yes," you breathe.
The word had barely left your lips—soft and entirely undone—when the entire room changed. The air got hotter. Hesitation gone. The safe, comfortable boundaries turned to ashes. Now, neither one of you had to pretend you didn't want the fire.
Slowly he lets his mouth hover just a fraction of an inch away from the sensitive skin of your neck. There is no kiss yet. No pressure of his lips, no sharp nip of his teeth. Just the heat of his breath ghosting over your collarbone.
It's an agonizing little space—the gap between what you were begging for and what he hadn't given you yet. He is letting your own filthy imagination do the work. He is letting your body ache for the contact, letting your mind picture exactly how his mouth would feel against your skin, forcing you to crave.
When his lips finally touch your skin, it's right against your pulse, making your eyes flutter closed without your permission. It was the kind of kiss that made your entire body said 'Finally' when your mouth was still far too terrified to utter the word.
Caleb feels the sharp, ragged breath you lose against his cheek, the stiff posture of your back instantly softening against his chest, and the way your fingers leave the marble counter to look for something—for him—to hold onto.
"There she is," he whispers against your skin.
This is the version of you he has been starving for. Not the careful woman who smiles politely in public and hides her filthiest cravings behind a quiet face. He wants the one underneath her. He wants the raw, undone version of you that burns just as hot as he does. The one who wants tenderness, but wants it with teeth.
He turns you around slowly until you are forced to face him completely. The front of your silk dress brushes against the crisp fabric of his shirt, making your nipples pebble. He slides his thumb under your jaw, lifting your chin until you can feel the ghost of his breath against your lips.
"Tell me what you want, pretty."
You kind of hate him for asking you that because silence is safer. But Caleb waits. He just watches you, his eyes fixed on your mouth, completely unbothered by the quiet. He can wait. He has been waiting for years, a few more seconds of you squirming under his gaze is nothing to him.
"I want more..." you whisper, the confession torn from your throat.
The way his lips finally meet yours feels like restraint died proud.
It isn't a frantic, clumsy collision. It's slow, deep and enough to make you lean forward, chasing his mouth when he pulls back just a fraction.
Caleb steps into your space, his body pushing yours back until the edge of the marble counter presses into your lower back, making you feel the hard reality of what you do to him. Until you finally understand. His control was never the absence of desire. It was a warning. It was the very last polite thing about him.
And now, it’s gone.
Once his control starts slipping, you feel it everywhere. It’s in the possessive grip of his hands gathering the fabric of your dress, it’s in the demanding rhythm of your shared breath. An intoxicating heat coils deep in your stomach and climbs up your neck, making you feel as if your entire body is blushing from the inside out. He devours your mouth, his tongue tangling with yours with an unchecked hunger that tells you there is no going back.
Every touch feels like a slow burning sin you are committing together, but it's too good to be wrong.
Because there was no zipper to quickly pull down, your dress had to be worshiped off your body, and the patience required only made his intent feel more dangerous. His hands slid over the expensive silk, tracing the exact lines of your hips, gathering the fabric up with a slow friction that made your skin flush everywhere his hands touched.
"Look at me"
You force your eyelids open, vision blurred by the weight of your arousal.
"You're shaking, baby," he murmurs, his hands sliding to your waist, the bunched fabric resting there as his thumbs move across your ribs "Is it too much?"
"No," you gasp, pulling him closer. You didn't want him to stop. You needed the friction, needed the weight of him to ground you because your mind was spinning entirely out of control. "Caleb, please..."
A deeply satisfied smile tugged at his lips at the sound of his name breaking on your tongue. "Please what? Tell me."
He was doing it again.
But you couldn't wait anymore. The slow agony of his control was driving you out of your mind. You hooked your arms around his neck, pulling him down into a kiss, your hips tilting forward against his, begging for the relief he was withholding.
In one swift motion, his hands grab the silk at your waist and guide it up and completely over your head. The expensive dress pools onto the floor, leaving you entirely bare under his gaze.
He lifts you effortlessly. Your feet leave the floor as he sets you onto the edge of the marble counter, parting your thighs with his hips.
His mouth comes back down on yours, a demanding possession that tastes like a lifetime of starved patience. He reaches down, shifting the fabric of his trousers out of the way, his breath turning heavy and ragged against your lips.
Then, his hands grip your hips, lifting you slightly to line his hard lenght against your entrance. Your fingers dig frantically into the fabric of his shirt as your whole world narrows down to the heat of him filling the space between you.
He takes you right there on the kitchen counter, his rhythm deep, heavy, and slow. The friction of his trousers against your bare thighs a dizzying reminder of how undone you are compared to him. You can hear the uneven sound of his breathing, the low, masculine groans he can't catch in his throat.
His fingers dig into your hips to tilt you up, forcing you to take every inch of him. A tight, sweet ache coils so deeply in your stomach that it makes your head tilt back, your throat baring to the ceiling as a breathless, fractured sob escapes your lips.
Caleb immediately buries his face in the crook of your neck, his teeth grazing the skin right over your racing pulse as he drives into you harder.
The rhythm he sets is relentless, leaving no room for your mind to catch up with what your body is feeling.
His hands move from your hips, sliding up your ribs to cup your soft breasts. His face is entirely tight, his jaw clenched so hard the muscles jump under his skin.
"I want you looking at me when you break."
Your thighs clamp tightly around his waist, your toes curling in the empty air as you try to pull him even deeper, consumed by the need to reach the edge.
"Cay, baby, ple-ase..."
"I've got you, give it to me."
The coil inside you snaps, a blinding wave of heat crashing over you, making your entire body lock tight. A broken cry leaves your throat as the world spins completely out of focus, leaving you floating in nothing but pure pleasure.
Feeling the pulsing tremors of your release wrapping around him, Caleb loses the very last of his restraint.
His hands lock onto your hips with a bruising grip, lifting you up and driving himself into you one last time as his own body shudders violently against yours.
He doesn't pull away. He stays right there, his forehead resting against your shoulder, his fingers slowly uncurling from your hips, leaving dark, flushed imprints on your skin, before sliding up to gently tangle in your hair. He presses one slow, trembling kiss to the damp skin of your collarbone, a gesture that feels entirely tender—but the unyielding weight of his body still holding you to the counter makes it beautifully clear that everything has changed and you'll never be able to pretend you were just friends ever again.
Summary: You finally gather the courage to visit your grandmother's old cabin by the sea after she passes. Endless memories of your childhood summers stretch before you here, your favorite being of the times you played by the ocean, in and old hidden cave far down the beach...
Little did you know that this particular cave was the home of an enchanting siren who fell in love with your voice and your kindness towards sea creatures. He kept his distance, watched over you from afar... until you disappeared.
Now that you've finally returned, will he ever let you leave again?
Content Label: 18+! I know this looks pretty and dreamy but this is not exactly a light read. My goal in this fic is to unsettle you and turn you on a little. (Dubcon, if you squint), weird mermaid sex, ummmm listen these aren't extensive so enter at your own risk, lol.
From Hammy: This is one of my faves from my archive (*/ω＼*) I hope you love it. I drew on all my favorite memories from Virginia, playing in the ocean as a child. Good stuff...
The ocean in mid-July was your favorite scent. The air hung warm and salty, thick enough to cling to your skin and sink into your clothes. The moment you stepped out of your car, it wrapped around you, washing you in its familiar comfort. For a moment, the years seemed to fold in on themselves—you were a child again, climbing out of your grandmother’s old car into a summer that felt endless, the sea waiting just beyond the cliff edge and tall grass.
Then the moment passed, and you were left standing in the same salt-washed air, your chest tight with the bittersweet weight of how much had changed.
Grandma was gone now. And after her passing, you hadn’t been able to make yourself return. You pulled your suitcase from the back of the car, swallowing against the ache crawling up your throat. You willed your feet to move up the old, familiar cobbled driveway.
The cottage was exactly the same as it had been then. The same furniture rested in the same places, and the windows still welcomed in that warm, honeyed afternoon light. It even smelled the same…
Everything was as it had always been, and yet it felt different now—like a lovely shell left behind, still full of beauty, but emptied of the soul that had once made it feel alive.
Old wooden floors creaked beneath your feet with warm familiarity as you made your way up to your childhood bedroom. Nothing was different here either. Your bed was still made with the quilt your grandmother had sewn for you when you were only a little girl. The window overlooking the ocean still opened with that same gentle creak, and a cool, salty breeze swept through at once, billowing the curtains around you like sails. From your window, the beach unfurled below in a long ribbon of gold, cradled by the grassy cliffs that lined the coast.
The shore called to you with an aching sweetness, luring you with memories of sun-warmed sand, cool waves, and the fine mist of sea spray against your skin.
But it would have to wait…
The old house exhaled around you, seemingly happy to have some company. For now you unpacked your things with a listless sigh, working slowly. You stood after tucking the last of your folded clothes into your old dresser and decided to walk around, trailing your fingers along the faded blue wallpaper as you went.
The swelling ache of your memories filled the empty spaces as you wandered, slowly passing by the old, familiar rooms…
Her sewing room passed on your left. Where you laid at her feet for hours as she made clothes for your dolls and endless quilts. Next was her bedroom. Beaded curtains made of glittering sea glass still hung, still cast rainbow fractals along the walls and floors… for a split second you saw yourself as a child, dancing in the colorful shadows as they swayed with the breeze.
You choked on a little sob, suddenly fleeing downstairs to escape the heaviness.
A quick trip to town seemed to be in order. You needed fresh air—and some essentials from the little mart anyways. Without giving it a second thought, you snatched your keys off the hangar by the door and dashed to your car. The stiff ocean breeze caught in your hair and pulled it loose from its clip before you could shut the door…
Far down the coastline, something else from your past was stirring, drawn from the dark depths. For six long years, he had kept the cottage at the farthest edge of his vision, watching and waiting for even the faintest sign. Then, at last, it came—the sudden, unmistakable glimmer of light from your window when you opened it to the sea, flickering like a beacon across the water.
It set his cold heart racing.
At once, he surged toward the shoreline, swift and silent through the dark depths, slowing only when he reached the turbulent surf. He lifted himself carefully from the water and blinked into the light, clearing his vision as he searched for the slightest movement.
Was it really you, after all this time?
Evening crept up on you fast after you returned from town. Even with how quickly you unpacked and put everything away, night had already settled deep by the time you stepped onto the back porch. You leaned back against the door frame and looked down the winding path to the shore, your thoughts lingering on the risk of it.
Grandma had always warned you about going to the beach after dark—about the strange, things that drifted in from the water, the stories of disappearing wanderers drawn in by the moon. It was the kind of story told to wayward children, meant to keep them safe in their beds once night had fallen. You caught your bottom lip between your teeth, unable to resist the soft, aching pull of the shore despite her gentle warnings playing in your mind.
Slowly, you padded barefoot across the wooden patio, its white paint worn thin beneath your feet—descended the narrow path down the cliff, moving carefully, savoring the familiar hum of anticipation that rose with every step. The trail glowed beneath the pale wash of the full moon, silvering the grass. The entire outside world was swallowed up by the deafening roar of the surf as you neared the shoreline.
Every now and then, the wind shifted, carrying the faintest trace of your scent over the water, and each breath of it left him reeling. Sweet enough to stir something old and hungry inside him—something that had slept uneasily for far too long. You were here. Truly here. After all these years, you had really come back to him.
He had waited for so long…
The longing that seized him was nearly unbearable. He needed to see you. To hear your voice spill out over the waves again. To know the shape of your face had not changed so much that he would not know it. His song hummed restlessly in his throat, aching to rise.
There was only one way to bring you closer. One way he knew would reach into you, curl through you, and draw you helplessly toward the sea.
The rising tide had swallowed the shoreline completely, waves gnawing at the worn, rocky path until the beach was lost beneath dark, restless water. You sighed softly, disappointed that you would have to wait until morning. But this was lovely too. After the punishing July heat, the cold air and salt spray felt luxurious against your skin.
You lingered there for a moment, bathed in silver moonlight, while the ocean tossed and spat below, churning only a few feet from where you stood. It stretched toward you again and again, reaching up the rocks. But no matter how it swelled and pulled it couldn’t touch you.
Then, just as you were about to head back, you caught a faint glimmer beyond the surf. You went still, narrowing your eyes against the dark, trying to make out the shape. There—another brief flash of movement on the rocks.
Your breath caught in your throat. In an instant, the soft moonlit trance of the shore was broken by the sudden, prickling certainty that something out there was looking back at you. You retreated slowly from the water’s edge, one careful step at a time, slowly—so as not to draw its attention fully on you.
It’s nothing, you tried to reason with yourself. Probably just a bird perched on the rocks… during high tide… at night…
You turned and hurried back up the trail once you were a safe distance from the shore, that strange, prickling sensation following close at your heels all the way to the cottage. Only after you slipped inside and latched the door behind you did you breathe out a small, shaky sigh of relief.
He watched your bedroom light spill out across the dark from his place on the rocks. It was you.
Your face had changed, though not by much. Time had touched you gently. You were taller now, older, your features no longer those of the girl he remembered, and yet still so unmistakably you. And your scent—your sweet, familiar scent—was unchanged, still carrying that maddening warmth that made his cold, slippery body clench.
He could lure you back to the shore. He could sing, and you would come to him. He could pull you into his arms at last and feel your body where he had imagined it for years. The thought woke his ancient hunger with a flare. How sweet would you taste, how warm would your soul be as it slipped down his throat? He winced, straining against the instinct even as it coiled tighter through him.
With a sudden dive, he disappeared beneath the dark, swirling water, as if the cold depths might break the spell you had cast over him. The sea rushed around him, hissing against his skin, but it did nothing to quiet the hunger…
It was already warm when your feet touched the floor, the breeze drifting through the open windows doing little to ease the heat from your skin. Grandma had never bothered with air conditioning, and truthfully, it was only ever unbearable for a month or two each summer. With a quiet sigh, you carried your iced coffee out to the deck and watched the sunrise bleed slowly over the water.
The only real relief this time of year was down by the shore, tucked into the cool shade where the cliffs broke open into the sea. A couple miles down the beach, reachable only at low tide, a cave waited along the coastline. You had spent whole summers there as a girl, wandering through tide pools, filling your pockets with shells, and whatever else the ocean was willing to give up.
Smiling faintly, you reached beneath your shirt and drew your necklace into the light, turning it between your fingers.
A large pearl rested in its gold setting, glowing and luminous in the early morning sun.
There had been other things before it.
Small, strange treasures that always seemed to appear as though the ocean had set them out for you—an ancient compass, ruined by seawater and time, a large conch shell placed carefully in plain sight. You had never thought to question it back then. The pearl had been the last gift, found the summer you were nineteen.
After that, life had pulled you sharply away from this place. Grandma was suddenly gone, and whatever magic had once lingered here seemed to draw inward, going dormant and unanswered.
For a moment, you cradled the pearl in your palm and looked out at the glittering line of the sea, feeling that old, nameless curiosity wake softly inside you.
The wind came hard against the cliffside, lifting your dress and teasing your hair into tangles. You laughed under your breath and caught your hat before it could slip away while your old straw bag swung empty at your side, ready for whatever the shore might offer. That old, familiar excitement quickened your steps until the cave appeared at last.
It felt smaller when you stepped inside. As a child, this place had seemed vast as a castle, alive with hidden corners and secrets waiting just for you. Now it was only a cave again—still beautiful, but achingly ordinary beneath the weight of memory.
You trailed your fingers along the slick stone at the entrance and glanced up at the holes in the high ceiling, where pale sunlight streamed through and poured itself over the sand and scattered tide pools.
The ocean’s waves echoed through the cave, washing over you in soft, living sound as you slipped off your shoes and dipped your toes into a shallow pool, green-slick with algae.
You remembered singing to the tiny sea creatures trapped there, offering them what comfort you could until the tide came back for them. Nothing ever remained in this place for long. By the next day, it would all be swept clean, the old lives carried off and new little souls left behind in their place.
You leaned closer to the shallow pool where a single starfish clung stubbornly to the stone and, almost without thinking, let a tune drift from your lips—a wandering little melody, soft and sweet and half-remembered, the kind of thing you might have sung as a child.
The cave carried it strangely.
Your voice brushed along the walls and came back to you transformed, warbling with the breathing pull of the sea.
You laughed under your breath at yourself and rose, moving farther in.
The deeper parts of the cave had always felt different. Far from sunlight, some passages short and narrow. The air cooled the farther you went, and the pools grew darker, deeper, their surfaces black in places where the narrow beams of sunlight couldn’t reach. The tide hissed somewhere beyond the bend ahead, water slipping through some narrow channel in the rock.
Your fingers trailed along the cave wall, singing softly as you went, following the smooth curves cut there by years and years of saltwater. There were still little pockets in the stone where you used to tuck away treasures—shells with perfect pink mouths, bits of blue glass, smooth stones you had believed were lucky.
A faint splash sounded ahead.
You stopped mid-note.
For a moment, the cave went very still around you. Only the soft drip of water and the hushing sea and the quickened sound of your own breathing.
“Hello?” you called softly, straightening.
No answer came.
You told yourself it was probably nothing. Water shifting. A gull that had somehow found its way in. A seal, maybe. Though the thought of a seal this deep inside the cave made a strange little shiver travel across your skin.
You stepped carefully around the bend anyway.
The pool there was larger than the others, a basin carved into the stone, wide and deep enough that the dark water within it looked almost ink-black. Sunlight from a crack high above spilled weakly across the surface.
At first, you thought the shape half-submerged against the far wall was just another rock.
Then it moved.
You gasped and stumbled back a step so quickly your heel skidded on the wet stone.
A man—or something shaped like one—was hunched over the edge of the basin.
One arm braced against the rocky lip, he kept his head bowed as though catching his breath. Wet hair, darkened by seawater, clung to his skin in dripping strands. The rest of him disappeared into the dark water, his shape broken apart by ripples and shifting light.
Your heart kicked hard against your ribs.
For one wild, dizzy second, you thought he must be hurt. Shipwrecked somehow. Dragged in by the tide and stranded when the water fell away.
“Oh my God—”
The words slipped out before you could stop them.
His head snapped up, and your breath left you all at once.
He was unnervingly beautiful, in a way that reminded you of the deep sea—strange, and made for the dark. His face was too still, his gaze too bright as it fixed on you with a quiet, terrible certainty. Your heart pounded against your ribs, every instinct warning you to turn away. But you couldn’t. His eyes held yours, glowing faintly in the dimness, and some soft, perilous pull within them coaxed you one step closer.
When he finally spoke, his voice reached you strangely—warbled by the water and the cave, smoothed into something unearthly as it echoed off the stone.
“It’s been a long time since I’ve heard your voice.” He sighed contentedly, basking in the sound of you so close to him.
You halted, your breath snagging in your throat.
“M-my voice?” you stammered.
He only hummed, folding his arms atop the rocky edge of the basin and resting his chin on them as though he had all the patience in the world. His eyes gleamed. A small, almost affectionate smile curved his mouth.
“I’ve missed your songs.”
Cold swept through you so suddenly it left you motionless, your body locked around it, too frozen even to blink.
He knew you?
The realization felt like a plunge into icy water. How long? How long had he known you—watched you? Horror rose sharp and dizzying in your chest, braided helplessly with disbelief. Had he seen you here when you were a girl?
“This is my home, you know?”
His eyes gleamed as they traced every flicker of feeling across your face—your shock, your fear, your terrible awe.
“You used to decorate the walls so prettily,” he said, almost to himself, the words touched with fondness. A quiet sigh left him after, weighted by the old memory.
The silence stretched between you, and he let it, patient as the tide.
“Come closer,” he murmured. “Let me see your pretty face.”
His fingers reached toward you across the distance—long and elegant, the delicate webbing between them catching the light as he beckoned. You stared despite yourself, transfixed by his inhuman grace.
“I—”
The word broke apart on your breath. Your thoughts would not hold still long enough to shape into anything useful. Somewhere inside you, instinct screamed to stop, to run, to turn back now—but your feet betrayed you, carrying you one step closer all the same.
He hummed, low and pleased, as you approached. His voice drifted over you like mist rolling in from the sea, softening every sharp edge of thought, leaving your mind hazy and your body pliant.
Above, pale shafts of sunlight spilled over you, turning you almost luminous where you knelt before him. Your scent engulfed him, suffocating his senses until he felt half-drunk on it. His cold heart swelled as your breath touched his skin, warming him like sunlight.
“I’ve missed you terribly, beloved.” His voice trembled with reverence.
Another little gasp tore from your throat.
“B-beloved?” You tried to recoil, but your body would not obey. Your spine refused to stiffen, your limbs stayed soft and heavy as his finger rose to trace the curve of your cheek just beneath your eye. The path of his touch fluttered and pulsed, as though the echo of his heartbeat had been traced beneath your skin.
“Who are you?” you whispered through trembling lips.
He did not answer at once. Instead, he lingered there, watching you as if he meant to commit every detail of this moment to memory. Then, slowly, he sank back into the water. The inky dark curled around him until he vanished from sight, only to rise again a few seconds later.
Carefully, almost reverently, he laid a handful of little treasures along the lip of the pool before you.
You knew them at once.
The perfect shells you used to decorate your castle with. Smooth pebbles, pale and familiar. A few glittering pieces of sea glass.
“I am your chosen,” he said at last, after giving you a long moment to stare at the offerings in stunned silence.
His bright gaze lifted to yours.
“And you,” he murmured softly, “are mine.”
He smiled again and lifted a hand to the pearl at your throat, cradling it with a touch so cool and careful it made you shiver. He turned it lightly between his fingers, watching the pale surface catch the light.
“You accepted my offering. You wear it warm against your skin,” he said, in the patient tone of someone explaining something simple to a child. “And I keep your gifts in my chambers, close to me. I do not even let the ocean touch them. We are promised to one another.”
“What?” you breathed, your gaze dropping helplessly to the pearl in his hand.
He did not answer at once. Instead, he seemed to drift somewhere inward, his attention caught on the shimmer of the pearl as though it held years of memory inside it.
“I thought to kill you at first, you know.”
He let the pearl slip gently from his grasp, then folded his arms again and settled there with lazy ease, as though he had not just sent your heart plummeting into your stomach.
“But then you sang to the little creatures caught here. You were gentle with them.” His voice softened, his gaze drifting with memory. “You decorated my home so beautifully.”
He sounded almost wistful.
“Surely you meant no harm,” he said, looking back at you with that terrible calm. “Why, then, should I have killed you?”
All you could do was stare, helpless and breathless, as his glowing blue eyes dipped to the frantic beat of your pulse at your throat.
“I don’t understand…” you managed at last, your voice thin and unsteady. “What are you?”
Something mischievous flickered in his expression.
“You are a silly human,” he murmured, almost to himself, a soft, amused chuckle escaped him. Then his bright gaze lifted fully to yours. “Most people along this coast know better.”
His eyes held yours, shimmering like sea-glass in sunlight.
“You call us sirens.”
Your heart lurched so violently it nearly choked you, and in an instant the haze he’d woven around your thoughts snapped clean through. He lifted his tail from the dark water.
It gleamed like the pearl he had given you—large and writhing, a soft milky sheen that shifted with every movement. The fins were almost translucent, delicate as veils until the light struck them and turned them opalescent. He grinned when you stumbled back, sharp teeth catching the light. Your fear spilled into the space between you, cold and unmistakable as it bled through your scent.
His hand lashed out and caught your ankle, cold fingers locking around it with crushing strength. He dragged you back with a sudden, terrifying force, until your feet slid into the freezing water. But he did not pull you under. He stopped there instead, shuddering with effort as he grazed his teeth along the slope of your leg.
“Please,” you choked out, struggling against his grip. “You have to let me go. Here—”
Your hands shook so badly you nearly fumbled the chain as you tore it from your neck and thrust it toward him.
“I’m sorry,” you whispered, breathless with fear. “I didn’t know this was your home. I didn’t know this belonged to you. Please… take it back.”
The plea quivered apart on your lips.
He stared at the necklace trembling in your hand, clearly heartbroken by the sight. His brows drew together, casting a shadow over his glowering eyes. He took a moment to collect himself, to find the words that would make you stay.
“This cannot be undone,” he murmured at last.
His free hand folded gently over yours, cold enough to chill your skin, and guided the pearl back against your chest with quiet insistence, as though it belonged there more surely than it had ever belonged anywhere else.
“I have waited six long years.” His voice wavered then, agony spilling softly through his words. “I searched these shores for miles and miles. I never left. I have stayed. Waiting for you to come back to me.”
While he spoke, his mouth hovered over your trapped leg, his breath cool against your skin. Then, with a tenderness that only unsettled you more, he nuzzled the warmth of your flesh and pressed his lips to your knee.
“You could not cast me away so easily, could you?”
His eyes had gone pale and glassy, blurred with something that looked horribly like grief. Tears slipped over his lashes and fell from his chin in silvery streams, each droplet hardening into a tiny pearl before hitting the stone with a delicate little ‘tink’ sound.
For one fragile second, guilt pierced you, but fear broke through it just as quickly.
You jerked against his hold again, trying to wrench yourself free, but his grip never loosened. He only drew you closer.
“If I could only make you understand…” he lamented, undeterred by your struggling.
He hummed again, low and soothing, he knew no other way to calm you. The sound slipped into your mind like warm water, melting down the sharp edges of your fear. Your breath caught as it settled over you, quieting the frantic hammer of your heart and turning your limbs heavy in his grasp.
“Are you going to kill me?” you whispered at last, going still as the question left your lips, as though some part of you had already surrendered itself to whatever answer he chose to give.
Slowly, he withdrew his face from your leg.
He tipped his head back to look at you through the sweep of his lashes. His glowing purple eyes were soft with adoration, so open and earnest it made your breath catch.
“I could never harm you, beloved,” he whispered. “How could you even say such a thing?”
The words should have comforted you. Instead, they only deepened the chill already wrapped around your spine.
“I could have killed you easily back then,” he murmured, the pain of betrayal shining clearly in his gaze. “I could have let you drown when the waves caught you off guard all those years ago.”
You gasped.
The memory rose all at once—the summer you were seventeen, the way a sudden wave had crashed over you before you could brace for it, how the water had seized you and dragged you helplessly out to sea. You remembered the blind panic, the violent, endless tumble, the terrifying certainty that you were going to die.
But you hadn’t.
You had woken on the beach instead, coughing seawater into the sand, dazed and shaking, never understanding how you had escaped the sea.
Now he looked at you as though the answer had always been obvious.
“You are everything precious to me,” he said softly. “Everything beautiful. And I wont lose you again.”
A shuddering sigh left him as his mouth grazed the tender flesh of your thigh. He seemed half-drunk on the warmth rising from your skin. Slowly, he drew his lips back, exposing the sharp rows of his teeth, and pulled your scent through them as though savoring something sweet, letting it rest on his tongue and curl along his palate.
You could only watch as his eyes rolled back for a moment, a soft hum of pleasure vibrating out of him before his gaze found yours again, blurred now by a searing hunger. Then, with a terrible gentleness, he reached up and cupped your jaw in his frigid hand, guiding your face slowly toward him.
And still, you did not move away.
You could only stare as it happened, held fast in his gaze like something already caught in a trap. His breath brushed across your face like a cool ocean breeze, fresh and salty, his lips hovering just above yours, drawing you in with the steady pull of a current.
Your eyes widened as his mouth opened. His jaw unhinged, baring rows of those sharp, gleaming teeth. Something deep and instinctive inside you answered. Your own lips parted, your delicate pink tongue slipping out as though to taste the charged air between you. You felt it gathering there at once—a pressure without shape, something vast and formless filling your mouth as he offered it to you.
His cold, rushing heartbeat. The glowing warmth of his affection. The terrible ache of loss. His fear. His loneliness and longing.
You swallowed it all without understanding how, taking in the full, aching force of what he pressed into you. His devotion slipped through your body like lava slipping slowly into the ocean, seeping into your core—searing you, heating your skin like a fever.
Your eyes snapped open as he let out a broken moan, his head bowing beneath his restraint. Hot tears spilled over your lashes as his love poured through you. It filled your chest, your throat, sunk deep into your bones, tangling together until you couldn’t tell what was his and what was yours.
You reached for him helplessly, fingers slipping into his hair, soft and wet beneath your touch. For a moment, the ocean seemed to hold its breath with you.
Then you drew his mouth up to yours.
You gasped against him as bright, searing currents of his want rushed through you, white-hot and pulsing until your whole body trembled with it.
You felt him rise from the water like some great sea-creature from an old story, guiding you back in the cradle of his powerful arms. He lowered you gently onto the rocky floor, and though the stone should have felt cold beneath you, you could barely register it through the feverish heat burning under your skin.
You blinked up into the light spilling through the cracks in the ceiling, pale shafts of noon sun pouring down in molten gold. For a moment, the whole cave seemed to sway around you—salt air, rushing water, the distant cry of gulls beyond the cliffs. Then his mouth found you again, soft and reverent, trailing slow kisses along your skin as if he meant to worship every inch of you he had been denied for all those years.
A wanton moan flitted from your lips as his pleasure crashed against yours. His frigid mouth kissed lower and lower, pulled by the intoxicating aroma of your arousal and the intense heat thrumming between your legs. You felt the hard tug of your dress being yanked, the fabric shredding apart in his grasp.
A cold, slimy muscle pressed wetly against your clothed sex, followed by a rumbling groan. His tongue, you realized. It wriggled in a frenzy against the dripping entrance of your lips, straining against the drenched barrier of your panties, desperate to breach the heat behind them.
You reached down to help, showing him that they could come off. He seemed awed by this, hypnotized as you sat up to pull them off your legs. You then scooted forward, perching yourself on the lip of the basin, dipping your legs into the chilly water on either side of his face.
The sight laid before him was delicious—warm and glistening like a jewel. His eyes met yours for a moment, afraid that this might be another dream, that you might still crumble into glittering gold and fade off into the breeze.
You pressed your hand to his face and he turned into it, nuzzling further into your warmth. His eyes met yours again, then slowly trailed down, marveling at the way your naked body glowed in the warm beam of sunlight overhead. He felt your sudden, burning need for him to touch you, felt your pulse thrumming just above his lips.
He obliged.
Your mouth fell open as his tongue split into you, a little surprised by its strength, its size. It completely filled your walls, chilling you to bone with each punching thrust. His eyes rolled back at the taste, the direct heat drenching his tongue, the sensation of your pleasure building with his. Your hands tangled in his hair, pulling tight as you gasped for air, already cresting over the edge.
He sank his tongue to the hilt, squirming wildly inside your heat as you clamped down around him—singing your ecstasy in long, stretching moans that bounced off the cold walls of the cave.
He drank you down, dutifully cleaning every last drop. And once there was nothing left to clean off, he would enter you again, his throat vibrating pitifully as he whimpered. By now he was painfully erect, thrusting desperately into nothing. But he couldn’t make himself stop, drowning himself in in the heat of your sex with an unmatched hunger. You could feel his euphoria, absolutely drunk on your shimmering essence. The weight of your scent suffocated him as he forced his tongue deeper, wishing you could swallow him whole.
You lost count of your orgasms, lost count of time as you fell into the trance of your mixed pleasure. It could have been minutes or hours…
The afternoon sun had eventually faded towards evening and he finally released you. His tongue slid out of you with a wet squelch. His chest was heaving, his skin heated beneath your hands,
“I can’t wait any longer, beloved.” He gasped, “Please, let me take you as mine. Let me have you for all this life and the next.” He drew you down from the stone’s edge and into his arms. Cold water rose up around your neck. You gasped at the shock of it, at the feel of his erect length pressing up against your thigh, cold and slimy and soft as he squeezed you to him.
Every line of his body was tight with need, trembling with restraint, but beneath the carnal frenzy, you felt the aching sincerity of him. The fierce devotion swelling in his chest. The terrible, tender certainty with which he held you—something lost to him once and never meant to be lost again.
You kissed him once, then again, pouring all your strange, tangled certainty into him. The fading light floated down and around you as he turned with you slowly in the water—guiding you through soft, endless circles. The sea rocked around you just outside the cave as the last of the golden sunlight slipped across the cracks in the ceiling and faded away.
A misty darkness settled around you.
He was suddenly everywhere, winding around you—his tail wrapping tight around your legs as he turned you gently toward the stone wall, steadying you against its slick edge. His arms bracketed you on either side, sealing your hips to the wall.
He wasted no time, rutting his length into the backs of your thighs, desperately punching a path, throbbing with need as it searched for your tight pulsing heat.
You whined, shoving your hips back in an attempt to help him. Something large, much larger than you were expecting, with a bulbous head squeezed through your lips, gently prodding your tight entrance gently—over and over—until finally your warm heat parted enough to suck him in. He yelped, bucking forward wildly before stilling, catching his breath with you for a second. He was huge and slick and nearly bulging through your stomach, the painfully thick head of him stretching you deeply, squelching up into your cervix. He hissed through his teeth, pulling back.
“I’m sorry my love, I don’t wish to hurt you.” You were lost to him already, head lolling back as you drowned in his pleasure mixed with your pain.
“Don’t stop.” You hummed, rocking back against him, chasing that searing, white hot pressure in your belly, flooding and engorging you. You felt close to bursting, the pressure rising, building like a glowing flame, a burning star rising up through your chest. Your limbs seemed to float away, the light building behind your eyes as you tipped over the edge.
Your head tipped back, mouth thrown open in a silent gasp, only it wasn’t air that filled your mouth.
It was cold salt water that gathered you in, pressing gently against your chest as the fever of the moment softened into something stranger, something vast and inevitable. You drifted upward through the dark, rippling water, rising slowly toward the pale moonlight filtering through the cracks above.
Somewhere below, his voice reached for you through the trembling hush of the sea.
“Don’t be afraid, my love. We’ll be together soon.”
The words came to you blurred by water, the grief in his voice lost under the tide.
Below the surface, the ocean began to claim you with a terrible gentleness. Your skin loosened into foam beneath its touch, dissolving as softly as sea mist beneath the morning sun. The bond between you was complete.
And when the next full moon rose over the tide pools, the sea would return you to him here, remade in the moonlight, birthed into devotion. He would wait for you, patient as the tide, until you rose once more into his arms.
And after that, there would be no more parting—only the sea, and him, and forever.
My pretty-gorgeous list: @onlyafterrain @jo260401 @typicalme23
That there is it! I hope you enjoyed it, reader! If you talk to me my head and heart will combust (but like, in a good way). Thank you so much for reading ❤️
[FRATLEB x READER] Can you really call Caleb your best friend after losing your virginity to his loathsome twin brother, Perses, at a frat party? || CW: 18+ mdni, smut, frat/nerd!au, nerdleb is Caleb, fratleb is Perses, virginity loss, mating press, spit kink
Can you really call Caleb your best friend after losing your virginity to his loathsome twin brother at a frat party?
The answer gets muddied with each harsh thrust Perses delivers into your slick cunt. One hand pushing your knee to your chest and the other groping a handful of your tits.
Does he care that you're his geek brother's best friend or a virgin? Probably not. To him, you're just a tight pussy he gets to drunkenly fill tonight. So he's not in the business of being gentle or sweet, but it's not like you have any complaints if the sounds of your moans are anything to go by.
Maybe the reality of the situation would've kicked in if not for the alcohol running through your system. All you can focus on is the way Perses's cock fills you perfectly.
And… maybe the alcohol also helps you blur Perses into Caleb. They are identical, after all.
You run your fingers through Perses's shaggy hair and push his bangs higher. Those violet eyes scan your blissed out expression with intent, analyzing carefully.
Just like Caleb, you wistfully think.
That's the same expression he gave you when you told him you wanted to go to a frat party for the first time. Of course, Caleb didn't want to join you, opting to pull and all nighter at the library for his exam on Monday. So you went all alone, feeling like a lamb to slaughter surrounded by strangers in a packed frat house. The only source of comfort being his brothers familiar face.
Perses pushes your leg higher, letting him hit you at a new angle that makes you gasp and writhe. His heavy cock buries into you deeper than before.
"Ca-"
He swallows your voice with a deep kiss, tongue delving into your mouth—it's hot, demanding, all consuming. It's like he wants to possess you, engrave himself in you so that you can belong to no one else but him—least of all his brother.
He tastes like cinnamon, remnants of his drinks tonight. You lean into it, curling your fingers through his hair and pulling him closer. He completely dominates your mouth until you're breathless, panting as he pulls away with a string of saliva to connect you. He smears it against your lower lip as he scowls.
"So fucked out you can't even remember whose cock you're takin'," Perses scoffs under his breath. He grabs your jaw and forces you to focus your half lidded eyes on him. His face is flushed in a way you've never seen Caleb's. "Now, say my fuckin' name."
He emphasizes each word with a powerful thrust that slams the headboard.
"Perses." His name comes out in a whisper. It's as if saying it any louder will solidify this moment in truth—you're fucking your best friend's twin brother. The best friend you have a crush on. You're so fucked. In more ways than one…
He clicks his tongue, slowing his hips to an agonizing grind. "Don't get shy on me."
You buck your hips, in a desperate attempt to get him to move but he holds steady. Uselessly, you claw into his biceps and whine, "Please, Perses!”
"Louder," he commands. When you say his name again, there is a wild, triumphant grin that forms on his lips. He grips your jaw until you open your mouth to complain. "Good. Now, stay like that."
With your mouth pushed open and him leaning his weight against you, you can only watch as he spits into your mouth. You flinch as it lands in your mouth, a little catching on your bottom lip. He pushes your mouth closed.
"C'mon, swallow," Persus goads. He leaves you utterly humiliated by him, and the sick part of you is enthralled by it, craving it. He watches your throat bob as you obey him. Your pretty eyes stare up at him the whole time as he well and truly claims you.
A/N — originally supposed to be longer but i’m tired of this rotting in my drafts :’) i hope you enjoyed tho!!!!!
The screen door rattled in its frame, a loose screw buzzing against the aluminum as the late afternoon wind picked up. Outside, the sky was starting to turn gray but the kitchen still held the dry, baking heat of the day.
You stood by the sink, rinsing a bowl of strawberries, cold water splashing over your wrists. The hem of your white cotton sundress—thin and covered in tiny embroidered apples—brushed against your thighs every time you shifted your weight.
Caleb’s boots gave two heavy thuds on the porch before the door whined open. He smelled like sweat and gasoline, his throat coated in a fine layer of sawdust from the shed he’d been clearing out. He didn't say anything. He just dropped a heavy iron wrench onto the counter with a metallic thud that made the porcelain mugs rattle in the cupboard.
You turned your head, wiping your wet hands on the skirt of the dress. "The storm’s moving in fast. Did you get the—"
He was already in your space. His hand, dark with grease stains around the knuckles, came down flat against the laminate counter right next to your hip. He leaned in, his chest nearly brushing your shoulder.
""August, three years ago. You wore a dress just like this one for one of Grandma's Sunday dinner. The weather was exactly like this."
"I remember. You barely said two words to me that day and spent the whole afternoon fixing her lawnmower."
"Because I couldn't trust myself to open my mouth," Caleb rasped, his chin brushing your shoulder, breath hot against your neck. "You sat on the porch swing. Every time you kicked your feet to keep it moving, the skirt would part, and I could see the soft skin on the inside of your knees. I was under that damn mower, covered in oil, with my teeth clenched so hard my jaw ached for three days."
"Caleb—"
"I also spent hours imagining exactly how loud that fabric would rip if I caught you by the waist and pinned you against the screen door."
Your breath hitched, a small, dry sound in the quiet house.
"That's the sound you made in my head, too."
Your chest rose and fell in a quick, shallow breath. The air between you felt thick, charged like the sky outside.
He didn't untie the small bow at the shoulder, he just pulled, exposing the curve of your breast to the air coming through the open windows.
A small gasp caught in your throat, your hands automatically coming up to touch his chest, your fingers bunching into his damp grey shirt.
Caleb didn't give you time to think. He hooked his hands under your thighs and lifted you straight onto the counter.
He crowded between your knees, his heavy thighs forcing yours apart.
"I built these counters two inches higher than standard," he whispered, his mouth hovering over yours, his breath smelling faintly of the black coffee he'd had at noon. "You know why?"
You shook your head, your fingers digging into his shoulders as the heat of his groin pressed hard against yours.
"So I wouldn't have to bend down when I did this," he said, and then his mouth crashed into yours.
His kiss tasted of salt. He bit your lower lip just hard enough to make you whine into his mouth, his tongue taking up all the space, relentless and heavy. His hand slid down between your bodies, long fingers grouping the lace of your underwear and shoving it aside.
When his fingers found your bare skin you arched off the counter, your head hitting the wooden cabinet door behind you with a dull thud. You were already slick, the sound of his voice having done most of the work.
"Yeah," Caleb muttered against your lips, his thumb finding the small, swollen center of you and pressing down with a rhythmic friction that made your toes curl. "Let me hear you, baby"
"Caleb, the windows—" you choked out, your hands flying to his hair.
"Let them hear," he growled, his fingers sliding inside you, two of them stretching you wide, filling the ache until you were panting, your hips jerking against his hand in short, helpless motions. He didn't stop, his thumb circling your clit until your breath turned into broken stabs of sound.
When he felt you were getting close he pulled his fingers out with a wet slide, leaving you empty and shivering. Before you could complain, his hands were at his belt, the heavy brass buckle clinking as he yanked it free. He didn't take his jeans off, he just pulled his cock out and lined himself up against you.
A deep, slow thrust buried him completely inside you. Your breath left your lungs in a sharp cry, legs instantly locking around his waist, pulling him deeper as the first roll of thunder finally broke outside.
Remember this list👇? Guess who's working on it? 😝😝
Here’s the thing about trying to do something nice for someone who is annoyingly capable of doing everything himself: it doesn’t work.
You’ve been trying for three weeks.
Three.
And you have nothing to show for it except a slightly bruised ego, a jaw that aches, a pussy that’s always throbbing, and a creeping, maddening awareness that Caleb Xia Yi Zhou might actually be impossible to spoil.
His birthday is in two weeks.
Two weeks, and you’ve cooked him exactly zero meals because every time you shuffle into the kitchen with some grand intention — a recipe pulled up on your phone, ingredients arranged on the counter — Caleb is already there.
Already at the stove.
Already flipping something in a pan with the confidence of a man who learned to cook before he learned to shave.
He’ll glance over his shoulder at you and smile, and it’s that smile, the soft one with the slight crinkle at the corner of his purple eyes, and you’ll feel your irritation deflate like a sad balloon because god, he’s so annoyingly pretty.
You tried cleaning.
You got up early. Practically military-early, which for you is a genuine sacrifice.
You dug out the cleaning supplies from under the sink and you had the vacuum cleaner out before seven in the morning, which should have earned you some kind of medal.
Instead you found the living room already clean. Not recently clean. Impeccably clean. Like it had never been touched by the concept of mess. There was a note on the coffee table in his handwriting: Don’t strain yourself, Pipsqueak. — C.
You may have crumpled that note aggressively.
You may have then proceeded to sit down in the middle of the clean living room floor and have something that could generously be called a meltdown. A tantrum, if you’re being less generous.
Caleb came in from wherever he’d been — still in that black and orange flight jacket, hair slightly messed, looking unfairly effortless — and found you sitting on the floor with your arms crossed and your expression set to full operational sulk.
He didn’t say anything at first. He just looked at you, and then the corner of his mouth tugged upward, and he laughed. Not mean. Never mean with you.
Just warm and rich and a little helpless, like you were the funniest thing he’d ever seen and also slightly exasperating.
“I just wanted to help,” you told him, which came out more like a whine than a declaration.
“I know,” he said, and before you could say anything else he had you up over his shoulder like you weighed nothing — like you were a bag of laundry, like the laws of gravity simply applied differently to you when he decided they did — and the world flipped upside down and his hand was firm and warm on the back of your thigh.
“Caleb—“
“You wanna work so much?” His voice had dropped, that particular low register that lived somewhere between teasing and intent. “Alright. Put that mouth to work.”
And the thing is. The thing is. You’re not going to dwell on what happened after that.
You’re absolutely not going to think about how you ended up on your knees on the floor of his office with his hands loose in your hair and his cock heavy on your tongue, or about the sounds he made, or about the way he looked down at you with those purple eyes gone dark and said good girl like it was the most obvious thing in the world.
You are not dwelling on any of that.
You’re especially not dwelling on the fact that you’d have done it again. Enthusiastically.
But the point is — and you have to keep coming back to the point because your brain has a truly inconvenient tendency to wander — his birthday is in two weeks.
And you have done nothing.
Zero.
You’ve been outmaneuvered at every turn by a six-foot-two military pilot who apparently never sleeps and has a pathological need to do everything himself before anyone else can.
Domestic route: blocked. Culinary route: blocked. Cleaning route: blocked and mocked, very gently, via handwritten note.
Fine. Fine.
If he won’t let you help him with the house, you’ll help him in a different way. A much more interesting way.
The idea had come to you in the middle of the night, the way good ideas tend to. If Caleb loves his uniform, and he does, he’s meticulous about it in a way that borders on religious — the pressed lines, the insignia, the whole Colonel energy he wears like a second skin — then what better way to short-circuit his brain than to wear it yourself?
You’d ordered it three weeks ago, back before the tantrum, when you still thought the cooking plan might work.
It had been sitting in your closet ever since, tucked behind a row of regular clothes, hidden in plain sight as something so mundane that Caleb, who does occasionally poke his head into your room to return folded laundry like some kind of domestic nightmare, would never look twice at it.
Just a dry-cleaning bag. Just a work uniform. Nothing to see here.
You pull it out now, holding it up in the soft late-afternoon light that comes through your window, and you look at it critically. It’s exactly right. The cut, the fabric, the insignia you’d had replicated. The jacket. The pants. The whole setup.
Caleb is in his room, the door cracked open the way it always is when he’s working at his desk, which means you can hear the faint occasional sound of papers shifting or his pen moving, which means he is exactly where you want him.
You look at the uniform again. You look at yourself in the mirror on the back of your closet door.
You’re going to march into his room, and you’re going to make Colonel Caleb Xia Yi Zhou lose every single thread of his composure, because it’s almost his birthday and you refuse — refuse — to be outmaneuvered a fourth time.
But here’s what they don’t tell you about ordering a uniform online when you’re more focused on the fantasy of it than the logistics: size matters.
Size matters a lot.
You step into the pants first, which is a process. You get them up past your knees fine. Past your thighs is already a project. By the time you’ve wrestled them up over your hips you’re already slightly out of breath, and when you look in the mirror the fabric is pulled so tight across your ass that you can practically count the individual seams.
You turn sideways. You turn back. You try bending at the knee to test the range of motion and the pants make a sound like a warning.
Don’t, the pants say. Absolutely do not.
Okay, so bending is out.
Moving with anything resembling caution is also out.
If you sit down in these you might genuinely be trapped.
You accept this as the price of the plan and move on to the jacket, which is the least of your problems until it isn’t — the buttons close over your stomach fine, but once you get to your chest it becomes a negotiation.
The fabric strains. The buttons are doing their best. They are trying so hard and they are losing, and there’s a gap between the second and third button from the top that wasn’t there in the product photos, where the fabric pulls apart just enough to show a strip of skin and the edge of your bra.
You look at yourself in the mirror for a long moment.
“Okay,” you say.
Your ass looks genuinely extraordinary. You have to give the too-tight pants that — they’ve done something transcendent back there. The uniform jacket hits just above the curve of it, which means when you lean forward even slightly there is an event happening. And the gap at the chest is doing something. It’s doing something you hadn’t planned, but you’re choosing to count it as a feature.
You rake your hair back, let it fall, tilt your chin. You point at your own reflection.
“He’s not gonna know what hit him.”
Your reflection looks back at you with the energy of someone who is sixty percent confident and forty percent about to back out.
You do not give her the opportunity.
You turn away from the mirror before the forty percent can gain ground, grab the door handle, and head out into the hallway.
The apartment is quiet. The late afternoon has gone gold and long-shadowed, and Caleb’s door is still cracked the way it was before, a thin rectangle of warm light falling across the hall floor. You can hear him in there — the faint shift of paper, the soft particular sound of his pen, totally absorbed. He has no idea.
You stop outside his door. You breathe.
You arrange your face into an expression of worried contrition, which takes some doing because underneath it you are absolutely delighted with yourself, and you knock twice on the door frame, keeping your body just out of sight around the edge.
“Caleb?” Your voice comes out with exactly the right wobble — concerned, a little sheepish, the voice of someone who has done something they feel bad about. “I’m really sorry, but — I was trying to do something nice, and I think I kind of messed up...”
There’s a pause. You hear his pen stop.
“Messed up how?” His voice is careful, not alarmed. Just attentive, the way he always is when you sound uncertain, because Caleb has never once in his life been able to hear you sound uncertain without immediately paying attention. It’s one of his more exploitable qualities.
“I tried washing your uniform for you,” you say, and you let the words come out small and guilty. “And I think — I think it might have... shrunk.”
Another pause. You can picture him at his desk, his brow doing that slight furrow, trying to work out why that’s a problem that requires you to sound this apologetic.
“Sweetheart.” His voice is mild, unoffended, just a little puzzled. The chair shifts. “Let me see it. Come here.”
That’s your cue.
You step around the door frame and into the light of his room, and then you walk toward him. You take your time with it, because the pants make fast movement inadvisable anyway, and because the whole point is to let him see every inch of you in this thing that barely contains you — the jacket pulled tight across your chest, the gap where the buttons strain, the pants that have given up any pretense of modesty and are simply painting you in detail.
Caleb goes completely still.
He’d been turned partway toward the door, one arm braced on his desk, and that’s how he stays — perfectly, completely motionless — as you cross the room toward him.
His mouth doesn’t drop open. He’s more composed than that. But his eyes go somewhere darker and the breath he’d been in the middle of just... stops. You can see it. The stillness of his chest.
His cock is already pressing against his pants. You notice this without looking directly, the way you notice a fire — by the heat of it, by the fact that the room feels different suddenly
You don’t say anything. You walk to his desk, turn so your back is to him, and lean against the edge of it. Your ass settles onto his work papers with a soft, definitive sound. You glance back at him over your shoulder.
He still hasn’t spoken. He’s just watching you.
His eyes trace the uniform, absorbing every detail like a blueprint he’s determined to master. His jaw is tight. The smirk hasn’t arrived yet — it’s building, you can see it in the set of his mouth, the way the corner of his lip is just beginning to pull.
You cross your arms loosely, settle your weight back, and look at him.
“Well?” you say, keeping your voice light, unbothered, like you aren’t desperately aware of your own heartbeat. “What do you think? Think it shrunk?”
And there it is — the smirk, slow and deliberate as a knife being unsheathed, landing at the corner of his mouth like he was never trying to hold it back, just waiting to make sure you were watching when it showed up.
“Mhm,” Caleb says. It’s not an answer. It’s not even a word. It’s just a sound in the low register of his voice that goes directly down your spine. The look in his eyes is the look of a man who has already decided what’s going to happen next and finds it very, very funny that you thought you were in charge of this.
You swallow.
Maybe you didn’t think this through all the way.
You think — well, you THOUGHT — that you have the upper hand here.
You’re sitting on his desk, his papers crinkled under your ass, wearing his uniform like you own it, and he’s just standing there in front of you looking at you with that smirk, and you think: yeah, okay, I’ve got him. You think: he’s flustered and I did that. You think a lot of things very quickly, in the way you do when you’re trying to feel confident and your brain is helping you lie to yourself.
Then Caleb stands up.
He’d been leaning slightly forward, one hand on the arm of his chair. He rises to his full height like the tide coming in, slow and inevitable, and suddenly he is very tall.
You’ve always known he’s tall. Six-foot-two is not a secret.
You have lived with this man, you’ve stood next to him at the grocery store and craned your neck at him across the dinner table and had him tuck you under his arm for years without really registering it the way you register it now.
You have to lean back just to keep eye contact. Your hands go automatically to the desk behind you, bracing.
“Hi,” you say, which is not what you’d planned to say.
He doesn’t answer. Instead he reaches out — and picks you up. Both hands, one at your hip and one at your thigh, and he lifts you like you’re a piece of paper he’s clearing off the desk and deposits you further back on the desk surface, higher up, and the pants — the beautiful, already-suffering pants — finally meet their end.
The seam goes with a sharp tearing sound right down the middle, and you feel the cool air of the room find your inner thighs, and you make a sound you hadn’t planned to make, somewhere between a gasp and a laugh, and your hands fly down to cover yourself automatically. That does nothing, by the way, because Caleb’s hands are already there, wrapping around your wrists and holding them to the side with a calm, immovable firmness.
His hands are enormous around your wrists. You could probably fight it but you don’t, because you’ve already forgotten what you were fighting for.
Your panties are orange. Bright, irreverent orange, the exact same color as the stripe on his flight jacket, and they are completely visible through the wreckage of the pants.
Caleb stares at them.
And then he does something you didn’t predict, because you should have known by now that Caleb in this mode is ungovernable: he drops his head.
He dips down between your thighs and puts his nose right against the fabric, and inhales. Long and deep and completely shameless, like you’re something he’s been wanting to smell for a long time and he is going to take his time about it.
You feel the breath of it through the fabric, warm and deliberate, and your hands jerk reflexively in his grip but he doesn’t let go.
“Caleb—“
He licks. A long, slow drag of his tongue over the front of your underwear, and the fabric is thin enough that you feel all of it — the wet heat, the pressure, the shape of his mouth working against you like he’s trying to memorize you through the cotton.
He does it again. He makes a sound low in his throat that is not a civilized sound, that belongs to something older and less housebroken than any version of Caleb you’ve been allowed to see before.
There is saliva soaking into the fabric now. There is the obscene warmth of his mouth. And there is you, gripping the edge of his desk with fingers gone white, breathing through your teeth.
He lets go of your wrists, steps back, and reaches into his own pants. He doesn’t bother taking them off — just shoves them down to his knees, enough to free himself, and his cock springs out like it’s been waiting for this, already flushed and heavy, standing up toward his stomach.
He wraps one hand around the base of it and strokes it slowly, watching you, watching the orange of your panties, watching the evidence of what he’s already done to them.
“Mmm,” he says again, that low sound from before. Not a word. An assessment.
Then he steps forward, and instead of pushing in — instead of doing the obvious thing, the thing you are absolutely ready for whether you’ll admit it or not — he just leans against you.
Pushes his cock down flat against the front of your panties, along your stomach, and the length of him is just. There. You both look down at the same time.
His tip passes your navel. Surpasses it. There’s cock laid against your stomach in a way that makes the math of the situation very, very clear.
“Look here, Pips.” His voice is low and easy, like he’s making an observation about the weather, like he’s discussing something reasonable and not currently resting every inch of himself against your skin. “I’m gonna be in here one day.”
Not I want to. Not can I? Just — I’m going to. The same tone he uses when he talks about flight routes and promotions and things he’s already decided are going to happen.
Your mouth opens. Nothing comes out.
He pulls back, and there are wet spots on your panties, and he looks at them with an expression of profound satisfaction before he presses himself back against you. Not inside, just along you, rubbing the length of his cock over your pussy through the ruined fabric. You’re so wet that it soaks through immediately and he can feel it.. You can tell by the hitch in his breath and the way his hips rock forward once, twice, following the slick heat of you like he can’t help it.
“Fuck,” he breathes, and it comes out reverent.
His cock moves against you in long, rolling strokes, gathering up your slick, dragging it across the fabric. Spreading isn’t enough. It isn’t enough, and Caleb knows it, and you know it, and the knowing doesn’t stop anything.
You feel the exact moment he loses the last organized thought in his head. It’s in the shift of his hips, the way they press forward with new intent instead of the rolling stroke from before.
His hands grip the backs of your thighs, and he pushes, and the wet cotton of your panties catches him, gives just a little, and his tip nudges in by a fraction — barely there, barely a suggestion of inside — and that’s all it takes.
He cums.
Just like that.
A low, bitten-off sound tears out of him, and you feel it — the heat of it soaking into the fabric, spreading in a wet rush that joins everything already there, and he’s still pressed against you, shuddering, his forehead dropping toward your shoulder without quite landing.
“Jesus—“ he breathes, and it comes out broken, like he wasn’t expecting himself.
You look down. The orange cotton is wrecked, soaked through and stained, clinging to you with the weight of what he’s done, and Caleb is looking down at it too.
“Again,” he decides, out loud, which is not a request.
He draws back and pushes forward again, harder this time, and the fabric holds for approximately one more second before it doesn’t.
The seam at the center tears cleanly, cotton splitting apart, and with the combined slick of you and the mess he’s already made, his cock slides and then doesn’t quite find the angle it was looking for. Instead it slides up, and he ends up fitted snugly between your lips, sandwiched in the wet heat of you, your folds closing around him on either side without him getting inside. The tip of him grazes your clit.
You make a sound that isn’t your voice, or isn’t a voice you’ve used before.
He goes still. Then his hips roll, experimentally, once, feeling it — the slick of you on both sides of him, your flesh pressing in, and the soft brush of your pubic hair against the base of his cock strike him directly in the brain stem.
“Oh, fuck.”
His hips find a rhythm, a steady roll that sends his cock gliding between your lips. Each thrust drags him against your clit, his length slick with your desire and the remnants of his own release. The room echoes with filthy, sloppy sounds—the smack of skin on skin, the lewd squish of his cock plowing through the fucking mess you’ve made together.
He cums again. Just erupts, fountaining up your stomach, over the ripped hem of the costume jacket, and it goes everywhere and he watches it go everywhere. His cock is still twitching.
Then he looks up at you.
“Ma’am,” he says, and the word is wrong and filthy in his mouth. Wrong because you’re not his superior, wrong because he’s never called you that in his life, wrong because of everything. He says it with a straight face.
With his hand already moving, rubbing the flat of his palm over your stomach, spreading what he’s put there into your skin. His jaw is tight. “I don’t think this uniform belongs to me anymore.”
“Caleb—“
“’Yes, sir’ works.” He isn’t looking at your face. He’s watching his own hand move, the cream worked into your skin going slick and shining. His thumb drags through the mess of you and he pushes it between your pussy lips — against them, not in, just the pressure of him insisting — and your thighs try to close and his hips stop them. “You’re so wet for me, Pips. You’re soaking. Did you know that?”
You knew. You’ve known for the last fifteen minutes in excruciating detail.
“You did this to me,” you manage.
“Yeah,” he agrees, like that pleases him enormously. “I did.”
He takes the ruined waistband of your panties in both hands, the torn fabric hanging in tatters, and pulls the remnants taut. A strip of it pressed flat against you, between your lips, and then he presses his cock back over it, and the combined friction is something your nervous system genuinely wasn’t prepared for.
He drags. Long and deliberate and slow, forcing the fabric tight against your skin, and the edge of the seam catches your clit just right and you make a noise loud enough to embarrass yourself, your hands scrabbling at the back of his neck.
“There she is,” Caleb says, very quietly, and he does it again.
Your thighs shake. The pressure builds with a speed that makes you feel cheated out of the anticipation of it, and when you tip over the edge you take him with you. You squirt, sudden and surprised and messy, and it hits him across the lower stomach and the base of his cock and he makes a sound like he’s been hit.
You expected this to slow him down. You expected this to be the moment he regroups, take a breath, bring some of that Colonel composure back to bear.
He grabs your hips instead.
His eyes are wide and dark and there is nothing composed about him. He looks at the mess between your bodies, your slick and his cum and the ruined orange cotton of your underwear, and his expression is the expression of a man who has found the meaning of life,
“Need gege to clean you up?” He asks.
His hips roll forward, coating himself back in you, and the mess makes a sound, and Caleb Xia Yi Zhou, Colonel, decorated pilot, the most responsible person in your life, looks at you with your ruined uniform jacket hanging off your shoulders and your thighs wrapped around him and his cock slick with everything that’s passed between you, and he smiles. Wide and a little wild and completely without apology.
You are in so much trouble.
Caleb grabs the remnants of your panties in both fists and pulls, and they give immediately. The cotton is already destroyed, and the last of it comes away with a sound of final surrender.
He drops it somewhere. He grabs the shredded ends of the costume pants, what’s left of them still clinging to your legs, and those go too, peeled down and discarded over the edge of the desk. You’re bare from the waist down in the ruins of this cheap costume uniform and the cool air of his room comes for your skin all at once.
Caleb doesn’t notice, or maybe he doesn’t care. He’s looking at you with the focused, slightly unhinged attention, and his cock is still hard and flushed and absolutely ready despite cumming all his kids all over you.
He picks his cock back up in his hand. Looks at you. And then he brings it down against your pussy in a single, deliberate slap.
The sound it makes is obscene. Wet and sharp and loud in the quiet room, and the splatter of everything already there — your slick, his cum, the accumulated evidence of the last twenty minutes — goes everywhere, and you jerk. Your thighs try to close and Caleb puts one hand flat on your inner thigh, open-palmed, holding you in place.
“Stay,” he says, like you’re a very beloved problem.
He does it again. The slap of his cock against your pussy, light and then firmer, and every impact sends a shock up through your hips. The wet sound of it fills the room and he is watching — watching it happen, watching the cream fly, watching the way your lips part and close around the impact, and his expression is so rapt and so unabashedly delighted that you almost laugh except that you’re too busy making sounds that aren’t laughter.
“Caleb—“
“Sir,” he corrects, absently, still watching what he’s doing with the focus of someone who finds it genuinely fascinating. “Or ma’am, I don’t care, pick one.”
“I’m not calling you ma’am,” you say, breathless.
“No, you’re the ma’am.” He looks up briefly. “You’re in uniform, Pips.” Then back down. “You’re technically outranking me right now.”
This is demented reasoning and you both know it. But it doesn’t matter because he’s moved on from slapping his dick on you to pressing his tip directly against your clit, circling it in slow, lazy strokes like he’s drawing something. His free hand has found your pussy lips, two fingers sliding along either side, pressing them together, releasing, pressing again, the wet sounds mortifying and you’re watching him do it with your mouth open because apparently your body has decided to spectate.
“Hi,” Caleb says to your pussy, conversationally. His fingers press your lips together again. They make a sound. “Yeah,” he says, nodding, like he’s hearing something only he can understand. “I know. Me too.”
“Are you talking to it—”
“Shh.” His tip presses down and rolls over your clit again and your sentence evaporates. “We’re having a moment.”
You are going to lose your mind.
In fact, you are already losing it.
You lost it approximately seventeen minutes ago and you’ve just been running on the fumes of it.
And Caleb is still working that slow deliberate circle with the head of his cock and squishing your lips between his fingers with the focus of a man who has found his calling.
“You’re so goddamn soft,” he says, and now his voice has dropped all the way down, into that register that does things to your ovaries.
“You know that? Every time I think about how — “ he presses down harder, rolls, and you make a sound that does things to his expression — “how fucking small you are—“ another stroke, the tip dragging slick — “I can’t even, Pips. I would fill you up to your throat, do you understand that? I’m not — I’m being serious right now—“
“Caleb—“
“Sir,” he says again, more firmly this time, though it’s undercut by the fact that he’s clearly struggling to form sentences himself.
His hips have started moving again with that roll, working himself against you, and the slick built between you is audible and continuous and bubbly. “I would split you in half, sweetheart, I would be so far in you—”
He cums.
It happens mid-sentence, which would be funny under other circumstances. His voice just stops, replaced by a rough broken sound, and he tilts forward and his cock kicks upward and he paints you with it. Long white stripes landing across your stomach and the open front of the costume jacket, soaking into the fabric and your skin alike. And he keeps stroking through it with his fist, milking every last drop out, watching it land.
The uniform is destroyed.
It is a complete loss.
There is no dry cleaner in the world that could help this uniform.
You don’t care. You reach out and grab his wrist.
“Again, sir,” you say, which is what he said earlier.
He looks at you. His chest is heaving. His hair is messed up, falling across his forehead. His pants are still at his knees, which looks ridiculous, but on Caleb it just looks like a man who didn’t have time for niceties.
He tries. He genuinely tries.
His hips shift forward, his hand moves, and then his whole body seems to make a decision. Caleb falls forward, catching himself on his forearms on the desk, and lowers his head until his forehead rests in the crook of your neck. His weight on you but managed, warm and enormous, his breath coming against your collarbone in deep, ragged pulls.
He doesn’t move.
The room is very quiet.
After a moment, Caleb says, in a muffled, genuine tone, “I think my soul just left my body, Pips.”
You stare at the ceiling. Your chest is heaving.
There is cum on the costume. There is cum on you.
Your pants are in pieces on the floor and you are sitting on his work papers and his face is in your neck and he has just, apparently, experienced some kind of astral event.
“Are you dead?”
“Yes.” A pause. “Don’t tell Gran.”
You bring your hand up — slowly, because everything is a little slow right now — and rest it on the back of his head.
His hair is soft. It’s always soft, stupidly soft, and he makes a low satisfied sound at the contact like a very large, very spent dog who has found his spot and has no plans to relocate.
“Don’t die yet,” you tell the ceiling.
Caleb laughs into your neck. It’s muffled and helpless and warm, and it shakes through his whole chest and into you, and you feel it everywhere.
caleb x reader. hurt/comfort, late night calls, references to depression, not proofread. wc. 816
a/n: feeling really tired. listened to Jeff Buckley's "Lover, You Should've Come Over" on repeat and this is what came out.
dividers by @pixopix
“Caleb?”
Your voice sounds broken, even to your own ears. Like a CD that has been played repeatedly, tossed out as soon as the music falters from overuse. It doesn’t help that tears fall down your face akin to a waterfall.
On the other side of the line, Caleb’s voice is full of concern. A faint sound of a chip bag rustles, and the speaker of his phone rubs against the comforters he seems to be moving around. “Hey. What’s up?”
Courage is elusive, a fire ignited by determination. Unfortunately, you are reduced to nothing but weariness at the moment, only clinging on by a thread. You can’t find the courage to open up, nor can you find the words to explain the mix of emotions stirring in your beating heart.
But your silence is loud enough for Caleb to notice the meaning behind it. “Are you okay?”
You shake your head even though you’re aware he can’t see it. The sniffles should speak for themselves, as well as the little wails you try to hide behind tissues and pursed lips.
“Pips?” he calls for you, a hint of desperation in his tone. “Talk to me. Tell me what happened.”
Yet you are nothing but tears and sadness. Words are too much for a state so devastating. The best attempt you can muster is a whisper of his name, a plea for him to be here. To comfort you until your exhaustion is no longer so consuming.
“I’m here,” he says. “I’ll be here for as long as you need me, okay?”
Tears fall even more at the statement, not only because of the warmth in which he says them, but also because of the lie that coats them. He’s here through this call and his utmost attention to you, but he’s not here. He’s not in your room, whispering sweet words in your ear as you cry on his chest. His arms aren’t around your waist, gently caressing them as your words spill onto him effortlessly. His physical presence isn’t here to whisk your exhaustion away.
“Pips?” His voice is broken now, almost as broken as yours if that was even possible.
“I… I just needed to hear your voice,” you admit, courage seeping into you slowly. “I’m so, so tired, Caleb.”
When your voice comes back to you, you keep going.
“Life feels so… empty, you know? I-I have to drag myself through the day, but it doesn’t even feel worth it at the end. It all feels…”
The sentence drifts off into nothingness, for words are inadequate to describe the dark abyss that has depleted your light and left nothing but your tears to show for it.
For a second, you think Caleb hung up on you. The silence persists long after your last word, and it makes you wonder why you even spoke at all. Why you allowed courage to consume you, even if it was for only a moment.
But you hear him clear his throat on the other side of the line, tethering you back to the reality that Caleb would never ever hang up on you.
“I’m proud of you,” he murmurs, as gentle as the wind yet it makes that aching feeling in your chest rustle. “I’m so proud of you for waking up every day, pips. I can’t imagine how hard that must’ve been.”
So hard, you want to confirm. There were even days where the only sunlight you saw were the ones blocked by your curtains. Sometimes, when the day feels too much, you only see it through your eyelids.
Caleb clears his throat again. “Can you say that out loud for me? That I’m proud of you?”
His voice breaks as he says the absurd request, but you trust him regardless. “Caleb is p-proud of m-me.”
“Good. One day, I know you will be proud of yourself too, but until then, let me be the pillar you lean on.”
“O-okay.”
“Get some rest,” he follows. “Try to fall asleep by thinking of the clouds, or something that brings you comfort.”
The first laugh of the night escapes your lips. “I’ll imagine you cruising through the clouds.”
“That’s…” He falters for a second. “That’s good too.”
More laughs follow the first, all quiet and hesitant to bloom in the sunlight of hope. You clutch your blankets and bury yourself in them as you close your eyes.
“Feelin’ better?” he asks, and his voice sounds more stable now.
In truth, the emptiness still persists as it always has, but it feels lighter under the warmth of clouds and Caleb and his inability to not be proud of you. You hum a sound that closely resembles contentment.
“I’ll be there tomorrow, okay? Just stay put and don’t go anywhere.”
Delighted by this news, you fall asleep on the phone as Caleb’s voice becomes the music accompanying your dreams.
a/n: i hope this brings comfort to someone who needs it. thank you for being here.
any form of interaction is appreciated. take care :)
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