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fudgebuggyy · 15 hours ago

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♥︎ All Fours ♥︎

Pairing: Rocco Gauthier x Fem!Reader Summary: You leave your quiet hometown for the bowels of a dazzling, slightly chaotic Boston, in the hopes of reinventing yourself. But old habits die hard and your taste in men remains predictably disastrous. (Who knows? Maybe this one doesn't need any fixing?) Wordcount: 21.531k (for reasons only known to God wtf is wrong with me) Warnings/Tags: SMUT! (oral sex m!receiving because this asshole deserves a sloppy bj okay, unprotected p in v, massive praise kink, lots of "good girl"s, lil' bit of everything) Mechanic!Rocco, Dom/Sub Dynamics, Bit of Bratting, Angst, Humor (I like my shit slightly sad and very ridiculous okay), Slow Burn, Dating, Mentions of Drug/Alcohol Use, Strip Clubs, Mentions of Gangs/Gangsters?, Rocco owns a gun but no one gets hurt it's just hot, Reader is mid-twenties and grew up religious A/N: i love how i wanted to turn this into a chapter-by-chapter thing and then gave up. Here's all of it. Why so much you ask? Ethel Cain's Fuck Me Eyes probably... Reader is slightly unhinged and very babygirl (my favorite) and Rocco is a recovering shitbag and also babygirl (also my favorite). (I've decided to ignore Riff Raff for the most part, because...come on...) also it gets so corny, so, so corny you know me i can't help myself i must i must

All Fours

“Oh, no, babygirl. Out of all the schmucks in the world—”

“He’s nice.” You proclaimed this to your reflection in the heart-shaped mirror mounted to the ceiling, staring at yourself sprawled across the bed like a very pouty, very pathetic little Vitruvian Man.

“You’re so full of shit.” Tayla twisted upside-down on her practice pole.

It was weirdly cinematic: A stripper pole in the Honeymoon Suite of the Sugarland Motor Lodge.

It had taken the two of you a whole afternoon to set it up, cracking the popcorn ceiling paint in the process. For a moment you watched her, buttery brown skin in the glow of the television, her cropped tee riding high when she stretched her arms back, shaking her head as she twirled.

“He’s got a huge dick, and that’s about it.”

You narrowed your eyes. “Where have you attained such crucial information and how trustworthy is your source.”

Tayla laughed, all hiccupy with her still dangling upside-down. The ceiling groaned from the tension.

“Look. No one with a functioning frontal lobe would ever call Rocco Gauthier nice. And if you’re about to tell me that I don’t know him like you do, I’ve been here, baby. You should’ve seen him fresh out of juvie. Kid was a horny stray with, like, rabies. And a mullet.”

“Well, he’s neutered now.” You stared at yourself in the mirror again. “Metaphorically.”

You could feel Tayla’s deadpan like a slap to the back of the head. The sound of her skin squeaking down the pole as she lowered herself.

“He’s nice,” you repeated, sounding so, so, so stupid with it.

“Do you think you were dropped on your head when you were a baby? Metaphorically?”

“Fuck you. Fine. He’s nice-adjacent.”

“Mh-hmm.”

“Sometimes.” God. “When he wants to be.” You buried your face in your hands and rolled off the bed, puddling onto the floor and spewing a pathetic sigh. Lately that was all floors were good for; to be sprawled across and pathetically sighed upon. “And he’s hot. He’s so—hot.” You murmured this into the musty pink carpet, into its cigarette burns and dubious stains, confessing it in one desperate gush, trying to rid yourself of it. You wanted to rip the bristles out with your teeth. You wanted to die.

“Why must he be so fucking hot?”

Tayla hiccuped another laugh. “There she is.”

“I want to lick motor oil off his hands. I want to scoop his stupid hair gel into my mouth—”

Tayla kept laughing, and you kept wining, about your borderline world-ending taste in men. You were flush with it, swollen, filled to the brim, thinking and thinking desperately, Why is it always like this? Why does it always have to feel like this?

You blinked into the cavernous space beneath the bed, littered with forgotten scrunchies and dust bunnies. A condom wrapper, two. You spotted a dollar. You palmed it and clenched your eyes closed and wished, really, really hard, like blowing out a candle:

Please, please, please, please, you mouthed, just let me like someone the normal amount.

Just this once.

(Wishing wasn’t praying after all. This was your loophole.)

· · ♥︎ · ·

The first time you saw her, she was out on her smoke break. Glowing in the nimbus of her pink fur coat as she sat at the back entrance of a strip club. Body glitter, her see-through heels like frosted glass.

Looking back, she’d described you as fresh-off-the-bus: Like Wendy from Kansas on the worst day of her damn life.

It had started to pour by the time you’d made it two blocks away from the bus station—duffle bag; phone dead; ten bucks in your backpocket—stumbling up a street crammed with clubs and strip joints and neon-lit massage parlors promising a 50% discount for first-time customers. Men whistled at street corners, cars hurtled past spraying muck up the sidewalk. Everything punishing, dizzying. Everything everywhere.

Boston, that day, had been relentless.

You hadn’t realized you’d been crying until she’d called out to you, an angel in an alleyway beckoning from inside her soft cloud of smoke. She offered you a cigarette and some shelter from the rain, and you sat with her, the lush press of her fur coat against your arm as she listened to you cry. Her name was Tayla. She smelled like candy.

You missed your sisters so much you couldn’t speak.

The next thing you knew you were in the dressing room of a strip club run by some retired showgirl named Miss Dottie; her panther-like face fluffed with filler, her fog of Chanel No. 5. And you fell asleep on the couch in the back, cheek mushed against sequined thongs, surrounded by what your mother would’ve described as a godless hotbed of wicked women. (Which was fantastic news, really, considering she believed you to be a wretched whore not right with the Lord.)

It was there, you’d taken off your grandmother's cross necklace and placed it in a pink crystal ashtray the girls kept by the wig stand. It had felt too easy. Was it really so easy? Was the secret algorithm to leaving a life really just boarding four Greyhounds to nowhere in particular?

You couldn’t dance, and you certainly could not spin around on a ten-foot pole, so Tayla schmoozed Miss Dottie into letting you wait some tables until you found a job in the daylight. She’d said it like that too, like this right here was vampiric business, a thing meant only for nocturnals, for wretched whores not right with the Lord.

Before your first shift, Miss Dottie sat you down in front of one of the bulb-lined vanities, like in an old Hollywood movie, like in Sunset Boulevard, black-and-white, that deep mystic whimsy, and she helped you glue on fake lashes as wide as paper fans, powdered your nose and lined your lips, dusted glitter down your cleavage, your thighs.

When she was done, she squeezed your cheeks like your grandmother once had. That sweet, sweet southern pinch that reminded you of a place that had left a home-shaped hole in your head.

“Welcome to the coven, babygirl.”

Was there a word for feeling like the saddest happiest person alive?

· · ♥︎ · ·

Admittedly, that first year was a mess: double-shifts and admissions paperwork and weekend benders and college course catalogs and overdraft fees and Victoria's Secret Body Sprays that made everything smell like birthday cakes and Caribbean vacations.

Life was as dazzling as it was awful.

Like Tayla, you rented a unit at Sugarland Lodge down on Western. A rundown motor inn, where as long as you paid every Thursday before noon, no one asked any questions and no one unplugged your AC. It was a place of cheap withered kitsch, of pink carpets and mirror ceilings, baby-blue bathrooms with tubs shaped like hearts where Tayla and you would lie like newlyweds, sharing a bottle of candy-sweet pharmacy wine, crying over men, crying most over your mothers.

It wasn’t great, but it would do. You had big, big plans, and there was enough space for them here. The world was bigger in Boston.

Tayla called you a real doer, that this was what doers did, that sometimes they had to leave things behind to make things happen.

She’d been at the Lodge for years. If she’d just sell her car, she’d be able to afford a place of her own, but she’d told you a girl needs a hobby, and hers happened to be, “My satin-pink Cadillac DeVille Convertible with leather seats as soft as a saint’s bare ass!”

You knew the truth was she liked the impermanence of a place like this, that things could be forever transient and life could be forever unserious. And your favorite days were the ones where she drove you all the way to Revere Beach, the two of you all done-up, pretending you were flush with time and money and carelessness. Top down, hair flying, the ocean roiling black beside you.

Sometimes you’d think of God. Other times, you’d think of your sisters, your shared childhood bedroom rotting somewhere in a swamp in the south—where only mosquitoes lived and shame.

You were a wicked woman now. Wicked women didn’t have to miss anything.

They didn’t have to be mindful of how they spent their days, or what they said out loud, or how they dressed, and in the backrooms of the club, you let Tayla spangle you in plastic diamonds, her murmured good girl while you patiently let her slip on a pair of nylons for you or tightened a corset, strapping your heels like you were a doll. You’d never been fussed over like this. You wanted to be fussed over forever, by everyone, anyone, all the time, wanted to be turned this way and that, eyes closed, purse your lips, smack ‘em, tits out, babydoll, tits all the way out.

How your brain went fuzzy in the mess of it all—watching the girls shimmy to Madonna in the dressing room, patting baby powder to their crotches and smearing the insoles of their heels in Vaseline. Band-Aids on burst blisters. Eyebrows fixed with hairspray. Takeout hastily scarfed down with tiny plastic forks. Your unapologetically vicious bouts of laughter. The real kind, with your head shooting back, mouth all the way open.

And every night, you waited patiently for Miss Dottie to float into the dressing room on her cloud of Chanel No. 5, and she’d clap her hands and declare with such bravado, “Showtime, witches!”

Like rattlers, out into the night you spilled.

· · ♥︎ · ·

Your days ended at five in the morning, when Tayla drove you back to the Lodge. And you threw tired kisses at the early commuters dragging themselves across the parking lot, their slow march in the hazy morning light. They threw tired kisses back—a silly choreography that had started when a group of Polish women had moved into the rooms next to yours, hopping into the same white van labeled Sterling MaidsCo every morning at five AM on the dot.

“Good morning, angels!” Tayla shouted at them as she clambered up the stairs, waving sweetly.

“Good night, anioły!” They shouted back from the parking lot, waving their glimmering cigarettes and phones.

You didn’t bother with going to your room, stumbling straight to Tayla’s where the two of you ate cup noodles curled on the bed, smoking the joint some John had wrapped in bills and tucked into the strap of Tayla’s thong. It helped with the blisters on your feet—but it also made you want to call home.

Sometimes the need of it swelled inside of you like an abscess.

In the background Lilo & Stitch was playing the fourth time that week. The TV only played DVDs you could borrow from Ron at the front desk. It had become your habit of trading a new movie for a pack of cigs each week. (You two had your sights set on Uptown Girls the following Monday.)

On the screen, Lilo sat on her little knees and prayed for a friend.

Joining in, Tayla kneeled on the bed, waved the joint like a smudge stick, her cherry-red acrylics clacking when she pressed her hands together. The whole world smelled like weed and coconut body spray.

“It’s me again, bitch,” she ad-libbed in a whisper. “I need some reliable dick in my life. I beg of you, send me a man with good credit—”

And smiling, all loose, you closed your eyes and clasped your hands in mock-seriousness; thinking suddenly, with something almost like pain, of those sweltering Sunday mornings spent on a pew that creaked every time you’d flattened your dress to your thighs.

If you just wished really, really hard, it wasn’t praying. It wasn’t.

Maybe an angel,you mouthed. Send me the nicest angel you have.

· · ♥︎ · ·

“—listen up, you crusty ballsack-lookin’-ass motherfucker. I know where you live, you geriatric fuck! I swear to God, if that payment is delayed one more time I will bust your fucking kneecaps. I will—you know what? I will drive your fucking Barracuda into a fucking wall. Oh, you think that’s funny? Let me—I’m not done! I’m trying to run a legitimate fucking business here, I’m not taking your goodwill bullshit anymore. If you—No, if you fucking hang up, so help me God, I will—Hello? Hello—”

A curse. A groan.

You stared down at the mechanic lying beneath a very expensive looking car, his jean-clad legs jerking once and hard before sprawling out in defeat. A phone followed, tossed out from beneath the car and skidding across the pavement. It bumped against your boot.

The man didn’t move for a long time. You might’ve considered nudging his leg if his phone hadn’t lit up, vibrating with an incoming call from: Jerk-Off (Uncle P).

At the sound, the man pulled himself out from beneath the car, revealing the rest of him in one smooth glide—leather belt, white T-shirt riding up, chest, neck.

Face.

And what a face. What a dreadfully lovely face for a man who’d just called someone a crusty ballsack.

“Can I help you?” he said.

You nodded, staring. Could eyes be disastrously blue? Life-threateningly so?

“I’m here to check on a car?” You had to push it from yourself. You felt hot. “For a friend.” You felt hot, hot.

Frowning, the man got to his feet, stepping closer. You stepped back, boots scraping across the asphalt.

“You got a claim tag?” He bent down to grab his phone.

“Uh—no. Sorry—” Sorry, because here you stood, in gas-station sunglasses and boxer shorts and the threadbare Patriots T-shirt you’d scooped from the floor because you’d forgotten you were supposed to be here in the first place. Freshly floundered-out-of-bed, hungover, a can of Redbull in one hand, pack of Camels in the other. You looked like a frat boy.

He looked like a stubbled Matt Dillon in Rumble Fish.

At full height, the man was tall enough to loom over you. A strand of dark hair loosening into his face before he slicked it back.

“What car is it?” he said.

“Um…it’s pink," you said.

And as if all the cosmic powers that be had teamed up to spite you, a divinely timed ray of sunlight streamed in through the warehouse windows, hitting him square in the jaw as if to say, this one, oh, this one right here—

“Let me guess, leather seats as soft as a saint’s bare ass?”

· · ♥︎ · ·

The mechanic’s name was Rocco.

And when Rocco wasn’t busy giving the general public an aneurysm with his big blue eyes, he ran the R&R Autobody Shop with some guy named Vince. Which made them sound like two-bit goons in a 50s gangster movie. But it was, after all, a legitimate fucking business that did not take goodwill bullshit.

Apparently Rocco had been the one who’d sold Tayla the Cadillac in the first place. Back then, it had been midnight-blue, and the line with the saint’s ass had been his original sales pitch.

You hadn’t thought much about where Tayla brought her car whenever she complained about a hiccup in the engine or the paint needing a touch-up. She’d mention some cryptic garage in passing: This tin can off Highway 9 next to this gutted Staples that’s, like, legit spooky, bro...

She’d never asked you to check on her car before, but she’d been swept away on an impromptu trip to Miami with a divorced dentist named Carl or Calvin (you didn't remember; you didn't think Tayla remembered either)—so there you were, unsure of what you were supposed to do in the first place. Make sure the car was still in one piece? That all of the tires were still attached?

Rocco led you to the back of the small warehouse. There, between stacked tires and work benches and heavy machinery, the Cadillac glistened like a pink jewel bug.

Its long hood was propped open as Rocco leaned into it, big hands hovering over a complicated tangle of tubes and wires. “—carburetor was the main issue. Secondaries weren’t closing right and the bowl was overfilling, so we had to rebuild the whole thing. Fucking pain, but she shouldn’t have any flooding now.” He scratched at his jaw, his soft five-o’clock-shadow. “Bodywork’s done. Two-stage paint. Also, she’s getting a discount on the lettering. Be very sure to tell her that, otherwise she’ll send over her weird-ass cousins again, and I’m too old to get my shit rocked—” All you could do was nod when he showed you the lettering in question. It was painted on the driver’s side door in red ink; tiny, curlicue, very pretty: Scorpio Rising.

It was so Tayla you would’ve rolled your eyes if you weren’t having an internal crisis over how this man’s big hands had painted something so delicate, or how his cologne kept wafting towards you when he stood so close, and he stood very, very close, because he seemed like a real lean-in type of guy, a getting-all-up-in-your-business type of guy, and he told you he’d send the bill tomorrow, and you were nodding, tomorrow, okay, tomorrow, and he said, tomorrow, yeah, tomorrow, and you realized then you still had your sunglasses on, and you wondered how much bluer his eyes would be without them, and so you shoved them up into your hair and they got tangled in the strands and you were trying to unhook them, trying not to look like such a terrible mess, because what a mess, what a fucking mess, and Rocco was mid-sentence, and then he wasn’t, and he was kind of just looking at you, and you were kind of just looking back.

He said something. He waited. He said it again.

“—all yours.”

“Hm?” You blinked. You were sure your glasses were perched all crooked on your head.

He was smiling. It almost looked soft. “The car.”

“Right. The car.” You stared at his mouth.

Rocco clicked the hood back into place before reaching around you to open the driver’s side door. The hot skim of his arm against yours. Graze of those soft hairs. Big plume of cologne. Flash of blue beneath dark lashes.

This was still new to you—the handling of beautiful men.

“The ramp’s a little wonky,” Rocco said, voice low enough it scraped through you. “So you have to back her out slow, but other than that, key’s in the ignition. She’s good to go.”

You blinked at that. Vision sharpening all at once.

“Uh—wait. I’m not here to pick it up. Tay said I was just supposed to check—”

“Check what?” He chuffed under his breath. “If it still has four tires?”

Rocco wasn’t standing so close anymore. You took a deep breath like you were scared the room would run out of oxygen the second he leaned back in.

“I don’t know, she said, you know, she said to go check? And I said—okay?”

“Look, the car needs to be picked up. We don’t have the space. She knows that.”

“She also knows I can’t drive stick.”

“You can’t drive stick.”

Okay.

You didn’t like the way he’d said it.

Rocco tilted his head like he needed a better angle to judge you from.

“Uh—Yeah,” you spluttered. You were spluttering. “Me and eighty-nine percent of all Americans.” You were also making up statistics on the spot. “My point is she’d publicly decapitate me if my ass even faced that driver’s seat.”

Rocco’s face shifted from slight-amusement to kind-of-pissed-off. “I’m confused. Why are you here then?”

“I told you, to check on the car.”

“No, I got that. I just think that’s fucking ridiculous. You don’t think that’s fucking ridiculous? The car is here. It’s fine. It’s waiting, actually. It’s been waiting four whole days to be specific, which honestly, you know what, I’lll add to the bill—”

“Okay, cool?” You coughed up a laugh. “I still can’t drive it.”

“What do you expect to happen here?”

You couldn’t help your scoff, looking around like this was a sitcom. “I don’t know, man. You drive it.”

He cocked a brow.

“I’m sorry, what do you want me to do?” You jerked your head, fumbling to keep your sunglasses from falling. “Push it across town? Round up the neighborhood? I’ll post it on Craigslist— ”

“I don’t care how you get this car out of my garage, just get it out of my fucking garage.”

He leaned all the way in. There goes the oxygen, you thought. And then you stopped thinking altogether.

"Sure." You slid into the car.

And as you tossed the Camels and the Redbull to the passenger’s side, you knew that if Tayla were here to witness your ass firmly settled in the driver's seat, even if done out of complete and utter pettiness (a state of mind she usually championed), she would have you hanged in the Sugarland Lodge parking lot.

But Tayla was in Miami. And you were a creature fueled on spite as you adjusted the seat, the rearview mirror, jostling the stick shift the way you'd seen her do countless of times. Foot on the brakes, you turned the key in the ignition. The little hot-pink pompoms dangling from the keychain you’d gifted her just last month, swinging when the engine rumbled to life. Okay, you thought. Okay, okay.

That prickle on the back of your neck as Rocco watched. You had a feeling this was a man who could wait out a bluff. Little did he know that you were a woman who could take a bluff too far.

Rocco made a sound like a grumble or a laugh, and maybe he wasn’t waiting this out at all, maybe he’d actually let you roll right out of this garage and straight into incoming traffic. Into the closest hospital, possibly. An untimely death, hopefully.

You clenched your eyes closed, opened them, tried to take a breath, but you hadn’t been able to breathe for the last half hour—fine, fuck it—and with the kind of impulsivity you blamed on the hypoxia, you eased your foot off the brakes.

The Cadillac rocked backwards.

Rocco’s arm shot forward so fast you made a sound like a hiccup. His hand grabbed your knee, slamming it down to keep your foot on the brakes.

For a moment you stared at it; his hand, thick and wide and tan and hot on your bare skin, the deep divots of your flesh beneath his fingers, how you gave way to it so easily. With his other arm, he reached for the stick shift, maneuvering it back, before twisting the key to turn the engine off in one fluid, practiced motion.

Pink pompoms swaying. His shoulder grazing your chin when he leaned back.

Eyes.

Cologne.

You felt hot, hot, felt like something had knocked you loose, like you were the only thing in the world at an impossible angle. He was close enough you felt his breath on your face. And the heat of it then. The heat of him, how it spilled everywhere. How it made the panic lap up your throat like water rising, made you think, oh no. Oh no, oh no—

“Vince!” Rocco shouted into the cavernous warehouse, head at an angle, but eyes fixed on you.

“Yeah!” Someone shouted back twice as loud. Vince, you presumed.

“Running an errand!” Rocco shouted.

“The fuck!” Vince shouted back.

To you, “Scoot over, Schumacher.”

· · ♥︎ · ·

Two strangers sitting in a pink Cadillac DeVille Convertible somewhere on a highway in Boston—the setup to a cheap joke you hadn’t found the punchline to yet.

(Was it funnier if one of the strangers was concerningly hot?)

“Did we just have our first fight?” Rocco finally said after a bout of silence.

You felt a kind of relief smooth back your smile when you shoved your sunglasses onto your nose. “I grew up with three sisters, that was smalltalk.”

Nodding, Rocco kept his gaze on the road. He was frowning a little. It made you think of Robert De Niro. He wiped a hand across his mouth, taking a breath. “Working on being less of an asshole. How’d I do?”

“Depends. Who were you on the phone with earlier?”

“That doesn’t count.”

“That doesn’t count?”

“I’d like my interactions to be evaluated in a vacuum.”

“Oh, so like in real life.”

Rocco punched out a laugh. You wondered if his laughter always sounded like this, like a terribly assembled nail bomb, unpredictable and spewing and very dirty.

“Who’s Uncle P?” you said.

“A jerk-off,” he said, biting a smile like he was trying not to laugh again. “Would you really have driven the car?”

“Probably,” you said, biting a smile like you were trying not to laugh with him. “But I’m trying to be more responsible.”

“Oh, yeah?” He lifted his brows. “And how’s that working out?”

“Well, first of all, thank you for asking. So,” you took a long rattling breath, “I was four days late to checking on my best friend’s car. And then I was late again today because I got drunk and dropped acid with our new bar manager, his name’s Beans—don’t ask—and Beans sells GHB to minors out of a water bottle that he keeps in the trunk of his car, all of which I knew beforehand.” You turned to face him. “I’ve come to the harrowing conclusion that I have the survival instinct of a shrimp.”

Rocco laughed again. Deep grooves dipping right below his eyes, cheeks bunched high. “Did you have fun at least?”

“Time of my life.” You grinned, and it must’ve been big enough, Rocco shot you a glance, eyes flicking over your mouth.

A car honked behind you, a rowdy Jeep of young men piled atop each other, revving the engine.

Rocco’s hand tightened on the steering wheel, but he stayed on his lane, paid them no mind.

You liked the way his hand looked on the stick shift.

You wanted to trace the shape of his long slender nose with a finger.

“Where the hell did you come from?” Rocco asked this like one might a crab crawling across a supermarket parking lot.

“Ezel,” you said. “Texas.”

“Ah, yes. Ezel, Texas. Home of…”

“Swamps mostly. And a church,” you added. “One supermarket. A bait shop—two, actually. Oh, and a meth lab. Possibly. Multiple.”

He took a breath. “Wow, that’s—”

“Seismically depressing?”

“I was going to say quaint.”

“If you squint.” You were still turned towards him, leg hiked up a little to face him fully.

Rocco shot you these glances, long enough, deliberate, like he knew what he was doing; eyes on your mouth, your leg, your thigh pressed against the center console.

You watched his hand weave the stick shift, that low chug-click of the gears changing, that low chug-click in your throat every time they did. You thought of what that hand had felt like on your bare knee. You wanted to scrape your fingers through the swirl of hair on his arm, all the way up to where his shoulder stretched his T-shirt.

You were hot, hot.

Shuttling across the highway in a pink rocket, floating in it, chest rising against the snag of the seatbelt.

“Place wasn’t for you?” Rocco asked.

“It’s not for anyone,” you answered.

The Jeep from before rumbled past as you veered off the highway, red-faced boys dangling out the window like a cage full of snow monkeys, slapping their hands across the car doors, whooping, baring their teeth.

“Well,” nudging his head towards them, Rocco sighed, “welcome to this fucking shithole.”

“I can tell you’ve never lived near a swamp before.”

His dirty little laugh. “Touché.”

“I like it here.” Clouds slung low over the skyline, buildings bulky, boxed-in, threaded by telephone lines. “I think it’s nice,” you said this to the vast grey expanse.

“Nice, huh. That’s a first.” Rocco’s fingers dribbled a rhythm across the steering wheel. And when the car rocked to a stop at a red light, he turned towards you, and his slender throat bobbed as if he was about to ask you a very important, very serious question.

Shall we perhaps fuck like rabbits in the backseat of your best friend’s car? What is your stance on impromptu blowjobs? Have you ever, per chance, been fingered in public? Would you like to be?

“Do you like truffle lasagna?” he asked.

“What?”

“Do you like truffle lasagna?”

You snorted, knocking your knees together, swaying. “I don’t know. I’ve never had truffle lasagna.”

“There’s a real nice place around the corner. Best truffle lasagna in…” Inhaling like he was thinking, before huffing a breath, “I don’t know, probably in a three-block radius. Who fucking knows.”

“Truffle lasagna,” you said.

“Truffle lasagna, yeah.”

“I kind of like saying it.”

“It’s a nice mouthful.”

This time you cackled, head tilted towards the car ceiling, mouth all the way open.

“I feel like our definitions of nice are very different,” you finally said when you caught yourself. You looked down at your boxer shorts. “Also, I’m in my pajamas.” Your mismatched socks peeking out the shafts of your boots. “And I think I’m still a little high.”

The light turned green. The engine revved.

“We’ll take it to go then,” he said, and his mouth smoothed into the slowest smile, rearranging his face like it had to make space for something so dreadful and so lovely.

· · ♥︎ · ·

That night, when you stumbled up to your room, when you closed the door with your back against it, when you slid slowly to the floor until you lay sprawled across the carpet. You squeezed your eyes shut. And then you laughed, shaking your head. Hand smacked to your open mouth.

Oh no.

· · ♥︎ · ·

“Why is Rocco Gauthier here and why is he asking for you?”

The beaded curtains of the dressing room clinked as they parted for Margot, fresh off the stage in her chrome bikini, her hair like a white swirl of soft-serve.

“Who the hell would he be asking for?” someone shouted from the vanities.

“Texas.”

You were mid-chew, working your way down a fried clam roll, feeling suddenly like a car crash caught on live television when everyone’s head snapped towards you.

A crumpled dollar bill fell from Margot’s thong.

And then it started, a barrage of squealing and shouting, tubes of mascara flying, a wild frenzy that reminded you of the girl’s locker room after PE.

“Rocco who?” you murmured around a mouthful of brioche. Mayo plopped into your cleavage.

“Oh, don’t play dumb in here, Texas,” someone else called out from behind the clothing racks. Girls jittered with laughter.

You were in the process of wiping mayo off with a used cotton pad when one of the dancers flicked the back of your head with her acrylics as she passed. “Ow,” you hissed. “Come on! He can’t be that bad!”

“Oh, girl…” It came from all around the room, like some bedazzled, hairspray-humid Greek chorus. They were judging you, you were being judged. “Should we give her a lobotomy?”

You tossed a fried clam at the closest cluster of conspiring heads. Their shrieks of delight.

Margot scooped the bills from her thong and tossed them on your vanity. She pulled the halter of your dress back onto your shoulder from where it had slipped.

“Don’t worry about them,” she said. “He’s pretty, he’s just a little…polarizing.”

Someone howled with mean, mean laughter.

"You better tell him to leave, because if Tayla gets off stage, she’ll tell Dottie, and Dottie will perform an exorcism. Stop laughing. I’m not kidding. With a whole-ass priest. He blesses her office sometimes.”

“I still have one clam roll,” you mumbled, trying to school your face.

This was your break after all, and your feet were aching, and the bachelor party on table nine wouldn’t stop asking you for a lap dance, and you were so endlessly exhausted because you hadn’t slept for two days straight, your mind spinning circles around a certain pretty, polarizing, blue-eyed mechanic—who was here now, at The Dollhouse, asking for you.

Margot arched a perfectly shaped brow.

“How do I look?” you asked.

“Like a bitch with bad taste.”

“Fair.”

The girls slapped your ass as you left the dressing room, which felt a lot like some silly version of getting towel-whipped by a bunch of jocks on the way to the showers. You tried not to laugh, tried not to feel so ridiculous teetering on your too-high heels, in your too-tight dress, as you dipped back into the club.

It felt the same every time, like holding your breath as you entered the “Tunnel of Love” at an amusement park. Suddenly dark and hot and everything glinting in the soft purple light.

Through a tangle of people, you spotted him leaning against the mirrored bar. Tall, lean, jeans, bomber jacket. You liked the shape of him, the easy bend of someone comfortable with themselves. He was talking to Beans, your GHB-pedaling bar manager, laughing at something he’d said. (Beans was not funny, so at least Rocco knew how to be somewhat polite—your taste couldn't be that bad, could it?).

You wished it was quiet enough for you to hear that laugh, the dirty lilt, the spew of it.

Taking a breath, you scooped your halter from where it had slipped from your shoulder and marched towards him.

“So your presence has been described as polarizing,” you called out in greeting.

Rocco turned, grin faltering when he registered it was you, grin disappearing altogether when he registered what you were wearing. “Jesus Christ.”

“Hi.” You smiled.

“Hi” His eyes flicked to your cleavage, flicked back up.

“Well?”

He blinked. “Hm?” Swallowed, staring at your mouth.

You huffed a laugh. He looked like he’d been drinking, face glazed over with it

You'd forgotten it would feel like this, like dunking your head underwater, immovable in it, that pressure pushing into your ears.

You were hot, hot. You were trying to breathe.

Maybe you really should let the girls give you a lobotomy.

“I have a feeling Dottie would have you thrown out if she knew you were here.”

“What makes you say that? I’m famously well-behaved.” His cheeky grin. All crooked, and just a little bit mean. You knew then this was his move: Come on, baby, I’m a good time.

Your halter slipped again, but you were too busy staring at him to bother.

“What are you doing here anyways?” you said. “I was kind of on my lunch break.”

“Tayla refused to give me your number.”

“So you came all the way here to ask for my number?”

“I came here to ask you out to dinner,” he said. “Or drinks,” he added. “Or coffee. I’m going to be honest, I haven’t been able to stop thinking about you. I’d take a smoke break, at this point. I’d take five minutes.”

“I’ll give you six. I’d like to finish my clam roll.”

He grinned, nodding, looking at you like you amused him endlessly.

“What about ten?” he tried.

“Eight.”

“Deal.” He smiled, and it was boyish and just a little bit crooked, like that crookedness promised things he’d never say out loud.

He nodded, okay. And you nodded, okay. And he leaned in close, and you were too clouded with it to lean away. His hand hovered over your arm, you felt the heat of it there, before a finger scooped up your halter and slid it back up. The cuff of his knuckle along your skin.

You swallowed when he leaned in even closer, face to face with the wide swell of his chest. The flash of a silver chain at his collar.

“You look like a fucking heart attack.” Murmured right into your ear as if to kiss it.

· · ♥︎ · ·

You gave Rocco your number, saved it under Shrimp 💜

· · ♥︎ · ·

Sometimes it felt like you’d grown up in secret—sprawled across the living room carpet, always damp in the depths of a summer night with the bullfrogs croaking.

Chewing on your cross necklace and drinking iced tea gone warm, there you lay glued to your dad’s old laptop, the one with a screen that glitched. Its black power cord crawling from the kitchen, over the couch, beneath the coffee table, like a tangled centipede.

When the house was asleep, you gorged on the world: GeoPlus and Youtube and Omegle and Craigslist and Rotten and Twitter and Neopets and Pornhub and LiveJournal and Facebook and Seventeen Magazine (“Suit Yourself! 60 sexy swimsuits, tankinis and bikinis for every girl!”).

By the time you were thirteen, you’d accidentally watched a public decapitation and you knew what it meant when barely legal girls wore striped socks and pigtails for men older than your father.

It felt strange then, to have also grown up on the old movies that ran on TCM. You and your sisters piled atop each other in a sweaty tangle of limbs, watching those black-and-white movies with that old-school Hollywood dazzle, about sensitive women with their hair in glossy coils and their aching love for serious men.

Men in black suits, men in black waist coats, men standing in the rain, men stiff with love, like Paul Henreid in Now, Voyager. Like Mr. Darcy, arthritic from all his desire, doubling over from the mere sight of an elbow.

These were men who never said what they wanted to say and never looked you in the eye. These had been the men piled into church with you every Sunday, the unbearable heat like pressure when the floorboards creaked every time the Reverend lifted his arms for another hymn—Draw Nearer, O Lord—draw nearer so!

Their eyes grazing, secretly, across your knees when your dress fluttered.

These were the men you grew up on.

But these weren’t the men at the club. These weren't even the men at the deli around the corner. These foreign mamals; loud with all of their intensities. They drove their revving cars and chirped at women on the sidewalk, their constant drawling, their insipid need for you to look.

It confused you, how they didn’t hide their hunger; and not because they weren’t taught the way you’d been, but because they just didn’t bother. They didn't care.

And the not-caring made a hot bubble expand in your belly, filling with a rage that was ancient and plentiful. But there was always something at the bottom of it, and it made you feel nothing but shame because it knew something about you no one else was supposed to, and it was supposed to stay there, and you weren’t supposed to think about it, weren’t supposed to look it in the eye—until Rocco Gauthier ran his hand along your arm and said you looked like a fucking heart attack.

You were told all your life not to want men like this.

Want me, you pleaded. Oh God, want me always, all the time.

Rocco said what he wanted to say, and he looked you straight in the eye when he did. He was unflinching. He was loose and he was brash and he was fun and he picked you up on your nights off, leaning out the window of his black Camaro, “Hey, Shrimp! Wanna do something stupid?”

His big crooked grin.

He drove you to some old navy yard by the water, taught you how to drive stick with his hand atop yours—chug-click of the gears, chug-click of your heart—taught you how to spin donuts the way the boys had done back home in Ezel on those wide dirt roads. Their wildness and godlessness. Round and round and round. Head out the window, hair whipping, gravel and night and the sky so big you wanted it to swallow you whole. You felt crazy with it. You felt crazy.

“Again!” You’d beg, out of breath, staring at his big blue eyes in the glow of the dashboard. “Please, can we go again?”

· · ♥︎ · ·

Rocco was like those men in the stories, the smoking boyfriends who loitered beneath your window, waiting for the lights in your parents’ bedroom to turn off, before climbing up the awning. The uninvited guest. The little demon on the windowsill, knocking.

You wanted to unlock it. You wanted to lie on your bed and wait for him with your nightie sliding up the arc of your thigh like a tide receding. Beckoning, as if to say, Here. Right here.

I’ve been waiting all my life.

· · ♥︎ · ·

The first guy you were ever with was Michael Turner. He was two grades above yours and he’d poked his half-flaccid penis into your dry vagina in the back of his mom’s Toyota Tacoma. He was drunk. You were crying. He told you to wipe the blood from the backseats with your hoodie. He left for college a month later, and you were on your knees every night, praying that God would forgive you for being a wretched whore (and that maybe, just maybe Michael Turner had sinned harder than you had and that maybe, just maybe, he deserved being hit by twenty trucks—no such luck…apparently he worked in finance now).

In Boston, you’d met most of the men on apps you’d delete and then re-download whenever you were drunk and lonely enough, letting Tayla talk you into posing in tight dresses on her bed, “Okay, now pop your tits. More. You know, like this. Yes. Thank you. They’re saying hello to the world, greetings earthlings. We’re going for Recovering Catholic with, like, a feral need to get her holes stuffed—”

“Jesus, Tay…”

“Exactly. He fumbled you big time, babe.”

You’d never dated anyone properly before, like in the movies. Getting to know someone. Slowly, inch by inch. That ritualistic blueprint of dinners and long walks and coffee shops and long phone calls at night, your face turned into the pillow, listening to him talk about anything and everything, and how you pushed against sleep with elbows and knees, raged against it if it just meant you could hear the smooth murmur of his voice a little longer. Shrimp? You falling asleep on me?

How had no one told you this? How had no one told you that you’d be sick with it, that you wouldn’t be able to eat or sleep, or how tragically convinced you were that this was the best part.

This is the best part.

How had you never gotten to it before?

All of your past blunders had been over watery cocktails at divebars with a handful of guys—okay guys, acceptable guys, with jobs and decent hygiene—who wanted to “keep it chill” and weren’t looking for anything “super serious, you know?”, and how great you were for being okay with it as you wiped their cold cum from your stomach, what a cool girl you were as you bought the morning-after pill with last night’s tips, what a “chill fucking chick”.

But they didn’t know.

They didn’t know you’d grown up on Anaïs Nin and violent porn and Paul Henreid in Now, Voyager.

Your longing was a spiral, and you moved into the tight heat of it like creeping down a never-ending whelk. You wanted to stay there forever. You were so flush with this needing you didn’t know what to do with it.

Where to put it all? Where to put it? Where to put it if not into this big wide hand that settled on your back whenever you moved through a crowd together, the same hand that taught you how to shift gears, that opened doors and pulled back chairs at restaurants and pounded on the horn just to watch you jump in surprise whenever he spotted you around town.

“Hey there, Shrimp!” he yelled, leaning out the window of his Camaro, honking once more for good measure. “Small world!”

“Fuck, you need to stop doing that!” Hand smacked to your chest.

“You need a ride?” He smiled, all straight bright teeth. You smiled back. You were always smiling. He made you smile. His stupid dreadfully lovely face made you smile, made you feel so silly for shuffling across the street, stumbling over yourself just to get to him. Leaning into his open car window like you were about to dive.

Cologne.

Eyes.

“Hi.”

“Get in,” he said, voice low. “I need to drop by the garage, but I’ll make you something to eat after. You hungry?”

“Rocco…I’ve seen you every day for the past two weeks, I think we should, like—”

Slow down?

Give each other a breather?

Stop?

Never stop?

Neve ever, ever stop?

Never ever?

“Like what? If you’re about to tell me the next time I get to see you is tomorrow, I’ll vaporize.”

“Oh, you’ll vaporize?”

“Fuckin’ seize to exist.” He blew his cheeks up, made a sound like poof.

You tilted your head. He mimicked the movement; he said your head always dropped to a different angle depending on how serious the thing you had to think about was. (It’s like a dial but for contemplation, he’d told you on the phone late at night, and you wanted to tell him that wasn’t something people should know about each other so quickly).

“Fine,” you whispered. He made you want to whisper, to tell him things in secret. “Carbonara?” Hopeful.

“Anything you want,” he whispered back, leaning closer. His breath washing hot across your cheek. You imagined dropping your forehead to his, with your eyes closed and your mouth open.

A bus hurtled past. A baby cried in a stroller.

“Anything, hm?” So, so hopeful.

He chucked your chin. “Okay, chill, we both know I can make exactly four things and that’s including cereal—”

You snorted as you rounded the car to get to the passenger’s seat, catching his smile there, the slow creeping kind, the kind his face had to make room for.

· · ♥︎ · ·

Was his longing a spiral too?

· · ♥︎ · ·

“Rocco?” You pressed your phone tighter to your ear.

“Yeah?”

“How’d you get that scar on your arm?”

“Hm? Oh…you mean the—”

“Yeah.”

“Pissed off the wrong people. Used to do a lot of that.”

“What about now?”

“Well. Been trying to do better. Haven’t been shot at in a while, so I think it’s going pretty, you know, pretty great actually.”

“Congrats.”

“Does that freak you out?”

“The scar?”

“The being shot at.”

“Takes a lot more to freak me out.”

“Oh, yeah?”

“Yeah.” Then, “Does it freak you out that it doesn’t freak me out?”

· · ♥︎ · ·

You liked Roccos place. You’d laughed the first time he told you he lived in a converted warehouse. Of course. Very man of you, you’d said. But it was surprisingly more tasteful than that, a former storage depot for a museum near Jeffries Point.

Covertly expensive with its brickwork and exposed pipes, big paintings leaning against walls forever waiting to be hung, the wood of the floor arranged in patterns like fishbone. The shiny kitchen. The brown sofas that folded back onto themselves like rippled stovepipes, like caterpillars.

It was a place for a grown-up, who recycled and whose shelves were filled with books and records and who didn’t have to boil sausages in a coffeemaker (bagged for thirty percent off at Walmart because of a wonky handle).

“It’s nice,” you’d said that first time, standing by the big factory windows, watching people scurry across the wet street under the colorful bloom of their umbrellas.

“Everything’s nice to you.”

“Well, it is. It’s really, really nice.”

“Really, really nice, huh? High praise then.”

You liked dinners at his place, liked that he always worded it the same: Come on, I’ll make you something to eat.

Home-cooked meals seemed like a natural progression of things, the next step in the sacred ritual of dating. The one that came after the first late-night-phone-call and the driving-you-back-home.

It was another piece you’d add to him.

That was his car. And this was his apartment. And there was his sprawling Monstera gone rogue in the corner of his living room. And this was what he looked like in a sweater making his mom’s chicken parm in the oily glow of the rangehood.

And this was what you felt like staring at his mouth, imagining what your body would do if you were to finally kiss it.

You’d had too much wine to trust yourself with more than making sure the pasta cooked from your perch on the kitchen island—your favorite spot—watching Rocco grate a monstrous amount of Provolone cheese.

You liked watching him. You liked tracing the shape of his nose in your mind. You liked listening to him when he’d had a glass of wine, his silly monologues of Shakespearean proportion.

Sometimes it felt like being on the phone with him, how he could ramble on and on if you just made space for it. You liked making space for it.

“—the shit people smuggle into jail will blow your mind. You wouldn’t believe what this guy was hiding up his asshole. His rectum was like that long-ass cave in Indiana Jones. That scene with the boulder?”

You spluttered a laugh, shook your head.

“You’ve never watched Indiana Jones?” Rocco threw you a piece of cheese, grinning when you caught it.

(He was always throwing things at you—car keys, gum, ketchup packets—infinitely amused by your reflexes, Damn, look at you, Johnny Bench!).

“Don’t worry,” he said, “we’ll add it to the list. Anyways, this guy, huge dude, by the way. Ten feet easy. Fucking unit. Fucking Goliath. The guys in D called him Viking ‘cause he had this funky accent, think he was from Sweden or something. Right, so the Viking had three whole flip phones up his ass. Can you imagine having one flip phone up your ass? This guy could’ve been in Cirque de Soleil.” His spew of filthy laughter. “I bought one off of him for like a month’s worth of my commissary—Should I just put all the cheese in?” Rocco deadpanned, frowning as he stared down at his mountain of grated cheese.

And then you were squeezing your eyes shut, wheezing from laughter, crazed like a child with its legs jiggling.

Had anyone in the world ever delighted you this much? Was there anyone in the world so delightful?

· · ♥︎ · ·

You were used to being touched too quickly.

You were a thing dressed in assumptions made by men who’d never been denied a thing. If you laughed at too many of their jokes, if you smiled too much, if you touched their arm for too long—their hands found your waist, the back of your neck when they mashed you into the wall. Their dog-panting, open-mouthed kisses that made your teeth ache from all the clacking.

What you weren’t used to was waiting. You weren’t used to holding your breath so tight, hoping, always hoping endlessly that his hand would linger just a little longer.

It wasn’t like Rocco didn’t touch you.

The first night he’d taken you out to dinner, his fingers had gently pressed into the small of your back. He was always picking the fuzz off your jackets, brushed your hair out of your face, chucked your chin like a kid when you were being stupid. Once even, just once, he’d wiped ice-cream from the corner of your mouth, his thumb big and smooth—oh, you got a little something there—and you’d placed your hand on the same spot at night, pressed your thumb into it just so.

It was perhaps because of this act of waiting, that you’d decided that Rocco Gauthier was nice. He must’ve been. Why else hadn’t he whipped his cock out yet, jammed it down your throat and fucked your face without fanfare?

You’d even said so to Tayla. And Tayla had said you were full of shit. And you’d said, no, really. And Tayla had asked if you’d fallen on your head as a baby.

(You had, in fact, taken this into consideration.)

He was nice—except for when he was rolling his window down to yell at cars cutting him off at the exit, or getting tossed out of bars for starting fights with people twice his size whenever he’d had too much to drink.

He was nice—except he’d spent five years in South Bay for racketeering.

He was nice—except for when he blew up on some guy who’d boxed in his Camaro because he’d parked, like a fucking moron! Who the hell parks like this? Do you need medical attention? Is this an emergency? Are you going fucking blind? Oh, I’m yelling? Eat a dick, fuckass! Better yet, learn how to park, learn how to measure a fucking foot!

“How’d I do?”Sometimes Rocco would ask you this when you’d had too much, when you’d left him on the sidewalk or gotten out of his car at a red light, like you were trying to wedge enough distance between yourself and the unbearable heat of him.

How’d I do? Like a guilty dog laying its snout in your lap.

Sometimes you heard Tayla in the back of your head, your fairy godmother with cherry-red acrylics, bonking her wand onto your forehead like she was trying to pummel the sense back into you.

But Tayla didn't know Rocco took care of his mom, that he’d gotten her a nice place near Rhode Island and that he called her every Sunday at three PM. That his dad’s Saint Christopher medal dangled from his Camaro’s rearview mirror even though they hadn’t spoken to each other in years. That he picked up Vince’s nieces from school whenever his sister’s shift at the hospital ended up being longer than expected, and that he’d always take them out for ice-cream at the same place because of the coin-operated Sandy Horse out front.

That he fed his neighbor’s cat when the old man was at the doctor’s office. That he picked you up from work and dropped you off at home and always waited until you closed your door and flipped him off from the window. That he’d taken in a turtle he’d saved from a gutter and named her Speed (Like the amphetamine.), which he kept in a terrarium in his living room. How it glowed in the dark like a tiny museum exhibit, with tiny rocks and tiny plants.

And how on one particular evening, the two of you had gotten so high you’d spent an hour watching Speed chew on shreds of lettuce, cooing at her yapping mouth. And all the windows were open, the nighttime breeze pulling and pushing through his apartment, pulling and pushing through you, and he was so close, his arm brushing yours. How you felt him watching you, felt him needing something, felt yourself needing it ten times over.

You wondered if you’d always feel like you were the one who needed the other more.

Maybe it was the weed or maybe it was that thought. Something about being there made you miss your sisters, the wonky ceiling fans with the long beaded cords, the cicadas in the summer. Sometimes missing that place tore through you like a cluster bomb, sucked all the air out of the room and left you immobilized in something like agony.

Could you miss something so much you couldn’t move?

You’d never told anyone that when you were high enough, you’d call them at night because no one would pick up. Because they knewthere was only one person who called thrice in a row at midnight. You were the bogeyman. You were the devil.

You imagined the mint-green landline in the living room ringing through the terrible quiet of that house, like morse code: I—m—i—s—s—y—o—u

And your breath hitched so horribly, and when you turned, Rocco leaned in, the long stutter of his lashes across his cheeks, and for all of your intolerable fucking waiting and unbearable fucking wanting, your body did something you hadn’t expected it to: it lurched back in a flinch.

Rocco stopped.

He looked at you like you’d admitted something to him and like the admitting of it was okay, like everything, everything, was going to be okay.

He nodded, leaned back, and smiled.

He said, “Come on, I’ll make you something to eat.”

Maybe the truth was Rocco Gauthier wasn’t nice. But he was kind.

There was a difference.

· · ♥︎ · ·

“Wait, so you moved to Boston because of a movie?”

“Because of Paul Henreid and Bette Davis, there’s a difference.”

Your first week here, you’d spent a whole afternoon at Back Bay Station, eating three whole chocolate croissants on a bench, thinking of the two of them in black-and-white, tangled in each other as they said their farewells—Oh, Jerry. Don't let us ask for the moon...

How you’d hoped all your life someone would look at you, the way Paul Henreid had looked at Bette Davis.

“So you moved to Boston because of Paul Henry—”

“Henreid.”

“Right. And Bette Davis. So why’d you leave home?”

“Can’t it be for the same reason?”

“Usually isn’t.”

Quiet. The AC purred through your room.

“Sorry, I didn’t mean to—You just never talk about it.”

You picked at your sheets, pressed your face into them once before coming up for air.

“I guess…I took up too much space, like I was too much and I wanted too much,” you whispered. “Scared my mom. She wanted to send me somewhere that would fix it.”

You stared at the ceiling, imagined Rocco lying in his bed just like you were.

“You don’t need any fixing,” he said. “You’re all the right things.”

Eyes closed, you listened to him breathe and breathe and breathe and breathe…

“You falling asleep on me?”

“Wouldn’t dream of it.”

“Oh, yeah?”

His tired laugh crackled through the phone.

You pressed your face into the pillows.

“Will you stay on the line?”

Eyes going heavy.

“Yeah. Yeah, I’ll stay.”

· · ♥︎ · ·

It happened on a Sunday night.

The Polish women had been evicted for reasons Ron at the front desk couldn’t disclose, no matter how many packs of cigarettes you tried to bribe him with. Their absence had torn a cleft of silence into the Lodge, and it was strange not hearing their shrieking guffaws through the thin walls, no more cigarette smoke creeping through the vents, their shared CVS perfume.

You’d spent most of the day asleep, lolling in bed after a grueling shift that had finally come to an end at seven in the morning, in part thanks to cleaning up the mess behind the bar after some drunken John had tossed his tumbler into the liquor shelves. (Shockingly, grown-ass men didn’t like to be told they couldn’t touch a tit without permission.)

You knew days like these were best for prepping, to go through the unopened envelopes from the college admissions sitting under a perfume bottle on your desk.

But you were sore and you were tired, and it was night again—how was it always, always night again?—and Rocco was at some cousin’s birthday, and Tayla was God-knows-where doing God-knows-what with Divorced Dentist (Carl not Calvin—who drove a Tesla and enjoyed being stepped on). And you were trying very, very hard to enjoy your own company, but your own company kind of sucked ass, and the silence was jarring and everywhere, and you really wanted to feed Speed some lettuce and then draw shapes into the sumptuous fuzzy carpet in Rocco’s living room.

You really wanted to text Rocco, but you were trying not to be needy, don’t be needy, and you wondered what he was wearing and who he was talking to and what they were talking about and if he enjoyed their company and was he thinking of you too? Would he maybe call you once he was home? Hey there, Shrimp—

When your phone rang, you didn’t bother checking the number, smacking it to your ear with a garbled, “‘ello?”

Silence.

Staticky silence for so long you almost hung up…if you hadn’t caught those jackrabbit breaths. Only the littlest of things breathed like this. You pictured a small pink mouth that smiled in the Texas sun, wet with watermelon popsicle.

The line went dead.

You knew not to call back. Knew you’d wake your mother, knew it would rattle through the house. You imagined your little sister, the littlest one with eyes like a baby Tarsier, was crouched in the living room trying not to make the floorboards creak. Her littlest feet, toes like pink gumdrops.

You’d never thought about the things you’d say once you got them to listen.

You’d never thought about it because you were terrified that maybe you had nothing to say at all.

· · ♥︎ · ·

The thing about leaving a life was that sometimes you didn’t get to choose what to take with you.

· · ♥︎ · ·

“Heeeey, guys.” You were trying not to slur, blinking up at the figures towering over you, black against the night sky, like two very beautiful, very disappointed gods judging the drunken human crouched on the curb.

You were also trying not to laugh.

(None of this was particularly funny, but this was the only way you could cope with crippling shame—you’d grown up under the watchful eye of God after all.)

“Please deal with her. I’m late for work,” Tayla sighed, brushing up her lashes with the side of her finger before leaning down. She grabbed your chin, the sharp snag of her acrylics. “Rocco will drive you home. I’ll deal with your goofy ass tomorrow.”

“Bring the paddle.”

She rolled her eyes. “Oh, great, the funny bit in her brain still works.” To Rocco, “Enjoy.”

The second half of the godly duo didn’t say much as he lugged you into his car.

“Easy there, tiger,” he murmured as he wiped your hair out of your face and put on your seatbelt, like he’d just picked you up from the dentist.

Your mouth felt numb. Maybe you had been to the dentist. In a sequin dress and heels.

“Are you angry?” you finally asked.

“No.” He looked angry.

Taking a breath, he jerked his chin back. “Where’d you even meet these guys.”

“At work.”

“At work?”

“Okay, fuck you, you don’t get to cherry-pick whenever you’re cool with me working at a club.” You didn’t know how much of that came out un-slurred, but Rocco seemed to have caught most of it because he said, “That’s not what I meant. Do you really think those are the most trustworthy people to party with?”

There was a certain kind of hypocrisy tossed into the mix, but you were too exhausted to drag it into the conversation.

“You’re kind of angry,” you murmured, fumbling with the buttons on the door to roll the window down. Rocco rolled it back up. You rolled it back down. He let you.

“I’m not angry,” he said, wiping a hand across his face. “I was just—worried. Tay was worried. You told no one about where you going. No one knew where you were. You weren’t picking up your phone.” His hands tightened around the steering wheel. “You were gone since last night. It’s tonight right now. I mean, what the fuck were you even—” He took a long ragged inhale, and you could tell he was trying to calm himself down.

“I was worried.” That crinkle between his brows. You hated that it was there and there because of you, and you wanted to tell him that you hadn’t meant to make anyone worry, that you were sorry, that you were bad at trying to do all the right things.

It hadn’t seemed like such a terrible idea.

They were Margot’s friends after all. Beautiful Margot with her long butter-brown legs and her platinum soft-swirl Dairy Queen locks, Come on, babydoll! Why so down? You need some cheering up? I got some shit that'll make you feel better—

And her glitter-tipped hand had placed the sweetest little pill on your tongue, and she'd kissed you on both of your cheeks—mwah-mwah! smack-smack!—and off you went.

How it felt like your first weeks in Boston, when life was electric all the time and everything was new-new and dazzling and you let yourself, carelessly, be pulled from bar to club to bar to club, and you danced all night, you danced and danced, and someone handed you something to smoke, then something to swallow, then something to knock back. You were infinite. You were mother-less and father-less and sister-less and free.

There you go, Pocket Rocket, someone pressed against your ear, all sharp cologne, sharper stubble.

That sudden pang of yearning shot straight into your gut. You wished Rocco were here.

You wanted to run your hands through his hair stiff with hair gel, wanted to bury your face in the crook of his slender neck and take a bite, just one. Maybe you’d call him, tell him to come dance. You knew he didn’t like dancing, but you’d make him. How could he not when life was so delicious?

Every face was blurry, every body moved right through you. You’d lost Margot a minute ago, or maybe it had already been an hour, or hours, or one-hundred days. But you were told not to worry, Just dance with me! Just dance!

The next thing you knew you were sprawled in a McDonald’s with your face in a pile of fries. No phone, no wallet. One of the employees at the register let you borrow her phone. You’d almost dialed the wrong number on reflex, the one that belonged to a mint-green landline worlds away.

You didn’t remember what you said once Tayla picked up, you just remembered your fervor like a lost child finally calling home. Come get me. Please come get me.

“How’d I do?” you said after a bout of silence.

Rocco chuffed a surprised laugh. “How’d you think you did?”

You lolled your head out the window, hoping the wind was strong enough to clear your head out, rinse you clean.

“Did you at least have fun?” Rocco asked over the air rushing through you.

Your cackle shot from you like a cannon. You imagined it left a hole in the sky. Unhooking your seatbelt to lean further out the window, fighting against Rocco wrangling you back into your seat with his free hand.

“Hey, hey—What are you—“

“Boston!” you yelled at the passing streetlights, your arms reaching for the world. “I had the time of my life!”

A woman whooped from the sidewalk. You threw her a kiss like you were a princess on a float at a parade.

Rocco managed to pull you back into your seat at an intersection, strapping you back into your seatbelt. He rolled the window back. You let him.

In the silence, you watched his hands flex and unflex around the steering wheel.

“Sorry,” you whispered this. You always wanted to whisper things to him. “I just wanted to stop feeling...like…” Picking at the sequins on your dress. “I don’t know.”

You tipped your head back from so much exhaustion.

After a moment, Rocco cleared his throat. “Did I ever tell you about that time I took so much ket at my grandpa’s funeral, Vince had to physically restrain me from taking my clothes off? Can you imagine? Me with my cheeks out at Grandpa Frankie’s funeral? He would’ve crawled out of that coffin to shoot my dick off…”

You snorted, smacking your hand to your mouth. And you felt awful for laughing, but then you were laughing so loud because Rocco was laughing louder. The two of you howling from it.

What relief it was, to be forgiven if just for a moment.

· · ♥︎ · ·

You wobbled into your bed like a stringless puppet, all clacking elbows and knees. Fisting the rumpled sheets, you watched Rocco survey your room with the polite bearing of someone at an exhibition hall.

Somewhere in the gooey pits of your mind, you thought of how he’d never seen the inside of your place—possibly due to it being less of a place and more of a glorified motel room with a microwave.

Had he felt like this the first time you’d seen his apartment? Touched the pictures on his fridge, fingered the smooth scalloped leaves of his Monstera.

Rocco was staring at your desk, its clutter from the night before, the cyclone of makeup powders and jars and tubes of lipgloss and bent Q-tips dabbed with eyeshadow. The bralettes tossed across the chair. The second-hand textbooks and folded college pamphlets.

Your pink coffeemaker with the wonky handle.

You suddenly felt very young and very bare. You didn’t know if you liked this feeling.

“Help me get ready for bed?” It came out all garbled.

Rocco’s face tensed with confusion, so you said it again, strung the words out like a taffy pull. And he smiled all crooked, chuffing under his breath the way he did when he was trying to hide his amusement behind some charade of annoyance.

“Please?” you said, sprawled across your sheets, waiting. You stretched out a leg as if to make a point. “Can’t shower with my heels on.”

It didn’t help that you were wearing a complicated tangle of straps that criss-crossed up your calves like a Roman sandal. You wondered what his fingers would look like unlacing them, the very same fingers that painted the lettering across car doors and bumpers with so much care.

“Pretty please?” you said again, face tipped into your pillow like you were being coy.

Rocco scratched at his jaw, the prickle of his stubble there, and then he huffed and then he nodded. He took his jacket off and laid it on the bed.

You went warm all over, you went so warm.

“Alright.” Rocco sighed, settling onto the edge of the bed. “Come here.”

Come here.

You faltered at that, leg bent at an awkward angle until he gently maneuvered it across his lap. His skin on your skin.

“Let’s see what we’re dealing with,” he murmured, with the same focus you’d seen him inspect an engine with. “Strings. Nice.”

“Straps,” you corrected.

“Straps. Nice. We can deal with straps.”

You snorted. He gave you a warning look.

“If wouldn’t mind, ma’am, I’ll need complete and utter silence for this procedure. Do you have forceps?”

“Maybe they’d be off already if weren’t talking so much.”

He cocked a brow, which was never a good sign. “You want me to do this or not?”

Grinning, you wedged your lips between your teeth.

Carefully, so carefully, Rocco loosened each long strap, thumb soothing the puckered skin from where the pressure had been too tight. It was disorienting for it not to feel like…more.

He was simply taking off your heels, one at a time, careful like he wanted to make sure it didn’t hurt, murmuring here and there about how tight the knots had been, “Shit, and you were walking in these the whole time? Poor thing...”

He was so tender with you that it almost made you ache with shame—because all you could think about was putting those fingers in your fucking mouth, shoving them so deep until the spit ran down your chin.

Sometimes you wanted him so much you couldn’t push it all the way down, but you'd never been good at pushing things down, they were always boiling up inside of you, until you got your mess everywhere. Your mess was everywhere. You were messy.

Sometimes your mother roared up inside of you like the Leviathan: You wretched whore! Wicked! You’re wicked! Out with you! Out—

“Dress next,” you said, your drunken fog making everything sizzle and spark.

Rocco took a breath, swallowed. “I don’t know if that’s a good idea.”

You shook your head all sloppy. “Zipper’s tricky.”

“Oh, yeah?”

“Mh-hmm.”

“And where is this zipper?”

Your legs were still sprawled across his lap, and you couldn’t help shimmying lower, rolling your hips up once like a dare, contorting your hand against your back, saying, ”Here.”

Rocco chewed once on his bottom lip in thought. “That is tricky.” His voice went so low you felt it between your legs.

You were nodding, headless, and the world moved with you until it felt more like it was rolling, like you’d started something you couldn’t stop, like momentum, like a wave.

“Turn over for me,” he said.

For you…I’d do anything for you. Do you know that? Do you know all the things I’d do?

With a breath, you slowly rolled over. And you couldn’t help yourself, and you loved the scrape of his jeans against your skin, loved to bathe in his unrelenting attention that felt so hot, like that prickle after getting slapped. And you were so wicked, and you were so wretched, and so you snaked farther across his lap, serpentine, the little rattler, until you were perched over his knees like the women in the videos, their cheap sugary squealing, Oh, spank me, Daddy!

You felt the heat of Rocco’s hand loom over you, and you waited in your pit of heat, waited for him to shove you off or grab you, throttle you by the back of the neck.

But all you felt was the gentle scrape of your hair being swept over a shoulder, the tug of the zipper at the nape of your neck. The slow, slow unraveling of it. The spill of cool air down your back. How it felt like you were falling open. How you chased it, arching until the zipper found its end where the stitch met the base of your spine.

“You’re going to kill me, do you know that?” Rocco whispered. His voice cracked right in the middle as he leaned back, settling his hands onto the bed.

That was no good, you wanted his hands on you, you wanted them demanding and sharp and hot and everywhere and you wanted their fingers to fuck into you just like this, until your hips stuttered up, until you gagged for breath, the sheets shoved into your mouth.

You laughed. What a terrible time to laugh.

“Oh, you like that, huh?” Rocco said. “You like making my life hard?”

You kept laughing. You nodded, crazed.

So, so hard—

You writhed on his lap like a live wire, twisting back around to face him, your dress loose around you like snakeskin, strap sliding down your shoulder. You sat up, your ass sliding between his thighs, reaching for him, reaching. Come here, you beautiful, beautiful fuck.

“Hey, hey—” Rocco murmured, leaning away. “Stop—Stop.”

He was serious.

This was the kind of stop that didn’t invite a cheeky make me.

Your breath caught as he gently grabbed your jaw, made you look at him. “Not like this," he said.

How then, you wanted to plead, crawl on hands and knees. I’ll do anything. Do you even know that? I'll do anything.

His thumb was so close to your mouth, you tilted down and gnawed at it, sucked it into your mouth until Rocco chuffed another breath, and your chest sprang up with need—

“Don’t,” he warned.

You opened your mouth like a dog dropping the food it wasn’t supposed to eat. He carefully removed his thumb. You wanted to chase after it. You were so hungry. You were wild with it.

“There you go, good girl.” He’d said it jokingly, you knew that, but you froze anyway.

You were too drunk for him not to have caught it.

The silence stretched on like you were both there to witness it happen.

good

girl

You realized too late that the straps of your dress had slid all the way down to the crooks of your elbows. The air was cold on your bare skin.

Gently, Rocco slid them back up. His eyes weren't blue in lights this low.

“You think you can make it to the shower on your own?” he whispered, all breath.

You nodded. “Mh-hmm.” Then, “Don’t leave, okay?” You were so close to him your foreheads bumped, the tip of your noses.

You wanted to run your pinkie finger through his eyelashes. You wanted to prick your tongue on his stubble.

I want to kiss you.

“I won’t leave,” he said.

“Promise?”

“Yeah. Yeah, I’ll stay.”

· · ♥︎ · ·

You’d grown up believing patience was a virtue. Patience was for the angels, for the worshipful: Let us not become weary of doing good—and so on and so forth and so on.

But had the angels or the worshipful ever seen Rocco Gauthier sprawled beneath a muscle car? Covered in grease with his T-shirt riding up? Had they ever seen the tight lines of his naked torso?

You’d never been taught how to want properly.

Wanting was for the selfish, for the unrighteous, the undeserving, the feral, the crazed, the sluts, the whores, the wicked.

You'd never been good at wanting anything the normal amount.

How the shame used to claw its way up your throat until you were on your knees, foaming from the mouth: Please, please. Banish these unclean thoughts from my mind, my body. Wash my heart clean, steer it back onto the right path. Forgive my body. Please, forgive it. My body, my body. My twisting, pulsing, needing, wet, hot, gushing, writhing, wanton fucking body—

How your hand would snake between your legs, cracking yourself open. The humid lush heat of it. Fucking yourself on fingers and pillows, hot spray of the shower head, the tap in the bathtub, the purple vibrator with its fleshy ribbed end that dragged across that spot inside of you, there. All you wanted was to be filled. You wanted to ride. I want to feel. Cheek to the mattress, teeth out, spit on the sheets, body thrashing helplessly like a holy roller.

You weren't on your knees anymore—you were on all fours.

· · ♥︎ · ·

Rocco used to be a fixer. He was the guy people went to when they’d made a mess.

You’d been in Boston long enough to understand what kind of messes needed fixing.

You saw the things he’d done in everything he was trying to do better, saw it in the life he was trying to build, saw it even in those intense tattooed men who lumbered up to the garage, smacking Rocco on the shoulder in that good-to-see-you-brother way, echoing a kind camaraderie born from some mysterious un-talked-about time in their lives.

Even though Rocco had left his past behind, you still caught the tension in his shoulders every time he drove past the cops, their narrowed stares like they were waiting for a misstep. You caught him eyeing cars and passers-by. Once even, you’d had to leave a restaurant mid-meal because someone had entered who shouldn’t have.

Long story, Rocco would say. He was full of long stories.

The worst thing that had happened back in Ezel was when the sheriff had a shootout with the druggies on the campgrounds. Violence in a place like that had felt small.

Boston was a place of magnitude, and Rocco’s past was filled with a kind of violence that fused to the body. The first time you truly understood just how much, you were holding a pastry box full of the boys’ favorite jelly donuts from the place down the road.

You’d heard them yelling at each from a block away. Which wasn’t unusual. It was how they communicated, like Howler monkeys perched on opposite ends of a tree, screaming with their arms jangling about.

“—are you out of your fucking mind?” When Rocco was really, really angry, his voice scraped at the bottom of his stomach and went guttural.

“Look, it just happened, it was all, like, in the moment, and I didn’t recognize her at first, like it was dark as shit, dude, and we were having a good time—”

“A good time?A good fucking time, Vince? Are you high?” Rocco was smacking his hands at him. “We had one rule, man—”

“Don’t bring your bullshit, I know!”

“You don’t, that’s my goddamned fucking point! And all because, what, you needed to stick your dick into something? I swear to fucking God, if he doesn’t blow your brains out, I will. I’ll chain you to the Camaro and drag you across Sixth, you brainless fucking shitstain—”

The second your boots scraped across the asphalt, Rocco faltered. He turned to you, taking a long breath. Something about this felt all wrong.

"Surprise," you murmured, feeling like you just walked in on your parents fighting. "I brought jelly donuts."

Rocco reached into his jeans and tossed you his car keys. You caught them on top of the pastry box.

“Get in the car," he said.

You cocked a brow; you were getting good at it. “Excuse me?”

“Please. Can you get in the car, please."

He gave you a look, and it was grave enough that you didn’t have the energy to be a shit about it.

“Sure. Hi to you too,” you mumbled, shoving a donut into your mouth before heading to the Camaro and getting in.

“Vince! Do you see that?” Rocco called out from where he was heading towards the office at the back of the warehouse, gesturing at you. “Think of all the folks who come here. Your nieces were here yesterday, for Christ’s sake!” He emerged with his leather jacket, tucking something into the back of his jeans, before bounding towards his car.

You leaned over, opening the driver’s side door for him before he accidentally ripped it out of its hinges and hurtled it into the sky.

“Close up shop, and lay low until I’ve talked to him,” Rocco instructed Vince with one leg in the car.

“He’s pissed, dude, I don’t think—”

“I’ll deal with it. Now let’s all just—” He took a long, long breath, nodding, before he got in fully. “Let’s get out of here. We'll get out of here. It'll be fine."

You realized what Rocco had slipped into his waistband when he pulled it back out, leaning over you to tuck it into the glove compartment.

You’d seen a gun a couple of times at the club, flashed in warning before Ben the bouncer got involved. You’d seen enough of them back home too, the shotgun in your dad’s old cabinet.

But it was strange to see Rocco with one, and it was even stranger to see the way he handled it so matter-of-factly.

The two of you drove in silence.

You’d eaten half the box of jelly donuts before you finally decided to offer him one, holding it to his mouth at a red light. He took a big bite, the stubble on his chin scraping your fingers.

“Fuck—that’s good,” he groaned, leaning his head back for a moment, eyes closed, chewing. You ate the rest and lightly tapped his hand when the lights turned green.

He softened just a little.

“What did he do this time?” you said once you were back on the highway. Unlike Rocco, Vince had a proclivity for riffling through his past. Rocco had a proclivity for cleaning up after him whenever he did. It was weirdly synergetic.

“Something stupid.” He shook his head. "God, I'm too old for this shit." Exhaling loud and forceful. He took a breath. “You working tonight?"

You shook your head. "I have the placement test tomorrow, remember?"

"Fuck. Right. Sorry. Sorry." He looked at you, and his eyes in this light were very big and very blue. You didn't know what he was apologizing for. "Look, I'll drive you back to the Lodge, just—Please, just stay there for the night.”

“Wait, how bad is it?”

“It’ll be fine. I’ll deal with it.”

“What does that mean?” You stared at the glove compartment.

“It’s not what you think.”

“And what do you think I’m thinking?”

“I don’t know, some insane Godfather shit.”

You laughed. It didn’t feel like the best time to laugh.

At the parking lot of the Lodge, Rocco finally turned to you fully. He had his serious face on, which was almost identical to his sad face—all long grooves and scrunched brows.

“I’m sorry,” he said.

“For what?”

“For freaking you out.”

Through the windshield, you stared at the crooked neon tubing of the motor inn sign, dotted with bugs trapped inside.

You chucked Rocco’s chin. “I don’t freak out easy, remember?”

· · ♥︎ · ·

The situation was, in fact, some insane Godfather shit.

At a party, a drunken Vince had ‘accidentally’ slept with none other than the equally drunken wife of Johnnie, Leonnard “Lefty” Hannigan’s son, who'd just gotten out of prison for armed robbery and whose dad used to work for the Albanians running the Old Harbor Outfit, which was a gang out of South Boston that pedaled guns and girls and favors that usually ended with someone getting ‘disappeared’ (very Godfather). And if that wasn’t bad enough, Vince had slept with Johnnie's wife at Old Trudge, which was where the Albanians still hosted what Rocco had described as ‘meetings’ (also very Godfather), a hole-in-the-wall pub where “Lefty” had laid out a ‘peace code’, an old-fashioned pact that ensured no disrespect and no betrayal.

“It’s like church,” Rocco had explained. “And Vince pissed in it.”

(Very, very Godfather indeed.)

And at first, a drunken one-night extramarital affair didn’t seem like a cause for such alarm, until Rocco described to you in painful detail that Johnnie had once beaten a man half to death with a mallet and then locked him into a shipping container for dating an ex without asking for permission.

Sitting there on your bed, watching Rocco pace your room while he tried to explain the unnecessarily confusing tangle of old-timey gang etiquette, maybe you were freaking out just a little bit.

He left for a while, walking up and down the outside hallway on the phone. When he came back, he made a pot of coffee in your pink coffee maker with the wonky handle, and then he came to you.

“You good, Shrimp?” He tucked your behind your ear.

“I think I ate those donuts too fast.”

Crouching in front of you, he surveyed you before wiping at your jaw. “Got some sugar on you.”

You couldn’t help but lean into his warm, dry hand. You closed your eyes, listened to the coffee pot chug and roil in the quiet. Outside, cars shuttled past.

“I've got the spare, so don’t open the door for anyone. An old friend's coming, he’ll stay in the parking lot until I’m back, okay? Beefy dude in the black Mustang.”

“I thought it wasn’t that bad.”

“We’d be in Jakarta with Halloween store wigs if it was bad.” He looked at you for a long, long moment, until the silence made you squirm.

“It’ll be fine,” he said. “I know how to deal with him.”

“This all feels very…cartoonish,” you mumbled.

“Welcome to my life.” His laugh was tired and not a laugh at all. “Wait until you meet my pops.”

You knew Rocco had meant it as a joke, but it made something big and sad grow inside of you.

“It’ll be fine, baby.”

Baby.

He stroked your cheek, then pinched it until you popped a wary grin.

You were baby.

And he was beautiful always, and he said everything would be fine.

Tilting your head into his hand, you let his palm hover hotly over your mouth. You could've kissed it then. I think of kissing you all the time. You wanted to kiss it, lave at it, tell him to stay here, please stay here. But then the moment was over, and he was gone, and you didn’t know what to do with this feeling.

You didn’t move from the spot on the bed. You stared at the belly of the coffee pot as it filled. You drank half of it eventually. Then you sat again.

You called Tayla when you were sure she was on her break, the sound of muffled Afro House and girls laughing raucously in the background—Tayla, who said it would be fine, that Rocco was just overreacting the way he always was. Tayla, whose soft baritone always soothed you enough to believe whatever she said.

“—Johnnie just got out, do you really think he’d risk shooting up some autoshop? Rocco’s going all caveman because of you.”

“It’s not because of me.”

“You should’ve seen him during Hangover 4.” It was the name Tayla had lovingly dubbed your 24-hour drug-fueled stint of late that she had still not fully forgiven you for, and your feet hadn’t yet fully recovered from. “He was doing the fucking most.”

You wanted to say something else, wanted to tell her about this feeling, how ridiculous this all was, how preposterous, did you know that they have gangster pacts against bullshit? It's like church, Tay! It's like church!

But everything seemed to have congealed in your throat.

“Okay, look, babe, you and I both know I think he’s a turd with eyes and you could do better, so I’m only going to say this once. If Rocco says it’ll be fine, then trust me—it’ll be fine. He’ll handle it. Okay?”

“Okay. Yeah, okay.”

You didn’t pray per se, you just kneeled a little and hoped really hard. Your forehead pressed against the edge of your mattress. Your knees vibrating from a very particular kind of ache.

You never thought pain could remind you of a place. A bedroom somewhere in a swamp, with the two sticker-ridden bunkbeds shoved so closely to one another you could swing your arm out at night to touch a soft downy head on the other side, rake your fingers through hair until little eyes opened in the dark, a babbling little mouth, Are you gonna leave tonight?

Are you gonna leave?

· · ♥︎ · ·

He came in the night, leaning over you, his warm dry hand brushing the hair from your face. Crinkle of plastic. The smell of takeout. “Hey, little Shrimp. Brought you some food—”

You reached for him blindly, trying to tear him into bed. You’d read somewhere that drowning people often dragged their rescuers underwater in a blind panic.

The smooth glide of his leather jacket against your skin. Your hands frantically moving over him in the dark as if to check if he was whole; face, neck, shoulders, back, hands, hips, legs—

The lean sinewy shapes of him as your fingers raked across his clothes, his jeans, snagging at his leather belt. You tipped into him, buried your face against whatever you could reach. His soft laugh in the thick of it. How palpable his relief was, pulsing through the whole room. “Good news, we don’t have to move to Jakarta,” he whispered into your ear, and you turned to mash your mouth to his stubbled cheek, to his jaw, the pretty curling of his ear like the inside of a pale shell.

Pulling him on top of you, the weight of him settled between your open legs. How the closeness of it shocked you awake.

In the dark, you were all hands, and he was all heat, and you were thinking and thinking: How could a thing like patience survive in the same room as Rocco Gauthier’s mouth?

How had you lived like this?

How have I not kissed you? Over and over and over and over? How dare you exist un-kissed-by-me?

His hands cradled your face and pulled you close. Forehead to forehead. The soft press of his nose, his breath. The sound of a swallow. And there was his mouth, and here was yours.

You wanted to die kissing him, you wanted to fucking die.

· · ♥︎ · ·

That night, you dreamt your heart crawled out of your mouth, dreamt it floated in the middle of the room, turning like a tiny wet planet.

Dreamt the whole world spun infinite circles around it.

· · ♥︎ · ·

You got the letter on a Monday. Very serious-looking with its crinkled address window and its red oval seal. You tore it open right there at the front desk and begged Ron to read it for you with your eyes squeezed shut.

· · ♥︎ · ·

Rocco picked up after one ring.

“Yeah?”

“Did you just yeah me?”

“Heard it the second I said it. Redo.“

He hung up.

You called again.

“Good evening.”

You blurted a laugh. “That’s it?”

“Oh, I’m sorry, would you like a fucking serenade?”

“Please no.” You didn’t need to be reminded of the drunken karaoke catastrophe on Tay’s birthday.

“Good evening, my liege. How’s that.”

“Better.” You grinned. “Put on something nice tomorrow night. I’m taking you out to dinner.”

His dirty, dirty laugh.

“You wanna wine and dine me, Shrimp?”

“Mh-hmm. I know this really nice place that serves the best truffle lasagna in, like, a three-block radius.”

· · ♥︎ · ·

You’d come to learn that Rocco’s Boston adhered to a different map than yours; the buildings he avoided, the storefronts he rushed past, police precincts he shouldn’t be spotted anywhere near. The strange jigsaw puzzle of his life.

It was nice knowing then, with complete surety, where he felt most comfortable.

It was a cozy place, pleasantly buzzing. The tablecloth was checkered, rippling in the glow of an old candle bulky with globs of wax. You waited for him by the rain-stained window, in a backless dress, chewing on the breadsticks the eager young server had practically shoved onto the table, leaning casually against a chair, chatting with you about the terrible weather and the terrible traffic and, look, if this guy stood you up, I’m off at nine.

“Hey, baby, sorry I’m late.” Rocco bent down to kiss your cheek with a little too much tenderness. (You were used to getting your forehead flicked, followed by, Hey there, lil’ Shrimp.)

The server went rigid, falling for this complete farce of a choreography performed solely to signal that you were, in fact, not being stood up and that you were, in fact, with him. And the only reason you played along was because you’d be lying if you said you didn’t enjoy people knowing you were, in fact, with him.

Being with Rocco Gauthier had inadvertent side-effects—aside from Miss Dottie flinging holy water at you whenever she thought you weren’t looking and Tayla calling you a dumb bitch to your face—like most of the regulars holding their tongue during your shift and avoiding eye-contact in a way that made you wonder just how many messes Rocco had fixed in South Boston back in the day.

“God, you might accidentally kill someone in that dress. Abrupt heart failure, spontaneous combustion—”

You spluttered a laugh. “Okay, calm down, loverboy.”

“So what’s the occasion?” Rocco said, looking very, very handsome in his crisp button-down.

“I got in.”

He slapped the table loud enough an elderly couple beside you jerked back in surprise. “Sorry,” he mouthed. To you, “You serious?” Grabbing your hand and squeezing it so tight you almost forgot how you’d tried to call your mom just last night. “That’s fucking—Fuck!”

He pulled your hand to his mouth, kissed it, and this time the kiss was for nobody else but you. The hot brush of his lips across your knuckles. You went loose beneath it, you fell open for it, all the way.

“You sure you won’t let me pay for dinner?” he asked carefully.

You tilted your head, laughing when he mimicked it. “Very,” you said.

“Super?”

“Super.”

“Okay,” he hummed. “Close your eyes.”

Your brows scrunched. “Why?”

“Come on, close 'em for me.”

You chewed your lip, shook your head, but you did as you were told.

“There you go. Good girl.”

You kicked his leg beneath the table. “Don’t do that here,” you murmured.

His dirty little laugh.

“Rocco, if you’re about to flick my forehead, so help me God, I will push you into incoming traffic—” But the rest snagged in your throat when you felt the cool glide of metal on your wrist.

You opened your eyes, blinking at a dainty silver bracelet with a single charm, dark blue stone shining in the candlelight.

It was beautiful.

“Kinda knew since yesterday,” Rocco mumbled, running his thumb along the chain. “Tay told me.”

“‘Course she did…”

“You like it?”

You swallowed, feeling an uncomfortable pressure flare up at the base of your throat. You felt hot for all the wrong reasons. “It looks…expensive.”

Rocco sighed. “I have a feeling you’re about to tell me you can’t keep it.”

You’d stopped counting the number of times the two of you had had this conversation, about how you could never accept a gift or a favor, about how you were always splitting bills down to the cents, the meticulous log in your notes app dedicated to what you owed to whom and how much. You didn’t like owing things to anyone.

Breath hitching, you looked at Rocco. Rocco looked back. The stone on the bracelet reminded you of his eyes.

“You deserve good things.” He lifted your hand to his mouth again, kissed the inside of your palm with so much care you couldn’t move. “I mean, either you take it, or you pay me back in installments.”

You cracked a smile, loosening your hand from his grip to flick his forehead. He grinned, all impish. A strand of his hair fell into his face. Still smiling, you brushed it carefully back into place. The way he leaned into you. The way you wished no one else was around.

His face flush and lovely in the light.

I’m sick. I’m so fucking sick with you.

Could it physically hurt to look at someone? Could it feel like being pushed from a building every time, stomach slamming up into your throat?

“Thank you,” you whispered. You were always whispering to him. “I love it.“

“Good. Because I got you a matching necklace.”

“Rocco—”

And he was laughing, and the whole world was sharp and sweet, stinging from it, and you wanted to kiss his face and laugh and never stop and double over from all of your longing.

Oh god, oh god. You loved this too much.

You loved nudging your foot at his leg beneath the table, and you loved how the elderly couple beside you kept shooting you curious glances, and you loved how the waiter wouldn’t stop bringing breadsticks, and you loved the way Rocco kept playing with the bracelet around your wrist, the little blue stone.

“You gotta stop looking at me like that, Shrimp,” he murmured somewhere in the thick of it, “We’re in public—”

“Rocco!” A man’s voice cut through the pleasant mumblings of the restaurant. “And look at this beautiful creature.”

You felt it down to the millisecond, how the whole moment tilted upside-down. Rocco’s hand froze around your wrist, eyelids stuttering, before he turned towards the man shoving his way between tables, other diners scooting their chairs to make way. He stumbled a little, lopsided in his rain-drenched coat and shiny shoes.

The waiters had known Rocco, and their whispering now hinted they knew this guy too.

Rocco cleared his throat. “Hey, Johnnie.”

“Small fucking world, huh?”

The man tossed his pack of cigarettes on the table. Parliament. The tell-tale cocktail of smoke and liquor, the kind that slopped into the skin for days. You’d been on enough benders to know what it looked like before you crashed.

“I was just walking by, enjoying a little nighttime stroll as one does, you know, trying to get my steps in, and who do I see through the window, hm? Is that salmon?”

He reached for Rocco’s plate with a concerning kind of over-familiarity, pulled off a chunk with his bare hand and tossed it into his mouth, chewed, contemplative. “’S fuckin’ good.” Turning towards the waiters in the back like he was extending his compliments to the chef.

Rocco brushed your thumb gently before letting go. It’ll be fine.

“Another one of Dottie’s.” Johnnie nudged his chin towards you. “You’re getting predictable, man.”

“And you’re getting drunker every time I see you. Should we call you a cab?”

You flinched when Johnnie smacked Rocco’s shoulder hard enough the tables around you went quiet. He gripped him there, hard, pressing his thumb in. Rocco didn’t move. You saw it in the set of his jaw, that deep irate hum that always pushed you out of the room before it grew into something you didn’t know how to handle.

You shot him a pleading look. Don’t, you thought. Please, please, don’t.

“Little doll from The Dollhouse.” Johnnie said to you. “Bottle service, right? Jesus Christ, what a waste.” His eyes slid to your cleavage with the kind of intent that was meant to be known. “You ever thought about dancin’?”

Rocco’s chair inched back, even Johnnie clocked it, and when Rocco opened his mouth, you knew he was about to say something cataclysmically stupid, and if anyone was going to say something cataclysmically stupid, you wanted to beat everyone else to the punch.

“Look, I don’t mean to be rude.” You meant to be very, very rude. “But we were in the middle of having a really nice dinner and my lasagna’s getting cold. So I’d appreciate it if you’d get the fuck out of my face. Better yet, fuck off.”

Rocco stiffened in your periphery. You kept your eyes on Johnnie’s in a silent dare.

You hoped desperately that this wasn’t a man who could wait out a bluff, and you hoped even harder that you wouldn’t take this bluff too far.

It’ll be fine, you told yourself, It’ll be fine. As your hand inched towards…probably the butter knife, you couldn’t tell.

You waited for the moment to collapse into itself, and your eyes burned with how hard you were trying not to blink, don’t blink, and it felt so absurd, did they not think that this was absurd, and just when the waiting had reached the top of its agonizing crest—Johnnie spit out a laugh.

“Congrats.” He gave Rocco’s shoulder another smack for good measure. “This one’s fun.”

You would’ve slumped back in your seat if you could get yourself to move.

The table shook when Rocco finally stood up. He was taller than Johnnie, crooking his neck at him before swiping the pack of Parliaments and shoving them against Johnnie’s chest, hard enough he swayed backwards. “Come on. How about I walk you out.” It wasn’t a question.

“Look at you.” Johnnie surveyed him for a moment, then he turned back to you. “You know, he didn’t always have these fucking manners.”

You watched them weave their way through the restaurant, past the tables gone quiet. You heard the rain against the window, the ditzy elevator Jazz crackling from busted speakers. Halfway to the door, Johnnie turned towards you again.

“Boston’s a village,” he called out. “Looking forward to seeing you around, Pocket Rocket!”

· · ♥︎ · ·

At the overcrowded dive next to Rocco’s apartment, you ordered two of the stupidest shots you could find scribbled onto the blackboard above the bar:

You lifted your Buttery Nipple to Rocco’s Russian Quaalude: “To Boston being a village.”

He blurted a laugh, shaking his head.

Clink-clink. Ha-ha.

You scrunched up your face, mouth blooming with the sweet-smack of butterscotch liquor.

The music here was loud and the people here were louder, and you felt the life-affirming heat of relief move through you like you were a spelunker who’d almost been trapped in the black-bottle-neck of a cave.

“Ten more, please!” You told the bartender, heaving your milky shot glass into the air like a viking.

Rocco reached for your arm, shooting the bartender a look. “She’s joking.”

“Nine, please.”

“Just one.”

“Fine,” you huffed.

“Don’t do that again,” Rocco said, dragging your barstool closer to place his foot on the metal bar. Your knee grazed his thigh. You knew he didn’t mean ordering ten Buttery Nipple shots.

“Or at least, I don’t know, try?” That worried scrunch between his brows.

It made you reach for it, thumb rubbing gently against the crinkled skin to smooth it out.

He swallowed. You wanted to kiss him there.

“He’s smaller than I thought,” you said.

“I’m serious.” His voice was so low you could barely hear him over the noise. “It’s not worth it, trust me.”

“You’re worth it to me,” you said. “And my lasagna was getting cold.”

You felt like a teenager again, life’s dramas operatic and absurd.

You wondered what the Rocco from years ago would’ve done in that restaurant. Wondered, as you did so often, about the person he used to be and the person he was trying to be.

Did he wonder the same about you?

The Christmas lights around the bar made his face light up, red-yellow-green-blue, blinking in a steady pulse. You wanted to sink into the smell of his cologne, watered-down by the night and the lingering smoke from the cigarette the two of you had shared on your way here, like harried detectives that had just closed a case.

It was always hard to breathe like this, when he was close, when he looked at you. Even now, you weren’t quite used to it yet—the handling of beautiful men.

Cupping his face in your hands, his warm stubbled skin, you pulled him close.

You kissed him. He kissed you back.

The two of you, kissing each other in this crowded divebar with Christmas lights and billiard tables, its name some silly double-entendre you’d forgotten the second you’d finished giggling about it.

His hand found your waist to pull you close. Mouth wet-hot, insistent, all butterscotch liquor. Soft graze of teeth. His tongue. Oh, your tongue. You were liquid all over. You were scorching with it, aflame. What a beautiful word for something so awful.

“Wanna get out of here?” He pressed into the corner of your mouth.

You’d waited all your life to be asked this question by a man in a leather jacket.

Nodding all clumsy, you laughed at the bump of your chins, laughed like a child.

· · ♥︎ · ·

Had anyone in the history of the world wanted someone so much?

· · ♥︎ · ·

Your dress was a glossy black puddle on his bedroom floor.

On his bed, you waited, lay there in the glow of the streetlights pouring in through the windows. You were wearing nothing but that bracelet.

You were the wanton thing. You were baby.

“Look at you.” Rocco came to you in the dark. “You kill me, do you know that? Do you even fucking know that?” How the bed dipped when his knees dug into the mattress.

His face so close, breath hot with smoke. The damp haze of it pushing you in, pushing you down. You imagined yourself sinking to the bottom of something dark and deep and tender.

“Rocco—”

“Do you know how much I’ve thought about this?” His hand cupping your cheek. The press of his thumb against your bottom lip, tugging. Letting you suck it into your mouth, the salty pang of his skin on your tongue, the scrape of his nail on the inside of your cheek. “Thought about my mouth on you?” The wet kiss to your jaw and your chin. “Thought about being inside of you.” To your cheek. “Fucking you.” To your brow. “Fucking you for days—” Your mouth, your hot-hot mouth.

You spluttered a sound like a sob, and your eyes were screwed shut because this was everything, his weight above you was everything. You were moving through molasses, your movements heavy, taking forever. Pawing at him, trying to shove your fingers into his button-up, your impatience gnawing at you as you pulled at his belt, his jeans.

Your heart. Your heart was beating so fast. Could you die from this?

Twisting in his grip, you pressed both hands into his chest and pushed him down into the mattress. You sat perched on his stomach, feeling his breath shallow against your hands.

Patience was for the angels and the worshipful. But had the angels and the worshipful ever seen Rocco Gauthier without a shirt on?

“You’re perfect,” you gasped this, like you’d come up for air. “You’re so perfect…” And you're everything, all of it, all the time. And I’m all yours. And I’m with you. I’m with you. Let me show you. Will you let me show you?

"I mean it," you said. "I mean it so much—" And it made him laugh. He shook his head. It made you so sad to think no one had ever told him this.

His hands stuttered over you like they didn’t know where they wanted to be first; your thighs, your hips, lifting your breasts on their way to your collarbone, thumbs flicking at your nipples, fingers around your throat.

He got a hold of you then, grabbed you, fistfuls of your hair as he pulled you back down, like you were leashed, leading you to where he wanted you the most: to his mouth, to the glossy hot plume of his tongue.

You slid low on his lap, and when he shifted against you, separated by nothing but the flimsy cotton of your underwear and his boxer briefs—you moaned into his mouth as if feeding it to him. Have this. The nip of his teeth on your bottom lip. The peck to the edge of your mouth. Smiling, laughing, grumbling, groaning against each other.

Because this was perfect and unbelievable, and had he fantasized about this the way you had? Did he even know how you were a woman gone mad with it? Mad, mad, as you kept laughing, and he kept laughing, and you loved his laugh, oh god, how you loved his dirty little laugh.

“Stop—” you grinned, and Rocco snapped at you, mouthed along your chin, licked all the way up your cheek. Licked. Like a dog. Rocco Gauthier was fucking filthy, and you should’ve known.

“Make me, baby.”

Baby. Babybabybabybaby—

You mashed your mouths together, letting your teeth clack hard enough it hurt. Never had a tongue been so soft. Rocco moaned low when you remembered to move your hips. You wanted this so much. I want you so much. Were you ridiculous for wanting it forever? Wanting it so, so much?

You shimmied lower, bit into Rocco’s neck the way you’d fantasized to for so long, and you loved the way he twitched, his hips moving up like he couldn’t help it, like maybe, just maybe, he needed you just as much.

Let me show you, you thought.

Your mouth on the big swell of his chest, pressing your face into it for a moment, feeling the cool metal of his silver chain against your cheek. Breathing, breathing. The smooth expanse of his skin as you moved your mouth along the taut ripplings of his abdomen, yanking at it softly between your teeth. Rocco’s laugh warbled into a moan that looped through your head in one delirious swirl.

Your mouth ventured lower, to the soft dusting of hairs right below his belly button, and down, down. Further. There.

You fumbled with his boxers, couldn’t help laughing when Rocco lifted his hips to help, loved the sound of his snort when you tossed the boxers across the room with such carelessness.

Rocco’s cock rested thick and angry-red against his stomach. For a moment, you just looked at him. Rocco Gauthier was gloriously naked. The obscene sprawl of him. Your thoughts went sluggish, silly, needing, imagining yourself sticking your face into the space beneath those arms, of kissing the tender skin around his bellybutton, you’d lick into it, you’d put all his fingers into your mouth, let him be so far inside of you, all the way inside, thought of laving your tongue along every crook and valley of him. Catching his spit in your open mouth to swallow.

Rocco tilted his head to the side, and you realized with a pang of such private pleasure that he was doing it because you were, mimicking your dial of contemplation.

Your hand finally ran along the length of his cock. It was the sure weight of him against your palm. It was the sigh he made when you dipped your head. Rocco’s hand joined yours. Warmer, bigger, toughened by years of use. When Rocco took the reins to gently slap his cock against your mouth—the pearling of pre-cum, the bitter burst of it—all sense you had left tipped sideways and scattered.

You would’ve let him do whatever he wanted, whatever he needed, and so you let him tug you closer so gently, so carefully, here, baby, here, and you opened your mouth for him. Your tongue dragged along the hot pulse of a vein, collecting the taste of him, earthy and personal. The sound he made when you tongued at the head, letting your spit gather, letting it run down the sides. You licked it back up, gripping him tighter, giving him one slow wet pump after the other. Rocco’s throat went taut in hazy lights as he stretched back, his head hitting the pillows.

“Holy—fuck,” he groaned. Then laughed. Then groaned again. Then took hold of your hair and scraped his nails across your scalp as if in warning. “Tap my leg, if it’s too much, yeah? Look at me. Good, baby. Okay, okay—”

Babybabybaby.

What you would’ve given to have met him sooner. To have been undone by him on a lonely dirt road in the back of his Camaro, sixteen and trembling and full of the world.

You could’ve rolled your eyes back at the way Rocco’s grip tightened, how both of his hands were now cradling your head, thumbs wiping at the skin beneath your eyes, while you worked your mouth up and down the heat of him. Slowly something inside of you left—it wasn’t sense; that was long gone—but something more imperative, something that didn’t dislodge itself so easily.

You curled into the hazy cocoon of it all, nuzzling into the smell of this body thick in the air, letting yourself spiral. Your jaw loosened to take him down deeper. Teeth scraping lightly, tongue swirling, spit crawling out the corner of your mouth. The vulgar gulping of it, like you were drowning, made only more vulgar by the absolute nonsense Rocco tossed from himself, “—taking me so fucking good, baby. God—baby. Fuck. Need you so much. You’re so good, you’re so good. Look at you, baby. Look at you. Hmmm—” And in the messy middle of it Rocco’s hands tightened around your head to gently pull you off, to ask you, “You okay, baby? Breathing, yeah?” His thumb carefully wiping the spit from your chin. You felt so filthy, felt so deeply, thoroughly inside of this thing that was all impulse and all body. My body. You’d choke for it with your eyes closed and your mouth so desperately fucking open.

“Yeah—Yes…” Your voice was hoarse, suspended above yourself, floating on some far-away surface. You felt blurry. Filled with static and hunger. Rocco. You heard yourself stammer around all the things you wanted to say, all the things you wanted him to know. Your tongue ached with the need to feel him again, to have him.

“Didn’t catch that, baby,” Rocco said so patiently, and you bloomed with warmth.

“—you, want you to fuck my—mouth,” You leaned into Rocco’s palm pressed against your cheek, clumsily turning your head to nip at his fingers, to invite his thumb into your mouth, to suck at it, eat it whole. Consume him. You wanted to swallow him whole, bones and all. You’d do it by accident. You’d leave no trace.

“Jesus Christ.” Rocco collapsed his head back for a moment, barking a laugh. You imagined it sprayed across the ceiling. “You really are going to kill me.”

You heard yourself laugh too, laugh around Rocco’s thumb in his mouth. Dumb. Delirious. So good. All of this felt so good. You gave his thumb one last suck, before you batted it away. Rocco kept you upright, pulled you up to kiss your face.“My pretty fucking girl—”

The rest came in a haze: That heavy cock back in your mouth, Rocco’s hands cushioning your head. The sweet rhythm of it at first, going meaner and meaner as you loosened for him. Your fingers slid past your underwear, found your clit, and found your hole. Slid all the way in. Your hips ground into the sheets, chasing something you couldn’t reach in time.

Humming around the pressure wedged into the back of your throat. Your eyes going teary, blurring, the ringing in your ears, the taste of salt and bitter-tang and there was so much and more, want more, want you and want you—How terribly you’d missed this. Being here, needing nothing but this, being needed for nothing but this.

The world collapsed into a person, to a feeling, dreadfully lovely Rocco, taking from you and taking from you. This was all you needed to be. You could’ve wept from it, a starving woman clawing up the steps of church.

Rocco’s rhythm faltered, went haywire, hips stuttering, and you went blind or maybe you’d closed your eyes. “—stop, baby—shit, stop, stop, stop—”

Stop. Swallowing, swallowing. Lungs straining for breath, the pressure in your chest tightening like a corkscrew. The perfect tear of hands in your hair as he pulled you off.

Hissing above you, Rocco’s leg bent up and down. “Fuck—holy shit, okay, okay—Almost came. You—fuck. ” Gently rubbing at the juncture of your jaw, the two of you stared at his hard cock springing wetly against his belly.

You coughed, struggling for breath. A string of saliva still stuck to your lips. You couldn’t keep yourself upright, flopping down like a freshly born colt, wheezing. Your cheeks were wet. You weren’t done. You’d beg for more. Choke me, use me, toss me around the fucking room—this nasty violent thing in you flaring up like a rash.

Rocco scooted back against the headboard, throwing the pillows aside, and then with both his hands beneath your arms, he hauled you into his lap and pressed you against his damp chest. Your foreheads bumped a little too hard, and you scrunched your face up in pain.

“Shit, sorry,” Rocco mumbled, kissing your forehead, once, twice, your eyebrow, both of your eyelids, one by one, before licking and nipping at the edge of your mouth. Could he taste himself on you? The bitter tang of his precum?

“You are so good. You’re so good, baby. Look at me. Such a good girl. You’re my good fucking girl, baby. Oh my god.”

And then he was kissing you again, and it was uncoordinated and terrible, wet-sloppy, kissing down your neck, biting into it, laving at your shoulder, the top of your breast. His mouth opening over your nipple, the velvety glide of his tongue, sucking at you there, groaning into you. Peppering kisses around it, before laving at it until you arched for him.

Fuck me. You weren’t done. Please, fuck me. You’d beg for more.

“Fuck me—”

He kissed you between your breasts, then between your collarbones. “Yeah?” he breathed. “Need me to fuck you, baby?” You nodded, gripping his hair, burying your face into it, mewling. His fingers, his hot-hot fingers sliding past your stomach, between your thighs—

“—so wet for me. Look at how wet you are. Does my baby need me to fuck her? Need me to fuck this pretty little pussy?”

You lost yourself then. Your body was his body. My body. Yours.

Time moved too quick and too slow, riddled with holes. One moment, you were sitting in his lap, the next, you were on your back. His mouth on your neck, your breasts, your stomach, your pussy. Thumb tenderly rubbing the sweetest little circles over your clit.

His breath so hot it was all fumes, it was all flame when the spongy tip of his cock nudged at your hole, rubbing up against your wetness, brushing against your clit, tapping at it, grinding against it until your thighs shook.

Rocco was saying things again, soothing things, filthy lovely caring things, and his cock pushed in and in, stopped when you twitched, continued when you sighed and you said, “Oh god, oh god." One hand moving down to thumb at your clit, the other holding you open for him.

Gasping, you tipped your head back, nuzzling into Rocco’s calming kisses to your neck, his soft, soft murmuring, “Slow, baby…You’re doing so well, Shrimp. Look at you doing so good, hm? You’re doing so good for me. You take me so good—”

Rocco spewed all these things from himself, his sweet desperate breathless fucking drivel. It was ridiculous, how much he meant it. You wanted to lap the words out of his hand.

With a shaky breath, he let his full weight pull him down. It wasn’t enough. You wanted to take all of him, wanted him to tip you upside-down and bury himself to the fucking hilt. You sobbed from the craving of it. Your need in that moment was so immense you swore it pushed you apart, skin so tight you couldn’t breathe.

When his hips met yours, you pressed your foreheads together. Your ears ring. There was so much of him. More, you pleaded, more. Could he hear you? Were you loud enough?

The deep drag of Rocco’s cock inside of you was so slow. You whined, letting his body rock back and forth in a seething rhythm. He fucked you like this. You were bobbing in the shallow end. Rocco’s eyes, half-lidded, watching you in the dark. His mouth. You kissed it, laved at it. Moaned for it. Wanted to be so wet and willing for it.

It went on like this for far too long, and you felt the tremble in Rocco’s legs like he couldn’t keep still, the held-back frenzy in the way his hands tore into your hair, clutched at the back of your neck.

You choked on a moan as you buried your face into Rocco’s damp neck, breathing in his sweat, his watered-down cologne.

“Told you—told you to fuck me,” you slurred.

Fuck me—

Rocco blinked, and his swallow was loud in the quiet, and whatever capacity for civility kept him calm for so long, undid itself, and you swore you saw a smile, or maybe you’d tasted it, like all your senses had leaked into one indistinguishable mass.

The first thrust knocked the air out of your chest. Rocco’s hips lifted, knees bolted to the bed. You couldn’t move like this, nailed into place with Rocco’s arms looped around you.

There was nothing but this, and Rocco looked as desperate as you felt, and he slipped out and in, you opened for it, wider, easier. You took him. You were the limpet, tossed and twisted, fucked. You were being fucked, and you can’t do anything but sob for it.

The hot arc of his cock breaching you deep. Kisses messy, slick, your bottom lip caught between teeth. Rocco's hands on your chest, your breasts, dipping down to pull a nipple into his mouth. You pawed at him, shook for him.

“—such a good girl, baby. You’re so good for me. Good girl. Look at you. Look at you taking it so fucking well—Fuck.”

You wished you could absorb into him, travel through him to be in all these places. You wanted so many unbelievable things.

Rocco fucked you into the bed, bad-mannered, unapologetic, fucked you like the men you weren’t supposed to want, the ones who said what they wanted to say and looked you straight in the eye when they did.

You were saying his name. How it flooded your mouth, huge in your throat as you blubbered it all over yourself. Blubbered it into Rocco’s neck, across his face, into his mouth. You kissed, you fucked, you kissed again. Rocco held you down while his hips thrusted deep. The slap of his skin, the mattress creaking beneath you, moving like a see-saw, like waves. The sheets were damp. You were whimpering. He was deplorable. The solid ache of Rocco’s cock was lodged so far inside of you you were strangled with it. You were so full, so fucking full you couldn’t catch a fucking breath. You couldn’t breathe. You were scrambling. It’s so good, you’re so good, all of this, everything, everything, I'll take everything—

With a groan, Rocco pushed back in, lifted you, the wetness of your heat leaking down your tailbone. His thumb found your clit, strumming at it, until your eyes rolled and you felt it in your stomach, felt it coming for you.

“That it’s, baby. You're going to come for me, baby. You're going to come for me—” He was rambling. His hips hitting your skin in wet demanding cuffs until they lost all rhythm.

When it finally came, that big cyclone inside of you, when your leg kicked high, when it hit you all at once—you thought of how the soft light used to slant through the windows at church and it felt just a little bit like heaven.

· · ♥︎ · ·

You lay with him all morning, traced the shape of his nose with a finger. You kissed the tip of it. Bit it. He laughed.

“You’re all the right things,” you said.

The morning light hit his jaw like a sundial.

· · ♥︎ · ·

“Good afternoon, my liege.”

You snorted. “Stop.”

“Wrote you a sonnet.”

“If you sing to me, I will hang up and you will not hear from me for a week.”

“You’d miss me too much.”

“Wanna bet?”

“You’re hot when you threaten me.”

“Mh-hmm.”

“Mh-hmm…What’s up?”

“So, hypothetically, if I were to give you lots of kisses and promise to love you forever, would you pick me up tomorrow? There’s this study group. It’ll be at the library, and it’s gonna get pretty late so—”

“Do you need me to park around the corner again?” He said it with enough veiled bite that you tilted your head. You imagined he was tilting his too. Like you were telepathic twins in a sci-fi movie.

“Why are you saying it like that?”

“Because you asked me to park around the corner last time. Like an uncool dad.”

“First off, you’d make a very cool dad. And second of all, yes, but only because you rev the engine like a huge asshole every time.”

“It’s funny—”

“And then you honk.”

“It’s funny!”

“Yeah. Ha-ha. Real fucking clown over here.”

“You hang out with me too much, you’re starting to sound like my Uncle P.” (You’d met Uncle P at a block party last week, and you could confirm that Uncle P was indeed a jerk-off.)

“What are we cooking tonight?”

“You mean, what am I cooking tonight?”

“Carbonara...? Because you looove me…?”

“I’d love you even more if you let me park in front of the library.”

“Rocco.”

“I swear I’ll only honk, like, once. Just once. Your face does this adorable thing when you’re mortified—”

You hung up, texted him: Fine

He sent you a shrimp emoji. Like an uncool dad.

Smiling, you pocketed your phone in the bomber jacket you’d stolen from Rocco’s coat hanger this morning. Looking back up Revere Beach, you spotted Tayla waving at you from that spot on her jewel-blue towel. Face haloed by her wild curls shaking in the wind. You waved back.

The sky was roiling with clouds and it was far too cold to swim, but you waded into the water anyway. Fisting your long skirt against your stomach, you let the waves lap up against your thighs, hissing against the cold sting of it.

You’d never seen the ocean before Boston, never thought there was enough space in the world for something so vast. But there it was, sprawled beneath an even vaster sky.

What sweet relief it was, knowing the world was so big there was space even for you.

· · ♥︎ · ·

The text came from an unknown number, shimmering there on your screen:

I miss you too

· · ♥︎ · ·

You did it on the night you’d let Rocco talk you into watching Indiana Jones.

He used to watch it every Christmas with his dad when he was a kid. By the end of it, he was quiet, staring at Speed in her terrarium, her little feet paddling in the shallow end.

You ran a hand through his hair. No gel. It was soft and wavy like this, and it framed his face in a way that made you want to cup both his cheeks and kiss his forehead.

“Shall we just have a cigarette on it?” you asked, and he chuckled, a little confused but said, sure, and you pulled him to the open kitchen window, its criss-cross of iron bars.

The street below, empty at night, shone with a fresh layer of rain.

You grabbed your Camels and placed two cigarettes into your mouth to light them both, before handing one to him.

He smiled. He kissed you, long and full with feeling.

Rocco had never watched Now, Voyager.

He didn’t know of enchanting Paul Henreid, who had loosened only at the end, from all his love, standing by that window with Bette Davis. How he’d looked at her like she’d slotted into all the parts of him he never thought could be whole.

The night boundless, beautiful. That operatic swell of strings and brass and love.

Oh, Jerry. You heard the sing-song cadence of Bette’s voice like a handbell. Don’t let us ask for the moon. We have the stars.

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