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h0mespun · 11 days ago

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Operant Conditioning

a Mel/Frank drabble | Explicit | AO3 link | Dog motif, etc.

Part II to Classical Conditioning—I recommend you read that first. Thank you to @khrogerswrites for the excellent beta work :)

The problem, Mel has considered at length, is that she didn't create a viable incentive system at the start. She started with mints and Starbursts, and she had assumed that’s where it would stay.

But Frank kept wanting more, more, more.

Mel hadn’t anticipated the inevitable inflation. She hadn’t considered his need for variety.

After a while, Frank didn’t want mints anymore. Or pink Starbursts. A hug after shift didn’t cut it.

The hugs in the parking garage had been… selfish, to be honest. Maybe more for her than for him at the beginning (Becca had been in the process of moving out then, which Mel had found emotionally challenging). But it turned out that the hugs really motivated Frank. So it was easy for Mel to ignore the erections that poked her in the stomach. Just physiology, she told herself.

Then the humping incident occurred in January: a clear touchstone. When Mel reflects, that was perhaps the moment she could have made a different choice. She could have gotten up off the couch after she felt him hard against her leg. But he had done so well on his assignment, and it felt so nice to rub her hands through his silky hair as he grunted and moaned into her stomach.

Didn’t he deserve something special?

Doug Driscoll came into the Pitt with a STEMI just a week later, and Frank had drawn the short straw and had to treat him. Frank’s professionalism had left a little to be desired, but he probably would have been charged with assault of a patient if he hadn’t obeyed Mel. In a high-pressure situation, her command had held. So yes, that deserved a reward. A jackpot, actually.

Mel considered herself inexperienced at fellatio—a more charitable term than her college boyfriend had bestowed mid break-up speech: “generally un-sexy and weirdly bad at blowjobs”—but Frank was a great teacher, so rewarding him while also receiving some actionable feedback was really just killing two birds with one stone.

Frank drove them higher and higher, up the corkscrew levels of the parking garage.

Two birds with one stone, Mel assured herself as she rubbed her thighs together surreptitiously in the passenger seat.

—

Maybe Mel wasn’t that bad at sex after all, because she had barely taken him into her mouth before Frank was cursing, shuddering, punching the ceiling.

She swallowed him down before smugly offering him a mint from her tin.

—

That hasty blowjob on the seventh floor parking deck had blown the top off of Frank’s motivation. Every day now, Frank is coming up with a new achievement, a new goalpost, something that definitely deserves a treat. He’s going the extra mile with patients. He’s taking his vitamins and hitting his protein goals. He’s training for another triathlon, the first since his back injury.

It’s been a full month of getting Frank off in the seventh floor parking deck after the good shifts. He wants her hands, her mouth. He wants to touch her, all over, all the time. He’s voracious in a way that is sometimes daunting. He wants more, more, more, and Mel is left pumping the brakes, desperately trying to recalibrate in this new economy she’s woken up in.

So now Mel finds herself here: her mouth is sore, her hands are sore. Even the area between her breasts is sore. But she can’t argue with the results.

Frank is the ingenue of the department again. He’s catapulted from the bottom tier of patient satisfaction scores to the tippity-top. Gloria Underwood, the CMO, even comes down from her ivory tower to the Pitt to congratulate Frank personally.

Mel watches from the North Wing as Gloria speaks to Frank. She can see him warring with himself. She knows his inner calculus as clearly as if he is saying it aloud. On the one hand: hospital administrators are bad. Sucking up to them is detestable. That’s Robby’s voice (his former master).

However, Mel is a rule-follower, and well-liked by her supervisors. Mel never wants him to be rude.

So Frank schmoozes with Gloria. He’s a charismatic guy when he wants to be, when he dons that character, and the administrator melts like butter. Gloria even shadows him for a couple of cases, “to see what the patient satisfaction scores are raving about.”

At the end of their shift, Mel and Frank walk to their cars together. He’s peering at her carefully, not even watching where he’s going, so he trips on a crack.

“Watch where you’re stepping,” she scolds gently, no bite. She doesn’t have it in her to really get onto him, though Mel has intuited that Frank might like to try that, sometime.

“Sorry,” he says. They’ve reached Mel’s car. Frank has his hands in his pockets, lingering. “Gloria was very impressed with my patient satisfaction scores,” he said, cocking his head.

Mel shrugged. “I gave you a reward for that the other day. The day we got the email.” The day they had received the newest updates to the patient satisfaction scores, her jaw had still been sore from last week. But she had been so proud of him, so he really had deserved something special.

The mistake had been that they didn’t have any lube in the car, and he’d been asking to fuck her breasts for a solid month, so he said, “Spit, baby,” and held out his open palm exactly the way he does for her mints. So she’d been convinced to spit in his hand as demurely as possible.

He’d used her saliva to coat his dick and rubbed it between her breasts. Titfucking, he’d called it, swearing and sweating in the backseat while she knelt in the floorboard. With lube it probably would have been fine, but the spit wasn’t slippery enough, so now Mel has a big red rash between her breasts from the irritation. His dick was apparently fine (unfair).

“But I was nice to Gloria for hours, and that was really hard,” Frank points out.

Mel hums. She kicks the toe of her shoe along a crack in the asphalt. “I’m still kind of sore. My jaw and, you know. The carpal tunnel.”

“It’s fine,” Frank says quickly. “I could— I could get you off?” he asks with a hopeful lilt to his voice.

Mel shakes her head. “That’s okay.”

It’s already messed up that she’d started this with a guy she had feelings for. But to reward him by making her come just wouldn’t be right. He would do it, of course: he is slavishly devoted to her pleasure at this point. But that makes it feel even more wrong.

So that’s one of her rules: she could only give him orgasms. Nothing the other way around. You give gifts to your employees, not your boss. Same concept.

He huffs, looking down at the ground. He’s frustrated that she’s not letting him. Of course he is—he’s a good boy, so it makes sense that he wants her to feel good. Mel can see his wheels turning; he’s reasoning out an argument.

“Drop it,” she says with a warning in her voice.

He was tense, shoulders up, ready to argue. There’s a moment of dissonant static after her command, then all the tension just melts out of his posture. It’s like she changed the channel in his brain.

Frank turns placid eyes toward her. “Did I make a mistake?”

Should he not have been so friendly to Gloria, is what he meant. Certainly his old master Robby wouldn’t have been. Mel has begun to realize that she has stepped into a role that was vacated, not one that never existed. Frank is… a pleaser. He was panting after Robby for years—not sexually, Mel didn’t think so, anyway—but for more formal approval, like quarterly evals and letters of rec and stuff like that.

Then Robby threw him away, right when Frank needed him the most…

She melts. “No, no, Frank,” she soothes him. She rubs his back, and he leans in. “I know it feels weird, but I think you did really well,” she says.

He peers at her. “Maybe… Okay, no sex stuff. But Becca’s staying at the Center tonight, right? And I don’t have the kids. Maybe I could sleep over tonight? In your bed?”

Oh, goodness. That would be a trial. Over the last two months, Mel’s bedroom had really become a sanctum of privacy. Like, sexual privacy. She’s been getting him off after nearly every shift, coming home to an empty apartment, and fucking herself in her bed. Her sheets have to be filthy. She’s not even sure that she cleaned off the vibrator she used last night.

Mel takes a deep breath, trying to keep her voice even. “That sounds nice. Or instead, we go up to the seventh floor parking deck and you can masturbate and come on my breasts?”

Frank purses his lips, then shakes his head.

Mel nearly throws her hands in the air in exasperation. He used to love that.

“You can come on my face,” Mel adds, and immediately regrets it. That was way too high-value. She’s been saving that one for a rainy day, a day when he did something truly amazing. Now she has just offered it to him like it was on par with a blowjob.

He freezes, eyes wide. But then he cocks his head, considering, and ultimately shakes his head. “Sleep in your bed,” he decides.

“It’s a one-time offer,” Mel warns.

“Sleep in your bed,” he insists.

Mel sighs. Here they go.

—

It feels so nice to have Frank in her apartment, not that Mel can really admit that to him. Just the warmth of another human presence, another pair of shoes at the door, two dirty cups in the sink. Becca officially moved into her apartment at the center full-time three months ago, and maybe Mel has been more lonely than she thought.

When Frank enters, he surveys the common area for a long moment with an imperious frown. There’s a film of dust on every surface and the air is stale (Mel has been spending most of her time in her room, for aforementioned reasons). Then he beelines to Mel’s bedroom. Mel has already verified that her vibrator is safely out of sight in her bedside drawer, but she doesn’t expect him to crawl on the bed in his outside clothes (gross) and lay spread-eagle. He’s rubbing snow angels in her cotton sheets, taking great big sniffs of the bedding, and —oh, gosh.

The pillow. She hid the vibrator but she forgot the pillow she’d been grinding on last night. The one that he is currently mashing his face in—

“Shower,” she says, clapping her hands. Her face must be beet-red. “I don’t like hospital in my bed.”

She’s already opening the linen closet, grabbing a towel for him as well as new sheets.

He freezes, eyes shifting to the linen closet suspiciously. “Don’t change those,” he orders.

She rolls her eyes. “You just rubbed your scrubs all over them.” And it’s been a solid two weeks since she last changed the sheets. Not to mention the pillow, which is obviously a code red.

He sighs, beleaguered, and stands to grab the towel from her. He’s tenting his pants.

“The hot and cold dials are backwards. Feel free to use any of my shower stuff.” says Mel. “And you should probably jerk off in there, or you won’t be able to sleep.”

“Yeah,” Frank agrees. He walks back to the bed, picks up the pillow, and smashes it to his face as he takes another long drag. He hands it to Mel on his way to the bathroom.

—

Some context:

Last year, Frank Langdon had been in a funk. Depressed, melancholic. Maybe dysthymic is the best word.

He no longer cared about Mel’s cool cases. He didn’t listen to his EM podcasts anymore (he told Mel once that he didn’t even turn the radio on during his commute). He stumbled through his shifts in a daze, downing Red Bulls and Celsius to stay awake. Robby tapped Samira for cases while Frank made enemies for cherry-picking. His patient satisfaction scores were circling the drain.

Mel didn’t mean to take Frank on as her new project; it just kind of happened, concomitantly with Becca spending more and more overnights at the Center.

At first she was concerned about his sobriety. So she invited herself over to his new apartment (very bleak, is all Mel will say). They were supposed to be watching a movie, but Frank really just stared at the wall behind the TV. He didn’t even notice Mel digging through his bathroom and kitchen cabinets. When he stepped out for a smoke, Mel vacillated on the couch for about five seconds before efficiently searching his bedroom as well. She found no drugs, no alcohol, just some cigarettes. She dug through his pill bottles and committed his medication regimen to memory. (Some of those psych meds aren’t what she would have chosen, but she’s not a psychiatrist, and of course she doesn’t know what he’s tried and failed before.) Overall, he has shockingly few personal effects.

She quit pretending to watch the movie after that. Before she drove home, Frank walked her to the front door and thanked her for spending time with him in a bizarrely earnest fashion. The whole night left her feeling melancholy, but at least she ruled out drugs.

So then Mel assumed that he was still in love with his ex-wife. Abby had decisively moved on with a Frank 2.0: a blue-eyed, black-haired plastic surgeon who works out of Shadyside. Shen, who apparently plays pickleball in Shadyside on Thursdays (ew), reported that Abby’s new boyfriend was two inches taller than Frank with no forehead wrinkles. No laugh lines, either.

But Frank didn’t seem hung up on Abby—at work, he mentioned her a normal amount, in very normal ways, always in the co-parenting role. He didn’t appear to harbor any bitterness, even about the new boyfriend.

He only had Tanner and Millie every other weekend, a hard reality about the occupation he chose, so that did get him down. (“EM is not a lifestyle specialty,” the advisor had warned Mel in medical school.) Especially since his kids were at the age where they didn’t really feel comfortable in Frank’s house. They carried a litany of complaints about Frank’s apartment—it was always cold there, Frank’s cooking sucked, their beds weren’t comfortable—and it was just normal kid whining, but it cut. Millie usually cried when Abby drops them off.

Mel helped where she could. To make the bachelor pad more homey, she helped Frank pick out patio furniture and soft blankets for the sofa. He’s a horrible cook (he cooks, like, chicken breast and steamed broccoli for dinner, and then gets his feelings hurt when Tanner says he likes Mom’s cooking better) so that was an easy way for Mel to help. She found kid-friendly recipes on Pinterest and saved them to a special folder. She ensured that his kitchen is stocked before the kids come over—fresh blueberries and raspberries, string cheese, a frozen pizza for emergencies.

The dog was a godsend. The kids just adored Sonny. On warm summer nights, all Tanner and Millie wanted to do is chase Sonny around the patch of grass in Frank’s backyard.

It’s on one of these nights that Frank said it, off-handedly, like he hadn’t just handed Mel the key to his psyche, the one she’d been digging for fruitlessly over the last six months.

“What I wouldn’t give to be a dog.”

Mel eyed him, equal parts concerned and amused. “You would switch places with a dog?”

“Sure, wouldn’t you? No ‘what’s for dinner’, no rent to pay, no hoping you don’t kill someone’s kid at work because you forget to take your Ritalin.”

Well, no, she would not. She wanted agency in her life. She had hobbies and pursuits beyond eating and sleeping. Frank sounded… really burnt out.

“I didn’t know you were finding work that stressful,” she said after a moment, trying to keep the concern out of her voice. Maybe now would be a good time to bring up his psych medication regimen.

Frank shook his head. “Unconditional love. Endless belly rubs. Being called a good boy. Treats.”

“Hm,” Mel replied thoughtfully. She took out her phone and jotted down his list verbatim on her Notes app. Then she googled “good boy treats human male reddit” which brought up a lot of porn (Thank god for her privacy screen). She blushed so hard that her cheeks stayed pink for the rest of the night.

After leaving Frank’s house, Mel holed up in her room for further research. She annotated that list from earlier.

What Frank Langdon wants:

Unconditional love (system already in place, unfortunately)

Endless belly rubs (likely inappropriate—check HR Handbook)

Being called a good boy (?!)

Treats (refer to social psychology notes from undergrad)

When Mel looks back on this whole debacle a year later, when she’s naked in the shower and desperately trying to get herself off with the showerhead so that Frank won’t be able to sniff out her arousal in bed, she realizes that it all started here.

That is, with the rewards.

—

Frank is actually really well-behaved that night, staying on his side of the bed just like she instructed. Mel is so pleased with him in the morning that she has to talk herself out of waking him up with a blowjob. (“We don’t reward expected behavior,” Mel recites to herself.)

It’s also that he looks so cute, drooling into her pillow as shafts of morning sun illuminate the highlights in his hair. Mel just wants to eat him.

For the millionth time, she wishes she had just asked him on a date six months ago. What she wouldn’t give for a normal fucking date.

But then he’d probably still be wallowing in his funk. His hair and skin wouldn’t be shining from his vitamins and high-protein diet. He would still be struggling at work. His kids would dread their days at his grungy bachelor pad and count down the hours until they could return to mom’s house.

So Mel defers the blowjob, but she does wake him up with gentle caresses. Soft pets and scratches with her nails up and down his forearms, his shoulders, up his neck and his cheek and temple.

He wakes up with a pleasured shiver. Cracks his bright blue eyes open. “Mel,” he murmurs, like he can’t believe she’s here. He grabs her hand, brings it to his mouth, and kisses it.

He sounds so devoted, so happy, so loving that Mel’s heart breaks a little bit.

“Was this worth it?” Mel asks. “Was this better than…” (she still has trouble with voicing vulgarity.) “Than the one-time offer?”

He kisses her hand again. The sunlight streaming through the window is making Mel feel fevered.

“This is better than all the sex stuff combined,” he admits. He’s using his normal voice, his work voice, rather than the low, gravelly voice he uses to demand sexual favors from her.

Mel exhales helplessly, watching him kiss up her wrist. Oh gosh, now he’s licking her arm—little kitten licks—and the feeling shoots straight to her pelvis. No wonder this guy had two kids by the age of thirty, she thinks distantly. Her uterus is panging for him.

“Mel. I know you don’t want me to touch you,” Frank says, eyes carefully focused on her arm. “But I think you need to let me. It’s not fair.”

Mel huffs in amusement. “You touch me all the time,” she points out. “You’re touching me right now.”

Frank shakes his head. “Like the pillow. The vibrators in your bedside table. The showerhead.”

Mel is blushing. Six months ago, she’d installed one of those nice detachable shower heads last year, replacing the standard one in the rental. And obviously after he’d gone in there and jerked off last night, when she was staring down the barrel of a gun of sleeping next to him, she’d showered after him and… yeah, she’d used it. Just a quick one, to take the edge off. “You looked through my drawers while I was in the shower.”

He shrugs, like, yeah, obviously.

She moves to lie on her stomach, head propped on her forearms to face him. “Why is it not fair?” she asks.

“I thought at first you were saving it,” Frank explained. He scoots toward her on the bed so their whole bodies are touching, ankles to hips to shoulders. “Like you were going to let me get you off once I was good enough. But then I come here and find your little sex den. And it has me thinking. You’ve been going without. You’ve been giving me all these rewards with nothing for yourself. It’s not fair, baby. And I can tell you’re lonely—Becca hasn’t lived here in months, has she?”

Mel exhales. “She moved to the center full-time three months ago,” she admits.

He clicks his tongue. “And you hid it from me. We’re supposed to be best friends, Mel.”

Inexplicably, tears well in Mel’s eyes. “I’m sorry,” she murmurs. “It’s been really hard.”

She’s been so, so lonely.

“So you need to let me,” he concludes. “You have to let me.”

“What are you asking for, exactly?”

“This morning? Lick your cunt,” he says immediately. He’s nosing at her shoulder, playing with her tank top strap. He’s sweeping his hand up and down her back, which would be relaxing except he’s going all the way down her thigh. “Moving forward? I’m going to take care of you, as often as you can handle it. Whatever you let me do.”

Mel feels her eyelids flutter. God. As often as she could handle it. She’s just a human girl. So she makes a decision. “It, uh, it wouldn’t be a reward. It would just be something we both wanted to do.”

He freezes, releasing his mouth from her shoulder with a wet pop. “A freebie?” he clarifies.

Mel shakes her head. “No, like,” she pauses. “I can’t reward you by having you pleasure me. It doesn’t make sense.”

He snorts. “That’s dumb, but whatever. Turn over, baby. Lift up.”

She flips over to her back and lets him shuck her tank top off.

“I’m serious, Frank,” she says, batting his hands away from her sports bra. She’s going to lose his frontal cortex as soon as that comes off, and they need to have this discussion.

After all, they’ve never actually acknowledged it.

She takes a deep breath. He’s looming over her in the bed now, so she wraps a hand around his jaw and looks at him earnestly. “Listen. If we do this, we hit pause on the dog thing. It would just be us. Mel and Frank.”

He cocks his head in confusion. His blue eyes are guileless as he stares at her for a long moment.

Then he says, “What dog thing?”

Mel freezes.

Frank bursts out into a throaty laugh, leaning down to hide his face in her throat, pressing a kiss there. “Oh god, sorry. Your face.”

She whacks him on the shoulder gently, face flushing.

“Sure, we can hit pause on the dog thing,” he agrees affably, like it was always that easy, like Mel has been torturing herself for the last six months for absolutely no reason. “The only thing is…” he paused, looking sheepish.

“What?” she asks, heart sinking.

“When I’ve been thinking about eating you out… the dog is, like, part of it. The fantasy.”

Mel blinked. “Oh.”

“Yeah. So I’m probably still going to channel that a little, if it’s okay with you.” He has her bra off now, and he punctuates that statement with a long, slow lick up the valley between her breasts. His canines glint in the morning sun.

“Channeling—“ her voice breaks, damn it. “Channeling is okay.”

“Thank you,” he says primly. “Green, yellow, red? Anything else I need to know?”

Mel wrinkles her nose. “That’s fine, but is it really necessary? This is just going to be normal cunnilingus, right?”

He chuckles breathlessly, resting his forehead on her sternum, like she’s said something hilarious. “Yes, Mel, totally. This will be the most normal cunnilingus of your life, just like the rest of our relationship.”

Mel furrows her brow at that, but she’ll have to ponder his exact phrasing later. He pulls her by the ankles to the edge of the bed, snaps her panties off as he kneels to the ground, and descends on her cunt like an animal.

He’s kissing and sucking and biting her inner thighs. It’s a lot.

“Careful,” Mel yelps, hips reflexively lifting off the bed. “I’m sensitive, from last night. The—showerhead.”

He manhandles her, getting both knees above his shoulders and clamping his forearms over her pelvis. “I don’t see what that has to do with me,” he says. “You’re the one that pressure-washed your clit when I was literally waiting in your bed.”

Which, oh, is such an asshole thing to say, so why does she feel a fresh rush of arousal?

His actions belie his words, though. Once he actually gets to her clit, he’s gentle. He slows down, takes his time, laving his tongue flat across the bundle of nerves.

She’s absurdly wet, preposterously turned on. She balls up her fists to cover her eyes, squirming and shaking.

Frank doesn’t let up. It only takes a few minutes of that, focused attention on her clit, before he’s wringing an orgasm from her.

Her muscles contract so forcefully that she’s shaking and sore afterwards. For a long moment she just breathes through it, staring at the ceiling. When she finally comes back to herself, Frank is starting to press kisses into her inner thigh again. Gosh, she thinks through a haze. Was this what normal cunnilingus was supposed to be like?

“One more,” he begs. “I’ll give you one more.” One of his hands has disappeared under the edge of the bed, and Mel knows he’s touching himself.

She shakes her head. “That’s— too much. I’m too stimulated already. Frank, come up here, I want to see you.” She grabs his arm and tries to yank him up off the floor, only she still has noodle arms. He acquiesces, climbing from the floor over the length of her body to straddle her on the bed.

He’s so, so handsome, is all Mel can think. He’s backlit by the morning sun, eyes roving up and down her supine form as he’s jerking himself off, and Mel gets the front-row view. The muscles in his veined forearm ripple as he strokes himself. He reaches out with his other hand to palm her breast, just to touch her, and they both moan.

He’s getting close.

Fuck it, Mel decides. He’s been so good this morning. She props herself on her elbows.

“You can—“ she gestures at her face. “If you want.”

He slows down for a second, then catches her drift. He shakes his head. “Your chest?”

So she bares her chest to him, and he comes, long and agonized.

After he catches his breath, he kisses her forehead. “Thank you for that.” He gestures at her chest, at the semen dripping off her nipples. “The face thing—I don’t know, it’s not for me,” he says in explanation.

Mel frowns. She thought all men fantasized about coming on their sexual partner’s face. Something about dominating women, probably?

She’d been counting on it as a high-value reward; after all, she didn’t have many others left.

“I mean, we can do it if you want to,” he adds, misinterpreting her frown. “You’d look very cute, don’t get me wrong.”

“No, I’m good.” she admits. “I just thought you would want to.”

Frank bustles to her en-suite and comes back with a warm wash rag. He wipes the white stripes off her chest efficiently. He pauses, looking at her out of the corner of his eye.

“What?” Mel asks.

“I know we’re not there yet,” Frank says. “And I’m not rushing, or pushing. I’m enjoying the ride, honestly. But as far as kinks go…”

Mel eyes him with bated breath.

“It would be the, erm—“ He coughs, blushing. “The barebacking. Or like, coming inside you. That would be, like, the peak for me.”

She brightens. A new high-value reward. Relatively normal. And incidentally, something she also found sexy and had never gotten to try. She probably still had time to make an appointment at her OBGYN clinic to discuss LARC options. This could really dovetail nicely with the first time she lets him fuck her, she considers.

After all, she has plans for that.

#kingdon #melfrank #yeah…it’s the puppy play fic #you’re a good boy frank langdon #the plot of this one is that the price of good boy behavior keeps going up #mel POV #in case you are wondering i AM embarrassed that i wrote this #shen plays pickleball in every homespun universe #Spotify

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h0mespun · 15 days ago

Text

WIP Wednesday:

a snippet from Love Game, Chapter 6🎾

Our favorite mixed doubles team, Mel and Frank, go up against Doug Driscoll and Myrna White during the semifinals of the Italian Open. TW for canon/sport-typical violence.

For @rippleintheocean. I hope you enjoy!

Driscoll whammed the lobbed ball straight at Mel. It was a body shot, perfectly aimed. She couldn’t get her racket up in time to parry it back. The ball hit her thigh point blank, probably going 100 miles per hour. She felt the impact rattle up her femur, through her spine, vertebra by vertebra. Mel groaned reflexively, dropping her racket as the tennis ball bounced uselessly to the clay.

“Shoot,” she whispered through clenched teeth, falling into a crouch and holding her thigh. A stinging sensation bloomed under her hands.

Frank dropped his racket and ran up to her. “Mel! Mel, are you okay?” Then, in a louder tone, across the net: “What the hell, Driscoll? Umpire?”

“Sorry,” Driscoll said in an insincere tone, while the umpire from his chair called, “Part of the game.”

“It’s fine, it’s fine,” Mel said. She uncovered the area with her hands and winced. There was already a raised welt forming on her inner thigh, bright red and angry. “Targeting the weaker player is part of the game,” she said. Frank crouched in the clay, grabbing her hand and squeezing.

After a moment of breathing into his shoulder, she stood up from the clay. “Let’s go,” she said through gritted teeth. It was true that targeting the woman was typical in mixed doubles strategy, but she sensed a bully in Doug Driscoll. She wanted this match to be over as soon as possible.

Mel and Frank dominated the first set. By set break, the surface capillaries on Mel’s thigh had burst, forming a stark reddish-purple circle.

As they got into the second set, Mel kept catching Frank eye the bruise with a clenched jaw. The placement was a little awkward; the bruise was on the meat of her upper inner thigh, just barely peeking out below her tennis skirt. (She hoped there was no media coverage at this match; she really didn’t want images of that part of her body going around.)

Driscoll picked up on it.

It was like he taunted Frank by going for Mel. He was basically hunting her; every chance he got, he shot a stroke right at Mel. This was largely ineffective—Mel was practiced at catching body shots back—but it was nerve-wracking.

Unfortunately, the intimidation tactic was working. Frank was rattled. He was lobbing over Driscoll’s head to his partner’s forehand every chance he got, which was the strategically incorrect shot. He hit two balls out past the baseline that way, thus losing the first game of the second set. Then the next game was his service, and he double-faulted the first two points.

“Frank.” Mel trotted back to the baseline between points. She reached up and touched the ruff of his neck. He’d sweated through his shirt, and his skin was cold and clammy. Mel had never seen Frank like this during a match, and that’s when she realized he was actually, like, full-on freaking out.

“Hey, it’s okay, it’s okay,” she said soothingly. “Look at me. We just need to finish the match.”

Frank let her guide him by the back of the neck down to touch foreheads. He breathed out a gust of air right into her face. “I hate this,” he said plaintively. “I’m sorry.”

“I can handle Driscoll,” Mel said. “This is part of mixed doubles, Frank. Sometimes there are bullies.”

“It’s horrible.”

“I just need you to play solid strategy. We’ll win this set and never see them again. Come on.”

He nodded, a new resolve hardening his face. Mel unwrapped her fingers from the nape of his neck and trotted back to position.

Frank aced Driscoll’s partner, Myrna White, and then he aced Driscoll. Mel let out a breath she didn’t know she was holding. But then on the next point, she was at the net when she mishit a forehand.

She saw it happening as soon as the ball left the strings on her racket. She saw Driscoll sneak over from the side to poach the arching lob, which set him up perfectly for a slam—

Fuck.

Mel abandoned strategy altogether. She attempted to bring the racket up to guard her face—

The ball whizzed past her ear, so close that hairs at her temple whip out of her braid.

Driscoll had been going for her head.

Mel’s racket fell out of her hands, bouncing on the red clay.

“Umpire!” Mel and Frank both yelled. Now that was egregious.

“Sorry,” Driscoll called from across the net, hands raised in apology with a smarmy smile.

“Part of the game,” the umpire repeated.

“Fuck you, Driscoll,” Frank shouted.

The umpire pointed at Frank. “Penalty. Unsportsmanlike conduct.”

Frank’s jaw dropped as the crowd devolved into jeering. “You’ve gotta be fucking kidding me. He’s trying to kill my partner.”

Mel sat down on the clay court, tuning out the devolving sparring match between Frank, the umpire, and Driscoll. Myrna White, Driscoll’s partner, wandered up to the net across from Mel. “You can’t even take a nap in this hellhole,” she said, preposterously.

Mel held her hand up to her face. It was shaking like a leaf. She could barely even hold her racket.

That had been really close.

“Mel,” said Frank, and suddenly she was shaded from the bright Italian sun. She peered up to see Frank haloed above her. “I got fined three more times. Are you okay? You didn’t get hit, did you?”

Mel released a gust of air she hadn’t realized she was holding. “Yeah. Yeah, I’m fine.” She hadn’t even gotten hit; why was she sitting on the ground like some delicate flower? “Help me up,” she said, reaching a hand up.

Frank pulled her up easily, then kept a hand on her waist. “I want to quit the match. I don’t want this guy on the court with you.”

Mel’s jaw dropped. “Quit?” Surely she had heard him wrong. “No way. We’re way better than them.”

Frank shrugged. “I don’t care.”

“Absolutely not,” said Mel. She stepped away from him, and the hand on her waist fell to his side. “We have to win this to play Santos and Whitaker in the final.”

Frank had a peculiar expression on his face. “There’s always the next tournament.”

Mel shook her head. “For you, maybe. Not for me.”

“I don’t think it’s a good idea—“

“It’s my call, not yours, right?” she said, overriding him. “Since he’s targeting me? Come on. We can win this match in three games.”

She picked up her racket and brushed the clay off her legs. “Come on,” she repeated. “We’ll win quick.” She got into position.

Frank sighed and fell back to the baseline.

They took that game and the next. Like Mel had said, White and Driscoll didn’t actually play at a high level of tennis. Driscoll had a big swing, but he was slow on his feet. White played bizarrely; her shots didn’t make sense. She might have been good five or ten years ago, Mel had to guess, but she seemed a little slow on her feet too.

It was 5-1, Mel’s serve. Just one more game stood between Mel and Frank and the finals match tomorrow against Santos and Whitaker. Now she could relax slightly. She could stay at the baseline now in relative safety. Frank played a lethally aggressive game at the net, so he would keep Driscoll busy.

And the first couple points were easy. Mel brought out her kick serve—the one that Frank had taught her at the U.S. Open last September—and aced Doug Driscoll. She finally got up the bravery to look him in the eyes across the court, and when she did, Driscoll was smiling right back at her. It made her shiver uncomfortably. He was so—creepy. Something about the guy was off. Mel never wanted to meet him alone at night, that was for sure. Especially once they beat him.

It was match point: 40-15.

Mel squared up at the baseline and served to Myrna. Her forehand back was slow, arching. Frank caught it at the net and sent it back.

Driscoll poached the ball at the net. He sent it back in the alley, down Frank’s line.

The crowd oohed.

Frank, in an incredible feat of athleticism, ran all the way off the court to hit the ball over his shoulder and back into the opponents’ central court. It was a looping, arching ball.

Mel stepped into the center court to hold the middle, staring down the barrel of Driscoll’s forehand. She saw him grin manically as he took his shot.

Mel took the tennis ball straight to the nose, sport glasses shattering.

The impact threw her backwards, and she fell to the clay stepwise: first her tailbone, then her shoulder, then with an ugly crack, her skull.

The Roman sun above winked away. Her vision went black.

#kingdon #love game #the pitt #pro tennis au #this is whump and i’m sorry for doing this to our girl #this was inspired by the author getting a circular thigh welt from pickleball last week #PICKLEBALL not even tennis 🥺#wip wednesday #melfrank

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