#|| inbox call | Explore Tumblr posts and blogs

tropes-and-tales · 2 months ago

Text

Fall from Grace

(Captain John Price x F!Reader)

CW: Slight angst. Inexperienced (but not virgin) reader. Smut (oral, f!receiving; PiV, unprotected). 18+ only.

Word Count: 7324

AN: This was requested by an anonymous person!

It’s part of Captain Price’s job to know his soldiers. He has their dossiers memorized, of course, but he also learns them intimately through their work together. How could he not? War reveals the true core of a person, their real character, but the mundane moments add color. The long helicopter rides, the long plane rides. The long stretches of time sitting, waiting for intel, waiting for orders.

It's boring. His soldiers talk to fill the quiet and pass the time. They joke and tease each other, discuss football matches and rugby scores. Sometimes, when it’s dark outside, in the quiet hours before dawn, they talk in low voices and share secrets, fears, worries.

Captain Price overhears much of it.

He overhears Gaz talk about his girl back in London, how terrified he is to lose her. How he worries that he’ll never be good enough for her.

He overhears Ghost’s low rumble as he talks about his family and the loss of them. How losing his brother Tommy and his nephew Joseph broke some part of him that will never heal.

He overhears Soap—convivial Soap—talk about his passel of siblings and how they’ve all married and found careers and started to have children. How he feels left behind, out of sync with his own family. How he doesn’t want to go home on leave, sometimes, because he feels so out of step with where he came from.

What Captain Price overhears from you is less deep for a long while. You’re a cipher. He has the bare facts of your dossier, but when it’s the small hours of the night and everyone is restless, you don’t open up the way the men do. You rarely let your guard down.

It shouldn’t affect Price, but it does. Is it a benign sort of misogyny that makes him want to protect you more than he does Gaz or Ghost or Soap? Or is it the fact that he sees how hard you try, how you keep your walls up even when everyone else is sharing their darkest secrets? Is it because he worries that you think he’s judging you, that when you catch him watching you, you see judgement there?

So for a long while, Price overhears little from you. He hears inconsequential things. Music you like, your favorite brand of beer. A memory from your childhood that makes the guys laugh.

But there is a night where it changes.

The 141 is on a plane back to base. The latest mission was a success, a new terrorist group quashed before it could get off the ground. Price sits in the back of the plane and gets a head start on his paperwork while you and the guys sit around a four-seat table and play a no-stakes game of poker for little chits of torn notebook paper.

Everyone has leave coming up, so the evening’s talk is brighter. There’s more laughter, more gentle shoving and ribbing as Gaz throws down winning cards and sweeps the pile of chits in front of him.

And when the chatter turns to sex, Captain Price bites the inside of his cheek to keep from smiling. He’s reminded that these soldiers, his men, are little more than boys sometimes.

It starts with Gaz waxing poetic about his girl, and Soap makes it bawdy by saying Gaz will spend his leave horizontal and return to base dehydrated and exhausted. Gaz chucks him on the shoulder but Price can see the pleased grin on the man’s face: of course he’s going to spend a lot of his leave in bed with his girl.

Then it shifts to Soap and his handful of reliable hook-ups. He says he has a bevy of women, all Scottish and feisty, and that earns him a chuck from you, a hard little punch to his bicep and you tell him to behave himself.

“Ach, don’t be jealous, hen,” Soap whines, rubbing his arm. “I could clear some room in the schedule for ye if ye want to join me in Inverness.”

“That’s a lot of travel for, what? Two minutes of disappointment?”

Soap lays his palm over his heart, mimes being wounded, and he says something in reply but Price misses it because Gaz and Ghost are laughing too loudly.

And that’s how Price learns about you. The flight turns into rapid-fire questions, talk, and rejoinders about sex. You mostly stay silent, but you take little zings—mostly at Soap—but each time Price glances over at you, your face has a taut quality that he’s only seen on the battlefield.

Interesting.

If he thought it’d be something for him to mull over later, he’s wrong. Halfway through the flight, Gaz brings up the topic of favorite positions, and when Soap asks you what your favorite position is, you snort and say, “on my right side, curled up with my pillow, alone. Asleep. White noise machine set on ‘rainstorm.’”

That makes Price laugh, but he covers it smoothly with a cough, keeps his head bent over his paperwork.

But the guys are like sharks, and your sarcastic non-answer is like chum in the water. And you’re good—smart, resilient—but you’re also their captive audience, and they wear you down.

An hour into their three-on-one interrogation, the truth comes out: you are fairly inexperienced at sex.

“Virgin?” asks Gaz.

“No.”

“How many times—” starts Soap, but you cut him with a glare that even he won’t challenge.

“Were you assaulted?” Ghost asks in his soft rumble, and that makes you go soft too, your glare shifting from Soap to gazing at the hulking man in his skull mask.

“No, Si.” Your voice is low, and Price watches as you lay a gentle hand on Ghost’s forearm. “I’m lucky. Never that.”

Ghost pats your hand with his own. “Just saying, love. If you were, and you knew the guy’s name, I’d make him a grease stain before the week is out.”

(And this is part of why being a captain is such a burden: the quiet little exchange between you and Ghost makes a hot flare of love burn in his chest, how the two of you are like a brother and sister to each other. The purest form of found family.)

But then Soap breaks the moment. “Just not into it then?”

You shrug. “Guess not.”

“Why?” Gaz asks it, and he sounds genuinely curious.

Another shrug. “It’s hard to have a relationship in our line of work.”

“Ah,” Soap says. He leans back in his seat, crosses his arms over his chest. “Makes sense now. You need to be in love with someone before you’ll sleep with ‘em.”

“Not necessarily.” You reach out and gather the playing cards, the poker game long abandoned. Price watches from under the brim of his hat as you fiddle with the cards, stacking them up, squaring the edges, shuffling them idly.

“Then what?” Soap prods, and you sigh.

“I dunno. It’s just…a lot of work, you know? You gotta vet a guy even if he’s a one-night stand, and you have to play it cool but not too cool, and you have to be friendly but not too friendly. You have to shower and shave and smell nice but not put on too much perfume, and you have to dress just right and wear uncomfortable lingerie and pinching shoes. I did all that shit when I was in my twenties, and the handful of times I finally got a guy on the line and reeled him in? It wasn’t worth the effort. All that work and stress for what? A few minutes of nothing. A few minutes of bad kissing where the guy slobbers on me worse than a Saint Bernard, awful beer breath too. And while he’s jamming his tongue down my throat, he’s groping me like someone drowning and grabbing at a life preserver. Then what? Then the main event, and all that effort is a waste because he doesn’t notice the nice lingerie at all, he doesn’t notice that I smell nice and shaved and moisturized because he’s lying on top of me like some paradoxical corpse slash jackhammer because he’s weirdly positioned and barely touching me, not looking at me, just dead eyes fixed off into space, but he’s also, what, thrusting for half a minute before he’s done? And then it’s ‘thanks, love, great shag,’ and he’s rolling off of me, getting dressed again and out the door, and the entire affair took less time than it takes to bake a frozen pizza. I mean, what’s the point?”

A deadly silence falls over the group. The only sound is the thrum of the plane’s engines, and you look up from where you’re fiddling with the cards to find everyone staring at you. Your eyes dart over to where Price is staring at you too, and you make a face and duck your head.

“Jesus, hen,” Soap breathes out.

“I’m sorry,” Gaz adds.

You chuckle weakly. “For what?”

“On behalf of men, I guess?”

Ghost, at least…sweet Ghost and his brotherly love for you…he pats your hand and says quietly, “well, you always smell nice, love, and I always notice.”

-----

Price doesn’t do anything.

Leave starts and you disappear, off to someplace on your list of places to visit. Who knows with you? You love the world, all parts of it, so it’s just as likely that you’re in a jungle in Costa Rica as you would be in Tokyo.

Leave ends and the team reassembles. There’s a mission in the mountains of a country teetering into civil war. There’s a mission for intel. There’s an extraction mission. There’s a mission to take down a warlord in a lithium-rich country, and there’s a close call there. A bullet grazes you, cuts a burning line along your hip, and seeing you bloodstained and limping pulls Price up short.

He shouldn’t care the way he does. He cares about all of his soldiers, loves everyone, but he’d be lying if you weren’t different. The love he holds for the men is paternal: Soap and Ghost and Gaz are the sons he never had.

You? His love for you is more complicated. There’s a whiff of paternalism, a protectiveness that he knows you’d chafe at if you knew. There’s admiration, of course. But there’s also a deep vein of romantic love that threads between you and Price, and if you don’t know it, it’s only because Price has a good poker face and hides his feelings so well.

By the time you’re shot, everyone has earned another leave. Ghost, Gaz, and Soap all disappear for a month. Price could go to his empty house in the countryside, but he usually just stays on base anyway.

You?

The night before leave starts, there’s a knock on his office door, and when he calls out, you poke your head in.

“Have a moment, sir?”

He nods, gestures at the chair in front of his desk, and he winces internally at how you limp a bit, your stitches obviously pulling. You settle in your seat and he nods at you to start.

“I thought I might stay here for leave,” you say. “I’m not really in any shape to travel, and I’d be close to medical if anything goes bad with my wound.”

He says nothing, so you add, with less certainty, “would that be alright, sir?”

Price clears his throat. “Of course.”

Of course it’s okay that you stay on base for leave. With him. With few other people around.

-----

But he does nothing during your month together. How could he? He’s your superior. It would be wildly inappropriate to knock on your door some evening and confess his feelings for you.

One small concession: he orders you to call him ‘John’ while you’re on leave. No Captain, no ‘sir.’ He wants you at ease, relaxed, healing. You still wake up early, he notices. You train on a modified program as you heal. You keep your room painfully neat, hospital corners on your bed, boots polished and tucked in your foot locker.

But you do relax. You go off base and have a pint alone in a pub, come back slightly looser with your smiles. His name rolls easier off your tongue when you have some alcohol in you.

You lie on the couch in the rec room and read giant novels. You doze off to tennis on the television, and Price aches as he watches you sleep. You look so young this way; the years and stress slough off of you in slumber.

There is one night he cajoles you into joining him out for dinner off base. There’s a steakhouse nearby, and Price is craving a steak and a whiskey and a good cigar, and he’s craving your company. You agree, and the weeks on leave have softened you towards him. Maybe you see him as John now and not just Captain Price, and the conversation over steak flows so evenly that any casual observer might think it a date between an established couple.

But he does nothing more. Not this time.

-----

Leave ends. Another mission. Another. Intel-gathering, coup-ending. They intercept a dirty bomb for sale in a Morocco marketplace. They break up a human trafficking ring. They support Kor-tac in a mission.

Another leave. You’re healed now, but when Gaz asks where you’re going, you shrug and say nowhere.

“I didn’t plan anything,” you admit, and Price watches you on the sly. You explain that New York City was next on your list of places, but you are tired of cities, tired of the crush of people and always wondering where the next threat was. You tell Gaz, as Price eavesdrops, that you really just wanted a quiet month in the country but hadn’t the time to research anywhere or book anything—

He has to wait for Gaz to leave, which gives him a moment to despair that it’s a bad idea. It’s a terrible idea, the worst idea, but even with a moment to stop himself, Price can’t stop himself. He pulls you aside once you’re alone and the words tumble out of his mouth before he can stop them.

“I have a place in the Lake District,” he says. “Quiet, in Rosgill. I’m going myself, but it’s a big place for just me. Too big, really. You could join, if you want.”

It’s a terrible idea, the worst idea, but it must mean something that you only think on it for a beat before you smile at him and accept his offer with your genuine thanks.

-----

On the trip to his home, he explains it to you, and he hates how he sounds like an estate agent selling you on the charms of the place.

“It’s an old seventeenth century blacksmith forge that’s been converted into a home. Quiet. One side overlooks the eastern fells.”

He explains how he bought it when he was young with the windfall of his father’s modest estate when the old man died from a heart attack.

He doesn’t explain that it had been his dream as a young man to share it with someone, and as that dream had steadily died off, so too has the planned renovations. The place is half-restored—mostly the house proper—but his plans for the outbuildings and grounds have been abandoned. He had planned a copse of trees, a raised garden bed for vegetables and herbs, a small greenhouse. What was the point of sinking money into a place that never saw any use?

You laugh quietly, then say that you don’t even have a home, that you have a small storage unit in Reading for the handful of things you can’t bear to give up.

“I appreciate your hospitality, Captain,” you say.

He tuts, reminds you to call him by his first name. “There’s no Captain Price in Rosgill. Just John.”

-----

It takes less than a week to fall into a comfortable domestic rhythm with you. John wonders at it: he had a girlfriend in his late twenties who had moved in for a year, and the two of them never reached even a fraction of the ease you and he reach within days.

It doesn’t mean it’s not torture. The house has two bathrooms and a WC, but you end up sharing a bathroom because it’s the only one on the second floor, situated between both of your bedrooms. It’s torture to shower after you, when everything is damp and faintly scented with your soap. It’s torture to see your toiletry bag sitting on the edge of the sink, and of course he snoops. Takes in the tube of lip balm, your brand of toothpaste, a bottle of paracetamol. He sees a little ornate glass bottle of perfume, and he uncaps it, smells it. It makes him remember the conversation on the plane, your rant about your disappointing experiences with sex, all the effort you put in to look nice and smell nice.

Which makes the rest torture too. You calling him John. You stretched out on a chaise in the conservatory that overlooks the fells. You making him a simple, hearty dinner—who knew you could cook?—then calling him to table, your name in his mouth, your hands passing him a plate with chicken and roasted vegetables, your smile as he pours you another glass of wine. You passing him in the hallway at night in your sleepwear, the soft-looking pajama pants and oversized t-shirt that strains around your breasts. You meeting his eye, smiling at him, saying “g’night, John.”

Then the torture of your bedroom door clicking shut behind you, with John on the other side of it.

-----

It’s the meteor shower that changes it. The Perseids, and John’s home has a big conservatory with a wall of windows that overlooks the night sky. He mentions them to you that morning, suggests it might be nice to stay up and watch them together, maybe open a bottle of Lagavulin to mark the occasion.

It’s also Soap that changes it. You and John make dinner together—just a spag bol—and your phone chimes as you’re sitting to eat. You swipe at the lock screen, read the message, and snort.

“Soap,” you say, and you hold up the screen to John even though he can’t read the tiny print. “Says he had a cancellation with one of his standby ladies and can work me into his rotation if I can get to Inverness in an hour.”

John chuckles, shakes his head. “Want me to put him on KP duty when we get back?”

“A few extra laps on his runs wouldn’t hurt. Wearing full kit, for the weight.”

The thread of conversation could die off, but it’s an opening, and John takes it. He clears his throat, spins a forkful of spaghetti on his plate, then offers, “I’m sorry you’ve had such a rough go of it. Romantically, I mean.”

You shrug. “It’s fine.”

“For what it’s worth, I’ve not had the easiest time of it lately.”

It earns him another snort, and you cock an eyebrow at him, pull an incredulous face. “I don’t buy it.”

He’s not lying. His twenties, he was a wolf on the prowl. Broke plenty of hearts, had his own broken in turn. He had a few girlfriends, one who moved in for a bit, then moved out after a terrific row, never to return. He always had the fixed idea that he’d meet someone by his mid-thirties, take an early retirement by his mid-forties, and have a family waiting for him by then.

But as his mid-thirties receded, he found the prospect of dating a bleak affair. Some women were too young, too immature. The generational differences in sex and love were too steep to overcome. Some wanted a sugar daddy. Some wanted to be taken care of with no care extending back in his direction. Other women were older, closer to his age, but saddled with ex-husbands, children bitter from divorce, a cynicism that John couldn’t overcome.

He doesn’t tell you any of that. Instead, he volleys it back at you, retorts with a gentle smile that he doesn’t buy that you hadn’t had a single satisfying experience in your life.

You sigh, shrug again. “Ah, well. I guess I can’t blame the men entirely. Who’s to say I wasn’t the problem? Maybe I’m a terrible kisser.”

“Doubtful.”

“Just outrageous amounts of tongue.”

John laughs, and you grin at him, add, “garlic breath, too. Got too bitey halfway through a make-out session. Made the guy bleed. Now he has a scar on his lip and he tells all the blokes down at the pub about the crazy girl he took out once who bit him.”

John puts down his fork and takes a drink of wine. He smiles around the rim of his glass. “None of that can be true.”

“Didn’t know how to move during sex, so I elbowed him hard and broke his nose. Touched him in a weird spot in an attempt to be sexy and creeped him out.”

He laughs again. “What’s considered a weird spot?”

“Maybe I, I dunno…rubbed his elbows in a seductive way. Touched him between his toes in the hopes of turning him on. Maybe no one ever told me that that there’s no erogenous zone in the space between toes.”

His laughter grows at the mental image you’re painting; tears creep out of the corners of his eyes. “That’s how I know you’re lying,” he manages to reply. “Because most men would find any type of touch from a woman sexy.”

You cock an eyebrow at that and take a sip of your own wine. “Duly noted, John. If I ever make a move on you, I’m coming for your toes.”

“Prepare to be awestruck then, sweetness: I have feet like a fucking hobbit.”

Your first response is to laugh at him, but he notes the way you take in the pet name, the little shine you get in your eyes. The conversation dies off, shifts to other topics, but the rest of dinner holds a charge in the air, and both of you can feel it.

-----

After you share clean-up duties in the kitchen, you make your way to the conservatory. It’s just a fancy word for ‘living room,’ but it holds no television: just a bookcase, a fireplace, and a few chaise lounges and couches for taking in the view. John used to envision lazy weekends in here with a family: a wife and kids, maybe, settled around a board game. A dog curled up by the fire.

He also used to envision something like this: sharing an intimate moment with a woman here. His ex hated the house, hated how remote it was. She liked London and the bustle of cities, but you are a better fit. You settle on the chaise, curl up on your side like a cat, and you sip at the cut-glass tumbler of whiskey when he hands it to you. John settles on the floor right near you, and the two of you chat while you wait for the meteor shower to start.

You don’t talk about much of consequence. It’s a rambling conversation, tinged by the alcohol but not impaired by it. The evening holds a dreamy quality, like it’s not quite real, like if John raises his voice above a low rumble he might pop the ambiance like a soap bubble.

When the first streak of white shoots across the sky, you both fall silent. John turns away from you and faces the windows, and you both watch quietly. Once in a while you sigh, a pleased little exhale, and the spell deepens. Weaves of magic seem to tighten around the two of you with each brilliant falling star.

John leans his head back and rests it against the chaise, but he bumps into some part of you. He mutters a sorry, and you whisper back no worries, but a beat later he feels your hand on the top of his head. Tentative. Shy. A question in the touch, and he answers it by leaning into you more. You push your fingers into his hair, and he honest-to-god has to bite his fucking tongue at the moan that threatens to tear out of his throat at the feeling of you touching him.

He turns his head and finds you watching him, not the meteor shower. He knows he cannot go a single step further without putting it all out in the open, addressing it immediately.

“You know I’m your commanding officer,” he says softly. “Not here, but when we get back. And I’m not stupid. I know some part of you still thinks of me as your captain even here, just like some part of me still thinks of you as my charge.”

You nod. Say nothing. Look at him expectantly.

“What I mean is, this leave will end and we’ll have to go back. We have to be able to compartmentalize it. And I need to know that you want this completely free and clear. That there’s no part of you that feels you have to do this, because I know there’s a power imbalance, but…” He trails off, doesn’t want to admit it out loud.

“But what, John?” you prod, and he takes a breath, finally says it.

“I know there’s a power imbalance here, and I know I should be strong enough—should be your captain, I mean—and stop this before it starts. But I can’t. I don’t want to.”

You don’t laugh at him, and you don’t pout at his words. You nod seriously. You say you understand, that it’s complicated. You promise that you will try to compartmentalize it.

“It’s just me and you right now,” you say, softly. “Just two people. Not boss and employee or captain and soldier. I don’t feel pressured or feel any power imbalance. And John? I don’t want you to stop it before it starts. Truly.”

This must be what falling from grace feels like. Some small part of John despairs at this breach of trust, even if you assure him it isn’t so: he’s your captain, he’s worked so hard to always keep clear lines between him and his soldiers. He needs to be able to send people he cares about, people he loves, into situations where death is more likely than staying alive. He needs to be able to leaf through your dossier and not blink at the section where you’ve listed out your final wishes in the event of death. He needs to be able to leave you behind if it threatens the mission or the 141, and he’s always been able to do that before but the moment you lean forward and kiss him—your hand cupping the curve of his face, drawing him to you eagerly—he knows he’ll never be able to do any of that again.

He's failed as a commander, and a small part of him despairs, but the larger part rejoices at the feeling of your lips on his, your hands on him. His eyes shut, and you both completely forget the meteor shower as you fall from grace together.

-----

You make out in stages: the eagerness cedes to a near-shyness, then melts into a level of comfort as you get used to each other. John knows now that you oversold your inability to kiss—you’re eager, then you’re shy, but you’re pretty damned good at it after all, and if those other assholes you’ve slept with didn’t think so, then that’s on them.

He eventually makes his way up to the chaise to sit beside you, and then he guides you into his lap. He has you straddle him, and when his palm gently grasps your cheek to lead you back to kiss him, he feels how flushed you are under his hand.

“You okay?”

You nod against his hold. “Yes,” you reply, but you perch yourself back in his lap, closer to his knees, and he can feel how you’re holding your weight off of him.

“We can take this slow. There’s no rush. We can stop here.”

“I know.” A beat, and you add, “I’m good, John, really.”

“Then c’mere, love. Settle in.”

When you don’t move, he puts his hands on your hips and draws you down and in, pulls the delicious weight of you right where he wants you most. Right on top of him. His growing erection presses against your clothed core, and your breasts brush against his chest. He slides one hand around to your ass and grips the swell of you, kneads at your flesh, but the other hand slides up to cup the nape of your neck. To hold you steady as he kisses you more forcefully.

John tries to strike the perfect balance between gentle and still leading you. He presses his tongue against the seam of your mouth, urges you to open yourself to him, and you obey. He licks against your mouth, tastes the smoky peat of the whiskey on you, and the sensation of his tongue against yours makes you rock in his lap. He feels the pressure of you brushing against his cock, and it draws dual moans from each of you.

He breaks the kiss, catches his breath. “Sweetness, what do you want? What do you like?” He wants to make you moan like that again and again, wants you to breathe out his name or scream it or both. He wants your eyes to shine up at him like they did at dinner when he used that sweet nickname on you the first time.

You shake your head. “I don’t know.”

He knows what it must take for you to admit that. He remembers your rant on the plane, the disappointment in your past dealings with lovers. It makes his chest ache at how lonely you must have been, how separate you must have felt from others.

He loosens his hold on your neck. He slides his palm around to cup your face, and he brushes his thumb over the curve of your cheek.

“Then how about we find out together?”

You answer him by turning your head into his palm and kissing him there, a sweet gesture, and that ache in his chest blooms stronger.

-----

It’s awkward at first, and John can’t figure out why.

He manages to get you out of your shirt and shorts, manages to unhook your bra and strip himself until you’re both nearly naked and stretched out together over the chaise. You let him lead, but you aren’t exactly eager. You are passive to an almost uncomfortable degree, and there’s something off—

“Is this okay?” he murmurs against your skin. You’re so warm under his lips, soft, and he is going so slowly, but you’re hardly moving and you’re saying even less. Your earlier touches—your hand in his hair, cupping his face—have disappeared entirely.

Yet when he asks his question, you whisper back that it’s wonderful.

It takes another moment before he realizes part of what’s wrong: you’re holding your breath. You’re barely breathing, and once he locks in on that, everything else falls into place. You’re not precisely rigid underneath him, but you’re tense, your muscles taut to the point of trembling. And your hands lie by your side. Not touching him at all.

He pauses, then makes his way back up to where your face is. In the faint light from the windows, he can make out a tension in your expression too. Something else too. Not dread, maybe, but maybe a lighter version of that. Trepidation.

John kisses you lightly on your mouth. “How are you doing, sweetness?”

“Good.” You smile at him, but it doesn’t reach your eyes. “Great, really.”

“You sure?”

You nod.

He brushes his lips over your cheekbone, to the edge of your jaw near your ear. “Not nervous at all?”

“Maybe a little.”

You’re hedging. Lightly lying to him. Your nervousness fills the room like the incoming tide, and John susses it out gently, teases it from you bit by bit. It’s not difficult to guess the source of your nerves.

“Thinking about past encounters, maybe?”

You huff softly near his ear. “Hard not to.” You hesitate, then add, “it was always so bad.”

“And you think you were the reason it was so bad?”

Another huff, and your voice is tinged with embarrassment. “I’m the constant factor each time, John.”

It occurs to him that you’ve likely missed all of the experimenting that many people get when they are younger. All the goofy, awkward moments in sex, when a person figures out what they like or don’t like, what they love and what they hate. You’ve probably been left with a handful of one night stands where you got no feedback, never had a chance to understand what felt good to you, and now are paralyzed to the point of doing nothing.

John resets the moment. He strokes the side of your face, then leans down and kisses you. Slow, gentle. No rushing. The barest brush of his tongue against yours, just enough until he feels you relax a bit underneath him.

As much as he wants to compartmentalize it, John knows from working with you that you’re eager for feedback. You’re eager to learn, and you never take constructive criticism badly.

“Let me help you,” he says now. “Okay?”

You gaze up at him, and if your body is tense as a strung wire, your eyes are full of trust. “Okay.”

“First thing, sweetness. You have to breathe for me. You’re holding your breath, and it’s making you tense.”

Sure enough, your tight, shallow breathing evens out and deepens. And sure enough, he feels your body relax a bit more. He kisses you as a reward, then gives you more advice that you take readily.

“You can move your body. Make yourself comfortable.”

“I want to feel your hands on me. I want you to touch me too. I’m yours.”

“You need to talk to me. Tell me what feels good. Tell me if anything doesn’t feel good.”

As he instructs you, he eases back into it. Kisses your mouth, kisses his way over your face and neck, spends long moments at your bared breasts. It’s the first test, but you breathe as he mouths at your tender skin, as he suckles against your hardened peaks. And you move underneath him, arching your chest to give him better access.

A beat later, he feels your hands—still tentative, but warm, soft—touching him. Stroking his shoulders, his arms. Running your fingertips through his hair.

He’ll find out later, days later, that you had only been working off of previous feedback from those terrible one night stands. The guy who told you that you were breathing too loudly, the guy who told you to lie still. One baffling guy who told you not to touch him, to keep your hands to yourself as he fucked you.

But now? This is a good start to finally getting to what you like. To finding out together.

What you don’t like: anything remotely like tickling. He skates his fingertips too lightly over your sides, down the curve of your waist, and you jerk away from him like you’ve been burned. You apologize a second later, but John laughs, which makes you laugh too. It dispels some more of your nervousness, and when he tries the move against with more pressure—down your sides, over your waist—you like that far better.

You also don’t like it when he pauses at the scar on your hip. It’s still a lurid red, and it pulls him up short for a moment. Dampens his own mood. It reminds him at how close you were to really being hurt, even killed. You don’t like it when he bends his head to kiss the ridge of scar tissue, and he doesn’t push it. Instead, he shifts his head and kisses your stomach where the edge of your panties is, and you like that a whole lot more.

What you like: everything else. Every other thing he gives you, everything he does to you. You like it when he eases your panties off you. You groan when he buries his face between your thighs, and you gasp when he kisses you there, when he drags his tongue over the slick seam of your cunt. You like it very much when he laps at your arousal, when he lays plush kisses to your swollen clit, when he slides a finger inside you and a second finger and when he slides them along your inner wall until he finds the spot that makes you jerk underneath him, whine out his name, reach down and tug at his hair.

You like it when he makes you come with his mouth, and you like it when he makes his way back up your trembling body, when he spreads your legs wider to fit him. When he pushes into you in a slow, steady thrust, so soon after your orgasm that he feels the tiny aftershocks as he seats himself inside you for the first time. You gasp at the sensation, you breathe out a “god, John,” but when he opens his mouth to ask if you’re okay, you grab his head and kiss him so hard you steal his breath from him.

And you especially like it when he coaxes another orgasm from you, his thrusts strong and steady, deep. When you bend one leg alongside him, he reaches down and hikes it higher over his hip. It allows him to push deeper inside you, that extra fraction making you cock-dumb, because you’re so far gone you forget to be nervous. You forget to lie still, to keep your hands to yourself, to hold your breath.

You arch up and meet him thrust for thrust. You wrap one arm around his broad shoulders but the other hand reaches down and grips the meat of his ass, urges him on. You breathe; you pant in his ear, and sometimes it’s just your hot breath, but just as often it’s you talking, babbling, begging him to fuck you, to please don’t stop, to keep going, to never stop fucking you.

And you like it when he does as you say. He doesn’t stop, and you come again, but then you whine out that it’s too much. It probably is: you’ve gone from disappointing interludes with absolute bell-ends, and now you’re an overstimulated mess underneath him. You’re not openly crying but tears leak out of the corners of your eyes and streak down your face. Your lips are slightly chapped and swollen, and you look stunned.

“Want me to stop?” he asks. He kisses one damp cheek, then the other, and he can taste the salt from your tears. “Too much?”

“Uh-huh.” It comes out slurred.

“Need you to use your words, sweetness.”

“I don’t think…” You blink, and you lose a bit of your stunned quality. “I don’t think I can again.”

“Oh, I think you could.” Another kiss, this one open-mouthed on your pulse point. He presses his teeth there, sucks lightly against your skin. “I think you have one more.”

“John—”

“Gotta make up for lost time.”

“I can’t.” You whine, but it ends in a moan as he bites you harder at where your shoulder meets your neck. “Too much. It’s too much.”

“You’re doing so well, though. You don’t have one more? Not even for me?” He laves the flat of his tongue over where his teeth have left dimpled marks, then he blows over the wet line, makes you shudder underneath him.

“John,” you reply, but it holds less of a warning than before. There’s surrender in your tone.

“Love feeling this sweet pussy coming around me,” he growls in your ear. “Fucking soaking my cock, sweetness.”

The dirty talk makes you clench down on him, and he smiles to himself. He draws back, sinks back into you. He goes slow, and you whine that it’s too much, but you like this too because you hold him tighter. You press back against him each time he seats himself in you, his hips settled against yours. He goes slow, so slow, sinks into you as deep as he can, barely pulls out before he’s pushing back inside. You’re swollen, fevered where he’s joined to you. You’re so fucking wet that he feels your arousal soaking the coarse hair at the base of him, dripping down your thighs, likely soaking the chaise.

He's proud that he’s been able to forestall his own pleasure, but his restraint has frayed. How could it not? The whole moment had been sold as for you, to make you feel good, to make sex not the scary specter it has been for most of your adult life, but John can’t remember the last time he had sex where he felt so connected to his partner.

Maybe he never has. He can’t conjure up a moment from his past when he felt so flayed alive, his heart visible and beating as he joined with another person. He can’t remember ever reveling so deeply in his partner’s pleasure. He can’t remember anyone else’s touch or voice in his ear or breath panting underneath him making him feel so whole.

But you like it when he finally comes too. He pulls another orgasm from you, less intense but longer—you tremble for longer, and your cunt twitches against him—and it sets him over the edge. He groans in your ear that he’s close too, asks where he should…but your hand on his ass pulls him deeper into you, and if the gesture wasn’t clear, you whisper that you want him to come inside you, you want to feel him, and he does. His pleasure breaks around him, shatters him, and he growls your name as he fills you, and you answer by whispering his name back, over and over.

-----

If you never had a satisfying sexual experience before, John can guess that you never had the post-sex moments either. The come-down, the cuddling, the falling asleep together.

He gives that to you now too, but it’s not altruistic at all: he wants it too. He selfishly wants it. He leaves you on the chaise to get a washcloth, a glass of water, and he helps you clean up. He helps you recover, but then he leads you to the deep couch on the other side of the room and has you lie down. He lies down beside you—it’s a tight fit, but he holds you safe between the broad planes of his body and the back of the couch, and he covers you both with a light blanket.

“Thank you,” you tell him, and it’s plaintive. It makes that ache in his chest flare back, so he kisses you gently, replies, “don’t ever thank for me this.”

It doesn’t take long for you both to fall asleep: you go first, the slack weight of you pleasant against his body, the deep and even breathing, the little grumble as you shift. He’s not far behind you, but he has a moment or two where the earlier thread of despair pushes to the forefront of his mind.

He might just be John right now, and you’re just you, but soon enough you’ll be soldier and captain again. How will it ever work, now that you’ve fallen from grace together?

#kinktober2024 #clear the inbox 2024 #tropes and tales #captain john price #captain price #captain john price x reader #captain john price imagine #captain john price x you #john price #john price x reader #john price x your #call of duty modern warfare #call of duty #cod

1K notes · View notes