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sticky-sugar · 9 months ago

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try it. (matsukawa issei x reader)

tags/cw: roommates to lovers, somnophilia, fingering, mattsun sends porn as a coping mechanism, size kink if you really squint

word count: 3.1k

“i’ve always wanted to try that.”

issei chokes on his beer when you speak. you point at the tv in explanation, as though he needs one. the scene playing has just started out with a couple in bed, spooning while they fuck. everything’s covered, but it’s easy to tell through the blanket that the woman’s leg is lifted, her back arching against the man’s chest while she cries out lewdly.

“never been fucked in the morning?” he jokes, keeping his eyes trained on the screen so he doesn’t have to look at you. his laugh sounds awkward even to him.

“mm-mm.” you shake your head, draining your wine glass, and he can’t tell if that’s a confirmation or a rejection of his guess. but he can tell that that wine bottle on the coffee table is empty, because you would never say these things to him sober.

“not that part,” you explain. frowning when you realize there’s no wine left, you rise from the couch, disappearing from the room and padding down the hall. issei sighs in relief at the moment alone, running his fingers through his hair and tugging hard.

“she’s drunk,” he whispers to himself, a reminder. “she’s drunk, and she’s your friend. and you can’t afford rent anywhere else, you stupid fuck.” that’ll do it. he’s broke as shit, and you’re a good friend. he can steel his nerves with those facts.

“she was asleep when he started,” you call from the kitchen.

fuck.

issei drops his head back, hitting it on the wall a few times with purpose. fuck, fuck, fuck.

you come back in, and he straightens, yanking the throw blanket over his lap. you’re too drunk to notice.

you’re too drunk to notice much of anything, really — including your own running mouth.

“she was asleep,” you say again. “and he fucked her anyway—“ you rush to explain yourself, holding a hand out when his eyes find yours, wide and uncertain. “consensually, obviously.”

that doesn’t help. he’d been assuming that, but you confirming it makes it worse.

somnophilia, his mind whispers, the word latching itself to you.

“i dunno,” you shrug, your refilled wine glass brought to your lips. “i think it’s hot, i guess. i’d try it.”

he really can’t afford rent anywhere else.

—

you’re scouring roommate ads in a hungover daze the next morning.

what is your problem?, you think, rolling over to groan into your pillow. you open your bank app, staring at the number in your checking account and wondering uselessly if it’s enough to afford a place on your own. one where you’ll never have to look mattsun in the face again.

why did you tell him that?

your brain flashes through two bottles of wine and drunk admissions, and you switch over to uber eats, deciding that cooking is simply not an option today. standing in that kitchen for more then four seconds and risking running into him is not an option.

you know why you told him that. you know exactly why you told him.

you told him because, despite every coping mechanism you’ve tried over the years of living with him, matsukawa issei persists in being the most attractive man you’ve ever met.

you told him because you wanted to test the waters. why you would ever test the waters with somnophilia, of all things, and not something standard and vanilla like ‘making out with a friend just happens sometimes’ or ‘drunk hookups aren’t so bad’, you will never know.

but you’d told him because you think about it. you think about him, doing things like that. things that aren’t standard or vanilla or easily explained or plausibly deniable.

you think about matsukawa issei fucking you while you sleep. and maybe it’s happened one too many times. maybe now it’s all you think about, enough that it comes up in your stupid, drunk admissions.

maybe — just maybe — you hope he might take you up on it, now that it’s out there in the open like that.

but that’s just a maybe. so you’re looking for another apartment, on the very real chance that he’s going to call you a freak and never speak to you again.

your phone buzzes in your hand.

it’s a text from him.

[10:17 AM]

mattsun: [link attached]

your face crumples into a frown. “what?” you murmur, jabbing a thumb on the link and hoping it’s not a virus.

your phone starts moaning at max volume.

you scream, slamming down on the side button to lower the volume as the video intro plays through. your eyes fly to the title.

milf fucked by son’s friend while she’s sleeping

there’s no fucking way he just did that.

[10:19 AM]

mattsun: smth like that?

“matsukawa!” you scream, rolling out of bed and storming out into the hall. he’s laughing loudly from his room, and you all but kick his door down. “what the fuck is your problem?!”

he’s in bed, cackling gleefully and covering his face with his blanket — but his eyes are anything but shy when he looks at you.

“just trying to ease the tension-“

“by sending me porn?!”

he shrugs and gestures to his phone. “im just saying, you’re not alone! at least—“ he glances down at the screen “—3.8 million other people are into it, too-“

you scream in frustration, turning and stomping back to your room. his laughter follows, echoing through your door even when you slam it.

he does it for two weeks straight. every few days, you wake up to a new link, each video titled something more obnoxious than the last.

guy takes step-sister while she takes a nap

mom wakes step-son up with a special surprise on his birthday

repairman finds sleeping beauty home alone

each one draws an irritated screech of his name and the echoing giggles of satisfaction from his room.

you could stop it. in fact, he’s asked you more than once if you want him to.

‘if you really want me to stop, i’ll stop, he’d said in your kitchen last week.

‘just say the word,’ he’d reminded you on his way out one morning.

‘i think you and i both know how important consent is,’ he’d murmured just two nights ago, leaning on your doorframe, his eyes hot on yours.

you’d shivered under his gaze and pretended to be engrossed in something on your phone. you’d hoped he couldn’t see the way you’d pressed your thighs together, but when you looked up, he was already staring down at them.

he’d met your eyes again and just hummed, flicking his dark eyebrows up at you before turning away. your phone had buzzed with a new link only seconds after his bedroom door had clicked shut.

you’re certain he knows why you haven’t told him to stop. that the truth is that you don’t want him to stop. you’re certain he’s testing the waters now, too.

because each video he sends you gets closer and closer to being about roommates.

your phone buzzes in your hands. you wonder if he knows that you watch each one, waiting for him to pull the trigger on the one that sits unspoken in the space between you.

he does, a week later.

—

you’ve caught him, issei realizes belatedly.

maybe he should have noticed after you started sitting closer to him on the couch. or maybe after you’d refused to tell him to stop sending you porn. or maybe even after he’d sent you something titled ‘roommate can’t help himself while she sleeps’ at 4 in the morning and you hadn’t called the cops on him.

maybe he should have realized you’d caught him after any one of those. but he doesn’t. he doesn’t realize it, not until this very moment, as you’re standing from the couch and bending over to clean the table of empty beer bottles before bed.

he doesn’t realize it until he realizes you’re not wearing any underwear.

he glances at you shamefully when you bend at the waist, hoping you don’t look back and catch him. and then he coughs violently, choking on his own spit and drawing your attention.

he waves you off, blushing furiously and not even bothering to stop his eyes from flying to your ass when you just shrug and bend over again. your pajama shorts have ridden up, but there’s no lacy edge on pink panties where there should be.

yes, he’d noticed years ago that these shorts tend to ride up and not mentioned it. yes, he knows what kind of panties you wear. yes, he has a favorite pair.

what are you gonna do if you find out, call him a pervert? he’d sent you roommate somnophilia porn and you’d made him coffee in the morning.

“‘kay, goodnight,” you mumble, and issei wonders if you’re shy about it or if he’s just hoping you are.

“g’night,” he breathes, eyes finding yours. you keep eye contact all the way out of the living room. your eyes drop to his lap at the last second, and he watches a grin stretch across your face just before you disappear from the room.

he looks down at his lap, and then he swears under his breath. he’s visibly hard in his sweatpants.

—

he feels like a pervert. he really feels like a pervert.

he stands in the hall outside your bedroom, one hand on the knob, feeling like a pervert. it’s 2 in the morning, and he feels like a pervert.

he sighs to himself and turns the knob slowly — ever so slowly, because he knows how it creaks, and he doesn’t want to wake you. he pushes the door open carefully, and then he finds you in the dark, moonlight spilling over your body.

you’re completely naked.

you’re on your stomach, blankets draped over your lower half and one knee bent out toward the wall. issei can see the expanse of your bare skin and the swell of your breast, but you’ve got your back slightly to him, so he can’t see everything.

but it’s enough.

he breathes hard, stepping into the room and shutting the door silently behind him. he runs his fingers through his hair, tugging hard and giving a soft sigh as he pads over to you.

when he lowers his knees to your mattress, it’s with his heart in his throat and his cock straining against his pants. you look so innocent, so sweet like this, even while he’s sliding the blankets off of your skin and exposing you in the moonlight.

is he really allowed to want this as badly as he does?

your breath is steady, only changing slightly when he braces himself behind you, propped up on one elbow. he scoots toward you, breath caught in his throat, and then slides his hand under the back of your knee. you shiver, probably because his fingers are ice cold, and he keeps his eyes locked on the side of your face.

when you don’t give any other sign of waking, he lifts your leg and hooks it backward over his knee, opening your body up for him.

he swears under his breath, staring down at you in the moonlight.

you shift, adjusting to the new angle of your body with a sigh. your back presses to his chest, and issei has to press his lips together so he doesn’t moan at the sight of you.

he keeps his eyes on your face when he slides his fingers along your inner thigh, watching you intensely as his icy fingertips dance close to the spot between your thighs that’s radiating heat.

when he cups your bare cunt, your skin breaks out in goosebumps, but you don’t move otherwise. issei moans now, because your body knows what he’s doing, but you don’t.

he’d had a feeling before — in the weeks between that moment on the couch and this moment right here — that he’d unlocked a new, previously untouched fantasy. that his reaction to your drunken admission might have been about more than just being attracted to you.

he sees it now. now, as he’s sliding two fingers between your folds and watching as you remain completely unaware, he realizes that you’ve done something to him. that you’ve made him want to do this to you, tonight and every night after.

it takes every ounce of his self-control not to shudder and moan in your ear when your pussy twitches under his fingers, reacting to him even when you don’t.

he drops his head to your chest, eyes locked on your face as he takes one of your nipples in his mouth. your lips part, and he freezes, but the sigh that falls out is nowhere near conscious, so he keeps going, sucking and licking and grazing his teeth over the bud while he massages your cunt with his now-warm fingers.

the first sign that you’re reacting is the growing ease with which he’s able to push his fingers against you. your entrance becomes slick, and he can’t help that he pushes his hips against your ass in response, seeking relief. he drops his touch lower and swipes the pads of his fingers through the mess there, spreading it all over your cunt.

when he circles your clit, slippery and warm now, your breathing changes, harder and rougher. the rise and fall of your chest pushes at his mouth, and he latches on with fresh fervor, watching your brows furrow and your lips twitch at the onslaught of sensations.

it shouldn’t be as easy as it is for him to push his middle finger past your entrance.

“fuck”, he whispers despite himself, mouth slipping off of you with a gentle pop and eyes rolling back in his head. your walls pulse around his finger, warm and velvety and wet beyond belief. his cock twitches hard in his pants as he slides his finger in and out of you, searching for that spongy spot that’ll wake you up.

he knows you might have wanted him to fuck you like this, but he can’t help himself anymore. he doesn’t have it in him to be careful anymore.

when his ring finger joins his middle, it’s with intent. the push is rough, bullying your cunt open with the size of his fingers, no doubt longer and fuller than you can get on your own.

you shift under him, a quiet noise of question leaving you, and he lifts his head, attaching his lips to the crook of your neck.

“y/n,” he whispers, more a moan than anything else. “need you.”

he sucks on the column of your throat while you come to, his fingers curling and spreading inside of you — his sloppy attempt to prepare you for him.

“h-huh-“ your head lifts slightly, and then you’re slamming it back against the pillow, your back arching. “oh, my god, mattsun-“

he almost comes in his pants when you say his name like that.

“couldn’t help myself,“ he starts, shaking his head and pushing his body against yours almost desperately. “you were so pretty.“ your cunt tightens around his fingers in response, and he files that away for later. keeps it in mind, the things that make you react like this. “need you so bad, y/n-“

“yes, god yes,” you breathe, a whine trapped in your throat. you turn your head, back still pressed against his chest, and drop your still-sleepy eyes to his lips.

the coil under issei’s navel tugs hard when he realizes how well he can read you.

he pushes his mouth against yours eagerly, moan unrestrained when your tongue slides against his. he wonders if you know how often he’s thought of this moment, years of wanting you and craving the feeling of you coming undone under his fingers.

“please,” you whisper against his lips, back arching when he pushes the pads of his fingers against that spongy spot that makes you whine. “more, mattsun.”

he groans, shivering when you pull his bottom lip between your teeth. “not yet — it’ll hurt,” he murmurs, leaning on every molecule of self-control.

“i can take it,” you just say, pushing your ass back against his aching cock. “promise.”

he never had that much self-control to begin with.

his moan comes out in a shuddered breath, overpowered by the sound of you whining when he slips his fingers out of you. he shoves his sweats down to his knees, meeting your eyes and seeing the urgency he feels reflected in your eyes.

when he slides his cock between your folds, it’s with a choked groan and a heaving pant in your ear.

“can i- are you sure-“ he stutters, already lining himself up at your entrance.

“please, please, please,” you babble, arching your back to make the angle easier on him.

you come around his cock before he’s even halfway in.

there are stars in his eyes by the time you’re done.

you cry out for him, shaking and clenching down hard, and he can’t do anything except bury his face in your hair and keep your leg lifted high with a trembling hand.

“fuck,” he breathes, voice tight. “fuck, y/n-“

“more, mattsun,” you sob. he thinks you might be the girl of his dreams.

pushing the rest of the way in, he shoves down his own orgasm, fighting and kicking and forcing it away so he can last more than thirty seconds inside of you.

he only manages a minute before he’s spilling into you with a stuttered moan of your name, face buried in your neck and head full of static.

you’re just slumped against him by the time he comes to his senses, breathing hard and synced with his.

“sorry,” he mumbles into your hair, ears burning with embarrassment. “i swear i usually last longer than that-“

you laugh, tired and still weak but bright all the same. “yeah — so do i.”

he snorts, pulling out slowly and letting your leg drop closed, trying his best not to moan at the feeling.

“are you sure that was okay?” he asks, a tiny inkling of doubt still seeded in his veins. you just giggle, whispering his name in fond exasperation.

“sorry, which part of me sleeping naked was a warning sign?”

“shut up,” he mutters, curling himself around you and feeling the beginnings of exhaustion start to drain his energy. “i’m staying here tonight. i don’t do one-night stands.”

you just turn in his arms and wrap your arms around his neck. “was i that good, mattsun? i was asleep for half of it.”

you’re gonna be the thing that kills him, he just knows it.

#banner by @/cafekitsune !!#matsukawa x reader #matsukawa issei #matsukawa smut #haikyuu smut #hq smut #hq x reader #haikyuu x reader

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blocktech · 2 years ago

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#Blockchain Consensus Mechanisms #Decentralised Application (DApp) Development #Smart Contract Development #Security Auditing #Scalability Solutions #Non-Fungible Tokens (NFTs)#Token Standards and Issuance

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fizz-pop-thwip · 4 months ago

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I struggle thinking about non consensual human experimentation as a whole, but what happened to Bucky really it does just make me sick.

To start, think of how his stomach dropped when he fell from the train, the fucking fear knowing you're dead. You have 2 seconds and then your dead, this is it.

Then you wake up to 1) being alive, horrifically unaware of the 70 years of hell ahead of you and 2) your arm being not only surgically removed but replaced with a metal arm, a foreign body, a parasite. You fight because what else are you ment to do? But you fall unconscious again.

You wake up to days and days of torment and torture and slowly loose hope that it will ever end, that you'll ever be saved. He didn't know that Steve was dead, how long did he yearn for Steve to find him? How mad did he get? Did he punch the wall, did he scream? Did they have to sedate him because of just how psychotic that made him? How fucking manic he would go?

How long till he lost all feeling, all emotion and hope?

When they started putting him in the chair, did he scream and cry? Did he beg for anything else? Any thing, anything, fucking anything. Did he beg for death? Did he feel himself slowly lose all of his memory, did he sob when he first couldn't picture Steve's face, or when he could remember the most important person in the world, but not a name or a background or a face, not a crumb.

The first time he's put in cryo freeze, does he remember his reflection? Seconds before he fell unconscious, never knowing how long it would be before he woke up again. Did he wake up, begging to just be put back in, the closest fate to death he could ever achieve? The closest thing to mercy? Does he catch himself falling asleep at night and wake up in tears, not even sure if it's been 20 minutes of 20 years.

Did his crys for help fall on the shiney leather shoes of scientists who showed no emotion, did he question if he was even human to begin with? Surely a human would be treated with even a fraction of care. No one treated like this was born from a mother, no one treated like this was ever looked at with maternal love.

He stopped feeling like a person, he didn't even remember he was a person. When things seeped though it just hurt, they hurt him, it made it worse. So he stopped it, he wouldn't let himself. It was impossible to live. He had no coping mechanisms, no outlet, he would show any signs of struggle and be hurt for showing humanity. He had to be what they wanted.

Even after he was broken in, no crying anymore. No begging for mercy. Did he spend his nights awake, just TRYING to remember what he forgot, FEELING the missing spots in his mind? Did he hold that metal arm close because he can't even remember how he got it anymore, all he knows is it makes his shoulders ache.

He was completely and utterly trapped, the more he suppressed, even the minor shards he remembered, the more mania he would experience.

Even once he's free, how do you come back from that, even if it was just a mental thing, the physical, real DAMAGE to his brain was enough to make him never heal again. Bucky is a walking fucking miracle and maybe THE survivor.

He is going to have memory problems, severly. He is going to have intense PTSD flashbacks, total hallucination level, breakdowns. Seriously, this level of trauma is NEVER leaving him, not fully. Phantom pains, endless nightmares, coping mechanisms that don't make sense but comfort him none the less.

He's going to have periods of times where he can't even stand being touched, not Steve, not anyone. Weeks where he can't shower or move out of a space his brain has deemed safe for fear of being hurt. Scratches at the seam between his flesh and the metal of arm, wanting it off, wanting it away from him. Again does it necessarily make sense logically? NO!! but does he feel it 100%? Yes!!

He gets better, his bad periods get less intense, more far in between but they never fully go away. As fuckimg depressing as it is, hydra made a permanent mark on his psyche. It's FUCKED.

Gods strongest soldier is Bucky Barnes.

#so so many thoughts #steve Rogers is snuggling the FUCK out of that guy somewhere‼️‼️#NO BODY TOUCHES ON THIS ENOUGH EITHER OUUHHHH BOY #ouhh my shaylaa #my shaylllaa #bucky barnes #the winter soldier #hydra #mcu #stucky #my thoughts

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1800titz · 28 days ago

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The one where Y/N and Harry are neighbors in an apartment complex, he's got a bunny called Snuggles, he makes softcore porn spanking people (it's a REALLY LOUD HOBBY), and Y/N has definitely called the police for a domestic disturbance next door.

HI FRIENDS. The council has spoken, so here is the first part of the lovingly-dubbed spanko fic. This series will be early access, so— parts go up on patreon first, then they come to tumblr 3-ish weeks later (but if you wanna get ahead, the second part is already up on patreon). Reader insert, emotionally a slowburn, and basically a garbage fire I'm pouring my deepest, darkest desire into as a coping mechanism :p If you liked TDIAG, you'll probably rock with this one. As always, feedback/reblogs massively appreciated <3 WEEEEEEEE okay bye

ᴄʜᴇᴄᴋ ᴏᴜᴛ ᴛʜᴇ ᴘᴀᴛʀᴇᴏɴ ᴍᴀꜱᴛᴇʀʟɪꜱᴛ : ᴍᴀɪɴ ᴍᴀꜱᴛᴇʀʟɪꜱᴛ

CONTENT/WARNINGS: miss girl misconstruing consensual kink for domestic violence (oops)

WC: 7.8K

Harry’s face is the reason average men have developed a phenomenon called personality.

Historically, it was faces like his, at the very least, that ignited adaptation— this wasn’t an overnight implementation, after all. Men don’t move that fast. There’s a long-lasting, brutally destructive record there, and a tale as old as time itself. Before charisma had to be manufactured in the absence of a devastating jawline, there was the high-cheekbone aristocracy, and its counterpart, what’s known today as the “he’s actually really nice” faction. The beauty privilege inventors; the bedroom-eye monarchy; the symmetrical syndicate of a resting smolder—

And the rest of everyone else.

Rumor has it that the first comedian was a man who watched another guy, who had eyes like wet chrysocolla and really broad shoulders, turn a casual glance into an entire bloodline’s origin story. Maybe the first poet sat next to a man wearing the skin of divine nepotism— and the only defense strategy was to pick up a hobby that spoke less in pretty, heart-shaped lips and more in words like love’s trembling hand doth trace its name upon thy skin. New seduction ritual: implemented.

Basically, the survival mechanism goes like this: if you’re competing with bone structure sculpted by an empyrean chisel, a mouth worthy of oil paintings and crumpled love letters, and the kinds of dimples that were engineered for the sole purpose of emotional damage (Cupid’s attempt; two, little exit wounds, the perfect pair of injustices parenthesizing his smile)…

And you’re lingering in the shadow of those attributes? Operating on a deficit? Well, then. There’s a little more work left to be put in.

If you’re lucky, you’re tall, or you’re well endowed in the basement, or both. If you’re none of those things, you’re banking on a gift with a musical instrument, or you’re coping with the weight of your wallet. You’re getting into niche, esoteric interests you will impress upon every woman that steps foot into your orbit to stand out, or you’re polishing up your comedic abilities. The thing is, society has evolved to the point where this compensation is the foundation to procreation. The foundation to function. And the kind of men with faces like Harry, who got in line not once, but twice when God was handing out genetic privilege (the overachieved extra credit projects), just get to sit back and let the world unravel at their feet.

Men like Harry don’t need personalities because they already look interesting enough. When you’re the kind of pretty that inspires love songs and ill-advised tattoos, you don’t need wit, or pockets lined with green. It opens doors (and legs) with such minimal effort that it may as well be as simple as breathing. The quiet space in a room bends around you when you become the focal point by existing, incidentally magnetic.

It’s pretty unfair, to say the very least.

Y/N only really registers it passing— in fleeting, peripheral moments when the space bends around him and her eyes glue, almost like an accident. A brief sighting here and there, like a rare animal caught between the trees—seen but not acknowledged, because staring starts to feel like stepping into something too raw, too deliberate.

He’s always moving. In motion, slipping past. Glimpses of wide shoulders cutting through the communal pool, water slicking over musculature in a smooth tide and then rivulets, droplets sticking against sun-warmed skin. A silhouette in the elevator at the end of the hall, head bowed. Sorting through crinkled envelopes between his massive hands with a ruckle between his brows.

He’s got the kind of face that suggests he should be gently perched on the edge of a marble fountain, carved in alabaster. A cherubic thing. Rosy-mouthed, haloed by damp curls that tuck around his ears in perfect, artistic disarray. The kind of beauty that feels vaguely mythological, like he should either be blessing crops or luring unbeknownst sailors to their deaths. A visage that belongs on domed Renaissance ceilings.

Y/N breathes. Her pulse feels like it’s rattling a little. It makes her head feel a little gooey when he’s stood in front of her.

And here he is, holding a package in one hand, water still beading at his collarbone from a morning shower, damp curls dripping onto the fabric of a lived-in, vintage T-shirt. The tragic failure of modern existence is that a man like this— who should, by all logic, be strumming a lyre on the edge of a celestial fountain— has instead been doomed to wander the mundanities of the human condition. To swipe through his mail. To stand in front of her door and say things like “Think they swapped our mail again” in that perfectly unassuming, relaxed tone, like his very existence isn’t actively offensive to the concept of mediocrity.

His singular flaw? That one, teeny thing?

He’s a horrific neighbor.

Abysmally inconsiderate, in fact. Maybe, one of the worst people Y/N has ever had the pleasure of sharing a paper-thin wall with.

The thing is, under all normal circumstances, eye candy is a desirable next door tenant, to catch those scarce glimpses of and swoon over. But Harry? He’s dangerous. An illusion gilded in beauty that sits in this achingly so, lazy way. It’s an excellent cover for someone who— based on volume alone— should be legally required to sublet a soundproof chamber instead of an apartment. Beauty privilege, remember?

Instead of spending his days spreading divine harmony and whispering sweet nothings into the ears of poets, her tragically beautiful neighbor has chosen a different calling. One that involves subjecting Y/N to an auditory experience that can only be described as an unholy, unprovoked act of sonic terrorism against anyone who possesses functioning ears.

While he may look like the patron saint of soft lighting and tasteful nudity, he lives like a man who has never once considered the presence of neighbors. Evidently, the universe operates on imbalance.

It’s not surprising that he fucks. Nor is the frequency, given— everything. It would be more surprising if he didn’t, which, statistically, seems impossible. It is the sheer volume at which he fucks and the blatant disregard for customary noise ordinances.

Y/N has had the great misfortune of gaining intimate knowledge of Harry’s extracurricular activities through nothing but flagrantly inconspicuous, unsolicited proximity. She is now, against her will, deeply familiar with the sound of his bed frame against the wall. With the low, gravel-thick groan that spills out of him before everything goes quiet, the sharp gasp from whoever is tangled up in the sheets beneath him. The pornographic chainlink of yes, yes, yes, as if to lyricize the tempo of a wrought iron headboard ramming against hollow drywall. She’s a victim to secondhand moaning; a hostage to the unchecked libido of a man she’s not even screwing.

The young woman isn’t sure who he’s sleeping with, but based on the sounds, they either really, really like whatever feat of Olympian-endurance he’s performing on the other side of the wall, or they’re being held at gunpoint and doing an exceptional job of faking it. It’s loud. A predictable regularity. Enough to make her consider downloading white noise apps and investing in a stronger liquor cabinet.

And every morning, after nights filled with thumping and gypsum-dulled dirty talk— horny monologue hour, hardly softened by an overworked, underpaid layer of rental-grade plaster— and the occasional bass-heavy indie rock soundtrack, he leaves his apartment looking criminally rested. Peaceful. Unbothered by the absolute railing he has just put someone (and the walls) through.

For all his divine aesthetics, Harry fucks like he’s trying to earn a standing ovation. With the kind of dedication to performance that suggests he thinks there’s an awards committee waiting outside in the hallway to hand him a trophy when he’s done.

Y/N doesn’t know what’s worse—the rhythmic, wall-shaking thump of his bed frame, the low, muzzled stream of just incomprehensible enough to stay offensive murmurs, or the fact that he has the audacity to look well-rested when she sees him the next morning, while she lurches past him like a woman who’s been spiritually waterboarded by the full-scale resonance of his sex life.

Y/N has tried— earnestly tried— to ignore it. To mentally downgrade him from disruptively attractive to something more manageable, like guy-next-door cute. But Harry is simply too loud to be ignored.

And not just in volume— though, yes, he operates at a decibel that insinuates he believes “inside voice” is an urban legend. It's everything. The way he takes up space. The way he stretches his arms over his head and his shirt rides up, exposing a sliver of toned stomach like some kind of aesthetic oversight. The way his lips pull into a smirk when he's amused, a single dimple pressing into the smooth skin of his cheek.

The worst part? He doesn’t weaponize it. Just… exists, as if he entirely lacks self-awareness for the unrelenting power he yields with pure aesthetics.

Perhaps the only thing more dangerous than his unregulated evolutionary favoritism is the lack of object permanence it causes. Inspires. Because at the end of the day, despite how polite, how deeply-gnarled in neighborly niceties, The Incident from last month still exists, but miraculously manages to melt into her every time she’s face to face with him. Like a static buzz settling into the way her composure thaws away.

His most notable sound pollution, to date, spilled in the form of audible rejection on a rain-drenched afternoon, dripping through the drywall in a dissent-rusted chain. Stop. No. Please. It was a voice she didn’t recognize. A voice trying to be firm but not entirely expecting to be listened to. It sounded so defeated, like a cry and then a high, sharp whine in response to whatever distinctly lower-pitched murmurs the insulation muzzled. All velvet-dipped tones swallowed by the structural integrity of a shoebox apartment.

Y/N is the last person to dig into others’ preferential depravities, nor does she have the mental bandwidth to file through the archives of a borderline stranger’s hedonisms, but her stomach had twisted up like one of those coiled, abstract sculptures that fits on a bookshelf, and she ended up on the couch with her cellphone tucked to her ear.

Because it wasn’t just the kind of sound that prickled at her nape, but curdled deep in the belly of her, heavy and rotting.

(“Um, hi, I think my neighbor is— hurting someone.”)

But the thing is, standing with her door cracked now, Y/N thinks there needs to be at least one, obnoxiously visible character flaw to remind her and offset the audacity of his aesthetics, because up close, it’s so much worse.

Anything— an overinflated ego, a questionable tattoo, a personality cultivated exclusively from Joe Rogan podcasts. But no. Harry is polite— painfully so, armed with the clean-shaven jawline of a man who has never known an awkward phase and the kind of infuriatingly natural charm that makes all rationale and reason puddle off into awed oblivion.

“Hey,” he says, cradling the package in one palm, curls wet, one rogue lock clinging to the crest of his cheekbone in a way that would look deeply artificial on anyone else. “Think they swapped our mail again.”

The level of allurement at which he functions should come with a warning label, so it’s a little tough to keep The Incident afloat when he just… waterlogs it with simple, blissfully unaware presence. In these types of situations, all that buoys is the vague, internal monologue reminding her that she’s been gawking wordlessly too long to be considered socially acceptable.

Her taller neighbor (significantly taller; really, Y/N thinks— it’s as if he collected hallmarks like they were on conveniently timed clearance) blinks. He’s still holding the package out. Y/N blinks back. Batting her lashes shakes something, as if warding off gnats off in a plume of smoke. Slowly, she accepts the misdelivered offering, and unease creeps into the soft spot between her rib bones and her organs.

Despite the way the man has embedded his existence so deeply into her thoughts— honestly, so much so that he may as well be paying rent (she should be getting compensated for the unpaid mental labor)— Y/N doesn’t actually know Harry.

She knows his name is Harry. H-A-R-R-y, always inscribed in all capitals, besides the cacographic tail end of the lowercase, curving Y. She’s given up on trying to understand why whoever the post office sends insists on treating their mailboxes like interchangeable suggestions rather than fixed addresses. She knows that their mail, through some act of bureaucratic sabotage, somehow manages to interchange between 9B and 9C with unsettling regularity.

She knows he fucks. A lot. So regularly that at this point, it’s practically a statistical impossibility that his celibacy record stands longer than a sparse handful of days. She knows that he wears the face of a misplaced effigy, with a halo’s worth of plausible deniability— the kind that should be mounted to an Italian plaza centerpiece, or live frescoed, immortalized on a high ceiling between Corinthian columns. She knows she called the police on him last month, so she needs to ball her resolve in her arms when it spills apart like unrolled toilet paper—

There is one truth Y/N must latch on and cling to in these tragically catastrophic stand-offs (probably… entirely one-sided, given that the opponent to her poor mettle and overactive nervous system is just… standing there, breathing, entirely oblivious of his innate talent to dilate pupils and cause momentary amnesia), and that truth is this: no superficially aesthetic veneer of deception can shell-up reality.

And the reality is that Y/N does not know this man, and so no cherubic façade, neighborly niceties, or feigned self-unawareness can suppress that he may as well be an entirely different person behind closed doors.

It’s months down the line that the irony will hit her— that yes, undeniably, Harry is almost a direct, walking contradiction behind the assumed sanctity of a closed door— that no pleasantries or seraphic, unassuming dimples can soften the obscenity of his pastimes. Hobbies include: vinyl collecting, long walks, and ensuring that an attitude adjustment sticks. But that’s months down the line, and right now?

Right now he’s just her obnoxiously loud neighbor that, according to probable cause (and the recording of the phone call she made to the emergency hotline, stored somewhere in the 911 archives), may or may not take no for an answer. Which is the biggest tragedy of all, in her opinion.

“Thanks.” There’s a little bite there to the word, there. Enough for him to clock it— for something to flicker along that lazily charming smile, like a gossamer-thin, bewildered film over the surface of his expression.

Harry pauses, almost like he wants to say something (probably to acknowledge the awkwardly apparent dissonance going on), but then he just… doesn’t.

“Okay,” as the man breathes, the breadth of his shoulders swells up, thick muscle rising up under the cotton fabric (not quite pulled taut— not anywhere besides the span of his shoulders— but enough for the shape of his pebbled nipples to poke through the material). Y/N chews into the gummy-smooth skin along the inside of her cheek. Honestly, it’s unfairly disarming; his low voice, his stupid face, his hard nipples prodding through the tee. With his dewy meadow eyes glued onto her, her resolve wobbles like a flimsy stilt house on the coast in a hurricane. “Have a good one.”

He ducks his chin (a subtle period on the uncomfortable pause, a formal seal on his exit) at the young woman, still holding the parchment-wrapped package she’s been awarded as if solidified into a stone-encasement of the position. Y/N blinks. Harry turns.

With a final glance toward his retreating back, the girl closes the door. As her fingers tighten around the package, her knuckles bleach from the strain. It’s either that or punch drywall, and quite frankly, she’s been paying too much in rent to consider remodeling and too many fees in the form of involuntary eavesdropping to afford a fracture in the (poorly constructed) noise barrier. She tucks the chainlink back onto its track as the door clicks shut and resigns herself to another unfortunate truth: Harry is so dangerously attractive that not only is she almost certainly going to think about this moment later, but she will be reminded, every time she’s shepherded into close proximity with him, that when God packages something up in 6 feet of limited-edition facial topography and artfully tousled curls, no amount of unsought aural pornography and creeping suspicion can stop a cosmic nepotism baby from dismantling her concentration.

The last thing Harry expects from a disgruntled herd of bleary-eyed, sock-shuffling renters— a crowd caught somewhere between sleep-deprived and half-dead— is small talk.

Half these people have a look that suggests they contemplated burning alive before choosing to evacuate, and the other half probably wish they decided to wear real pants to bed. Tonight, Harry falls into both categories. With the fire alarm still shrieking from the guts of the complex and the blinking glow of blue and red in the corner of a tar-black night, the briefs hitching high on his meaty thighs is almost… poetic. Cinematic, at the very least. Like a scene from an experimental indie film focused on the gradual dissolution of dignity.

The downy rabbit nestled in his arms, coiled more like a floccose ball than a living animal, is the sartorial maraschino cherry— it pulls the look together. Emergency Evacuation chic. He looks about as disheveled as the rest of the congregation; bedhead, sleep still dusting at his half-mast gaze, keyring slipped over his middle finger and his phone cradled in the same hand (though, Harry thinks wryly, no building-wide emergency couture quite tops the tighty-whitey socks-and-sandals combo that the guy up ahead of him is rocking). There’s sparse chatter going on all around him, a kind of background drone that fades into the wail, but he doesn’t have any intention to engage. Despite the unplanned slumber party and the potential opportunity to trauma-bond, he can’t really find it in him to start ice-breaking and sharing life stories. There’s a time and place to build community with your neighbors— half-dressed in a parking lot at three AM isn’t one of them.

Instead, he stands in the midst of the mass, dead-silent as if still calibrating. It takes him a while to notice the young woman a few feet ahead of him— long enough that the cool air has settled over him in a coat. Her bathrobe wraps tight around her, cinched pink terry-cloth. He doesn’t recognize that she’s a familiar face until she turns enough for him to see her side profile, her phone screen casting light and painting shadows in the crease of her furrowed brow as she sniffs. Thumbing over the device, Y/N turns back over her shoulder.

The longer he stands there, creaking into a more-awake rendition of himself as the faint chill cuts through the grogginess in his skull, the more the silence marinates into impatient restlessness. Stretching like old gum. She lingers in his periphery, shifting from foot to foot as if nursing the same restive itch. Once again, his neighbor twists to the side, rocking onto the balls of her feet and then back down onto her heels. A huff spills from her lips as she turns her phone off and tucks it up under her upper arm, crossing them. It’s not cold enough for the air to bloom with her breath, but the exasperation in it is audible. Maybe because he’s managed to seep closer.

“—Wonder if someone just pulled it.”

At first, Y/N doesn’t acknowledge the statement, as if she doesn’t recognize the remark is directed at her. And then, the presence behind her— not pressing uncomfortably close, just distant enough to notice— has Y/N turning her head over her shoulder. She double-takes.

Harry’s in a new light. Still abysmal to her train of thought, already weak on its tracks given that the drowsiness from being rudely awoken in the middle of the night still has her lingering in a dull, cotton-wrapped awareness. But now, he’s a fraying shape; sleepy and half-nakedly soft. Hair a masterpiece of sleep deprivation— the typically styled ringlets on his head sit mussed; whatever shape (she assumes the usual— somewhere between windswept and enticingly intentional) existed yesterday has gone rogue, erased by his pillow. What’s left is a tousled disarray. He’s in another tee, once again pulled snugly over his shoulders, and he’s cradling what could be a live, fuzzy animal, but more resembles a balled fur stole, its potential face tucked into the nook between his muscly upper arm and his chest. Despite the ridiculous assortment of this particular wardrobe showcase, that’s not what catches her eye most. Y/N sucks in a breath.

Considering a fair share of the evacuees around them teeter on the brink of public-indecency, it shouldn’t throw her guard off as much as it does, but all she can manage in such close proximity with Harry’s thighs is to blink wordlessly. It’s not necessarily his thighs so much as the way they’re denuded— not the way his trousers sit on them so much as their entire lack thereof. It’s the way his lower region is only covered up by a pair of jet-black briefs, clinging like a second skin, riding ridiculously high and ridiculously low. High enough that the only place her eyes can focus is the (chewy) musculature, slightly sun-bathed from all those hours spent in the residential pool, dusted with hair. Low enough that a sliver of skin peeks from between the waistband and hem of his shirt, hitched up just a touch on one side. Enough to hint at a sharp dip of a mostly concealed V, where muscle sinks in a hard line along bone. A tease of whatever workout routine he’s committed to. Beside the rigid line chiseled in there, an inked, leafy stem climbs (a set of mirrored layers that she’d observed on him, supine on a pool chaise).

Basically, it’s the type of thing that should legally classify him as a walking thirst trap.

With the crowd sporting bedtime fashion, some covered only in the most legally vague sense of the word, it leaves Y/N wondering: if most of the people decided to haphazardly vacate their apartments by only tossing on the most minimal attire— if opting to add to their garb in any way— what did Harry add? Did he wear the cream-toned tee to bed? Just the Calvins? Both? Or was he entirely bare, only sloppily throwing on whatever was left discarded by the side of the bed? Does he sleep naked?

With all these sordid thoughts clouding up the forefront of her mind like a thick plume of fog, she can’t find words through alphabet soup and the vague mental images of Harry’s bare skin tangled by sheets. To make it better, he’s just staring at her, like he’s expectantly waiting for her to respond. What was the question?

Y/N blinks again. “What?”

“The—“ Harry bobs his head towards the cluster of emergency vehicles, olive eyes oscillating to the apartment complex and back onto her, “fire alarm. I wonder if someone just pulled it.”

If ever the universe was to humble Harry from a breathing renaissance painting, half-clothed and half-asleep would be the time. He could be knocked down to whatever status a man up front is bearing, clad in a questionably classy fusion of tragic, high-cut cotton underwear, socks, and suede, open-toed sandals. Somehow, though, it’s worse that his bedhead, for the most part, still leaves the tendrils curling in lazy, untamed waves. That his nakedly-beguiling thighs, strong and sculpted with muscle, look like they’re meant to pry knees wide. It’s mortifying—

“Then, they’d be an asshole,” she murmurs, her own gaze raking out and lingering on the building. The words come out clipped with exhaustion, and then that pause lingers again.

Harry hums. She chances another glance at the furball curled to his chest.

“Snuggles,” Harry supplies, raising one arm a tad from where it’s caged to support the animal. The motion is enough to jostle the thing, and it tucks its face out, twitching its nose. With careful precision, the man moves one hand out from the cradle— the one not clutching his keys and his phone (by the way, casually dwarfed by the sheer size of his palm and cupped, lengthy fingers) to skim his pointer along the Holland lop’s dangling ear. “He’s a bit delicate and has some strong opinions on sudden, loud noises. Not a fan of fire alarms, as it turns out.”

The young woman hums noncommittally, eyes snaking back off to the polychrome strobe.

The last thing Harry expects from his neighbors during a mandatory, middle-of-the-night evacuation order are pleasantries. Between the slouched postures, the collective, dead-eyed aura of suffering, the general degree of resentment perfuming the air, and the visible internal debates over whether a hypothetical fire is worth enduring the cold, it’s safe to assume morale is at an all time low. Which brings him to his next point— there is, Harry suspects, something about him that fundamentally offends his neighbor.

Not inherently because she’s not talking to him. Naturally, the theory has no relevance to her lack of enthusiasm at the moment.

There’s a clause to life that he learned as a little kid, an absolute truth that the motto “water off your back” was created around, and this clause is that not everyone will like you. There’s really no gentle way to chew on that one, but it’s a fact Harry has long come to terms with. Jealousy, misery, even a simple case of personalities repelling like mismatched magnets— all things that can cause someone to decide you’re just not their cup of tea. Incompatibility could very easily leave your existence grating someone down to the molecular level. And you can never please everyone— that’s another piece of that truth he had to gnaw on before he decided that he was going to spend the rest of his life marching to the beat of his own drum.

Apparently, something about this tempo scrapes at some highly-sensitive nerve of hers like a dull knife on a chalkboard.

It’s an intuition thing, really. There hasn’t so much been a sharp, substantial instance so much as there’s been instances. Little, creeping things; the way her eyes ward when he’s close, despite the way they hover; the tone she seems to reserve for him, not outwardly rude, but suspiciously close to some awkward admixture between tolerating jury duty and being held at gunpoint. There’s more, among those, too— the suspiciously long pauses that sit like preludes to every response she gives him. The way her gaze flickers off avoidantly.

And those last two aren’t flustered mechanisms.

Harry knows he is, according to conventional, societal standards, attractive. He’s no stranger to reflective surfaces, nor is he unaware of the way actual strangers look at him. Ogle. Gawk.

It was a burgeoning metamorphosis he became acutely aware of between awkward kidhood and the place he’s at now. First, all lanky angles of uncertainty, only half-grown into his features, when his bones had made up their mind but the muscle and skin over them hadn’t quite decided what they wanted to be yet. Then, it was almost overnight. Everything began stretching into place and ubiquitously working in his favor. Eyes lingered, heads turned…

It’s safe to say he knows nervous girls. Boys. The lack of eye contact, or on the polar opposite hand, the blanking, empty stares and the silent beat as their response time glitches and their mouth tries (and fails) to keep up with a short-circuiting nervous system. Not everybody is able to stay the most suave version of themselves interacting with someone they find sexually attractive— his firsthand experience involves not only being on the receiving end, but on the giving end, as well. Granted, the aesthetics boost had given him a sense of confidence that buried his inhibitions down, so it’s been a long while since the last time he tripped over himself in front of someone that made his dick sit up and pay attention, but—

The thing is, Y/N doesn’t glance away like staring at him rapidly dissolves her thoughts in a static haze. She doesn’t take long pauses because she’s floundering over the next word. She doesn’t even look at him in a way that insinuates she’s worried he’ll nip her or something, she’s just so utterly…

Closed off. Disinterested. Like his presence is a jury duty evaluation and she’s wriggling in her seat, waiting to talk about her views on jury nullification.

In fairness, it could very well be a me-not-you thing— the awkward shuffle through their interactions, the severe deficit of enthusiasm. Those communication patterns could very well be sound across the board… in another universe. There are footprints that lead him to the massive elephant in the room, and those footprints spell the vague shape of it didn’t used to be this way.

Sure, Harry contemplates, if she was a miserably unpleasant person that holed up in her apartment with no interest in corresponding with another human being, he’d get it. If she’d given him the idea that something about him rattled her down to atoms the first time he ever said hello to her, he’d get it. But she used to smile. Coyly, almost, he’d go as far to say— one finger away from twirling a lock of hair around her pointer as she talked to him. The kind of simper that accompanies a giggle from a barista handing his drink over across the counter, eyes honed. She used to lean onto her door frame when he handed off a stack of envelopes that got misplaced into his mailbox, or hung back with her eyes wet and lively as she stood at his doorway and handed off a package.

What’s more is that his history is marked by drawing more people in after he opens his mouth, than turning them away. He’s arguably likeable— not in an arrogantly self-absorbed way, but strictly based on track record. He’s befriended too many older ladies (who sparked up chatter with him in grocery stores unprompted, mostly), and gotten slipped too many drinks (on the house) from bartenders to believe otherwise. Generally, his existence tends to fall into the category of charming rather than grating.

When he considers all of this, his analysis only leads him to one conclusion— there is something about him that suddenly, fundamentally offends his neighbor.

And it’s with this hypothesis that Harry clears his throat, hesitates, and prods, with just a moment of lull after she’s turned back away from him, “If I’m misreading this, feel free to tell me to piss off, but— did I do something?”

The young woman pivots back over her shoulder, blinking, almost as if she’d forgotten he was behind her at all.

“…What?”

Harry shrugs. The motion coaxes Snuggles to lift his head again. “I don't expect us to be friends, but I also don't want to be the person you actively avoid in the hallway. If I've done something to make things weird, l'd rather fix it than pretend I don't notice."

For a long second, Y/N doesn’t say anything. Just batting her lashes up at him, features lax, like she’s processing the earnest directness behind his words and letting them settle. And then her face twists.

Ooh— okay. Ruckling brow bone, lips tugging down, the nearly incredulous burst of air she expels as she turns her prickling face away—

She scoffs, muttering something strangely close to, “can’t be serious,” under her breath, and Harry’s eyes pensively narrow just a smidge. Enough to be entirely imperceptible as he drinks in her body language. That’s an indicator, if Harry’s ever seen one.

“You know what, Harry,” she says after a moment (now her arms are caging defensively, that’s an interesting touch), “…I just don’t really …appreciate how you treat women, to be honest.”

Of all the responses Harry had been anticipating, curiously honed on every word, that was— not the one. His dark canopy of lashes sweeps over his eyes as the admission lands and… knocks him off kilter, just a bit. His brows relax, then furrow up as he mulls the statement over, buffering.

He sounds a little bewildered when he says, voice much more soft-spoken, “…Sorry?”

“You should be,” his neighbor tells him pointedly, her arms still crossed like a defensive barrier across her chest, “Hitting women is wrong. Very illegal for a reason, actually.”

At the mention, his head bobbles back a bit like he’s dodging a smack between the brows with the context-lacking declaration. He’s not quite sure he’s heard her right, eyebrows climbing and eyes widening almost comically. Right, okay. This is… a gross misunderstanding, he decides. When the realization hits him, truly hits him, his knee-jerk response is an incredulous laugh, which he muscles down. Instead, his appalled amusement trickles out like a little huff, corners of his strawberry mouth tugging up. Unfortunately, the reaction only seems to irritate her further, and her forehead crinkles up as her own eyebrows ascend in stunned disbelief.

“You think there’s something funny about hitting a woman?” Y/N presses, eyes steeling into slits, her priorly indoor-voice rising a decibel.

The volume of her statement (and the misleading content) has his otherwise mirthy expression falling into something far more serious. Full of comically flat, grievous denial, like a kid being scolded for spray-painting a concrete wall after being caught with the can in its hand.

“—No,” Harry shakes his head slowly, side to side, “Not at all.”

Cautiously, his gaze slips off to the corner, where a few tenants have turned over their shoulder to gauge the commotion. As the young woman’s head swivels to tail where his eye contact has meandered, Harry realizes that backpedaling is only going to become a feat of incredible verbal athleticism from here. Upon catching the other glimpses from the crowd, slowly turning back to their own conversations, Y/N makes a deadpan sound of amusement before she turns back to face him.

“Oh, what? You’re ashamed now that you’re being called out for it? Good,” she bites, shoulders teetering as she leans toward him and unfolds her arms, pointing her index finger into his direction scathingly, “You should be ashamed. It’s absolutely disgusting to put your hands on a woman.”

This is tragically weighed against Harry’s favor. Here he was, just a half-asleep evacuee, holding his rabbit, clad in only a pair of hardly decent briefs, contemplating whether he should Uber Eats tacos as soon as the emergency exit fiasco were to clear up (might as well, since he’s already awake). Somehow, he’s managed to morph from an unassuming extra to the perceived antagonist.

No, Harry thinks— this wouldn’t be a disaster film; it’s a full blown, poorly-contrived drama with a plot twist even the supposed villain is caught off guard by. The curly-headed brunette chances another glance to the other side now, where more people have not only glimpsed over in brief acknowledgement, but have fully twisted their shoulders to observe the apparent scandal. As much as Harry wholeheartedly marches to the beat of his own drum, at this moment in time, his reputation is shaking in its boots and he’s reached a mental checkpoint called time for damage control.

Weaving sincerity into his tone and shaking his head placatingly as he steps forward— a subconscious attempt to coax her into lowering her volume— Harry tells her, “I don’t put my hands on anybody that doesn’t consent to it first.”

Her face scrunches up.

“I think,” his pink tongue slinks out to wet his lips, “maybe, there’s been a misunderstanding.”

“Oh, I don’t think so.”

“No, I really, really do,” Harry counters, ducking his chin into a nod.

Instead of hearing him out, however, his neighbor, as if fueled by the internal calling to manually dismantle misogyny, one assumed violent criminal at a time, only raises her volume a little more. Exceeding the normal range, definitely steeping in public-humiliation-ritual territory.

“I’m not misunderstanding,” Y/N bites, brows pinched like he’s personally offended her by even insinuating as much, “I have ears, just so you know, and I’ve heard a woman saying no, and please, and stop. So you can drop your good boy act, okay—“

Harry blinks. If not for the character defamation going on and the way Socks-and-Sandals raises his phone out of seemingly nowhere, pointing it into their direction as if there isn’t a potential fire to be filmed instead of all things, Harry would laugh. But there is, and the flash is on, weak along his peripheral edge—

“I know guys like you, I know your type,” Y/N declares, jabbing her finger against him again, this time so close to grazing the area along his chest, right between the tops of his pectorals, just over Snuggles, “and it’s gross that you think because you’re attractive you can walk all over everyone and do things like that to people, and you know what, next time maybe the cops won’t be so nice—”

Ah, nice. Another mystery resolved; one which involved a pair of men with guns in their holsters at his door performing a wellness check and an excruciatingly awkward clarification on impact play, consensual sadomasochism, and safewords. For weeks Harry wondered what had inspired a legal inquiry into his pastimes. Now, staring at the culprit— case dismissed— he can only blink before his brows wrinkle up.

“You’re the one who called the police?” Harry murmurs, a note of soft incredulity soaking the phrase.

“Any sane woman would call the police when she heard another woman being abused—“

“Abused?”

“Yes! Abused! And— and— honestly—“

Before Y/N can launch into another ruthlessly-curated, virtue-plated diatribe, Harry resituates the animal in his grip, unlocking his phone to the homescreen. Then, Safari. He thumbs over it with a careful determination seeding along his downturned, sculpted expression.

“I don’t know what form of assault would be worse,” Y/N chimes, hands climbing up in an exaggerated, universal symbol of exasperation before they fall back to her sides (as if she hadn’t even noticed his attention has been redirected to his phone), “but when someone says no, it means no.”

It only takes a second for her to register that his focus has been rerouted elsewhere, though. Her tone dips indignantly.

“Excuse me. I’m talking to you. And also, while we’re at it, you’re unbearably loud and an unmannerly neighbor—“

Harry turns his phone around. His expression is impressively flat, all things considered. Y/N pauses.

“Typically,” Harry states as her eyes rake over the glowing screen, “I like to be wined and dined before I give a crash course on my preferences, but.”

The image stretched across the illuminated LED sits over her tired gaze as she absorbs it, pupils jittering as she reads, but through the lens of his own profile mirrored back, he can see the moment her righteously fueled demeanor chips.

“I do, like, a… softcore porn type thing,” he admits.

Still, her brows are kinked. Only now, in stupefied doubt. “I— what?”

It’s with a rotting sense of dread curdling in the pit of her tummy that it suddenly dawns on Y/N— the mortified realization that she has succumbed to a horrible misunderstanding.

The website the tab is set on almost looks archaic, like a kitsch relic— repository archives of a porn blog from the early 2000s. Spankinggram. The page is set onto a profile, something called Rings&Paddles, and the squared image of an avatar slices through the garishly orange palette of the site’s logo. Her gaze sweeps over the vista; a man sitting down on an armless chair, thighs splayed, palm curled over a …hairbrush.

The profile picture sunders off at the neck. It’s a faceless silhouette, but the miscellany of sketches cascading across a forearm and the distinctly chunky medley of rings are… enough—

“Consensually,” Harry— Rings&Paddles, Y/N recognizes, molten heat dripping along the crests of her cheekbones— adds, “No one is being abused.”

In retrospect, the only feasible option to survive this, Y/N decides, is to change her name and move to another state.

Probably something short and vaguely melancholic, one of those names that would look intriguing in all lowercase. A quiet town. Somewhere coastal, maybe. West. No— north. As far north as geographically possible. Perhaps she could get a dog. An older, ratty boy from a shelter. Drive an old car that’s too big with a busted radio. She’ll pretend it’s a benefit, rather than an inconvenience, because she’ll be the fabricated kind of mystique that insufferably enjoys the quiet calm (and rainstorms). A rebranded, movie-clichè hipster, but not unbearable in real life—

“But I understand the concern,” her neighbor says, cutting through the haze as she contemplates what brand of cigarettes she’ll be taking up as a trait of her pseudo-identity. Against all odds, his tone is calm in an all-too-merciful kind of way, “You can look into… domestic discipline, if you’d like. If you wanted to understand a bit better. There’s loads of really good information on the internet.”

For a moment, Y/N deliberates burning alive. If there isn’t a fire licking up her department store drapes, she’s going to set one to avoid bearing the weight of this shame for the rest of her life. Granted, the heat sizzling at her face feels like a flame, enough, both at the way she’s just publicly kinkshamed an innocent man and at the mention of …domestic discipline.

She’s going to cry.

They would be Virginia Slims.

“You— …what?”

The garbled confusion drenching her tone is almost laughable. She sounds it, too; voice pinched and deceptively close to trembling off into a sob. Y/N stares straight ahead, body locked in a fugue state of humiliation as the realization calcifies in real-time. Her shoulders have gone stiff and her spine rigid, posture squeezed somewhere between standing and catatonic. The scale of her miscalculation worms into her skull like a parasite that’ll chew her awake in the middle of the night, years down the line.

For the last month, Y/N has spent every interaction with Harry evasively toeing over eggshells. Floundering over the way his face was sculpted, rather than compromising the integral structure of their acquaintanceship. Somehow, a sleep cycle cut short and the ambiguous suggestion that he had picked up on her avoidant habits was all it had taken to not only slander his (apparently not safe for work) extracurriculars, but probably assure her foreseeable Amazon packages suddenly start going missing.

Now, with a semi-public declaration of his profile pressed out to her face and his name no longer being audibly smeared with accusations, Harry can appreciate the quiet sense of revelation.

His neighbor, on the other hand, looks visibly wrecked. Her entire stance is pulled in tight, like she’s actively trying to make herself smaller, but it’s her face that really gives her away— the way it twists, fluctuating between wide-eyed horror and the dawning realization that she’s just detonated a social landmine at point-blank range. All heat-tinged and shame-doused, the young woman blinks up at him, doe-eyes rounded in apologetic appall and lips parted slightly like she’s still buffering. The combination of words that just left his mouth— softcore porn, domestic discipline, consensual— seem to be wrestling in her brain like tangled Christmas lights, none of them quite fitting together in a way that makes sense and glinters.

“I am sorry about the noise,” he tells her, shutting the phone off and nestling his arm back up under his pet, “I’ll make sure to keep it to a minimum from now on.”

Y/N wilts. With the phone no longer held out into her direction, the way she stays glued to the same spot on the cement— as if mortified into a motionless piece of stone— is ridiculous enough for him to gnaw into his cheek to chew back a bark of laughter. Despite all trials and tribulations, his coping mechanisms never fail.

“You— oh my God,” Y/N whispers. She makes a sound that could be a vaguely pained noise or the byproduct of her soul seeping out of her body. “Oh my God.”

Harry blinks.

“I called the police on you,” she tells him, utter dismay lacing the words together.

“You did, yeah.”

Harry still remembers the blank expression varnished along the officer’s face— the kind of emotionally vacant stare reserved for department store mannequins. The echo of the distant, metaphysical NOPE that definitely rode along his brainstem the moment the curly-haired brunette mentioned “it’s a kink thing,” and the way his partner, hands allocated to his holster belt, started very obviously examining his own shoes.

“I thought—“ Y/N stutters, her wobbling voice sounding squeezed from her trachea, “I thought—“

“You thought you were living next door to a criminal,” Harry supplies. When he tilts his head, a rogue curl flops over his forehead.

Finally, the young woman moves, burying her face in her hands. This will haunt her, she thinks. Forever.

From the corner of his eye, the man can tell that most of the tenants have gone back to their regularly scheduled repertoires of stalled misery. And despite the absolute PR mess her blunder has induced— his eyes wander over her, the way she’s cupping her face like she wants to melt into her own hands and seep off into the pavement— he feels oddly… bad. Not secondhand embarrassed (firsthand, definitely firsthand), but Y/N looks like she’s going to combust. It’s tragic, really. The kind of pitiful that makes him purse his mouth and stare down at her in contemplation.

“Honestly,” his voice cuts through the haze in her throbbing, hot skull, all even-toned sincerity (which is worse, so much worse), “if I was in your position, yeah? I’d do the same thing.”

The admission coaxes her into a horrified peer through the wedges between her fingers. The warmth pressed to her palms feels borderline pyrexic.

“And if that were the case, you’d be the neighborhood hero. So.” He raises a shoulder nonchalantly.

Y/N doesn’t immediately respond. Instead, she soaks in the crime scene, doused in the blinking blue and red.

“I’m not sure neighborhood hero is how I’ll be remembered,” the young woman finally answers, groaning through her hands, and then pressing her fingertips into her temples.

Harry hums. Then, he sighs. “No, you’re right. I’d say misguided vigilante. I reckon it’s a bit better than violent felon, though.”

Y/N makes another sound. This one sounds a little more wounded.

Next part here

#harry styles #harry styles x reader #harry styles one shot #harry styles smut #harry styles dirty one shot #harry styles dirty fanfiction #harry styles writing #harry styles fanfic #harry styles fic #harry styles fanfiction #dom!harry x sub!reader #harry styles au #harry styles x y/n #harry styles x you #harry styles one shots #dom!harry

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camomileapplesyrup · 10 months ago

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one of my biggest gripes with bdsm & "taboo" kink discourse was the overused "coping mechanism" defense that i hear oh so much. especially on twitter, from women in heterosexual relationships.

i won't go into the "not all coping mechanisms are good coping mechanisms" argument, but i will propose this;

when you are allowing a man to engage in a non consensual fantasy, or incest fantasy, or otherwise violent and abusive fantasy, what trauma is he coping with and relieving?

is he getting off to helping you re-contextualise a situation where you lost all control, in a controlled and safe environment? or is he enjoying the power to hurt & abuse you that you are offering to him on a silver platter?

and do you think, that at the end of the day, your safety & healing is what turns him on? or the fact that he can freely abuse a traumatised woman, under the guise of "fantasy" and "sexual liberation"?

#radblr #kink critical #radical feminists do interact #radical feminists do touch #radical feminist safe #radical feminism

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abbotjack · 8 days ago

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This City Doesn’t Forget (part two · 6:00 AM)

read part one here

a/n : ok so this one’s a little unhinged. there’s sex (messy, desperate, not soft), jealousy, manipulation, and jack’s brother being genuinely the worst. it gets dark toward the end—coercion vibes, threats, and that feeling of something way bigger starting to spiral. also yes, the porch scene is that kind of porch scene.

word count : 5192

content warning: emotional manipulation, coercion, implied blackmail, explicit sexual content, stalking, sibling rivalry, obsessive behavior, explicit sexual content (consensual but emotionally intense), sex on a porch (public semi-exposure), vaginal penetration, dominant/submissive language, unprotected sex, mutual desperation, alcohol present but not impairing.

MONDAY – 6:00 A.M.

Hospitals don’t sleep. They hold their breath.

Allegheny General is already alive—buzzing, sterile, too bright. The fluorescents overhead cast no shadows, only a cold kind of clarity. You breathe in recycled air that smells like metal and memory—saline and bleach, the faintest echo of sweat, coffee and loss.

The elevator doors shudder open behind you with a mechanical sigh.

You step out alone.

Your new badge is clipped to the collar of your scrubs, stiff and unfamiliar. Dr. [Y/L/N], PGY-1. It hangs there like a dare. Like something you’re not sure you’ve earned.

You move inside the resident lounge, fingers curled tight around your phone like it might anchor you. The screen’s already gone dim, but you tap it back to life anyway. You scroll the assignment sheet again—like maybe the fifth time will hit softer than the fourth.

It doesn’t.

TRAUMA – Dr. Abbot, J. Residents: [Y/N], T. Santos, V. Javadi, D. Whitaker

Your name next to his. Not even bolded. Just… there.

The coffee in the lounge is burnt, the pot half-empty already. A few early risers shuffle in—Javadi muttering to herself, Santos nursing a Red Bull like it’s the last one she’ll ever have. You try to act like it’s just another Monday. Like it’s not your first shift. Like it’s not him.

You’re mid-sip when the door swings open.

Black scrubs. Jaw set. That gait you’d know blind—shoulders squared, spine rigid, right leg bearing a slight shift in weight. Not a limp. Not a stumble. Just deliberate. Just Jack. Every step measured like he doesn’t waste movement on things that don’t matter.

He walks in like he owns the place. Maybe he does. Not technically, but no one questions it.

He doesn’t look surprised to see you. Of course he isn't. He meets your eyes once. Just once. And then nods, calm as ever. Like this was always inevitable.

“Rounds in five,” he says to the room. His voice cuts through the low hum of morning chatter. “Get your shit together.”

And that’s it. He turns, and the others fall in line. No one questions him. They never do.

You move to follow, slower than the rest. Deliberate. Like maybe if you take your time, the ache in your ribs will fade, or your legs will remember how to be steady again. But they don’t. Your shoes squeak faintly against the tile as you trail after the others, staying back just enough to avoid the orbit.

You follow last. You always follow last now.

But you watch the way he walks ahead of you—how his hand occasionally brushes the side of his thigh, how he doesn’t glance back once.

HOUR ONE

Jack doesn’t look at you.

But he doesn’t ignore you either.

He does what he’s always done when he wants you to rise to the moment—what he used to do back when you were eighteen and stubborn and still figuring out how to be taken seriously. He doesn’t coddle, never did. He throws you into the deep end and watches to see if you’ll swim.

He asks you the hardest questions. The ones with weight. The ones where the line between right and wrong is thinner than breath—where the answer could be the difference between a pulse and a flatline.

“Y/L/N, what’s your plan?”

No warning. No setup. Not even eye contact.

The question slices clean through the noise of the trauma bay—sharp, surgical, and aimed squarely at you.

You straighten your posture, mask the jolt behind practiced composure. You've had years to perfect it. Your voice doesn’t shake when you answer. You don’t let it.

He nods. Just once. No praise. No correction.

Just keeps going.

Calls on you again ten minutes later. And again after that. Never when your hand is raised. Never when you’re ready. He cuts you open mid-thought, mid-breath, and waits to see if you can stitch yourself back together.

He wants you sharp, perfect, unshakable.

You are. You have to be.

Because if you crack now, it won’t stop at the surface. You’ll bleed through your scrubs, through the silence, and everyone will see just how deep it goes.

Each patient blends into the next—a teenager with a punctured lung, an elderly man whose arm won’t stop spasming, a woman who coded twice before sunrise. Jack moves between traumas with his usual focus: fast, efficient, exacting. He’s the kind of attending who doesn’t waste words unless they’re necessary. Or sharp.

He never corrects you in front of the others. But he never lets you coast either.

“Do better,” he mutters once after a missed detail on an intake report.

It’s not unkind. But, it’s also not soft.

By minute thirty-seven, Santos starts to notice—the way Jack’s questions keep hitting you, deliberate and precise, like stones dropped into still water. Like he’s less interested in your answers and more in watching the ripple.

Like he’s not testing your knowledge at all.

He’s testing how long you can hold your breath.

She quirks an eyebrow after a particularly brutal round of questioning and mouths: Damn.

By minute forty-two, Whitaker’s brows are knit, and he’s side-eyeing you both like he’s mentally building a conspiracy board with red string.

By minute fifty-eight, Robby leans against the trauma bay door, arms crossed, eyes flicking between you and Jack like he’s piecing something together. He lets out a low whistle, more observation than surprise.

“Tense crowd this morning,” he murmurs, not really to anyone—but not not to you, either.

You pretend you don’t hear. Just double-check the patient chart and re-wrap a gauze bandage like your hands aren’t trembling just slightly.

You and Jack move like muscle memory—one step apart, never overlapping, never straying too far. It’s precise. Practiced. Like something that used to be intimate and has since calcified into distance.

The space between you hums with it. Not quite anger. Not quite nostalgia. Just the echo of something scorched down to the foundation, still radiating heat.

Once, you moved in sync for different reasons—quiet kitchens, shared secrets, summer nights nobody talks about now.

Now, it’s choreography by necessity.

Now, it’s survival.

After the patient is stabilized and you’re headed toward CT, Santos falls into step beside you, unwrapping a granola bar she has no intention of eating.

“You sure you and Abbot never crossed paths before?” she asks, casual as anything, but her tone says bullshit.

You glance at her. Offer a smile that doesn’t reach your eyes.

“I’m sure,” you lie.

She raises an eyebrow, but you keep walking. No follow-up. No clarification.

Because the truth is messy—threaded through empty parking lots, old voicemail drafts, and all the nights you said too much without saying anything at all.

It lives in the way he used to steady your wrist when you were younger and unraveling, when you hadn’t learned how to hide the panic behind your badge.

In the way he doesn’t reach for you anymore.

No one here knows the girl who met Jack before the scrubs. Before you learned how to keep your voice even and your hands clean.

They don’t know the version of you that belonged to a different life.

And if you can help it, they never will.

FLASHBACK – THE PUNCH : The house smells like mildew, smoke, and something that used to be family.

The kitchen reeked of warm beer and something burned in the toaster two days ago. The linoleum was warped near the fridge. One of the ceiling lights buzzed loud enough to make Jack’s head hurt.

He stood near the sink, arms crossed over his chest, bottle of Yuengling sweating in his hand. The dog tags under his shirt clinked softly when he shifted.

The stereo in the living room crackled with static between tracks—Linkin Park’s Numb, warbled and low. The CD was scratched. Everything in this house was scratched.

His younger brother strolled in like he owned the place—barefoot, jeans half-zipped, red Motorola flip phone in one hand, confidence in the other. Hair sticking up. Eyes still bloodshot from the night before.

He tossed a greasy pizza box onto the counter without looking. “Cold as hell,” he muttered, cracking open a can of Coke. “Still better than whatever powdered crap they feed you in the desert.”

Jack didn’t answer. Just sipped the beer and kept his eyes on the clock.

The phone buzzed in his brother’s hand. He flipped it open. Read the screen. Snorted.

“Jesus,” he muttered, grinning to himself. “Daniella’s still sore from last night.”

Jack didn’t move.

“You’ve got a girlfriend,” he said flatly.

His brother looked up, unbothered. “And?”

Jack stared. “And you’re still sleeping with other people.”

A beat.

His brother shrugged, unapologetic. “It’s not like we’re married.”

Jack turned his head, finally looking at him. “You’re with her.”

His brother scoffed. “Jesus, relax. You act like she’s made of glass or something.”

Jack’s grip tightened around the bottle. His voice didn’t waver.

“She loves you.”

“Yeah? That’s her mistake.”

The stereo crackled in the corner. The room went still, heavy with it.

Jack didn’t blink. “You don’t even feel bad.”

His brother let out a dry laugh. “About cheating? Not really. You being jealous, though? Kinda figured.”

Jack said nothing.

But his silence said everything.

“I see the way you look at her,” his brother said. “Still do. But last summer? The cutoff shorts, her in my lap—you looked like you were about to fall apart.”

Jack’s jaw clenched.

“And she looked back,” his brother went on, like he was proud of it. “Don’t think I didn’t notice. You were standing in the dark like a creep, and she couldn’t stop glancing over.”

“Shut up.”

“She bit her lip when you walked past, man. Like she knew she shouldn’t be looking, but did anyway.”

“I said—shut your goddamn mouth.”

His brother grinned wider. “What’s the matter? Pissed because you never got to find out what she sounds like when she—”

The bottle hit the floor before Jack’s fist hit bone.

The punch landed clean—jaw, hard enough to knock him sideways into the fridge. The Motorola flew out of his hand, battery clattering across the floor.

Blood hit the linoleum in sharp, red flecks. His brother let out a grunt, staggered back a step, and caught himself on the edge of the counter, knuckles white against the laminate.

“Holy shit,” he muttered, wiping his mouth and seeing red. “There’s the big brother I remember.”

He looked up. Smirked.

“Thought the Army would’ve taught you how to hit harder.”

Jack moved again—this time fast, all weight and fury. He grabbed the front of his brother’s shirt, yanked him upright, slammed him into the cabinet.

“You don’t get to talk about her,” he said, voice low, rough, almost shaking. “You don’t get to say her name.”

His brother spit blood onto the floor, wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. “Why not?” he shot back. “Because she means something to you? Please. She is a break from the noise. Something nice to think about while you are cleaning sand out of your boots.”

Jack didn’t hesitate. His fist connected again—this time slicing open his own knuckles. His brother hit the fridge with a thud, a streak of blood blooming across the dented metal door.

“You cheated on her,” Jack growled. “And you meant to. You wanted to hurt her.”

“Yeah,” his brother coughed. “Maybe I did.”

Jack’s chest heaved.

“You don’t get to say you love her,” he snapped. “You don’t get to walk around like none of it matters. She is—” He caught himself. Jaw clenched. “She is the only good thing in your goddamn life.”

His brother laughed again, voice thin, bloody. “And she still picked me.”

Silence.

Jack didn’t swing again. His brother had found the spot that hit deeper than anything he could’ve thrown.

“She was never yours,” his brother said, eyes gleaming. “And you hate that. Hate watching her kiss me. Cling to me. Like you aren’t in the room.”

Jack’s voice dropped, flat and quiet.

“She trusted you.”

“And you want her,” his brother said, stepping forward, blood trailing down his chin. “Don’t act like you don’t. I see it. The way you look at her legs. The way you stop talking every time she walks in.”

Jack was shaking now. Not from fear. Not from adrenaline. From restraint.

“I’m gonna tell her,” he said. “About Daniella. About everything.”

His brother blinked. “You think that makes you a hero?”

“I don’t care what it makes me.”

“You gonna hold her while she cries? Pretend you weren’t waiting for this exact moment to slide into her bed?”

Jack stepped back, blood on his hands, heat crawling down his spine.

He didn’t speak again.

Just turned and walked out the door, into the heavy summer dark—knuckles burning, jaw clenched, heart pounding with everything he hadn’t said and everything he still could.

He was going to tell you. He was ready to tell you.

But by the time he found you—curled up on the porch in the clothes you’d been crying in, eyes already glassy and far away—it was too late.

You already knew.

Not because Jack told you.

But because his brother beat him to it—mumbled it like a joke, too sloppy to sound honest, too late to sound like regret.

And still—when your eyes met his in the dark, when you blinked and tried to swallow what you were feeling—

Jack knew.

Whatever this was between you… it wasn’t going anywhere.

Not really.

Not ever.

PRESENT – LUNCH HOUR

You’re in the lounge, halfway through your charting, trying to ignore how much your scrubs itch at the collar and how nothing feels like it fits—your body, this badge, this hospital.

The door opens, and you know it’s him before you look.

Black scrubs. Posture still rigid, but slightly more relaxed now that no one’s coding in front of him. The chaos of the shift has passed, but he hasn’t shed it—still wears it in the way his jaw ticks when he sees you.

He walks past the counter. Doesn’t grab coffee. Doesn’t speak.

Just stands across from you. Quiet. Present.

Too close to ignore. Too familiar to look at without unraveling.

You don’t look up. “If you came to say I fumbled the trauma workup, you’re a little late.”

Jack doesn’t answer right away.

Then: “You didn’t fumble it.”

You glance at him, skeptical. “Could’ve fooled me.”

“I needed to see where you were,” he says simply.

You blink. “And?”

His gaze holds yours, steady as always. “You’re exactly where I thought.”

That shouldn't sound like anything. But it does. It hits somewhere low, somewhere unguarded.

“Well, I hope that was satisfying.”

Jack crosses his arms, weight shifting slightly onto his left leg. You notice the way he favors the right knee less when he's off-shift. Small things. Things you shouldn’t still track.

“I told you I matched here,” you say. “At the wedding. And you still ran me like I was some clueless walk-in.”

“You told me where you matched,” Jack replies. “You didn’t tell me who you are now.”

That stops you. Briefly.

“I’m a resident,” you say.

Jack nods once. “Exactly.”

“This going to be how it is?” you ask. “You treating me like everyone else?”

“Would you rather I didn’t?”

You open your mouth. Close it again. Because you don’t know the answer. Not really.

Jack exhales through his nose. Not angry. Just tired. Heavy in a way that says he’s thought about this moment a hundred times and still doesn’t know how to hold it.

“You weren’t supposed to end up here,” he says. “Not this hospital. Not this city. Not with me.”

“Well,” you say, standing slowly, “here we are.”

He looks at you. The kind of look that saw straight through you once. The kind that hasn’t touched you in years—but still feels like it remembers.

“I wasn’t trying to punish you this morning,” he says.

“Maybe not,” you answer, voice steady, “but you weren’t trying to protect me either.”

“That’s not my job anymore.”

You almost flinch at that. Almost.

You take a breath. It doesn’t help.

“You were the one who said it couldn’t happen again,” you say quietly. “You made that call.”

Jack doesn’t blink. “And I meant it.”

“Then stop looking at me like you didn’t.”

That does something to him. A fracture you barely catch. Just in his eyes. Just in the space between the words.

“I wasn’t expecting to still feel it,” he admits.

And there it is.

You look at him like he’s a landmine you’ve already stepped on.

“Don’t say that,” you whisper.

“Why not?”

“Because it’s my first day, Jack.”

“I know.”

“Because you left.”

“I know.”

You pick up your chart. Your coffee. Whatever’s in reach.

You need to leave before something gives.

But he says one more thing—quiet, and almost too late:

“I didn’t think I deserved you. Especially not after what my brother did. After what my mother said. What she made you feel.”

You freeze in the doorway.

He doesn’t move. Doesn’t fill the silence.

Just lets the truth hang there, stripped bare between you.

You don't turn around.

You don't give him the relief of softening.

You just say, steady and quiet:

“You didn’t.”

And then you’re gone. Leaving him standing there in the silence he made.

FLASHBACK – THE PORCH, POST BREAKUP

Summer. Late. The kind of air that tastes like rain and rage and everything falling apart. The porch is still damp from the storm earlier, your bare legs sticking to the wooden step. You’re sitting curled in on yourself, sundress wrinkled, damp at the hem, a phone slipping from your hand and landing face-down beside you.

His voice still echoes in your ears: "I fucked up, but come on, babe. It's not like I don’t love you. We can work through this."

You didn’t shout. You didn’t sob. You ended it like it was a business transaction—calm, efficient, like the weight of it hadn’t just cracked something open inside you.

Then you sat on the porch and sobbed until your throat burned.

Jack's truck pulls up less than twenty minutes later. Fast. Loud. No subtlety, no headlights. The door slams shut and heavy boots hit gravel. You hear the urgency in every step as he climbs the porch.

He doesn't speak. Just hands you a beer, cold and dripping. You take it with shaking fingers.

He sits beside you.

And waits.

No pressure. No questions. Just the steady presence of a man whose hands are still raw from hitting someone who deserved worse.

You sip the beer in silence. So does he.

When the tears finally stop clawing at your chest, you whisper, "He told me. Thought I'd forgive him."

Jack doesn’t look at you. Just mutters, low and sharp, "I broke his nose."

You let out something between a laugh and a sob. Then turn to him.

He’s already watching you. And for the first time in weeks, you don’t feel invisible.

Your hand finds his. You run your thumb over the split skin of his knuckles.

“Thank you,” you whisper—soft, but not fragile. Like the words are heavier than they look.

Jack doesn’t answer. Just swallows hard, throat working like he’s holding something back. Regret. Anger. Want. Maybe all three.

You turn toward him slowly. Your hand is still wrapped around his, your thumb tracing the bruised skin of his knuckles, and you feel it—how warm he is. How solid. How close.

And then you lean in.

You don’t hesitate. Don’t give yourself time to question it.

You kiss him.

It’s not soft. Not shy. Not the kind of kiss you give someone when you’re thinking clearly. It’s desperate. Messy. Like trying to fill a hunger that’s lived under your skin for too long.

You kiss him like you’ve imagined this moment in the dark—like you’ve pictured it while lying next to someone who didn’t deserve your body or your heart. You kiss him like he’s the answer to a question you were never supposed to ask.

And Jack—

Jack responds like he’s been waiting for this since the second he laid eyes on you. Like he’s spent years biting his tongue, burying his hands in his pockets, refusing to look at you for too long because he knew this was what would happen if he did.

He pulls you into his lap like it’s instinct—like his body was always meant to hold yours like this. No hesitation. No breath between cause and effect. One second you’re beside him, and the next you’re straddling him, sundress bunched around your hips, thighs sliding over denim, sticky with sweat and anticipation.

Your knees plant on either side of his hips, and you settle down slow, your core pressed right against the thick, unforgiving length straining behind his fly. He’s already hard. Painfully so. And you feel every inch of him through your soaked panties—thin, useless fabric that does nothing to dull the friction.

Jack groans, low and guttural, his hands flying to your ass, gripping it tight, like he can’t decide if he’s grounding himself or dragging you closer. Maybe both. His fingers dig in like he owns you—like he's been waiting for this moment longer than he’s willing to admit.

You roll your hips once, slow and deliberate, and the sound that leaves his mouth borders on obscene.

“You’re gonna ruin me,” he growls. “You always were.”

He grabs your face with one hand, fingers splayed across your cheek, his palm cradling you like he’s afraid you might disappear if he lets go. And then he kisses you—hard. No hesitation. No sweetness. It’s all teeth and breath and years of restraint crashing down in the space between you.

His other hand finds the hem of your dress and shoves it up roughly around your waist, exposing you to the humid night air. You gasp against his mouth, but he doesn’t slow down—just snakes his hand beneath the thin fabric of your panties, fingers slipping between your folds like they belong there.

He groans the moment he feels how wet you are—low and wrecked and filthy.

“Fuck,” he hisses, breath hot against your jaw. “You’re soaked.”

Your head falls back, hips canting forward, needing more—needing him.

“I’ve wanted you since the second I saw you,” you whisper, voice cracking like it’s been caged too long. “Used to stare at you when he wasn’t looking. I wanted it to be you—every fucking time.”

He freezes for half a second. Just half. Then lets out a broken sound, something between a moan and a growl, like the confession punched the air out of his lungs.

“Jesus,” he grits, his thumb dragging hard over your clit. “You have no fucking idea what that does to me.”

His voice is wrecked. His pupils blown. His jaw clenched like he’s hanging on by a thread. “You looked at me like that—walked around in those tiny shorts, laughing with your mouth wide open, and I couldn’t touch. Couldn’t even breathe.”

Your fingers tangle in the back of his hair, tugging him closer, needing to be devoured.

“You can touch now,” you whisper. “No one’s stopping you.”

He fumbles with the fly of his jeans, breath hitching, hands shaking—not from nerves, but from how badly he wants this. Wants you. When he finally frees himself, his cock springs forward—flushed, thick, leaking at the tip. Your eyes flick down, and your breath stutters. God, he’s big. And he’s hard in a way that makes your thighs clench around nothing.

Jack notices. Smirks. But it’s not cocky—it’s wrecked.

He drags his hands up your thighs, slow at first, then rougher as he grips the waistband of your panties. His eyes stay locked on yours as he tugs them down—wet and ruined, sticking slightly to your skin. He peels them off like they’ve kept him from you too long.

You lift your hips, bracing one palm against his shoulder while your other hand wraps around the base of his cock. He’s hot and pulsing in your hand. You guide him to your entrance, slow, teasing, your slick folds already parting for him.

Jack’s jaw clenches. His fingers dig into your thighs like he’s anchoring himself.

“Jesus Christ,” he grits. “You’re gonna be the end of me.”

And then you sink down.

Slow. Stretching. Devastating.

He groans—low and broken—as your body swallows him inch by inch. Your mouth drops open, eyes fluttering, breath caught somewhere between a gasp and a moan.

He fills you like no one else ever has. Like he was made for it. Like this is the only place he’s ever belonged.

“That’s it,” Jack growls, voice dark and thick with hunger. “Take it. All of me.”

You drop your forehead to his shoulder, whimpering against his neck as he bottoms out. The pressure. The fullness. The way he doesn’t move—just lets you sit there, trembling around him.

But then he thrusts.

Hard.

Deep.

Brutal.

And all that control shatters.

You cry out, clawing at his back, nails dragging down muscle and cotton.

He grips your hips, guides your rhythm, makes you ride him right there on the porch like you’re the only two people in the world.

“You’re mine tonight,” he growls. “Say it.”

“I’m yours,” you gasp. “Jack—I’m yours.”

Your dress is bunched at your waist, your bra yanked down, your breasts bouncing with every slap of skin. His mouth latches to one nipple, sucking hard while his hips slam up into you over and over and over.

“You look like sin like this,” he whispers. “Like everything I’ve ever wanted and never should’ve had.”

“Don’t stop,” you beg. “Please, don’t ever stop.”

He moves faster, snapping his hips up, and your world tilts sideways. You’re close. You’re shaking. The porch creaks beneath you.

“You gonna come for me?” he pants. “Gonna let me feel you lose it?”

You nod wildly, whimpering, and he brings his thumb to your clit.

One circle. Two. Three.

And you break.

You come with a gasp, clenching around him, sobbing into his mouth as he kisses you through it. Jack thrusts twice more, then buries himself to the hilt and comes with a guttural groan, holding you so tight you think you might shatter.

Neither of you speak.

Not for a while.

You stay wrapped around him, forehead to forehead, bodies slick and trembling, the air thick with everything that’s finally been said without words.

And Jack whispers it. Finally.

“You’re never getting rid of me now.”

You believe him.

You want to.

PRESENT – NIGHTFALL / PARKING GARAGE

The lowest level of the hospital garage is silent—too silent. The kind of silence that hums, that stalks. Fluorescent lights flicker in the corners. Your footsteps echo against concrete, sharp and too loud, your keys clenched in your fist.

You’re not just tired. You’re unraveling—held together by caffeine and obligation, by the way Jack looked at you earlier like he still remembered the way your breath caught when he was inside you.

You reach your car. Unlock it. Open the door.

And freeze.

There’s a manila envelope sitting on the driver’s seat.

No name. No label. Just waiting.

You glance around the garage. Nothing. No movement. No sound.

Your pulse spikes.

You climb into the car, slam the door, lock it, and tear open the envelope with fingers that won’t stop shaking.

Inside: a photo.

Not just any photo.

You. Jack. That night. That porch.

Your sundress hitched above your hips. His hand gripping your thigh. His mouth on your chest. Your face slack with pleasure. His face buried in the place no one else ever got to see.

The photo is blurry, but not enough. Taken from a side angle. Someone had been outside. Watching.

Watching the moment everything changed. The moment you stopped pretending.

Taped beneath the photo: a line scrawled in thick, angry ink.

Doesn’t look like nothing to me.

You choke on air. Sit back. Your ears ring.

There’s a second note, folded once, paper already creased at the corners. You unfold it with dread curdling in your gut.

The handwriting is familiar. Sloppy. Aggressive.

You were mine first. Jack always takes what’s mine. The Army, med school, the fucking applause. You.

You think I didn’t notice how the whole goddamn room turned when you walked into my wedding? Everyone looking at you like you were the bride. Everyone looking at him like the fucking hero.

You stole the spotlight. He stole everything else.

But I saw it before anyone. The way you looked at him. The way he looked back. Like I didn’t exist.

You should've stayed gone.

The envelope slides off your lap.

Something moves in your periphery.

You snap your head toward the window.

He’s there.

Jack’s brother.

Leaning casually against the wall of the garage, hands shoved into his hoodie pockets, like this is just another night and you’re just another conversation.

He steps forward slowly, shadows wrapping around him.

That smile—the one that used to pass for charming in daylight—is something uglier now. Tighter.

“Hell of a photo, huh?” he says. “Shame it wasn’t taken by someone more professional. But the message lands.”

You say nothing.

He laughs. A hollow sound.

“You think Jack protected you by keeping his distance? You think sleeping your way into a white coat gets you immunity?” He shakes his head, then takes another step closer. “No. That’s not how this works. Not anymore. I will make sure that photo ends up in every hospital inbox from here to the board.”

He steps into the light now. You can see the bitterness etched into his face. Not sadness. Not heartbreak.

Rage. Jealousy. Obsession.

“You were supposed to be mine. The one who stuck around. The one who smiled on command, played perfect even when I fucked it all up. But he—he gets to be the hero. The golden boy. The war vet. The guy who swoops in wearing black scrubs like he’s some goddamn knight.”

He sneers.

“You didn’t choose him because he was better. You chose him because I was real and messy and too fucking close to what you didn’t want to admit you were.”

You open the door. Slowly. Controlled.

He blocks it with one hand.

“We’re gonna play by my rules now,” he says. “You want to keep this residency? This clean-slate new-girl reputation? You want to walk through that ER tomorrow with everyone thinking you earned it? Then you’re gonna listen. And you’re gonna be nice. Real nice.”

He leans in closer, breath hot and sour.

“Because if you think I won’t blow it all up just to watch Jack crawl out of the ashes, you’re dead wrong. And you?”

He lifts the photo. Holds it up.

“You’ll be collateral."

You don’t flinch. Not yet. Not until he steps back.

Not until he drops the photo at your feet.

And disappears into the dark.

The only sound left is the flicker of the lights.

And your breath, sharp and shallow.

Because this?

This isn’t over.

It’s just beginning.

#I fear this is too obscure #but oh well #Jack abbot #jack abbot x reader #dr abbot #dr abbot x reader #dr abbot x you #the pitt fanfiction #the pitt x reader #the pitt #smut #angst #enemies to lovers #shawn hatosy

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