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hyper-fixates · 4 months ago

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Time After Time

Logan Howlett/Wolverine x AFAB!reader (no pronouns/gendered language).

Explicit content (18+)

Word count: 15.2k never let me near him again

Tags/warnings: age-gap due to logan’s mutation (reader’s age not specified), mutant!reader, unprotected sex, teasing, friends to lovers, explicit language, dry humping, storm cameos, fluff, domesticity, the claws come out when he’s close (👁️👁️), detailed descriptions & scenes of nightmares/trauma/PTSD/panic attacks, one (1) ass smack, alcohol consumption, vomiting, biting/marking, angst, soft!logan, creampie, groping/touching, use of “baby” once, aftercare, yearning (kindly let me know if anything was missed!).

Summary: 4 times you end up in Logan’s bed, and the 1 time he does something about it.

Notes: this falls somewhere in between “which could mean nothing” and “we can fix each other” 🫡 (written with a mix of X1 & X2 logan!)

Your heart, despite always being alive and beating, sometimes wakes up before you.

You can feel it before your eyes even have a chance to open. It jolts your sleep-ridden body and collapses your lungs without giving your brain a chance to fight against it. Muscles and limbs feel lifeless and detached from your body, shaking from the sleep that your heart knows wasn’t completely dreamless.

You kick the blankets off of yourself and sit up in a panic, trying to regain some control of your sudden erratic breaths while bringing a lethargic hand to your heaving chest in hopes to ground yourself. It never works.

Maybe your ribs are shrinking and squeezing your lungs, making you delirious from the lack of oxygen, but you know that’s not the case. Your heart feels like it’s being squeezed and broken into a million tiny pieces.

No part of your body feels real, yet you keep your hand on your chest as firmly as you can, trying to focus on controlling the pounding of your heart that’s working so hard with each beat that it hurts.

“Fuck. Fuck,” you choke out, feeling the tears finally breach and roll down your cheeks as your nervous system catches up to what’s happening.

Panic. It’s all panic.

You can’t do anything but sit there and let the tears hit the freshly-washed fitted sheet on your bed. So you let it happen. Nothing can stop it.

Trauma is such a fickle thing. One moment you’re fine, and then the next, your heart is screaming at you and forcing your body to process something at 4 a.m. on a random Friday when all you wanted was some goddamn sleep.

There is no choice. Your mind doesn’t give you one.

The tremors subside slowly after a few minutes, giving you the feeling back to your arms and legs, albeit minimal.

You slide to sit at the edge of your bed, resting an elbow on your thigh and setting your chin into your palm with a defeated, yet shaky, huff.

You look to your window and see that the sun hasn’t even started to rise yet. You’ll be up for the rest of the foreseeable morning, but there’s not much to do so early besides wander aimlessly and think…then think some more.

You’re confident the professor isn’t even awake at this hour, which says enough about your state. You would typically go visit Storm for some comfort, but she’s been gone fuck-knows-where with Hank and Scott until Sunday at the latest. Thanks, Charles.

A questionable, and probably manic, decision comes to mind. One that’s only two doors down, one over from Storm.

Your impulsive feet make up your mind for you. The cold hardwood floor shocking you further into consciousness as if your heart didn’t do a good enough job.

You tiptoe a couple steps down the hall, forcing yourself to turn and face the large wooden door when you reach it. You just stand there staring at it, unknocking, analyzing the wood grains, suddenly very interested in what type of wood it is and what stain was used to—

“Uh. Are you okay?”

You refocus your eyes onto the man now standing in front of you in the doorway, adorning a barely-zipped school hoodie and black sweats.

“Huh?” You blink a few times, disoriented.

Logan quirks a brow, looking you up and down cautiously. “Are you okay?” He asks again, offering a look of concern—or maybe confusion—that you haven’t seen often. A look that’s never needed to be directed towards you.

You come back to yourself. “But—I…didn’t knock,” you respond, looking equally as confused as him as you point to the door.

He leans against the edge of the door, face softening. “I could smell you before you passed Storm’s room,” he clarifies, a hint of reluctance in his tone. Oh.

You feel like a child who has just gained awareness, all too conscious of your situation.

“You’re…awake?” Is all you manage despite probably needing to say much more than that to explain just why exactly you’re standing outside Logan’s room at 4 a.m.

“So are you,” he counters with a curious look. “So let me ask again. Are you okay?” He locks his eyes on yours, probably in hopes to understand why the fuck you’re outside his room at 4 a.m.

“I’m not sure how to answer that,” you say, and it’s the truth.

You should probably be embarrassed. You show up at Logan’s door unannounced, dressed in a flimsy shirt and matching sweats—thanks, Charles—that can’t fully hide the remaining quivers throughout your body.

Logan pulls his lips together at your admission. You can almost see the wheels turning in his head trying to figure you out.

“Can’t sleep?” He questions, but he knows he’s right.

“Yeah.” You don’t know why you’re making it Logan’s problem, though. Sure, he happens to be awake, but maybe this is all too personal to push on the guy who’s seemingly all pride and no solicitude most of the time.

It’s not that he’s not a good, nice guy, but you don’t know how you would define your relationship, or lack of.

You know each other well enough from existing in the same space over the past couple months, being part of the same “team”, but it’s nothing to call a close friendship like you and Storm. He’s a bit of a rare species in the mansion, not really lingering around.

He cocks his head in a half shrug, the soft points in his hair broken by sleep shake gently with the movement.

“I don’t think I can help you,” he says wearily. “I’m no better. Clearly.” He gestures between you, drawing attention to the fact that you’re both awake. The helpless cannot help the helpless.

“Oh—no, I’m not looking for help. I think I’m beyond that at this point,” you laugh but stop yourself short when Logan doesn’t follow. Tough crowd.

“I, uh, don’t actually know what I’m looking for,” you offer.

You knit your brows together in thought, still wondering why the fuck you’re here. Comfort? Entertainment? Some other unknown third thing?

“I’m not really used to Storm being gone for so long,” you admit. “I just feel…all over the place, I guess.”

Logan considers your vulnerability for a beat, eyes flicking to yours. “I can hear you sometimes,” he says, a knowing—almost sympathetic—look on his face. “We have the same problem.”

You go cold, any expression you had on your face sliding away. You wish the floor could swallow you right now. You know things have been getting worse recently, but you didn’t think anyone could hear that fact. Maybe it shouldn’t come as a surprise from someone who could smell you from down the hallway.

He steps back, pulling his door open further. An invitation.

You don’t move right away. Could this be a false awakening? You’re not sure what you expected when you came to his door, but you also didn’t expect him to open it without you knocking, so you have to suspend disbelief for now. You figured he’d offer a few words of advice and dismiss you, or maybe even tell you to fuck off, but he opened his door wider for you. But you didn’t exactly think any of it through in the first place anyway.

You force your feet to carry you into Logan’s room. It’s not much different from yours; scarce belongings, minimal decor, a small work desk, brown curtains that are drawn back, and a bed.

“Were you, uh…sleeping before I came?” You sit on the unmade bed, nothing noticeably different from it compared to yours.

He shuts the door quietly, moving to the small desk across the room and filing some scattered papers together neatly.

“Trying to,” he says, keeping his gaze on the desk.

Fucking duh. “Sorry if I disturbed you,” you wince to yourself.

You see him briefly shake his head at your unnecessary apology. “I had to get up anyway.” His voice is still gravelly from sleep.

It feels like you’re invading his space. But he invited you in. How many others have had the opportunity to be in here? Probably too many. There’s nothing to make this special.

“I’m fucking exhausted,” you sigh, flopping back on his bed defeated. Simply overwhelmed with the uncontrollable repercussions of your mutation.

“Try to sleep. If you want,” he offers, moving to the edge of the bed. “It’s easier said than done, but I have to meet with Charles in an hour.” It’s gruff, but he’s sincere.

Maybe the professor is awake after all.

You roll your head to the side to look at him. Was he really offering for you to stay in his bed?

“Oh, wow…uh, sure.” It comes off as more of a question, but he quirks his brows in acknowledgment, turning back to the desk and collecting a handful of other miscellaneous papers.

“I have to head downstairs and take care of some things. Stay as long as you need,” he says, zipping his sweater the rest of the way up. Thank God in heaven.

A shy “thanks” is all you manage as you situate yourself on the bed.

Is this fucking weird? You could name a handful of others in the mansion right this second that would kill without hesitation to be where you are. They’d probably kill you specifically to get it. It’s not much of a secret that Logan is the subject of almost all students’ desires. He knows it, too.

“See you later,” he adds, his lips forming the slightest hint of a caring smile as he sees himself out. You throw one back before the door clicks shut.

Should you be offended that he didn’t stay? That he left so quickly? No, no, he can’t. He couldn’t. Charles is expecting him. The timing is just horrid. But now you’re just…alone…in Logan’s room, expected to sleep because of a random act of kindness in his heart.

Lying in his bed instead of yours is an odd sensation. The sheets and mattress are exactly the same, the pillows are just as fluffy, yet it feels unalike.

You flop your head on his pillow, tugging the blankets up to your chin. Your fingers graze something by your hip as you settle in, making you push the blanket back down. Leaning over, you see three puncture marks in the mattress, fraying the bedsheet material into feather-soft strands around the deep holes.

Your eyes widen, remembering his words before he invited you in: “We have the same problem.”

Part of your heart fractures for the second time today. Your eyes cross over to the other side of you, seeing a matching set of holes just below the pillow. It’s suddenly easy to understand why no one besides him has been seen coming and going from this room in a while. One day, things just seemed to change.

Maybe his act of kindness was an act of mercy. Trauma will always find you, and it will make sure you feel it until you either destroy it or it destroys you.

Even the Wolverine isn’t an exception.

━━━━ ● ━━━━

The gold liquid is gone from the glass as quickly as it was poured.

Your throat clenches and protests the swallow as you try to suppress the urge to gag. You gently set the shot glass back on the counter, watching Storm chase with a piece of lime that does nothing to help the puckered face she makes from the tequila.

“No more, no more. I can’t.” Your arms anchor you to the counter to stop yourself from swaying too much.

Storm nods, still fighting off the sourness with furrowed brows and a scrunched nose. You giggle at her when she quickly screws the cap back on the bottle, sliding it out of reach.

“You’re a bad influence,” she scolds as she wipes her mouth with the back of her hand.

“No—I’m under the influence,” you counter, a playful smile on your lips. “There’s a difference. You still have your own free will.”

Storm rolls her eyes so hard you only see the whites of them. “We have training tomorrow,” she slurs. “Charles will not be happy if we show up half-conscious.” She rounds the counter to you, grabbing your shoulders for stability, and you do the same.

“He’ll be lucky if we show up at all,” you mumble.

The dim kitchen lighting embraces the two of you, the rest of the mansion blanketed in darkness with everyone fast asleep—like you both should be.

You close your eyes with a roll of your neck, more giggles falling through your lips as you clumsily grab onto Storm and rock and sway together for a moment, the alcohol quickly catching up to your motor skills. It feels like you’re spinning through time and space, and you’d be lying if you said it didn’t feel fucking euphoric. At this rate, neither of you will be able to make it back to your rooms.

“Am I interrupting something?”

You lose a bit of your balance as you try to find the resonant voice, eyes shooting open. Storm unintentionally startles and stumbles away from you, white hair also jumping from the excitement.

You grab onto the counter again, sucking in a deep breath. “Fuck, don’t do that,” you growl through your teeth, a hand on your chest as you try to calm yourself.

“Don’t do what? Come to the shared kitchen to grab a drink?” Logan huffs a laugh, an amused smile creeps to his lips as he takes in your drunk and shaken state from the entryway.

“Doesn’t anyone sleep in this place?” He mumbles to himself.

“And with that, I’m done for the night,” Storm chuckles, fixing her hair. “I’ll see you tomorrow.” Her eyes lock intensely on yours, index finger firmly poking the middle of your chest to make her point for you to show up to training very clear.

“See you, Logan,” she dismisses, stumbling as she passes him.

Logan shakes his head, still smiling. He steps to the fridge, opening the double doors and plucking a bottle of soda from the bottom shelf. No alcohol is readily available in the communal fridge because, after all, you’re all in a school full of kids, so Storm had to get creative; Scott will be missing a rather large bottle from the now not-so-secret stash in his room.

As the alcohol continues to settle in you, you feel more and more lightheaded as it brings you to a new level of euphoria again. You only know this because watching Logan pop the cap of his drink with mindless ease feels a little more exciting than it would be if you were sober. But you’re not sober, and that’s the problem.

“Not gonna follow Storm?” He asks, taking a generous sip from the bottle as he casually places his free hand on the counter to lean on across from you.

A tight smile forms, mostly to yourself. “I don’t think I can make it down the hall,” you laugh in embarrassment. Maybe that last shot was one too many, and it’s not even fully done working its magic yet.

Logan raises a brow. “Want some help?” There’s no judgement in his tone like you expect. Then again, you don’t know what the fuck to expect from him.

Your already half-closed eyes, blurry and unfocused, meet his hazel ones in interest. Another favour?

It’s been two weeks since he let you sleep off the nightmares in his bed. Two weeks since you learned he’s burdened with them, too. You traced the holes in the mattress over and over before you eventually fell asleep, wondering what—or who—could have hurt him so badly. He plays it off cool; you wouldn’t suspect anything from talking to him. The same could probably be said about you.

“I didn’t know wolverine’s were chivalrous,” you tease.

The yellow hue of the lights dance over the quaffed points in his hair, making them appear sharper than usual. You would never admit it, especially to him, but you adore them. They give him an absurd amount of character that you’d expect a guy like him to not care about.

You’re not exactly complaining about the fitting grey tank-top he has on either.

“Not overly,” he plays along, taking another mouthful of the fizzy drink. “I like to think I’m special,” he says quieter.

“Maybe you are,” you say as you try and straighten yourself to see if you can stand unassisted.

The world tilts as you stand to your full height, eyes rolling into your head from the wave of dizziness. “Wow, okay,” you say to yourself, squeezing your eyes shut to stop the spinning. How many shots did you have again?

A warm hand presses between your shoulders. “Woah, nice and easy. Nice and easy.” Logan appears by your side to steady you, other hand grabbing your elbow to pull you straight. You wobble in his grip, letting him guide your useless, alcohol-ridden body.

His hand on your back rubs a few small, comforting circles as you work to regain your bearings. He watches your expressions intently, looking for the right moment to get you moving back to your room safe and sound.

Your arm crosses over your body out of instinct to grab the hand he has on your elbow for extra support.

“Are you okay?” He asks. He seems to ask you that a lot.

You lean into him, your shoulder to his chest, and you can feel the blackout creeping up on you like humidity from a thunderstorm—it’s usually too late to do anything once you notice it.

“I drank a lot,” you laugh deeply, rolling your head onto his shoulder to look up at him.

He looks so much more delicate under the ambient lights—his usual defined features have shifted and melted him into someone that doesn’t look like they should be a feared animal out in the world.

Logan all but cradles you, that same look of concern crossing his features from the night you went to his door. The only difference is that you’ve had a generous amount of tequila—and are currently being kept alert by the hot touch of his hands. That’s new.

“Can you walk?” He holds your squinty eye contact, probably searching for any signs of a coherent thought behind the blissful expression on your face. “Or will I have to carry you?” He muses, a hint of a smile crosses his lips as his hand moves up to gently rub over your shoulders.

Drunk you likes the sound of anything relating to Logan keeping his hands on you right now. You wonder what sober you would think.

“I’m not gonna tell you no, but it feels like I’m floating in a bubble that won’t stop spinning,” you hum as you let the sensation consume your senses. “I might fly away.” You dip your head back off of his shoulder in amusement as you laugh again.

“Yeah, you’re fucked up,” he mumbles lovingly. Just like anyone else who’s concerned for your well-being would.

“Hey, kitty cat—I’m perfectly buzzed,” you emphasize the teasing nickname, narrowing your eyes at him sternly as you bring your gaze back to his in defence.

“‘Kitty cat’? Really?” He snorts. “I think you’re past your bedtime by three drinks,” he remarks back with equal levity.

“Then take me to bed if you’re so concerned,” you sigh dramatically, going limp in his arms to make your point.

Truthfully, you’re probably past your bedtime by five shots. But he doesn’t need to know that. You just know that you can’t control your limbs like you were able to ten minutes ago.

“Maybe I will.” You don’t see it, but he does his quick little eye roll that you’ve seen pointed towards Scott too many times.

He slides the hand on your elbow down to the backs of your knees, pulling you up off the floor and into his chest as you fall into the arm that was rubbing your back.

Oh, so it’s gonna be like that.

An excited—or maybe shocked—noise escapes your mouth as he adjusts you in his arms. You extend your right arm up and over his shoulder to hug his neck and keep yourself stable.

The trip to your room isn’t one that should take long, but each sway from Logan’s steps goes straight to your stomach in waves of queasiness. It feels like forever before you feel him bend awkwardly to turn your doorknob.

You’re fighting to keep yourself conscious the entire time, not wanting to regret missing the feeling of being in his arms.

The room is only lit by the silver moonlight creeping through the window. It’s hard to distinguish anything through your bleary eyes besides Logan’s look of determination to get you in your bed.

He leans down, shuffling you out of his arms and onto the mattress as swiftly as possible. The care of it all pokes at your heart.

He silently goes around each corner of the bed adjusting the blankets. It may be dark, but the moonlight highlights the peaks of his shoulders as he moves. Your eyes might be involuntarily half-shut, but that doesn’t stop you from staring.

You’re now probably no better than every other mutant in this school.

“Logan,” you start before you can fully process the foolish thing you’re about to say next.

He rounds the bed back to the side you’re huddled on, looking down on you. “Yeah?” The subtle jingle of his dog tag pierces the quiet that’s lingering in the room.

You part your lips to speak but the words die in your throat. They’re replaced by a flood of saliva that has you sitting up at a speed that shouldn’t be possible for someone as intoxicated as you. You cover your mouth with your hand, feeling your stomach churning and finally rejecting the tequila.

You suddenly feel very awake.

“Hey, hey.” Logan squats down in front of you with his already permanently-furrowed brows pinched closer together than you’ve ever seen before, a hand coming to your shoulder in concern. “What—”

“Bathroom,” you mumble through your palm, eyes rolling shut at the nausea.

He doesn’t say another word. He pulls you to your feet by your arms, walking behind you fiercely with his hands gripping your shoulders to guide you to the small bathroom across the room.

You push the door open, falling to your knees in the darkness over the toilet as the mistakes from the night expel themselves from your body through rounds of coughing and gagging. He lingers in the doorway, keeping an eye on you but still giving you privacy.

“Fuck,” you cough, resting your warm forehead on your hand as you slump against the toilet. That definitely sobered you up fast.

Exhaustion hits you like a truck. “Logan…” you croak from your crumpled position on the tile floor.

He steps in, bending down again to reach your height. You can barely make out the shadow of him in the fading moonlight.

“Just…help me back to bed,” you groan, reaching for his arm as you use the toilet seat to push yourself the rest of the way up. You stumble against him as you try to make it back through the doorway.

He guides you to the bed the same way he did to the bathroom—steering you from behind.

“I’m gonna get you some water,” he says as you settle back into bed, head hitting the pillow with a quiet thud. “Even though you did this to yourself.”

“Fuck off,” you groan.

You close your eyes, hearing his footsteps fade back toward the bathroom. You hear the tap run for a couple seconds before he’s next to you again, sitting on the edge of the bed. “Drink. All of it,” he says firmly, holding the cup out to you.

You sit back up slowly, no doubt lethargic, an unimpressed look on your face that earns you a raised brow that tells you there’s no room to object.

You finish the cup in four mouthfuls, handing it back to him. “Thanks.”

You fall back onto the pillow, no longer feeling like you’re travelling through space and time.

The clothes you’re in are close enough to pyjamas. There’s no sense in undressing in front of Logan, especially with what you were about to say to him before you were rudely interrupted by the consequences of your own actions.

He returns the cup to the bathroom and you pull the blanket over your waist as you hopefully settle in for the rest of the night. You owe him big time for this. The thought of just how exactly you’ll manage that fills you with anxiety.

You turn on your side, fingers sliding over the mattress with the movement. They graze familiar strands of feather-soft fabric by the pillow.

This is Logan’s room. Are you just that drunk that you couldn’t tell the difference when he brought you in? Or are your rooms just that similar to each other?

You dip a finger in one of the three holes, hearing the bathroom door click shut as Logan makes his way back.

“Why am I in your bed?” You see him rustling through some drawers of clothing by the small desk, but he stops when you finish your question.

“You can’t take care of yourself tonight,” he says. “You’re too drunk.” He pulls the grey tank-top off, stuffing it in one of the drawers and shutting it.

You sit up at that, head still foggy and tipsy, watching him move to the foot of the bed across from you. You try to focus your eyes on anything but his bare chest and the dark hair that adorns it and trails down past the waistband of his sweats. His hair is somehow even more wild from mindlessly pulling the tank-top over his head.

“Ah. I was gonna ask you to stay anyway,” you reveal, almost whispering the bold confession.

You were planning to ask before the tequila decided to make another appearance, but maybe doing it this way isn’t so bad either. He did all the heavy-lifting.

A modest, tight-lipped smile graces his lips. “I think you still have some tequila to sleep off.”

Whether or not you still have some shots in your system, what you feel and want right now is real. It’s not influenced by anything besides some mild andronitis created by the fact that you share a common struggle.

“Is it…safe? To share a bed?” The most coherent thought you’ve had all night makes him stiffen from your sudden nervous tone. Your body could easily replace the mattress and become a new home for the deep punctures.

Your eyelids have been fighting against being pulled shut by alcohol-induced drowsiness, yet your eyes are wider than they’ve been all night in this moment.

You’re sat right in the middle of the bed and Logan comes around to the right, sitting on the edge of the mattress to come down to your level.

“You’re just gonna have to trust me.” His eyes are imploring and apologetic all at once. He understands the prospect of even having you here in the first place.

You nod, sliding over to the left to give him more room.

Logan wouldn’t put you in harms way, you reason with yourself. He wouldn’t risk potentially killing someone, especially a fellow mutant, if he wasn’t absolutely sure of his mental state. But you also don’t really know his demons.

You roll onto your right side, tugging the blanket up to your chin in comfort. “Why haven’t you been given a new mattress?” You ask as he turns to face you in the same position, his half of the blanket resting at his hip.

The bed dips significantly on his side, almost encouraging you to roll over against him.

“Forgot to ask,” he says quietly, running his right hand through his hair to push the shorter strands off his forehead.

From his tone you can decipher that he actually means “can’t be bothered.” It’s a devastating thing to imagine just how many he goes through, anyway. He probably doesn’t see the point in replacing something that will inevitably have the same fate as the others.

There has to be less than an arms length between you two. It’s a surreal situation to be in considering what you thought you knew about him. A recluse. Standoffish. Maybe it’s all a fluke and the alcohol is severely fucking with your perception of what’s actually happening.

“Thanks for everything,” you whisper as if someone else will overhear.

“Get some sleep,” he insists, rolling onto his back. You do the same.

You stare at the blank ceiling for a while, noticing the exact moment Logan falls asleep; his breathing grows slow and his body runs even hotter than before.

You think about how he could wake at any moment, claws accidentally sliding right through your stomach from a nightmare or two. You imagine all the others that have been in your position—if they felt scared, if they even knew.

He asked you to trust him, and that should be enough.

There is a body full of secrets and hurt sleeping undisturbed next to you with the ability to withstand and regenerate from any physical injury, yet there’s something that hasn’t allowed the same to be done for his mind.

━━━━

The bright amber sun hits your closed eyes through the window, making you roll your head away onto the other side of the cool pillow.

You want more sleep. Your head feels like a bag of bricks and your body feels like it got beat with them.

You stretch a leg out, gently grazing something solid with your foot. Your eyes shoot open, the night coming back to you as you drift into consciousness. Logan.

You shoot up, bouncing a little from the momentum.

Logan startles next to you, clearly interrupted from a deep sleep. “What the fuck…” he groans, rubbing a hand over his face, not seeming interested in making a move to sit up with you.

“What time is it?” Your eyes bounce around the room looking for a clock.

He grunts, reaching for a watch on the nightstand. “Seven-forty.”

You needed to be in the Danger Room for 7 o’clock.

“Fuck!” You rip the blanket off, almost tripping as you run to the bathroom.

Logan also wants to roll back over and go back to sleep, but he knows he won’t be able to. He doesn’t work like that. So he just lays there, listening to you swear and make a mess of his bathroom as the clattering of fuck-knows-what fills the room.

The surprise of how well he slept makes him feel uneasy. Although it definitely wasn’t eight hours, it was uninterrupted. He doesn’t want to credit that to you, though. He wants to believe that he’s getting better overall, and maybe he is, so he can’t offer you any flattery in his mind.

Another distant “fuck” escapes the bathroom, pulling him out of his thoughts. You exit a few minutes later, as refreshed and presentable as you could get yourself, and the sight of Logan still in bed makes something in you ache for another moment of feeling him care and tend to you. Maybe that’s your hangover talking.

“Thanks again. I’ll see you around,” you say hurriedly, offering an apologetic smile as you turn the doorknob to leave.

“Good luck with Charles.” It’s a genuine advisory. Fuck. You’ll be so incredibly lucky if he doesn’t give you more than a stern lecture in front of everyone.

You take a deep breath in and slip out of Logan’s room. There’s not a single cut, mark, or scratch on you, just like he promised.

━━━━ ● ━━━━

“I was told it’ll take a day to fix,” Storm explains with a shrug. “You’ll have to find somewhere or someone to room with until tomorrow. Jean already offered to have me stay with her.” A contrite look passes over her face.

You stand outside your rooms, staring in at the remnants of the mess caused by two terrakinetic kids fucking around in the courtyard when they weren’t supposed to be. They somehow managed to throw, or launch, sizeable tree branches right through each of your windows. Of course it wasn’t on purpose, but the Danger Room exists for a reason—to avoid mishaps like this.

Shards of glass and fragments of wood splatter your floors. The branches are hanging half-way out both of your windows, caught on the window sills and bobbing in the evening summer wind. The kids are extremely fortunate that neither of you were in your rooms when it happened.

“It’s fine. It’s just one night,” you sigh, rubbing your eyes in frustration. You don’t love how quickly your mind picks out who to go to. It’s already nearing 11 p.m., so you have to work fast.

Storm squeezes your shoulder in comfort. “The living room is always free,” she suggests with a remorseful smile.

But you don’t want the living room. Stiff couches mixed with students clamouring and passing by at the crack of dawn isn’t exactly a recipe for a good nights rest. As if you usually get one, anyway.

“Not a fucking chance,” you laugh. “I’ll be fine,” you say again, dismissing her worries. You wish her goodnight when she steps by you to head towards Jean’s room at the very end of the hall.

You glare at the mess in your room, not daring to step in. The amount of shattered glass everywhere makes the floor look like a body of water from the reflections of the pale moonlight bouncing and refracting off of the jagged shards.

“Fuck,” you spit through your teeth, solely to yourself.

Not even a full week after Logan saw you at your worst, you’re going to go back and ask for the left side of his bed. Shameless.

You don’t have much of a choice; you’re not comfortable having it be anyone else. It’s only because Logan saw you at your worst that you feel he’s the most logical choice. Already having shared a bed with him this week may also have some weight in your decision.

You take the few self-assured steps to his room, once again standing in front of his door. This time you feel more confident in approaching the Wolverine in his den.

You knock three times, the piercing sound echoing through the hall.

“You start to miss me or what?” A bare chest enters your view. You note the dog tag hanging from his neck again before you find his unyielding gaze full of ambiguity, wondering why you’re here. Again.

You blink at him slowly in hilarity. “Ha, funny. Can I stay with you tonight?” You ask flatly, not thrilled with the situation, but not completely displeased with being here now. “My window—”

“I know what happened,” he interrupts. “Figured you’d go for the couch in the living room.” He looks at you more pointedly with teasing suspicion.

“I think you know no one would ever willingly choose to sleep out there,” you reason, running a hand over your face in both shame and defeat.

He makes a face that tells you “touché” and you smirk in satisfaction. “If you don’t mind giving up half of your bed again, I would really appreciate it. I promise I’m not trying to make this a habit,” you sigh. Spending the night in Logan’s bed three times in the past month has to be a record for anyone recently.

“I don’t think it would be a bad habit,” he argues. Oh. “C’mon.” He gives a jerk of his head to allow you in, his tufts of his hair bristling with the quick movement.

“Thanks,” you squeak. He wants you here?

He shuts the door behind you, following you to the bed that’s clearly already had him in it. The blanket rests in waves on the mattress that remind you of just how human Logan is despite his reputation and image.

“Do you have an early morning?” You ask, slipping under the blanket.

“No. Charles was feeling nice for once,” he raises his tone sarcastically to rag on Charles’ judgement, which has clearly been a much needed one before now.

“Not an early bird?” You roll onto your right side like last time, facing him as he settles on his back with a deep breath. The bed sinks in again where he lays, your body wanting to give in to the laws of gravity and fall into him.

“Fuck no,” he laughs lightly, eyes crinkling around the corners. It’s self-deprecating, but it’s still a genuine laugh. The condescension from it lingers in the air, all directed at himself in a way that tells you he’s thinking about how inconceivably fucked up he is.

The last time he had a decent sleep was when you were drunk in his bed a few days ago.

“People like us don’t usually get the pleasure of a full eight hours,” he notes, sliding his gaze to yours for a fraction of a second.

He props an arm behind his head, the other resting on his chest and idly twisting the dog tag between his fingers. You watch the thin piece of steel slide and flip easily, the chain tinkling with every movement.

People like us.

“You mean mutants,” you state. You see his jaw tense in what little light there is from the half-moon tonight.

You see his brows pull together. “Yeah.” He has a point.

You think about the mutants you know, how they all have some horrific story about their gifts or family, or both. How they either were shamed by society or experimented on like rats.

The scenarios are endless. If you can think of it, some mutant has probably lived it.

Your heart sinks to the bottom of your stomach. You and Logan are not isolated or special cases, but you’ve already shared a moment of vulnerability with him when you came to his door all those weeks ago seeking solace for the same thing he fights with: the inescapable ability of remembering.

You pull the blanket tighter against you. “I don’t think you’ll hurt me.”

He turns his head to you, confusion written on his face. “What?” He stops toying with the dog tag.

“Your claws. I trust you.” You didn’t feel like you were in immediate danger that first night, but you want to reassure him anyway. Or maybe you’re reassuring yourself.

He hasn’t had to say a single word for you to know his nightmares trigger something instinctive and combative that’s been hardwired into his DNA. In this case, it’s his claws needing to find a home in his mattresses, where another body could potentially lay one night. Like yours is right now.

You noticed the lack of holes in this mattress when you first got to the bed. Maybe you mentioning them last time was enough for him to finally request a new one.

Logan knows he shouldn’t make promises he doesn’t know he’ll be able to keep, but he wants to keep you here tonight, so he improvises. He abandons the dog tag between his fingers completely, turning onto his side and reaching to find your hand under the blanket. You meet him halfway, sliding your fingers between his as your palms lay flat on the bed.

A smile tugs at your lips for a moment. He watches your interlinked fingers, observing the size difference, wondering if he really just did that—and why.

You assume it’s his way of saying “thank you” for your trust when you probably shouldn’t be putting that much into him.

“Does it hurt?” You whisper, pulling your fingers out from his just enough to caress the divets between his knuckles that conceal the claws.

He knows what you’re asking. “Every time.” He softly pushes his fingers back into yours, squeezing a little.

There’s a deadly stillness in the room despite his window being cracked. You both know you’re one in the same in a way, and that’s a connection that Logan hasn’t let himself experience. Not everyone likes looking in a mirror.

To be truly seen by someone, wholly, without judgement or fear, is what he deserves.

“What are you?” He asks, rubbing his index finger back and forth along the top of your hand. “Telekinetic? Psychic?” His curious voice grows quiet, hazel eyes fascinated with you and your lack of a physical mutation, at least nothing that he can see.

It never occurred to you that he didn’t know your mutation, or that you’ve never told him. It was never needed, but it seems unfair that you know about his when he wasn’t the one who told you.

“Ha, close.” Your eyes twinkle as you notice how intently he’s listening. “Psychometric,” you correct, watching his forehead crease.

“Sounds like math,” he quips, readjusting his head on the pillow. He’s close enough that you can feel the heat he’s putting off.

You laugh quietly. “No, it’s extrasensory perception. It lets me see the history of any object or person I touch, but only if I accept the energy,” you explain.

You watch his eyes narrow and you know what he’s thinking, so you quickly interject as he begins to pull his hand out from yours. “I need to touch a pulse point to be able to see anything,” you reassure, feeling his fingers slide back against yours. “The heart remembers everything,” you clarify.

The catch? The person’s memories and past stay with you after you see them. It’s become hard to distinguish what memories are yours or someone else’s. They all become intertwined. Good or bad, violent or gentle. You see it all, and then it’s part of you. Forever.

“I haven’t looked. I promise.”

“Good. You don’t need to see that shit,” he huffs, eyes wandering over your face. He isn’t sure what he’s looking for, but he’s a little startled for the first time in a while.

“I’m sure I’ve seen it all,” you state. It’s probably not far off from the truth. Your gift came when you were all too young, and plenty of time has passed since then for you to rack up this amount of damage from near-strangers and their lives.

“No, you haven’t.” A sure expression passes over him, shaking his head as best as he can against the pillow.

“Then I’ll count myself lucky,” you say softly. You have no idea what Logan has experienced, but his demeanor makes you want to stay curious. Not everything needs to be known, and you’re definitely not entitled to it.

A faint smile appears on his lips, then it’s gone just as quick. “Get some sleep,” he rasps. He turns onto his back and his hand abandons yours.

It’s a complete repeat of last time.

Something twinges in your heart, and you don’t like it. What exactly had you expected from Logan? He’s just doing you a courtesy by letting you stay here for the night. Nothing more. And that’s what you should expect: nothing.

The hum of crickets outside eventually lulls you into a dead sleep. It’s heavy and deep, not a single muscle twitching in your body. Logan breathes steadily next to you, a hand on his chest as the occasional snore fills the air.

From above you two might look like you’re transient, only here in this moment for a short time. And, realistically, you are.

━━━━

Logan was no where to be seen by the time you woke up, and you made quick work to get out of his room. It always feel wrong to be in someone’s space when they aren’t there.

Just like Storm said, the windows in your rooms were fixed the next day. It looks as though nothing even happened.

“Thank fuck,” you mumble to yourself as you step back into your room.

If you ever have to spend another night in Logan’s bed, you might as well wear a shirt that says “yes, we’re fucking!”, even if it isn’t true. You could deny it all you want, but it won’t stop what students would say. Nothing gets past them, even if it’s behind a closed door.

━━━━ ● ━━━━

“Are you fucking Logan?”

You almost swallow your tongue. “Sorry?” Your brows shoot up in surprise, eyes round in disbelief.

“Are you guys sleeping together?” Storm casually asks as she flicks through the T.V. channels, glancing over to you from her spot on the couch.

You’re sat comfortably in an arm chair, suddenly no longer caring what channel she decides on. “Why would you think that?” Technically you were sleeping together, but not like that. It may never happen again, no matter how badly you want it to.

“Things travel fast around here,” she deflects with a cheeky smile. “And, you know, Logan is…Logan.” She shrugs.

You don’t even know what to say to that. Is there a right or wrong answer?

“It wasn’t like that,” you grumble. “He was doing me a favour. As a friend.” It hasn’t even been a full day since he let you stay with him while pieces of your window laid on your floor, and people are already convinced you’re fucking.

You haven’t even managed a chaste kiss, despite how much as you want to, never mind his dick being balls deep in you.

“Right.” She emphasizes the word, not convinced. Or just pushing your buttons because she can.

You roll your eyes. “If anything was happening, you’d be the first to know,” you point out.

She looks back over to you. “I know,” she says with another, more sincere, smile. “You two would be cute, though.”

You give her some side-eye, not quite sure if you disagree entirely with that statement. Whatever happens, happens. Logan is not something you can control or influence. He does what—and who—he wants, when he wants.

━━━━

A bolt of lightening strikes you. You gasp, then release a choked cry, eyes flying open as you claw at your chest in terror.

Your throat tightens and you break out in a cold sweat as you sit up. The soft blanket around you feels constricting. Sporadic and short breaths make you heave as your body registers the horrors in your subconscious.

There was never any lighting. That’s just what the pain feels like.

The muscles in your shoulders and neck tense from your panicked state as your heart struggles to keep a normal rhythm. You yank the blanket off, feeling weak from fear and the onset of tremors. Your whole body gives up on itself as you sob through broken exhales. Your legs have gone cold, lungs shrinking inch by inch with every passing minute.

You crawl to the edge of your bed, wanting to just get out and leave—the blanket. The bed. The room. Most of all, you want to escape your own mind.

You sink onto the floor when a foot touches the ground, and you realize walking isn’t in the cards right now. You’re shaking too badly to be able to physically move. All your strength is gone, robbed by your memories.

Balmy tears paint your face in determination, making sure no part of you is left untouched by this spell.

You screw your eyes shut, tears still slipping out with ease anyway. Leaning your back against the bed-frame, you curl into yourself and wrap your arms around your knees on the chilled hardwood.

You try to focus on your breathing to at least slow your heart down to a pace that doesn’t hurt.

Wounded cries rip their way out of you, interrupting the breaths you try to steady. A hand touches your arm and you yelp like an injured dog, flailing at the contact as your arms swing out from around your knees in shock.

“Hey, hey, it’s me. It’s me.” Strong hands quickly wrap around each of your wrists to stop your arms from thrashing.

You try to focus your eyes, blurred and stinging from tears, on the person kneeling closely in front of you.

“L-Logan…” you whisper, balling your fists to try and expel the shakes.

He looks like someone who shouldn’t be able to be concerned about another person, yet the look on his face scares you. Brows pinched together in worry, eyes frantic, lips parted from heavy breaths. All because of you.

“It’s just me,” he hushes your cries. His thumbs stroke the undersides of your wrists tenderly, no doubt feeling your racing pulse.

You feel disoriented. “Wh…how…”

“I heard you,” he explains, watching you process everything. He drops your wrists when some recognition passes over your face.

“What do you need?” He follows your gaze as it wanders around the room, trying to keep you from spiralling further.

You look at him for a moment. He’s got his white tank-top on, the black sweats, and an intense need to help you written all over him. Fresh tears burn your cheeks as you come back into reality.

“I want it to fucking stop,” you weep, head falling into your hands in shame.

You don’t want him to see you like this, even though it’s a commonality between you two. It’s too intimate. You’d take him seeing you blackout drunk everyday of the year over this.

Then you do remember that it has stopped. Each time in Logan’s bed. There was silence. Peace. For the whole night. For both of you.

“Tell me what you need,” he says firmly, angling his head down to keep your eyes on him, desperately wanting an answer.

“You.” You suck in an agonizing breath to try and collect yourself.

He doesn’t flinch like you expect him to. If anything, his eyes become more pensive, clearly considering something. Then he shakes his head in wariness.

“C’mon. Let’s get you out of here,” he breathes, voice barely above a whisper. The only sound echoing in the room is your wobbly breathes, your body jerking with each one as you enter the aftermath and begin to go slack.

An arm slides behind your back, his hand grabbing ahold of your side while he pulls your legs over his other arm, picking you up off the floor.

He cradles you against him just like he did when you were drunk, carrying you out of your room.

He left your door open when he came in, and you hope no students heard or saw anything. He tilts to grab the doorknob, shutting it without a sound.

You wipe and rub at your eyes as Logan takes a few steps down the hall, quickly getting to where he needs to go when you feel him lean for his doorknob.

You’re sure a few rogue, leftover tears fall onto his shirt before he manages to sit on his bed lightly, you still curled tightly in his arms.

His hand pushes on your back for you to sit upright on his lap. “Face me,” he encourages, holding onto your sides as you twist around, bending your legs to slide over his thighs and straddle him loosely.

You look down at him, he looks up at you, feeling the quivers in your body dissipate as you melt further into his lap. A fondness crosses over both of your tired faces. He rests his arms over your thighs, warm hands linking behind your back as you do the same around his neck.

It’s nothing provocative or seductive. All you can feel is the care and concern rolling off of him in suffocating waves. He wants you to feel safe, and if that means overrunning your senses with his presence, then that’s what he’ll do.

“Got anything to say?” He murmurs, the fallen strands of hair around the edges of his forehead bristle with each move of his head. The rest of his hair fails to fully resemble the cat-like ears he had earlier in the day.

What does he want to hear?

You let your head hang a little, your nose almost brushing his. “I have nothing to say,” you assert, fidgeting with the chain of his dog tag at the nape of his neck.

You don’t necessarily feel embarrassed about him seeing you in such a helpless state, but you don’t want to simply unload your shit on him. So, in turn, you have nothing to say.

“Bullshit.” He almost rolls his eyes. There’s no real threat of him forcing you to say anything behind it. He won’t pry, but he doesn’t believe you.

An offended look overcomes your face, and you almost pull away. You don’t want to feel the humiliation of elaborating on just why exactly you said you needed him in this moment out of everything else.

“I just…” You roll your lips together in thought, measuring the words you could say but won’t. “Want to sleep. Here,” you sigh. “I don’t wanna go back.” You deflate in his arms, voice wobbly.

It’s already who-knows what time, and you need to pacify your wired nervous system; Logan simply holding you has already helped with that more than you want to admit.

His mouth quirks up briefly at that. “What happened to not wanting to make that a habit?” His eyes soften as his arms retract from around your sides, letting you slip easily onto his bed from his lap in a moment of calm, or relief.

Habit, if not resisted, soon becomes necessity.

“Special circumstances,” you reason, already pulling the blanket over you while he keeps his place at the edge of the bed, observing you with amusement.

“Seems like you get into those a lot,” he notes, pushing himself off the mattress.

He steps around to the other side—his designated spot—and slips the tank-top off, letting it drop to the floor. You’re not trying to be a freak, but you watch the whole thing.

The flex of his arms and shoulders are out of your mind as fast as they entered as you watch him hook his thumbs in the waistband of his sweats and pull them downright in front of you, not even turning around or to the side to try and conceal himself.

Your eyes widen, then you reel in your thoughts before they get lost at sea. No one who is sane fucking sleeps in sweatpants. Duh.

But didn’t he the last two times? It’s hard for you to remember, but you’d certainly recall if you were face-to-face with the outline of his di—

“It’s rude to stare, y’know.” Logan pulls his lips together, interrupting your thoughts. You try to not eyeball the bulge too hard, but it basically looked at you first.

The snug briefs do little to hide anything. They hide nothing, actually.

You almost scoff, but the playfulness in his tone tells you he couldn’t give a shit. He probably likes it anyway. From what you know, he definitely does.

“Oh, yeah, like you’ve ever cared about modesty,” you throw back, averting your gaze to the ceiling anyway.

It’s not that he runs around the mansion naked, but he definitely isn’t shy about what he looks like or against showing some skin. You’ve seen and heard enough over the past few months.

You hear a stifled chuckle as he joins you under the blanket without a retort. He knows you’re right. He’s just glad you’re a little lively and alert.

“Will you be okay for the rest of the night?” He brings both hands behind his head on the pillow, propping himself up a little.

“I should be fine,” you say confidently. “The challenge will be getting back to sleep.” You laugh in exasperation.

It’s always hard to calm down and get back to a place of tranquility after everything has settled with your mind. You’re pumped full of adrenaline and there’s not much that can curb something that persistent flowing through your body.

You haven’t found anything to help with it. Yet.

“There’s not many people that’ll understand what you go through,” he starts, voice rough with fatigue. “But I do.”

You look to him, sliding an arm under your pillow as you turn on your side. “How do you…help it.” You’re not sure if you phrased that right. It feels crude to reduce something so complex to the likes of a common cold that has an array of over-the-counter solutions.

“You don’t. It just has to run its course.” He looks to you, wanting to see your reaction.

It wasn’t meant to be hurtful or insensitive, but he’s not going to lie to you and say that things can only get better and that the worst is over. Especially for mutants, that’s not always true.

Although you don’t know what Logan lives with every day and sleeps with every night, you do know that his capacity for empathy is still intact. Here you are in his bed after all, seeing and indulging in a side of him that many never will.

You sigh lightly. “We’re quite the pair.”

A comfortable half-smirk slips over his lips. “I think we’re just fucked up insomniacs,” he suggests with a breathy exhale that’s close enough to a laugh.

You wish you could slide a thumb over the pulse in his wrist and see what’s haunting him, just to understand what happened to the Wolverine, but you’ve learned that doing so usually isn’t worth the price you’ll pay after. If what’s in his head is horrific enough to cause him to go through a couple mattresses a month, then it won’t do you any good either.

“I sleep pretty good with you,” you offer, seeing how he raises a brow in doubt almost instantly.

He sleeps well with you, too. It kind of rattled him when he noticed a pattern of uninterrupted nights and you being by his side. Not a single mattress ruined on those nights.

“Try not to knee me in the stomach tonight,” he deflects with ease. He takes his hands out from behind his head, sliding his left arm under the pillow as he turns over onto his side and closes his eyes. Facing you.

You mentally smack yourself. Multiple times. You didn’t think you drifted that much when you slept.

“No promises,” you mutter. You catch a small shake of his head before you let yourself join him in unconsciousness as you mirror each others lonely bodies.

━━━━

Your eyes ache—to open, to move, to touch. Enough crying will do that to you.Your eyelids are heavy, but there’s something else weighing down on you.

A tired groan crawls from your throat as you try to place yourself for a moment. The morning sun is just beginning to shine too brightly for your liking, and you squish your face deeper into the pillow.

You’re still tipsy with sleep, lying flat on your stomach, but there’s something dense and hot resting over your back.

You prop yourself up on your forearms, giving yourself a minute to wake up. You twist your hips around to sit yourself up, feeling the thing on your back slide down to your waist.

The blanket pools around your hips, and you feel a hand reflexively squeeze over the meat of your hip in disapproval of your moving. Something in you clenches at the sensation of something invading the area with ease. A spot reserved for intimacy.

Your head quirks to your right, seeing Logan on his stomach with his right arm thrown over your midsection.

You blink in surprise, staring at his sleeping body. His hair is sticking up every which way, his head half-off the pillow, his side of the blanket not even covering the curve of his ass anymore. It’s endearing to see the Wolverine in such a normal, human state.

But if someone were to walk in, it would look like you two spent the whole night fucking. A lot. That wakes you up a little more.

You peek over at the nightstand behind him and see the time blinking on his watch. It’s already 8 a.m.

You rest a hand over his shoulder to gently guide his arm off of you, but you stop yourself. Instead, you lightly trace your fingers down his shoulders and upper back a couple times, occasionally scratching softly over the ridges of muscle.

A shiver quickly rolls through his upper body, but your touch doesn’t fully wake him. He knows it’s just you.

It’s the least you can do for him as a thanks for recovering your broken body from the floor of your room and bringing you here when he didn’t necessarily have to.

It almost feels like instinct to offer comforting gestures to him. There’s something inside you that just pulls to him. You want to be the one that can give him comfort and help him put himself back together.

You want to be the only one.

━━━━ ● ━━━━

There’s a shadow that’s been following you around the mansion.

As soon as you stepped out of Logan’s room that morning a few days ago, it started.

This shadow likes to be nosy about what you’re doing. This shadow likes to be in your space. This shadow wants to be in your space. And he is.

No one has seen Logan out around the mansion this much, including you, and that’s how you noticed he’s basically been attached to your hip ever since he decided your back was a comfortable armrest.

He’s always just there, like a stray cat begging for food or affection. There to entertain you, banter with you, indulge you, in any way he can, including now as you trail back inside the mansion well behind Storm from an evening walkabout in the garden.

“No smoking in the courtyard,” you sing as you pass him carelessly, not even offering a glance to him in interest.

You like playing this game. Whatever it is. Constantly poking and prodding at each other to see what you can do to get the other to break in some way, no matter how slight.

Your heart flutters and flips every time; maybe from the thrill of it all, maybe from the arousal you get from the tension. You hope he feels everything, too.

He turns his head to watch you cross into the entryway. “Blow me,” he throws back playfully through a thick puff of smoke, leaning against the brick wall with a cigar pinched between two fingers.

You suppress a chuckle, keeping your unwavering pace. “Yeah, you wish!” You yell over your shoulder. You know he hears you. He wouldn’t let himself miss it.

Logan smirks and shakes his head in amusement, always impressed with your quick rebuttals that occasionally tent his jeans. He takes one last drag out of spite before following your footsteps inside.

You have become, by definition, friends…in a way. Even if you sorely cross the line into other territory more often than not. Sexual innuendos and friendly flirting can only go on for so long before the underlying intentions and meaning reflects real desires.

It’s evolved into more than just borrowing his bed a couple times or helping each other out. It’s surpassed the fear of whatever habit you were afraid of forming from doing so. It’s become a dependency to get that adrenaline high from simply riling each other up.

You have an assumption that if you were to end up in Logan’s bed again, somehow, there will be a point of no return that you’ll be faced with. There aren’t many more excuses that can be used for explaining to yourselves why you’re together in bed before you have to recognize the truth.

That platonic line is being stretched too thin, and you’re not sure how much farther it can go.

━━━━ ● ━━━━

“How’ve you been sleeping?”

“Fine. You?”

“Could be better.” Logan hides his smirk, but you can hear it in his voice.

You narrow your eyes skeptically as he fishes around in the fruit bowl sitting in the middle of the kitchen island.

“How so?” You ask. Your legs swing leisurely as you sit upon the chilled countertop on his left, idly waiting for Storm to show up and go with you to training.

A smug, tight-lipped grin flashes across his face, a green apple rolling around in his palms before he puts it back. “You could be there,” he provokes, his eyes bright.

It’s your turn to raise a brow at him, but you can’t stop your smile. “Oh?”

He turns to you, tenderly grabbing the tops of your thighs and parting them slightly to stand between your legs.

This isn’t the first time he’s done this, and he knows it rouses you in all the right ways. But, neither of you will do anything about it. Not even a brief kiss.

“Come on,” he goads, planting his hands down next to your hips, bringing himself in closer as he bears his weight on his arms. “You scratch my back, I’ll scratch yours.” He sways his head side to side to emphasize his point.

Fuck. That’s good.

That may be exactly what you did for him, but it’s now a figure of speech for something else entirely. It’s almost impossible to argue against either way, as if you want to. This is what you’ve been patiently waiting for.

You put your hands over his as you lean back a little to put some distance between you. “How sweet,” you hum.

His eyes flick from yours to your lips one too many times before you continue. “You start to miss me?” You tease as you lean forward again, echoing what he said to you the night your window got smashed in.

“Smart-ass,” he mutters as you laugh quietly. The tips of your noses barely graze each other as he steps in closer again. You’re almost at the same height like this.

“Save me the left side,” you advise, bringing your hands to his shoulders as you fondle his white t-shirt between your fingers. You’re so close, and he’s already so warm against you just like this.

“Always do.”

━━━━

You want to rip your heart out of your chest from how hard it’s pounding against your ribs. It’s almost throwing you forward with each heavy beat.

Three resounding knocks fill the hallway as you shuffle on your feet, waiting for Logan to open the door.

It feels like you’re doing something bad. Something parents would warn their kids against. Something greatly envied.

Everything inside you feels on fire. Your thoughts, desires, anxiety, all jumbling together into one distorted state of mind and body.

“Ah, welcome back.” His sarcastic tone makes your face go hot. A satisfied smirk crosses his lips as he runs a hand through his shaggy, unstyled hair.

You shake your head, pursing your lips. “Knock it off.” You gently shove at his bare chest. Misbehaviour already. But are you really surprised?

Logan grabs your wrist, delicately guiding you into his room. “You enjoy it,” he says lowly, quickly shutting the door as soon as you’re in.

“Maybe,” you hum in response, pulling away from his grasp and seeking out your side of the bed. Logan follows closely behind, giving your ass a light smack in encouragement before he cuts away to his side while you jolt in shock, a stunned look on your face as you whip your head around to him across the bed.

“Oh, really?” You scoff. He’s biting back a smile, not moving until he knows what you’ll do next. He’s never gone that far before.

“I’m sorry, that was rude—how can I make it up to you?” He almost chokes on a laugh, pulling his dog tag back and forth along the chain while he considers you.

This Logan is very different from the one you were met with the first night he let you in his space. This one is attentive and exuberant, yet he hasn’t given you much up until this point right now. You’ve gotten way too comfortable with him without even doing anything to you.

In this moment, he isn’t the brooding, animalistic Wolverine many see him as. He’s just Logan—for you.

You watch him carefully, easing yourself onto the bed. “Get in the fucking bed,” you slap his side of the mattress with a thump of your palm. “And do what you promised earlier,” you stare pointedly at him.

He owes you that “you scratch my back, I’ll scratch yours” favour he decided to pull out to get you here.

“Mm, alright, alright,” he surrenders, a look of amusement still on his face as he kneels onto the bed. “I thought of a pretty good idea for it,” he says softly, crawling to sit next to you on top of the blanket as the bed-frame creaks with the added weight.

Your shoulders almost brush against each other. You shift, turning your body fully toward him. “Oh? Wh—woah!”

You squeal when his strong hands latch onto your sides, lifting you just enough to pull you over his legs to plant you on his lap. He leans back against the headboard, pulling on your thighs so you straddle him tightly.

He looks devilish when you catch his gaze again, and you know what’s coming. What’s been coming. Your hands find their places on his shoulders, warm and taut, as his hands hold your hips.

The bond between you will culminate tonight. It will be wrapped in a blanket and trapped between two alike souls that lie heart-to-heart in the dead of night. It will be perpetual.

The heat of him between your legs makes you restless. It’s just you, him, and the darkness in the quiet room you’ve become too familiar with.

“Logan…” you trail off bashfully when you feel something firm through his sweats poke against your cunt. It clearly doesn’t take much to excite him.

“Hm?” He takes you in for a split second, hands running from your hips up to your chest leisurely with a sharp inhale, not yet completely bothered by the fact that you have a shirt on.

You suck in a shaky breath when your hips accidentally shift over his bulge from his hands pushing and pulling over you.

“What’s the idea?” Your voice wavers.

You know what it is. He knows that. You just want to hear him say it and fill the silence.

“Something I’ve wanted for a while,” he murmurs, eyes hyper-focused on you.

Your fingers dance their way to the sides of his neck, brushing along the supple skin while you feel muscles and tendons flex with every slight movement. You subtly press the pad of your index finger against the pulse point right under his jaw, just to ground yourself and truly feel that Logan is there in front of you.

His pulse is steady but hard, much like yours, and the prickle of energy festering against the finger almost makes it go numb from not accepting it into your body.

“Show me, then.” You smile sweetly, leaning in closer while you tilt his head up with the hand under his jaw, your finger slipping from his pulse and caressing over the dense, coarse hair along his cheek.

Your noses bump while your lips part in anticipation. His eyes flutter as he falls into you and frantically claims your mouth in an unbreakable kiss.

The first kiss. Nothing could tear him from you in this moment.

Your hands cradle his cheeks, keeping him from pulling off too far. His hands scratch and paw at your back, trying to find a way to somehow get you closer against him.

It’s all a little messy, your lips mostly just mashing together without any rhyme or reason, but neither of you care. You only care about how electrifying it feels to finally have Logan and feel how perfectly connected you are together after all these nights. You go together like a key and its lock.

“Logan,” you pant when his mouth releases yours for a fraction of a breath. The seconds between kisses dwindle the more you take from each other.

Your thighs tense as he pulls half an inch away just to reconnect more crazed as his lips lock over your bottom one aimlessly. Something deep inside you trembles and aches.

He grunts, accidentally sucking the tip of your tongue briefly before slotting his lips back over yours in an apology. “Hold on,” he mumbles in a rush against your parted lips. He knows what you’re asking—or trying to ask. He snakes an arm up along your spine and wraps the other around your waist.

Then the world is tilting.

He drops you on your back on the bed from his lap, hovering over you as he distracts you with harsh but pleasing kisses and wet bites along your neck, settling his hips heavily between your thighs. You squirm and feel how bolts of arousal are making your cunt pulse involuntarily.

Logan groans. “Fuck—I can smell it. I smell you.” He slowly grinds his hips into yours almost reflexively. He squeezes his eyes shut, and you tip your chin up to press a chaste kiss to his slick lips.

“Taste…if you want to,” you propose, lightly scratching up and down his shoulders and arms, only enough to leave faint red lines for a couple seconds.

Logan’s eyes almost roll into the back of his head before he gives it a small shake, a conflicted look overtaking his face. “Of course I fucking want to, but—fuck—next time. I promise.” He swallows whatever you were going to say with a deep kiss that has you nearly shaking when he sucks on your bottom lip.

“Let’s just take things easy,” he says roughly, bearing his weight on his left arm while he tries to get your sleep shorts and underwear off.

A promise of a next time makes your brain go fuzzy like static.

“I’ll hold you to it, then,” you resolve, lifting your hips as much as you can for him to lean back and pull away to wrestle your clothes the rest of the way down your legs, discarding them just as quickly.

“I hope you will,” he breathes through a small laugh as he shuffles on his knees. He doesn’t want to completely overwhelm you and scare you off, he just wants to enjoy you in a simple way that won’t entirely ruin you for tomorrow.

He doesn’t know what you can or cannot handle, but he’s going to find out.

The fresh air in the room brushes cooly against your wet cunt. It’s a nice contrast to how fiery your whole body feels, but Logan feels even warmer than you somehow. Maybe wolverine’s just run hot.

His sweats have ridden down his hips from his desperate grinding against you, and the dangerous cut of his v-line grows more and more narrow as the waistband teases the reveal of what’s underneath.

You watch him—palming his dick once as your knees sway side-to-side in waiting. His thumbs hook under the stretchy fabric, working what remains of his clothes down his sturdy thighs.

“It’s rude to stare.” He pops a brow, a smug, arrogant grin quirking his lips.

You push yourself to sit up, considerably shorter than him in this position as he stands on his knees, and walk two fingers up his toned stomach to his chest, avoiding the hard cock between you.

He looks at you with curiosity until your hand grabs his dog tag in a fist, pulling it towards you. “Then stop showing me your dick,” you say as he leans in to your pulling a little to not have the chain break away.

You knew the night Logan dropped his pants in front of you and let you eye-up his bulge would come back to haunt you. But it’s alluring. Big. Curves a little to the left, barely noticeable. A respectable amount of hair decorates the space between his bellybutton and the base of his cock.

He gives in to the tension on the chain, falling back to the mattress with you and trapping you between his arms as his cock rests heavy on your clit.

“How about I find somewhere to put it?” His smile pushes a whole new wave of arousal from you.

“It would be a damn shame if you didn’t,” you say against his mouth, giving your hips a roll just to tease him before hugging his waist tightly with your knees.

“Good.” He gives you a strong kiss with a small grunt, running his hands over your sides under your shirt. The movement pushes it up, up, up, until you have no choice but to stretch your arms out above you and let him slide it off between more thoughtless kisses, leaving you entirely bare.

He lets you breathe for a moment, dipping his head to bite and suck marks along your collarbones messily. You squeeze around his hips harder, trying to get him to give you something other than his scratchy cheeks rubbing against your skin and the chilled steel of the dog tag dragging over your chest.

The tip of his cock falls and catches over your clit when he moves lower, licking and sucking over your chest like a starved animal finding food for the first time in a week. You gasp from the mixed sensations.

“C’mon, kitty cat, you can do all this while inside m-me,” you say breathily, fingers digging into his shoulders to stop yourself from trembling too much.

Logan bites over a nipple before pulling himself back up to look at you. “Is that a promise?” He says lowly, that stupid smirk gracing his face again.

“Try it and find out,” you demand, enjoying the sting of the deeper bites blooming on your torso.

He purses his lips, shifting his weight back onto his knees to grab ahold of his cock to angle and guide it in.

“Hm, guess no lube is needed,” he muses when he gets a look at your cunt, sparing you a glance through his lashes.

You roll your eyes shut when your whole body lights up red-hot. “Jesus fucking Christ, Logan,” you slap a hand over your eyes as you grimace. You don’t want to be that aware of your naked self right now.

He suppresses whatever expression was about to cross his face when his cock notches itself between your soaked folds, teasing your hole with the blunt tip. His brows pinch together and you forget the embarrassment from his crude remark.

But he leaves his cock like that, on the precipice of sliding the rest of the way in with a snap of his hips. Instead, he carefully uncurls his upper body to crawl his way back up to you while holding his hips deathly still.

“Alright, stay with me,” he whispers against your neck when you moan, pressing a tender kiss to your rabid pulse in reassurance.

“O-okay,” you sigh, running a hand through his hair and tugging at the roots while the other squeezes around his arm as best as it can. You’re not even really sure what he’s saying.

He kisses up your cheek and over to your lips again. You try to keep up with his quick mouth, licking and sucking whatever part you can get ahold of, but you’ve become lost in the feeling of him all over you.

He’s in your mouth, on your chest, against your stomach, nudging your cunt. Everywhere.

He slips his tongue over yours, securing your lips together at the same time he pushes his cock in halfway. Now you understand what he was saying.

The lightheadedness from being filled, even just a bit, almost makes you lose yourself. The stretch makes your stomach drop, your legs shake, and your mouth fall open with a whine.

“A-ah—fuck. Fuck, Logan,” you whimper, fisting his hair with both hands to stop yourself from falling apart.

He groans, either at the grip you have on his hair or how good your cunt feels already, and runs a hand up your left thigh in comfort as you squeeze around his hips tighter to draw him in.

“Just a bit more,” he soothes, trying to resist the urge to slide into you in one fell swoop. It would be so easy to just let his hips fall into yours and fill your cunt.

Another heated kiss, another few inches. He works his cock into you the rest of the way with ease. You guess the lube thing wasn’t really a joke. His hungry, needy kisses may have also helped with that.

You choke on your gasps, not wanting to get too loud, and Logan does the same. He tries to muffle both of your moans with his mouth, attempting to form complete kisses, but it just turns into you panting against each other as he finally bottoms out, hitting his end.

Your legs relax around his waist as he deftly rocks his hips in small thrusts to get you familiar with his size, his small grunts filling the air each time you swallow him whole.

You let out a deep breath, dropping your hands back to his tense shoulders. He lines your jaw with soft kisses, fisting the blanket in his hands beside your head.

“Fuck. Already feels too good,” he moans, pressing into you harder and unintentionally rubbing himself over your tender clit.

You smile, squirming while he works down your neck again. “Best of luck,” you huff, amused at the fact that he might not last as long as he wants to.

He brings his face back to yours, a completely blissful expression controlling his features, but there’s still some mischief in his hazel eyes. “Oh? Yeah?”

You hold each other’s gaze, both equally dazed and overwhelmed, and he draws his hips back and pushes into your wet cunt with a complete, strong thrust. The sound of his pelvis hitting against the backs of your thighs makes him laugh in pleasure and satisfaction when you instantly roll your eyes and head back.

Your cunt quivers, gripping him tight, and then it’s Logan’s turn to lose composure. He drops his head to your chest, managing a few deep breaths as he slowly pulls out halfway just to push right back into you, over and over.

It’s a pace that isn’t quite pure, mindless fucking, but it’s also not somewhere near earnest love-making. It’s something that feels specifically curated for you. Something that feels measured and sincere.

The strength of his thighs hitting against yours pushes you up the mattress a few inches, and you don’t know whether to gasp or moan. He reaches somewhere deep inside you, and you know he can feel that, too.

A helpless groan slips through Logan’s lips. “Where have you fucking been, huh?” He muses through shaky breaths, the determined plunge of his cock hitting something that makes your muscles tense throughout your body.

Your fingers tangle in the hair at the base of his neck, keeping him close. “Two doors down,” you giggle, understanding that’s not quite what he was asking.

“Fucking smart-ass,” he grumbles, silencing any further rebuttals with a wet kiss. You don’t think you could manage much more of a conversation even if you wanted to.

The silence is quickly filled with obscene sounds that only seem to leave you wetter and Logan throbbing. You can hear your bodies connecting through your gasping for air and his choked moans, and you can feel the mess you’re making all over him. It’s smeared along the inside of your thighs from how deep he’s been hitting. The squelching only seems to make him fuck into you harder.

Something inside you starts to grow tight and wind up in your core, making you repeatedly clench around him while his cock strokes all the right spots inside you as he makes sure he’s fucking himself in to the base. He doesn’t deprive you of anything.

He drops his head to your neck, wedging his face in to latch onto the spot right where your neck starts to slope into your shoulder. The dense muscle there gives him something to basically chew on, sinking his teeth in as deep as he can without drawing blood.

“H-hah, Logan,” you whine, tilting your head into the side of his and squirming from the pleasant sting.

You feel his arm move beside you, then you hear the sound of tearing fabric as he gives a particularly brutal snap of his hips, followed by a deep groan against your skin.

You can barely form any thoughts, but you can guess what just happened. If he pulled his hand back, three long, slim holes would probably be where his knuckles are right now.

“Fu-uck, Logan, you just got t-this mattress,” you laugh a little, your words choppy from how hard he’s driving into you now.

He draws back from your neck, seeing your half-lidded eyes trying to focus on him. “Can’t always control it,” he reasons, giving you two short, fleeting kisses as you hear his claws retract from the innocent mattress.

You see the double-edged sword. You can guess that that’s the same explanation he would probably use for the nightmares. It can go either way, and now you’ve seen both sides.

“It’s okay,” you say in a hushed tone. You cradle his face, and he rests his forehead against yours. “Keep going…keep going,” you coax, face scrunching from your nearing orgasm.

You can feel it in your toes, your stomach, your shoulders—you’re tightening up everywhere, and he can undoubtedly feel it in your cunt as you pulse around him. It grips him just right for a couple seconds before relaxing completely and leaving him to chase for more.

“Keep squeezing me like that and you’ll get whatever you want,” he offers, fighting to maintain his steady pace for both your sakes.

You almost whine, knowing whatever your body does is beyond your control at this point.

“Just—inside.” You can’t even string together a full sentence anymore, but the urgency and stress on the last word makes Logan’s ears perk up.

He presses a soft kiss to your clammy forehead in acknowledgment, the muscles in his arms straining and flexing as he grabs ahold of his own orgasm after a particularly inviting flutter of your walls.

You’re both walking the line, teetering on the edge of utter euphoria, and you know nothing will be the same after. You don’t want it to be. You hope it isn’t.

He reaches an arm back, sliding his hand up your thigh again and slotting it behind the bend in your knee. He pushes forward—only slightly—bringing your leg closer to your stomach to stretch you open for him.

His cock brushes over something new. Something that makes you bite your tongue. The angle lets him fit perfectly against you, not hindered by the flesh of your thigh stopping his hips.

You want to cry from how good it all feels. You want to be suspended in this feeling forever. You want Logan to—

“Focus, baby. Focus on me,” he coos, bringing you back to reality. He holds the side of your head with his other hand affectionately. “Come on…come on, I know you’re almost there,” he encourages with a quick kiss that goes straight to your stomach.

The burn in your thigh from the stretch can’t overpower the sparks of your orgasm, and Logan just fanned the flames with a few little words.

You come with a broken sob, convulsing around his cock while he fucks you through it, submitting to his own orgasm only seconds after with deep, shaky breaths as he empties himself inside your cunt.

He doesn’t pull out or pull away. He relaxes on top of you, sweaty and sticky with cum, and he places the barest whisper of a kiss on your chin, your parted lips, your nose, and then your forehead.

Your ears ring from your orgasm, eyes still slightly out of focus. Your body trembles from your muscles finally releasing the tension they’ve been caught up in.

You desperately suck in air, trying to calm your pounding heart, and you just lie there and let Logan walk your body through a cool-down. Soft kisses. Soft touches. Soft looks. Between sweat, cum, and whatever else.

He rocks a little on his knees, weak from his release, and carefully pulls out of you with a huff as he caresses your stomach and thighs appreciatively to wind you down. You get a good look at him. Not a scratch. His hair tells a story, though—one where he’s completely possessed by bliss.

You probably look like you survived an animal attack.

“Are we even?” Logan says through a kiss against your stomach.

A mindless laugh crawls from your throat, caught up in the feeling of his hands rubbing circles over your hips. “I think I still owe you,” you argue, resting your hands over his as they travel smoothly up your side.

You’ll find a way to make everything up to him. Including the sex. The scale is now tipping to his side too much. All the nights spent in his bed, what he’s done for you, what you’ve done for each other, may just be immeasurable, but that won’t stop you from finding a way to get him back for it all.

“We’ll figure it out,” he mumbles, snaking back up your body and pressing himself against you. Face-to-face. Chest-to-chest.

You mindfully run your hands over the sides of his head, trying to tame his hair and style it back to how it was earlier in the night. It doesn’t work. He enjoys it anyway.

“Do I have the pleasure of staying here tonight?” You ask rhetorically, enjoying the warmth of him on top of you against the brisk air creeping in from the cracked window.

Logan blinks. “You can stay every night.”

A loving smile springs over your face. This may be the beginning of the end to your troubles and worries.

You—maybe foolishly—trust him. You trust that he won’t accidentally bury his claws in your side during the night, but you’ve had impressive luck with that up until this point. The only thing you can do now is continue to push that luck.

Healing isn’t linear, and you can’t expect someone to fix you, but everyone finds their thing at some point.

You slither your hand down to his neck, index finger grazing over his pulse again. You feel the energy biting against you.

Your lips graze over his, tempting him to give you a slow, deep kiss. “Can I have the left side?” Rhetorical, again.

Logan chuckles against your mouth. “Always.”

#did my best to appease readers from the criticism i’ve seen about logan fics so. lol #logan howlett x you #logan howlett x reader #wolverine x reader #wolverine x you #logan howlett smut #wolverine smut #xmen x reader #xmen x you #xmen smut #hugh jackman x reader #hugh jackman x you #marvel smut #the wolverine x reader #x men x reader #logan howlett fluff #wolverine fanfiction

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charlotlie · 1 year ago

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bitches be like “this is the best piece of literature i have ever read” and it’s either a book that took them six weeks to finish or a fanfic they read at 3 AM

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wanderingcas · 10 months ago

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people are really looking at stats to determine if a fic is worth reading? no wonder fics that never got popular at the first drop never had a chance 💀

#also people don't really leave kudos anymore #or comments #so stats are fallible!!#don't do this i beg of you #best fic i ever read: barely 100 kudos #worst fic i ever read: most popular in a fandom based on stats #i'm just saying!!!

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skyrigel · 5 months ago

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Brother's best friend! Simon who's always so smitten and sweet to you. Bringing along sweets and snacks whenever he comes over.

Brother's best friend! Simon who casually tucks your hair back, asking you bout' your day and listening and doting on every word.

Brother's best friend! Simon who takes you for a ride on his motorcycle, buying you ribbons and scarfs.

Brother's best friend! Simon who would fight with your brother if has to, to make your wishes come true.

Brother's best friend! Simon who agrees with you when you say, you can date whoever you want until it's Joe from class B, and he's beaten to pulp the very next day.

Brother's best friend! Simon whom you share your first smoke with, coughing and laughing as he bumps your nose.

Brother's best friend! Simon who expects a kiss on cheek too, after you say bye to your brother and absolutely goes pink when you place a chaste wet kiss on his face.

Brother's best friend! Simon who takes you on prom along so you don't feel left out, kissing you sweetly so you know how it feels.

Brother's best friend! Simon who gives you a summer job in his garage, watching you grow into a bigger person.

Brother's best friend! Simon who likes watching you in your summer dress hopping around and helping him like a good girl when he asks for some tool.

Brother's best friend! Simon who spreads your leg on his desk, lowering his mouth while your eyes connect with his, melting into a puddle when his tongue swipes along your clit, humming with your sweet juices.

Brother's best friend! Simon who has your legs in his lap as your brother and his fiance go on about their first meet while your friends are laughing.

Brother's best friend! Simon who goes crimson when you catch the flower bouquet your sister in law tossed, kissing your forehead so proudly.

Brother's best friend! Simon buying you a car when you graduate, watching you proudly when you drive up to your new shared home, going absolutely crazy when the wall is decorated with a huge poster, WILL YOU MARRY ME MRS.RILEY !

Brother's best friend! Simon hugging you as you melt in his big arms, “That's not a question baby !” you half laughed and half sobbed, “I am gonna fire you if you say no.” he kissed your forehead delicately.

Brother's best friend! Simon who marries you with the twilight in his eyes, the same when you were sixteen, kissing you sweetly as fireworks go ablaze in your head.

Grim Reaper!Simon

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pearlessance · 6 months ago

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Our Little Secret

Summary - Joel Miller deals with disgusting, intrusive thoughts about the girl next door who smells like vanilla and uses cherry chapstick.

Pairing - dbf!Joel Miller/Reader

Warnings - explicit sexual content MDNI, kinda perv!Joel, age gap, no cordyceps outbreak AU, reader's in high school but is eighteen, dom/sub undertones, seduction, underage drinking, body worship, unprotected sex, reader is called 'jailbait’ by Tommy, oral sex, breeding kink if you squint, praise & degradation

WC: 11k

[crossposted to AO3]

Joel Miller told himself he wasn’t a pervert. He just wasn’t. Double glancing at a pretty, young girl didn’t make him one of those guys — it just made him a man, right?

Never mind the fact that your father was one of his closest friends or the fact that you lived just next door, embodying half of the very typical scandalous, small-town affair. Never mind your eighteen year age difference. Never mind those obscene images that sometimes invaded his brain. Joel had heard the term once. He thinks Sarah might have told him about it from that science documentary she watched—those sordid images were called intrusive thoughts, right? Involuntary, unavoidable, unwanted.

It wasn’t only him who stared in your direction a little longer than necessary, anyway. The very first time he’d seen you, Joel and Tommy had been in the driveway doing an oil change on the truck. You and your dad had just moved in, Joel had introduced himself the day prior and helped haul a bed frame through the front room. Your dad had mentioned he had a daughter, but Joel had expected to see a girl closer to Sarah’s age.

He hadn’t expected to see you, wearing those tight blue jeans and that tiny tank top that left very little to the imagination. The straps were thin and the fabric billowy, and when you shifted the box beneath your arm from one hand to the other, the pretty pink fabric of your bra was out in the open for all eyes to see. Your hair had been pulled into a ponytail at the crown of your head, swishing back and forth with each step. It made Joel wonder about how soft the long strands were, how they would feel between his fingers, how they would look splayed out atop a pillowcase — intrusive thoughts.

Tommy was quick to abandon his tools and cross the front yard to greet your father, offering you what seemed like an innocent helping hand. Joel thinks his younger brother has no self control, but he leaves the truck too. Only to introduce himself, though. Definitely not to get a closer look.

Your voice is sweet, he thinks. It slides through him like a hot knife through butter. And when you laugh at Tommy’s awkward attempt at conversation, that sound stabs him in the chest because it’s so girlish. So young and youthful and airy. That pink lace is still poking out of the side of your shirt, even though Tommy now carries the box, and Joel strains himself trying to keep his eyes above your chin.

“And you must be Mr. Miller,” you say, sticking your tiny hand out to him.

He knows it’s a bad idea, but he doesn’t want to be rude, so he takes your hand in his and shakes it gently. Your skin is soft, nails painted red and manicured and he wonders what other parts of you are this soft, wonders if red has always been his favorite color, wonders what it would look like wrapped around — “Just Joel,” he tells you, clearing those damn intrusive thoughts as quickly as they appear.

“Joel,” you repeat, tasting his name on your pink tongue and giving him a sweet smile. “There's two more boxes. Wanna help me grab them?”

He’s careful not to answer too fast, afraid of sounding too eager. But he agrees, and you lead him to the open truck bed, and as you bend over to grab the smaller box his hands flex at his sides. He thinks you must be doing this on purpose. Right? Torturing him, sticking your ass out, silently begging him to look. But he doesn't. Instead, Joel picks up the larger box and notices the scent of vanilla radiating off your skin. This is almost worse because his mouth begins to water.

“My dad said you have a daughter,” you say.

“Yeah. Sarah. She’s younger than you, though.”

“That’s okay. Does she like cake? I have to bake one for my home ec final and could use a taste tester if she’s not busy.”

It really puts things into perspective, and he’s glad for it. Finals. School. High school. “I’ll ask her,” Joel says.

You lead everyone inside and direct all three men to take the boxes to the living room where you begin unpacking. You sit on the floor as you sift through the boxes, legs tucked underneath you, and Joel has to force a smile when you look up at him through your lashes. You say thank you, Joel from your knees and he feels something very, very wrong stir inside him.

Tommy follows him back outside, and on the way back to their truck his voice is high pitched in mockery as he says, “Thank you, Joel! You’re so handsome , Joel! Let me repay you with my body, Joel!”

He just laughs it off, but as he continues with the oil change beneath the hood an uncomfortable silence settles between him.

Eventually, Tommy shakes his head and snorts. “That girl is nothing but fucking jailbait, man.”

He sees you quite a few times after that, because your dad works in construction, too. Joel drinks the same kind of beer, and your dad has a pool table in your garage…so, naturally, they become the best of friends and very quickly at that. Tommy joins the party too, and within months they become an inseparable trio.

It’s during one of these nights when the three of them were standing in the garage with the door wide open, music playing from the speakers in your dad’s truck when those intrusive thoughts plague him again. Tommy’s losing at pool, drunk before the sun’s fully set, and your dad is laughing at something he’s saying.

You’re walking home from practice and stop suddenly at the end of the driveway. Joel can see you, but he doesn’t think Tommy or your dad can. The truck is in the way, but he’s in the perfect position. He stares a little too long, but he can’t help it. You’re wearing your cheer uniform, and your midriff is exposed, and your long legs are so fucking appetizing that his tongue sticks to the roof of his mouth. Your skirt is rolled up at the waist, making the fabric shorter than it’s supposed to be, making it sluttier than it’s supposed to be.

When you notice him staring, you shoot him a sinful little smile and raise your finger to your lips. A secret, Joel realizes. You want him to keep something a secret, and somehow it feels intimate, having something between the two of you. He watches you unroll the hem of your skirt and pull at the ends so it covers more of your legs. You turn in a semicircle, and he licks his lips, and when you look at him again you raise your hands in question.

He gives you a discreet thumbs up, and when you make your way up the driveway you give him the prettiest smile and say, “Hey, Joel! Nice to see you!”

Tommy gives him shit for it later, but he’s too distracted at the sight of you in that uniform to even remember Joel exists.

“You’re late,” your dad chastises. “Practice was over at five today. It’s almost six.”

“Took the scenic route,” you reply easily, and Joel can hear the playful tone in your voice that lets everyone in the room know of your insincerity.

You walk past them, backpack slung over one arm, but before you disappear inside you wink at him over your shoulder.

“Get ready, Joel,” your dad tells him with an exasperated sigh. “Teenage girls are hell.”

And Joel is inclined to agree. Even more so when he’s laying in bed that night, wondering about all the things you could’ve been getting up to in that hour it took you to get home. The school was a short, ten minute walk from your house. And even if you truly did take the scenic route home, it wouldn’t have taken you an entire hour to arrive.

So, what were you getting up to? Joel didn’t think you had a boyfriend. At least, not one you ever brought home. But not having a boyfriend didn’t mean anything. Not in this day and age. And Joel knew the mind of a teenage boy. He had been one, once upon a time, and knew without a doubt the lengths a boy your age would go to spend an hour alone with you. He thought about all of the things he was doing at eighteen, and his brain ran wild with those ideas.

After hours of laying there, unable to find sleep, Joel Miller took out his phone and opened a private search tab. It had been a long time since he’d done this, and he’d tried not to — truly, he had spent every minute since he’d closed his bedroom door trying to get the images out of his head. But it was like an itch he needed to scratch, becoming more and more irritating the longer he put it off. So, he typed cheerleader into the black and orange search bar and promised himself it was the one and only time he’d ever do this.

He just needed to get it out of his system. That was all.

(If he was honest, Joel knew as soon as the thought crossed his mind that it wasn’t true. Even when he scrolled through the videos to find a girl who looked strikingly similar to you. Even when he turned his volume all the way down, and reached into his sweatpants with his free hand. Even when he squeezed his eyes shut and thought of that rolled up skirt and that pretty pink lace, pornographic images long forgotten in favor of the ones you’d supplied. Even when a few quick tugs was all it took to shoot thick ropes of cum across his belly. Even when he cleared his search history, cleaned himself up, and rolled over to sleep…even then, he knew it would not be enough to get you out of his head.)

The next day, Joel saw you leaving for school and couldn’t bear to look in your eyes. He couldn’t stop thinking about what he’d done and feeling shameful, feeling like the very sordid man he knew himself not to be. He wasn’t a pervert, but he’d certainly felt like one that day.

You waved your hand and beamed like you did every morning. But Joel didn’t wave back. Oblivious to his atrocities, you played your hand at concern. “You okay?”

“Fine.”

“You don’t… seem fine. Is there anything I can do to help?”

God—your voice, full of kindness and sweet summery grace, was better than the audio in any porno he’d ever seen. “I said I’m fine.”

Thankfully, you took the hint and scurried off, not dissimilar to a wounded animal. Guilt immediately choked him. But, pushing you away is what he’s supposed to do. So he doesn’t change his mind.

At least, not at first.

He spends the entire summer going out of his way to avoid you. He offered to host guys nights at his house on the weekends instead of your dad's garage. He left for work five minutes earlier than normal to avoid having to hear you say good morning, Joel! and wave at him with those pretty red nails and smile at him with your pretty white teeth.

But once summer starts, you and Sarah begin spending way too much time together. And at first, it makes him nervous. You make him nervous. He doesn’t want to make small talk. He doesn't want to see you in your uniform. He doesn’t want to look at you at all, actually.

It works out in his favor though, Joel thinks, because you and Sarah have the same taste in movies, and she thinks you're the coolest thing that’s ever existed, and so whenever Joel and Tommy are in your garage, you’re at Joel’s house with Sarah. So he doesn’t have to be on edge, wondering if he’d turn the corner and you’d be standing there smelling like vanilla and wearing pink lace.

But then you’re hosting a high school graduation party a few short months after you move in. And your dad invites Joel and Tommy to the party in your backyard. In fact, he practically begs them to come and keep him company. And Joel can’t say no, because what excuse would he have? Sarah would never let him skip it, anyway. And so his avoidance comes to an end, and he finds himself standing in your backyard with a glass bottle in his hands, watching people congratulate you and your accomplishments all day long. Straight A’s in all those AP classes you took, your dad tells him proudly, clicking his tongs together over the grill. Joel knows you’re a smart girl, he doesn’t need to know your grades to see that you have your head on straight, but he also knows you’re a far cry from the timid little girl your father believes you to be. Joel can see it in you.

Still, you’re far smarter than he is, because while Tommy drones on and on about a project he’s got going on at home, all Joel can notice is the pretty sundress you’re wearing. It’s pink, like the lace that sometimes still haunts him. It clings to you at the top, molding sinfully against your chest, and flows out at the bottom, cutting off at your midthigh.

It’s too short, Joel thinks. Way too short to be wearing around so many male classmates. Around your dad’s friends. Tommy likes younger girls, you know. And Joel…Joel’s turning away from you and swallowing what’s left of his beer. He clinks the empty glass against Tommy’s and asks, “You need another?”

Your dad is the one who answers. “How about a shot of whiskey? The cabinet above the sink.”

Joel thinks it's a fantastic idea. He gets stopped by Mr. Adler on the way inside, who asks what the celebration is. He talks for far longer than he’d like, and by the time he gets to the kitchen, Joel really needs something stronger than beer.

Except, when he steps into the room, he freezes the moment he sees you standing there. Your head whips in his direction, eyes wide as if you’ve been caught. It’s only as he tears his attention away from you and notices the two red solo cups on the counter and the bottle of tequila in your hands, perched over them, that he realizes what he’d just walked in on.

Your cheeks are pink, the same hue as your dress, and you quickly try to explain it away. “Joel! Hey! This isn’t…I’m not like—you know, it’s just a celebration and…I’ll be nineteen soon and—I mean, it’s just a little .”

He raises his eyebrows, unsure of how to navigate this terrain. On the one hand, he feels the need to discipline you somehow. To turn this into a lesson of sorts, to let you know how the age of legal alcohol consumption is twenty one for a reason, that being drunk in a social setting like this is dangerous, especially for a girl like you.

But on the other hand, Joel knows he’s not responsible for you. He’s not your father, and he’s not going to be the one to give you the speech about underage drinking. He’d been far younger than eighteen-almost-nineteen the first time he’d gotten drunk. And you were right…this was a celebration.

The war in his brain seemed to dim what little common sense he had because Joel found himself standing behind you with almost no room to spare. The sweet scent of vanilla filled the space. You’d curled your hair, and the ends tickled the inside of his arm. Soft. So, so soft he could die. He puts his big hand on your bare shoulder, and reaches above you into the cabinet, finding the half empty bottle of whiskey. His fingers twitch with the urge to squeeze your supple flesh. Christ. It’s just a fucking shoulder, Joel, he tells himself. “It’s your party,” he says. “I won’t tell.”

It feels wrong just to say it to you. I won’t tell. Perverted thing to say, Joel thinks. You spin around to face him, and suddenly your breasts are brushing his chest, and Joel can’t breathe. “Thank you,” you whisper, taking your bottom lip between your teeth and sending him into his fucking grave.

It’s then, as he stares down at you and you stare up at him all sweet and innocent-like, that Joel finally admits to himself that avoidance has done absolutely fucking nothing to put out the fire you started. He clears his throat. “Yeah, yeah—it’s, uhm…it’s no problem. Have fun.”

He turns to leave, but then your arms are around his neck and he can’t smell anything but vanilla and he can feel your tits pressing into him, can feel you everywhere. But Joel isn’t a mean man, so what can he do but hug you back? If someone walked in, they’d think it was a fatherly embrace. Proud. Protective, even.

But they wouldn’t know that all Joel could think about is the way your skin felt under his calloused hands. Or the way your soft hair tickled his cheek as he laid it against the top of your head. Or the way your hips were nestled right between his thighs—and you were so warm and—

Intrusive thoughts.

“You’re the best, Joel,” you say, eyes bright and cheery. He’s relieved when you pull away, but also a little bit empty. He watches you pour a shot into each red solo cup. “You know, I’ve never tried whiskey. It seems so, like… manly .” You giggle, and it’s music to his ears but Joel begins to wonder if maybe this isn’t your first time stealing from the tequila bottle tonight.

“It’s definitely not the best tasting thing in the world,” he says. “Gets the job done, though.”

To put the tequila away, you have to stand on the tips of your toes. It elongates your entire body as you stretch upwards, and he can’t bring himself to stop staring at the curve of your hips. “You have to be drunk to hang out with me or something?”

The question surprises him. Yes, he thinks. Yes, he does need to be inebriated to hang out with you because otherwise his sober mind never lets him forget the way you look all dolled up. But he doesn’t say that. Instead, Joel laughs quietly and says, “I’m here for your old man. You think he wants to be the lone adult in this sea of kids?”

He says it as a joke and is thankful you find humor in it. “I’m not a kid, Joel,” you remind him. “I’m a woman now. Is my company really so bad?” You tilt your head, pushing your bottom lip into the tiniest little pout.

Joel needs to stop staring at your mouth. He knows it, because the urge rises in him to bite that lip, to surge forward and taste your tongue for remnants of tequila. The idea alone sends a bolt of white-hot desire straight to his dick. “No, no…s’not like that,” he says. He’s too focused on your face and the gleam in your pretty eyes to notice you’ve unscrewed the top of the whiskey bottle.

You pour a shot into an empty solo cup and hold it up between the two of you. “I’m scared,” you admit sheepishly. “Is it gross?”

The wrinkle in your nose is the cutest thing he’s ever seen, and the sight forces his lips into a small smile. “I don’t think so,” he says. “But you might.”

“Because I’m a kid ?” You scoff, but shake your head and smile at him all the same. “Women mature faster than men, you know. Which means when I make my decisions, I know what I’m signing myself up for.”

“Oh, is that so?” He remembers being this cocky as a teenager. He thinks maybe you’ve been spending too much time around Tommy and his defiant attitude is rubbing off on you. Joel offers a challenge—if you’re just so mature. “Drink up, then.”

He watches every microscopic movement as you lick your lips and lift the cup to your mouth. It’s a beautiful sight, watching you tilt your head back and swallow the tiniest bit. And when you pass the remaining liquid to him, your expression is fashioned from steel. Nonchalant, blank.

But he sees it, sees the way your hands twitch at your sides, sees the way your jaw feathers as you clench your teeth. He can’t help but chuckle at your persistence. Joel turns the cup in his hands and puts his mouth right where you did.

It’s almost like kissing, he thinks. Having his mouth where yours was seconds ago feels good. Better than he thought it would. And he can taste cherry-flavored chapstick before he can taste the whiskey, and he wonders when the last time was when he’d had a shot because it goes straight to his head and makes him feel drunk. Or maybe it’s just the wide smile that stretches across your face.

“That’s awful,” you confess. “I’ll stick to tequila, I think.”

“Tequila’s worse,” he says with a shake of his head. Tequila makes Joel feel your age, makes him forget the word consequences, makes him buzz with energy.

“No way,” you say. “The taste isn’t nearly as strong.”

While that may be true, it wasn’t about the taste at all and he doesn’t really know how to explain it. “Tequila encourages people to make bad decisions.”

Your eyes widen in surprise. “Bad decisions,” you echo contemplatively. “Sounds like a great time.” You take both of your tequila filled cups in hand and press a kiss to his cheek. “Thanks for always keeping my secrets,” you whisper.

Joel has to stand in the kitchen an extra few minutes after you leave because he still feels the ghost of your lips on his skin and doesn’t know how to act. Eventually, though, he finds the courage to face his brother and your father. He stays for the remainder of the party and helps your dad clean up the yard after everyone filters out.

It’s a relief when he’s finally in his own bed that night. He tries to resist thinking of you. Truly, he does — but it’s no use, and he’s alone in his bed, and this time he doesn’t even reach for his phone when he touches himself.

And it’s good. So good that he tries to draw it out. He tries his damndest to make it last. But his efforts become futile in just minutes, because he can feel your soft lips, can taste cherry chapstick, and he’s right there—right fucking there—when his bedroom door creaks open.

“Joel?”

For a second, he’s convinced himself he’s gone crazy. He’s well and truly lost it now, and his fantasies have grown into hallucinations at this point. You’ve driven him batshit insane. But his eyes focus in the dark, and he realizes his mind isn’t playing tricks on him at all. “What are you doing here?”

You take it as an invitation, and he desperately wishes you wouldn’t. He can still feel the buzz from the beer and whiskey, and his cock is hard beneath the sheets, and his brain is filled with images of you, and you’re in nothing but spandex shorts and a loose tank top, and when you sit on the side of his bed you lay your hand on his knee for balance and Joel’s hands shake.

“How did you even get in?”

“I used the key under the mat,” you confess. “I need your help.” Your voice is so mousy and soft, and it pulls him back to his senses.

“What’s wrong?”

“You were right,” you tell him. “I made a bad tequila decision and now I’m sad.”

Joel doesn’t know what to say. You couldn’t possibly still be tipsy, he thinks. It’s been hours since he saw you in the kitchen, but he supposes you very well could’ve gone back after everyone left. Either way, you’d come to him to fix it, and even knowing the right thing would be to call your dad, he was still high on the second secret you two shared. So, Joel sighs and puts his hand on yours. “What did you do?”

“I snuck a boy into my room,” you say.

Joel’s jaw clenches. Anger rises in his chest, crawls up his throat, and chokes him. A million things cross his mind—first, what the hell did he do to you? Did he hurt you? Joel would find the boy and break his fucking jaw. Did he touch you? Maybe he’d break the boy's hands instead. Or, worse, did he touch you when you didn’t want him to? The thought alone has his heart beating so fast he thinks he might die. Slowly, quietly, he asks, “What happened?”

“Nothing,” you sigh. And it isn’t one of those teenage girl nothings, it’s sincere. You climb over him to the other side of the mattress, and Joel thinks he should stop you but the sight of you in his bed is so fucking pretty that he can’t bring himself to. “That’s the problem. I wanted him to fuck me.”

The words give him pause. Everything freezes.

“But he didn’t want to,” you say. “Even though we were flirting all day.” You turn on your side, hands beneath your head. “I don’t get it. Is it because I’m not pretty?”

He can’t stop the snort that leaves him at that. Joel can’t believe you’d wonder about it for even a second.

“Do you think I’m pretty, Joel?”

If there’s anything in the world he hates, it’s this. He wonders a little if maybe you’re antagonizing him. It’s a yes or no question, isn’t it? So why does saying yes feel so… heavy? Weighted? He decides it best to keep the conversation directed away from his personal opinion on the matter. “Of course you’re pretty, baby.”

Baby? God. Maybe he has lost his fucking mind.

But it seems to bring you so much joy he doesn’t have it in him to regret it. You wrap your small hands around his bicep, and he can feel the heat in your touch, and it’s like he’s burning from the inside out. And when you turn a little more and bring your leg across his hips, Joel can’t breathe.

He wonders if you can tell how hard he is, wonders how he’s supposed to push you away when you just keep withering away his resolve. If he hasn’t lost his mind yet, he’s about to. “Is it okay if I sleep with you tonight?”

The words hit him like a freight train. But after a second, he realizes that you actually mean sleep —and he knows it’s a bad idea still because he’s having those intrusive thoughts once more. But he can’t say no. So instead he says, “I don’t think your dad would be comfortable with that.”

“I’ll tell him I had a sleepover with Sarah,” you quickly supplied. “I don’t want to be alone.”

He doesn’t either. But Joel knows he should be. And if not alone, certainly not with you. And yet, he says nothing. Not yes or no, just nothing.

“Can I tell you a secret?”

“Sure.”

“I think about you all the time,” you say. “I thought you were mad at me for a while. That made me sad, too.”

It made his chest ache to think he had caused you any harm. But it was for the best, wasn’t it? You probably just saw him as someone to seek comfort in, and he saw you as something entirely different. He was no good. Definitely not for you.

A few minutes pass, and he thinks you’ve fallen asleep, but then you kiss his cheek again in the same spot as this afternoon and say, “Thank you, Joel.” And he feels so wrong. He feels awful, and selfish, and greedy, and desperate, and perverted.

He thinks that’s the end of it. But then you kiss his jaw, and this time it’s an open mouthed kiss that leaves wetness on his skin. Joel shivers.

You kiss his neck, and his cock throbs inches from your thigh. He should stop this. He knows that. Joel isn’t a stupid man—he’s just a bad man. He doesn’t stop you when you climb into his lap. He doesn’t stop you when your tongue darts out between your lips as you kiss his collarbone. He doesn’t stop you when your kisses grow heated and heavy.

And when you kiss his lips, he doesn’t stop himself from kissing you back. He doesn’t stop himself from threading his fingers through your silky hair to pull you in deeper. He doesn’t stop himself from biting that bottom lip and sucking off the cherry flavor. He doesn’t stop himself from slipping his tongue into your mouth, or from lifting his hips just a little bit, pushing himself against you. The friction pulls a low groan from somewhere in the back of his throat, and Joel knows he won't be able to ever stop himself now.

You take the small movement as your cue to unleash yourself and roll your hips against his even harder. He can feel the wet heat radiating from you even through the spandex shorts, can feel his benevolence fading into the ether. You let out a breathless moan when you roll your hips again, and again, and again. And he curses, muscles tight, and feels a confession on the tip of his tongue. Joel wants you to say it, just once — wants to hear his name in your mouth shrouded in lust. He’s imagined it so many times, but he wants to hear it.

But then you pull away abruptly. “Joel?”

You sound mousy again, and he feels suddenly ice cold. “Yeah?”

“I think I’m gonna be sick.”

He holds your hair away from your face for the remainder of the night as you vomit up the rest of the tequila in your stomach. You apologize over and over again and greedily drink up the water he brings you.

Normally, Joel would hate this. But it’s you, and something feels good about taking care of you. About making sure you’re safe, making sure you feel pretty even with sweat coating your pallid skin.

You fall asleep sometime in the middle of the night, and Joel carries you to his bed. He doesn’t climb in next to you. He can’t because he already feels bad enough for allowing a drunk eighteen year old girl into his bed. It’s his turn to feel nauseous. Shame smothers him, and guilt, and mortification…Joel knows he should feel regret, too. But he doesn’t.

Sometime before sunrise, he nods off with his head resting against the bedside table. He doesn’t hear you leave, but when he wakes an hour later you’ve vacated the room.

He wonders if you remember how you ended up in his bed, if you remember how eager he was to taste your mouth, if you remember anything at all. He hopes not, because that would mean a conversation he was not equipped to handle.

When he trudges down to the kitchen, Joel stops upon the sight before him. Sarah sits at the kitchen table beside Tommy, who’s sitting across from your dad. And then there’s you—standing in the kitchen with a spatula in your hand and two still-wet braids in your hair.

It isn’t the fact that you’re in his kitchen, making pancakes for everyone, padding barefoot on the tile that makes him anxious. No one in the room can read his thoughts. They wouldn’t know how much it pleases him to see it. They wouldn’t know how he thinks he could get used to this, but knows he can’t.

No…no, it’s the fact that you’re wearing his flannel that makes him anxious. Your father wears flannels on occasion…but this one is so plainly Joel’s that he wonders why your dad is sitting there laughing at something Sarah said instead of killing Joel with his bare hands. He swallows thickly and pours himself a cup of coffee.

“Good morning,” you say cheerily, as if last night hadn’t happened. He thinks you’ve forgotten, or maybe just decided not to ever mention it again.

It was only a lapse in judgment, after all, wasn’t it? Just a split second where you and Joel both lost all sense. It didn’t mean anything. It couldn’t. “Morning,” he responds.

You ask him to help carry one of the heaping plates of fluffy pancakes to the table. When he reaches for the taller one, your hand brushes against his and Joel nearly jumps out of his skin at the contact. But then you’re holding your pinky out to him expectantly, and whisper, “Our little secret.”

The vanilla scent is gone, Joel notices. You smell like irish spring instead. Realization dawns on him that you must have showered while he was asleep— and used his body wash. There’s something about that little tidbit of information that sits with him. He likes it, he thinks. He likes smelling himself all over you, likes that something possessed you to use his things without asking. Something inside of him shifts, something… intense.

He knows he shouldn’t, but Joel winds his pinky finger around yours anyway. It feels so good to have yet another thing between the two of you. Something of yours that belongs only to him. It makes him feel giddy as if he wasn’t running on a single sip of coffee and an hour of sleep.

The remainder of the summer goes on without incident. You don’t end up in Joel’s bed again, though you never once leave his intrusive thoughts. He sees you sometimes, tanning in the backyard. He has a perfect view from his bedroom window, and he wonders if maybe you wear those tiny bikini tops for his benefit. But he never asks, even during the few moments you have alone, and is content to pine after you but not touch for the rest of his painfully sorry life.

He works. You taunt him. He plays pool in your garage. You come home late in too little clothes and smelling of vanilla scented tequila. Joel says nothing, though. He listens and agrees with your dad that since graduating you’ve become a little wild . A little… defiant. They dance around the word bad, but Joel knows the truth. Knows that more than anything, you need a little bit of discipline.

You’re not his to correct, though. So he doesn’t. He certainly enjoys watching you, however. He watches you sneak out through your window one night when he’s sitting on the porch. You press your finger to your lips, creating another secret between the two of you. He walks into the kitchen one night to find you filling a vodka bottle with water. Joel says nothing—but after grabbing another beer he’s got a smile on his lips he can’t seem to shake.

He’s mowing the grass in the backyard one sunny afternoon, and he catches a glimpse of something he shouldn’t. Joel holds a lot of your secrets close these days, but this one is…different.

Through your bedroom window, he can see you changing. The curtain is wide open, and you’re wearing nothing but that same pink bra he first saw you in, matching panties, and those knee high socks you used to wear with your cheer uniform. He’s not sure if you��re getting out of your clothes or into ones more comfortable, but he knows he can’t look away. His mouth is dry, and all the blood in his head rushes south. He thinks you’re beautiful. He wants to touch you so badly it’s overwhelming. The supple curves of your hips, the soft tendrils of your hair down your back, the swell of your breasts— God, you’re the sexiest thing he’s ever seen.

And then you pick something up from the floor, and Joel realizes a second later that you’re putting on his flannel. The one you stole at the beginning of the summer. Do you wear it often? Do you always wear it alone, half naked in your bedroom? His lips part and his breath catches in his throat. He’s not there. He’s just standing in his backyard, ruining this patch of grass…but a part of him is. Something of his is there, with you, touching you, and somehow it sets him on fire.

Especially when he watches you climb into bed. He won’t watch you sleep, he decides. He might have intrusive thoughts and secrets and uncontrollable fantasies, but he’s not a creep.

Except you don’t go to sleep, so Joel continues to watch. He watches you run red painted fingers over your bare skin, between your breasts, over your belly, and back up. You do it again, slower this time, and Joel’s cock strains in his jeans. He watches you slip your hand beneath the band of your panties. He can’t see any details from this far away, but his breathing synchronizes with the speed of your fingers.

Suddenly, he remembers you’re still in his flannel. Realizes that you put it on to touch yourself. Pressure builds in his cock, and he finally admits that yeah— maybe he’s a little bit of a perv. But only for you—there’s something about you that drives him fucking insane.

He stands there and watches you touch yourself until you finish. He revels in the small arch of your back, in the tremble of your legs, in the way your chest heaves with each ragged breath on the come down. He wants to clean you up with his fucking tongue.

Joel doesn’t finish mowing the lawn that night.

When you go off to college, he can’t deny what a massive relief it is. You move across Texas to some campus far away, and the distance makes him feel like he can breathe easily again. He stops having so many disgusting, intrusive thoughts. He stops feeling guilty every time he plays pool with your dad because those secrets he kept for you were ones that don’t truly matter. Not when you’re nowhere to be found, anyway.

As the year stretches on, Joel realizes that he’d been wrong all along. He wasn’t a pervert. You are a seductress. Even Tommy jokes about the obvious schoolgirl crush you had and admits one night when it’s just the two brothers that if you had thrown yourself at him, he wouldn’t have been able to resist you so easily as Joel had.

It’s not him that’s in the wrong. It’s you. You and your soft hair. You and your pretty smile. You and your red nails. You and your pink lace. You and your soft voice. You, you, you.

For several years, those intrusive thoughts haven't plagued him. Not until your junior year of college, when some problem with campus housing surfaces and you’re forced to stay at home for a few days. Your dad is excited about it and forces the four of you to go out to dinner together to catch up.

He sees you for the first time in so long, and you look so different but somehow even prettier. You’re wearing a short white dress, and Sarah tells you you look like an angel, and Joel silently agrees. You have a tattoo on the inside of your wrist. It’s the tiniest little image of two hands with their pinkies wrapped around one another, and he thinks it’s so fitting for a girl with so many secrets.

Every time you look at him during dinner, Joel shifts in his seat. He isn’t very hungry. Not for food, anyway. He’s a little floored when you proudly present your shiny, brand new ID to the waitress and order a fruity pink drink called a Paloma. You explain that it has tequila in it, and share a subtle glance across the table, and Joel feels his insides warm as if he was the one drinking a cocktail instead.

He drowns himself in work the entire week. He cannot— cannot afford to find himself back in his old ways. You’re a woman now. A fully grown woman, who no longer needs validation from older men. He knows you're not interested. He knows this time, this time, it really is Joel who’s the problem. Avoidance, surprisingly, works.

Until you knock on the door one night with a DVD in your hand. “Is Sarah home? I found my old copy of Evil Dead. She said she missed having movie nights.”

Joel shakes his head. “No, uhm—she spent the night with a friend. Sorry.”

“Oh,” you deflate. “That’s okay, I get it. She’s older now. It’s…”

“Weird,” he finishes.

You laugh softly, and the sound brings a smile to his face. “Yeah, really weird,” you agree. “I just hope she’s nothing like me.”

“Why’s that?” Your eyes darken, and Joel asks himself why he’s attempting to make conversation at all. It’s dangerous. He knows this.

“You know,” you say purposefully. “All those secrets? There were definitely more.”

For a reason he can’t pinpoint, it makes him a little annoyed. He knew it the whole time—of course, he knew there were more secrets than just the ones he was privy to. But a part of him wanted to know you better than anyone else. And maybe he did, for a second, but that second was long gone now. It was probably over moments after it began. “Yeah, well…that’s different.”

“How so? She’s only a little younger than I was when I met you.”

It’s an accusation. Joel can feel it. He can feel the anger seeping through your fake sweetness, too. But he doesn’t understand it. He didn’t do anything wrong. “You’re not my daughter. That’s what’s different.”

You roll your eyes, and his hands twitch with the urge to grab you by the jaw. “God, Joel—you’re such a pussy. Do you know that?”

Your words startle him. A crease forms between his brows, and he takes another step out of the doorway. “ Excuse me ?”

“Just say it! Say what you so desperately want to say. I can take it. Say it.”

The words come out slow and deadly, sounding far meaner than intended. “Say what?”

“Tell me it’s different because I’m a slut. It’s okay, Joel. It’s just the two of us now. Go ahead. Admit it.”

His jaw ticks.

“What, you think I’m dumb? You think I don’t hear you laugh at Tommy’s jokes when I walk out of a room? You think I didn’t know you guys called me jailbait for years?” You laugh cynically, arms crossed over your chest, and Joel thinks he’s never seen you so angry. So heated.

So hot.

He grabs your elbow and yanks you close. “Have you lost your fucking mind?”

Your face is inches from his, and he can smell vanilla and cherry and something happens. Something familiar and unique to you. Something disgusting. “And you know what the worst part of it all is?”

The worst part is that he’s twice your age. The worst part is that he’s known you since you were in high school. The worst part is that he’s friends with your father. The worst part is that you’re friends with his daughter. The worst part is that those perverted thoughts were never involuntary. They were never unavoidable. They were never unwanted. They were never intrusive.

“You like it,” you say with a smirk. “You like that I dress up in short skirts for you, and you like it when I climb in your bed when someone else leaves me unsatisfied. I almost finished that day, did you know?”

“ Jesus—fuck —don’t—”

“You barely touched me but I was so close just sitting in your lap. You like that I put on your clothes and touch myself in front of my window, hoping you’ll see. You like that I’m a slut for you, Joel Miller. Admit it. It’s okay. It’ll be our little secret .”

He pulls you into the house and slams the front door closed. His blood boils beneath his skin. He should have slammed it in your face, he thinks. But you’re here now—trapped inside with him. Or maybe he’s trapped inside with you.

The pleased smile on your face is his undoing. His breath comes fast, and he knows if he moves an inch there will never be any going back from this. So he doesn’t move. His limbs are frozen and his eyes are fixed on yours.

After a couple of tense filled seconds, your smile falters. Joel sees it. He hears the slight change in your voice too, as you confess, “I want you to touch me so badly.”

Fuck. Fuck, fuck, fuck —Joel holds your face in his hands and slams his mouth to yours. You taste just the same; cherry sweet and delicious. It’s his favorite flavor, he thinks. Better than any forbidden fruit. Your tongue is so soft against his and impossibly more greedy. You invade his mouth, his soul, his heart.

It happens so fast, and so easily. Your arms loop around his neck and Joel pulls you flush against him and grips the back of your thighs. He lifts you up and you wrap your legs around his waist, hips already rolling against him like some feral thing inside of you is desperately clawing to get out. His cock has never been this hard, Joel knows. And he knows—he knows that he could cum just like this. Touching you, tasting you, feeling your softness. It’s enough.

Still, he wants more. He wants to see you fall apart. He wants to reach inside your chest and make you feel what he feels, make you feel tortured the way he’s been for years.

Joel walks to the sofa and sits with his legs spread wide. You’re still kissing him with everything you have, and it’s a clash of tongues and lips and teeth that he loves so much it’s an effort to thread his fingers into the hair at the nape of your neck and pull you away, but he does it. You’re both panting, and you let out a whimper at the loss of contact. His cock is throbbing, straining behind his jeans. “Put your money where your mouth is, baby,” he says breathlessly. “You wanna act like a slut for me, be a slut for me.”

He fists your dress in his hands and pulls it up and over your head, tossing it to the floor. And then it’s just you, sitting in Joel’s lap, wearing nothing but pink, lace panties and a pair of strappy white heels. You’re so pretty, and he’s always known it—but seeing you up close has him weak. He can’t keep himself from touching you, from running his hands over your hips and living the fantasy he’s existed in for what feels like forever.

Once he starts, Joel can’t stop. He runs his calloused palms over your belly, your ribs, allowing his thumbs to ghost across the underside of your breasts. He moves slowly, meticulously, enjoying every moment. And when you hook your thumbs in the band of your panties with the intention to remove them, he places his hands over yours. “Hell no,” he says. “You think you can tell me you almost finished in my lap that night and get away with it?”

“But, I—”

“Nuh-uh. Prove it.”

Hesitantly, you tilt your hips against his. He wishes he was in only sweatpants the way he was that night because his jeans are keeping the feeling of your wetness away from him this time. But he can see it—the baby pink fabric is darker at the apex, and as you grind your hips against his Joel realizes you’re creating a mess on his clothes, too.

He understands. He really, really does. He feels it, too. Joel understands how desperate and needy you are. And because he’s just so understanding, he grants you a little reprieve. He leans forward and takes your nipple into his mouth. He’s real sweet about it too, giving you the same tender treatment your mouth gave him that night in his room. He licks the hardened peak softly, swirling his tongue, and you let out the prettiest moan he’s ever heard. The pace of your hips picks up, rolling against the bulge in his jeans faster.

“Oh, god,” you whimper. Your breath catches, and he can hear your heart beating rapidly behind your ribcage. He peppers kisses across your sternum and inhales deeply, sucking in a breath that’s nothing but you and holding it in his lungs. He kisses your other nipple and pinches the one wet with his spit between his thumb and forefinger.

He sucks your nipple into his mouth and groans when you fist your hands in his hair. You sound so pretty, he thinks—and he leans back on the couch to admire just how pretty you look. He can’t catch his breath, but he doesn’t mind.

Your pace falters the slightest bit, and your chest is heaving a little slower now. He sinks lower into the couch and thrusts his hips up into you—once, twice, and your legs are shaking. “Aww,” he coos. “You’re so sensitive, baby. Look at you.”

Too lost in your own bliss, Joel decides to help you, to teach you. He grabs your chin and forces it down, forces your attention to where your bodies are joined.

“I told you to look,” he repeats. Joel turns his fingers in the waistband of your panties and pulls them taught, creating even more pressure against your clit. The pink fabric immediately becomes darker, sopping up some of the mess you’ve created on top of him, and Joel intends to make good on his wish to clean you up with his tongue. But not yet—not when you still have something to prove. “You gonna cum just like that? Hm?”

You nod frantically, your attention flickering between his dark eyes and your panties clutched between his thick fingers. “ Yes,” you tell him, legs trembling. Your pace is quick, and each roll of your hips becomes shorter and shorter. And with Joel moving underneath you it only takes seconds more before you combust. “Oh, fuck—fuck—I’m coming, I’m coming—!”

“That’s it,” he says, and you feel the deep timbre of his voice skitter across your skin like embers. “There you go. You’re being such a good slut for me, hm?”

When your orgasm finally fizzles out, you fall limply forward and Joel is there to catch you, like he always has been, like he silently vows he always will be. He rubs soothing circles against your spine and presses sweet kisses into your hair, waiting patiently as you try and regain what little composure you have left.

You lift your head from the crook of his neck, and your eyes are glossy and your bottom lip is swollen and your cheeks are flushed with a rosy hue, and Joel thinks you’ve never been more beautiful. But then you slide from his lap to the floor in one fluid movement, and he realizes that this is the prettiest you’ve ever been; on your knees before him, eyes bright with anticipation and excitement. You place your hands on top of his strong thighs, look up at him through your lashes and ask softly, “Can I suck your dick, Joel?”

He has to squeeze his eyes shut. He has to because his cock is so fucking hard and your voice is so sweet and filthy he can’t handle it. He breathes in slowly through his nose and says, “Of course you can, baby.”

Without a moment's hesitation, you unbuckle his belt. The metal clinks in your fingers, and Joel’s heart is racing when you unbutton his jeans and hook your thumbs through the loops to tug them down. His cock snaps against his belly, and you lick your pink lips.

You take it in your hands, and Joel aches when you swipe your tongue over the tip, tasting the salty sweetness of his precum. He can’t believe this is really happening, that you’re really here, running your sweet, sweet tongue over every inch of his cock. You’re tasting him, savoring him, and Joel wonders if it pleases you to see him all bent out of shape like this.

He prides himself on his masculinity. He’s always been a strong man, one who handles his shit on his own. Maybe it’s the Texas in him, but Joel’s always had traditional values. He’s always been the provider, the protector—he’s always been the one in charge. But when you wrap your lips around him and ease his cock into your hot, wet mouth, he’s at your complete mercy.

“ Fuck,” he hisses, hands going to your hair. He tangles the silky strands between his fingers, and you hollow out our cheeks, creating a suction that has him groaning. He feels each pass of your lips down his spine, pressure forming low in his belly. “Just like that, pretty girl.”

You wrap your hand around the base and stroke the length you can’t fit into your mouth, and his grip in your hair tightens. Your nails are painted red—and the look of them wrapped around his cock is far better than he’d ever been able to imagine in his head. It’s so good that he doesn’t want to stop, he wants to cum just like this. He wants to expend himself at the back of your throat and watch his cum leak out of your mouth.

But Joel doesn’t get too far ahead of himself. There are other things, filthier things he wants to do to you than fill your mouth up. You let out a whiny groan as if sucking him off is somehow more pleasurable for you than it is for him. It’s the sexiest thing he’s ever seen, and the vibrations nearly send him over the edge, but Joel rips your head back to prolong this precious time with you.

Your eyes are glassy, makeup smeared, lips swollen. You give him a beaming smile and Joel huffs a breath. “Did I do a good job?”

“ Yes, baby,” he says. “You did so well. C’mere, stand up.” You do as told, even though your legs are wobbly, and Joel lifts your foot into his lap. He unbuckles the straps of your heel, takes it off and sets it aside. He presses a kiss to the inside of your thigh and repeats the action with the other one, and then proceeds to pull your panties down your legs. He helps you out of the pink lace, and he knows he shouldn’t but he just can’t help himself and shoves them between the couch cushions, where he hopes you’ll forget about them.

He presses his mouth to your hip bone, an open mouthed kiss that leaves goosebumps in its wake as he does the same to your other side. “That feels so good,” you tell him.

Joel keeps peppering wet kisses across your belly, below your navel, over your pubic bone. Your thighs are pressed together, and you’re shifting on your feet in anticipation, and Joel can see the shiny wetness coating your pussy. He reaches between your legs and so gently slides his middle finger teasingly over your slit. It comes away sticky and wet, and he can’t resist the urge to lick the digit clean. It’s heady and sweet, and he feels drunker than whiskey or tequila has ever made him. “Oh, sweetheart,” he says, forehead falling against your abdomen. “What are you doing to me?”

“It’s okay,” you tell him. “I want you so bad, Joel. Please touch me.” Your hands are in his hair, stroking the unruly curls and lightly pulling.

The word please in your mouth sounds so fucking cute, so needy and desperate. What is he supposed to do? How is he supposed to be a good man when you exist? He can’t, Joel knows. So long as you’re near—he’ll never be a good man. Only a bad one. Only a perverse one. He hooks his arm around your leg and lifts it over his shoulder, keeping his other hand wrapped around your waist for balance, and lets himself taste you fully, to drink from the source.

And Jesus Christ, Joel loses it. He laps at your pussy, swallowing you up. He cleans up the mess you made in his lap, relishing in the decadence. He could do this for hours, he thinks. Could swirl his tongue around your swollen clit, could suck it between his lips, and kiss it softly for the rest of his life. He breathes in slowly, taking your scent deep into his lungs, and wonders why he’d ever want to come up for air. Your moans are music to his ears.

He dares a glance up at you to watch your expression when he reaches beneath you and slips a finger easily into your dripping pussy.

Your head falls back, your mouth falls open, and Joel falls in love.

The noises you make are obscene as you grind against his face, but not nearly as much as the sounds he’s making from between your legs. He’s groaning with your clit in his mouth and you’re creating a puddle in his palm, and it’s so sloppy and disgusting and he fucking loves it.

Joel silently admits that you were right; that he loves your obscenities. He loves your secrets. He loves your defiance. He loves your depravity.

He loves that you’re such a fucking slut.

“Oh, god— Joel—!”

He pulls away because if you’re going to moan out his name again it’s going to be because of his cock. He stands abruptly, keeping one hand at the small of your back, and holds your jaw. With your face tilted up towards him, he smirks as he watches tears form in your eyes. “What’s wrong, baby?”

“Why did you stop?” Your voice is so whiny, so hopeless and frantic that it makes his cock twitch. “You were about to make me cum,” you say.

He kisses you hard, and you moan into his mouth, and Joel runs out of patience. He lifts you up and lays your back flat against the couch. He’s hovering over you, and his cock is just inches from the place it’s wept to be inside for so many years. Joel rolls it against you, gasping at the feel of your pussy on the underside of his cock. You’re so wet, and he doesn’t know how he’s supposed to last long enough for this to be good for you.

But he’s determined. “ Joel,” you beg breathlessly, bucking your hips to try and find just the right angle where he slips inside.

“Yeah, baby?” He tilts his head slightly, watching as your eyes flicker back and forth between his hips and his predatory grin.

“You’re being mean,” you say. “Stop teasing me. Just put it in, Joel, I need it so bad.”

He kisses your forehead. “S’that right?”

“Yes!”

It’s impossible, he thinks, to hold back his laugh. “You’re so fucking cute, baby,” he says. “Say please.”

“ Please! Please, please ple—!”

Joel lets out a ragged breath as he pushes into you. Finally, he thinks. Finally, finally, finally. “Fuck.”

It’s so much better than he ever imagined. He sinks in deep until your hips are flush, and even then he pushes your knee back to open you up and get impossibly deeper.

“Oh my god,” you whimper, and Joel kisses you to swallow up the beautiful sound.

You take him like you were made for his cock. And maybe you were, because Joel had never known it could be this fucking good. He knows it’ll never be this good again. “You’re taking it like such a good slut, baby,” he whispers into your ear, tongue sliding up your neck. He pulls his hips back and snaps them forward, the sudden change in force ripping a cry from your throat. “Shhh, it’s okay. You can take it.”

With your arms and legs wrapped around him, Joel fucks you slow. Real slow, real deep—he’s touching parts of you you didn’t even know existed. You feel so full and pressure coils around your spine.

“Feels good, doesn’t it?”

“Yes, yes yes— mmm—!”

He sets a steady pace, hitting that soft spot inside of you every time. He reaches between your bodies and swipes this thumb over your clit. “Say thank you, baby.”

You look right into his eyes, warm and dark and full of devotion. You say, “ Thank you, Joel,” and you suddenly remember the same memory he does of that first day.

He remembers how pretty you looked on your knees, and you remember how you spent that whole night in your bed touching yourself to him.

And now it’s happened, it’s finally happened, and his cock is buried deep inside of you and his thumb is pressing hard against your clit and before he realizes it, your pussy is squeezing him as you cum.

Tremors rock through your body, legs shaking and red painted fingernails clawing at his back. He keeps his same steady pace and says, “Give it to me, baby. Good fucking girl, being such a good little slut for me. That’s it. Give it to me. There you go.”

Even when your muscles loosen, you keep your limbs wound around him tight. Like even though you’ve finished and he’s seconds away from following you there, you still want him as close as possible. It makes him feel tender. “I want you to cum inside me,” you say, and Joel’s cock spasms in your tight pussy. “Cum in me, Joel, please —fill me up.”

He shouldn’t, he really fucking shouldn’t, but he already is, and stars blur his vision. Joel fights through the blindness though, and squeezes your cheeks in his hand. “Look at me,” he orders, and looking at your face makes him cum even harder. You take his thumb into your mouth, soft tongue circling it. And Joel bottoms out inside of you, has the best orgasm of his entire fucking life inside of a girl half his age, but cannot bring himself to regret a single second.

The weight of him over you is heavy but comforting. It’s perfect, and helps you catch your breath. Joel is panting, and you smell like vanilla and irish spring and cherry chapstick and when his eyes close, he wonders if he’s died and gone to heaven.

Your fingers are stroking his spine lazily when the fear creeps in. Do you regret it? Now that it’s out of your system, do you wish you’d never have done it? Never have taunted him, never had let him keep all those secrets, never have come over tonight? The Evil Dead DVD sits on the floor by the front door, abandoned.

There couldn’t have been much tequila in your mixed drink. You didn’t taste like alcohol at all. But still, you’d had some—do you feel like maybe he took advantage of you?

Joel is afraid to look at you. He’s afraid to open his mouth, to ask if you’re alright, to apologize, to beg for your forgiveness.

But then you ask him softly, “Is it okay if I sleep with you tonight?”

He hears the echo of those words, and wonders if you do, too. You wince as he finally sits up and pulls himself out of you. He knows he should say no, but he can’t. Instead, he asks, “Will you make pancakes in the morning?”

The sound of your girlish laughter greets him and calms his fears for now. “Anything you want.”

Joel stops at the bathroom on the way to his bed and cleans the sticky mess from between your legs. It’s then as he realizes how many unhinged decisions he’d made tonight. He doesn’t know if you’ve slept with other people without protection, doesn’t know if you’re on birth control, doesn’t know if you’d be willing to take a contraceptive pill in the morning if you’re not, doesn’t know anything. The distance, while easier, has taken so much of you from him. And the realization leaves Joel cold.

You’re so young, and he’s so much older than you…if the worst happened, would it even be the worst? Do you even want kids?

A new fantasy emerges in his brain. The first one since admitting to himself that it’s a little more than just an intrusive thought. You’re standing on the back porch with a beaming smile, hand over your eyes to block out the bright summer sun while he mows the lawn. You’re in a pretty pink sundress, and your belly is swollen with Joel’s baby, and his knees buckle as he leads you to his bedroom.

You climb in beside him, and he holds you under the blankets a little tighter than you hold him. Emotion chokes him. Joel swallows it down. But then you ask, “What’s wrong?”

“I want to keep you,” he confesses. “I want to keep you forever.”

For a moment, it’s quiet. He wonders if maybe you think he’s going to say more, but he doesn’t. He doesn’t know what else to say. He doesn’t have anything else to say.

“So do it,” you whisper.

“But I can’t.”

“You can,” you tell him with a sigh. “You can, Joel. That’s the real secret.”

The words reverberate through him. They clang around in his brain and leave him with something akin to elation. You kiss his jaw, and Joel thinks maybe you might be right. Maybe he will keep you.

But for tonight, having you here pressed against him with the promise of pancakes in the morning is enough.

[PART TWO]

[masterlist]

divider by @thecutestgrotto <3

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aninnai · 4 months ago

Text

if i could find the words to explain the masterpiece that this story is the world would be different

Minotaur!König x Ariadne!Reader Theseus is dead. You’re escorting the Minotaur, more beast than a man, out of the Labyrinth. The problem is, he seems to be more interested in what’s between your legs than in his mission of killing the notorious king of Crete… (12 k. Minotaur is not an actual hybrid in this fic. Reader is Hecate’s initiate. Part 1 here.) Tags/warnings: Shameless smut mdni, dubious consent, extremely possessive behaviour, abduction, first time (König & reader are both virgins), hugs & cuddles, washing blood off your monster boyfriend, awkward flirting, semi-rough sex, shifting power dynamics, sexist insults & slurs (the citizens of Crete do not approve of your choices), implied cannibalism, fluffy ending. Mythical AU.

The candle goes out before you reach the surface.

To someone else, it would be the end of the world: to you, it’s only a hindrance, a nuisance, mostly.

You’re not easily distressed. If you were, you wouldn’t be in the service of the greatest goddess of the Underworld. And you’re not mourning losing the sight of your warmly illuminated beast... You’re only worried about what he will do once the darkness descends. Whether he will forget about his vow, whether the baser instincts take over him once the darkness falls.

And darkness is not capable of making you lost: you can always follow the string in your hand. But without light, it’s difficult to predict the Bull’s moves: whether he decides to maim or fuck you against the wall, you can never tell. He hasn’t lived in the real world among people; he doesn’t know what’s right or wrong and what’s expected of him. Even the best of men can succumb to the demands of the flesh, so what power would a Bull Man have against his animal wants? No one ever taught him to respect the gods, let alone the maidens who serve them...

Then again, if a simple candle was the only thing that kept you alive, then what’s the point of lamenting the loss of it? Your life was already forfeit when you chose to descend here.

So you let it go: as always, the greatest lesson in life is to simply let go. Of control, of judgment, of fear, of hope.

He doesn’t say a thing when the light flickers, then fades. The candle goes out in silence, and you let it drop before the remaining wax burns your palm.

And it’s not the absence of light, but strength, that forces you on your knees before even an hour has passed. There’s still a long way to go, and the yarn is like a thin string of hope in your hand, but you’re too exhausted, too worn out, too hungry and too tired to go on.

The Bull Man doesn’t object to your suggestion to lay down and sleep for a while. He has walked behind you in silence the whole day. Or night… You can’t tell the difference; you lost count somewhere along the way down here. The air is stale and humid, and there’s no torch, not a single candle anywhere and even if there were, you wouldn’t do anything with them without a flint.

The horror is kept at bay only through your numerous exercises with the goddess who introduced you to darkness many, many moons ago. You were initiated during the dark Moon, the new Moon, the blood Moon, introduced to the mysteries of the maiden, mother and crone, to the secrets of both the living and the dead. You’re not afraid, but your body still warns you of danger: you just don’t know if it’s a memory from childhood or a reaction to the Bull, panting behind you – out of lust or exertion, you don’t even know. Someone who wasn’t a maiden probably could tell… At times, you curse the fact that there hasn’t been a single phallus inside you because men too possess knowledge. Taking a man into your bed would have initiated you to a different set of mysteries, but now, you are poking blind.

The Bull Man is an animal, you remind yourself. The longer you stay in his company, the more he starts to resemble a human, even if he is a man of few words. How he even remembers them is another mystery: you thought he was sent down here as a young boy. He speaks oddly but eloquently, a remnant of his noble descent, perhaps. Or perhaps he has listened to the people speaking in the Labyrinth, eavesdropped his victims an hour or two before killing them. Whatever the reason, you have to constantly tie your tongue because there’s simply no point in talking to a beast. The less you know about him and his past, the better.

You ready yourself for sleep, but the cursed cold of the tunnels keeps your body awake. Your flesh is human even if your mind is forged to withstand hunger, thirst and pain. Endurance against cold was never your strong suit, and you miss the heat of the sun, the warmth of it on your skin, even the ample light it gives. You, a lover of the moon, missing the heat of Apollo… It’s a joke, surely.

On the stone floor, it’s even colder, the rough, damp ground making your very bones ache. How on Hecate’s name has the beast survived this place?

“Bull Man,” you speak into the darkness, thick like an impenetrable wall and thin like a virgin’s veil.

“Maiden,” he echoes with a dark, low growl, slightly amused by the name you’ve selected for him.

“Are you cold?” You whisper.

Perhaps he doesn’t quite understand the question or why you asked it. It doesn’t matter: you have to swallow your pride and ask for his help if you’re going to survive this dark prison.

“I don’t get cold,” he finally responds.

“Good. I need your heat.”

The silence drags on, and you fear he has misunderstood you again, but then he speaks again, with the same slightly amused tone as before.

“Come take it.”

You’re not sure if you’ve completely lost your mind, crawling to him through the uneven floor of the Labyrinth. Who knows what he will do to you once he gets those arms of iron around you? You’re placing your maidenhood, your whole body at his mercy. And you’re not even sure if it’s a he, if this thing is human at all.

Human or animal, your hand meets the bull’s head on the way to him. He has taken it off, then... It’s not a part of him, just like you suspected. Maybe he is just a giant, daunting man, born from whatever forbidden desire Pasiphae had. Who knows if she only went to a foreign lover’s arms when her husband was at war? Who knows if King Minos has trouble getting his phallus up… These things happen: women get pregnant from their lovers, they do desperate things to pacify their husbands. And you don’t need a bull to get yourself an heir...

You feel his heat before you feel his skin: the Minotaur is verily blazing. He has gotten used to the cold, it seems, his body like a small bonfire in the clammy tunnel.

“Cold little female,” he comments when you snuggle towards him shyly, thoroughly aware of the uninviting chill of your body.

You settle next to him, every muscle in your body tight like a bowstring, your breaths shallow when he gives you a welcoming rumble. Goosebumps prickle across your skin and your throat goes dry, the thick swallow in the tunnel echoing around you like a thief.

Arms like iron go around you, and his body is taut, just like yours, but for a whole different reason entirely. He’s not afraid or nervous; he’s just… big. Pure muscle, his whole body thick, the stock and heat of him remind you of the sun. A miniature sun down here in these dark tunnels, but while you start to slowly soften in his arms, a different threat is already emerging. It doesn’t take long before his cock stiffens against you, and with the scarce clothing you both have, you can feel its every excited twitch.

Artemis… Protect me from this beast. Turn him into a dog if he tries to penetrate me. Let him rip my throat instead…

You’ve never prayed to the Virgin Goddess; you don’t know if she can even hear you from down here. But Hecate would only laugh if this Bull decided to breed you. No mercy would arrive from that direction: she would either send a disease of blisters upon the Minotaur for touching her chosen or then she would cackle like an old woman, thousand times raped.

“Thank you,” you whisper, hoping your kindness will distract him from what’s happening downstairs.

“My pleasure,” he grumbles, mimicking the words he probably heard as a child in his father’s great hall.

It sends a chill down your spine and butterflies into your heart to hear him speak like a polite man of court. And again, you think of asking him about his childhood... His mother, his father, the things he remembers from the surface. How he survived here without water, if there are underground springs here somewhere. Whether he eats humans like they say... If he ever embraced the dead women he killed.

“Can you do it again,” he rumbles against you, cutting you away from your grotesque thoughts.

“...Do what again?”

“Touch me… With your hand.”

His words are blunt now, his speech clumsy. But the way he says it is not an order. It’s an odd beg, more like. Laced with hope and wishes far away from greed. This Bull is never greedy, per se… He’s just lacking. Starved, for so many things that you fear there’s not enough time nor kindness to give him what he needs.

Your pulse flutters when you slowly lift your hand and caress the strong cords of muscle that make his neck. The rumbling returns; it turns into a low purr as the beast relaxes under your touch. Something softens inside you when he sighs from relief. His unbridled happiness tugs at your heart, trying to yank open something forbidden. It’s the softest violation you’ve ever felt: to be held by a giant killer having a roaring erection, while the said killer clearly enjoys your caress like it’s the touch of Aphrodite herself…

You even stroke his face. His jaw, unclenching under your touch; his cheek, covered with what you suppose is simply a wild, overgrown beard.

“Your hand,” he groans softly, “makes me sleepy and warm…”

The cold, uncaring goddess recedes. The burdens of past, present and future dissolve. Softness takes place in your heart; the iron locks give in like brittle brass. A smile plays on your lips as you continue to pet him softly, lulling you both to sleep with your voice.

“Then sleep, Bull of Crete...”

…

You wake up to his cock pressing against you.

Not against your stomach like when you went to sleep – that you could do with – but against your cunt, barely veiled by the thin linen of your dress.

The panic is soon wrestled down with reason: you tell yourself it’s just a cock. It’s just him. You’re simply in the Minotaur’s arms, and he’s sound asleep still; there’s no reason to buck and jerk and scream.

The darkness feels like a safe womb now, but with nothing to lock your gaze to, you have to take a moment to ground yourself into reality. And the first thing you ground into is a thick cockhead, pressing fast into your nether lips. He’s practically at the gates, and you’re lucky he’s still asleep.

It’s perhaps your fault this happened in the first place: you notice you’ve dragged your thigh over his hip; as if wanting him to fuck you in your sleep… You embrace him like Helen of Troy, and he holds you through his sleep like a man in love, perfectly content with napping on the cold ground with you.

“Mm…” The beast stirs, probably noticing how the female in his arms is tense as a rod. “You smell like you want to fuck…”

“No I don’t,” you hurry to whisper.

Gods curse this man’s ability to smell everything from miles away. Blood and humans and, apparently, a woman at her most receptive.

What if he can actually smell the wetness between your legs?

“We need to go,” you slowly remove your leg from on top of his waist, hoping it would go unnoticed that you were clutching him like a lover. You have no such luck: he grabs your thigh and draws it back, sets it safe and snug around his waist while adjusting his grip on you, now hugging you entirely like a lover would.

“I want to mate with you,” he says softly. “You want to mate too. Why go?”

He sounds so adorable when he’s still in the process of waking up to a new day. Drowsy and sweet, voice husky from sleep, body warm as can be, the hard-on between his legs happy and stiff.

“I thought you wanted to kill the king,” you try to point out.

“This is more important,” he gruffs. “Urgent.”

The cock pushes further up and against you, now spreading your folds under the dress, trying to penetrate into your heat. Your eyes go wide as thick need pools down to meet his greed. His body, his cock makes your head go dull for a moment; you feel like you’re not even capable of thinking actual thoughts.

“No, it’s not. We need to get up.”

You stiffen in his arms, push yourself away, and to your surprise, he actually lets you go. Reluctantly and with a hollow grunt, but he lets you go.

You rise with a wobble, and adjust your dress, your head spinning from his advances. You swear he becomes more man-like every day, every passing hour, even. Or is it just you who’s changing…?

The Bull Man is up before you get to ponder on that thought for too long. Your heart and head struggle to find their footing for a moment, your legs are so weak you feel like fainting. He catches you before you fall, the warm, thick arms closing around you with stout affection.

“You need more heat?” He asks softly.

You look up out of habit, even if you can't see his eyes, covered by the carcass again because his voice is muffled.

“No… I’m hungry.”

He’s silent for a moment, probably thinking what he could do to help the situation. You fear he will suggest you go back to visit his “pantry” and eat whatever horrible, half-rotten man-flesh he might have in store there, but he only holds you close to prevent you from sliding back to the ground.

“Hmm. No mice up here,” he ponders.

“You eat mice…?”

“Sometimes.”

You leave it at that: you don’t want to know what he’s had to do to sustain himself down here. You don’t even have a fire to cook the vermin, even if you would be ready to eat even those after another day or two without food.

“Not a long way up,” he says. “We will reach the sun soon. Then I’ll find you something to eat.”

“How do you know that…?”

“The air smells different.”

You sigh and search for the string, your lifeline to the outside world. You can’t wait to get out of here, and with both hurry and an odd dread, you hike for what seems like another whole day. Tension, hunger and thirst distort your thoughts, and you’re sure by now that the time flows differently here in the Underworld. With no small amount of pride, you feel accomplished to have survived this place so far. Even gods have had to do some tricks to escape the nether worlds: it is no small feat to charm the Minotaur and then walk out of here unharmed.

To your knowledge, you’re the only one who has ever escaped the Labyrinth. You haven’t even had time to think about what you will unleash with you… The demon that walks on your heels will take his revenge, not only on the king but on the city who threw him here.

Well. It’s their problem now. Minos and Pasiphae simply have to deal with their successor. The world will simply have to deal with the Underworld’s wrath.

And oh, how Hecate would laugh if she saw this monster prince of Crete escape his prison because of you – the feared Minotaur set free, only because he’s mesmerized by a woman. You suspect he would have his cock jumping for any girl, though. It's not because you're an exceptional sorceress that he follows you: it's your cunt he's after. And it shouldn’t make you feel jealous that he probably gets distracted the moment he sees a better offer walk by.

But it does. In your darkest wishes, you would keep the Bull Man all to yourself. Get him a leash, perhaps... Feed him with your own hands and let him grope you in the dark, watch him go wild from lust when you finally give him access to your cunt.

Many would hardly think you’re a virgin if they took a peek inside your head. But the things you’ve seen and done, the white bulls you’ve slaughtered for the dark Goddess, adorning them with cypress wreaths before slashing their throats open, would turn any woman bleak and twisted like this. For once, you would like to save the bull from slaughter.

When you see the first evidence of light, your body lets out a sigh it has been holding ever since you arrived here. Seeing the sun gives you more strength than any food or meal, and you pick up your pace while the Minotaur behind you begins to hesitate.

“It’s too bright,” he says before you’ve even walked out of the tunnel, now turning into a vast cave, the entrance to the Labyrinth.

You turn around to look and stop in your tracks when you see the fear in his eyes is acute. It’s mixed with wonder, the curiosity wrestling away doubt slowly but surely. He only needs a little nudge, a gentle pull, an enticing little smile and eyes that he can trust.

“You’ll get used to it soon,” you extend your hand.

He takes a step, then another, then another, until he reaches your outstretched fingers, and hand in hand you walk out of the Labyrinth and into the bright morning sun, burning over the kingdom of Crete.

He’s only a breath away from panicking, but covers it well. You wonder if it’s truly the light that’s too bright or if the feeling of being so exposed is what makes him so afraid. Clearly, the vast space opening up before him is intimidating.

There are grassy plains as far as the eye can see, little hills that dot the horizon, and skies so expansive and bright it must hurt his eyes. Goats are grazing under the sun, trees are bending in the wind, the rustling of leaves and the sound of birds calling him to look in all directions as he tries to make some sense of his surroundings.

“It’s alright,” you give his palm a soft squeeze, and the way he looks there under the sun, so big and powerful and able, and still so utterly lost, is giving you heartache you haven’t known since you were a child.

“There’s… so many colours,” he says, looking at the blue summer sky, the deep olive greens, the dirty whiteness of the goats, the flowers upon the grass. A butterfly, flying past, yellow like the citrus that people harvest from a few miles from here. A big blackbird with an orange beak, swooping down to catch a cricket, the slate grey pigeons flying so close to the sun that he has to shield his eyes even if they’re already safe and sheltered under the bull head.

Seeing his wonder and awe makes you look at the scenery so differently that it burns, it actually hurts: there’s so much beauty in the world, and you have always taken it for granted. Cursed the rain and the storms, cursed the droughts, cursed the gods for sending down another famine, when in truth, the world was filled with abundance, of colours, of life and joy… And all you’ve done is worship darkness. Now the darkness is out: it’s standing next to you, watching the view of your mundane everyday life like it’s nothing short of a miracle.

And when you turn back to look at him again, his eyes are upon you.

“What?” You ask, freshly caught in your moment of weakness.

“You are pretty,” he says, eyes wrinkling with delight under the mask.

Gods damn him…

He doesn’t know that human men don’t act like this, talk like this, or if they do, there’s usually something vile involved behind it all. He doesn’t know how to play games, he was never introduced to the lies and deceit of the world.

The Bull of Crete only looks at you with soft fondness in his stare – he doesn’t understand that he should cover that softness as well if he intends to win. Any woman could put a leash on him before another moon has passed, but he doesn’t seem to care. And it’s not even heat or hunger that makes you weak this time... It’s those eyes, looking at you with more and more warmth.

“Nonsense,” you huff without a voice, and turn towards the old road with an adoring bull on your heels.

The cold sigh of the underworld is quickly left behind you as you walk up the old carriage road, nearly grown in with weeds. The Labyrinth is located miles away from civilization, but the people living in these hills are used to the cold cave by now. They trust that the Minotaur will never escape and only turn away their heads and close the doors of their huts when the screaming, crying human sacrifices are delivered to the mouth of the cave. Little do they know that the monster is now looking at their little hills and goats with delight, not bloodlust.

For the Minotaur is fascinated with your world: he has to touch every leaf, every tree, every blade of grass, it seems. The goats are afraid of him, but one small nanny is bold enough to come and sniff his hand. Perhaps it remembers that beings walking on two feet give her apples sometimes, and the giant studies this small white animal with gentle curiosity, allows the goat to smell his hand, only chuckles when the goat gives out a little scoff when she notices there are no treats to be found there.

The vision is more adorable than when you’ve seen children play with kittens, and no matter what you do, you can’t turn your heart into ice anymore. You were taught that the Minotaur is a monster who enjoys torturing his victims, creatures far more helpless than him. Now you see him watching the she-goat with warm curiosity, rumbling softly inside his helm, far from the ravaging beast that approached you in that tunnel what seems like months ago.

You watch him with tender sadness as he marvels at the sky and remembers how he used to sit in the shade of an olive tree when he was a child. He goes to sit there now and examines how the sun filters through the massive branches of the tree as if trying to recall the memory.

He asks questions like: “How can you humans stand this heat?” or “Why is there only one road?” and listens to your answers carefully.

He says he can smell the sea, even if the salty water is miles and miles away, and gets curious about what’s behind that hill, or that one, what about that one… You wonder if he’s even interested in killing the king anymore and suggest that he could just forget about this cruel place and buy himself a sea voyage with that expensive sword. He could get rid of his helmet and ask if anyone needs a goat herd or an able-bodied man to help at construction sites or stables; he could get work from the docks any day, sail to Athens or some other big city, forge himself a new life.

But he doesn’t want to.

He says he has to avenge his mother who always cried when he was little.

More wretched tugs pull at your heart as you approach the city. The lovely summer’s day turns into a nightmare once people see who’s on his way to the heart of Crete.

You don’t understand their screams, not anymore, while only a few days ago you knew they preceded death. The Minotaur doesn’t kill anyone, mainly because he doesn’t have to. Everyone flees before his wake, people rush to their homes and bar the doors, even soldiers slip away to be with their loved ones or run to warn the king if they have any loyalty left.

You’re left to walk through the marketplace in settling dust and tense silence as the Bull Man explores the abundant samples of food on display. He has to have a taste of everything from all stands, but only after he has offered figs, olives, grain, grapes, grilled meat and fish to you first.

“Eat,” he says and shoves a handful of pine seeds your way. “You were hungry?”

“This is not the way to–” you ignore the food only through sheer willpower. “This is not right. People own these things. They sell them at the market, you need to pay for these.”

“Pay? With what?”

He looks at you for a moment, unable to recall what money is and how these things are supposed to work. He probably had his mother’s servants bring him everything he needed as a child anyway, so how could he know?

“They will take your hands for stealing,” you try to explain with softly building despair.

“I will take their heads before that.”

“The next king will hunt you down and punish you,” you rush after him, and when he won’t listen, you seize his hand and finally get him to halt. He looks down at the weak palm around his wrist, then raises his gaze to you.

“Bulls don’t have kings.”

Your attempts to tame him are futile. The things they’ve taught him to be are now being used as a way to escape responsibility, and while it’s none of your business, you refuse to let him believe that he is nothing more than an animal.

“You are not a bull,” you wail in frustration. “You’re a man.”

He hesitates, only for a moment; the gentle, loving gaze makes your legs weak.

“You’re the first to think that.”

Then he rips himself away from you, softly but sternly.

He doesn’t need directions to the palace: he knows he has to head for the most prominent building in the city to reach the king. The grandiose heart of Crete, white-chalked and beautiful under the burning midday sun is the pride of every citizen, even if it houses another monster.

You sigh as you watch him go: the Bull Man, the demon of the underworld, the one you thought would rape you bloody before you get to crawl out of the Labyrinth. The fact that he wanted to kill his father more than he wanted to be born again into a new life wasn’t a surprise, but that he chose to bloody his sword rather than his cock is somehow... insulting, almost.

What actually haunts you is how your insides coil and turn when you rush back to your temple. It’s not like you thought the Minotaur would take you with him. Board some trade ship bound for distant shores, and ravage you ever so softly in the belly of the creaking hull. It’s not like you dreamed of petting him to sleep while you two embark on a new life. But the way your heart twists and wails inside your chest makes it clear that losing him is even more painful than losing Theseus and the life he promised you.

You never even wanted Theseus; you only wanted him to take you away from here. His affection would have been the result of ample witchcraft at best.

He’s practically already dead, and your heart turns to stone far more slowly than you would prefer. It’s just your luck to first have the golden hero of Greece look down on you in disdain, and then witness even the Bull Man walk away from you like you never meant anything to him. Men killing each other is the oldest story in the world, and you want no part in it, but something in this beast has stirred you awake from a long, cold slumber. It’s infuriating that you can’t dispel a simple animal from your heart. Oldest story in the book, that one, too…

But oh, how you now yearn after some cruel, lowly, dirty beast… The Minotaur already owns you, and he never even had to plunge his sword inside you to prove that. Besides, you would’ve been perfectly willing had he decided to take you on the green grass, under the vast sky, while some noisy goats graze around you. You realize that that’s what you expected to happen, and when it didn’t, you’re left more than disappointed: you're left completely hollow. You always find out these things a little too late, it seems… The Bull is headed for the palace and will likely get killed after he slaughters his cruel father. There’s at least thirty spears in that building, and more will arrive when called.

You arrive at the temple, panting and with your body flushed and weak. The maidens at the entrance share a quick glance with each other before turning their fearful gazes back to you. They’re the youngest arrivals, not even initiates yet; one of them hardly even bleeds.

“The King is dead,” you announce without bothering to even greet them, and the girls huddle up together like they’re a bunch of slaves about to get slapped.

You realize you must look like an animal with your dirty robes, dishevelled hair and your wild, alive stare. No wonder they look like they’ve seen a ghost... You basically are one, coming back from the dead like this.

“What?”

A priestess arrives at the threshold like an image of Hecate herself, dressed in robes as black as the midnight sky, but you don’t shy away from her like you used to.

“Or he will be. Soon. The Minotaur is here.”

“How did you… How did it...”

You’ve never seen the priestess in disarray. She’s always composed, cold and distant, but seeing you like the wraith that you are, freshly escaped from the Labyrinth, spat back from the bowels of the earth like the dark gods didn’t even want you there, makes even the greatest of Hecate’s servants a little uneasy.

She gathers what’s left of her dignity and finds her most commanding voice. Sadly, it doesn’t have the power to shake the ground anymore.

“Where is Theseus of Athens?”

“Disemboweled… is my best guess,” you say in a listless voice, then turn your head toward the smell of fresh fruit.

Normally, you would walk these halls with dignity, but now, you simply barge in and grab the first piece of food you find. You ought to get whipped for your insolence, but no one dares to raise a hand against you. The maids and priestesses stare in shock as you eat and drink like a starved prisoner. You’re a living Hecate in certain aspects, your arrival the first toll of the bell of doom as the palace guards sound the alarm.

So…

The Minotaur has reached the king.

…

The priestesses deem it only logical that the King finally pays for his sins: the gods have been offended by the number of human sacrifices sent to the Labyrinth, and this is their way of exacting revenge. You were only an instrument of their will.

After a quick wash and some more food, you begin to feel like a human again. The maids bring you a new chiton, flowing and white: your old clothes are burned in a brazier as if that would help you forget.

And this might be the only place you don’t get blamed for unleashing a monster. You were at a crossroads with the Minotaur, and anyone would have done the same: try to talk him out of his killing spree, calm him down, entice him with a gift. No one expected that the beast could even speak, so your approach was unusual, perhaps, but it worked. Hecate guided you through the tunnels, even when the candle went out, she stilled the Bull’s loins until you reached the sunlight where the beast got distracted with other things. You leave out the Minotaur's attraction to birds, bees and butterflies because your story is unbelievable enough as it is.

But the Minotaur will be slain after he has done his deed: Minos is the one who should be punished, not the city of Crete. And it is only just to put down this beast, a mercy.

So when he appears between the pillars of temple, this time wholly covered in blood, people are bound to scream. Even the priestesses who are used to seeing blood, shriek like widows when the Minotaur steps inside the holy shrine of Hecate.

“Where is the maiden of the crossroads?”

He came back for you, after all…

The boom of his voice is familiar, and yet, you cower on the bench when you hear it. The Minotaur sounds like he’s an envoy of Hades himself, and while you’re not among those who scream and yell, it still sends shivers down your spine to hear him speak like that.

Or is it the excitement, a tiny flame of hope that makes you quiver like this?

“We all belong to the goddess,” someone peeps, the Minotaur now descending down the stairs.

The massive head turns, gaze like razor sweeping across the marbled shrine. You’re so far back that he can’t catch you, sitting behind many bodies and faces, and before you can force yourself to rise, the main priestess, the oldest, most crooked of the crones, steps forth to meet this beast.

“This is a House of Hecate,” she speaks. “No man is allowed to enter unless they are Death.”

The black carcass turns, but the priestess doesn’t waver. If anything, her spine turns into unbreakable metal before this man’s gaze.

“I am Death,” he says, far more gently than anyone would expect. Then he walks past the crone like she’s just a harmless elder. No one does a thing, because even the head of your temple is powerless now.

“She had a red string and a candle. Where is she?”

He grabs the first woman he sees, and you rise up before he decides it’s time to thrust his blade into someone to loosen the tongues of these women.

“Please,” you take a hesitant step towards your Bull. “I’m here... I’m the one you’re looking for.”

The Minotaur lets go of the frightened initiate the instant he sees you. She’s shoved aside with little interest, the blue eyes behind the corpse now solely fixed on you. The way they soften into hazy ice makes your knees weak – that’s the stare of someone who recognizes their loved one among a thick, dull crowd…

“Come with me,” he extends a hand when he reaches you, strong legs swallowing tiles like he’s in a hurry to get back to you. You open your mouth, close it, and look at his hand, the rough, enormous palm held out for you to place your own little hand in.

“You belong to me,” he says with great weight when you don’t speak. It should spark the ire of the goddess for him to dare to talk to you like this… But mostly, your body sings. It tells you to take a step and take his hand: to let him have you, once and for all.

“My place is here,” you utter, all power gone from your voice. All your dreams, all your fears are offering their hand to you with his, and the maidens, mothers and crones of this hall look upon your exchange with the Bull Man in stupefied silence.

“You were sent down to me,” he presses on. “You are mine now. You belong to me.”

Your body is singing, singing, singing.

It’s not a request… Or a proposal.

It’s a god, taking what’s his.

…

You swallow with nothing in your throat and look at the head priestess with helpless misery: she looks back with the eyes of a noxious Medusa, wholly dispassionate to the problems you brought upon yourself. And what could she even do? She’s unarmed against the claims of Hades: Death is now in love with you, and there’s nothing you or anyone else can do about it.

He doesn’t want to stay in the city, as enchanting as it is, saying that it stinks and that he’s tired of the screams. No one wants him here; he already knows that, and the task he was meant to do is done. He doesn’t seem to be much moved by it either, only asking you if there is a place where he can wash the blood off himself.

People become more bold when they see you walk out of the city. Not even the sight of a crimson demigod makes them watch their tongues. Insults and slurs follow you through the streets, shouts such as “Kingslayer!” and “Beast!” are accompanied with curses such as “You are an abomination!” and “Go back to your lair!”

No one treats him as their prince and savior, no one sees him as the man he truly is. And because hatred thickens in crowds, you get your share of the insults as well.

What kind of a woman would follow a beast like him? Have you sold your soul to the demons of the desert, or has Hades himself forced you to be with this monster? Are you behind the murder of their king?

“Must I remind you?” You turn on your heels, standing tall and proud with the posture of a queen. “According to the old laws, the one who slays the king is the next to rule.”

“You led him out of the Labyrinth, didn’t you?” the voices ask.

“Gave him your cunt, too,” they sneer.

“You’re worse than the bloody Gorgon,” they mock, but you have a thick skin: if anything, you take it as a compliment to be referred to the mighty slayers of men.

What cuts through your heart is the filth and hate they spit at him, the man who has known nothing but loath since he was born.

“Hecate’s whore… I should kill you first,” one soldier shouts with spit running down his chin.

The citizens of Crete would never hail the Minotaur as their king, but none can say the deed didn’t prove great strength. Some would even call it justice. He is the queen’s son, after all: he’s more royal than any of these dung-stinking peasants will ever be. He should never have been sent down to those tunnels in the first place.

Before you know it, the Minotaur swoops past you in haste, diving towards the screaming crowd with hunched shoulders and a fiery breath.

“Stop,” you say, and he halts immediately, gaze still directed to the one who called you a whore. The soldiers back away along with the peasants and tradesmen, these poor, humble Cretes who act like they never meant to be so mean.

“Let us go in peace,” you command, voice unwavering and stern. “Or I will curse you all. You and your families, down to the seventh son and seventh daughter.”

That manages to shut them up. The threat of a curse frightens these poor beasts even more than the enraged Minotaur breathing fire through his helm. No one wants rot and puke to follow them wherever they go; no one wants to doom their offspring with illness, death and sorrow. They disperse in all directions and only hiss and whisper as they go.

You spit on the ground as your last gift to these people, leaving the city of Crete with the ever-adoring Bull at your heels.

“You’re even prettier when you’re angry,” he says while walking next to you, voice thick with genuine passion and awe.

You roll your eyes: any man would cower before Hecate’s curse, but this one? This one only gets more horny.

“Perhaps you are part bull after all,” you retort dryly.

“It takes more than one spear to kill me,” he boasts, but you don’t need more proof of his prowess. Surely, people have tried to kill him in the Labyrinth, but he’s survived every single attempt on his life – for that alone, he should be a decorated hero.

The only thing that makes you annoyed, however, is this childish need to prove he could’ve taken the whole city by himself just because some man happened to call you a slut.

“Mother said I’m a monster instead of a man,” he says, completely unaware that your snap wasn't meant as a compliment. He says it like he’s partly proud of it, and you finally sigh and turn.

“Your mother was heartless. And wrong.”

The Minotaur only looks at you with a building passion that goes straight to your loins.

“But you’re not.”

“...What?”

“Heartless.”

You feel stripped naked before him, the way his eyes seem to burn away your poor dress. But the fact that he unearths your most guarded secret, just like that, is a catastrophe of a far wider scale.

You’re not sure who’s tied to whom anymore… Or if you’re tied to each other, the gods now laughing in their wine as they look down at you two: a fierce and bloodied giant following the maiden he stole like it’s you who took him and not the other way around.

You reach the roaring waters of a waterfall in silence, the night wrapping the lands inside a dark blue veil. Stars will be visible soon, and with the moon creeping up to the sky, you won’t be needing candles tonight. The silver mistress gives plenty of light for you to admire your beast, and compared to the thick darkness of the tunnels you emerged from this morning, it feels like a generous blessing.

You sit on the banks of the small, clear pond, utterly exquisite at nightfall. The sun’s heat has turned into a warm, caressing breeze, and you submerge your feet into the water, giving out a satisfied sigh as the cool pond embraces your travel worn feet. The Bull sinks to a crouch some distance away from you, curious about your obvious moment of pleasure.

“Did you meet her…? Your mother?” You ask from the cool water lapping at your feet – how can a simple man make you feel so restless and shy?

“Did you… kill her?”

“She cursed me,” he says, sullen and wholly unsurprised. Time and time again, you are shocked by the hatred his own kin shows him. How can a mother be so cruel?

“How could I kill my own maker?”

“I’m sorry,” you whisper. “For everything.”

You swallow before such unwavering love. The same man who cursed the gods yesterday honours the womb he came from so much that he won’t raise a hand against it, not even when his own mother spits curses at him. You don’t know if it’s his greatest strength or biggest weakness, but sometimes you wonder if he’s more human than humans, this beast.

“I’m not,” he retorts immediately. “The king is dead. Mother is safe. I have you... This is the best day of my life.”

You turn to look at him. Time and again, the lack of lies and deceit in this man catches you off guard. It’s more painful than any wound, to see how the Minotaur has no protective skin against the corrupted human nature, that he is human nature before it was defiled.

“Let’s get you cleaned up,” you falter.

The chiton pools around your ankles, and you wonder if the man even breathes anymore. You know your skin is glowing with the last rays of the setting sun, you’re aware that the water and moonlight play upon your skin and make you look like an illusion, powerful in its own way.

When have you ever faltered…? Back when you were a little girl, you reckon, the notion euphoric and eerie in your bones.

You rise up and undress before him nonchalantly, trying to ignore the fervid stare of your admirer. Unclasping the brooches holding up your white linen dress, you let it fall down and set you free, secretly reveling in the downright carnal stare now glued to your skin.

Ripe for plucking, you think while stepping out of the pile of cloth and into the thin evening air. His gaze feasts on you: the plump breasts no one ever loved, the vulnerable navel down below, the dark triangle between your legs, the secret power it holds.

Heat pools into your core as you watch him: everything in your body turns warm and soft when you take in the utter heftiness of him. The mean, swelling phallus between his legs, the near inhuman strength those shoulders and chest possess. Your body is the complete opposite of him, ethereal, almost, compared to the absolute brute strength before you.

His eyes linger there the longest until he rises too, stiff and dreamy, a beast entirely taken by a thrall. The loincloth is practically torn away, as if it’s only a nuisance he must get rid of immediately. His eyes never leave your shape while he bares himself, and the phallus, you notice, belongs to a human. It’s thick and wondrous, fully erect, adorned with dark curls and accompanied by a set of balls you’ve mainly seen on horses. Big, full and round but unlike animals, they’re covered in dark fur, almost black here in the evening light. Thick seed beads through the slit of his cock from simply seeing you, and the way his chest heaves makes it clear that this man is ready to mate as soon as he’s allowed to do so.

“You need to take off your helm,” you lift your chin, thoroughly aware of your power over him, even if it’s laughable, a miracle that he doesn’t fuck you on the spot like the animal he is. “You’re a man, not a bull.”

His eyes don’t betray any kind of hesitation. He doesn’t seem to be interested in whether he wears his mask or not. He just blinks as if he’s indeed under a spell and nods.

“If you say so.”

The broad muscles flex as he takes it off, and what is revealed to you from underneath the head is both a surprise and a disappointment. There’s not a monster under there, only a man, a stoic, boorish, shaggy male who’s in desperate need of a wash and a comb. He’s somewhat handsome under all that facial hair and knots, actually, not bad at all – if you like your men rugged and wild.

He lets the head drop to the ground with a thud as if it was never a part of him at all, and follows you into the pool like you’re his mother and he’s your cub about to get scrubbed clean.

He seems to dwarf you, even when half submerged in the pond, leaning back with a sigh not unlike yours. If you’re afraid, your body has a peculiar way of showing it: even in the clear, glossy water, you can feel yourself get wet. Never have you seen such strength, not in any man: in horror and awe, you realize he could be a descendant of Zeus himself. As if providing proof to these claims, he looks up to the sky, mesmerized by the myriad stars dotting the vast, unattainable blue.

Using this momentary distraction to your advantage, you reach to pluck a handful of moss from the bank. With this soft little sponge in your hand, you hope to make it clear that this is indeed a bath, not foreplay.

“They’re stars,” you say softly while slinking closer to him. “Have you ever seen them...?”

“Yes,” he rasps with his head lolled back, throat completely exposed. It always hurts your heart to see that he trusts you so fully. You are no threat to him – even if the gods changed the moss in your hand into a weapon of some sort, you wouldn’t pose any kind of challenge. And still, the way he allows you to creep towards him and wipe his rough hide with the makeshift sponge without so much as flinching is heartbreaking.

“I have forgotten…” his voice drifts off as he examines the night sky, eyes filled with distant, glass-like delight.

“Beautiful, aren’t they...?”

“Your world is pretty,” he brings his gaze back to earth and to you. “But you’re the loveliest thing I’ve seen so far.”

You almost freeze upon hearing that. His compliments always catch you off guard, but this time, something forbidden and long forgotten comes undone: a lost want, no, a need to hear such simple words of shallow praise.

“You do not scream... You do not run. Why?”

Your eyes are liquid, glass about to break as you set yourself on the task of scrubbing him clean. You refuse to get emotional in front of him: an initiate of the dark goddess, shedding tears when a horny man calls her pretty? What utter nonsense.

But then he grabs your wrist: not to seize back power, but to prevent you from escaping this fragile moment.

“You are different,” he agrees calmly, then releases you, but you reckon it’s mostly because he misses the soft rubs you were giving him.

“Perhaps I’m crazy,” you breathe while looking at the damp curls on his chest.

Yes… That’s the only explanation for this madness. It has to be.

“Is that why you took me?”

“I took you because you’re mine. I want you.”

“You can’t just take what you want,” you warn softly.

“Why not?” His head tilts a little to the side as he’s trying to make sense of you and the manners of your world. “Don’t you want to be mine?”

You lift your gaze and risk a look into his eyes, stripped from all facades as always. You even catch a passing wave of worry there: he had counted on you being as fascinated with him as he is with you. The hunger behind that want, the need to be something special to you, is a whole another issue that must wait until your head is more clear. Way more clear…

“Perhaps,” you confess.

“I have nothing to give you,” he shrugs, eyes looking slightly past you this time, out of shame or anxiety. It takes a while for you to understand he’s liking you to the goods at the market and thinks he’s expected to have money to be able to keep you.

“You don’t need to pay for me,” you smile, trying your best to disguise the soft amusement in your voice. His brows only furrow as he tries to calculate and think.

“I don’t understand the rules of this world,” he finally shakes his head.

“I’ll teach you.”

For a while, he only looks on with fascination how you rub his arms and belly, basically massaging him with the wet moss. His eyes drift closed when you scrub the back of his neck, the stout erection only getting thicker under the cool water. You’re careful with his legs, not because you’re afraid he’s ticklish but because you try to avoid touching the huge cock already jutting up from happiness. It gives a few excited bounces when you wash his inner thighs, hopeful to get its needs satiated soon.

“I can hunt for you,” he suggests. “Bring you food… Protect you.”

He’s visibly excited when figuring out a way to give you something in return. He wants to provide offerings for your company, your lore, and eventually, your cunt, too. You might be a virgin, but you’re not stupid: of course he wants the soft, wet prize between your legs. A pair of lovely tits to squeeze at night... Ears to groan hushed confessions into, thighs to nibble, bite and suck until you cry...

“What do you think?” He asks, breath heavy from the bliss you’re already granting him by simply giving him a bath. “I could give you my heat. Please you...”

“You know how to please women?”

“No. But you could teach me.”

The way he says it is not shy. Only tentative. A bear, walking on ice and hoping it would carry his weight. One wrong step and the ice will swallow him, spitting out his bones only in spring.

And then…

“Do you know how to fuck?”

The ice holds, mainly because you’re too shocked to even slap or ridicule this man. His eyes bore into you with such unbridled greed that you have trouble keeping your precious pride intact.

“Of course,” you hear yourself whisper like it would be an insult to your intellect if you didn’t.

“Teach me,” he says, ever more greedily.

“I…”

Your jaw is left open, but not a word comes out. A strong palm closes around your wrist again, this time to bring you flush against him. The water laps at your skin, a distant crow cackles somewhere. Your hand is brought to his phallus, but he doesn’t have to wrap your fingers around it: you do it all by yourself, breath locked in your throat as you feel how hard and blazing he is.

“You want my cock,” he says, mouth only an inch from yours. “Don’t you...?”

You wet your lips – a mistake, because his half-lidded gaze darts to your mouth the instant your pink tongue lashes out. You’re in a predicament, but on the other hand, what else did you expect, taking your clothes off in front of a touch-starved bull?

“I’d give it to you happily,” he insists. “No female ever wanted to spread her legs for me.”

Or a leash.

Your fingers tighten on their own, they mould around him. Like a bond…

“Really?” You breathe. “What fools they were...”

The cock gives a full throb inside your palm, exalted to be yours. But only a moment later, the dreaded Minotaur moves.

You find yourself under him before you can even gasp for air: the soaked, hot body of a giant now pinning you on the grass and crushing you under it with ease. The weight of your error is fully pressed against you: he was never tamed, and you were a fool to think you could put him in chains.

The raw scent of earth and musk fills your nostrils, making the stars above you spin. His cock is trapped between your bodies, giving another rich pulse against your thigh. Gods, if he were throbbing like that inside you…

“You make my skin burn,” he growls into your ear, the heat of his skin now unbearable, the coarse hair prickling your skin from neck to thigh. “My loins, ache…”

“Are you a witch?” He asks, and you finally allow yourself to breathe.

If he only knew… But hexes and charms are of no use for you now: the only thing you can do is moan, apparently, as he dives for your neck, planting barbarous kisses on your skin.

Down, down, down he goes, pure avarice driving him to feast on every part of you. You’re too weak to stop him when he searches for the source of your intoxicating scent. Discovering it between your thighs, he dives nose-first into your sex, meeting your core with a hungry grunt.

Your back arcs with pleasure, your nails sink into his back: a funny thing to do when he’s already as close as can be. The trail of crude kisses leads him to your breasts, and you try to keep your whimpers in control, but a gasp erupts when he drags a hot tongue across your nipple. Massive palms close around your tits while you squirm in his hold: he doesn’t seem to be driven by the need to please you; rather, he wishes to study you first, examine how your body reacts to his groping. He leaves your breasts aching and sore, every bite and suck managing to make you wetter and wetter, your cunt screaming for attention by now.

“Gods...” you wriggle on the soft earthen bed, not expecting him to take you with his mouth first.

He withdraws, only a little, but his voice is surprisingly soft.

“Do I hurt you...?”

“No… But this is not mating…”

“Even I know that much,” he says darkly, and grabs you by the waist, moves you around like a doll until you find yourself on your belly.

He looks at you from between your thighs, demonic and keen. The broad shoulders force your legs wide apart when he’s seated there, waist-deep in the water, with you hauled to the shore like a siren.

Not a moment is wasted as he pulls you back to him by the hips: you’re drawn to all fours, a hot streak of cum dragging on the inside of your thigh from the cock that meets your skin. He grabs and steadies it with an annoyed grunt, and the fat tip is shoved straight into your folds, your nether lips parted with brute force almost.

“Guide me.”

His voice is demanding, impatient as he drags the fat head up and down the entrance of your hole, coating his cock with your slick in the process. You wonder if it’s instinctual, if he knows that this is where he should poke and that it will hurt you less if he’s well-oiled. He’s about to rut you into oblivion the instant you tell him where to shove his cock, and the prospect only sends more sap flowing down your thigh.

“There…” you stutter when he finds it, the aching spot that’s leaking profusely. He pushes the head in, not by teasing but by bullying, almost forcing it inside from how tight and unreceptive you are.

“Tighter than my fist,” is his only comment, and it makes you shudder. “I will not last long…”

You wince from the burn, but the rest of it glides in like a dream, and suddenly you’re filled, to the capacity, one could say. He grunts just from the way your womanhood is hugging him, not sure what this foreign object inside you is – is it a good thing or a threat?

“Easy then,” you breathe a huff into the sweet night air, filled with fireflies and night birds who know nothing about the fucking you’re about to go through.

He doesn’t move – inside you, that is. Outside, he crawls forward until he moulds around you, heavy body enveloping you completely. The hairs on his thighs tickle the back of your legs, his chest scrapes your back just so as he demonstrates how you belong to him in every way. But when your cunt starts to squeeze him again, he swallows thickly.

“Does this feel good to you too…?”

You catch faint confusion and concern in his voice, astonished that such a soft, frail body like yours can take his cock just like that. Little does he know you’re still adjusting to his size, thanking all the gods that he doesn’t move yet.

“Yes,” you confess because it does feel good: his thickness inside you, stretching you both gently and violently, studying how it feels to be inside a loving, wet heat.

“Then I will fuck you every day,” his lips come to brush your ear. “Many times...”

You hear yourself whimper, more humble now than ever. No man would dare to take you on all fours, but here you are, like a bought bride about to get stuffed…

He withdraws a little, asks, “Like this?” when he returns with a rough, nasty thrust. The balls meet your mound, heavy on the tender nub you’ve flicked when you’re lonely, covering your mouth while you do it. Both your hands are planted on the ground now, your legs spread before this beast, cunt filled to the brim with his cock.

“Not so rough,” you warn, and he heeds your instructions to the letter until he’s moving in and out with a slow, delicious pace that allows you to feel every thick bump of him. Soaked now down to your thighs, the sounds of your mating is utterly sloppy and slick, and of course he’s curious.

“Are you always like this…?”

“Like… what,” you huff in between the slow, torturous thrusts.

“Soft,” he rasps. “Tight… Wet like rain.”

“No. It’s just when…”

“When you want to fuck?”

You whimper for an answer, mostly because he starts to slip from the agreed sluggish pace. His cock invades you with more urgency, chasing the eruption that must be generous from those thick balls that should belong to a horse.

“I knew it…” he says dreamily behind you. “Some women want to mate with bulls...”

He punctuates his newfound pride with a full, deep thrust, and you wince.

“You’re not a–”

“Keep telling yourself that, little maiden.”

He exhales a hot smile next to your ear, and you’re neck deep in love. Your mouth hangs open, your lids half closed and fluttering from the way he pounds into your poor, abused cunt. Heavy balls slap your swollen nub with careless abandon, making you squeeze his thickness every time he hits the end of you. His grunts become more animalistic with every thrust, and your cunt is a wild thing, leaking and weeping and throbbing until you fear there’s something wrong with you – no woman is supposed to be this needy for a beast…

I’m going to come… You realize in horror as the slick sounds of fucking overthrow even the coursing roar of the waterfall. The knowledge shoots your body full of dark, hot ink; it explodes inside your core like a liquid star, throbbing through your cunt currently being ploughed like you’re nothing but a needy, sloppy hole for him. You’re swimming in so much pleasure that it’s almost painful, the revelation some secret of the gods, no doubt.

He growls when you moan, heavy arm snaking its way around your middle to keep you in place for him. The purr is eager and low, the rumble erupts from his chest like a thick, loving volcano, a statement of how perfect you are. He nuzzles his nose into your neck and rubs his scent all over you while fucking you through it, the divine rapture that leaves your throat dry from moans.

He doesn’t need to be told what it means when you’re crying like that: he doesn’t need to be explained that his cock is giving you ample pleasure. It’s so desperate, how much he wants to both fuck and please you, just own you and fulfill you, that you start to shake, your frail body not capable of handling the orgasm he just gave you.

Your strength fails, and you find yourself on your elbows, cunt even more exposed to him now, the cock pistoning into you with a relentless pace. He’s like a titan upon you, taking pleasure from your quivering, weak frame and the tight wet hole that belongs to it. You’re still in rapture when he starts to sound like broken, wounded man.

“You were made for me,” he huffs. “You were made...for me…”

His voice evaporates along with your thin, adoring mewls, just before he fucks himself over the edge. You can feel the hot, thick spurts, filling you as he roars into your hair, balls pressed flush against your sex, thighs meeting yours in a moment frozen in time.

They can probably hear him all the way to the city, hear what a cunt like yours does to an invincible beast like him… But his cries are only met with silence; the night sky looks back with disinterest, the birds continue their songs when they notice it was only the roar of a mighty beast that filled the land. Before long, he’s groaning above you, using your hole more softly; loving it until the last drop is milked.

When he stops, his whole body is trembling from release, but you’re not given a moment of reprieve. He forces you to the ground with him on your back, the rough, thick body never leaving yours. Coarse beard chafes your neck, his body trapping you completely under him, he even opens his jaw to take your shoulder between his teeth and bites you while his cock is still pulsing fat inside you.

“I can’t get enough of you,” he pants into your ear, angry, almost.

“Good,” you breathe a smile, but he’s not satisfied.

“You couldn’t get enough of me too… I noticed.”

“You gave me pleasure,” you agree. “Lots of it.”

“That was a lot of seed… I haven’t spilled in days.”

He huffs into your ear, astonished and proud that he could do such a thing. You feel him shift to take a better look at you, fingers arrive to graze your temple as if to make sure you’re real, as if having his cock inside you wasn’t enough proof of that. They’re a little shaky, a little uncouth, but the touch is gentle enough, and sweet.

He's boasting again perhaps, you don’t know, but you give him a soft laugh, notice how he stops breathing momentarily when hearing the bright sound.

“I am filled to the brim with you, yes… It will take a while before I can take more.”

“...You have other holes in you,” he offers after a while, quite seriously, in fact.

“Get off me, you beast,” you huff and squirm to get out from under him, but there’s a luscious grin on your face, a smile that tells him you would more than approve of his obscene ideas later.

“This feels good,” he murmurs into your hair. “This feels right...”

He allows you to leave from under him, only whines when his cock gets exiled from your cunt. He misses the wet heat like a newborn child misses the womb, but you need to recover from the recent invasion. Seed gushes out from your hole, making a mess on the ground as he pulls you against him, wanting to cuddle you next.

You wonder if he even knows what cuddling means as you lie there with a sticky mess between your legs and the heat of an entire sun on your cheeks. You smile into the coarse, sweaty body hair tickling your nose, deciding it doesn’t matter whether he knows or not: the most important thing is that he wants to hold you like this.

“Yes,” you smile. “This feels right…”

Something blooms in your chest. An odd flower, persistent and sweet.

The stars above are cold but motherly as they look down on you two: born again into a world that doesn’t want either of you. The only things that accept you now are flowers, birds, the wind and the rain, bees and salty sea, but that’s aplenty. That’s more than the whole of Crete could ever give you.

“Are you thinking about your hero,” he asks above you.

“What? No…”

“Good,” he rasps, so softly now that you start to fear he’s about to cry.

You are more than capable of lying, but Theseus hasn’t crossed your mind in hours: the last time it did, the memory was received with loath and disdain. Thinking about Theseus while you’re draped all over your Bull, his seed flowing out of your womb... What a ridiculous idea.

The reason for his hardly disguised anger is laid out plain before you: he's just jealous like any other man. Somehow, it makes you feel even more glowy inside.You’re my hero, you want to say, but have no courage to spill out the words. He was balls deep inside you mere moments ago, but telling him this intimate truth seems to be too much.

It never occurred to him, then, that you would enjoy copulating with him. He fucked you with the impression that you needed thoughts of another man to make you wet… That perhaps with the help of the image of Theseus in your mind, you were able to come with his cock inside you.

“My Bull,” you whisper. “Tell me your name. You must have a name…?”

His breath stops only for a moment, the heart in his chest gives an arduous beat before he answers.

“Asterion.”

Starry one…

Of course.

All monsters have names, usually the opposite of what they’re claimed to be. His birth is in heaven, in the stars; he belongs to the company of heroes and gods.

“Asterion,” you whisper it out into the night air while the animal an man both find their new home in your arms. “Your birth is written in the stars. Did you even know…?”

“Does that make me a hero?” He snorts, more old wounds torn open right before your eyes.

You wriggle yourself out of his hold, but he avoids your stare. You lift a hand to bring those beautiful Olympian eyes back to you.

“It makes you immortal.”

Perhaps you should’ve known he would be enticed with an apple instead of tethers and deals. Or with a palm, held out with no intent to strike…

It’s lovely, how he blinks every time he’s confused. You’ve yet to see him shy, but if he ever is, this might be the moment… You even catch him swallowing under that wild facial hair, an awkward blob right after that blink when his birthright is acknowledged.

But even more dumbfounded he becomes when he realizes you’re truly and veritably admiring him. When you whisper it to him – you’re my hero – and watch something shatter in him that was supposed to wrench itself free, that’s when he’s truly granted divinity.

Perhaps it was all about becoming animal again, allowing the other to have a sniff. Baring your throat and embracing the instinct to trust. Marrying your wild soul… The deepest magic of all.

#könig x reader #könig cod #könig x you #konig x reader #könig smut #best fics

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