#ghost cod x reader

[silkendress]

A Space Barely Lived In

-ˋˏ➛ Call of Duty

-ˋˏ➛ Suggestive

-ˋˏ➛ Simon "Ghost" Riley/Reader

-ˋˏ➛ Long Distance Relationship, Civilian Reader, Domestic Fluff

-ˋˏ➛ 3k Words

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After almost a year of long distance, you finally meet your boyfriend in person.

As planned, you will be spending the remainder of your visit in his home, of which you’ve never seen before.

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Read on AO3

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This story was a suggestion i received on my tumblr! (My first one, actually!) The tone of the story wasn’t specified so i just went with whatever came to mind. Hopefully i did alright!

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You were alight with excited nerves.

It was your first time flying, and it would also be your first time seeing the man you loved face to face.

Of course, you exchanged pictures—multiple, even—but you were always miles upon miles away from each other. The only points of contact being the screens on your devices.

Video calls couldn’t compare to seeing him, and touching him, in the flesh.

Your mind was filled with thoughts of him; both excited and anxious. Such thoughts only doubled when you finally landed at the airport, your eyes sharpened to any male silhouette which vaguely resembled your Simon.

You walk hesitantly, yet swiftly, your luggage rolls behind you in a single hand, your heartbeat pounds frantically.

It is then you hear it, an all too familiar gruff voice calling your name over the chatter and commotion of people coming and going.

Your feet carried you rapidly to the source of the sound, breaking out into a jog when you saw a towering figure dressed in all black with blond hair.

His strides are long and determined, and before you realize it he has pulled you into his arms.

He squeezes you so tight it’s almost uncomfortable. You only nuzzle further into him. He could hug you until you were sore for all you cared.

Simon was far taller than you were expecting, and just as solid and broad as you observed through your phone.

Big and safe.

He lowers his head, his nose nudging against your hair. You feel each heavy, steadying puff of breath leave his nostrils—it’s the only discernible indication of his elation.

You, however, were more inclined to wear your heart on your sleeve. Joyful tears were already rolling down your cheeks, your hands clutched at him.

It is only when you sniffle that Simon seemingly sobers, he pulls away only just enough to see your face.

He tucks his head down, his chin almost tapping against his chest. You blink rapidly, your lashes fluttering in an attempt to get the blurriness out of your eyes.

A single, broad palm comes up to cup your damp cheek, his eyes soft and drooping. You realize just how far your neck is straining just to meet his umber eyes.

He wipes a tear away with his thumb, then leans down to press a his lips against yours; chaste and no less sweeter for it. Then he pulls away only just enough, your foreheads still touching together.

You smile at him, still sniffling.

Simon’s lip twitches upward, a muted smile of his own.

Simon takes your luggage, you only brought one suitcase and a duffel bag, but he still takes both from you despite your insistence that you could hold at least one for him. He silences you with a single stern, yet soft, look.

He opens the car door for you with his free hand, once you get in he pushes it shut and loads your things into the trunk of his car.

Simon opens the driver’s side door and slams it behind him with a tad more force than he did yours—not recklessly, or even consciously, but in a way that suggested he was being more careful with you than he typically was. You beam at him. He simply stares at you with a flicker of warmth in his eyes.

“Ya cold?” He doesn’t wait for your answer, he’s already turning the heat on in the car.

The drive had been comfortably silent thus far. Simon had his large hand resting over yours while his other was on the steering wheel. It wasn’t as awkward as you were fearing to share a physical space with him, you think the frequent video calls helped a little with that.

“Want to get somethin’ to eat?”

You feel pleasant butterflies in your stomach from how he was already mildly doting on you.

“Maybe after I get settled in?” You honestly just wanted to change into pajamas and bury yourself in blankets with Simon as soon as possible.

Simon nods and gives your hand a single, affectionate squeeze.

The building he parked in front of was plain, but not wholly unwelcoming.

You unbuckled your seatbelt the same time he did. “I’ll get it.” He mumbled. You were momentarily confused until he came around to your side and opened the door for you.

You feel your chest tighten with affection, and trail behind him as he opens the trunk to retrieve your luggage.

Once he slings the bag over his shoulder he slams the trunk shut and nods his head in the direction of the building, wordlessly beckoning you to follow.

You follow him up the short steps, hovering behind him momentarily as he fishes his keys from his pocket and jams it into the lock, twisting it and opening the door.

He holds the door open with his thick arm, staring down at you expectantly.

You thought you got used to the intensity of his stare by now, but it was like you had to reacquaint yourself with it all over again in person. You give him a sheepish smile and shuffle inside. Simon follows in behind you.

The first thing you do is take off your shoes, holding them awkwardly in your hand for a moment while you think of where to put them. Simon lets your duffel bag slide off his arm and land on the hardwood floor temporarily while he unlaces his boots.

“Next to the others is fine.” Simon tells you in a low mumble, seemingly catching your conundrum. You turn around in the narrow hallway and see that Simon had his shoes—of which there weren’t many—stacked up in a little two tier storage cabinet by the door. He had already put his boots away.

Simon picks your bag back up and tugs your suitcase along with two of his fingers hooked into the handle. You find yourself unable to look away from the casual way he ambles out the entryway, a quiet confidence in everything he did.

You decide to place your shoes on the upper rack and follow suit behind him.

Your eyes squint to adjust to the dim lighting inside—there were windows but the curtains were shut, save for one in the left-hand side of the room that you have yet to see.

You blink once, then again.

The entire space was barren, devoid of any personal touches or decoration. It was utilitarian—almost brutally so.

You think this was the living room because there was a single seat sofa situated in front of a television.

Your eyes flick around the space, searching for any personal possessions you’d expect in a home. Photographs of family or friends, little baubles or knickknacks that told you about the person who resided there. The walls were just as bare; no art or posters hung up.

Just grey, monotone.

“Alright?”

You flinch, looking to the source of the sound to see Simon leaning against one of the walls connecting to an adjacent hallway, his arms crossed. He had taken off his jacket at some point, leaving his well muscled arms on display—as well as his tattoos. Your bag and suitcase were gone, you assume he put them away. You’d have to ask him where.

You feel your face grow hot with embarrassment—you were so preoccupied with examining his living space that you didn’t realize you stopped in your tracks in the living room.

He cocks his head at you when you don’t immediately answer, and eases himself off the wall to come up to you.

“Homesick already?” He catches your chin in his thumb forefinger, gently tilting you up to look at him. Your heart beats faster from the tender gesture.

‘No, far from it,’ you think of telling him as much; but the words die in your throat with the realization that you’d have to admit you were scrutinizing his living space.

His home wasn’t even bad, per se. But it was oddly…Cold. Distant. The fact that he only had a single seat sofa implied he barely, if ever, got any visitors.

You never pried about Simon’s family or youth. The few times the topic came up he would respectfully change the subject, and you never pressed him to talk about something that clearly made him tense. You weren’t sheltered; you knew not everyone had happy or healthy families. You left it at that.

You didn’t want to outright lie to him, so you end up saying; “My place is cluttered compared to yours.”

Simon’s brows twitch up imperceptibly, his eyes still held that muted look he naturally had, however.

“Not fond of the place?” He cocks his head at you, a mild curiosity in his tone.

You consider your response. Simon had thick skin, so offending him wasn’t something you were worried about. However, you still didn’t want to come off as rude.

“Wherever you are, I’m happy.”

Simon’s eyes go soft, it’s slight but it’s there. Your heart melts.

The gentleness is gone by the next blink, replaced by his usual stoicism. “So you think it’s shit.” He suddenly remarks, voice flat.

You sputter out a laugh, Simon scoffs and leans down to kiss the top of your head.

You feel warmth pool in your belly. It turns into an inferno when Simon shifts his hand to give your waist a gentle squeeze before pulling away.

You have to roll your shoulder to shake off the pleasant shudder that rolls up your spine from the brief contact.

You wonder if Simon notices, but before you can ponder that you hear a phone ringing. Simon looks mildly annoyed, but reaches into the pocket of his jeans to retrieve his phone anyway. His eyes only thin out further when he sees the caller ID.

Your curiosity gets the better of you. “Who is it?”

“Work.”

‘Ah. Work.’

You knew Simon was in the military, of course. You didn’t know much else about it. Not for lack of trying—it was just that Simon always shut the topic down whenever you made an attempt to. You acquiesced and accepted the fact that some things were just beyond what you or any average not-in-the-military person should know.

“Gotta take this.” He murmurs, stepping around you and going out the front door, but not before sliding a pair of slippers on his feet.

A realization hits you. Just before the door shuts behind him, you call out, “Where’s the bathroom?”

“First door on your right, in the hall.” He hollers over his shoulder.

His bathroom was both oddly empty yet strangely cluttered. Perhaps due to how cramped the space was.

It was clean, at least. You didn’t see any grime or stray hair strands in the sink from where Simon would shave. His toothbrush is in a single glass cup, a plastic cover over it. There’s a tube of toothpaste laying beside the faucet controls. A large bottle of almost empty mouthwash on the opposite side.

There was only a single door, mirrored medicine cabinet over said sink.

You stare at your own reflection for a moment, briefly wondering what was inside before shaking the thought out of your head.

You were staying at his home, sure, but that didn’t give you license to pilfer around his things.

Still, you can’t help but think about how a man as large as Simon going about his daily routine in here. The space was small for you, it was probably nigh claustrophobic for Simon.

You’re sure he made enough money from his job. Maybe he just found his current living situation to be the most convenient, maybe some part of this minimalistic space was comfortable to him, familiar, perhaps.

You’re not sure. It felt beyond rude to ask, so you won’t.

There’s a bathtub with a shower attachment to your right, the shower curtain is stark white—clean. New. You wonder if he replaced them in anticipation of your arrival. The thought is an endearing one, it makes a smile twitch at your lips.

The toilet was thankfully just as clean. Then again, you weren’t sure why you were worried about his cleanliness—or potential lack thereof—to begin with. If there was one thing you deduced about him through your various calls and texts was that he was rigid with routine and remarkably strict with himself. It made sense that it would apply to hygiene as well.

You wash your hands and dry them off with the towel hanging on the door, hung up by a command strip.

When you exit you find the house is extraordinarily still. You note that the slippers haven’t been returned to their rightful place by the front door, which meant Simon was still on the phone.

Directly in front of you, across the hall, was another door that was slightly ajar. You might as well search for your luggage, now.

You pad over to the door, tentatively pushing it open and peaking your head inside.

Simon’s bedroom is just as plain as the rest of his home.

The bed is nice, with a thick and soft blanket neatly tucked and a single fluffy pillow at the head. ‘A large bed for a large man,’ you muse. The thought of sleeping arrangements cause your face to grow warm. It was more than big enough for you to rest comfortably with him on it.

You step into the room slowly. There wasn’t much to examine. You’ve seen slivers of it from video calls before. His bedroom was far larger than the bathroom but substantially more empty in comparison. There is a single medium sized window over the foot of the bed, the curtain is open so you don’t have to strain your eyes at all to see.

To your left is a closet in the wall with a plain white sliding door. You don’t see your luggage in plain sight, so you assume he placed it in there.

You open it carefully, for some reason you didn’t want to cause too much of a disturbance in his room, despite the fact you would be sleeping in here tonight. Maybe it was because some part of you wanted to observe his space before your presence got all mingled in it.

Once you open it, you see a bunch of jackets, coats, and hoodies hanging up. On top of the hangers was a rack, you saw a an old, once white shoebox shoved up there as well as some other miscellany you couldn’t make out. The shoebox catches your eye. You squint, standing on the tips of your toes to get a better look, you make something out on the side of it, scribbled in faded, black marker.

You think you see the letter ‘R.’ You wonder what’s in it, but get the feeling it’s not for you to see.

You rip your attention away to look at the floor, it is there, tucked in the corner of the closet, where you find your luggage.

“Lookin’ around?”

You yelp and practically jump out of your skin.

You had no idea how a man of his stature could be so quiet, you didn’t even hear him come in.

“Looking for my things.” You affirm, gesturing vaguely to your duffel bag still sitting in the corner with a hand.

Simon hums in acknowledgment, a low, deep sound. He goes over to his bed to sit down on it, the mattress dipping slightly with his weight. He leans forward and rests his elbows on his knees.

You turn back around to kneel down and unzip the bag, searching for your pajamas. You can almost feel Simon’s eyes on you.

When you stand with your clothes crumpled in a heap in your arms, Simon tilts his head at you, his eyes watching you with severe precision.

“You can change here, if you want.”

You learned that Simon could be rather blunt at times, and typically wasn’t one to hesitate with making his thoughts known. Still, your body goes hot regardless.

While Simon has sent you photos of himself shirtless—including one instance where upon asking he sent you a photo of himself in the shower, with his intimate lower half purposefully out the frame—You’ve never sent any such pictures in return. You knew he was interested, considering he has asked you before, but you always politely declined and he never pressured you.

You knew that he was simply telling you that he wouldn’t mind it if you changed in front of him, not that he expected you to.

“I’ll keep that in mind.” You manage to reply. Simon eyes you curiously, the implication of your response had his interest piqued.

You scamper out of his bedroom to get changed in the bathroom, feeling pleasant goosebumps go up your back from the intensity of his gaze.

After you’re done, you return to his room, your face awash with heat the moment you enter.

Simon is in the middle of tugging a different, less form-fitting shirt over his head. He has changed out of his denim jeans and into loose sweatpants instead. You catch a glimpse of golden hair starting from under his navel and disappearing under the waistband of his sweats.

When he catches you in his peripheral, he tips his chin over his shoulder to his phone lying on the bed.

“We’re gettin’ takeaway. Get what you want.” Is all he says.

You nod wordlessly, not trusting your voice at the moment.

After selecting what you wanted Simon placed the order. It wouldn’t be arriving for a few minutes. You were quick to crawl under his blankets afterwards, resulting in Simon shooting you a somewhat amused look.

Your suspicions of his bed were correct—it was very comfortable. Even more so than your bed back at home, you breathe out contentedly, sinking deeper into the covers.

“Tired?” He asks.

Instead of answering, you tell him; “Come cuddle with me.”

It was one of the things you told Simon that you were most excited to do once you finally met him in person. Recognition flashes immediately in his eyes.

He ambles over and lifts up the blankets to crawl in with you.

You shudder a little when his limbs brush over yours, his fingers and toes had yet to warm up from being outside on the phone earlier.

You nestle into him anyway.

His arms still momentarily from your shiver, but then wrap tightly around you once you nuzzle in his chest. He pulls you close and shifts to roll on his back, easily positioning you to lay your head on his chest.

You allow your eyelids to droop, comforted by the muffled sound of his heart beating a steady rhythm in his chest.

Simon’s hand glides up your shoulder to mess with your hair idly, affectionate. His other lays relaxed over his stomach. The callouses on his hand had brushed over the bare skin of your arm earlier, leaving goosebumps in its wake.

His arms are thick and muscular, his torso firm and trained from persistent physical exertion. Yet despite that, he felt comfortable to lay on. He had a healthy layer of body fat on top, and while he was far from soft, he was warm and nice as a human pillow.

You liked how small you felt with him.

“What’re you smilin’ about?” Simon remarks. It is only then you realize your lips weretugged up a little.

You answer honestly. “You.”

Simon hums, gruff and thoughtful.

“What about?”

You think of how best to answer that. “You’re nice to lay on.”

Simon huffs a breath through his nostrils, his way of scoffing. You don’t need to look at him to know he rolled his eyes—albeit in good nature.

The room falls into comfortable silence, your eyes don’t fully shut but they are close to it. Simon’s thick fingers keep messing with your hair; it’s soothing, gentle. His touch was featherlight, which was remarkable considering how large his hand—and by proxy his fingers—were.

With the way you were angled you could see the overcast sky out the window from the foot of the bed. It only served to make the space even more monochromatic. You wondered how his home would look during a bright, sunny day with all the windows open.

You also think of what decorations you would put up around the place.

“A coffee table would be nice.” You suddenly say.

“Context, love.” Simon reminds you flatly. At this point he was used to your habit of saying things that in your head made perfect sense, but was borderline incomprehensible once spoken aloud.

You shift around a little on his chest to get more comfortable, Simon stops fiddling with your hair to hold you still. “In your living room, it would be nice to have one.” You elaborate.

“Oh, and a full-length sofa, too. And a bookshelf.”

“Fancy yourself an interior decorator now?” Simon deadpans.

You snicker. “Maybe.”

A moment ticks by, Simon returns to messing with your hair. “Why the bookshelf?” He eventually asks.

“For all of my books.” You reply absentmindedly.

A beat passes. 

“Plannin’ on moving in?” Simon questions flatly, a small twinge of dry wit in his tone.

Your face burns hot. You didn’t stop to think about the implication in your earlier answer.

You think of his empty canvas of a home. You really think.

You imagine a nice, big sofa in the living room. A bookshelf to your collection of fantasy novels in, photographs of you and Simon could decorate the walls and coffee table. Souvenirs, too. You’d have your toothbrush next to his and his 2-in-1 body wash would be replaced by your floral scented soaps and shampoos.

You imagine hanging up dainty little lights for the Christmas time, a seasonal wreath on the front door. You think of plastic pumpkins with those fake LED candles in them for Halloween. You think of waking up in Simon’s arms becoming your new normal. You realize, then, that you’d want to be here, wherever Simon was—barren or not.

“Maybe.”

You feel it against your cheek, the small hitch in his breath.

He recovers instantly. He tilts his head so he can narrow his eyes down at you. “You’re takin’ the piss.”

“Not at all.” You admit.

For a moment, Simon says nothing. Then he murmurs;

“Next time, book a one-way.”

He kisses your forehead and cradles you further into his chest with his hand.

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It was nice to just write something really quickly without thinking too hard about it! I wrote this in about two sittings ;; and i think it shows, but i had fun.

While writing this i got oddly attached to the long-distance-relationship concept, i may add on to this or make something else in a similar vein that’s more fleshed out at some point if inspiration strikes!

Thank you so much for reading and i hope you enjoyed! I deeply appreciate any and all likes or reblogs!

[7s3ven]

tatted! simon motorcycle shenanigans

TATTED UP! Simon Riley who lets you turn him into a colouring book. He doesn’t care how you colour his tattoos, he just wants to see the scrunched up look of concentration on your cute face.

“What colour do you want?” You murmur as you glance at your numerous eyeshadow palettes. Simon wants to say black or grey but he sees the way you eye the pink palette for a moment too long.

“… Pink.” He finally answers, his gaze focused solely on your bright smile.

You find joy in colouring his arm with various shades of pink and purple as he watches. “Look, so cute.” You murmur, eliciting a low laugh from Simon.

“Yeah.” His voice rumbles, “You wanna colour the rest in?”

BONUS

“Aye, LT, you got your tattoo redone or what?” Jonny can barely hold back his laughter as he looks at Simon’s arm. The previously edgy tattoos were now adorned with feminine colours and glitter.

“No. Just making the misses happy.” Simon doesn’t really care for his teammates’ reactions because the memory of your smile is enough to block out Jonny’s cackles.

[succubusvalentine]

Simon Riley who doesn't talk you through it. He talks her through it. CW : dirty talk, rough sex, sloppy/dirty sex.

The first time you slept with Simon, you loved how he talked dirty to you.

The second time you slept with Simon, you realised he wasn't talking to you. No, he was speaking to her.

"There she is" Simon groaned as he bottomed out inside you. You felt his thumbs pulling your sticky folds apart; a shiver running down your spine at the cold air hitting your clit.

"Y'taking me so good, huh?" Simon growled at your cunt, starting to thrust his hips forward over and over at a toe curling pace. "Oh poor baby. All hard and swollen from how good 'm making y'feel?" he grinned wolfishly, his thumb starting to lazily circle your clit.

"S-Si plea-se!" you whined. Your begging making Simon chuckle.

"Shhh, lovie. 'M trynna talk to her" Simon groaned; his thrusts only getting harder.

You whined and squirmed as Simon practically ignored you in favour of your cunt. But he occasionally leant down to lick some sweat from between your tits. Only making your brain all the more mushy.

"So wet, hm? What a pretty little cunny for me" Simon grunted. Grinning when he feels you clench around him. "she loves it when I compliment her, love" Simon growled, pinching your clit to get your eyes to focus back on him.

"Think she wants to come for me baby, but she's so wet and full she can't beg f'it. Why don't you beg for her? Beg to let your wet little cunny come" Simon demanded. The tip of his cock grazing that perfect spot inside you. Making you scream.

"Please! Please please please, Si! Let her come! P-Please let my cunny come! She's been good!" you sob in pleasure, your legs trembling on Simon's shoulders.

"alright, baby" Simon chuckled. "Go on. Come for me. Let her gush all over my cock" he growled. And you did. You came harder than you ever have.

Simon growled and buried himself as deep as he could while he came. And you whined when he pulled out.

"was such a good girl for me" Simon told your cunt. Pressing a kiss to your sensitive, wet clit. chuckling at how your thighs twitched from the overstimulation.

⛧°. ⋆𓌹♰𓌺⋆. °⛧

[skyrigel]

“Does that feel good…huh ?”

Simon pulled you back by your neck, his breath piping down your spine in blazing hot rings. “I bet it does.” He growled maniacally, chuckling as you whimpered against his chokehold.

He pulled out his cock just until it breached against your used wasted hole before slamming back in all over, arching your back further as your orgasm came in waves — there was no point holding back as your thighs shaked, still the constant pouncing didn't stop, the back of your thigh met his hips in every jiff, while hot cum leaked down and coaxed his big cock and he groaned at the heat of your pussy, me, only letting him rattle your insides while your toes curled from overstimulation.

“Did Daddy say you could cum, huh ?” Simon didn't wait for an answer, and as came his hand pinching hard on your bud, and after were two consecutive hard spanks that stirred another heated arousal, “ya’ being bratty today, is that what'll do ?”

Your vision blurred, tears brimmed and fell down and you shaked your head, it felt good to be pounded down after moaning and writhing over dildos that were nothing compared to your man's veiny cock, but even so you lost count how many times you came and how many times Simon punished you by going harder once again.

“C’mon you promised to be daddy's good girl, no ?” He leaned down over you, enveloping your bare back with his hot body, his heat pulsing like a drum through you and not to mention the bulge that twitched as you moaned like a whore against his arm.

All your thoughts were mussy except how good his big dick felt inside you, how obsence it must look — on your fours getting pounded from behind like cock slut, being forced to take it after third or maybe fourth orgasm.

“Daddy didn't say you could cum whore ?”

Simon kneaded your tits that jangled with every thrust, and you couldn't take it anymore, feeling your nerves numb in your body as you thought to utter your safeword with no success, finally remembering to shake your head as Simon always told you.

Simon couldn't understand until thrusting three more times then he pulled himself out, his hold of your throat came undone as you trembled all over against the emptiness of your pussy when he pulled out with wet pop, swollen and hard.

“Lovie.” He cooed, all the hardness left somewhere as his soft voice hummed — you fell face down on the pillow, tears soaking against it. “Hey, hey…love ?”

Simon's deft finger pushed away your hair that sticked up through sweat and tears, his eyes were sweet and loving.

“Did I hurt you ? Tell—”

“No.” You croaked, feeling your thigh numb all over, his weight shifted beside you until you scrambled over and laid your head on his chest, his heart beating melodiously enough to lull you in some heavenly sleep.

“I was too hard on my princess, wasn't I ?”

You looked up, knowing how heavy your eyes were and no doubt your lips were swollen from the intense make out session earlier, and cum drying over like frost on dew.

He loved you like this, all fucked up, all marked up — just for him, only by him.

Simon smiled shyly, then leaned to kiss your forehead — “I should get us a bath—”

You didn't want him to go anywhere, “Stay ere’ with me.”

“Mmm.” Simon pulled you closer to his chest, wrapping his safe arms around you while you relished in the sillage of sex and euphoria of it all, finally breathing Simon's sharp cologne.

“Would you like water baby, huh ?” But you didn't, you only wanted Simon to cradle you in his arms and sway you gently.

“Alright lovie, sleep.” He whispered, carding through your hair and soothing your scalp, knowing he'd pulled too hard, just how his nasty girl liked, “I love you.”

“Love ya too.” You inhaled, feeling so good.

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[amaranthinespirit]

boyfriend!simon riley and american!bimbo(ish)!reader

simon loves his ditzy, american girlfriend. how you make him repeat his words, sounding out the syllables because his accent's so thick, and voice so deep. though he thinks it's just an excuse for him to talk right into your ear, his voice several octaves deep, a rumbling sound low in his chest.

he loves your little american terms, the differences in your cultured upbringings in terms of slang, and lingo.

"'s futball, lov'," he'd murmur, a beer in the hand of the arm slung around the back of the old leather couch as you watched the game. his other arm would be across your shoulders, fingers creeping up your neck as he caressed your soft skin and lengthy collarbone subconsciously.

he'd huff a chuckle if he heard you mumble 'soccer' in return.

but it wouldn't be too long until he heard his own words integrated into the vocabulary, but only when you weren't laid on your back, legs thrown over his shoulders as he plowed his hips into your slick cunt.

your sweet, american accent just mewling his name so nicely from your lips, harsh contrast to the stinging pain your claws left in his scarred back.

it only earned you grunts in return, followed by a particularly harsh thrust, lewd, filthy sounds of flesh on flesh.

but pretty, pretty music to his ears after you'd been fucked stupid, a cock-drunk babbling mess. pretty american girl.

he'd call you a good girl for calling it 'football' instead of 'soccer,' and eat you out too.

[chamomiletealeaf]

Ok but Simon with dad glasses 😩😩

He’d be reading something and when you ask him something he looks at you from over the thin rectangular frames ugh 😩

He could be sitting on the couch reading a newspaper like an old man and when you ask him if he wants some tea he lowers the paper into his lap and looks at you from over his reading glasses like:

“Hm? What’s that lovie?”

And you get so flustered you start playing with your hands like:

“Um. I- do you want some tea baby?”

And he smirks at you before pushing the frames up on his nose to go back to reading before saying:

“Sure love, but after you come here and sit in my lap while I finish this column.”

[ebodebo]

You and Simon had spent the better part of the morning indulging in the decadent breakfast you had prepared as the sun rose over the horizon.

He pleaded for you to stay in bed and not fuss about making him breakfast. He’d get you those bagels you loved from the shop down the road and some fresh cream cheese from the dairy to slap on top.

You leaned closer, placing a smack of a kiss on his cheek. “You deserve it, hon,” you smiled, slipping on your cozy slippers and one of Simon’s hoodies, happily making your way into the kitchen. He couldn’t help but sink into the mattress. How did he manage to find you? A divine blessing you were.

You thought you overdid it with all the food you made. Crepes, waffles, bacon, sausage, eggs, all to be washed down with some fresh-pressed juice from your orange trees—far too much for just the two of you. But Simon would be damned if he left even one piece of the crispy bacon uneaten.

“Good?” you asked with a smile, fiddling with a waffle on your plate as you watched Simon demolish his food.

“Damn good, baby. Got me such a pretty chef,” he muttered, biting some egg. You flashed him a smile, tipping your head towards him as you reached for the syrup, filling every hole on your waffle.

A comfortable silence fell over both of you. The occasional ‘clank’ of silverware and the soft hum of the heater kicking on were the only noises to be heard. The doorbell sharply rang, echoing off the walls of the hallway and bleeding into the kitchen.

You sat your fork down, easing your way up before Simon shooed you back down and placed your fork back in your hand. “Eat,” he mutters as he walks to the front door.

Simon swings open the front door to be met by the postman, who is staggering with excitement as he hands Simon a loose envelope. The postman tips his head slightly, viewing you inside, standing, and placing more bacon on Simon’s plate. Simon’s hoodie hit just below the curve of your ass, and as you moved, it shifted a little higher, giving him a view of your panties.

“I suggest you stop making looks at my wife, or I’ll do more than just kill that pretty pension check,” Simon says, ripping the envelope from the postman’s hand. The guy's eyes flick to Simon’s in record time, full of worry.

“I don’t know what—” he starts, his tone defensive.

“You think I’m an idiot?“ Simon stoically says, crossing his big arms over his chest. “Huh?”

“No—I, I,” The post guy stutters.

Simon raises a brow. “Can’t speak now?” The post guy says something incoherent, and Simon breathes impatiently.

“Use your fuckin’ words,” Simon hurriedly says.

“I—I you know what, I, I, I’m gonna go,” the post guy stammers, almost falling over the porch's front steps, flalling to his mail truck, but not before shouting, “The next shipping is on me.” You bet your ass it is.

Simon clenches his teeth as he closes the door, turning to see you standing behind him. “Baby, I think you scared him,” you laugh out. Simon reaches out, grasping your hand and pulling you closer. You yelp as Simon pulls you flush with his body, placing a kiss on the top of your head.

“Fuckin’ animal, that one,” he mutters into your hair.

Simon never really believed in coincidences. His brain was too methodical—calculated. It was something you learned from your long history together.

So, it was odd to hear him say to the police that it must have been a coincidence that the same day he gets into a scrabble with the postman, he goes missing and is then found dead in a lake with bruises covering his body.

It was definitely a coincidence.

a/n: your honor my client didn't commit that crime! just trust me!

[lightwing-s]

𝐒𝐄𝐂𝐑𝐄𝐓 𝐇𝐀𝐕𝐄𝐍

pairing: simon "ghost" riley x reader

It must’ve been early when the knocking woke you up. Rolling in the warmth of the bed, you struggled to get up and once you did, you walked towards the door on pure muscle memory, still too tired to proceed with any coherent thoughts.

You opened it automatically, rubbing your heavy eyes and letting out a yawn.

“Ghost, Price and I were thinking that maybe…” you heard a voice you faintly remembered blurt out words you vaguely put together. “Yn? What are you doing in Simon's room?”

Freezing at the spot, your eyes dart open, as wide as they could possibly be, and a burst of energy runs through your body, making your mind jolt alight, finally deciding to work.

“Fuck.” you whisper, as you could hear the sound of objects falling and stumbling steps rushing to your side. Simon, still shirtless, holding up his loose sweatpants and whose mask had been clumsy put on, only one of his eyes properly fitting through it’s proper hole, arrived beside you breathlessly, pulling Gaz into the room and closing the door immediately thereafter.

Pushing the Sergeant onto the unmade bed, it took him a moment to catch his breath, spinning around on the same spot on the floor. He had fixed his mask, and the moment his eyes caught yours you could clearly understand his message.

We’re fucked.

Your eyes were restless, moving from Simon and Gaz so quickly it was making you dizzy. Your hands tugged at Simon’s shirt, dressing you like a dress, but barely covering your legs, ones you were not used to exposing in front of your comrades.

It was awkward, this whole situation an awkward mess you had put you all in.

I’m sorry, you mouthed and pleaded with your eyes as Simon stopped in front of you, his hands reaching for your arm, rubbing it warm, consoling you as much as he could as you two sulked in unwanted company.

“Can you two explain what’s going on?” asked your “guest”. Exchanging glances once more, you two fought over who would break him the news. “Or am I supposed to make my own conclusions?”

“‘S pretty obvious, innit?” Simon replied, dryly.

“I wanted to hear it from you, it looks too surreal.” he said, leaning back and straightening his position, a smirk spreading on his face, amusement evident in his eyes. “The Lt and Yn shagging.”

You looked back at Simon once more, his arms crossed on his chest making his biceps look twice their size, and his clear crunched jawline, probably planning three hundred different ways to murder his teammate. Touching his shoulder, you asked for allowance, watching as he considered the options before nodding in return.

“Gaz.” you called, catching his attention. “We’re married.”

Gaz’s head bobbed forward as his eyes almost jumped out of its socket, questioning the shocking news and his own reality. To confirm your words, showed him your hands, more specifically your ring finger, where a pair of letters, ‘SR’, were tattooed secretly on its side. The Lieutenant followed suit, uncrossing his arms to expose your initials drawn on the same spot in his ring finger. 

You two were married. Married, and no one in the base knew it. Hell, they didn’t even know you two had a thing for each other, was going through Gaz’s mind.

“Married?” he repeated, more an affirmation than a question, trying to process it in his head. “I can’t wait till Johnny knows it.”

“Johnny can’t know it.” you immediately cut him. “Please, Gaz. I-it’s…” private, you wanted to add, our lives. But a lump in your throat caught you, feeling everything you’d build crumbling down. 

You’d been so careful. You and Simon had taken every possible precaution since the first night you hooked up, not wanting anyone to find out your silly “mistake”, to the day of your wedding two years ago, the most important day in your entire life. And now the secret was done for, days counted even if Gaz were kind enough to keep it to himself.

“Private.” Gaz completed your words after a brief minute of silence, and the hope in your chest grew. “I get it. You know I’m not a snitch.” Standing up, he continued. “Your secret is safe with me.” and extending his hand towards your husband he wished. “Congratulations, Simon.”

Your husband, after second thoughts, shook Gaz’s hand in his, evident force used to make sure a warning was heard: you say anything, you’re dead. However, knowing him like no one else, you notice signs no one would, and the slight drop in his shoulder lets you know he trusted his Sergeant.

“Congratulations you too, Yn.” he turned to you, giving you a tight hug instead, lifting you off your feet for a brief moment before returning you to the floor. “Does this make me the best man over Johnny?”

Fishing for a pillow, Simon threw it straight into Gaz’s head as he rushed out of your room, giggles heading out with him. You too stood laughing, enjoying knowing your secret paradise wasn’t done for yet, and trying to calm down your sulking and annoyed husband.

.

a/n: short drabble to announce i'm now taking simon and other cod men requests ♡

[eccentricallygothic]

I am half asleep but older boyfriend!Ghost who makes you so shy but you love his big dick so…

Warning(s): Age gap, size kink, praise kink, unprotected p-in-v, doggy style, d/s vibes, intimidation kink, teasing, humiliation kink, slapping (nether regions), Simon's BDE, his dick is BIG, allusions to painal. MDNI.

. . . 

“Well,” Simon half turns on his heels, voice guttural and breathing somewhat labored because of how his hand strokes his member that is rock hard from the knowledge of what he is about to do to you. “Get on there, then” his ripped body is huge as he stands beautiful in all his glory in the middle of you and the bed that his head cocks towards. 

Your cheeks burn and though you are more than ready to climb the bed in the primal position of choice to present your own naked body to him to use, you avoid his darkened eyes. A whimperish hum is all you can let out while you chew on your bottom lip and scuffle to the bed. 

“Just like that, good girl” Simon praises you by a sharp smack to your ass that makes your tense and embarrassed form jump with a squeak. His fingers hurriedly dart down to fondle at the bruise the strike will make. A shiver sizzles past your lips and your eyes roll to the back of your head at the feeling of the pain multiplying in his grip due to how he kneads your skin. 

“Now let's see this about here” he doesn't like how narrow your kneel is. So he roughly pulls one bent leg away from the other and you nearly fall face first into the mattress but your arms support you. “Where is she?” Your heart is thumping in your ears from how humiliating the manner in which he ‘taps about’ to locate your sopping cunt is like he doesn't know it. 

A loud and nearly fearful gasp leaves you when you feel his leaking tip rub against your pucker, causing for your poor little hole that has had its fair share of disciplining at the hands of the unfair and firm impaler that tries to kiss it like a perverted lover making it recoil in defense and blink up at Simon who is busy warming up your core with strict, rapid claps against your folds. 

“Ah…” He drawls out the cool exclamation as he gropes and squeezes your petals, making you whine and your arms give up, causing for the upper half of your body to collapse into the mattress. “There, there” Simon coos uncharacteristically to comfort you when you begin to whine when his heavy tip begins to peel into your tiny hole that puts up a vain resistance. “Almost there, you're doing so well, sweets” though his scarred fingers flex over the soft skin of your back before they caress the lower region, you are still moaning and gurgling on your own spit because penetration with Simon is always a tough sport.

“O- Ouchieee~” you whimper when his tip has successfully fought itself asylum between your gushing walls that burn just as hot as your loins. Though Simon can't see you, he can vividly imagine the pout on your lips and soft scrunch of your eyebrows.

You are such a baby and he loves it. Always shyly nuzzling into him and whispering requests in his ear for his dick only to sob up a mess when it comes to actually taking his cock. 

Simon growls when the base of his tip gives you your first meanie stretch -as you call it- and he feels your insides move around his hard skin. “Ah, fuck, look at that” he is trying so hard to be considerate of your young, priorly inexperienced and sensitive body but the visual of your pucker frenzily reacting to his cock sheathing itself in you is almost too much even for the Simon Ghost Riley to handle. 

“Such a crybaby” though it's meant to be a tease on his part, his rough voice and thick accent makes it sound like a scold and to protect your poor band from ripping around his girth, the older man decides to take his frustration out on your attention seeker of an asshole that bats itself at him constantly. “Tsk, spoilt little dirt hole.” 

“Owie!” Your voice is muffled and weak when Simon's fingers begin to give mean pats to your even smaller hole in hurried intervals and the pain and embarrassment makes you clench your bottoms so hard that your cheeks not only harden under his cruel wrath but your pussy sucks him inside until he is pulled against your ass, his heavy sack colliding with your petals.

It's in, and you're on.

Simon makes handlebars of your hair by dividing it on either sides of your head and wraps the pigtails around his large fingers until they look like some odd galaxy buns.

And then he begins to pound.

. . .

MASTERLIST 

[yeyinde]

dangle on the leash | Simon "Ghost" Riley x F!Reader

The flimsy sarcophagus housing all his wants, his desires, cracks open when Price announces that his missus is pregnant. Ghost cocks his head in consideration. Intentionally knocking you up is amoral. Probably illegal. Somehow, even more dastardly when the reason for it is simply selfishness. Want. Greed. Hunger. But he's a rabid dog burning with the urge to bite. No one should really be surprised when he finally decides to sink his teeth into you. Unfortunately, that hail mary Price sent into the aether never reached you.

(your bird is too big for a cage— —but maybe a collar would do.)

this is a babytrapping fic lmao but please read the tags carefully. a companion piece to this (Price + babytrapping).

DEAD DOVE. SMUT. 18+

HARD WARNINGS—coercion. dependency. intentional alienation. unsafe, unprotected sex. this very much toes the line of noncon (that is still very dubcon even when consent is given) in many ways, notably: somnophilia, and condom/contraceptive tampering. intrusive, violent thoughts. mentions of violence. manipulation; slight gaslighting. implied kidnapping. references to past abuse (Ghost), brief mention of drugging/threats of drugging (ambiguous as to if it was ever followed through on or not, mostly just Ghost's internal monologue unfiltered). ADDITIONAL TAGS—smut. rough sex. unsafe sex. dom!Ghost. mean, obsessive, unhinged!Ghost. spit kink. dacryphilia.

he's feral, but he's yours. too bad for you, no one is really sure if that's a good thing or not.

One of the things Price often tells new recruits is to shove their old life into a box. 

“There's home,” he huffs, fingers twitching as if he's subconsciously flexing around the hilt of a lit cigar. “And then there's work. Whatever box you decide to put this, or your family, your personal life, into is your choice. But for fuck’s sake. Keep them separate.” 

Most of the new recruits are fresh off selection, shaded sickly chartreuse, and take his words as a literal gospel. Work, this; home, them. They don't start to unravel the second part of his gruff speech until much later. Until they can't wash the blood from their hands, and the scent of their mum’s eucalyptus hand soap is nauseating. Unfamiliar. When being in civvies feels like wearing skin that doesn't fit, and everyone around you is alien, foreign. They don't know. They'll never know. 

It's only when they find themselves gazing at the clock on the wall of their family home, counting down the minutes until their mandatory leave is over do they realise that home is the barracks. 

That's something Ghost has always understood. Maybe it was because his home life was already in ruins, tatters. Beer soaking into the knock-off Persian rug a cousin nicked from a flea market when he was nine. No fine china in the cupboards because it'll end up in shards on the floor. Plastic plates and forks and cups. Always. Howling in his head. Screaming from down the hall in his mum's room. His bedroom door creaking open at night. The anger, the curdling fear (shameful—be a man; punch him back, hit him before he hits you, you useless prick—), of not knowing whether or not it was his dad, high as hell and itching for a fight after busting their mum’s lip wide open, or Tommy sneaking into his bed at night because his is soaked in piss and he can’t sleep when they scream at each other like this.  

(Funny that, he always found; neither of them could ever sleep when it was silent, either.)

Blood on the linoleum. Trying to eat burnt toast and overcooked beans with a busted lip and a twinge in his jaw—

(Fractured, they'll say later, years later, during his mandatory medical checkup when he's first recruited. Healed all wrong. Son, didn't anyone take you to hospital?) 

He understands the separation between home and work—even if the former lost all relevancy nearly a decade ago. Back when he buried them all. Was buried himself—

What Ghost never really understood was the box. 

Shove it into a box. 

When he asks over cheap whisky somewhere in Siberia, Price tightens his fingers around his glass before bringing it up to his head. His index finger juts out. He knocks the tip of that bruised, scabbed knuckle against his temple. Once, thrice. Levels Simon with a pointed look he both can’t understand and somehow knows all too well. 

“Up here."

“Paid nearly fifty quid for that,” he grouses, shaking his head. “Think I've been ripped-off, Price.” 

Price scoffs, places the glass down with a hollow thud. “Don't be a fuckin’ muppet, Simon—” his real name makes his shoulders tense. Around the barracks, they know him only as the Ghost. “You put it away somewhere. Hide it. I don't fuckin’ know. But if it keeps you goin’, keeps you sane, and doesn't become a mess I gotta clean up, well—”

The implication is stark. Heavy. 

Price was always good at chiselling through layers of accumulated indifference to get to the madness within, but considering Ghost’s past and his mile-long rap sheet, the warning digging into his words like a dull blade isn't unwarranted. 

Old dogs, he'd called the pair of them when they first met. There was a sharp keenness in his eye when he lifted his hand, waved his cigar toward the tangled mess of scar tissue crisscrossing his face (made with a dull, rusted knife, one that gouged out deep pocks of skin, ugly fuck, looks like the badlands, don't he? like a postcard from the Grand Canyon, sweetheart. not so cute anymore, are ya, pretty boy—), and said, “well, you're fuckin’ rabid, ain't you? Better put a muzzle on that before it becomes a problem, mm.”

His problem, specifically. 

And Ghost gets it. Thinks Price might understand that particular brand of madness—despite growing up on literal opposite sides of the track, his Manchester to the others Liverpool; poverty and prestige—if only just. Because Price seems to be able to curb those baser impulses in a way Ghost hadn't yet mastered (and won't for quite some time yet). He's put together. Sort of. Respected. Normal.

The men in the barracks don't look at him and flinch. 

But he sees the way the man's eyes linger in the crowd, shrewd and careless, before falling on the pretty bartender in the back. The one with roses in her eyes and a smile full of dandelions. Soft, like butterscotch. It's here when they darken. When he reaches, almost angrily, for his whisky. Pats his chest with a heavy fist searching for his cigar. 

She's a sweet thing, he reckons. All pretty and trusting. Birds like her make his head itch—

“Don't even think about it, Simon,” Price grumbles, and it feels like territorial posturing, a challenge he almost raises to meet with his chin, if only to make Price fluster, but it's hollow. Empty. He denies himself, too. The prick. 

“How'd you do it?” He asks, and doesn't specify. Doesn't think he needs to. 

When Price swallows, it looks like a grimace. “Years of practice.” 

He considers the weight of it, his eyes straying back to the woman behind the bar. She's tucking a strand of hair behind her ear, wrist delicate like bone china, the kind they could never afford, and for a moment, the intrusive thoughts, the ones he gets sometimes about wanting to tear things to bloody pieces, rears—

It's stamped down in a swig of flat lager You stupid fuckin’ mutt, Price would say tomorrow morning, shaking his head. You always think with your prick? 

Simon cranks his head sharply to the side instead. The resounding crack seems to echo through the empty pub. 

Price just shakes his head. “Christ. No one ever house break you, yet?” 

“Yeah, they did,” he rasps, staring at the bartender who gazes back at him now. Skittish, unsure. Not so sweet after all. She looks away, cowed. Her hands tremble. He leans back, and hums. “And now I piss outside, like a good ‘ol boy.” “Ain't nothin’ good about you, Simon. Fuckin' Christ—”

And he's not wrong. 

The Ghost has a reputation of being a cold-hearted bastard. A Frankensteinian beast cobbled together with spare parts robbed from a jailhouse graveyard. Worst of the worst. An arm from a mass murder. The leg from a spree killer. Heart a patchwork mess of ichor and sulphur. Sutured together with barbed wire. 

It's all sort of macabre. Rather trite, too. 

The rumour mill in the barracks is insatiable.

But sometimes, he wakes up and he's still buried. Still dead. Dirt in his throat, lodged in his nose. He breathes in and feels pebbles scraping his lungs. Feels worms in his ears. Maggots in his head. 

They crawl through his grey matter. Leeches burrowing into his thoughts, sucking the good in him dry. 

Or, whatever's left of it, anyway. 

He thinks with his teeth because it's easier that way. Cold, calculative instinct. Just barely boxed into a neat package slapped on the desk of Price's higher-ups. 

A good man, they say, and turn him loose on the streets. One of the best we have, as he breaks jaws, and tears through jugulars. A force to be reckoned with. 

They hand him a gun, a rifle, when the bloodied footprints leading back to camp become too much of a hassle to clean. Shoot from a distance. He takes to it like the bulk of metal was made for his scarred hands. Scythe to a Reaper. 

It feels like bloodletting. Draining him of his anger, his fury, until a cold, gnarled indifference curls in the basin left behind. Icy, frigid. Down to the bone. 

Sometimes, he doesn't remember what it felt like to be warm, even buried under a thick balaclava and layers of military fatigues. 

Frankenstein’s monster. Patched together from the rotten remains of horrible men. 

And as he stares in the mirror at the patchwork ruins of his face, his body, he wonders if there's some truth to it, after all. He's pretty sure if someone cracked his skull open—again—they’d find rot. Tumulus. Infested with maggots and worms. Cobwebs behind his eyes. In his nose. His brain perfectly preserved: a zombified tombstone. And oh, how it hungers. 

Wants. 

But in a box it goes. One shaped like a coffin. Placed pretty in the back of his broken head. 

He stares in the mirror and thinks he sees something moving under his eye. Wriggling around. The temptation to claw it out rears, but the shredded tissue on his thighs reminds him of what happens when he listens to that insidious hiss in the back of his head (some amalgamation of his old man, and that bastard—) and goes searching for gold in bone marrow. 

He huffs. Fingers curling around the porcelain. His head is rotten. Putrefied. He can feel the decomposing sludge press against his temples. It grows teeth sharp like a razor blade and hacks away at jaundiced bone. Ghost lifts his hand, digs his fingers into his temple. Down boy—

(Simon doesn't even want to consider what his heart must look like, then.)

Cold-hearted, sure—

But he likes sweet things. 

The kind that will undoubtedly give him cavities. A spillover, perhaps, when candy bars were too expensive, and the only dessert he was given was a toffee by the neighbour when she wasn't moaning to his old man about all the shit he and Tommy got up to. 

(Bruises came afterwards, the colour of liquorice. Sour cherries.)

Unfortunately for him, sweet things don't like him much—a shame, really. Simon has always had a sweet tooth. 

His rough edges are too sharp for their liking, and Simon's—

Intense. Like a dog with a bone, he doesn't know when to let go. When to unhinge his jaw from the morsel between his teeth. He bites hard. Shakes his head. Tears into the things he wants until it's bloodied meat pinched in his incisors. 

And so, they keep their distance. Like they can smell the rot on him. The funeral dirt. The stench of an unearthed sarcophagi. 

Sometimes, though, the wiley ones will inch closer, looking to get messed up badly by a bad man, and it makes something inside his head howl when he turns them down. Following Price’s creed. Can't give in to the pretty ones, he'd said. Nothin’ but trouble. 

Trouble, like a pair of shackles. A noose. Trouble, like gentle, clean hands and fragile bones. Fine china. Fine powder. The marshmallow soft kind of trouble that will melt in the acid that leaks from his pores. Aqua regia. Attacking anything that gets close. 

(Breakable, is what Price means. Pretty chew toys that are beyond repair once he's finished with them.

He must think Ghost is some sort of psychopath—)

But still. He stays away. It's easier on base, in safe houses, too far out from the general public to have to worry about doe eyes and soft touches. He doesn't need it, anyway—

Then comes you. 

And the forfeiture of his self-control. 

You're trouble of a different kind. 

Trouble, like the end of a sledgehammer. Trouble, like the grill of a car. The barrel of a gun. 

In the shape of a battering ram, one strong enough to dislodge the madness in the back of his head. Where the corrosive acid should ruin you, eat you alive, it doesn't. Not with your tantalum skin. 

But oh, do you pack a punch—

At first, you think he's homeless. 

Some scruffed-up man sleeping on a park bench outside of your apartment. 

In another life, he might have been. He isn't a stranger to bad habits, and had the military not been his only choice in life for some semblance of good (laughable, considering what he does for a living), he could see the threads of his life leading him here. Drugs. Manchester is good for it, this he knows all too well. Especially the shithole neighbourhood he's from. 

He doesn't clue into this, though, until you glance at him, warily, and then shuffle into the cafè he’s holed outside of, the place where his current target gorges himself on steeped tea and crumpets. 

(Price's dry text sits, open, on his burner phone: and don't fuck this up—)

It feels a bit like an omen. Made worse when you meet his gaze through the glass, and—

Well. Shit. 

The impact is a collision. Hitting a pole at top speed. Metal bent around concrete. 

His teeth ache (so, so bad—).

You emerge from the small building a few minutes later—the faded eggshell with chocolate trim is nauseatingly sweet against your pastel yellow raincoat—holding a takeaway bag, and balancing a tray of coffees in your hand. 

He tenses. It's instinctual. There's nothing about you that's an immediate threat to his person—unless you plan on adding to his scars with the tip of your umbrella, the scalding coffee in your hand—but it's odd, isn’t it? No one approaches him. Not unless they have a reason to. 

And no one, in his experience, ever has a good one. 

“Hi,” you chirp, disarmingly sweet, as you come to stand in front of him. His jaw aches. Even sprawled across a bench, you're barely looking down at him. Sticky, cold fingers tap a strange rhythm down his spine. “I, um, hope this isn't weird, but I saw you sitting here, and—well. I got this—”

You wiggle the bag. He smells something greasy. A breakfast sandwich, he's sure.

It's an unusual assassination attempt. Price will be livid. 

“What for?” He rumbles, sitting up in the seat. The shift of his bulk seems to make you nervous. You take a step back, and he fights the urge to follow. To back you into a corner. No escape. 

You regain your footing, even if the smile on your face wobbles. Weakens under his flat stare. Some people can smell the rot on him. 

He wonders if you can, too. 

(Pity that. You're a pretty bird, ain't you?)

And the way you take him in lacks a distinct thrum of hesitation, fear that’s normally there. It occurs to him, then, that you see him as just another man. Just another person. 

(“deader than a doorknob, this one. such a goddamn waste, boss. he was a fun one, wasn’t he? should we burn ‘em?” 

nah. bury him out back—)

It's laughable, really. A joke. He has the urge to crack one—sick and awful enough to make that little smile on your face wilt. Wither away. Almost does, too, but it get tangled in his throat when he feels the weight of your stare on him. 

The easy sweep of your eyes is barely discrete, but it's clinical. Pitying. But the softened edges of that empathy dissolve as your pretty head adds up all the numbers on him, coming to a standstill. Your eyes linger on his wrist. The gold of his wristwatch peeks out beneath the black sleeve of his hoodie. An intricate web of complex timekeeping that only he's privy to. A little luxury he picked up in Italy when the cash he'd been given was getting too tiresome to carry around. 

Dead men, after all, don't need bank accounts. 

And then—

You fluster. “Sorry, I just thought—”

It clicks, then. The pity. The soft words. The goddamn coffee— 

His gums itch. He has the sudden urge to be mean about it. Pick you apart in this street until nothing but embarrassment and humiliation remains. 

“That I was homeless? ‘nd you brought me, what? A coffee? ‘ow sweet of you. Some breakfast, too. Well, aren't you a lovely girl?” 

You are embarrassed. It blisters across your expression. Has your hands trembling around the cardboard tray, spilling droplets of coffee down the side. Your head is bowed, cowed in shame. It reminds him of that bartender some years prior. Pulling away when the bad dog growls—

But there's a thin sheen of intrigue in your eyes, burrowing holes into the shoes in front of you; a tangled knot of want coiling in the heat of your embarrassment over this blunder. Over offending him. 

Well—

That's new. 

Some get off on it. On humiliation. Specifically, of the public variety. He didn't take you as the type. The way you twist, squirming in place, is odd, though. It doesn't fit as well as he originally thought. No. It's not the public shame, but—

Him. 

Ah. 

Sweet, sweet girl. 

(So naïve.)

He reckons he could get you to do just about anything to make it up to him. You would, too. You're soft enough to be submissive, to bow your head in contrition, but there's a flicker of defiance in the jut of your chin when you lift your head. 

This is a blunder and you're sweetly embarrassed, sure, but it isn't enough to break you. 

And now Simon just wants to ruin you. Teach you a lesson about bad, vile men—

(Something you'd welcome with open arms, wouldn't you?)

“Didn’t know Manchester was so charitable,” he rasps. His throat is dry. Parched. He reaches for the coffee—black, with extra creamer and sugar on the side, tucked neatly in a little bag; fuckin’ hell. Ain't you just adorable—and places it on the spot beside him. “I’ll be takin’ this. Will need it for later.” 

You look like you want to protest. Fight back. His hackles rise, ready for it—eager. Something anticipatory, dark, bleeds through the moulted mess of his head. Sickly. Terrible. He thinks about what you'd look like sprawled under him, shaking and begging for more, for him to stop—

Fuck. Birds usually make his head itch, but you make his fucking skin crawl. 

In the end, you just huff. Roll your eyes. He wants to chew them out of your head. Pop them between his teeth. He bet you'd taste divine. 

You walk away from him before he can. You don't look back once. 

Pity, he thinks. Someone's gonna snatch you clean off the streets like that—

Hours later, he sends Price a text message with the coordinates for where to pick up the package Ghost left. 

He considers it a blessing when the man sends him back, good job, now get a pint from me as a little reward. Can't say I don't treat my team well. 

A reward, huh? 

Well. With your stature in comparison to his own, Ghost easily can see you being considered a pint. 

So, he follows you home, and tallies this one as being on Price. 

It's easy. Too easy. He slips deftly behind you, tucked away from view, and masks his footsteps under the echo of yours until he's standing in the shadows outside of your house. This, too, feels like a blessing. It's a duplex. He waits for one of the lights to flicker on, and—

The window brightens. Room number two. 

He hums, and palms his pockets for the pack of smokes he nicked off the man. Needing something to take the edge off. To quell the urge to bite. 

It's even easier to engineer meetings. Random run-ins. All blamed on happenstance, chance. Of course. This towering mountain of a man with his thick manc twang—the sort of gallows humour that can only be found in the blue-collar streets of Salford from the nasty old men squatting on the corners—must have better things to do than stalk you. Surely. You're not special enough to be hunted, right? 

Still. You're a touch wary of him. Distrustful. You keep your distance—six inches for Jesus Christ, aren’t you a peach?—and try to skirt the line between neutrally polite to the strange man loitering outside of the shops you frequent (your schedule burned to his memory, naturally) and that fascinating skittish intrigue from before. All simmering heat. Blunt want. The kind wrapped up in silk threads. 

It's interesting to watch it play out when he steps closer and all those long-forgotten instincts in the back of your head flare up. The shaky step you take back. The inward frown of confusion when you're not sure why your body craves space, acting almost on its own. And then the sweet defiance that breaks over you. The intentional step closer. The feigned warmth in your tone as you talk to him.

It's easy to pocket the uglier aspects of his personality. The coldness. The indifference. The flat, droll insincerity that leaks into his tone. All of it shelved, locked away, and he's not sure if Price would be happy that he listened to what he said, followed his example, or furious that he's bastardising it to lure this pretty fish in.

)The latter, undoubtedly. But Simon gets a sick kick from it all.)

Especially when it brings you closer to him. Thaws you as you rationalise his reaction during the first meeting, gears spinning. Kicking up excuses. 

Anyone would be angry, offended. It's natural. He's alright now—

It makes you look at him differently as you forcefully fight the urge to flee. 

Silly bird. 

Wary eyes rake over his massive bulk. Brows furrow at the series of black medical masks he wears in public. Always. That, in addition to the heavy black of his wardrobe—black jacket, black hoodie, black leather gloves—sometimes makes you glance at him with a touch of worry. Fear. Probably wondering if you brought home a delinquent. 

But it changes when he rolls up his sleeves one day after you've been moaning about your broken beach cruiser (the, I don't know, chain—or something—keeps catching—), and crouches down to fix it. 

There's a hitch in your breath. A distinct swallow. A guilty tinge of something shy, deliciously so, shading your eyes ruby-red when you look down at him. 

And ah—

Sweet little treat snagged on the line. Ain't he a lucky lad? 

It's all the better when you do the work for him. Reeling yourself in, practically throwing yourself in his cooler when you ask about his tattoos, carefully—considerately—nudging the topic away from his ugly scars. 

He guts you clean as he tells you he's in the military. Top secret, pet. Don't ask because I'd hate to ‘ave to hurt a pretty face like yours—

You preen under it. Pet. Pretty. You don't even notice when he slides his knife over your scales, dices you up on his chopping board. 

You're the picture of sweetness when he unkinks the chain in your bike, and sets it straight. All happiness. Smiles. Appreciative glances. You flutter your pretty eyes at him as you say—

“Thank you—”

You're waiting for a name. His belly rumbles. He could eat, he thinks, and licks his teeth. 

“Simon. Simon Riley.” 

The risk-reward ratio is balanced when you breathe it out between plump lips, chasing the end of it with your tongue. He wants to eat it out of your mouth. Swallow it down. 

You touch his arm, hand warm, soft. “If there's anything I can do to pay you back—”

He takes you out for a kebab later on. Nudges you out of the way when you open your wallet to pay. Draft girl. Naïve, too, because he can feel the heat in your cheeks from where he stands, reaching over to snatch the bag from the man with a grunt. 

You must think him quite the gentleman. So trusting. 

Doesn't matter. He lets it take root. Especially when you shyly invite him back to yours to eat. 

He makes a feast of it, and fucks you on your mint green chaisse after he's finished. 

(Not on birth control, you say, and hand him a box of condoms, suddenly shy. It's unopened. He hums, and burns that to memory.) 

He keeps his distance—an easy feat when he's halfway around the world, and you're stuck in the gloom of Manchester. 

It's purposeful, of course. He made a promise to Price not to give him a reason to worry, but fuck—

You're proving hard to quit. He's never had anyone cuff him upside the head on his bullshit. Not anymore, anyway. Not as the Ghost. He likes the thrill of it, of this chase. 

You don't let him steamroll you when he's in a mood to fight. You punch back, hitting him right in the mess of his guts, and fuck. Fuck. He's a little bit obsessed with it. With you. This wily little fish that acts so shy when he's got three fingers buried in your cunt, but rides him after like you're starving for it. Clawing at his chest. Scratching his arms. It's raw. Primal. He wants to break you—this fiery little kitten that bites his fingers until they bleed, and then purrs in his lap as he drives a pickaxe through your head, shredding logic into pieces. Rummaging around until he nicks the optic nerve that lets you see red. 

You’re everywhere. In everything. In the back of his head, under the howling that hadn't stopped since you trailed your finger down the jagged topography of his bare chest, digging your nail into the crude x across his heart, and whispered, soft and sweet: you're all kinds of fucked up, aren't you? 

A bludgeon to his self-control—

He resists. Has to. Is mean about it, too. Doesn't tell you where he's going (it's need to know), or what he's doing (would ‘ave to bash your pretty ‘ead in if I told you), but keeps you strung on the line (keep thinkin’ about that pretty cunt of yours; can't wait to come ‘ome and ‘ave you sit on my ugly mug—). 

It's dangerous, this game of his. Thrilling for all the wrong reasons. 

But he’s a good mutt. Good—

Until the text. 

The one you send to him when you're out with friends. A picture. You're in a pub somewhere in Moss Side, a drink in hand. A gaggle of nobodies crowded around you. It makes sense, he supposes. There's that old idiom—you’ll trap more flies with honey—and he doesn't know anyone nearly as sweet as you. 

His sweet girl.

(you fuckin’ mutt—)

Ghost stares at you for a moment, teeth aching. The little ensemble—a crop top and jeans—is a vision, he reckons. But it's spoiled when he catches more eyes on you than pointed at the camera. Practically spilling out of your top, aren't you? 

He breathes heavily through his nose. Tastes guncotton in his throat. 

Ghost commits every face to memory, and then calls you. 

You're drunk. Too drunk to remember it tomorrow. Stuck in a pub on what's supposedly a bad part of town. Chatting away about going to your friend’s house. He gets the address, and something sour twits in his stomach. Shit council houses. 

“That safe?” He asks, leaning back in his chair. He's already chubbed up in his slacks at the slur in your voice. “And dressed like that? Didn't take you for a slag—”

It makes you sputter on the line. “I'm—I’m not—”

You're so quick to placate him. So hasty to make him happy. Please don't be angry with me, Simon. I'm just having some fun—

The claws and fangs are tucked away when you're drunk. He shoves the information in the cache, eyes burning. Head aching. He's feverish. Hot under the collar.

Odd considering he's dead—

“Sounds like you will be.”

“It's not like that—”

“‘ow would you know? Might meet a nice fellow. Might take him home.”

“I don’t—I wouldn't—”

The sniffle makes him throb. Fuck. “Yeah? Well, ain't none of my business, I reckon—”

“It is.”

“Oh? How's tha’?”

“I—I like you, Simon—” he can taste your embarrassment through the phone. He didn't even need to bring you flowers and you're already boxing him into monogamy, confessing to him. So sweet. So tender. If he were a better man, he might have told you to sober up. To talk about this tomorrow. 

Too bad for you, he isn't. And what’s worse is that he’s a loyal bastard, too. 

But that's later, and right now—

He's halfway across the world, and you're vulnerable. In the den of hungry mutts. 

It’s charr in his throat. Anger in his veins. “You like me? An’ you go out dressed like that?”

“There's nothing wrong with how I'm dressed—”

He sucks his teeth. “Dunno ‘bout tha’, pet. You look like you're achin’ to get fucked.”

You take a shuddering breath. “I just want you—”

“Yeah?” It's a growl. His cock spits prespend in his trousers. “Then be my good girl. Go home and wait for me.”

It's quiet on the line. He catches the hitch in your throat, the sharp exhale, like you can't really be sure if he's serious or not. He says nothing. Waits. 

Where there would have been a fight—fists and teeth and snarling words—you quieten in the silence. Docile. Submissive. It's in you, he knows. He saw the glimpses back when you first met, when he'd bent down and fixed the bike he broke. All it needs is a little—

“Jus’ worried about my sweet girl, is all.” 

And you relent. 

Corrosive oil spills out of the necrosed holes in his head. It curls over his thoughts, liquid sin. He takes himself in his hand, blood pulsing in his veins, white-hot, damning, and bares his teeth at the urge to come to you, to push you down on the floor, and mount you like a snarling beast—

“Good girl,” he growls when you tell him you'll call a taxi, that you'll go home and have some wine with your friend instead.

Friend. Friends. 

He'll have to do something about that. 

(The thing about deprivation is that it bleeds into a vicious sense of possession when it's finally obtained. Greed. His wants have wants, have wants—

A perfect ouroboros. One you feed into almost destructively.)

Because the thing is—

Simon wants to tie you to his bed. Keep you locked up in the safe house he has in Manchester. Chained, shackled. A prisoner with him as your iron guard. 

It isn't just fantasy, either. 

The flies that congregate around you are an annoying, incessant buzzing in his ears. Remora clinging to the biggest fish. 

But they're easy to scatter when he waves his hand. 

(Waves off. Threatens with bodily harm, with physical aggression—

Same thing.)

The sting in his knuckles and the blood on his shoes are worth it in the end when your tantalum skin cracks. An aggregate of beautiful lines, pretty in their fragility, their brokenness. He wedges his fingers between the splints, widening the chasm to pet at the sticky-soft centre hiding beneath all that rough rock. Sweet girl. Hard candy enclosing taffy-softness. 

His coos melt you to the consistency of mercury. Liquid silver pebbles along your lash line, spilling over in a dizzying display of raw vulnerability. 

It makes every predatory instinct inside of him bristle. Locking onto the sweet lines of crystalline sadness that run down your cheeks. It has his heart racing. Eager, anticipatory. The thrill of the chase, of running you down into the ground until you're fine powder under him. 

And it’s there, it's in his arms—the maw of a beast—where you seek comfort, lamenting the loss of your friends, your coworkers. No one wants to hang out with you anymore. They don't return your calls or answer your texts. 

What did I do? You sniffle, throat bared. Belly turned up. 

Flooded with tears. The lachrymal face that peers up at him makes his teeth ache. He rolls his head back, feels himself thicken in his pants. 

Simon loves it when you cry.

“Fuck ‘em,” he rasps, words sticking to his dry throat. “If they can't see what a catch you are, then they don't even deserve to breathe the same air as you.”

It makes you cry harder, makes you mumble into his chest about how lucky you are to have someone like him. Someone who cares. 

His breath hitches. Warm floods his veins, fever-hot. 

“Thank you, Simon—”

And then you, smooth silver and wickedly sweet, cradle him in your palms as if you could hold all the broken pieces of him together. 

He thinks it's cute. 

Doesn't really have the heart to tell you it's a lost cause.

“Anytime, pet.”

And you're perfect, too.

You take this mangy mutt into your house, and let it eat your food, sleep in your bed. You let him fuck you stupid, and listen so prettily when he convinces you to let him spoil you. Let him pay your rent, your bills. Let Simon dote on you the only way he knows how—mercilessly possessive, and a touch cruel, mean—but you roll over, showing your belly. Submissive and sweet. 

It's even better when you try to lash out at him with a collar in the shape of his teeth branding your neck, spitting and hissing like a feral cat who doesn't know yet that's claws have been clipped. Only to then curl up in his lap, purring as he strokes your fur, and carves out a place for himself in your life. 

He wants to sink his teeth into you, and you think he's a big dog. Undomesticated. One who comes and goes as he pleases. A stray. A mutt. 

It's said fondly. Full of love—

His mouth is full of cavities. His teeth ache. His gums bleed. 

(do you know he's rabid? that the faded name on his dog tags once read cujo—)

Everything about you makes that sludge flood behind his eyes, pounding rotten fists against his temple. take, take, take; mine, mine—

The howling doesn't stop. It tells him to press you into the mattress and fuck you stupid. Tie you to the bedposts and never let you go—

He throws fists in the dark, trying to hit the madness in his head. Ends up with bloody knuckles and laughter in his ears. 

(a voice of reason says, your bird is too big for a cage—)

He clings to it. 

You're warm beside him. Burning hot. He syphons it from your veins when you're asleep, pulling you close just to feel something on his skin other than dirt. Other than blood. 

It's easy to pretend he's fine with these little nips. Leaving teeth marks in your neck. Bloody rings snaking up your thighs. 

He wraps one hand around both of your wrists, holds them high above your head, and tells himself it's enough. Shackled by him, under him, as he takes you apart, pulling at your sense of independence like the gnarled fingers of winter bringing defoliation to summer's bloom, but even with this, all of it, he still aches. Still wants. Needs—

Stupid fuckin’ mutt. 

Then you bring his hands up to your throat, letting him wrap his bearish paws around your delicate neck, and he knows these little bites will never satiate the hunger in his guts. 

He wakes up the next morning feeling warm. Full. Edges softened, if only just, by the sticky sweetness of your breath ghosting over his chest. 

Simon curls his arm around you, holding tight.  He won't let go. Won't—

Hide it. Put it away. 

Ghost does neither of those things. He buries it, instead.  

But in doing so, you find cracks in the foundation. Ones that are just big enough for your willfulness to slip through. To hand him back the cash he gave with a scoff, and a, i work, too, you know? i don't need your money, Simon. that's not why i’m with you—

(All he hears is, I don't need you.)

And then you send him a text. I'm going out with friends from work tonight. We're going drinking. I'll talk to you tomorrow! 

In the zombified remains of his head, a new howling starts. The hisses tell him you're pulling away, running from him—

It's a big world out there. It'll eat you whole—

Like Tommy.

The thing about want is that sometimes it grows teeth, hands. Claws. Without a body of its own, it tends to mould itself after its maker because that's all it knows how to do: devour, consume. Yearn. 

He shouldn't be too surprised to find that this need of his has dug itself out of the grave he buried it in. 

(he did, too—)

The flimsy sarcophagus cracks open when Price announces that his missus is pregnant.

The howling in the back of his head stops abruptly. The pulsing ache in his temple abates. It's heavy, this weight. This absolute, utter emptiness—

No. It's not hollow. The chasm isn't drained, it's—

(In the silence, something growls. Feral. Possessed.)

—full. Perfect equilibrium. All of the patchwork parts of himself, the ones that don't quite fit, suddenly find synergy. 

Communion. 

Ghost cocks his head in consideration.

(your bird is too big for a cage—

—but maybe a collar would do.)

—after all, could you ever leave him with his name etched into your womb—

In leaving the key under the mat for him to come and go as he pleases, you've left yourself vulnerable. But—

Not anymore. 

He has a safehouse he'll take you to. You'll let him, too, because it'll be the best choice for you. The three of you.

He's never entertained any ideas of family, not when the closest approximation he has is drenched in gun oil and smells of smoke from artillery fire, but the howling in his head quietens at the idea of it. He can't shackle you to the bed—stupid fucking mutt—but he can tie you down all the same. Make you his. Wholly. Always. 

And the thing is—despite a pickaxe making figure-eights out of his grey matter; lead poisoning and rust giving him these sour, awful thoughts about locking you up in his house, leaving you a needy mess, dependent only on him—Simon supposes he knows right from wrong. 

Intentionally knocking you up is amoral. Probably illegal. Somehow, even more dastardly when the reason for it is simply selfishness. Want. Greed. Hunger. 

But in carving himself a place in your life, he failed to realise that the walls behind him closed in. No way out. And so, his only option is to go forward. To keep moving.

He'll be crucified for this, but that's fine. 

He doesn't intend for you to find out, anyway. It'll be an accident. He came home early, and found you drunk. Drank with you. Your drunken idiocy merged, creating a terrible, noxious cocktail of awful, bad choices. Permanent ones. Irreversible. 

(You're so sweet, so docile when you're drunk—)

It'll be easy to convince you. To play the part of a stoic man suddenly in turmoil. You'll offer to get rid of it, a suggestion that he'll flinch at—a cornered dog, a hand raising in the air. You'll whimper. Shake in his arms as you tentatively smooth over the wrinkles in his brow, murmuring out your options in a stilted breath.

You'll be a Riley before the end of your term. It's only proper, he'll mutter, stiff and uncomfortable, and you'll melt. Liquid tantalum in his palm. The fruits of his labour laid bare, seeping from the corners of his mouth. Tucked tight between his teeth. Mercury he can swallow down, keep in the bracket of his rotten ribs. Safekeeping from this world that just takes. Devours. 

But not if he eats you first. 

The mere notion alone serves as an anchor, locking him to the seafloor. The tumult in his head calmed at the promise of owning. Biting to claim. To have. Greedy for it. For you, and the strange sense of quiet your proximity brings him. The warmth, too. 

He's a rabid dog. This he knows—has known—for quite some time. Indisputable. It pools in his mouth. Liquid sin. Makes him ache for just a sip. Unquenchable, though, because he's wary of water. Hydrophobia, but only for how it washes his efforts away. Cleanses. 

The urge inside of him to bite, to infect, quietens when he gets closer to you.��

(a rabid mutt licking at the window you're on the opposite side of, dreaming of just a taste—)

A byproduct of that maddening virus in his veins, the one he must have picked up six feet in the ground. Bite, bitebite—

—and give you a collar in the shape of his teeth.

He finds you in bed. A bottle of wine on the end table beside you, courtesy of your friend. The one lingering remora he couldn't snap at—one who sends you messages about how you are being manipulated. Taken advantage of. Fuck that loser, the latest one says when he picks up your phone, scrolling through the dwindling conversations housed within. Just him now, and them. 

It preaches about empowerment. About how you shouldn't let a man pay your bills (textbook manipulation. he's putting you in a position of dependency. making you feel obligated to stay. it's all on Google, babes. like, fucking get a clue!!!!), or how it's moving so quickly (maybe you should come stay with me in Durham for a bit, hun. get away for a weekend. i worry about ya, is all). He hums, thumbing through the old chats. 

You told her to fuck off about the manipulation, but it came after a lot of, oh, yeah. well, he's just. you know. he's different, and you haven't declined the invitation. i’ll think about it, is what you write. 

It simmers under his skin. That independence he plans on stomping out under his heel. With his kin. 

(sick, sick sick, wrong—)

It's desperation, this. Clawing at the walls—the dirt—until his nails are torn off his fingers. Until his skin splits, peels. Broken under rock and rubble. That animalistic need for air. To breathe. Basic training tells him not to save the person drowning unless he's sure they won't kill him in their struggle to live. But what's he supposed to do when that person is his rotting body, sinking down to unfathomable depths? When all he has is you to cling to—

Damnation built by his own hands. 

You'll die together, he reckons, and tosses your phone on the hamper in the corner of the room. 

Ghost can't remember the last time someone made him feel anything at all other than impartiality. Indifference. Casual apathy. 

Price is the exception to this on the grounds of being consanguineous to him.

And you—

An outlier. 

One he intends on sinking as deep as he can with. Anchored, maybe, by this little plan that beats and pulses in the back of his head. That clogs his throat with a want so thick, he can already taste the brine from the ocean. Water in his nose. Down his esophagus—

Better than dirt, he supposes. And it spurns him forward.

You're malleable like this. Tensile. He bends you easily with just a touch until you're flat on your back, a pillow shoved beneath your tailbone, and stripped. The loose shirt you wear to sleep is hiked up under your neck. Panties are pulled off until your sweet, bare cunt is revealed to him. All pretty and soft, and his. Untouched, he notes, and gives an appreciative stroke over your clit with his thumb. 

It was something you were whining about the other day, panting in his ear as if he wasn't a continent away. Pleading with him on the phone to please, please let you come. 

Simon likes the way you cling to him when it's been a while since something has wrecked you as thoroughly as his cock. When your spoiled pussy was neglected for a few days, weeks, and starved for attention. You were so sweet to him then, cooing in his ear how good you've been, how much you want him and only him, need him. Begging so prettily for it. 

He's almost sad to spoil himself in your cunt when you can't weep for it. Can't bully him closer. Try to claw his eyes out. That delicious push-pull where you hiss at him for pulling away, but whine when he gets too close. 

Sad, but—

Not enough to stop himself. 

You're not wet enough for him to slide inside unprepared—his cock too big, something that makes his bones tremble—and he rectifies it by leaning down, letting saliva pool between his teeth and lips. He holds it there for a moment as he spreads your folds apart with his thumb and forefinger. 

And then he spits on your bare cunt. 

It hits your clit, the thick glob siding down your slit. He reaches between your thighs, pawing at you. Slides his fingers through the slick mess he made, teases around your tight rim. 

Simon usually likes to take his time with you. Lapping at your pussy for hours until you're a weeping, snot-nosed mess whining in the sheets. Spoiled rotten. Begging him to fuck you already, Simon, you can't take it anymore—

He's mean. Cruel. Edges you for hours until your legs shake, trembling around his ears. He never lets you reach that peak—doesn’t let you come until he's buried inside of you. 

Coming on his tongue, his fingers, is rarely a privilege you ever earn. Too much of a spitfire, a spiteful little kitten, to give in and do what he demands. So he keeps you on the precipice until he's ready to fuck you, ignoring your bribes, your bargains. Simon doesn't give in even when you beg, when you relent and tell him you'll finally be good. 

You never are. 

Spoiled, he always huffs. Down to the fuckin’ bone. 

Like now. Pulling away from him. Him, the only person in your life who stuck around. A little bullying (bones breaking, splintering under his fists; the wet, hot smear of blood on his hands, skulls smacking against the pavement—an’ if you tell anyone, he cracks his battered fists and it sounds like a snarl, a gunshot, your parents will be cryin’ over an empty grave—) shooed the gnats away. He took a more clandestine approach to others. Birds that kept circling you tight. Protective, shrill. They made his head ache, but—

(don't want to start nothin’, but i don't want to be alone wit’ ‘er. tried to kiss me, is all. ain't like that, pet—)

It was a test. And they all failed. All but him. 

Yet—

come to Durham. 

i’ll think about it. 

Ungrateful. It's his fault, though. Simon doted on you too much, cosseted by his affection, when he should have clipped your wings from the beginning. 

Ah, well—

Lesson learned. 

You're wet enough now. He pushes in two fingers, scissoring them apart. You'd be yowling at him, kicking up a fuss if you'd been awake. But you're not. It thrums through him. Thick, heady. He likes you like this—probably more than he should. The heat simmering in his veins bubbles. Pops. Sap on charring wood. It clogs his throat with his smoke until it burns, a dry forest fire. 

He needs you. Needs to be in you. He's tired of waiting. Impatience burrows into him like a maelstrom. 

Simon adjusts his hold on your leg, fingers curling behind your kneecap. Steadying himself. His fingers slip out of your cunt with a sloppy squelch that ghosts across his spine. Anticipatory. A touch anxious. He wants you. Wants you bad—

He takes himself in his hand, and slides the weeping tip over your slit. Taps it once, thrice on your clit. And then guides it to your centre. Your warmth bleeds into him. Eager, he shuffles forward. Feeds you his cock. Eyes drilling into the place where his head slips in, swallowed by your sloppy, wet hole. The glands make you stretch around him. Rim pulled taut. 

The sight alone must have been crafted by some Luciferian dream, dangled before him in the shade of nirvana. 

take a bite, it urges. and then take more—

Like this, passed out with your legs hitched over his shoulders, drooling into the pillow unawares, you're just a doll. 

Made for him, and—

“Fuckin’ hell—” He presses into you—cock splitting tight, warm heat—and tries not to lose himself to the sensation of being bare, raw, inside of you. 

—“A perfect fit.”

It's always been condoms. You're not on birth control. Ink blots in his eyes. He goes a little feral with it. Instincts unleashed. Unfettered. 

Simon bullies his fat cock into you until his hips tap the back of your thighs, buried as deep as he can go. It's molten heat cocooning him—a warm embrace. For the first time, ever, he thinks he understands the meaning of home. Sliding home, in particular. 

(Welcome home. Home. Home. He'll make a house out of your body. Sleep inside the brackets of your thighs, head pillowed on your chest—)

As good as you feel around him—slick, wet, and tight—and as much as he wants to saviour the sight of you, passed out on the pillow, cunt split by his cock, he has a goal, a mission, to see through. 

His hand falls, slick and tacky, to your lower belly. Palm pressing against the subtle bulge in your abdomen, the outline of his cock. You always whine and hiss that he's too big for you. That you can't take him to the root. 

Hurts, you complain, hand against your naval. Fingers knotting over the place that aches. 

He presses his fingers there instead, feeling himself under your skin. Changing your anatomy to make room for him to fit—

It lights him in fire. Spurns him on. He bucks into you, pace sloppy, clumsy. Selfish. He's unrelenting as he splits you apart, drilling the full length of himself into your supine body, supple flesh relaxed under him, practically melting into the sheets. 

The thread keeping his resolve, his self-control, sprung up tight begins to quiver. Each piston into you has delicate fingers drumming across the strings of a harpsichord. It reverberates through him, echoing in the stifling, suffocating, silence of the bedroom, overtaking it. Clouding it with the musk of his desire, his devotion to you, to this dream blooming in the prison of his mind. 

Everything narrows into a needlepoint. 

There's just your burning flesh beneath him, softer than it's ever been; pillowy. Welcoming. And the sounds of him fucking into you—lewd squelches, slick and wet; the sound of his cock finding home in the basin of your spread thighs; his heavy breaths, his groans and growls that seem to rattle the bed. The noise breaks, an incomplete requiem of sin in his head, and he loses himself in the lulling notes, dragged under in the bestial beat of taking what his—

A sudden noise shatters through the room. Beneath him, you stir, gasping wetly. The sound mangled in your throat. 

There's confusion in your sleepy, hazy gaze when you peer up at him, lashes clumping together. You moan, whimpering, as you struggle to latch on to the threads of cognisance that he's content to fuck out of you. Your hand lifts, falls to his wrist still pressed against your lower belly. The grip is lax, loose. You’re not pushing him away, but clinging to him. Centring yourself. 

It makes his blood thicken. Has him burning red-hot. 

“Wha’s a’matter, pet?” He taunts, grinding his cock into you hard enough to make your dazed eyes water. Your hand tightens around him, holding steady. “Don't like it? Not fuckin’ you hard enough?”

“Simon—”

His name tapers off into a keen when he angles hips, and starts pistoning into you with a mean, merciless fury. The desperate noises that spill, unhindered, from your slack mouth is the perfect accompaniment to the lewd sound of him fucking your sopping cunt; the piece he was missing when this started. His requiem, complete. 

It's a serrated blade to his self-control, already frayed and threadbare as it is. The pressure makes it snap.

“C'mon, sweet thing. Thought you wanted this?” 

There's a place in hell just for him. It's sealed when you blink your tired, sleepy eyes up at him, mind a slurry of lingering somnolence and the heady alcohol on your breath, and offer a shuddering whimper. Always so soft for him, so agreeable when you’re drunk. 

“So’ry, Simon—”

You can barely string words together. Poor, pitiful you—vulnerable under him. Breakable. Malleable. Anyone else could have tricked you into this same position when he was away. Got you beneath them like this, compliant and unawares, and took what belongs to him. 

(The only thing in this destitute existence he claims for himself—)

Not anymore. Not ever again. 

It's almost callous when he grinds into you. Hateful. Brutish. Furious. And dazed as you are, you barely even flinch at the snarls that spill, unfettered, from the back of his throat. The low groans of him making promises with devils unknown; constructing shackles from brass, iron. 

Entrenching his future in motion, cupped protectively between the parentheses your thighs make around his hips. It's almost a vicious sort of poetry, one laid bare in the odious ruins of that broken thing he calls a heart. Etched into his rotten pericardium. Necrosed devotion. He'll see it through—however noxious, and putrid, you might find the miasmal stench of it spun tight in his web. 

It's for your own good.

And as if you agree, you answer him in perfect euphony, moaning sweetly as you tilt your hips up for more. 

Ghost groans low in his throat, bestial and spinning rapidly out of his control. He feels everything spinning, slipping; the trudge to the finish line narrows into a pinprink. He needs something to cling to, to hold on to with broken hands—

The only purchase he finds is in your demise. 

His hand lifts, shaking yours loose. He reaches up, fingers dig into your chin, forcing your pouty mouth open. You blink at him, sluggish, but he catches the thin gossamer of awareness spooling thin cobwebs over darkened crevasses, covering the canyons in your eyes with cognisance. It makes him leer. 

“Stick your tongue out, pretty girl,” he rasps, words sticking together, muffled under the mask. Crushed aggregate stone under the weight of his own desire. “Tha’s it. Open up nice and wide—”

He lets spit gather again, pooling on his tongue. It's degrading, you always say. Gross. But you swallow it down like a good girl, anyway. Always. You come at him with fangs and claws, but somehow, you always merge in a perfectly dizzying polyphony. 

Ghost spits on your tongue. Lets it land right in the middle of fleshy pink. A sick, twisted pleasure thrums in his veins at the sight. 

There's checking the boxes of an established kink, and this. Horrifically proprietary. Ownership that ignites a fire in his marrow, setting him alight from the inside out. Turns bone into blackened char, cinder. He can almost taste it on his tongue. 

It's made worse, turned frenzied, when you—sweet, perfect, you—bracket it protectively in the curve of your tongue. Completely dazed, head filled with a heady slurry of somnolence and alcohol, but still aware enough to know, even if only through muscle memory, what you're meant to do when he spits in your mouth. 

If anything, you're more obedient like this. Little doll. Coddling it lovingly, this little piece of him that he gives you. 

And it might be the madness speaking—these fraying thoughts take on a vitriolic edge, corrosive aqua regia pooling in his throat—but Christ. He's been stabbed in the guts, repeatedly, and it somehow packed less of a punch than this. 

He wants, wants—

Family never crossed his mind, was never even on the table or something to be considered, but with you it brims. Blooms in rot. Roots in tenebrous. 

He has this insatiable urge to devour you whole so you'll always be with him. The waves of his desire are monstrous. The waters below are rapacious. A gaping maw eager to eat you up—

Pity it’s not an option. 

But he’ll make do. Buy a ring tomorrow. Something pretty that matches your eyes. The curve of your smile. Sanctioned ownership. A collar in gemstones and gold, glimmering and shining bright enough that should any light fade from your gaze, it’ll illuminate in the gloom; twilight made in sorrow. The prettiest blues—

Said eyes water. Ghost’s hold on your face relaxes when you give a muffled keen, cheeks bubbling up against the pressure. Tongue still stuck out even as he takes his pleasure from your supine flesh. Suspended in motion, stasis. Such a good girl for him—

He swallows. Tastes poison, rot, on his tongue. “Swallow.” 

You're a little sluggish, a little slow, but you follow his command all the same. He knows, then, that it could only ever be you. 

No one gets under his skin like this. No one makes him itch, want, crave, as much as you do—

You make a face, twisted up in some amalgamation of pleasure and confusion. It nudges the ruins of his chest and feels almost like a heartbeat when it pulses in his flesh. 

“Simon, Simon—”

His name is all you can say, and he's not sure if you're begging for mercy, or muttering it out into the scant air between your heaving breaths like an obsecration, an orison, but he eats it all the same. Bites down on your pleas, your cries, your prayers, and chews them up between fangled teeth. Takes them down into the swirling pits of his belly where they're eaten alive by what grows in the decay.

(belly full of dirt:

he heaves, and heaves, but nothing comes out even though he can taste humus in his throat, feel worms using his organs like a playground—)

“Somethin’ you want, pet?” He taunts, and shifts his hips back just enough to drag a few inches of his cock out of your drenched cunt. A tease—cruel and mean. He’d get lobbed upside the head for this had you been in your right mind. A tap to his temple, shaking the cobwebs loose. He would have bent down, and sunk broken teeth into your jugular. Merging violence with love until bloody knuckles feel like a kiss. “All you ‘ave to do is ask. Use your words, pretty thing—”

You whine, low and drawn out. A lazy whimper in the back of your throat. “Pl’se—”

You can barely speak. Tongue too thick. Sleep too heavy in your veins. Alcohol, too. A lesson, perhaps, for his willful little pet come the morning when you struggle to measure just how deep into his gullet you’ve let yourself fall. 

He can’t help rubbing salt into the shallow cuts, if only because he likes the way you pout. 

“C’mon, sweetheart. You can do better’n that.”

And damn him—damn you—you do. Your hand curls over his wrist, pulling it close to your mouth where you place a kiss against his palm. Tender. Chaste. Midnight blooms in your eyes, casts shadows under pale moonlight. His breath stutters in his chest when you lean your head back, letting his hand fall to your bared neck. 

Your heavy, lidded eyes gaze back at him, cutting through the shade of night that sews the air like satin. Etched in the file silk is threads of trust in stark white. The kind that bleeds for him; hungers. One that aches, always tender like a bruise. The throb of it echoes between mouldering ribs. Booms between his ears. 

Ghost doesn’t fall into pieces. Doesn’t shatter. No. Something in the splintered remains shifts. Settles. He wraps his fingers around the thick of your throat, thumb notched tight against your pulse, and he feels complete. Whole. Remade from the ruins. 

Your breath hitches. The sound is a gunshot in his ears. He squeezes down, a gentle press. Just enough to make the air spill out of your lungs, to let your eyes water. Lachrymose, eager. It does something to him when you cry. He feels tipped upside down, torn inside out. Left all askew, asunder. He wants to drown in the pebbling river growing against your lashline. Wants to drink it down until it quenches his neverending thirst. Wants, wants—

He feels his name spill from your lips. Brassy and broken, trembling against his palm. A plea—

More.

And he gives it to you. 

Simon hitches your ankle on his shoulder. Adjusts the grip he has on your throat. He settles over your body, blanketing you under his bulk. Stygian beast devouring the maiden whole. The thought amuses him even as it knocks the air from his lungs. 

He anchors himself into the mattress with his knees, steadying himself, curls his other hand around the iron ring of the headboard. All the while, you look up at him—glossy eyes burning coals in the dark, in the gloom. Wanting, hungry. Mouth held open as if you’re waiting for his scraps—

And then he bucks into you, the leverage giving his thrust a savage edge. 

The whines are snuffed out under his palm. Your eyes widen, tears now spilling down your temple, soaking the pillow below your head. 

He groans, head rolling back. “Fuckin’ hell—ain’t you a pretty sight?”

Tucked under him, throat swallowed by his palm. Split on his cock, slick and wet. The tears streaming down your face makes him feel wicked, foul; but the spit running down your slackened jaw quells any doubt. The hand on his wrist holds him tight, tighter still, to your flesh. 

You want this. His spoiled rotten bird.

So, he gives it to you.

Simon’s almost ruthless when he snaps his hips into yours, cooing viciously into your ear about how you feel, how you look, how you sound—so pretty wrapped around him, under him; his little doll—

“S’where you belong, pet—” guttural words spill, flintlike and savage, from his mangled throat. Reinforced with the hateful way he blugeons his cock into you. Times it perfectly with the firm squeezes against your jugular, never letting you catch your breath. Your eyes roll back, legs trembling. Shaking. But you don’t move, don’t struggle. The hand on his wrist is a shackle, and it makes him smirk, scars pulling up in a gnarled mess of mirth; ugly and mean. “Right where you belong. Ain’t tha’ right?”

He leans down, babbles nonsense into your temple. Promises you the heads of gods, the ichor they bleed. Swears he’ll build a shrine for you in Durham.

But for as mocking as these words he murmurs into your ear are, they’re tremulous. Raw. A current roars beneath; a steady stream, a plea, all full of need: stay, stay staystay—

(please)

He buries his nose into your hairline to stem the ravening ache in his guts, breathes in the heady scent of you—of sex, and wine, and sweat. Drags it into his lungs in harsh, angry gasps to stain his skin with the smell of you. Of him. 

It goes right to his head in a heavy rush until he’s dizzy, almost sick, with the swell of it flooding in. An animal, he thinks, drunk on merging pheromones that make him mindless. Unfettered. 

It’s as if he’s driven on instinct alone; his frenzied pace ebbs, grows sloppy. The air around him feels thick. Syrupy. Stifling. The balmy breath in his chest is nearly as unbearable as it is addicting. Sickeningly sweet. Still—

His chest expands, taking as much of the potent miasma into his lungs as he can, filling them up, up, until he feels the edges threaten to brust. It’s only then, when ink moults across his vision, that he lifts his head just enough to shove his mouth against yours, a broken snarl ripping free from his throat as he forces the infectious air into your mouth, down to your lungs. Polluting you with the same sickness. The same rot. 

Little hiccups tumble past your lips as you swallow it down, taking everything he gives you, and he catches them on his tongue. Plays with them between his teeth, basking in the salty tang of you—brine, loam; peatsalt. Ashes, guncotton. Molasses. He’s not sure if he wants to drown you in him, or crawl into the warm, wet cavern of your mouth that pulses around his tongue like a heartbeat. 

Both, maybe. Everything. All of it. 

Always—

But he’s chasing pleasure on fumes. Trying to run with broken legs. There’s nothing refined about this. About the way he cudgels the head of his cock into the places that make your mouth twist away from his greedy lips in a silent scream. His weight is crushing you, he’s sure, but you cling to him harder, holding him tighter. Almost afraid to let go. And fuck—the notion alone is a kick to the chest, harsh and heavy. He nearly gags on the litany of broken moans spiling out of his mouth, landing on your tongue. 

Driven mad, maybe (or pussy-drunk, and high off of his own poison); but in that madness, he discovers this:

Nirvana exists between your thighs. 

Home, too. 

(well—

not yet.)

Pleasure fissions down his spine. The paroxysm taking him deeper into the battle-worn depths of his demise until the walls narrow, closing in. Crushing. No escape. But—

He won’t climb out of his hole he dug. Not until he makes a bed from your flesh; shelter out of your bones. He wants to ingrain himself as deep within you as he can, arsenic subsumed down to your marrow. Poisoned with the fill of him, too sick to let go. 

(Bone nausea. 

A death sentence.)

It metastasises inside of him, filling the barren spaces up until it leaks from his pores. 

He wants it: this dream so tantalisingly close. 

Simon lifts his hand from your throat, and reaches out, grasps at it with a shaking paw—

All it takes is a few crass, careless swipes of his calloused thumb across your clit, cock angled toward that spot that makes you rake your broken nails down his back, yowling in his ear for more, there, please, Simon, please—

You clench like a vice around him. A pretty bow tied up at the base of his cock. He bows over you, grunts spilling from his chest as he sinks his teeth into your nape, splitting skin btween his teeth. The warm, ozonous tang of your blood flooding his tongue is euphoric, eclipsing his mind in a haze of pleasure that crackles and burns at the base of his spine, spitting smoke up his body and into his skull. 

The harsh whine you let out—all prey, all animal; wounded, stuck under his muzzle—has some part of him, basal and inborn, rearing up. Roaring in his ears, ripping talons across the jagged remains of his head. 

(mine, mine, mine—)

He answers your scream with a growl, one caught in the smoke clogging his throat. It sounds inhuman when its wrenched out of his mouth—more animal than man: the devastating howl of a forest on fire—but the feel of it vibrating between his teeth is connatural. Innate. It belongs between his incisors; fits like a puzzle piece in his broken muzzle. Unleashed now. Finally free from this ill-fitting cage he housed it, this goddamn box—

Cobbled together from palm ash and brimstone, ichor and salt. Sewed up with copper sutures in the shape of a man for a perfect fit. 

Every cell in his body screams that he was made for this. To be over you, in you. Maw filled with your blood. Pussy stuffed full of his cock. 

He might not have clawed out of the dirt for you, but this mossy, gnarled lump in his chest beats now only for you. Apodictic. Ironclad. His teeth in your jugular, your life pulsing wetly on his tongue. 

It’s his apotheosis. His end. 

His hips stutter. White noise in his head. It drowns out the shrill screams, the hisses. Everything is just—static. Pleasure of a silent kind, humming, buzzing, and molten. Ghost buries himself inside of you as deep as he can, until his cock is fit snug against the plug of your womb, and lays his claim by branding it with the potency of his name. 

Tidally locked, you’re dragged down the summit with him, tumbling to your demise. Too dazed, too wound tight in his arms, his embrace, to see the jagged rock at the bottom of the hungry chasm thirsting for your blood, you just cling to him. Refusing to let go. 

(silly girl—

His pretty little perigee.)

His body aches in ways that cruelly remind him of his age. Joints stiff, stomach quivering. His knuckles sting when he unfurls it from the headboard, skin pink and raw from the tight hold he had around the metal. 

It’s made worse when he heaves a harsh breath, and pulls away from you with a long, drawn out groan. He settles back on his haunches, eyes searing into the space between your thighs. Messy with his spend. It dribbles down your slit, your ass, pools on the sheets below. 

Your chest shudders, legs splayed out how he left you. He thinks, viciously, of gazelles, and wonders if the blood he feels drying on his mouth looks anything like the muddied mane of a lion after eating its fill. 

“Fuckin’ hell—”

He should clean you up, hide his crime, but he burns the image of you into his head (another tattoo over scar tissue), and drops to a heap beside you. The moment his back hits the mattress and all thoughts of moving are erased in silk, in smoke and clover. 

Chest heaving, slick with sweat, he feels the thrum of his victory in his veins. The high of the chase abates, and he nearly purrs with contentment. Hangs his pride on a pedestal, and doesn’t think about the absence of any guilt. Doesn’t even entertain the thought, not when victory dries between your thighs. When you roll over with a huff, reaching out for him. 

It's as if you're trying to bury yourself inside of him, crawl into the safety of his ribs. 

Ghost grunts, feels his sensitive, spent cock give a feeble twitch on his sticky thigh. The idea of you, blissfully unaware, seeking comfort from the man who writ your body with his virile spend, irrevocably changing your life and entwining it so deeply and so messily with his own that to severe either of you from each other is nearly impossible, floods him with satisfaction so deep, euphorically heady, that his chest seems to shudder. Resounding with some amalgamation of a purr, a grow, so utterly primal, that he sounds more beast than man. 

His roots run deep within you, now, and every misaligned piece of his patchwork body seems to sag and shiver in an almost perfect parallelism. Congruence ascertained with the cupping of you between its mismatched maw. Shackled in a baleen prison. Nestled, safe and sound, between white teeth. 

Ghost pulls you close, holding tight, and hums. As you drool on his shoulder, dripping with his spend, he knows he'll keep you there forever, until you're nothing but bones. 

There's a cloud of confusion hanging over you the next morning, a twinge of uncertainty gnarling across the gaps in your memory. The pieces of a puzzle that belong to a different set. He watches you scramble through them, filling in blanks. Oscillating so deliciously between wariness and discontent. 

“‘morning,” he greets, as if his spend hasn’t dried on your thigh last night. Tucked up nice and tight against your fertile, unprotected womb. As if he couldn't taste brimstone in the back of his throat when you wince as you walk, achy and battle-worn from the weight of his desire crushing you all night. 

“Morning,” it's a sticky rasp in your throat. He wonders if you taste him on your tongue. “When did you get in?”

“Las’ night.”

You nod, but it's absent. Flickering through the timeline of events that aren’t drenched in black, shaded over like a heavy bruise. Your expression is fractured. Raw. Pensive. Something untouchable, unchartable, and yet he reads you as plainly as the tea leaves at the bottom of his cup. 

You don’t remember. Don’t know what to make of this chasm, this fissure, that looms, icy and deep, before you. There’s no anger, though. You don’t demand recompense for what he stole, what he took. The lashings he deserves are tucked quietly between your teeth. Hidden under layers of normalcy to prevent yourself from seeing him as is: a beast. 

“Well, um. Some homecoming, huh?” You joke, but it's hollow. Flat. Fragile like fine glass. You're digging for more. Rooting around to connect these vague, absent dots that linger, lost in the vacancy of your memory. 

He almost purrs. 

He wants to chew you up. Spit you in the palm of his hand. Maybe tuck you in his breast pocket, nestled against the lump in his chest—the one those silly enough to dream might call a heart. Keep you there forever. Hidden in the barrel of his loaded gun. 

“Bit rowdy.” 

It’s horrifically vague, but you cling to the prevacation he proffers to you; a lifeline in the turbulent sea, letting it overwrite the absence, the itching in your skull that must be clanging on the walls, begging for you to run. 

“Sorry,” it's sheepish. He knows the ferality in which you sometimes come at him when he's buried deep inside you is something that makes you twinge with embarrassment. Little kitten clawing at the old dog trying to get it to play. Rolling over immediately when it growls. Docile, sickeningly sweet.

But even naive kittens know to watch out for the frothing, foaming maw. 

“Did you use a—?”

He dips his chin. “I might ‘ave.”

And you take it as gospel. As truth. Why would Simon have any reason to lie to you about this? 

Relief shudders over your shoulders. You relax, inching toward the seat across from him. Gazelle making a home for itself in the lion’s den. 

The spell of unease is broken, now, and you quickly fill the chasm with chatter about your day. Your plans. Asking him how he’s been. 

You shove at the warning signs until they’re hidden away, and ignore the bones of your brethren scattered around you. All because you trust him. 

He aches with the urge to crush it between his teeth. 

And he will one day soon, he’s sure, because it’s just as easy to enact his plan as it was to get you to open the door. 

It starts with him convincing you to drink with him after dinner. Jus’ a glass. Got this fancy bottle. Reckon we should ‘ave some. 

But—

Can’t drink forever—no matter what his dogshit dad thought. 

So, he pokes holes in the condoms you hide in the bedside table, a little wary now. A touch fretful about your contraceptives in a way that makes him preen. You have good instincts, but rarely do you listen to them. Your head must be filled with sirens, but it's futile, he supposes. He's already stuffed cotton into your ears. 

It only feeds into that gaping chasm that bellows up from the depths that this world is not good for you. That it will tear you into pieces, into shreds. You need him. Need the Ghost to protect you. 

Case in point:

You’re needy beneath him, panting and mewling into the sheets as he teases your clit with his thumb. So wet, it almost feels like hot oil on his skin. Syrupy thick. 

In your desperation, you cling to him, throat bared. Fragile fine china. Belly up. Vulnerable. 

You barely notice when he pulls off the condom, crumpling it up into a ball and shoving it in the pocket of his slacks.. Don’t even react when he shoves his bare, raw cock into you. 

You don't even notice. 

(or when he slurs in your ear about how badly he wants to knock you up—breed his pretty girl until she’s stuffed full of him, making life with what he offers. salvation in the form of creation. ain’ tha’ a thought? he huffs into your ear, humid mirth curling over your skin. a stain. and the way it unfetters you—tightening around him, gushing slick—he finds his answer, one reinforced in the rolling of your eyes as your common sense, independence, trickle out of your ears and down your slackened jaw—)

And when that fails, he just slips you a sleeping pill. There's always an easier way to the finish line, he finds. 

(stupid fuckin’ mutt—)

Nothing bleeds from the cracks he wrought, or slinks from the shadows cast by his machinations until weeks later. 

Life just goes back to what it once was—Simon coming and going, letting himself into your home with the door you leave unlocked. You go to work, and chatter aimlessly about this vision you have about a home in the countryside, near the ocean. Saving up—uselessly—for sheep and goats, and the sought-after Highland cows. Chickens and ducks first, you say, and barely notice when his gaze drops, drilling holes into your stomach. Watchful. Leering. 

He can almost scent the change on you. Nose pressed to your skin; bloodhound sniffing the ground. 

Ghost keeps time in the slow, susurrus drawl of your voice sifting through the cotton in his ears, waiting for those precious decibels to catch on, to tilt up at the end as your eyes skim the calendar he keeps scratching x’s across in red, almost delicate, innocent even though it's from his sanguinary hand. A countdown to something you haven’t yet caught on to. 

And it’s all so sweet. 

—the waiting game, the subtle changes, the desperate way you cling to normalcy—

Sweet, like the way you carve this life out for yourself, filled with stuffed animals full of idealism. So much so, that it's almost bitter. Acrid. He watches the light glow in your eyes as your plans take shape, moulding putty between your hands, and like a pit viper, he coils in on himself. Frenzied. Fearful—

But only just. 

The excitation has run its course. He’s drifting, languid, into his scheme. Content. The notion of you slipping from his fingers is a thought that rarely crosses his mind these days, especially when that house on the prairie grows from an occupant of one to two—

“And, you know… when you're not out saving the world—” your eye roll and air quotes make his lips twitch, tugging at the scar tissue, the acid burns, splashed across his mouth. An ugly fucking Pollock. “—maybe you can come visit.”

“Never fancied myself a rancher,” he drawls, just to watch you squirm. Brow furrowing into a deep ravine as you struggle to make your intentions known without actually giving them sound. Skirting around the issue of wanting him there, of planning a home with him. 

(Too much, maybe? Or too soon—? 

if only you knew—)

He finds it charming, really. 

Still—

“It's just a thought,” you mutter, downcast. He wants to choke on your misery. Your sadness. Drown himself in your anger. Float in your happiness. 

Fuckin' Christ—

All this playing daddy in his head has thrown him off his rocker. Made him soft. Sentimental. It's probably why he yields to you. Offers a lazy shrug and another smarmy twitch of his lips. 

“Sounds like a plan,” and the way you brighten is a dagger to his chest. 

And the thing is. It does. It sounds like a dream, a perfect vision. Just—

Maybe not in the way you'd want. 

He's been looking into places unmarred by human hands. Ghost towns, uncharted territories. His home here isn't perfect for it, not like the vast geography of Mexico. The uninhabited wilderness of Canada, places so remote that it's almost untethered to modern civilisation. Islands of forest, mountains, all on their own. 

Vast corners and crevasses where someone can disappear and never be found. 

But those won't work in tandem with his flighty lifestyle. While he plans on keeping you barefoot and pregnant (common sense in the back of his head screams that he's foul, vile, monstrous—), he will continue to work. Has to, really, to avoid suspicion. 

So—

Home it is. 

But he gets inspiration from the Highland cows you coo on about and purchases a plot of land in the Western Isles. Gives this whim of his—yours, really—a concrete foundation made of the abstract. The filament provided by his newly christened Sergeant—an overeager mutt that bleeds warning signs from his pores. 

(don’t get close, reactive dog. will bite—

the little mutt is a great pyrenees, ain’t he?)

But bless Johnny’s bleedin’ heart, he thought as the man prattled on about this cabin he owns. A place of solitude. Could fire a gun and no one would even peek out the curtains. Beautiful, the way all of Scotland is. The highlands, he breathes in that shade of catholic madness only the dutiful soldiers of god's right-handed wrath can be, is where he keeps his home. A place chiselled from stone, surrounded by wilderness that eats tourists alive. 

(he didn’t ask at the time why Johnny was so keen on finding these places scattered around Scotland, ones with little traffic and a nearly negligible amount of souls within the vicinity, but he finds its best not to get too close to mutts crossbred with wolves.)

But Simon is nothing if not devoted, and so. 

You’ll get your fantasy ranch in the middle of nowhere. Your highland cows, your billy goats, your chicken, sheep, and ducks. A baby in your arms, too. One that shows its hand the next morning, dashing all your carefully laid plans. These paths of independence of yours run parallel to his whims but never converge. There’s the potential in this for these fraying threads to split, and diverge. Separate. 

(But it’s all put to rest at the sound of you heaving in the adjoining washroom. His path eats yours until it’s overtaken. Consumed. 

The evasive, unfettered little bird trammelled, caught. Wing-clipped, and all his.) 

Any misgivings the part of his gyri not buried under the frothing mess of his polluted grey matter might have is vitiated by the unwavering certitude that, despite his own gains in this, it really is in your best interest. 

And maybe it's something that should have come earlier in your relationship—however threadbare that word is in conjunction with the unhinged desire blooming in the pit of his chest; madness masquerading as love or some obsessive, desperate facsimile of it. Maybe a proper man, a better one, might have dug down and fully laid out the reality of intertwining your life with the living dead. That the idea of danger, death, and revenge are all everpresent threats scratching at the walls of this sickeningly sweet fantasy you wrap around yourself. 

He’s a dangerous man. A creature of devastation—manmade, bent into, or congenital is yet to be unearthed—which, in itself, brings about a certain lifestyle. One with fewer people around, and always shrouded in secrecy. Friends, family—none of that matters when death curdles gnarled fingers around his jugular. 

You’ll get used to it. Eventually. The only other choice is to let you, his now flightless bird, go. Released back into the wild vulnerable and reeking of his stench. 

You’ll be devoured before daylight, ripped into pieces—only if they’re feeling generous, that is. 

Simon has his own twisted remora. Ones with claws and fangs and a hunger that runs deep. Insatiable. Any scraps that fall from his mouth are devoured before they can touch the sea floor. They’ll crush you in their maw and dangle your mangled body from the gaps between their teeth. 

You’re not made for the wild. Not anymore. You’re meant to be protected. You—this fragile, delicate thing. He’ll hold you close, keep you secure and safe in a mausoleum of your own making. 

This little glass jar domicile. 

A billet in the mountains. 

He’ll fill it with the finest things—silk linens, fine china; mahogany and teak, pink ivory; a bed of soft, downy feathers, sherpa, Egyptian cotton; (sticks and stones and grass and moss). Buy you whatever you need. Chickens and ducks. Sheep and goats. 

They’ll keep you company when he’s away. 

(and if that fails, he can always plan playdates for you with whatever dirty secret Johnny’s been keeping tucked away in the woods.)

He draws an x in the empty, white box of the calendar, the tip of his red marker gliding silkily across the glossy surface. Something unfurls in his guts. Blossoms in his bones. There’s an almost indescribable sense of satisfaction—primal and animalistic—that grows from the upturned dirt in his head. Life composted from rot. 

Ghost hums to himself when he turns, the sound nearly a purr—bestial as it is, suffocated under sulphur. It reverberates through his chest, trembling across the brackets of his ribs that expand with his deep, heavy inhale—breathing in the sight that greets him like a lover’s kiss

The kebab he ordered lays untouched on the table across from the television—some trashy reality show playing in the background while you tried to eat; a dating show, you’d said when he merely shrugged, having other things on his mind over what to watch while you ate. It all seems to be preserved in time. Frozen in on the exact moment when you’d sniffed the döner kebab he got for you—the same thing you order each time—and then promptly wrenched yourself back, gagging. The sandwich was flung back in the takeaway box before you slapped your hand over your mouth, rushing into the washroom. 

If his phone wasn’t in the other room, he might have taken a picture. A little memento to remember this moment. Framed it in iron and perched it on the desk they gave him back in Hereford, the one just down the hall from Price. 

(ah, speaking of—he’ll have to send that caustic bastard a fruit basket, or something, won’t he? maybe some pretty flowers for his lady.)

His reverie is shaken when the door to the washroom creaks open slowly, and you emerge through the gap with sweat on your brow, knots across your forehead, and a shaking hand resting over your churning stomach. 

Shame, he thinks. He really should have brought his phone—

You lean against the wall, taking in deep, shuddering breaths to steady yourself, confusion and worry knitting over you like a thundercloud. It tastes of ozone when he inhales. An approaching storm. In the blue gloom of the living room, illuminated only by the light flooding out from the washroom behind you and the static glow of the television, you look etiolated. A wilting flower. 

His budding rose. 

He coos. “You alright?”

You glance sideways at the kebab on the table, mouth pinching into a grimace as if to stem the nausea still rippling through you. You stare at it for a long moment, seemingly trying to make sense of the reality sitting in front of you on scratched, old pine; confusion runs laps over the dawn cresting in your eyes. This puzzle is too unfathomable for you to piece together; the keys and slots all askew. 

The air around him grows still. Silent. Anticipatory. A tiger crouched low in the tussock. A little fawn roaming too close. 

There’s a heaviness in your eyes when they flicker back to the wall where he stands, drilling holes into the x. Something implacable frissons over your threadbare expression, fracturing across sallow cheeks. 

The air is electric. It pulses across his bare flesh, irritating scar tissue, acid burns, and scorch marks. His skin prickles at its whisper. 

“Feelin’ sick, pet?” He ponders, playing pretend. He’s viciously, deeply amused at the desperate denial splashing across your cheeks. The thin shade of askance that unfurls like the leaves of a flytrap when you look at him. “Mus’t’a been the kebab. Bad meat, I reckon?”

You offer a weak nod in response, pinching your lips tight together. The matter seemingly concluded, brushed aside. Pocketed for later. 

And you say nothing else for the rest of the night—gaze unseeing, turned inward; pensive—but he purrs in contentment as if everything was alright, sprawled across the couch with his head pillowed against your churning stomach as if he could hear the whisper of another heartbeat from within. 

In the saturated blue light, he catches your eyes listing toward the calendar every so often. Wary. Nervous. He thinks you might say something, might ask, but you don’t. It’s caught on a stilted breath. A harsh swallow. 

All you do is bring your hand to his shorn head, and raze the stumps of your clipped claws against his scalp. It’s almost as if you’re trying to soothe the madness from within. Scratching that itch deep inside until it goes away. Gentle hands play pretend and dress up as a panacea. Affection to scrape the illness away. 

He thinks you should know better than that, even as he leans into it with a soft exhale, more relaxed than he'd ever been his entire life. Content. Unassailable in his conquest. 

Simon has always been more scar tissue than man, and no place is damaged more than the upturned tumulus inside his head. 

But oh. How you try—

His sweet, sweet girl. 

The look you give him the next evening is, in parts, brumous. 

A polynya of dread, worry, guilt, fear that frissons across the deep valleys in your eyes, shaded in plumes of darkness, filled in deliciously with the weight of your beleaguered uncertainty. It yawns out before him, this heavy gloom. 

So close he catch the embers in his hand. 

“Simon… We should—talk. I, uh—”

You hold up a little rectangle, dismay, misery, etched in the blue tinge spreading across your face. It seems to steal the words from your throat, turn them into ash. What else are you meant to say, he supposes, when you look out at the world now from the gape in his maw? 

But there’s a veil of wonderment that hides below the tidal wave; this precious, deadly, undercurrent that rents the air, splits his chest in two.

The happiness, however meagre, thin, it is right now (just a sunken boat on the seafloor), is there. Ripe for salvage, and he sees that it’s handled with care. Cupped between his palms, nurtured by his own conviction to do what’s right, an’—fuck, pet—know this ain’t what we planned, but—

but:

The howling quiets, turns to a low growl, and then a susurrus hum, when you shakily utter the words he was waiting for. 

“Yes, Simon—”

You shudder when his fist closes over your wrist, pulling you into his purring chest. Shaking like a prey animal in the jowls of a beast, bested and ensnared. It has a profound, almost predatory, sense of satisfaction curling over his bones. He knows this was the right choice, and is sure, in time, you'll come to realise that, too. You’re in the early stages, he knows. Prodromal. You need to be handled with care to curb the lacrimation, the hyperesthesia. 

And there’s no one better than him to guide you through the throes of it. To lead you to the unequivocal end. 

He leans down, and whispers in your crown—

“Good girl—”

—and the sound of his voice is gravel encased in sticky, sweet honey. Dark, smokey molasses. The very same cadence as a key sliding inside of a lock; metal grazing metal. Turning—

“If it’s a boy, we’ll name him Tommy.”

Click. 

(he gives you that ring he promised when he takes you to the mountains. you smile wide, and tell him it fits like a gyve.)

Simon stops shovelling his want under the cold dirt and starts burying it inside you instead. Makes a domicile from your flesh; a place where he can rest his aching head every night until the howling scraping down fractured bone stops— (paralytic)

[agoofyannoyancetolaw]

consider... Ghost babytrapping reader. It's something some could see Soap or Graves doing, but never Simon.

He's so sly and sneaky, never showing his needs, but when he senses you drifting away, he will slip a pill in your drink when he's sure he's ovulating to ride you till sunset, making sure to milk you dry

a/n: god I love these requests

minors DNI- warnings: baby-trapping duh, trans ghost as well

ghost wasn’t ever going to admit how much he wanted you, how much he needed you in fact. He didn’t want to put into words how he felt- but he knew deep in his gut that you were his, right? You had to be his in some way. You and him had been friends for quite a while, and eventually just enough more that he could call you to his barrack any time of night and have that perfect feeling of sex fade into his senses with you

that’s all you really were though- fuck buddies. God he hated that term, it made his gut boil with envy and hate that someone could slide into your life and end it all so easily. No, no, that couldn’t happen. He wouldn’t let it happen.

these thoughts all brewed in his mind over the months, but the thing that set it all in motion was when he saw you at the closest base pub getting all close to some civilian. That’s what truly got him going, the fact you were flirting with a civilian- not even part of the team, although he’s not quite sure if that would have been worse.

sure he could tell you his feelings straight up, but where’s the point in that?

so he made a plan. It started in physical motion the second you got back from base and he texted you to come to his room for the usual quick fuck, nothing horrible so far

he had this all planned out- unknown to you of course. Any condom you have now has little needle holes poked in and any drink at his house has just a smidge of something he found just to make sure he takes

he rides you all fucking night even when your half asleep and tired, he still keeps bouncing on your length, his body clenching around your member and his folds wet and inviting as if he was trying to keep every little drop inside of him, his gummy walls squeezing every little drop he can get out of you and cockwarming you till you fall asleep next to him

he just felt it in his bones that it was gonna take, it just had to. And god was he close to bouncing in joy when he pulled out a test a few days later and it came up positive, him getting ready to put on some fake tears to tell you. You couldn’t really just be fuck buddies now, could you?

[silkendress]

Bitten Bullet

Previous Chapter First Chapter Next Chapter

-ˋˏ➛ Chapter 4: Jumping The Gun

-ˋˏ➛ Call of Duty

-ˋˏ➛ Suggestive

-ˋˏ➛ Simon "Ghost" Riley/Reader

-ˋˏ➛ Strangers to Lovers, Civilian Reader, Slow Build

-ˋˏ➛ 8k Words

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Friends certainly didn’t hold each other like that.

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Read on AO3

Friends certainly didn’t hold each other like that.

You were sitting on your bed after pacing around incessantly with your towel still wrapped around you, having just finished your shower. Your head hung low in your hands. It’s rather early in the morning, you had just woken up a few minutes ago. The pastel blues of night shifting to day do little to calm your nerves.

His affection was plain, even your attempts at denial were so foolish that you stopped after the first try. It wasn’t like you didn’t want to have your feelings returned—but rather that you were scared.

You should be relieved, of course. Your tender feelings were finally reciprocated by someone for once. But you couldn’t help but be worried.

Worried. You always worried.

You worried that you would make a mistake, that maybe Simon was endeared with a version of you that didn’t exist, or you would get your heart broken. It was paradoxical; to crave affection so desperately to only be petrified when said affection was given.

You couldn’t help but agonize over it, you were already terrified of pushing him away, or smothering him, or—

The ring of your phone echoes sharply in your ears.

You didn’t even have to look to know it was Simon.

Your throat felt tight, your skin did too. You didn’t want to avoid him per se, it was just that you had no idea on how to talk to him after yesterday.

Doubts that were previously passing whispers were now a roaring cacophony. The contrast between your emotions were so harsh and disparate that it was actually beginning to feel draining.

Still, you didn’t want him to think his feelings weren’t reciprocated—in matter of fact, that very concern was what pushed you to answer the phone.

Simon says your name at the same moment you say ‘hello.’

You clamp your mouth shut, the burn in your cheeks only worsening.

There’s a moment of pause, perhaps he’s giving you a chance to speak first, perhaps he’s thinking—maybe it’s both.

Either way, it’s him that speaks again first. “I’m headin’ your way now.”

You don’t miss the subtle rasp in his voice, the sort of huskiness that was evidence he woke up around the same time as you did.

He to come see you as soon as possible. Your hand clutches desperately at your bedsheets.

“Okay.” It comes out strained. There’s a beat of silence that follows your reply.

You hear Simon softly breathe out on the other end, the sound heavy and stable. “Have you eaten yet?”

You’re hovering by your front door, peeking out one of the nearby windows to see when Simon arrives. Déjà vu.

You got dressed the instant you got off the phone with him. Your emotions had calmed somewhat—but that was more due to the fact you became numb to the whirlwind raging inside you rather than those feelings being quelled.

You see Simon’s car pull in to park after some time. You are already opening your front door.

You’re quick to lock it behind you and are even quicker to walk out to the car. You still haven’t looked him in the eye yet due to some irrational fear that if you did, he would see your thoughts written plain as day on your face.

The sound of his car door clicking open echoes in your head. You fail to resist the natural impulse to look in the direction of the noise.

It’s just Simon, as you have always seen him. You ridicule yourself for being so unnecessarily nervous.

He’s wearing a thicker jacket this time around, which was understandable; you were doing the same. It was nigh frigid today.

Interestingly, he takes his mask off once he sees you. You’re still getting used to seeing the entirety of his face. You can’t help the way your temperature increases when his features come back into view. You wonder if he took it off just because he wanted to or for you. Either way, you feel your heart dully ache. You watch his midnight eyes take you in.

You’re not sure what to say, you think you are supposed to say something, but you don’t know what. It felt rude to remain mute after yesterday night. You want to say something, you truly do.

You manage to eke out a small ‘hello,’ the sound grating your own ears. Simon regards you.

He stares at you just long enough for you to believe that maybe that wasn’t the right thing to say, but then he nods. Your cheeks burn self-consciously regardless. In the back of your mind you worry over whether or not this small interaction had set the tone for the day.

Simon makes his way over to the passenger side of the car the moment you do.

You hear his boots come over and trail behind you. You can almost feel his presence at your back, on your heels, much closer than was necessary yet still not close enough for your yearning heart.

You expect him to reach his hand out to open the car door as he usually does. When no such thing occurs, you risk looking up at him.

He truly was towering, especially when standing so close.

Simon’s figure looms over you, his eyes unwavering. You swallow thickly, finding yourself incapable of breaking his gaze.

You feel his fingertip, worn and calloused, brush up slow and gentle against the side of your hand. He rubs a small circle there unabashedly, you feel your heart beat double. His sight never leaves you, it’s blatant. His gaze is searching, and once again you find yourself at a loss for what precisely.

“Forgot your gloves.” He murmurs, the low register of his voice making the hairs on the back of your neck stand.

“Oh, I…” Your mind goes blank. Maybe you could have said something witty about how hypocritical that was, considering he was barehanded, but wit never came naturally to you. Not to mention, you weren’t really in the most legible states of mind at the moment.

Simon simply stands there. He doesn’t take his hand away from yours, he doesn’t stop mapping out incoherent constellations on the far smaller surface of your hand with his fingertip. Your mind doesn’t get any more coherent.

“Get in the car. I’ll get ‘em.” Simon mumbles, a gentle authority lacing his voice that made your insides feel molten.

It is only when his hand leaves yours that you realize why he’s holding his palm out expectantly.

You give him your keys without much thought, and without any hesitation.

Perhaps if your mind wasn’t especially frazzled today, you would have insisted to get them yourself just out of courtesy, but you trusted Simon. You knew he wouldn’t go looking anywhere he wasn’t supposed to.

It is only after the keys are in his palm that he opens the passenger door for you.

He lingers by the car door until you’re seated and fully settled, then he closes it shut and goes walks back inside your home to retrieve your gloves.

You watch his broad back as he goes, observing the sureness of his step and his long strides. The denim of his jeans stretch around his thick thighs. It was a wholly innocent observation, but halfway through you remember yourself. You make yourself look away with no small amount of self-directed chastisement.

In your peripheral you see the movement of your front door opening and closing—Simon entering—and it is only then that you slump in your seat.

Trying to untangle your thoughts felt like a nigh impossible task at the moment. You still felt like you should say something, but you didn’t know what to say. Silence was always an option, but that didn’t feel right either.

So why couldn’t you open your mouth and fix your lips to say what you wanted?

You were scared. Confounding, considering Simon was in frequent rotation in the carousel of your thoughts ever since you met him.

Your heart ached. You wanted to talk about it, but you didn’t know how. You neverknew how, you always settled things in your own head, by yourself.

You never knew much of anything when it came to other people.

Simon was far more worldly than you, certainly had more life experience than you by virtue of him just having more years on this earth under his belt. Even on a practical level, you weren’t certain of the unspoken rules of being in a relationship.

You couldn’t shake the ounce of dread that welled up in the pit of your stomach the more you thought about it. Soon droplets of insecurity became a downpour, your mind going in a fruitless loop that left you more confounded and drained than you were before.

You actually jump when the driver’s side door opens.

You didn’t even realize that Simon came back already.

“Did you find them?” You blurt out, not wanting to acknowledge how you were so deep in thought that he surprised you.

When Simon gets inside and pulls his car door shut he hands you the gloves wordlessly.

“Thank you.” You mumble hastily, already putting them on your slightly shaky hands. Simon simply grunts. His dark eyes linger on you for just a breath longer than necessary. It was remarkable how disinterested yet intimidating his neutral expression was, even without the mask.

“Where were they?” You suddenly ask, sliding your hand into the other glove.

He stares at you, unblinking. “On the counter. In the kitchen.”

Neither of you say anything more, it’s long a long enough silence for one of you to do so, but nothing comes out. You get the thought that he’s interrogating you with his eyes, but dismiss it.

Simon’s eyes only tear away from you to look out the windshield to drive.

There was certainly some manner of static in the air.

You couldn’t quite place it. Maybe it was the mild rigidity in his shoulders or the subtle narrow to his eyes. Despite his outward demeanor being as it usually was, you couldn’t shake the feeling. It was a stark contrast to whatever enchantment came over you yesterday night.

You wondered if you were reading too much into how his eyes flicked over to you every now and then, or if there was a twinge of concern there.

Irregardless of the odd tension, you were still contented to be spending time with him. Simon must have thought the same, considering he was the one that not only told you he wanted to see you once again, but also offered to take you to breakfast.

Speaking of… “Thanks for taking me again.” You mumble sheepishly, so quiet that it would be forgiven if Simon didn’t understand you.

Simon doesn’t say anything for a moment.

“‘Course.” He eventually replies, voice gruff.

Simon didn’t seem like the sort of man to avoid conflict, or dance around something that was bothering him. Perhaps that was what truly bothered you. Perhaps that was where that odd tension was coming from.

You chew on your bottom lip, only speaking after giving it considerable thought.

“I…” It seems like your thinking was for naught, because the second you open your mouth your mind goes blank.

You catch Simon glance at you out the corner of his eye for a split second before reverting his attention back on the road. A burn trails up your neck and coils around your face.

‘Maybe I should just be honest.’ The calculated, well-thought out route didn’t work, after all.

“Yesterday. I-I’ve…Thought about it a lot.”

This piques Simon’s interest, you can tell by the way his index finger begins to slowly tap against his thigh in thought. If he wasn’t preoccupied with driving you were certain that he would have glanced at you.

“Yeah?” You nod meekly. Simon sees it in his peripheral.

“What about it?”

Your mouth opens, then closes.

You thought about his tattoos. You thought about the scar on his lip. You thought about how, in his own words, you never bothered him. You thought about his chest so close to yours you could feel his heartbeat. You thought of how simple it was for him to slip into your life. You thought of his lips brushing against your hairline. You thought of his lips against—

You blink rapidly when you realize Simon has pulled into an empty parking lot. Not of a restaurant, you note. He does so rather quickly, almost like it was a split decision he made.

He parks the car and kills the engine.

Simon remains almost eerily still, save for his chest rising and falling with steadying breaths.

It takes another second or two for him to speak. “If I overstepped, tell me.”

Your eyes go as wide as dinner plates. 

It made sense in retrospect that Simon would mistake your nervousness as discomfort. You can’t help but mentally belittle yourself for not considering that as a possibility.

“No, no—you didn’t overstep at all.” You blurt out hastily.

Simon still isn’t looking at you. He’s thinking, perhaps. Either way, you keep opening your mouth.

“Yesterday, I…I really liked it. It’s all I could think about today.”

You continue, “You were all I could think about today.” Your voice trails off in a mumble, your heartbeat is thunderous, your cheeks scalding.

In your peripheral there is a moment where Simon’s expression goes gentle, if you blinked you would have missed it, because then it’s gone as quickly as it came.

The pauses between his answers aren’t too long as to be awkward, but just long enough for it to be noticeable. He’s thinking, for certain.

“What are we doing?” His voice is a steady, deep timbre, but there’s a looming intensity there. His voice is agonizingly flat, a practiced monotone that stripped away any hint to whatever he was truly feeling.

Despite that, in context he sounds almost frustrated, impatient—desperate for an answer. When you don’t respond immediately he finally locks eyes with you, unwavering.

You blink at him, and blink at him again.

He stares at you, and as the seconds add up there’s an anticipation that rises along with it. You can see him make an active effort to relax the tension his shoulders.  There’s a weariness in his umber eyes that you don’t recall ever seeing before. It’s all too easy to imagine the thoughts going through his head, all some variation of—

He says your name, he’s fixed his voice to be as neutral as it could be at the moment. He takes another breath before going on.

“Listen. This isn’t just something fun for me. I’m not that sort of man.” And I never will be, is unspoken.

You hang onto his every word, he was giving you the smallest molecule of what could be considered vulnerability and you were giving him your full attention.

“I’m not the sort to fuck around, I’m too damn old to be playing at that.” Your mind did not yet fully comprehend the point he was getting to, but somewhere your subconscious must have—because you feel your heart squeeze in longing.

“This isn’t a game to me, or temporary.” It almost sounded like a warning, like he was giving you an out if needed.

You remain silent, because it wasn’t needed at all.

Simon’s brows are knitted harshly together, his lips thin and severe. This pause is far, far longer. So long in fact that for a moment you think he’s waiting for you to reply.

“I don’t want another man spending time with you like I have.” Your pulse stutters.

“I don’t want anyone else holding you. I don’t want anyone else holding me.” Your mouth feels dry.

You can’t shake the impression that he intended to say more—to admit more. But something—his mind, his tongue, him—wasn’t cooperating. Like the words he ended up with weren’t nearly eloquent enough to describe what he was feeling.

Simon runs a palm roughly over his face, his fingers not quite pinching the bridge of his nose but pressing against the side of it. “Fuck,” he hisses through his teeth.

“I want to come home to you.“

It’s a tone of voice you’ve never heard Simon have before. It’s severe, yet still measured and restrained in that way Simon always was. Your heart aches, your throat feeling tight, all just from the fact that it was you that made him sound such a way.

The sound of your own heartbeat is deafening in your ears, you can feel its beat in your stomach.

Then Simon’s eyes tear away from you. He’s staring off out the windshield, he’s staring somewhere else, somewhere you can’t see. He rubs his hand over his eyes—which were momentarily pinched shut—a heavy sigh out through his nostrils.

You watch his chest rise and fall, once, twice, thrice.

Simon says your name, he lowers his hand and stares at you in wounded acquiescence—a decision made, regardless of consequence.

It came out his mouth wooden and stilted; foreign.

“I love you.”

Its instinct, as effortless as breathing or blinking, to say; “I love you, too.”

‘Come here,’ he then said. The naturally deep register of his voice as soft as it could be.

Simon’s hand is cupping your face before you get the chance to fully lean forward. His eyelids are lowered, pale lashes framing dark eyes; the harsh planes of his brow have been smoothed out leaving only a soft, placid expression.

His thumb runs over your cheek. You shiver with the awareness of how small you felt being touched by a man as imposing as Simon, you once again feel cherished.

His rich eyes soak up your features, before they momentarily flick down to your lips and back up again. You feel your heart rabbit-kick between your lungs.

You stammer out, whispering. “I…I—“

“It’s alright.” Simon mumbles, unphased. You weren’t sure what you were even trying to say, but somehow Simon understood. The spell you both were in did not dim nor break from your nervous sputtering, Simon did not cease cradling your face in his calloused palm.

The skin there was rough, especially so against the soft skin of your face—you knew that his hands were ones that have done acts you wouldn’t dare repeat, and yet they held you so gentle.

His other hand comes up slowly, and instead of resting on your other cheek like you were expecting it comes around to cup the back of your head, his thumb brushing tenderly across your earlobe. You couldn’t stop the shudder that ran through you even if you tried.

You hear Simon exhale slowly, almost sounding like a pleased hum.

He whispers, “I’m gonna kiss you now, love.”

Your stomach does backflips just from the term of endearment. You’re nodding almost immediately, you think you would have regardless of what he said.

The his lips twitch, not from a smile, more like the muscles there jolting in anticipation.

His head dips low, then lower.

Your nose bumps against his, you don’t get the chance to mumble out an apology—Simon doesn’t let you, he simply continues.

His kiss is far softer than what you could have ever imagined.

You thought you would feel the scar on his lip, but you don’t—not consciously. It’s there, soft flesh that’s a bit raised; by no means distracting. His lips are only somewhat chapped; just enough that you felt it. You do feel his stubble tickle your face, something within you jumps eagerly at the sensation.

Simon’s mouth was measured in its yearning, whereas you were desperate and longing. He didn’t pull away from your enthusiasm, he simply used the hand cradling the back of your head to pull you closer—deepening the kiss.

Your lips press awkwardly against his, your noses bump together again, the heat of embarrassment is cooled down whenever he just pushes past it and keeps kissing you. He doesn’t pull away when you open your mouth wrong and your teeth clack together, he doesn’t pause to tease you for your increasingly evident inexperience.

What he does is keep kissing you.

You find it impossible to resist melting into him, and even if it wasn’t, you couldn’t fathom wanting to try. Your fingertips buzz with excitement, nervousness intertwining with the feeling, coalescing in the intoxicating yet frantic beat of your heart.

Frantic could also be used to describe how you were returning his kiss; your lips overexcited and eager. Simon matched your enthusiasm calmly, the thumb he had on your cheek drawing languid circles. He remained immovable, stable.

Simon’s mouth pressed sweetly against yours one last time before pulling away just enough to break the kiss, you chased his lips reflexively, only halting when your brain caught up. Your enthusiasm must have been endearing to Simon, because you hear him huff out a single, low chuckle.

You see the corners of his mouth subtly tug upward, the phantom of a smile. It is then that you notice the hazy pink smeared across his face—it extends past down his throat, disappearing under the collar of his jacket—a flush so subtle that it could have been dismissed as a natural reaction from the cold—but the car was warm.

Fondness floods your heart.

You watch his brown eyes shift slowly across your face, as if committing your current state to memory, then he dips his head back down.

His lips press against your forehead, then your temple.

You feel your breath hitch, a frisson going up your spine. The tenderness he was giving you was not something you were familiar with, you almost didn’t know what to do with it, you never expected it from him.

But then again, in hindsight, maybe you should have—

Simon glides down to lay a kiss upon your cheek, then your jaw. He murmurs your name, rough yet sweet. You shiver.

Upon feeling the tremble of your skin he pulls back. His lips were certainly redder than before, you notice a hint of rose on the tips of his ears.

The darks of his eyes are syrupy, there’s a subdued amount of concern on his features; the crease in his brow and the narrowing of his eyes.

“You alright?” It isn’t until he breathlessly asks you that you realize you’re shivering slightly.

Your face is scalding. “I’m fine.” You croak out.

Simon eases.

His gaze lingers on you, and for a moment there is but the sound of your combined, quiet, labored breaths.

His thumb goes across your face, tracing the line of your jaw, brushing past your bottom lip. You want him to hold you.

But Simon’s hands slip off of you, gliding down to your shoulders before cascading off, leaving phantom goosebumps in its wake. It is only then that you remember where you are—in his car, in an empty parking lot. Soon enough he would hold you close while his lips were flush against your own.

You feel a warmth pool in your stomach just from the mere thought of it.

But for now, you were basking in a tranquil sort of joy; a calming euphoria.

You don’t realize the soft smile on your lips until Simon gives you a small one in return. The crease in the corner of his mouth and the wrinkles in his eye. Your heart stutters; you commit it to memory and hope that you see more of it in the near future.

Simon pulls away from you entirely then. You don’t miss how it sluggish he is; like he was reluctant to do so.

He leans back a little in his seat, a hushed sigh escaping his lips.

You find yourself reclining in a similar fashion, your cheek against the headrest of your seat as you looked at him.

Simon gives you a single glance out the corner of his eye before sitting up straighter and starting the car.

“Let’s get you somethin’ to eat.”

The thoughts in your head might as well have been a raging tempest, it would be all too easy to drown in them. With no small amount of determination you manage to push past the most negative of them—what if he falls out of love with you, what if something changes, what if the eccentricities that made him fond of you turn into resentment—

And instead allow your conscience to simply enjoy the moment for now.

The drive is quiet. There isn’t any music—barely audible or otherwise—playing on the speakers, no chatter. Just a shared, gentle silence.

One of Simon’s broad hands is on the wheel while the other rests languidly on his thigh. You can’t help the thought of his hand resting on yours instead.

You’ve been on the road for just little over a minute until Simon speaks; his tone on its own was composed, but the longing look in his eye belied his feelings.

“Don’t remember the last time I did that.”

“Kissing?” Your question is earnest.

“Yeah.” He eventually answers.

He was truthful in his reply, but as soon as he responds you realize that wasn’t specifically what he was talking about.

Like can recognize like. Simon probably doesn’t remember the last time was open in such a way with his emotions. He probably doesn’t remember the last time watched movies with someone, either.

Early on you got the impression that Simon was always a lone wolf; independent. You wonder when his solitude became a prison for him.

You look over to him. His eyes are firmly on the road.

You want to tell him something comforting, but you worry that it could come off as patronizing. Thus, you say nothing.

Instead, your hand slowly snakes over. Your heart is pounding and your instincts are telling you ‘no,’ but you ignore it, for your instincts—while helpful—were forged in desolation and survival. This was different. Simon was different.

And so you choke down your doubts and tentatively brush your fingers against the hand lying on his thigh.

You watch in your peripheral as umber eyes dart from the road to your far smaller hand, then back up.

Simon lifts his hand to place yours on his leg, in the spot where his palm was resting previously, eclipsing your hand with his own when he lays it over yours. He lazily rubs his thumb over the side of your hand.

Your fingers bend, feeling his body heat from the denim of his jeans. You trace slow and indiscernible patterns there. Simon’s following exhale is heavy when it comes out his nostrils, his eyes going half-lidded while remaining fixed on the road.

You relax, leaning back in your seat and watching the world go by.

The silence that follows is soothing. Neither of you say anything else for the rest of the drive because nothing needs to be. Simon holds your smaller hand the entire time.

It’s a pleasant looking restaurant, you can tell it’s spacious just from the outside. Plenty of cars are parked in the lot, you see a family exiting the building while another group goes in—fairly busy.

It’s nice. You could appreciate the bustle of life.

Simon undoes his seatbelt shortly after he parks the car, you do the same. You reach out to open your door, barely getting your fingers into the handle before you hear Simon mumble; “I’ll get it.”

You think about how you’ll have to be getting used to that. Your face becomes pleasantly warm.

He wastes no time at all exiting the vehicle and coming over to open the door for you, moving out the way only just enough for you to get out comfortably. You give him a hushed thank you as always. Your torso brushes past his as you get out, his fingers flex imperceptibly on the door.

He shuts it behind you.

Your hands are tucked in your pockets despite wearing gloves, more out of habit than anything. Simon reaches out his hand to lightly tug at your wrist with two fingers.

You blink up at him, and when you meet his gaze you realize what it is he wants.

Your chest aches. You pull your hand out for him to take. His hand envelops yours.

You feel your hand be tentatively clutched, like he was testing out how your palm felt against his. Afterwards he begins to walk to the restaurant hand-in-hand with you, it’s easy to fall into step next to him.

Simon squeezes your hand at random intervals during the short walk to the building.

You both are seated. Simon sits facing the entrance again.

There are so many questions on the tip of your tongue, curiosity pertaining to what together with Simon would actually entail.

Simon was aware of your lack of hands-on knowledge concerning relationships, any doubt as to otherwise was probably dashed after he kissed you. You realize this with a bit of a mental grimace—you hoped you weren’t terrible at kissing.

He was currently looking at the menu half-heartedly, his eyes skimming indifferently over the black lettering. He notices your prolonged gaze at him in his peripheral.

“What’s on your mind?”

Your tongue pokes the inside of your cheek.

“Just…” His eyes lift from the menu to look at you.

“Us. Being together.” You wave your hand a little, not satisfied with what ended up leaving your mouth, but at a loss of how else to word it.

Simon tilts his head up then, leaning back in his seat. He wordlessly urges you go on with a nod.

Your lips purse momentarily in thought. Try as you might, the words were eluding you. You were happy, elated, and a bit nervous.

You couldn’t help but wonder if Simon wanted the same things as you did, if his idea of years later bore any resemblance to yours. Inexperienced though you were, it didn’t sound like a particularly smart idea to wait only to then realize your wants were at odds with one another.

Simon is patient.

“I guess I was thinking about the future.”

You watch Simon’s eyelids raise for a moment, a spark of genuine curiosity.

“Yeah?”

You nod, shifting in your seat and flitting your eyes around the restaurant in a nervous fidget. You redirect the question back at him. “…Have you thought about it?”

“I have.”

“What does it look like to you?” You ask, perhaps a bit too quickly. “The future, I mean.” You hastily tack on when Simon doesn’t immediately answer.

As soon as the words leave your mouth you promise yourself to remain silent until Simon replied. You bet he understood you just fine—he was just mulling his words over. You feel your face heat just a little.

“Prefer to live in the present.” Before disappointment could creep in, he continues.

You feel relieved that he didn’t just end the discussion there.

“I meant everything I said.” You only nod along as he speaks, not wanting to interrupt.

Then his eyes drift away, you watch his mouth settle into a thin line in consideration.

“A ring on your finger, one day, when we reach that point.” He then says, cautious yet resolute. Your heart pounds.

His eyes return to you then, studying you. “And more if it ends up that way.” He adds with a barely noticeable shrug of his shoulders.

“More?”

“Of you and me.”

It takes you a second, then another, to comprehend his meaning.

“…Oh!” You blurt out, your face scorching.

Simon huffs; amused. Your body temperature only increases from the gruff sound.

A moment of quiet passes before he questions you. “How’s that sound to you?”

“Perfect.” You reply after a pause. You think Simon’s lip twitches upward.

The conversation seemed to reach its natural end. You finally look through the menu yourself. You rest your chin in your palm.

Simon calls your name, quiet yet just loud enough to grab your attention. You blink up at him.

“If somethin’s on your mind, just tell me.” The low monotone of his voice carries the faintest hint of wariness.

“Alright?” He then says.

“Alright.” You promise.

You both had decided on what you wanted. You were busying yourself with people watching, observing the crowded tables, the coming and going of patrons, cars driving by from out the massive restaurant windows. Simon was leaned forward in his seat, his arms folded on the table, his eyes somewhere else.

He looked content, though, wherever his mind was at.

You half-expected a conversation or two to spark while waiting for someone to take your orders, but no such thing occurred.

It wasn’t a bad thing. You were used to silence with Simon at this point.

What you weren’t expecting was for him to stretch his long leg just enough to for his clothed calf to incidentally brush against yours under the table. Your head lifted up from where it rested in your palm, eyelids widening at him curiously. His only response is a knowing tilt of his head.

Your cheeks grow hot, your throat pinched. You make yourself settle back down.

You thought that little touches like that wouldn’t have such an effect on you after you kissed, but it appeared not to just yet.

You nearly jump out your skin when the waiter suddenly announces his presence. You swear you see Simon’s lip twitch in mild amusement.

Your face is alight, your cheeks hot. Simon rattles off both your order and his own.

You end up scoffing at yourself, a smile, small yet bright upon your lips. Simon’s eyes flick down to your mouth, then away again.

“That festival still goin’ on?” You spare a glance over to him, brows raised. His eyes are over your shoulder, staring at the entrance behind you, people exiting and going.

‘Good question.’ You retrieve your phone from your pocket and search for the date. You wonder, briefly, what prompted him to bring it up.

“Looks like tomorrow is the last day of it.” You muse, staring at the promotional photos of vendors and lively crowds. An errant thought about time flickers through your head.

“Still want to go?”

Your eyes go wide. You did. However…

“Do you want to?” You ask. You were perfectly content to spend the rest of his presumably paid time off just lounging on the couch watching movies. You were comfortable with the presumption that he wanted to spend the remainder of his free time with you, all things considered.

You watch Simon’s jaw shift momentarily in thought. “If you’re goin’, so am I.”

You blink at him. You get the impression that Simon couldn’t care less about such an event, but by virtue of you caring about it, so did he to some mild degree.

“I want to.”

“Then we’re goin’.” Simple as that.

A beat passes. “Bike or car?”

You actually consider it for a moment. “Either is okay.”

Simon only nods.

Your mind can’t help but wander as a comfortable silence overtakes the table. Simon would be here for Halloween, he told you as much. Looking at the festival schedule made you realize how soon that would be.

You wondered if he’d be there for Christmas or New Years. You can’t help the barely there frown when you realize, ‘probably not.’

‘Just be grateful that he is here. With you.’ You ridicule yourself.

In your peripheral you see him slowly cock his head at you, his eyes thinning.

“When will you be back?” You end up blurting out.

Simon’s eyes dance across your face for a beat, searching for your meaning.

Your face feels hot. You can’t shake the feeling of guilt rising in the pit of your stomach, like you weren’t appreciating the time spent with him enough, already wanting more—

“Not sure.” You cock your head in mild curiosity. You begin to wonder if he truly doesn’t know, or if that information isn’t meant for you to know.

He leans back in his seat, his arms loosely crossed over his chest, his sights focused solely on you. As the silence stretches on, you begin to believe the latter more and more.

“Okay.” You settle.

A small moment passes before Simon’s rough voice murmurs in a softer tone; “I’ll be back.”

He’ll be back. “I’ll be waiting.”

The food is nice. Delicious, even.

Simon pays for it, when you mumble out your thanks he gives you a look—one that is gentle, mumbles something along the lines of, “It’s what I’m supposed to do, love.”

You’re about to tuck your hands in your pockets on reflex until Simon’s hand darts out to capture yours in his. You nearly trip over your feet as he leads you out the building and back to the car, your stomach fluttering.

After your seatbelts click into place, Simon looks over to you, then says your name.

You hum in acknowledgment.

You glance at him in mild confusion when he doesn’t answer right away. He’s staring off out the windshield, his hand laying loosely on the steering wheel. You watch his fingers flex against it a single time.

He speaks carefully, calculated.

“Could spend the night, if you want.”

You can’t hide the surprise on your face. Your heart leaps up in your throat and your face is ablaze. You swallow thickly, trying to remind yourself how to move your tongue to make words.

“W-well, uh—“ You’d be lying if you said you didn’t like the idea. That, combined with the reality that Simon would be away from you for who-knows how long made you desperate to squeeze the most out of what you could with him. Usually, you imagined taking things much slower, but circumstances were different and you were far more lovelorn than you expected—much to your embarrassment.

You wondered if Simon was moving faster than he usually did, too, for similar reasons. Your subconscious pondered Simon’s past relationships—you knew he was experienced, unlike you, it was just so obvious—but you nip the thought in the bud.

“I didn’t…Pack anything.” You mumble lamely.

“Still can.” He answers calmly. Then glances at you from the corner of his eye.

“Don’t feel like you have to.”

You shook your head. “No, it’s not that. I want to.”

Simon grunts. “Remember to pack your things tomorrow, then.” And then he’s driving out the parking lot.

You don’t even fully understand what the implication there was, you just know you nodded in agreement.

The car falls into a comfortable silence. For the most part. Music is playing this time, softly, but loud enough for you to hear it without straining your ears. Another song with loud singing and guitar riffs. Simon’s taste in music was so painfully him that it was endearing.

You catch yourself looking at Simon in your peripheral, admiring his profile, the way the sun would occasionally hit his blond hair and make some of the strands go white. You take the chance to admire him for a moment, only ripping your eyes away when you reminded yourself of what you were doing.

“Do you like festivals?” You ask conversationally.

He mulls over your question for a moment. “Won’t go outta my way for ‘em.” He says flatly.

So he was just going for you. You can’t help the affection welling up in your heart.

“I like them.” Simon gives you a single glance that says, ‘I know.’ You smile sheepishly to yourself.

“What do you like?” You then question, a bit of a lilt in your tone.

“Guess.” You sit up a bit in your seat, looking at him with a raised brow and a smile.

He simply nods his head at you, eyes still on the road, silently prompting you to do exactly as he asked; guess.

You lean back in your seat, thinking it over.

“Skulls.”

“Ha.” Simon responds, so utterly deadpan and devoid of emotion that you can’t help the laughter that bubbles out of your throat.

The edges of Simon’s eyes soften and his lids droop as the melodic sound of your laugh fills the car.

The car ride isn’t too long, but it’s long enough to give you time to think.

That first night in the bar felt so far away now. You pick apart the days, the weeks, all of the phone calls.

‘I’m really going to miss him.’

You wonder if it was some kind of generational curse; your endless worry. Maybe this was a way for that curse to spite you even when you finally have something you’d never thought you’d have. You were going to fight to live in the moment, to not allow yourself to taint something so sweet. Despite every nitpick you have about yourself—big and small—he is here.

He said he loved you.

Your heart clenches. You feel your stomach go taut with butterflies and your throat tighten with longing. You angle your head away from Simon to look out the window, just in case the pinch in the corners of your eyes give way and a tear falls.

He is here and he loves you. For now, that’s all that matters.

You’re reluctant to part from him. You get the feeling he is, too, with how he lingers in the car for a moment after arriving at your home.

You wanted to spend the day with him again, but try as you might you couldn’t think of any convincing way to go about doing that—and most importantly, you didn’t want to come off as clingy.

Oh, but how you wanted to cling to him.

Either way, you understood that wasn’t a trait most found appealing, so you choked it down and reminded yourself you would be spending the entire day—and night, apparently—with Simon tomorrow. That thought alone was enough to brighten your spirits.

Simon undoes his seatbelt and that’s your cue to follow suit.

He opens the car door for you like always and this time you hold out your palm expectantly for him to hold it. It was such a short walk from the car to the front door but you didn’t care, you wanted to feel his big hand holding yours one last time before he went home.

Simon casted you a mildly bemused glance, but eagerly took your hand regardless, his other tucked in the pocket of his jacket.

He doesn’t let go even when you reach your front door. He gazes down at you past his pale lashes, almost expectant.

You stare at your feet, shifting your weight, unsure of what to say.

‘Thank you for loving me’ didn’t seem appropriate and was far too honest.

Simon steps forward, his torso brushing against you, the movement makes you blink up at him. He just holds your gaze, then he slips his hand out of yours to wrap his arm around your waist instead. He didn’t hesitate with pulling you close to him.

His calloused hand cradles your head close. You nestle into him on reflex. You don’t want him to let go.

He leans down, his nose brushing against your hair. “I meant everything I said.” He murmurs.

Your arms come up to clutch at him—he was too broad for you to wrap your arms entirely around him—and you shuffle a bit closer. Which wasn’t much, considering he already had you right against him.

You feel his blunt fingernails flex against you, then you feel his thick arm squeeze your side affectionately. “Everything.” He says so quietly, you barely hear him.

You don’t know what to say, if anything, so you melt in his embrace.

You both stay there for a moment longer. Wrapped up in his solid form and far softer hold. You want to stay like this longer, but the chill on your nose reminds you of the location. Simon is first to pull away, albeit slowly.

The hand that was cradling you was now cupping your cheek. He sweeps his thumb over the skin there.

“You’re gettin’ cold.” He remarks, his voice gruff. You say nothing, lost in brown eyes and blond eyelashes.

A moment passes, then another. And Simon leans down. He must have been moving too languidly for that ancient, desperate part of you, because you stood just a little on the tips of your toes to meet him—he was so tall that he still had to lean the rest of the way, but your blatant enthusiasm would mortify you later.

For now, though, you were melting into his lips, trying to temper your excitement and match his slower movements this time. 

His kiss is just as gentle as before.

Your hands grasped desperately at his jacket, and Simon tilted your head with his palm the way he wanted, his other arm shifting to hold your waist in his hand.

You chase his lips when he breaks the kiss, your face igniting when he scoffs warmly at the overt display of eagerness.

“Text me when you get home.” You say suddenly, wanting to brush it off. Simon has a knowing look in his eye, but says nothing. He only nods.

He gives your waist one more affectionate squeeze before lazily backing off. You don’t withdraw your hands right away, your palms laying over the broad expanse of his chest for a second longer than expected.

Obsidian eyes glide down to where your far smaller hands remain, then flick back up to you. And for a fraction of a second you see something new glint in Simon’s eyes, warm like you were getting acquainted with—but also something almost carnal. Then it’s gone.

You feel a frisson go up your spine. Swallowing thickly, you have to manually remove your fingers from his jacket and will yourself to let your arms dangle at your sides. It’s easy to play off the shiver that goes through you as being from the cold.

“Get inside. Warm yourself up.” He tells you, flicking his head in the direction of the front door. You ignore how your heart starts racing just from his voice.

You nod, and hover for just a beat longer before finally walking up to your door to unlock it. Simon remains standing where he is.

When you open the door, and slip inside you look over your shoulder, Simon stares at you expectantly. You give him a weak smile and finally shut it closed.

It is only then that Simon tucks his hands into the pockets of his jacket and makes his way back to his car.

You have long since changed into your pajamas—you did so as soon as Simon’s car drove away.

It wasn’t like you’d be sleeping soon, just that it was comfortable to wear around the house. You guessed that you were going to find out how Simon preferred to lounge in his own home tomorrow, and it was that musing that reminded you that you should pack a few things.

You struggled with what exactly to bring other than a toothbrush. You decided to bring a change of clothes and something comfortable to sleep in.

The monotonous task helped you ignore your thoughts, of which there were too many for you to dwell on at the moment. You also had a feeling it wouldn’t be a good idea to let your mind run amok; too much happened today and frankly you were determined to keep this day a happy memory.

It wasn’t too long later that Simon texted you that he was home. You simply replied with a thumbs up.

Day became night, and before long you were tucked into a cocoon of blankets, scrolling on your phone—blue light and all. It became an increasingly arduous task to keep your eyes open, so you decided to text Simon good night and allow yourself to drift off to sleep.

A few moments after you sent the text, your phone began ringing.

“Hi.” You greet.

A beat passes. “Hey.”

“You pack your things?”

He must have been looking forward to tomorrow, considering he was reminding you. Your lips lift in a tired smile.

“I did.”

“Good.” Heat rolls over your body, you shift around in your bed.

“We’ll head out early tomorrow, so get some rest.”

You nod, even though he can’t see you. “Alright.” It comes out with a relaxed sigh. You both linger on the phone, needing to hang up but neither wanting to.

“Good night,” Simon then says, his deep voice quiet.

“Good night, I love you.” You blink rapidly as soon as the sentence leaves your mouth, your face scorching.

‘I love you’ sort of just came out, you were brought up in a family where such a thing was normal to say before bed, it was reflex.

Simon replies without hesitation. “Love you.”

You swallow thickly. “Okay. Bye.” You whisper, your voice barely audible, then you hang up after a moment passes.

You shouldn’t be embarrassed, especially not after you both said such things earlier today in his car, but you are. You’re embarrassed.

But also happy.

‘I love Simon.’

It wasn’t scary to fully acknowledge it now, not after he said it back to you, not after he gave you a kiss so deep the only thing you could think of was it.

‘And he loves me, too.’

You roll onto your stomach, burying your face in your pillow as a smile is wrought from your lips. Your chest is light and your heart is warm.

Tonight, you struggled to sleep much like an overexcited child would on Christmas Eve.

┈┈┈┈┈┈┈┈┈┈┈┈┈┈┈┈┈┈┈┈┈┈┈┈

Thank you dearly for the continued interest and heartfelt comments! 🫶❤️ I got thrown out of rhythm while writing this chapter, and it was a struggle, but reading all of your kind words motivated me so much. ;;__;;

This chapter took much longer than I initially planned or wanted…

I felt like with the way the last chapter ended it would be reasonable for a relationship to be realized. Any attempts I made to stretch out the pining/yearning phase felt a bit silly after a moment as intimate as that haha. ;;

Initially I did put a bit of pressure on myself to make the first kiss and confession of feelings be “perfect” or this big spectacle. It was easier to write the scene once i took the pressure off myself. ;;

Thank you so much for any likes or reblogs! And once again I deeply appreciate all of the support on this story!! It means so much to me. Thank you for reading and I hope you enjoyed!

[7s3ven]

FILE LOADING… tf 141 x hacker! reader

pt one

You needed a way to lighten your prison sentence and Task Force needed a hacker who actually knew what they were doing.

It was a win-win situation if it wasn’t for the fact that you always work alone. Teamwork? That was an unheard concept to you.

You, with a criminal record so long it could be used as a blanket. You who came from a mafia family so it’s no wonder such a sweet looking doll ended up in prison for stealing valuable files.

Task Force 141, an elite squad who had no idea how to spend their hefty pay checks. The idea of a special woman in their lives was merely a figment of their imagination until Laswell threw your files down in front of him.

You were young, barely twenty-seven. The tattoo ink decorating your body with feminine designs was a harsh contrast to your background. And when you sneered at the camera, it gave a perfect view of your tongue piercing and gems adorning your teeth.

In short, you were the perfect little thing they could spoil.

“Reaper? Why do they call her that?”

“Because it’s the last name you learn before a bullet pierces your fucking skull. Once she steals your information, there’s no getting it back. And when she shares it with your enemies, you’re a deadman walking.”

[succubusvalentine]

I wrote this about Steve Harrington like a year ago but I think it would do great for Simon Riley. CW: size kink, stomach bulge.

Sliding down ever so slowly onto his honestly monstrous cock, your body covered in a thin sheen of sweat, feeling so fucking full and yet not full enough. 

You could barely make out the whiny sounds coming from your throat, nor Simon's gruff praises. All you could hear was the blood rushing through your ears.

All you could feel was the brush of Simon's cock inside your cunt, the pressure on all sides of your inner walls was overwhelming, to say the least. Not to mention the feeling of his cock making a small bulge in your lower tummy. 

Simon's gruff praises ceased when you got about halfway down his cock and the blood in your ears finally started to calm down. All that was left was the delicious sting and ache of his cock stretching you to your limits. 

Your eyes fluttered open as you heard mewls and whimpers far too gruff to be your own. And you were met with Simon looking more desperate than any man you'd ever seen. his hands clawing at your hips, blunt nails leaving red stinging streaks. 

Then you notice the tears running down his cheeks. Broken gasps coming from his chest between whimpers. His dark brown eyes glossy, and struggling to remain open.

You slow your hips, but Simon shakes his head no desperately. "Fu-ck, no love, don't-christ. Don't stop. Keep going f'me" he choked out. Only to be met with your confused and concerned eyes. "Nev-shit, never had-a girl manage to take all o' me" he manages. "guess 'm a-mmmph, bit sensitive lovie" 

Your cunt fluttered at the statement. Which only made Simon gasp and choke out another moan. But you seemed to be taking too long to speed up for Simon's taste. 

Next thing you knew, two thick arms were wrapped around your waist and a mouth was biting down on your neck. Simons hips starting to slam up into you at a pace you went utterly dumb. Your nails clawing at Simon's muscular shoulders. It wasn't Simons fault. You just felt so good, and the lower half of his cock was so sensitive.

Could you blame him for making himself come seven times inside you that night?

⛧°. ⋆𓌹♰𓌺⋆. °⛧

[skyrigel]

Simon “Domesticated” Riley is my favourite.

Yes, he would kill for you and he would die for you but his affections and undying love isn't limited to oaths. It's boundless and endless.

He will cook for you, learn because he wasn't taught very good and he wants everything to be good for you.

He will sing for you, because you'd heard him in the shower and couldn't get past to fall asleep without his husky songs to make you fall asleep on his chest.

He will wash the dishes, side by side you. Laughing along as you dry the plates and using his hands at work to your own advantage to play mischief on him.

He will hear you, as you would continue to talk about everything because nothing was out of field, and despite you being a very seducing distraction, he's always trying his best.

He's a “my girlfriend, my wife” guy despite the other Task force guys teasing him about it, he doesn't mind holding your purse, instead he prods on it, he's always on his knees to tie your shoelaces, to help you out from those pointy heels. He doesn't mind being whipped, as Soap christened it, or smitten as Gaz chortled, because he is, as he should.

He's not patronising, despite being raised up to be one. He's gentle and kind and soft for you, and he's working on becoming a better man everyday for you.

He doesn't let his anger that's so unforgiving and terrible get the better of him, he's not a monster despite the blood on his hands as you've always told him so, he would pace around the lawn, sit in the grass, wash his face but he wouldn't let his anger be something you should be scared off, he wouldn't let it get between this holy thing called love.

He talks things out, understands your opinion, values them openly. 

He expresses everything even so it'd become difficult after being told to be stoic for so long, but he tries, always for you. 

He's always startled and flushed when you compliment him and he's trying to learn that you mean every word of it.

Masterlist

[amaranthinespirit]

boyfriend!simon riley when you're mad at him

simon can easily tell when something's off with you.

he'd be clueless as to why you're giving him the cold shoulder, your lips sealed shut with closed off body language, arms crossed over your chest and a sour expression on your face.

although, on some occasions, it's easy for him to recognize what he'd done because let's be honest, simon riley has a habit of pissing off his lovie. just means it gives him a reason to make it up to you.

whether you're frowning, clanking things aggressively in the kitchen, his big hands would wrap around your waist, effortlessly dragging you to sit up on the counter, weaseling his way between your legs before you can shut him out. you can't shut him out, lovie.

a gasp escaping your lips involuntarily. his rough palms pressed your thighs, pushing your legs further apart of his lips traveled down your neck before skipping to your clothed cunt. his tongue pressed flat against the cotton, eyes fluttering shut for a mere second at the faint taste of you before peeling away your panties.

he didn't give you time to react, latching his lips around your sensitive clit, tongue teasing along your puffy folds. a low chuckle rumbling against your sopping pussy when your hands went to his short-cropped hair, tugging at the strands.

"still mad, baby? hmm?" his voice was dangerous; low and raspy, vibrating against your drooling cunt as he lazily lapped up your slick. a slight frown still on your face, and a small nod pulled his lips into a smirk. he knew what you were doing, lovie, you can't fool him.

"oh, are ya?" he'd hum, "can't 'ave tha' now."

or maybe you're on the couch, sulking as you stare at the blank tv screen. he'd press on your shoulder, pushing you to lie flat back on the cushions, keeping a warm, calloused hand pressed to your stomach.

burying his face in your damp cotton panties, crooked nose putting a teasing pressure on your little clit, the friction of the fabric sending a spark through your body.

he could spend hours between your legs, just lapping up the sweet slick that drools from your slit, teasing your pearl that easily becomes more and more sensitive, slipping in his thick fingers to coax your walls for his heavy cock later.

so go on, lovie, keep being mad at him, it just means he gets to make it up by burying his face in your sweet pussy.