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yeyinde · 4 months ago

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STRAW HOUSE, STRAW DOG

Baby Trap + Soap x Fem!Reader : or, Johnny finds a wife in the woods and decides to take her home.

18+ | DEAD DOVE, DO NOT EAT: noncon, kidnapping, breeding/baby trapping. somnophilia. implied stalking. obsessive behaviour. forced reliance/dependency. non-con drug use (implied). vulnerable character (injured reader) being preyed upon by an opportunistic scavenger.

Somehow, getting hurt in the remote wilderness of Nahanni National Park without any immediate rescue is the least of your worries when a rugged man shows up and claims he's going to help. Out here, you've been told your biggest fear should be bears, steep canyons, and a swift death with fangs and claws.

But maybe you should have been more concerned about strange men with crowlike smiles and blistering eyes.

ADDITIONAL TAGS: descriptions of injury. implied head trauma. bearded Soap. smut. this is my love letter to NWT and a what not to do in a national park.

BABY TRAP MASTER LIST | AO3 LINK

It happens in an instant.

The trek up the fjord narrows suddenly. Chossy growing slick from rainfall the night prior. You pace yourself, stepping carefully on the wobbling slate, testing its resilience before you take another step. Climbing higher. Higher.

There's a storm brewing in the distance. Its burgeoning pace grows rapidly, nipping at your heels as cool winds whistle through the steep valley below.

The park wardens at the visitors centre warned you about it when you set out into the rugged wilderness of Nahanni this morning. Brows pinched, wary, when you'd come to them—all alone—and signed your name on the barren ledger collecting dust on the counter. A fact that drew your attention when you flipped through the empty pages.

Don't get too many visitors around here, the man murmured, eyes cresting in apprehension at your question. Not the most isolated or remote, no. That's probably higher up. Quttinirpaaq, maybe? Heard from some buddies up there that they had no visitors last year. We do pretty well. About one thousand a year? Usually filmmakers and the like. Adventurous types. Gets kinda lonely up here. Ain't no Banff, that's for sure.

They added that the weather was unpredictable this time of year. All year, really. Nahanni is known for sudden swells and white-outs, for weather that can turn in an instant, going from calm to cataclysmic within seconds.

(“Storms,” the man huffs, and you think the sigh was meant to be a laugh. One that falls flat when he takes in your hiking boots (too big, but the sales lady at the sporting goods warehouse assured you it was fine, that you would grow into them), and your cheap Lululemon knock-off tights. Your flimsy rucksack. The tinge of green around your ears; the stench of an overeager novice. “And, uh, it’s urban legends.”)

Valley of the Headless Men, he intones, squinting up at you when you ask about them. Adding: be careful out there when you turn to leave.

Dauntless, you still set out into the park, determined to at least make it to your campground before it set in. But the majesty surrounding you on all sides distracted you from your pace. Eyes caught on the Xanadu of an untempered wilderness slowing your trek to a crawl as you took in the steep, rolling batholiths reaching high into the aether, their sides sloping down in a dizzying, vertiginous drop to a lush valley below of scheele’s green below. It all looked so perfectly symmetrical from the high point in the valley where you stood, breathing in the scents that perfumed the air. With the rugged mountains cupped around a winding white line where the river sawed through.

A lone moose grazed at the bottom of a rolling fell. The sight of her stopping you in your tracks long enough that the plume of darkened clouds—all a terrifying burnt sage—had time to catch up to you, crackling overhead as thunder rumbled through the canyons.

Your campground is at the top of this ravine. Three nights spent inside a cabin with nothing but yourself and several paperbacks for company. Into the Wild amongst them—a morbid parting gift from a friend on what not to do—and its inspirational predecessor, On the Road.

You won't read it. You never do. But it sits, a humourous paperweight, in your rucksack as you clamber up the ravine. An anchoring comfort. A piece of home. Something that reminds you you're not completely alone even though you are.

The book, your friends, and the encroaching loneliness that you feel prickling behind your eyes, all weigh on your mind. Spooling out before you in loose, loop threads. You follow them eagerly, glad for something to abate the unnatural silence, and—

A sound.

It comes from the left, hidden in the thick tangle of furze. A click. It shatters through the eerie quiet of the sprawling boscage. An animal, maybe. Hopefully.

It must be, you think, heart hammering thunderously in your chest. There's a sinking feeling in the pit of your stomach. You hold your breath. Eyes glued on the thatch of green shrubs lining the base of the dense forest.

Nothing happens. You blink, shifting on your feet—

A red line pierces through the gap between the leaves, aimed straight at your ankle. It's thin, diaphanous. Slips over the scraggy rock like liquid.

It's so out of place here that it takes you a second to familiarise yourself with its unexpected presence. A laser—

An explosive boom fills the ravine the moment the thought connects. A rifle. Aimed right at you. It happens fast. The world turning over itself, spinning right off its axis. You fall against the ledge in a crumpled, heavy heap, legs so close to dangling off the precipice.

Gravity is a choking weight on your sternum, pushing you down, down, toward the jagged, rocky shoreline. A fall like that—

You curl into yourself instinctively.

“Ah, shite—” is all you hear amid the roar in your ears. “Y’alright? ah didnae see ye thare—”

In your tear-stained periphery, a man appears. He stands into the glare of the waning sun, limned in a halo of gold. There's a pinch between his dark, thick brows. A steep ravine. He's ragged. Wild. Tuffs of black hair hang loose past his ears and nape, curling slightly at the ends. It blends, almost seamlessly, into his thick, scraggly beard. He pushes a hand through the top, grabbing a fistful in his palm.

“Easn't expecting anybody oot 'ere. Nae this far intae th' woods.”

He seems to be speaking to himself more so than he's talking to you. There's anger writ in the fine lines of his face, but this ire isn't turned toward you. It's inward. Self-admonishment. His eyes darken when they flicker down to your ankle, as if reminding you of the hurt there when you'd been so focused on how out of place his accent is in the Northwest Territories.

The ache in your ankle brings you crashing back into reality. The pain seems to vibrate from within your marrow, riveting up your bones.

You chance a glance—

You swallow down the drum of panic. A trick of the light. It must be.

A dream. A nightmare.

But the man appears. His hand falls onto your knee, holding you steady.

“Ah will hae tae put oan a tourniquet. Will hurt a lot, doe.”

Absently, you nod. Keep nodding. Can't stop.

There's a hole cut through your ankle. Tore thro' yer Achilles, he's saying, words water in your ears. He instructs you to wiggle your toes.

"Ah know it hurts, but just dae it fer me, okay?"

You do. You—

Nausea buds in your guts, churning your stomach. The apple you ate earlier is choked out into the bushes dotting along the ravine. Insides purging themselves, replacing everything—food, water, coffee from earlier, bile—until nothing but shaky panic remains. It tastes like iron in the back of your throat.

“Ah know, doe,” he's saying, fingers knotting into your slick hiking trousers. Lululemon knockoffs from an outdoor warehouse in the city. A pocket knife follows, and cuts a seamless line inches below your hip.

Sad tae see ‘em go, he murmurs, accent thickening around the words. Saturating them in a drawl that's too liquid for your unpractised ears to catch. He makes a mournful sound when he slides the blade down your leg, adds, “hugged yer arse like a dream, doe.”

Another trick. The mountains do funny things to sound, you know. It must be all in your head. All—

“Don't worry,” he's shushing you now as he peels the fabric off your legs, groaning low in his throat. “Ah have ye. Ah will take care o'ye, tae, doe. Bonny thing, aren't ye? a' alone. Nae anymore, doe. Jus' me 'n' ye now. Jus' us —”

You always thought you'd have your wits about you in a traumatic situation. Be able to think clearly, rationally. Make appropriate decisions that befit the situation unfolding. Life saving ones. Practical.

To gear up for this trip, you watched survival videos on YouTube. How to make a fire. How to make drinking water. How to build a shelter. Tips on weathering down for a sudden storm. Tucked it all inside your head, and thought, I got this.

Had to, really, because everything you've read about Nahanni says it's unpredictable. Calm weather, gorgeous views one moment, and then a sudden deluge the next. Snow falling quicker than you keep up with. Animals blend in seamlessly with the landscape. Slips, falls. It's so easy to get lost, someone wrote.

But as he uses the scrap of your trousers to wrap around the wound on your broken, mangled ankle, you realise all that planning was for nothing. This was one of those moments when you discovered just how much you bit off. That panic made you mute, made you freeze up.

The pain is almost secondary to the surge of adrenaline. Fear.

You need to go home. You tell him this, slowly. Muttered through numb lips.

There's something almost like pity in his eyes when he glances up at you.

There was a mix-up, he says, slowly. Cautiously. You got yourself turned around in the opposite direction. There's no campground on the fjord above. All the lodges and cabins are in the opposite direction.

Y'got lost, he tells you. Turned the wrong way out. Ye'r in th' backcountry.

“I'll go back,” you press, urgent. Insistent. Panic is acidic in your throat. Corrosive. It burns when you swallow. “Please, just tell me which way to go, and I’ll—”

"Cannae dae tha'."

“Why?”

“Storm,” he points in the distance where a plume of cloud gathers. So dark, they're almost black. Ominous. “Gonnae skelp solid. Na choice but tae git oot."

“I don't have anywhere to go—”

He rakes his hand through his hair. “Ah kin take ye tae mines. Git a cabin in th' woods. Juist ootdoors o' Nahanni Butte.”

“No, I—”

His hand squeezes tight around your ankle. The pain makes itself known in a visceral, awful throb that travels up your leg, curdling at the base of your spine. Wrong, wrong. Something is wrong. Your body is trying to reject the agony. The breaking of your bone. It's foreign, it doesn't belong. But there's nowhere for it to go.

Pain pulses in tandem with your heartbeat.

You don't realise you're screaming until you hear the echoes of it rebound against the limestone walls. And then there's a whisper in your ear. You feel the scratch of his beard against your cheek.

"Shush, bonnie. Cannae let ye go oot oan yer own. Gonnae take ye home, yeah?"

Home. Home. You nod furiously, and it's only when the scraggly black curls covering his chin and jaw catch on damp skin do you realise you're crying.

He leans away from you, arm stretching toward the rucksack behind him.

The rifle leans against it. You feel sick all over again.

“Drink this,” he says, unscrewing the cap. “It'll make ye feel better.”

He presses the lip to your mouth, a hand slipping over the back of your head, tilting your chin up. “Drink,” he says again, and it's firmer this time. A command. “Ah promise ye'll feel better, doe.”

It tastes bitter. You swallow it down. Keep swallowing.

“Good,” he rasps, hand sliding down the length of your spine until it rests against your lower back. “Keep drinkin’, sweet thing.”

It pools in your belly, sloshing uncomfortably when you move, but it washes the bitterness from between your teeth. You keep drinking. Swallowing it down. You know you shouldn't, that you might get sick again, but it's a distraction from the mess that is your ankle—bloody, twisted, mangled—

Nausea swells. You choke it down until you can breathe without feeling as though you were going to be sick again.

“You'll be okay,” he's saying, moving around you with a practised efficiency for something so broad. It's almost graceful. Agile.

He patches you up as much as he can with the supplies he has, but you refuse to look again at your ankle. It's broken, that much is clear. You can feel your bones grinding, sliding against each other. The sensation is horrific. Wrong. You turn your head to the ledge you were standing on just to distract yourself from the agony of it all.

You're surprised you're not crying. Screaming. The urge is there, just beneath the surface. But for some odd, unfathomable reason you find you can't. Your chest feels heavy. Lungs sluggish. Slow.

It must be an adrenaline crash, you think. Why else would you feel so tired, so exhausted.

“I'm—” you start, but you feel dizzy. “‘m—”

“Shush, doe.” He mutters, and it sounds far away. Garbled. “You need yer rest. Had a traumatic accident. But don't worry. Ye can trust me. A wouldnae let anythin' ill happen tae ye ever again."

“Yeah,” you breathe, nodding. Nodding. You can't stop, can't—

“Lay back. Git some rest. A'm almost done, 'n' then ah will hae ye back home in no time—”

You come to on a groggy whimper, head buried in the messy locks curtained over his nape. There's a soft, pulsing thud in the back of your head when you try to lift it up. It feels heavier than it should. Leadened. You groan again, fighting against the currents dragging you back down to those soporific depths—

Your head is a slurried marsh. Thoughts ephemeral, broken. Fragmented. They slip through your fingers when you reach for them, diaphanous wisps you can't seem to catch.

“Don't worry, doe—” your world quivers when he speaks. Words vibrating through your chest, catching on the heavy rails of your ribs. The seismic vibrations rumble in your ear, coming to life as a mere echo in your head. “Ah will keep ye safe.”

It's comforting. A raft in squall, something to cling to as the waves make futile attempts to drag you under. Your arms, dangling loosely over his shoulders, sluggishly flatten to his chest, linking over his chest.

He grunts at your touch, palms slick on your skin.

“Thank you,” you slur, words thick in your throat. Sluggish. “Thank you for helpin’ me. Fer savin’ me—”

Your body shakes when he trembles. With your forehead against his nape, you hear his thick swallow. The air ghosting out of his lungs in a soundless whisper.

His hands flex around the backs of your knees. Squeezing tight. The man doesn't say anything for a moment. In the silence, the pursuing somnolence catches up to you. It digs heavy fingers into your eyes, dragging you back down into the sticky, thick tar.

Sleep finds you in an instant.

You try to read his words in the quiver of your bones when he speaks. Make sense of the tremble reverberating through the hollow gaps, tangling in the pulpy mess.

But there's a mistranslation somewhere. A missing decibel. A forgotten wavelength.

It almost sounds like he says—

“Wouldn't leave mah wife alone in th' woods like tha’.”

How funny, you think, and hide a giggle into the hardened ridge of his shoulder blade.

Cognisance is a transient flicker.

You're not sure how long he matches through the thicket with you on his back, navigating the unending chaparral with an ease that feels innate rather than practised. You stare down at the ground, world hazy around the edges, and think, suddenly, intrusively, that you ought to remember the steps. Every left, every right.

You get to seven lefts, three rights—a small ravine, a flattened coppice; a gnarled spruce sat alone in a valley of lush green and clumps of topaz podzol—before your eyes are too heavy to keep open. They slip shut. And you think, only for a moment. Just a second, I just need to rest my eyes, and then come to at the sound of a groggy engine growling to life.

The world morphs from a dense forest intercut with sheer cliffs looming, indomitable, in the grey distance, to the faded beige felt covering the ceiling of an old truck.

Your blink is a slow crawl, lashes weighed down by anchors dredging over the seafloor. Gritty, raw. It hurts, now, to hold them open. A furious throb jabs at your temple. It aches like a bruise. But it's nothing compared to the nauseating agony that floods your core each time your foot is jostled. Nerves being lit aflame in an endless throe of pain unlike you'd ever experienced before.

Your mouth feels sealed when you go to speak. Lips glued together. Sluggishly, you squeeze your tongue through the crack between your teeth, licking along the seam.

A plastic bottle appears in your periphery, nozzle tipped toward your mouth. A hand curls around the body of it. Fingers overlapping. It looks small in this big hand. Tiny. Long wisps of black hair cover their ruddy knuckles, spreading in a dense crop up their forearm, growing thicker at the wrist.

Their skin is pale, tinged slightly pink. Even through the brume, the lambent light of the sun catches on their skin. Illuminating small scars, cuts. Little scratches from the snagging furze.

Their hand shakes. The dark veins that branch off from the white-capped peaks of their bent knuckles pulse under the thin skin when they move.

“Drink, hen,” he murmurs, bringing the bottle to the jut of your lower lip. “Ye’ll need it.”

A plastic bottle is an odd choice to bring into the backcountry, but as you peer through the translucent skin, you find the water inside is cloudy. Chalky.

“Donnae worry—” he gives the bottle another shake, disturbing the sediment congealing at the bottom. “It's electrolytes, ken. Nothing fishy.”

Your teeth ache from the cold when he slips the rim between your lips, prying them apart. With your head already tilted back in the seat, the water slips in. A slow trickle. He feeds it to you, humming in appeasement when you swallow.

“Tha’s a good girl.”

It carves a jagged tunnel through the murk in your head. The praise slipping in, liquid, until it coats your burgeoning trepidation in a sudden swell of endorphins. With their unpractised, gauche hands, they paint a mockery of Sargent in the gaps of your synapses, stuffing the spaces between with oversaturated hues of teal, white, yellow, orange, and pink.

Carnation, Lily, Lily, Rose.

But despite the shoddily crafted pastiche, it works.

Your eyes flutter, bones growing heavier, heavier, as they're forced to carry the weight of your liquified flesh. This molten heat in your chest turns your insides into putty.

Water dribbles down your chin. He sees it and coos.

“Ah, doe. Right mess ye are now. Ah will hae ye home in no time. Git ye a' cleaned up."

The idea of home melts you further. You sigh in the seat, soft and drawn out, and shake your head slowly when he wriggles the bottle in front of you again.

“Get some rest, doe,” his hand falls, heavy and warm, on your thigh. Thumb stroking along the curve of your leg, fingers curling into the seam, digging deep. Resting there.

It's too high to be appropriate. You know this. Went through lesson upon lesson in school of bad touches and what's considered friendly, polite. But when you try to open your mouth to say something about it, you catch the spread of his palm over your flesh. Wide, broad. Masculine. It catches in your throat, and gets tangled in the mush at the base.

It should be fine, you think, dizzy over the way his hand swallows you whole. He saved you, after all.

But it burrows. Digs deep. Some sense of wrongness permeates out from the firm grasp he has on you. It feels possessive. The sort of thing you might expect between people who are intimate with each other. A couple. You've known him for—

Hours, maybe?

Most of it was spent in a pain-induced hypnagogia.

It curdles in your stomach. Rotten, spoiled milk.

But—

He saved you.

You'll choke yourself on it if you keep thinking about it. So, you don't. You push it down. Cover it beneath the sediment, and bury it deep.

He's just a man.

Kind. Helpful.

As you dig a hole for this unease, he keeps his hand fixed on your thigh. The other is pressed against the steering wheel, the ball of his palm under the curve at the top of the wheel. Relaxed. Easy. You try to adopt his nonchalant disposition and glance out at the blurry world around you.

You feel exhausted. Unsettled. The sort of fatigue that comes with a raging fever. There's sand in your mouth. Your throat is dry.

You don't ask for water.

In the lull, he pitches the truck forward with a grave rumble. The silence is broken by the crunch of vegetation and gravel beneath the wheels as he ploughs forward.

There are public roads to get to Nahanni. The floatplane you entered into the park on was chartered by Parks Canada. And yet—

He commandeers the truck around a flatbed of rock and dirt. Muskeg dots the tops in some places, and he veers expertly to avoid them.

It's less of a traditional road and more so a forged desire path. You know the highway has to be close by, the link between Fort Liard and Fort Simpson, but as you peer out the window, the world around you looks overgrown. Wild. Alien.

Sloping hills in lush green stretch out into the distance, meeting with the dense montane forests dotted along the stretch of land. The grassy coppice under his wheels is matted down, and interspersed with clumps of brown, wet muskeg and crushed slate.

Over the grey peaks of the mountains in the distance, a thick, black cloud looms. The sky turns gunmetal, almost indistinguishable from the monoliths jutting beneath them.

At some points, he takes his hand off your thigh to navigate winding turns better, but it always ends up back on you. And always a little higher than it was before.

Your mouth is filled with lead. Tongue thick, malleable. Tensile like mercury. You can't speak. So you just ignore it. Dig your crown into the headrest, and breathe in the woodsy scent of him. Laurel, tree moss. Coumarin. Rotting pine. Sweet acacia. It tickles the back of your throat. Sticks there, glued in the syrupy mess.

You'd hoped it would get easier to ignore, but it stays there, a constant weight, even as the world outside fades into a hazy twilight.

In the hush of the cabin, he squeezes your thigh. “Cannae wait tae get ye home, doe.”

Against the staggering backdrop of a black, jagged mountain, a doe stands in the talus. Her fawn fur and tuffs of white spots stick out against the charcoal-coloured cliffs, and you watch, some distance away, as she bends down to fossick through the scree in search of food.

With the looming clouds of gunmetal and ash gathering around the craggy peaks, her presence here feels dangerously out of place. Jarring. She shouldn't be here. She doesn't belong.

But the beauty of this moment is breathtaking. Mesmerising. You stare in muted horror, awe, as she grazes in the rubble, slender neck bent in a graceful arch. The sloping handle of fine china. Her wet, black eyes are so open, so kind. Puddles of ignorance, naïvety, as she flicks her tongue out against the desolate rock, a fruitless search for grass in which to mull on.

Thunder crackles over the snow-capped ridges. Her ears flicker, but she doesn't run. You should warn her. Scare her away. But you can't move. Can't speak. You're a mute spectator, a piece of dross on the ground watching the approaching calamity without a mouth. Horror churns. You want so badly to tell the doe to run—

An impossibility, you know. It's much too late for her to do anything at all.

Around the doe’s leg is a shackle.

Your skin rips, tears, as you force your jaws apart, blood pooling in your mouth. If you can make a sound, she’ll—

A boom echoes through the canyon's cradle.

The scream gurgles in the back of your throat.

Agony rips through your leg—

—you wake with a gasp.

Sputtering, choking on the saliva pooled in your mouth. It tastes bitter, brackish. You feel something gritty between your teeth. It sticks to the backs, granular specks that dissolve, sour and chalky, on your tongue when you run it along the ridges of your gums.

You swallow it down, grimacing at the acidic taste.

“Awake, aye?” His voice chips through the dense fog. You blink the haze away, glancing sideways at him through bleary, heavy eyes.

His profile is lit by the harsh glare of high noon. The sharp jut of his ball cap. The curve of his nose set in the thick bushel of his scraggly beard and moustache. His broad chest concealed most of the view from the driver's side window. The lax bridge of his arm, knuckles loosely curled around the steering wheel.

He tilts his head toward you. “How're ye feelin’?”

Sluggish. Awful. There's sand in your eyes. Cotton in your head. You feel like you've been left out in the hot sun all day. Dizzy and sunburnt. Feverish. Heatsick. Your throat is dry, but you don't ask for water. You don't answer him at all. Can't. Your tongue is laden. Lips numb.

It takes you a moment to reorient yourself, squinting through the glare of the sun—

That reels you back. Breaks through the fog.

You know that the concept of day and night in the summer is different here. Twenty hours of daylight with twilight lasting all night. But even with the skewed perception of time and the heavy molasses thickening around the edges of your cognisance, you know that something is wrong.

When you left the park, it was close to five in the evening. It should be twilight, not—

Your gaze lists sluggishly to the clock on the dashboard. Through the haze, the unmistakable gleam of one-fifteen stares back at you.

It was the right time last night.

“Wha—?”

You're not sure what you're asking. It's not even really a word, but a garbled sound. A noise of distress, confusion, in the back of your throat.

He seems to understand it all the same.

“Park had a bad storm,” he answers, pitch far too light for the severity of your situation, of what you're feeling. It makes you frown, sharp and sudden. “Washed through th’ river. Where ye were—well. Wouldnae ‘ave made it out, ye see. Would’ve gotten all torn up in th’ storm—”

You read that storms in Nahanni are vicious, sudden. Weather can turn in an instant, going from moderate to devastating in a blink. But—

What he's saying doesn't make sense. You remember bits, pieces, from earlier. He said you got turned around. Wandered too far off the trail, lost in the deep wilderness of Nahanni’s sprawling valley.

“Where are we?”

“Nearly home.”

You push the wave of nausea down. “I need to go to a hospital.”

“Can't dae tha't'.”

“Why not?”

He doesn't answer for a beat, eyes fixed on the dirt path. Unblinking.

Finally, he mutters: “had tae leave th' park oan th' opposite side when th' storm came in. No roads take us tae town.”

“I have—” you're not sure where your bag is. You hope he had the wherewithal to snatch it up after you fell. Hope. “I have a satellite phone. I can just call—”

“Sorry, hen. Yer bag flew off th' ledge. Ah coudnae grab it 'n' ye. Ah dinnae hae a phone oot 'ere. Never needed one—”

Hopeless. Hopeless.

“How—how could you survive out here without one?”

“Nahanni Butte is a few hours awa'. Go intae town when th’ winter road is open. Inaccessible now. Th’ rivers flooded it. Cannae cross it. Can hunt, 'n' ah hae everything a'm needin' oot here.”

“So…” the reality of your situation is beginning to dawn on you. Helpless. Hopeless. “I'm stuck here until—winter?”

“Ah hae a friend flying oot fae Yellowknife. Comes tae drop off supplies 'n' th' lik'. He'll be 'ere in two months—”

“Two months?” This whole situation feels impossible. Wrong. You're so close to people—Fort Liard, Nahanni Butte, Fort Simpson. How could you be stuck here for two months? The idea of it is absurd. “You're not—you can't be serious.”

“Aye. I am.”

There's a pinch between his brow. You wonder if it's meant to convey the severity of the situation, but as it grows deeper, deeper, you have the sudden sense that it's not an emotional decree of his sincerity. That it's, instead, a sudden twist of anger.

It scares you.

“I want to go home.” You mean for it to be forceful, but it comes out in a whimper.

The man nods. The punch in his brow lessens. “Aye, me tae.”

“Where are you from?” You pry, needing the distraction from the endless trawl of green and slate and permafrost enclosing in on you. “You're not from around here, are you?” At the gentle raise of his brows, you add, hurried, rushed: “you just. Have an accent, and I—”

“Fae Scotland,” he answers, and there's a quick grin on his face. Roguish. Charming. The sight of it has your start thudding in an uneasy gallop. “Edinburgh."

“Oh. Far from home.”

“Aye—” the grin fades, twisting into something ugly. “Had an—accident,” he spits the word out, brows pinching once more. Anger is writ in the hard clench of his muscles, his jaw. His knuckles blanche around the steering wheel, and you think you should have just kept your mouth shut. “Sent me here.”

There's a multitude of questions you want to ask. Vying for the top is the most obvious—why did this happen? why isn't he letting you go?—but what comes out instead is, “why?”

Just that. Nothing else.

“Military.”

He adds nothing, either.

“Military?”

A nod. “Go’ hurt. Had rehab. Sent me here tae clear ma heid, and well—” his eyes flicker to you. You can't read his expression. “Got a fresh mission, dinnae I?”

“You don't—”

“I cannae leave ye. Both oo' us are stuck 'ere 'til someone comes tae pick us up, 'n' take us home.”

The idea that somehow he's just as trapped as you are hasn't occurred. Why would it when he has a rifle, a truck, freedom—

But what good is all of that when you're landlocked in a place known for winter roads. Permafrost. The forced shift in perspective doesn't quell the anxiety roiling in your guts, but it lessens it. Somewhat.

“Two months?”

He nods. “Aye.”

“And you have no cellphone? No satellite?”

“Ye can check it—” he makes a flippant motion toward the glove box in front of you. “Deader than ever.”

You hesitate only briefly. Long enough to level him with a searching look that yields no results before you reach for the compartment, gingerly pulling it open, and—

Sometimes, things get overlooked by their surroundings. Swallowed in the vacuum. Blending seamlessly into the muddle, the commotion.

This isn't like that.

It sits on top of a manila folder. Sleek black and cold silver. You're not terribly well-versed in guns—the extent of your knowledge stemming mostly from formulaic crime shows aired late at night; CSI, NCIS, Criminal Minds—but you recognise this one instantly. Some sort of handgun. Police issued, you think. It's bigger than you'd expected. Looks heavier, too.

Your heart stutters. The air galloping out of your lungs in a stammering rush.

He makes a noise, soft and nonchalant, as if keeping handguns in the glove box of his old, burnt orange truck is perfectly normal.

“Fer protection,” he mumbles. You catch the jerk of his chin in your periphery. “Forgot I had it in here. Been usin’ th’ rifle fer huntin’ mostly. Or th’ shotgun.”

Three guns. You swallow. “Why—” your voice comes out in a brittle whisper. You clear your throat. “Why, um, why do you need three?”

“Not fae around here, are ye?” He echoes your words with a wry twist of his mouth, eyes slanting in the sunlight. “Tha’,” he takes his hand off your thigh to jab his finger at the handgun. “Is fer wolverines.” His index finger falls, his thumb juts out. He jerks it over his shoulder. “Tha’ is fer huntin’. The shotgun back home is fer bears.”

You try to move out of the way when his hand falls back to your thigh, but the pain radiating up your leg immobilizes you. There's not much you can do in this situation but endure.

Military. Wounded in action. Three guns. Touchy.

You're not sure what to think. It would be easier if you couldn't.

“What do you hunt?” You ask instead, glancing out the window to the barren landscape rolling out around you. There doesn't seem to be much in the jagged hills, and towering mountains.

“Gettin’ hungry? Donnae worry, doe. Go’ tha’ pesky hare I was tryin’ tae shoot oan th' ledge fer dinner tonight.”

It's not much of a comfort. The idea of being injured—by accident, he claims—to such an extent over a rabbit makes you feel a little sick.

“That's it?”

“I can make a mean steak oot o' anythin'. Stews fer tougher meat. Fish—whitefish, arctic grayling, and lake trout. Learned how tae make a nasty fishfry from th’ locals in Nahanni Butte. Bannock, too. Got berries ‘round ma cabin. Caribou, Moose. Taste better in tacos or burgers. Mountain goat, Dall’s sheep. Been eatin’ better ‘ere than ah did at home.”

“And you're—just allowed to hunt them?” The website advised about a permit through some special outfit needed to hunt when you requested your pass into the park. Said that only aboriginals were allowed to do so. “You're not—”

“Aye,” he cuts you off with a small nod. “No huntin’ in th’ park. But. We're nae in th' park anymore.”

“Where are we?” You ask again, firmer this time.

“I told ye. Nearly home.”

“And where is home?”

The way he sucks his teeth makes you recoil slightly. Wet. Irritated. As if he's tired of this conversation already.

“Close.”

You don't let his flat tone deter you. “Are we—are we still in the Northwest Territories?”

“Thereabouts.”

It's not an answer. It doesn't reassure you in the slightest.

You open your mouth to say so, words curling on your tongue when he jerks his chin toward the handgun, brow furrowed.

“Thought ye wanted tae check oan th' satellite phone.”

His tone is severe. A growl curdling the ends, pitching it down, down. Displeasure, irritation, blooms in the gnarled petals of witch hazel when he narrows them into slits.

You swallow, wrenching your gaze from the storm brewing over fields of wheat, and set your jaw. Masking your fear for annoyance. Confidence.

But your hand shakes when you reach for the black box shoved into the corner. Palms slick with sweat. You try not to touch the gun, doing your best to curve around it. It feels—

Real.

A real gun. In the real world. In a place you came to get away for a weekend, experience something you'd never had before. Freedom. Reliance on nobody but yourself. And now—

Somewhere in the Northwest Territories. Injured. Locked inside of a truck with a man who wavers between warmth—an unending heat, a furnace; a beacon of light—and severity like a swinging pendulum. You feel safe with him. You commit every turn to memory. He's in the military. He's going to take care of you. You think he's lying to you. He'll—

He'll let you go.

You're sick. You're paranoid. You're taking all of your grievances out on this poor man who is just as trapped as you are, turning him into a monster for no reason at all. At the end of this, when he drops you off at the airport in Yellowknife, you'll have to grovel on your knees for his forgiveness. Sorry I thought you were a bad man.

It could be worse, you suppose. He hasn't done anything untoward to you—touching your thigh like he's owed the right aside—and you shove it down. A problem to deal with later even though the suspicion tucks itself into your head, folded up against your skull. Metastatic. It eats all of his expressions, turning them over and over again for hidden clues.

If he does something, you'll run.

You'll—

“Almost there,” he murmurs, and you hear the rasp of exhaustion glued to the hinge of his jaw. You wonder how long he's been driving for. And why didn't he just go back to Nahanni Butte. Flooded he said. Too deep into the park. Never would have made it.

If that's the truth, you suppose you should thank him.

It sits in the back of your throat. You swallow around it, reaching for the phone instead.

There's a small thread of hope in your chest that it'll work. That he's wrong, doesn't know how to work it, and all you have to do is press a button and it'll crackle to life. Freedom within reach.

But when you press down on the button, the phone doesn't even whimper. Broke, as he said. Dead.

“Can you—can you charge it?”

“Tried. Must’ve blown somethin’ inside. Fried it.”

His words are a prison sentence carrying a punishment of two months. You knew this, of course. He said so himself. But the reality of it breaking over you is different from blind belief. The realisation of your predicament is a jagged knife cutting through tissue, letting corrosive panic entrench you as it spills out.

This is the sort of thing you’d only read about. Novels, and biographies. Memoirs. Movies. An extraordinary event that could never happen to you. Never.

And you're aware of it. Optimism bias. The not-me fallacy. But everything in your life thus far had been so unequivocally mundane that the possibility of it not happening seemed to eclipse any chance of it occurring at all.

The crux of the bias, you suppose. Though it does little to stem the disbelief surrounding it all. Even when you told your friends, and your family, that you were going on this trip, the most mordant of them said you'd get eaten by a bear or end up lost in the wilderness.

Injured, unable to walk, and stuck with a man you only marginally know (trust) seems like the plot of a lifetime movie.

But—

Two months.

You're sure in the meantime, someone will notice your absence. Raise the alarm. Call the police. They'll launch an investigation, and come searching for you. It's just a waiting game.

And—

(You glance at the man once more, his profile limned in a halo of gold. The rim of his hat casts shadows over his face, eyes concealed in the thickening tenebrous that enshrouds him down to his broad chest, dense with corded muscles. Athletic. Trim. Big.)

—staying alive.

Survival.

If only for just two months.

But the facts are cold, unforgiving. You are alone with a man you don't know. A man with three guns. Military. His experience in this wilderness vastly eclipses your own.

He's fine. Fine. Touchy, sure. But he hasn't asked for anything.

—his hand is on your thigh—

You'll be okay.

It hurts to swallow. “Thank you,” you murmur, hoping the conciliatory lilt eats the panic you feel. “For saving me.”

His gaze darts to you so sharply that the truck veers slightly to the left, tires crunching over thick beds of furze that line the forged road. The action is sudden—surprised, maybe, by your reedy gratitude. A deviation from the demeanour he'd shown you so far—calm friendliness. Affability. It jars you. Scares you. You grip the seat cushion tight in your fists as he mutters something sharp you can't discern under his breath.

It only takes him only seconds to correct, rippling his hand away from you to commandeer the truck back into the centre of the beaten path. Even keeled now. Almost as if nothing amiss had happened at all.

But it's undeniable. Congeals in the air, tense and unignorable. A vacuum that siphons the breath from your lungs. It sits in the whites of his knuckles, arsenic bones jutting from thin, rough skin, demanding to be seen; the terse set to his shoulders. To the grind of his jaw as he clenches his teeth.

You take him in with bated breath, swallowing whole each microcosm that buds to the surface of his demeanour. Wary. Watchful. Squeezing the satellite phone tight in your hands. But he doesn't meet your wide-eyed stare, choosing instead to keep his gaze fixed on the dirt road. Knuckles popping, brows furrowed. Silent.

But it's heavy. Oppressive. The same unrelenting chill as outside. You fight back a shiver in the blooming cold, wishing you'd packed more than just a pair of hiking tights (in tatters, now) and a thermal windbreaker for the trip.

The hum of the engine, and the cracking of rock and muskeg crushed under the wheel, are the only noise that fills the cabin. You stifle your breath. Hold it in your throat. Skewer your eyes to the landscape yawning out around you. The deep, thickening sense of unease grows in the pit of your stomach. Metastasizing.

Outside is a sprawling taiga forest. Emaciated spruce, balsam fir, jut out from the muskeg, dusted in a sparse layer of sphagnum. You can almost hear the trickle of a stream. The dirt road is wet under the tires now. A creek must be close by. A river. Flat River. South Nahanni. Further out might be Slave River. The Liard. Little Buffalo. Great Slave Lake, even.

Narrowing it down seems impossible when nearly the entire south corridor of the Northwest Territories is wet marsh and snaking bodies of water.

It both worries and reassures you at the same time. Getting to Nahanni alone was a challenge. With most of the surrounding area limited to a few year-round highways, there are not many places he could go without reaching dead-ends or winter roads closed for the season, inaccessible in the warmer summer months as the snow melts.

Though—these highways arch as high as they can. From Yellowknife to Tuktoyaktuk, right on the coast of the Arctic Ocean.

But he hasn't driven on any stretch of highway since you woke up. The road is unpaved, wild. You're confident you're still south, but the exact location eludes you. Northwest Territories. Yukon. Northern Alberta. It's overwhelming. Daunting.

You try to commit the geography to memory. Sifting through an endless trawl of nothing to find something familiar. A mountain range. A sign. Anything. Anything—

“Ye mean tha’?”

The sound of his voice draws your attention, raspy. Hoarse from disuse.

He swallows. There's something raw in his expression, fractured. Yearning, you think. For something. What that something is, however, you can't place.

It stays on as he slowly slides his tongue out, licking over the bristles of hair covering his lip.

You offer a shallow nod, unsure why this matters to him suddenly.

“Yeah, I'd be—”

You pause, words turning to smoke in your throat. Uninjured, is the first thought. Without him, your leg wouldn't be—

Whatever it is. Ankle broken. Achilles torn. A gunshot wound clean through tendon and tissue.

But at the same time—

All turned around, he said. Lost. He was hunting, too. You must have somehow wandered outside of the park limits. Must have because the sound of a rifle would have drawn attention from nearby wardens. They'd have come to investigate.

You swallow down the bloom of unbridled panic. The aftertaste is bitter in your mouth. The thought of being outside of the borders, all on your own—

“I’d be dead if it wasn't for you.”

The hush that falls is immediate. Your own mortality dangling by a thin thread. Happenstance keeping you alive.

He clears his throat again. Your fingers tighten around the metal until it hurts.

“Names Johnny.” He twists in his seat, facing you. “Johnny MacTavish.”

It's a bit late for introductions, but you take it in all the same. Johnny. Johnny.

(saviour—)

His eyes grow wide when you slowly, haltingly, breathe yours out. Letting it sit in the air where it dissolves into the silence, the weight of it somehow more damning than being alone in the woods. There's power in a name. In knowing it. Military. You're not sure why it matters, but it does.

You fight another shiver when he says it back after a beat, much too fond, adoring, for the sparse companionship you've barely begun to build.

“I'll keep ye safe,” he says your name again, accent curling in between the bridges of each letter. There's a heat in his eyes; pyretic. A sickness. “Don't hae tae worry aboot anything.”

He turns back slowly, angling the wheel around a sudden bend in the thicket. The path is clearer here, looking more like an established dirt road than a sparse coppice. It twists upward, cutting a meandering line through a dense cropping of spruce. The canopy above—as thick as it is—curls over the road, enclosing it in a bed of conifers branching overhead. Concealing it from view.

The sight fills you with a new bloom of unease. How quickly the wild swallows you whole, shielding you from prying eyes, prickles against the nape of your neck, dripping like hot oil down your spine.

“Where are we?” It comes out in a whisper.

He makes a noise in the back of his throat. In your periphery, you see him lift his hand off the wheel, but sit, paralyzed, when he brings it down to your thigh, giving what attempts to be a pacifying squeeze.

“Home,” he answers, making the turn.

A log cabin comes into view. It’s situated at the end of the clearing, covered by the same dense tangle of trees as the path. The forest seems to bend around the single-storey home, enclosing in a cradled embrace of intermixing wry jack pine, bold tamarack, dark spruce, and white birch. Trembling aspen peaks above the heads of the other trees, hiding the smoked black spruce roof from view above.

It might look homey under different circumstances, but the thick, stripped logs—made of varnished white spruce—jutting out half-crescents to form the walls seem brooding. Claustrophobic. It's small—just a storey and a half. A camper's cabin not meant for longtime use. It wears its age in wood rot and peeling varnish. The scent of wet wood clings to the air when he rolls the window down, coming to a stop a few paces away from the single step leading to the porch.

Firewood stacked high to the awning on both sides of the blue door, encased in metal to keep it dry. Moss-covered concrete foundations lift the house off of the ground, keeping it from melting the permafrost below. The remains of a snuffed, charred campfire is perched to the left of the winding path leading to the door. Felled lumber lays on its side, the top whittled down onto a seat. A wooden rack leans against a tree close by. The hide of an animal is stretched taut across the panels. Leather-making materials sit in a bucket beside it.

A metal box—bear-proof, you're sure—is half-buried in the soil. Storage, perhaps, for the unusable remains of the animals he hunts.

It's fairly standard for a cabin up north, you think. But something about this place makes you feel anxious. Trapped. You can't see anything at all through the dense cluster of trees, but you can hear the sound of running water. A river, maybe. A stream. It splashes against the rock, the current too quick for you to even think about swimming in it.

It only adds to your unease.

“This is home,” he says, jerking his chin toward the house.

Home is a cabin nestled somewhere in the unorganised wilderness of the Northwest Territories. Nahanni National Park is several hours in another direction. Too few communities exist on highway seven for you to even stumble onto them—

Assuming, of course, that you could walk there to begin with.

The lingering pain in your ankle, the heavy bandage wrapped around it—it's an immediate certainty that you can't walk. Broken, you know, from the glimpse you'd taken before. Milkwhite against raspberry red—

You don't think about that.

You don't think about much at all.

“Right.” You murmur. This place is the furthest thing from home you could imagine.

He moves in your periphery, reaching for you. You jerk back, driven by instincts. The need for distance, space—

The jostling of your foot makes you hiss in pain, and he offers a conciliatory hum.

“Ye’ll be alright, bonnie. Lets jus’ get ye inside now.”

The inside is made of varnished wood. A mix of black and white spruce. It's cosy, you suppose.

It opens up to a living room immediately upon walking in the door. A mat sits under your feet. A small closet to the right with the door slightly ajar. Along the length of the left wall is a doorway spilling into a small kitchen. From your vantage point, you make out a sink, and then another door to the right.

Along the back wall beside the arching doorway is a brick fireplace. Soft fur is spread out on the ground in front of it. An old, weathered couch is pushed against the left wall, a shawl tossed over the back.

There's no television. A stack of books and magazines sit above the couch—used more for an end table than entertainment, you note, spotting the glass of water resting on the pile. A pack of cigarettes beside it. An ashtray on the floor. Bottles of beer sit on the small table shoved under the window. One of the chairs is covered in clothes.

It's lived in, you note, but lifeless.

There are no pictures on the wall. No personal artefacts littered around. It's—

Perfunctory.

He comes home, shucks his boots off by the front door, and drinks warm beer on the couch until he falls asleep. An inference, of course; but as he carries you further into the house (his insistence—ye cannae walk oan tha’, doe, stop bein’ stubborn and lemme carry ye), your notion gains credence. It's sparse. Threadbare.

There's a single plate in the sink. The old stove, separated from the sink by a small countertop, is covered in a layer of dust. A fridge is pushed against the back wall.

The door you glimpsed in the kitchen leads to the washroom. It's tight. A shower, a sink, a toilet. No windows. A towel is hung over the curtain rail, still damp from his shower before. A single mat covers most of the tiled floor below. A tube of toothpaste sits in the porcelain basin of the sink.

Beside the washroom is the master bedroom. The bed is unmade. An untouched glass of water is left on the end table beside a worn leather book and a bible.

An open closet sits across from the bed. The window is open. The breeze flutters the old, jaundiced curtain.

He gives you his room and says he'll take the couch. Under normal circumstances, you might have fought it. Insisted that he sleep in his bed. You're a guest. You couldn't put him out like that. But the door has a lock.

“Thank you,” you murmur, and he seems to tremble at your words before nodding.

“O' coorse.”

Johnny places you on the bed before he sets to work rebandaging your ankle. You're all too aware of the fact that you need to know. You need to see what you're dealing with, and how bad the damage is, but the pain that cuts through you when he rests your ankle—as gingerly as he can—on top of an extra pillow makes you yowl in agony.

It's vicious. Whitehot. The pain rattles through your bones.

He shushes you as he unwraps the clumsy brace he put on in the park, murmuring incomprehensible things under his breath that you think must be Gaelic. Words of comfort, perhaps.

You feel none of it except an uneasy dread pooling in the empty pit of your stomach.

“How bad is it?”

He hums, brow pinching tight. “Th' hare took most o' th' damage,” he says, eyes tracing along the congealing blood on your ankle. Dark cherry red. You swallow down a gag. “Tore yer achilles, though. Clean. Doesn't seem tae be any fragments. Broke your ankle, though. But,” he taps your calf, just above the bend of your foot. It doesn’t hurt. “It’s a clean break. Maybe just a fracture. Shuid heal up in no time.”

“And what about infections?”

“Got some stuff oan hand if that happens,” he leans back, and gives you a wink. It feels out of place considering the severity of your predicament. Garish, almost. “But ah was a good nurse. Patched ye up nicely.”

You don't ask anything else, and silence trickles in as he refocuses his attention back to cleaning your wound and redressing it. The bed is soft under you. Giving. You lean back, staring up at the log ceiling, and will yourself not to think at all. Each slight jostle of the wet cloth running along your ankle feels like fire licking at your skin. If you had anything at all in your belly left, you might have thrown it up on the side of the bed.

This pain is consuming. Persistent.

Your fingers knot into the soft blankets below, gripping tight until your knuckles ache. A futile attempt to exchange this pain for a lesser one. Something you can ignore, forget.

Through the open window, you can hear the playful caws of a raven searching for food. You want it to distract you, to pull you away from the sickening sensation of your ankle separating from the heel, but it doesn't.

All you can think about is the fresh pain. Your flesh ripped apart. Torn achilles, he'd said. You feel it as he moves, washing away the dried blood, the viscera. The break in your tibia. It's a nauseating feeling. Visceral. It screams at you that something is wrong, reverberating through your bones.

The raven caws again.

“Gonnae ‘ave tae stitch yer heel up.”

You make a sound—a pathetic whimper choked in the back of your throat.

“Fine,” you rasp, tensing. “Just—”

Get it over with.

Johnny seems to understand, offering a consolatory pat on your shin. “Ye'll be fine. Ah know what am doin’.”

You glance back at him, avoiding whatever is happening below his elbows. Refusing to look.

He reaches up, fingers stained pink with your blood, and pulls the ballcap off his head, shaking the matted hair loose. His hair is thick, curling at the ends. Dark brown. Soft. You take in his expression, him, as he works, using it to churn your thoughts away from the prickling sensation of him pressing your torn skin back together, readying it for the needle.

He's intense, focused, as he works. Eyes lidded to half-mast. Long lashes fanning out over the dark circles beneath his eyelids. Bruises that speak of long, sleepless nights. The empty bottles of beer and the full ashtray within arm's reach make a little more sense as you see the extent of his fatigue.

It doesn't concern you. You rip your gaze away from the thin, twisting rivers of red that snake through the jaundiced whites of his eyes; the possibility of his vulnerability notches something inside your chest you don't want to think about. Can't.

Your saviour, you think again, veering sharply on the edge of too cruel—

“Might pinch a bit, doe,” he mutters low, soft. His thick, even brows pull together at the centre. You feel the prick of the needle pushing through your skin—

Down his brows. The oblique curve of his nose. Bottled to a point. The thick bed of hair beneath his nostrils. Thin, pink lips jutting from the thatch of black bristles. The wisps curl down the slope of his neck, thinning at the hollow below before thickening back into a dense crop on the scant patch of his skin visible from his unbuttoned shirt.

Another prick—

A thin, gold chain loops around his neck. Tucked against his sternum is a Latin cross. It's plain. Traditional. Solid gold, maybe. But not purely for decoration. Where the arms meet the body, the surface is smoothed down. Worn. In the reflection, you can see the thin, circular lines of a fingerprint.

The bible on his dresser makes sense. You glance over at it, taking in the folds and creases on the leather cover. Aged and well-loved. Used. Pages are dog-eared. Waterlogged. Scotch tape holds the spine together.

The Holy Bible gleams in faded gold lettering. Douay–Rheims is etched into the surface.

The sight of a worn-down book and thumbed cross shouldn't relax you, but it does. A good ol’ boy, then. You turn back to him, eyes caught on the gleaming gold flush against tanned skin. It's tight to his sternum. Hung delicately around his neck.

Seeing it now feels a touch voyeuristic. It wasn't intentionally bared to you. Wasn't offered up willingly for you to gawk at, mind looping around thou shalt not kill and do unto others as you yourself would want done unto you, and finding comfort in the ordered morality of its symbolism—however fickle that could end up being.

You know a man is not as moral as his religion demands of him, but he looks devout.

A good Catholic boy.

Still—

You peel your gaze away from his chest as the thread slides through. The sensation is uncomfortable. Ticklish. Forcing your attention back to him, well above the neckline. His nose. Nostrils flaring when your knee jerks. His hands close over your shin. Mouth parting slightly just to say, keep still, doe. Donnae want tae hurt ye.

His hair is slightly greasy near his scalp. Sweat from earlier dampens his locks, flattening it tongue head. It's longer at the top compared to the sides. An odd, asymmetrical hairstyle that doesn't feel like an aesthetic choice at all. Maybe he had a mullet. Or—

You see it when he tilts his head down, chin angled toward your foot.

A scar stretches from his temple back, thinning the hair that lines his scalp on the right. The flesh is jagged, uneven. Cratered. It forms a ravine. The canyon walls clumped scar tissue. The nullah in the centre is all pink and raw.

You think of a shooting star. Meteor showers in the indigo sky.

You think of his words from earlier—ah know what am doin’—and the depth of his medical knowledge. It stands out now. You suppose he would, wouldn't he?

The thought has shame dripping down your spine like hot, slick oil. Burning. Tarry. You remember what he said in the truck about being wounded in action, the misery in his words, the anger, and choke yourself on the regret that swarms your throat.

He looks up, then, catching whatever awful amalgamation of self-hatred, shame, and regret makes of your expression, and the words—sorry, I'm so sorry—tear through your throat until it's bloody and raw. Pulp. Unspeakable, now.

It dampens his brow, but there's no embarrassment in his eyes when he holds them to yours. Nothing except an intense, dizzying sense of curiosity. Of—

Intrigue.

It doesn't have a place here, and the sight of it is sobering.

Why is he looking at you like that when you're gawking at his injury? Confusion knots deep. Uncertainty coiling around your ribcage. Maybe he didn't notice. Doesn't care.

Is too used to it to worry about whatever conclusions you might draw from the jagged skin barely knitted back together. But his eyes flash. Understanding edging out the unfathomable greed lurking in hazel plains, nestled, restive, in the shade that falls over the sloping boscage.

You almost miss the shadow when it appears. Wrought with Leashed ghosts. Tempered anger. Wild, frenetic. The chains holding it at bay tremble. Shake—

And then it's gone.

Dissolve back into passive cordiality. All ire stayed behind a wall.

You want to apologize, but the words are ash in your throat. Unspeakable. Johnny doesn't address it. He dips his head down once more, silently refocusing his attention to your ankle, and offering no explanation for the scar on his head.

You don't ask. Don't pry. It's not your place. But your eyes are still glued to it.

It's a horrific injury. Survival from such a terrible wound seems like an impossibility. A gunshot, you're sure. Seeing the small chasm carved into skin, narrowly missing his eye socket, fills you with a blistering sense of pity for this man, and you quietly, quickly, peel your eyes away from the jagged surface, letting your gaze run across the room. A meagre sense of privacy, you're sure, but it lets you breathe a little easier when you can't see the way his temple split apart to make room for a bullet—

“Had a mohawk,” he says. “They cut it off when this happened.”

A mohawk. The asymmetry of his hair makes sense now, and you can almost picture it as you stare at him. The edges shorn, the top long. Unruly. His hair has a slight curl to the ends, but is mostly straight for the first few inches.

As wild as he looks now—untamed, rugged; the thick tangle of uncharted wilderness—the mohawk must have made him roguish. Boorish. With his broad shoulders, thick biceps, and piercing blue eyes, the mohawk would have added to the playful appeal. Boyishly charming with his cropped hair and puckish grin. The draw of a bad boy, a vandal.

But as you try and shape this around him, you catch the strain in his shoulders. The terse set to his jaw.

“You don't have to talk about it if you don't want to.”

“Was shot.”

It's said without a preamble as if he was waiting for you to ask. But the words are spat out like they're something foul in his mouth; like he's ridding the taste of it between his teeth. The anger, the aggression cows you slightly, but you offer a small, warbling smile you hope is conciliatory. Apologetic.

“I'm sorry,” you offer around a stuttering exhale. You can't imagine what that must be like. Shot in the head. The idea is unthinkable. Improbable. And yet, the evidence slashes across his temple; a meteor shower carved into his flesh.

He lifts his chin, staring down at you from the bridge of his nose. “Wasnae yer fault, doe.”

“I know, I just—”

Johnny gives a nod in response, ending the bubble of words and apologies building up behind your teeth. It is what it is, he mutters when you blink at him, flummoxed. This sort of reveal seems like it should necessitate a bigger conversation, a deeper one. Questions buoy to the surface—from prying (how did it happen, how did you survive) to intrusive (what did it feel like, does it hurt still)—but you trample them until they sit, a building mass lodged in your throat.

He seems content, then, to continue with what he was doing, and says nothing more about it. And it's not your place to pry. To chisel into his trauma.

You let it pass. Let it moulder.

The raven caws once more. You lean back in his bed, staring through the fluttering curtains, mind reeling at this discovery.

Stupidly, you feel more at ease in his presence. As if this show of vulnerability somehow negated the distress of your predicament, and the infeasible nature of how you ended up here, in his home. Gazing through the thick canopy of green to the golden sky above. A whole world away from your home. Broken. Injured. But the cross, the thumbed-through bible, and his human fragility seem to curl along the vicious dread curling inside your guts, soothing over the distrust with gentle, sweeping brushes.

Quelling a frightened child after a nightmare.

How strange, you think, but let yourself relax in his presence all the same, breathing in the scent of stale smoke, sweat. Coumarin. Tree moss. Fresh pine. It smells like the valley. Soft, waning detergent. Masculine.

You pretend you're watching for the raven as you sneak small glances at him. Taking in everything with a new perspective. The broadness of his shoulders. The thickness of his waist. There's power in his arms, in his thighs. Sculpted musculature, honed and refined. Despite the thickness of his fingers, he has a delicate touch. Deft and sure, as if he's used to working his bulk around small parts.

He's unkempt. The ballcap hid most of his dishevelled state, but he's not sloven. It reminds you of the outdoorsy explorers. The hikers you met on your trip out. Roughhewn and unconcerned about their overgrown beards and their tousled hair.

There's something potently masculine about it, and you can't deny that even with the garish wound on his head, all mangled scar tissue, he's handsome. Rougish. The scar elevating it somehow—a testament, perhaps, to his resiliency.

He catches your stare on the next glance, holding it as he leans back with a quirk of his lips. It's not quite the grins he aimed at you before, but the shadow of it lingers.

“Now,” he utters, the severity in his tone makes you flinch. Sobering quickly under the weight of his solemnity. “Th' bad part.”

“Bad part?” You echo, confused. “What could be worse than that?”

He taps two fingers against your swollen ankle, urging you to look. You swallow and force yourself to glance at where he rests his fingers.

With your split heel stitched up and wrapped in bandages, the sight of your leg doesn't make you want to curl into the fetal position and cry. But it's still horrifying to look at.

A mass half the side of a baseball juts out from your skin.

“Ankles dislocated,” he murmurs, sliding his fingers over the mound. “Gotta pop it back into place.”

“That's not—” you shake your head. “That's impossible.”

“S’okay, doe. I gotcha.”

“That's not the point. That's not—”

“Look,” his pitch lowers dangerously, firm now. “Gotta do it or you'll have problems later on. Much worse than a bit o’pain.”

“But—”

He inhales sharply. “Can't let it go, doe. Gotta fix it.”

You understand the logic in that. Leaving a dislocated ankle will undoubtedly cause problems later on. But—

“Will it hurt?”

Your fear quiets the irritation brewing in steeled hazel. “Aye. I won't lie tae ye, doe. It will hurt.”

You swallow around a whimper.

“But,” he leans over, his hand sliding over your cheek. Cradling your face in the palm of his hand. “I'll do mah best tae be quick. Ah won't hurt ye, doe.”

It must be the way he carries himself that puts you at ease, so assured in his abilities; confident in what he can do without any sense of grandiosity.

“Fine.” The word is juttered out of your chest. “Just—”

His thumb catches the tears that spill over your lashline, swiping them away with a tenderness that makes you shiver.

“Ah’ll be quick.”

He reaches into his pocket and pulls out two chalky white pills. Tylenol, he mutters, catching the furrow of your brow. It abates the unease somewhat, and you let him drop the pills into the flat of your palm, rolling them over with your thumb as he grabs the water on the end table. They're circular with a slit down the middle.

“It'll take the pain away.” He says, holding the water up to you. “Ready?” It's uttered so severely, so seriously, that your breath hitches in your lungs. Mirth blooming between your teeth.

“As I'll ever be,” you rasp out before popping the pills into your mouth, cradling them on your tongue protectively as you reach for the glass he holds out. They're bitter.

You wash it down with a mouthful of stale water before leaning back on the bed, letting the scent of his sheets wash over you once more.

Outside, the raven trills.

The pain of popping your ankle back into place leaves you a weeping mess in his sheets, but Johnny doesn't seem to mind the shuddering sobs. He pets down your back, shushing you quietly under his breath as he mutters something in Gaelic that you're sure is meant to be soothing.

“Ye’ll be fine,” he says, tracing figure-eights down your spine until the Tylenol kicks in, and the agony tapers off into an aching throb. “Jus’ breathe. Ah’ll get ye somethin' tae eat.”

He leaves soon after. You let the numbed, drowsiness of the pain medication lull you into a doze, listening to Johnny move in the kitchen. The squealing slide of unvarnished wood rubbing against old metal. The thud of a knife. The scent of hot oil. Muttered curses. A playful raven's caw.

You're not sure how long you slip in and out of this dreamless state, but Johnny appears in the doorway, arms crossed over his chest as he leans against the frame. He watches you with hooded eyes, a small, secretive smile tugging on his lips.

Blearily, you yawn, somehow still exhausted despite how long you slept between yesterday evening and today. Trauma, you suppose, and say nothing at all about it when he helps you sit up in the bed.

Dinner consists of leftover bannock—the fried dough soft in your mouth, the flavour buttery; smokey—and hare stew. He pulls a chair from the living room into the bedroom, eating on the edge of the bed with you.

He's sloppy about it. Slurps all the meat and potatoes out of the bowl before sopping chunks of bannock into the gravy, shoveling it into his mouth with a grunt. It dribbles down his chin, and dirties his beard. This slovenly display might have churned your stomach before, but you're just as ravenous.

And it's good.

The bread leaves grease stains on your fingers, but the toes on your uninjured foot curl when you bite into the crispy surface, teeth sinking into the pillowy dough below.

“This is bannock, you said?” You ask, dabbing the napkin he offered with a wink when you finish. At his nod, you continue. “It's good.”

“Aye,” he grunts around a mouthful. “S’the best. Make it every mornin’ so ah go’ fresh bannock tae go.” He swipes the back of his hand over his mouth, slurring out: “s’good wit’ jam.”

“Did the locals teach you how to make it?”

He nods. “Scottish dish, originally. Made wit’ oats. Drier, too. But—fuck. S’good—nae. Better like this. Ol’ couple taught me when ah first came. Paler ‘n’ shite, they said. ‘n didnae ken a fuckin' thing about surviving oot ‘ere. Big man, Jim, taught me ‘ow tae hunt. Where tae fish. An’ ‘ow to cook it. Made this cabin, aye. He, ah, and his son. Offered ‘er up tae me when they realised ah didnae come wit’ shite all but a bad attitude.”

“That was nice of them.”

“Most folk up ‘ere are. Quiet, ken? People take care’a ‘emselves, most. Take care’a others, too.”

You mull over his words as he leans back in the chair with a satisfied groan, legs spread wide. His hands folded over his belly. The picture of ease. Contentment. This freedom of motion makes you slightly envious.

“An’ wha’ about ye?” His eyes are lidded, leonine, and fixed on you. The intensity is always on the side of too much. Too dizzying. Consuming.

You stamp it down, running your thumb along the inseam of his gingham throw. “What about me?”

“Why’d ye come here?”

His question throws you off balance. “It’s a pretty park,” you offer with a shallow laugh. “Who wouldn't come here?”

“Lots of pretty parks. Why this one?”

“Dunno. It was—”

“‘ave ye ever been tae any other parks? Anything like this?”

“I hiked a bit, and, um—”

He sucks out a piece of meat from between his teeth. “A bit, aye?”

“Yeah. A bit. Why—”

“Ye came all the way here fer what? A pretty park? With no experience at all? And alone?”

The shift in his posture reads as angry, irate. You blink, bewildered by this sudden change.

“Well. It was supposed to be an experience.”

“An experience, aye? Survival skills of a lemming.”

It's derisive, cutting. You bristle through the sting of humiliation, grappling through the slurry of fatigue to cobble together some form of defence against this lambasting of your—admittedly—ill-thought adventure, but he's already moving on. Fingers tapping an off-rhythm beat against his belly as he levels you with a sober look. More serious than you'd ever seen him before.

“An’ yer family? They just let ye come here oan yer own?”

The mention of your family makes guilt well to the surface, buoying above the indignant anger at his mocking words. Cowed, you shrug.

“Sure.”

Something cracks in the severe mein he carries; fracturing through the blatant disapproval. Cutting it like a knife.

He sighs through his nose before reaching up and scrubbing his hands over his face. ��Shite. Ye really needed me, aye?”

You blink at the odd choice of words, brows drawing together in a tight knot. It's indefensible, of course. In many ways, he's right. If he hadn't found you—

Well.

You temper that thought before it forms. You're too out of it, spatially unaware and unmoored, to let yourself fall into an existential pit of despair when you know you won't be able to climb out. Thinking of your assured doom out there, all because of a misstep somewhere along the path, makes dread bloom in the pit of your stomach. Nauseous, roiling. It froths over the basin, ready to spill over and drag you under.

Swallowing around the surge of panic—mortality a fickle thing in a place like this—you offer a despondent shrug in response. Unable to scrape together any sense of a defence that won't make you sound childish and idiotic.

You ready yourself for more mockery, having become the very thing the park rangers tried to warn you about when you showed, alone, in hiking boots much too big for you.

But then he's shifting, expression clearing. The anger folded back behind a quick grin.

“Pretty here, isn't it?”

You're not sure what to make of his mercurial temperament; emotions cascading by, quicksilver and sudden. The flashes of anger, intensity, curiosity, and this, all happening within such a short period. It's overwhelming.

It unsettles you. But—

“Yeah,” you mutter, unable to stem the awe from leaking through.

The change in conversation is freeing. Sometimes it's just easier to let sleeping dogs lie, and that's exactly what you do. Tucking his odd behaviour behind a plexiglass of indifference, pretending it wasn't there, lurking just out of sight. Something to unravel later, when your heart wasn't on the verge of buckling under the strain of your anxiety. When your chest didn't feel like it was slowly being crushed. Your stomach is all twisted up in knots too tight to untie with your bare hands.

It's easy to let yourself heave through jittering lungs, and pretend you couldn't feel the rot festering on the sides of them. Eating holes through delicate tissue.

The majesty of this place hasn't quite worn off, and you use that as an excuse to drift. To close the doors on the overwhelming deluge of hysteria creeping up on you.

You still think of the jutting fjords instead. The steep ravines, the moose in the distance—her colours sharp against the green backdrop—and let the untempered sense of reverence split you down the middle.

It comes out in a flood, then—as if you've been biting back the words this whole time.

You tell him about the valley. The waterfall. The white river. The marmot you saw poking its head out. No bears, you sigh; the forlorn lilt to your tone seeped with a touch of relief, an aspect he pokes at with a crooked smirk until you huff, rolling your eyes to the ceiling at his gentle ribbing. Huffily, you admit that as much as you want to see a bear, you're not quite ready to face them in the wild.

Lots’a bears ‘round ‘ere, he taunts, rolling his knees out further as he sinks deeper into the chair.

He dodges your next question of where, exactly, is here with a silky grin and a need tae know rolling off his lips before they tug downward in a sudden frown.

You must be acclimating to the strange ebb and flow of his emotions because the lour grimace on his face doesn't deter you as much as it did moments ago. You pick up the slack when the conversation lulls, telling him about the places you've been and how they compare to Nahanni.

“They just—don’t.”

It's hard to encapsulate the scale of it all into simple words; digestible pieces someone else can swallow. The park isn't too far from Yellowknife, and yet it feels like a world on its own. The remoteness, the vastitude of it all, is hard to describe, but Johnny seems to understand.

He listens with a slight quirk to his lips. A smile you'd almost call fond. He gets it, you know. The words you can't say. The ones that feel too lacklustre when you do.

“That really why ye came?”

You hesitate for a moment, looping a loose thread around your finger. Contemplating. Mulling it over. You've never told anyone the reason for the trip outside of a new experience for yourself. Testing your mettle. But with Johnny—

There's a sense of kinship, you find. An understanding.

“It seemed so—” he waits for you to find the words. “Lonely, I guess.”

“Lonely,” the way he says the word is ruminative. Rolling it around between his teeth; testing the weight of it. “Ah suppose it is.”

“You don't think so?”

“It's—” he pauses, eyes listing to the side as he mulls over what he wants to convey.

He does this sometimes, you think. Gets lost. Loses himself. Retreats inward. You can't help but wonder if this is a manifestation of his trauma—a head injury such as this would be classified as a traumatic brain injury, wouldn't it? You're not well-versed in this area, and it feels a little mean, cruel, to have this thought, but it blooms as his eyes fog over. As he struggles, almost, to find the words he wants to say, to give voice to what he feels, thinks.

“Lonely, aye,” he grinds out after a beat, but he looks frustrated about it, and glares down at his lap, silently fuming. Annoyed. “Big.”

The word is ripped out from between his teeth, and you nod, hastily, to both quell the looming anger brimming in the terse set to his shoulders and to let him know you understand. Can read between the lines—if only just.

“Is that why you came?”

The shrug he offers is noncommittal but you can see the tension pooling in his brow despite your efforts to quash it. “Couldnae go home after this—” he lifts his hand, tapping his fingers against the scar tissue on his temple. “Wasn't safe. Had tae give up everything after. Maw. Da. Sisters. Cannae ever see them again.”

It doesn't make sense. None of it does. The innate understanding between you is shattered by the impossibility of this moment, and his half-formed words. What you gave up seems paltry in comparison to what he's confessing to. His family. His whole family—

“Might see them one day. Once that fuckin' prick is in th' ground, but 'til then—” he shrugs again, easy. As if the look on his face wasn't cataclysmic in its anger. It's rage. Sorrow. Hatred. You flinch back as if the blackhole of these awful emotions will eat you alive.

Johnny sees it, and reaches for you, making soothing noises under his breath as his hand wraps around your thigh. “Ah, doe, don’t worry. He wilnae find us—”

You're not sure what to say to that, but the grip he has on you is firm. Unyielding. There's a scowl etching over his lips, as if the mere thought of such a thing fills him with disgust, fury, and you shake your head slowly.

“I'm not—I’m not worried.” You don't know how to tell him that this phantom prick from his past isn't what made you reel back, but the intensity of his wrath. The sudden infliction of his ire. So you don't. You give in with what you hope is a conciliatory smile. “I, uh, I trust you.”

It's loose. Shaky. Your conviction wanes around the edges, falling flat and hollow when it trembles out. If Johnny notices the brittleness around it, he doesn't show it. If anything, he seems to take it as a sudden gospel.

“D’ye—” There's a crack in his voice. He swallows, then. Adam's apple bobbing harshly against the skin of his throat. You wonder if you've upset him. Angered him. But he's leaning down, eyes widening. Feverish. Blue lagoons. “Ye trust me.”

It's not a question, but he poses it as such. You nod slowly and unsure.

Johnny ducks his head, then. Lifts one hand to rub at the bristles around his chin and upper lip. Lost in thought, maybe—

It's when he reaches around, scrubbing at the nape of his neck, do you see the flush peeking out from beneath the thick bed of hair covering his cheeks. The sight is jarring. Unexpected.

You're not sure what to make of it. Of this strange reaction. But it passes almost as quickly as it started. The red is replaced by a wide, blinding grin. He squeezes your thigh.

“Hah, doe. Ye really know what tae say tae cheer me up—”

You haven't said anything at all, but this, too, goes unacknowledged. And before you can even try to draw attention to it, he breathes in deeply as he sits up in the chair.

“Ye finished?” He motions to the bowl and plate on the bed. You nod. “Alright. Ah'll put ‘em away. Get ye some tea.”

“Oh, I'm fine—”

“Nah, hen. Tea is good for ye. Will help ye heal.”

He leaves without another word, carrying away your dirty dishes. The unfinished conversation lingers in the air around you, but beneath the loose strands of everything unsaid, you feel something tangle inside your chest as you replay his words in the back of your head.

All alone in Nahanni, unable to see his family. You're sure the prick he's referring to is the one who gave him that horrific scar, nearly taking his life.

Somewhere in the loop, a knot of pity begins to take shape.

Johnny brings you Labrador tea—a speciality he learned how to make from Ethel and Jim, the couple from Wrigley who took him in. It's good. It tastes sweet, earthy. Honey and pine. You sip at it as he grabs sleep clothes from his dresser, watching him with a muted sense of listlessness.

You can't imagine the next sixty days that loom before you. Restlessness, claustrophobia—it coalesces into this strange, itchy feeling that sits, uncomfortably, atop your chest; an increasing pressure. You wish you could pick it off like a loose scab. Dig your nail under the hard clot and tug—

Peel it all off until just silken new skin remains.

Johnny looks antsy when you finish the tea. Eyes bright. Wide.

As you contemplate the surrealism of your predicament over Labrador tea, he grins like a shark and tells you he only has one toothbrush.

“Dinnae mind sharin’, doe,” he offers, too jovial, eager, for the notion of lending his toothbrush to a stranger he met less than twenty-four hours ago. Ah ‘ave good hygiene, he adds, as if that might make this any better.

Putting away the disgust, the idea of sharing a toothbrush feels much too intimate to you. Something befitting a long-term partner, or kin, before a man you know only the bare bones of.

But like most things lately, what choice do you have?

Johnny grins brightly at your acquiescence. All teeth. He hands you an old sweater—his favourite football team, he adds with a wink when you blink at it—and then moves toward you with a wicked gleam in his eyes you try to pretend is just overeager hospitality.

“Wait—” you start, jerking back instinctively as he looms over the bed. “What are you doing?”

A dip forms between his brows, and he cocks his head quizzically at you. “What're ye talkin’ ‘bout, doe? Need'tae brush yer teeth, don't ye?”

“I—I can walk—”

He snorts. “Oan yer broken ankle? Will only hurt yerself more.”

Despite the truth in this statement, the flippancy in his voice stings. Prickles under your skin. Your loss of mobility, of being wholly dependent on another person, is a bitter thing to try and swallow. Especially when you're here for the literal antithesis of it. To be free. Self-reliant.

Not needing anyone at all except the grit in your bones and the determination to see things through.

Having all of that ripped into pieces in front of you, by a man who says it with such nonchalant disregard—as if your efforts were meaningless, insubstantial for what it got it—is humiliating.

You can't remember the last time you needed someone for something so simple as walking to the washroom to brush your teeth, to wash up. The loss of this minute freedom makes you want to cry; to break down. Rage. Break things with your bare hands just to show the world you still can. To fight against these shackles locking around your ankles, and run—

Johnny's hand falls on your knee, thumb brushing the torn edge of your tights, grazing the skin beneath the loose threads with each pass.

“Don't worry. Ah'll take care 'o ye.”

That's the problem, you think, chest burning. This awful feeling inside is churning. Frothingly acidic, corrosive. You don't want him to. You don't want to need this man at all. Ever. For anything.

But—

“Thanks,” you choke out. It tastes like iron. Like defeat.

He carries you to the washroom, cooing the whole time about how ye ‘ave nothin’ tae be embarrassed ‘bout while you blister from mortification, from shame.

You came here to be self-reliant. To grind your mettle against the wilderness and come out on the other side victorious and better for it. But what you've accomplished so far is getting lost, getting hurt, imposing on a man you barely know—

One who has to sit down on the ledge of the bathtub with you cradled in his lap like a child, injured foot elevated on the lid of the toilet seat. He cups his hand under your mouth as you scrub at your teeth, trying to catch any of the foam from the toothpaste that spills from your mouth.

It's mortifying.

You've never felt so vulnerable in your whole life.

“Sorry,” you choke out around the brush—his brush—as he slowly commanders the weight of you around enough to spit in the sink.

He waves you off with a noise. “S’alright, doe. Ye can lean oan me all ye like.”

So he says. But you feel the rapid inhales behind you. The soft pants spilling from his lips, lungs expanding, broadening his chest into your back. Exertion, you think, slightly cowed and humiliated. Desperately trying to hold some of your weight on your uninjured foot.

“Nah, ah,” he breathes, arm slinking around your middle, tugging you firmly into his lap. “Ye jus’ worry about gettin’ ready tae go tae bed now. Ah got ye.”

He soothes his palm up and down the length of your arm as you finish up in a fruitless effort to calm your nerves, but it doesn't work. Can't. Because you know what's coming next.

“Can I, um—” your tongue is thick in your mouth. “I need to use the washroom to–to, uh, washup, and stuff—”

His thigh jerks beneath you. When he speaks, his voice is rougher than normal. “Okay.”

But he stays where he is.

“I think I can do it on my own—”

“And if ye step oan yer leg?” He tuts, arm tightening around you. “Only gonnae hurt yerself more, doe.”

“I'll be careful, but I really have to—”

“S’okay,” he coos. “S’only me.”

That's the problem, you think wildly. Hysterical. That's the whole problem, isn't it?

“No, you don't understand. I need to, um, go.” He makes another noise, soft. Agreeable. Fuck. “I need to pee.”

It comes out in a hiss. Feral, like a cat. Embarrassment turns you into more animal than man.

Again, he hums. “I know, doe. Donnae worry, ah’ll hold yer leg.”

“Can't I just keep it, um, on the ledge?”

“No, no. If ye put weight oan it, doe, ye’ll be in serious trouble. Dislocated. Broken. Jesus, ye cuid slip the bone out of place—”

No. No.

The idea of him holding your ankle as you piss is beyond any measure of shame you've ever felt before. You like your privacy. Crave it, sometimes. You don't think you've ever done this in front of someone since you were a child.

You need—

A moment.

Time. A pause.

But he doesn't give you a chance.

Johnny's other arm loops under your knees, and with a small huff he stands, holding you aloft with an arm anchored across your belly. It's quick. Mercilessly so. He steps back and lifts his foot to toe the lid off the toilet seat, unbothered by the loud clang it makes when it hits the tank.

“There we go,” he mutters, and sounds almost breathless for it. “Let's get ye ready.”

It should be awkward. Clumsy. But he moves with a surprising agility that belies the firmness of his muscles, the bulk. He lets your uninjured leg drop to the floor, murmuring for you to put some weight on it as he cradles your shin in his hands, careful not to let your foot move more than it needs to.

The strange dance ends with him holding your shin in his hands, stretching your thighs out more than they'd ever been before. An image that might have been comical under different circumstances but just makes you flounder at the suggestiveness of the pose. Added, in large part, by the firm hold he has on you. There's not an ounce of give. No threat of falling.

You gasp when he moves, shuffling backwards to pivot you around until the back of your shin meets the cold porcelain.

“Alright now, doe,” he motions toward the seat as he slowly bends down to a crouch on the floor, your foot still held in his grasp.

You follow him down until you meet the seat, trying to avoid his gaze as you clumsily paw at your tattered pants, slipping the down your thighs in a hurry. Your panties follow after a moment of hesitation.

When his breath catches, you say nothing at all. Pointedly avoid whatever face he might be making as you stare, fixed, at the panels on the wall behind his head. Wallpaper. Probably moisture-resistant. It's peeling in some places. Decades ago, it might have been a soft canary yellow.

His breathing is shallow. You ball your hands into fists and press the flat of your knuckles against your thighs.

It's hard to focus when you can feel the scorching heat of his body bleeding into your leg, your knee. Close enough that all he has to do is bend down a little more, and his face would be pressed against your thighs.

There's no room, no privacy.

You close your eyes and pretend you can't hear how his breath seems to fill the entirety of the small washroom, ghosting over your skin. Virginia Falls comes to mind—a roaring rush of water—but even in the solitude of your mind, you can't ignore the way his stare drills through your skin.

You swallow. You can't do it. Can't do this.

“Can you—” back off, go away. Stop breathing so heavily because you might get the wrong idea, like this whole thing excites him somehow—

His voice is rough when he speaks. Ragged. “Cannae ah what, doe?”

“Turn the tap on? I can't—I can't concentrate.”

“S’only me, bonnie girl,” he murmurs, but does what you ask. Leaning over you, broad torso swallowing you up entirely under his bulk. You can feel the soft give of his belly on your knee as he presses it into you, but it only lasts a second before you meet a wall of solid muscle beneath. He braces a warm, rough palm on your naked thigh, leaning in as he reaches over to the sink above.

It's barely a fraction of his weight but the drag of it makes you blink in surprise. His skin is burning. Redhot.

Opening your eyes brings you close to his chest, nose only a hair away from the tanned skin stretched over his collarbones. The metal chain gleams in the flushed light hanging overhead, sitting in a golden contrast to his sunkissed flesh. Its reflection casts beads of glittering lambency over the slope of his neck.

Pretty, you think, watching as it coruscates in a mesmerising dance each time he moves.

The faucet turns with a metallic squeak, breaking you from your reverie. Water gurgles up from the pipes, spitting into the basin with a hiss. You pull back, twisting your head to the side as heat floods your chest.

“Thanks,” you mutter, unable to meet his stare.

His fingers tighten around your flesh. His voice is raw when he mumbles, “anytime.”

The trickling rush of water reverberates around the room, and it's easy to close your eyes and pretend you're alone.

So that's exactly what you do.

His palm grows slick on your skin. Damp. But you ignore it, focusing on nothing but the urgency of getting this over with as quickly as you can. It works, marginally—

(Johnny makes another noise in the back of his throat.

That, too, you ignore.)

“Finished?” His voice is thick, wet. You nod slowly, peeking out from the sliver between your lashes to paw at the wall for the toilet paper roll. “Here, ah’ll help ye out of fer pants—”

Your head feels heavy. Limbs laden. The embarrassment crushes you into a fine powder; malleable, putty. You let Johnny take the lead after. Let him slip your tattered tights down your thighs, and say nothing at all when too much of his palm glides along your skin as he pulls. Needlessly, of course, when just two fingers would do.

But it's fine. Fine. Maybe he's never taken off tights before. Maybe the material is too thin and he's worried about it catching on the scrapes over your knees, the bandage wrapped up to mid-calf.

Your shirt, too. When he slips his fingers under the hem, splaying them wide over your belly before dragging them up until it bunches around his wrist. Tugging, tugging. Hands gliding over your skin, fitting along the contours of your body.

He keeps one hand moulded to your neck, fingers brushing your jaw, as he gingerly pulls the shirt over your head. The ragged pants in your ear, the soft groans when you slip into his old shirt—

It's exertion, really. Must be. He's tired from holding you up the whole time you brushed your teeth, washed your face in the sink. It's all fine. He's being gentle. Doesn't want to hurt you.

He's just being nice.

(And when you notice that your panties are missing from the pile of dirty clothes he shoves into the corner behind the door, that, too, you ignore.)

Exhaustion takes you soon after Johnny tucks you into bed, dragging you under once again. He tells you he'll be on the couch. To holler if you need anything. Sluggishly, you nod. Thank him when he places a glass of water on the bedside table for you.

(Bite your tongue when he brushes his fingers over your cheek as he bids you goodnight.)

Through the gossamer of sleep, you can hear the floorboards creak in the doorway, but when you look, there's nothing there. Just an empty kitchen. The soft flicker of the fireplace smouldering in the living room.

Nothing, you think. It's nothing at all—

There's a weight on your chest.

Warm, searing. It dampens your skin where it sits, heavy, on your breast, cold air ghosting along the sweat building up each time it moves.

You stir. The pressure takes shape. A hand. A man's hand. Rough, calloused, and hot. In his palm, he holds your breast, thumb brushing along the curve of it. Sliding, sliding—

You come awake with a gasp.

There's a twinge in your ankle when you move, and the pain grounds you, silences you. His thumb twitches on your nipple, but he, too, stills. Quietens. An impasse.

And you suppose this would be where you'd scream. Rage. Slap him across the face, rip his hand off your breast. Curse at him for being a creep, and a pervert, and nasty, disgusting man because there's nothing at all that could justify the reason for why the shirt he gave you to wear to bed is tucked up over your chest. The bruising press of something hard digging into your hip negates any excuse he might try to give. This is unmistakable. You should scream, cry, and—

Leave.

This is what glues your lips together. Keeps you from moving at all, from making a sound. Where would you go? How would you even get there to begin with?

It's this—the uncertainty, your vulnerability—that paralyzes you. Keeps you still, silent, as his hands brush over your skin, touching, fondling. His palms are rough, calloused. Pyretic. He squeezes, kneading your flesh in his sweat-slicked hand like he's owed the right to touch you. Like he's allowed.

He pants against your temple, breath warm, humid on your skin. Heaves like a dog in your ear, grunting low as he ruts his hips into your side, smearing something hot, tacky across your skin. Something you try not to think about, to inch away from. But he catches you quick, and stops your meagre protests before they form.

His thumb and forefinger close over your pebbled nipple, pinching softly at your budded flesh. The shock of pleasure is unwanted. Awful. It churns your stomach, and you fight the urge to weep—

He leans up, ragged exhales growing heavier as he moves until milk-warmed breath shudders over your bare breasts. His excitement throbs against your hip. You swallow down around the sudden wave of disgust, the sickness knotting itself together in your belly. It devours the lingering pity you'd felt earlier. The safety, the comfort, that brimmed inside of you for him.

(bleeding heart—

he gorges himself on it.)

Stay still, you think. And maybe he'll go away.

But he doesn't. Of course, he doesn't.

Johnny leans down, mouth closes over your nipple. It's all searing heat. Wet, soft. A sudden jolt of pleasure shoots down your spine when he sucks in tandem with the soft, rolling pinches he doles out on your tiger nipple, and you hate your treacherous body a little bit more for it. For how good it makes you feel when he flicks his tongue over your hardened peek, laving it sloppily. Messily. Drooling all over you—the big fucking dog—

You wonder how long he's been doing this. Touching you in your sleep. The thought sits like hot oil in your guts; sloshing against the soft lining of your stomach until it aches. Burns. You blame it on that when he grunts against your breast, the vibrations send a shiver down your spine. Have to, don't you? Because the alternative is to admit that you're slick, soft between your thighs already; folds soaked, inner thigh damp. Wet. Blame it on him, and the burden in your chest eases when you feel the stirrings of desire, lust, thicken in your lower belly. Bodily reaction becomes your clutch, your lifeline when he lays his upper body against you, the weight, the heft, of his bulk forcing the air from your lungs.

Johnny lifts his head suddenly, eyes drilling into yours before you can feign sleep to avoid looking at him. You don't want this. Your body thrums with reluctance, with fear, but you can't drag your gaze away from him. The rapturous look in his eyes, burning in the low simmer of a never-ending twilight, is paralyzing. Electric. You can't remember a time in your life when another person has ever looked at you with such raw want. Desire. Need. It's covetous. Ugly. Marbled with heady streams of hunger, of awe, as if he's not sure whether or not he wants to eat you alive or savour you for aeons. Taking bites, nibbles, when this urge becomes too burdensome to bear; when the ravenous chasm in his guts threatens to devour itself, bones and all, like a man-made black hole. Under this heavy, unrelenting stare you wither. Submit. Your head rolls until your cheek is pressed against the pillow, neck bared. Offered up to him.

(anything, you think, to run away from the naked want on his face. because with his mouth slack, lips slick, glistening with spit, he looks predatory like this. animal. bathed in gloam and flushed a deep roseate.)

He props himself up on his elbow, watching you. Feasting. Your quiet submission makes him moan; hips juttering at the slow reveal of your vulnerable neck. A paroxysm. As if he just can't help himself to hump against you like a beast in rut.

He swallows. You watch his throat work from the corner of your eye, Adam's apple bobbing up and down, up and down—

Then:

He lifts himself up higher, angling his body until it's bracketed over you. Sliding between your legs until your slit is pressed against the coarse hair that covers his thighs. He keeps his elbow propped on the pillow, sliding up, up, until his forearm comes to rest beside your face. It boxes you in completely under his weight, and the position forces your legs to spread open to accommodate him. Not given up freely, of course; but your compliance in this is inessential, it seems. He moulds you how he likes, mindful of your injured ankle the whole time. A kindness that makes something molten thicken in your throat, stifling the scream that claws its way up your esophagus.

You try not to stare when he clambers over you, chest bare against yours. Hips chiselling a gorge between your thighs wide enough for him to fit. To press his fattened length on the insides of your sticky thighs; groins drawing together. Your legs slung loosely around his tapered waist. A dreadful pastiche of lovemaking. Intimacy.

But even as a mockery—bastardised as it is—it’s embarrassing how easily you open up for him. Legs falling, spreading further apart. Hot, sticky at the apex of your thighs. Wanting.

Blame it on sleep, on this endless hypnagogia you've been feeling since he leaned over you on the cliff edge, and said, pretty thing, aren't ye? All alone. No’ anymore, doe. Jus’ me an’ ye, now. Jus’ us—

You swallow, fighting the urge to cry. Blinking rapidly against the tears that pebble against your lashline, but you're helpless to stop the flood even though the levee doesn't break, doesn't spill over. It just sits, a sorrowful lagoon with nowhere to go.

In your attempt to hold back the deluge, you let your gaze wander away from the piercing blue that drills into your face—seemingly unbothered by the tears in your eyes, the ones that clot over your irises, stinging and hot—and stare down at his broad chest. A mistake, maybe, because you catch sight of the gold cross dangling around his neck. Like a pendulum, it swings. The motion is mesmerising. Hypnotic.

It distracts you for a moment. Or maybe you've just grown accustomed to his touch, to the heat of his hand on your skin. Whatever the reason, it's enough to pull you away from the feverish trail his fingers leave as they make a steady drag downward. It's only when they dance over your belly button do you realise the muted tickle is Johnny, and by then—

“Shush, s’alright, doe,” he's cooing, warm breath ghosting over the plains of your face. It might be comforting if he didn't rest his weight on his elbow, freeing his other hand just to bring it over your mouth, thumb brushing under your eye. A warning maybe. Don't scream. “Ah go’ ye. Ah’ll make ye feel so good—”

There's a fever in his eyes. Wildfires spreading through the yawning boscage, burning everything in sight. The heat is hot enough to char bone; to blacken meat into a dessicated husk. Eating away at everything in its path.

You know, almost immediately, that Johnny's beyond reason. Or, rather—

He's gone, turned inward; delusional enough to think that this is something he has to do.

You'd seen all the warnings of the kindling fire before. Something you'd decided to ignore even as the hunger in his eyes surged; as the shape of it morphed into a frothing devotion that felt ill-fitting for two strangers stuck together like this.

Stupidly, you thought you could outrun it. That he was a good man beneath it all, and wouldn't succumb to touching you in your sleep, to lulling you into a false sense of security—

Except. He hadn't, had he?

He'd been blunt about it all since the beginning. My wife—

How silly, you thought.

But the humour fades when he teases over your hips, resting his palm over your mound, middle finger perched above your clit. Just holding. Touching. The possessiveness of the action is unmistakable, unignorable.

It shouldn't send a shiver down your spine when you'd rather he didn't touch you at all, but it does. There's something about him, you think. Electric. A lightning storm. It crackles in the air around you, humming low in the atmosphere; this unavoidable surge, natural phenomenon. Maybe that's what he is.

More storm than man. A force you can't outrun, but can only endure—

His eyes flash when he slides his fingers further down your slit and finds your skin soft, hot. Drenched. When he groans your name out, it sounds like a prayer. An orison.

“So wet, doe,” he's heaving out in a whisper, eyes nearly rolling back into his head as his touch grows bolder, more insistent. As if the softness of your flesh, the wetness that sticks to your inner thighs, is all the consent he needs. “So fuckin’ wet fer me, aye? Been waitin’ fer this, haven't ye?”

You want to shake your head no but it's futile. He drops his head to look down the chasm between your bodies, watching his hand slide along your skin. Legs spread around his waist, inviting. He curses foul under his breath when he sees how wet his fingers are from just a touch, words mangled in the back of his throat. They sound less coherent as he roams your body, parting your folds and stroking through the slick spilling out of you, dragging it up to your clit.

His voice is closer now. Lips bruising against the shell of your ear. Butchered English. Gaelic. An amalgamation of low whines, and rasping grunts. He sounds more animal than man. A booming thundercloud groaning above you, as if touching you is enough to please him, too. Siphoning it from your body as he presses his fingers against your clit, circling, stroking.

It’s good. So good. And that's the problem, you think. It's easy to give in like this when he pets your pussy like the feeling of your fluttering heat on his hand is enough to make him cum. No one has ever touched you like they were starving for it. Needed it as badly as you did.

The sensation is almost too much. The notion of it getting tangled in the back of your head, looping around the part of you still screaming to run. To go home. To push him away.

(your arms are laden. your tongue is a puddle of mercury in your mouth—)

But just as the pleasure blooming in your belly raises with each pass of his thumb, he pulls away. Slides down, down—

Circles your hole with the tips of his slick fingers, petting with the same desperation he showed your clit until he deems you soft enough for him. He slowly sinks his finger inside of you to the knuckle, stretching your walls around him as he moans into your ear about how good ye feel around him, all tight. Hot. So fuckin' wet, do. So wet fer me—

He pulls out just as slowly, shushing the soft gasp you make when the ridge of his palm catches on your clit.

“Ah told ye, didnae ah? Ah’ll take care’a ye.”

He presses two fingers inside of you as he peppers kisses over your cheek, cooing low about how badly you need him. Only him.

Johnny fucks you slowly on two fingers. Gently. Deeply. Sliding into the last knuckle, petting against your slick walls, like he's owed the privilege and not touching you in your sleep.

He brings you to the edge, takes you right there, and—

Pulls away. His fingers slide down as your hips flit, lifting to make them catch on your clit again. It's embarrassing how badly you want him to touch you. Shameful.

He leans up and catches your mouth in a messy kiss. It's all tongue, wet, no finesse. The wild, unkempt tangle of hair abrades your skin, rubbing it raw as he devours you. Scoops out your tongue with his own, enticing it into his mouth. His teeth close on the thick of it, lips pursing. Sucking on the tip.

His kisses are doglike and obscene. Leaves drool dribbling down your chin, soaking into your neck. He can't seem to decide what he wants to do, so he tries to do it all. Everything. Biting your lips, trying to choke you on his tongue. Slurping up the taste of you until his mouth is stained with it. Beard matted down, drenched.

Despite it all, he's a good kisser. His pace is fast, breakneck. You can't keep up, but you try. Struggling along as he seems hellbent on eating you alive. But it's sporadic. He pauses just long enough to settle into an easy rhythm that makes you arch into it, silently begging for more as he fucks you on his fingers. Nips your tongue as he slides in a third, swallowing the gasp you let out, savouring your moans between his teeth.

Johnny ruins you with just a kiss. Leaves you panting, unmoored. Mouth slack, open wide for him to do what he pleases because the taste of him is divine.

“C’mon,” he urges, spreading his fingers inside of your cunt until you keen, whining his name. “Suck my tongue, bonnie.”

It's disgusting. You do it, anyway.

Your quiet acquiescence makes him moan, hips rutting against you. The hard press of his cock into your skin is bruising. It aches. Your inner thighs are tacky with your slick and the smears of pre-cum he leaves behind as he humps against you.

He sounds mournful when he pulls away, mouth messy with spit, and whispers, “fuck, wish ah could taste ye again, doe—” You don't know what he means until his eyes drop down to his hand, working insistently between your thighs.

Your stomach drops. Plummets. You thought this started when he was touching your chest, when you woke up to his hand on your breast—

“Ye didnae wake when ah did it before,” he says, as if sounding mournful, sad, over the fact that you didn't wake up to him eating your pussy while you were asleep, was normal. “Must’a had too much tea—”

You wish, so suddenly, so viciously, that he'd stop talking. You can't hear this. Can't bear to listen to him confess to all the needling worries that bloomed in the back of your head, ones you stamped down with a heavy foot and a potent sense of guilt, shame, for condemning a man who was just trying to help.

It makes you want to cry.

“Oh, doe, don't cry—” he coos the words out, contrite and conciliatory, but you can feel the way his cock twitches against your thigh. The unmistakable heat mushrooming in his eyes as the sight of tears streaming down your face.

He seems to take it as misery over not feeling his mouth on your cunt, a plaintive assertion he whispers into your ear (poor thing, jus’ wannae feel ma mouth on you, aye? wannae feel me lick yer sweet pussy again?), and decides to rectify your sorrow by kissing his way down your body.

His fingers slip out when he moves, resting them on your knee as he kneels back on his haunches.

You spare a glance toward him, nervous with trepidation, and—

This whole time, his cock had been this phantom sensation against your skin, bruising and hot. Leaving wet smears over your thighs. Hidden from view. But like this, it's the first thing you see as it hangs, heavy and thick, from between his thighs.

The sight is—

Something.

You don't want to think about the heat in your belly. The nervous flit of your heartbeat.

A pearlescent strand dribbles down the weeping, slick head, dropping to the sheets below. The shaft of his cock is similarly drenched, smeared with what seems like a copious amount of precum. It gathers at the base, a startling contrast of thick, black hair and globs of milky white.

Something about it makes you recoil. Almost instinctively, primal.

Your flinch just makes his cock twitch, spitting more out.

The motion seems to unveil more of it to you, adding to the growing unease you feel because his cock is the furthest thing from pretty.

It's flushed a daunting vermillion and purpling like a bruise around the engorged glands. Thickening at the base. Streaked with dark veins that run the length of it, like rivers intersecting and jutting up from his skin. Blotches of red, pink, purple, and peach make up the colouring of it. Marbled like a black eye. A busted lip.

It bobs when he moves. Ugly, garish. You don't want it anywhere near you—

But Johnny’s wet hand on your knee keeps you from moving. Holds you in place as he bends down, resting on elbow to bring his face as close to your pussy as he can get.

Johnny stares—unabashedly—at your bare cunt when he finally settles between your thighs, widening them further to fit the broad stretch of his shoulders. Eyes lit with a heady greed, a hunger, that knocks the air from your lungs.

“Missed ma mouth, didnae ye?”

For a moment, you think he's talking to you. Confusion colours the panic you feel, dampening the dread down until it's flattened by sheer bewilderment when you realise his eyes haven't left your slit.

“Such a bonnie girl,” he purrs, breath ghosting over your cunt. “Been so lonely without me, aye? Poor thing.”

It heats you up from the inside out. The mesmerised, almost unfettered look of pure adoration shaded alongside the raw want on his face twists a sense of desire inside of you. Has anyone looked at you with such naked need on their face? As if the idea of not having a taste was somehow the most agonising thing they could experience? The way Johnny looks at you is enough to make you ache. And with anyone else, having him address your pussy instead of you would be awkward, humiliating, but somehow, him doing it makes you burn white-hot. Makes you want—

“Johnny,” you whisper, paper-thin, and his head shoots up, brows inching high on his brow. You're acutely aware that this is the first thing you've said since this started. Since you woke up to him groping you, touching you, in your sleep. And it's his name. Johnny.

Not no, don't. Stop. Please. Just—

“Johnny.”

It's not consent. You're not sure you're fully capable of doing so right now, if ever. But it's the closest you think you could come to saying yes. Admitting that you want his mouth on you, even though the situation leading up to this still makes something ugly and awful twist in your guts, is as much as you can give. He seems to see this. To know.

But Johnny takes it between his teeth as an unequivocal yes despite that, groaning low in his throat, midnight eyes rolling back into his head. The hands on you tremble. Shake.

He breathes in deeply through his nose, the sound whistling as a great plume of air is forced through small channels, filling his lungs. Perfuming them with the heady scent of you, of sex, clotting in the air.

“Fuck, doe. Gonnae give ye what ye need.”

And then he bends his head, eyes lidded still, half rolled, and without any preamble, glues his lips to your drenched slit, forcing it between your soft folds.

The first touch of his tongue is molten. Soft, tensile, he laves it over the whole of your slit from the sensitive skin beneath your hole, to the crest of your clit. Digs his tongue in, swirling it over and under your folds leaving no part of you untouched. Feasting. Devouring.

It makes you mewl. Your back arches off the sheets, ankle throbbing in a heady, pulsing pain at the sudden movement, adding to the shrill whine in your voice.

He notices, and pets your knee once before sliding his bicep under your leg, looping his hand around to secure your thigh in the crook of his below. Locked in tight. Immoveable. The other he pushes down with the flat of his palm, until your joints ache from the stretch. Your knee is almost flush with the mattress. Widening you further for his searing, eager mouth.

If his kisses are dogish—wet, messy; sloppy with drool—then the way he eats your cunt is foul. Slobbering down his chin, slurping up the mess he makes with a series of chewed-off moans and muffled whines. He paws at you as if he was denied the pleasure of drink for aeons, feasting like a man half-delirious and starved. There's no finesse. No skill to speak of. Just a desperate man lapping at you like a beast. Worshipping you.

He nuzzles his chin and cheeks against your cunt, drenching himself until his beard is matted to his skin. The feeling of his coarse hair grazing your sensitive flesh is overwhelming. Too much. Too ticklish. But—

It feels good.

The contrast of his fleshy tongue rolling over your clit, and the rough brush of his hair when he nuzzles you with the point of his chin, cooing softly about how pretty this little pussy is, getting him all wet, is cataclysmic. The heat floods your belly, and you clench around nothing. Achingly empty. Moaning at the feeling of him bringing you right there, right to the brink, with nothing by the hair on his cheek. It's unreal. Inescapable. Your head drops, mouth lax, open wide as you pant and whimper through the madness of Johnny MacTavish trying to find a way to suck your clit and fuck you with his tongue at the same time. An impossible goal, you know, but he doesn't seem to care about logic or reason with his head buried between your thighs, mouth never leaving you once. He merely nods his head up and down, refusing to pull away.

It's divine. It's worship. It's—

He pushes two of his fingers inside of you, lapping at your taut rim to stem the sting of his sudden intrusion, and you think, for a moment, that you see Nirvana behind your eyelids.

It's embarrassingly how quickly he brings to you the brink, slurping messily as he drills his fingers into your hole, petting against your walls in a mockery of what he'll do to you once he's had his fill. Satiated his hunger with the taste of your pussy.

Something he can't seem to get enough of.

Your thighs draw together, crushing him between your legs. Arching into his mouth, nearly smothering him as you rut clumsily against his face, moaning at the rough scrape of his beard against your skin. You're not normally so aggressive, but he loses himself in it, eyes rolling as he grabs your hips and pulls you closer to his wanting mouth, encouraging you to use his tongue, his lips, to meet your end as you see fit. Riding his face as much as you can with your leg locked tight between his shoulder and bicep.

And it's in between his loud grunts, his whines—almost caterwauling into your slit—where you shatter. The sound of his pleasure, the feeling of his mouth on you—it’s all too much. You break when he sucks your clit into his mouth, keening in the back of his throat as he works another finger into you. It feels good. Too good.

Johnny works you through it. Lets you take, and take as your muscles spasm with the force of your release. Fingers digging into his shoulders, fisting the sheets. He moans along with you, eagerly lapping at your cunt until you whine, begging him to stop. You've had enough. Can't take anymore—

He only pulls away when you melt into the sheets, shuddering with the aftershocks bubbling through your body. Leaning back on his haunches once more, the hair around his mouth slick and wet. The evidence of your pleasure dripping down his chin, droplets still clinging to his beard.

He crawls over you once more, eyes boring into yours. Pits of coal. An endless black hole.

In this strange space, liminal, you lose yourself. Shed pieces of who you were before when he slots his hips between your thighs, cock heavy in his hand, and presses it to your slit.

This is happening. He's going to fuck you.

You wish the thought didn't make your knees fall apart a little wider for him. Make your hips flit, lifting slightly into the air. Eager. Hungry for it. For him.

It's loneliness, you think. Desperation.

Madness is addictive. It feeds itself and infects those around it. Noxious. An all-consuming black hole that eats, and eats. It must have bitten you, too. Dug infectious teeth into your skin, severing flesh to imbed its jowls in your marrow. Clinging. Poisoning you from the inside out.

There's no other reason for why you reach for him, hands sliding over his sweat-slicked skin as he falls into the open brackets of your arms, grunting when the head of his cock catches on your rim. He's a wall of heat. Firm muscles. Your nails dig into the thick cords of his shoulders just to feel the reluctant give of his skin.

Nothing about this man is soft. His waist, his thighs, his chest, his arms, the hard ridge of his cock. It's all unyielding muscle. Burning. Searing into your skin when it drags against his.

“Gonnae fuck ye, doe,” he whispers, words pitching low. Damp wood, felled timber. Rough. You shiver from the heat of it. The warning, the plea; both extremes coalescing together to make truism more potent. Weighty. “Gonnae fuck this pretty pussy, and yer gonnae beg me fer it.”

Despite the surety in assertion, he doesn't wait for you to plead with him to split you apart, taking the initiative instead to sink the head of his cock into you. The stretch stings already, and only his glands have sunk in, a fact he grunts into your ear as he drives forward another inch. Another—

You don't think you've ever been this unmoored before. Rendered this docile. A mere domicile for him to burrow inside of; to carve a home from the sanctum of your walls wrapped tight around him. And carve he does. Splitting you apart as he grunts with the efforting of forcing his cock into you, feeding it further with blunt jerks of his hips, his hands feverish on your skin. Sweat slicked already even though he's barely halfway inside of you.

“Feels so good,” he slurs into your ear, face pinching. Twisting up as pleasure blooms over his brow. “So fuckin’ good, doe, fuck—”

It does. Beyond the blunt pressure of him forcing his cock inside of you, the sting of the stretch, there's an intense, dizzying pleasure in the fullness you feel. In the press of him notching against something inside that makes heat bloom in your belly, turns your bones liquid. It might be the previous climax rendering you oversensitive, but the feeling of him splitting you apart is euphoric.

It's aided by the moans he lets out as you take more and more of him, as if the sound of his pleasure is funnelled into yours. By the look on his face, eyes widened, feverish, as he darts his gaze between your face and your pussy, unable to decide if he wants to watch his cock disappear into you or watch your face, pinched up in pleasure, in flickering pain, as you take him fully.

This sort of bliss, this pleasure, is addicting. Narrowed down to the sharp nudge of his cock grazing places inside of you that light your nerves on fire, burn through your synapses until your thoughts are muddled, mush. No coherency, no logic—just the fat length of him bludgeoning into your walls; the tap of his heavy, full sack slapping against your ass as he finally, finally, roots deep.

He must feel it, too. This strange, overwhelming pleasure loops around your lower belly, twisting itself into knots because when he pushes the last few inches inside of you, he nearly collapses on top of you, his whole body shuddering. Trembling. Presses his damp face to your cheek, matted, slick hair tickling your skin, and groans from deep within his chest at the feeling of you wrapped around him. The noise shivers through you. His pleasure is enough to make you clench down, tightening up around him. Already on the verge and all he did was slide his cock inside of you.

A fact he seems to luxuriate in, huffing shakily into your ear as he quenches himself on the soft, fluttering pulses of your walls around him. Content to grind his hips into yours in shallow gyrations that make your eyes roll into the back of your head. The tension in your belly coiling tighter and tighter, the pleasure ameliorating the shame you'd felt before, burning it into cinders.

As long as he keeps his cock inside of you, as long as he keeps pushing the blunt head into that spot that makes your vision whiteout, you think could cum just like this. Right now—

He doesn't.

Johnny lifts himself off of your chest, elbow coming to rest beside your head, taking the brunt of his weight. His eyes are bright, burning. He stares down at you, and the look of sheer adoration on his face is daunting, overwhelming. It threatens to eat you alive. Devour you whole. Pure rapture. Devotion.

You flush, face stinging with embarrassment. Prickling with unease. No one has ever stared at you like this, so hungrily, and the fact that it's him makes your head spin. Looping endlessly in circles of disbelief and fear.

He might be omnipotent, you think, with the way his lips tug sharply downward, brow bunching together as if he can hear your thoughts, taste your disquiet in the air.

Johnny rolls his hips back slowly, inching out of you with a hum until just the tip remains. The loss has your hands scrambling down his chest, fingers tangling in the coarse, drenched hairs at the soft incline of his belly. The other sliding around the thick breadth of his ribs, nails digging into the slick skin covering his spine. Pressing. Biting.

More, you don't say. Please.

The knot in his brow dissipates. Eases into something almost playful, impish.

“Want ma cock, doe?” He whispers it waggishly, like a cloy secret, and you pretend the tease in his voice doesn't make your heart lurch in your chest. “Didnae anyone teach ye some manners? Gotta ask politely.”

You won't. You won't.

Your reluctance makes him sigh. The chain around his neck swinging when he moves. His hips pull back, and he reaches down with his free hand, and grabs his cock, pulling it out of you, and sliding it against your slit. The head bumps into your clit, and you nearly choke on the gasp that's ripped from your chest. The pleasure is too much, too—

He pulls away, denying you the euphoria of release.

“No, no, please,” you babble, resolve crumbling into ash. “Please, Johnny, please—”

“That’s more like it,” he coos, and lets his cock dip back inside of your fluttering hole, rim stretched taut around him once more. The sting is lessened now, but still there as the thick glands force you open for him. “Sound so pretty when yer desperate for ma cock.”

He leans down, catching your mouth in another sloppy kiss as he slams his cock back inside of you hard enough to bruise. To make you see stars. Cockhead bludgeoning into your cervix in a dizzying amalgamation of pleasure and pain that makes you whine, the whimper snatched up between his teeth as he burrows them into your lip with an echoing groan.

He fucks you hard, working his cock into you at a maddening pace. Bestial, now. All animal. The tenderness from before dissolves into an choppy desperation. An eagerness to seek his own end as you fall to pieces beneath him, shaking from the force of taking him over and over again, each piston, each hard thrust driving the thoughts from your head until all you have left is sensation. An absence of everything except the way he feels above you, inside of you.

Sweat builds up along your hairline, gathers at the base of your spine, and soaks the sheets below. You feel liquid under him. A ragdoll for him to sink his jowls into, to toss around as he likes.

Johnny is all sensation and a cacophony of sound.

He ruts into you clumsily, groaning in your ear. Moaning out how good you feel around him. Pretty pussy made just for him.

“Oh, fuck, doe—” he moans, arching into the next thrust. Drool dribbles down his chin when he curves his spine, dropping his forehead onto your temple. “Feels so good. Feels like my cock is meltin’ instead ye—”

The lewd squelch of his cock pistoning into you seems to echo through the room, louder somehow than the ragged moans that spill from his mouth.

“Been so long,” he shudders against you, rooting his cock deep. Burying himself inside of you as his cockhead bullies into your cervix. The flash of pain is whitehot, blinding, but the bloom of pleasure eats it whole before it can pollute the puddle of bliss pooling in your belly. “Been savin’ it all jus’ fer ye—”

His hand slides from your hip, burrowing between your bodies as rubs at your clit. It feels so good that it nips sharply into pain, into agony. Too much, too much—

But he doesn't relent. Fingers toying, circling your clit in time with each jarring thrust, tightening the coil inside of you until it whines from the tension, the pressure—

It snaps when he growls into your ear—cum fer me, doe; wannae feel this pussy squeezin’ ma cock—and releases in a flood, a deluge of molten heat. Back arching, toes curling. You're barely cognisant of the ache in your injured foot, the throbbing pain. It's swallowed by the surge of endorphins roaring through you, ringing in your ears. Blotting everything out except the way you pulse around the thick of him still lodged deep inside of you.

You barely have time to come down before he starts again, forcing you to take him as he thrusts in harder than before, mindlessly seeking his own end as you gush around him, nails raking across his flesh.

He's babbling above you, spitting words into your ear about how he's going to take care of you. All of you. Take you back to Scotland with him so you can raise your children—

It slices through the haze, ripping a hole through the fog clouding your mind.

“No,” you whimper, devastation flooding your chest alongside the vicious pleasure still rolling around inside of you. “No, please—”

Children, he breathes like you hadn't spoken at all. Lots. Lots of them. Brothers and sisters. Two, maybe three, of each. But he's not picky, bonnie, he'll take whatever you give him. And keep fucking you over and over again until he gets what he wants. A whole family to raise. To surround himself with. Been lonely, you think he says. Needed something to keep him busy.

You don't want this. Can't. But he doesn't stop, doesn't relent. He breathes life into the picture he paints with the soft flutter of your cunt clenching tight around him at words, once again betrayed by your own body.

Despite the nausea that bleeds to the surface at his words, your eyes roll back into your head once more, driven mad with the thunderous pleasure that rips through you as he forces every last inch of his cock into you.

Johnny grinds his hips against yours, moaning, loud and untethered, muscles jerking, twitching, as he cums deep inside of you.

The aftershocks of his pleasure make him tremble, body spasming as he drives himself tight against the seal of your womb. A new heat grows inside of you as Johnny slumps against you, panting in your ear.

“Ah’ll be so good tae ya,” he promises in a rasping growl, shoving his head into the crook of your neck. Gyves close around you as he nuzzles his mouth into your flesh, licking at the sweat that beads on your skin.

“All mine. All fuckin’ mine—” The confessional is tainted with the sickness that leaks from the craggy hole chiselled into the side of his head. Obsessive devotion hewing ruinous dogma into the fibrils of your head. Tenderised, softened, by the blunt, unyielding touch of his hand. A slurry that this polluted notion slips inside, tainting your resolve until it's thickened into his whim. His wants.

You sob into his chest as he wraps you up in his arms, shackled against the man who carved a place inside of you just wide enough for himself to fit. Who spat poison in the hollow crevasses, and called it absolution. Love.

All you can do is heave through corrupted lungs as he smothers you under the weight of his madness.

“No’ gonnae let anyone touch ye. Ah'll kill anyone who tries to tae take ye away from me, doe—”

The conviction in his tone is bound in steel. In feverish blue.

“Ah’ll take care’a ye,” he rasps, voice thick in his throat. “Donnae worry about a thing, doe.”

“Will you let me go?”

He doesn't answer at first. Just digs his nose into your hairline, breathing in deep until the wide breadth of his chest expands across your back. Mulling it over, maybe. Coming up with an excuse for his behaviour. Something to negotiate with on reasons why you shouldn't call the police the moment he does.

And for a moment, a startling, terrible moment, there's hope. The assurance wells on your tongue. Some unfathomable amalgamation of please and i’ll never tell. Maybe you were going to tell him he was an honest man who did something bad. That there was still good within him. All of those hideous clichès bubble up through the cracks—

But it's all dashed when his hand drops down from its perch beneath your bare breasts, sliding over your skin until it curls possessively over your lower belly.

He breathes out and the hope inside you is snuffed under the gale of delusion, his obsession. “Why would ah do a thing like that?” He prompts, and the genuine confusion in his voice makes you shiver, as if the idea of it is so outlandish, so absurd, it negates everything he'd done to get to this point. You feel hollow. But not—

Not empty.

As if he hears the thought thundering in the ruins of your mind, he presses a tender kiss to your temple that you think is meant to be soothing. Shushing you softly when you begin to shake. “After it took me this long to find ye, doe. Am no’ lettin’ ye go fer the world, ken. Yer mine. All mine.”

And then he closes his jowls around your throat.

Time feels artificial here.

You wake up several hours later, groggy and disoriented, but the sun doesn't seem like it moved from where it was perched last night at all. Fixed in place. Lost in some strange, eternal twilight zone where the sun is a warden, watching you tirelessly through the window.

Cardboard cutout hung amongst the stars.

Your ankle aches horribly—an agonising throb. You must have turned in your sleep, jostled it. You're further away from the spot you were last night, too. Rolled over in your sleep, maybe. The burn brings tears to your eyes that you swallow down with a groan.

As you awkwardly settle your leg in a way that hurts slightly less than it did before, you let cognisance slip back in to keep your mind off of the horrible ache that tremors through your bones. Your neck.

Between your thighs—

It's then that you hear Johnny.

He's whistling in the kitchen. You peer out through the crack in the door, catching the broad expanse of his naked back as he works over the stove. Flexing. Muscles bunching. He hums a tune you can't recognise as he scrapes the spatula over the cast iron pan.

His grey sweats sit low on his hips. The divots above the hem—dimples of Apollo, you recall—are stark against the hollow ravine of his spine. You can't help but stare. Gawk. Limned in the soft light of the morning sun that spills through the open window, he looks almost ethereal. Unreal. Like something out of a magazine and not the middle of nowhere in Canada where the sun doesn't set this time of year.

He feels surreal. A man too good to be true. All sculpted musculature that looks like it could just as well be handmade by an amalgamation of both David’s by Michelangelo and Gian Lorenzo Bernini. All sharp, angled lines; beautiful in their fluidity.

It's unfair, you think suddenly. To be stuck with a man you feel nauseous thinking about but can’t seem to take your eyes off of. Some paradoxical madness. Retribution for a time in a past life where you swindled fate and got away unscathed. All of your karmic sins pile down on top of you as the events last night flicker past, drenched in seafoam. Ghosts linger in the cracks; in memories.

The phantom weight of something slung over your waist, knotted tight between your breasts. Scorching heat glued to your spine. A heavy hand cradling your lower belly. Words whispered into your nape—

He turns, then. Catches your eye like he knew it was there the whole time. Stands there like the picture of ease, of a satiated man puttering around a small space while his sweetheart lounged in the bed, lazing the day away.

Like this wasn’t illegal. Immoral. He treats you like a lover even though you’d only met less than a day ago—

And already his cum was drying on your inner thighs, thick and sticky. His madness pooling in your head, words uttered into your ear about this cabin he has back home, back in Scotland. He’ll take you there, he said. It’s time he came home, he thinks. His head is on straight again, and he finally feels like he can breathe without shattering into a million pieces—

(He put your hands on his head last night, palm cradling the ugly scar on his temple, and whispered, fervent and insane, ye keep ma head together, doe. Ye make me feel whole again—)

Knows a man, he told you. A good bloke who’d help him get you home, too.

His smile is bright. Blinding.

“Mornin’, doe. Ah made breakfast.”

#johnny mctavish x reader #soap x reader #baby trap anthology #the kinks in this are just #wow #UM proceed with caution lmao

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alixezae · 6 months ago

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Staring ๋࣭⭑ ryomen sukuna x reader

Synopsis: ever since you got pregnant you've never felt so happy in your life and ryomen by your side the king of curses soft for you and the baby, but that doesn't change the fact the ryomen kills whoever and whomever touches you and your swollen belly

Warnings: slight mention of murder, pet names (wife, queen, sun) - reader being a sweetheart, fluff, sukina being soft for reader, heian era

As the sun slowly crept above the horizon, casting a warm golden glow across the land, a soft gentle breeze rustled through the cherry blossom trees that dotted the lush, emerald green hillsides of heian-kyõ. The air was filled with the intoxicating scent of their delicate pink petals, which fluttered like confetti across the verdant landscape. In the distance, the gentle hum of bees busily collecting nectar from flowers created a soothing, almost meditative atmosphere

It was on this idyllic morning ryomen, the king of curses, awoke from his slumber, the warmth of the sun caressing his soft pink hair, he stretched languidly, yawning wide before blinking several times to clear his sleep from his vivid red eyes. His gaze drifted over to the figure of his beloved wife, the queen, as she lay curled up in a makeshift bed they had fashioned for her. Her swollen belly rose and fell gently with each breath she took

Ryomen nuzzled her gently, careful not to disturb her rest. He couldn't help but marvel at the miracle growing inside her, her tiny life that would soon be a part of their world. A pang of guilt shot through him as he remembered the countless times he had been to defend her and their child from those who dare harm them. But he knew that he would do it again and again, a thousand times over, if it meant keeping them safe.

As he watched her sleep, he felt a wave of tenderness wash over him. Despite the hard exterior he often presented, he was deeply in love with his wife, the queen, and cherished her more than anything else in the world. He had never known such happiness as he did with her by his side, and the thought of losing her, or worse, their child, filled him with dread.

She woke from her slumber and saw his eyes filled with tenderness she kissed his cheeks softly and he smiled, she was amazed by the tenderness and care that ryomen showed during her pregnancy. He would place his hand gently on he swollen belly, feeling the baby move and kick. His eyes would soften with love and adoration, and he would whisper sweet words to both his wife and their child. Despite his fearsome reputation, ryomen was a devoted and loving husband, eager to protect and cherish his growing family.

As days passed, y/n and ryomen prepared for the arrival of their little one. The palace was filled with joy, the married couple basking in the happiness of their new life together. Y/n's heart swelled with love for her husband, grateful for his love and support throughout her pregnancy.

However, despite their happiness, there was always an underlying sense of danger surrounding ryomen. The king of curses was fiercely protective of his wife and their unborn child, and he made it clear that he would not hesitate to eliminate anyone who posed a threat to them. He gaze was sharp and unyielding, his power palpable as he stood guard over y/n wnd their precious baby.

Y/n, known as the queen of the palace, was a gentle and kind-hearted woman who radiated warmth and love. She was adored by all who knew her, her sweet nature and caring personality making her a beloved figure in the heian court. Ryomen, the fearsome king of curses, was utterly smitten by his wife, referring to her as his "sun" and his "queen" with a tenderness that belied his reputation.

And so, in the world of heian era, where curses and magic mingled with love and devotion, y/n and ryomen loved happily ever after, their bond growing stronger with each passing day. The queen and the king of curses, a match made in heaven, their love shining brighter than any star in the night sky, and as their child entered the world, welcomed with open arms and hearts full of love, y/n ryomen knew that they were truly blessed to have found each other in this lifetime abd the next.

#tumblr fyp #alixezae #18+ mdni #jjk x reader #jjk fyp #sukuna fluff #ryomen sukuna x reader #sukuna x you #sukuna x reader #sukuna #heian sukuna #heian era #jujutsu kaisen fyp #16+ and above #16+#jjk fluff

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austinbutlerslovers · 4 months ago

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Benny Cross: The Bikeriders Fantasy

Label Mature 18+

Chapter 1 Handsome Stranger 🔗 Chapter 2 🔗 Chapter 3 🔗 Chapter 4

Summary Heading out late to help spot a friend for cash at a local bar leads you into a den of wolves. Bikers frequent the place intimating you and sexually harassing you as you try to enjoy the evening with you friend. As she gets your drinks leaving you momentarily alone you become so frightened you want to cut the night short and leave. That is until you see the most attractive man you’ve ever laid eyes on in your life. Benny, the handsome alluring biker that takes your breath away. The night is filled with wild twists and turns as you navigate your newfound feelings for this attractive stranger in your contrasting worlds.

10k word count

♠️ Passionate Smut ♠️ Slow burn • savior/hero complex•independent female•propositioned by Benny •Benny claiming you•Benny wants to be yours •stimulating make outs• nipple play• oral fem • fingering fem• body worship•extreme orgasms •missionary• raw• creampie • after care

📖 Proofreader @purejasmine 🫦 Smut Consultant @burnthheparaphilia 💭 Plot Consultant @austinbutlerfly

Heavily Based on The Bikeriders Movie 🏍️ Inspo: anonymous requests combined 🏍️ •Benny strong silent type •Benny a wanderer/ nomad -reader stable home •Benny submissive to reader •Benny love obsessed w reader •Benny being nurtured/cared for by reader •Recreate meeting Benny + smut •Benny as a gentle/passionate lover *more requests in upcoming chapters*

Handsome Stranger

It is late night and you are at home, alone in the house willed to you by your parents. There is an eerie silence as you do the dishes only hearing the splash of water and the clunk of the plates submerge in the water and hit the basin.

The house is a large two story brick and mortar in the suburbs of Forest Glen, Chicago surrounded by a lush green lawn that you played on as a child. You grew up your entire life here, each room filled with memories of laughter and warmth.

It was a happy home, filled with the smell of your mother’s cooking at supper and the sounds of your father’s music playing softly in his office in the evening as he worked.

Your parents worked hard to create a nurturing environment, and their love was evident in every room of the house.

The day they’re perished was the day your world stopped. You quit your job at the local bookstore and began relying heavily on your friends for emotional support during your time of grief

The house, once a place of joy, became a silent reminder of your loss.

Your parents, both hardworking upper middle class, were dedicated to ensuring your future was secure. Setting up a trust fund and a life insurance policy.

As their only child, you inherited everything after their passing: the family house filled with memories, the cars they had carefully maintained, and your dad’s rental property in the next town over.

With your father being the former Director of Operationsfor Ford Motors and your mother being an accountant they had always prioritized your well being, wanting to provide you with a solid foundation for a successful and stable life.

No longer having their reliable guidance and without needing to work, you found solace in reading books about franchising and exploring potential business ventures, like owning several local laundromats in town, something your father had always wanted to do.

The idea of managing a business intrigued you, offering a sense of purpose and structure in your otherwise free and unoccupied life.

However, your friends, seeing you single and often too invested in your books, worried about your sanity and social well being. They frequently pulled you out to mingle, encouraging you to enjoy yourself and meet new people.

They wanted you to remember that there was more to life than just moping alone with your inherited wealth, they wanted your to find happiness and fulfillment with a husband.

Though you had dated a few men in town, they couldn’t get over the fact that you wouldn’t submit to traditional gender roles. Having your own finances allowed you to readily dismiss them at the first signs of male authority, decideding quickly you would no longer submit to any man.

The times were changing during the late ‘60s, and women were prevalently rebelling against domestication becoming in charge of their own lives. This cultural shift resonated deeply within you, sparking a fierce independence.

As you place a dish in the drying rack, your phone rings in the kitchen. You pull the receiver and press it to your ear and shoulder as you answer. It’s one of your close friends Donna in distress, you can barely hear her above the loud music playing in the background of her location.

“Hey, I’m so sorry to bother you so late. You know I wouldn’t unless I really needed to, but I’m at a bar and I’m short on cash. It’s about five bus stops from your place. Can you come spot me? Maybe have a beer with me? I can pay you back with my check on the first.”

You smile, your friends constantly ask to borrow money here and there, and you are never one to deny them. You understand how hard it is to work nonstop only to have spare change for fun. You balance the phone on your shoulder, the cord stretching across the kitchen as you place the last dish in the drying rack.

“Of course, don’t worry about it,” you say warmly. “I’ll be there in a bit. Which bar are you at?”

She gives you the name and address and you quickly jot it down on a notepad by the phone. It’s in seedier area of town but your friend has always had a knack for finding the hippest places around, so you think nothing of it deciding to join her.

“You can hold off on the beer. I think I’ll have a pop though,” you correct her. Your friend laughs.

“Not at this bar, dress up. The guys are having a meeting here tonight.” she informs you.

“Sure, alright, I’ll dress up,” you say, not entirely sure what she means by the guys meeting up but assuming it’s the usual locals.

You hang up, a small smile playing on your lips. Helping out your friends always brings you a sense of fulfillment. You pull on a lilac colored sleeveless form hugging top with white jeans and platform sandals. Nothing too fancy, but it would definitely draw the male gaze. You check your reflection, admiring your attractive features as you brush your hair, letting it cascade over your shoulders in soft waves.

You pull out a wand of mascara, carefully applying the dark, thick formula to your lashes, enhancing the depth and allure of your eyes then framing them with eyeliner. Next, you glide a rich shade of red lipstick across your full lips, the color making them look even more inviting. You then take a brush and apply a touch of rouge to your cheeks, blending it in for a natural, rosy glow.

Satisfied with your appearance, you give yourself one last approving look turning to check your form in the mirror. You would never head out this late for your safety, but because the bar is nearby and you are meeting a friend, you grab your purse and head out into the midsummer night of Ohio.

The air is warm and filled with the sounds of crickets. The sky is clear, stars twinkling above as you make your way to the bus stop. The bus is still running, and you hop on, finding a seat near the back. The city lights blur past the window as you ride through the familiar streets, your mind wandering to the night’s possibilities. You exit the bus a few stops later, the bar just a short walk away.

The brick building is lit up, neon signs flickering, casting a colorful glow on the sidewalk. You can hear the faint sound of music and conversation from inside. Tons of motorcycles are lined up out front, their chrome accents glinting under the streetlights. The air is filled with the mingled scents of cigarettes and gasoline. The atmosphere is charged, alive with the energy of the night

You take a deep breath and step through the door, scanning the loud crowded bar for your friend. The atmosphere hits you immediately this is not the usual crowd. The bar is filled with rough looking bikers, their leather jackets adorned with patches and insignias. Their faces are rugged, some sporting thick beards and tattoos snaking up their arms and necks. It feels as if the room falls silent for a moment as you walk in, all eyes turned to you, scrutinizing you with a mix of curiosity and predatory interest.

You feel their stares, some of the men openly leering.

“You need a man?” one of them calls out, his voice ripping with insinuation just above the music.

Another smirks and gives you a once over, “Looking for some fun tonight?”

Your heart begins to race, worry creeping in, it’s as if they can sense your unease, like predators sensing prey. You scan the room desperately, searching for your friend. Finally, you spot her waving at you from a corner table, looking both relieved and slightly apologetic.

You make your way through the crowd, the bikers parting reluctantly. Some of them brush against you, while others continue to watch you, their gazes and unwanted touches making your skin prickle.

You reach your friend Donna’s table and slide into the seat next to her, trying to steady your nerves. She is sitting across from a biker who is nursing a beer, his rugged appearance adding to the intimidating atmosphere.

“Hey,” she says softly, clearly aware of the tension in the bar. “Thanks for coming. I’m really sorry about this. I didn’t realize you were gonna dress up this nice…that’s gonna make things a bit more… interesting for you tonight.” She reveals with a grin.

“It’s okay,” you reply, forcing a smile. “Let’s just get you sorted and I’ll head out of here.”

“You should stay a while. These guys are something else,” Donna says as you hand her the money she needs. “You’re the best,” she adds, smiling as she counts it but you can’t help but feel the weight of the bikers’ stares.

This night has turned into something far different than what you expected, and you can’t shake the feeling of being a rabbit in a den of wolves.

The biker across from Donna leans forward, a smirk playing on his lips. “Name’s Cockroach,” he introduces himself, his voice cheerful and welcoming.

You give him a wary eye, trying to gauge his intentions. “Nice to meet you,” you manage, your voice steady despite the unease swirling inside of you.

Cockroach’s eyes flicker with amusement as he looks you over, clearly enjoying your discomfort. “Don’t worry, we don’t bite… much,” he says with a chuckle, his gaze never leaving yours.

Two more bikers approach. One is wearing only a vest, his bare chest exposed, while the wears a heavily stained t-shirt. They both look drunk, their eyes bloodshot and their steps unsteady. They reek of stale beer and cigarettes, clinging to each other as they sway slightly, propping each other up.

“Hey, you-as wants-ta go home with me?” The one in the vest slurs to you, his words barely coherent.

“What about me you wanna live with me? The other chimes in with a grin before taking another swig of his beer. He leans in too close, the overpowering stench of alcohol heavy on his breath

You slightly recoil at their statements, trying to keep your composure.

“No thank you, I’ve got a date. I’ve gotta be home by midnight,” you quickly lie, feeling extremely uneasy and not wanting to engage with either of them.

Cockroach lets out a hearty laugh, the sound rough and loud. “You hear that, boys? Cinderella’s got a date and she’s gotta be home by midnight or else she’ll turn into a pumpkin!” The group erupts into laughter, the sound echoing through the bar.

Cockroach gets up and slaps the shoulders of the two bikers and they wrap their arms around each other as they head to the bar. You watch as they stumble away, their laughter still ringing in your ears.

You look around and begin to notice several of the bikers gathering together, casting glances your way and sharing whispers with one another. Already on edge, you lean towards Donna to warn her. “Look at them, it’s like they’re planning something over there.” You say trying to keep your voice steady but your panic is evident.

She shrugs it off. “Don’t worry about them,” she says trying to reassure you.

“I gotta go,” you say abruptly, the unease becoming too much.

Donna laughs. “Just sit tight. I’ll go get you a drink,” she says and stands up.

You watch her walk away, completely at ease among the bikers, she moves with a casual confidence, even giving a friendly pat on the back to one of the bikers as she passes by. It’s clear she feels comfortable in this environment, blending seamlessly with the rough crowd.

Feeling even more exposed now that you’re alone, the atmosphere feels thicker, the air heavy with the scent of beer, smoke, and something else you can’t quite place.

You glance around nervously, noticing the bikers’ eyes still lingering on you, their whispers becoming more apparent.

You can see them watching you now, their gazes more intense and predatory, their eyes following your every move, making your skin prickle with unease.

You quickly stand, clutching your purse, scanning the bar for your friend to head out to leave, and that’s when you see him the most physically stunning man you ever laid eyes on.

He is at the pool table, standing stoically with his hands resting on the edge. His broad shoulders and muscular frame are hard to miss, accentuated by a sleeveless black shirt. His presence commands the room, and despite the rough crowd around him, he stands out with an air of calm authority.

For a moment, everything else fades away. Your heart pounds in your chest, a mix of excitement and nervousness flooding your senses. You watch him, mesmerized by his effortless confidence and the magnetism.

He gazes down, seemingly lost in thought, and when he looks up, you get a full view of his handsome face in every detail. His piercing blue eyes that look like they could see right through you, a head of thick tousled sandy brown hair, a rugged goatee surrounding his full enticing lips, and a strong, chiseled jaw . You feel a thrill shoot right through you, his looks take your breath away.

His eyes slowly lock onto yours, and it’s as if he can sense every bit of your attraction for him. His gaze intensifies, showing a clear desire for you in return. He straightens up, revealing his towering height and makes his way over to you with determination in his stride.

Your heart pounds in your chest, and you feel a rush of excitement and nervousness as you sit back down, almost in a daze, watching the confident way he approaches your table.

He turns the chair across from you around backwards and slowly sits revealing every detail of his chiseled muscular arms as he casually rests them on the edge.

“I’m Benny,” he says, his voice soft and rich like honey.

Your voice comes out weaker than you intend as you respond, “hello…”

He stares at you intensely and though you try to meet his gaze, your eyes keep wandering down to his chiseled muscular arms and back up to the handsome features of his face.

He studies every detail of you in return his blue eyes slowly trailing over your body. His eyes tracing the line of your neck, lingering on the delicate skin there, before moving to your full, red lips. He continues up to your eyes, his stare deep and inviting, never breaking contact in a testament to his desire for you.

The intensity of his gaze makes your skin begin to tingle and your heart race. You’ve never been stared at in such a way. Despite your nervousness, you find that you like his unwavering attention, it makes you feel desired and alive in a way you’ve never felt before.

Summoning all of your courage, you finally regain the ability to speak.

“What are we doing here, just shooting the breeze?” you ask, trying to sound casual but failing miserably. Your voice wavering, betraying the nervous excitement inside of you.

Benny’s smile widens, a beautiful smile that captivates you entirely. “I guess so,” he answers, his eyes never leaving yours.

When Benny doesn’t continue the conversation, a thick silence settles between you two. His eyes gaze into yours with an unspoken longing that makes your heart race and the intensity of the moment becomes overwhelming.

“Benny… I’ve gotta go home,” you relent, watching as his demeanor changes.

“Oh…okay” Benny responds the sadness flickering in his beautiful eyes, his deep voice tinged with disappointment.

His gaze lingers a moment longer before he lifts his hands in a gesture of surrender.

“Alright,” he says, a knowing smile on his lips, his voice still that soft, intoxicating murmur. “You gotta go,” he echos.

When he rises from the chair and walks away, your heart is pounding as your eyes follow his every move. You know you won’t forget your encounter with Benny anytime soon.

Just as Benny leaves, another biker sits down in front of you, taking his place. His presence is commanding and intense, exuding seniority.

His appearance is cleaner than the others; his black hair is slicked back neatly, and his stern face exudes authority. He wears a neat black button up tee with white etching along the seams, giving him a polished yet intimidating look. His sharp eyes, slightly narrowed, survey you with a calculating gaze.

“I’m already spoken for,” you announce,knowing in your heart you are already drawn to Benny.

The biker gives you a knowing look. “Don’t worry,” he says with casual confidence.

“Don’t worry about what?” you shoot back, wanting to deter any of his advances.

“I’m Johnny, the president of this club,” he says beaming with pride before continuing. “The guys, they just want t’have some fun. But I’m not gonna let nothing happen to ya,” he says with a twinkle of mischief in his eye.

“What’s was going to happen to me?” you ask, your voice tinged with concern.

Johnny leans back, his eyes steady on yours. “Nothin’,” he reassures you but his eyes shift.

As he studies your demeanor you realize it must be very late and excuse yourself.

“It was nice to meet you, Johnny, but I’ve really gotta go,” you say politely , and look around the bar for Donna to say your goodbyes. When you are unable to find her a slight panic sets in, and Johnny watches as you hurriedly leave the table the rise in your nerves evident.

Leaving is more difficult than coming in. More bikers have come to the bar, making you have to weave through the crowd. You are groped several times, slapping a hand or two away on your way out as they yell sexually suggestive advances.

“Hey, sweetheart, where you going in such a hurry?” one calls out, his eyes raking over you.

“Don’t be shy, honey, come sit on my lap,” another one jeers, reaching out to grab your wrist.

“Why leave so soon? The night’s just getting started,” a third biker says, his hand grazing your lower back.

“Let me show you a real good time,” one whispers in your ear, making your skin crawl.

You push through the throng of men, your heart pounding and your breath coming in short, panicked bursts. As you finally make it to the door, the catcalls and whistles follow you out into the night.

You don’t stop moving until you are a safe distance across the street at the bus stop. You look down at your white pants, now covered in their dirty black handprints,

“Disgusting!” you scoff, trying in vain to wipe the grit of their handprints off.

The bus is taking longer than usual, and you feel an uneasiness settle in. The street lamps and the distant sounds from the bar offer some comfort, but you can’t shake the feeling that something isn’t right.

That’s when you see Benny leaving the bar, his calm commanding presence exuding an aura of confidence. He focuses on lighting his cigarette as he walks, moving with a fluid grace that makes you stall, looking at him in admiration.

His leather biker jacket accentuates his strong shoulders, and his jeans highlight his confident stride. As he lights the cigarette, smoke billows from his mouth. He walks to his bike a short distance in front of you, seemingly unaware of your presence.

He swings his leg over his bike and kick starts it, taking a pull of his cigarette before looking over his shoulder at you, revealing that he knew you were there the entire time. You smile, but it quickly fades as your eyes are drawn the group of loud bikers leaving the bar. They immediately see you standing alone at the bus stop.

That’s when it hits you, and fear rushes in. The bus isn’t coming anymore; it’s too late.

“Oh no,” you mutter, walking quickly down the pavement. But they bound toward you, surrounding you almost instantly, pressing you around you and jeering as you walk.

“Where do you think you’re going, sweetheart?” one of them sneers, his breath reeking of alcohol.

“Come on, darling, don’t be shy,” another says, his hand reaching out to touch your hair.

You slap his hand away, your heart racing with fear. “Alright alright !” you respond to knock their lewd advances, but your voice wavers, betraying your terror.

The night air feels suffocating with their laughter echoing in your ears.

Just as your situation seems dire, you catch a glimpse of Benny on his bike, watching the scene unfold, the cigarette hanging from his lips.

His eyes lock onto yours, and he gestures for you to come to him. Summoning all your courage, you push through the men, ignoring their jeers and grabs, and rush towards Benny. You climb onto the back of his motorcycle and hug onto him tightly as if your life depends on it.

Benny flicks his cigarette away, the ember glowing briefly before fading into the night. The bikers begin hollering and shouting.

“Looks like Benny’s got himself a prize!” one yells, his voice ripping above the others.

“Yeah Benny! Take her! Take her!” another yells as they begin to holler and cheer. The rest of the bikers and their ladies spill out of the closing bar and into the street, joining in, their voices rising in the night air with whistling and hollering.

Benny’s demeanor remains calm and composed, but you can feel the tension in his muscles as he revs the engine. The powerful roar of the motorcycle drowns out the bikers’ voices, but you can still hear their laughter and shouts in the background. Benny’s hand reaches back to gently squeeze your arm, reassuring you.

“Hold on tight,” he says, his voice steady and firm.

You cling to him even tighter, pressing your face against his back, the leather of his jacket cool against your cheek.

Benny kicks the bike into gear and peels out onto the street, leaving the jeering crowd behind.

You’ve never been on a bike before and find it exhilarating as the wind rushes past you as the motorcycle accelerates, making the street lights blur into streaks of light.

With each passing second, the distance between you and the bar grows, the noise of the bikers fading into the night. Benny maneuvers the bike with skill and precision, navigating the streets effortlessly. You begin to relax slightly, the fear slowly ebbing away, replaced by a sense of safety and gratitude.

After a few minutes, Benny slows down and turns onto a quieter street. He eventually stops the bike in front of another bar, this one open later into the night. The neon sign casts a warm glow on the pavement, inviting you inside. He turns off the engine and looks back at you, his intense eyes filled with concern.

“You okay?” he asks, his voice softer now.

You nod, “Yes, thank you. I don’t know what I would have done if you hadn’t been there.”

Benny helps you off the bike and stands by your side, his presence comforting.

“Do you want a drink?” he asks, his voice calm and reassuring.

You nod again, feeling a wave of relief. “Yes, that would be nice.”

He leads you into the bar, the dim lighting and the low hum of conversation providing a stark contrast to the dark, tense night you’ve just escaped.

The air is filled with the scent of beer and the soft strains of blues music playing on the jukebox. You follow Benny to a booth in a quieter corner, feeling a mix of relief and gratitude for your unexpected savior.

As you sit down, Benny signals the bartender for a couple of drinks. He sits across from you, his gaze steady and reassuring. “You’re safe here,” he says, his voice calm. “Just take a moment to breathe.”

You nod, taking a deep breath and trying to steady your nerves. The warmth and relative quiet of the bar help you start to relax, the events of the night slowly fading into the background as you focus on the present, feeling grateful for Benny’s timely intervention.

The bartender brings over two cold beers, placing them on the table. Benny takes a sip, then looks at you with a smoldering gaze.

“Those guys back there, they’re my crew,” he says casually. “and you’re the most beautiful woman they’ve ever laid eyes on.” He admits.

You blush, feeling both flattered and a bit wary. “Well, they have an interesting way of showing it,” you reply, your voice tinged with sarcasm.

Benny chuckles softly. “Yeah, they’re rough around the edges, but they know not to mess with someone I’m looking out for.”

You take a sip of your beer, feeling the cold liquid soothe your nerves. “Thanks for that. I was really scared back there.”

Benny’s expression softens. “You don’t have to thank me.“

You both sit in silence for moment until you come up with a question you’ve been curious about.

“What’s it like being a biker?” You ask.

Benny leans back, considering your question. “It’s freedom,” he says, his voice thoughtful. “No schedules, no bosses. Just the open road and my bike. I go where I want, when I want. There’s nothing like it.”

“Where do you live?” you ask.

Benny smiles, a hint of mystery in his eyes. “Wherever the road takes me,” he replies. “I’ve got places I crash, friends’ houses, motels, sometimes just under the stars. Home is the ride.”

“What about you?” he asks, looking you over with curiosity in his eyes.

“I’m from Forest Glen,” you admit with a bit of hesitation.

“Fancy,” he says, lifting his eyebrows with a grin.

The heat rises to your face as your cheeks blush, feeling self conscious from his correct assumption.

“Well, your life sounds very entertaining, Benny,” you admit, taking in his rugged charm, admiring his sense of freedom and independence.

Benny’s eyes soften as he looks at you. “It can be. But it’s not for everyone. It’s rough and unpredictable. You have to be ready for anything.”

You nod, taking another sip of your beer. The differences between your structured life and his free spirited existence fascinates to you, drawing you even deeper into irresistible allure.

You share two more beers together, talking about your vastly contrasting interests. You, fascinated by his wild, unpredictable life, while he listens intently as you describe the comforts of home, your love for quiet evenings with a good book and the security of a routine. Hours go by, the conversation flowing easily between you two, until you glance at the clock above the bar seeing its 4am.

“Oh wow, Benny, we’ve been out all night. I didn’t even notice the time until now.”

He glances at you with a hint of reluctance, “You gotta go?” he asks not wanting the night to end.

You nod reluctantly. “Yeah, it’s really late Benny.”

“Let’s get you home, then,” he says, standing up and signaling the bartender. He pays for the drinks, and you follow him out of the bar, feeling a mix of contentment and excitement.

Outside, the night air is cool and refreshing, as Benny leads you to his bike. He stands next to it for a moment, adjusting his gloves and giving the machine a once over. With a swift, practiced motion, he swings his leg over the seat and settles in.

He grips the kick starter firmly, and gives it a powerful thrust. The engine roars to life, the sound reverberating through the quiet night. Satisfied, he looks over to you and extends his hand, helping you climb onto the back. “Hold on to me,” he says gently.

This time, as you wrap your arms around him you let your hands wander down, marveling at the strength and solidity of his body as you hold his waist. As the engine roars to life you imagine that he’s yours and that this connection between you is something real and lasting.

You press close against his back, feeling the warmth and firmness of him. The vibrations from the engine travel through you, heightening your senses. Soon you’re off, the streets blurring past as Benny navigates the quiet roads to your home. The city lights twinkle above, as the wind rushes past you, carrying a newfound sense of excitement for Benny.

The ride is exhilarating, the powerful machine beneath you and the feeling of Benny’s solid form in front of you providing comfort. The journey is smooth, and you feel safe, trusting Benny completely as he takes you home.

Eventually, he slows down, pulling up in front of your house. He cuts the engine, and the sudden silence is almost startling. You reluctantly let go, dismounting from the bike.

“Thank you, Benny. For everything,” you say, looking to him.

He smiles, his eyes warm and genuine.

You linger for a moment, neither of you wanting the night to end. Finally, you turn to head inside, but before you go, you look back at him one last time.

“Maybe we can do this again sometime?” you suggest, feeling a bit bold.

“I’d like that,” he replies, his smile widening.

With that, you head inside, a sense of warmth and excitement building within you. Once in doors you watch from the window as Benny starts his bike and rides off into the night, the sound of the engine fading into the distance. As you lock the front door you realize that tonight was the beginning of something new and unexpected in your life.

Do You Want Me?

Just as you hang your purse on the entry rack you hear the familiar sound of Bennys bike retuning. The loud rumbling suddenly cutting off.

You pull back the curtain of the front door window and notice he’s parked himself across the street. Confused you watch him pull off his riding gloves and dismount from his bike, taking a carton of cigarettes out with his lighter sparking one up, sitting calmly against his bike to smoke it.

You assume he’s waiting for someone and head upstairs. Once in your bedroom you click on the lamp and begin to unwind from the night. You take off your platform sandals one at a time, placing them in the shoe rack, feeling relief as your feet touch the cool floor.

You remove your crop top, letting it fall to the floor, then shimmy out of your white jeans, revealing your panties and bra. With a quick motion, you slip off your bra and step out of your panties, placing all the items in the hamper.

You turn on the shower, waiting for the water to warm up, then step inside. The hot water cascades over your body, washing away the stress and grime of the evening. You let the water soothe your muscles, closing your eyes and taking a few deep breaths.

After a moment, you step out of the shower, wrapping yourself in a soft towel. You brush your teeth, the minty freshness a stark contrast to the taste of beer lingering from the bar.

Feeling refreshed, you slip into a comfortable nightgown and lie down in your soft bed. You can’t help but replay the night’s events in your mind, especially the moments with Benny. His charm and protective nature leaving a lasting impression on you.

Suddenly you sit up, curiosity getting the better of you and walk over to your bedroom window pulling the curtain aside, half-expecting to see an empty street. To your surprise, Benny is still there, leaning casually against his bike, his gaze fixed on your house.

“He’s still here?” you whisper to yourself, a mix of surprise and confusion flooding your thoughts. “What is he waiting for?”

You watch him for a moment, feeling a mix of curiosity and excitement. His presence outside your home feels both unexpected and oddly reassuring. You look at the clock on your dresser seeing it’s 5: 50 am and wonder why he hasn’t left yet and what he could be thinking.

Unable to resist, you throw on a robe and quietly make your way downstairs. The cool night air greets you as you open the front door and step outside. Benny looks up, his eyes locking onto yours, and a small, knowing smile spreads across his lips.

“Benny, what are you still doing here, are you guarding my house all night?” You tease and he chuckles before pulling a drag from his cigarette.

“I guess so,” he says, smiling as he exhales. His smile is so beautiful that it makes your heart skip a beat.

“Do… you have some place your supposed to be?” you ask, curiosity mingling with the undeniable attraction you feel toward him.

“Not till later,” he responds casually, his eyes locking onto yours with an intensity that makes you smile.

The first light of dawn begins to creep over the horizon, casting a soft glow over the street.

“The sun’s coming up, Benny,” you observe and he glances over, squinting as he takes in the view of the rising sun.

“How about I make you breakfast?” you suggest with a grin.

Benny looks back at you, his eyes meeting yours as his smile widens. “I’d like that,” he says.

He stands and flicks his cigarette as he approaches your house, and you watch his confident stride as he stretches his arms relieving his sore muscles from sitting on his bike for so long.

He stops just in front of you, his presence commanding yet comforting. He looks you in the eyes, a hint of something playful in his gaze.

“You want to go to a meeting with me today?” he asks.

Surprised, you blink. “A meeting? What kind of meeting?”

“It’s just something with my club,” he says, his tone casual but inviting. “Thought you might like to see what it’s all about.”

You feel a surge of excitement at the prospect of experiencing his biker lifestyle firsthand. Your earlier interest in him only intensifies. “I’d like that, Benny,” you say with a grin,

“Good,” he says, a genuine smile spreading across his face.

You invite Benny inside just as the sun starts filling your kitchen with early morning light. Benny looks around your place, impressed, his fingers trailing along the countertop in the kitchen, taking in the affluent atmosphere.

“You’ve got a great setup here,” he remarks, his eyes wandering over the well kept place.

“Thanks,” you say, grinning as you gather the items to make him breakfast. “It’s been a lot of work to keep it this way, but it’s worth it,” you admit.

“Well, you’re doing a great job,” he murmurs, his eyes wandering over the curves of your body, knowing you’re too focused on your tasks to notice his provocative gaze.

You smile from his remark as you start your routine, putting on a kettle of water for tea and beginning to make scrambled eggs.

You crack two more for Benny and retrieve the bacon from the fridge setting it in the second skillet, the sizzle filling the kitchen with a the delicious aroma. Grabbing a loaf of bread, you pop a few slices into the toaster to make him a full meal.

As you move around the kitchen, Benny rests back against a counter, admiring you work. His presence is both comforting and intriguing. You can feel his eyes following your every movement, adding a layer of warmth to the room.

The eggs fluff up nicely in the pan, as the smell of bacon wafts through the air

You look back at him and see he has a grin on his face clearly enjoying being made a hot meal.

“Go in the dining room Benny and I’ll bring your plate when it’s ready,” you say sweetly and he shyly smiles happy to do as he’s told.

The kettle whistles, and you pour the hot water into a set of cups, letting the tea bags steep. The toast pops up, and you butter the slices, placing them on a plate alongside the bacon and eggs. You bring everything to the table, and set his plate down in in front of him arranging everything with care.

He looks up at you with admiration in his eyes, and you respond with a warm smile. His gaze then shifts to the food you’ve prepared, his expression softens with deep gratitude as he takes in the sight of the meal you made for him.

You step away momentarily to bring the tea cups, carefully placing one beside him and then setting yours down next to your plate.

He waits for you to sit across from him and, only after you take your first bite of food, does he begin eating. His fork scrapes the plate several times as he hungrily eats.

“This is one of the best meals I’ve had in a long time,” he compliments, and you smile, watching him continue to enjoy each bite.

You begin to study him closely noticing he must be starving and tired. His scent is heavily tinged with cigarettes, his hands are calloused, his fingernails are covered in grit and his sandy brown hair is heavy with oil.

Noticing his rugged appearance, you suddenly realize that Benny doesn’t have a place to call home, a place to be cared for and comforted and your heartstrings tug for him.

“Benny “ you ask softly watching him eat his last bites of foods. “Would you like to shower here? Maybe have a rest on the sofa before we go to this meeting of yours ?” you offer gently.

Benny looks up from his empty plate, a mix of gratitude and surprise in his eyes. “That would be great actually,” he admits, his voice softening.

You smile warmly, feeling a sense of satisfaction being able to care for him.

You clear the table and he takes his jacket off draping it over his chair, revealing the definition of his strong, muscular arms in his sleeveless shirt.

Seeing him getting comfortable sets you at ease, and you smile as you make your way over to him. “Will you follow me upstairs so I can show you to the shower, Benny?” you ask, and he slowly grins, his face lighting up in the way that sends a warmth through you.

“Yea I’ll follow you” he says his voice carrying a mix of gratitude and anticipation.

He follows you up the stairs, his heavy footsteps behind yours, and you lead him down the hallway, your own footsteps echoing softly in the quiet house.

Stopping at the linen closet, you pull out a fresh set of towels and hand them to him. He takes a moment, bringing the soft fabric to his face and inhaling the scent, appreciating the clean, comforting smell of fresh laundry.

You pull a toothbrush and a bar of soap from the closet, placing them on top of the towels as he lowers them slightly.

“The bathroom is just on the left,” you say, pointing the way. “I’ll be in my room tidying up and getting ready. If you need anything, just knock.”

“Thank you,” he says, his eyes meeting yours with a sincerity that makes your heart flutter. “I really appreciate this.”

You smile, touched by his appreciation. “It’s no problem at all, you’re my guest.”

He glances down, then back up at you, his eyes softening. “You really didn’t have to any of this.”

“I wanted to Benny” you reply softly.

You give him a reassuring smile, and he returns it with a grateful look before heading to the bathroom and closing the door behind him.

You head to your bedroom and close the door. Hearing the shower start you feel a sense of contentment wash over you, knowing you’re able to care for him.

You tidy up your room and begin to get dressed, choosing a loose fitting shirt and denim jeans, assuming you’re going to be with the same rowdy group of bikers he was with yesterday. Before you put your socks and shoes on there is a knock at your door.

You open it to find Benny standing in the hallway, half naked, wearing only the towel. His well defined physique catches you off guard, and your breath hitches at the sight of his muscular body.

His defined abs glisten, and his broad chest rises and falls with each breath, his hand gripping the towel beneath the deep v-line of his waist. He looks refreshed and more relaxed. His hair, now clean and slightly damp, falls in soft waves around his face that radiates with a newfound vitality. You momentarily lose your voice, captivated by how attractive he looks.

“What would you like me to do with my clothing?” he asks gently, helping you refocus.

“Y-you can bring them to me, Benny,” you say,still in shock at the perfection of his body. He collects his clothing and brings the pile to you. Quickly grabbing a hamper, you place his clothing inside.

“Let’s go down and get these washed for you,” you announce, trying to focus on the task at hand.

“Thank you,” he says smiling again, and as you walk downstairs, he follows you. Still in the towel, holding it at his waist. As you reach the base of the stairs, you can’t help but look back and notice how the towel clings to his muscular form, each step emphasizing every contour of his physique.

You sigh dreamily and gesture him toward the living room. “Why don’t you relax on the sofa while I head to the laundry room,” you offer.

Benny nods, and you watch as he enters the living room looking the place over. He sits down on the sofa, adjusting his towel before resting back, his muscular arms outstretched against the plush cushions, enjoying the comfort.

“Do you need anything?” you ask kindly, wanting to ensure he’s comfortable.

“No, this is perfect,” he says, giving you a grateful smile.

You nod and head to the laundry room, feeling a sense of satisfaction being able to help him. As you start the washer, you can’t help but think about how different your lives are and yet how connected you feel to him in this moment.

As you pour the detegent in, the morning sun filters through the windows, casting a warm glow over the room and it dawns on you, you’re falling deeply for Benny.

When you head back to the living room, you find him studying a framed picture of your family on the mantle. “These your folks?” he asks.

“Yes,” you answer slowly.

“Where do they live?” he asks.

“They passed away Benny,” you say, your voice somber. His face falls in shock, realizing his mistake.

“I-I’m so sorry,” he stammers.

“It’s alright. It’s been some time, but I do miss them terribly,” you admit, your voice softer.

His eyes gloss over with sadness for you. “I didn’t mean to bring up painful memories,” he says gently.

“Benny it’s fine, I’ll be alright .” you say with a reassuring smile.

He looks around at the living room, taking in his surroundings.

“You live by yourself in this big house?” he asks, his eyes scanning the place, noting the quietness.

You nod. “Yes, it’s just me now. It’s a lot of space for one person, but it’s home,” you say, offering a small smile.

He takes a deep breath, his gaze returning to yours, filled with a mix of admiration and concern. “It must get lonely sometimes,” he says softly.

“It does,” you admit, and then you fall silent, lost in thought realizing that you’ve willingly let Benny—a man you just met tonight— into your home and now he’s standing in your living room, nearly naked, wrapped in a towel.

The reality of the situation hits you hard and you are surprised by your own actions, you would never willingly allow a handsome stranger into your home, let alone someone you barely know, but with Benny somehow its different.

His presence reassures you. The way he looks at you with genuine care and concern, the kindness in his eyes, his gentle yet commanding demeanor, all make you feel safe with him in a way you have never felt before.

He captivates you with his powerful presence, a mix of beauty and raw strength exuding a sense of protection and confidence that is impossible to ignore. As you watch him, standing nearly naked in your living room, you can’t help but feel a surge of admiration and desire.

You look at his perfect body again, your gaze lingering on his broad, chiseled chest, his heavily defined muscular arms, and finally settling on his ridged abs, each one perfectly sculpted, narrowing down to his sculpted waist. His entire body exudes strength. The sight of him standing in your living room takes your breath away.

The truth of your motives comes to the surface as your eyes linger on him longer than you intended and you feel a surge warmth spread through you, a magnetic pull that makes it hard to look away anymore . Feeling a mixture of desire and curiosity that you’ve never felt before you begin to realize you invited him in to do more than just to care for him.

Benny catches your lingering stare, his eyes meeting yours with a knowing look. A small smile plays at the corners of his lips, and you can see the spark of desire in his eyes as he takes a step closing the distance between you.

“What do we do while we wait for the laundry?” he asks, his voice low and sultry. Your heart flutters, finding it hard to concentrate on anything other than the desire building between the two of you.

“I-I hadn’t thought about that,” you admit, your voice trembling slightly.

As he steps closer you instinctively move back, bumping into the bookshelf behind you. The sudden movement causes a book to tumble off the shelf and hit the floor with a soft thud.

He kneels down to pick it up, and you catch a glimpse of his cock, sending a thrill straight through you. It is long and thick, the biggest you’ve ever seen, stretching impressively down his thigh. Utterly impressed you quickly cover your mouth.

He doesn’t take notice and reads the title of the book he’s picked up.

“Business Franchising,” he says, grinning as he stands. “Is this yours ?” He asks and you slowly nod, slightly trembling unable to form words from what you just witnessed.

“You’re smart .” He confirms looking into your eyes with a satisfied grin.

His muscular arm extends to push the fallen book back into the slot next to your head and his closeness is intoxicating. He sees your hesitation, your head lowered as you avoid looking at him in such close proximity.

He doesn’t back down, instead, he gently tilts your chin up with his fingers, guiding your eyes to meet his. His gaze is intense and unwavering, filled with an unspoken understanding and desire. As you stare into his eyes, he searches deeply into yours, making it impossible to look away.

“I never thanked you properly,” he says softly, his eyes darkening with a mix of gratitude and longing.

The heat radiating from his body and the scent of him, fresh from the shower, fills your senses. He’s intoxicating to you, and the longer you stare into his beautiful, mesmerizing blue eyes, the more your heart races in anticipation.

“I’ll make it up to you,” he promises, his voice deep and filled with emotion. The intensity of his gaze is magnetic, drawing you in completely and his breath mingles with yours, warm and inviting as his lips move closer.

The world around you falls away as his full lips slowly brush against yours and you feel the spark ignite between you, a deep and passionate connection that sends waves of heat through your body. He kisses you slowly and deliberately savoring every moment of his lips on yours with an unspoken desire.

His hand gently cups your jaw and his fingers trace the contours of your face as you feel the warmth of his palm against your skin.

His other large hand grasps your waist pulling you flush against him making you feel as if your heart will explode from the overwhelming mix of emotions.

Bennys lips move against yours slowly devouring you as you lose yourself in the sensation, feeling an incredible sense of connection to him. His kiss is filled with a longing and desire that promises so much more.

Feeling a firmness press against your thigh, you break the kiss, peering down to see his substantial erection hard against you. Looking back into his eyes you see his intent.

“Benny,” you shakily whisper, your voice trembling with the intensity of the moment. “We should take it slow,” you manage to say, but as the words leave your mouth, he stares at your lips with a fierce longing before looking back into your eyes. His breaths are heavy and uneven, his desire for you is intense, as if he’s fighting to hold himself back but wanting to give you more.

You slowly place your hand on his chest, trying to calm him, but his eyes search yours, filled with lust his need is evident and the intensity of the moment is fierce as you fight your reservations.

Quickly, you turn from his grasp and walk to the kitchen, creating a distance between you to force the thought of stripping the towel off of him from your mind. You want to date Benny properly, not get swept away in a moment of passion.

“I want you,” Benny admits following you closely.

“You make me feel differently than anyone ever has,” he reveals, not even giving you a moment to cool down.

“When I’m with you, it’s like everything else fades away and I’ve never felt this way before.” He confesses.

Your mind is overwhelmed with desire for him as you listen to his words, your eyes looking around the kitchen, frantically searching for anything you can do to preoccupy yourself.

“I can’t stop thinking about you,” he says closer, his voice filled with emotion. “I’ve never wanted anyone so much.”

You reach the sink and grip the edge, feeling Benny’s presence behind you, and he presses himself against you, his strong arms encircling you, trapping you between him and the counter. The firmness of his hard body pushing against yours makes a gasp of pleasure escape your lips, and he gently turns you around to face him, his eyes searching yours.

His eyes fall to your lips, then lift back to meet your gaze. “I need you,” he confesses, his voice soft and genuine, filled with a depth of longing and desire that takes your breath away.

Your heart pounds in your chest as you process his words. The desperation in his eyes, the way he stands so close, everything about him in this moment is charged with a raw sexual energy and without a second thought, you reach up and kiss him, your lips meeting his in a rush of heat and need.

His body responds immediately, his large hands gripping around your waist, pulling you closer and deepening the kiss. His lips meld with yours full of passion as all the pent up tension between you two finally falls away.

“I’ve wanted this,” he murmurs against your lips, his voice a mix of gratitude and desire. “Since I first… laid eyes on you.” He admits between kisses.

You nod, breathless, your hands exploring his muscular chest.

“..Yes….Benny ” you pant, feeling his strong arms envelop you knowing that this moment, this connection, is something you both desperately need.

He kisses you deeply, tilting his head and roughly capturing your mouth, his strong hands wandering down your back making you feel cherished in his arms.

Each caress and press of his lips deepens your connection flooding you with emotions you’ve never felt before.

His towel falls away, and you feel his hard length press against you making you softly moan.

He pulls his lips from yours and kisses down your neck, holding you firmly yet tenderly as you tilt your head back, giving him better access to your throat.

“How do you want me?” he whispers against your skin, his voice thick with desire as he continues his trail of soft kisses. Your heart pounds with longing and nervous anticipation.

“..Benny,” you say, breathing heavily, feeling the hardness of his full erection pressing against you.

“W-we should wait,” you gasp.

He leans back to look at you, his eyes filled with a serious depth of devotion. “I want you,” he says with unwavering conviction, “and I want to be yours.”

The sincerity in his eyes melts away your reservations. “I want you too, Benny,” you whisper, your voice trembling with anticipation.

His hands travel up tenderly pushing under your top and pulling it over your head before he discards it to the floor.

“You’re beautiful,” he smiles, his eyes lingering on the sight of you undressed for the first time. His large hands cup your full breasts with reverence, sending waves of pleasure through your body.

“I can’t believe I get to touch you like this,” he whispers, his voice filled with awe.

His lips brush over your sensitive skin, kissing your soft nipples making you ache with desire. His tongue slips out, gently flicking and swirling around the buds until they are hard and sensitive.

Then, his mouth descends, lavishing attention on them and you gasp as he alternates between each breast, sucking and kissing gently, his hand continuing to caress and knead the other. His rough touch contrasting perfectly with the softness of his mouth.

When he pulls back, his eyes lock onto yours with an intensity that makes your heart race. His hands holding your waist as he slowly lowers down on his knees in front of you, making your breath hitch.

His hands slide up your thighs unbuttoning your jeans and pulling them all the way down, the cool air contrasting sharply with the heat of your skin

His lips trail soft tantalizing kisses up your thigh.

“I want to taste you,” he murmurs against your skin stopping shy of your panties. He slowly pushes his hand between your legs feeling you already soaked through for him and hums in satisfaction.

“Benny.. I haven’t done anything like this before …” you pant growing more overwhelmed by the second knowing he’s going to perform oral on you.

“I’ll go slow“ he promises and delicately slides your panties off, trailing kisses down your navel to your wet heat.

“I want to please every part of you,” he vows, his voice deep and filled with satisfaction as his hands grip your hips, holding you steady. “I want to make you feel things you’ve never felt before,” he whispers, his breath warm against your skin as his mouth descends.

The first touch of his wet tongue against your clit sends waves of pleasure coursing through your body as you gasp.

“Oh god, Benny!” you cry out, the softness of his mouth latching sending jolts of pleasure directly to your core. His warm slick tongue begins to lick expertly, exploring every inch of your folds as his facial hair grazes against your thighs making you clench. You look down at him, your breaths hitching as you watch him devour you with an intensity that leaves you trembling.

“F-feels so good Benny” you whisper, your voice shaking with pleasure.

His tongue explores deeper into your folds, and you moan desperately, tangling your fingers in his hair, pulling him closer. The new experience is overwhelming, the sensation heightening to a level you’ve never known.

His tongue flicks circles of precision on every stroke sending waves of pleasure through your body unraveling you under his skilled touch.

He laps at your clit, alternating between gentle licks and firm flicks, driving you insane with lust. His eyes, dark with hunger, suddenly lock onto yours, and the sight of him dedicated to giving you such pleasure makes you tremble, becoming completely undone.

His hands grip your hips tighter, anchoring you in place as his tongue delves deeper, tasting you, exploring your inner walls. You can feel the vibrations of his satisfied hums against your most intimate parts as his facial hair brushes roughly against you. The intensity of the moment takes your breath away, and you begin moaning uncontrollably, surrendering completely to the ecstasy he’s giving you.

He brings his hand from your hip, slipping one long, thick finger inside of you. Feeling the roughness of his fingertip against your soft sensitive inner walls makes you clench as an intense moan to escape your lips.

Chills cover the expanse of your body as his tongue and lips, swirl and flick against your clit with precise timing as his finger slips in and out of your sensitive inner walls.

“Benny…please…Benny“ you moan incoherently losing control of your mind, the arousal completely taking over as you lose yourself to him.

He adds a second finger inside of you and the stretch is deliciously overwhelming, your walls contract around his fingers as they move in and out with a steady rhythm. He curls his fingers inside you, hitting a perfect spot that makes you gasp and arch your back.

“Benny oh god! ” you cry out your hands trembling as you grip his hair painfully. He moans loudly against your folds and you savor the vibration of his voice sending a jolt straight through your core.

You begin to high-pitch moan, your breaths coming in ragged gasps as your orgasm builds.

His tongue licks broad strokes and quick flicks against your clit while he fingers you making you see stars.

“Benny your… gonna…make me come like this” you relent your thighs trembling as you try to endure every powerful sensation.

Your walls rhythmically contract around his thrusting fingers and the pleasure becomes too much to bear. You let out a desperate cry, your hips bucking softly against his mouth as your orgasm crashes over you. You moan, your voice trembling in ecstasy,

“Benny you made me come!” you cry out as waves of pleasure ripple through your body, leaving you light-headed and breathless, your heart pounding in your chest.

He continues to gently lick your clit, deliberately slowing the movements of his fingers inside of you, drawing out every last bit of your pleasure until finally, you collapse back, catching your breath as your body tingles with the aftershocks of your intense release.

You pant, staring down at him in awe as he slides his fingers from you and into his mouth, tasting your wetness. He smiles and the sight of him savoring you sends a shiver through your body.

“Benny you’re incredible,” you say in astonishment.

He rises and stands to look at you, his eyes dark with desire. “I’ve never wanted anyone as much as I want you,” he confesses his voice thick with emotion as his hand trails along your waist. “I will do everything to satisfy you” he murmurs, his gaze locked onto yours with an intense longing to please.

You feel warmth spread across your body at his words. “Take me the bedroom,” you say breathless, eager to see more of what he can do. You want him to take all the time in the world on you, feeling every part of you. His intense gaze remains locked on yours as he smiles at your request taking your hand and guiding you to the staircase.

As you walk up the stairs, you continue to steal glances at him. His strong, chiseled physique is mesmerizing, every muscle perfectly sculpted and radiating raw strength. The sight of his impressive erect cock heightens your anticipation even more.

His hand remains intertwined with yours, the roughness of his calloused fingers a stark contrast to the tender way he holds you.

Entering your bedroom, the morning light filters softly through the curtains, casting a warm, golden glow over the room. Benny closes the door behind you, and you can feel the charged atmosphere enveloping you both. He turns to you, his eyes filled with an intensity that makes your heart race.

He leans in, capturing your lips with his, as his hands begin to explore your body. You feel his warmth, the firmness of his muscles pressing against you, as he gently guides you toward the bed. He lays you down carefully, his touch both tender and possessive.

Benny’s lips trail down your neck, planting soft kisses along your collarbone and further down to your chest. His hands caress your sides, memorizing every curve your body. The feeling of his touch, combined with the lingering sensations from your previous climax, sends shivers of pleasure coursing through you.

He takes his time, his lips and hands worshiping your body as if it were sacred. You feel his breath against your skin, the warmth of his kisses, and the gentle firm pressure of his hands. Your mind is clouded with desire, every touch and caress heightening your need for him.

Benny grabs your hips, pulling you to him with a roughness that sends a thrill through you.

As he finally positions himself over you, his eyes meet yours, and you see a mixture of lust and something deeper, a connection that transcends words.

He looks over your body, his gaze lingering on your curves, taking in every detail with a mix of admiration and desire until there is a moment of pause, a flicker of uncertainty in his eyes.

“My condoms are in my bike,” he realizes, his voice thick with need and before he can move to retrieve them you gently touch his wrist.

“I’m on Enovid,” you smile softly.

He blinks, confusion flickering across his face. “What’s envoid?”

“It’s a pill, I can’t get pregnant,” you explain

“Not ever?” he says and you smile gently as you see the initial panic in his eyes. You reach up, touching his face tenderly.

“If I stop taking it, I can easily become pregnant Benny.”

His eyes widen in realization. “I can… come in you?”

“Yes, Benny,” you affirm, your voice low and sultry, your eyes showing a dark seduction that makes his breath catch.

He stares at you in astonishment.

“This will be my first time… without a condom,” he confesses, a slight vulnerability in his eyes that makes your heart swell.

You smile reassuringly, caressing his cheek. “It’s okay, Benny. I trust you.”

His expression softens, and he leans down to kiss you deeply, his lips pressing against yours with a newfound intensity.

He positions himself at your entrance and the anticipation is almost unbearable. You can feel the heat of his body, the weight of him above you, and the hardness of his cock poised to enter you.

Slowly, he pushes in and you moan feeling every inch of him, the feel of his cock is intense as he deeply stretches you full of him.

He feels your tight walls taking him in, the sensation is a blend of pleasure and intimacy, he’s never experienced before making his breath hitch.

“You feel…. -So …good,” he groans, his voice filled with pleasure and awe as his eyes close immediately. His brows furrow in concentration as he savors the feeling of your slick, tight walls surrounding him. Every inch of him feels alive, every nerve ending tingling with the raw, powerful sensation of being inside you.

The warmth of his body against yours, the rhythm of his breathing, and the way he opens his eyes looking Into yours all combine to create a profoundly intimate moment.

He begins moving with slow measured thrusts, savoring the feeling of being inside you without any barriers

“Benny you’re …so deep” you gasp your voice trembling with pleasure feeling every inch of his hard cock thrust into you completely.

Benny’s eyes lock onto yours, his expression filled with raw desire and tenderness.

“I want you to feel all of me,” he breathes, his voice thick with emotion.

You moan from his words, the connection between you deepening with each thrust as he picks up the pace, his cock sliding in powerfully driving into you with a rhythm that leaves you breathless. His eyes never leave yours and you can see the raw emotion in his gaze.

“Am I making you feel good?” he rasps, his voice filled with a mix of desire and tenderness.

“Yes Benny, yes,” you moan, your voice trembling with pleasure.

His eyes darken with passion as he breathes, his movements becoming more intense.

“I’ve never felt anything like this,” he confesses. “I can’t get enough” he rasps. The warmth of your slick, walls grip his cock tightly, the skin to skin sensation, sending intense waves of pleasure through his entire being.

“Am I yours?” he questions, thrusting harder,“Do you want me?” he asks, his eyes desperately searching yours as you get lost in the overwhelming sensation of his large cock driving deep into your tight walls.

“Yes, Benny yes!,” you cry out, your body arching against his. “I’m yours, I want you!” you moan, clenching around him, the pleasure intensifying with every thrust of his large cock.

“I’m yours then,” he pants as he continues to thrust into you, his pace quickening the sensation of his size is like nothing you’ve ever experienced before.

Without a condom, your wet walls glide against him and he can feel every pulse, every contraction, the raw intimacy of it almost too much to bear.

The connection feels so intense and primal he drives faster, thrusting harder, and pushing deeper, each motion fueled by the exquisite pleasure coursing through him.

His hips begin softly clapping against yours as he grunts thrusting into you at a forceful pace driving you both toward a powerful climax.

“I can’t hold back,” he groans, his voice raw with need. “You feel too good, I’m losing control,” he admits .

“Benny, come in me” you desperately moan, your body arching against his.

He responds with a deep, primal groan, his thrusts becoming urgent and powerful, each stroke pushing you closer to the edge.

“…-I want to feel you come around me first ” he breathes and brings his large hands to your waist pulling you forcefully to meet against his thrusting cock. You cling to him, your nails digging into his back leaving marks as you ride the waves of ecstasy, your bodies moving in perfect harmony.

“Yes Benny, yes… oh my god, yes!,” you cry out, your voice filled with raw pleasure as he roughly thrusts into you satisfying the tightness of your core. You begin gasping, your walls contracting around him as you orgasm.

His eyes squeeze shut from the sensation of your fluttering walls and he surrenders to the overwhelming pleasure.

His cock pulses hard inside of you, his hips stuttering as he loses control. Finally both reaching the peak your loud cries mingle together as you come simultaneously, the climax sweeping through you like a tidal wave.

He releases his cum deep inside of you, his desperate cries rattling your brain as you rhythmically contract around him, absorbing each other’s pleasure. The orgasm is like nothing you’ve ever experienced before, a wave of pure ecstasy that leaves you breathless.

He slowly collapses onto you, his breathing ragged, his heart pounding against your chest. He holds you tightly in his arms, basking in the afterglow of your shared passion, knowing that this moment has forged an unbreakable bond between you.

As the waves of pleasure subside, his hand gently caresses your shoulder as you both catch your breath. His face resting in the nook of your neck as his body grows heavy.

“I don’t want this to end,” he murmurs against your skin, his voice filled with a mix of satisfaction and reluctance. “I’ve never felt anything like this and I want to stay like this forever.”

You stroke his hair gently smiling, feeling the warmth of his breath against your neck. “I don’t want it to end either, Benny,” you whisper back, your voice tender and filled with emotion.

He smiles at your words and reluctantly sits up sliding his large cock back until the heavy tip slips out of your entrance leaving you momentarily empty. He rests his head against your chest, his breathing gradually slowing as he tries to hold onto the connection you’ve just shared.

You continue to stroke his hair affectionately, your fingers weaving through the soft strands, watching his eyes grow heavy as he tries to fight the comforts of sleep.

“It’s alright, Benny,” you soothe him softly. “Just rest now.”

His eyes slowly flutter closed, and you feel his body relax completely against yours as he drifts into a deep sleep. You watch him for a moment, as you hold him in your arms. His face soft and serene, the warmth of his body, the rise and fall of his chest, and the scent of his him all combine to create a profound sense of connection with him.

Continuing to stroke his hair you feel a deep attachment to Benny, realizing he has become so much than you ever expected. The rhythm of his steady breathing lulls you, and your eyes grow heavy, surrendering to the pull of rest. The last thing you feel is the comforting presence of Benny in your arms, as you drift into a deep and satisfying sleep.

🏍️ To be Continued 🏍️

🔗 Benny Cross Part 2: The Vandals 🏍️

Benny brings you to a Vandals biker meeting and introduces you to his club members and their old ladies. Everyone is surprised by your contrasting natures and pokes fun at Benny for dating a ‘fancy girl’.

They privately cast bets on how quickly you’ll use him for a thrill and ditch him once the fun’s over. Little do they know you both are in it for keeps.

You find out more about his rough biker lifestyle and his club leader, Johnny, who has Benny at his beck and call.

🏍️ Benny Cross Tag List 🏍️ @finley-08 @ashleybutler-26 @ifuckindontknow @landlockedmermaid77 @jvanilly @oceanablue @12joeywheelerfangirl @autumnleaves1991-blog @presley1992 @rose-deathman 🏷️ Always Tags Me List 💌 @burnthheparaphilia @purejasmine @lindszeppelin @abswifey @faegoddessog @obsessedvibee @austiebuttbutt @jessica987 @oh-my-front-door @slowsweetlove @hardcoredisneynerd @magicovento @thegabbyh @fallofthedamned @buckysteveloki-me @bucking-mustangs-with-wings @shegatsby @darlingisntit @unicoreads @lovereadingfanfic @elvismylove04 @denised916 @thatoneweirdgirl17 @shockercoco @minispice-1 @meetmeatyourworst @rougegenshin @avidreader73 @jkdaddy01 @xxmandaveexx @mamawiggers1980 @imjustheretoreadsmuthaha @majestyjade @pearlparty @depressedfairie

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priyablog · 2 years ago

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20 Best Places to Visit in India

Deeply traditional yet endlessly surprising, India is one of those destinations that ends up on every traveler's bucket list at some point. They might dream of going to Agra to see the Taj Mahal in all its glory, or exploring the royal palaces scattered throughout Rajasthan. Others find themselves attracted to the jaw-dropping landscapes in Darjeeling and Rishikesh, or the postcard-perfect beaches in Goa.

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#The iconic India Gate #an arch gate made using sandstone #is a war memorial situated in the Rajpath area #Delhi. It was built to commemorate the Undivided British Army (also known as British India Army) soldiers who laid down their lives during #000 soldiers written on it. Surrounded by lush green and well-manicured gardens #India Gate is a favorite spot among Delhiites #who enjoy their summer evenings and Sunday picnics here with families and friends. Formerly known as All India War Memorial #it is one of the top tourist attractions to explore once you check in at the hotels in Delhi.#Want to know more? From its history and architecture to timings #entry fee #and lesser-known facts #nearest metro stations to reach by #here’s everything you should know about the Indian Gate in Delhi.#India Gate Information:#Location #Rajpath #New Delhi #Type #Memorial #Also Known as #All India War Memorial #Timings #Morning till evening; every day #Entry Fee #Free #Still and Video Cameras #Architect #Edwin Lutyens #Architectural Style #Triumphal Arch

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k-hippie · 5 months ago

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A BRAND NEW SIMS 3 WORLD : SHETLAND HARBOUR

And here we are ... At last :D

10 years ago, Rope crafted a remarkable world, inspired by Starlight Shores, and generously given away to the community : Brightwater.

We embraced this gift, transforming and reshaping it, creating an island to eliminate distant terrain, and thus, Shetland Harbour was born ...

While many creators have fashioned stunning Sims 3 worlds with a Northern charm—like Saaqartoq, Greymont Bay, Lillebror, or Plymouth Isles—ours, stands a little apart.

Shetland Harbour is a unique blend : a touch of Aurora Skies, a hint of Moonlight Falls, and a dash of the unfortunate Barnacle Bay, all interwoven with our own vision of course. It is a vast yet easily navigable world, balanced between lightness and richness, featuring nearly all the Rabbit Holes the game offers.

Our aim was to craft a cohesive and vibrant world, one that feels alive and contemporary, with harmonious architecture and a spirit that invites exploration and delight :)

Welcome to Shetland Harbour, a picturesque coastal town nestled between rolling green hills and a fantastic bay … It is a beautiful medium/large-sized world, a community nestled on its own secluded island, accessible only by ferry. The town is known for its charming cobblestone streets, a vibrant fish market, and a rich history dating back centuries, dotted with quaint cottages, a bustling coast, and a grand lighthouse standing guard at the harbor’s entrance ...

This hidden gem is a haven for sheep, but don't let that fool you – Shetland Harbour is far from a sleepy place. With its rich maritime history, the town offers a unique blend of tradition and vibrant local culture.

Designed to capture the essence of a northern European island, Shetland Harbour offers a self-contained community with 100 lots in total : 65 residential lots + 35 community lots. Each Lot ( except the Old Renovated Factory ) is fully furnished.

In addition, there are multiple sheep ( all by Murfeel ) fields here and there – the latter being especially dear to the local culture, a close-knit community, where the ocean's presence is always felt and the simplicity of rural life is celebrated.

Shetland Harbour combines a lively downtown with peaceful suburbs and serene neighborhoods, featuring quaint cottages, charming gardens, and scenic paths through lush greenery.

The town's historic churches, like Old Church, Albert Church or Lux Chapel, are steeped in tales of ancient rituals and ghostly apparitions ... Albert Church, built on a Druidic site, is haunted by druid spirits, while Lux Chapel is known for the ghost of a sailor, seen on stormy nights ...

The mysterious stone circle inside the Graveyard, Ghost Place, adds to the island's mystical allure. Rumored to be a portal to another realm, it activates during celestial alignments, with visitors reporting strange occurrences. Town elders speak of a prophecy foretelling the return of ancient spirits and the awakening of the island's mystical powers. Signs include a rare star alignment, the stone circle's awakening, and three chosen individuals with the island's ancient bloodline ...

• Harbor Bay : The central feature of Shetland Harbour is its expansive bay. The bay is a natural harbor with calm, crystal-clear waters, making it ideal for fishing and sailing. It is surrounded by gently sloping hills and cliffs that provide stunning vistas of the sea. The marina is bustling with fishing boats, sailboats, and yachts sometimes … It’s the hub of maritime activity, with a fish market ( aka Grocery Store ), boat repairs, and a sailing club ( aka Business and Journalism Center )

• Lighthouse District : Right beside the Harbour, stands the Lighthouse Point, this district features historical homes and buildings, including a Norman cottage, a strange Diner and higher into the Hills, a fantastic museum dedicated to the town’s maritime history and a recent Hospital ready to welcome all the citizens of Shetland Harbour :)

• Beaches : The Coastline is dotted with sandy beaches, perfect for beachcombing, picnics, and bonfires. These areas are popular spots for locals and tourists alike. And you may want building some Coastal Houses for your Sims which is possible almost all alongside the sea ;)

• Old Town : The heart of Shetland Harbour is the Old Town, characterized by cobblestone streets, historic buildings, and a charming town square. Shetland Harbour's downtown area is a kinda picturesque pedestrian square, and quaint paths perfect for leisurely strolls …The Old Town includes the Town Hall, the Old Toad, the Talking Dog, a Fish and Chips, and even a Geek Store, all of them under the shadow of one of the oldest shop of the Island : the Elixirium ...

• Rolling Hills : Surrounding the town are rolling green hills covered in wildflowers and dotted with grazing sheep. These hills are perfect for hiking and offer panoramic views of the town and the bay. Beware of the fog !

• Forests and Woodlands : To the north of the town are more dense forests and woodlands with waterfalls upstream of the river which separates part of the island. These areas are home to various wildlife and provide a natural retreat for the residents. There are several well-maintained trails for hiking and exploring :)

Come and explore Shetland Harbour all your content ... Whether you're building your dream home, running a local business, or simply soaking in the serene atmosphere, this unique town promises endless possibilities and a truly captivating experience ...

Download Shetland Harbour today and start your new adventure!

\o/

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

IMPORTANT : Before downloading Shetland Harbour !!!

Shetland Harbour contains custom content. As much as we try to include them into the world building process, we learned with time the necessity of providing a list those items. No worries, we used the same cc creators as usual and added 2 or 3 more. Such as the grey/dark roof we made, based on the terracotta roof of the game and the Wood walls you'll find on different lots, the same as the ones of Oaksoak Hollow ... Or more important, the boats used in the world and of course ... The sheeps ! All you need should be included and/or available down here ;)

1) the ANTS & CC :)

ANTS stand for Absolute Necessary Things & Stuff to enjoy Shetland Harbour :)

Download ANTS and CC ( both are needed to have all the right textures, the right look and feel of Shetland Harbour )

You will need too some of our Rabbit Holes

Not mandatory but nice : our 88 Patterns mostly brick, masonry, concrete and wood ;) A bit of fabric & paper too ...

ATTENTION : if you have played with one of our Worlds, you might see duplicate files. We try to use the same objects as much as possible. Of course, you don't have to install twice. Skip whatever you already have. We use Blams objects for some Sims 3 objects ... so if you already have those objects from any other means, just skip ;)

CREDITS & THANKS due to all the following creators :

ATS, Noir and Dark Sims, pitheinfinite, Brunnis-2, Blams, CycloneSue, HydrangeaChainsaw, Leroy157, Lisen801, Murfeele, Nilxis, PotatoBalladSims, Qahne, TheJim07, Mammut ( from BlackSimsZoo ) BlueCoco, BuffSumm, JomSims, Ladesire, Mutske

2) the Saved Games

They are in the same page than Shetland Harbour itself. You have the choice between Unpopulated and Half-populated. Whatever you choose, we always strongly advice with a save game ;) But as far we know, once we delivered a World, it is entirely up to you to begin a new adventure and make your own challenges with your own Sims :D

Download a save game

3) the Lots ( both residential & community )

Quite a bursting town, Shetland Harbour has 100 lots : 65 residential and 35 community and very important : many small sheep fields ( visitors not allowed com lots )

Download ALL the lots

Some lots are Maxis ones we modified, some lots are our own creations, and for the others, they come mostly from MTS ;) And we are very grateful to those creators who always offer a special flavor to our Worlds :)

CarlDillynson - Bellakenobi - Bast - MySimRealty - stonee206 - Norn - Cutbacks - Ferguson Avenue - SimplySimlish - hazelnutter100 - PolarBearSims - RubyRed2021 - CircusWolf - Moihi - Lasciel

Well, it is time for discovery now and you are ready for sure ! We wish you all the best, all the fun with your new life in Shetland Harbour !

Download Shetland Harbour World

PS : Shetland Harbour is a medium/large sized world of 88MB, and has been tested 1 week long on both Mac and Pc ;)

xoxo - blackgryffin

#the sims 3 #sims 3 gameplay #sims 3 #thesims3 #ts3 #sims3 worlds #sims3 build #shetland harbour #sims 3 world #sims3 cc #k hippie #k-hippie

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evermoredeluxe · 3 months ago

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malala: One of my favorite memories from Swat Valley is a field trip I took in middle school with my best friend, Moniba (second photo, on the left). Giggling, we went to a waterfall hidden away in a lush green mountain. We were so excited because we were finally allowed to go to school again and could be outdoors with our friends laughing and singing together.

Having lived through a time where music and art were banned, music felt like a gift. Moniba and I found the highest rock we could, climbed on top of it and announced to all of our classmates and teachers we were going to perform our new favourite song called LOVE STORY. We sang with all of our heart, taking in the joy we felt every second. That's where my Swiftie journey began. It feels magical that my first-ever proper concert would be to see @TaylorSwift, singing along to every song surrounded by friends.

Three years ago, the Taliban regained power in Afghanistan. Once again, music no longer plays on the streets, and girls and women are barred from school, work and public life. In Swat, music made my friends and me feel confident and free. And one day I hope we will live in a world where every girl will be able to enjoy music and live out her wildest dreams. 💖

#it’s so kind of her to make this sort of post for eras and use it to talk about her childhood and an important thing #to think taylor was a point of happiness and was part of one of her fav memories from that time… her impact is wild #also love story you will always be famous!#eras tour london 5 #eras tour #malala yousafzai #taylor swift

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banj0possum · 1 year ago

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Okay hear me out: yandere harpy. The reader is on a hike or something and he notices them and is immediately enamored. He grabs them and keeps them in his nest and because it's so high up they can't get down on their own 😳

Lovey Dovey

Harpy x GN Reader

CW: kidnapping, stockholm syndrome

first day back from my hiatus and were already on some more sweet sweet terato ( ´ ∀ `)ノ～ ♡ ive never written a harpy before but by golly ive been wanting to for a while! thank you smallcactus22 for requesting!

🪶 All you wanted was a fun adventure away from work, a breath of fresh air after being trapped in a colorless cubicle for god knows how long.

🪶 You wanted, no, needed a vacation. You looked through the many websites that showcased lovely tourist spots like beaches and retreats, all either a little too shady or way too expensive.

🪶 One caught your eye though, an ad for a hiking trip across a mountainous landscape filled with lush greens and lovely pink flowers, it was pretty affordable too. You immediately booked a spot on the hiking trail and wrote up a letter to your boss that you'd be on vacation for a few days.

🪶 When you finally came, you were already enamored by the scenery. Everything was a pink and reddish hue from all the petals that fell from the trees. You saw a person holding up a sign that said, "Hiking Trail!" and quickly ran up to the group of people supposedly taking the same hike as you.

🪶 The tour guide explained the history of the trail, it sounded more of a legend or myth however, with him speaking of an ancient race of humans with the ability to fly.

🪶 You thought nothing of it, probably just a part of the place's culture or something, you then followed the rest of the group to start the hike.

🪶 You couldn't help this uneasy feeling of being watched while on the trail, like there was something following you as you continued along the red path surrounded by pinks and blueish greens. It was probably a wild animal or two, you were in a forest after all.

🪶 On the other hand, Kalva could do nothing but watch you from the dense flora he was perched within. He's seen humans travel through the harpy infested woods before, all of which were uninteresting as a dried leaf on the ground.

🪶 So when he laid his eyes on you, it felt like an arrow to his chest. He was taken aback by how cute you were, so soft, so graceful. With the shawl you had on he would've mistaken you for one of his kind if it were not for you walking alongside other humans.

🪶 The harpies were very weary of humans, especially tourists. Only the few that have grown up near the mountains know of their existence, one that is protected lest danger falls on them like the old dragons of legend that was wiped out by greedy humans who thought of themselves as divine saviors in a world of evil.

🪶 Even with all these thoughts swirling in his head, he thought you were different. You didn't look at all like the other tourist who were babbling to themselves about who knows what with their funny black bricks that sparked now and again. They were so clumsy and ditzy compared to you who was just admiring the scenery around you, truly in the moment unlike the others who only cared for a nice photo or two.

🪶 After about an hour, the group stopped at a rest stop to take a break, you kept watching the flora dance and sway as everyone else drank and rested their feet. You treaded deeper into the pink forest, making sure to keep the rest stop in sight.

🪶 Just then you hear rustling from above, a large shadow gliding past you from overhead. You would think it was a bird if not for the size of the shadow. The shadow circled around you, as the shaking of the leaves above grew louder and louder.

🪶 Now your uneasiness is back tenfold, your heart racing as you frantically look around.

🪶 There was nothing there however, and you breathe a sigh of relief before turning to go back to the rest stop.

🪶 You yelp as you are, however, met with giant yellow eyes staring at you. You trip on a tree root and fall on your butt as a man half covered in feathers stared at you, penetrating your very soul.

🪶 You try to scramble away but the creature keeps walking nearer and nearer, his head cocking to the sides like that of a bird.

🪶 Your back meets with a tree as you're left in the mercy of this massive birdman in front of you. You feel tears starting to form in your eyes as a taloned hand reaches to your face.

🪶 You were surprised at the gentle touch you felt on your face as Kalva wiped your tear away, cooing softly.

🪶 "uhm...hello there?" you mutter.

🪶 "hello..." He replies in a raspy but quiet voice.

🪶 "Wh-who are you?" you ask, the tension in your body dissipating as you get more comfortable with him, well not really comfortable, just a little less tense as you were before.

🪶 "My name is...Kalva..."

🪶 "Kalva..I'm (Y/N).."

🪶 His pupils dilate at the sound of your name. He mutters it to himself like a word he wished to remember.

🪶 He sniffs at you, all over your body and clothes, focusing then on your bag. You reach inside and take out some crackers you packed for the hike and gave it to him. He was confused at first, never seeing a seed or insect like it, but was then greeted with a wonderous sensation of sweet and salty. He squawks happily, nuzzling his head into your chest, making you a tad bit surprised and unsure of what to do now that a bird man creature thing is cuddling you in a forest. You placed a hesitant hand on the back of his head and started petting him, he started cooing very softly, that must mean he's happy.

🪶 You then hear the tour guide call for everyone to continue on the trail, you greet Kalva goodbye and try to walk away when you're suddenly grabbed by your shoulders and lifted up. You yelp and scream, asking to be put down but the harpy ignored your pleas and flew high up into the mountains.

🪶 Oh what a day it was for Kalva! He knew the little human was the one! They fed him, they preened him, just like a good mate would! He must have been very good as his courting! Of course, his little mate couldn't have seen it from down below, but they surely would have if they accepted him so quickly right afterwards!

🪶 Finally they reached his perch atop a tall mountain. It was a giant circular hut of some kind made of branches and lined with colorful flowers and leaves. Inside, his nest was filled with cotton of the softest kind, only the best for his mate! Little baubles and shiny trinkets hung from the curved ceiling and trinkled softly as they shook. He placed them down as they shook in fear at the height.

🪶 Kalva landed next to them cooing and chirping comfortingly, don't worry my lovely! You won't fall from here! I will protect you!

🪶 It was like this for days; you trapped a thousand miles high in a nest you can't escape from otherwise the harpy would find you and carry you back. He would leave for hours at a time, offering you food and small gifts he's found he thought you might like, some of them things left behind by other tourists like a water bottle, a book, a hat and a few others.

🪶 At night, he'd pull you into a warm embrace under his wings. He can't help but stare at you as you snore peacefully under him.

🪶 Of course you were frightened to the core the whole time, but you tried your best to explain to him that you weren't his mate and that you needed to go home, but he kept insisting that you two were meant for each other, for him to coddle and fed you and you to love and preen him when he returns home.

🪶 He dreams for you both to have chick of your own, the idea of coming home to the happy chirping of little hims and yous gave him a happy giddy feeling.

🪶 After a while you figured getting down on your own wasn't an option and Kalva was your only hope in returning to the familiar world below.

🪶 You started talking to him more, books he would bring home, you'd read to him, food collected would be shared between you two.

🪶 And somehow, throughout this whole process, you managed to grow quite close to the man.

🪶 He understood English more, now collecting other foods like stolen snacks from tourists instead of bugs and wild fruits he'd usually eat.

🪶 You found yourself missing his company when he was away. He'd chirp happily as you rushed to hug him as he lands in your shared nest after a hunt.

🪶 Soon enough, he'd trust you to explore the mountain's peak outside of the nest. There was a lovely little lake next to his abode with a tree bearing red fruits. In the distance you could hear the faint calls of other harpies.

🪶 All you wanted was a fun adventure away from work, and you were given more than what you've bargained for, a glimpse into a hidden world of creatures far beyond your imagination, with one of them being your very loving mate.

and as a bonus, Kalva doodle for yall <3

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whispersoftheton · 7 months ago

Note

Anthony bridgerton x wife!reader. Maybe his wife has quite a childlike innocence that the women of the ton take to be weirdness and they tend to isolate her but she never knows why. Maybe they’re newly married and she decides to invite some of the ladies for tea but no one shows up and she’s upset because she’s confused and Anthony comforts her and joins her for tea instead to cheer her up.

Hey! Thank you so much for requesting this & for being so patient! This wasn't meant to be this long but it sort of took on a life of its own. I hope you enjoy it <3

Anthony Bridgerton x Fem!Reader

Warnings: none just comfort :)

Word Count: 1.1K

Every square inch of Aubrey Hall's walls flourished with the season's most stunning flowers, the gardens lush as far as the eye could see. The breeze did little to cool you off from the summer heat as you sat under the tent, sipping your afternoon tea overlooking the meadow alongside Violet Bridgerton. It had been a tedious day of tending to various duties around the household, and you were expecting company from some ladies of society later that evening. It seemed your schedule had been considerably more than full since your wedding a few months ago. Rather frankly, you were just as exhausted as you were delighted in your new marriage to the Viscount. Keeping up with the Bridgertons all while being the latest lady of the house proved to be quite the task. Sure, your introverted preferences to stay within the walls of your home with a good book or spend quiet time in the gardens studying the plants were different than the interests of the ladies of the ton. However, you always tried your very best to keep everyone surrounding you in good spirits while performing your obligations, always looking toward Violet for approval, wanting to stay within your welcome. She was the Viscountess before you, after all. You could only dream of living up to her in your new position. Overseeing every small detail runs smoothly across your home, not to mention the impending weight on your shoulders due to the responsibility of Anthony's sisters coming out in the following seasons. You didn't know how long you could keep this facade up if you were being honest with yourself. But you had standards to upkeep, ways in which the Viscountess held her own beside her husband, and the last thing you ever wanted to do was let Anthony or his family down.

The sun blared upon the exquisitely green grass; surrounding the field on the outer edges were countless trees with blossoming flowers overflowing the gardens. Springtime at Aubrey Hall, indeed, was like no other. You turned your attention toward the Pall Mall game. Your husband stood before his siblings, mumbling something you were sure was some tease towards Eloise, making you smirk. Anthony turned toward the field and adjusted his grip on the mallet before making his final shot. A generous mix of disappointed grumbles and cheers erupted from the handful of Bridgertons as he made the final winning score. Half of them scrambled to debate the shot while the other half stood by, giggling toward them.

Anthony left his siblings to argue among themselves over the game he now reigned as champion over. Eloise was clearly bitter and left feeling she had been made a mockery over this loss after spending her spare time practicing for this very moment. Anthony placed his mallet on the stand alongside the others and approached you. He graciously extended his hand toward you, motioning you to go with him before the both of you bid goodbye to his mama and slipped out of sight and into the grand home.

"Eloise is taking quite hard, isn't she?" You said as he guided you through the doors. "She must have thought her practice would allow her to best you once and for all."

"Having hopes of besting her older yet clearly more skilled brother? Unlikely, my love." Anthony taunted, evidently still on a high from his victory. You stood in the main room while Anthony poured himself a drink, beckoning you to join him before you politely declined.

"I cannot. I am having the ladies over for tea shortly, and I cannot be anything less than perfection for their arrival." Anthony wrapped an arm around your waist and pulled you in for a brief kiss. Enough to have you wrapping your arms around his neck and yearning for more as he pulled away just enough for your noses to brush tenderly against one another.

"No moment in time exists in which you are not perfection, my love." Anthony's smile warmed your heart as you relaxed against him. "They will love you as much as I do; I am sure of it." His validation and loving gaze melted any lingering stresses still dancing around in your head. All that was left was to check off some last-minute preparations, and the tea could commence.

The late afternoon sun cast dispersed shadows across the cobblestone path. Anthony strolled into his home since returning from a lengthy afternoon of business meetings and running several errands around town. Anthony had hoped to come home to you excitedly telling him of your afternoon tea with the ladies of the ton. Instead, he found the halls seemed eerily calm for this time of day. He entered the main room and caught you sitting quietly on one of the sofas in a far corner. You curled up beside the unlit fireplace, twirling your fingers anxiously in your lap when you felt Anthony take a seat beside you.

"Sweetheart." Anthony paused before placing his hand in your lap. You didn't know if it was for comfort or to stop you from fidgeting. His warmth was welcome either way. "Is something wrong?" He cautiously asked.

"No one came." The words strained from your throat. "I know your mama and sisters left this morning on a day's travel, but I hoped-." Your voice broke before resuming. "I hoped at least someone would have-." Tears brimmed your eyes, and scattered tears stained across the top of your dress, some still falling down your cheeks. Anthony's hand cupped your face, his thumb gently preventing the tears from their continued flow. He took your hands in his and placed a lingering kiss on your knuckles before standing before you and offering you his hand. Without another word, Anthony dragged you along the halls and out into the gardens. Various flowers bloomed around you, and he brought you to one of the rarer flowers now flourishing on the property.

"What are we doing here?" You questioned while admiring the intricate patterns in which the vine had taken, the beautiful springtime flora temporarily making you forget the catastrophe of this afternoon. Anthony stepped closer from behind, arms wrapping around you as he whispered in your ear.

"It is when I am gazing upon the most exquisitely beautiful flower in the garden that I think of you." Tears again swelled inside you, but for a different reason this time. "The day will come when the world will see the beauty I am fortunate enough to hold near every day. In the meantime, I get you all to myself, hm?" The warmth and comfort of his words and presence enveloped you, brushing away the day's worries and woes with an ease only he possessed. His voice was a soothing balm for your soul that always had a way of convincing you everything would be okay. Because when you were around Anthony, you knew it would be.

Mini Tag List: @bugnug @queenofmean14 @fiction-is-life @thethreeeyed-raven @ssprayberrythings @fatbottomedvirgo @fictional-hooman (let me know if you would like to added by leaving a comment here or dm me if you’d like to be added.removed)

I DO NOT HAVE WATTPAD. I do not consent to having my work reposted, translated, or published to any third party site or app. if anyone sees my work anywhere that is not ao3/tumblr or under any other username that is not whispersoftheton, it has been reposted without my permission

#anthony bridgerton #bridgerton #anthony bridgerton imagine #anthony bridgerton x reader #bridgerton netflix #anthony bridgerton fluff #anthony bridgerton fanfiction #anthony bridgerton smut #anthony bridgerton x y/n #anthony bridgerton x you #bridgerton season 2

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ameliathornromance · 5 months ago

Text

He first saw you picking flowers.

The Orc was on a walk through the town centre, heading towards the beach. It was too nice a day to be staying inside, baking in the heat and becoming one with his leather sofa. If he must melt into a large green puddle, he will do it at the beach.

As he strolled through the town centre, he admired the impeccably kept gardens of lush grass, bright red roses, purple and pink lilies. And amongst the colour, was you.

The Orc stopped in his tracks, watched you working, trimming away at dead flower heads and picking off wilting leaves. This was the first time he’d ever seen someone take care of the gardens.

The peaceful smile, combined with the delicate way you picked the flowers enraptured him with a kind of calm that he hadn’t felt in years.

You just looked so content, so natural to be surrounded by the bushes, as if you were a deer drinking water from a still lake.

Feeling eyes on you, you looked around to see the source of your discomfort. Locking eyes with the Orc, he flinched, “s-sorry.” He apologised, looking away from you. “I didn’t mean to stare.” He must have looked really creepy to be watching someone so intently.

You smiled at him. “It’s okay, it’s not a normal sight.” Tucking the flowers into the crook of your arm, you stood and made your way over to him. “I mean, it’s not often you see someone raiding a public garden for flowers, right?” You let out an awkward chuckle.

The Orc nodded in agreement, reflecting your awkwardness. “Yeah, I guess not.”

Silence sat between the two of you for a moment. “I’m technically not allowed to be picking them.” You said, after a moment. “I’d appreciate it if you didn’t say anything.”

Smiling, the Orc assured you, “I won’t tell a soul.”

From that point onward, he made it a point to go and see you at the gardens every day. It was such a rarity to see someone be so happy in their own company, doing their own thing.

He didn’t like to just watch you though, he always made conversation with you. The last thing the Orc wanted was to make you uncomfortable. It would look to other people, a lone Orc, sat on a bench while a pretty young lady tends to the flowers in the public garden.

Through your talks, he learned that you actually work for the local council and take care of the garden every day… while taking some of the flowers home for your own viewing. “I mean, I tend to them, I should at least be allowed to take some home, right?” You told him.

The Orc had nodded absent-mindedly in agreement. You were just so passionate about your job, the delight and excitement you had on your face when he asked you botanical questions made his stomach bubble.

You never acted annoyed by him, laughed at his jokes and even invited him to come and help you with your work. Whenever he had questions, you answered them without judgement and with such zeal.

After spending his days with you, he’d return home, the world seemed… dull. Without all the brightly coloured flowers around and your glowing prescence, he sometimes wondered if it had always been this way to him. He then realised it hadn’t, because you lit up the world.

The Orc pondered on how best to tell you about his feelings. There was a part of him that worried you were only nice to him to… be nice to him. But it wouldn’t hurt to tell you how he felt… would it? It’s not like you were ever nasty or cold to him, so there had to be a chance for him, right?

He thought how best to tell you: Box of chocolate? No, too stereotypical. Just asking you out to dinner? That’s way too basic, and then you might think he wants something else.

He didn’t need to worry about that for long however, one hot summer day, you asked him:

“Did you know that the Victorians used to have a language for flowers?”

“No, I did not.” The Orc answered. He was sat beside you this time, holding up a Rose bush so you could reach the thorns at the roots of the plant.

“They used to use it to tell other people things,” you said as you snipped off the sharp edges. “Like, if you wanted to tell someone you loved them, you’d bring them honeysuckle and roses.”

“Huh.” He said, thoughtfully. He was silent for a moment, thinking on what you’d said.

This was it. That’s how he’d tell you he liked you, through Honeysuckle and Roses.

Once back at home, he jumped on his laptop and researched. The next morning, he went to three different florists, and got what he needed.

While in his car, the Orc did his best to rearrange the flowers in an attractive manner. After adjusting them five or six times, he sighed. The Orc still had his reservations. Of course he was nervous, he hadn’t told anyone he liked them since… Wait, had he ever even liked anyone this much?

He shook his head. “Just have to tell her,” he muttered to himself as he stepped out of the car. As he made his way through the garden, picking and making final changes to the bouquet in his hands, he looked up and stopped dead in his tracks.

You stood at the edge of the garden, talking to a human man. You held a strong scowl at the man, who jabbed and pointed a finger at you, similarly angry with you.

The Orc hung back, watching the altercation unfold.

Finally, the man sighed, and raised his hand to your cheek, like he was going to cup it. But before he could, you raised a hand and slapped him hard across the face.

The man let out a shout, grabbed at your wrist and yanked. You jerked forward.

Within seconds, the Orc was by your side and caught you around the waist with a free arm. He glowered down at the pathetic man, “what’s going on here?” He growled.

The man let go of your arm. “It’s none of your business, I was just having a conversation with the woman here.” The man glared at your Orc. “This hasn’t got anything to do with you.”

“It is, actually.” The Orc hissed.

“How so? You’re just some random-”

“I’m her boyfriend, actually.”

The moment the words escaped him, the Orc wanted to clamp a hand over his mouth, to take back the words and hide them away.

His realisation of horror thankfully, hadn’t shown on his face.

The human man flinched. “Oh…” He said. His tone low, “sorry, I didn’t know…” And with that, he turned away and stalked off.

Huffing, the Orc turned to you. “Are you alright?” He asked, eyebrows furrowed. “He didn’t hurt you did he?”

You shook your head, “no, I’m fine… He was just some creep who wanted my socials. That’s all.”

Your Orc friend let out a sigh, “I… I’m sorry I said that. The boyfriend thing…” The bouquet of flowers were still clutched in his hands, petals wilted slightly from the unpleasantness.

He probably really lost any chance now, just announcing that? To a park full of people? He wouldn’t be surprised if you just stopped talking to him entirely.

“It’s okay… I liked the title, actually.” Your words came out small, mumbled. But to the Orc, they were like the clang of a church bell. His stomach somersaulted, his heart thumped hard in his chest, eyes widened.

“I was hoping that you would ask me out at some point… otherwise I would have asked you myself today.” You gave a cheery, but abashed smile.

Clearing his throat, face burning, the Orc held the flowers out to you, “I still can.” He smiled, hands shaking, “would you like to go out with me?”

You bit your lip, taking the flowers from him. “I’d like that.”

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#monster lover #orc fiction #monster romance #orc boyfriend #monster x human #orc romance #monster x you #orc x reader #monster x female #monster x reader #orc x reader fluff #orc x human #orc x human reader

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in-som-niyah · 11 months ago

Text

"No, none of that baby. Let me see that pretty pussy of mine."

in which you catch Jason mingling with a girl you think is prettier at a gala, and he reminds you who he belongs to with his face between your thighs...

The night is young and alive. In the four walls of bruce's charity gala, there was expensive champagne, rich people music and gorgeous women.

You were advised, no instructed to come with Jason to his father's galas for a while now. The scene was nothing new.

Bruce would throw millions at a gala for a bunch of rich people 4 times a year to keep himself in their good graces. You would stand in the corner and watch people pretend to like each other with wide smiles and chaste hugs.

Secretly, you hated these events. Well, Jason knew you would rather stay home, but he thought it was because you just find them boring.

He could't be more wrong.

As you claimed your usual spot with your back to the wall in a corner, you watched the skinny, blond-haired girls in their tastefully fitted dresses garner the spotlight of the event. The way they batted their blue eyes up at a mesmerized man was the 8th wonder of the world. They were so effortless in their seduction, so enamouring in their figure.

So stunning.

It wasn't that you weren't pretty, no, it was that you were sorely out of place.

And Jason had no Idea.

How could he, when he stood at six foot something, broad shoulders and a physique to die for. Lush green eyes and prominent yet soft features.

And Gods above, his smile.

Any girl would have won the lottery if she saw his genuine smile.

It was no secret that you didn't match him, not at all.

It is in these moments that you begin to question your relationship. If these are the kinds of women he is surrounded with, why the fuck was he with you?

You scoffed and took a swig of your Champagne as you watched yet another girl wave to him.

Presently, he was doing his job, talking with investors and other important people in Gotham.

He was talking to some high up CEO when a gorgeous girl bumped into his side. He turned around to meet her embarrassed gaze.

Though you were out of earshot, you could make out her flustered apologies and Jason's attempts at reassurance. Out of courtesy, he asked for her name or other surface info and the two seemed to get to talking. She was blabbering on about who she was and what she does for a living and she made a joke. And Jason Laughed.

He laughed. Fully and genuinely. He laughed.

Then so did she, sparkling blue eyes looking up at him once again as they laughed over something you couldn't find funny. You would never find this funny.

Soon enough, the lights dimmed and Bruce called the attention of the crowd to welcome them and thank them for their attendance. His list of thanks and acknowledgements went on as normal.

"...And I'm so glad my son Jason found a friend at these so-called 'boring' events he hates going to." Bruce joked.

The crowd laughed.

But so did Jason.

You took this as your opportunity to leave, slamming your champagne flute down on a nearby table and making a swift exit.

Hot tears threatened to burn rivers down your face as your legs carried you out of the venue as quickly as they could. You found an elevator, and decided to take it up to Jason's bedroom.

Once on the correct floor, the floodgates opened and you began to sob.

You flung open the door to his bedroom and slammed it shut. You took off your expensive heels and pelted them across the tidy room. Everything reminded you of him; the portraits on the wall, his diplomas, old weapons, even the faint scent of him.

This was something you could no longer take. You were so tired of feeling inadequate, silently counting down the days until he found someone better than you. In your mind, that day had come and though it had been in the back of you mind for as long as you were with him, you were damn unprepared.

You undid the zipper on your dress and flung it off your body. Jason picked out this dress for you when he mentioned that he wanted you to come to this last gala with him. You painfully recall how happy and excited you were to be able to wear a dress in his colour that he picked out for you.

How foolish.

Your sobs grew stronger as you began to think that your relationship should have never happened, seeing that he would have found someone prettier, skinnier, funnier smarter-

Knock

"Y/N?"

Jason was at the door to his room. Growing bored with the festivities below, he wanted to find you and go back to your place. When he couldn't find you in the crowd, he went up to his room to check something. It was then that he heard your heavy sobs coming from behind his door and panic filled his system.

You stopped crying immediately and moved to dry your tears that have surely ruined your makeup by now.

"Yeah baby. J-just give me a second." you blurted in an unconvincing tone.

He couldn't know how distraught you were about something so trivial. It wasn't his fault that he was so hot, and it wasn't yours that you thought you weren't. There was nobody to blame for your insecurities, and you didn't need him to know how terrible you felt because of your own self-inflicted wounds.

"Can I come in?" He pried gently.

You appreciated his courtesy of asking if he could enter his own room. You scrambled to find a shirt of his to cover yourself with. There was no need for the added anxiety of what you thought you looked like right now. Your heels still splayed across the room and dress slumped against his armchair.

"Sure." you let out with a defeated sigh.

The audible twist and click of the doorknob filled the quiet space. Jason's brow was pinched with worry as the door swung open to reveal you, sitting on his bed in his shirt, in pretty bad shape.

He closed the door and locked it behind him, something you appreciated, and took off his jacket. He made his way to the edge of the bed and sat on the mattress with his back to the edge, facing you.

His soft gaze took in your state, and his shoulders slumped because he didn't like what he saw. He hated seeing you sad, it broke his heart into a million little pieces.

Jason reached out his hand for you to take, but you curled in on yourself and inched further away from him. You were still overwhelmed with your thoughts of his hands all over someone elses' body.

You wanted to vomit.

"Can you look at me, Y/N?" Jason asks cautiously. He doesn't know what you're thinking, and the last thing he wants to do is scare you.

The tears came back and you struggled to keep them at bay.

"C-Can't" your strained voice came through gritted teeth.

"Oh come here pretty girl" he cooed.

You resolve was gone and you moved to throw yourself in his arms.

Jason's strong arms came to wrap around your back, one hand on the back of your head and the other around your abdomen.

Your hands grabbed at his ironed dress shirt. Usually you were courteous, but now you were too hurt to care. Makeup, snot, tears and other fluids rubbed into his clothes as you broke down in his arms.

You were grateful he didn't say anything about his ruined shirt as his hand rubbed up and down your back.

Jason's mind was racing, searching all corners of his brain to figure out what would make you this upset so quickly.

Your sobs began to slow but your breathing remained erratic. There was too much and not enough air at the same time. Jason stepped in quickly to make sure you didn't pass out.

"Hey hey hey slow down baby girl. Follow my breaths alright? In. Out. Keep going sugar. In. Out. Atta girl"

As you breathed with him, you felt calmer, but the guilt of him having to deal with your outburst began to gnaw at you.

You lifted your head from his shoulder and broke out of his embrace. He studies your state, which was much better now, but stayed quiet.

"I-I'm sorr-"

"Absolutely not." Jason sharply interrupted your attempt to apologize

"There is nothing for you to be sorry for sweetheart."

You could tell he was searching your face for any kind of acknowledgement, but you couldn't look at him.

"Look at me baby. Please?" he whispers as his hands roam up your neck to cup your cheeks.

You shook your head no.

Jason tries again, pressing his forehead to yours, looking at your tightly closed eyes.

"You're breaking my heart pretty girl. Please? For me?" he whispers so softly.

Deciding to obey, you look up at him. A single tear escapes your eye as you stare into his worried green ones.

"None of that anymore sugar" he reassures as his thumb wipes away the tear.

You nod in agreement.

Jason and you stay close with your forheads on each others for a while, basking in the intimacy of it all.

He breaks the silence.

"Talk to me love. What happened hm?" he asks, his breath dancing on your lips.

You take a deep breath

"What got my girl so upset?"

Truthfully, you had no idea how to start. How to tell him you've been feeling like a horrible girlfriend since you've been having darker thoughts about your appearance. How can you tell Jason, whose only fault was loving you, that you feel inadequate in his presence. That you feel that it is only a matter of time until he finds someone prettier, skinnier, smarter-

"Baby?"

His inquiry pulls you out of your head.

"It's stupid." You respond in a small voice.

"No. Not if it made you feel this way."

You drop your head again in shame. You don't deserve this kindness after you just questioned his intentions with you.

"But it has nothing to do with you" you mumble.

"It has everything to do with me because I love you. And I cant stand to see you so hurt over something I don't know about or help you with." He countered.

"But-" your voice begins to shake once more

He sneaks his index finger underneath your chin and lifts, giving you no choice but to look at him.

"But nothing." he shuts you down simply.

Jason kisses your forehead, then your cheeks, then your nose, making you giggle.

"There's my girl" he mumbles to no one in particular.

His face lines up with yours once again. This time, it is you who moves closer to capture his lips in yours. It was a soft and passionate kiss, a silent thanks for his patience with you.

Jason broke the kiss before you could and smoothed a braid from out of your face.

"Can you tell me why you're upset? You don't have to if you don't want-"

"I want to." You interrupted him.

After a long period of explaining your feelings with a few more stray tears, you both came to an understanding of how the situation came to be. Jason told you how much he loves you, and that nobody with a smaller figure or more socially "beautiful" than you could take him away from you. You were his girl; his to love, his to smile at, his to laugh with, his to touch, his to feel, his to caress-

His lips were now on yours. He kissed you with a fever of determination, a thousand feelings infused into the union of your lips.

His hands began to roam your body. Up your back and down to your hips. You know he loves seeing you in his clothes.

As the kiss deepens and both of your hands are all over eachother. Your hand roams down his front to find his bulge. He stops you abruptly, and you raise you head to look at him questioningly.

"Are you sure?" Jason whispers.

You chuckle at the question.

"Yes, of course" you answer incredulously.

At that, your hand made its way down again and was stopped once more.

"I want tonight to be about you, princess. Let me prove how much I love you."

You shot him a questioning look.

He smirked.

You have no idea what's coming He thought.

With his hands on your waist, he gently pushed you down onto the bed. He hiked up your (his) shirt to reveal your pretty tits.

Jason pressed open mouthed kisses on your neck, shoulders and chest. A hand came up to massage your breast and play with your nipple. His actions earned a moan from you, which only spurred him on in his antics.

"So beautiful" he murmured into your skin.

He continued down your body, only stopping to catch a glimpse of your head thrown back in painful anticipation.

Once he made his way down to your underwear he kneaded the flesh of your thighs and pressed kisses on the inside of each one.

"Gorgeous" he breathed between kisses

"Can I take these off?" He asks

You nod your head yes, but this is not sufficient for him.

"Need words pretty girl" Jason presses.

You let out a breathy yes and he begins to pull down your panties.

They were his favourite colour, Red.

"No other girl could wear my colour and be a sexy as you are. Understand?"

"Yes" you moan as his hands are at your feet, tossing your panties and rubbing your ankles.

At the cool breeze in the air, you snap your thighs together, unfamiliar with the change in temperature on your heat.

"No, none of that baby. Let me see that pretty pussy of mine."

You swear you could have cum at that statement alone.

Jason takes matters into his own hands as he gently and slowly pries your legs open, while maintaining eye contact to make sure you're still okay with what's going on.

Before he makes his descent, he lifts you slightly to move you further up the bed. A swift hand pulls a pillow and places it under your hips.

Clearly, he meant business.

Before your nerves had a chance to ruin the moment, Jason cuts the tension by turning to your inner thighs, leaving little bites and dark marks.

Without warning, he dives right in, relieving your sopping cunt of its misery.

The flat of his tongue drags up your soaking pussy, eliciting a surprised moan from you.

He continues with his affirmations.

"Nobody's pussy is a perfect as this one right here, yeah?"

You moan out at the praise.

"Need words baby or I'll stop"

"Y-Yes Jason!" you gasp as your hands desperately grip his sheets for relief. His tongue dancing with the devil on your soaked folds.

Briefly, he rises from between your legs and a scene of his saliva and your essence coats his lips and chin. His lips, now puffy, curl into a smirk.

"Now repeat after me. You make a mistake and I'll stop. Understood?" he continued.

"Fuck- Yes, I understand"

"There's my good girl" He affirms.

He goes back down with fervor this time. Jason's tongue wasted no time before lapping up what ended up on your thighs and circling your clit.

He begins. "There is no girl more perfect for Jason than me"

God he's good.

"T-There is- shit no girl- oh" You start, interrupted by his lips sucking on your clit.

"M-More perfect- ugh for J-Jason than me" You finish, proud that you were able to complete your first sentence.

Your success earned a proud "atta girl" from Jason as he continued his mission on your folds.

"There is no woman on this planet prettier than me" He started again, before his tongue resumed his actions.

This one was a challenge. Between his tongue and the suction of his lips, your orgasm was approaching quickly.

"There i-is no shit woman- fuck Jason I'm gonna-" you spit our frantically.

"Not yet. Finish the sentence first. You're almost there." He says as he raises his head from between your legs.

You let out a desperate whine at the sudden lack of stimulation and pushed your hips up against nothing. A strong forearm came to stop you, which your desperate state didn't appreciate.

You are left no choice but to continue.

"on this planted p-prettier than me." You finish.

Before you could beg, he was already there, hot breath ghosting over your need.

"Last one pretty girl. You can do it." Jason whispers. He moves his unused hand to interlock with one of yours that was previously gripping the bedding for dear life.

"Ready?" He asks

You nod weakly, followed by a whiny yes, knowing that only words will get you what you want.

"I am the only woman Jason has ever loved" He speaks over your heat.

You swore you came instantly.

Jason's heavenly mouth got to work again, leaving you a panting, mewling mess on his dark sheets. You were sure there was a puddle where his mouth met your cunt, and lewd, wet sounds filled the room.

Desperately needing your release, there was only one way to get it.

"I am t-the only fuck-" You were stopped by a particularly intense suck on your clit.

Jason's hand squeezed yours in encouragement. A silent "you can do this sugar" was mumbled over your pussy.

"Woman Jason ha-has ever- Ohh I'm so close Jay pleasepleaseplease". Your attempted recitation died with a desperate babble of his name.

His hand squeezed yours tightly, encouraging you once again to continue.

The tight coil in your tummy grew stronger and harder to ignore as Jason picked up the pace between your legs. It was as if he was a starving man, craving only one thing and finally receiving it.

"L-LOVED" You screamed as your release washed over you. Your eyes rolled and your back arched at the sudden sensation. Every nerve in your body was lit ablaze, burning so sweetly as he continued to lap at you through your high.

Nothing but, white-hot bliss filled each of your senses. You were so lost in your own pleasure, it almost hurt to come back down to earth.

When you opened your eyes again, you were met with a panting and disheveled Jason, juices all over his chin, and sweat down his brow. His collared dress shirt was unbuttoned and sinfully wrinkled. You couldn't help but marvel at his beauty in such an unkempt state.

Slowly, he began to remove the pillow from under you and pull your shirt down over your body. You hissed at the fabric dragging across your still-sensitive nipples, for which he apologized with a kiss on your nose.

Aligning his face with yours, he looked deep into your eyes and used his free hand to thumb away the tears of overstimulation on your cheeks.

"Don't you ever feel like you're not worthy of me again without telling me okay?" he remarks as he gives you a small, kind smile.

You nod, and he doesn't press you about it this time.

"I'll repeat this as many times as I need to sunshine, no questions asked."

He continued.

"I love you."

931 notes · View notes

sukirichi · 5 months ago

Text

[ DUSK ‘TILL DAWN : 010 ]

“we who bear the burden of the crown do not need to love. you only need to stay here, with me, in power, in greed, in lust – in victory.”

cw. modern royal au. infidelity. slight angst. reader is beginning to question everything she knew. reader almost drowns. toxic characters. suggestive. toxic relationships. unedited. SHIRTLESS KIYOOMI SHIRTLESS KIYOOMI

notes. the end of kiyoomi arc... mayhaps? also highly recommend listening to the linked song for this chapter and the fanmade playlist linked in the masterlist <3

wc. 8k

series masterlist

[ TEN ] you’ll see me in hindsight, tangled up with you all night, burning it down. someday when you leave me, I bet these memories follow you around

You underestimated Kiyoomi’s enthusiasm.

Blame it on the fact you would’ve never figured the word ‘enthusiasm’ and Kiyoomi could fit in the same sentence, but as always – the Prince was full of surprises. At precisely seven in the morning, he had knocked on your door to wake you up. Not the maid, nor the butler. The Prince himself. He’d asked you to join him for breakfast, boasting that everything was from farm to table – the cheese from the milk of his cows, the meat from his poultry, the scrambled eggs neatly placed around the plate – save for the wine he’d brought all the way from Greenville. ‘Nothing like liquor from your lands,’ he’d commented, and poured you a drink. You stifled a laughter. You hadn’t thought one could have wine for breakfast, but alas, the customs in the Palace were different. Here, you were just you, and Kiyoomi could simply be.

After breakfast, he’d given you a tour of his farmhouse, although calling it ‘house’ was entirely too humble.

Located in the countryside, surrounded by thick greenery and a dense forest with overlooking hills, Kiyoomi’s farmhouse felt like a sanctuary compared to the Palace. He didn’t even need much security, whatnot with the tall trees decorating the driveway to offer privacy. His gardens contained lush greens, and a diverse variety of flowers you hadn’t ever seen before. He knew them all by heart, even their scientific names. You teased him about it, how he was just showing off at this point, because who spews scientific names of flowers when no one asked? He took it with grace, though, or as much grace a flustered Prince could, anyway.

He’d scratched the back of his ear, looking at everywhere but you. “You spend enough time reading books and you can’t help studying everything.”

“I think it’s impressive,” you nudged his shoulder, “I’d certainly boast, too, if I had that knowledge.”

His brows furrowed in confusion. “But maybe not about flowers. No one cares about flowers.”

“I do!”

“Sure,” he snorted, “As long as they’re pretty enough to look at, you’ll like them.”

“I can’t help that I like pretty things.”

“No, you can’t,” his face smoothened, and he snuck a glance at you – all too quickly before straightening up. “I certainly can’t.”

Sometimes, you wondered if Kanami made herself busy on purpose. If maybe, just maybe, she had installed cameras all around the farmhouse and giggled to herself if she could see you and her son interacting. Bent over a bed flowers, with Kiyoomi explaining their origins, and you listening intently. Or Kiyoomi introducing you to his chickens (yes, he’d named them), and then snickering (which you soon learned was his version of a laugh) when you ran away after a mother hen mistook you for a threat. Of course, you didn’t share the same sentiments of humor. The mother hen’s claws were not a laughing matter, but Kiyoomi thought otherwise. He’d simply shaken his head because he wouldn’t let any form of harm come to you, anyway.

You wished that offhanded comment didn’t make you feel so warm inside.

Being here with Kiyoomi was… Well, it was better than anything you’d expected. This was how you wished your honeymoon had been – filled with laughter, sharing in good, lighthearted conversation, and being a part of nature. Spending minutes in silence while you took in your daily dose of sunlight. Being in good company. You were glad you accepted Kanami’s offer, and you only enjoyed yourself more with each passing hour you’d made yourself acquainted with Kiyoomi and his precious farm.

And then there was that nagging voice that told you he wasn’t Rintaro.

You snorted. He definitely wasn’t. If he had been Rintaro, you would probably be in the middle of nowhere, miserable, and crying yourself until you’ve dried up like a prune. No – you didn’t want to think about him right now. It would defeat the entire purpose of this getaway. You wanted to enjoy yourself, and enjoy you did. For now, you gazed upon everything your human eyes could take in – the slope of the hills, the slight swaying of the tree leaves from the fresh breeze, the cows grazing on the grass, and Kiyoomi’s dog, Kael, herding those who went astray. Such a confusing image to paint, that of a Prince wearing his riding boots at the porch of his back garden.

“Wow,” you exhaled, following him into the stables. He’d lent you some boots, too, and was now reigning the straddle parts for the horses. “I underestimated your place. Do you own all of these lands?”

“I do,” he proudly said, and swung open the tiny, white wooden gates to reveal a tall horse with shining black fur. He chuffed upon the sight of Kiyoomi. His tail wagged, his snout reaching over just when Kiyoomi extended his palm to cup his nose. In front of you, a ghost of a smile flittered on his lips. “This is Astra. He’s mine. Had him since he was an infant; Kanami got him for me on my twelfth birthday.”

You couldn’t help but smile too. For all his grumpiness around his Mother’s fretting of him, it was clear the Prince loved her. And it was such a nice thing to see since the other Princes weren’t so lucky when it came to their mothers.

Kiyoomi beckoned you to come forward, and so you did. You were hesitant at first, because Astra was enormous. He stood at least two heads taller than you, with thick, powerful legs that could easily crush you with one kick. But Kiyoomi was there holding him close by his reigns, and you grew more confidence with each step. Smiling at him, you bravely lifted a hand to cup his face.

“Hello, Astra. You are so beautiful.”

Astra chuffed at your compliment, and Kiyoomi let out his barely audible breathy chuckles.

“He’s flattered by the compliment. And that one next to him is Lucy, his girlfriend. She’s great for beginner riders,” he was now fixing Lucy’s reigns as he spoke, adjusting the foothold before leaning over her to glance at you. “Have you ridden one before?”

“Only several times.”

Nodding, you followed as Kiyoomi led the two horses outside the barn. Astra seemed to be over the moon upon being with Lucy without being separated by their gates, chuffing and whinnying repeatedly while bumping noses with her. Lucy was much more reserved, but returned the gesture and even licked him adoringly, which made your chest ache. Gods. Now you were jealous because these horses had a healthier, more loving relationship than you.

Before you could dwell on it, however, a pair of strong arms were already lifting you up. You yelped as you rose mid-air and flailed wildly. The ground below you disappeared, and soon, you were perched on Lucy’s back, while Kiyoomi effortlessly hopped on a much taller Astra. The action seemed so natural to him as if he’d done it multiple times – and dare you say, infuriatingly attractive. The Prince had the top three buttons of his shirt undone because he’d worked a sweat chasing the chickens away from you a while ago, and his curls stuck to his forehead in a way that showcased high-chiseled cheekbones you hadn’t seen before. And… wow. He was breathtaking without realizing it. It felt wrong to think that way, to feel this way, but it was just admiration, was it not? He was a literal Prince Charming, with a dash of awkwardness, and a spritz of unexpected geekiness.

You turned away when his large, calloused, and veiny hands began stroking Astra’s mane. You’d rather not have to think about how those same strong, yet gentle hands lifted you up as if you weighed nothing, and truly, that white shirt of his did little to hide his muscular build. Clearing your throat to rid yourself of those thoughts, you tightened your grip on the reins. “Where to, my Prince?”

“To the edge of the world.”

A smirk was all he gave you before he tapped Astra with his ankles, sending the stallion running off. Your jaw dropped. You hadn’t expected he’d leave you behind, and you refused to be left alone. Mimicking his gestures, you tapped on Lucy and bellowed. She ran and ran, hard enough that your bottom began to feel sore, but that was nothing, absolutely nothing compared to the sensation of the fresh wind whipping at your cheeks, the sun shining down on your skin, and the sounds of hooves hitting the Earth. Your racing heart matched the beat of Lucy’s footsteps as she easily caught up to a carefree Astra. She whinnied, and he responded with one of his own, making the Prince smile when you showed up beside him not a moment later – the smile on your faces proud.

“I knew you could catch up,” he shouted from over the wind, and your smile broadened.

The two of you rode aimlessly for what seemed like hours, even if it was just only minutes. Kiyoomi took you everywhere – in the middle of the forest, where you squealed as the horses ran over puddles and the dirt muddied your boots. But you found yourself unable to care. You were filled with so much glee, with so much life, that you were certain your heart was now pulsing in your arms. It was surreal how much you could see in slow motion despite the speed you were riding at. How your vision had become crystal clear as you took in the tall trees surrounding you, the deers running off and hiding when you’d ran past them. How Kiyoomi always seemed to be a few steps ahead, but always looking back to see if you’d follow him. You did, and you always would, even as he led you deeper into the forest and past the clearing.

Astra slowly skidded to a halt as you took in the scenery in front of you, and you tugged on Lucy, eyes wide open and jaw dropped. A nearly torn down fortress built of stone that was probably piled hand by hand stood before you, vines and moss growing from the walls from old age. It seemed sturdy, yet the holes and cracked towers said otherwise. It must have been centuries since someone last used this place.

“Are those castles?”

“Castle ruins,” he corrected, clicking his tongue as he led Astra to circle around the ruins. “Before Inarizaki split from Itachiyama, the first rulers set their base here.”

“So this was where the original monarchs were.”

It was the typical layout of a castle, with a flatter centre in the middle, and two, tall pillars on its side to serve as its towers. The right tower had already been destroyed, though, leaving a hole in its wake. The large wooden doors from the entrance of the castle had multiple marks on it, as if people had repeatedly tried to beat the doors down with their stakes and weapons. Black marks also decorated the stones, and judging by the empty, darkened patches of soils that was blatantly contrasting with the otherwise growing greenery around the ruins, this Castle must’ve been burnt down at some point.

“Yes, but as you can see, they’re nothing but ruins now. Inarizaki took with them whatever old rules and scriptures they had back in the old days. That’s why we still keep some traditions in our country, although its true origin was from the True Land. The old Itachiyama.”

“Traditions such as last dances on a debut ball?”

“Traditions such as that,” he agreed, rather shyly. His voice had grown distant now that he rode before you, more out of protectiveness as he peeked in the open windows. Once satisfied with what he’d seen, he jumped off Astra and walked to you, absentmindedly placing his large palm on your knee. “We can go see the ruins for ourselves, if you would like.”

Heat spread from where his hand came into contact with your skin – or leggings. Blinking back your nervousness, you reached your hands out to Kiyoomi, letting him gently place you down until you were steady on your feet.

“We are allowed? Wouldn’t that be trespassing?”

“We are royals. Technically, these are the homes of our ancestors,” he stated, and then pursed his lips when you didn’t laugh. “It was a jest. Everyone is free to roam around as they please. As I have said, Itachiyama has less rules.”

You venture inside the castle ruins, fascinated by it all. You kept thinking about what Kiyoomi said – how these were the homes of your ancestors. Once, a long time ago in history, Inarizaki and Itachiyama were united as one, huge territory. Their Kings and Queens lived here and wrote history for themselves. People roamed these hallways once, and it must have been bustling with life. These same stone staircases in which you climbed on were probably littered with torches beside the walls, with their knights guarding each mysterious and hidden door. And gods, the things done behind those doors. Did the Princesses giggle amongst themselves during tea times? Did the Princes like to sharpen their swords and had their choice of horses, as well?

Did the Kings love their Queens?

So many questions unanswered, except Kiyoomi did have answers. He satisfied your unending curiosity by telling you everything you wanted to know – that yes, Kings did love their Queens and former monarchs had many heirs and heiresses. Or how the original Castle only had a right and left wing, but the last King before the country was split in two dedicated a South wing as a burial spot for his wife, the last Queen, who had died in childbirth. He was nicknamed ‘The King of the End’ because his wife’s death led him to a dark path of war, bloodshed, and ultimately, the separation of Inarizaki and Itachiyama. He had become so cruel in his grief that he wielded his power as King wrongly; starving his people, abusing his servants, and neglecting his daughter, who had become the leader of a movement that gave way to Itachiyama becoming an independent territory. Unable to handle anymore of her father’s evil ruling, she’d banished him to Inarizaki, to the northern areas of the country, where her father continued the monarchy.

The story – heartbreaking and dark – caused the mood to dampen. You watched as Kiyoomi stopped inspecting the rooms, probably imagining for himself how this place held a lot of memories, both good and bad. He’d even made a point that he technically wasn’t a half-blood foreigner, since Inarizaki and Itachiyama all originated from one nation.

But he brushed it off, and you wondered if the Prince somehow felt alienated for being the only ‘half-blooded Prince.’ Which you found ridiculous because if that was the logic you followed, then all the Princes except Rintaro would be a half-blood for being illegitimate children. You made no other comments, however, and instead let the Prince reveal things about himself that he could in his own pace. Still, it seemed his mind had gone off a different path the quieter you got, and you nudged his shoulder, a teasing smile on his face.

“I still can’t believe you attended my debut ball. I was a nobody at the time. To hear of a Prince coming…”

Kiyoomi looked confused.

“You were not a nobody. Your father is the kingdom’s general.”

“Yes, but we like to keep to ourselves, and Inarizaki hasn’t fought wars in decades. It isn’t like my father is an active soldier when he has no battles to partake in.”

“He is still an important figure for the Crown. Not to mention your mother comes from a family of business tycoons,” he reminded, narrowing his eyes at you in what seemed to be ridicule – more out of puzzlement than rudeness. “You truly are unaware of your influence, do you? Your family is one of the three noble families that helped Inarizaki’s kings hold the crown.”

You shrugged. You were well-aware of your family’s position in the Kingdom, but it did not feel the same. “That may be true, but I did not go out much. People did not make efforts to befriend me, either. I cannot help but think people do not care much about me.”

“All of the Princes received the invitation letter for your birthday, but we get them enough that Her Majesty discards them, or leaves it up to our judgment should we wish to go,” as if recalling the memory crystal clear, the Prince went beet-red from his neck-up. He tried to hide it by puffing out his collar, but to no avail. The redness of his skin still peeked from his shirt, and you stifled a giggle. “I had just turned twenty-one at that time, so my mother had visited. I guess you could say it was sheer luck that she chanced upon your invitation and insisted I go.”

“To establish connections and form alliances with the general’s daughter?” you cajoled.

“To find a wife, actually,” he sputtered out, “My mother worries I will die a lonely man because I do not speak with women. Or to anyone, at all.”

“You speak plenty to me.”

“Only because I enjoy your company, and our conversations are not mindless, boring politics.”

“True, but if we were back in the Palace, I would have probably talked about politics with you. Or worse, biscuits and tea. We would not have been able to talk casually about flowers, or say,” you gestured around you, “The history of our countries and all the wars caused by a man in love.”

“May history never repeat itself,” he replied drily, and you laugh.

You roamed the ruins for a little longer, noticing details like the dusty and faded portraits of the old monarchs. Some of them have been torn up, save for a portrait of a beautiful young woman who must have been the last Queen. The one buried at the South Wing.

The rooms had been emptied, too, which you found off. You expected to see at least remnants of a bed, or a study, but Kiyoomi had explained that not much survived the fire. You were enamored with everything, though, feeling like you were time travelling. And you didn’t stop exploring until you’ve turned every room upside down without bothering the evidence of history, and Kiyoomi was content to let you be. Later, when you’d both grown tired and weary of the weakening rock fortress, you returned to where you tied Astra and Lucy.

The way back home was blissfully silent. The horses were no longer running, since Kiyoomi said the sun would shine brightest at this time of day, and he wanted to take you somewhere beautiful. Letting him lead the way, he led you back inside the forest and towards a lake hidden by the tall trees. It almost felt like a gated pathway, with all the trees lined up to the side and the lake sitting smack in the middle of it all.

He was right – the sunlight made everything a hundred times more beautiful.

The water glinted, gleamed like it was made of crystals. The water was so clear you could see everything underneath, from the tiny pebbles, down to the fishes swimming underneath in all bright colors. Even your reflection smiled back at you brightly. Unable to help it, you dipped a finger into the water, fascinated by the small ripples it caused, and how the smaller fishes scurried away from the motion.

Meanwhile, Kiyoomi secured the ties of the horses around a nearby tree and opened his satchel, handing you a red apple. “I grew it myself,” he nudged the fruit towards, “Here.”

“Thank you.”

You bit down on it, and held back a moan. Gods. Was Itachiyama heaven or something? Or did fruits just taste better fresh and without preservatives? His apples were juicier than the ones you have back at home, and you were gobbling it, uncaring of the juices that ran down your wrist, leaving a sticky trail in its wake. Kiyoomi had an apple for himself, too, but he seemed too amused by your reactions to start eating his.

“So,” you leaned back on your palms, bum flat on the bank, “What do you do back in the Palace?”

“Avoid Belleview at all costs.” He casted another sideways glance your way. “Do not ask me why.”

You wouldn’t dare ask why – you both knew – but you couldn’t stop your tongue from expressing your curiosity.

“Has… has Her Majesty ever pressured you and Iris to have children?”

“That is a very personal and uncomfortable question,” he sighed, exasperated, “But to answer you, no. She could care less about us as long as we fulfill our duties and do the necessary work. I imagine the case will be different for you, though, seeing as you married her precious son.”

“She hasn’t told us anything, but on the dinners we share with her, she will imply a thing or two.”

He snorted, and took a bite of his apple. “Well, good luck with that.”

“Have you known Iris a long time?”

“No. I never even knew she existed until Her Majesty told me I was getting married,” gently, he took the leftover apple core from your hands and pulled out a handkerchief, dipping the ends of it into the water before reaching for you. You stared at him, confused, when he gestured to your palms. Realization dawned on you, and you handed him your palm. Carefully, the Prince rolled up the sleeves of your blouse all the way up to your elbows and wiped the sticky remnants of the juice with his damp handkerchief.

His actions – so gentle yet intentional – made you feel all kinds of things you shouldn’t be feeling in the first place.

Yet, you couldn’t make yourself pull away from his grasp even if you wanted to.

“Why do you keep asking about her? I figured you would avoid anything that concerns her.”

You winced. “I just… I cannot help but compare myself to her. I often wonder what she has that I do not. Why Rintaro is completely smitten with her, and why he cannot love me just the same,” you admitted, thankful that the Prince has your hand in his, otherwise you’d make all sorts of flailing gestures and make yourself look more like a bumbling fool compared to the ever-so-graceful Iris. “It’s not to say I am the better choice, but have I not given him everything? I gave him my heart and soul. I vowed to spend a lifetime with him. What has she given him that I could not?”

“My brother is a fool. You cannot intellectualize a fool’s decision.”

“On the contrary, your brother is very smart.”

“Academically, maybe, but he knows nothing about life.”

“Oh, and you do?”

“I have lived longer than him.”

“Only by three years!”

“And yet it is crystal clear to me what Rintaro cannot see,” he pulled your sleeves down and stashed his handkerchief back into his satchel, leaning forward with his hand on his knee as he cast you a hard look. You couldn’t read whether it was anger, or something else entirely on his face. “He is a witless excuse of a husband, and more so of a man, because he truly deluded himself that he is in love with Iris when he is not.”

“Wh-what do you mean?”

“Those two do not even talk,” he scoffed, “They merely use each other’s bodies as a way of getting oneself of. But I doubt Rintaro has shared anything intimate with her, and knowing Iris, she will not open her heart to him, either. At least I know very well she does not share the same affections.”

You shook your head, consciously rubbing your wrists together.

“What you speak of is impossible. They care about each other.”

“Rintaro doesn’t even know Iris is allergic to shellfish. He has tried feeding it to her plenty of times on their ‘dates.’ And Iris has not an effing clue over what Rintaro likes outside the bedroom – things that a lover should know about their significant other. What makes Rintaro smile? What makes Iris tick? They know none of that. They are not in love. They are just lonely.”

You flinched. “I was lonely, too, when I met the Crown Prince. Does that mean I was not in love, as well?”

“You are in love,” he gritted his teeth, “Hopelessly so. And I honestly wish you had chosen better. Anyone instead of him.”

You opened your mouth to retort – somehow, his words sounded like an insult. As if you were an idiot for falling for Rintaro, and even worse, for marrying him. Fine, you were stupid. Sure, you didn’t make the best decisions when you were in love, but must he be so cruel about it? His words had pierced your pride and shattered it, and you felt humiliated. So you stood up, determined to walk away from the Prince when your foot slipped on something, and the world turned upside down.

The blue of the sky shifted from the clearness of the water as you were submerged. The scream you were about to let out was lodged in your throat, and you kept sinking, sinking, sinking. You thrashed your arms out wildly as your wet clothes weighed you down. You struggled to breathe, your eyes stinging until you were pulled out of the water and hefted into Kiyoomi’s lap.

“Princess! Are you well?”

His hands were everywhere. Cracking your eyes open to ensure you were with him, his thumb brushing over your lips numb from the cold, and his other hand, warm and comforting at the small of your back. Briefly, in the haze of post-shock and the urgent need for air, you could vaguely see your bra peeking out from the white shirt sticking to you like a second skin. A pastel pink bra – and suddenly you were cold for an entirely different reason. Thankfully, Kiyoomi didn’t seem to notice, or if he did, he was too much the gentleman to comment on it.

“Princess,” he tapped your cheek, and this time, you had no choice but to look him in the eye to reassure him. The Prince audibly sighed. “Thank the heavens you didn’t go too deep. Are you okay?”

Your teeth chattered, but you managed to flash him a thumbs-up.

“Th-the water is effing cold.”

Alarm painted over his features. The next thing you know, the Prince was shedding off his shirt and motioning for you to remove yours, as well. He’d already turned around before you could be embarrassed, taking his shirt from his outstretched hands. And my, was it warm. It smelled like him, too, of freshness and mint and nature. But mostly, it was dry, and you had no protests as Kiyoomi carried you once again – this time on Astra’s back instead of Lucy.

“Here, ride with me. Share my heat just until we head back to the farm.”

“O–” Kiyoomi was behind you in an instant, his chest deliciously warm as it pressed flushed against your back. Meanwhile, you burned to your core with embarrassment. He didn’t notice, though, because the Prince was too busy trying to get Lucy to follow him, all at the same time leading Astra forward with you blocking his path. He was so close his natural scent wafted off of you, something so masculine yet comforting. The muscles on his arms also flexed when he reached for Astra’s reign, and you were certain you were being tested right then and there. “–Kay.”

“Princess, can you promise me something?”

The hairs at the back of your hair stood. He sounded a lot closer than you previously thought he was. “Y-Yes?”

“You should avoid Iris at all costs. She is not who you think she is.”

You made it back to the farmhouse in half the time it took you to reach the castle ruins. Kiyoomi had been so worried over your health that he rushed back home. Eventually, he’d snapped at Lucy with such a fierce tone that the poor girl scurried forward, leaving you three behind with a heavier weight. You knew he meant well though – Lucy knew the way back home, and he figured seeing her without a rider would alert one of the servants to anticipate your arrival. True to his words, someone was already waiting.

“Oh, dear! What happened to you?!”

Kanami rushed forward just as Kiyoomi set you down. Like mother, like son – you thought. Kanami wouldn’t stop raising your limbs as if to inspect an injury, and she paled once she realized you were wearing Kiyoomi’s shirt, and her son strutted around the porch in his mighty, shirtless glory. Oh, Heavens. All that farm work really paid off. He was nicely built.

“She fell in the lake,” he responded calmly, though his frantic movements as a servant ran forwards said otherwise. “Please draw a bath for her. And make it warm. Thank you.”

“Yes, sir!” The maid scurried away.

Kiyoomi rushed inside the house first, while Kanami guided you back like you were a newborn foal unsteady on her legs. You didn’t need it, but the kind gesture was appreciated. A moment later, Kiyoomi appeared with a handful of towels.

“Th-thank you.”

“Oh, my, you poor thing,” Kanami crooned, “I will prepare dinner for the three of us. Please do join when you have made yourself comfortable, Your Highness.”

Excusing yourself, you headed upwards and took a warm bath. The tub had already been filled with vanilla and other oils, and you soaked in it, letting the hot water seep into your skin and relax your muscles. It also wouldn’t hurt to smell nice – especially when Kiyoomi always smelled delectable. But just as that thought crossed your mind, and the sight of his abs flexing while he ran around the porch looking for a maid flashed in your memory again, you dunked your head under the water. You’ve heard of cold dunks, but now, it was time for hot dunks.

You had to stop thinking about him.

Or… why should you? Was it to stay loyal to Rintaro? Did it even make sense to be loyal to someone who wasn’t? Was it a sin to be attracted to Kiyoomi when Rintaro was clearly into Iris?

You were exasperated, and by the time you’d finished your bath, the time on the clock told you that you perhaps enjoyed it a little too much. Remembering that Kanami was preparing dinner for tonight, you quickly got dressed and rushed downstairs. You were about to announce yourself when you heard two voices – the loud, clear one of a woman’s, and an aggravated, quieter voice belonging to a man. You froze in your spot, unsure if you should make yourself known. But what if they were arguing? Would that make it worse? Or maybe you should just walk away and not eavesdrop? You should respect their privacy –

“If you have something to say, just spit it out.”

“Silly boy. You could be sweeter to your mother. I cooked your favorite dinner!”

“This was my favorite five years ago.”

“Well, how would I know? You don’t tell me anything!” Kanami argued, and faster than you could blink, her aggravated tone quickly turned into a sickly-sweet one – the persuasive Kanami you knew so well. “Anyways, I just wanted to say I am very proud of you, son. I heard Her Majesty was pleased with the work you managed to finish here, and your people are very delighted to hear you have returned. I really wish you would visit more often.”

“…I will try.”

“And bring Her Highness with you, of course,” she added, and you bit your lip. You could just be imagining it, but Kanami sounded like she had another meaning to it. Like Kiyoomi was somehow by default going to invite you. “Also… speaking of the public. Well, they’re just eager to see you! Both of you! Which is why I am inviting you both to the premiere event of my latest movie-”

“No.”

“What do you mean, no?”

“Too many cameras. I don’t like it,” he tried to reason, and you heard footsteps echoing from the dining room. Without enough time to duck and hide, you plastered yourself against the wall, forcing a smile on your face when the Prince caught you red-handed. He smirked, seemingly amused, crossing his arms on his strong chest. “Let me ask the Princess herself if she’d like to go, though. If she does, I might change my mind.”

“I…I’ve never been to a premiere night. I would like to,” you smiled, albeit shyly, your gaze darting between Kanami and her son – who you think is now going to be your biggest problem. Or more like the things he was making you feel was becoming the problem.

“Then it is settled! I’ll bring my stylists over and we will all get ready for tomorrow’s event,” she announced, circling the dining table as she pumped her fists in the air. “Oh, you guys will be the talk of the whole country for weeks! This is going to be great!”

“I look forward to seeing your movie, Kanami.”

“Oh, and don’t forget! You’re each other’s dates,” she winked, and just like that, all hell broke loose.

For a country that claimed to not indulge in the luxuries, Kanami’s premier night could rival that of a Prince’s birthday ball. A red carpet. A hundred photographers, with even more journalists and interviews. Celebrities were everywhere you looked. This night was the definition of a night to be remembered, with all the flashing lights on you that it was actually blinding. Apparently, the public had caught wind that Prince Kiyoomi, and you, a Princess of Inarizaki and a potential Queen, would be attending, so the crowd doubled in size in anticipation. It wasn’t often their lovely Prince made an appearance to public events solely catered for media and entertainment. It was even more baffling he brought a Princess with him – one that wasn’t his wife.

At first, you were anxious they might not like you. You were the date of their Prince, and he wasn’t your husband – but the crowd cheered and screamed as you left the car, your gloved arm looped around Kiyoomi’s. He was extra handsome tonight – his curls gelled back, revealing a handsome face sculpted by the Gods themselves, and he wore a tailored suit nothing short of extravagant.

Kanami’s team did great making you look beautiful too. And dare you say, you felt confident enough to be standing next to the Second Prince. You wore a sleeveless champagne colored dress that hugged your figure well, with a fur cloak wrapped around your shoulders. A Bvlgari Serpenti Viper necklace hang on your neck, a gift from Kanami before she left first for the event. It was a simple look – nothing too flashy, and yet you could tell the difference from your usual outfits were you to show up in royal events.

Firstly, you wouldn’t be allowed to show this much skin. The amount of collarbones exposed for the world to see would have Her Majesty in a cardiac arrest. And the necklace you wore wasn’t dainty or minimal enough – by Her Majesty’s standards. The fur cloak would have her in shambles, too, but somehow, you couldn’t care that much.

Kiyoomi couldn’t tear his gaze off of you, and the cameras flashed at each move you made. Every blink, every smile, every nervous graze of your finger against Kiyoomi’s arm.

The last time people had noticed you this much and showed their love for you was when you married Rintaro. The only difference was you didn’t feel this exhilarated. On that day, you only felt miserable. Like your entire hurt was on display for the world to see. That your heartbreak was being broadcasted worldwide, and the smiles Rintaro sent your way was scripted, perfected for the cameras.

Kiyoomi wasn’t like that.

Kiyoomi wasn’t like him.

He never looked at the cameras once. He only had his eyes on you, and when he spoke, he did so behind your earrings, as if he was aware people could read his lips and this moment was private. It was just you and him, and not even the watchful, inquisitive eyes of the world could take this away from you. He made you feel safe, utterly protected even when presented for everyone to judge and criticize.

“If you wish to leave at any point, tell me and I will take you away from here.”

His voice, deep and smooth and gentle, sent shivers down your spine. It felt oddly intimate taking photos with him like this, how his arms had snaked around your waist to pull you closer to him. How he would always speak secretively, yet the slight curling of his lips would be open for the cameras to witness. How his fingerless ring sits comfortably at your hip, and you were leaning against him, smiling at the cameras whilst he smiles at you. The moment was utterly sensitive that you feared one wrong move could undo it all.

And you wouldn’t let it.

Turning your head to the side, you leaned up to whisper at him. “Thank you, but I think I will enjoy myself tonight.” You kept your voice low like his, spoke your words slowly as if you were treading on icy ground, and when you pulled away, you noticed you’d left a smear of your lipstick on the tip of his ear.

You didn’t tell him to wipe it away.

You didn’t stop when he held your hand. You didn’t tear your gaze away from him when he led you inside the building, and neither did you tell him to stop when he kept his arm around your waist until you’d found your seats. Admittedly, you couldn’t focus on the movie. It was difficult when you could feel Prince Kiyoomi’s gaze on you – how braver he seemed when in the dark. You feign ignorance to it all, or more like you tried, because you lightly pinched his thigh and told him to focus on the movie. For a moment, you thought he didn’t hear you. But then he turned his head away and you both watched his mother’s romance film – which, thankfully, she isn’t the love interest in. It would be extremely awkward if she was. But it was still a rather intense romance film – a forbidden relationship between a man and his best friend’s wife.

Kiyoomi shifted uncomfortably in his seat. You were now at the scene where the female main character and her lover, her husband’s best friend, were under the rain. They had gotten into an argument – the woman didn’t want to continue their relationship anymore, didn’t want to have to continue lying to those close to her, but the man was having none of it.

He loved her.

He’s loved her for a long time.

He loved her first.

And he knew damn well her husband wasn’t treating her right. They only got married anyway because he had gotten her pregnant at a university party, and things went downhill from there. But he could only handle so much. He could only endure so much. Eventually, all the love he’d been holding back had grown too much it had poured out from his veins. He would run after her, chase her, and follow her wherever she went. She had his heart from the moment he laid his eyes on her. He wouldn’t give up on her now.

But it was wrong – she knew it was.

You gripped the edge of your seat.

The man, broken and down to his knees, professed his love to her. His tears were flowing down his face on time with the rain, and the woman… Well, she was devastated for a lack of better words. She didn’t like her marriage. She didn’t even like her husband. But what would people say? They wouldn’t understand. They would only see her as a lowly woman who cheated on her husband, with his best friend of all people. They would never see her pain, or how she, too, craved to be loved the way she loved others.

No matter what she said, the man was never swayed. He would fight for her. He would be brave for her. And then he stood up, took her face into his palm, and kissed her. Your eyes grew wide. The kiss was too intense it was hard to believe it was only acting. No, he kissed her like he was consuming her soul, like he was breathing her in. Like he was the air she needed to live, and without her, he would be nothing. And when she kissed him back, she had melted. Like all of pins and needles she used to hold herself up withered away because there was no need to be strong when she knew he would always catch her, that he would be there to be her pillar, her strength, her fortitude.

You looked away from the kiss. Beside you, Kiyoomi had turned his gaze away from the screen, too, and his eyes were so dark it was hard to see him at all. But you knew he was looking at you. And something about his gaze seemed forbidden – felt like a secret. Because in this theater, everyone had their eyes on the screen, completely unaware that the Prince held the same intensity in his eyes when the man kissed his beloved.

Your lips tingled.

Your fingertips curled, aching, itching to reach out to him. He was right there – just within your reach. You could run your hands through his thick, dark curls. You could stare into those dark eyes and get lost within them. It wasn’t love – no, not really. But it was the beginning of something more, and you didn’t know what was louder – your heartbeat or the cheers of the audience as the movie came to an end.

And then the realization struck you –

You wanted Kiyoomi to kiss you.

The lights flashed on. The audience cheered and applauded. The moment was broken.

You looked back to the stage, feeling cold dread wash over you. You couldn’t believe it. You had thought of a different man that wasn’t your husband in ways that were… inappropriate. Is this what Rintaro felt? When he looked at Iris, did he feel this need to have his lips on her? Did he yearn for her? But what could this mean? Were you falling for Kiyoomi? It couldn’t be. It’d only been a week. You were great friends – yes, friends! And friends didn’t go around kissing each other. Friends didn’t want their friends to kiss them.

But you had wanted him to, anyway, and now your dress felt suffocating.

Wordlessly, you stood up from your seat. You headed for the exit, or the restroom, you were unsure. All you knew was that you had to leave. You turned away from everyone who greeted you, pushed away anyone who asked for a photo, and your blood ran cold. What would the tabloids say? That you were a rude Princess? You were sure you look like a madman running out of the theatre when the night had barely even begun. Maybe you looked like a criminal caught in the middle of her act – and what crime? Adultery.

Tears pricked at your eyes. You willed them away, because you didn’t want to ruin your makeup. But you just… This was all a mistake. You should have never come to Itachiyama.

He was your husband’s brother!

You pushed the doors open, arms raised to call for a driver when a flash of lights bombarded you. It stung, blinding you for a moment until you stumbled back. A horde of reporters were shoving their phones and microphones in your face before you could process anything. You pushed back to the crowd, begging for reprieve, but there were too many of them, and only one of you. They all screamed your name, chanted your title, and in the midst of it all, you heard Rintaro’s name being spoken.

“Please,” you insisted, “I just want to get back to my car. Please, let me–”

“Your Highness! Princess!” a reported shoved his way through the crowd, his microphone hitting your lip hard enough that your teeth ached. Shit. You lowkey missed the strict customs in Inarizaki – people wouldn’t be so comfortable being in your personal space otherwise. But the reporter’s next words made your stomach drop.

“Did you visit here with Prince Kiyoomi as payback?”

“I – excuse me?”

Stunned into silence, you stared back at the man demanding answers from you. There was a crazed look in his eyes, his free hand clutching a camera that had taken multiple photos at the look of surprise in your face. Your sweat turned cold, and you took a step back. You headed back for the building, only to collide with a firm chest and a familiar scent washing over you. Before you could do anything, Kiyoomi had spun you around to face him, your head tucked in his neck as he pushed through the crowd. “Out of my way!”

You clung onto him like a child. You close your eyes, letting him shoulder all the pushing and shoving, all to keep you safe within his hold. The entire way back to the car, Kiyoomi bellowed at the people to give way for the both of you, and you’d never heard him sound so angry. Yet, you didn’t feel scared – at least, not of him.

The night was just taking an unexpectedly wrong turn, and you weren’t sure how much more you can handle.

“Kiyoomi,” you cried into his chest, “I don’t know what’s going on. I’m scared.”

“Do not answer them. Those are reporters and journalists crazed for the latest gossip.”

“Princess! Is it true your marriage is falling apart? Are you here in Itachiyama because of what the Crown Prince did? Answer us, Princess! What will be the future of the throne?”

The car came into view. Kiyoomi’s security team formed a barricade around you to allow you safe entry inside the car, puffing out their chests and shoving away anyone who dared tried to follow. Once inside, Kiyoomi barked on the driver to just move, and the car sped away. Your breathing slowly stabilized, but you were still far from being composed. In front of you, Kiyoomi had his hands balled into fists at his knees, his jaw clenched so tight you feared he’d pop a vein.

“Kiyoomi. What is going on? What were they talking about?”

Kiyoomi visibly relaxed at the sound of your voice. Dragging a hand down his face, he sighed, reaching for a tablet tucked away behind the seats and clicked on something. Then, he handed the tablet to you – and all your worst fears had now come to life. All the secrets you buried, the lies you’d kept – none of it was hidden anymore.

Trending for the past hour was an article recently published by a man named Kuroo Tetsurou, headlined ‘CROWN PRINCE RINTARO AND PRINCESS IRIS: LOVERS WITHOUT THEIR SIGNIFICANT OTHER?’

The headline photograph was taken from a window, the photo blurry yet all the details were clear enough. Rintaro, on the bed, leaning against the headboard with his dress shirt unbuttoned and falling down on his shoulders. Iris, on top of him, bare with only her chest censored by a thick, black line. She was kissing him, her hands looped around her neck. Rintaro held her tightly, too, like he was afraid of letting her go – his hand with your wedding ring on it cupping her cheek as he kissed her back. On his neck were multiple hickeys, and her hair let loose and wild.

You felt like you stopped breathing entirely.

“Sir,” mumbled the driver nervously, “Are we going back to the farmhouse?”

“No. Head for the airport. We’re going straight to the palace.”

“But… Sir, your mother is still at the-”

“Kanami will understand,” grunted Kiyoomi, who suddenly snatched the tablet from you and shut it off. You didn’t know whether to be thankful or not. Quite frankly, you didn’t know what to feel. You felt numb and about to go insane all at the same time. Kiyoomi was more composed, at least, but it seemed he knew about this earlier and came running after you. Sighing, he loosened his tie and leant back against his seat.

“We need to go back to Inarizaki.”

You swallowed. You knew it now – you weren’t any better than Rintaro in the photos. But you could be honest, you could tell the truth, you could make it all better and stop it before it gets worse.

“Kiyoomi,” you trembled, spinning your wedding ring around your finger. “There’s something I need to tell you.”

The Second Prince shut his eyes. His placid face a contrast to his fists tightening even more. “Don’t,” he said, his voice sounding more resigned. Funny, how he was inches away from you, and he suddenly felt so far away when he opened his eyes – and you couldn’t recognize the man sitting in front of you anymore. “Whatever it is, just don’t.”

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