#my empire of dirt if you will | Explore Tumblr posts and blogs

weltraum-vaquero · 1 year ago

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You could have it all (my empire of dirt)

3. when the last light warms the rocks (and the rattlesnakes unfold)

[Chapter 1] ↠ [Chapter 2] ↠ [Chapter 3] ↠ [Chapter 4] ↠ [Chapter 5] (coming soon)

[AO3 link]

Western AU

18+

Jayce Talis x GN AFAB Reader

Word count: 17.5k+

Synopsis: Jayce’s relationship with you changes — for the better, and for the worse.

Tags/warnings: cowboys in love, anal fingering, Jayce being head over heels but also an anxious mess, angst, crying after sex, reader being emotionally constipated

Notes: Hi. This is what I've been pouring my heart and soul into for the past 6 months. Rest assured that we've still got a long way to go, and that this is NOT the final chapter of this fic. We're only about halfway there. Strap in, strap on, and get ready for porn town, and also pain town. As always, a huge thanks to @valaruakars and @heraldeez for helping me polish this bad boy. It wouldn't be here without you :].

“What has got you smiling through the meatloaf you usually despise so deeply, Jayce?”

Swallowing an unchewed bite of the meatloaf he usually despises so deeply, Jayce straightens up in his chair, glancing Cassandra’s way. The sound his throat makes when he swallows is almost cartoonish — he wants to curl in on himself then and there. Instead, he clears his throat, his smile now long gone.

She watches him intently, like a cat on the prowl, while she awaits her prey — his reply.

“I wasn’t—“ Jayce manages a nervous, dumb little laugh. He’s screwed. “I mean… was I? I don’t think I was.”

“I think you mean who’s got him smiling,” Cait chimes in. As she shifts in her seat, Jayce realizes she’s tucked her legs under her chair specifically so that they’d be far out of his kicking range.

God, he hates when she does this.

“Oh?” Cassandra’s brows raise with interest, and she sets her fork down on the fine china gracefully before her gaze rests on him, icy blue and downright relentless. “Is that so?”

His stomach seems to physically sink while he scrambles for words and finds none. Bounty hunter, protector, hardened outdoorsman, and yet both of the Kiramman women can outdo him in a handful of sentences or less.

Tobias gives him a sympathetic smile, like he pities him already, and like he knows what he’s about to go through all too well.

Being at the mercy of Kiramman women does evoke a certain sense of camaraderie.

“I, uh–” Jayce clears his throat to stall for time; he reaches for the wine glass he hadn’t touched throughout the whole dinner so far. “Sort of.”

“It would be wonderful to meet them sometime,” Cassandra says.

Jayce has never taken a bigger gulp of anything in his whole life than this godawful wine. Caitlyn muffles a laugh into her napkin.

It tastes horrendous. He still fails to understand what exactly Cassandra loves about this expensive, bitter vintage and hates about the sweet cheap bottles he buys at the general store. He swallows it down even though it scratches at his throat and weighs heavy on his tongue. He realizes that all his stalling counted for nothing, because he still has no idea what to say.

“I’m not, uhm–”

“Look at him, he’s redder than a steamed lobster. Let the poor boy be,” Mr Kiramman interrupts. He tops up his wife’s wine glass — a peace offering of sorts, before he claps his hand on Jayce’s shoulder. “I’m happy for you, Jayce ”

“We all are.” Cassandra pauses briefly, and though her voice has gone soft, Jayce can feel her scrutiny weighing down on him. She’d love to know more, he can tell, but much like her daughter, she knows that information takes patience to obtain. Unfortunately for him, she has it in spades. “As a matter of fact, Tobias and I were starting to wonder how much longer bounty hunting and tinkering with guns would keep you busy.”

“Oh.” Jayce swallows thickly. “I-I’m still… very much focused on my job. This is, really, it’s nothing… serious,” he lies.

Because it is, now.

Has been for longer than he’d like to admit. He’s been hung up and restless and devoted, even while he was still waiting for you to return to Piltover for your tent.

(And for him, god, hopefully for him too.)

He’d ridden up to that spot under that weeping willow, and spent the afternoon waiting and wondering and ignoring the leaden feeling in his stomach that maybe you wouldn't show. What’s an outlaw’s promise worth, after all?

But you had.

He’d spotted you, possibly before you’d even spotted him from under the drooping branches. Your hand had clutched tight at the strap of your rifle, ready to unshoulder it, while you’d been cautiously approaching the riverside.

It was only then he’d realized how much of your previously held power you’d relinquished simply by returning.

There were ways he could have used this against you — ways he could’ve set up an ambush. A few of Marcus’ men tucked under the ridge you’d pushed him off of, another one perched up on a tree in the not so distant forest with a scoping rifle, and you’d have been done for.

And Jayce had wondered how naïve, how trusting and gullible and utterly unaware he had to be, to not have had that thought cross his mind even once until now.

But that lasted just until you spotted him, and your hand had fallen loosely from the strap of your rifle to your hip.

You’d still approached slowly, not skittish in any way, but merely cautious. You’d tried to be subtle when you had briefly glanced towardthe riverbank (in the search of footprints that didn’t belong to him, Jayce could only assume), then met his gaze with sinking shoulders and an unclenching jaw.

He’d not been sure if he should’ve felt insulted that you’d thought he’d have used this opportunity to catch you, or flattered at the fact that you’d still taken a chance on him and returned anyway.

There wasn’t much to see much of your face, not until you’d raised your chin and met his gaze, one brow quirked expectantly, an amused little smile growing ever wider as you’d watched and waited. Waited for him, he’d realized, nearly choking on his spit. All the words inside his head had seemed to form a sticky, stupid mass he hadn’t been able pluck anything coherent out of.

“I, uh, hello.” Jayce had swallowed thickly, awkwardly, before he realized he’d curled in on himself, and rushed to straighten out his posture. If your growing smile had been anything to go by, you’d noticed. But you had the decency to not point it out — or maybe you were saving it for later.

“Howdy.” You’d cleared your throat, and though the way you’d set your hand on your hip could have seemed relaxed, practiced, Jayce could tell you were practically gripping it with how the leather of your black glove creased deep with the pressure. Your posture had seemed unusually… stiff.

“I, uh…brought your tent.” Jayce had gestured to the gear tucked under his arm, before mentally cursing himself for being such a conversationalist.

“Thank you kindly,” you’d replied, significantly less suave than you’d been the last night he’d seen you, yet significantly suaver than anything he could ever muster up. Reluctantly, you’d shifted your weight off one foot onto the other before you’d looked at him with a small, but still oh-so-winning smile and told him: “I’ve brought you something, too.”

Jayce had found the amorphous mass of words to have tangled and turned even stickier, just like his throat, tight with surprise, anticipation and anxiety.

You’d brought him something?

You’d thought of him, in the weeks you’d spent apart, you’d picked something out for him, you’d–

You’d likely done this just to get him into your bed. Well, sleeping bag, probably, but there had been no other plausible explanation, had there? You’d never seemed the kind of person to pay mind to such… sentimental matters, unless there was something to gain.

If Caitlyn would’ve been there with him, she would’ve told him to give you your gear and leave. And perhaps he should’ve brought her, to keep him from doing something as stupid as accepting a gift from an outlaw, but he hadn’t.

“Here,” you’d encouraged, stepping closer and holding it out to him. “I hope it suits you just as much as I thought it would.”

And how could he have said no to that?

Jayce’s hands had almost been shaking when he’d taken it from you, driven only by willful ignorance and curiosity as he slowly cupped his hands around the fabric you’d dropped in them, swallowing though his mouth had gone dry the moment the weight pressed against his palms.

He’d risked a glance back at you and had found not malicious expectancy, didn’t find you looking at him like he was prey about to fall into your trap, but with genuine excitement.

So Jayce had pushed the foreboding feelings to the back of his head and then pushed the fabric in his hands apart with his thumbs to peek at what was wrapped within.

A pendant. Dark golden gemstone, no bigger than the tip of his index, wrapped in delicate wire to hang onto a leather cord just long enough to reach around his neck.

“The woman that sold me this,” you’d told him, “didn’t speak a word of English. But I saw this pretty little thing with the rest of her wares, I knew I had to have it. All golden and pretty, it looked just like your eyes shining by the campfire that last night I saw you. And when I pointed at it and asked what it was, do you know what she told me?”

Jayce had taken it from the fabric to inspect it in a shaky hand, half-confident in what he could still remember from all the books on gemstones he’d consumed in his youth.

And it had looked… like citrine, most likely. It was common enough to be readily available and not cost too much, and he knew for a fact it couldn’t be amber after he pressed his fingernail against it and found it to be rigid.

Jayce’s heart plunged all the way into his stomach then bounced back up into his throat with excitement when he realized — could this be Topaz?

No. Considering its price range, absolutely not. It was not cheap or even readily available gemstone, especially not in a shade this dark. It had to be citrine. Most definitely.

“Topacio,” you’d answered, like you’d followed every step of his thought process and were eager to turn it all belly-up with just one word.

“I, wh— Topaz?” Jayce had blurted, feeling very much like you’d cracked his skull open and peeked at his thoughts. The prospect of having been gifted something so rare and expensive — it… well, he had liked to consider himself a man above materialism, to believe himself not so easily swayed by an expensive little gift, because it wasn’t like he lacked the money to buy himself pretty gemstones, it was just…

Different when you did it.

“What do you think?”

He hadn’t dared saying it, but he’d remembered that first night at the saloon, when you’d set your eyes on him and figured out everything he needed and wanted to hear with just one glance.

Didn’t dare telling you it had felt like you’d been there, when his mother had put her knobby, laundry-soap-cracked hands over his and thunked the heavy mineralogy book shut and told him that there were other things, more important things, that needed his focus. That this useless passion was not something he could indulge in right now, with his father gone so soon. Not with so many new responsibilities waiting to lay heavy on the shoulders of the new man of the house.

He hadn’t let go right away. Had still fallen asleep on his books after a day spent shoveling shit and herding cattle and unearthing vegetables and shooting practice. But it had become increasingly obvious over the years that all his gemstones and books best belonged under his bed in his childhood home.

You’d found and pulled them out — though metaphorically — without the slightest idea they even existed in the first place.

Jayce had been downright terrified of how little you knew about him, and yet how much you’d already seemed to understand.

“I can’t accept this,” he’d said, though he wanted nothing more than to stroke his thumb over the uneven ridges of the gemstone in his hand over and over until they were etched into his fingertips. “I— this must’ve cost quite a pretty penny.”

You’d winked.

“Not nearly as pretty as you.” Hadn’t given him the chance to insist before you changed the subject. “‘S your stallion’s name, too, ain’t it?”

And Jayce hadn’t quite fathomed that such a detail mattered to you enough to not only recall, but bring up.

“Yes,” Jayce had confirmed, overwhelmed with a passion he’d long buried and forgotten because it just wasn’t something he could afford to indulge in, now reawakened by you. “I didn’t… Didn’t think you’d remember. It’s been a few weeks.”

You’d offered up a smile unlike your usual ones. It was warmer, more genuine, but didn’t lack an ounce of your usual smugness.

“I did say I would be missing you fondly, didn’t I?”

You say it like it’s plain and simple. Like Jayce could’ve easily anticipated you buying this for him, regardless of the price — because topaz is by miles pricier than citrine — all because it had reminded you of his eyes.

Over the past weeks, he’d held and stared at and touched each and every curved letter in the note you’d left him, like it meant touching you, seeing you. But he’d be lying if he said it hadn’t crossed his mind that you might’ve lied when you said you would be missing him just to get another fuck out of him when you’d be returning.

(He’d be lying if he said he didn’t think about letting you.)

“I just–” You’d shrugged, suddenly stumbling in the sweet talk that used to come so enviously easily to you. Not that it had been obvious. It never was, not when it came to you; he’d suspected you’d long outgrown anything more insecure than faltering in your words. “I knew it had to be yours. Do you like it?”

To have you looking for reassurance had made his face run hot and his chest run hotter. His throat had started to close and — oh, those were tears clouding his vision, of course they were. He’d rushed to push them down with a thorough exhale, but of course his throat had started whistling with its growing tightness. Perfect.

“Yes,” Jayce had spoken through the tears he hadn’t yet managed to swallow wholly. “Yes. Will— help me put it on?”

“Of course.”

You’d rushed to, literally. Had closed what little space there was between the two of you in the blink of an eye, hands coming up to tie both strings behind his neck, forearms resting against his shoulders in something that desperately wanted to be a hug, but didn’t dare to.

And you’d been quick to finish, too. Nimble hands had tied a sturdy knot before you’d retreated, hands lingering on his shoulders, running down his arms, barely ghosting over his palms before you stepped back.

The gemstone had laid heavy and cold against his collarbone, like a promise.

“I can’t thank you enough,” Jayce had said. “It’s— it’s wonderful.”

Possibly the most wonderful gift he’d ever gotten.

And how much sadder that thought would’ve sounded had it left the confines of his brain. The most meaningful gift he’d ever received — coming from an outlaw who’d fucked and tricked him not once but twice. Laughable, pathetic, but most of all simply sad.

He’d spent the rest of the night worrying when you’d demand something in return for your gift, because he’d been well aware keeping and returning a tent could not compare to a gemstone so pricey.

But you hadn’t. You’d left it at that. Had spent the rest of the night simply talking to him, telling him of little things that had happened to you in your weeks away, and he’d clung onto every word, had offered some of his own, which had been revered equally.

That was that. You hadn’t kissed him, hadn’t touched more than what you had when you’d put the necklace on him. Once dawn had broken through the clouds and he’d caught himself yawning through his sentences, you’d dragged yourself up to your feet. And you’d told him that you’d best get going, you had places to be by next week, places he hadn’t dared asking about. If this was going to be the last time he’d see you, Jayce had figured you might as well linger in his memory fondly, and that he’d rather not worry about who you’d rob and where you’d strike next.

This — you bathed in the early morning light — would have been a much nicer way to remember you. The outlaw who fucked him once, fooled him twice, and treated him fairly, gently at the very end in spite of it all.

But you’d said, right after you’d swung your leg over your stallion’s back and Jayce had started staring at the tips of his boots to hide budding tears, that you would be passing through Piltover again in a few weeks' time. Had told him you’d be here, shall he want to see you.

And then you’d left.

He’d spent the whole night and the following week holding back tears whenever he’d remembered the pendant – which had been often, given how unfamiliar it felt, hanging above his collarbone, steadily soaking up his body’s ecstatic heat. A new part of him now, a constant reminder of you.

And that you’d be coming back.

By the third time you’d stopped by to see him – and Jayce had started suspecting you were taking unnecessary detours specifically to pass through Piltover – you’d started sending letters. Small things – just a few affectionate words, pressed leaves or petals (or sea glass, when you’d spent some weeks in Bilgewater). But you hadn’t kissed him for months on end. Not once in all the times you’d come to visit him.

He’d had to ask for it.

Even though your nose had been nudging his after he’d leaned in with laughter from a particularly corny joke of yours, Jayce had to close his eyes to gather his courage and swallow his beating heart before he could get out the words, just a mere whisper: “Please kiss me.”

They’d weighed so heavy for a moment; he’d wondered why he’d had to ask in the first place, when you’d been so brazen when you first met him. Did you not want to anymore, or had you just been waiting for him to ask?

You’d confirmed the latter when you’d dived into it like you’d restrained yourself for months. You’d licked into his mouth, starved, had sucked on his lips and charted out the taste and texture of his tongue like it was something to be savored. Like you’d been aching to rediscover it – rediscover him, but do it properly this time.

Which you had.

One thing had lead to another, touches had lingered, kisses had dipped lower, teeth had scraped sensitive skin, lips had followed suit to soothe. And your lips always soothed, always known where to latch on and how to coax him right where you wanted him – panting and spent and boneless and wrung absolutely dry–

Jayce startles when Cassandra clears her throat and leans in her seat with a knowing smile.

“Well, if it does get… serious, I simply hope that special someone won’t distract you from your duties – you’re still in your prime, you know. Retiring now would be a shame.” She smiles over the rim of her wine glass.

Jayce can only nod, although the seed has been planted.

“It would be,” he agrees, but the thought of settling down with you lingers in his mind from then on, and grows stronger every time he wakes up next to you, knowing you will have to bid your goodbyes come noon.

It’s during one of those late mornings after a long night spent with you that it dawns on him. He wants to taste your kiss – still bitter from sleep and coffee – every single morning for the rest of his life. He wants to hold you every night before he drifts off to sleep, wants to cook every meal with two people in mind, and wants your scents to mingle until they become indistinguishable, present in every room of the house, unidentifiable to either of you.

He wants to spend his life with you.

And he’s downright terrified of asking for that.

–

“This better be worth it, darlin’.”

“Have I ever let you down before?” He says it in a light tone, like he knows the answer to it without needing to hear it, and yet he finds his own shoulders slouching and gaze dropping to the tips of his boots and the tree roots below them.

It’s a question he’d rather not know the genuine answer to. It worries him more than he’d like to admit that one day, without warning, you will stop returning to Piltover. Stop replying to his letters. That he won’t even know where to send them, because you never stay in one place for too long, and you always have to tell him which post office to send them to before you go, or in a letter you send his way first.

He shouldn’t be having those thoughts, not when you’ve been accommodating him these past months, with the number of your visits steadily increasing, and your letters becoming more frequent. There is nothing to worry about, there should be nothing to worry about, especially not right now.

He chooses to draw in a steadying breath and chase those thoughts from his mind, which is made easy when you catch up to him and brush your gloved hand against his.

“Never,” you reply. He wants to believe that.

“Besides,” Jayce changes the subject, “if you could endure the ride from Bandle City all the way back here, you can endure a short hike, can’t you?”

“How short are we talkin’?” you ask. Your pinky threads around his index, and when you lean in, your voice is warm, leaves him shivering with the first brush of your cheek against his own. Your breath is humid and warm at his earlobe and your voice reverberates in the nerves of his spine, leaving his brain a pliant mush. “Because I’ve got something of my own planned for you, too.”

You’re sporting a grin that’s practically dripping with desire to consume when you pull away; reminiscent, although only briefly, of the first night you’d spent together all those months ago. He knows you’re not that same person anymore – not towards him, at least. He doesn’t know how you make a living outside of Piltover these days, and frankly he’d rather not think about it.

It shouldn’t matter. You’re— you’re not harming him, or the Kirammans, or anyone else in Piltover, for that matter, and that’s as far as his duty extends anyway. It should be easy to ignore that part of you when you’re here, with him. What you do and who you are outside of your relationship should be packed into a box and shoved away like his embarrassing rock collection from when he was fourteen. Out of sight, out of mind.

Except for when he’s listening to the sounds of the night and staring at the high ceiling of his room in the Kiramman estate or at the inside of his tent and wondering whose blood you might have on your hands at that moment. When he kisses and sucks on the fingers of those same hands, when he shivers at their touch, Jayce wonders how much of that blood has rubbed off on him.

And yet all that blood becomes trivial when your hand, metaphorically bloodied as it is, squeezes his own, and he finds himself quite content with the warmth.

“Oh, ain’t this the place that pretty little Pilt offshoot flows through?” You ask, focused little frown on your face. Once Jayce manages to stop listening to his beating heart (and self-doubt), he realizes you must have picked up on the faint sound of the river nearby.

“It is,” and it hits him now that there’s a good chance his surprise might fall flat if— “you’ve been here before?”

You shake your head. Thank god.

“Much further upstream,” you clarify, “though it’s perfect. We’ll need to take a quick dip tonight.”

“We will?” Jayce questions, head tilting with confusion. Oh, god, he doesn’t— sure, he’s been working up a slight sweat riding out and about through the morning and noon heat, sure, but he bathed just last night, it can’t be that bad.

“To properly enjoy my present for you, we’ll probably have to, yes.”

Oh.

Which opens up about another ten questions and piques his curiosity with a confusing mix of anxiety and anticipation. Your expression is as impenetrably smug as always; a practiced poker face he’s more than envious of. Jayce settles for finding out the answers later, and gives your hand a squeeze instead.

You reply with a squeeze of your own, walking with him in silence until you stop in your tracks, eyes wide, and he realizes that his plan for this rendezvous did not fail him.

You’re bolting like a freshly shot bullet, hand gripping his wrist tight as you drag him with you until he regains his footing and keeps pace.

You don’t stop until you make it to the edge of the forest, field of bluebells is laid out in front of you, as far as the eye can see, blue as the late afternoon sky, dense enough to blur the line of the horizon and make it seem like there is no limit between the very ground you’re standing on and the vastness above. Just as he remembers.

Now, for the second doubt he’d had about tonight — will it disappoint?

“Is this what you wanted to show me?” You ask, and for a moment he tries to sniff out any kind of concealed let-down between your words, although he knows he’s vastly untrained for that.

“Yeah,” he says, cautious. Careful. Resists the urge to ask if you like it here, or if you think it’s boring. In retrospect, he should’ve come up with something better. Maybe he should’ve brought his six-string to play you a song, or his gramophone to teach you another high society dance for you to make fun of, maybe he should’ve just bit the bullet and rented a boat for a ride down Pilt.

In retrospect, the idea of taking you — seasoned outlaw, well-traveled saddle tramp — on a picnic to a flower field is just bound to fall flat.

You notice. Jayce is not one for monosyllabic replies unless he’s anxious.

“It’s gorgeous, sweetheart,” you assure, because you know he has an affinity for that word by now.

Oh. Maybe he’d been too quick to jump to conclusions.

The tension fades from his shoulders, and Jayce gently twists his wrist out of your grip, until his hand slides into yours and you intertwine your fingers. You crouch down to pick one of the blue flowers at your feet, inspecting it for a moment, before your face turns smug. Not the teasing kind; rather the kind that seeks to diffuse and reassure through humor. “Aw, did you bring me here to make me flip bluebells with you?”

“I— uh… no.” Jayce frowns, though his curiosity is piqued. “Why would we do that?”

“Oh, come on, there ain’t no way you didn’t do that with other kids way back when you was little.”

Jayce resists the urge to tell you that there were not a lot of friends to speak of, in his childhood (or even now, really. It’s not like that department has seen a vast improvement once he’s hit adulthood, all things considered). An unfortunate combination between the remoteness of his childhood home and the simple fact that he’d just been awkward as hell.

Still is, Jayce realizes when you stare at him expectantly, a little confused with his prolonged silence.

“Uh, show me,” he says instead.

“Well,” you begin, plucking a bluebell off the stem of the flower, “it’s simple. Not so different from loves me, loves me not, really. You just flip a bluebell inside out, like so. If it don’t rip, it’s supposed to mean you’ll, uh, what was it? Win the one you love over, I believe.”

Jayce huffs as he glances down at the flipped flower in your hands, which you proudly present a moment later.

He can’t hold back a smile before he looks back up to you, and recognizes the hunger you’re watching him with instantly. Ravenous, just waiting for approval. An approval he’s itching to give. “I’d say that’s gone pretty well.”

You slide your index under his chin as you lean in, and tuck what remains of the flower behind his ear with the other. Your lips brush his own with your words, dripping down his spine and clinging at his lower belly sweet and warm like molten honey.

“I’d say so, too.”

—

“Lower your head for me.”

Jayce eagerly complies, closes his eyes while you wrap the string of braided flowers around the crown of his head, and find that it’s still too short.

“One more should do it,” you mumble. “Maybe two.”

“Take your time, we’ve got plenty of it.” And maybe that’s only half the truth; the other being the fact that there is something he just loves about watching you work — intense, focused, silent. To emphasize his point, he leans back on his elbows, briefly regretful about all the flowers he’s crushed under his forearms. When you don’t offer up a reply, he glances back to you, questioning. “Don’t we?”

There’s been times when you’d promised you’d stay, only to leave after one night or less. And it’s been months since that’s last happened, sure, but he can’t help the uncertainty.

“We do. But you’d wish I wouldn’t take my time if you knew what I had in store for you.” You glance up at him from under the rim of your hat, wink at him so briefly he wonders if he’s imagined it, before you switch your focus back to your work in progress.

Tease.

Curious, Jayce turns to flop on his stomach to be granted a better glimpse of your expression, but finds it as mischievously indecipherable as ever. So he does what he’s realized he does best: glances up at you with a convincing little smile and makes sure to bat his lashes the way you like.

“Can I at least get a little hint?”

Your mean smile answers before you do.

“Nah. Patience, sweetheart,” you coo, in all your teasing hypocrisy. Your hand finds the back of his head a moment later, scratches gently at his nape before easing his head to rest on your thigh. And Jayce can’t find it in him to refute, not when he gets to rub his clean shaven cheek against the coarse material of your jeans and bask in your scent like a cat in the afternoon sun. He’s quite content to simply watch your hands work away and your frown return when the flowers don’t cooperate with what you have in mind.

Your handiwork is sloppy, stems braided together messily, but when you flip the chain right side up, there’s just the smallest hint at the mess below. The twined, tangled stems hide well enough behind the blue flowers. Not that it matters — he’d wear it even if it were horrendously ugly, just because you’d made it. Because you’d told him less than ten minutes ago that there was something about his skin and his eyes that simply harmonized with the vivid blue you’d tucked behind his ear, and you’d asked him if he knew how to make a flower crown, and if he could show you.

Jayce knows that sort of… tenderness doesn’t come easily to you. So he treasures it when it does come his way — even like this, in crumbs. He clings to them, because without those, he has nothing of substance.

You’re yet to say those three words he’s all too eager to blurt with every opportunity and has to bite down on before they leave his mouth. He’s said them before, three times. Right after you’d made him cum for the first time since… well, since things had become serious. Another time, in a letter. And a third, with his head on your lap while you’d hummed songs from your home region to him.

You’d never said it back. Had always rushed to distract him with a kiss or saccharine words, neither as sweet as reciprocation, and he’d made do with just that at the time.

When you flip the crown to check the other side, one of the blooms drops to your lap, so close to Jayce’s face he sees it doubled. He carefully plucks it off your jeans with two fingers, gives his gentlest attempt at flipping over.

And tries to ignore how it rips.

Swallowing an unwanted and unwarranted knot in his throat, he flicks it into the grass.

Whatever. Whatever.

“This should do.” Jayce turns to look your way instead of depressively where the ripped bloom disappeared in a sea of blue and green. “Sit up?”

Frankly, he’d rather keep seeking comfort in the warmth positively radiating off of you, but above all that, Jayce wants to please. So he raises his head up off your lap, but doesn’t turn over to sit, just leans on his elbows, pressing his hips into the ground to raise his head to a comfortable height for you.

You’re quick to tie the flower crown around his head securely. Before Jayce gets to ask how it looks, he finds two hands cupping his face on either side, raising it until your lips brush his.

He hums with delight at the taste of your tongue, but doesn’t get the chance to revel in how you suckle at his bottom lip, because you move on dizzyingly fast. To the corner of lips, to the apple of his cheek, to his closed eyelids, and finally, to the spot between his brows.

“Gorgeous,” you whisper, and he finds himself pressing his face into your hands, into your lips, desperate for more. More warmth, more praise, more love. The next of your words are squished against his forehead, but not lost on him regardless. “My pretty flower princess.”

Choking on his own heart and surprise, he pulls back just enough to glance up at you. The word’s still ringing in his head, new and strange, and before he knows it, he’s blurting it out as if to taste it.

“Princess?” Jayce’s voice pitches up embarrassingly high with uncertainty at the end of his question. There’s the impulse to hide his blush beneath your palms, still cradling his cheeks, but judging by how your thumb rubs at them suddenly, you’ve picked up on the heat already.

“Yeah.” You laugh is the kind that diffuses and soothes, and when you ask, you do so genuinely: “Too much?”

And Jayce finds he feels the opposite.

“I wouldn’t… mind hearing it again.”

Your expression goes from uncertain to devious stomach-flippingly fast. “You will,” you promise, sealing it with one final kiss that lingers and nibbles at his bottom lip. Not enough to leave him dazed, more than enough to leave him wanting. “I believe my surprise might help with that.”

Your surprise. He’d pushed that notion to the back of his head to avoid dying of curiosity, but it becomes irresistible when you dangle it in front of him like that.

“How?”

The look you shoot him tells him he’ll have to bite through a lot more impatience before he gets the sweet relief of knowledge.

At this rate, he’s going to explode. God, he’s going to explode.

“We should bathe first,” you decide, hands running down his face, his neck, stopping at his shoulders, where they give a pat-and-squeeze at his deltoid. Though Jayce still burns with curiosity, there’s no part of him that minds stepping into a cold river with you and being forced to rub against you for warmth while you wash his back. “Did you bring your city boy soap, or are we using mine today?”

Jayce frowns. “What’s wrong with my lavender soap?”

“Nothing wrong with it, city boy.”

—

He hasn’t got the slightest clue how, but Jayce’s skin is set on fire with anticipation in spite of being dripping goddamn wet while he watches you sort through your satchel.

How you can make even that painfully erotic (though, you are naked and sopping wet yourself, so there’s a definitive advantage) is beyond him, but he’s not about to complain if he gets to watch your hardened nipples and perfect ass and what’s left of the water you’d left minutes ago still dripping down between your muscles. He’s holding his hat atop his slowly hardening cock — which might’ve gone harder even sooner, if it hadn’t been for the positively freezing river and the chilly summer night wind.

Waiting, he shifts his weight from one foot on the other, making an awkward step to the side when his balls stick to the inside of his left thigh. Which is the wrong move, apparently, because next thing he knows there’s the edge of a rock under his foot, making his entire frame wobble with it. He winces, barely remembering to not drop the hat, then looks your way to check if you’ve noticed – and you have. You look at him briefly, questioningly, but he waves you off, so you continue pawing through your bag, and he goes back to waiting dutifully.

“Come here.” Your voice is overflowing with barely masked excitement as you’re slowly pulling something out of your bag. Jayce nearly makes a run for it.

Whatever surprise you’ve brought him will not disappoint — not only because he will love almost anything you’d give him, but because you have him figured out more thoroughly than he has himself figured out. He trusts your choice, whatever it is.

Even if it’s…

“Leather… straps?”

You nod, glance up at him through your wet lashes, before you take them — four leather hoops bound together by one triangular piece, adorned with some kind of… ring.

Jayce feels stupid for briefly assuming it might be some sort of strange belt.

“Not just any kind of straps,” you say, spreading the hoops with your hands. Almost giddy with excitement, you demonstratively hold his… gift over your hips. Visual aid aside, he still cannot, for the life of him, figure out what it’s supposed to be.

“These,” you say, pointing at the first set of leather straps, “would go over here,” your index traces above the notch of your pelvic bone. “And these, down here,” you point at the second set, then around your thighs, under the swell of your ass.

And Jayce still has no idea what the hell that’s supposed to do. But his cock twitches with interest, so he can’t help but feel like he’ll definitely be into whatever that is.

“And, uh, what…” He clears his throat, desperately trying to understand what this sort of…harness is supposed to even do. The center piece seems like it would settle right above his cock, which, frankly, seems uncomfortable.

Maybe that’s the point?

Or maybe he’s just being a sad, horny pervert because this is the first time you’ve come to see him this month, and just minutes ago, your naked bodies were smushed against each other while he tried to not be desperate and focus on lathering himself in soap, had tried to focus on not grinding himself off on your thigh like a stupid mutt when your fingers had dipped between his asscheeks and rubbed at his hole—

Holy shit.

As if you’d figured out that the cogs in his head had finally, finally turned enough to generate one coherent thought, you grin up at him, set the leather straps down, before you pick up a piece of linen that is obviously wrapped around… something.

“They hold this in place.” You’re eager when you unwrap it, stepping closer to sate his curiosity as he leans in to peek at what’s in your hands.

Wood, most certainly, but it’s shaped… like a cock. Has roughly the size of it, too, while it seems to be smooth and lacquered, flaring at the base.

A glance back to the harness — to the circle on the main piece, to the smaller, daintier straps he realizes are obviously meant to secure the circle into place, it… it has to be—

“Go ahead,” you encourage, holding out the leather for him to take.

So he does, gingerly lifts it from your hands, and finds that the leather is soft, malleable, but undoubtedly sturdy — of very good quality. The smaller loops that hold the circle flush to the triangular plate of leather come undone with a little bit of fidgeting, and Jayce looks to the cock one last time, to confirm his burning suspicion (and hopes). The ring was definitely made to hold the cock in place. But what for? He has— it’s not like he has any need to wear this. Sure, he knows his size is not the most impressive there is, but, surely, this isn’t… it has to be… for you.

“Will you… be the one wearing this?”

You nod.

“Unless there’s anyone else you’d like to fuck you full of wooden dick, yes.”

Jayce is not proud of how he chokes on his spit.

Or of how you have to pat the space between his shoulder blades while he tries to calm himself down and straighten himself back up, before he realizes it’s quite difficult to hold your gaze now.

“How did you know?”

Your smile grows wide now, cracks into a self-satisfied little grin. Damn you. Goddamn you; you have him figured out down to his barest, most depraved thoughts. Have had him figured out since you’d first set eyes on him, in that saloon.

“When… I was touching you one night a few weeks ago, you said you would like it if I… were the one who fucked you. You told me you wanted me to take you. Do you remember?”

There’s nobody on this big, green earth who gets him the way you do. Jayce wonders if he’s dreaming, because there’s no—

There’s no way a thing like this even exists. This has to be some conjuring up of his imagination, a product of his naked, shameful, deluded desire. There just isn’t any way that someone not only made a cock you could fuck him with, but that you’d found and bought it.

You grab his shaky hand, bring it up next to the one that’s still clutching the linen around the wooden cock. “This — along with that harness I just showed you — would let me do that. If you still wanted me to.”

If he still wanted to? Like he hadn’t fantasized about… your fingers massaging at his insides, about you doing to him what only he can do to you, like he hadn’t spent months suppressing those thoughts and only had one slip through, once. Like he hadn’t rushed to sweep it under a rug of shame, even then, when you’d looked at him with invigorated interest. And yet you’d caught onto it, you’d found and bought this thing which he had never fathomed could even exist. And you’re asking him if he wants to, like the answer isn’t fucking obvious.

“Would you?” You ask again, in a rare moment of uncertainty caused by his prolonged, panicked, delighted, disbelieving silence. “Want me to? We don’t have to, Jayce, if it’s not—”

“I would— yes.” He realizes he sounds uncertain. Which he’s— he’s not. He wants this, god, he still has to wrap his head around the fact that it’s even possible. But there is not a chance he’s turning down you fucking him. “I would love… for you to be inside me. I’ve wanted you to for… so long, now.” He says, glancing down at the wooden cock with reluctant eyes.

He lifts his hand, but he lacks the courage to just… reach out and take it. So his hand awkwardly hovers between your chests, fingers clenching and unclenching like he’s preparing himself to touch the hot end of a branding iron and not a piece of wood.

“Go on,” you encourage, and he realizes there is no challenge to brave through. But there are discoveries to be made, and he does not shy away from those.

Slowly, he wraps his hand around the linen, fingers dipping the give of it until they prod at the hardness of the wood.

It’s not heavy. And when he strokes his thumb over the lacquered part that peeks out from the fabric, he realizes it’s smooth to the touch in a silky way, that it doesn't catch on his skin. Like it was made to feel pleasant — which it is.

“It’s just— god. How did you even— where did you find— how—“

You laugh, but it’s not mocking. It’s delighted, the sweet and light kind of giggle that used to be rare from you, but which has grown so abundant over these past few months that it makes his heart full.

“I’m glad you like it.” You say, lean in to kiss his cheek, and along with his brain, his heart seems to burst, too. “It was a bit of a hassle to find a well-made one. I wanted something proper. Well-sanded wood, quality lacquer, comfortable leather. I did have to do some shopping around, but…” You shrug like you’re stating a simple truth. “Only the best for you.”

How is he supposed to not swoon at that? How is he supposed to not sit in a puddle of his own overjoyed tears while he sobs about how much he loves you?

“Here,” you thankfully interrupt his thoughts — and his oncoming tears.

Jayce gulps when you slide the wood out of the linen, realizing that it’s— well, it’s not necessarily an intimidating size in and of itself, but… it is intimidating for a first attempt.

You must’ve caught on, because your hand is at the hollow of his cheek, stroking slowly, gently.

“I remember you told me you hadn’t done this before,” you don’t say it like it’s a fact or an observation, but rather, reassurance. “Way back then, when you’d mentioned wanting me to fuck you that night. Have you, since then?”

Jayce shakes his head, shaken with the question. He wonders how you ask it so easily, like he’d let just about anyone touch him the way you do.

“You know there’s no one else I’d—“

“I know,” you interrupt. “I meant, by yourself. Have you… fingered yourself, since then?”

Ah. Of course that’s what you’d meant.

Jayce swallows thickly. “I wanted to,” he admits. “Often. But I— I always wanted to let you… do it to me, first.”

The way you stop breathing briefly, then rush to fill your lungs with a shaky inhale through your nose tells him all he needs to know.

“I would love to be the first one to do this to you,” you say, and though your words are paced, your voice comes out dry, elated. “Even if it’s just with my fingers. We don’t have to use the cock tonight.”

And he’s not sure what to say, because on one hand, he wants you to fuck him into the dirt right here and now, but on the other, he’d be lying if he said the prospect of it didn’t scare him a bit.

“We should start slow, work you up to it,” you add, seemingly having read his mind, “until you feel ready — be that tonight or in a month.”

“Okay,” he says, sucking in a tense breath. That sounds good. Just a taste for now, more to look forward to later. He’s sold. Has been already, if he’s honest, but your reassurance seals the deal. “Okay. I’d like that.”

“Now?”

“Now. Please.”

You grin, sliding a hand over the back of his head to pull him close, closer than before, to press an ecstatic kiss at the corner of his lips. “God, you’re more excited for this than I’d ever dreamt you’d be. Fucking perfect, that’s what you are.”

Jayce bites back on the urge to say he loves you — he doesn’t want to risk ruining anything with it, not right now. It’d be stupid to spoil this moment, just because he can’t swallow his feelings and because you’re probably going to resort to some method of not reciprocating them the way he wants them to be reciprocated. It’s fine. It doesn’t matter.

He resorts to letting you settle him down on the bedroll, and briefly prays it won’t rain tonight. Neither of you have bothered setting up a tent.

Your other hand slides up his leg, to the middle of his thigh, where it pushes gently. Though he hasn’t felt this tense since the first time you’d stripped him naked all those months ago, it comes more easily to follow your commands, silent as they are now.

You must’ve figured your words would be much better spent on coos of reassurance or smug purrs; and you’d been right. Right now, though, there is no room for the latter, and you can tell. He knows, which is why he lets his legs fall open for you to crawl between them, even though he’s so nervous he can feel his heart pounding all the way up to the bottom of his Adam’s apple with every anxious beat.

“Easy, princess,” you repeat the nickname half-jokingly; though it does tremendous things for his confidence. And for his dick. “I just wanna make you feel good.”

It’s not that Jayce needs reminding that the person settling between his legs and petting his thighs is the very same one who hugs him in cold rivers and braids him flower crowns. But it still helps.

“Yeah, I know,” he says, burying his nose in your hair and inhaling the familiar scent of you. Jayce only realizes his legs have fallen open further apart when you give a little laugh. He doesn’t get to bask in it, not when you muffle it against the side of his neck, where his pulse hammers hard, quick, and icy-hot.

You put your weight into seaming your body against his, focusing not on his pulsing half-hard cock tucked between the two of you, but on covering as much of his skin with your own as your anatomy allows. Jayce lets you use your weight to guide him until he’s pressed into the bedroll, delightfully crushed between you and the ground below.

At your mercy is a wonderful place to be.

“That's it, lay all the way back for me,” you breathe into the skin below his jaw. Jayce suppresses a shiver, badly. The hand you dont brace beside his head for support comes brushing at his naked back, like you’re trying to soothe him, while your tongue does the very opposite — drawing circles into his pulse point that shoot down his spine like electricity.

Your hand slips further down his spine to cup at his ass, then under his thigh, the callused skin of your fingers catching against his own, dry with the thoroughness of the soap you’d used. And Jayce realizes there might be a problem. A big one.

“I, uh—“ he swallows nervously, squirms under your weight and hand. “There’s no— don’t you, I mean, shouldn’t we use… oil?”

He can feel your grin at his neck, sharp teeth pricking his pulse point.

“Did you really think I’d flip Runeterra upside down to find a cock to fuck you with but forget to bring oil, Jayce?”

Oh.

Jayce can’t help a smile, winding one thick arm around your shoulders. He doesn’t know why he’s ever doubted you. You, always so thoughtful of his wants, always so thorough when it comes to him, to his pleasure, so gentle and passionate and perfect—

He can’t help it, that you pull away so fast it leaves him dazed and confused and empty, and that his knee jerk reaction is to whine about it. But once Jayce cracks his eyes open and sees you’ve tucked your hand into your satchel with a searching expression, he understands.

You notice, though, how he suffers for the momentary loss.

“I’m not going anywhere,” you say, even though it’s obvious. And it helps, even though it’s obvious.

You uncork the bottle of oil differently than how you uncork bottles of moonshine. You don’t thumb at the wood til it’s sent flying; you pluck at it carefully, set it somewhere to the side, before you position your hand above his cock and pour.

Whatever oil comes dripping off your palm trickles down onto his dick, and though he twitches for it and for more, you choose not to comment on it. He has to resist grabbing his cock and fucking into his fist just from this – from being ignored. Something, Jayce thinks, is most definitely wrong with him.

You set the bottle somewhere near where you’d put the cork, then slide your dry hand under his knee, easing it up onto your shoulder. Pliant, soft, Jayce simply lets you, his breath catching with excitement.

He’s never felt more spread open and vulnerable than now, and mind you, you’ve spread his legs quite a few times now. He’s felt the cold air, has felt your tongue lapping at his taint, has felt your hands, squeezing at his thighs and forcing them apart after he’d come once already and was writhing with the post orgasm pleasure-pain. But knowing what’s to come now — it’s different, new, has him tensing.

You notice.

“I’m just gonna touch you for now.” Your voice comes out less methodical, more soft when you speak again, breath tickling the curls on his inner thigh. A kind kiss pressed to the meat of it follows your reassurance, reinforces it enough for Jayce to rush to obey your following command. “Relax. You know I’d never hurt you, sweetheart.”

Attempting to sync his breath to your own, Jayce finds himself at a lack of air when your fingers prod at his taint, smearing it with oil. You work off the pleasurable and familiar, circling his perineum in a way that draws out sparks — the kind that burns into an easy, comfortable heat in his stomach. Jayce finds his hips tilting up to meet more of your touch.

“There you are, good boy, so eager for me,” you breathe. Thumb still rubbing circles at his taint, your other slick fingers dip lower, lower, until Jayce chokes on his own breath because he has to focus on not kicking out the leg on your shoulder with surprise.

“Hey, look at me,” you breathe, not a command but a gentle instruction. He does, and you meet his gaze with reverence, the kind that tells him he’s in good hands — in your hands. “Keep looking. I want to see your face, sweetheart, want to hear you when I touch you.”

Jayce nods, hands clutching at the bedroll while your fingers slide back down again. You rub in slow, careful circles at his rim, cooing with delight when he makes a barely-contained little noise. He’s fantasized about your touch… there. Had maybe let one of his hands drift there, sometimes, while he rubbed himself into completion, but he’d lacked the courage to… well, to do what you’re about to do.

“How does it feel?” You ask.

“Mm-hm,” he stammers stupidly. “Yes, good. Mh-more, please.”

The heel of your palm grinds against his taint while your middle and index finger rub at his slick hole, and Jayce’s hips tilt for it. Whatever touching he’d attempted there, he’d done shyly, just barely, hadn’t– hadn’t focused on it like you do now, and it’s different. It’s not the thing he does to himself when he’s teetering over the edge to push himself into completion, not the usual spark of electric warmth up his spine, no, it’s ebbing with tension in his tummy, the unfamiliar but pleasant kind that has him squeezing his eyes shut and muscles clenching. Your expression shifts from focus to interest, and your smile is wicked with your new discovery. “Aw, you like that, don’t you?”

“Y-yes,” he replies, “feels— s-so good when you touch me, baby.”

And to encourage you to do so, Jayce grabs the leg that isn’t on your shoulder and hugs it tight against his chest.

The way your breath catches, your eyes go wide, fixated on him – you look like you’re about to faint. Only for a second, because the next, you’re moaning and biting his thigh hard enough to leave the red imprints of your teeth, all the way back to your molars, like you want to devour him. When you’re pulling away from his saliva-matted fuzzy thighs with a string of spit, you lick your lips hungrily.

“God, you’re so perfect, princess,” you groan, “so delicate and pretty, presenting your hole like you’re begging me to fuckin’… ruin you.”

It makes him shiver, your words reverberate up his spine, in his brain, then shoot all the way down to his cock again. Jayce feels himself dripping, doesn’t even need to look down at himself to feel the tingle of a drop of precum dripping off his cockhead and onto his tummy.

You do, though, mesmerized and utterly fucking ravenous.

“You’ve been aching to hear that, haven’t you?”

Damn you for reading him so well. For knowing exactly what he needs to be told.

“Yes. Please do it, please fuck me… full,” he says, like his body hasn’t been screaming it at you. Almost as if to bask in his words, in how he yearns for you, you stop, breathing him in, before you speak.

“I will, baby, you’re so fucking leaky for it, leaky for me.” Your fingers don't grant reprieve, tips circling at his hole and palm rubbing at his perineum. “I can’t believe this is all it takes. What’ll you do when I finally fuck you open on my fingers, sweetheart? Are you gonna cum then and there?”

As you say it, your index dips just so, tip hooking into his hole to rub at the inside of his rim, massaging him open. He finds his body acting on its own accord, pulsing around what little you’ve fed into him as if to say more, please. You don’t give it to him yet.

Jayce sucks in a shallow breath that comes out shaky, slow.

“I can feel you clenching,” you say, and it’s obvious how your gentleness is slipping, replaced with ecstatic obsession, “like it’s trying to pull my fingers inside, holy fuck. Tell me when I can fill you up—”

“More oil,” Jayce rasps, even though he doesn’t necessarily feel the need for it; just in case. As much as he wants this, he also just wants to avoid any unnecessary pain – at least for now. You comply, gently pulling at his rim with your fingertip, and pour the oil straight into him and—

He finds himself clenching his eyes shut and wincing, trying not to focus on how weird it feels, cold and slippery and just seeping up into what feels like his guts.

Definitely not his favorite part.

Your finger retracts, slick hand resting on his asscheek and squeezing absentmindedly. Worried, almost, you focus on his face, and Jayce swears he can feel himself melting under the attention a little bit. “Everythin’ alright?”

“Yeah. Just felt a little weird — uh, cold. Sorry. You can— you can go ahead.”

He must not have sounded very convincing, because your frown deepens. “We can always stop for a bit — or altogether. Jayce, you know that.”

And he does, by now, truly, but— “That’s the last thing I wanna do right now.”

You go silent for a moment, awe-struck.

Then there’s a near painful stretch at the back of his thighs as you lean over him aggressively, pressing both his knees to his pecs. You brace one hand beside his head on the ground, while the other, now tucked between your bodies, still works his slick rim slowly, gently.

Your lips press at his collarbone feverishly, your breath comes out hot against his neck, like he’s struck something inside of you that made your restraint crack. You inhale at his neck, shivering with a moan that makes him feel much like a delightful meal about to be devoured.

“I want to make you cum until you go dry,” your voice comes out wrecked, breathless, “until there’s nothing you can give me anymore.”

Jayce feels his entire spine rattle with your words. All he manages is a punched out whine, and he wishes he could hug you, if it weren’t for his thighs being in the way. He settles for clenching around your fingertip, tilting his hips into your palm, swallowing a mouthful of saliva before he speaks, heated and raspy.

“Please, please.”

“Tell me,” you say, voice shaky with adoration and excitement, “if it hurts, or you need me to go slower, or— anything. Anything.”

And, well, since you said anything…

“Kiss me.”

It’s near terrifying, how voraciously you dive for it, not quite hitting the mark with your rabid enthusiasm; kissing and licking at the corner of his lips before Jayce turns his head to accommodate you. You take his demand seriously, deliver what you’ve denied so far. And you deliver it tenfold, tongue tracing over his teeth, sucking at his lips, before Jayce remembers he can do more than just breathlessly sit and take what you’re giving and smooths his tongue against yours, earning himself a salacious moan.

“Mmf, you taste so good,” you mumble against his lips, and though he angles his head to chase another kiss, you’re long gone, nipping at his jaw and neck while you talk. “Can’t wait to open you up on both ends, stuff you… stuff you fuckin’ full of everything I can give you. Fingers, tongue, cock, anything, sweetheart, anything you want.”

Jayce briefly wonders what the fuck is wrong with him when he finds himself wanting that — being full of you — along with being suffocated by you. He wants you everywhere; inside, outside, taking, stifling, enveloping, swallowing. You, all of you—

“Need all of it,” he says, because he’s afraid of even trying to verbalize the rest of his blurry, foggy thoughts.

“Yeah?” Your index and middle finger both dip into just his rim — he finds himself clenching around the intrusion, shivering when you scissor them apart and tug him open. “Now?”

He nods. Begs for it, too.

“Okay,” you say, almost as if to calm yourself down, too. You breathe in, deep, before your weight lifts off him, and he finds you sitting back on your knees, both his thighs resting on either of your shoulders loosely, boneless. Jayce tries not to be disappointed with the loss of contact, with how cold and plain the air he breathes in suddenly feels without your scent thickening in every inhale, without you pressed against his body.

The other hand, the one you’d used to brace yourself against the ground before, now grabs a firm handful of his asscheek and spreads.

The way you positively purr with delight has him squirming.

“Oh, look at you, so pink and pretty,” you croon, eyes lidded and fixated on where his rim flutters around your warm fingers. “I’m gonna start pushing in, yeah? If it hurts, tell me.”

You don’t start until Jayce gives an affirmative hum, and even then, it takes him a second to realize that you’ve started pushing in. Your fingers don’t relent in massaging at his walls, and it’s enjoyable enough to be distracting until they must have sunk in down to maybe the first half.

Although you go slow, painstakingly slow, the intrusion is palpable now. Jayce finds himself clenching around it, gripping your slick fingers, while he comes to grips with the new sensation of something inside him. He knows it’s small, realistically, it is just two fingers, after all, but he can’t shake the feeling of it feeling like it’s much deeper, almost touching at the back of his bellybutton, which is– it’s stupid. He’s just being paranoid, he knows he is.

That’s when it pinches, just barely, an amount of pain that Jayce would shrug off, normally, but now it’s… inside him and it’s different and he finds himself wanting to close his legs and tilting his hips away and—

“Hey, hey, breathe.” You inhale audibly, demonstratively, and Jayce instinctively follows you, your pace, slow and deep. That helps; the thoroughness of the inhale, the fact that all he has to do is focus on your lead and let his lungs go full, then empty. The pain subsides, but the unfamiliar sensation of having something inside him doesn’t, and he hates that it overpowers the pleasure he’d so been looking forward to. “Good,” you assure. “Don’t forget to breathe, sweetheart. How does it feel?”

You haven’t pushed in all the way, Jayce can tell, because your palm hasn’t settled against his taint yet. Your fingers don’t move — not into him, not out of him, not apart. You seem content to just wait, and when Jayce opens his eyes to glance your way, he finds you looking at his face already. Focused, but gentle, present, and waiting for an answer.

“Weird. Uuh, not… not the bad kind, but,” he swallows, uncertain, shrugs in the most unsuccessful attempt at nonchalance he’s managed in a long time. “It’s just new.”

“That’s alright, sweetheart.” Soft lips brush at the inside of his thigh with a kiss. “Take your time, ‘n let me know when I can move.”

“Okay.”

There’s a brief moment of silence, and you occupy it by petting at his fuzzy stomach with your free hand, nuzzling his thighs with delighted little hums.

He wishes there could be… more of that. More of you, touching him all over, than just inside him.

“I would—“ he swallows, looking away once he realizes he’s already started saying what’s on his mind. But you cock your head attentively, squeeze at the pudge right above his hips as if to say I’m listening. So he continues. “I would like it if you could… hold me.”

You go silent for a beat, gears visibly turning in your head while you chew on the inside of your cheek. It’s obvious when you do figure out how you want to go about it, and he already burns with the anticipation for more contact, more of you.

“We can arrange that. I’m gonna pull out, okay?” Your warning is appreciated, though Jayce is not exactly sure how to prepare for it — when you do it feels weird, and he doesn’t know how to keep himself from squeezing your fingers on their entire way out. It’s a sensation that tingles all the way up his body, neither pleasant nor unpleasant, but intense and strange enough to leave him squirmy.

Too caught up in the unfamiliarity of it, Jayce doesn’t even notice you settle down next to him, not until your chest is pressed firmly to his shoulder, and your arm slips under the back of his neck, cradling his head.

Fingernails scratch at his scalp, and Jayce can’t do much but watch through dreamy, lidded eyes as you lean over to kiss his hairline.

He’s never felt safer than now. More cherished than now.

“Better, princess?” Your words come out smushed against his hair. Jayce nods gently, as to not knock his skull against your teeth, and suddenly finds himself smiling so hard it hurts his cheeks a little.

“Yes,” he sighs, tucking his face against your neck. There you are. If he could’ve smelled your warmth and scent throughout all of this, he doubts he would’ve needed a reminder to breathe. “Thank you.”

“I’ve got you.” Your still slick hand trails down between his legs again, doesn’t stop to rub at his half-hard cock (though he kind of wishes you would) and instead, prods at his hole once again, rubbing at the rim. “I’m gonna put them back in, okay?”

“Please.”

It’s different this time. The entry is marginally smoother, and when your finger slips back in, just one, then two, the positioning is… better. Jayce can’t figure out what exactly it is that does it for him this time — your warmth, the kisses you press to the side of his face, the heel of your palm pressing to his taint, or your fingers slowly sinking into him, waiting, before you start to draw them out. But you don’t do it all the way this time, you do it purposefully, searchingly, almost. They curl towards his tummy, fingerpads pressing, rubbing, circling—

“Ah-hnn!”

With the first brush of your fingers at some certain spot he had no idea even existed, sparks erupt, and though Jayce doesn’t know where, they prickle all the way across his entire body, licking with heat at his spine and brainstem and stomach and holy fucking shit, you’re doing it again. And again and again and again and you want him gone, you must want him broken and useless and dead if you keep going. How his body is capable of producing, and of holding so, so much… pleasure is beyond him. Beyond his brain, rendered a mess of goo and broken synapses.

“Gh-god, fuck, ah-mmh,” he mewls, mouth falling open the next second. You don’t miss a beat, you never do, licking at the inside of his open mouth while his eyes roll into the back of his head.

“There it is,” you purr, like you aren’t making his brain melt and disintegrate and break and boil just with— with the steady, unrelenting circling of your fingertips. “I’ve got you, sweetheart,” you say, and he believes you. You’ve got him, you always have, always so considerate, everything he’s ever wanted and yearned for in this world is you, and you’re inside him, and it’s too much. “Just let me make you feel good.”

It’s going to break him. He’s sure of it now, the closer you get to rubbing him into completion, and he’s getting closer, closer steadily, he thinks it’ll be the last thing he’ll be feeling. Exploding ecstasy, so vehement that all that’s left of him will be shaky, soulless, brainless, whimpering, useless. He’s terrified and he wants it so, so very badly.

“Don’t— don’t stop,” he sobs, “please don’t stop.”

“I won’t, sweetheart,” you promise, and you could tell him anything right now in that saccharine tone and he’d believe it, he’d take it as gospel. Jayce realizes what he’s saying only after he’s been repeating it over and over and over for god knows how long and holding onto you while he mutters it like they’re the only two words he knows.

Thank you.

Except that they’re not, there’s two more, but by some miracle he has the presence of mind not to blurt them out now.

“You’re gorgeous, princess,” you whisper, kissing at his forehead, then at his shut eyelids once he can’t be bothered to keep them open anymore. The hand that had been scratching at his scalp comes up to cradle his head, keeps him still enough to kiss further — down the bridge of his nose, over his cupid’s bow, before you smooth your mouth over his and swallow his moans like they’re feeding you. Like you want to keep each and every one of them somewhere inside your lungs to cherish forever.

When you pull back, it’s with a wet, pleasant sound. You lick your lips like you’ve savored each and every one of his mewls, before you lean in close to his ear, and shush him.

The mere sound of it floods him with warmth and goosebumps; you’re shushing him. You hold him like he’s fragile, Jayce clings to you like you’re the only thing that’s ever mattered — and you are, you are, and he loves you. He loves you, he loves you, he loves you.

“I— hah, nnnh… I love—“

You lips are back on his in an instant, eating up the only words he wishes you wouldn’t, or at least wishes you could spit them back into his mouth once you’re done chewing on them, wishes you would accept them.

You don’t; but when you pull back and look at him so reverently, Jayce settles for it. It’s enough, it’s entirely enough that you’re doing all this for him, that you’re spoiling him like this, that you’re holding him and kissing him and sucking the tear that pearls down his cheek between your lips. That you’re taking care of him.

It’s enough.

It has to be enough.

“Almost there, sweetheart, ain’t you?”

Jayce nods, wants to tell you so, but finds that he’s entirely incapable of it without moaning like a well-fucked whore.

“I can tell.” Meaningfully, you glance down at his tummy, where he realizes his red, swollen cock has drooled, holy fuck, what looks like an entire puddle of something clearer, runnier than his own cum into the groove of his bellybutton. “Look at you, getting so wet and messy for me.”

Something about the mere fact that his body had reacted like this for you, that you’ve made him leaky, it does something tremendous for his fucked-out brain. It flips a switch that has his dick visibly convulsing, feeling like it’s going to explode with an orgasm that’s built up so high but can’t, won’t tip over in spite of how dangerously it teeters.

The ridge at the underside of his cockhead aches for the slightest touch. Just a brush of something, anything, please, would probably do him in.

But Jayce is nothing, if not obedient, even as his fists clench into the meat of his thighs.

“C-can I— let me touch m-my cock— please. Please.”

You hum, as if deep in thought, though Jayce knows the answer without even looking at you, just based on the mean and playful tone of your sound. You decide, cruelly: “No.”

Jayce gasps for breath, just about ready to debase himself any way you’d want him to, just to reach that unattainable, terrifying high.

“I want you to cum from my fingers inside you, sweetheart.” But you’re gentle. And you love him, you have to, because your tone softens, spoken encouragingly right against his temple, and his skull rattles with your words in spite of their gentleness. “Just a little longer. Try for me, focus on my fingers, focus on how it feels.”

Your hand stops thrusting for a moment, simply rubs at where his prostate swells. “Clench,” you instruct, so he does.

Your grin nips at the corner of his lips while you practically purr at him with delight. “Yeah, that’s exactly it, so warm and soft, pulling me in… you needed this, didn’t you?” Jayce nods, desperately, and thank god, you’re pounding his prostate again, pounding it so hard it fucks all the way up into his emtpy, dumb brain. “Needed to be fucked full. ‘M gonna give you… gonna give you everything you can take, gonna use my fingers and then my cock on you until you shoot nothin’ but blanks for me.”

Jayce’s abdomen goes concave at the very thought of that — of being wrung so dry there’s nothing in him left, of being ruined so thoroughly. Ruined by you.

The pressure behind his cock becomes unbearable; he fears, briefly, that he’s gonna explode with it. But there’s no place for fear when you start fucking him with your fingers in earnest now, pummeling that spot inside with every push, palm settling against his slick taint with wet slaps, over and over and over. All there’s left — all his body can even carry anymore — is pure fucking extasy. The overwhelming kind that renders him so stupid he can’t even moan anymore, simply whining out little ah’s with every hit at his prostate.

It starts at the edges, in spite of what he’s used to. His orgasm was something localized, heat gathered in his tummy, his cock, his balls, but this is something else. It’s not in waves — it’s one big wave, growing, fizzling at his extremities, inching closer and closer to his core, at first just warmth, then heat, then pressure. It overpowers his eardrums with the rush of his own blood, makes the backs of his eyes spot with white even though they’re clenched shut, drowns out the world until there’s nothing left in it but you.

You, kissing him senseless, you, fucking him into oblivion with nothing but your fingers, you, cradling his head. He buries his face against you, doesn’t manage to find a spot that allows it, that isn’t in that awkward, hard place between your collarbone, chest and shoulder, but then your hand is at his face, coaxing him away, and you’re cooing at him.

“No, no, don’t hide from me.” Your breath brushes warm and humid against his cupid’s bow, the tip of your nose grazes his own, your forehead settled against his. “I wanna see you. Let me see you.”

It’s with great difficulty that Jayce manages to open his eyes, and once they’re open that he finds himself gazing deep into your eyes, sharing your mouthful, tasting your breath. You half purr, half gasp with just the sight of him, and it makes his heart full.

“There you are.” Reverent, your palm cups his cheek like you’re holding the only thing that’s ever mattered — him. Tears glisten at your waterline before you swallow them back down, as if the sight of him is too precious to be soiled with their fog. “There you are, oh, gorgeous. Look at me, wanna see you when you cum, Jayce.”

“Y-yes,” he gasps, trying to lick at your lips through his moans, succeeding at just grazing the tip of his tongue over the sharp edge of your upper teeth. Your pace increases, knocks against his prostate with every shove of your wrist. Jayce fights against letting his lashes flutter or his eyes roll back, stares at you with determination while he writhes and mewls and takes everything you’re giving him. “Yes, I— ah, I will, baby, I will, I promise.”

You’ve always loved him, from the moment you’d first set your eyes on him and decided you were going to devour him, you’ve loved him with every letter, loved him with every flower you’d braided into his long forgotten crown, loved him with every push and pull of pleasure you’d spoiled him with. You’re holding and fucking and kissing and cherishing him, you love him, he knows it, in how your lips ghost over his cheeks and in how you whisper lovesick nothings to him, you love him, you love him, you love him.

Just the thought of it, reinforced by the way you hold him, the way you make his body bend to your will like he’s glowing hot glass molding into whatever you want, hot iron being hammered into what you need, he’s always been yours, just waiting to he claimed, remade into what he was meant to be.

He loves you.

The sound he makes is embarrassingly high, feminine almost, though he finds himself quite content with it, rather than ashamed. You kiss the front of his throat like you’re thankful for it.

“I think I’m-mh…”

“I know, baby boy, I know.” And he believes you. How could anyone else know how ruined he is, except for the one person tearing him apart. He feels himself go taut like a bowstring, feels the muscles at the root of his cock flex and twitch until they’re painfully rigid. “Let go.”

So he does.

And it’s like diving underwater. There’s not much he remembers — except for the pleasure that swallows him and seems to chew through him like he’s nothing but meat, that spits him out reborn. He remembers the pressure, blooming behind his eyelids, exploding in the rest of him, remembers the soreness in his throat, but doesn’t remember his sounds, doesn’t remember how he ends up holding onto your arm for dear life, doesn’t remember when hot tears started spilling down his cheeks.

He remembers your chuckle — the first thing he hears once his muscles go limp and useless and his hearing returns. He swallows a mouthful of thick saliva, but breathing doesn’t feel any easier. Jayce wonders if it ever will again, when the reminder of how good it felt to go breathless for you is soaked in his lungs now. Why would he ever want to breathe comfortably anymore, when he could let you wring it out of him instead until he’s left gasping for it?

“Oh, look at you.” Jayce finds that’s the last thing he wants to do, when he could be looking at you instead. He inhales another cold lungful, forcing his eyes open even though they’re heavier than anything he’s had to carry in a long time. “My pretty boy. The prettiest.”

He squeezes your hand, wants to say something, anything, but with his brain drained of thoughts and his vocal chords used and raw like his prostate, there’s little he can say.

“That was so good, Jayce, so very good. I knew you could cum for me, but… this is more than I could have asked for.” Your thumb (of the hand you’d used to support his head) comes to swipe at his chin. “You messy little thing,” you joke, bringing your finger, now slick, up to your lips to suck it clean. “Shot your load all the way up to here. Not to mention you’ve been leaking for me all over yourself, you’re unbelievable.”

So that’s where his brain went.

“Wha… huh, I…I did?”

In disbelief, he looks down at himself, and can’t believe the sight below. Cum streaks his collarbone, his chest, pools of it across his stomach, matted into his dark body hair. The first thing — the only thing — he can do is laugh in disbelief.

“I’ve never… not this much,” he confesses with a raspy voice, “not even in two loads. Jesus. Jesus Christ.”

“Tends to happen with this kind of… stimulation,” you assure, drinking in the sight of him before you continue. “God, you look good enough to eat, all covered in it.” You gently knock your fingers against his prostate, and his entire being both sings and recoils with it, and you’re gigglimg when he writhes and shivers and his cock drools out even more, somehow. It feels good just as much as it feels ruining. Jayce considers asking for more before you say, “I’m gonna take ‘em out, alright?”

He’s not so sure how to feel about the prospect of emptiness, now that he’s realized just how good being full can be. But he doesn’t get to worry about it long. Slow, reverent, you pull out your fingers, ghost them up his perineum, smearing his cum over himself, watching the swirls of your own fingers raptly. “Beautiful. If I could keep you like this forever, all to myself, I would.”

He shivers with your words. “I’d let you.”

“I know,” you purr, licking up his torso, lapping up his cum. He watches you intently, mouth already watering at the prospect of what he already knows you’ll do – either spit his spend into his mouth, or feed it to him with a kiss.

It’s with delight that he accepts the latter as you brace one hand beside his head, licking at the seam of his lips just halfway before he eagerly parts them, and lets you lick into his mouth with a groan. One wobbly, orgasm-numb arm raises to wrap around your shoulders, pulling you close like he needs it. And he does, especially now, after the new experience, Jayce finds comfort in the familiar. He lets you massage your tongue against his until he’s somehow even more lightheaded, drunk off the lack of oxygen, and follows your kiss even as you pull back.

“I’ll be right back,” you whisper against his mouth, cupping at his cheek to ease him away.

Still, you press one last peck to his lips before you stand, taking a rag with you, trotting down to the riverside. Jayce is content to simply watch you crouch beside the water, smile when he sees you wobbling and wincing when you step on the gravel at the riverside.

And it’s only now that your warmth is gone that Jayce realizes just how cold the night is, now that you’re not whispering to him when he realizes how loud the crickets are. And it’s now that you’re not at his side when he realizes how drained he is, in every sense of the word. It’s the good kind of exhausted, though. The kind that’ll knock him out quick and easy the moment you get back beside him.

He closes his eyes and savors it, boneless and happy. The crickets chirping away, the rush of the river, the gravel under your steps, getting louder, closer.

“This’ll be a little cold,” you warn once you’ve reached his side, kneeling beside him on the bedroll. It doesn’t really help – Jayce still flinches and sucks in a breath with the first contact, feels all the content exhaustion practically jump out of his muscles.

“Aw, sorry, princess.” You grin as you run the rag down his heated, sticky tits, down his tummy. “Let me kiss it better?”

Jayce hums, and, a moment’s consideration later, pushes himself up on his elbows and presents himself in the hopes of egging you on. With a laugh, he wiggles his eyebrows at you. The laugh he earns is priceless. “If you insist.”

You spend minutes like that. Indulging in the cold wetness of his now clean skin, the fluttering of his muscles under your lips. Sucking at licking at his nipples, lavishing his tummy and sensitive hips with attention until you’ve had your fill.

And then you settle beside him, brushing your hand through his damp hair, over the scar at his cheekbone, as if he himself is something utterly delectable to look at, to touch, to love.

“You were wonderful,” you tell him. “I wish you could’ve seen yourself when you came, sweetheart. So bright, I coulda sworn the stars paled for you.”

Jayce doesn’t want to choke on fresh tears. He doesn’t want to be too much, doesn’t want to bury his head in your chest and let you coo at him, doesn’t want to say he loves you. But he aches with it, it’s bubbling out of him.

“Oh, don’t cry, Jayce.”

He sobs, and the only thing he can think of doing is hiding his face against the heat of your chest.

“I’m sorry,” he says. And he is — sorry for the tears he’s wiping on your skin, sorry for the way he’s reacting to your words, sorry for what he’s about to say. “I didn’t mean to.”

“You sweet thing. Don’t be.” Your hand cups at the back of his head, pulls him impossibly closer, while you kiss the top of his head. “There is nothing in this world you oughta be sorry for.”

He wants to believe you’ve read his mind. Wants to believe you know what he means, because you always do, you know him so intimately he sometimes wonder if you don’t crack his skull open to peek inside every so often. And maybe you mean it, maybe you do mean it, that he shouldn’t be sorry he loves you so vehemently when you’re not there yet.

Maybe now you will be.

“I love you,” he mutters, a fourth in all these months he’s been seeing you, but no less truthful than the three previous times. You kiss at the top of his head again, squeeze him tight.

But you’re wordless.

Fuck, you’re wordless, and he’s been too much again, when things had been just right so shortly before.

All in due time, he rationalizes, swallowing his disappointment like bitter medicine. You’ve waited on him, too, in other ways. Waited for him to decide when and if you would ever get to kiss or touch him like this again, waited for him to grow comfortable with you, waited until your touch was associated with comfort just as much as it was with excitement. Maybe it was only fair that he had to do some waiting now, too, Jayce thinks while he lets you lick between his lips and brush his tongue with your own.

He pulls back soon enough, doesn’t quite feel like letting you kiss him after… that.

“Do you, um,” he swallows his disappointment, tries to mimic your characteristic, gentle smoothness. “Do you want me to do something for you, too?”

You shake your head. “Trust me, sweetheart, getting to be the first one to fuck your ass is enough to think about for the rest of my days. I could die happily now, but—“ you glance to where the wooden cock and strap lay, forgotten for tonight, “we have more to look forward to. Don’t we?”

And that’s enough to stifle the pit in his chest, for now. Jayce grins, pulls you into another kiss, one that he eases out of once his breath comes out short, letting his head fall against your chest. You’re right. You do. And you’re not going anywhere.

“How much longer will you be staying?” He asks, trying to make a mental estimate of how much… getting used to this it’d take him until you can actually use the cock you’ve bought.

The way you go tense, not visibly, but palpably, your chest going rigid with a held breath under his cheek—

Oh, no.

Your silence answers for you. He can hear it reverberate in your chest, how you swallow then sigh. He knows what you’re going to say before you even say it — but that doesn’t make it sting any less.

“I’ll have to leave by Wednesday evening. I’m sorry, sweetheart, I am.” You sigh. He thinks you’re going to leave it at that — it’s a silent pact by now, the fact that you don’t talk about your jobs, the fact that he doesn’t talk about his.

It’s obvious that you hesitate, that you dread the silence. You play with his hair nervously now, focused on distracting yourself rather than making it pleasurable for him, unlike the way you usually touch him. Jayce listens to your heartbeat, how it speeds up, before he loses track of it as your voice covers it up so suddenly he almost startles.

“There’s this job — a big one, in Ionia. I have to make it.”

Jayce lifts his head from the safety of your arms, looks to your face, but finds nothing other than the warm underside of your jaw. You’re looking away, he feels your throat bob under his cheekbone when you swallow.

He’s not sure he wants to know, but… you’re letting him in, and that, in and of itself, means more to him than anything else, so he hums, to let you know he’s listening. Even though he wishes he wouldn’t.

You find the resolve to continue.

“If I pull it off right — and I should, because the people I’m working with, they know what they’re doing, I know them, and it’s… it’ll be huge. Jayce, I could live comfortably for months.”

The way you talk about it so longingly, it emboldens him. Stupidly. He’d decided, somewhere in the back of his head, that he wouldn’t bring it up, not tonight. But he can’t, not that he now knows you want it. That you long for the idea of comfort, of not having to spend your days worrying about where you’ll sleep next, what you’ll eat.

Because he can change that for you. He wants to change that for you — and the only missing piece is you.

“I… have a better idea.” His voice is already weak and hushed; the fact that it’s muffled against your skin doesn’t help. Your arms around him slacken just enough so you can pull away, and look at him now, properly.

God, he’s doing this.

Alright. He’s doing this.

“A way you could live comfortably… for years,” Jayce continues. “For as long as you want to.”

First, you laugh in disbelief. A short little snort, like you think he’s made an attempt at a bad joke, but then you glance down at him, intrigued and confused all at once.

“What?”

Oh, god. No backing out now.

As he looks back at you, Jayce wonders, briefly, if what he’s going to ask you has even crossed your mind.

He swallows thickly, can’t stomach to look you in the eye when he blurts out the rest of it. “Before I became a bounty hunter, my parents… we had a cattle farm — a big ranch, it’s not… it’s not too far from here. Just a little further downstream. It’s abandoned now.”

Your brows shoot up, clearly surprised with the implication, before they furrow, confused. You’re either hiding from his implication because it scares you, or because you want to hear him say it. “What about it?”

You want to hear it.

Fine. He can say it.

He’s going to say it. If there’s even a chance at a future with you, even if it involves a gamble (and Jayce has always fucking sucked at poker, if he’s being honest), he’s going all in.

“I’ve been thinking that we could…” Jayce’s voice falters, but he presses on, even though it’s shaking, barely above a whisper. “Over the years I’ve worked for the Kirammans as a bodyguard, and for all the bounties I’ve brought in at the sheriff’s, I’ve saved up… enough to sustain two people for… a decade, probably. Possibly even more, maybe even… the rest of our lives, if I go back to herding cattle, if we… if we grow our own produce. The land there is… very fertile, perfect for it, and it’s desolate, really, we could… if you wanted to…”

You’re silent for a beat. He internally begs for a yes, a nod, even a stinging little ‘I’ll think about it’. Anything but a no.

“What?”

There’s fear, actual, genuine fear that flashes in your eyes before you regain yourself. You’ve even pulled away as he’d been saying it, the hand at the back of his head had fallen to his shoulder, and there’s a slight tremor to it now.

And then you laugh, the meek and nervous kind that he’s only ever really heard from himself, never from you.

“Jayce, I…”

You don’t even look him in the eye.

It’s the desperate thing to do, he knows it is, but he reaches out for your face, slides his index under your chin, as if to beg, please look at me. You grab his wrist before he gets to.

“It’s very remote,” he tries again, like that’s going to change anything, “if that’s what you’re worried about. It’s the last place anyone would expect you to be.”

You shake your head. And he forces your grip, until he does get to touch your face and cup your cheek, but you’re still not looking at him. You’re still not fucking looking at him.

“You’d be… you’d be safe.” His thumb rubs at the dip of your cheekbone as if to remind you, I love you, as if to beg you to give him a chance. Let him make it good for you, please. “I’d make sure of it. You wouldn’t have to run anymore. I could— take care of you. Of us. You could take care of me, we could, we could…”

But it’s all for nothing when you stare off into the distance, cold and wordless and Jayce can feel his windpipe being tied into a deft knot that’s not coming undone anytime soon.

“Please.” He hates how desperate he sounds, how downright fucking pathetic — begging to be loved. Begging you to love him, or to let yourself be loved at the very least. If you won’t give him what he needs, let him at least give you what he’s overflowing with so abundantly.

It feels like fucking forever until you speak again.

“I can’t do that.” Your thumb rubs a circle at his arm, like that’s going to dampen the blow of some of the most hurtful words he’s had to hear. “I’m not made for this kind of life. You know that.”

“I still thought you might try. I thought I was— I thought we were—” He sighs again, but it sounds significantly less like a sigh and more like a whimper as it passes through the knot in his throat and past his quivering vocal chords.

Jayce swallows back tears that still overflow in spite of it all. He looks down as he lets his hand fall from your cheek and instead wipes at the annoying tear that’s rolling down his face.

He understands, then.

You’ve been avoiding his love down for months, and he’d been a fucking idiot to think that would change now. He’d been a fucking idiot to think you would change now, just because he’d let you be the first person to finger him open and just because you’d talked sweet about it.

Had you even meant it?

“Jayce,” you say, in a way that’s both soft — laden with pity, and chastising all at once, like it’s his fault for thinking you’d even want this. “It’s not about trying. You can’t just ask me to leave everything I know behind for, for—“

“For me?”

Jayce freezes with his own question, and realizes that, above all else, he’s scared of your answer.

You don’t deny it. That hurts more than anything you could’ve hurled at him. He’s not enough for you, and you didn’t even need to say it to make it ring in his head loud and clear.

“Jayce, that’s not what this is about…” You try.

Not what this is about his ass. He’s not stupid.

You don’t want him. Not like this. You want him when he’s pliant and stupid and horny, you don’t want him when he’s thinking of more. You don’t want him when he’s in love. You don’t want him when he lays his heart and the rest of what he has at your feet.

“Forget it,” he spits. “It was such a stupid thing to ask. Such a stupid thing to think you’d even want to.”

It aches how it makes him so briefly hopeful, how it’s almost a balm on his pain and still making it hurt tenfold, when your eyes go wide, flashing with the very real fear of losing him.

You do care about him, in some halfhearted way. But just not enough, Jayce realizes. He’d been clinging to just the crumbs of it, the taste of your affection, hoping there’d be more, someday, some way, somehow. But there never was. Never would be.

Are you even capable of something as devoted, as genuine as loving? Were you ever?

“It’s not that I don’t want to,” you try to rectify.

He never thought you’d had the audacity to lie to his face again. But you did.

“It’s just that you don’t love me.” He bites back, hoping so very desperately for a rebuttal. A genuine, tear filled but oh, Jayce, I do, I love you, I could just never work up the courage to tell you, but there’s none of that. There’s none of that. Never was. Everything he’s ever thought there was had been in his head. He’d been aching to be loved so bad he’d conjured it up in his imagination. God, he’s pathetic.

“Jayce, I— When have I said I don’t love you?”

“When have you ever said you do?”

And you can’t argue with that. You can’t say it, not even now, when he looks at you for a beat, clinging to some deluded hope.

Of course you don’t.

God, he’s fucking stupid.

Jayce bows his head, standing abruptly. He kicks pebbles into the campfire, doesn’t look at you even when you call out his name. He picks up his clothes, slipping on his pants, not bothering to button his shirt, slapping on his hat.

You call out his name a few times. He doesn’t register it. Doesn’t want to. The same way you don’t want him, not when he asks for more than sex and a few letters every month, not when he asks for more. He struggles to breathe through his tears without wheezing, and he manages, he manages even as he shoves his feet into his boots, he managed like a fucking champ even while he turns to leave.

But when you call him sweetheart, it bounces around in his brain like a punch straight to the eye socket.

Jayce looks to you for a moment, searching, through the warm fog of his tears, for your face, searching for some truth on it.

Had you ever even meant it, calling him that? Had he ever even been something as precious as a sweetheart to you? Or had it just been another way to keep him under your boot, buttered up with just enough affection to keep him eager and dumb? Just another way to get in his pants?

“Sweetheart,” you try again, because of course you’ve realized it’s worked in making him stall, making him falter, worked in getting through to him, “please.”

Fucking liar.

“Don’t call me that.” He wishes there were less hurt and more venom in his voice. But how could there be anything but hurt as he’s trying to hide his hot, bitter tears under the brim of his hat? When the campfire smoke stings in his eyes, his lungs, or is it his chest aching with the realization that all the love he’d basked in had been his depraved delusion and a part of your toying with him concocted into something dizzying enough to make him think he’d been loved.

God, he’s fucking stupid.

The entirety of his body recoils as you approach, like a spooked animal looking for a way out. And he nearly does it, nearly makes a run for the trees, but then your fingers are wrapping around his wrist, holding firm.

How dare you?

“Please, don’t hide from me. Look at me, Jayce, let me see you. Talk to me.”

How fucking dare you use the echo of the words he’d swallowed up like honey mere minutes ago? It’s a potent weapon, because it nearly has him sobbing then and there, to think where you’d had him less than an hour ago, all vulnerable and eager and yours. And now you have the gall to act like you’re in any position to tell him what to do. Like you have the right to touch him.

His wrist seems to burn, just the way it had the morning after he’d rubbed it raw against the rope in the bed you’d shared, where you’d left him robbed of dignity, robbed of affection.

Just like now.

You’d never changed your intentions. You’d just changed your methods.

“Don’t touch me.” And oh, there it is, the venom that’s been boiling surfacing. It feels so satisfying in some wrong, horrid way, amidst all of the pain, to spit it out at you. He rips his hand from your grasp. “Don’t fucking touch me.”

This is the first time it truly gets to you, the realty of the situation. You’d been scared, yes, but now, the corners of your mouth twitch downward, and that squint — he knows that squint. Not on you, but on himself, the attempt to hold back tears.

“You’re being unfair.”

You’ve never sounded this meek.

It doesn’t suit you.

“I’m being unfair?” Jayce’s blood boils with the accusation. “I’m being unfair, for letting you get away scot free after everything you did, for loving you, for offering you a home, for offering to give up everything so we could— sure, I’m being unfair.”

“That’s not what I meant.” You don’t scream it, you don’t grit it out through tears. You say it like an afterthought, like it doesn’t even matter anymore.

And you’re right, it doesn’t matter anymore.

He would have given you everything. All you had to do was take it, and you couldn’t even do that. It makes him want to scream.

You don’t say anything. Not that Jayce thinks there even would be anything on this green earth you could say that could make him change his mind now. There’s nothing else for him here. Never was, except for a waste of his love, his time, his hope.

He swallows his heartful of tears when he looks you dead in the eye.

“Don’t write me any letters.” He decides, and he means it. The tone he takes on is familiar, he’s used it countless of times on his bounties, but never on you, and that alone makes it fit like a glove that’s one size too small and won’t bend around the fingers. But he uses it regardless, heavyhandedly, hoping it fucking hurts you just as much as it hurts him. “If you come back to Piltover, I am having you arrested, one way or another.”

He hates that he doesn’t even believe himself. But he turns away, because even though leaving you behind is the last thing he wants to do, it’s the one thing he owes himself.

#jayce talis #jayce arcane #arcane jayce #jayce talis x reader #reader insert #my writing #you could have it all (my empire of dirt)#cowboy AU #western AU

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weltraum-vaquero · 2 years ago

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You could have it all (my empire of dirt)

2. it ain't the letting go (it's the things that you take with)

[Chapter 1] ↠ [Chapter 2] ↠ [Chapter 3] ↠ [ Chapter 4] ↠ [Chapter 5] (coming soon)

[AO3 link]

Western AU

18+

Jayce Talis x GN AFAB Reader

Word count: 12.6k+

Synopsis: Jayce is out to settle the score with you. You make it very difficult, in every way imaginable.

Tags/warnings: western AU, mastrubation (Jayce), yearny Jayce, brief mentions of drugs (1800s cocaine products), Jayce epically failing at being a bounty hunter, reader being emotionally constipated, then emotionally diarrheic, then emotionally constipated again, Handjob (Jayce receiving), brief allusions to non-con (nothing bad actually happens), Jayce being a weepy confused mess, Dirty talk.

Jayce should hate you.

Correction — he does hate you.

Hates your eyes, their hunger, their heat, their knowing. Hates your smile, hates the shape of it, the confidence tucked somewhere neatly behind your canines. Hates your cutting wit, just waiting to be unloaded in one line that would make him weak in the knees. And he hates the shape of your lips.

Hates how wrong the shape of them looks on the bounty poster.

They’re flat and different and wrong, wrong, wrong. He knows, because they’ve been in places he hadn’t even dared putting his own hands, knows because they’ve sealed and sucked at his throat, his chest, and that wretched, lifeless stroke of ink could never hope to do the pleasure they’ve brought him justice. Could never do you justice, because you’re—

This is absurd. He should stop. Should put the damn paper away and have another go at finally falling asleep, maybe the third time’s a charm.

It’s not like he wants you to touch him. It’s not like his mind has been circling back to it the way a dog chases its tail, unending, unrelenting, stupid, pointless.

It’s just — the prairie’s desolate, the night’s quiet, the fire’s out, and he’s alone. Laying on his back in his generously large tent — generous enough for two if you squeezed together tight enough — and finding it achingly empty. Finding his hand achingly empty, so he fiddles with the button of his jeans, looks at your poster.

It’s not like he’s actually going to do anything. His hand just happened to — to drift there, really, and, well, you can’t exactly blame him for staring at your poster. In fact, you should count yourself lucky that he hasn’t hung it up somewhere and fired an entire round into your face. You’d deserve it.

It’s also not his fault that his thumb just so happens to slip, and, well, so does the button of his jeans, it just— it just slips out of its eyelet, and the zipper isn’t too far behind either. It just happens. He’s getting comfortable for the night. It’s not like he’s going to put his hand down his pants.

It’s not like the sight of you and your annoying, mean, stupid, no-good face makes the heat in his belly stir.

Is he—? No, no, he’s not. He’s not jacking off to the thought of you, he just… needs some kind of release to put him to sleep. He needs the rest. Especially after following your trail into Zaun and spending a good two days tracking you down, he’s going to get his hands on you soon, if he gets a good night’s rest. He’s sure. Sort of.

He’s got a vague idea about what you’ve been up to.

Marcus had come by for dinner last week, and complained about a break-in at the Ferros pharmacy his lawmen had found no leads on. The store had not only been robbed blind, but someone had knocked out the clerk and the two guards that night and had disappeared with all of the cocaine products on the shelves. Not a small or an easy job by any means.

The issue, Marcus had pointed out, weren’t just the missing wares and money – but the increase of violent crime in Zaun as a byproduct, since it appeared the stolen, potent cocaine products had found their buyers there, where cocaine had specifically been outlawed for that very reason.

Jayce’s professional opinion? This entire thing practically reeked of you.

You’d gotten the money you’d needed, and caused a distraction all in one fell swoop. With everyone’s eyes already off of you, you just needed to wait things out. Until your next strike.

Smart, simple, deceitful. It had to be you.

And he could’ve told Marcus that, could’ve given him the semblance of a lead he seemed to be so desperate for, but this was personal. Jayce had a score to settle, and this time, he would not fall for your tricks.

Wouldn’t fall for your voice, your hands, your tongue, your cunt (fuck, why is his mouth watering?), wouldn't let anything throw him off his game.

That’s why he inches his hand past the waistband of his underwear and takes his own, half-hard cock in his hand.

It’s a tactical choice.

He’d rather be distracted now, when he’s alone, when he can allow himself to be, than when he’s with you, and supposed to be doing his job. He won’t let you win again. Won’t lose sight of his purpose again.

This — getting off — is just a part of ensuring that.

Right.

That’s all there is to how his dick twitches when he looks at your poster. It’s a conditioned response, it has to be — the pleasure you’d wrecked him with had been so entirely new and potent that it can only be normal for his body to want to chase it. It doesn’t have to mean anything.

Yeah, that has to be it. He just needs to… distance you from it. Needs to recreate the experience on his own, so that his brain might stop gravitating towards you and stop acting like a cat in heat. Problem solved, it had been so simple, really, hadn’t it?

That’s it.

That’s right. That’s good. Good boy, that’s exactly what you need—

Oh, come on.

Jayce groans at the thought of your voice, encouraging him to do this with a ravenous but oh-so-pleased there you go, that’s an obedient boy as he drags his hand from root to tip. He knows you’d talk him through it, would praise him through it.

Dry. Utterly unlike your mouth, his hand is dry and callused and too warm and not yours. He persists regardless, gives his cock another near-chafing tug before he’s propping himself up on one elbow and spitting onto his tip, and oh, that’s better.

With the pad of his thumb, he rubs his spit into the petal-pink, soft skin. In an immediate response, his hips twitch up into his grip.

That’s much better.

A tingling spark of warm pleasure ignites in his lower belly, stroked to a small flame by the glide of his right hand and another glance at the poster he’s clutching in the left.

Maybe your lips aren’t true to life in that damn sketch, but your smile certainly is – a gnashy little smirk that promises trouble and delivers it through and through. You’d looked exactly like that when you’d told him you were going to take care of him; looked the same way when you’d lowered your mouth between his legs and sucked at his balls–

“Fuck.” He can feel his cock swelling in his hand with another jerk, now at full mast and red. The cold puff of his breath soothes the scorching heat of his flesh, hits his slick cockhead in a frigid wave of air that makes him shiver.

All because he’d looked at your dumb poster.

Jayce shouldn’t do this. It’s not— he’s doing the exact opposite of what he set out to do. He can only pretend it’s for the sake of relief for as long as he likes, because he knows, he knows he’s only going to ache once it settles in that the best fuck of his life was a one-time-thing.

But why think about that right now, if he can think about your tongue, your lips at his taint, sealing and sucking to turn his brain into mush and make his back arch at just the thought of it.

He needs it again. But his fingers aren’t as good as your lips, his fingers aren’t even as good as your fingers, but he still pops them into his mouth the way you had slipped your thumb in, parts his lips wide, lets his index and middle finger sink in all the way to his knuckles.

To think he hadn’t realized at the time how good it felt to be full. It’s blissful, how his fingertips lodge into the back of his throat and seem to pause his racing thoughts with just that.

Then again, there had been better things to think about when you’d fucked his mouth with your fingers, like the texture of your thumb, or the taste of your juices lingering at the tip of his tongue. It’s satisfying, to have his throat stuffed and utterly relaxed, before he pulls both fingers out and feels something akin to relief with the first breath that floods his lungs.

He wonders how his fingers would feel filling him up elsewhere, but lacks the gall to find out. Recreating the night spent with you sounds significantly more appealing.

In an instant, his hand shoots back down, cupping at his balls with the rest of his dry fingers, while the slick index and middle finger prod at his taint. It’s a hopeless, clumsy attempt at recreating your technique, but it’s enough. The careful circles of wet finger pads at his perineum urging the thick, languid warmth in his stomach into hot pressure, the squeeze of the rest of his hand at his sensitive balls, his cock pulsing, it’s enough.

Enough to have his dick jerk so hard it hits his wrist, enough to have him throwing his head back in delight and peering down at your poster, imagining his touch is all yours.

That you’re occupying the empty space next to him, that you’re gently cradling his head with one hand and using the other to take care of him. You’d be kind, in spite of who you are — because you were kind, even then. Had told him multiple times to let you know if it ever was too much (as if it ever could be too much), had kissed him raw after he came a second time, had made him come a second time not because he’d asked but because you’d wanted to. Because just maybe, some part of you had cared that he enjoyed himself too.

Maybe you still do.

Maybe right now, you’d be teasing him for how his body reacts to your voice, you’d be smiling at his contorted face, then at his leaking cock, before you’d wrap your hand around its base and lower your lips to kiss away the thick drop on its swollen tip.

You’d lap at it, at the sensitive ridge of the underside of his cockhead — closing his eyes and circling his frenulum with his slick index is nearly enough to be convincing — and maybe… maybe you’d let him taste you after he comes for you.

Yeah. He’d fucking love that.

Maybe you’d let him feel you grind against his tongue, let him feel the warm gush of your orgasm in his mouth, let him bury his face into your waiting heat until there’s nothing but you in every crevice of his senses. Maybe you’d let him wrap his arms around your hips and kiss and lick your cunt until his lips and tongue buzz with raw, numb pain, until he knows nothing but the taste of you, your sounds, your slick, your warmth, all of you.

Fuck.

His other hand, lets go of the poster, reaches for his waiting cock. Three dry, overstimulating strokes do him in, have him coming so hard he’s rolling onto his side to avoid soiling his own clothes and his sleeping bag, have him curling in on himself, whining out his pleasure to the lone prairie. He can feel his orgasm pulsing all the way up his fucking spine, exploding at his brainstem, loud enough to drown his thoughts out in a pleasant, hot buzz and makes his ears ring.

“Hnn—!”

Jayce grips his cock through his peak, gives a few more strokes that stop just below his sensitive, swollen tip, before he finally lets go.

His body sags with relief, head still pounding with his racing pulse, breath still coming out in sharp, quick bursts, limbs tingling with a fuzzy, syrupy high.

Yeah, this is definitely going to put him to sleep.

He cracks his eyes open just enough to look down at his own shirt and pants — both unsoiled, thank goodness, because they’re his last clean clothes after a not so pleasant incident involving a pile of manure out in Zaun yesterday.

Not so unscathed, however, is your bounty poster, with three fat, stringy drops of cum splattered across it, from your shoulder, across your face, to the rim of your hat. Fuck. Fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck.

His first instinct is to use his sleeve, but that’s hardly a viable alternative, so he rushes, instead, to smudge it away with his palm — somewhat successful, but the splatters are still very, very obvious, curling the paper where they’ve soaked it.

Normally, it would hardly be a big deal. He’d just head over to the Sheriff’s, get himself a new one. It’s just a piece of paper.

But right now? A ride from Zaun to that part of Piltover and back would take a day, at best. And who knows that the hell you’re capable of pulling off in one entire day? He’s hot on your trail, he can’t lose it because he— well, because he came on your poster. That’d be absurd. He likely won’t even need to use it, anyway.

It’s probably nothing worth getting worked up about. Caitlyn has told him multiple times that he’s prone to stressing out over things that end up bearing incredibly little importance, and this is probably one of them.

He should take advantage of the grogginess and get some much needed sleep instead of winding himself up about a cum stain.

—

He was right. There had been no use for your bounty poster, not when he’d spotted tracks of a lone horse and followed them, down into the forest quite a distance away from Zaun.

You’d made his job easy, stuck to the main trail leading through it, left heavy hoof imprints in the mud, like a treasure trail begging to be followed.

And you’d confirmed, very much so, that it was you he’d followed because you’d left your horse (a seemingly reliable, but skittish appaloosa), loaded up on a set of guns so varied that it could only belong to an outlaw, tucked away safely between the trees.

And you had left imprints in the mud, leading out of the forest. Jayce had dismounted off his horse not too far from yours and followed.

Followed them, all the way down to the Pilt offshoot passing through the valley, where he’d found your boots, neatly discarded beside the riverbank, and your clothes, folded and settled atop your boots to avoid the mud and oh—

Of course you’d be naked in a river.

Water splashes from ahead, where a willow tree hunches above the calm, trickling little waves and kisses its surface with droopy branches. And between them, a sliver of your skin peeks out.

His heart jumps up into his throat, comes tumbling back down heavily into his stomach at first, then, much to his dismay, dips further to pulse with heat in his groin.

All of last night’s hard work, gone to waste.

But you’ve not seen him yet, and that gives him the clear advantage he needs, and, not to mention, you’re naked — the tables have turned. His odds are good, for once. Karma is on his side, and revenge, although something he deems to be beneath him most of the time, will be so very sweet.

So Jayce advances, pushes the willow branches aside with the tip of his unshouldered rifle, sneaks up the precipice that should, by his estimation, overlook your naked form.

It does.

And gods, your back’s glorious in the filtered sunlight. Muscles flexing and bunching with vigorous movements of lathering soap across your front, skin sounding positively slick where you rub at it and for fuck’s sake he’s thinking about how you’d tasted and felt, soft and warm and ripe.

He shouldn’t, but he does take a moment to simply watch, and let his mouth pool and heart ache and lungs tighten before he raises the rifle once more, almost regretfully.

“Hands above your head.” Tone heavy and low, Jayce means business, makes a clear point of it by audibly cocking his weapon.

And you don’t even flinch. You don’t even turn around for that matter, either.

“Already back for more?” You tease — thank goodness it’s you (it’s not like hearing your voice is making his stomach clench). As your hands raise, water dripping down your arms, bar of soap clutched in one hand, Jayce swallows.

This is going to be much harder than he anticipated. In every sense of the word.

“Get out,” he replies, although his voice falls terribly, awfully flat when you do, water sloshing with as you turn around, turn towards him. “Slowly.”

And then you do turn to look at him, and there is nothing but coyness and a complacent grin on your face. You look at him not like prey caught, but like your bear trap has just snapped shut around his ankle.

And in spite of the fact that your unbotheredness should sound off alarms in his head, should make him worry, there is little for his shortwired brain to think about when you look as good in the afternoon daylight as you’d had in the low candlelight. Perhaps even better, now, with sun rays and shadows bouncing off your still soap slick skin.

“Slowly?” You repeat, grinning. “If I didn’t know you any better, I’d say you were hoping for a show, Mister Talis.”

He’s not. And even if he was, he wouldn’t— he wouldn’t give in to it. His demand is just a precaution.

“The only thing I’m hoping for is putting you where you damn well belong.”

When you chortle, amused, and take half a step closer, arms still raised, suds of soap dripping down your flexed forearm, fist clenched around the bar of soap, Jayce realizes last night’s release counts for nothing.

Focus. Focus.

“In your bed?”

Oh, fuck you. He should’ve known; should’ve expected it — why your flirty little question still makes his breath catch is beyond him.

“A prison cell,” he replies, although the mere thought of you rotting away behind steel bars makes his heart clench. What the hell is wrong with him? “Now get out, or I’ll shoot.”

“You mean the way you did for me that night? Twice?”

Fuck you.

“I’m serious,” he growls. “Out. Now.”

Your face drops subtly, but you regain your mental footing with dizzying speed.

“You wouldn’t.”

He hates how convinced of it you sound.

He hates how right you are.

“The poster said dead or alive,” Jayce insists, making a show of moving his index to rest atop the trigger. You don’t seem to take the bait. “Don’t make me choose.”

“I think you already have.”

With that, you still comply, approaching him ever so slowly, as he’s asked. It’s tantalizing, has him focusing at least half his mental capacity on not getting hard as you approach the riverside, and the water level slowly reveals more of you with every forward step.

Water clings to your collarbone, to your chest, to the part of your tummy he’d been aching to nuzzle against. Pearls down the flesh of you, drips off the grooves of your muscles like paint off a fresh masterpiece. And you’re smirking. Fuck you, you’re smirking.

“Don’t be embarrassed,” you coo, tone so saccharine it’s clearly fake. It takes Jayce a quick downward glance at himself to understand you can’t be referring to his bodily reaction. Not yet, at least. “I’m guilty of that just as much as you are. Why do you think I left you tied to that bed, instead of putting a knife up to your throat?”

Water sinks below your hips, below — below, fuck, below the middle of your thighs, lingers at your knees, and then you’re there, right there, close enough for the nozzle of his rifle to nudge your hairline. And — and the rifle’s shaking, he’s shaking, goddammit, too taken with the mouthwatering sight of you to even think.

You’re looking up at him from where he’s standing, still on that precipice, and he can’t understand how he’s standing above you, and yet feels so terribly below you.

“We both have a weakness for each other, Mister Talis.” Your head tilts with the statement, expecting a confirmation that does not come; not verbally.

It’s in the hitch of his breath, the way his index slips away from the trigger, the way his grip around the rifle tightens. You’re winning this confrontation; you are naked, unarmed, and still winning. How and when did he sink this low?

“My only weakness was trusting you that night,” he spits.

Your nose scrunches, and you give an unimpressed hum.

“One of your many weaknesses is not being able to stop thinking about that night,” you reply.

He tries for an unimpressed laugh. It comes out high, airy, nervous.

“And how do you know that?”

Everything about you — from the leaf-filtered sunlight catching in your damp lashes, to the way your smirk smoothes into a smile — is soft, genuine. “Because I haven’t, either.”

It’s disarming, in the most literal sense possible.

You haven’t. Either. It reverberates in his skull, and it’s only on the third mental echo of it that his heart begins to burst.

He’s been on your mind, maybe not as hauntingly and as obsessively as you’ve been on his, but you’ve thought of him, yearned for him, the way he’s yearned for you. It both soothes and strokes the flames inside him to new heights, you want him, you want him, you want him. You want him, too.

Not that he gets to give you a peace offering — and he shouldn’t, either — because you’re perking up at the distant sound of hooves. Bending just enough to peek through the willow tree branches, Jayce spots three armed silhouettes in the distance, mounted atop well-fed horses, the kind you don’t see much in Zaun. Definitely Marcus’ men.

Fuck. Now what? If they come any closer, it’s a matter of when, not if they spot you, the both of you, him standing high and mighty on the riverside, and you, stark naked and—

Fast, far too fast for him to process, you toss your bar of soap into the grass, place one foot against the slippery root of the precipice he’s standing on, just enough to boost yourself up to firmly grasp his belt with both hands, and, with your weight and momentum, yank him into the water with you.

Jayce drops his rifle and falls ungracefully, face-first, with a sound that sounds embarrassingly similar to a squeak, into the hip-deep water. Heaves as he’s dragging himself up and blinking the water out of his eyes for a few long, awful seconds, mind spinning with what the hell kind of maneuver you’re trying to pull right now, before your weight crashes against him once more, pushing him back. And his boots are slipping on the stony riverbed, ankle giving below his weight and your impact, bending until it hurts.

Jayce doesn’t get to groan about it, not as his back is shoved against the very precipice he’d been standing on seconds ago, and your hand comes up to cover his mouth, and you — you’re pressing him against the earthy wall behind him with what feels like your entire weight.

It shouldn’t feel this good to be manhandled. Fear, pain and confusion aside, he’d be a shameless liar if he claimed his stomach didn’t flip at being shoved into the dirt, or at how you press one thigh between his, forearm braced against his collarbone.

“Shh,” you whisper softly against his ear, hand at his chest descending, stopping at waist, rubbing a soothing circle into the skin below his ribs. His spine tingles, from the press of your naked chest against his soaked shirt — his nipples are hard, he hopes you can’t feel that — to the puff of your breath at his neck.

He could break free, if he wanted to. He could even call for help, if he wanted to.

He just doesn’t.

Jayce nods in compliance, but your palm still presses hard against his lips. You’re not taking any chances. It’s dreadful to think that if you had not chosen to make sure he’d stay quiet and hide, he would’ve vouched for you to Marcus’ men with little hesitation.

Not because he likes you, or because he cares, of course. This is just a matter of pride. You’re his to catch, not Marcus’. The fact that you might return his feelings shouldn’t throw him off his game – because by now, he knows you’re a fantastic liar. It doesn’t matter that you’ve been thinking of him, not after you embarrassed the soul out of him that night, and soaked him to the core now. Capturing and turning you in is long overdue.

Besides, retaliation aside, it’s also his responsibility.

The moment those incompetent bastards are gone, he’s getting the job done. For now, though, he’s going to savor the press of your thigh against his half-hard cock, and hope you don’t notice how he rocks into it once, just barely. Just to taste.

If you do, you don’t point it out. But you meet it with a nudge of your thigh, barely a forward twitch of it that has him wondering if it was a conscious choice on your part or not. It doesn’t matter, though, not when the press of his own jeans is flush against his cock, and leaves him brainless and desperate. He doesn’t dare grind again, simply settles for the mind-numbing pressure where he needs it, lets himself throb into the contact. You huff when he does, but your expression is unreadable.

The pounding of hooves grows louder ever-so-softly, then fades into the late afternoon buzz.

No wonder they’re useless at their job. How they didn’t think to check out the anything-but-subtle splashing sound he’d caused with his fall is beyond him, but, well, Marcus’ men have never been thorough.

He’s never been so thankful for that.

But now it’s time to do his job. And he’s anything but thankful for that.

“They’re gone,” you say, hand falling from his mouth, the other still pinning him to the wall along with the thigh placed between his legs. He could break free. He should break free, he needs to–

Your thigh moves, a slow drag forward, until your torso settles against the cradle of his hips, providing a maddening, slow friction against his cock. Unbidden, his hips twitch forward, chasing the heat. It earns a delicate, but no less devious smile from you, and the hand at his hip slides forward, to the front of his soaked shirt, then inches downward. “Look at you – already hard again. I’d expected more resistance after having a gun pointed at me, Talis, but you’re just terribly weak, aren’t you?”

He may be weak – especially for you – but he won’t fall for your tricks again.

If you reach your destination, he’s a goner. And he can’t have that.

“Don’t. Touch me.” His fingers are around your wrist in an instant, wrenching your hand away although he wants nothing more than to feel it trail into his pants, stroke him off better than he ever could, have him come undone until it hurts; he’s still got a semblance of mental clarity, and he’s hanging onto it for dear life. He can’t let you do that again. Not if he wants to do his job, not if he wants this (albeit pleasurable) torment to come to its end.

It’s only while you open your mouth to answer that he realizes he’s still got your wrist in his hand, and that he could twist it behind your back with ease.

And it’s only once he does so, then steps forward to gain the necessary momentum to incapacitate you, that his already painful ankle gives below him, and he takes a second nosedive into the river water.

For fuck’s fucking sake.

Jayce barely manages to brace his fall against the riverbed with both hands, coming up a spluttering, dripping, defeated mess.

Strangely enough, your hands find his shoulders, and he takes the help you offer without so much as a second thought. Your grip slides under his elbow on one side, the other his waist, steadying him on his way up, soaked all over again, awkwardly hovering his hurt foot off the ground like a terribly ungraceful version of a flamingo.

Embarrassing.

You’re letting an amused chuckle slip, but are kind enough to not make any other observations.

“Easy there, Talis. You alright? Twisted your ankle?”

No, absolutely nothing is alright. Ankle aside, you’ve taken his already shattered pride and pretty much turned it into fine powder.

“Yeah.”

Jayce Talis. Piltover’s defender. Soaked fucking wet. Can’t stand on two legs anymore. Holding onto a criminal for dear life.

He’s not turning anyone in like this, much less you. Not when his entire calf and foot pulse at the slightest pressure, and anything more than a half-step makes him want to tear his lungs out in a scream.

“Nice try though,” you console, patting at his soaked shoulder. Asshole. “Let’s get you to shore, hm?”

“I can do that by myself just fine,” he grits out.

“You sure?”

What do you care? You’ve just caused all of this!

“Yes,” he hisses, not so much because he’s sure, but because he can’t stand the idea of taking any more of the help you’re offering.

So you let go, turn around, and drag yourself back up the precipice with little effort. Not that he would’ve minded if you took a little longer. You’re not… you’re not a bad sight at all. Even less so with your muscles at work, with your ass on display. He wants to trace the curves of your frame, wants to… god, he wants to lick the droplets pearling down your shoulder blades. Wants to follow their trail, lower, wants to tuck his chin between your legs and beg you to let him have a taste again, please, just once, or at least just smell you.

Fuck.

Atop the ground, you turn to look at him, expecting. So he limps his way to the precipice, steeling himself mentally.

It seems bigger now that he only has one leg to rely on — daunting.

Goddammit.

If there’s anything smaller than fine powder, he’s just discovered it.

“Actually,” Jayce forces out, voice meek and going meeker still as you turn around and smile, “I could use a hand.”

It’s within his reach before he can get to lament the fact that he’s asking a criminal for help.

“C’mon, pretty boy,” you snort, planting your feet into the soil. Your nickname sounds far from being a compliment, and more like a taunt. “Let’s get you outta there.”

—

“As much as I appreciate the lovely sight, you oughta put some clothes on, sweetheart. Gets real cold around these parts after sunset.”

Scoffing, Jayce looks away, then scoots a little closer to the fire you’d so kindly lit while he’d taken off his clothes and hung them up to dry. It’s still beyond him why you did that, when you could’ve easily just hopped onto your stallion and galloped off into the sunset, with another successful getaway under your belt. Sticking around, helping him – surely, you realize it’s a risk. Or has he lost his edge that much?

It’s beyond him how you’d wielded your nakedness much like a weapon, and why now that the roles have switched and he’s wearing his birthday suit while you’ve slipped on a pair of jeans and a loose shirt, he feels at a disadvantage. It’s frustrating.

You always come out on top, regardless of your odds.

“I’m not naked for you, sweetheart,” he hisses, sulks in on himself. Just to conserve some heat, mind you, not because you make him feel small with just a sideways glance and a smirk. “If it weren’t for my ankle, you’d be tied up and on the back of my horse already.”

“Right,” you grin.

When you cock a brow, skeptical, he sighs, then gives in. “If you have to know, I’m all out of clean clothes.”

You shrug. “Put them on anyway. Trust me, I won’t be put off by the chocolate stain on your other white shirt.”

“Trust me, this isn’t about putting you off.”

The words come out sharp and mean, and he fully expects you to say something fitting in return. Maybe even pack up and leave. It’s not like he could stop you. He’s not even sure if he can make the ride to Piltover tomorrow, not unless the swelling in his ankle goes down a miraculous amount.

It’s fine. He’s still got enough supplies in his saddlebags. He can wait out the healing of both his ankle and his pride in solitude, then return to Piltover and, for the first time in his life, admit to having failed.

God. He’s failed.

He’s failed, he’s cold, he’s hungry, he’s all out of clothes, he can’t even set up his tent for tonight in this state, and— and you’re still right here. You could’ve left, could’ve spared what little there’s left of his finely crushed pride, but no, you’ve decided to get both his and your horse, and set up camp here for tonight.

To torment him, he’s sure.

He just wants to be alone right now. Is that too much to ask?!

“Here. ‘S my only one.”

Fleece drapes atop his left shoulder, then his right, scratchy but thick nonetheless. You pull it around his shoulders tight, until both sides meet in front of his chest.

A blanket.

Surprisingly, you don’t take the opportunity to touch his exposed skin. Not more than necessary, your intentions aren’t predatory in the slightest as your hands run up and down his now fleece covered arms in an attempt to generate warmth.

A thank you scratches behind his teeth, but he decides against it. After all you’ve done to him, a scratchy fleece blanket won’t cut it.

“‘S not a chocolate stain. It, uh— manure,” he blurts instead. He doesn’t know why he’s telling you this. “My only other clothes are covered in manure.”

He appreciates that you try your very best not to laugh. It takes you a few seconds of hesitation, enough to get up and walk to your horse in the meantime, before you finally dare ask.

“Dare I even ask why?”

“No.”

He’s not about to say he hadn’t been looking and tripped into one while chasing down a Zaunite with a packet of Ferros cocaine gum in their hands.

“Street brawl gone awry,” he replies, because he feels like he owes you this, at least. He owes it to himself, however, to spare what little he has of his dignity, so he adds: “I won though.”

“Mm,” your hum sounds complacent, satisfied. “I hear Zaun’s been unusually rowdy lately. Wonder why.”

Like you aren’t the very cause of it.

Asshole.

“I know it was you,” Jayce shoots back. “You robbed a Ferros pharmacy. And stole all the cocaine products to cause a distraction down here.”

You watch him for a moment, entranced, before your eyes widen and light up brighter than the sparks of the crackling campfire. The grin you crack is delighted.

“You figure all that out by yourself?”

He nods, scoffs, and pulls the blanket back up around his shoulders. It’s nowhere near big enough to cover the entire expanse of his back, but it’s certainly better than being naked. “The Sheriff’s lawmen haven’t even considered it might be you.”

Your head tilts. “And how did you?”

Jayce shrugs. He’s not about to tell you he spent an embarrassing amount of time mulling it over, thinking that it all seemed exactly like your brand of trouble. It’s much easier to write it off as a lucky hunch. “‘Twas a… guess.”

“I think,” you say, “that you should give yourself more credit for your smarts.”

It’s absurd that the compliment gets to him.

He’s been called strong, useful, he knows he’s a threatening array of qualities made for catching people like you.

But it’s rare to hear a kind word about anything that lies below his strength.

Still not enough to warrant a thank you, though.

“If you’re hungry,” you change the subject, turning to search for something in your horse’s saddlebags, “you might have to wait a little while longer. This spot don’t seem like a good one for fishing, but I’ll have a go.”

Oh, for god’s sake.

He can’t believe he’s doing this.

“There’s uh…” Jayce clears his throat, pulls the blanket tighter around himself to keep another wave of goosebumps from forming. “There’s two cans of soup on Topacio. Left saddlebag.”

“Topacio?” You ask.

“My horse.”

Your laugh rings out clear and pretty over the crickets. “Oh, no, I figured. I just…” you pause for a moment to coo something soothing to his horse, before you clasp the leather straps open. “I never heard that name before.”

It’s embarrassing to think that he’s so eager to explain the meaning behind his horse’s name, when he knows damn well you wouldn’t care. Nobody does, he knows, because he’s had people ask about things he cares about deeply just to make conversation, and found himself ranting for ten minutes straight. He knows, because he has a talent of picking up on the disinterested glances only when it’s far too late.

So he says nothing. Because he’s probably said too much already — and even if he hadn’t, he will.

You return with the two cans, place them both in front of him, then plop down next to him with an exhausted sigh.

“One’s for you,” Jayce says, rolling it your way. “For… the uh, blanket.”

You take it without fanfare, but with a thankful smile no less, and crack it open easily.

It’s surprisingly refreshing to eat around someone who has no notion of etiquette whatsoever. Sure, him and Caitlyn don’t abide by it when they go on their little camping trips, and he sure as hell doesn’t abide by etiquette when he’s eating by himself, but something about seeing you chug the soup with a complete lack of inhibition, unlike any Piltovan ever could is… entertaining. In a refreshing way.

He slurps away at his soup in silence, watches as the flames start to die and you make quick work of feeding more dry branches into it, wordless.

The quiet is far from threatening.

With how high and hot passion had run between the two of you that night, he hadn’t expected to find lull anywhere near you. Even less so at your side.

It’s… nice.

No, he shouldn’t— it’s not— he’s not enjoying the company of an outlaw. It’s just an observation.

“Y’know, Jayce,” you speak up from across the campfire, a smug little grin flashing white, “the light in the saloon never did your eyes justice.”

His heart shoots up into his throat, and Jayce actually has to suppress a breathy, subtle little gasp.

You don’t miss it.

He knows you don’t, because you chuckle, victorious and ravenous all at once, and his skin glows hot, from the tips of his ears to his chest.

That’s one way to combat the evening chill. He’d rather not think about any others right now, lest he gets hard under the blanket you’ve lent him.

“Save your cheap compliments for an idiot that’ll actually believe them.”

“I meant it,” you counter, meeting his gaze with lidded, but no less focused eyes that soften the exact same way they had when you were dripping, standing behind the barrel of his gun. “I remember when you first looked at me, all wide-eyed and eager, thinkin’ they looked much like a doe’s.”

His heart soars, to the point where he can hear blood rushing somewhere behind his eardrums.

Like a doe’s.

You’d have no way of knowing the significance that word carries. It’s not just about the characteristic fawn-tremble softness that permeates him and bleeds into everything he does, says, thinks. It’s that his mother used to cup his face and kiss his forehead and endearingly call him cervatillo when she wiped the tears from his eyes. Back when he was still allowed to be weak, when he still was weak, all bruised up and gangly legs and thin arms and ruffled hair and awkward, toothless smiles.

Back when the achy tenderness of his nature was considered a feeble thing time would solve, not something he had to remind himself to bury. It’s both terrifying and soothing that you spot it with such ease. Terrifying because he knows you will use it however you deem fit to suit you, soothing because you understand it, and you handle it — handle him — in ways he's long given up on hoping for.

No-one’s ever said anything about his eyes since his mother. And absolutely no one's compared them to an animal’s so delicate. No room for tenderness when there needed to be strength, duty, ruthlessness.

He hadn’t realized how much he’d been aching to hear something like this. Your compliment brings with it an aftertaste so bittersweet he can’t help but savor it, in spite of how his throat goes uncomfortably tight.

“You alright, sweetheart?”

Jayce blinks, swallows the knot in his throat he hadn’t even realized formed. “What?”

“You’re tearing up.” You’re not mocking him, you’re not even stating a fact, you just say it like you care. Like it matters to you that something hurts, like you want to make it better, like he’s important. “What’s the matter?”

Why do you have to make this so difficult?

“Nothing. ‘S the smoke,” he lies, “I’m just… sitting too close to the fire. And I’m tired. I should— I should set up my tent. And sleep.”

Relying on just one leg to get up is no easy feat. He manages, he always does, but by the time he’s standing, swaying ever so subtly from putting most of his weight on one foot, he starts reconsidering sleeping under the stars.

“With that ankle, you ain’t setting up anything,” you joke, ever-observant. “Want me to help?”

“No.”

“Wanna share my tent? I could keep you nice ‘n warm.”

God, that’s tempting.

“Absolutely not.”

You shrug, the soft hurt behind your nonchalance hits his chest with an annoying, painful twang. Why does he care?

Why does he care?

And why does he want to say yes so desperately?

“Alright,” you say. The way you lean back on your elbow and stretch out your legs is a practiced emulation of detachment. “Offer still stands, though.”

In your dreams.

–

“Oh, come on.”

The first few raindrops hitting the back of his neck feel much like the punchline of a very bad joke.

A very bad and awfully cruel joke.

As he’s kneeling beside the scattered components of what should’ve been his tent in less than ten minutes' time, Jayce realizes that today’s torment is far from coming to an end.

There’s no way he’ll be able to set this damn thing up while limping, naked save for the blanket loosely wrapped around his shoulders, shivering so hard he can feel his own teeth clattering, and while it’s raining.

Great. Now what?

“Talis.” The flap to your tent opens audibly, and you poke your head out with a sigh. “Swallow what’s left of your pride and get in here.”

Finely crushed pride should be easy to swallow. Turns out it isn’t. It sticks to the roof of his mouth like a handful of flour.

“I-I’ve got this,” he replies, “just a few more minutes and I’ll–”

“I wasn’t askin’.” For a criminal, your threatening voice sounds much more like scolding, rather than intimidating. “Now c’mon.”

He’d like to turn you down. You’ve already had the upper hand in far too many instances today, and he’d hate to grant you another, but what choice does he have?

So he awkwardly shuffles away from what should’ve been his tent, makes his way over to yours, where you await with a victorious little smile. You even generously offer your hand for support, which he ends up taking as he maneuvers through the tight space, and finally settles on the ground.

“Jesus, you’re cold,” you mutter, staring at where his hand rests in yours, huffing out a frustrated breath.

What do you care? Why do you care? What does his comfort matter, when you’ve left him tied to a bed for hours a little over ten days ago?

“‘S fine,” Jayce grits out, yanks his hand from your hold. Hastily, he tugs the blanket off his shoulders, and drapes it across his torso instead. “I’m fine. Let’s not pretend this is more than an unfortunate circumstance, yeah? Because what happened the last time we shared a bed isn’t happening again. Not after what you did to me.”

Part of him regrets flopping down on his side, facing away from you. He can’t make sense of your sigh, can’t tell if it’s angry or disappointed.

“What I’ve done to you? You were going to turn me in,” you reply. “I was lookin’ out for myself. A lifetime in captivity is, by far, worse than spendin’ one night tied to a bed, sweetheart. Get over yourself.”

Jayce turns to look at you over his shoulder. Get over himself?! After how you’ve abused of his trust, after you robbed him blind, after, after–!

“You humiliated me.”

Your grin is venomous. “You seemed to quite enjoy it at the time.”

Asshole.

Bastard.

The— the goddamn audacity!

“That’s it, I’m leaving.”

Jayce is sitting up before he’s realized it, dead set on not spending another second in your proximity. He doesn’t care what he has to do; put on manure covered clothes, limp through rain, hell, he’ll even crawl if he must, he doesn’t care, he’s not–

“Hey, hey, hey, I’m sorry.” Your hand wraps tight around the wrist he’s propped against the ground, and your thumb rubs a soothing circle into his pulse point.

An apology? That’s… new.

A step forward, or just a new trick you’ll be using to win the upper hand once more?

Your gaze darts from his hand to his face in a frenzy, settles into a worried frown once he finally sits back down.

“I’m sorry, sweetheart,” you repeat it like the first time you said it didn’t hit him like a wall of bricks, “‘Twas just a joke, I didn’t mean– Just… stay.”

Stay? That’s a ridiculously high demand after you robbed him and left, with his heart, money and dignity. He hates that it should be outrageous, that he should be outraged, but that he rather finds himself growing warm and soft and pliant instead.

“Why?”

God, he’s weak.

Your smile is devoid of all its familiar coyness, shines with something new and tender and unsettlingly genuine. “I wanna make it up to you. Y’know, for your sprained ankle n’ all.”

Oh.

Of course it’s about you feeling less bad about the damage you’d done. It’s never about him, is it?

His shattered pride is by far a more pressing issue than his ankle, but, fine. Fine. He’ll let you have this. Just because he’s so terribly generous. Not… because his chest warms at the fact that you might be worried about making it up to him. This isn’t about him. He needs to get that through his head.

His frame slackens, and so does your grip around his wrist, lingering up his arm as he settles back down. Still facing away. He’s not going to give you the satisfaction of seeing his pout when you let go of his arm, and move away to a respectful distance. As much as the tent allows.

It stays at that. Laying next to each-other a distance far enough to not allow more than the occasional graze, but close enough to hear your breath, close enough to hear how it slows.

Nature isn’t usually this quiet. Certainly not quiet enough to hear even his own breath, much less someone else’s. There’s nothing to distract him from the truth, from how his stomach turns and lungs swell with an urgent, subtle warmth and yearning and want. Almost everything he’d wanted to have the night you’d left him in that saloon is right behind him, yet terribly out of reach.

Your warmth, your breath, your skin, waiting and giving and warm and your sheltering arms, wrapped around him tight, tight enough to make him forget about what awaits and what’s expected of him outside of them. What he wouldn’t give for that.

What he wouldn’t give up for that.

At just the thought of arms wrapped around him, of a chest pressed up against his back, of– of you, breathing at his neck, instead of at the other side of the tent, his body gives an involuntary shiver, potent enough that it’s audible in his exhale.

“Still cold?”

Dammit.

“No, just, uh,” unable to come up with an eloquent lie, Jayce sighs, shakes his head. “‘S nothing. Sleep.”

“I could hold you, you know.” You clear your throat after you say it, suddenly uneasy with the prospect of it. Or perhaps shy? You’ve never really been that, and you’ve done much worse than just hug. He doubts this is enough to work you up into anxiety. “To share some body heat.”

It’s a punch to the gut.

You say it like it’s easy, like one night spent together isn’t the root cause of all your problems, like holding him isn’t going to lead to more of them.

He should know better. He does know better.

He doesn’t need to get his hopes up just to have them broken all over again – one time was enough, thank you very much.

“I’d rather you didn’t,” he snarks.

It’s unintentionally cutting.

“That’s alright sweetheart, no pressure.”

You don’t deserve to be talked to like that. Well— you do, because you’ve left him and humiliated him that night, but… it’s still not fair. You’ve given him your blanket, let him share your tent, and stayed for his sake. You’ve tried to make up for how you’d left him that night, and even though it still hurts to think about it, he can understand why. Behind all that buttery smoothness and salacious want, you had to be cautious.

And, besides, some warmth doesn’t sound half bad.

It doesn’t have to lead to sex. Right? It— it can just be exactly what you’d suggested, a sharing of body heat, and maybe a taste of the tenderness he’d craved so desperately after you’d left.

He wants that.

And there’s nothing wrong with just that, is there? It’s functional, it’s in his best interest to snatch up some warmth.

“Alright. Fine,” Jayce blurts. The pause he’s faced with after he’s spit out the words makes the heat in his stomach turn to anxious lead, weighing down in his gut as he awaits your response.

You snort out a laugh, confused. “What?”

“I meant that it’s fine for you to uh… share some body heat. You can— you can hold me.”

You hum, and when he turns to steal a glance at you over his shoulder, you’re fixating him with a wicked smile.

“I know I can, sweetheart, but do you want me to?”

Of course. Of course you would pull this, why did he think you’d make this easy? He’d deluded himself into thinking you actually wanted to help, when you so clearly just wanted to find a new way to torment him.

Why does he always do this? Always takes the bait, always—

The purpose of warming him up seems terribly distant when he damn near freezes at your arm snaking between the groove of his waist and the ground, while the other reaches to take his hand in yours, and oh, your chest seams to his back, warm and soft and your heartbeat is right there, a soft little thudding between his shoulder blades, nowhere near wild enough to match his raging one.

“Relax, I was jokin’.” He can feel your chest rumble with a little laugh. “How’s this, hm?”

The proximity between your lips and his ear makes him shiver in earnest now, entire body flooding with goosebumps that have very little to do with the cold.

It is working, if the heat zinging down his spine and gathering in his stomach and chest is anything to go by. And the slowly building pressure in his cock, scorching and gradually swelling into pleasant, pulsing hardness.

He doesn’t know what this makes him. A hypocrite, probably, for promising himself he would not want anything more while his body and subconscious are begging for it. Or an idiot, for thinking he'd be able to turn down whatever you offered, when he’s hanging onto every word, every inhale-exhale, every back and forth brush of your fingers.

Most of all, though, he’s scared. Scared to want more, scared that he does want more, and scared of what’ll happen if he ends up finding exactly that.

“Yeah,” Jayce croaks out. He has to squeeze his eyes shut to muster up enough brainpower for a second, marginally more eloquent response. “It’s fine.”

“Just fine?”

Jayce doesn’t answer.

He can’t answer, because he knows for a fact he won’t get out anything more than a shaky rendition of an affirmative word, or, worst case scenario, will wheeze out a soft, hushed whimper.

The hand that holds his starts rubbing at his palm, before it urges it into a lax fist, which you lift up to his shoulder, just enough to tuck your chin atop his collarbone and blow out a warm gust of air against it. The hand you’d wrapped around his waist is used as leverage to press the cradle of your hips up against his ass, steady but certain in how you smother him with your heat in spite of the fact that his frame is considerably bigger and wider than yours.

The texture of your jeans is rough against his bare ass, your breath tickles that one blissful spot right behind his ear, your hand, splayed atop his tummy, scratches gently at the first few hairs of his happy trail, and he doesn’t know what this is, doesn’t know what you want it to be, doesn’t even know how he should–

“Breathe, you’re stiff as a board.”

You don’t mean— no, of course you don’t, there’s no way you could know, because you’re not… You’re still touching his stomach. Right. And he’s clenching it.

“Sorry.”

With a fortifying breath in, and an exhale so thorough it makes his lungs ache, he finally goes as lax as he can in your hold. It’s a fabricated, forced kind of relaxation, but it seems to satisfy you regardless. Your smile is palpable at the back of his neck.

Your fingertips twirl the thick curls between his hips, and your lips — still split into a smile — press a fleeting kiss to his nape.

“There you go.”

That… is not helping.

At your saccharine praise, his hips give a twitch forward, the tip of his half-hard cock nudging the scratchy fleece just enough to have a soft moan catching in his throat. It’s hardly even contact, but it’s more than enough when he’s been throbbing, untouched, for torturous minutes. You notice. Of course you do.

“Oh?” you purr at the back of his neck, more of a delighted remark rather than a question. “What’s that, Talis?”

He doesn’t know why, out of all the things already rubbed up against him, particularly hearing his last name rubs him the wrong way – but it does. Has his stomach flipping with a new, heavy kind of heat, borne of both frustration and desperate need. He hangs onto the anger to navigate his foggy, pleasure-wired thoughts and come up with something to deflect from the obvious.

Not that it works.

“Stop calling me that.”

You steady him with the hand at his tummy, reel him back in, back against you, before your palm, callused, flattens and presses its heel into the skin below his navel.

“What would you prefer?” You ask, sweet enough that even Jayce — usually terrible at picking up on social cues — can tell it’s fake. You inch closer, pressed up so tight your heat permeates him down to his spine, before you whisper, taunting, “Pretty boy? Sweetheart?”

Jayce’s hand finds yours in an instant, wraps loosely around your wrist, realizing, to his utter terror, that the tension making his chest feel unbearably tight is not between him and you, but within himself.

You’re going to give him everything he’s been aching for, and he’s not sure he wants it.

That won’t matter, though, because he clearly doesn’t have much of a say in this, does he? He can tell by how greedily your hand still inches further and further down, can feel it in how you grip his chest in the other, can feel it in how indulgently you squeeze, until your nails indent his pectoral and your fingertips brush the curls at the base of his heavy cock.

You’re going to take what you want. It all comes down to whether he’ll let you or not.

Because you’re out to sate your hunger. This isn’t about him, never was about him. All of it — your choosing to stay, to talk to him, to look out for him — is faux kindness; hadn’t been anything more. He’d just deluded himself into believing otherwise, believing you, because he aches for it. Aches to be held not so that his body can be of use, aches to be held because he matters, because you care — but you don’t.

You take his cock in your hand and hum with delight at how he throbs, desperate and rhythmic like his heartbeat. His stomach drops, leaden with the realization that he’s nothing more than meat between your molars, but his body accepts it regardless, because it will suffice, it has to. Unwilling, unbidden, he thrusts into your fist, whimpers at the chafing grip of your hand on his buzzing nerves.

“You seemed to quite like being called a whore the other night as well, didn’t you, Talis?” Your voice muffles at the back of his neck, sinks into his brain like warm lightning, paralyzes thoughts, enables muscles. His spine bows for you, willing, as you stroke his foreskin back with the meat of your palm and press your thumb to his weeping slit. Your index rubs at the underside of him, nearly abrades in its certainty to hit the exact spot where his nerves burn at the slightest touch.

The bow of his spine is undone promptly, in favor of curling in on himself from the pleasure-pain, sensitive spot rubbed raw with the white slick testament of his own body’s disobedience, his desperation. “Oh, darlin’, look at you, you’re leaking. All for me.”

“Please—“

He’s not even sure what he’s begging for. Less? More?

“Shh, I know,” you soothe, although you don’t have the slightest fucking idea.

How could you? If you knew how he burns for tenderness, if you had any idea that the noxious, synthetic affection you pour into every touch is toxic, you’d stop. But you don’t know, or you don’t care, you’re only rubbing him raw into an orgasm that feels taken, rather than given.

You’re using him.

Jayce has half the mind to startle when you nudge his jaw, your sweaty cheek against his, your hand unrelenting in its pace and rhythm, wringing his nerves dry of all pleasure. Your tongue licks at the corner of his mouth, surprisingly tender, a taste of what he longs for. You’re husky when you say it, almost like you ache for it, too, slick at the edge of his lips. This is about as close as he’s ever seen you get to begging.

“Kiss me, sweetheart.”

So he does. Always rushing to please, to do as demanded not because he stops to consider the implications of it, but out of sheer habit.

He pays the price for acting on muscle memory.

The first brush of your lips paralyzes. Has him going lax in your arms, feeling much like a rabbit in a spearhead’s deadly embrace – pliant and soft. Having no choice but to soak the sugary-bitter poison you so greedily feed into his mouth with the push of your tongue, even if it’s making him ache.

It’s laughable that he can’t even understand why something so warm and devouring makes him hurt, until there’s a zing of phantom pain in his wrists and a less phantomatic one in his chest – and he realizes that you’d kissed him like this before you’d left. Kissed him raw and genuine and then left him, tied to that bed, hurting and confused and alone and used.

And you’re going to do it again. Because that’s all you do, isn’t it? Take, and take and take.

He can’t let you keep getting away with it.

“S-stop,” he stutters out, fist going tight around your wrist, although you halt before he can force you into it regardless.

The lack of contact feels just as wrong as its presence had.

“You alright?”

No. Nothing’s alright. From the painful, needy throb of his cock, to how his stomach and chest and throat go concave and tight and heavy and you don’t care; because if you did, you wouldn’t be doing this, you wouldn’t—

“Hey, Jayce—“ The hand at his lower stomach brushes up, presses to the space between his chest and stomach, right between his ribs, almost like you know that’s where it hurts the most. But you don’t, you couldn’t.

“Don’t touch me,” he hisses, for a second time tonight, although this time he sounds considerably less angry and more like he’s rupturing at the seams. Feeling like a startled animal, he scrambles to face you, and puts some much needed distance between you.

You’re confused. That’s the first thing he notices — head tilted, brows furrowed, eyes wide — you’re staring at him like he’s a problem you can’t quite figure out, but you’re not— you don’t seem angry. You look him up and down, eyes lingering on his fists, clutched tight to the point of bony whiteness. If they weren’t, they’d be shaking.

You reach out to settle one hand atop his knuckles, but you don’t force more contact than just the near-hovering brush.

“What’s wrong, sweetheart?”

What’s wrong?! You’re acting like you care, touching him like you don’t, and he wants— he doesn’t fucking know what he wants, doesn’t know he should want because he doesn’t know what you want, he just knows he doesn’t want this.

Putting all of this into words is a distant dream. Jayce settles for silence, the heavy and alarming kind that has you shifting closer, reaching out.

Instinctively, he flinches away, hand shooting away from yours, down to… his hip? His gun. Where his gun would be. Should be.

At his reaction, you stop, retrace the distance you’d tried to close moments ago.

That helps. Somewhat. It shifts the stifling weight from his stomach to his chest, anxiety to guilt.

“Jayce?”

Your tone pitches up high at the end of his name, and if he didn’t know you to be such a ruthless criminal, he might’ve classed your tone as guilty. But someone like you isn’t capable of that sort of thing. It’s something you’ve long had to discard to make it where you are right now.

It’s not fair that you still pretend you feel even a semblance of it. It’s not fair of you to use him, leave him, belittle him, try to use him again, kiss him like nothing happened, and then say his name like you’re genuinely worried.

He doesn’t deserve this. He doesn’t deserve to be thrown around and picked back up whenever you so desire to have your fun with him, he doesn’t deserve to be talked to like he matters just to be coaxed into submission and give you what you want.

“Will you just tell me what’s wrong?”

Everything’s wrong. You’re pushing every right button to weasel yourself back under his skin, because that’s what you do, don’t you? You have him figured out, you’ve had him figured out since the moment he shivered at the first word you addressed to him, and now you are going to abuse of that knowledge, because that’s all you know how to do.

Because you’re a criminal.

Because you don’t bother with the intricacies of emotions or even just the simplicity of giving a fucking shit.

“You don’t get to do that,” he says, can’t bring himself to meet your gaze even though he’s fuming. “You don’t get to treat me like this and then, and then just—!”

“What?” You ask, head tilting. “Treat you how?”

There is no malice behind your inquiry, at least not as far as his gut tells him. He’s not inclined to believe it – his instinct has failed him one too many times when it comes to you. Regardless, it just doesn’t make sense. He’s just had the most embarrassing outburst since the day he’s passed puberty, and you’re trying to understand, rather than kick him out of your tent?

Why won’t you just make him leave? It’d be a panacea to all of this, it’d make everything so much less complicated, much easier, but you won’t. Why?

“Jayce,” you say again, not any less gentle than the first time. Why? “Talk to me.”

Maybe talking to you and helping you realize he’s got all your cheap, predatory tactics figured out is enough to finally put a pitiful end to this. You want him to talk? He’ll talk.

He now understands how cats feel when they hack up a ball of fur. The sadness and loathing build in his throat, threaten to form a know that’ll go straight to his already watery eyes and do him in. But the words can be hacked up, and his tongue can be unstuck from the roof of his mouth, and then the truth comes easily.

“You used me,” he finally spits out. Jayce’s voice goes strangled and quiet on the second word, and he realizes it’s — above all else — shame that weighs it down. “And you left. And— and now you’re pretending none of it happened, pretending you care, and I— I was stupid enough to buy it once, but trust me, I’m not—“

“You didn’t want this?”

You swallow thickly, the hand you’d touched him with shooting up to your chest, prodding at your own collarbone, almost curling in on yourself. Almost.

He doubts that someone like you is even capable of genuine displays of guilt, after all you’ve done, guilt does not seem like something you could afford, but this — watching him like the thought of having touched him against his wishes makes you hurt — this comes quite close.

And it’s absurd, overwhelming and flattering in a way that leaves his mouth feeling sticky and dry that out of all the heinous things you’ve committed, it’s him you’ve deemed worthy of your contrition.

Jayce is going to throw up.

“You asked me to hold you, sweetheart, I assumed you—“ your sentence falters to a halt once the word is out, and there is regret and understanding and revelation all across your face and maybe — just maybe — you do care. Do you? “I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have assumed.”

Jayce has to look up to the tent’s ceiling, swallow back a sticky-suffocating mixture of vomit and tears.

He can stomach skinning animals, can stomach the feel of teeth cracking under the pound of his fist, can stomach the guts pouring out of a gash he slashes across a criminal’s abdomen but this is where his body draws the line? At a goddamn apology?

“You should’ve told me, sweetheart, I would’ve stopped–”

“So stop now.”

“What?”

“Stop acting like you care about what I want, because we both know that’s a lie, stop pretending whatever’s between us isn’t wrong and stop— Just stop.”

You briefly watch him in silence, caught off-guard by the outburst. He can’t exactly blame you for that — he’s just as surprised.

He’s not— he’s not like this. He’s level-headed, he’s smart, he’s resourceful, can (usually) hold his own. But you bring out the worst in him, in all ways. Make him terrified and brainless and lusty and unfocused and pliant and needy.

“Alright,” you say, and it sounds less like a verdict, and more like an agreement. “What do I… would you prefer if I left you alone in here?”

He’s never wanted to answer yes and no to a question so much. Much to both his dismay and relief, there is no choice to be made. There never is — not when it comes to him.

This isn’t a matter of preference. Of course it isn’t— nothing in his life ever was. It’s all circumstance; sometimes he has to wonder if he even has a hand in anything at all, when his entire life feels like an unrelenting river current he fell into. Becoming a bounty hunter, a protector, leaving home, abandoning his wants to become who he needed to be, there had been no choice in that. He’d done it all because circumstance demanded it, and now… well, now is pretty much the same thing, all over again.

Jayce scoffs. “Where would you go? It’s raining. And this is your tent.”

You don’t have an answer, and neither does he.

“Stay,” he decides, not because he wants you to, but because alternatives are scarce. “Just don’t—“

His voice sticks to the back of his throat, right behind his tongue.

Don’t what?

Don’t touch me even though I so desperately want you to? Don’t talk to me even though I cling onto your every word, no matter how sharp or soft? Don’t act against my wishes, even though I have no idea what they are?

“No funny business,” you interrupt. “You have my word.”

Jayce has no idea how much an outlaw’s promise is worth. He’s about to find out.

And he does. You keep it with uncharacteristic determination, you don’t say another word, don’t touch him, don’t even move. If it weren’t for the muted sound of your breath, you might as well be gone.

And it hits Jayce that he doesn’t want that.

Doesn’t want you gone even though he should, because it’s the right thing, the logical thing to want. Your leaving, regardless if it implied locking you up or you getting away, would solve half of his problems, if not more of them.

Except for his longing.

And, as it turns out, that takes priority.

Because Jayce is weak, he peeks at your form over his shoulder, and his five o’clock shadow scratches the fleece blanket as his head turns. Your eyes slide open at the sound, catching him red-handed.

And you smile again.

That’s the last thing he sees before he turns away again, and you stick to your goddamn promise, because you don’t speak or touch or laugh or do any of the things he really wishes you would do right now.

He’s hopeless.

You make a sound, a little cut-off consonant that dies before it even leaves your mouth properly, and Jayce turns to look at you again.

“What?”

“Was gonna say somethin’,” you tell him. “But I remembered I promised you otherwise.”

“I doubt that after all the robbing and crime, a promise is where you draw the line.”

You smile. “I gave you my word, T— Jayce.”

“Give me… the rest of them, too.” He sighs. Weak. “What were you going to say?”

“Well, I was gonna say, that… for what it’s worth,” you pause for a moment, still hesitant, “if I hadn’t figured out you were the Jayce Talis then, that night wouldn’t have ended the way it did.”

It’s a question he shouldn’t ask, and one he wouldn’t need to ask if he had half of Cait’s capacity to read people, but he needs to know.

“How… would it have ended, then?”

“I don’t tend to stick around until dawn.” You swallow audibly. “But I would have liked to, for you.”

And Jayce knows that’s a lie, the same way those nomadic merchants passing through Piltover set up shabby shop at the market and ask his name, then tell him it’s a good name, a strong name, fit for someone like him, that they like him and they’ll make him a special offer. It’s cheap, transparent manipulation, and still it works, because it makes his heart leap a fraction. But it’s a lie.

“Sure,” Jayce snarks, because he can’t really come up with anything better. “Stick around for what? Another quick fuck before you left for good?”

You hum like you’d been expecting his answer. “Not without asking you when you’d like to see me again.”

And that shuts him up for good. Weighs and sticks heavy and bitter and pungent on his tongue like tar because he doesn't want to believe it, but tastes sweet after he swallows, because he does believe it. You say it like it’s a simple, single truth, and he can’t help the way his entire being tingles with delight.

You would have wanted more of him.

“You’ve got all night to come up with an answer,” you add, smug, before you shift to turn away from him, too. “Take your time.”

You’re not wrong.

He does.

—

He doesn’t. He does have the whole night at his disposal, and your question has him warm and awake and alive even though he tries so desperately not to be.

And now he doesn’t have all night at his disposal anymore because he wakes from what little sleep he’d fallen into, and judging by how his bones ache like they’re going to crumble, the rest had neither been of quality or quantity.

So much for sleeping on a decision.

Jayce tenses what feels like every single muscle in his body, then, without giving his size too much though, flops onto his back.

And it hits him only after he does so that he should’ve been very much crushing you under his weight, had you been there.

But you’re not.

The spot next to him is empty.

You’re gone.

Sticking around until dusk his fucking ass. What’d he even expect? A kiss on the forehead and breakfast in bed? How typical of him to get his hopes up so very high that they shatter, how naïve of him, how deluded—

He wouldn’t be surprised if you’d taken everything and just left him with your shabby excuse for a tent and his naked horse. What’d he even expect from a criminal?

You’ve fooled him again and he’s let you. And you’ve used him, of course you have, because you don’t know anything else aside from that, do you?

And in spite of it all, Jayce, in all his wishful thinking, still wants to believe you’re there, sitting beside the dead campfire and waiting for him as he crawls out of your tent.

But you’re not.

Topacio — his horse — is still very much there, and so is his gear, and his still damp clothes, and his satchel. Once he slips into his sticky jeans and slightly less sticky shirt, Jayce reaches for the satchel, prepared for the worst.

But it’s still as full as it had been yesterday.

No, that’s wrong. It’s fuller.

Your bounty poster is folded, around— around something. As he unfolds it, a wad of cash slides out, and Jayce manages to catch it before it spills from the paper and hits the mud.

It’s the exact amount you’d stolen after the first night you’d spent with him, all there. All tucked into a folded piece of paper, which you’ve hastily scribbled onto:

I don’t want to make your job any more difficult than it has to be, Jayce. As of the moment I am writing this, I promise you — and you have seen how much my word is worth last night — that I will not cause you any more trouble. Not in Piltover, at least.

I will, however, be visiting next month. I do want my tent back. What we do in it after you return it will be up to you.

Jayce swallows thickly when he notices that there is, unfortunately, something written on the backside of this paper: big, bold letters and numbers are visible through the paper, and so is what seems to be a dried stain — oh. Oh, fuck. Of course you’ve found it.

This piece of paper is the bounty poster of you with the obvious smear of his semen across your face. Before Jayce gets to agonize about not ripping the poster into shreds or using it to fuel his campfire, another scribble catches his eye.

Right below where the paper curls with his dried cum, you’ve written in pencil:

I will be missing you just as fondly.

#jayce talis x reader #arcane jayce #jayce arcane #jayce talis #jayce x reader #jayce arcane x reader #arcane jayce x reader #jayce x you #jayce talis x you #western au #cowboy au #my writing #you could have it all (my empire of dirt)

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