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netherfeildren · 5 months ago

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Busy, Dying. Part 3;

Series Masterlist

Pairing: Joel Miller x F!Reader

A/N: This chapter is dedicated to my lovely and kind friend @FloBallestra whose beautiful beautiful art inspired me so much for this story. You’re the coolest, smartest girl in the world, Flo; I love being your friend.

Rating: Explicit 18+

Content Warnings: No Outbreak AU, A/B/O, Alpha/Beta/Omega Dynamics, Soulmates AU, Infidelity, Cheating, Heat Sex, Knotting, Fluff & Smut & Angst, Premature Ejaculation, Scenting, Dacryphilia; Explicit Sexual Content, Dom/sub Undertones, Breeding Kink, Excessive Amounts of Cum, Aftercare, Touch Starved Joel Miller, Angst With a Happy Ending

Word Count: 6.8K

Read on AO3

Part 3;

The apartment with the small, warm room you bring him to is a radiant and generous place; some brightly lit bubble of life Joel hasn’t looked upon in years and years.

You tell him you have a roommate who spends all her time with her girlfriend—crazy in love. They work at the opera, too—set carpenter and sound design. Soon, they plan to get married.

You tell him all of this with a patently wistful look in your eye. Like you’re happy for your friends, and also terribly aware of what it is that landed you in a place like the Emmanuel.

In your bedroom, there are twinkling lights that hang from the edges of the ceiling, and a mess of a pink and cream colored bed at the center of the closely packed room, blankets and pillows piled high into what looks like a preemptively engineered nest.

You move into the space slowly, like you’re shy, hesitant to allow him into this sacred place, as you drape his borrowed coat over the back of the desk chair. The surface of which is cluttered with books and papers, a beaten up red journal, a laptop and makeup strewn about haphazardly. An etched glass bottle of perfume perches precariously at the corner's edge, the deep golden liquid within: still and undisturbed.

“I like your room,” he tells you.

But what he’d really like to say is that he feels in danger here, in this comfortable space. That he wishes he could run but that there’s nowhere else he’d rather be, also. Nowhere to run to. That he’s grateful. That the act the two of you are about to commit here will be undeniably selfish. That at the end of it all, he hopes you might forgive him.

The look on your face when you turn to thank him, one hand braced against the back of the chair as if to hold yourself upright, is full of the ardor of your unfurling heat, the weight of your biology, the reasons for finding yourself in the basement of an old church. There’s sweat dampening your hairline and a glaze in your eye that tells him soon you won’t even remember your own name, but you’ll surely remember his.

Joel feels suddenly flayed open, like some prey animal gutted by a wolf, spilling all of his own ravenous hunger out for your witness. It’s a moment of undeniable honesty. His own face, a mirror, his own skin damp with sweat. He’s painfully hard already with your scent on his tongue and fingers and surrounding him everywhere in this room. And the look on your face is so similar to the shiver in his gut, that he decides to be honest with his fears:

“We’re about to do somethin’ selfish here. With no thought for how it might hurt anyone.” Not even ourselves. “And I’ve always been a selfish man. But I worry for you.”

Your lashes flutter, as if taking in the weight of his words. But you smile, “Think I can’t handle it?” Another drooping flutter of your lashes, thick and curling. The fever turns you into an unreliable narrator. He can see the flutter of a too fast pulse beneath the thin skin of your throat. All bravado—you struggle to maintain the smirk. “I don’t think I believe half the things you say about yourself.”

“I don’t care about anything,” he tells you, palms splayed wide as if to show you all his cards.

“You’re a bad liar, Joel Miller.”

You know his last name without him ever having told you, and it feels like a sign. Like you already know everything there is to know about him, so obviously he’s supposed to be here.

“You can sit down,” you offer, slowly moving to shut the door. “They never stay here, we’ll have the apartment to ourselves for a few days most likely.”

He swallows his nerves, the reality that he’s never done a thing like this, been in this position before, slides down his throat to settle heavily in his gut as he sits slowly at the edge of the pink bed. On the nightstand there’s a dangerously leaning tower of books: Anna Karenina, The Second Sex, Emily of New Moon, The Norton Anthology of Poetry, an autobiography of W.B. Yeats, The Happy Hooker, The Act of Creation, Seven Gothic Tales.

A wishful romantic, a realist, a smart girl doing a stupid thing.

He stares at the stack unblinking. You like to read. This is who you are, this person who collects books in your small, pink room with the absent housemate and a brother who’ll only speak to you once a month. Parents who you want to be nothing like. Someone who works at the opera and likes to walk and eats too many sweets, with the golden perfume teetering dangerously at the edge of a desk.

Someone who’d dreamt of something better.

Suddenly, he can’t think of anyone else in his life whose small details he knows like this. Not a single person. Certainly not the woman he’s lived with for the past seven years. Perhaps not even himself.

And learnt in such a short time, too.

You move around him slowly, a gentle hand at his shoulder dragging to softly touch his cheek. He’s glad it’s you he knows like this. At least there is that.

“I’m not scared to be selfish. I’m scared of other things, but not that.”

He swallows, eyes wide and dry. And you’re so beautiful, and wanting him, what else is there to be but frightened and here, waiting for you to decide what’s next for him.

Your soft fingertip follows the curve of his cheekbone, back and forth, watching him with eyes that are not as afraid as his, but wide and young and honest. Full of the potential for life that has so callously slipped through his own hands. He thinks there’s nothing within him that can understand why you’d have found yourself in a place for lonely people. Why would you ever need a miracle cure the way he does? How could God or the whole world not want to miraculously cure you of any sort of loneliness you might have ever suffered? Desperate for the power to turn back the clock, change his whole life, find you at a time when he was young and unbroken and honest, too.

You push his hair back, fingers sliding through the thick strands, dancing over the shell of his ear the way they’d danced over the temptation of sugar. His blood throbs madly at his temples, his muscles spasming beneath his skin; he shuts his eyes, sucking in a slow, deep breath to steady himself. He’s not afraid to admit he’s afraid of this.

He hadn’t suffered any sort of real sex drive in years. His libido cold and inconsistent and… gone. He can’t remember the last time he’d slept with his wife, taken himself in hand. His erection this morning had been the first he could remember in months. Joel worked, he thought of the past, he did not consider himself. He went home, he existed.

He was so, so cold. Frozen.

Now, he is here.

Slowly, he brings his palms to your hips, gripping you there carefully, hearing the phantom sound of your moan in his ear as he’d made you come on his fingers. Unbelieving he’d had the gall to even touch you like that.

The hand at his ear moves to the buttons at the base of his throat, opening the first, the second. His breathing goes erratic, coming in quick, hot bursts. He pulls you in closer, spreading his thighs wider to make room for you, and his hold on you slips higher, mapping the curve of your waist beneath your sweater. Looking up at you with all the wonder of a man coming upon the answer to a question he’d been looking for his entire life.

He tries for sound once, falters. There are so many things he wants to say to you now, and all his bravado from the church has fled him. His strength gone under the feel of your soft fingers and the glow of your pink room in the warm fairy lights. Things he wants to say that might frighten you, disgust you, make you wet and pliant. He swallows courage once again.

“You’re going to let me have you.”

A muscle under your left eye flutters light and frantic, spasming with your nerves. You nod once.

“Fuck you, knot you—” he insists on clarification.

Another nod.

“Say it. Lemme hear it.”

“Yes. I’m going to let you have me.”

He pulls you in even closer, a groan as he presses his face against your belly, breathing in deep, filling his lungs until they hurt with your scent. The ache in his groin and his stomach beats behind his eyelids. Your fingers move quickly, undoing the rest of his buttons and then push his shirt back and off his shoulders, smoothing over the hot skin there up to his neck to ghost over the sensitive skin of his glands. He shudders a broken sound, pressing his face deeper into your stomach.

“The rest—tell me.”

“I’m…I’m going to let you fuck me, knot me.”

He pulls you in tighter, thank you thank you, he says against your midriff, mouth sliding against the knit fabric of your sweater that he pushes up your waist, uncovering the skin of your stomach for him to kiss.

Tugging the garment over your head, you let it fall to the floor from listless fingers, the soft shucking sound landing heavy against the carpet of the quiet room. You have on a black bra, soft, translucent lace, he can see the color of your nipples beneath, beautiful and succulent so his mouth waters. You’re like wild prey caught in his thrall, looking down at him with those bright eyes full of mirrored hunger. His fingertips make their slow, ghosting way up the skin of your back and then down again, mapping you, catching at the waist of your skirt to tug it down over your legs. You’re left only in your dark tights and tiny underwear. Hands on your hips he pivots you, taking a look at the back of a little thong. He feels perverted—he wants to bend you over and spread you wide and look at it all, press his fingers against tight, sensitive skin before getting to taste it all, too.

His legs shake and he hides his face against your stomach again, embarrassed with the intensity of his wanting, breath shaking in his lungs. Your hands smooth over his hair, comforting him, soothing and painful all at once. And cautiously, you begin to push him backwards until he’s stretched out and laying against the soft duvet.

It’s like he floats on a pink cloud, and Joel is nervous.

With his eyes closed, he concentrates on the feel of gentle fingertips moving over his chest, down his belly, sifting through the hair there to the clasp of his belt—open, his jeans, the zipper, parted. It’ll be his skin next. He breathes fast fast fast, he can’t remember the last time anyone touched him, and he has to focus intently on willing the boiling heat his blood full of mercury has become to calm down or he’ll spend in his jeans without you even having pulled him out.

At his sides, his arms are tangled in his open shirt, and he’s unable to defend himself when you climb on top, settling on his lap in nothing but your flimsy tights and your tiny panties.

He can’t look, he’s afraid of what he’ll see. He’s afraid of you.

“Open your eyes, Joel—”

The immediate realization that he’d been wrong before, that he is a weak man, that he’d never been able to escape it, that maybe all the sad, childless alphas of the world are a little bit the same—dying, it doesn’t bother him as perhaps it would have, had he not made it here with you.

“I can’t believe I found you,” he says in utter awe—eyes wide open now.

Your smile is beautiful when you lean over to kiss him. Fingers twisting into his hair as you moan against his tongue, sweet kittennish laps while you grind and press along his chest. He tries to twist out of his tangled shirt, frustration mounting at his trapped arms. He wants to pull you tight, grip you hard, feel your skin and leave his fingerprints everywhere, but you reach down, bracing your hand against his wrist to hold him down. Other hand coming up to circle his throat lightly.

At the provoking nature of your touch, his instincts finally come fully alive.

“This you pretendin’ to be in charge?”

“Yes,” you shiver, pressing your face to his throat, your hips starting a rhythmic cant against his abdomen.

The rumble, low and satisfied in his chest, is one of gratification. Happy to let you play for a moment, familiarize yourself with his body.

“Alright,” he says. “Enjoy it. It’s all you’ll get.”

He settles back, accepting he’s trapped for now whilst you slither lower, shuffling to straddle his thighs. Your touch is tentative, looking up with your own shy candor and glowing cheeks as you carefully grasp his hard flesh.

The muscles in his stomach bunch, a rough, pained sound clawing its way up his throat—he has to clench his whole body to stave off a humiliation.

“Fuck—” Joel whines.

Pulling back, you shove his jeans down his thighs and he toes his boots off, helping you to dispense with the horrible, confining clothes that hurt his skin. When he’s free, his sex lies there, heavy and jutting, and it embarrasses him. The angry, violent looking thing under your beautiful hand.

But there’s a sound in your throat, click clicking, whining too like him, and when you wrap your small fingers around his cock, the both of you stare down in awe. Your touch is too gentle, not hard enough. He needs more. Straining to wrap his own large hand around yours, he shows you how he needs it. Squeezing tightly he writhes on the bed, moving your palms up and down together, teeth clenched tight. He pulls away, letting you handle him on your own, and your touch goes light again, maddening.

“Does it hurt?”

“God yes.”

It aches, it needs inside.

He hisses when you gently part the spongy skin of the tip, foreskin rolled back, pulling the small slit open. Your eyes are glazed over, shiny with the fever heat now, like you don’t really know what’s going on anymore. Humming to yourself while you play with him.

His sac is heavy and tight, the space behind beats. He’s going to come soon, already. It doesn’t matter that you’ve barely touched him, it’d been so long for him, and you’re so beautiful on top of him, sweaty and fevered and ripe. He rips his arms violently from the trap of his shirt, seams popping and grips your hip forcefully with one hand, the other pulling your touch back to his agonized erection, moving your grip up and down brutally. Reaching to tuck his fingers beneath the half-cup of your pretty, lace bra, he tugs, letting one soft, full breast free.

“I’m so close,” he begs.

Your lashes flutter at his tone, nodding your head—I’ll be gentle, I’ll be gentle with you—slicking your palm over the wide, wet head, and then gripping there in a twisting motion, sliding down the length. It’s not hard enough, but goddamn it’s so good, too.

“I’m going to come in your hand, I’m sorry,” he says, too far gone to remember he was feeling embarrassed just a moment ago.

Suddenly, his semen is spilling hot and wet over your fingers and down your wrist, knot pulsing in agony. His animal snarl sends a shocked shiver down your back so that you’re gripping him even tighter, pulling his hips off the bed by the cock, your own high pitched sound meeting his deep one.

He ruts into your fist, moaning, crying your name, and your other hand joins your moving fist to scoop up his thick white come, bringing it to your mouth to smear against your tongue.

Joel is going to die.

He jerks you forward, over himself, fists twisting in your tights and wrenching them apart, snapping the clasp of your bra to tear it off. You’re crying his name back at him, writhing against him, wet hand sliding over his skin and getting come everywhere while you tell him how much you ache, how hot you are, how it hurts without him. How you need him.

Joel is needed, and it is a perfect, suspended moment.

Flipping you over suddenly, he crowds you with his heavy mass, pulling you up off the bed against his chest, belly to belly, fingers in your hair to tug your head back roughly and bearing the soft column of your beautiful throat, he closes his lips around your gland and sucks hard, the flavor of your pheromones flooding his mouth, sticky on his tongue like honey. Your fists tangle in his hair, pulling him in closer, bearing yourself further, a keening cry on your tongue as he ravages the supremely sensitive skin.

With a growl, he pulls back, running his rough hands all over you. Skin, bare and soft and hot. And with one rough tug, he rips the barely there panties from your hips, beneath him you’re breathing fast and hiccupped in a way that makes him feel like a predator and you some small prey. Your breasts are soft and lovely—on a quiet, hungry sound, he captures the tip of one in his mouth, sucking careful, then hard, biting gently, working the sensitive nipple with his tongue until you’re moaning and pleading with him for more. He can feel your hot cunt wet against his stomach.

“Hmm, such sweet, sensitive pretty tits. Do you like that, little omega?”

Your scent builds, blossoming and swelling and he feels the change in your temperature when you dip fully into the pit of your heat, his own rut responding in kind, coming up on him like a wave so that he feels suddenly that all sense has been lost and all he is, is a thing that takes, with you beneath him so ready to give.

He had warned you that this would be a selfish sort of thing.

Wrapping his big hands around your soft tits, he sucks on one and then the other, slapping the side to watch it jiggle and then, with a rough sound, nipping at it again like he’s angry at how it moves. He slides lower, teeth scraping along your ribs, tasting the curve of your soft belly, dipping to bite at the plump inner slopes of your thighs. Between your legs—God. Had he ever smelled something so sweet? Your arousal is thick and leaking heavily, pooling between your thighs onto the bed.

You’re beyond words or reasoning now, maybe that’s why he feels brave enough to say: “You can’t imagine the things I’ve done t’you in my dreams. Disgusting things. I wanna fill you so badly, mark you with my scent and my come. Want you to be only mine.”

He buries his face in your cunt, lapping at your hole and sucking on your pretty clit, so swollen. Spreading your sex open to admire what’s his.

Oh please, you cry above him, dragging your palms over your body to squeeze your own breasts tightly. He watches a lone tear slide down your temple in rapt fascination, and he’s certain he’s never laid eyes on such a sight in his entire life.

“Shh,” he soothes. “Let alpha kiss your little clit.”

He presses a full mouthed kiss to the swollen bud, eyes still locked on your face, flicking his tongue slowly back and forth. You’re so wet, pouring slick for him. Joel takes a deep breath through a clenched jaw, and distantly, thinks it would be wise of him to make you come first on his mouth. But as he straightens to his knees, his palms sliding up the backs of your thighs, the pads of his fingers pressed against the vulnerable backs of your knees, spreading you wide, touching skin softer than he even knew was possible, he knows he can’t wait any longer. Doesn’t want to.

You’re begging for it anyways. You don’t want him to wait either.

His wet cockhead brushes against your belly as he leans over to give you a long, lingering kiss. One last moment of softness, he thinks, before all reason is lost to rut.

He’d like to say so many other things. That you’re like an angel. That it makes sense he’d found you where he did. That he wants to do obscene things to you. Tie you up—ropes wrapped around your heavy breasts, your soft thighs, so that he might watch your skin take his marks. Keep you captured and bound.

Abstinence does strange things to a man.

Kneeling between your spread thighs, he lets his cock lay heavy against you, reaching halfway up your belly. Your palm slides over it, pressing at the hot skin, letting yourself rock against it, thighs flexing.

“This part is the worst,” you cry. “—So hot. Oh, I itch and burn everywhere, alpha.” Your words are slurred and febrile.

“You’re alright,” he soothes, taking hold of his thick flesh. “I’m here to fix it now.”

You claw gently at his shoulders like a desperate creature seeking safety. He tucks the wide head against your little hole, and eyes full of glorious fever, hair clinging to your sweaty face, you lift yourself up a little to watch him push it in.

As he presses inside you, Joel feels like he might cry.

He’s sure when he returns to that house not a home, that meager and cold place, that he will cry. Thinking he can’t remember when the last time was that he allowed himself to weep. Like touch, like lust, like all he’d deprived himself of for so long—his whole life, nothing but abstinence—Joel can’t remember the last time he let himself cry.

Now, he presses deeper, lashes fluttering, and he feels the hot press of tears behind his eyes. He slides his hands beneath your bottom, lifting you, filling you, and hisses, eyes on where he fucks you open. His hips nudging forward, rocking, until he’s balls deep, the wide, painfully sensitive tip of his cock pressed firmly against the mouth of your cervix. His burgeoning knot is an unspeakable ring of pleasure at the base. He bends, hunching over your splayed open form, to kiss your midriff, nuzzling gentle at your belly. Above him, you mumble nonsensically: his name, alpha, pleading for more.

Joel—it sounds more beautiful than he’s ever heard it said before. Like it means something now, not just a thing that exists, but a real person, too.

He pulls his hips back until only the wide head remains caught in the tight ring of your pussy—it’s so swollen, he can almost imagine he sees the blood beating beneath the thin, slippery skin. You’ve bloomed for him, and you’re so beautiful for it. He slides forward, hard, bumping roughly against your womb again and grinding there, making you really feel him. You wail once, long and sharp, and then the low pitiful sound of an animal trapped in a maw of teeth.

“Fuck—Oh, fuck,” he grits, letting himself fall forward on braced arms, looking down at where you connect, how you stretch so shockingly around the thickest part of him, the place just before his knot starts to swell. As if he could tear you apart.

His thrusts pick up speed, not bothering to measure the strength behind them, you were made for this after all. Perfect little omega cunt meant to be fucked hard—it starts to flutter around him, the wettest, most obscene sound he’s ever heard, squeezing and milking his length as you come on him for the first time.

“That’s it. Yes—” he growls, fucking you on his cock, your arousal dripping down onto his balls as he pulls out and slides back in with a deep, satisfied groan at the feel of his omega coming for him.

Joel loses his mind to the feel of it—better than anything else has ever been.

“Is your pretty cunt feeling good? She’s sucking on alpha so well, little one. This is what y’needed. I know. F’r me to fuck you until you wet my cock with your come.”

Wrapping his palm around your throat, reaching for your wrist to pin it to the mattress, the way you’d held him, prone and caught beneath him, he holds your pulse in two places, presses his lips to a third, the perfect, fragrant spot behind your ear. Tasting there, licking and sucking on the delicate skin. Ravenous mouth moving down to your gland, as soft and sensitive as your clit.

“Perfect, perfect thing. Can’t believe I found you—” he says again, taking your mouth now in a desperately hungry kiss. Your free arm wraps itself around his neck, holding him tightly. His chest fills with a heat so unbearable his heart feels it’ll burst, and then he’s settling as deep as he can, knot catching and swelling, and he’s pumping long spurts of hot come into your soft little womb, filling you.

His weight falls heavy over you, smothering your body with his much larger one, while he throbs deep inside of you, breathing in your scent, letting himself be suffused with your warmth.

Your smell, full of heat-fever, so sweet it sticks to his gums—it fills his head with thoughts of what next…what if? Plots to keep this for himself for the rest of his life because beneath all of that sweetness, all of that sticky slick that slides between your two hot, perspiring bodies, there’s him. Beneath all of that, him, him, his. Your bones are made of his own scent now. How could he ever let you go when you’re made of him?

“Look at me, look at me.” He pushes the sweat soaked hair out of your face, tilting your head back to get a good look at you. “You’re alright? Lemme see that angel face.” Your cheeks are burning hot, eyes unfocused, but you give him the most beautiful smile, sated and entirely trusting.

Your fingertips touch his own face, passing lightly over his eyelids and nose to his mouth.

“I’m okay. I’m okay, alpha. I’m here.” You tug his head closer with weak, heat-sick fingers. “More. More. I’m so hot—” But you shiver like you’re cold. “It hurts, please.”

“Tell me how it feels,” he rumbles. “Describe it to me.”

He goes limb-heavy over your body, pressing you into the bed, comforting you with his breadth. The skin between your eyebrows wobbles and creases, a tiny frowning pinch, and you make the most curious hiccupping noise. Like the answer to his question needs to work its way slowly through your silly, little heat-addled mind.

“Oh—it’s… it’s— Joel, it’s so good. I never thought—alpha, I never imagined it would be like this,” you mumble and slur. “So full.”

He watches the bright eyes fill with tears then, and spill over in a hot rush, clinging in large perfect droplets to long lashes of which he counts every single strand. The sight of your tears, of your overwhelm—it makes him come more. His cock jerks and swells impossibly fuller, and he begins to spurt again, filling your belly swollen with his seed against his own stomach.

“Silly thing,” he soothes gently. “S’no need to cry, little omega.”

“Oh, but Joel—” you sob, nuzzling into his throat, mouthing at the swollen gland behind his ear.

“I know it’s a lot,” he assures you, rolling the two of you over onto your sides, cuddling you close and gentle-like, petting your hair and letting the deep, rumbling sounds in his chest wash over you soothingly. “Just need some rest now. That’s all.”

He presses a kiss to your hairline, your brow, your mouth again—he licks into it deeply, pulling the edges wider to make more room for himself, his tongue tasting all along your own. He can understand your tears, how overwhelming this must be for an omega inexperienced in taking an alpha with a knot as big as his. It’s true that he might not have had much experience before this, but this is natural, after all. This is who Joel is and what he was meant for. This is exactly where he’s supposed to be.

I belong here, he whispers into your hair as you settle into him, melting into a heavy and sated sleep—so beautifully obedient, willingly submitting to his caring command for rest.

He feels so far away from where he’d started, from that mad creature who’d lost everything—that man with a daughter a whole world away. With nothing to hold on to and even less to lose.

He feels closer to his real self, here and now, than he has in years.

You had both been so alone and in so much pain, but he had found you.

The heat dips and swells in waves and bursts. You wake gradually from that first reprieve, calling his name, begging for something only he can give you. He takes you again and again, the bed so wet it sticks to your fevered skin, sweat and semen and spit. On your side, back to chest, his body cupped around yours in a shape akin to love, kissing your neck, your chin, the cup of one palm and the inside of a wrist. On all fours, mounted like a defenseless thing, fluttering, little hole creamy from use—spread it open, let me see what belongs to me. Splayed above him, little drip of a girl, cooing his name mindlessly, caressing yourself, sliding your hands over the round of your belly, cupping your breasts, tips of your fingers tangling in your hair while you writhe above him, and Joel…Joel is sure he will die beneath you, watching you like this. He moves inside of your slick heat, cunt like a little furnace. Your tears leak in a constant stream that he licks from your cheeks to slake his thirst.

Time is a loop and a loop and a loop and maybe the two of you exist here only, together now.

He thinks that he goes away from himself too, sometimes. Forgets his name and his past and who he was or who he could be and lives only inside your cunt, to fill and mark as his. He is certain that this is the warmest bed he’s ever known.

When he blinks awake and coherent, he feeds you soup he’s pilfered from the fridge and water that he drips into your mouth from his own, and feels sure that it must turn sweet on your tongue. If anyone could, it’d be you—turn water to wine.

Joel thinks he might finally believe in God now.

The gut twisting realization of all he could lose here, how he feels so happy beside you—it turns him from a faithless man into one full of zealous belief. And on a sigh, he feathers his lips over yours, the round of your cheek, the arch of your brow. He’s not alone anymore, and he’s happy. If he could, he’d hold onto this feeling forever.

Your eyes blink open, focused for the first time in hours or maybe days, but heat burns so brightly from the center of your navel, osmosing into his own belly, that he knows he only has a moment.

“Hey,” softly.

You murmur back at him, confused little hiccups of sound followed by a fluttery kiss to the tip of his chin, the bite of hungry teeth demanding flesh.

“Did you know you snore?” He laughs into the sensitive shell of your ear, rolling on top of you. His knot is sated for now, but it throbs with the feeling of his heavy length moving within you.

You blink once, wide eyed—then a funny little frown. “I do not!”

“Yeah, you do. It’s very soft like the purr of a kitten,” he tells you, nuzzling at the swollen gland at the slide of your neck. You make a soft sound at the back of your throat at the touch. “Yes—just like that.”

“Don’t snore—” you mutter, lashes fluttering and drooping. Too much conversation for the sleepy omega.

“Don’t go away yet. Talk to me for a little bit. Stay with me.” He squeezes the back of your neck and your eyes blink open, hazy and then alert.

“Do you have dreams?” He thinks to ask you.

“Oh, yes.” Your eyes droop again, there’s a smile on your face.

“What about?”

You hum, the look on your face is sly in that half-sleep space he’s trying to tug you out of.

“Of being great. Of being loved. Of being happy. Of family. Like a story book. I never thought I’d find anyone to love me,” you say with your eyes closed. Joel’s heart writhes in his chest, pains him as if it were cleaving in two. But you’re smiling, tangled in your dream, and say: “I want us to know each other so long and so well, we don’t need words to speak.”

He’s like an imposter in this bed, for all his feelings of belonging—unsure he could ever give you anything you really want.

“Does your brother look like you?” he asks all of a sudden.

“Yes. Very much. Does yours?”

“I don’t think so, but people say he does. Where it counts, we’re nothing alike. What’s his name?” he asks you.

You whisper it in his ear. Another one of the small things about your life that he knows about no one else.

The two of you tell each other things you’ve never told anyone else, funny things, sad things. Words full of hope that leave a bitter and longing taste in Joel’s mouth.

“Did you never want to have a baby?” you ask, and his heart jumps to his throat.

“I did once. She died.”

He can’t believe he has the courage to say these words which he hasn’t talked of in years and years out loud. Your eyes snap open, the pupil contracting so quickly it frightens him.

“Oh. I understand now.”

“Do you?”

“Yes. I see it now.”

“What do you see?”

“What you were looking for.”

“What was it? Tell me—” For part of him feels he still doesn’t know.

“A way back to yourself, of course”

He nods, a feeling of relief so intense washing through his body, his limbs ache with it. Something chemical within him aligning for one perfect, singular second. He feels entirely known, and he thinks: this is the happiest moment of my life— before it fades away.

“Maybe. Yes.”

“Do you think it can be okay now?”

You press your entire palm against the skin of his face, as if you’d lift it off his skull and look at what’s held beneath.

“I don’t know. I don’t think it can ever be okay after something like that.”

“Please, don’t be sad anymore,” you tell him as if it were something so simple. As if it would just be within him because you’ve asked it so.

“I’ll try.” But he knows it isn’t something he won’t ever be hurt by. Joel realizes, with your simple words, this isn’t something he’ll ever be able to fix. That there will always be something missing, incomplete about him, and that no matter how hard he works, how hard he prays, how deeply he could ever lose himself inside of you, he feels sure it won’t ever be enough. He’s still in want of his miracle. “I’ll try,” he says again. “There are times I feel relieved. She suffered.”

“I’m sorry.” He can tell that you really are.

“We eventually all do. Perhaps that’s where the relief came from. She got hers over with quick.”

“What was her name?”

“Sarah.”

You put your hand over his heart, your face is wet with tears.

“Do you think this is a betrayal?” you ask him then.

The reminder of the woman who is his wife, who he had tried to love but who could never reach the bottom of that dark and fathomless well of cold within him to find anything worthwhile, it does nothing to him. Is it a betrayal? Surely to someone who cared it would be. But Joel cannot remember the last time they really talked, the last time either of them cared about one another. Maybe he’s a bad man. He’d chosen her for comfort, because it’d been what he felt he should do. Perhaps merely for something to do, or because he knew it’d be easy. Comforted by the fact that she was a beta and could thus never know him in a more intimate or painful way, in a way that would demand more of him. He couldn’t even accuse himself of not doing right by her because he’d always done what he was supposed to, what she’d asked of him which was so little, truly, that there could be no real claim of betrayal. At least, not before this, you, his knot locked within you and his heart on his tongue ready to be spit into your palm.

Yeah, maybe he’s a bad man. Certainly one who could never, ever deserve to keep this.

“I don’t know. I’m not sure I know what the word means anymore.”

He bids you to sleep again after that, and in a brief respite of clarity, he has the wherewithal to call his house, to let the woman who lives there with him know he’ll be gone for a few days longer. But there’s no answer, and he’s relieved. In the following days, his phone does not ring.

As he stands before your bed, he takes a moment to study the picture you pose as. Curled in the center of your pink nest—you look lonely.

Do you even really exist if no one loves you?

Outside, there is snow in the night—winter come alive in the midst of heat. He climbs back into the bed, taking you into his embrace, arranging you perfectly, a sharp elbow, the soft knee—certain that he won’t ever be able to fix himself, to keep you, choking on gratitude that at least he gets this. He’ll preserve it in his memory for the rest of his life and maybe it’ll be okay.

As he lays watching you sleep beside him, entirely innocent in your vulnerability, and with such trust, lying here in this bed you’ve shared together, he has for a moment a great and treasurable illusion of the past. This feeling of being trusted by someone so entirely, that gift of someone’s safety and heart and rest handed to him with little compunction, for there is that much certainty in the care that will come from him. Watching the dreamscape unfold behind your fluttering eyelids, the membrane so thin there’s that almost indiscernible pulse of your heart beating through your body. The street lamp glow comes in through a split in the curtains to lay warmly over your lovely face, and there’s only faint sound, the blown snow. Little light, a heart of warmth.

It’s late now, he thinks, I could love you. Saying it out loud would be like creating a world with its sound.

He shifts his weight to make you more comfortable, your warm, soft weight rolling more heavily into his side, moaning unintelligibly in your febrile sleep, and then suddenly, lucid—Joel. The sound of his name in your mouth makes him real again for a single moment—how will he ever let this go? His throat is tight, perhaps with the strangle of tears—don’t leave me, don’t leave me, you murmur like you already know. And then settle quiet again, falling away back into deep sleep.

There is only your rest now, the soft sound of your sleeping, darkness. They are here, the both of them, together. At the center of all things, there is this bond; biology or heart or soul. Fate—perhaps.

He could bite you, make you his mate, fuck it all to hell. Run away again. He’s done it once before.

But how could he ever keep you without a miracle fix?

Outside there exists, as always, that great tragedy, that undying grief, that barren loneliness. But for now, there is this, and you, this enduring heart of warmth. His own dreams.

This cannot be happiness; that ever elusive thing. He must decide that in the here and now, in the presence of this enduring moment. This is the thing he can never earn and will not keep, and even perhaps, cannot realize for what it truly is.

All of this, he decides with his thumb against the mating gland at the back of your neck.

This is not joy, Joel lies and lies and lies.

Part 4;

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