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fudgebuggyy · 13 days ago

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The Disappointment Club

Pairing: Rhett Abbott x Fem!Reader! Summary: After a rough couple of years in California, you move to the quiet pastures of Wabang to work in your sister's bakery, finding solace in the life she's built for herself there. A fresh start would've been a lot easier if a certain six-foot, blue-eyed cowboy hadn't waltzed into the shop with his Stetson pulled low. Wordcount: 13.239k (sorry) Warnings: SMUT! (it gets filthy pls don't look at me - oral sex f!receiving, fingering, handjob, spit play??, corny dirty talk), Soft Dom!Rhett Abbott, Possessive!RhettAbbott, Sub!Reader, Sub Space (adjacent? Sub-space-ish?), Mentions of Daddy Kink, Massive Praise Kink, Strangers to Friends to Lovers, Porn with a lot of Plot, Angst (can't write anything without it lmao), Fluff, Humor, Slow Burn, Mentions of Drug/Alcohol Use, Implied Bar Fights, Reader has a troubled past, CORNY THIS GETS SO CORNY. A/N: (this is my belated unsolicited two cents on the Sabrina Carpenter album cover discourse, like let a woman SUB BRO let a gal be a whiny bottom!) Yes, I've been temporarily Rhett-Abbott-pilled...Yes, I've been yee-haw-ed so hard...this was a one-time thing to exorcise my demons

The Disappointment Club

The first time you saw Rhett Abbott, you were behind the counter of your sister’s bakery, piping lemon-thyme curd onto a fresh batch of muffins with the precision of someone who shouldn’t be allowed anywhere near a piping bag—or a convection oven; or anything sharp, really; anything inside of a bakery, possibly.

“So, you’re the new hire?” The man said, all six feet, Wyoming drawl, and his Stetson pulled so low all you could see was his mouth.

You were about to speak up when a glob of curd plopped onto your boot.

“That’s my little sister, Rhett,” Maya warned, kicking open the swinging doors as she emerged from the kitchen, a batch of mint-green pastry boxes piled in her arms. “So you better not get any funny ideas.”

“Alright, I hear you.” He huffed a low laugh, rifling through his wallet before handing your sister a couple of bills. “I’ll make sure to keep my ideas void of humor.”

“Good, and keep them to yourself while you’re at it. Greet your mom for me!” Maya added with biting faux sweetness that had haunted you throughout your childhood. She handed him the pastry boxes, and the two of you watched in silence as he lumbered out of the bakery. The ding of the shop bell, the cuff of his boots on the tiles. He looked back once through the shop windows, the brim of his hat revealing a surprisingly tender face. The shape of it there, for a moment, in a soft bar of sunlight—before he disappeared from view.

You lowered the piping bag and took a long breath.

“Don’t even start.” Maya thwacked you with a dish towel.

“Who the fuck was that?”

“Someone you will not get involved with.”

“I’m sorry, Mr. Cowboy McDreamy—”

“Stop. Don’t start with your funny ideas.”

“My ideas are famously hilarious.”

“Trust me. Rhett Abbott’s the type of guy who goes for buckle bunnies and tourists—"

"Buckle-what?"

"—and you are very much neither, so how about you make sure those blueberry muffins don’t look like someone assembled them with their eyes closed, hm?” She cocked a brow at your army of malformed swirls. You scoffed.

“You know what?” Defiantly, you lifted the piping bag and proceeded to squirt the rest of the curd into your mouth—before scrambling to the back, dodging your sister's ardent attempts at skinning your ass raw with a dish towel.

· · ❁ · ·

The second time you saw Rhett Abbott, you were on a date at The Longhorn. It was the only bar in town that had decent enough beer and a dancefloor that wasn’t slick with liquor and vomit past ten PM.

Your sister had set you up: He was the son of the game warden, Adam or Adrian (you’d long forgotten), awkward but polite, built like a shy greyhound, and stealing glances at your cleavage in intervals growing shorter and shorter the further he worked his way down a bottle of Budweiser.

He wasn’t terrible company, patiently listening to you talk about the weather and how much you missed San Diego and your current hyperfixation on the baby goat that lived on the farm next door to your sister’s place. It has three legs, so they built her this tiny prosthetic, so she can walk properly. They named her Tres, as in Tres Leches, get it? Isn’t that the most adorable fucking thing you’ve ever heard in your whole entire fucking life?

You tried to ignore Adam-Adrian’s audible sigh of relief when you got up to grab another round of beers. Maybe you’d get yourself something stronger. Or maybe you’d find a good enough excuse to call it a night, and you would’ve, you really, really would’ve if you hadn’t bumped your shoulder into none other than Mr. Cowboy McDreamy himself.

He’d swapped the Stetson for a washed-out baseball cap. Jaw hard and stubbled, nose a long slender slope in the lights reflecting off the dancefloor.

“Hey there, Shortcake.” His quirk of a smile that aged him backwards.

Shortcake.

It wouldn’t have worked anywhere else, with anyone else, but you were a lightweight two beers in, and you liked the way the light hit his eyes, clear blue, like a drop of rain on a car window.

You would’ve said something cheeky, something about having funny ideas—but he cut you off: “He sure seems like a good time.”

Tipping his chin towards Adam-Adrian slouched in the booth like a lonely sapling.

You didn't like the way he'd said it. You knew men like Rhett Abbott, and you knew what happened when you let them into your life. “You know what,” you said, “he is, actually. Not that it’s any of your business.”

Rhett’s eyebrows lifted once, then smoothed out. “Okay.” He took a swig of his beer. “Got it.” Like something had been settled between you two.

· · ❁ · ·

The third time you saw Rhett Abbott, your sister’s husband, Jonah—Like the actor! Oh, and the book! Ha-ha! (which had gotten old the first time he’d said it)—took you out to the rodeo grounds.

You and your sister had grown up in San Diego, amongst beaches and high-rises and palm trees lining manicured promenades. A place of juice cleanses and electric scooters. Men riding bulls in an arena had seemed unthinkable to you; something arcane, something forgotten.

The rusty roofing of the grandstands shaded the crowd from the setting sun, its light disappearing behind the mountains, the endless sprawl of the valley. Everyone was buzzing, solo cups swishing beer, kids pressed up against the railing. A glossy nimbus of girls in cowboy boots and jean shorts chirped drunkenly one rung below. Every once in a while the PA crackled with the rumbling voice of the announcer, “Aaaaand here we go, folks! Big Joe out the gate, looking strong. Ah! Look at that spin, folks, right in the pocket—”

As a middle-school teacher, Jonah was forever sweet and excited about anything. Even bull riding, it seemed. He explained bull ropes and suicide grips, rattling down the names of the upcoming bulls in the pen. “—okay, so there’s Rotten Dynamite, rankest motherfucker you’ll ever see. Then there’s Terminator. Oh! And Iron Dome! We love Iron Dome. Blind in one eye, bucks like a whipcrack. Heard Rhett’s riding him tonight—”

Everyone knew Rhett Abbott rode bulls. The framed picture of him and his dad hung above the bar at The Longhorn, the two of them triumphantly holding up a big-buckled belt, the hard set of their twin jaws. People in Wabang rode bucking horses and lassoed cattle, wore their hats to the pharmacy and the supermarket, and hauled feed on their way to church. Old buildings still had hitching posts that cracked and blistered in the sun, like in a Western.

Rhett riding bulls wasn’t a surprise—but seeing it was.

When the chute slammed open, you imagined something inside the crowd opened with it. Iron Dome, with its roiling beastly body, black as a hole in the floodlights, thundered into the arena. Dirt spraying. Crowd shouting. Rhett’s slender body meeting each jerk and heave and lunge, face hidden beneath the wide brim of his Stetson. The crowd surged forward all at once, a wild energy shuttling through it like a wave. Jonah hollered next to you, pumping a fist into the cool evening air.

Five seconds, six seconds—

Seven point one.

Rhett's body bending back, bow-tight, arm flung as high as the kick of the bull’s hind legs. Fused in perfect symmetry, their golden ratio like something painted.

You flinched when Rhett’s arm snagged on the rope, and when Iron Dome finally lashed him off, and he went flying into the dirt—whatever had settled between you two, all at once, unsettled itself.

· · ❁ · ·

During the biggest fight you’d ever had with your sister, she’d called you a human hand grenade with the propensity for blowing up your life more than you could afford to. Which…okay, fair.

People never expected you to be difficult or complicated or messy. You didn’t look it. Most of the time you didn’t even act like it. Until you slipped up, and slipped up some more, and then the slipping up turned into something big, and the big thing turned into something unstoppable.

Your mom had been the only one to describe it right, she’d understood, and in a moment of rare clarity that tore through the molasses of her medication, she’d whispered it to you like this:

It comes in waves—until eventually the tide stops receding.

You’d arrived in Wabang with a duffle bag, wearing a rumpled sundress and hiking boots.

Jonah had picked you up from the bus station with an excited grin and a too-tight hug. Maya had made you chicken and waffles, like when you were kids.

Back then, she'd made it whenever Mom was at her worst, when she was passed out for days, barricaded in her room like a pharaoh in a tomb. Chicken and waffles usually meant things were shitty and couldn't get much shittier. It also meant you'd skip school and spend the day at the mall down Fifth, where the sun slanted through the glass dome in the food court, made it all hot and damp like a terrarium, and the two of you would pretend to be salamanders lazing on the bench by the churros stand, T-shirts covered in cinnamon and sugar and delight.

Wabang felt like those afternoons in the mall. Wabang was supposed to be the place where you got better.

You stuck to your routine, you made your bed, you ate enough and drank enough, you slept and woke on time, you went to work, you stuck to beers and cigarettes, you read and wrote and you fed the chickens in the garden, you always came back home.

One afternoon, sitting on the porch staring out at the endless bowl of the valley, Maya handed you the keys to the bakery. “I want you to open up the shop. Four-thirty AM on the dot. You think you're up for it?”

“Are you kidding?”

Tomorrow was going to be a day so big, even Jonah was stopping by to help. They’d prepped the order for the wedding on Willow Ridge all week. Maya had even pulled an all-nighter the day before. It was a big deal, and she trusted you enough to be a part of that big deal.

Trusted you enough to be a part of this life that she'd built so far away from the mall down Fifth, from mom—from you.

Smiling carefully, you reached for the keys. Maya snagged them away, narrowing her eyes. “Don't eat all the frosting, you little shit.”

“Not making any promises.”

She tossed the keys and you caught them.

You felt like a saint anointed, like someone had tapped a sword to your shoulder, and you glowed with it, and your sister was so beautiful in the sun, and you’d said thank you, and you’d promised you’d do good.

You’d be good.

Maybe you deserved to celebrate being so good.

It was a Friday night after all, and you were bored and maybe a little sad, and maybe you were exhausted from following all these rules you were trying to build your life around. And so you rode the rusty bike Jonah had dug up from the bowels of their garage all the way to The Longhorn. And what started with a beer, ended with a bottle of whiskey and a joint on the back of someone’s pickup. Tame in comparison to what you'd once done on a Friday night, or on any night, really.

So it was fine, right? It was going to be fine.

There was a girl with a shiny blonde mane and pink-chrome nails, her deep, lovely croon when she called you “—so fucking pretty, baby girl.” You missed feeling like this. You missed saying yes and yes and yes, bursting from it, unstoppable. You might’ve kissed her, but you weren’t sure, you might’ve wanted to marry her, which sounded about right, and you wanted to tell her this, to confess it to her and hold her soft pink-chrome-tipped hands...

The next thing you knew, you woke up next to your bike in the flatbed of a pickup, in a driveway you didn’t recognize, in a part of town you weren’t familiar with.

Head pounding, throat sore. Five missed calls from your sister. It was Saturday. It was noon.

You were still drunk when you reached the green-and-pink awning of Sweet Pea’s, its buttery cream trim like frosting. Inside, the bakery was buzzing with a barrage of patrons on the sunniest Saturday Wabang had seen in weeks. At the counter, Maya didn��t speak to you. Instead she sent you straight to the back where you threw up once in the sink and once in front of the convection ovens.

“Give me the keys,” Maya ordered, and you patted yourself down, before you remembered you’d stuffed them into your boot. She told you to go home, that she didn’t want to see you today. Jonah promised that everything would be fine, that Maya just needed a minute. Get cleaned up, he’d said. It’s gonna be okay, he’d said. But he hadn't looked so sure.

You hadn’t been good.

You hadn't been good at all—

Head throbbing more than it had before, you dragged your shitty bike through town. You rode until the sparse sprinkling of houses turned into open fields, pastures flat and endless. You struggled down a lonely dirt road, sweat spilling down your back, your chest, your face, stinging your eyes, you were hot, you were so hot, and your arms shook from the rattling of the uneven ground.

The road stopped abruptly at a rusty fence. You dropped your bike and climbed through the wide gaps between the bars. Marching through the field that stretched on forever, an ocean’s worth of it, green, dry, pricking at your bare legs, the afternoon sun battered you like judgment. You kept wading forward until you couldn’t get yourself to, until unceremoniously, with the theatrics of a very hungover and very disgraced saint, you collapsed into the shade of a lonesome tree.

You were sure then that you’d reached the end of the world, that you were so far away from anything and anyone, and that here, like this, finally, no one would hear you.

When was the last time you cried?

Covered in sweat and dirt, possibly still drunk and possibly still high, key-less, wretched, useless, melodramatic, sobbing, gasping for breath.

It comes in waves—

“Look, I don’t mean to bother you, but this here’s private land.”

You’d heard it too late.

The horse, the gentle pelt of its hooves in the field. It’s puffs of breath. A man’s low murmured, easy, girl.

You refused to open your eyes, feeling like a child, as you flopped onto your side to turn away.

You’ve got to be fucking kidding me.

“You doin’ alright?” His voice softer then.

“I’m fine,” you murmured into the grass. The buzz of a bug on your cheek. You slapped it away.

“Are you hurt?”

“No, just—” sunbathing? contemplating? “—having an existential crisis. I’m almost done.”

A sound like a huff or a scoff, a swallowed-down laugh maybe.

“Do you need me to call someone?”

“Just give me a second.” Pressing your hands to your face, you took long breaths, waiting for that big bawling bone-pelting agonizing throb of exhaustion to settle down. “Okay,” you finally said. “I’m finished.”

Turning towards him, there he sat, high upon his noble steed like a cowboy in a story. With his brows scrunched beneath his Stetson, he was a man fully unprepared to stumble upon some sobbing wildling on a Saturday morning.

You weren’t sure if he recognized you. You didn’t care. You’d lost your capacity for public shame a long time ago.

“Right. I’ll leave. Uh—sorry.” You got up, wobbling there like a newborn calf, shaking out the damp hem of your dress, before heading down the path you’d trampled into the grass.

“Wait,” he called out. “Do you want me to bring you back?”

The thought of getting on a horse made bile rise in your throat. You weren’t going to risk throwing up a third time.

“No, thank you,“ you shouted.

He followed you all the way back to the fence, the steady trot of his horse in the distance. You felt his stare across the field, hot and strange on the back of your neck as you peeled your bike off the road and headed home.

It was the fourth time you’d seen Rhett Abbott, and you’d prayed it was the last.

· · ❁ · ·

“Hey there, Shortcake.”

God didn’t like you very much apparently.

You swallowed, hunching lower behind the display case where you were restocking the cardamom cinnamon rolls.

Rhett was tall enough to lean over it. “You feelin' better?”

So he had recognized you.

Standing up straight, you cleared your throat. “All my demons have been temporarily exorcized, thank you.”

“Hm.” He huffed a laugh, that quick smile of his that made him all boyish. “Reckon I should try that sometime.”

“Well, I highly recommend hysterically crying on someone else’s property. It’s very cathartic—”

“That you, Rhett?” Maya shouted from the back.

“Yes, ma’am.” He straightened.

“Just gimme a sec, I’ll grab your mom’s order.”

You busied yourself with wiping down the countertop before your sister caught you fraternizing with the one person in Wabang that needed to be left un-fraternized with.

The two of you had only recently regained some common ground, and part of that truce was the unspoken rule that you please, please, please not obsess over the wrong people.

Rhett Abbott wasn't wrong per se; he just wasn't very right either.

Rhett’s shadow spread across the counter as he leaned over the display case again, close enough you caught the waft of his cologne, the unbearable blue of his gaze. You swallowed. His attention trailed down your throat. When he smiled again, it was soft, it stayed there for a while. His voice low then, “There’s a rodeo tonight. You should come. If none of us break any bones, we'll head to The Longhorn.”

You stared at the spot where the worn collar of his denim jacket pressed into his neck.

“I’ll think about it.” You said it to that spot.

“Good.” He said it to your mouth.

Good.

You’d found out long ago that there was one word that could make you do anything for anyone.

Just one word—and you were piled in the truck bed of Rhett’s Chevy Silverado, squeezed against the cab with some of his old friends from high school, your legs slung over the lap of a woman who’d known Rhett since kindergarten and who had the sweetest gap-toothed grin you’d ever seen in your life. You told her so, and the gap between her teeth seemed to grow with pride.

Driving down the winding roads of the valley, the cool air snapping your hair into your eyes, the hem of your dress fluttering, you tipped your head skyward. Before Wyoming, you’d never seen a sky so black. The nights here hit harder than anywhere else.

You cackled when Gaptooth helped you press the hem of your dress down before you flashed the whole truck, laughing harder when she offered a pull off her cherry-red vape. With the smoke citrusy and sweet in your mouth, you turned towards the driver’s seat, your cheek mashed against the flaking metal edge of the truck bed.

Rhett was driving. You watched his long tan arm lean out the window, fingers tinkering, playing with the wind. The soft swirl of hair. The faded bull skull tattoo on his forearm, flashing there in the beam of the headlights.

You wanted to reach out, mirror every turn of his wrist, trace the swell of a vein—

His arm went limp. You realized too late he was watching you in the side mirror.

That buzz in the back of your head, down your chest, places below.

You didn’t look away once.

· · ❁ · ·

At The Longhorn, everyone scattered, some fighting their way to the bar, others pulling each other to the crowded dancefloor.

“What’re you drinkin’, Shortcake?” The voice was too high to be Rhett’s. It was another rider from before. (Lloyd something-something; four point three seconds on a bull named Napoleon, which was fitting considering Lloyd was as tall as a water dispenser.)

“Uh.” You hastily checked the meager cash you’d stuffed into your boot. “Whatever five bucks will get me—”

“It’s on me.” The rough twang of that familiar voice as he leaned over you. You could still smell the dirt on him, the sweat. “Shortcake.” Rhett shot Lloyd a sharp smile, and you had to physically restrain yourself from rolling your eyes.

(You bought yourself your own cider with your own five bucks.)

The rest of the night went on easy. Crowd thick enough you kept drifting away from familiar faces, before meeting them again in the line to the bathroom. Hopping from table to table, clinking bottles and shuffling cards, until Gaptooth pulled you to the dancefloor, where girls in boots and baby-tees taught you how to line dance. “Shake those hips, San Diego!” And so you did, and life was at its sweetest, and you didn’t have to think about the last couple of days or the last couple of years or how Maya had stopped asking where you went at night. And you spun and spun, spun wildly, and thought only about a blue pair of eyes watching you beneath the wide brim of a Stetson.

Oh God, how you’d missed this feeling.

He found you much later; outside, at the back entrance, unlit cigarette between your lips, crouched on the ground with your back against the wall. You were in the process of yanking a boot off, tipping it upside down in the hopes it would produce your lighter. Had it fallen out on the dancefloor?

“Need a light?”

Rhett leaned one hand against the wall, presumably still a little lopsided from facing off a two-thousand-pound bull a couple of hours ago.

“One sec,” you said, yanking off your other boot, revealing a couple of coins and a tube of lipgloss. You looked up at him, his lighter already in hand. You smiled. “Yes, please.”

Rhett huffed a laugh. You wondered what his full laugh sounded like, big-bellied and unbridled. Did he tip his head back from so much delight?

Leaning against the wall with a stifled groan, Rhett carefully slid to the gravel, knees popping. He landed on the ground with a thud. “Shit. Ow.”

“Careful”

“Think that’s too late for me.”

“That bad?” you asked.

“Surprisingly less terrible than last time.”

“Who would’ve thought a bull named Bonecrusher would go easy on you?”

“If by easy, you mean he made me see God a couple of times, sure.”

You snorted, before popping your cigarette in your mouth and waiting patiently for him to light it for you. He huff-laughed at that too. Apparently he was easily amused.

His hand, big and dry as a baseball mitt, came up to shield the flame from the wind, and for a moment all you smelled was him. The earth, the acrid sweetness of sweat slicked across skin for too long. Like you’d been tucked into him, an animal in his burrow.

You couldn’t look at him like this. You hummed with this feeling. The brim of his hat bumping gently against your forehead. When the flame caught, you leaned away and took a long, long drag. “Thanks—” You cleared your throat. “Thank you.”

“Sure.”

The two of you sat there for a moment, drenched in the red halogen glow of a neon sign. You, crosslegged, playing with your necklace, pressing the pendant to your mouth; him, with one long leg stretched out, the other hiked up for his forearm to lean against, fiddling with his Zippo. You stared at a couple making out against a car. He stared at the men smoking by the bins.

You both spoke at once:

“Why do you—”

“Why were you—”

“Oh. Sorry.” You blinked.

Rhett pointed his Zippo at you. “By all means, ladies first.”

You snorted again, offering him your cigarette. He hesitated, like he hadn’t expected it, but you were still humming and the night was cool and life was still at its sweetest, and when he took a drag, stubbled jaw working, it felt like you could get away with more than you should.

“Why does everyone say you choose the rankest bulls on purpose?” you asked.

Rhett seemed to give it some serious thought, tugging his hat back to look at the sky. He handed you the cigarette. Then, “‘Cause I’m convinced I have something to prove. It’s either that or a real shit attempt at self-sabotage. Sometimes…it’s both.”

His honesty made something inside of you open.

”Why were you crying the other day?”

Taking a drag from the cigarette, you gave it some serious thought too. Then, “My sister’s giving me a second chance. I stopped getting those a long time ago, so I’m just trying really, really hard not to fuck it up. But I kind of suck at not fucking things up. I don’t know, it’s…” You took a breath, trailing off.

“Complicated?” he said.

“Excruciating.”

“Sounds about right." Rhett hummed in agreement, looking at you from the corner of his eye. “You’re in luck. You’re speaking to the Abbott Family Letdown. So.” He gave a silly flourish with his hand.

“Oh.” You sat up in mock-surprise. ”Why didn’t you say so? Always a pleasure to meet a fellow embarrassment.” You popped the cigarette back in your mouth and stretched your hand out. He shook it with a laugh. The squeeze of his thick fingers, warm and dry.

“We could start a support group,” he said.

Reaching your hands above your head, like you were hanging a banner: “The Disappointment Club,” you mumbled around the cigarette.

When Rhett Abbott laughed, really laughed, when he shook with it and his shoulders did a little shimmy, he did indeed tip his head back from so much delight.

You laughed with him. You wanted to press two fingers down the Adam’s Apple that bobbed up and down his throat. You were so close the brim of his hat bumped against your head again. You told him everything then, told him about the keys and the girl and the back of that pickup. “—and so Maya had to cancel multiple orders and pay it out of her own pocket. Plus, it was, like, the pastor’s daughter’s wedding. So I’m assuming God was cataclysmically displeased.”

“God’ll forgive you for a couple of fuckin’ muffins.”

“A couple of muffins? Those were toasted pear-and-almond tartlets with a frangipane center and a cardamom crumb topping.”

“Frangi-what-now?”

“Exactly.”

“Trust me, it ain’t that bad. One time I got so drunk in the barn I forgot to latch the gate, and we lost forty head in a night. Took me days to herd them all back together, and my dad didn’t let me into the house until they were all accounted for.”

“If we turn this into a competition, we’ll be sitting out here all night.”

He turned then. His slow crooked smile. “Sounds like a good time to me.”

You didn’t know how long you sat there, talking. Your cigarette stub forgotten on the cool asphalt. The parking lot was empty now. Even the neon sign seemed to have dimmed.

Whatever had unsettled between you two, unsettled itself so completely you fell wide open. He could’ve reached right inside, he could’ve thrown something in—

Was it so wrong to look at him like this and hope, with a desperation that might’ve killed you, that he wouldn’t look away?

· · ❁ · ·

Friendship.

Could you call it that?

It felt a lot sharper, had more blowback.

Rhett liked to describe it as your little two-man support group. “Hottest club in town,” he’d say. Which wasn’t particularly funny, but it was stupid enough it made you snort every time.

Time was no longer governed by phases—no more mornings, noons or nights, no more suns or moons—instead, you found yourself adhering to Rhett Abbott’s reliable rhythms.

Your days started when the tiny bell above the shop door rang, and the brim of a worn Stetson swung up to reveal that surprisingly tender face. Maya had her suspicions about Rhett stopping by the bakery almost every day like clockwork: “There’s only so many errands he can run…and do you really think Cecilia Abbott eats that many toffee-nut buttermilk muffins? Woman must be enormous by now—”

You felt like a puppy, Pavloved, scrambling to the counter every time the shop bell trilled in the quiet. On the days he didn’t come in early, you usually met him on your lunch break. You were notoriously terrible at making sure you ate properly, and so he’d bring you a sandwich, or take-out, and you’d eat on the back of his Chevy in the parking lot, legs dangling from the truck bed, kicking up every time he made you laugh. Rhett made you laugh the way you’d forgotten to, that startled smack of a cackle, like you still couldn’t believe that there was someone who made you topple over from so much fucking glee.

Your favorite days were the ones he was off work early, and he’d come pick you up, toss your bike onto the truck bed—“Get in, Shortcake, we’re going on a trip!”—and he’d take you to the lakes or a town one valley over or the mountains, show you Wabang, show you Wyoming. He showed you the delicate difference between yarrow and hemlock when you trekked through the forests.

“Wow, dude, real Bear Grylls energy,” you’d said the first time he’d started a fire on a bed of pine needles.

“That’s the most California thing I think you’ve ever said.”

“Wait until I start talking about the way they stack vegetables at Erewhon.”

He grunted a laugh.

“Do you miss it?”

“The vegetables at Erewohn?”

“Home.”

It took you a moment.

The thought of your sister’s and Jonah’s sweet storybook house, with their porch covered in sun catchers shaped like honeycomb, their little brood of chickens in the garden, how the thought of it all moved through you on reflex. But Rhett hadn’t meant that house or those people or this place.

“I don't know, sometimes.”

Sometimes being here makes me forget to miss anything at all.

You forgot to miss the most at night, when your days came to an end at the rodeo or The Longhorn. When Rhett sloppily swung you across the dancefloor, the smell of beer and sawdust and the distinct spice of his cologne. Rhett was fierce, he was momentum, he was unstoppable force in a place full of immovable objects. You wanted to hurtle away with him, wrap yourself around his body, thigh to thigh, chest to chest, chin to chin—take me places.

Did he know he did this to you?

Did he know how easy you were?

That when you chose someone like this, you fell into them, and everything and everyone else fell away?

You didn’t pay attention to Lloyd’s weird come-ons, didn’t care about the girls that crushed around Rhett after he tumbled off another bull, or the way he always seemed to sidle up to you whenever anyone tried to buy you a drink.

You were singular, soaking up his closeness until you felt thick and stupid with it, and all you could do was let him turn you on the dancefloor like a drunken spinning top, his gravelly laughter shaking uncontrollably in your ear. Those lean arms looped around your waist, and your hands slid up the skin of his neck, slick with sweat, to cradle his face.

How those eyes crinkled when he grinned, and how easy it was then to imagine him as a child. The defiant thing with bloodied knees getting into trouble at the edge of town. The Abbott Family Letdown, you thought with so much fondness you could’ve kissed his cheek.

Nights always ended like this: The two of you fused to each other, dancing, or squeezed into a booth, or smoking out in the lot, talking and talking about everything and anything, about the places you wanted to see, and the things you wanted to do, and the people you wanted be. The choices you wanted to make and the ones you really, really wished you could remake.

Sometimes you didn’t speak at all, and you just sat there and stared at each other, as if to say: Out of all the places in the world, this is where I find you.

· · ❁ · ·

You loved the rainy season, loved those humid afternoons you’d sit on the back deck at Rhett’s place.

He’d fixed up the Abbott's old bunkhouse with Perry, a small cabin at the edge of the forest where ranch hands used to stay back in the day. The two of them had worked on it for a year, and you knew Rhett felt a sense of pride whenever he talked about it, running his hands along the smooth timber walls with a kind of care that felt personal. He and Perry had carved their names like kids into the bottom of the front door, and Rhett knocked the tip of his boot against it every time he left the cabin. “For luck,” he’d told you once, and he’d looked a little sad.

His was a place of wide gridded windows and Navajo rugs. It was surprisingly sentimental, filled with keepsakes and old furniture from his parents or his grandparents, the kind of place that looked like it had been here from the start, as enduring as the soft in-line of a favorite coat.

You liked the traces of him here, the mundanity of them; aftershave and painkillers in the medicine cabinet, forgotten mugs of coffee left on window sills and counter tops, his belts, his toppled boots by the door, his packet of Camels by the sink, his dad’s old CD collection—The Black Crows, ZZ Top, Stevie Ray Vaughan—a small army of Amy’s arts-and-crafts projects sprinkled atop shelves, family photos tacked to the refrigerator.

Out on the back deck, your eyes trailed over the rocks set in a neat row on the railing. You sat in a wicker chair, listening to the rain pattering against the tin roof, the cradle of pine all around.

You’d had a long day at the bakery, and Rhett had had an even longer day herding cattle out of the west pasture, which had started to flood from all the rain.

He sat on the deck with his legs stretched out and his back against the railing. In a T-shirt and jeans, head knocked back, his baseball cap pulled low.

He’d closed his eyes a long time ago. Had he fallen asleep?

“Stop starin’,” Rhett mumbled, eyes still closed.

You snorted, caught. Ears going hot, you dug your cheek into the weave of the wicker, clenching your eyes closed like a child when he opened his. Your tell-tale grin. His low chuckle.

You felt young with him sometimes. Like you didn’t have to pretend the way you did with Maya, constantly trying to prove that you weren’t the useless little sister floundering through life.

It was easy with Rhett, you could be honest. And you had all these big feelings and these even bigger wants, and they were shameful, complicated, and they ached, and you knew this need all too well, had felt it with every crush you’d ever had, never knew what to call it or how to say it, or how to have it be done to you. You didn’t just like people; you disappeared into them.

And with Rhett…

You wanted to crawl after him on your hands and knees, feel his big, big hand grab you by the hair, pulling and pulling, your teeth sinking into the worn leather of his belt.

Open up, Shortcake.

You swallowed. You pulled your knees to your chest. You wanted to close yourself like a box.

“You want the talking stick?” Rhett asked with one of his huff-laughs.

The talking stick was silly.

You didn’t know when it had started; something to do with support groups and their strange rituals, and you’d said it as a joke once at the bar when Rhett had looked like he wanted to say something but was holding back. You’d handed him your soggy coaster and said, You want the talking stick? And he’d taken it with a smile loosened by relief.

You shook your head. “No, thank you.”

“You sure?”

“Super.”

“Because if you ain’t taking it, I will—”

“Oh god, if you’re going to start talking about that bull rope paste again, I’ll suffocate myself in the mud.”

“First of all, it’s called rosin. Second of all, ouch.” He looked genuinely offended. “And you better make your mind up quick, ‘cause I’m gonna start listing my favorite ones. Also, did you know you have to heat it just right? Otherwise it’s like pulling taffy—”

“I don’t think I’ve ever had the kind of sex I really want to have,” you finally said. Blurted, really.

You thought of what your sister had called you once: a human hand grenade.

The distinct click of Rhett snapping his mouth shut, teeth on teeth. The rain pattered on—and you knew you had to as well, you had to get it out quick before you stuffed it all back down.

“And I’m scared I’ll never have it because I’m too chickenshit to tell people about the kind of sex I want to have, and, it’s nothing crazy, it just—it’s…a feeling? And like, some people just aren’t into it, but I haven’t slept with enough people to really know if that’s true or if I’ve never bothered to get close enough to someone to actually tell them or to know if that really is the kind of sex that I actually want, because I’ve never had it, I just know that I want it, and what if I tell the next person that’s the kind of sex I want and then I don’t like it at all…what then?”

You’d closed your eyes again, vibrating, the blackness vibrating with you.

“What kind of sex do you wanna have?” Rhett’s voice was so low you barely heard him.

Breath catching. You opened your eyes. You stared at his hands.

You pantomimed tossing the stick over your shoulder. “Lost it,” you mumbled.

I'm sorry, you wanted to say but you couldn't get yourself to.

Even though you weren’t looking at him, you knew Rhett was thinking, trying to figure out if he could push you or if he wanted to wait it out, if he should pave it over with conversation, or if he should stand up to grab a beer. Because in the end, you were friends. And you did know him, and he did know you.

Rhett settled for something that broke your heart a little. “You know, you can talk to me. Right? About anything.”

You swallowed, nodded.

“Want a beer?” The soft familiar crack of his knees as he stood.

You were too scared of the things you’d say if you had one. Shaking your head, you said, “Water, please.”

· · ❁ · ·

Something shifted after that. It felt tectonic, structural. There was this muscle inside of you strung so tight. It waited. Agonized for relief, for a thumb to rub along its tendons and help it unravel itself.

It was different that morning, and you were curled in the tub, shower head pressed close—down there, right there—and you needed so much, and his name spiraled through you endlessly, oh god-oh god, eyes squeezed shut tight enough the whole world cracked open. You came so hard you felt helpless in it, loosened from yourself, your mouth finding your forearm, your teeth finding your skin—

You’d bitten down hard enough Rhett traced a finger over the swell when you met him later that day. “What happened?” His voice too low. Unfamiliar.

“Hurt myself at the bakery,” you lied.

He huffed. No laugh. He didn’t believe you.

Whatever had started to shift, didn’t stop its shifting. It infiltrated your conversations, or rather lack thereof, until both of you felt like you were fumbling through something that used to be easy.

Rhett stopped coming into the bakery, rather opting to drive you home whenever you had to close up shop on your own, even if it meant he had to leave the ranch early to drive all the way to town and back. There was an energy around him, especially at the bar when he was a couple of drinks in.

You were used to Rhett Abbott quietly watching over people, making sure no rowdy tourists messed with the regulars, or that the Tillerson boys left Perry alone on the rare occasion that he did join you two at the bar, or looming over you whenever some guy slid up to ask for your number, his blunt: Can I help you, man?

There was something about him, like maybe there was a muscle inside of him too, strung too tight for too long, waiting...

The first time Rhett got into a fight in front of you, something incomprehensible roiled in your stomach.

It had started innocently enough. You knew Lloyd liked calling you Shortcake, and you’d never paid it any mind; he was a touchy drunk the girls tolerated, each meeting his relatively tame come-ons with an eye-roll and a middle finger. But he’d had too much to drink that night, and his hands had sloppily snaked their way around your waist to pull you to the dancefloor. “—no, seriously, I’m good, Lloyd. Like, I’m running for evil mayor of that town in Footloose. I’m done—”

“Come on, Shortcake, for me?”

“I said I’m fucking good, Lloyd.” His arms tightened around you, breath bloated with liquors unknown. “You can let go now.”

You saw Rhett too late, shoving his way through the crowd. You lifted your hands like you were trying to reprimand an incoming cyclone, “Rhett, don’t—”

Leaning in close to slur something in your ear, Lloyd was oblivious to the fact that Rhett's shoulder was about to collide with the back of his head.

What proceeded was a burst of juvenile male posturing that consisted mostly of huffing and shoving, like two big pigeons clucking at each other over soggy bread on the sidewalk. But when Lloyd whacked Rhett’s hat off with an accidental swing, the next thing you knew, a fist met a cheek, and a knee met a groin—and you cursed God for ever making you this hopelessly attracted to dick.

· · ❁ · ·

“Please don’t do that again,” you told Rhett much later, sitting next to him on his couch, pressing a bag of frozen peas to his head. “Not for me, okay?”

Rhett sat slouched beside you, the big bend of his back, as he stared at the scuffed knuckles of his right hand.

“I’m a big girl. I can deal with Lloyd, for Christ’s sake. He’s, like, three feet. He’s a human step stool.”

“He was touching you—”

“People touch me all the time.”

“Not like that. I didn’t…I don’t want anyone else to fucking touch you like that.”

You tossed the peas into his lap.

He looked at you then, face hazy in the dim lights of his living room.

Anyone else…

It echoed in your body, over and over, traveled all the way through you.

“Pretty sure that’s up to me,” you said.

With a sigh, he pressed the bag of peas to his head. “I didn’t mean it like that. I’m—sorry. Okay? Sorry. I didn’t realize I was doing it until…Yeah.” He took a breath. “I’m a shitty drunk.”

“That makes two of us.” Shifting, you grabbed his arm to help him up, catching him when he swayed with a groan. “Come on. Let’s get you to bed, Bazooka Man.”

Rhett let you guide him to the bedroom, the same way he’d let you drive him home in his truck. It did things to you, knowing you could wrangle this big cowboy down the hallway and into his bed, without him putting up a fight.

You liked when he listened to you—and you knew full well there weren’t many people he listened to in the first place.

“Gotta admit, I got him good though,” Rhett murmured when he stumbled into bed, that stupid little grin of his, the one that made his canines flash.

You snatched the peas to smack him with it. “Stop,” you warned. “You kneed him in the ballsack, you trigger-happy fuck. Are you proud of yourself?”

“I hope his sperm count plummets.”

You couldn’t help your laugh, and he couldn’t help his.

This, you could handle. This was the Rhett with the crooked smile and the lopsided gait, his intense boyishness that made you wonder about how he got each scar on his body.

With this Rhett, things were easy, almost routine, and you felt lulled into the practiced rhythm of it, unthinking; helping him unbutton his shirt, before yanking off his boots, his jeans, the way you had countless of times after he’d been bucked off a bull hard enough he’d returned to the cabin in a tourniquet and his head foggy with medication.

On the first night you’d driven him home from the hospital, he’d told you that he didn’t like letting anyone help him like this, and you’d reached over the stick shift to wipe the hair from his forehead, and something about the way he'd leaned into it had made you so unbearably sad.

You didn’t know when you snapped out of it, crouched before him, about to grab his boots to bring them to the door—when you finally looked up.

His silhouette was black against the glow of the bedside lamp, eclipsed by it, he loomed above you in shadow. Your chest cramped up with a feeling you’d tried so hard to push away.

In your head, you were careless.

In your head, you let his boots fall to the hardwood floor. You crawled to him on hands and knees, and you nuzzled his bare knee, the soft hairs there, the lean muscle of his thigh, ran your nose to the spot where the checkered cotton of his boxers bunched just so. I need. I need and need and need—

“You can’t do that to me, Shortcake.” Rhett’s voice rumbled in the quiet.

“Do what?”

“Look at me like that.” His voice felt like a finger below your chin, tapping it up.

“Like what?” All breath.

Rhett didn’t answer. His head tipped to the side. You imagined yourself from where he sat, imagined his shadow was big enough it swallowed you whole.

This was a Rhett you didn’t know.

The bed creaked as he leaned forward. You didn’t breathe, didn’t move a muscle, when his fingers ghosted along the edge of your jaw. Your breath hiccuped when you felt a gentle tug on the corner of your mouth, and you realized he’d loosened a single strand of hair from your lips. The heat humming there, humming through you.

“Are you ever going to tell me?” he said.

Your confusion must’ve been obvious, because he spoke again: “Are you ever going to tell me what you want?”

What I want?

It was such a simple answer.

It shamed you how simple it was.

In the dim light, you stared at the vein roped along his forearm. You wanted to trace it with your tongue, with soft grazing teeth, wanted to lap up the salt and tang of his skin, gather it all in your mouth, take the sweetest littlest bites.

You wanted to lean all the way in, kiss the inside of his palm, that starburst scar from when his glove had once ripped during a bull ride. You imagined then, taking the thick pad of his thumb into your mouth, letting it press into your tongue until you bit down, until it reached all the way in. Until you writhed from it.

With a frustrated huff, you tipped forward. Your forehead bumped against his knee.

You didn’t know what to do with yourself anymore.

You could’ve wept when you felt strong fingers carefully run down the curve of your skull. The cuff of nails scraping along your skin. The sound it made.

He held you like this: your head cradled in his big, big hand.

You knew Rhett understood something about you in that moment.

You felt young, skinless, unsure in your body. None of you felt grown. You were all baby teeth. You were a tiny stack of bones that shook.

“You’re okay, darlin’,” Rhett said it with so much tenderness you made a shameful sound low in your throat, and your nose pressed into the scar that ran up the center of his knee.

What you would’ve done to kiss it then, just once, to lave it in spit, with your eyes screwed shut and a hand between your legs, there, down there—

· · ❁ · ·

Your biggest secret was this: You’d let anything be done to you if it was just done sweetly enough.

Your relationship with intimacy had always been complicated.

You knew what you looked like to men; you were the young desperate thing to be flung face-down and taken, filthy little whore, you asked for it, you want it like this, right? You want it like this—

The few times you’d had sex, that assumption had left you shaking in the bathroom after, still drunk or high or both, wiping cum off your face or scraping it out of yourself, rubbing the tacky film of it between your fingers until it got grainy.

The shame of it all, the shame of your body glaring back at you in the mirror like a creature unknown. Because you had wanted it like that, but not really, and you hadn’t known how to say it right, or maybe they hadn’t listened, and you hadn’t blamed them for it, except you had. Most of the time you blamed yourself, an archaic miserable reflex that seemed to define every aspect of you being a fucking woman.

When you thought about what you wanted, sometimes all you were left with was a feeling.

You thought of big sure hands helping you out of your shoes, unlacing one, then the other. You thought of your hair being washed and your mouth being fed and your cheeks being kissed, one at a time.

It was so embarrassingly sexless.

All you wanted was to know with a kind of relief that you could let go now, that it was going to be okay, and that for a blissful fucking moment, you didn’t have to be yourself anymore.

You could just want.

You could be all of your wanting at once and nothing more.

· · ❁ · ·

“Mornin’.”

You didn’t open your eyes.

A low chuckle from above. “I know you ain’t asleep.”

With a tired groan, you cracked one eye open, then the other. Rhett had changed into a T-shirt and sweats. He’d showered, hair still damp and curling at his neck.

He was staring. You knew why. Your dress lay puddled on his living room floor.

Still hazy from sleep, was it so terrible to let yourself be looked at like this? The worn cotton T-shirt you’d snatched from Rhett’s drawer riding up your stomach as you stretched.

You caught the bob in his slender throat. He was pretty like this, you thought. A patch of sunlight spilled across the side of his face, eyes a tremendous shock of blue. He smelled like his deodorant, his aftershave. His hand so close to your face all you’d have to do was open your mouth.

“You feeling better?” you said, voice frayed with leftover sleep.

A night on Rhett’s couch always left you a little discombobulated. It was deep and wide, all buttery brown leather, the kind you sunk into as if lazing in a palm.

Your gaze climbed from his hand up to his bare arm, from his throat to his freshly shaven jaw. You were so tired you couldn’t hide from him.

You fell all the way open.

His hand twitched like maybe he’d reach out.

But you two were good at this game. Especially sober, in the daylight.

Rhett cleared his throat. “Making breakfast. You hungry?” His attention wavered on your mouth.

You swallowed. He tracked it.

“Starvin’,” you drawled in some faux-impression of him, in the hopes it was silly enough to lighten the mood.

He chuckled. “Starvin’, huh? Okay, cowboy.” He grabbed a pillow and whacked your thigh, “Giddy-up,” before heading to the kitchen, limping slightly.

Had he not taken his painkillers?

“How do scrambled eggs and pancakes sound?” he tossed over his shoulder.

“Uh—Heavenly?”

“Okay, calm down, they’re more for me than for you.”

“Liar. If I weren’t here, you’d have a cigarette and a Bud Light.”

“If I didn’t make sure you ate properly, you’d be having orange juice Captain Crunch three times a day.”

“It’s delicious?”

“It’s deranged, is what it is.”

You laughed, more out of relief than anything else. This was normal. You could deal with normal.

Not bothering with putting on your dress, you dragged yourself to the kitchen in nothing but his T-shirt and your underwear. It wasn’t an unfamiliar sight—you’d weathered the occasional hangover on his couch wearing less—but something about this felt different. There was too much inside of you, and after last night, you didn’t know how to look at him without thinking about the way he’d called you darlin'.

You managed to sit through a painfully normal breakfast—radio on, mundane small talk—and even though it wasn’t Captain Crunch with orange juice, it would do (a mumbled statement that earned you a balled-up paper towel to the head).

You helped clear the table after, before heading out to brush your teeth. When you returned the radio was off, and Rhett was stooped over the sudsy sink, placing a plate onto the drying rack. You hoisted yourself onto the kitchen table and watched as he washed his hands, slowly, methodically, staring out the window like he was thinking.

“You want the talking stick?” you said.

Rhett huffed a laugh, bracing his hands on the edge of the sink, looking down, looking up. His wide back expanded as he took a breath. You almost expected him to shake his head when he finally spoke: “Who bit your arm?”

You blinked. “What?”

“I know what a bite mark looks like.” Of course Rhett Abbott would know what a bite mark looked like. It almost made you laugh, the ridiculousness of it. “Are you getting into fights I don’t know about? Or is Maya—”

“Oh God,” you pitched forward, “no, of course not! Biting’s not her style. She prefers dish towels.” You were joking but Rhett wasn’t laughing.

This whole moment felt unreal. You hadn't thought about it in days. The bruise was already healing anyway, yellow and mottled and absolutely not worth being contemplated on.

You raked through yourself for another answer, something stupid enough, something unbelievable: Tres, the three-legged goat? The wonky convection oven at the bakery? A rabid child on the street—

“Are you ever going to tell me?” Rhett gripped into the sink so hard his hands paled from the pressure.

The question surprised you.

You remembered how he’d asked you that the night before.

It made the same frustrating weight sink onto your chest. You squeezed your eyes shut and opened them again, vision splotchy. Staring at the tender swirls of hair gathered at the nape of Rhett’s neck, you took a breath and you said, “It was me.”

You watched as the color blotted back into his hands.

“I was in the shower,” you said. Then, “I was...thinking of you.”

Remembering then how his finger had traced along the tender swell of the bruise just hours later, in the bar, in the red lights, and how you’d secretly hoped he’d press down to make it ache, make you remember how much you’d wanted him, in that moment, in the bathtub surrounded by the splotchy shower curtain, the tiles painted in dried suds, like Venus in her shell, shaking open, shaking apart.

I was thinking of you.

You closed your eyes when Rhett finally turned. Sitting on the kitchen table, legs dangling over the edge, you kept yourself still. You listened to his breath ragged and strange in the quiet. A warble of birds outside. The creak of the floorboards as he came to you.

His closeness was a cloud bank rolling in, suddenly all around, the smell of him, coffee and deodorant and soap. Your face lifted on instinct. Eyes still closed, you basked in the heat of his breath pouring across your forehead, your cheeks.

I was thinking of you.

All of you sighed open.

And you waited for him in that blackness, until you felt the distinct prickle of skin on skin, a knuckle maybe, a single finger running down the inside of your forearm, down, down, before it reached that tender spot.

He pressed.

Your eyes snapped open. Sunlight turned that blue stare into something startling, electric.

As if moving through a trance, your hand settled atop his still on your arm, finding his thumb and digging it into the bruise even harder. That dull ache turned sharp, shot right through you.

Eyes twitching, mouth opening. The sound you made.

Rhett looked at you like he’d never seen you before.

Letting go of his hand, you reached for him, digging your fingers into the hair bunched at the nape of his neck, and you pulled him close, pulled him all the way down. Your forehead rolled against his, your nose mashing into his skin, mouth open, waiting, wanting so fucking much. Pleasepleasepleaseplease—

Rhett stopped you with a thumb on your bottom lip. You couldn’t even feel ashamed for spewing out the most pathetic huff. Filthy little whore. Your jaw loosening, tongue darting out to taste him, to dig your teeth into him just a little.

But Rhett slid his thumb away, pressed it like a gentle warning into your cheek.

“Do you want this?” His voice cracked right in the middle.

You nodded, nose bumping against his a little too hard.

“Speak up for me—”

“Yes.”

“Good,” he said, he smiled small. You wanted to bite at it, make it bigger. “You say the word and we stop, okay?”

You nodded. He waited.

"Okay," you said.

“We’ll go slow. Yeah?”

You nodded again, numbed to everything except for him. “Yes, please.”

Rhett groaned, leaning into you so completely your mouths almost collided. “God, you kill me with all your please-and-thank-yous. You’re so good. You wanna be good for me?” He said it like he was testing something. And your chin nudged forward, body bending towards him, and whatever he was looking for, he found it in the way your legs fell open all the way.

Gripping into the back of your knees, he dragged you closer, his thighs sliding between yours, and you sputtered a breath when you felt the hot press of him against all of you.

“Yes,” you breathed.

“You are, darlin’. "

Darlin'

"Fuck, you are. You don’t even know how damn good you are.” His hands sliding back up your side, your throat, gripping your jaw to tip your face towards him. Your fingers fumbling to hook into his forearms. You felt as though all you were doing was holding on.

Letting him lead. Letting him keep you like this.

He made you wait. Ran the tip of his nose almost soothingly along the bridge of yours. Lips taunting, that terrible shudder of closeness that escaped you every time your mouth tried desperately to meet his.

You thought of the way he ran his hand along the flank of his horse, patted her once, twice. Easy, girl—

Maybe you hated him for it. How much he undid you. How he had you sitting there, soaking in it, vibrating inside all of your unbearable catastrophic fucking need like he had you leashed.

“Please,” you finally mouthed into the heat of his breath. And his eyes flashed. And when you were ready to plead just one more time, without an ounce of shame left, his mouth collapsed against yours.

It surged through you like a spinal tap.

Drawing out, deeper, digging all the way in, tongue and teeth, the smooth jut of his chin.

Your hands were everywhere, unsure of what they wanted to grab hold of first, like a woman drowning; in his hair, on his jaw, scraping down his wide shoulders, sliding up the heat of his neck—Here and here and here, let me touch you right here.

Rhett’s hands stayed bolted to your jaw. You felt like he was the only thing keeping you upright, like you’d unspool if he ever let you go.

You were a wanton thing, wincing into his open mouth. A constant drool of need. And you were hot. God, you were so hot. You couldn’t breathe with how hot you were. Yanking at your shirt, you just wanted it off, off. Rhett nipped at your bottom lip once, and then he was smiling. Was he laughing? Like he was catching on, like he took such pity on you. Your teeth clacked against his. You couldn't keep your shit together. You couldn't think, you couldn't think...

“I want—” You tugged at the shirt until his hands joined yours. “I want all of it off.” You sounded drunk, like you were listening to yourself from one room over.

“Okay. Okay, darlin’, I got you.” And he did. He helped you peel the shirt off, but it snagged on your elbow, and your face was stuck against threadbare cotton, and you laughed, because what the fuck? Here you were, going crazy on Rhett Abbott’s kitchen table.

You were still laughing when the shirt finally came off, laughing harder when Rhett tossed it over his shoulder and it landed on the coffee maker.

He was smiling above you, the morning light painting him soft and perfect as he combed the hair out of your eyes.

You wanted to run your fingers over his face, read him like braille.

It was a foreign realization that, now, here, you could. You could do so much. You could have all the things that had piled inside of you, one on top of the other. All of your fucking wanting, it felt bigger than your body. You were so full. And it was just the two of you, and this was Rhett, and it was all going to be okay, it was okay to let go of him and to lean back, push the leftover coffee mugs to the edge of the table, to let Rhett huff a strangled laugh when one of them thunked to the floor, like he couldn’t believe that he was here like this, with you.

“Fuckin’ hell,” he muttered, staring down at you

A hand traced where your body met the table, like he was cutting along the shape of you, skin sliding against yours as he traveled up and up, past each dip of your ribs, your arms, shoulders, up the hollow of your throat to your collarbone, to that dip right in-between, where the pendant of your necklace rested.

He pushed it in just a bit, and the pressure made you arch, made you mad with it. “Fuck, look at you, baby."

Baby.

You were baby.

“No one’s ever taken care of you, huh? You poor thing.” His lilting condescension left you gaping. “Remember what you told me? You’ll tell me what you want. You’ll tell me, yeah? How do you want it, baby? I’ll take such good fucking care of you.”

He leaned over you, ghosting his mouth over your jaw, kissing you there, so unhurried. “Where do you want me?”

Everywhere.

You swallowed, shaking your head, eyes screwed shut.

Fucking everywhere, all at once, all the time.

You make me want so much it pushes out everything else.

He chuckled into your neck. “Gotta tell me, baby.” Sucked at your skin with tongue and teeth. His T-shirt hung low enough it grazed over your nipples. You arched into him.

He hummed. “Here?” His thumb tenderly traveled up the swell of your breast and tapped against your nipple. Breath hitching, you shook your head.

“What about here?” His mouth pressed a wet kiss to your clavicle. No. Going lower, kissing a path to your other breast, breath gathering over it. You closed your eyes when he looked at you.

“And here?” His tongue like a small flame over your nipple, laving at it so softly, round and round, the wet sweep making you dizzy. Losing yourself in it. Chest bowing up into his mouth, arching so high it hurt.

He bit down once. You whined. Shook your head again, not there.

On and on it went:

Here? Mouth on your sternum. And what about here? Hands grabbing your waist. A soft scatter of kisses around your belly button. Biting into the soft flesh of your tummy until it kicked a laugh out of you. No, stop, stop. Okay, okay. Here? He fed your fingers into his mouth, the warm glide of his tongue, snag of teeth when they caught on your knuckles. And here? Baby, what about here? Spit on his chin as bent down to lave at each hipbone—No, no, no.

Here? Traveling lower and lower to kiss the top of a thigh, then inside of it with a drag of his tongue.

Your body hiccuped once and hard with need.

Rhett moved around you with the same intensity he had waiting in the chute at the rodeo, holding something back, containing it. You wanted to slam it open, wanted him thrashing and sweating and tossed around, you wanted and you wanted, you wanted so much.

Maybe he took mercy on you, or maybe he’d run out of patience, when he finally—finally—parted your legs. That pained sound of his. That sweet little oh. “Fuck. You’re so wet. You need it that bad, hm?"

You were nodding again. "Yes—" Could he tell how hard you were nodding?

You heard the distinct drag of a chair on the hardwood floor, and you could’ve laughed at the ridiculousness of seeing him sitting at the kitchen table, the very one you’d just had breakfast at, now covered in the sprawl of your naked body, soaked and aching, your thighs parted for him, right foot resting on the back of the chair.

Rhett must’ve caught on because he laughed, tipping his head against your leg, kissing your calf. You hissed when he nipped at you there. “God, I could—” Groaning into your skin. “I could take a fucking bite out of you it's not even funny. Jesus.”

With his arms hooked around your legs, his kisses traveled up the inside of your thigh. You watched, open-mouthed, slack-jawed, as his dark swirl of hair traveled between your legs.

You’d fucked yourself to the thought of this.

“You want it here, baby?” He nosed at the elastic of your underwear, warm breath pouring over you.

You nodded so hard your head knocked against the table. You were swimming in it. The whole world swimming with you. “Yes, please…”

His murmured curse.

Your desperate whine.

Before finally, a kiss to your cotton-covered clit.

It made your whole body still.

“How you do you want it?” he mumbled it against you. Right there. Down there.

You knew he wasn't expecting you to answer, but your needing felt vicious like this, burned in the back of your throat, and you thought:

Messy.

And with a shame that bloomed hot and red across your chest, you realized you'd pleaded for it out loud, voice like a frayed rope one pull away from snapping.

Rhett's lashes were long and dark as he looked up at you. He huffed a laugh.

Something about it sounded very, very mean.

He gave your clit another quick kiss. And then another and another, longer this time, until his mouth opened, tongue flattening against the center of you. You felt him gather spit, felt the hot gush of it. How he grabbed the elastic of your underwear to stretch it across you so tight it made your clit thrum, holding you there, strumming his thumb up and down, playing with it. “Look at this.” Before giving you a quick pat, once, twice—the peeling wetness of it in the quiet. “Fuck, baby—”

Before you had time to gather enough breath, Rhett buried his face into you, mouth mashing against you there, right there. Taking big bites. Spit and tongue and heat that drooled right through you. He groaned, pressing in deeper, the wide pad of his tongue nudging your clit, over and over, working you like this, until you were soaked enough a string of wetness followed when Rhett finally pulled off your underwear.

He flung it across the kitchen, uncaring, and you heard it land somewhere on the floor with a slop.

You were completely naked then, and he stared down at you like he wanted to be everywhere but he knew he had to make a choice.

It made your brain light up. It made you writhe when his palm pressed a smooth circle over your aching core, before cupping it once and hard, holding you like this, holding all of you at once. “You’re so perfect, baby. Look at you being so perfect for me.” His endless reserve of nonsensical drivel, slow and honeyed and drawling, like he was pouring it into you.

You wanted more, you waited for it, legs opening wider, wider.

A breath, then—he spit on your hole.

It felt fucking preposterous.

And then his mouth was on you again. Without that barrier of cotton from before, everything was raw, wetness wetter, pressure harder. His tongue, spongy and hot against you, teeth scraping across your clit. Pulling in a deep mouthful. You felt it everywhere when he moaned. His head shaking once like something gone rabid.

One of his hands dug into your stomach, the other crept up the front of your throat, digging for entrance when it reached your mouth. You let him in, his thick fingers pressing into your tongue.

“Spit.” He said it right against your clit, before sucking.

You’d caught the undertone: You want messy? I’ll give you fucking messy—

You grabbed his wrist, laved at his fingers, until you felt a dribble down your chin, and before you could get lost in the pressure of something thick and foreign in your mouth, he pulled his hand back, smearing the mess over your aching hole. Thumb flicking fast—before stopping. You punched out a pitiful cry.

“You want my fingers, hm? You think this sweet pussy wants my fingers?”

You knocked your head into the table so hard your ears rung, yesyesyesyesyes. Nodding and nodding and nodding and nodding.

You were so open and so wet, he easily breached you.

Full of him. You were full with him.

His fingers curled against that spongy rippling spot inside of you, that spot that gave way completely. He pressed down on your stomach, hard, and you keened, elbows digging into the table, your hands hovering, twitching in the air.

Rhett was strong enough to keep you from moving too much. You blamed all those damn bulls. His body moved on instinct, meeting each buck and squirm of you. He’d told you once that it was never about anticipating the next move, it was about response, action-reaction, it was all reflex when he was on that saddle.

You couldn’t keep still, hips jerking, lurching wildly beneath him. You were everywhere. You were fucking dynamite. But he pressed you down, fingers working inside of you with that steady unbreakable rhythm. His tongue on your clit. The filthy sounds of it dripping into the kitchen, all the lapping, the squelch of his fingers, your wet keening sobs. You let him fuck you and fuck you and fuck you and fuck you like this. Your hands finally tearing in his hair. Feet fumbling to find the back of the chair for leverage, trying to ride his face, his fingers.

Don’t stop, you thought so hard it charged through you like voltage. Please, “Don’t stop—”

His hand on your stomach splayed wider, pressed down, gripping into you—and you realized he’d felt your body tense up faster than you had.

Something about Rhett feeling you were about to come made your vision blurry. His body meeting yours at every turn.

You said his name then. He groaned something into you, but you couldn’t hear it over the pulsing in your ears. Chest arching, legs buckling around his head.

You came in complete and utter silence.

Eyes screwed shut, dropping into blackness.

You thought you might've reached the bottom of something.

It was so perfect you wanted to cry.

The slow drag of his tongue coaxed you back slowly. His fingers had slipped out, now tracing soothing wet circles on the inside of your thigh. You couldn’t believe Rhett's head was still between your legs, mouth lazily lapping up the mess. You gently pushed him away, clit too sensitive for more.

Rhett blinked, bleary-eyed. He looked wild. Hair a mess, face ruddy and wet. Covered in you.

“Holy shit..” His voice was nothing but a low rasp.

Holy shit.

The chair jerked back as he stood again, roughly wiping his face on his T-shirt with such habitual boyishness you couldn’t help but reach for him. Delirious, gooey-warm. You were kissing him and kissing him, kissing him all over. You could taste yourself on him.

"Did so well for me, baby." He murmured in between kisses, smiling slow. "So fucking good." His hands gripped your head, turning you this way and that like he was checking in.

You couldn't do anything but nod. Your legs felt gummy as you wrapped them around his hips to pull him close. His hardness ground right against you.

Rhett hissed. Eyes squeezing shut. Nodding his head almost absentmindedly when you hooked your fingers into the waistband of his sweats to pull them down.

You felt hungry with it. Insatiable.

Rhett’s cock was heavy and full as it sprung free, the glossy-pink tip swollen with all his aching. Your mouth went numb, filling with spit, with how much you wanted to taste him, slide him all the way into you until you stopped breathing.

But Rhett was shaking his head, no. “I won’t last, baby—” Raw enough it almost felt like he was the one pleading with you now.

You didn’t want him pleading.

You wanted him to feel good. All you wanted was for him to feel good.

Without a word, you wiped a hand through the wet mess between your legs, all his spit, all yours, all your cum, the terrible gush of you, and you spread it over him in a slow filthy pump. He was so big, you stacked one hand over the other.

Rhett tipped forward, his jaw slack, transfixed as he watched your hands move over him. “Hah—fuck me...” One wet deliberate slide after the other, his hips bucking forward.

Next time, you thought, you'd have him all the way inside of you. You could almost imagine it when Rhett leaned over you, caged you in with shaking arms. His mouth buried in your throat, licking a hot strip to your ear, slurring more of his sweet nonsense, so fucking good, baby, oh my god, baby just like that, fuck fuck fuck—

He was thrusting into your hands so hard the table kept jerking back, hitting the window sill. The little ceramics there rattling. One fell to the floor. The back of your head knocked against something hard enough it left you dazed, and Rhett's bumbling hands came up to cradle you there, soothe you through it. Fuck, you good, baby?

He was so perfect it killed you, he fucking killed you.

You kissed him, breathed straight out of his mouth. All you wanted was to make him come for you. Come for me. Please, please.

And when he finally did, when his hips met yours in a wet cuff, when he groaned into your mouth, broken, out of it—he spilled hot onto your stomach.

Forehead to forehead.

Breathing heavy.

You felt the wet drag of his spent cock run from your stomach down to your pubis, where he patted it against your clit, once, like some nasty little parting gift, like a promise.

You kissed him one last time before you collapsed onto your back.

For a moment, neither of you said a word. You watched each other. Eyelids heavy. You realized you were breathing in time.

Out of all the places in the world, you thought.

Somewhere in the thick of it, you ran a finger through the puddle of cum on your stomach. Cool now. Spread it across your tongue—acidy, bitter.

The taste of him.

You wanted to disappear into it.

“You’ve gotta stop or you’ll actually kill me,” Rhett groaned, leaning in all the way. He gently grabbed you by the jaw, kissed you, wet and open-mouthed, the slip of his tongue going deep. “You’re so good,” he murmured against your lips. "You're so good..." Giving you one sweet peck, then another.

And you were still stuck in your daze, sitting at the bottom of this thing that felt vast and everywhere. Sunlight poured through the windows, cradling you in the warmth of your afterglow.

Before you could feel ashamed for it, you let it slip: “thank you, daddy.”

And Rhett looked at you like he'd received an answer to a question he hadn’t known how to ask.

· · ❁ · ·

Afterward, Rhett piled you into his arms and carried you to the bathroom.

You thought distantly of all the other times you’d had to clean yourself up alone.

Rhett was dense and fumbling after “coming my damn brains out, Christ.” But he was trying his best to be slow with you, helping you into the shower.

The two of you swaying like drunkards in the hot spray of the shower head.

You were so tired.

You’d been holding on to something so deeply for so long, it was knocked loose now, it was open like a wound. You imagined the water rushing in, clearing it out until the blood ran clear.

While you both rinsed yourself off, Rhett’s mouth found you every once in a while. It felt like he was making sure you were still there. Pressing a kiss to your temple, the top of your head, a scatter of them on your shoulder.

Once even, he lifted your hand and kissed the inside of your palm with such tenderness you wanted to die.

· · ❁ · ·

“What now?” Rhett murmured into your damp hair.

You were on the back deck, curled in his lap on your favorite wicker chair. Sunlight splintered through the trees as it hit the floor. A patch of it warming your bare feet.

It had taken you a while to climb out of the daze, find your way back to your body. Slowly, slowly, mind un-blurring until you felt coherent.

Your voice was a dry rasp when you finally spoke. “Do you think people should be fucking members of their support group?”

“Okay.” Scoffing, Rhett jiggled you in his lap. “Fucking? Really?”

“Fine. Fraternizing.”

He shot you a withering look. It made you snort.

You knew he was right.

Whatever you’d done on his kitchen table, it had left something big inside of you. It felt important.

“Who would’ve thought Rhett Abbott was such a closet romantic,” you mumbled, delighting in the way he rolled his eyes.

Leaving it at that, you curled back into his chest, lazily lifting a finger and tracing along the soft slope of his nose, down his Cupid’s Bow, each curve of each lip.

Look at you—so surprisingly tender.

He opened his mouth to nip at your finger.

“We’ll go slow,” you whispered, echoing the words he’d said to you before, with such reassurance it felt rooted deep.

“Alright,” he murmured, nodding, letting you press your finger to his jaw to make him look at you. “Slow. I can do slow.”

You couldn't help your grin, thinking about all the things he'd done to you in his kitchen just an hour ago. “Yeah. Tell me about it.”

He quirked a mean smile, pinching your side until you laughed.

Like this, you didn’t feel difficult or complicated or messy.

Your laughter spiraled as you tipped your head back from so much delight.

You let it shake through you.

You let it shake through the tin roof and the wicker chair and the rocks on the railing and the sun and the pine trees and the grass and the dirt and the valley that rolled all the way to your sister's house, the very place you'd started calling home the second your duffle bag hit the welcome mat.

And finally, you let it shake through him, sitting there, washed in shards of sunlight—looking at you like you were the easiest thing to love.

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fudgebuggyy · 1 month ago

Text

H E L L I C O N I A S P R I N G

Pairing: Thunderbolts!Bob x Thunderbolts!Yelena

Tags: Post-Canon, Thunderbolts Team Members Live in the Watchtower, Mutual Pining, Fluff and Angst, Fluff and Hurt/Comfort

Warnings: Thunderbolts SPOILERS contained!, Implied/Referenced Past Drug Addiction, Sexual Themes

Word count: 7.298k

Chapters: 4/4

Previous Chapter

Summary: Three months have passed since the Void descended upon New York, and Yelena is getting used to the life her sister led--dealing with PR agents and working in a team she's only recently learned to tolerate.

And then there's the Bob thing. And the Bob thing is super fucking complicated.

✢ Chapter 4 ✢

Once, Bob had told Yelena about the time he’d seen God, or something close to it. A sign maybe, a miracle.

Bob had never spared her of the worst parts of his past. The time he’d almost OD’d in the bathroom at his brother’s, with his wife and kid in the next room. The nights he’d spent in overcrowded drunk tanks, halfway houses, hospital rooms. The things he’d done for cash and the things he’d done to avoid being sent back to the US. And then there was the withdrawal, all the piss and shit and vomit and spasms and sores and loneliness. The loneliness, he’d admitted once, that’s the thing that kills you.

Nowadays all the agonies of his body were tucked away. Sometimes Yelena ached all over just to untuck them. She was the magpie, slotting all these pieces of him into the person he was now, and the person he was then, the person he would become in a year, or ten.

She knew most of Bob’s “voyages” were strangled by the vice of powders and pipes. But he told them with such detail, like she could walk right in and follow him there, like he was inviting her into rooms inside himself without knowing he’d left the door open.

Sometimes the lines blurred, leaving Yelena wondering whose memories were whose:

It was back in Cambodia, he’d told her—before he’d followed some backpackers onto a cargo ship headed to Malaysia, having signed up for a medical trial that would pay enough for another three weeks at the beach and back-up funds for a flight back home.

It had rained in Battambang for days, the overflowing canals and drains inviting pods of mosquitoes to loll over the streets. Bob was tripping on something he’d bought off a Polish guy who dj-ed down Pub Street. He never remembered the shit he was on, but he always remembered where he’d gotten it from; stolen from Russian tourists, bagged from Thai bartenders screwing over a white boy, a wet-market, the sandy backpack of a beautiful surfer on Railay Beach.

That night he set off on his own, following the muddy roads out of the city, trucks and motorcycles rattling past, spraying muck across his legs. He hadn’t eaten in days. He’d been high for so long there was no hunger in him, no thirst. Dragging himself off the road, he waded into the endless sprawl of the flooded rice paddies.

The sky was clear for the first time in weeks, stretching over the fields, the jungle in the blue wallow of night. He didn’t get far, falling to his back and disappearing into the water, the mud, letting the sticky heat settle on top of him. The mosquitoes buzzed over his motionless body. The water was deep enough it was in his ears.

And if he tilted his head just so, he could let the water in. He wouldn’t move and he’d let go and he’d disappear and he’d wanted to so desperately, he’d wanted to for so long he swore he must’ve been born with it, it must’ve been there since the very beginning, melded to him like a rind of fat, and when the desperation was at its strongest and biggest and most inescapable—there it came.

Its slow march towards him.

Bob had never seen a water buffalo up close before. Their black rippling bodies existing only on tourist pamphlets at check-in counters of hostels.

Looming above him, eyes beetle-back, its horns curved like a beast from the Odyssey, it looked like something to be fought by fleets of a thousand men. He lay at its feet, expecting its mighty hooves to pound into his skull. Maybe he asked for it to. But the buffalo waited and waited, and waited some more, until its heavy head bent down, parting the slick of his hair with a huff.

And then it just left. And then it was over. And I thought that was it, that I’d died.

A farmer’s son found him at dawn. They called Bob srauv leuk kbal—the white deadbeat. He got clean in a garage, on an air mattress with a red bucket beside it. Whenever he was strong enough to walk, he’d drag himself outside. He’d watch the farmer’s son ride the water buffalo through the muddy lowlands, patting its flank with a stick.

He’d later learn its name was Chivy. And Chivy meant life.

✢ ✢ ✢ ✢ ✢ ✢

Yelena didn’t know if she believed in God or signs or even miracles, but looking at Robert Reynolds slumped in this diner booth, the light of the neon sign by the window spilling across his face, his eyes so impossibly blue…Jesus Christ, maybe.

Maybe he was the closest thing to it.

“What?” Bob said, dunking a spoon into his milkless, sugarless coffee, unthinking.

She smiled staring at the way he stirred it.

“Nothing,” she said.

They were still wet from their mid-rain scramble through Hell’s Kitchen. Bob with his I love NYC baseball cap pulled low. Yelena in her I love NYC sweater, trying to hide her face beneath the hood. The sweater matched her I love NYC socks and her Yankees slides, which they’d gotten from a souvenir shop before closing, a dingy hole in the wall that would’ve managed to sell Bob a football-sized snow globe encasing a football-sized Statue of Liberty if Yelena hadn’t intervened. Bob was terrible at turning people down—which was why they were here in the first place, she supposed.

As far as disguises went, they looked so cartoonishly stupid Valentina would have a choleric episode if she were to ever receive photographic evidence that the media-evasion training she’d forced the team to suffer through had gone down the drain.

Bob slouched in his seat, fiddling with the napkins, his knee jumping beneath the table. It was his first time out in months.

It rendered him slouchier and more sarcastic than usual, and when the waitress asked where they were from, Bob mumbled something about a psych ward before Yelena scrambled to throw in, Paris! The one in Texas, begrudgingly shooting the waitress her press-friendliest smile. It was hard to pretend to be from Paris, the one in Texas, when Yelena’s face was plastered on a billboard not even a block away from here. And it was even harder to pretend when Yelena proceeded to order the whole menu in her droniest Russian accent.

Not even an hour ago, she’d tossed herself from the New Avenger’s Watchtower, trusting that one of the most calamitous beings on the planet would ensure she’d reach the ground in one piece. She had a Glock 26 strapped to her thigh, a flash charge and a tactical knife tucked into the shorts beneath her dress. She’d chosen the booth with the most advantageous vantage point, having tracked each possible entrance and exit of this 24-hour diner within the first five minutes of sitting down, because her life was as famously unpredictable as it was violent.

But just for a moment, just for this, Yelena wanted to look at Bob—sitting there, in this tacky red vinyl seat, with his rumpled suit and his baseball cap and his blue-blue eyes—and keep pretending.

She wanted to pretend they had nowhere else to be and nowhere else to return to. They were two painfully normal people, enjoying a painfully normal night.

The rain pattered against the window, and the place was empty safe for an old man hunched on a stool at the counter, and a group of kids at the back, still drunk or high or both, tiredly clucking at each other over a plate of fries. Redbone was playing from a glowing jukebox. Slices of strawberry pie sat sumptuous and gooey in the display case on the counter, beside a tip jar donned with a sticky note: For trip to Italy :)

Plate by plate, the waitress graced their table with chicken and waffles, pancakes soaked in rivers of warm butter, steak-and-eggs and stacks of golden hash browns, red velvet milkshake with a smack-red cherry on top, whipped cream dripping in dolloped globs down the glass.

God, how Yelena had missed this All-American junk.

“You sure you don’t want anything else?” She pointedly stared at Bob’s burger and fries.

“Uh—You’re saying that like you’re not going to share?” Bob pointedly stared at Yelena’s blatant attempt at cardiac arrest.

“You don’t think I can finish this?”

“My bad, didn’t mean to presume you’d fail at eating six plates on your own." Bob squinted.

“Don’t look so worried.” Grabbing the cherry from her shake, she popped it into her mouth, chewing. “I won the county fair pie-eating competition when I was six. Can you imagine? I was like three feet. There was a time in my life when I was ninety percent pie. I was designed for high cholesterol.” Before grabbing a fried chicken drumstick and biting into it with the fervor of someone who’d only had two crackers with caviar in the past six hours. She wiped her mouth with the back of her hand, smiling. Bob watched her from below the bill of his baseball cap, shaking his head, but smiling too.

“Can I try your burger?” Yelena asked.

Bob had just finished stacking two neat rows of fries on the patty. He cocked a brow.

“You just said you wanted to share,” she said.

He cocked his brow harder.

“Fine, I’ll order my own then—”

“Yelena—” Bob snorted, shooting her a warning look.

“Excuse me,” she was already leaning towards the waitress dashing past them, “could I order a bacon cheeseburger with curly fries—”

“She’s kidding,” Bob cut her off, before pushing his plate forward with a resigned: “Fine.”

“Never mind, thank you. But I will have another shake, please. Double-fudge Oreo.”

With an exasperated nod, the waitress dashed on.

Bob shook his head. “You’re going to be sick.” He used the same tone when he told Yelena to head to the med bay whenever any of her stitches popped.

“Counting on it.” She used the same tone when she said she’d go tomorrow.

And with that, she grabbed his burger and took the biggest, most obnoxious bite she possibly could, because Yelena from Paris, the one in Texas, was a real shit.

“Oh—Okay.” Bob spluttered a mean laugh. “Sure, man. Go ahead.”

“That’s fantastic,” Yelena declared with her mouth full.

“Good to know. Glad I’ll get to enjoy one bite of it.”

Bob shook his head, smiling, like he couldn’t help it, and she liked that he couldn’t, and she liked to think she was the only person who’d get to have him like this; head-shaking and tired and wry, openly annoyed but secretly delighted.

She shared her waffles with him, and her pancakes, stacking them on his plate and topping them with a swirl of butter as a peace offering. She sat in quiet fascination, watching his mouth peeking out from beneath the bill of his baseball cap every once in a while, the pink jut of his bottom lip. Slip of tongue and teeth.

She watched it eat, she watched it talk, and when she heard it say, “So this, uh, county fair pie-eating competition. Was it in Ohio?”, she almost didn’t want to answer, in fear it would stop moving, it would stop doing things.

A pause.

The bill of his cap swung upward, revealing his face.

Sometimes it startled her. How lovely he was.

“Hm?” She leaned back in her seat, vinyl squeaking beneath her.

“The county fair? That was back in Ohio?”

She nodded. He waited.

There was an unspoken rhythm to the way they spoke: Yelena coaxed—Bob followed.

It was…disorienting when it was the other way around.

“Did you go often? To the fair?”

Bob wasn’t tactful with his questioning, but he never prodded and he never pushed, and Yelena was always grateful for it. Right now, she might be grateful enough that maybe, just maybe, looking at a sweet brown curl of hair coiling behind his ear—maybe this time she’d give him an answer.

“It was my favorite time of year,” she said, scraping a fork across the leftovers on her plate.

“Summer?”

“July,” she said, dropped the fork and wrung her hands in her lap. She looked through the rain-spattered window. The $1 pizza joint across the street turned its lights off.

“They had this stand with chocolate chip cookies and you’d get a bucket of it and this huge jug of milk, and I’d crumble all the cookies and jam them into the milk until it was all sludgy—” She remembered the Ferris wheel, how its perfect bulb-lined curvature rose into the night sky. She remembered praying for it to get stuck whenever she reached the top, hoping she’d get to sit there for hours and hours, “—you could see the whole town from up there…all the lights. It was so small. It shocked me every time to see how small it was.”

It was easier here, to tell him these things.

It felt a lot like giving them to him. Giving Bob the hellish Anderson twins who lived in the nice part of town where all the shops were covered by blue-and-white striped awnings. Giving him the one-eared class rabbit she’d set free because it looked so heartbroken sitting there in a cage at the back of a musty classroom. She gave him the gold tooth a kid found in their chocolate cupcake in the cafeteria. Her first soccer game, her first broken bone. The sound beneath the house one winter—

“—that turned out to be a raccoon. Alexei had to squeeze into the crawl space below the house. I mean the man’s huge, it was like watching a brown bear cram into a shower drain. We had to pull him out after. It was crazy…God, I miss that house. It wasn’t anything special, but it was the perfect shape? Like from a storybook. Square with a roof on top, with a fence and a tree in the front yard. It was full of weeds, and there was this patch of dandelions that grew by the porch, and I’d always water it. And the street was all messed up. It was all tar cracks, potholes, but it was lined with these big oak trees. Like huge. In summer it would look like—”

“—a tunnel,” Bob mumbled almost absentmindedly, playing with the spoon in his coffee.

Yelena wavered.

She’d been spewing for so long, it left her dazed. She took a breath, dizzy somehow.

“Yeah,” she said. “Like a tunnel.”

Bob’s head dipped, and once again all she could see was his mouth moving below the bill of his cap. Pink, thin-lipped. The curve of his Cupid’s Bow.

“I’ve been having the same dream every night.” Arms resting on the table, he rubbed a thumb along the center of his palm. He looked at her. The sputter of the neon sign by the window spitting its red light across his face.

“You had these pink socks with ruffles.” All of his tenderness. “They were so small.”

This feeling.

It blew through her like a roof caving in.

The unbelievable pressure of it in her skull, the back of her eyes. How much it pushed and pushed, pushed more than it had when she’d stood on the ledge of the helipad, waiting with her terror. But was it terror? Was it devastation? Was she really so devastated by how he made her feel? What he could make her feel?

How he’d caught her mid-air, and how she’d clung to him then, scrunched into herself until she was this tiny vibrating speck of everything.

She couldn’t look away. She stared at him, unblinking, until her eyes seared with the pain of it like looking into the sun.

What she felt next was impossible:

The distinct bristle of Nat’s hair against her cheek. Box-dyed, peppermint-blue. She smelled her. Here, in this dingy little diner in the bowels of Hell’s Kitchen, she smelled her.

She felt the thick syrupy heat of a summer on Whitmore Lane slop against her skin. The dry pelt of grass on their front lawn. She heard the hum of every fan in every room of that house. Felt the swell of each wooden doorframe that had burst and splintered at the bottom.

She’d kept her eyes open for so long everything was a blur. When was the last time she’d cried in front of anyone?

She missed her sister, she missed that time in her life, missed it with so much of herself, I miss you every day, every second, all the fucking time, sometimes I miss you so much it replaces all of me, I miss you, I miss—

It stopped.

It stopped like breaching the surface after a long dive.

Because what she had felt was impossible after all. Her sister was dead, and Whitmore Lane was a tiny redacted paragraph buried beneath thick black bars at the bottom of her file.

“I’m sorry,” Bob said.

Yelena didn’t know if was for Natasha, or the intrusion of him inside of her memories. Except it didn’t feel like an intrusion at all, not the way it had in that vault in Utah. This time, it felt a lot like he’d given her something.

Bob’s big hand was resting on the table, the fine hairs on the back of it. Yelena reached for it with the kind of desperation that threatened to topple her, and her chest hiccuped, huge and horrible, when he turned his hand beneath hers so they were palm to palm.

Yelena didn’t know if she believed in God or signs or even miracles—but she believed in something then.

She believed in it so much it undid her.

✢ ✢ ✢ ✢ ✢ ✢

This feeling this feeling this feeling this feeling this feeling this feeling this feeling

✢ ✢ ✢ ✢ ✢ ✢

They stood on the subway platform between early commuters and party-goers dragging themselves back home. A man was busking at the foot of the stairs, collecting loose change in his guitar case.

She liked to think they were still pretending: Bob and Yelena from Paris, the one in Texas.

They stood huddled close, toe to toe, swaying like drunkards. They didn’t speak. The wind of a passing train whipped Yelena’s hair into her face and she frowned at the sour waft of the underground. Reaching out, Bob gently unhooked a strand of hair from her mouth, his thumb lingering on her chin, the cuff of his nail as he dragged it across her skin.

When the busker down the platform started playing Don McLean’s American Pie, Yelena didn’t know if she’d laugh or cry.

So, bye-bye, Miss American Pie, drove my Chevy to the levee—

“—but the levee was dry,” she hummed. Bob’s hand squeezed her arm, once, then twice. In her head she tipped forward, imagined herself mashing her face into his chest to bury herself there until no part of her was left out in the open.

They didn’t part, even on the train. They sat side by side, arm to arm, hip to hip, leg to leg, staring at their scratched-up reflection in the window across. Bob in his rumpled suit and baseball cap, Yelena in her rain-stained dress and the hood of her sweater pulled low over her face.

She hummed American Pie all the way back to the tower, thinking then she didn’t want the night to end, thinking she’d slam herself across the ground to keep the world from turning.

Bob’s arm was warm and sure as it hooked around her waist. With her hand on his head to keep his cap from slipping, she squeezed her eyes shut like a child, imagining the terrifying dazzle of the lights going out. The hem of her dress whipped against her legs when they shot up to the helipad, the blast of it like a rocket, terrible enough it kicked a shocked cackle from her. Stomach slamming down, heart bursting from her open mouth. When she blinked, the night was big and black all around. How it was just as terrifying as it had been the first time. How much tighter she held him, how she ground her face into the crook of his neck, wanting nothing more than to press her mouth to it, her tongue, burry her teeth right there—

Loosen your grip, Yelena.

When had that stopped being an option?

There was an inevitability to the way she pulled Bob to his room with a hand around his wrist, past the skeleton staff cleaning up stray glasses and plates of food, left-behinds of a night the two hadn’t been a part of.

Yelena waited patiently with her back against his door as he punched in his code on the keypad. It took him two tries. Her quiet laugh. His mumbled curse.

And when it finally unlocked, Bob’s eyes flicked to Yelena’s mouth, and then he was nodding, leaning in closer, and the bill of his cap bumped against her forehead, and Yelena’s hand fumbled to push the door open, and she was so headless and so full of heart. She felt like all the women in the movies.

Stumbling through the dark, she slipped out of the Yankee slides and unhooked her heels from her wrist, letting them thump to the carpet.

She didn’t know if she was still pretending. All the things she wanted then, crowding her body until she felt swollen with it. Could he see it in the dark?

The back of her knees bumped against his bed. She let herself fall into it the way she never would have, never like this. In Bob’s room, she sat on the couch or the floor or the carpet; she never bunched his sheets in her hands or let her legs curl over the edge of the mattress, feeling it spring against her feet.

She felt drunk, full and glad, and she wanted to rub her face into his pillows and inhale, she wanted his thumb to touch her chin again, wanted to feel it catch at her bottom lip.

Every part of her rung.

Bob stumbled over one of her heels on the floor, snorting, his sweet little: “Shit—sorry.” He stood at the foot of the bed. Never looking away, boyish and bashful, he slid out of his suit jacket, tossing it carelessly onto the floor. The baseball cap followed. The collar of his shirt was undone. The shine of his belt buckle in the dim city lights.

Yelena went fidgety beneath the glare of his attention, felt so warm in it she was all clammy. She pulled the sweater over her head, the hem of her dress riding up her legs. She could’ve sighed from the cool air on her chest, could’ve stretched her arms out and reached for him, and just when she felt shameless enough to do so—Bob lowered himself to his knees.

A panic jolted her, different from the one she’d been feeling lately. It was searing, like a charge, this feeling that unfurled in her stomach and lower, lower, making her want to squeeze her thighs together. Oh, the things to be felt, Yelena—

“Bob,” she started, but she didn’t know what she wanted to say.

“Your socks are wet,” he mumbled. “Just let me….”

After having scrambled through the rainy streets of New York, her feet felt swollen and achy as Bob gripped her calves, one at a time, before rolling off each sock with such care it broke her heart a little.

She didn’t breathe once as she waited for him to let go, but he stayed there, kneeling between her legs. The brush of his thumb along the joint at her ankle, a slow wonderful circle atop the bone.

Yelena didn’t like to think of herself as vain.

There hadn’t been much time to be. Until there was. She'd caught herself staring longingly at all the womanly cleanness of bodies in the look-books the image consultants kept tucked under their arms, donkey-eared and index-tabbed, like bibles. Sometimes she looked at herself as she sat curled on the counter in her bathroom, legs in the sink while she scraped a blade across the little hairs. Sometimes, she’d touch the scars on her skin, chart them like an explorer, their strange jagged valleys and bursts of pink blistered fields.

Bullets. Knives. Teeth. Shrapnel.

She bled like a human. She healed like one too.

Bob was looking at her left knee. She thought of the particularly harrowing scar an IED had left there, her skin mottled into a sickle right below the kneecap. The warm hand on her calf slid to the hollow of her knee so lightly she barely felt it, so lightly she could’ve died right then, in this room, with the lights off, and his breath pushing hot and honeyed beneath the hem of her dress.

Sometimes Bob had this look on his face, eyelids heavy, face foggy with feeling, that thick inescapable attention that made her wonder about all the things he wanted, all his mindlessness, all his urgency.

And when he tipped forward to brush his nose along her knee, his breath a damp spill across her naked skin—was it so wrong to arch into it? Was it so wrong to need it with so much of herself?

All her life Yelena had been taken apart and put back together, her body sealed with surgical screws and metal plates, and Robert Reynolds had the fucking nerve to press his mouth to her knee with such care, as if he was afraid she’d fall apart.

She wanted so much she didn’t know where to put it.

She wanted so much.

She wanted—so much.

She wanted to point at all the spots his mouth should be next—here and here and oh please here please here pleaseplease—she’d chart it for him, she’d pull and pull, she’d drag him to them with a hand fisting his hair—

“Sorry.” Bob jerked back.

He shook himself like a dog. He shook the moment. She saw the panic on his face. Was it the searing kind too? "Fuck—I didn’t meant to.” His voice cracked. “I’m sorry—I wasn’t thinking. I just—”

“Come here.” Come here. Please. Come here. Pleasepleaseplease.

Yelena hadn’t been allowed to want. She'd been deemed unfit and so they'd tried to take it from her.

But it was here now, in every corner of the room and her body, and she didn’t know what to do with it or where to start. She wanted, and her want was so big she felt it plume in her mouth, solid enough to bite down on.

Slowly, Bob crept up the bed. The sound of his shoes as they thudded, one by one, onto the floor. His weight made the bed dip. Yelena imagined all of her sliding into him. She imagined curling around him in all the ways she’d been too ashamed to think about. On hands and knees, he moved up her body, her legs parting for him, bending enough for her dress to shuck up further.

They’d sparred countless of times. She knew his body in a very tactical way, where to push to make him slip up, where to yank to make him yield.

But this…

It felt different like this.

Yelena was so muddled by the feeling of him looming above her, that when Bob’s knee bumped against her leg, it took her far too long to remember the Glock strapped to her thigh.

Her leg shot up on reflex, foot landing square on his chest to stop him from moving any further.

Bob went still, eyes wide in the dark. He looked like he’d been slapped.

“Wait. I should probably—” Yelena was all out of breath.

Her dress slipped down her thigh to reveal the holster. Swallowing, Bob stared at it. “You were wearing that the whole time?” he whispered.

She nodded, moving slow as if she was trying not to scare him off, unhooking the holster with practiced ease, checking the safety of her Glock, before pulling out the knife and the flash charge. Bob didn’t move once as he watched her carefully place it all on his nightstand.

Something about it made him laugh, that throaty lilting hiccup. Her foot was still planted on his chest, the starchy white of his dress shirt, the heat of him as he took one breath after the other.

Yelena realized he was waiting. For her, he was waiting, and the understanding of that settled something inside of her.

Snaking, slow, her foot slid down his chest to the warmth of his stomach, toes catching along the buttons of his shirt, along his hip, the snag of his leather belt. She bowed back for balance, dress tight around her chest, and with a heave, she hooked her knee under his arm, dragging him down to her.

Come here, come here—

Bob stuttered a breath. The wavy strands of his hair, loosening from behind his ear, heavy with gel. She reached up to curl it back behind his ears. He huffed another low lilting laugh. She smiled. And it hurt to smile like this—hurt, because she meant it so much, with all of herself. Holding his face in her hands, she brushed her thumb along the delicate skin beneath his eye. She wanted to run her pinkie along the swoop of his lashes. She wanted to blow at them, touch them with the tip of her tongue.

Look at you, she thought. How are you not the center of every room and every conversation? And attention? And gravity? How doesn’t everything on this tiny planet spin endless circles around you?

Bob’s arms bracketed her head. That sweet flounder of his when he ran his fingers along her hairline, tracking the movement with his eyes. Until his thumb found its way to her chin—there—dipping right below her bottom lip. He stared at her mouth. It opened for him. She opened for him.

Leaning forward, his nose ran along the bridge of hers. Supple. Soft. His breath pooling when he grabbed her chin, gently guiding it up and up—

Had anyone in the world ever been kissed so carefully?

It left her unfurled, that plush little peck, gentle and dry, and she wanted another, then another. What she’d give for another. His hands cupped her jaw. Her mouth so open. The slip of his tongue against hers. Their teeth clacking once. All of her uncertainty, her unstoppable eagerness. The wet press of his lips, so flush with heat she was gasping for it, clutching at him, her hands in his hair, down his neck, and his shoulders, everywhere. She wanted to be everywhere.

She felt like something that only writhed, she was the needing thing in his bed.

Bob made a strangled sound when they parted. Yelena’s head followed his when he leaned back, her elbows digging into the mattress as she pushed upward, straining her neck toward him. She felt so dizzy with it. She couldn’t stop, didn’t want to stop. And with a final push, her leg wrapped over his hip—the bulk of him hot against her bare skin—and with a move she would’ve decked him with on the training mat, she flipped him onto his back, his head hitting the mattress with a surprised exhale.

She leaned over him. She liked the way his eyelids twitched, liked the way his attention slid from her mouth, to her throat, to the neckline of her dress dipping open.

Yelena felt in control of something she hadn’t felt in control of before, straddling him with all of her nervousness, frazzled, buzzing, her shaking breath, her want so huge it throttled her like a hand around her throat. She wanted and she wanted, and she grabbed his hands, sliding them up her thighs, showing him—here, please, here—until they roamed on their own, gripping into her hips, her shoulders, before clutching the back of her head and pulling her down.

Their foreheads knocked against each other a little too hard. It spluttered a laugh from her, from him. “—fuck, sorry!”

“Ow.”

He mashed sloppy kisses across her forehead. “Sorry—” kiss. “—‘m sorry.” Kisskiss. She was laughing. He was lovely.

“I don’t break that easy,” she murmured.

“Tell me about it.” His thumb on the corner of her mouth, pulling.

She kissed him hard. His deep in-breath. And it was so warm, everything was so warm she spiraled right into it, letting her mouth stray, kissing him and kissing him and kissing him. His head cradled in her hands, she scattered her mouth across his face, from nose to chin to the side of his neck, his ears, the soft skin at his hairline, until Bob was laughing again, that sweet throaty thing that swept through the room and swept through her, swept her whole.

✢ ✢ ✢ ✢ ✢ ✢

What a surprise it was to find out that kissing was as much for jewelry commercials and horny poets, as it was for Yelena Belova.

✢ ✢ ✢ ✢ ✢ ✢

Yelena woke to the sun warm on her cheek and the sight of the back of his smooth pale neck.

Maybe there was a version of her that carefully peeled herself out of his bed, collected her heels and her sweater and her socks and her silly Yankee slides, and left.

But this version of her was tactless.

With an unabashed sigh she buried her face in his hair, inhaling…shampoo, hair gel. She was curled around him, conjoined, like a whelk to its sea snail. Huffing, she grazed her nose against the hot curve of his head. She wanted to kiss him there. So she did. Mind gone gummy from so little sleep, she wanted too many awful things, wanted to open her mouth, spoon his hair into it, wanted to take big bites from the soft skin of his throat—

“Good morning to the gremlin eating my hair,” Bob grumbled, his voice low and frayed from sleep. If she could spoon it into her mouth as well, she would. Buckets worth of it, bathtubs.

She wondered if there was a version of him that would’ve asked her to leave.

“Mm-hmm.” Yelena nuzzled further into his hair, and she felt tired and silly enough to try and gnaw at his skull, imagining the headlines: Deranged Carnivorous Superhero Eats Planet-Ending Lover—Bones and All.

She smiled when she felt his hand blindly batting against her head.

Bob snorted, then sighed. “‘Time is it?”

Yelena groaned. She didn’t want to think about it, didn’t want to think about the next disaster in the never-ending line-up of disasters, waiting for them in front of Bob’s bedroom door.

She was so tired and all she wanted was this.

The mattress wallowed when Bob twisted in her grip. She couldn’t let go of him, looping her arms around his neck, curling her leg around his hip, feeling all of herself give way when the warm weight of his arm pulled at her waist, hand splaying across her back, picking at her dress. She liked the press of his rumpled shirt against her front. She closed her eyes for a moment, humming when she felt his mouth against her brow, her cheek, her chin. His breath was acrid from sleep, but she didn’t care.

Was any of this even allowed?

Was it supposed to feel like this?

She touched him like a compulsion, like the needing of it was an irrefutable, unshakeable fact. Were they still pretending? Were they meant to go back to the way it had been the second they unlocked the door? Would she ever be able to forgive herself for it?

Opening her eyes, Yelena met Bob’s blue stare, unyielding in a solid bar of sunlight. She let him run his fingers along her jaw, all the way down to her throat. She let him feel her swallow when he pressed gently against her jugular.

And then the moment was over, and Bob's expression tensed, and he turned, reaching for his phone on the nightstand. He gave her a look, as if to ask: Okay?

She took a long breath, then nodded: Okay.

Staring at his phone, Bob’s eyes furrowed. She watched him thumb the screen a couple of times. “Fuck…”

“Don’t tell me.” Yelena squeezed her eyes shut. “Don’t even tell me what time it is.”

“Okay.”

“Is it bad?”

“Define bad.”

“All-Avengers-to-the-jet bad?” She opened her eyes just in time to watch Bob toss his phone back onto the nightstand. Knocking against the same paperback she’d spotted around him on and off for weeks.

He shook his head. “Maybe Strat-Ops drank themselves under a table last night,” he mumbled, flopping back down to the bed. They were quiet. She knew Bob was thinking. She shouldn’t have let him check his phone. With a thumb, she rubbed at the furrow between his brows to smooth it out, reveling in the way he snorted. Her attention trailed back to the book, its crinkled spine illuminated in the morning light. She angled her head to read the title printed above the image of that strange bird: Helliconia Spring.

“What?” Bob turned to check what she was looking at.

“What are you reading?”

“Hm?”

“Your book,” she murmured in an attempt to distract him. He followed her line of sight, then gave a huff.

“Oh, uh—sci-fi. Gift from my aunt.”

It took her aback.

Maybe it was ignorance, but Yelena hadn’t expected Bob to own anything from his life back then, the same way she hadn’t. Of course they all had things of their own they’d brought to the tower, and of course some more than others. Alexei and his Red Guardian memorabilia. Bucky and his stack of yellowed letters. Yelena had brought boxes upon boxes from safe houses all over; her vinyl player and colorful coats, her flamingo-pink lava lamp.

She felt ashamed for assuming Bob didn’t have anything to bring.

“It was her favorite book,” Bob said.

Yelena imagined scouring through herself, searching for the few morsels of information she’d saved on Bob’s aunt: Eleanor, she remembered, with the fringe vests and the yellow house at the end of the cul-de-sac and her slew of broken hearts.

“She gave it to me on my birthday. I was, uh—eleven, I think.” He laughed. “It’s pretty dry. I mean, I try to read it every once in a while hoping the older I get, maybe the more I’ll enjoy it?”

“What’s it about?”

Bob looked at her for a moment, taking a breath. “Uh—So, there’s this planet called Helliconia, and it orbits this binary star system,” he made a circle with his hand like he was painting it above their heads, “like, two stars that are gravitationally bound, and so the seasons last for millennia. They call it the ‘Great Year’. And it’s this endless cycle of whole environments and religions and cultures and lives changing, and there’s this part where a winter that lasted like six-hundred years—which is, you know, forever—it ends. And then spring comes around,” he said, staring out the window, past the skyscrapers, into the sky, “and it changes everything.”

His voice a low scraping ache.

The furrow between his brows returned. Yelena had to stop herself from reaching out again.

"I think my aunt was the only person who knew how to deal with my mood swings. Especially the lows. She'd kind of just sit with it. Like, she'd wait for me to come out the other end.” He nodded, and then he smiled so softly Yelena would’ve missed it if she weren’t so close. “Every time I felt better, she’d call it Helliconia Spring. And if the weather was nice, she’d pull me out into the garden—mostly so she could smoke," he added, "and we’d waltz, and it would feel stupid until it didn’t.”

The kindness with which he told her this, as if excavating only from the sweetest, most meaningful memories of childhood, conjured a woman who had loved him from start to finish. (Which was, after all, a grand gesture usually reserved for the likes of the Pope or the son of “The Crocodile Hunter”.)

Bob turned his face away from the window, turned his face away from her, until all she could see was the swirling shell of his ear, the tip of his nose peeking up from the mound of his cheek with each breath.

“Bucky’s right," Bob said, and something about it made her sad. "This is the first time in a really long time that I have this thing I can fall back on, and sometimes it gets to my head, and other times…I float in the gym and break Park Avenue in two.” He snorted, shook his head.

Yelena reached for him, carefully pulling his face back towards her. He blinked. She rubbed her thumb over his cheekbone in smooth circles. Show me, she thought.

“I don’t know where the middle is most of the time.” Bob looked past her. “But sometimes I do, and it’s like...that’s the fucking spot. You know? It’s perfect. And it’s everything. And it makes me think that maybe this is where I’m supposed to be.” He looked right at her then, that bar of sunlight grazing his eye, its swirl of impossible blue.

He was so beautiful she wanted to die.

Here was someone who’d come into this world left behind. He could’ve punished it for that, and yet he’d chosen not to. Every day, he made that choice.

Clutching the back of his neck to pull him close, Yelena—the mortal with her breakable bones, and the screws and metal plates padding her body—made a pact, one she would live by like doctrine:

If Robert Reynolds had to fight alone, it meant Yelena Belova was dead.

Bob’s hand was so warm as it curved along her cheek, fingers combing into her hair before carefully scraping along the piercings in her ear, like he was counting them. All she could look at was him.

“What about now?” she mouthed.

“Hm?”

“What season is it now?”

Looking at her, eyes painting shapes across her face, he smiled. And there it was, that secret dimple that popped on his cheek. How much it delighted her, how much it killed her.

There would always be other versions of this. Versions of life where they’d made the right choices and done the right things. Maybe there were versions of her that had been born happy and remained happy, who still had a sister and a home with the perfect shape, who’d never regretted a single thing, who’d never known shame or terror or loneliness or agony. Versions of them who could lie in a bed like this and know with such resolute surety that nothing would change and life would go on and always be easy.

In this version of life, everything was so uncertain Yelena didn’t even know what was waiting for them outside of this very room.

But for a moment, this version of her kissed this version of him, and when the sun touched her cheek, it felt a lot like being loved.

✢ ✢ ✢ ✢ ✢ ✢

Later, when Bob lolled back into sleep in a patch of sunlight, Yelena reached for the paperback. Tracing carefully the loopy writing scribbled across the title page:

For Robby:

Put on your dancing shoes. It’s Helliconia Spring.

—E

✢ fin ✢

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