julia4today

[julia4today]

play good riddance by green day at my funeral

[julia4today]

i’ll break up with my fiancée

Madison shot by Phyllis Christopher, On Our Backs April-May 2003 Edition

[julia4today]

EVERYBODY READ THIS RIGHT NOW.

milk teeth

cult leader ! price x f!reader cw: heavy smut. cult grooming. praise and punishment. lots of 'good girl' and a smidge of degradation. breeding. exhibitionism. things involving all three orifices. price is depraved. Jonathan sets his eyes on his next sacrificial lamb. This one might be his favourite. or [read on ao3]

Jonathan always had a taste for sweeter things. 

He fancied himself a collector. Some might have said the habit started when he was a young man; gathered the prettiest girls like notches on his belt, luring them with attention before moving onto the next once he inevitably grew bored of them.  

Truth was, it started long before then. Stemmed from his childhood, when he’d pilfer candies from other children and they’d cede to him without dispute, because they were frightened of him. Or perhaps from his infancy, when he’d suckle his mother dry, leaving her bruised and seeding a hatred for him deep in the pits of her. Or even from within the womb, when he hoarded all of the blood from her placenta and starved his twin of life, thus born already lavish with the greed of a victor.

He never considered himself greedy, though. 

Greed, he thought, implied an undeserving nature. One could only covet that which he didn’t have already — and Jonathan had everything. He deserved everything. 

All that he wanted already belonged to him, he needed only reach out and take it. He wanted money, so he was gifted with the charms of a salesman. He wanted women, so he was anointed with good looks that only ripened as he aged. He wanted power, so with the benisons he was born with he obtained it as easily as a river rolling downhill. What began as a runnel swelled quickly into whitewater, picking up creatures and stones as it went and carving an indelible valley into the bedrock. 

Followers flocked to him like chickens, pecking at his feet for crumbs of his attention, and he fed them just enough to keep them hungry. What started as one or two sycophants grew quickly into ten, then twenty, and soon he had a hundred-acre pasture to turn them out on and an array of hand-built coops to keep them in. A commune, as far as the rest of the world knew it, but in truth it was his abbey. Populated by disciples that worshiped him, serfs that toiled for him, pretty hens that waited on him. 

The problem with ceaseless indulgence, though, was how quickly he grew bored of it. Even the sweetest things turned sour if he sucked on them for too long. 

He was not ignorant of how spoilt he had become. So spoilt, in fact, that his flock’s willingness to appease him had turned to such cloying adulation that it made his head ache. Needy little lambs, the lot of them, scuffling for the milk of his praise, unendingly competing for a single drop of it. 

He had begun to fear that true satisfaction was impossible to attain. Nothing, nobody, would ever be enough for him. No amount of servile women could surfeit him. No amount of devotion could truly appease him.

What he really wanted was something intractable. Something to break in. Something he had to work to tame. 

Chickens and sheep were easy to herd, easy to please, easy to come by. Lions, bears, far less so. What strength was there to claim in leading livestock just as any old shepherd can? Domesticating a creature unbroken would be a true testament to his godliness, he thought. 

He had no interest in battling for dominance with an equal, though. He would never be willing to share his cathedra with someone of comparable strength or power — not to say that such a being could possibly exist, there was no one alive comparable to him. 

What he needed, he thought, was a cub. 

A callow little beast, not yet big enough to know her own strength, but coursing with a valour that his lambs seemed to lack. A creature he’d need to keep under a firm heel. One he’d need to bridle before she learned to bite. 

Such a thought ran through his mind when he saw you. 

Hadn’t caught your name yet. Hadn’t even been informed of your impending arrival, as you were shown to a seat at the other end of the vast dining table. Timid thing you were, feigning some moxie with your arms crossed, but he could smell your unease. Wide in your eyes when you caught his and he chewed hard on nothing. 

You might have thought you were only there to visit, sweet girl, but Jonathan had already decided that you were there to stay. 

Reaching out to your cousin was a last resort. 

You weren’t even sure that Freya was your cousin — perhaps a second cousin something removed, or merely a family friend — one that you didn’t remember meeting but had somehow been acquainted with since birth. You were friends with her on Facebook, and though you only hardly ever used the bot-infested website, you messaged her anyway. 

Hi Freya — this is so random and I’m so sorry to get in touch out of the blue, but I’m not sure who else to turn to!! I just lost my job and my landlord has doubled my rent and I have to move out by this weekend. I don’t mean to dump sorry, but I just remembered a while ago you said you were living on a shared farm or something? Totally understand if I can’t and literally no pressure at all, but just wondering if there might be room for me to crash for a while? I don’t want to be a burden so don’t feel like you have to say yes or reply or anything. Anyway I’m sorry it’s been so long since I reached out, I hope you’re doing well!!! xxx

You had sent the paragraph after ten p.m. on the Thursday. You dithered about it for a while before you gathered the nerve to hit send — curled up on the mattress that sat raw on the floor, snivelling quietly to yourself and nearly deliquescing into the foam out of sheer humiliation. You hated asking for favours, pathologically averse to seeking help at all costs; which, paradoxically, had landed you in this very predicament. 

The message went unopened until you fell asleep, but you woke up puffy-eyed to a reply that had been sent just after five in the morning;

Hi!! So sorry to hear about everything you’re going through, that sounds so hard. Of course, there’s always room here!! I would be soooo happy for you to stay! Do you need help moving out? My friend has a truck we can use. We can get you here before Sunday if you want. Let me know x

Freya and her friend Philip arrived the next day, tooth-achingly sweet as they helped carry boxes of your things into the back of the truck, stuffing in all the furniture that they offered to store at the Homestead, so they called it, until you found another place. All lolly-smiles and sunny pleasantries, offering you ice-cold homebrew that they kept in a cooler, wedges of a ginger slice they had packed for the ride, all homemade as Freya had beamingly told you. 

The drive to the countryside might have been awkward if it had been anyone else in the cab with you, but the two of them filled the silence with a cacophony of laughter and saccharine questions about your miserable life. You avoided real answers most of the time, but they were adept in milking honesty out of you, so painfully earnest in their responses — oh my gosh, that’s just awful, I’m so sorry. That must be so scary. You must be so lonely. 

The truck’s bench seat meant you were squished in together, Freya wedged between you and her friend — there was no space to turn your head away or quietly vacate the conversation by looking out the window. You could only sheepishly confess to everything they asked of you — that no, you weren’t seeing that guy anymore, and no, you hadn’t spoken to your parents in months, and no, you weren’t willing to admit to them how far you had fallen. 

“I’m just so happy you messaged me, it’ll do wonders for you,” Freya said loudly over the open windows, wind flipping through her sandy-brown hair, cut short just below her jaw. “Like — I was just thinking about you the other day. Isn’t that special?” 

“Yeah,” you replied, mustering as sincere a smile as you could. “I’m really grateful for your help.” 

“Of course,” she cooed, gentle hand on your shoulder. “We’re family! We’ll always be there for you.” 

Something made you uneasy about her use of we, but it was smothered by reluctant gratitude. The stars had aligned, after all; you had been granted such a stroke of luck by the powers that be that you dared not question them. You couldn’t risk Philip turning around to dump you back at your empty apartment, nor could you risk falling out of favour with Freya, who you were now completely indebted to. 

“The, um, Homestead — is it like, a village, or something?” You asked eventually, an hour or so into the drive.

Both of them giggled at that, and you did your best not to frown in bemusement. “Kind of,” Philip replied. 

“It’s just divine — paradise, really,” Freya added. “You’ll love it,” 

Not an answer. “So… like, a commune?” 

Freya gave you a thin smile. “That’s a cute word for it. Yeah, I guess it is sort of a commune. but—”

“You’ll see when we get there,” Philip interrupted. 

His tone was unthreatening though firm, and it ended the discussion. 

You asked no more questions for the remainder of the drive; most of which was rough and bouncy, trundling over dirt roads riddled with mud-filled potholes and the odd roadkill smeared over the gravel. 

It was beautiful countryside, you could admit — it had been a long while since you left the smoggy din of the inner city, and out here the air was fresh and bright, especially then in the acme of summer. The breezes were velvety, the sun-bleached trees were dense with lemon-green leaves, and the waving grass was lush and emerald. Swathes of freshly shorn sheep coated the hills, and some friesian cows shared the same fields, heads bowed as they chewed on the same pasturage they shat on. 

By the time you approached the farm the evening sun had sunk to the margins of the sky, disparate clouds catching its orange light on its way towards the horizon. Only as the hills flattened out and the truck passed a bulwark of poplar windbreaks did you finally start to see semblances of buildings.

You weren’t sure what exactly you had expected, but it wasn’t what you saw — an array of seemingly hand-built cottages, bedecked in tooth-white cladding and rectangle windows, with perfectly pointed gables and corrugated metal roofs. All of them were roughly the same size with a porch jutting out the front, lined up like barracks along a single path — hardly a road, merely a muddy track where the grass had been worn down to the rocky soil beneath it. 

“Home sweet home!” Freya crooned, as Philip pulled the truck towards some less cookie-cutter buildings — stables, or something similar, he parked beneath a large corrugated canopy under which a tractor and some hay bales had been stored. 

Freya dismissed Philip with a word and told you he would take care of your things — whatever that meant — as she scooped her arm around you and pottered towards the centre of the commune. Looking at it now, you could confidently call it such; you spotted the odd person in the distance toiling over the farmland, or hanging wet laundry over a washing line, or carrying buckets full of a liquid you couldn’t identify. No visible power lines, a functioning well, a windmill in the distance. Entirely off the grid, you presumed, and only then did the thought strike you that you might not have any phone signal out here. 

“So these are our houses,” Freya explained jubilantly as she led you down the gravelly path between the shacks. “Me and my friend Sam live in this one here.” 

“Nice,” you remarked politely, squinting to look into the windows as you followed Freya up to the porch, but they were blocked by lace blinds within. 

The flat panel door squealed on its hinges as she pushed it open, a little beaten up at the edges where it had been installed by rough tools and inexperienced hands. The interior smelt of sawdust and citrus and a faint hint of body odour — you guessed they were the kind of folk that didn’t use deodorant, and you found yourself praying they at least had running showers. 

Inside were two beds and a small kitchenette — hip-height shelves with flat surfaces for chopping vegetables, and a little gas stovetop. No fridge, no sink, no dishes. Seemed as though they didn’t even use the space for preparing food at all. 

“We can set up a bed for you in here, if you want,” Freya told you, “or otherwise there’s a bed in Philip’s cabin.” 

You frowned at that, because she said it with a little smile, and you didn’t know her well enough to decipher it. Whatever the case, it left a floury feeling in your tummy, and you nodded in place of an answer. 

“Well, you can decide later,” she said. “C’mon, you’re here in time for supper.” 

At the end of the road stood tall some kind of spire-bedecked chapel — a building Freya called the hall, and when your nose must have inadvertently scrunched at her bible-thumping description, she couched it by telling you; “no, it’s not a church. Or, it can be, if you want it to be. It’s for everybody.” 

It became abundantly clear to you that you were in over your head as you crossed the paths of other commune-dwellers venturing to the hall for supper. All dressed up in their prim and propers; every woman in flower-toned skirts of varying lengths and pleasant white blouses, men cladded in their button-ups and linen pants. 

“Looks like I’m underdressed,” you murmured to Freya, looking down at your jeans and t-shirt, infused with dry sweat worked up while lifting and hauling all your boxes and furniture. 

Freya giggled. “No, no, nobody cares about that,” she said. “It’s only because it’s the end of the week.” 

“Sunday best?” You asked with a simper, an attempt at a joke that you were well aware may not have landed. 

You could never quite get a read on her — she had the potent positivity of a bible-camp counsellor, that sort of tight-lipped smile that gave the impression she had a fragile tolerance for banter or disagreement. But that veneer didn’t crack, nor did it appear to conceal any manipulation or malicious deception — instead it seemed like that berry-jam sweetness was thick in the blood that pumped through her veins, and glowed earnestly bright and pink in her cheeks. 

“Yeah,” she chuckled, “I guess you could say that. But there’s no dress code, or… uniform, or whatever. Don’t worry. We’re not a cult or anything.” 

Preempting your burgeoning concern that the commune was a cult should not have comforted you as much as it did, but it was settling to hear some degree of self-awareness. In honesty, you hadn’t been there long enough to make a fair assumption, but the entire affair was undeniably Jonestown-esque — especially as you wandered into the gaping raw-timber hall, to find a boat-long table with a man seated at the head. 

He sucked the air out of you. 

Indescribably so. Like a black hole at the end of the room, drawing both light and oxygen into his orbit, occupying it all for himself. Palpable in the size of him — great hulking man with shoulders like an ox and arms as thick as trunks, flocked in dense hair that swept around his forearms and tufted out of the neckline of his shabby white t-shirt. The cotton was distended by bulk, pulled tight over a heavily padded chest, mucky with dust and mired by darkened patches of sweat between his pectorals and under his arms. 

You could feel his mass from where you slipped into the hall behind Freya, a weight that you felt in your stomach and it made your brows crumple up in worry you could not pin. 

Worse, when he met your eye. 

He leaned back in his seat like it was a throne. Eyes dark as cave pools that ensnared you above the brown beer bottle he tipped into a jutting jaw, hooked in a thick forefinger. They followed you sharply as you entered the room, like hooks, and you could feel where they pierced your skin. 

An ambiguous expression festered in his features; sceptical, maybe, or vaguely bitter — something fixed in it, though, an unspoken accusation that made you feel as if he had detected some wrongdoing you had yet to confess to. It compelled you to defensively wrap your arms around yourself, though you kept your eyes on him, if only to test whether he would look away. 

He didn’t. 

He was sheeny with sweat and ruddy-cheeked like he had just turned in from a day of hard labour. Decidedly underdressed compared to the residents of the commune that filed into the bench seats on either side of the table, one-by-one, well practiced; no shuffling awkwardly along to make room, no murmured sorries as knees knocked and seats bumped.

Twenty-four of them, sixteen on each side of the table. You tucked yourself awkwardly at the end of the row, next to Freya. It did not escape your notice that you had ruined their even number, clumsily jutting out of what would have been a perfectly mirrored seating arrangement. Your brows knitted together in chagrin when you got side-eye glances from the people across the table. 

It struck you that there were far more men than women seated — you and Freya were two of five — but the moment the thought gained traction you looked up to see eight women in aprons file in from a door at the back of the hall. 

Platters in tow, puffy trails of steam following them as they lay each dish down along the table. Lamb, by the looks; four great brown hocks of roast leg, charred and gritty with thick bones poking out of the slabs of meat. Accompanying those platters were large dishes of boiled potatoes, bowls of peas, a few piles of indeterminable green and brown mush. Soon the cavernous hall was filled with the thick scent of steaming meat and bone marrow, and it might have smelt appealing if you weren’t so on edge. 

On edge, not only because you felt a leech, latched on to the ankle of a community you hadn’t yet been introduced to, as though hoping they didn’t notice you there and pinch you off by the jaws — but worse, because you could feel the burning stare from the man at the head penetrating straight through you, and your skin all but bubbled and blistered under it. 

“Hungry?” Freya asked with a smile, rubbing her hands together above her empty plate. 

To face Freya meant you were facing that man, and you could see him glowering at you even out of focus, in your periphery as you addressed her. Your eyes flicked to meet him despite a concerted effort not to, so you looked at your plate instead. 

“Not really,” you murmured, though you quickly realised how rude it sounded once the words left your mouth. “Filled up on ginger slice on the drive over — but it smells delicious, so I’ll definitely have some.” 

“Good,” she says with a nod, “this is the real deal, you know. The good stuff. You could never buy food like this at a supermarket. You know Philip butchers it himself?”

You’re not sure why that comment made you swallow. “Does he?” You ask, out of polite disinterest.

“Mhm. He’s a good one, too. No gristle or anything, just you wait.” 

You nod and smile, gritting teeth, because you accidently caught his eye again when you hadn’t even tried to and it made your stomach cramp up. 

The women who brought in the food began to file into the empty sides of the benches, and one pressed up next to you as if you had taken her spot. Freya mindlessly fiddled with her fork, and suddenly you realised how quiet the hall had fallen. 

Silence settled like smoke. You suddenly had to bite down on the urge to cough. Glanced around the table, platters steaming and ready to be served with their great big spoons — and yet, nobody touched them. 

Until the man at the head leaned forward with a grunt, clunking his bottle down on the table and reaching over to grab the prongs on the platter in front of him. Pulled off a massive hunk of tender meat, stringy and dripping reddish juices along the table, before dumping it on his plate. 

The hall was suddenly alive again, then, and everybody continued their discussions as normal — a plethora of hands reaching across the table, grabbing spoons and forks, scooping and serving themselves humble helpings of meat and vegetables compared to the mountain the man had piled up for himself. 

“Here you go,” Freya said, having filled your plate for you without your noticing; a polite pile of meat, two potatoes, and a scoop of peas. 

“Oh, thank you,” you replied, with a smile, as she put it down in front of you.

It took a few turgid minutes before you could muster another word, swallowing dry mouthfuls of your meal to busy yourself while you felt those inculpatory eyes needling at the side of your head. 

“Who is that?” You asked Freya, quietly, swallowing a mouthful of potatoes. As casually as you could make your interest sound to avoid revealing how your thoughts had been invaded by him, pounding like a headache, from the moment you set foot in the hall. 

“Hm?” She hummed, mouth full, looking up and around to see who you were talking about. “Who?” 

“Him,” you said, nodding your head towards the head of the table, eyes dashing back to your plate when he met them again. 

“Oh! That’s Jonathan!” She answered you, jarring as a sudden clap. 

“Jonathan?” You probed, taking another mouthful of food to hide your scepticism. 

“Yeah, he’s the, like, founder, or something… I’m not sure what you’d call it.”

“Founder? Like, of this whole place?”

“Mhm,” she nodded, swallowing. “He brought a few of the old hands with him over from Liverpool to set up the farmland. I wanna say… ten, eleven years ago? Much longer than I’ve been here, anyway.” 

“How long have you been here?” You queried, regretful of how judgemental it sounded when you said it, but she seemed either oblivious or unflustered. 

“Over a year, I think,” she said. “Nearly two, maybe.” 

“Wow,” you said, through your food. It was actually pretty good. “Must be one hell of a farm.”

She snickered at that. “I’m not here for the farm,” she laughed, “well — it’s a bonus, of course. But, no, I stuck around for the family.” 

Family. You tried to conceal how it made you wince, but you weren’t sure how successful you were in doing so. You didn’t want to continue that line of questioning, though. It made your throat tighten up, and whatever else she might have told you, you didn’t want to know. You only needed a place to sleep, after all. Only for a week, two at most. No longer than that, you decided, repeated it firmly so that it was fixed as fact in the back of your head.

Then you caught his eye, again, and he seemed to tilt his head at you, a tug in his brow like he had read your mind and taken issue with your thought. 

“He keeps staring at me,” you muttered quietly, head tipped towards Freya so that none of the other people could hear you. 

Her head spun cartoonishly on her shoulders to look at Jonathan, and you wished you knew her well enough to elbow her for making it so painfully obvious you had been talking about him. 

He leaned back smugly in his chair. Held your gaze like a challenge. 

“I don’t think he wants me here,” you whispered edgily. 

Freya looked back at you with her brows pin straight. “He just hasn’t met you yet — you should go up and introduce yourself.” 

You frowned anxiously. “What? Right — right now?”

“Yeah, you should. He’s probably expecting you to.” 

“Expecting me?” You balked, face twisting at prospect that the man could have been audacious enough to expect anything from a stranger. 

“It’s only polite,” Freya said calmly, with an easy smile, and a gentle hand on your arm. “He’s the one who is letting you stay.” 

You chewed on that for a moment, forcing the vitriol in your mouth to slide down your throat with a hard swallow. She was right — if it was his farm, and it sounds as though it might have been — then he was the one doing you the favour. 

Before you could dither about whether you had the bravery to call across the table and say hello — which, you didn’t — he spoke. 

“Who’s this, Freya?”

His voice cut through the din of the meal like a chainsaw. 

Freya bolted upright, spine plank-straight as if called to attention, though it took her a second to register the question. 

A quirk twisted in his brow when she told him your name, and his jaw masticated on it for a moment. You prayed for the ability to curl up into yourself like a snail, because now not only was he glaring at you, so was every other pair of eyes at the table. All you could do was keep your chin high and act as if the bizarreness of the situation wasn’t eating away at you like gangrene. 

“She’s a friend,” Freya added sheepishly. 

“You didn’t tell me she was coming, did you?” He asked rigidly, and while there wasn’t anything directly accusatory in his tone, she reacted as if she had been scolded. 

“Um — well, I said that I had a friend coming, and you—”

“A friend. That’s right,” he crooned, and Freya deflated like a popped balloon at the release of blame. “C’mere, then.” 

“Me?” Freya asked tightly, and he only tilted his head condescendingly — all but saying obviously not. 

“Our new friend,” he said simply, ursine eyes fastened to you across the table. Gestured at you with a flick of his fingers. “C’mere, cub.” 

Your eyes darted abashedly around the room, unsure what you were looking for — an escape, perhaps. Maybe encouragement. You found none, so with a sharp breath you pushed yourself up to stand. Had to awkwardly clamber around Freya and the other woman next to you to step over the bench, bumping them both on your way up. All of the simmering attention in the hall was on you, and you wished you had never come to the weird fucking Homestead in the first place. 

There was no choice but to entertain it. You didn’t have your own car. You didn’t have it in you to demand to leave in front of all of these seemingly normal people. You didn’t have it in you to make a scene. 

“Bring your supper, love,” Jonathan said warmly. “Come sit.”

You sucked your lips between your teeth in reluctance, but you capitulated quickly — bending between Freya and the woman to pick up your half-empty plate, carrying it with both hands as you made your rueful way towards his end of the table. 

His head followed you as though on a stick on your approach. Gestured wordlessly at the man sitting on his left, and the entire row shuffled along the bench seat to allow you space right beside the head. It took you a moment to gather the nerve to sit, so you put your plate down first. 

“Sit down,” he said. 

Your lip curled at his patronising tone, and out of spite you remained standing for just a beat too long — until brief shadow of potent displeasure saturated his features, lips in a line under his dense umber beard. It made the back of your neck feel cold. 

The fleeting indignation was brushed off with a smirk, though, followed swiftly by a puff of laughter. Something in his air told you he’d only wait for so long, but for now he was amused by your disobedience. 

You sat yourself down, only because the awkwardness was suffocating, and your spite was quickly smothered by embarrassment when it became clear that everybody in the building was waiting for you to listen to him. 

“There you go,” he grinned, taking a sip of his beer to cut the tension, and it snapped like a rubber band. The others were abruptly busy with themselves again, chatting amongst each other and chewing away at their meals. 

Then it was only you, and the minacious beast of a man. Swallowed by the vacuum of his tunnelling attention until the rest of the room sounded hazy and indistinct. 

“What brings you all the way out here, then, sweetheart?” He asked casually, the air suddenly buzzing and warm around him. 

Eyes that you thought had been black were in fact blue as storm clouds, that creased fondly in the corners when he smiled at you. His lack of introduction felt pointed, confident that you were already well aware of who he was. 

“Um,” you bit, oddly lost for words, you poked at a pea on your plate with your fork. “It’s hard to explain.”

“Give it a go,” he pressed, scooping a mouthful of meat and potatoes into his mouth, though his eyes didn’t leave you. 

“Well, I was working at — I mean, it doesn’t matter. I was made redundant. Or, fired, or whatever. They were really vague about it, so I don’t even know,” you over-explained, suddenly regretting every word that rolled uncontrollably out of your mouth. “But then, well, I’ve been going back and forth with my landlord about rent for ages. I thought I had gotten through to him — because I told him, I made it super clear I’d have to break the lease if he increased it as much as he wanted to. But he did it anyway, bumped it to more than double what I was paying, and so—”

“So you’re homeless, are you, cub?” He interrupted, brows raised, as though summarising your rambling points for you. 

You tripped on your own voice like a raised root on a footpath, cocking your head back as you looked up at him. You weren’t sure why you were affronted by the suggestion. 

“I’m not — no, I’m not homeless,” you corrected, unconfidently, and he smiled at that. 

“Do you have a home?” He asked simply. 

A divot pulled in your brow. “Not right now, but—”

“Don’t pout, love,” he chided. “I’m not insulting you. It’s just the truth, in’t it?”

“But I’m not homeless, my parents have a house, and I—”

He seemed to stiffen at the mention of parents, and it should have alarmed you. “Parents, eh? But you’re here instead?” 

“Well, yeah, but it’s only because—”

“Easy, easy,” he cooed, voice low and gurgling. “No need to get so defensive, mh? M’only curious about you. S’not often we have urbanites like you wandering in.”

Something in his expression, in his voice, was as warm in your mouth as liquor. Eyes that earlier disquieted you were now soft, crinkled and sincere in their interest, and you could only yield with a short sigh. 

“What’s that mean?” You asked, failing to conceal your sulkiness. 

He chuckled at you, as he scooped up another mouthful of his meal onto his fork. 

“City bird,” he said frankly, through his food. “I can smell it on you.” 

You frowned, vaguely offended but with no clue what he meant by it. “Excuse me?” 

“All that perfume,” he explained disapprovingly. “Cigarettes. Car exhaust. Mh. This place’ll do y’good.” 

You resented yourself for suddenly feeling insecure. “You don’t like my perfume?” 

He shook his head once. “Bunch o’ chemicals,” he dismissed. “I bet you smell much better underneath it.” 

Couldn’t explain why that made your diaphragm seize up, and you let out a pitiful little cough on reflex. Maybe it was because he said it while he looked at you like meat, conspicuously letting his gaze rake down to your chest and linger there for a moment. You were thankful he couldn’t peer any lower by virtue of the table. 

“Probably not,” you said meekly, in an attempt to lighten the conversation. “I got all sweaty lifting all my furniture and stuff this morning.” 

He looked perturbed by that, a reproachful glance up from his plate. “Didn’t Freya bring Philip along to do the moving?”

“Yeah, he helped a lot,” you said, suddenly worried you might have gotten her in trouble — then doubled back on that thought, when you considered how vile it was that being in trouble was something the people of the commune might have had to worry about. “But, y’know. I had a lot of stuff, I wasn’t gonna make him do all the work.” 

He tutted. “Can’t have that.” 

“Can’t have what?” You asked dubiously. 

“Can’t have you doin’ hard work,” he elaborated, as though explaining something you should already have known. “Wee lambs like you should stay nice n’ soft.” 

Your lips pursed reprovingly. “I’m not a lamb,” you snapped. 

A grin dimpled his bearded cheeks. “Maybe not.”

You froze as his burly hand dragged across the table, before he brushed his thumb over the back of your wrist. The touch made your belly tense up and your hairs stand on end, and all you could do was blink at him. 

“Still nice n’ soft, though. Don’t want to ruin that, do you, cub?” 

Cub. 

His usage of it had gone unnoticed until the third time, but you quickly began to ruminate on it. An idiosyncratic term of endearment, maybe, but something in how he said it felt pointed. Knowing. Vaguely accusatory. 

His fixation on your softness should have made your hackles spike up, but his expression was almost exultory, and his touch made a shiver tingle up your arm. You were suddenly conscious of your heartbeat. 

You didn’t know how to answer him. 

“I don’t — I’m not soft—” 

“Feel bloody soft to me,” he remarked, giving your wrist a squeeze. “And m’sure you’re even softer on the inside.” 

Your stomach dropped at that, and you wore it on your face, bright and hot in the cheeks. He said it so casually, with such an earnest smile, that you chastised yourself for what must have been a wild misinterpretation. He surely meant metaphorically, commenting on your personality, your softness of nature, rather than your—

“Y’got a boy, love?” He asked candidly, returning to his meal, and the skin of your wrist felt cold once his hand retreated. 

“A boy?” 

He raised a brow at you, a silent what do you think? as he chewed his food. His use of boy felt calculated and you wondered how old he thought you were. 

“Oh — uh, no.” 

“Mh,” he mused, mouth full. “Somethin’ happen?” 

His ability to read you was uncanny, and it made you squirm. 

“Um, yeah, I came out of a relationship recently.” 

He raised his eyebrows as he swallowed. “D’he leave you?” 

That made you frown on reflex. Insulted that he had assumed it. Vexed that you were giving something away you hadn’t intended to. Troubled that you couldn’t seem to hold your cards close enough to your chest, and he was peeking at them whether you liked it or not. 

“No,” you retorted. “It was pretty mutual.” 

“Did he leave you?” He repeated, but there was no rigidity in it, no severity in his expression. It came out as naturally and calmly as small talk. 

You looked away from him, scratching the back of your hand. “Well, I — we were growing apart anyway, he just ripped the bandaid off.”  

He nodded in understanding, patently satisfied that you had capitulated. “Rubbish took itself out, eh?” 

You smiled wryly at that. Hadn’t expected him to say something in your favour after rudely assuming you must have been dumped.  

“S’pose so,” you said. “Definitely feel a bit freer without him.” 

“Good,” he chortled deeply, scooping himself another mouthful of meat. “We don’t have room for another lad livin’ here.” 

You pouted in thought — living here, he said. You worried for a moment he might have misunderstood your presence at the commune, or that Freya had not made it clear to him that your stay was temporary. 

“I’m not moving here, or anything,” you clarified hesitantly. 

“Aren’t you?”

You gave him a mild shake of your head. “No — I’m only staying for a week or so.” 

He smiled at that, letting out a gruff sigh as he leaned back in his seat, picking up his beer. “S’alright, love,” he said. “You can stay however long you like.” 

You looked askance at him. “I’m — thank you.” 

“Have you got yourself a bed?” He asked coolly. 

“Um, sounds like I’m either staying in Freya’s house or Philip’s house.” 

His jaw tightened. “No, no,” he dismissed with a scoff. “I’ll get you a proper spot.”

“What do you mean?” 

“A place with a bed just for you, love. No need to share.”

You shook your head guiltily. “Oh, no, I’m totally happy to—”

“Don’t be daft,” he grunts. “Freya already has a friend with her and Philip — well. Can’t have a thing as pretty and innocent as you sharing a bed with a man you don’t know, can I?” 

Your mouth went dry. Innocent should have been an omen to heed, but you were too busy spinning about pretty. Wanted to smack yourself for letting it get to your head, but by the time the remorse arose the seeds of flattery had already been sown. 

It crossed your mind, then, that Freya had failed to mention you’d be sharing a bed with Philip and not just a room. You remembered her little smile and wondered if it was your fault for failing to pick up on it. 

“I just — I don’t want to be an inconvenience, or anything.”

He shifted forward, then, and his immense hand travelled under the table, before fixing firmly to your thigh. 

Close enough to your knee that you would have felt unjustified in smacking him, but high enough that you felt a sudden fizzing in the base of you — a moiling, something warm and shuddering in the cradle of your pelvis, and your face burned hot. You wondered if you might have been ovulating, because that was the only justification you could muster for how your body reacted to his enormously inappropriate touch. 

“Not an inconvenience at all, cub,” he said sincerely. 

“That’s—”

Tranquilised, when his fingertips pressed just lightly enough into either side of your thigh that it could have been accidental. Sent a shock up your femoral nerve that stabbed you in the core and made you twitch. 

You attempted to finish your sentence, but your jaw was fixed, because you had short-circuited the moment he touched you. 

You had your people-pleasing tendencies, but you had never been a doormat. You knew when something was a step over the line, an affront, an action worthy of retaliation. In another setting you might have called him a pig and thrown some peas at him before storming off. That abeyant aggression had gotten you into sticky situations before, because not all men held to the moral of not hitting a woman back.  

You didn’t think he would have been the type to get violent if you were to snap at him, but there was a murkiness about him, and you could not say so confidently. Pupils somehow blacker than black, smoky within.

It wasn’t fear, though, that kept you placid. You weren’t afraid of him. Awestruck, maybe. Morbidly intrigued, like you had stumbled across a bear through the trees and despite yourself yearned for a closer look at such an elusive beast. 

It didn’t help that your thigh was dwarfed by the expanse of his hand. That his thumb grazed you up and down through the denim of your jeans. That you saw his pulse in the veins of his forearm as your stare trailed upward, fixing to the way the bands of muscle moved under his skin as he stroked your leg. 

“That’s nice of you, thank you,” you murmured, once you found your voice again. 

He nodded, satisfied, and his paw released your thigh before giving you a chaste pat on the knee. 

“Good,” he said, putting down his fork, and you realised he had already finished his mound of food. “Finish up your dinner and we’ll get you settled in, eh?”

You didn’t notice it then, but the moment his fork hit the table, so did everyone else's. 

The cabin he gave to you was another white cottage, but this one had a cariad rosebush out the front; dense with spring-bloomed flowers, tissue-paper pink, yellow anthers laden with pollen. It was also the closest cottage to the hall, the very last one at the end of the road, with no opposite cabin to mirror it. 

He had Freya show you to it. You heard him tell her under his breath to give her a proper welcome, which made your brow tight and your palms sweat. It was an uncomfortable wait as Philip brought your suitcase from wherever he had stored it, and he left it by the foot of your new bed — a narrow single, with a tartan woolen blanket and a single pillow. 

You thanked him as he left, and he rolled his eyes, responding with a curt scoff. “Yeah, you’re welcome.”

Freya leaned against the jamb of the door, giving Philip a strangely pitiful expression on his way out, before she turned her attention back to you. 

“I feel bad,” you said sheepishly, crossing your arms as you stood in the centre of your personal cabin. 

Freya sucked her teeth at that. “For what?” 

“I mean — getting a whole cabin. That feels like a bit much. I just thought I’d be—” 

She pursed her lips. “What’d he say to you?” 

“What?” 

“Jonathan,” she bit. “You were talking all supper.” 

If she was irritated at you, she concealed it well. Kept her brows high and her posture loose despite her line of questioning. 

“Um,” you started. “I dunno, he just asked me questions, I guess.” 

“Like?” 

“Like — uh, why I’m here and how long I’m staying for, and stuff.” 

She seemed to chew on that for a moment. “That all?”

“Why?” You questioned warily.

“Oh — nothing, I’m only curious. I’d just feel terrible if he interrogated you on your first night here.”

Your brows pinched together. “Um, I mean, he didn’t interrogate me or anything. He was nice enough.” 

She let out a short breath, and a smile pulled in her lips. “Yeah, he must like you.”

You only shrugged, unsure if the comment merited a response. Uneasy about the implied weight of him liking you, and you wondered what might have happened if it turned out he didn’t. 

“Anyway, I’m really glad you’re here,” she said, suddenly warming up. “You let me know if you need anything, will you?” 

You returned her smile if only out of courtesy. “Oh, thanks, I will.”

“Anything at all. Even if you only need a shoulder. We’re here for you, okay?”

It was too easy to slip into a routine. 

You had a few days of lounging — that’s what Freya called it — time spent leisurely as opposed to working like everybody else did.

The summer heat was dry but inebriating, and it sunk in through your skin like a percutaneous medicine. Soaked into your spongy brain like ether, and what was once a persistent anxiety that needled and hummed behind your forehead was numbed into a pleasant compliance. 

You had always felt that you suffered from a degree of social anxiety. A pathological fear of rejection that kept you under the heel of solitude, because being actively excluded was more painful than not including yourself at all. 

And yet, you were making friends. 

The people of the Homestead were so warm, so sunny, and so eager for your company, that any worry about not fitting in was forcibly shucked off of you like the husk of a corn. Whatever uncertainty about you that smouldered in the air during the first supper had evaporated, and suddenly those that had looked at you with suspicion were instead all agog about you. 

There was Georgie, who knocked on the door of your cabin at eight in the morning on your first full day, and offered to walk you around the farm. She told you she had never seen someone so pretty, and that she only looked funny at you at supper because she was intimidated by you. She asked you questions about yourself with such genuine intrigue that you found yourself answering in gratuitous detail, and she was fervently gracious for every word. 

There was Simon, one of the old hands, so Freya called them — who arrived at your house to set up gas-powered hot water, because he thought you might not be used to the cold showers on the commune. He told you that they couldn’t let you suffer such a shock to the system, that it was better to keep some of the things you were more familiar with, so you felt more at home. 

There was Linda, who cooked you pancakes for breakfast because you slept through their six a.m. communal one. She made you a coffee with whipped cream and told you that the vanilla syrup was homemade, and she gave you a bowl of strawberries that they had grown themselves. Only the ripest and sweetest ones, she told you, for such a ripe and sweet girl. 

By the fourth day, you were encouraged to follow their schedule. Told that you’d miss out on connections if you slept through breakfast or didn’t attend lunch. It was easy enough, when three of the women you had spoken to the evening prior came to your cabin bright and early. Gave you a little flower to wear in your hair and held your hands as they skipped with you to the hall. 

That was the next time you saw Jonathan. 

He was elusive in the daylight. More of a rumour than a man, something whispered as a deferential secret or referred to like a surveying deity that was perpetually present but just out of sight. He would appear in the hall for his lunch but would take it to go, and you could only speculate on where he spent his time in the space between dawn and dusk. 

He was frugal with his attention. You had begun to suspect his lavish interest in you on your first night was a rarity, a spotlight unique to being a new arrival — and you didn’t like that it wounded you. 

A thorn in your side, tiny but irritating, when you would sit down for dinners and he didn’t invite you to sit next to him. He would keep your gaze for bite-sized moments, ensuring you knew he was aware of your presence, but his focus would shift to somebody else just as you thought he might speak to you.  

So when he called your name after breakfast, before the prescribed cleaners began clearing the table, you perked up like a spooked cat. 

The thrill you felt when hearing his voice was sobering, and it sent a chill down your spine. 

It was subconscious, and it worried you. A latent fawnery that had germinated in your brainstem, one you were only made aware of when you hopped up too enthusiastically from your seat, and felt a swelling pride in your belly when Georgie gave you a knowing little smile. 

You could feel it there, a tooth-rotting lolly dissolving in the wet folds of your brain; you knew it was bad for you, but you couldn’t help but savour the sweetness. 

“Been missin’ you, Cub,” he said softly, when you went to stand beside him, and your tongue curled in your mouth. “Walk with me?” 

“Sure,” you said. 

He wore a faded red overshirt, rolled up to his elbows, and your eyes fixed on his thick forearms as he crossed them over his chest. Smelt of sage and sweat, the musk of labour and deer pelt, and you wondered if he had been out hunting the day before. 

“These things are no good,” he remarked, tugging at the waistband of your jeans by a belt loop, as he walked you out of the back of the hall into the blue-grey dawn. 

The air was cool but already warming with the incipient sun, and the cicadas were awake and humming long before you had been. The birdsong was almost deafening out there, mourning doves lamenting loudly from the tall pines and walnuts that dotted the acreage. 

“My jeans?” You asked, looking down at them, suddenly worried they were unflattering. 

“Mh,” he grunted. “They’re bad for you, y’know.” 

You frowned. “How?” 

He chuckled, as though the answer was so obvious that you were daft for not knowing it. “Aren’t they uncomfortable?” 

“I mean — I guess they’re a little tight,” you admitted bemusedly, running your hands over the waistband. 

He nodded. “Mh. Too tight,” he said. “You should be lettin’ her breathe.” 

You gawped at that. “Her?” 

“Your pussy, love.” 

Your heart skipped a beat when the word drawled its way out of his mouth. Tongue went wet with it, and you could only stare up at him, stupefied. 

“That denim is like sandpaper,” he continued placidly. “Too rough for such a sensitive thing.” 

You hoped he couldn’t see how flustered you were, as you broke your gaze from him and stared glassy-eyed into the gravel of the footpath he walked you down. He chuckled as he draped a heavy arm around your shoulders and gave your trapezius a squeeze, thumb pushing into a squishy knot and it sent goosebumps down the side of your neck.

“No need to get embarrassed, sweetheart,” he purred. “I just know these things.” 

You should have been humiliated by your deference, revolted that you didn’t feel compelled to shove him away and berate him for being so blatantly inappropriate — but some part of you, to your dismay, believed him. They were a little suffocating, you thought, stiff and uncomfortable to sit and walk around in. Perhaps you had become inured to the rigid seam that flossed between your legs and pressed harshly into your clitoris every time you sat down. 

“I — I only really have pants with me. Or leggings,” you quietly admitted, and his calloused hand smoothed down to your arm. 

“The girls can sew you something you’d look lovelier in,” he said. “Better than those city clothes. Wouldn’t you look pretty in something pink?” 

He was good at that, insulting and complimenting you in the same breath. Letting your insecurities fester under the surface but coating them in a thick lacquer of praise. 

“Uh, maybe,” you muttered eventually, once your bashfulness abated and you could find your breath again. 

“I don’t want to see these again,” he said, sternly this time, as his paw sank to your far hip and his thumb tucked into the waistband. 

You swallowed. You should’ve pulled away from him. 

“I… okay,” was all you said. 

You were a guest, you told yourself. He was housing and feeding you with no expectation of payment or contribution, the least you could do is abide by the dress code of his community. To heed his advice, because he seemed like an erudite man. 

He had led you to a pergola, one made of hand-chopped timber, faded grey beams, spattered in wrinkly patches of celadon lichen. Didn’t need to ask you to sit next to him on the seat beneath it, because he guided you there with his arm. 

“Settling in okay, love?” He asked you, arm hung over the back of the bench, and though he was no longer touching you, you felt the heat of his skin on the back of your neck. 

“Yeah,” you said, blinking up at him, before looking abashedly into the trees. “Everyone has been really nice.”

He raised his eyebrows. “Good,” he remarked, nodding, but his gaze continued to pry. “All been welcoming, I hope?” 

“Yeah, for the most part,” you answered, with a sedate smile. 

“Most part?” He questioned immediately, tone rigid, a dent between his brows. 

“Oh, no — I definitely feel welcome,” you stammered, suddenly worried that you’d come across as ungrateful. 

“One of ‘em hassling you?” 

You shook your head urgently. “No, no, of course not.” 

Eyes once doting had squinted in suspicion, and you felt suddenly transparent, like he could see the gears spinning beneath your skin. “I’m not stupid, cub.”

You huffed as you looked away from him, straight out into the tree line with your arms crossed, because you didn’t like the feeling of being pried open. 

“It’s not a big deal,” you said, “it’s just Philip. He just doesn’t seem like he wants me here.” 

“Philip, eh?” He droned, chewing on the name like it tasted foul in his mouth. “I’ll have a word.” 

“Don’t, please, it’s fine. He hasn’t even been rude, just a bit—”

“Enough,” he grumbled, and you bit your tongue. “Not havin’ him throw a fuss because things didn’t go his way.” 

Your brows tightened at that, mind rending itself to figure out what he might have meant by it, but any possible implication you arrived at made your guts churn with unease. 

He let out a long sigh, though, and patted your shoulder with his far hand. “Enjoying yourself otherwise, love?”

You almost jumped again to polite dishonesty, everything is lovely, rising up your throat — but you decided on frankness instead. 

“Yeah, but there’s, um, there’s not much to do,” you said. “I wondered if there might be something I can help out with?” 

He laughed, a bearish sort of chuckle, deep from the barrel of his chest.

“You’re asking for work, are you?” 

“Yeah, I guess so,” you said. “I feel bad just watching everyone else do it.”

He seemed endeared by the suggestion, grinning at you tenderly for a beat too long.  

“Aren’t you a righteous wee girl,” He crooned, large hand cupping your shoulder. “Didn’t I make it clear how I feel about you working?” 

You pouted at that, because how he felt about the matter was not law, though he evidently believed it to be. 

“It’s just — I’m a bit bored,” you said stiffly. “Wouldn’t hurt to have something to do during the day.” 

“Bored, eh?” he mused, through a wry smirk, thumb mindlessly stroking your shoulder. “Well we can’t have that, can we.” 

“I just mean—”

“Tell you what,” he declared. “You can help the girls in the kitchen. But I’m not havin’ you toiling out in the fields like a farm animal.” 

You gritted your teeth. Some sun would have been nice, you were sure, but you’ve always been a creature of comfort. Though the suggestion was patronising, you were not averse to the prospect of domestic labour, when you considered how ragged the farm-workers looked after ten hours of muddy chores. 

“Okay, sure, I can do that.” 

“Lovely,” he said. “You can bring me my coffee in the morning too, if you like. How’s that sound?” 

“Um,” you hesitated, “where… where would I bring it to?” 

“My bedroom,” he said, point-blank. 

You must have worn your stupor on your face, because he gave you a brazen smile, and he grazed your cheek with the hand hanging over your shoulders. He was only a tactile man, you told yourself. Touchy out of habit rather than lechery. That would explain why you didn’t bristle at the warmth of his skin against yours, despite the fact he was still but a stranger to you. 

“Okay,” you conceded, with a sharp exhale, because you suddenly felt as though you had agreed to something you shouldn’t have. 

He nodded, smile baring his ivory teeth, catching the light of the rising sun on a gold-capped premolar. Genuine pride in the steely eyes that gazed down at you, and you felt the warmth of it on your cheeks. You felt his fingers playing with the curls of hair by your ear, as he drew in a deep and steady breath. 

“Not wearing your perfume, mh?” He remarked, after a pregnant silence. 

You weren’t sure why the mention of it embarrassed you, that you had been caught obeying him when you didn’t think you were trying to. 

You hadn’t thought of him when you shirked your usual two-spritz routine to start the day. It wasn’t a conscious decision, you told yourself, you just hadn’t felt the need — in truth, though, you had not once used it since he mentioned it at the first supper. 

“No,” you confessed. 

You could smell the pride on him, crude and syrupy. Oozing from the smug grin that dimpled his bearded cheeks. His thumb stroked the skin of your neck, and you wondered if he could feel how fast your heart was racing. 

“Such a quick learner, cub,” he said. 

There was only one path for you from there. 

You had brought Jonathan his coffee for the first time the next morning. 

His room was in his farmhouse, a timber-cladded folk victorian with two storeys, though likely hand-built by him and his old hands. A short walk from the hall, separate from the other buildings and planted at the top of the hill. The front door was ajar when you went to visit, and you sheepishly ventured inside and went to knock on his bedroom door. End of the hall at the top of the stairs. 

Your eyes were level with his sternum when he opened his door for you, and you wore your shock like a smack to the face. 

Mountainous pectorals upholstered in bearish fur, rising and falling as he breathed you in. He was freshly showered, still damp, and you had arrived just in time to find him buckling up his belt. Hadn’t any time to put a shirt on before your arrival. 

You had never felt smaller nor more insignificant than when you stood in front of him, faced with such a mass of muscle and post-hibernation bulk that you felt drawn in by some deific gravitational pull. A mere moon in his orbit. 

“Hard at work already, lovie?” He drawled, petting the side of your head and taking the steaming mug from you. “Aren’t you a good girl?” 

He offered his praise like hard candy, and you were far too eager to suckle on it. 

He sniffed, dissatisfied, when he took his first sip. 

“I take it with cream,” he told you stiffly, and your heart dropped at the disappointment in his throat. “Next time, mh?” 

You gave him a weak frown. 

“Well you didn’t tell me that,” you retorted, probably a lick too defensive. 

He seemed amused by it, letting out a small puff of laughter and raising an eyebrow. “Now I have.” 

“Anything else I should know?”

He pursed his lips as he thought about it, you felt his eyes on your neck. “I like it sweet.” 

“Me too,” you said, holding back the smile itching in your lips.

“Bet you do, cub,” he replied, with a tepid smirk, and he shut the door.  

That was the last time you got it wrong. 

The next morning you arrived five minutes earlier, and he opened the door in his red-plaid boxers, eyes still puffy from sleep and skin radiating heady warmth from the cocoon of his bed. Unshowered. 

He caught your eyes flitting to the weight behind the buttons of his boxers; shape concealed by the wrinkling fabric, but length plain as day, reaching down the left leg of his shorts. Gave you an upbraiding glower when you swallowed the saliva that had accumulated in your mouth. A silent scolding for getting ahead of yourself with a gaze down his nose as you handed him the mug. 

“I put cream in it this time,” you said, revolted by how obsequious it sounded aloud, “and some of Linda’s vanilla syrup, I thought you might like it.” 

“Mm,” he crooned, the rumble of an engine deep in his chest as he slurped from the mug. “Tha’s lovely.”

A proud little smile curled in your lips. “Oh, good — I’m glad.”

“Know just what I like, don’t you, cubbie?” 

And what could you do but fawn at that? Get all starry-eyed and warm in the cheeks? 

You managed to barely hold on to your reservations for the first few days, keeping your appropriate distance. Dismissed his overt affection as a character quirk, and your willingness to appease him as simple politeness. 

But it was a slippery slope, and you had long since lost your footing. Tripped the very first time he called your name, and there was no climbing back up. You could only slide deeper. 

It didn’t help that all the girls were practically shoving you towards his house every morning. All giddy and fizzing to have you knock on his door, then clucking like chickens when you returned to tell them that he liked his coffee. That he said you were such a good listener, such a clever lamb, such a sweet girl. No wonder, they all told you, squealing it, you’re so lovely. You’re so kind. You’re so pretty.

How could you hold shut your doors to such generosity? Such overwhelming friendliness? 

It wasn’t long before that was your morning routine. What was a few days, became a week. Then two. 

You’d wake up at the crack of dawn, to the birdsong from either the blackbirds in the trees or the girls at your doorstep, and you’d skip to the kitchen to make Jonathan’s coffee. You’d have the mug out, cream and syrup at the ready, so that once the coffee had finished brewing you could assemble it all at once and it would still be puffing steam by the time you arrived at his house. 

Each time you visited him, you’d stand a little closer. Talk a little softer. Stay a little longer. You didn’t see him much during the day, elusory as he was, and you found yourself shamefully excited for your morning visits.

One morning, he didn’t answer his bedroom door when you knocked on it. You knocked on it twice, three times; careful not to hammer too firmly, nor so softly that he’d begrudge your toadying. You were not willing to break the routine, to fail in your fresh habit, so you gathered the nerve to open the door. Heart hammered in your ribs as the hinges creaked and the knob rattled, and the light you let in spilt into the room. 

It was warm in there, stuffy, curtains drawn and windows closed. The air was thick with him, full-bodied; it coated your tongue and filled your sinuses, made your head buzz at the temples. 

“That you, cub?” 

The growl of a sleeping grizzly as he rolled over in his bed, deep grunts and long exhales as his sleep-heavy eyes landed on you in the doorway. 

He must have been cold-blooded, you thought, because he was tucked under multiple woolen blankets even as the summer nights hit their peak temperature. You could hardly stand a single cotton sheet yourself; it was as though all the heat of the northern countryside pooled in the valley of the farm and was only augmented by his presence in it.  

“Yeah, um, I’ve got your coffee,” you whispered, waiting in the doorframe for him to welcome you deeper into his den. 

“Mh, bit early,” he grumbled, and you bit down on an apology, because it was not in fact any earlier than your usual visits. “C’mere.” 

You swallowed. Shuffled bashfully towards his bed as if you were breaking a rule just by being in his space. You were sure there would have been such a rule, too, because every day you learned of a new one. No nail polish. No mobile phones. No polyester clothes. No chore swapping. No wandering the Homestead at night. No eating before Jonathan. No unplanned visitors. No secrets.

“There was no vanilla left,” you said quietly, as you put the coffee down gently on his nightstand. “So I put maple syrup in it instead.” 

He let out a gruff sigh as though you had disturbed him, rolling onto his side to face you, and he lifted up the corner of his blankets with this forearm. 

“In y’get,” he grunted. 

You could only blink at him dazedly. 

A week or two earlier you’d have asked for some clarification, for him to repeat it, to ensure you hadn’t hallucinated such an inappropriate request from a stranger. Perhaps you had grown accustomed to it. Worse, excited by it; nobody else was allowed such visits. Nobody else magnetised such eager hands. Nobody else was invited into bed with him. You were special, and when you went back to the village to talk to the others, they’d tell you the same. 

So you sat on the edge of the bed, slipping in next to him, and he tucked you into his blankets.

You were swallowed quickly by the sweltering warmth of his body heat, heightened ten-fold by the thick cloak of his bedding, and the bulky arm that scooped you backward until your spine pressed into his sternum. 

His breath was hot against the back of your head, bleeding through your scalp like warm water. You were already sweating, because his heat was swathing and humid, and there was no slithering away now that you had put yourself there. 

“New frock, eh?” He asked hoarsely, arm shifting back until an expansive hand had settled flat on your ribcage, fingers catching in the folds of your ridden-up dress. 

“Yeah,” you murmured, “from Harriet.” 

“She’s a talent,” he hummed approvingly, as his hand edged down towards your waist, so slowly that you mightn’t have noticed if his fingertips hadn't pressed into the valleys between your ribs. 

She was, Harriet, one of two women at the Homestead who knew how to sew. She had sewn you three dresses, so far, one that was light pink, the other white. The one you wore now was a faint buttermilk linen, smocked under the bust with powder-pink embroidery. You were never much of a dress-wearer when you lived in the city, but how could you turn them down when they were custom-sewn, tailored for you? How could you return to your jeans and t-shirts when everybody told you how pretty you were in a dress? 

“Yeah,” you placidly agreed.

In a movement disguised by a shuffle and a deep breath, his hand was pawing at your hip, the skirt of your dress hiked up as if by mere accident. Little finger grazing the skin of your thigh, tingling as though static; and soon his whole palm was melded to your bare skin, and your tongue was in your teeth. 

Your thoughts were slippery and impalpable as eels, and they wriggled out of reach if you ever came close to grabbing one. Somewhere in your writhing head were the echoes of a little voice, faint and still fading; you shouldn’t be here. You shouldn’t allow this. You should tell him to stop. 

There was no rebuffing him, though. 

Not simply owing to the quiet fear of what he might do when displeased — worse, that you didn’t want to displease him. The others would have brawled among themselves to be where you were, praying that their years of devotion would pay off, that they would finally be worthy of being this close to him — but no, not one of them had lain where you now did. 

How could you squander such a privilege? 

Something else, though, something far more dangerous, was stirring and bubbling within you like poison in a cauldron. 

Beyond dismissed reservations, or the simple allure of scarcity — no, a smouldering heat between your hips, muggy and effervescent and impossible to ignore. It beat out from your heart and siphoned into the nerves between your thighs, where it cumulated until it was swollen with anticipation and twitching with every movement of his hand against your skin. 

“What’d I tell you about letting ‘er breathe,” he rumbled, when his fingers brushed the hem of your underwear on your hip, tone verging on reproach. 

You held your breath as you thought of what to say, throat kept closed when you felt a tug on the waistband of the elasticated fabric. 

“I don’t remember,” you breathed — a lie, whose motivation eluded you. You recall exactly what he said. Even how his voice sounded when he said it. Your pussy, love. 

He hadn’t mentioned underwear, though, had he?  

“Cunt shouldn’t be smothered all day,” he huffed, fisting the hip of your knickers and tugging them down to your thigh. “S’not natural.”

That little voice grew louder. You should tell him to stop. Tell him to stop. Tell him to stop. 

No, you lifted your hips so he could pull them down, and you did the rest for him — shimmying your legs so your underwear rolled down to your calves, then kicked them off your ankles into the belly of the bed. 

Another rule on the list, you thought. 

No knickers. 

You didn’t want to break his rules, because you hadn’t found a new place to live yet. Not to say you had been looking particularly hard — or, at all, since your phone only received one bar of signal if you climbed to the top of the hill, and to top it off you were actively discouraged from using it. It was a distraction from the natural splendor of the farm, they told you, and the light of your screen was bad for your eyes, and your city friends didn’t really care about you, so why text them?

Besides, he knew these things. You trusted his knowledge on the matter. You had the sense he understood your body better than you did; he was certainly more concerned with it, because it wasn’t as though you took particularly good care of it, and to him that was sacreligious. 

Such excuses flitted around in your head like butterflies in a jar when you felt his rough fingertips dig into the hollow of your hip bone, the flesh there tender enough to make you twitch. Breath caught in your chest as they crept further, closer, until the palps of his fingers brushed your mons, and he let out a dissatisfied huff into the back of your head. 

“Shouldn’t be shaving, either,” he grunted reprovingly. “Wee pussy’s too delicate for blades, mh?” 

Your tongue was wet, and your eyes had fluttered shut, and your breaths were broken and trembling. Dewy with sweat at the nape of your neck.

New rule. No shaving. 

He certainly was delicate with it. Pad of his finger tracing over your mound, light as a feather, as if to tickle you. It kind of did tickle, but the tingling sunk through the pillowy flesh and funnelled directly into your pebbled clit, until it was beating like a heart in the hope that he might deign to touch it. 

You knew in the pits of you it would be imprudent to let him have sex with you. Catastrophically so. Such a transgression would be a tipping point, one of no return. A leap off a cliff into murky depths that you knew would be impossible to climb out of. 

But his hand retreated, resolving your dilemma for you. Shame weighed in your chest. Appalled by the unjustifiable disappointment that wracked you in the wake of his touch. 

For the best that he didn’t venture any further, though, because you were on your period. Georgie had offered you tampons when you pulled her aside to ask, almost too giddy to offer them to you, telling you countless times that they were pure cotton and all natural, and to let her know when it’s over. 

He gave you an innocent pat on the hip, before peeling the blankets off of you, and the stifling air of his room was cold on your skin. 

“Need to get up and at ’em,” he grumbled. “Go join your kitchen girls.” 

You might have made a pother if you didn’t have a few remaining shreds of dignity. I don’t want to trickled down your tongue and itched at the tip, but you refused to let yourself release the words. 

You slipped out of his bed with a long sigh, wobbly as you found your footing on the hardwood. Smoothed out the wrinkled fabric of your dress, tugged the skirt down where it had ridden up. You felt on a step how slippery you were, pussy so sodden that you worried some might have soaked into the fabric of your skirt.

Jonathan sat upright with a huff, swivelled so he sat on the side of the bed and rubbed his eyes with the heels of his palms. 

“Y’alright there, cub?” He asked, when he saw you hadn’t moved from where you stood. 

You nodded winsomely. “Yeah, um — I’m just… I…” 

“All wet now, are you?” 

His voice was hoarse and slick with amusement, and it sent a shudder through you as you blinked over your shoulder at him. 

You were too timid to confess to that. “Um—” 

“S’alright, love,” he said, pushing himself to stand with a grunt, and you tried not to look at the half-hard cock in his boxers. “Tha’s normal. Don’t you go putting your fingers in yourself, though, eh?”  

“I wasn’t—” Going to went swallowed, because there was a non-zero chance it would have been a lie. “Why not?” 

Divots pulled in his temples as he clenched his jaw, aegean eyes turned black as they clawed down the length of you. 

“Because I said so,” he told you, as he ferried you along, giving you a pat on the rear to send you out his bedroom door. “You keep those fingers busy in the kitchen, yeah?” 

New rule. No masturbating.

“Okay,” you said sheepishly.

“Good girl,” he grunted, as he shut the door. 

It took you a while to confess what had happened to the girls in the kitchen, resolve only worn down by their squealing appetite for any information about your interactions with him. 

“Didn’t he like the maple syrup?” Georgie asked mournfully, evidently concerned that the reason for your silence was that you had gotten in trouble. 

You let out a little breath as you sliced up the nectarines on a wooden chopping board, fingers all sticky with the juice, distracting heat still bubbling under your skin. 

Chopping fruit and stirring batter were the only jobs you were allowed, they had said as much the first time you joined them. We’re not allowed to share chores unless he says so, they told you, and we can’t have you burning yourself. 

All so bizarrely strict about it. Even when you had asked Jonathan specifically if you could help them in the garden, just to pick the berries, you told him, he had firmly refused. Said he wouldn’t let you toil away because he needed you to nurture yourself.

Didn’t bother you too much. You were fine with your station in the kitchen because you weren’t too fond of handling all the raw meat. 

“I dunno,” you said, “he didn’t have any.” 

“Oh,” Freya blurted, cocking her head back in surprise. “That’s weird. Did he say anything?” 

You chewed on your tongue as you swiped a pile of nectarine slices into the big steel bowl beside you. “Not really.” 

“Not really?” Georgie pestered, busy stirring an enormous pot of porridge over the stove. 

“Well he, um,” you hesitated. “He asked me to get into bed with him.” 

You heard the bang of the butter churner as Freya stopped her work abruptly to gawk at you. “What?” 

Georgie was slack-jawed. “You mean—”

“Not like that,” you clarified quickly, looking at them sheepishly, as they both glared at you bulgy-eyed. Something of a lie. “Just to lie down, or whatever.” 

Freya wore an expression that made you feel a bit queasy. A little crease between her brows with her lips in a line. Not quite disapproval, not quite worry — somewhere in the middle. A crack in the fabric, a fleeting glimpse of reality that made your stomach flip, and for a moment you saw Freya the girl you knew as a child, and not Freya the bubbly kitchen maid. 

She side-eyed Georgie before she spoke. “That seems a bit—”

“Oh my God,” Georgie interrupted fervently, dropping her spoon to hurry towards you, and she took your wrists in her hands. “He must really think you’re special.” 

“I s’pose,” you answered, with a little smile, and she shook your hands in excitement.

“Did he like your dress?” She asked animatedly. 

“I think so,” you said.

Georgie tugged you towards her, then, pulling you into a hug so unexpected that you let out a gasp as she threw her arms around you. 

“We’re so lucky,” she crooned, rocking you from side to side. “So lucky, aren’t we?”

“Lucky for what?” You blurted, taken aback. 

She giggled, releasing you gently before settling two soft hands on either side of your face. 

“Lucky to have you,” she explained, eyes wide with an ardour that made your chest feel eerily warm. “Everything’lll be just perfect now that you’re here, you’ve brought life with you.” 

Whatever she meant by that utterly eluded you, but you couldn’t suppress a smile.  

The next time you spoke to Jonathan was just shy a week later. 

He wasn’t there for breakfasts, or for lunches, or for dinners. He came to collect his helpings from the kitchen when you weren’t there, and he had already left home every time you went to bring him his coffee in the mornings. 

Worry festered in the nadirs of your mind the longer that time stretched between his appearances. Riddled with a fear that you had stepped over a line. That he was done with you. That he was already bored of you. 

Nobody would elucidate where he went during the day, and you quickly learned that it was a faux pas to even ask. All you understood was that he was out with his old hands, a group of men that would disappear with him for days at a time. Maybe out building something, you guessed, or hunting — some form of manual labour, at least, because whenever you caught brief glimpses of him he was sweaty and sunburned and covered in muck.

Such was the case when he and three other men lumbered into the hall for Sunday supper, fashionably late. Everyone else already seated and awaiting his arrival before they could start. 

He fell into his empty chair at the head of the table with an exasperated huff. 

His blue plaid flannel was grimy at the cuffs, smudged with mud and speckled in shreds of tree bark. First four buttons undone, and his chest was gleamy with a drying layer of sweat, flocks of hair clumped and curled with it. You felt guilty for staring at him, heart sitting high in your chest, buzzing with nerves — his seat had sat empty for so long that you had begun to forget what it was like to have him sitting there. 

Caught your eye as he adjusted himself in his seat, pushing the cuffs of his sleeves up to his forearms, and dusting off his front. Wasted no time as he reached for the serving fork and skewered two heavy steaks with it, dumping them on his plate. You had forgotten how to act, suddenly so anxious in his presence that you immediately broke his gaze and stared down into your plate. 

As was the supper ritual, once Jonathan had served himself, the others immediately began tucking into their dinner. You were about to do the same, awaiting the spoon for the peas from the girl next to you, when his voice shot across the hall and cast silence in its wake. 

Your name hovered in the air like the smoke of a gunshot. 

It was so sudden that you felt panicked despite the lack of ire in his voice, even with the smile that bared his teeth. You perked up concernedly where you sat, obeisantly keeping his gaze from across the table, waiting for him to ask something of you. 

“Come over ‘ere,” he said, with no force in his voice, because he knew that he didn’t need to make demands of you. “Bring your plate, eh?” 

The supper mercifully returned to its noise of chatter and clinking cutlery as you pushed yourself to stand, especially convivial because it was a Sunday — heightened further by the fresh batch of pear cider that had finished brewing the day before, supplied in great glass pitchers peppered around the table. 

You stepped over the bench with your empty plate held in both hands, and wandered towards his end of the table. Waited quietly for him to order the others on the bench to move down so that there was space for you to sit. 

“C’mon,” he urged, and you frowned bemusedly — until you saw him rap his thigh with a flat hand, and you felt your tummy tighten up. 

When you dithered about it for too long, he reached out with his big arm and scooped you towards him, and in a confusion of feet and legs you were brusquely perched on his thigh. 

“There y’go,” he nodded, as he gave you a pat on the side of your thigh to settle you in. 

With his other hand he leaned across the table to scoop himself some mashed potatoes, a tower of it, before he stacked up a few scoops onto your plate, too. 

“Thank you,” was all you could say, stupidly, because your head was all rattled. 

You were potently relieved that the other people in the hall busied themselves with each other, deep in conversation or focused on sawing away at their steaks with serrated knives; because his hand was already atop your thigh, ostensibly to keep you stable, but it crept its way upward with every slight movement and it took the skirt of your dress with it. 

“Where have you been?” You asked quietly, as he continued to fill up your plate. 

He let out a puff of laughter as he impaled a steak with his fork and dropped it next to your potatoes. “Missed me, did you?” 

Yes tapped against the back of your teeth, but you subdued it with a clearing of your throat. “I’m just curious,” you said. 

He grinned, amused, arrogantly doubtful. “Been workin’ on something,” he answered, frustratingly vague. “Haven’t got long to finish it.” 

You watch as he added another scoop of peas to your plate, and you only then noticed how much food he had given you — not nearly as piled-up as his, but still far more than you would have grabbed for yourself, with a plum-sized cube of butter melting into the mash. 

“What is it?” You queried, more supplicantly than you had intended it to sound, though you now feared that any dissention would make him disappear again. 

“Don’t you worry about that yet, cub,” he grunted, yet perking your ears up, but his austerity told you not to ask anything further. “Now eat up. Not having you get bony.” 

Not the first time he had told you that — always insistent you finish your plate, that you don’t piss around with puny helpings, that you eat your pudding afterwards. He was just overly doting, you thought. 

You followed his bidding and scooped up a mouthful, chewing it quietly as you put your fork back down. It was delicious, rich and hearty, the potatoes were creamy, and the steak was tender and well seasoned. Venison, maybe, it had that gamey sort of flavour, but you thought it a little pale. Perhaps pork. 

By the time you swallowed, his hand had ridden up to where your thigh met your hip, and his thumb wedged into the crease. It didn’t escape your notice how he watched you, low-lidded, smug, ignoring his own meal as he took a sip of his cider. 

“Aren’t you going to eat any?” You questioned, eventually, as you swallowed another mouthful, and he mindlessly tapped on the neck of his bottle. 

“Might need you t’cut my steak up for me,” he commented pointedly, through the crack of a grin. “Hard to do it one-handed.” 

“I… you can just let go of me,” you replied, tight-lipped. 

The moment the words escaped your mouth, his hand pinched tight as a vice around your thigh. Thumb gouged deep into the sensitive tendons of your groin hard enough to make you chirp — not as much a pain as a shock, that bolted up your spine and turned to molasses in the cavities of your skull. A punishment for even suggesting it. 

“Why would I do that?” He murmured innocently, as if completely incognisant of the actions of his hand.  

You turned your head to look up at him beseechingly, brows knitted and lips pursed. The heat of his breath was sultry against the skin of your cheek. Goading stare a narcotic that turned your better judgement to gruel. 

What could you do but relent when he looked at you like that? 

His hand was firm around your thigh as you reached towards his plate to pick up his cutlery, but its grip loosened as you pierced the thick wad of meat with his fork. Crept up to your hip as you made the first cut, the steak not quite tender enough to give way with one saw of the knife. 

Palm was flat against your belly, then, once the first slice was severed and it flopped flat onto the plate. Lower, as you cut through the second. Masked the movements of his hands with each incision as though you might not have noticed while yours were busy. 

Lips loosened, efforts faltered, as his travelling hand nested between your thighs. 

You could only gulp at the dry air as his palm pressed firmly against your cunt, held you by it as if to keep you still. The thin cotton of your dress now the only barrier between his calluses and the fragile skin there, because you had forsaken wearing underwear, just as he had told you to. 

Acknowledging the incursion seemed to you like a fool’s errand. Fussing about it much the same. 

It was pacifying when it shouldn’t have been. Decoupled you from reality as all of the blood drained from your head and pooled between your legs. Rendered you foggy-eyed as the ball of his palm squished into your clitoris as he adjusted you on his lap, so that your arse pressed into his hip. 

“Need a bit more than that, love,” he remarked wryly, nodding at the three measly slices of steak you managed before you lost track. 

You drew in a stifled breath in an attempt to ground yourself. 

“Um — sorry,” you stammered, as you refocused your attention to his plate, reorienting his knife and fork in your slippery hands before you dropped them. 

Once again poked the meat with the fork to keep it steady, and began severing a fourth slice. Did your best to narrow your concentration into the movements of the blade — back, forth, back, forth, back, forth—

You hiccuped as he grinded his palm against your cunt, a blunt force on your clit that made your vision blurry and your jaw slack — but he released the pressure just as quickly, cupping your pussy as if it were incidental in keeping you steady on his lap. 

You knew he was testing you. Pushing at your boundaries to see how much effort it took to break them. Goading you to question him, daring you to rebuff him — and every time you didn’t, his boldness tumesced, and your resolve shrivelled. 

“You — you shouldn’t do that,” you breathed, the last of your self-preservation leaking out with it. 

You expected him to be coy about it, anticipated a provocative do what? while he continued to touch you unfettered. 

Instead, he drawled; “Why not?” 

Forcibly resisted your brows curling as his hand tightened again, as your wary eyes bolted around the hall, ensuring none of the others were looking in your direction. 

“There’s… all these people, they’ll see.”

“Who gi’s a fuck about them?” He jeered, a latent vitriol webbed in his words that before then you hadn’t heard in him. “You’re the only one in here that matters, cub.” 

What could you do but melt when he told you that? Stumble on your words like you had forgotten how to talk? 

“But — they might—”

He snorted. “Mh? What d’you think they’ll do?” 

You glanced worriedly at the people sitting next to him, who were graciously still oblivious and busy with their own conversations; but one blink in your direction would expose how flustered you were, berry-cheeked and heavy-eyed, as Jonathan craned his head to speak into your ear when you failed to answer his question. 

“They’ll do what I tell them to,” he murmured. 

It sent a chill needling down your spine to hear it admitted so brazenly. A fact obvious to you from the moment you saw him seated in his throne at the head, but you never let the thought gain traction, never let the concern take root. 

You knew that it should have raised alarm in you, that he would so unabashedly admit to being an autarch that ruled over the obliging residents of the Homestead like sheep. 

It didn’t. No, it made your heart hum against your sternum, because you were his favourite. You were special. The only one that mattered. 

“Go on, then,” he prompted you. “I’m gettin’ hungry.” 

What could you do but oblige him?  

You went back to work. Held his cutlery in shaky fists and sawed off another slice of steak, and another, and another — back, forth, back, forth, back, forth. 

His hand only served to torment you. A firm grip of your cunt to keep you steady, planted there just to make you twitch every time his palm tightened, but he never offered you more than that. Didn’t move the thin cotton of your dress out of the way, didn’t dip a finger into you, didn’t stroke your clit enough to sate you. 

By the time you finished slicing up his meat for him, your cunt was molten and shuddering around nothing, and you were certain the yearning fluids he had carelessly coaxed out of you had formed a wet patch on your skirt. 

“Look a’ that,” he crooned. “You’re a natural.” 

You couldn’t muster a response to that, save for the rasping sigh that was rended from your chest as his hand slipped out from the gap between your thighs. Reached forward to take his utensils from you, arms enveloping you as he stacked up a few slices of steak on his fork and scooped some mash on top with his knife. 

You scoffed, breathless. 

“Could’ve done it yourself,” you muttered, bursting at the seams with harried frustration, thundering under your skin and steaming out your ears. 

He snickered as he shovelled his food into his mouth. 

“Wee fusspot, aren’t you?” He teased, chewing noisily on his steak, “Go’on, eat. That’ll cheer y’up.” 

You sulked for a moment, prodding at your mound of potatoes with a fork. Your body still thrummed like a revved engine and it suppressed any appetite you may have had, before he drained all of your attention into that twitching spot between your legs. 

“Not tellin’ you twice, cub,” he reiterated, distinctly unamused. 

You sighed petulantly, but as you had fallen into the habit of doing, you did as you were told. The meat was a little chewier now that it had cooled down. 

Because you helped prepare dinner — peeling and chopping up the potatoes, and shucking the peas from their pods — you were spared being on clean up duty. 

A mercy, because you hated doing the dishes. You wondered whether telling Jonathan as much would mean he would ensure you never touched a sponge again in your life; but you didn’t want to be that spoiled, for fear it would turn the others of the Homestead against you. 

It was nice, of course, made you feel all gooey and warm inside that he was so attentive to you, so concerned with you. But you didn’t particularly like the idea of being such a tall poppy that the other people around you began to despise you. They were the ones you spent all day with, the other Homesteaders, and you liked them. Most of them, anyway. They were all inordinately friendly and chatty, eager to know more about you, eager to comfort and care for you. Listened whenever you cried about where your life had come to, about your ex, about your stupid fucking boss or your evil prick landlord. Told you not to worry, because none of that mattered anymore, because only good things lay ahead of you. 

Freya had invited you to join her and some of the others around the fire pit, the one a short walk from the hall, where people would spend time socialising and drinking after their long and arduous days of working. You told her that you needed to rinse off first, because you were all sweaty from such a hot day, but that you would join them afterwards. 

It was dark by the time you left your cabin, the sky predominantly navy save for the band of teal along the horizon, turning the silhouettes of the trees against it black as pitch. It was a short walk from your front step to the fire pit, and you headed along the gravelly path around the side of the hall in your sandals. 

The first person you encountered on your way over was leaning with a flat hand against the outer cladding of the hall, facing the wall and completely hidden in the shadow. None of the orange glow of the gas-powered lanterns could reach where they stood, and your eyes were still adjusting to the darkness. You heard, though, the distinct sound of a stream of liquid splashing into the dirt, and quickly surmised from his pose that it was a man pissing on the ground. 

You had picked up the habit from the others on the farm of offering a sunshiny greeting to everyone you passed by, an expected social procedure; but now you found yourself a little lost on what to do or say. You resolved to keep walking, awkwardly meandering around him without saying a word. 

But your name flew out like a net, and his voice was ragged and heavy-tongued, so you stopped momentarily.

It was Philip. 

“Y’know — y’re not what I expected you to be,” he murmured, buttoning up his trousers, and you resentfully caught a glance of his floppy cock while he did it. He was blunderingly drunk, you could smell it from where you stood. “Y’re not what Freya said.”

You found yourself at a loss for how to deal with him. In the outside world you probably would have called him a fucking tosser and marched away unfazed, but you hadn’t encountered a single interpersonal conflict in three weeks, and it suddenly seemed like an alien concept to you. So unfamiliar, in fact, that you found your mouth shaped to form an apology, like you had been the one to stir something unpleasant. 

Philip was, unlike the others, still a stranger to you. He was overtly contemptuous for the first few days, rolling his eyes at you or turning pointedly away from you whenever you were near him. Once Jonathan had his word with him, you supposed, that outward vitriol had given way to complete and utter disinterest. Not once had he spoken more than a single word to you in the weeks you had been at the Homestead, but it didn’t bother you enough to raise it as an issue. No big deal, because everyone else was so nice, so why would it matter if one of them wasn’t? 

“What’d she say?” You asked tightly, after a beat, in some effort to avert him from stumbling any closer to you. 

“Sh’said you were a — a — a peach,” he slurred. “Sweet n’ soft, she said. Yeah. Y’know what she told me?” 

You couldn’t have curbed your scowl even if you wanted to. Storming away from him would have been the wiser thing to do, but you were suddenly charged with a galvanic curiosity — sweet and soft? Had she advertised you like food before she was allowed to bring you along? 

“What,” you muttered through your teeth, arms crossing. 

“She told me you’d be perfect for me,” he blathered, greasy with spite. “For me, she said. That’s what she brought y’ere for. Me.” 

With that, your mettle returned to you like a slap to the cheek. Swelled up quickly in your belly as you frowned at him in revulsion. 

“What do you think I am, some kind of fucking brood sow?” You barked, a growl in your voice that had been buried for a while, “Freya saying that doesn’t mean anything at all.” 

He laughed at that, but it was so rich with acrimony that you could taste it like peroxide in the air. 

“You’re right, no, you’re right, because sh’was wrong anyway,” he ranted. “Y’re not a peach, you’re — you’re — you’re a goddamn prune.”

You gawked at him in bewilderment. “What does that even mean?” 

“It means you’re a whore,” he snarled, an abrupt shift to open aggression that made you step onto your hind foot. “Y’think I didn’t see all that? Lettin’ John play with your cunt under the table?” 

Your blood plummeted to your feet all at once.

Ignominy must have plastered itself on your face — because he laughed at you, loud and haughty, as he took a step in your direction. 

“Yeah, thought you were being subtle, did ya? Puttin' on a show for the whole damn family? Just rubbin’ it in my fuckin’ face, that’s what you were doing,” he raved on, and at that point you decided it was time to leave. 

You hurried down the path with your arms tight around yourself, marching away from him with big angry strides. For a moment you were anxious that he’d pursue you, because you kept hearing his drunken rambling even as the distance grew. 

“New lamb for me, tha’s what John said — only let Freya bring you ‘ere so I’d have someone to share my damn bed with. No, no, now he wants you, eh? Pisses all over his territory like a dog and makes me fuckin’ sniff it—” 

His slurring voice drowned out as you continued your escape, striding past the firepit with enough distance that the light didn’t catch you, and the others didn’t notice you pass them by. You were all upset, now, the flush of it had risen high in your cheeks and quivered warm beneath your eyes. 

Instead you tramped in the direction of Jonathan’s farmhouse, and by the time you knocked on his door you had a lump in your throat and your cheeks were sticky with tears. 

You heard his heavy steps from behind the door before it opened. 

His face sunk once his glower found you. Eyes heavy with it, a simmering indignation, lips tight. His expression only elicited more globby tears, because you suddenly feared that you had made him angry just by appearing on his doorstep when you hadn’t been invited. 

Seemed he wasn’t angry at you, though, because two great big hands reached across the small distance and fixed to either cheek. 

“What’s the matter, cubbie?” He asked hoarsely, smearing your tears from your cheeks with the pads of his thumbs. 

“I just — I walked past Philip, and he—”

“C’mon,” he hushed, scooping you towards him with an arm around your shoulders before ferrying you through his door. “Tell me about it inside. I’ll make us a cuppa.” 

He led you down the hallway, past his staircase, where until then you had never dared to venture. Found yourself in a proper kitchen. You would have been more rattled by the fact he had a kitchen at all if you weren’t so troubled by other things.

You let out a little gasp as he picked you up with mammoth hands under your arms and plonked you onto his butcher block counter — he gave you a brush of his knuckle under your chin, before he went to fill up the kettle at the sink. 

“Tell me what happened,” he said, turning on the faucet. He washed his hands with soap before he went to fill up the kettle. The pressure was weak, but you didn’t expect much else from a water system reliant on rainwater. 

“Well, he — he basically — he told me Freya brought me here for him,” you answered weakly, not quite tearful enough to trip over your words, but enough for it to be wet and gulping in your throat. “And then I said it doesn’t matter what Freya said, and then he, he—”

His attention was fixed on you once he put the kettle down on the stove, and he didn’t turn on the gas. 

“He what.” 

“He called me a whore,” you snivelled, wiping your soggy cheek with the heel of your palm. “He said he saw — he saw everything at supper.” 

The look of displeasure that suffused across his features would have been enough to make you shiver if it were directed at you. He ambled towards you, then, before planting both firm hands on each of your shoulders, and your knees brushed his hips. 

“Envy is a wicked thing, cub,” he said, voice deep, a faint simmer of anger audible in the lowest frequencies. “You just ignore him, yeah?” 

“But — but — he saw,” you moaned, the embarrassment at the thought once again rearing its head and it stung like the prod of a hot brand. 

He shushed you as his hand shifted to the back of your neck, fixing under your hair, and he pulled you into his chest. Draped another arm around you to hold you in close, and your thighs had to stretch around him to accommodate him. His chest was pillowy, comfortable, and the smell of his skin through the thin cotton of his flannel made your eyes glass over. 

“Doesn’t matter what he saw,” he grumbled, lips at your temple, and the touch made your brain whir like a purring cat. 

“I’m sorry,” you mewled, because you felt as though it was your fault for getting caught — probably made a noise, or a stupid needy face, maybe a whole scene because you couldn’t ever control yourself. 

“None o’ that,” he said, reeling back from you and once again settling his hands on your cheeks. “You’ve been nothin’ but an angel. Haven’t you?” 

You sniffed, blinking at him rheumy-eyed, and when he glared at you insistently you capitulated with a weak nod. 

“Mh,” he agreed, and you felt his left thumb feather closer to the corner of your mouth. “Such a good girl.” 

Thumb brushed over your lips, then, and the tickle made your mouth water. The touch alone coaxed them to part, just slightly enough to draw in some suddenly needed air. 

“And a good wee listener, aren’t you?” He purred, pad of his fore- and middle fingers ghosting over your bottom lip. 

Pelagic eyes that had been fixed to your lips shift up to meet yours, and again you realised it was not a rhetorical question, so you answered with another feeble nod. 

“Open up, then,” he said, rumbling, low enough that you felt the vibration of it through the narrow air between you. 

You were a good listener. So you opened your mouth for him, just enough to breathe through. 

He let out a rasping breath as he sild a salty fingertip between your lips, running it along the edge of your incisors. 

“Wider,” he instructed, and you did, allowed him enough space between your jaws to fit his thick finger, and you felt the rough palp of it on the tip of your tongue. “Good.” 

The second finger joined the first, pushing deeper into your mouth until the tips of them were midway down your tongue, and a spate of saliva began dripping down your throat. You were wide-eyed, beaming at him hopelessly. Devotedly. His expression was rigid, fixed, so focused that his eyes were dark with it. 

Fingers persisted deeper, until you felt them on the back of your tongue, mouth filled with the savoury taste of his hand, and you wondered if it was the same hand he had held your pussy with. 

The thought made your eyes flutter shut, but a press of his finger at the back of your throat quickly forced you to gag. 

He shushed you immediately; “Easy, you’re fine,” he cooed, and you drew in a wet breath through your nose, swallowing the flood of viscous spit that filled your throat. 

Reeled his fingers out only slightly, as if just to feel the friction of your tastebuds beneath his fingertips, before pushed them in again, and you fought back another gag. 

“So thirsty f’me, aren’t you, cub,” he drawled, hazily, a fascinated grin twitching in the corner his lips. “Drink from me, then.” 

Your hands lifted to meet his, clutching it by the wrist with both as if holding a milk bottle, allowing his fingers to slide in to the root, and his knuckles pressed into your cheeks. 

“Suck them,” he grunted. 

And you did. Suckled on his fingers like a calf on a teat, blinking at him when the urge to gag abated, fat tears rolling from the corners of your eyes but evoked now by something entirely different. 

“Good girl,” he murmured, as his other hand released your cheek, sinking down to your chest, catching in the folds of your dress as it clawed down your stomach. 

He hiked up your skirt with intention — no longer being coy about his efforts, he was fervent in it — and in a heartbeat your frock was at your hip, and his hand ran along the inside of your thigh. 

You puffed out a whimper through your nose when he glided his fingers along your slit, base to top, only splitting it on the second swipe — smiled agape to himself when he dipped into wetness that had already leaked and accumulated there.

“Haven’t you been patient?” He hummed, smearing the tips of his fingers upward until they swiped over your clitoris, still puffy and wanting from when he worked it up at supper. “Neediest thing and still so patient. I reckon you deserve a treat for that.”

You gazed at him doe-eyed, huffing out squeaks around his fingers as he danced his others around your clit, not quite indulging it with a real touch. Your hips arched into him despite the effort to control it, and he gave you a delighted grin, fingertips remaining just agonisingly out of reach. Only when your head rocked back off your shoulders and you groaned desperately did he finally relent. 

Rested the tip of his thumb into your mons to balance his hand, as his fingers stroked your clit, languid, almost cruel in how slowly he moved them upward and down again.  

“S’this what you want?” He droned, satisfaction dripping from his grin. 

You nodded, as much as the fingers in your throat allowed you to move, brows curling up and eyes too fluttery and heavy to keep properly open. 

“Thought as much,” he muttered, smugly amused. “Could smell it on you the second you showed up. Aching little cunt with nothing to break it off on, eh?” 

You could only whine like a wounded puppy, trail of drool leaking out from the corner of your mouth where his fingers held it open — twitching as the calloused pads of his fingers cosseted the raw pink flesh of your clit, too swollen and sensitive to handle direct touch. 

“Mh. Yeah, I’ll take good care of ya, cubbie,” he cooed, almost pitying, as if he was enacting some great charity for the down and out girl he dragged in off the street. Not far from the truth, as you considered it. 

“Keep sucking,” he ordered when your tongue went slack, because his other fingers had shifted downward from your clit, nestling between your folds and prodding at your fluttering hole. 

He mercifully decided against two when you squeaked in fright, instead pushing a single fingertip into you. Fed it in slowly, bit by bit as if too much would spook you, until his palm was flush with your pussy. His finger was as thick as two of yours, and it might have been enough to sting if you weren’t so slick. 

It made you tipsy to feel him inside you, even only his fingers, in two places at once — his fingers, his his his — it buzzed around in your head like a caged hornet until your blood was runny and your eyes clouded over, and he hadn’t even moved it yet. And when he did, hooked his finger to push into the squishy flesh below your bladder, so tender there — you mewled loudly enough that your voice came out fractured, panting out of your nose with your eyes wrenched shut. 

“Like that, do ya?” He chuckled, watching you raptly as he curled his hand, so he could thumb at your clit while he fucked you with his finger. Dragged it out to push it back in again, slow and steady. 

Didn’t matter how slowly he did it, you had been a hair-trigger away from coming at any given moment all night, and you just might have done it fingers-free if you thought about his hand under the table for too long — this, this, was almost too much. A daunting climax loomed over you, so ruinous that your body seemed to shy away from it, too sensitive, too desperate, too—

“Mh, I feel tha’,” he goaded, rumbling deep. “Close, are ya, sweetheart?”

You nodded, tearful, whimpering, every noise muffled by the fingers in your mouth, nose runny and sniffling every time you sucked down an eager breath. Thumb rubbed your sore clit with the motion of the one inside you, and as it all began to cave in on you, your eyes shot open. 

“Easy, cub, no need to panic.” 

Acting as if you might never have had an orgasm before, soothing you like you might be afraid of the overwhelming rush of feelings he was provoking within you — it settled you despite yourself, and your shoulders sunk inward, letting out the hot air that you had been hoarding in your chest — and then it swallowed you. 

“Yeah, tha’s it,” he encouraged you, pushing his fingers deeper into your throat as your whines grew louder, and your face crumpled up, and you balanced on the summit— 

“Goooood girl,” he crooned, as you came around his finger so forcefully that your eyes just about rolled into the back of your head, clit burning so hot that it made you jolt and squeal when he touched it too firmly. Fingers pressed down on the back of your tongue right as you tumbled over the zenith, forcing out a squeaking gag and a long band of saliva that dribbled down your chin. 

Entire pussy convulsed in the aftershocks, clenching around him in pulses each time his thumb swiped gently over your clit — but he didn’t torment you for long, slid his finger out of you slowly until you were mournfully empty, and you felt a runnel of your slick drool down the cleft of you. 

Reeled his pacifying fingers out of your mouth, then, pulling a string of saliva with them and your entire skull felt hollow in their absence. You released a weak sigh as you collapsed forward, foundations crumbled, heavy head landing against his padded chest. Almost trembling with exhaustion now that every drop of energy had been siphoned from you. 

“There we go, love,” he hummed, petting your hair, letting out a ragged breath into the top of your head. “That better?” 

You were milk drunk, tongue swollen and viscid in your mouth, and forming a single word was a near impossible task. All you could muster was another nod.

“Don’t you worry about Philip,” he said calmly. “I’ll deal with him.” 

You might have thanked him if you could form the words, so you instead lay a weary hand on his stomach, bunching the fabric of his shirt between your fingers. 

“M’tired,” you slurred, breathless. 

He chuckled. “I bet.” 

“Can I sleep here?” You asked weakly, muffled by his chest. 

He tutted at you, hand settling on your shoulder. “Don’t get ahead of yourself, cub.” 

Wednesday came with the threat of rain. 

The sky was distended with rolling grey cloud by the time you were out for your mid-morning stroll, once breakfast had wrapped up, and it was still a few hours before you needed to return to the kitchen to help prepare lunch. The air was thick with it, muggy and warm, the smell of imminent summer rain was stuffy in your sinuses and it made your skin prickle up. 

It was pleasant, though, as you wended about the Homestead, strolling among the knobbly old pear trees, between the potato fields, down to the river that wound through the base of the valley, to watch the pike fingerlings swim between the reeds. 

You crossed Freya’s path on your return to your cabin, and she hauled a few large baskets with her — empty, you noticed, as she walked up to you with a weak smile. 

“Do you want to help me pull some carrots?” She asked you, after all the how are you pleasantries. “You must get bored in the kitchen.” 

You wavered for a moment, um-ing and ah-ing, because you did. 

It was the same thing every day, but for the rare occasions that Linda let you use the stove because Jonathan had disappeared and would surely never find out. Or, sometimes, you could choose how to season the vegetables when you were put in charge of preparing them. Aside from your time in the kitchen, your only other physical activities had been going for walks and attempting to learn how to sew — you had gotten slightly better at that one, and now you could hem a skirt on your own, but it hardly enraptured your attention. 

The one thing that kept you from jumping on the opportunity to do something outdoors, was the memory of how expressly Jonathan had forbidden it. More than once he had reminded you how unacceptable the notion was, of you toiling over the land, so he described it; because that was a job for rough and calloused hands, not soft and pretty ones like yours.

But he had been absent for another several days, despite how he had undone you in his house and sent you back to yours afterwards. You would have thought he had dropped off the face of the Earth if you hadn’t caught peeks of him venturing back to his house in the distance, or strolling into the hall to collect his meal and vanishing once again. 

Perhaps a touch of spite motivated your decision. “Yeah, sure,” you told her. 

The carrot crops were a far stretch from the heart of the farm, a good ten-minute walk up and over the hill, and you hadn’t ventured that far before — new trees, new bushes, new paths.  

“How big is this place?” You asked her, as you approached the emerald green field, bright tufts of carrot leaves jutting out of the ground in not-quite-straight rows. 

“Umm,” she thought aloud, “few hundred acres? I’m not sure.” 

Pulling carrots was not a great deal more thrilling than working in the kitchen or attempting to sew, but it was something different, and childishly, made you feel a little bit rebellious. You had used your hair tie to hike up your skirt and knot it at your thighs, so that it didn’t get any dirtier than it needed to. Last thing you needed was Jonathan catching you with farmy muck all over you. 

The carrots were all thick, long, and persimmon orange — Freya had instructed you to brush off some of the soil before dropping them in your basket, and to pluck off any little hair-like roots to save time in the kitchen later. You enjoyed it, getting dirt under your nails, that loamy smell of soil and geosmin emanating out of the dirt with each plucked carrot. 

The ground was dry and gravelly, and it was a little rough on your knees — but you were a big girl, not as soft a thing as Jonathan seemed to think you were, and you could prove it. 

Wasn’t long before it began to rain, those fat drops of a summer shower, slow and sparse. Not enough to saturate you, but you did shiver when a glob of lukewarm water landed on the back of your neck and rolled down your spine. 

“You spoken to John recently?” She asked you quietly, after a long duration of pleasant silence, dusting her soily hands off on her apron. 

There was a prickle of worry in her throat, something hesitant, and you might not have noticed it if you didn’t see her glance around before she spoke. 

“Not since Sunday,” you answered, failing to swallow that touch of bitterness that rose up from your belly at his mention. 

“Neither,” she said, what seemed like a hastily applied band-aid to a wound she inflicted by asking it. “You saw Philip on Sunday, right?” 

Your brows pulled together, but you focused on unearthing the next carrot. “Yeah, how come?” 

“Well I—” She hesitated, and you finally turned your attention to her when you picked up on the genuine concern in her tone. “I know he was out of line, he told me what happened. And I’m sorry about — well, it’s hard to explain.” 

“Explain what?” You asked, wiping away a dribble of rain from your forehead, the rainfall had gotten a little heavier in the few minutes since it started. 

She let out a long sigh, sweeping her hair out of her face and sitting on her heels. “I did tell Philip you’d be perfect for him. He wasn’t lying. He’s been — I mean, lots of the others are already in their pairs, and he isn’t, so he’s been lonely,” she unravelled, as though nervous to say every word. “But I never promised it, or anything. I just wanted to say that, well, I didn’t mean for all that to happen. I thought he had sorted himself out already ‘cause, I mean, you obviously had no interest in him.”  

You nodded slowly, looking at your dirty fingernails, because you weren’t sure what to say. 

“Yeah,” you started, “it’s okay, it wasn’t a big deal or anything. John said he’d deal with him so hopefully that’s the last I have to hear of it.” 

Her chary eyes flitted around again, head swinging over her shoulder as though checking for someone behind her, and it made your hackles rise just a bit — you were anxious by proxy, because Freya was always as collected and calm as any of them, and you had never seen her on edge like that. 

“That’s what I wanted to ask you about,” she whispered. 

“What?” 

She took a shaky breath. “I haven’t seen Philip since Sunday night.” 

You only looked at her, chewing on the inside of your lip, uncertain what she might have been implying. 

“You think Jonathan kicked him out?” 

“Maybe,” she said, bunching her apron in her fists. “I just — I’m sure we would have heard from him, if he was banished or whatever. He’s been here for six years. I can’t imagine that he’d just vanish… I mean, he’s American, I doubt he still has his passport — where would he even go?” 

“I dunno,” you murmured. “Maybe he just left out of spite, or something.” 

“I’m worried,” she lamented.

You were at a loss for words. Confronted by a problem you had seemingly lost the capacity to deal with. Freya was the one that had vouched for Philip, for Jonathan, for the entire farm in the first place. You had trusted and believed her. 

Now you felt peculiarly defensive. As though she might have been suggesting some greater evil within Jonathan or the Homestead that you, with every iota of your being, refused to believe was possible. 

“What are you saying?” You questioned uneasily, still hopefully she wouldn’t shift from implying to making certain accusations that would risk rattling your worldview. 

“I—”

She abruptly choked on the first syllable, eyes shooting past you— 

“Shit.” 

“What?” You gawked, cocking your head back and twisting to look behind you, as she scrambled to futilely adjust herself, wiping down her apron and aimlessly fixing the carrots in her basket. 

You saw the broad shape of him before you recognised who it was, marching up the hill with a fuming pace that made your stomach drop. Knew who it was once he got slightly closer, because you could see his expression from where you kneeled in the dirt. 

You glanced back at Freya, who looked at you so sheepishly you wondered if she might break into tears. 

“I’m sorry,” she whispered. 

“What do you—”

“Fuck d’you think you’re doing, cub?” Came a growl from behind you that made you jolt in fright, somehow having crossed the distance in the time it took you to turn around. 

“I’m — ah!” You squealed as he brusquely scruffed you by the neck, hauling you up from the dirt until the soles of your bare feet caught the ground and you wobbled before finding them. 

He craned down from behind you to speak at your level. 

“We’re gonna ‘ave a talk,” he snarled, a scalding anger in his voice that made your eyes water and your skin blister up. 

“Why,” you moaned, kept placid by the unyielding hand gripping the back of your neck, thumb and forefingers burrowing into your tendons so tight it made your legs tingle. 

“Y’know damn well,” he said, dragging you around until you faced the way you came, releasing your neck with a shove. “Walk.” 

“Where?” 

He chuffed. “Stable.” 

Didn’t take much to make you cry, and this was enough to arouse big brackish tears and a puerile sob. It wasn’t terror, though, not dread about what he might do to you — but shame, so concentrated in your blood you could feel the cold sludge of it beating through your arteries. Ignominy rooted in the crime of angering him. Terrified that you had forsaken his approval, turned his sweetness bitter, because you weren’t a good girl anymore. 

“Jonathan,” called Freya, as you stumbled forward with a nudge; you had hoped that she wouldn’t acknowledge the tiff, would stay silent and pluck her carrots, but with an active spectator of your castigation you could only shrivel up in embarrassment. 

“You keep that trap shut,” Jonathan spat, turning to address her with an accusatory finger. “You’re on thin fuckin’ ice already, girl.” 

“Where’s Philip?” She barked, with all the might and caution of an outnumbered dog. 

Jonathan didn’t acknowledge her question, instead giving you another nudge when you stopped walking to coax you down the muddy pathway, your feet squelching into the freshly sodden dirt with every step. 

“I’m gonna find him, John!” Freya yelled as the distance grew, a desperation in her voice that made your tummy ache, because the dissonance you were wracked with made you feel like a snake devouring its own tail. 

Jonathan only grumbled something under his breath, striding at your heels as you made your careful way ahead, wary of stepping on a rock or twig with your bare feet. You left your sandals by the carrot patch, but you weren’t about to ask him to turn around. 

You bleated like a goat when he suddenly hooked you by the waist, swivelling you around in a bluster and hauling you up and over his shoulder. “Useless little legs y’got.” 

You sobbed, clutching the fabric of his overshirt in claws over his back, voice strained and broken as your stomach bounced on his shoulder. The rain had only grown heavier, and it ran in rivulets around your head, dripping off your nose and into the dirt.

“I didn’t do anything,” you whined — a stupid fuss, really, because you knew well what you were in trouble for — you simply hadn’t expected to actually get in trouble.

You had admittedly seen him roar like a grizzly more than once at other Homesteaders. At one of the butchers for keeping a mobile phone stashed away in their cabin without disclosing it. At a farmhand for disobeying him and letting the bull in with the cows when he shouldn’t have. At a kitchen girl for burning enough meat to feed fifteen people because she was distracted by gossip. 

You just never imagined you’d get in trouble.

He had always been so stable, so overbearingly sweet with you. Such a good girl, he called you, an angel. A good wee listener, cub, such a quick learner. You could never have anticipated such a mutation in his treatment of you, and you felt your standing crumbling beneath your feet. Peripeteia that gave you such whiplash it made your neck ache. 

“What’d I tell you?” He grumbled, as you saw the ground beneath him gradate from muddy grass to gravel, and you knew you were approaching the stable. Heard the moaning old wheels of the sliding door as he rolled it open. “Huh?”

“Not to — to work on the farm,” you sobbed, as he ferried you inside, jostling you to keep you in place as he unlatched and opened a stall door. 

He grunted in agreement as he slid you from his shoulder like a buckshot doe and dropped you ungracefully to your feet, and you landed with a squeak in the centre of the empty horse stall. Felt the hay and shavings between your toes, shreds of it sticking to the mud that caked them. 

“Wanna be a farm animal, do you?” He snarled, rummaging through the tack hung on hooks and draped over benches. “Let’s see you act like one, then.”

You stood contritely in the centre of the stall, hands interlocked over your chest, toes curling anxiously on the floor — watched edgily as he turned to face you with something in his hand, metal and leather. 

“I’m sorry,” you snivelled. 

You hadn’t seen him so angry — not towards you, anyway — he was tumid with it, apoplectic, and it made you want to curl up on the ground like a kitten in the hopes he’d feel pity if you were smaller.  

“Not yet, you’re not,” he grumbled, as he shut the stall door behind him. “I’ve half a mind to break a crop over your arse.” 

You sniffed, blubbering, pathetic. “I just wanted something different to do.” 

Your excuses ricocheted off him. Only glowered at you fanged and sable-eyed, fiddling with whatever piece of equipment he had between his hands. 

“Dress off,” he ordered dryly, gesturing at you with a flick of his fingers. 

“But, I–”

“Do animals wear frocks?” He asked facetiously. Mockingly. “Y’seen a ewe out there with a skirt on, have you?”

“I just—”

“You really wanna make me tell you again, cub?” 

You sulked, grimacing, but obliging. Not many other options, you thought, and even if there were you had no interest in pursuing them. You could have tried to run, sure, but you bet he’d have chased you. Then what? He’d have been even angrier with you, when you didn’t want him to be angry with you at all.

Your dress was gluey with rain and it stuck to your skin, and it made sticky noises as you pulled it up your thighs — reeled it up your stomach, tugged it over your chest — and once it was off your head, it landed on the dusty floor of the stall with a squelch. 

You hadn’t been naked under his eye before, all goose-pricked and shivery, but you felt a familiarity bedded in your belly, something embryonic, because he knew your body better than you did. Understood its moving parts like he was conversant with every facet of you. 

He didn’t look impartially intrigued, though, there was no clinicality in his glare. No, it was selachian. Nostrils flared like he could scent your gamey blood from where he stood. 

“Fuckin’ filthy,” he grumbled, approaching you measuredly, unraveling the straps he held in his hand. Grabbed your forearm once he was in front of you, splayed out your hand to reveal all of the soil embedded in the creases of your palm, stuck under your fingernails. “Rollin’ around in the mud like a piglet, were you?”

“I was only pulling carrots,” you whined, stuttering, felt a hot tear dribble into the corner of your mouth. 

He chortled vindictively at that. “Piglets love their carrots, don’t they.” 

“I’m n-not a piglet.” 

“Open your mouth,” he grunted indifferently, and your brows pinched together, because the last time he had told you to do that you ended up with fingers in you, and now that was all you could think about. 

You almost let loose a why but thought better of it, holding it under your tongue as you unhinged your jaw for him. Shame rang in your ears, because you quietly hoped he’d put his fingers in your mouth again, and you wondered if they’d be salty with his sweat, or earthy and gritty from his labour. 

He held up a small metal bar with o-rings at each end, a link in the middle that allowed it to bend. Leather straps attached to its rings. 

A bridle. 

You whimpered when the steel knocked against your teeth, grating sensation of metal on bone that made your skull quake, as he pushed the bar into your mouth and wedged it behind your molars. The corners of your mouth pillowed around it, and the rings dug into your cheeks, as he pulled the leather straps behind your head, and your nose was a few inches from the valley of his pectorals. 

Must have been busy working on his something all day, because he was ripe, the air around him heady and thick with the damp of sweat, fetor of a wet dog — embarrassingly amatory when it filled your nose, when you tasted it on your tongue, and you felt it in your cunt. 

He buckled the straps at the back of your head, tightening it until the bridle cut into your cheeks enough to hurt and you bit out a pained squeak. 

“Down y’get, then,” he grunted, and your eyes flitted between his in some effort to glean what he meant by it. “Animals walk on four legs, don’t they, cub?” 

So they do. 

You lowered yourself one knee at a time, balancing yourself with a hand clutching at the fabric of his trousers, and he sucked in a hoarse breath. He took a step back as you leaned forward, flattening your hands in the wood shavings, splinters in your palms. Watched a bead of saliva land on the floor as you ran your tongue along the cold bar in your mouth. 

“This what you wanted?” He drawled, malevolently satisfied as you looked up at him through your sticky lashes. He raked his eyes over you, bare and reverent on the floor before him, and he breathed it in deep, the scent of victory. “Feel like an animal now?” 

You whimpered and returned your gaze to the floor, but you responded with a guilty nod. 

“Know what happens to animals, cub?” He grumbled, feet shifting to your left, leather boots plastered in mud. He took one step, then another, circling you like a vulture. “They get flyblown. They get glanders. They get blackleg.” 

Your elbows ached. Wobbled under the weight of you. You could only suck on the bit between your teeth. 

“They get pithed. Flayed. Butchered,” he droned, and you saw a tear land next to the puddle of your spit on the floor. “I don’t want that for you, love. You got any idea what kinds of diseases are in that soil? You want gas gangrene, love? You want listeria? Legionnaire’s?” 

You didn’t understand half the things he was saying, and that only amplified the fear it sowed in you. What didn’t he know? How couldn’t you listen to him when his plethora of wisdom seemed to you as unending? 

He was behind you, then, you saw the silhouette cast by his shadow stretch out in front of you. 

“My rules are simple, aren’t they? Or are you too stupid to understand them?” 

You shook your head, let out a mewling noise in place of a sob, and you wondered if he could see your pussy from where he stood. 

“Your body is special, cubbie, so special—” His silhouette shrunk, lowering, and you felt the floor quake beneath you as he lowered to his knees, “—n’ I’m not havin’ you ruin it just because you’re bored. Y’think you’re here to have fun, cub? S’that it?” 

You tasted iron in your mouth and you had no response to give him, because all of your focus had funneled between your legs once you felt his eyes on you, splayed open like a meal. 

“Well you’re not, even if you think you are.” 

You winced when you suddenly felt a cold finger against your pussy, just a graze of it, smearing up a drip of the slick that had escaped you as if to marvel at it. You wondered if he played with it between his fingers. Wondered if he tasted it while you weren’t in the position to see. 

Instead you heard him scoff. Not sure if in awe or disgust, but whichever the root it made you shiver crawl down your spine, because you could feel his breath on your backside. 

“Look a’ you,” he said, and it came out mangled, rumbled out from his belly like a growl. “Like a bitch in heat.” 

Those words hit you like a gunshot. Flatlined. Your eyes glassed over. Unearthed something feral and opprobrious from deep in the sticky pits of you and you weren’t sure if you liked the taste of it. 

“Wan’ me to fuck you, I bet.” 

A shock wracked through you base to crown when you felt his thumb against your puckered hole, and your entire body went stiff as wood. He only let out a chuff of laughter, biting. 

“Not this hole, though, eh?” 

You shuddered, whimpering, slavering like a rabid animal, biting down on the bridle in your jaws until it made your teeth ache. 

“Wan’ me in your cunt,” he mumbled, pressing harder, until the tight ring of muscle quivered with the touch, and your skin went cold. “Only makes sense, s’what y’were made for, mh? All stroppy ‘cause you haven’t had my cock yet?”

Then, with a grunt, he pushed in — broke past the clenching sphincter until his thumb was all the way in and his palm was flush with your rump — went in dry, and it hurt, you bleated out in shock and rocked forward on your knees, fingernails clawing into the horse bedding beneath you. 

“Y’not ready for that yet, cubbie,” he snarled, ragged. “Even if your ‘eart is, your body isn’t. Gotta time it right, cub—”

You heard the clink of his belt unbuckling. Slowly dragged his thumb out by an inch before pushing it in again, and it stung a little less.

“—won’t take otherwise, eh? Need to wait till y’ready—” 

Felt the thump of a weight on your rear. Heavy. Long. Hot and drumming like a heartbeat against your skin. 

“Know you’re desperate, cub, I do,” he rumbled, reeling out his thumb, pushing it back in. Pull, push. Pull, push. “Look a’ you, loosenin’ up — you’d even have me in this one, wouldn’t you?” 

Whatever noise tumbled out of your throat was foreign and bleating. The keen of a dying songbird. You might not have been afraid when he found you, misguidedly confident his wrathful nature would never be directed towards you — you were special, after all — but now a swirling apprehension sat low in your stomach, writhing, shuddering, with every push of his thumb; because you were wrong. 

“Too brave for your own good there, cubbie,” he hummed, and he tugged his thumb until it popped out of you, hole resisting its departure with a tight grip. “I’d break you in half.”

Felt three fingers swipe up your pussy, ladling your juices into his hand like water from a fountain — you couldn’t see what he did with them, you could only hear it. The gruff sigh he bit out, the sound of hand on skin, the slick noises of your wetness being smeared on something else. 

“An’ I need you whole,” he grunted, and you felt the smack of something heavy against the cleft of you, three firm slaps — his cock, you could tell, and you shuddered at the weight of it — his his his — “fuck, even though I’d kill to break you in, lovie—”

Cock wedged in the cleft of you, felt his steeled shaft grind against your flickering hole, squeaked like a mouse as he rutted where you split. He rocked you forward on your knees with each thrust, aching in your kneecaps, and you dropped to your elbows as he just about knocked you flat.

Dug both mammoth paws into each of your cheeks, clutching you by the meat of them, pressing them together to tighten the fissure he fucked — and he fucked in earnest, pistoning like he might if he were inside you. But he wasn’t, he deprived you of that, instead thrusting through the cleft of you like he might saw you in half. 

You groaned, sulky, needy — hungered for him to spear himself into you so desperately that your cunt ached, and you arched your spine to lean into him like you might wordlessly guide his cock where you wanted it to pierce you. 

He only chortled, breathless, because he knew your body so well — better than you — what it so palpably yearned for. What he pointedly declined you. 

“I know, cubbie, I know—” he panted, gnarled through a tight jaw, “—s’not much of a punishment if y’like it, though, is it?

You sobbed, both holes shuddering around nothing as his shaft slid against them, pitilessly taunting them with an admonition of what they could have had but were not allowed. 

You’d have begged, but the steel bit in your mouth restricted your lips from forming the words, tongue pushing against it like the bars of a cage. You could only whine and bitch while he chased his malicious end, and he only grew crueller as he came closer — his grip of your hips was malignant, fingernails boring into your skin, grunts were toothy and hateful and cut with murmuring acrimony—

Snippy little whore—wanna be an animal so bad?—I’ll fuckin’ tup you like one—

With a penultimate growl he bucked you flat and you were pinned beneath him, landing with an umph — his teeth scraped against the burning skin at the back of your neck, groaning into your flesh, ragged voice quaking through your skull like a crack of thunder — you felt the splatter of fluid over your lower back, viscid and hot, landing on your skin in spurts that dribbled down either side of your waist and pooled in the valley of your spine. 

You lay as still as you could muster underneath him, trembling as if you were cold but you were molten to your core. There wasn’t much of a reprieve before he pushed himself to stand, chuffed as stood upright, sniffed as he buckled up his belt. 

Couldn’t bring yourself to look at him, you kept your nose against the floor, wood shavings sticking to your cheeks. You felt his gaze on you, watched his shadow blanket over you like a cloak as he soaked in the aftermath of his discipline. 

“Girls’ll need an extra set o’ hands in the kitchen tonight,” he grunted coldly, adjusting the collar of his shirt. 

You said nothing. Only sipped in tiny swigs of air as if he might chastise you for breathing. Kept still as he stepped around you and unlatched the stall door.

“Y’can clean yourself up in the rain,” he murmured on his way out. “That’s what farm animals do, right, cub?” 

It was venison for supper. 

That’s what Linda told you, when she wheeled in the crate of meat fresh from the butcher, and the rusty odor of lard and myoglobin was so thick in the air that it condensed on the windows, oily beads forming on the glass.

It made you feel sick. Writhing and ferrous in your belly. You got as far as chopping all of the carrots before you had to apologise and excuse yourself. You had lingered for as long as you could muster it, out of sheer guilt, because Freya wasn’t there to bear the load of your absence.

You didn’t come back right after your punishment in the stable. You had sat in the rain for half an hour, as Jonathan had advised you to, letting the warm droplets rinse off the mud and come and drip through your scalp until you felt corporeal again. 

Corporeality was out of reach for you, though. 

You drifted back to your cottage in your sheer water-logged frock, mouth sealed shut, head throbbing, leaden — because there was something in the air. Swelling and humid. Something you could feel in your teeth, chewy and full of gristle, and its sanguine juices leaked down your throat. It tumesced in your jaws minute by minute. Not long until it was too thick to swallow.

Jonathan’s words parasitised your brain tissue until they were all you could hear, plangent ringing in your ears; need to time it right, cub, you’re not ready yet. You’re not ready yet. 

Hollowed out, he was all you could think about. Filled the empty space in your skull cavity like a new organ that only beat for him, something burgundy and parenchymal, dripping down your brainstem. 

When your cabin door opened, you didn’t shift from your bed. Stayed curled up on your side and blinking at the wall, waiting for your inauspicious nausea to abate. 

“There y’are, cubbie.” 

His voice was soft, deep, the gravel of a near whisper. 

He let out a long sigh as he shut the door behind him, and your ears perked at the slow beating of his shoes on the floor as he moseyed towards you. 

“Scoot,” he said as he approached your bed, and you pushed yourself over without question, so that he could sit on the edge. The flimsy mattress sunk under the weight of him, and he patted his thigh. “C’mon.”

You adjusted yourself so that your head lay on his lap like a pillow, tucked your hands and knees into your chest, and let out a long held breath. Relief as sweet as syrup pumped from your heart and you could finally feel your fingertips again. 

“Are you upset with me?” He asked, as characteristically gentle as you remembered it, none of the lascivious vitriol that frothed at his jaws earlier that afternoon. 

You nodded once. You were still sulking. He had left you wet and wanting, coated in his come with the bridle still strapped around your head. Your locks had knotted in the leather and it took you ten minutes to undo without scalping yourself. 

He combed his fingertips through your hair on the side of your head, soft and careful as petting a cat. Brushed a fine curl behind your ear. 

“I’m sorry, cub, I really am,” he said tenderly, “but you understand why I did it, don’t you?” 

You nodded again as he stroked you, and your lids grew heavy. 

“Mh,” he hummed, contented. “I don’t like being angry, love. But sometimes I have to be, if you don’t listen to me. There’s a reason I tell you not to do things. I don’t make up rules just for fun, do I?” 

“No,” you whispered. 

“No,” he agreed. “Rules aren’t fun. But they’re necessary. Without them this would all fall apart. You don’t want that, do you, cub?” 

“No.” 

“Course you don’t, sweetheart,” he cooed. “Now will you come join us for supper?” 

You breathed in slowly. “I’m not really hungry,” you confessed. 

“Feelin’ under the weather?” He asked, caressing hand shifting to flatten over your forehead as if to check for a fever. You probably were febrile to the touch, your blood was magmatic and only growing hotter, and it simmered in your temples. 

You shook your head gently. “No, I’m…” you eked, struggling to find the words to explain yourself. “I just feel a bit funny.” 

He exhaled languidly. “I understand, love,” he said, hand stroking to the top of your head. “Change is always hard. But you’ve been such a brave girl.” 

A warmth swelled in your tummy when he said that. Tempers settled by the wide hand petting your hair, and the softness of his lap under the side of your head. The worry that he had spurned you waned with each breath, because he was there, sweet as ever, lulling you to the brink of slumber under his doting touch. 

“You get an early night, then, cub,” he said gingerly. “Just make sure y’eat a big breakfast, yeah?” 

You only hummed, slurred and sleepy, and managed to puff out an okay before your eyes ebbed shut and your body sunk into sleep.

Your scruples had evaporated. 

There had been vestiges of your more circumspect self lingering around in your first few weeks, a careful eye kept on the farm and its esoteric leader, wits kept about you despite how often you forwent them. 

Now you looked on that scepticism as ignorance. 

A conceited belief that you had some greater understanding about the world than people who were truly connected to it, knee-deep in the ground, toiling to better themselves and the Earth. 

Besides, Jonathan’s notions were consistently proven right. Pollution, climate change, proxy wars — what else was to blame for these cataclysms but human conceit, addiction to all the noxious things created for simple convenience? 

Every time he gave his speeches to the Family as a whole, his sentiments only rang more true. 

Didn’t you feel so much better, now? 

No reliance on your phone, on plastic, on cheap and suffocating clothing. No consumption of mass-processed slop, of mind-rotting screen media, of lab-manufactured anodynes that poisoned you from the inside out. No longer reliant on friends that didn’t care about you, family that had no respect for you, a society that had utterly forsaken you. 

Why? Because you were no longer productive within it? Producing what, Jonathan would ask you, and the answer was nothing. Imaginary bullshit, he called it. Meaningless numbers that existed only on screens and in wires and yet somehow dictated the course of a sorely misguided mankind. 

These were the fragments of debris embedded within you that rotted you from the inside out. Gangrenous, necrotising every part of you they touched until you could hardly call yourself a human. 

Jonathan was the only one who could debride the wounds they left. Picked out the shards of refuse left by your dependence on the toxic and artificial. 

So much purer, they told you, they could see it in your eyes and in your skin — a glow from within, they said, because you were reviving your most natural, inborn self. Nurturing her, the most important part of you. 

Freya and Philip abandoned ship because they couldn’t handle it, the others told you. Because their dependence on the synthetic was adamantine, and their cowardice triumphed in the end.  

Not you, though. 

You were special. You were important. 

So important that over the course of the next week you were waited on hand and foot. You were brought raspberry leaf tea first thing every morning, and a mug of bone broth before you went to sleep every night. Given your own meals at John’s behest, a different meal on your plate than everybody else’s when you sat down for supper. 

Rare red meats, tender and well-salted, still juicy and dripping when you’d cut into them. Beef liver and bone marrow. Yams and boiled spinach. Eggs for breakfast every morning, dates and berries with full-fat cream for dessert. Need to keep you healthy, John would tell you, need you ready. 

Every day was a day closer, and you could feel it breathing down the back of your neck. 

Aren’t you excited? Linda would coo, and although nobody had said it outright, you felt in your belly what exactly the days were counting down to. 

Your hormones were beating and surging until they saturated every inch of you, permeating between the fibers of your muscles and coating your tongue and the walls of your cunt. A feeling you would never have noticed until it was pointed out to you, until it was all they asked about, and all you could focus on; do you feel it yet? Is your body preparing itself? Are you warmer between your legs? 

When you noticed a few specks of blood on your toilet paper, the slightest smear of pink, you told Georgie — she smiled as bright as the sun, kissed you on the lips, because how lucky, a godsend, you were finally ripe. 

The last sliver of the waning moon had vanished that night. It was as black as the rest of the sky, hung low over the hill above Jonathan’s farmhouse. 

Unseasonably warm for late summer, as though the sun was still baking in the sky, and the air was sultry with it. Formed dewdrops on your skin as you waited for the knock on your door. 

It was Georgie and Harriet that arrived on your doorstep, an hour shy of midnight, garmented in white dresses. Georgie approached you with a bloomed cariad rose pinched between her fingers, pink and fluttery, and she slid the stalk behind your ear so that it was tucked into your loose hair. 

You smiled back at her when she stroked your cheek, her enthusiasm an airborne infection that filled your lungs like steam and felt fuzzy in the centre of your forehead. Anticipation as inebriant as ethanol had been slowly accruing in your blood day by day, until your thoughts were all hazy and thrumming and the hours oozed by like honey. 

Georgie held your hand as she led you out of your door, Harriet close behind you. Out on the path waited the rest of the Family, all thirty of them, candles in hand. Your erstwhile self might have been humiliated by your stark nudity — instead you felt pride, loving warmth in your veins, because they all looked on you with pure fondness and blind devotion. 

They followed behind you like a flock of sheep, reverently silent, as Georgie led you down an unfamiliar path, illuminated only by the candlelight. Through the pear trees and over a bubbling creek; the water cool between your toes, the ground mulchy beneath your feet. 

The terminus of your journey was a pyramid. 

Hand-fashioned from timber, lacquered in ivory paint. No windows. A dormer containing a hole where a door might have been. Situated in a clearing among the oak trees, almost haunting, the tip of it just about invisible in the darkness of the night. 

Georgie let go of your hand and gave you an encouraging touch on your bare back. 

“Wait inside,” she whispered, beaming, “he won’t be long.” 

Stepping through the entrance was one of no return. 

You felt it in your chest. Smoky and heady. Dense enough that it was hard to inhale. 

The interior was unpainted, raw wood, logs recently chopped and lumbered into boards. Terpenic on your tongue. The sticky scent of balsam. Mingled with the lanolin exuded by the sheepskins carpeting every corner of the floor, warm and soft under your feet, curls of wool tufting out between your toes. 

Candles had been lit by the entrance, but those were the only sources of light within the peculiar room. You looked up to the highest point of the ceiling and saw only a void. 

Minutes passed like muggy eons and you sat yourself cross-legged on the woolly floor, facing away from the entrance. Apprehension crept up your gullet like acidic reflux, and swallowing brought you no relief. 

You heard his breathing before he spoke. 

“Stand up, cub,” he drawled, low, full-throated. You thought you might turn around and see a bear standing there opposed to a man. “Let me look at you.” 

You did as you were told. Rose up cautiously, filly-legged, wobbly as though unused to gravity. Faced him with your fingers in knots and your toes curling into the fleece of the floor. 

His eyes were stygian as he approached you. Lips tight and pensieve under his beard. Stood shirtless, but still in his trousers, belt buckled. 

“You are a lovely thing,” he murmured, lost, as he reached across the narrow gap and brushed your breast with his hand. Feathered his thumb over your nipple and watched raptly as it tightened to a point under his touch. 

You had no words to offer him. Not for a lack of trying, but every syllable that worked its way along your tongue fizzled before making its way out, because nothing you could say felt worthy of him. 

“How are you feeling,” He asked hoarsely, monotonously, running the back of his finger down the length of your belly, just light enough to tickle. 

“Nervous,” you breathed, after a sweltering pause, because his touch persisted lower even as you failed to respond. 

“No need to be nervous, cubbie,” he said. 

He craned slightly downward to slide the tip of his fingers between your folds, and you hiccuped at the touch. Bit your tongue as you felt him wipe over your hole, dipping in but not breaching, before he reeled them back out. He held up his fingers to look at your slick, attentive as if inspecting it, watching how it clung in glossy bands between his thumb and forefingers. Breathed raggedly through his nose in satisfaction. 

“It’ll only hurt for a little bit,” he explained, tone staid, but you could hear the appetite simmering in the back of his throat. “But we’ll go slow.” 

You nodded deferentially. 

“Get on your knees, cub.” 

And you did. The wool was soft underneath your kneecaps. 

“Take it out.” 

Your hands went to his belt without dispute, fishing out the tail and undoing the buckle. Moved quickly onto the buttons of his thick canvas work trousers, popping them loose one by one. 

His cock was partially soft when you pulled it out through the fly of his trousers, but you watched it grow harder the moment it was free — length doubled before your eyes, girth almost three-fold, as the veins roping under the ruddy skin thumped with blood and his foreskin peeled back from the smooth bulge of his head. 

He let out a grunt, then a sigh, when you curled your fingers around the base of it, slightly too thick to fully wrap your hand around. The sound was like liquor and you were already drunk on it. 

“Lick it,” he gritted. 

You angled his cock upright, and dragged your wet tongue from the curls above his balls to his frenulum, painting your saliva along the length of it and breathing hot air over his skin. He groaned, and your blood went runny, because the only thing you wanted was to please him — him him him — and you were high on every sound he chewed out as you did. 

His thick fingers carded through your hair, gentle at first, but as you grazed your lips against the tip of his cock his hand turned to a fist, and you chirped at the pain in your scalp. 

Must have heard you, because his grip went slack, and he clenched his jaw instead. 

“Swallow it, cub,” he grumbled, barely encouraging, “as much as you can fit.” 

Easier said than done. You unhinged your jaw to take his blunt head in your mouth, lapping at it to keep it wet, terrified you’d scrape your teeth on it — but you leaned forward, bit by bit, and his cock was heavy on your tongue. 

“Tha’s it,” he huffed, biting down on nothing. “Eyes up.” 

You blinked up at him, rheumy and upset, because soon his cock was at the back of your tongue and you were only halfway down. You did your best with what you could take — sealed your lips and suckled on him, grazing your tongue along the underside of his cock as you moved your head back, then forward again, and he let out a satisfied growl. 

“Good girl, cubbie,” he groaned, when his glans hit the back of your throat and you gagged around him. “Easy. Doin’ so good.” 

The remaining liquid in your body turned to syrup, hot and sweet in your cheeks, a treacly film over your eyes — I’m a good girl, I’m a good girl, I’m a good girl — reverberated around in your head like a bullet ricocheting off the walls of your skull. 

Went delirious with it. Mouth so slick with saliva it dripped down your chin, soaked his cock from base to tip until the curls at the bed of it were sodden and clumped together. Throat relaxed enough to take him deeper, and you gagged again, though he praised you for it. 

You’re so good for me, cubbie. My good girl. So special. Perfect girl. 

Your cunt had liquefied. Molten. Burned so hot that it throbbed between your legs and you rubbed your thighs together involuntarily. Alight with anticipation, because you knew where he’d put his cock next. 

Couldn’t stop yourself, though. Couldn’t settle your tongue. Couldn’t slow down when he told you to — a distant voice that didn’t quite break through the fog, slow down, cub, careful.  

Your fervour was only deepening, because his groans were bitten out more desperately each time you sucked his cock deeper into your throat, and you only wanted to make him happy, to be his good girl forever, to—

“Slow the fuck down.” 

Suddenly your hair was knotted in a fist and it was yanked from your scalp, and you squealed as your head was torn off his cock and your throat was violently empty. He pulled your head back off your shoulders by your hair so that you were forced to look up at the ceiling, and it hurt enough that your face crumpled up, eyes dribbling tears that trickled down over your temples. 

“Still don’t know how to fuckin’ listen, do you,” he thundered, rage flaring from an ember to a scorching flame, and you could see its red glow lambent in the hollows of his eyes. 

You yelped as he dragged you by the hair, claws scratching and grasping at his restraining wrist as you were hauled to the centre of the triangular room and thrown flat on the woollen floor. 

I’m sorry I’m sorry I’m sorry — emetic apologies spewed from your mouth like vomit as you rolled yourself onto your back, and you watched him shuck his trousers off in a single motion. 

Loomed over you like a mountain. Cock heavy, bouncing with his heartbeat, glistening with your saliva. He made the cavernous pyramid seem small, shrinking around him, like he could touch the peak of the ceiling just by reaching upward. 

You blinked and he had clambered over you, snared your ankles with massive hands — tore your legs apart and dragged you towards him until your arse was perched on his lap, and your thighs were wrapped around his waist. 

“Didn’t want it to be like this, cub,” he growled, leviathan paws on either side of your waist, and his cock nudged around between your folds for an aperture. “Thought you could control yourself. Gave you too much credit.”

You bleated as he pulled you down onto him, spearing his cock into you in a single motion, a battering ram that broke through your entrance without warning or care. A squeal ripped from your throat as his head plunged in as deep as it could go, to the hilt, pushing innards out of his way to fit, and you felt the ache in your teeth.  

“Coulda been nice n’ slow,” he snarled, tight-jawed.

He hunched over you as he pulled your hips out to unsheathe himself halfway, before yanking you back onto him, hole pulled so tight around him you could feel his heartbeat in your fragile skin. 

“Woulda got you warmed up. Nah, wanted to rush it, did you?” 

I’m sorry I’m sorry I’m sorry — babbling and tearful, slurred in panic — pleading like you had angered God, because you had. 

“S’alright, cub,” he murmured, leaning back and hucking up a lump of saliva, spitting it straight down where your cunt met the base of his cock, and it landed square on your clit. “My fault for makin’ you wait so long, eh?” 

He let go of your hips, hands sliding to the core of you — pressed his left thumb into the top of your slit and pulled the skin upward, uncovering your puffy clit and exposing it to the torrid air. 

Your head rocked back into the wool on the floor when he smeared over your vulnerable clit with the pads of two fingers, gliding frictionlessly by virtue of your slick and his spit. You exhaled with a shrill moan, and you bucked your hips to chase his touch, then yelped in pain when his cock jammed into your liver. 

“Easy,” he chuckled at you, deep and throaty, “don’t hurt yourself.” 

Your hands clutched at the wool on the floor in fists, clumps of it knotted between your fingers, as your spine arched into him — what was once a stabbing pain softened to a throb, his attention on your clit analgesic, and your pussy unwinded around the cock warming itself inside you. 

“Tha’s more like it,” he hummed, as you splayed yourself open for him, grunting as he felt your pussy fluttering around the length of him.

You were already close to the brink before he had even touched you, and it did not take him long to work you up to the edge — your moans turned shaky and high-pitched, panting, moving your hips so you could feel him skewered inside you, and everything flooded in at once—

He bit down on a groan as you came, walls of your cunt constricting around his cock, a tourniquet, tightening in the shockwaves of the orgasm that wracked through you viciously enough to leave you concussed. 

“There y’go, cubbie,” he grunted, offering you no clemency, not a beat to catch your breath as he hooked his hands under your thighs and lifted them into the air before pressing them into your chest. “That’ll make it easier.” 

You cried as he plunged his cock into you, folding you in half until your knees touched the floor by your head, and you could feel his cock in your ribcage. 

He grunted and groaned like a bear, pulling back his hips to reel out his cock before bottoming out with a clap of his hips on your rear, reaming you open with each thrust. 

You had no room to squirm, held so firmly to the floor that you struggled to breathe, and he fucked right through you as if the head of his cock might reach your throat. You could only try and take it, biting down on pained yelps each time he pistoned into you, bludgeoning your cervix enough to bruise it.  

You were not suffering in vain, though. 

The pain was salvific, martyrdom for a cause — him. His pleasure was yours because you owed it to him. You owed him everything, your enlightenment, your happiness, your body, your soul.

Went dizzy with rapture at the thought of his cock impaling you so deeply, of him coming in the depths of you, of his seed implanting in your womb so that you could have him inside you and a part of you forever. So that you could give him the gift that nobody else was worthy of giving him, because you were special. You were important. 

He grunted as much in your ear, breathy and angry and hazy with pleasure; my special girl. Fuck, cubbie, you feel so good. Tryin’ not to break you in half, cubbie. Tryin’ so hard, my good girl, special girl. Gonna give me my baby, aren’t you, cub? I’ll fuck you like this every day until you do—

You watched him in devoted awe once you were able to keep your eyes open — vein bulging in his forehead, burning red in his cheeks, eyes a stormy grey in the darkness of the room. How his brows curled as he chased a final rut, fucking right into your diaphragm, and he pushed all the air out of you as he pressed you into the floor. 

“Fuck,” he groaned, frayed and broken as it rended from his chest, and his head tumbled from his shoulders. “Keep still, cub — fuckin’ hell.” 

You felt his cock lurching in the security of your pussy, his come pumping in surges directly against your cervix, so much of it that you could feel it in your belly and taste it on the back of your tongue. You wondered if he had injected it directly into your womb through sheer pressure alone, and you hoped it would settle there, meeting the egg that had awaited his arrival. 

You went glassy-eyed as you imagined it, his come taking, swelling and swelling inside you until it was a baby — heaven sent, the perfect amalgamation of you and him — him him him — you couldn’t fathom something so immaculate existing in the world with you. You were sure his baby would outgrow you, viviparous, would burst through your skin and emerge a fully grown person, as deific and faultless as him. 

Selfishly, you imagined it not taking. That he had timed it incorrectly, that his sperm had hunted for your egg and was found wanting — and he’d have to fuck you again, like he promised he would. Again and again, ejaculating in the core of you until your insides had become more him than yourself, body completely usurped by him, organs and all. 

You gasped, shaken out of your come-drunk reverie when he pinned your ankles together with a single hand, straightening out your legs. 

“John, what—” You squeaked, as he pushed your knees to your chin, and he hunched over so that you could no longer see him past your thighs. 

Almost bit your tongue off when you felt him lick up your slit in a flat swipe, immediately bucking to get him away from your already aching and hypersensitive clit. 

“No, s’too much—” you bleated, whining as his tongue smeared over your clit again, and the shock made your brain short-circuit. 

“I know, I know, cubbie—” he hushed, wrangling you until you stilled, and you felt his breath on your inflamed skin, “—it’s important, helps it take, love. Won’t take long, just be a good girl—”

You cried as he sucked your clit into his mouth, knee knocking against your chin, air squished out of your lungs as he folded you in half on the sheepskins. 

But you did as he said, because you were a good girl. Let him suckle on your swollen clit until it was sore, lapping at you with the fervour of a bear hunting honey in a beehive — still felt the flood of his come sitting high in your cunt, pooling against your cervix as he held your legs in the air, and it threatened to pour out of you with every constriction of your pussy. 

“Please—” you wailed, aimless in your begging, because whatever you wanted he had given it to you and then some. 

His hands dug into the flesh of your thighs, keeping himself steady more than you, and you climbed back towards your apogee with a sob and a held breath — released it all at once as he laved his tongue over your pulsing clit, and you came hard enough that you felt yourself begin to black out, such a lack of oxygen in your brain that your vision turned glittery at the edges. 

“J-Jonathan, ah, stop!—” You begged, teary and desperate, and only when you kicked haphazardly into the air did he release the suction on your clitoris and conclude his torment with a chaste kiss on your slit. 

He straightened out with a satisfied sigh, rough and gurgling from his chest, gently lowering your legs and laying them softly on the wool beneath you. 

He planted kisses up the length of you; on your hip, on your belly, on your breast, on your collarbone; crawling up your body until he landed on his back beside you with a whumph. With his expansive hands he scooped you up, and you gave no protest, floppy and exhausted to the point of debilitation — he lay you down on his chest, head balanced between his pectorals, and you settled in with a ragged exhale. 

“Such a good girl,” he murmured into the top of your head as he draped his arms over you, petting your skin wherever his hands landed. “Brave little cub.” 

You deflated, dissolving into him with a pent breath as your eyes fluttered shut, and you could have stayed there, like that, forever. 

He pressed a loving kiss into your hair, languidly stroking your shoulder, and you wondered if your mother was looking for you. 

this fic somehow tripled in length as i was writing it lol. anyway here's the pinterest board for it. <3

[julia4today]

Everything You Touch; masterlist

simon "ghost" riley x fem!reader | originally known as "soft spot" | read on AO3 | pinterest board

Simon Riley lives a fine life. Even despite his gruesome past and his bleak present fighting as a soldier in every corner of the world, he's content with what he has. His small apartment and his weekly visits to the bank might not mean much, but he wouldn't trade it for the world. Except, he finds his world turning upside down when he finds you, his favorite bank teller, battered and torn to shreds by your abusive boyfriend. He suddenly realizes that there's not much in the world that he wouldn't trade if it means he gets to hold you close. But Simon forgets that his hands aren't clean, and everything he touches always ends up stained with blood in the end.

a/n: please heed the warnings on each chapter; overall; angst/hurt/comfort; whump; strangers to lovers; domestic violence

Chapter One Chapter Two Chapter Three Chapter Four Chapter Five Chapter Six Chapter Seven Chapter Eight Chapter Nine Chapter Ten Chapter Eleven Chapter Twelve Chapter Thirteen

extras:

simon and reader fanart by @iluvcove

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[julia4today]

kiss the skin that crawls; masterlist

john price x fem!reader | the surrogate au | read on AO3 | pinterest board

Living in an old cottage on the fringes of nowhere and somewhere, you find yourself strapped for cash, and in desperate need for repairs. When you come across an online post of a same sex couple searching for a surrogate, you decide to take up their offer after seeing the weighty compensation they present. What you don't realize is that the sperm donor enjoys doing things the old fashioned way, and you grow closer to him than you ever knew you wanted to.

a/n: while i plan on keeping this anthology very light and fluffy (an oddity compared to my other works) please heed any content warnings on the chapters as the story progresses, just in case!

help wanted terms and conditions signatory response required on hold actionable request [early access]

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[julia4today]

omg.

kiss the skin that crawls

john price x fem!reader | the surrogate au | masterlist

part one: help wanted

It starts with the shattering of iron. 

Manmade structures can only withstand the test of time for so long before nature swallows what was once hers. Arms growing, invading, reclaiming what was stolen. You’re very much aware that you are the problem as you stand in your bathroom, eyes glaring at your clogged shower drain, yet you only pity yourself. 

Tree roots, the plumber says. Common with these old houses, an old cottage just on the fringes of nowhere and somewhere, something that was bequeathed to you when your granny passed. Its charm is quaint, though far from opulent, you took it in a heartbeat, excited to start your life as a true adult. Yet, after all these years, you’ve yet to find a partner to settle down with, or a job that pays you well enough to travel the world, and now you’re footed with a bill that reminds you just what it means to be an adult. 

You pick up more hours at work—as many as you can from a remote position, anyway. Tapping away on your computer, trying not to shiver too much from your drafty windows, you chip away at the cost bit by bit. Eating away decay. Willing it away in an attempt to have your dream home. You tear down the floral wallpaper in your office and coat it with a shade of green that reminds you of old copper—a patina that lingers on your fingertips—all while pretending that the bathroom sink isn’t leaking half your wells worth of water. You pretend that your drops in the ocean make a difference; a ripple large enough to feel. 

Of course, something else shatters. 

Ancient windows crack. The gap between the front door and its frame is too big. Electricity and gas blows through your bank account worse than groceries. You’ve cut your hands on the logs you tried to chop for the fireplace. When winter bleeds into spring and summer, the heat is unbearable—stuck in a furnace that cooks you, tender flesh and all, you are dying in this home. Alone, working to fix every chip that cracks from the stones that build your house; you need something more. A breakthrough, a promotion, a favor. 

Salvation presents itself to you on your third hour of browsing online forums and social media for odd jobs. Mind rotten from pyramid schemes and near slave labor, you almost miss the post entirely. Her name is Kate Laswell, and she has—perhaps—the oddest job of them all; a need for a surrogate for her and her wife. 

Initially, your eyes gloss over the post. Pregnancy is exhausting, and with the state your home is in, the last thing you need to do is get pregnant—lumbering around, swollen like a balloon, attempting to make renovations on your dilapidating cottage. If you were at any other time in your life—more settled, steadier—maybe you’d seriously consider it. 

All your qualms dissipate the moment you read the foot of the post. 

Compensation starts at £100,000.

The zeros are almost more than you can count—more than you can comprehend. It burns into your eyes, urging your fingers to twitch. How anyone could afford to pay this much is beyond you, but you suppose children are expensive either way; certainly it’s nothing to this woman and her wife. 

With that type of money, you wouldn’t even have to do the renovations yourself. 

After an evening of deliberating, you blindly decide to shoot off a private message to Kate Laswell. Her profile is odd—void, and blank. No pictures, hardly any posts. You tell yourself it’s likely a scam, and you’ll receive some sketchy link back from her during some odd hour in the night, if you even get anything in response at all. Yet when you wake in the morning, that pictureless account has sent you a message in response: 

We would like to speak with you in person. When can you meet? 

Stupidly, you meet with Kate and Lottie Laswell the following weekend deep in the heart of London in the cozy embrace of a coffee shop that does nothing to settle your nerves. Caffeine is thick in the air, nestling in the weaving of your clothes, sticking to your hair and skin. Though you’ve never seen Kate before, you recognize her instantly. Her stern, straightforward gaze beams at you from beneath her mousy brown fringe the moment you walk through the door, prompting you to awkwardly wave in greeting before she motions you over to the table. 

If Kate Laswell is the moon, then her wife, Lottie, is the sun. Her bright blonde hair scintillates, and it only grows in intensity in the sunlight that seeps through the perforated curtains drawn over the window on her right. Pale blue eyes framed by florid cheeks crease as you take your seat across from them, and you note the way she buzzes in her seat, hands politely folded on the table, manicured nails tapping against the wood grain at her fingertips. She tilts her head to the side, soaking you in, and her smile only widens. 

“It’s so nice to meet you.” Her voice is pitchy—draws long and soft. She’s American, you realize. Southern, you think. Blinking in surprise, you return the gesture. 

Though Kate is kind and cordial, she is much more business oriented than her wife. Once curt introductions are out of the way, she gets on with her questions. Her low, even tone and keen eyes have you sweating—this feels more like an interrogation than an interview. She asks everything about you, prodding the deepest part of you, poking your skin just to see how far she can push before you wince. Her questions about your health history and sex life come blunt, and it pairs oddly with Lottie’s airy giggles, but as the questioning drones on and you see more nods of approval from Kate, you find your nerves slowly mending themselves back together again. 

Eventually the questions fade into something softer—easier to spit out. Tastier to swallow. They ask you about your life; the hobbies you partake in and the work you do. How your family is, and if you’ve been well. You tell them about the garden you attempt to keep in the flowerbeds lining the cottage, and the administrative tasks you do and the office you just painted. You try to avoid the topic of your home—the isolation, the exhaustion, the yearning—so you slap your life with buttercream frosting and pray it doesn’t melt under the heat of the conversation.

They indulge you when you ask questions about themselves, too. Lottie stays at home—has been dreaming of a child to dote after for ages—but she bakes for shelters and spends time volunteering at their local retirement home. It fits her, you think. Her bubbly attitude, the bright sheen in her pale eyes; a literal princess among mongrels. The patience of a saint, but with a wit sharper than most tongues you’ve seen.

“I work for an intelligence agency,” is all Kate says when the conversation points towards her. It’s stiff—firm enough for you to not question any further. 

“So, what made you interested in being our surrogate?” Lottie cuts in, saving you the grief of backpedaling. 

“Oh,” you chirp. Your explanation gets caught in your throat as a rosy heat settles at the base of your neck. Embarrassment. Evil, vile—you hate begging. Crawling, groveling. “If I’m being honest, really, it was… well, the payment…”

Kate nods in agreement, hands curling around her coffee mug, though the liquid has long since gone cold. “There’s no shame in that. It’s a big favor that we’re asking for, and we have the means to compensate accordingly.” 

She reads you like a book, and despite all your flaws, welcomes you. It comforts you knowing how strictly professional this is—you have no skin in the game. Nothing to hold on to. You’re simply being a good person. Doing a good deed. Helping their dreams come to fruition. In turn, they help you with yours—an equal exchange. 

“So, what made the two of you come to England?” you prompt, leaning back in your seat. “Sorry, it’s just that I’ve noticed the accents. Did you two move here recently?” 

“What, oh no,” Lottie giggles, hand floating in the air, waving as if pushing away the very notion. “Oh no, I don’t think I could ever leave Georgia.” 

“The donor lives here,” Kate explains simply. “Figured it would be easier to coordinate with a surrogate who lived nearby.” 

You nod, but it’s not enough to knock the confusion free from your brain. It’s visible on your face—your question. How you place two and two together; why would you need to be close to the donor? 

Before your mind can wander too far into that hole, Kate interjects. “We like meeting everyone in person. To ensure that it’s done right.” Then, her hands release her mug. “But he’s an individual I’ve worked with several times before. He’s a good man. Someone I trust.” 

“I imagine trust doesn’t come easy for someone in your line of work,” you quip. 

Kate cracks the first real smile you think you’ve seen from her this entire interview. “You’d be right.” 

“Oh, John’s such a great man. He’s been nothin’ short of sweet to us,” Lottie chimes in. As if suddenly remembering something, she begins to rustle through her purse until she successfully fishes out her phone. “We’ve been staying in a rental while we’re here—a beautiful thing—but we had some issues with the sink and cupboards and look! Fixed them right up for us, good as new!” 

She turns the phone towards you, revealing the kitchen and attached dining room that lies in their rental. Scrolling through a few pictures, you spot the before and after of their mini house project, and you try not to turn green with envy. Unhinged cupboards quickly screwed back into place, water damage mopped clean and patched up, good as new—almost every issue that’s been plaguing you in your cottage has come and gone within a blink of an eye for them, all while you’ve struggled to gather the means and the skills to bestow such a fortune like that upon yourself. 

Then, you see it—

—him. 

There, in the back, leaning against the granite countertops, blue jeans sitting on his hips, this donor—this John—wipes his hands off on a tea towel with a tight lipped smile. Thick patches of dark, coarse hair line his arms in hatch marks, thickening towards the swell of his forearms as he dries his thick fingers off with cotton. His head is lowered as if in prayer, crows feet on display, obscuring the color of his eyes, but you see the way his trimmed beard lines his jaw and upper lip, how it blends into the inky locks of his hair. 

He’s a large man—you note the way his iliac crest rests on top of the counter rather than beside or below it, a towering creature with a soft smile that stands out against his broad frame. Swelling biceps, flexing fingers—

“Such a beautiful rental,” you comment before your mind can wander any further. 

The sharp corners of Lottie’s cupid’s bow flattens as she clicks her phone off, lips curling into a near-smirk. “We’re having dinner tomorrow night at our place with John. Just a little get together is all, but we’d love it if you joined. Might be easier to flesh out all the details with everyone together. I promise I’ll cook you up the best chicken pot pie you’ve ever tasted.” 

Something tickles the back of your mind. It unsettles, wiggles, writhes where it shouldn’t. You feel how it crawls around on the inside of your cranium, slices through your brain and prods at the back of your tongue—it’s incessant. It urges you to speak before you can even think of the words. Meeting with donors—having the donors meet together... 

Then your mind thinks of that number. The zeros make your head spin, jumbles it up enough that you don’t even bother to question the circumstance or terms and conditions before you’re nodding. 

“Dinner sounds perfect.”

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[julia4today]

Knocked Up | 2

— pairing: simon ‘ghost’ riley x fem!reader 

— warnings/info: 18+ only | Accidental Pregnancy AU; (unprotected) sex/smut; premature ejaculation; hurt/comfort; angst; humor; jealousy; teammates to lovers; cussing; pregnancy; (most probably) military and medical inaccuracies

Pining for your friend leads to a boozy night and a terribly life-changing consequence.

 ᥫ᭡ masterlist

Five weeks later... | June 24th, 2025

It started this morning―excruciating nausea combined with hot flushes that wake you up even before your already disrespectfully early alarm clock goes off.  

A stomach bug, you tell yourself, which is a terrible realization for someone who suffers from emetophobia, and you end up popping a colourful arrangement of pills into your mouth like any Special Forces operator you know would―a nice recommendation of Jade―and you start your day with a steaming cuppa from the mess hall that tastes more of the plastic cup than Earl Grey and a cheap fag borrowed from some rookie that you passed on the way to your office. 

It’s noon, in the middle of a briefing for an upcoming recon mission, when your unusual queasiness becomes too much to ignore. 

The nausea remains persistent. It clings to your stomach like your damp undershirt clings to your feverish skin. The fluorescent lights are too bright, burning your suddenly overly sensitive eyes, and the gum you’ve been chewing to keep yourself from throwing up, is starting to taste awfully metallic on your tongue, making everything worse. 

After breathing through another urge to gag while your mouth keeps filling with sour saliva, you can’t take it anymore. 

“Captain!” 

Your chair scrapes over the linoleum floor as you stand abruptly, the sound uncomfortable and sudden enough to interrupt the captain’s monologue at the front of the room. Clearing your throat awkwardly, you accidentally swallow your gum. 

“Cap’n Price... ugh... sir,” you press forward, fingers curling around your thumbs, nails digging into your sweaty palms as you clench your hands into fists to distract yourself from the rumbling in your stomach. “I’m sorry, sir, but I need to step outside a moment.” 

The room goes silent with several heads turning around to ogle, their attention snapping to you all at once like a bunch of nosy classmates instead of elite operators, only adding to the sudden rush of anxiousness you’re already experiencing.  

However, one pair in particular―dark and sharp and always assessing with a sniper’s precision―stands out to you, and your lashes flutter briefly when you make eye contact with him across the tables in a way that’s not purely professional for the first time in five weeks. It’s almost imperceptible behind his mask and the black, greasy paint covering his pale skin, but you do notice the way his gaze softens with something akin to concern, and your heart gives a strange flutter in return. 

There’s still that artificial distance between you and Simon since you’ve snuck out on him the morning after, but in this moment, it doesn’t feel like he hates you as much as you assumed he does. 

“Sergeant?” Captain Price’s deep voice coaxes you back to the present, his bushy, furrowed brows making the wrinkles around his eyes stand out while he gives you a quick once-over, his gaze narrowed, obviously picking up on your hazy eyes and sickly state. He’s rarely seen you not well―even after severe blood loss you’ve managed to crack jokes and one-liners in the past. 

And just like that, the same palpable distance snaps right back into place once you break eye with him, your gaze meeting your captain’s instead. 

Then Price makes a vague gesture towards the door. “Do us all a favour and go see a medic while yer at it, aye? That’s an order. You’re dismissed.” 

The way from HQ to the infirmary on base feels like a trek through unknown territory and several climate zones as you drag yourself through paved streets on wobbly legs, arms hugging your shivering and feverish form tightly while you try your darndest not to hurl right in front of some passing soldiers before staggering through the blinding corridors of the all too familiar MTF. 

A pretty picture you must be―one of Captain Price’s brilliant task force operators wandering the base like a zombie straight out of The Walking Dead. Even the low groans and grunts you’re letting out under your breath fit the role. 

Your heart jolts with relief as you notice that the door to Jade’s office is cracked open. The door reading her rank and name in bold letters―Capt. J. Antara MD. 

The soft sound of her voice is drowned out by the rushing in your ears and the sour taste of saliva filling your mouth again while your heart thuds harshly against your ribcage with anxiety and the effort of your oesophagus and throat tightening.  

“Jade―!” 

In a rush, the white door pushes open and slams into the wall while your arms flail, gripping for anything as leverage before you nearly stumble into the examination table in the corner. You can barely hear her gasp and call out your name as you’re slumping onto your knees and bending over the small waste bin, body tensing instinctively as you retch and vomit loudly. 

Fat, salty tears are streaming down your face as you empty the remnants of last night’s supper into the bin for what feels like an eternity while Jade is quick to kneel next to you after closing the door; her palm warm and soothing to your trembling body as she gently rubs and strokes your back. 

“Jade... ‘m dyin’,” you choke out in between pathetic sobs, dramatic as ever. She snorts, still rubbing your back. “Nonsense.” You retch again. “Make it stop!” 

You spit and sniffle, desperate to get rid of the taste of vomit, and Jade’s presence only leaves your side momentarily as she picks up her water bottle from her desk, unscrewing it before offering it to you. 

“Drink up, darling.” 

As you sit back on your haunches as soon as your stomach seems more settled, you take the offered bottle with shaky hands and a runny nose while the snap of rubber gloves brings your attention back to your friend. 

“Really?” you ask hoarsely, playfully offended as Jade adjusts the blue gloves over her nimble fingers. She cocks an eyebrow while she eyes your feverish face. “Are you hungover?” 

You scoff, lips pursing as you shake your head slowly. “Then yes, really.” Jade nods curtly. 

Once she manages to help you up onto the examination table, you’re still quivering, alternating between hot and cold flushes, utterly drained of your energy, wiping your face and gurgling with water. 

“So,” she starts as she grabs a clipboard and clicks the butt on her pen, putting down your general information on the patient info sheet. “Tell me about your symptoms.”  

“I’m sorry for barging in here like some bloody animal,” you croak out instead, legs swinging while your cold hands are tucked between the rubber mattress and your thighs. “I hope I didn’t interrupt anything.” You sound sheepish, uncomfortable, and you know that Jade can hear it. 

Now that you’re less nauseous and more aware of your surroundings, a different strange feeling settles in your gut―awkwardness. You know you haven’t been the best of friends in the past few weeks. 

“It... err... it’s alright. Don’t worry about it,” she makes a dismissive gesture with her hand, keeping her eyes on the clipboard before letting out a soft sigh. “I was on the phone with the boutique,” she explains, her voice even and professional, trying her hardest to keep her face neutral. “Made an appointment to try on dresses. It’s a whole―” she makes another gesture with her hand, “thing now that my momma and Kyle’s mum... and his sisters... and my sister... want to come.” 

There’s a pause. You chew on the inside of your cheek, picking up on the frustration in her voice, and knowing Jade only wanted her witness―namely you―present while choosing her wedding dress. You’re not surprised that she’s asked her family members by now. 

Gently, you nudge her shin with the tip of your right combat boot like a puppy testing its limits. “Jade–” 

Her shoulders tense underneath her white coat. “Don’t. It’s okay.” But you shake your head, even if she refuses to look at you right now. “No, it’s not. I’m so fucking sorry for being... so distant again.” 

“No, I know. I get it.” Finally, her long lashes flutter as she glances up into your eyes, her own glistening with unshed tears. “Thank you.” 

“I swear I’m gonna do better. I–I wanna be there for you... and for Gaz.” She wipes at the corner of her eye and you nudge her shin again, cracking a crooked smile. “It’s my fault you two ended up together after all, eh? ‘S my responsibility that everything goes smoothly until you’ve tied the bloody knot.” 

“Oh, shut up you.” Jade rolls her eyes in faux annoyance, but her hazel eyes shine with mirth. “Now tell me why you just threw up into my bloody bin before I change my mind and send you over to Doc Bryan.” 

That makes your nose wrinkle dramatically. “Ugh, stop that right now. You know I won’t let anyone else near me but you―especially not that bloody tosser.” 

Jade chuckles quietly, relishing in the fact that she can still use his name alone to get under you skin so easily. “Then be a good little soldier and answer my questions.” 

And so, you do. 

Nausea, vomiting (obviously), fatigue, light sensitivity, hot flushes, shivers― 

“No diarrhoea?” 

You shake your head, legs swinging again. “Negative,” you answer obediently before kissing your teeth, peeking at the clipboard as Jade keeps scribbling too many words on the sheet. “Now gimme the good stuff an–” 

“When was the last time you had your period?” 

Her eyes flicker up after a moment of silence from you while you simply stare at her, frozen. 

“Well?” You exhale through your nose, spine straightening up as you begin to count mentally. “Like... three, no, four–four weeks ago.” Your mouth goes dry again. A pin drops inside your brain, right into the pit of your stomach as nausea overcomes you again―more forcefully this time.  

“Okay, uh–” Jade’s eyes scan the paper while you’re slowly starting to panic, blood running cold while the pulse in your neck begins to throb. The mental image of soft brown eyes staring at you, flash through your mind; the phantom touch of rough, brawny hands on your hips causing you to jolt on the spot. 

“Hey, don’t panic now, okay?” Jade’s cheeks dimple while her plump, glossy lips pull into her soft trademark smile. “It’s just a standard question.” 

But you’re already spiralling, inhaling the sterile air of her office with sharp, shallow breaths. “No... No, you don’t–” Your voice cracks and you clear your throat to keep some bit of composure while your fingers curl into the fabric of your cargos. 

“You don’t understand, Jade.” You’re pleading now as if she could make the possibility of that go away.  

Her forehead wrinkles as Jade regards you with nothing but confusion, clutching the clipboard to her chest. You surely would’ve told her about any one night stand you’ve had―oh, if it hadn’t been for the sudden radio silence in the past weeks.  

“Sweetheart, you can’t be pregnant unless you had unprotected sex, you know that.” 

Your face drops even more and for a moment you simply stare at each other, until her eyes widen and her lips part with a shocked gasp.  

“Wait–What?!” And suddenly, all professionalism vanishes despite the location, the rank and doctor title stitched onto her white cloak; doe-eyes becoming bigger with each squeaked question. “When? With WHO?!” 

You bite your lip hard, contemplating if you could simply lie, but Jade is persistent―and nosy. 

“Who?” 

“You’re not allowed to ask that as my doctor.” You’re almost smug to know that fact. 

She frowns, huffing. “Girl, I’m entitled to know as your bloody friend.” 

“Ah... shite.” Her frown deepens, half-teasing/half-serious, eyes narrowing dangerously. You owe her this and you know you can’t do this by yourself. Exhaling a long, heavy sigh, you answer: “Well... there’s just... just one man who could possibly–” 

Thinking those words are enough to make you gag and you swiftly clamp your hand over your mouth while Jade takes a swift step backwards, already pushing the waste bin in position between your dangling legs. 

“It’s Johnny, innit?” 

You burp in surprise, and it smells awful as you glare at her through wet lashes, still breathing through the nauseous. “Fuck no,” you mutter, shoulders slumping in defeat. “It’s... It’s Simon.” 

“GHOST?!” The clipboard clatters to the floor, you flinch and Jade hurries to pick it up, muttering curses under her breath. “Ghost?” she repeats, calmer this time, as she steps closer again, sensing your distress. 

“When–” 

“The night we returned from that mission in Rio,” you remind her, twiddling your thumbs nervously. “I got... fuck.” You rub your hands over your face, both willing away and trying to remember the memories of that particular night. “I got absolutely pissed... because of Johnny, and I just–” 

“You ended up sleeping with Simon?” You wrap your arms around yourself, rubbing your arms self-soothingly as you nod, feeling all those suppressed emotions bubbling up in your throat at once, adding to the ongoing sickness. “I was frustrated... and sad, and he–he was just there, and he was so–so fuckin’ nice to me, Jade.” 

You only realize that you’re crying when Jade pulls a tissue from her pocket, shushing you softly before she pushes the bin aside and steps between your thighs to pull you into a hug. 

“Hey, shhh, it’s okay.” The light pressure of her lips on your hair is enough to make you cling onto her for more comfort. “So, what? You’re dating Simon now; that’s Johnny’s bloody loss. I just wish you would’ve told me sooner, you dafty.” 

That makes your ears perk up before you let out a shuddering breath. “I’m not... Simon.” She pulls back, holding you by the shoulders as she processes your statement. “What?” 

Wiping your nose with the tissue, you can’t bear to meet her eyes. “I snuck out the next morning, because I was scared, and confused, and–and fuckin’ ashamed, and–” You shrug half-heartedly. “He never approached me, and we never talked about it.” 

“You two been acting like nothing happened for, what, like a month now? Seriously?”  

The tone in her voice isn’t accusing, but she does sound like a disappointed mother who taught you better than that, and the urge to roll your eyes like a petulant teenager, itches behind your eye sockets. 

“Seriously,” you confirm reluctantly. “I mean... he’s not known to be the most... communicative bloke, is he?” 

Jade tuts, cocking a perfectly plucked eyebrow. “Neither are you.” That makes you cringe internally. “Yeah, I deserved that.” She hums in agreement, but there is no malice or grudge in her eyes, and you can’t help but feel thankful for that. 

“So, what’s next? Am I–” You swallow thickly, the aftertaste of vomit still thick and sour on your tongue. “Calm down. We don’t know anything yet. It could still be a stomach bug or food poisoning. Just because you had unprotected sex once doesn’t mean he managed to knock you up, okay?” 

You nod tersely, teeth clenching with ongoing tension despite her reassuring words. 

There is a pause as she puts the clipboard down on her neat desk before she walks over to one of her cabinets while you observe, thoughts running a mile a minute, and making you woozy. 

“I was ovulating that day.” The remark makes her freeze, holding the white cabinet doors open as she glances over at you with a blank expression. “You’re really not making this case any better, love.”  

Less than fifteen minutes later, you’re sitting in the armchair in front of Jade’s desk, holding the life-changing answer in your hands; unblinking and rigid, as if you could simply will away the second pink line if you stare at it hard enough. 

Now blissfully numb―no more trembling hands, no more nausea, no more racing heartbeat―your head feels like it’s filled with cotton. 

The only sound you register being the clock ticking on the wall, loud and taunting, shoving the fact that a life is now growing inside you―with every passing second―right into your face. The thought makes you sick again. 

Eventually, Jade speaks up softly from behind her desk: “You’re in shock.” 

“I’m pregnant.” Voice is barely a whisper; afraid it will become unbearably real if you say it any louder. “Jade, I can’t do this.” Your eyes finally tear away from the pregnancy test resting in your palms and you meet hers. “I’m fucking pregnant.” 

The piece of plastic clatters on her desk as you throw it haphazardly before leaning back in your seat, pressing the heels of your palms against your eyes with a groan while Jade sits with her legs crossed, hands folded neatly on top of her knee, radiating nothing but calmness as she ponders.  

“You’ll need to see a gynaecologist soon to confirm your pregnancy. I can make an appointment for you here at the clinic and–” 

“No,” you interrupt her, shaking your head as you sit up straight again, forcing yourself to recover and function. “I don’t want anyone on base to know.”  

“What? But you need to see a gynaecologist, love,” Jade insists, brows furrowing into a worried frown before she adds: “And you should also tell Simon.” 

It’s like the floor shifts beneath your boots while you’re slowly unravelling at your seams―everything you’ve worked so terribly hard for falling out of place because of one foolish mistake.  

Not an enemy’s bullet, not a miscalculation, a teammate’s error or insubordination―real threats you’ve feared since joining the army. No, you let something mundane like personal matters cloud your judgment and ruin your life. 

Clutching the armrests, your nails dig into the thin leather cushion, and neither Jade speaking your name nor the rhythmic knocking at her office door manages to snap you out of your internal spiral. 

When the door to her office flings open, Jade is about ready to bark curses at the intruder, until she sees her fiancée’s tall frame and toothy grin as he struts into the room like he owns it, clad in his fatigues and combat boots. 

“Have you ever heard of knocking, Sergeant Garrick?” Jade hisses half-heartedly, relaxing back into her seat as Kyle ducks his head sheepishly and closes the door behind him.  

“It’s your lunch break,” he remarks, tapping a finger on his watch before his eyes dart over to you curiously, still slumped in your seat. Jade clears her throat and shoots him a look as soon as his gaze meets hers. “Hey, I just wanted to see my wife, alright?” He shrugs nonchalantly as if his words didn’t just cause her heart to flutter like a hummingbird's wings in her chest. 

However, when Jade opens her mouth with a witty retort tingling on the tip of her tongue, she notices how Kyle’s gorgeous brown eyes suddenly widen comically as his attention shifts to her desk. 

In a blink of an eye and with the reflexes of an elite operator, he snatches up the pregnancy test and clutches it in his gloved hands while his chest heaves with deep yet shaky breaths. 

Your head snaps up, heart dropping into your queasy stomach while your eyes flicker between your best friend and your teammate with rapidly spiking anxiety.  

And all logic vanishes at once as he stares down at the little piece of plastic in his hands―just like you did mere moments ago. 

“Kyle–” Jade jumps to her feet, nearly losing her balance as her office chair pushes back with force. She takes a swift step towards him. “Kyle, I can explain!” 

“Baby, are you pregnant?!” he exclaims, and you shrink in your seat, utterly speechless as guilt and fear claw up your spine, causing your neck to break out in another sweat. Causing even more problems is the last thing you want, especially not for them―not for Jade, the one friend who has been nothing but supportive, understanding, and kind to you. 

But when your open your mouth to clarify this terrible misunderstanding, no words dare come out and before you know it, Kyle has pulled Jade into his arms. 

“Fuckin’ hell, baby,” he mutters through panting breaths before kissing the crown of her dark hair. “Fuck! I can’t believe it. I’m so fuckin’ scared and happy right now. I’m gonna be a dad!” 

Your lips part in silent shock, and you bring one clammy hand up to cover your mouth as Kyle lets out a loud, boyish laugh. Jade turns her head as he keeps hugging her tightly, and she peeks at you with her cheek squished against his chest―a look of pure bafflement and plea on her face. 

Your heart pounds in your chest. “Uh... uhm...” And you clear your dry throat. “Gaz?” 

[julia4today]

not a question but your ghoap kitties are so cute and they made my day completely! hope to see some more of them if you get the feeling

Happy you like them anon! I'll most likely draw more in the future! I really love cats lol

Also, I just realised I haven't posted the kitties on here yet so here they are 😺

[julia4today]

y'all want a fic?

is simon really trying to do better for his bird? or his he still the same deadbeat husband he portrayed himself to be?

(simon riley x exwife!reader)

"drop it, mactavish." a firm order. an edge of warning to his sergeant. his sergeant, who was always a curious one. interested in whatever simon riley was doing, or where he was. and unfortunately john "soap" mactavish did not drop it. he kept pawing at the inners of ghost. extracting what little information he could find and compiling it until he had his pièce de résistance.

"you got a family, lieutenant?" the room went quiet. no more grunting of men lifting weights, no more slamming bodies on mats, just the dead silence. johnny wasn't one to shy away from the attention given to him, especially if that attention was from his lieutenant, but right now...

simon's face was red, you could feel the heat radiating off of him. johnny of course couldn't see this, but the pure blind rage that wafted towards john from simon was palpable.

"no." simon stands up to his full height. the slight bend to his posture gone. if you were close enough, you could hear the creak in his joint and the pained groan he exhaled as his back stretched to it's full potential.

an audible thud is heard as simon takes the back of johnnys neck in his large hand. "and i told you to drop it, didn't i, lieutenant?"

the squeeze placed on johnny's neck was a sight to see, you could tell it was painful. the rest of the gym tried their best to continue on with their workouts, but the sight of the rambunctious sergeant being in a near death situation was something they couldn't pry their eyes away from. "yes, sir." johnny's words interrupted by his labored breathing. all he could do was hold eye contact with the angry blue eyes staring at him.

with one last scrutinizing stare from the lieutenant, simon brushed past him. his hulking figure stalked through the gym, cutting his workout short. small whispers were heard throughout the gym. after a minute everybody returned, all slightly more on edge than originally.

anybody in that locker room before simon walked in scattered before he even stepped foot inside. "my bird." a pained voice sounded from him. one he hadn't heard in a while. he pulls out his phone. almost 7am. maybe she's awake.

"what."

"hi baby..."

"i'm not your baby anymore simon. leave us be, please. i don't need to hear your begging."

he didn't talk for a while. 'she hates me' he used to think. but he doesn't think so anymore. he knows so.

"hellooo? going to answer? you know i'll hang up on you. honestly i don't even know why i haven't blocked you-"

"just calling to ask about the kids."

"oh..." his bird breathes out. almost confused. for a moment she was surprised. he rarely asks about them anymore, at least since the court hearing. the court case where you had won full custody since his job was so dangerous and required him to be away from home so often. "well, amelia is fine. she recently got glasses. seems she's got my mothers vision aswell."

"bloody brilliant. and charlie?"

"he's... he's having some trouble at school. at home too." you laugh, although nothing is really funny. your son, charlie, has been getting into it. fights, smoking, drugs. certainly reminds you of simon. of when you two met for the first time.

"just like his old man." simon replied, a distant smugness with an air of melancholy surrounding the call.

"i'm not exactly pleased about your two similarities. let's just hope he doesn't become a deadbeat like his father." a wrong thing to say, but you knew that the second it came out of your mouth. and in a way you both knew this. so you sat, in silence. until eventually you couldn't take it.

"you could. you know, if you have time off soon you could-" you interrupt yourself, almost hard to get the words to leave your throat. "you could come see them. maybe talk some sense into charlie's head. have him see where he'll end up if he doesn't get his act together."

his coarse breath comes through the receiver. you can practically hear the disbelief. he hadn't seen his kids more than 6 times since the trial. and that was years ago. "really?" the response is almost practiced. he had been through this before with you. you'd offer, then back out. because seeing him again may trigger something in you, that you're not ready to face yet.

"yes, that is what i said isn't it?"

a giggle can be heard in the background. he can't hear the television program but he can guess amelia has got some drama on. if that is what 8 year olds like nowadays. god he doesn't even know anymore.

when you were still together he knew everything about amelia. and amelia would just cling to him for hours. she would use him as monkey bars, have him throw her in the air, or push her on the swing sets.

"when? when can i see my kids?"

"you tell me."

beep. beep. beep.

he stares down at his reflection in his now dark phone screen. all he can feel is relief. relief that you didn't cuss him out this time for even suggesting the thought of him seeing his kids. he knows why you do it though. and it was his fault. he just hopes you don't change your mind this time.

i kind of want to write a fic where he has to earn her love back. and i slowly give backstory to like how they met and what he did. would y'all read? cause i'd write it

[julia4today]

johnny loves a pantsuit, what can i say 🤷‍♀️

Because I currently want to quit my job and be a pretty little housewife right now, here’s my thoughts on the 141 and their opinions on the matter

(slight warning for mentions of DV?, breeding kink and housewife kink ahead, as always 18+ MINORS DNI)

Simon would be the least likely to want a housewife. He’s seen what happens to women who have nothing to rely on but their husbands, and whilst he knows he’d never do to you what his father did to his mother, there’s always that niggling voice in the back of his head saying what if. What if he can’t escape his father’s grip, what if he does turn out just like him? Of course he rationalises it to you by saying that if something happened to him, he wants to know you could take care of yourself, even though he knows damn well that he could set you up for life, between his pension and the money he’s stashed by never spending a cent on himself. But he wants you to have something just for yourself, something that couldn’t be taken away by him in any way. But if your job is causing you the slightest amount of stress? He’s the first to tell you to quit. If you want another job you can take your time to find the right one, but he won’t have anything distressing you, even if it’s just a micromanaging boss or tight deadlines.

Controversial opinion but Johnny has a slight preference for a career woman. Nothing against housewives, and he definitely loves seeing you at home by the stove in a pretty little dress telling him dinner’s almost ready, but something about a woman in charge just does it for him (he does love putting a woman on top...and on her back...and on her knees). It turns him on seeing you be confident and capable at work, especially if that job involves giving orders or putting people in their place. Plus it gives his ego a nice boost when he can take that strong independent woman and fuck you absolutely stupid until you can’t even remember your own name. It’s his favourite way to help you de-stress after a bad day. If you want to be a housewife, however...I hope you like kids. Because this man has the biggest breeding kink of them all, and nothing brings it out quite like seeing you being all soft and domestic and taking care of him. Besides, it must be so quiet and lonely when he’s away, wouldn’t it be so much better with a house full of children’s laughter?

Kyle doesn’t care either way. He’s your number one supporter in whatever you do. He’ll let you practice presentations on him and bring you dinner if you’re working late. (Plus both he and Johnny love hearing the office gossip) He’s absolutely got heart eyes listening to you explain some detail about your work. It doesn’t matter what your job is, this man is so proud of you for having it and will brag like hell to anyone who’ll listen. But if you ever wanted to leave your job, he’d still be so supportive. He’s so proud of you for recognising that it was hurting you, and for being strong enough to walk away when everyone else (and society as a whole) tells you you need to have a job to have value. He would do whatever it takes to reassure you that you’re not being a burden, that you don’t have to ‘bring something to the table’ in this relationship – you bring yourself, and that’s enough – in fact most times it’s more than he thinks he deserves. The least he can do is spoil you in return. And he absolutely does. If you want to spend all day on your hobbies, he’s got you – you have all the supplies you could ever dream of (and even some you couldn’t, because he brings back things you’ve never heard of from every deployment). Whatever you want he's 100% behind you (and in front of you, on his knees)

John wouldn’t call himself a feminist (he hates that word. Why does there need to be a special word for what should be obvious?) but he is, for the most part. He’s worked with plenty of women who could leave him in the dust, and sees no difference in a woman or man doing the same job. But you? He wants you at home with nothing to worry your pretty little head over other than what colour manicure to get or how you want to arrange the furniture. Not because he doesn’t think you’re capable of having a job – he knows damn well you could run the whole damn world. But he sees it as his responsibility to look after you, to provide for you, and that extends to everything you could ever want. If he can’t give it to you without you having to lift a finger, then he’s failed as a partner. He puts the fate of the world solely on his own shoulders, and you’re his world, so it makes sense he holds himself to the same rigid standards at home as he does at work. He’ll never admit that he has a raging domesticity kink and wants to fuck you over the kitchen counter wearing nothing but your apron and a pair of heels.

[julia4today]

BRO. the creativity that comes out of people’s heads astonish me

houndtooth

[masterlist]

tags/cw: slow burn, enemies to lovers, kidnapping, torture, references to and later depictions of sexual assault (not by ghost), forced cooperation, bodyguard ghost, eventual smut (see: slow burn), lots and lots of guilt, lore accurate (mostly)

you're the pampered wife of a russian warlord. ghost hunts you down and finds a use for you.

1 - nectar 2 - bloodhound 3 - frostbite 4 - cage 5 - soak 6 - gamble 7 - hunger 8 - instinct 9 - covenant 10 - tactics 11 - domain 12 - scrutiny 13 - comrades 14 - sonder 15 - conversation 16 - brink 17 - wake 18 - supplication ⋆ 19 - herring ⋆ 20 - lamb 21 - epilogue

or [read on ao3]

extras

pinterest board houndtooth tag (lore and asks and stuff)

[julia4today]

EVERYBODY GO READ THIS WHOLE FIC NOW.

Chapter 12: Only you (And you alone)

(Series Masterlist: Divine Violence) (Read on Ao3) (Inspired Playlist)

Series: The Divine Violence - chapter 12: Only you (And you alone)

Wordcount: 4,5k

Pairing: Simon "Ghost" Riley x John "Soap" MacTavish x Gn!Reader

TW: (View masterlist for full series tw and tags) - DEAD DOVE DO NOT EAT, Religious Trauma, PTSD, Anxiety, Cult themes, Flashback heavy, Torture, Manipulation, Murder portrayed as suicide, Panic attack, allusion to self harm,

Description: You remember things best forgotten.

A/N: I've been waiting for this chapter for a long time, I've been wanting to write it almost since I even began this series, which is quite awhile ago now. I'm so happy it's finally written.

[Prev chapter / Next Chapter]

Graham is here.

It's no longer a question whether it's a figment of your imagination. You saw him clear as day. John saw him. He was there, and he's doing his work just like he used to. Possibly even tighter than he used to. This would prove a bigger problem than you anticipated. The first time around the collective wasn't this quick to organize, it took several months, years even. This time around they had something solid already.

For weeks you'd been left with nothing, scratching at the ground for crumbs about the whereabouts of your old mentors, and you knew, where Graham was, Michael wasn't far ahead.

Those familiar faces have haunted you ever since you got out of bed that morning. In every corner, every little shadow you see their eyes watching, you hear their voices whispering chills down your neck. It's only a matter of time before they figure it out, you're here too. It ignites a deep-rooted anger. One you're not even sure is truly yours.

It makes your hands shake when you move the papers around on the table. It's hard to stay focused with how your mind is running. You hadn't even fuelled it properly. It was still working overtime to the point of an exhaustion you couldn't control.

You're pulled out of your own little trance at the sudden laughter of Gaz and John in the kitchen, it mixes well with the cheery music of the radio playing. The sound makes your heart twist, it incites your curiosity and the want to go find the source of their delight grows strong. You resist it nonetheless. There's a strange comfort in knowing that they're always there. You've spent such a long time alone, you forgot how it felt to be surrounded by people that didn't have such ill intentions towards your every action.

It was nice.

You struggle to regain your focus, to refind the anger that made the entirety of your driving force today. Every ounce you try to hold onto deflates by the seconds ticking past, and leaves you hunched over the table of scattered papers. It gives way to the creeping darkness in your mind instead. The part you've been fighting against the entire day.

You've felt it coming on for hours now.

Ever since you woke up really. You've felt off. Wrong. You knew what it was, it's far from the first time and you knew it wouldn't be the last. It's always a slow descent, or perhaps a rise is the more appropriate word to describe your itching torment. It bubbles beneath your skin, crawls throughout your body to find it's way to your throat and grab it tight.

It's hard to ignore when every single one of your senses are focused on it. The panic. The worry. The need for action. Those brief times when you can feel it in your bones that something is fundamentally wrong with the way your brain is wired, when you become all too aware of yourself.

You move a few documented reports aside to pull out the old newspaper article. The centre picture is of Michael, one could even see Graham hanging near the back if you squinted. The grey ink had long since bled from the rough handling. This one was your own. Kept safely hidden until you needed it. You'd thrown it into the pile of necessary evidence to analyse without much suspicion.

The picture itself had been taken on the worst day of your life.

The day when you had been turned into something different, inhuman. He told you that you were above the rest, an authority figure for them to lean on. In reality he put you beneath them all. Something much more akin to a feral animal obedient to only the few.

You were cropped out of the picture on the table, but sure enough in the expanse of the void you were there. Off to the side next to Michael. You're not sure what expression you had made. When people looked at you that day, it had been fear from the elders and admiration from the young. You had been a symbol of what could be achieved with faith and prayer. You still were.

It had been a day of celebration, of song, dance and prayer.

When you had been recognized for what you were, and the fear your position was supposed to elicit. That part wasn't covered in the paper however. No, that story was about a beautiful congregation, of how a community of faith and love had formed in that small town it all started in.

It was an accurate assessment from someone on the outside. Nothing was wrong, everything there was love and faith, two things that go hand in hand with fear all too well. If you allow yourself to think, those three things was exactly what got you to stay for so long.

The radio in the background ends the last song, an announcer revealing the upcoming one after a short commercial advertisement. It starts slow, the rhythm lost on you until...

"Ooonly you."

Your ears don't recognize it at first, but when the first few words are sung through the speaker your heart drops. You stare holes into the radio, the familiar notes dancing around in your head to the slower beat of the music.

"Can do, make all this world seem right."

Nausea swirls. Your balance wains. Old memories best buried resurface.

Your vision is almost completely gone. It swirls around creating a dizzy mimicry of the actual world. Your hands feel as though they’re on fire, but you can't get yourself to move. The sound of water coming out of the shower head fills your ears. It becomes white noise to your brain.

Your body is shaking and you're not exactly sure why. It's only when you try to exhale the air in your lungs that you realize you're hyperventilating.

You let the scalpel fall out of your hand, clattering on the tile. It's sharp sound cuts something deep into your ears. Your head slowly scans the room, settling on the body next to you.

"...Emma?" you call her name in a hoarse voice. Every little movement you make is filled with a spiking pain, but you manage to crawl to her crumbled form in spite of it. Ugly marks cover her skin, scars you hadn't ever really noticed before. Thighs, arms, not much of it was left unmarred.

Her skin is cold. She doesn't wake up from any of your calls, and remains unmoving when you try to shake her. Red covers the floor beneath her head, colouring the water to take shape around her like a halo.

You can't find the source of her wound, there's nothing to put pressure on. There's nothing to save. You shake her, scream at her, do anything to get the girl to move, but alas she remains cold and unresponsive.

Your ears are ringing and everything is wrong. "Please...just wake up!!! I'm telling you to wake up!" It doesn't matter how much you scream at her, order her, try to force her to sit up. She just flops back down, lifeless, she won't even look at you.

A shadow towers over you from behind. You don't turn around to see what it is, your attention too focused on the body you so desperately want to stop being cold. "Please," your throat is turning sore from your sobs and screams. He's heard you calling.

"What happened here." His voice is cold. It holds no warmth for you. No more. When you turn to see him, his eyes are dark. He looks at you like you're the culprit. He looks at you like you did nothing at all to prevent this outcome. "What did you do."

You swallow down another cry. Warmth licks your cheeks like flames, the crusty feeling only further enhancing the despair you feel. "She-" You can barely get a word out. They seize in your throat, turn to dust on your tongue.

"You killed her."

Your brows furrow, as you slowly return your eyes to her. "No..." your voice is so quiet it barely even counts as a sound. "No no I didn't!" Your next words are clearer, panic entering your system faster than you can even think of an explanation.

"You killed her."

His voice echoes in your head. You killed her. You killed her. You killed her.

The ringing returns.

"Was she not worthy?"

Confusion spreads like a disease. Doubt in your mind like poison. "What no, no she-"

"Was she a deceiver? A heretic? Did she deserve it?"

His questions make no sense. They dance around your skull, pestering you for answers that you don't possess.

"Was she unworthy?"

You're hauled up from the floor, eliciting a shriek from you. The fight you put up against him is entirely worthless. It does nothing but make his actions angrier. You're slammed against the tile wall. The wind in your lungs escape, black dots forming briefly in your vision. You try to focus but fail.

"Your training isn't moving fast enough my Angel."

There's the honey. The sweetness. The warmth.

The love.

Hidden beneath layers of frustration and anger, but it's there. He still loves you. He's not angry with you. His fingers trace your jaw. He washes the blood away from your face, putting extra attention around your scalp so clumps don't form. He uses nothing but his scarred fingers, and it feels heavenly.

Your bliss lasts no longer than five minutes. When he finishes cleaning you up, you're pushed out of the showers. You try to look back at her, but he doesn't let you. "But Father-"

"No."

He turns you away from the showers entirely, out of the locker room. He doesn't tell you anything. Any questions you have are shut down. Nothing gives you answers, and when you pass the door to your room, you stop asking.

The wind is once again knocked out of your lungs as you're flung into the chair. You're quick to respond, a feeble attempt at getting back up. It's disrupted as he takes your wrists, binding them to the chair with rope. "Father," you plead with him, and normally it would have worked but there's something different about him. He doesn't respond to you at all. Barely even looks at you as he kneels down to tie your legs as well.

You can't move.

"There's a specific practice I've shielded you from, my angel." His voice is different than normal. There's none of that sweetness that he usually carries when he talks to you. For a moment it feels like you're not dealing with him at all, and more his brother. A chill goes down your spine at a realization your body has before you do.

"But It's about time you learn...won't be long before you're going to be the one teaching." He turns his back to you, rolling over a small table on wheels. You can't see what’s on it but he messes around with something metallic.

"I'm...going to teach? The younger ones?"

"When you're ready."

He picks up a scalpel, almost identical to the one you had held in your own hand. Some nervous feeling starts rise in your body, pulsing through your veins at the implication of what he's going to do with you. He walks closer to you, enough to tower over.

"First...you will listen. You will learn."

The scalpel is lowered to your arm, and your eyes widen. The first cut elicits a yell of pain from you. One that is shortened as your Father's hand wraps around your throat and pushes you back in the chair. "Quiet, Angel." He leans in close, to have his voice right in your ear.

"This is for your own good. This is your atonement."

You gasp out, holding back the tears forming in your vision. "My...My atonement?" You try to turn your head to look at him but he keeps you in place.

"Yes. Feel the pain, the agony, every cut, every letter, every word. You deserve to feel it."

The knife is brought back but this time to your abdomen. The next cut doesn't elicit a yell or a scream, but holding back the sound of your pain proves much harder even with his hand on your throat, squeezing the reminder in your head.

You can't breathe.

Every heave for air makes the burning on your skin worse. More blood escapes from the wound on your chest. The words pulse, the feeling lick your insides like flames eats at wood.

GREED

He'd explained it, but you didn't care to listen. You don't understand. Why this. Why now. His words echo in your head, to the point you can't tell the difference from the real and the fake. It all blends together like a corrupted dream.

"Do you believe in god, My Angel?"

"Yes! Yes! Please stop! It hurts! There's so much blood!"

"Then why do you keep lying to Him Angel...why do you keep lying to me...it can all stop...all you have to do is...confess."

"I'm not lying!" you scream at him, trying lunge forward in the chair but the restraints keep you in place.

"Yes, you are." He insists, grabbing the arms of the chair to get back in your face. "You're lying to me! You're lying to Him!" he screams back in your face.

You sob harder, plead with him for mercy, for break at the very least. The pain was too much, so much worse in his hands to wield. It's nothing like the training with Graham. In the training you at least had a goal, you know what to do. Here you feel lost, he claims to be your guide but you feel no guidance besides the pain he wreaks upon your body.

And then something changes in him. Like the flip of a switch, he lets go of the scalpel and cradles you. "I know it hurts my Angel...but I've got you...I'm only giving you as much as I know you can take...I'll always protect you, you know that yeah?" The blood on his hands smears onto your cheeks, but you've never felt more loved.

"Yeah..." your voice is barely there, but he hears you all the same.

"Yeah, you know that I wouldn't ever harm you. I'm doing this for your own good. You'll thank me in the end," he lets go of your face and picks the knife up again. "I'll make sure of it."

"No no no! Please! Father!" You scream for him to listen but his face doesn't even twitch. He throws you into the room. Your bloodied naked body hitting against the concrete making you cry out in pain.

"Please!"

He doesn't even look at you as he locks you in there. A room you didn't even know existed before this. No windows, no furniture, nothing for you to even lay on. The door shuts with a heavy screeching sound. It echoes in your ears as you're left in the darkness.

You curl up on the floor, and try to ignore the pain. It's overwhelming. Made even worse against the scratchy cold floor. "Please...I don't want it like this..." Your cries turn quieter with no one to hear them.

You try to reason with it, try to find where you had done something wrong. He's been at it for days now. It's left your body weakened, begging for sleep that will not come. Your head is pounding. Your Father's words echoing in your mind. It doesn't matter how much you scream for it to stop, for it to be quiet, it keeps going.

All until you clasp your shaking hands over your ears. It all seizes in an instant. The symphony of voices being commanded to stop to make way for something entirely different, for something worse.

This is pathetic really.

Your face scrunches up in confusion, and you open your ears to look into the darkness.

"What?"

I mean honestly, what did you expect would happen? That he would just forgive you because you didn't mean to do it? Your actions have consequences.

"No no...I...I didn't mean to-"

Of course you didn't. You never do, but guess what you still did. Spider.

Your heart is pounding in your throat now. The uncontrollable shaking in your body turning worse as you see him emerge from the darkness. He's still young. Just like how you last saw him, but he doesn't look pleased with you.

"Simon...what...what are you doing here..."

I thought you'd be better than this Spider. You know I really thought you'd take the hint the day I left, and actually go make something of yourself like I did. Then again you were never good at understanding hints were you.

You claw at the ground, try to crawl closer to him but no matter how close you get it's like he's forever out of reach. You manage to curl up against the opposite wall before he speaks again.

You're a great disappointment to me, Spider.

"No...please...I want to go home...please help me..."

You're beyond help.

You can feel him walk away, the sound of his footsteps getting quieter the more you wait. You panic. "No wait!" You fling yourself around to see him again. Just one more time. Just one last glimpse of the beauty in his eyes.

You find nothing but silence and darkness in front of you.

"Simon?"

You wrap your arms around yourself and scream.

The smell of death and decay is ingrained in the room itself.

Sometimes your own familiarity with it haunts you. You've started even dreaming of it. The amount of teaching you do doesn't equal to the time you spend in here these days. Everyday more people come to the cause seeking shelter. Everyday your growing list of tasks expands.

This one is particularly stubborn. He came seeking food and shelter, on the run for something he didn't do. Or so he claims. His mind is fragile, easily malleable, like yours had once been. Yet you had still expected him to last longer before he cracked.

He's already screaming and the blade hasn't even touched him. You suppose you don't fault him. There's been a shift as of late, one even someone as dense as yourself have noticed. The respect people used to have for you has changed, it hasn't minced in any way, but it's taken a turn. There's wariness mixed with the usual adoration. The people seeking guidance from you now hesitate, their voices are quieter, their tone more patient.

"Do you wish to confess?" you ask the man calmly. His name had started with an A or an E, but you could hardly remember. He's one of the newer ones. The type that doesn't quite get the permanence of your community.

You would show him.

Someone is watching you from the corner. Eyes practically glowing in the dark with how intensely they're fixated on your movements. He does it every now and again. Makes sure you don't hesitate, don't show remorse, and when you eventually do, because you still fall back into it every now and then, he'll take it upon himself to remind you too.

The first incision is always the hardest. When you have to control the shake in your hand, and make sure you don't go too deep. It's meant to hurt, it's meant to scar, but it's not meant to damage.

His pleas and echoed screams fall on deaf ears as you come to finish up the first word. Pride, had been his main sin. The thing he struggled too much with to even admit. You would help him, like you helped the others, like you'll help everyone.

The cruel truth of it is that it doesn't even matter if he says the right things. If he confesses like you ask him so kindly to do. He has to feel the pain. It's only thing that will set him free in the end. The only thing that will cleanse him. They all thank you afterwards. Some take longer than others but they all do in the end. It makes you feel a little better, like what you're doing actually has some meaning.

"Fuck you," he spits. Some of it hits your cheek, causing you to flinch back. "You think you're righteous in this? You're just as disgusting and the rest!"

You nod quietly, watching him finish his little fit. He heaves for air. The thing he doesn't seem to realize is that it doesn't matter.

You don't care.

When the knife meets his skin, he screams again. He struggles against the restraints like his life depends on it. You have no intention of killing him however. No, that wouldn't be productive use of your time or your skills. You're not a killer unless He demands it. A rehabilitator fits more accurately to your skillset. It's how people would describe you, at least to your face.

You cut out the words, repeating his sins back to him. Waiting for him to confess them would take longer, require more. Ample time that you don't have the luxury of today.

Today is a day of celebration. New believers will join you, the old will greet them, and together you'll expand more than you ever thought possible. The collective has come a long way. You try to feel proud of it. That is what is expected of you.

You pull back your tainted hands when the word of lust are engraved on his arm. With a little luck it would heal, and look better than the ones you sported on your own body, beneath layer and layer of clothes.

Shadows creep up behind you. Small congratulatory whispers in your ear as your scenery shifts. The church has never looked more beautiful, and your smile has never looked as good in all white. The Father and his brother smile at you, look to you with proud faces that speaks to rewards you'll reap later on. The children run to you, they adore you. The adults pay their respects, asks for a blessing that you kindly redirect to the one you know who can give them.

The local paper is here too, and you pose for a picture that will never be seen. Some here will leave with a spark of something new in their hearts, an itching feeling that will get them crawling back before long. The rest will never want to leave again.

And you wouldn't have it any other way.

The memories are like an assault on your sense, and before you even know it you're hyperventilating. It doesn't matter how much air you hold in your mouth. It's not enough. It's never enough.

Cleanse the nonbelievers.

The shadows no longer whisper. They scream.

They're right there next to you, around you, penetrating into your mind, and there's nothing you can do to stop it. Your body seizes, your hand tight on the combat knife that had been on the table. The song continues in the background, a catalyst to your unstable mind.

"When you hold my hand."

It's for your own good

Your stare could bore holes into the table.

"I understand the magic that you do."

I'll always protect you, you know that yeah?

Your stomach swirls with nausea, and you can feel it threatening to come back up.

"You're my dream come true"

This is pathetic really

"Spider?"

Your eyes dart up to the source of the noise. A grotesque sight forming in front of you, his body covered in darkness festering like mold. It obscures him, hides him. His head parts like a hungry mouth, teeth and tongue lunging for you with no remorse.

It attacks your peace of mind as much as the auditory input does. Without an extra thought the knife is thrown with jarring accuracy. An ability you've missed, locked behind the unfocused part of yourself you refuse to go past.

It flies through the air, right past Simon's face.

His actual face.

You falter, gripping the table for support. He looks at you just as shocked. The crease on his forehead pulls on his scars, his expression changing from one of shock morphing together with concern.

You can hardly hold the contents of your stomach down any longer, and you run for the bathroom.

"My one and only you"

At first, you're not sure who follows you. You have little time to care when the bile travels up your throat and only narrowly manages to land in the toilet instead of the floor. Someone comes to your side, talks to you, though nothing gets through the ringing in your ears.

His hand rub reassuring shoulders against your back, and something with a vaguely Scottish accent does make it through for you to recognize. It doesn't help you relax but at the least it doesn't add on to the anxiety you're throwing up into the toilet. Another body kneels to your other side, Gaz's voice filtering through your other ear too.

What they say hardly matters, you feel their presence, their want to help. And they get to help you a lot more than you'd originally have liked when the black spots in your vision gets bigger, claiming it completely.

When you wake the room is pitch dark, but you can feel from the sheets it’s not your assigned bed. It's a bit rougher, a bit lumpier and has a distinct smell you attribute to Simon. You stir a little, curl up on yourself as you stare into the darkness. Things move in it, eyes watching back from the abyss. Instead of focusing on it, you close your eyes again.

The song couldn't be an accident. No matter how much you wished it to be. It's too sudden, too random for it to just be up to chance. Someone saw you. Someone knows. They're calling on you, in their own subtle way that they know will only reach you. It makes your chest clench, nausea threatening to return.

The bed dips, someone new laying down behind you. A hand circles around your waist, pulling you closer to him. He's warmer than the blanket, a furnace in a human body. You opt not to move away. Only when his hand travels to your hip, crawls its way under your shirt do you stop him. Guilt rises, warming up your face. The scars were still there, ugly branded marks, words of your sins. You didn't want him to feel it.

"Simon."

He stops, freezes before retracting his arm, settling it on top of your shirt instead and giving you a squeeze. "Sleep," he mumbles against your ear. His breath softly fanning against your skin. You feel his face press against the back of your neck. You can feel the ridges and bumps in his scars, a crooked nose, chapped lips. You want to turn around but your body is chained.

A shuddering breath leaves you. As long as you don't turn, as long as you don't open your eyes, you can pretend that this moment is real, you can pretend it means something. It brings little comfort, and you allow yourself to drift once again.

Likes, reblogs and comments are always appreciated, love ya! <3

Taglist: @unlikelyaperson @ghostlythots @haipasa @woodlandgirl22-blog-blog @kaoyamamegami @ellabellabunny123 @chickennn-soupp @spicyspicyliving @lilynotdilly @heeknow

[julia4today]

THIS IS SO GOOD

simon 'ghost' riley x reader

wc: 0.2k

the phone buzzes at 3:07 a.m.

you answer on instinct, heart thudding like a warning—but the moment you hear the low crackle of distant static, your chest eases.

"si?" you whisper, voice thick with sleep.

"told you i'd call."

his voice is gravel, dulled by poor signal and fatigue. but it’s him.

"you okay?"

"fine," he says. it's automatic. a soldier's answer. then quieter, "can't sleep."

you sit up against the headboard, brushing hair from your face. "where are you?"

a silence and then, his answer.

"nowhere good."

he never tells you, not really. you stopped asking a long time ago.

there's a pause. you hear him breathe.

"is she awake?" his question makes you smile for a moment.

"she had a nightmare an hour ago. i rocked her back down, but she’s been babbling since. talking to the ceiling fan, i think.” you explain softly, sitting at the bed.

he huffs something close to a laugh.

"i'll put you on speaker."

in the dim nightlight, your daughter—grace, as he was gifted to call her, lies in her crib, blanket half-kicked off, tiny fists waving at nothing.

simon listens. on the other end of the world, he's crouched in some half-shelled out building, rifle at his side, bone-weary—but when his daughter coos into the line, high and breathy and nonsense-sweet, his eyes close.

"bah-bah. da-da-da-da."

he bites down the ache.

"daa,"she says again, louder, like she knows.

his voice breaks low over the line. "that's me, sweetheart."

as the line keeps up, you smile with your eyes closed. tiny moments, as you called them. tiny moments where simon could feel happy even if he was crossing the whole world.

a/n: simon would have a daughter fight me

[julia4today]

I NEED MORE

reunion :)

[julia4today]

reunion :)

[julia4today]

Bird Watching

Construction Worker!Simon ‘Ghost’ Riley x single mom!reader

‘Birds of a feather,

We should stick together, I know,

I said I’d never,

Think I wasn’t better alone’

Part one (2.3k words)

Part two (2.4K words)

Part three (3.6k words)

Part four (coming soon)

Main Masterlist

[julia4today]

OH MY GEE

the warren

price x f!reader | ongoing | dark

You flee your old life and seek refuge in a remote lake town, where a charming local takes notice. But as summer stretches on, people vanish, bodies surface, and the town begins to feel less like a shelter and more like a trap. warren, noun - a network of interconnecting rabbit burrows. - an enclosed piece of land set aside for breeding game, especially rabbits. 🐇

series cw: canon divergence, au - supernatural elements, surveillance, animal death, violence, referenced domestic violence, breeding kink, stalking - full list on AO3

bait

fix

trouble

nothing

abscond

natural

call

digging

misunderstanding

curious

outsider

purpose - all chapters from here are only on AO3

plates

smoke

power

habit

wound

flowerbed

moodboard | general tag