lunarmothim

[lunarmothim]

"i don't comment on ao3 because i don't wanna be annoying or weird" skill issue + you greatly underestimate the power dynamic here, writing multi paragraph comments is like feeding a bunch of deeply insane and possibly starved ducks at the park and watch them go completely mad over having received a piece of bread

[lunarmothim]

fig. 3. heart in flames; baptism by fire | John Price x Reader

MASTERLIST · AO3

The universe hasn't seen fit to give Price a mate of his own. He'll have to take matters into his own hands.

or: the forced mating omegaverse au

tags: Size Difference, Size Kink, Omegaverse, Explicit Sexual Content, AFAB Reader, Stalking, Kidnapping, Heavy Noncon/Dubcon Elements

His appetite is an arsenal all on its own. 

It’s always been bigger than him, barrel-chested. All consuming. It’s the reason that John is where he is today, always chasing down something larger than himself. Greedy for what he can’t have. Ambitious to a fault. Promotions and titles and commendations and accolades; they’re all wrapped up in his psychology, into whatever it is about him that wants without end. Without satisfaction. 

It’s likely why he ends up being referred to an endocrinologist specializing in hormone disorders in alphas when an overproduction of androstenone turns his ruts violent. Over the years, they’ve been steadily getting worse, even with a partner to help see him through the worst of it, the overproduction of hormones making him a little too mindless, a little too frenzied. 

“It’s not especially common for men your age, if I can be frank,” the doctor tells him, flipping through his chart. “Not uncommon, but low enough that I want to send you for a couple tests just to be safe. You’re still unmated?”

John nods. “That’s right.”

It’s not that the option hasn’t ever presented itself, but the timing has never felt right. Even marriage hadn’t sweetened the deal, and maybe that’s why he’s just north of forty-five and already divorced. The fault lies with him alone; he’s man enough to admit that. Maybe if he’d been more attentive, less likely to disappear for months at a time; if he’d swallowed his reluctance and just bit his omega instead of dragging his feet through his marriage like a prisoner marching to his own doom—maybe things might be different. 

“Any plans to change that?”

“‘Fraid not.”

The truth of the matter is that, though he’s waited a lifetime for that special someone to cross his path, no one has ever come close to smelling right. Even his ex-wife had only come so close—good enough to turn his head, but not enough to keep him. Or maybe he hadn’t been enough to keep her. These days, it’s hard to say which feels more like the truth. 

Sometimes John thinks that it’s simply not in the cards for him. That for whatever reason, destiny or God or the universe or whatever force that decides the fate of all things, has deemed him unfit for the other half of his soul. 

It’s just that it’s been—

It’s been a long time without anyone to call his own.

The doctor scribbles something down in John’s chart. “Alright.”

With his rut coming up in just a few days, the timing couldn’t be better. It sizzles like a low grade fever under his skin. He works up a sweat more easily, even a couple flights of stairs leaving the pits of his shirt dark and damp. There’s a little extra padding around his midsection, a bit more bulk on his arms and thighs; his beard a little thicker than usual, forcing him to trim it twice a day to keep it from growing out of control. Even though it happens every year, it sneaks up on him, the added mass making him a bit lethargic in the weeks before his rut. 

“We won’t have the results in time for your next scheduled rut, but I’d recommend asking a trusted partner to help you out. And wear protection. We have extra mouth guards and other paraphernalia if you need anything.”

John holds up a hand when the doctor goes to open a drawer. “I’ve got plenty at home. Appreciate the advice though. Any medication I should be taking?”

“I don’t want to start you on anything this close to your rut, but maybe after. I’ll have the front desk set up a follow up appointment for you for two weeks from now.”

He nods, making a mental note. 

There are a couple girls he could call up on short notice, but the thought sits like a dull weight in his chest. The decades of casual heats and ruts have left him with little appetite for that sort of thing these days. What he wants—craves really, needs really—is something permanent, something meaningful. John’s been around the block enough to know that he’s looking for something more. 

He’s had good ruts and bad ruts. Ruts spent in the warm embrace of another, filling up a soft, wet hole again and again until his spend leaked down their thighs, lost in a daze of pheromones and heat-slick. Ruts spent entombed in his own frustrated lust, mindlessly rutting into a cum-filled fleshlight to slake a thirst that never ebbs, only flows and rushes over the guardrails, dragging him further under. 

This one might end up falling into the latter category.

“Right, well, thanks for stopping by, John. You have a good rest of your day, alright?”

“Same to you.”

His nostrils burn the second he walks back into the main corridor, which is teeming with activity, children climbing over their parents’ laps and people still waiting to see a doctor slumped over in their chairs. Two interns wheel a bed down the hall, forcing everyone to scoot to the side and cling to the wall to get out of the way. There’s always too many people in the hospital. Too many smells. 

This close to his rut, everything reeks. Congealed sweat and antiseptic; plastic chairs that smell simultaneously of sick and Lysol wipes, confusing his nose. Stale body odour from those in the waiting room on their sixth hour of waiting on loved ones or on an available doctor. It’s a bludgeon to the senses, particularly when they’re more sensitive than usual. 

An elevator takes him down to the first floor, which is even more chaotic than the one John was just on somehow. Patients and doctors spilling out of rooms, announcement after announcement blaring over the intercom, and always—always—the sharp scent of isopropyl, astringent against the inside of his nose. 

“I don’t understand—did she leave?” 

The voice catches him like a fish on a hook on his way towards the main entrance, beadhead soaring through the air and slipping under the surface of the water just as he’s angling to leave. 

When John turns around, you’re standing by the front desk with your chin tucked into your chest. You make a pitiful sight like that, with your lips pursed and your eyebrows pinched, and you hold yourself almost delicately, hands gripping the edge of the desk to stabilize yourself. 

He takes a deep inhale. Though admittedly he’s not close enough to get a good whiff, your scent is muted, likely dampened by the effects of several painkillers and the anesthetic still running through your system. The stench of pain is strong too, which accounts for the way you hold your body and move so gingerly, the brace on your arm a good indication. 

“I’m sorry, ma’am. If she’s not here, she must have left. You could try calling her?” the nurse at the front desk says, almost apologetic. “We can’t let you leave without an escort to take you home.”

“Okay, um…” you whisper, and now your scent is pungent with panic, acerbic. “Let me call her and ask her to come back.”

The sound of your voice is stronger now that it’s had time to travel. Again he feels it pinch him like coming out of a dream.

It’s so unremarkable that John nearly carries on down the hall towards the entrance, nothing about the interaction sticking out. 

Something keeps him rooted in place though. Intuition or a sixth sense or finely honed instincts. So instead of leaving, he turns around and walks right back to the front desk, stopping when he’s within arm’s length of you, eyes soaking up the sight of your tensed shoulders.

He doesn’t know the words are going to come out of his mouth until they do. “Lost your way home?” 

When you turn your eyes up to look at him, he feels the breath get knocked out of him. Prettier than anything he’s ever seen, the lure at the end of a fishing line drawing him in. 

And yet, for as pleasant as you smell, it’s nothing dissimilar to the countless omegas John has come across before. It evokes nothing primal—no deep-seated urge to sink his canines into a plump gland and bind you to him. 

You simply smell nice.

It’s difficult to articulate the devastation that courses through him. He’d hoped against hope that it would happen, that someday he would turn a corner and his fated mate would be there, looking at him like what took you so long? But how long can a man be expected to wait? How many years of disappointment can he be expected to weather by himself, his hopes dashed repeatedly? 

In less than a second, he makes a decision. 

One too many times, he’s hoped for fate to intervene and reward him for his patience. It never has. That responsibility must fall on him. 

There’s nothing new about trying to immanentize the eschaton, but John has faith in himself. If fate won’t do what must be done, then he will instead. 

“Excuse me?” you ask. So polite. 

“Heard you talking to the nurse about your ride home; sounds like you’re in a bit of a fix.”

“Yeah, I…um…” You seem torn on whether or not to keep up the conversation, likely finding his attention a bit intrusive, but gentility prevails in the end. Good. He was just starting to like you. “My friend was supposed to drive me home after surgery, but it looks like she might’ve bailed. She’s not answering my texts, but someone else said they saw her leave.”

“Sorry to hear that. Not fair, putting you in a spot like that.”

“I’m trying to give her the benefit of the doubt, but…uh…” You laugh, a touch derisively. “This is kind of screwing me over. I’m trying to get another friend to come pick me up, but it’s short notice and most people can’t just call out of work at the drop of a hat.”

There’s a vulnerable note in your voice almost masked by the touch of annoyance in your laugh but still plain for anyone attentive enough to hear. John is nothing but attentive.

“Don’t let her screw you over and get away with it,” he says, positioning himself on your side. “Short of someone dying, there’s no reason she should’ve left you on your own after an operation.”

“You’re probably right,” you murmur, too tired to put up a fight. “It just sucks. I wish she hadn’t told me yes in the first place—I could’ve asked someone else and given them more notice.”

“If you’re looking for a way home, I’d be happy to give you a lift.” John shrugs a shoulder when your lips open, the polite refusal already bubbling up your throat rebuffed by his next words. “I’m headed out now anyway. Just came to get some bloodwork done, nothing serious. Wouldn’t be an imposition at all.”

Your eyebrows pull together, teeth sinking into your bottom lip. 

“I’m not sure if I should be accepting rides from strangers.”

There’s a teasing lilt there, but also an undercurrent that he’s become familiar with over the years. A tempered kind of caution. One that says the words with a smile but prepares to sprint the other way. 

He smiles and holds out his hand. “I’m John.” When you take it, he knows he’s got you. “Not strangers anymore, are we?”

You answer that with a coy shake of your head, giving your name just as readily.

“So, how about it? Can I take you home?” John asks, repeating the invitation. His blood simmers when you take too long to answer.

“Ma’am,” the nurse suddenly interjects from the front desk, taking your attention away from him. It’s surprising how much that displeases him. “Have you gotten in touch with your friend yet or do we have to put you on the list for the drop-off service?”

John can see you warring with the options in your mind, eyes flitting between him and the nurse. 

“Actually, I found a ride home. Can I sign out?”

“Mind if I ask what you were in for?”

The drive to your house is mostly uneventful. He plugs your address into the GPS and hits save when something outside the window catches your attention. 

“It was just a little procedure.” His ensuing silence must make you nervous because you volunteer the reason for your stay after just a few short seconds. “Carpal tunnel release. My job involves a lot of typing, so I couldn’t keep putting it off; can’t wait to go back to living normally.”

He clocked the splint and the bandage around your hand and wrist when he approached you at the hospital, but it’s good to put a label on it. John makes a mental note to look up the post-op protocol for carpal tunnel surgery when the two of you get home. It’ll help him to better understand and address your needs in the coming days and weeks, and what he’ll need to watch out for when his rut finally sets in. 

He’ll clue you in on all of that later when he’s had a chance to explain himself. 

“Shame that your friend didn’t stick around to get you home. Probably still in a bit of pain, aren’t you?”

“Not yet. The painkillers they’ve got me on are really good.”

“Hm. I bet.”

You’re not that loopy despite being on painkillers though. More tired than anything. 

“I probably could’ve planned this better. I didn’t even get groceries before leaving for surgery.”

“You want me to stop and pick you up a couple things?”

He can see you turn to look at him from the corner of his eye. “Are you sure?”

“I’ve got time. Do you know what you need?”

You rattle off the couple items that you need and John merges into the left lane while listening, heading towards the nearest grocery store. 

He makes you stay in the car while he goes in to pick up a couple things, his number plugged into your phone in case you need him to rush back. The few items you rattle off aren’t sufficient enough for what you’ll need over the coming weeks, so John takes the liberty of purchasing a few extra things. Cured meats, fruit, a box of pastries for breakfast, and a couple frozen microwaveable meals. Baby wipes, lotion, and a multivitamin. All the essentials for a rut. 

There are things back at his place that he’ll need for his rut, but he’ll ask Simon to pick those up whenever he has a chance. It’s why John gave him a spare key after all. 

When he wheels the cart out of the store, he comes around by the back of the car, popping the trunk before you have a chance to see the sheer amount of bags in his cart. There will be a time later to talk you through what’s going to happen. 

“Sorry if my list was complicated,” you apologize when he gets back into the front seat, the cart in the corral. It doesn’t change where things were already heading, but it makes him look at you a bit differently. There’s a sweetness to you, one he hadn’t noticed before. 

He likes it though.

“Wasn’t complicated in the least,” John says, brushing off the apology. “Just took me a while to find everything. Didn’t mean to keep you waiting.”

Your eyes crinkle when you smile. “I’m not in any hurry.”

John’s always liked docile things. Sweet, simpering things with nervous eyes and gentle demeanours. 

Moreover—

what isn’t already tamed is his to break. 

You’re a cagey thing as well though. At least, you get cagey when John gets out of the car and follows you up the front stairs on your porch instead of hovering a safe distance away. He keeps the subterfuge up by only carrying in the bags with the things you requested, leaving the rest in his car for now.

“I really appreciate all your help; I should be able to take it from here though,” you tell him at the door, the key still tucked in your hand. Your voice is infused with enough gratitude that a duller man might let it stroke their ego while you slipped inside and out of their grasp.

John smiles instead. “Wouldn’t be doing the right thing if I let you go without making sure you got to bed safe and sound. Open the door, sweetheart.”

He can see the hesitation on your face plain as day. Every instinct telling you not to let a man into your house, much less an alpha. 

But inevitably you let him in.

Good girl.

The house is saturated with your scent. He has to take a deep inhale right off the bat, committing your scent to memory. Without the overwhelming stench of antiseptic and sickness from the hospital, your scent is cleaner, richer. Preserved in amber. 

There’s something faint underlying your lived-in scent though. He can’t quite name it, but it sits on the tip of his tongue like a tune he’s heard before. 

“Mind if I put these away for you?” John asks, lifting the grocery bags in his hands. 

“Oh—yes, thank you. The kitchen’s that way.” You point towards the back of the house.

John carries the bags with just your groceries to the kitchen and unloads everything one by one into the fridge. The meager contents of your fridge speak to a frugal, solitary existence, and suddenly the faint smell permeating through your house has a name. Loneliness. 

A man hasn’t been in here in quite some time, if ever. Every single inch of the house has been scrubbed with your scent, not a trace of any former occupant remaining. No roommate or close friend or boyfriend. 

“Nice place you’ve got,” he comments when he walks back into the living room to find you fiddling around with the cushions on the couch, arranging them to make yourself a cozy spot to lie down.

You look up at the sound of his voice and smile, faintly flattered. “Thank you. I’ve only had it a year, but uh…I’ve been doing my best. Also—thanks again for driving me home. And stopping for groceries.” Your lips go round like you’ve remembered something. “I still have to pay you back by the way. Wait right here.”

“Let me go get the rest from the car first,” John says. 

“There’s more?” you ask, surprised. 

He nods. “I got you a couple extra things—on me. I hope that wasn’t too much of an overstep.”

You chew your lip but ultimately the uncertainty melts from your gaze the longer he stands there waiting for your approval. “…No, that’s…that’s fine. You didn’t have to, but thank you.”

His overstep is just a toe over the lip of the door, but it’s still a foot keeping the door from closing. 

On his way back out to the car, John happens to glance down while passing the table in the entryway and finds, much to his delight, your phone resting casually beside the vanity tray. It sits there like you purposefully left it for him to take. 

If not you, then fate. 

With deft fingers practiced at lifting, he pockets your phone, and then heads back to the car for the rest of the groceries, whistling the whole way there and back. 

You start to look at him a bit differently when he brings in the second round of groceries. The number of bags hanging from his forearms must strike you as odd, too many for what you asked him to pick up. John doesn’t bother making any excuses though. 

He can see your trust wavering, pulled out from the water and left belly up in the air, gasping for breath. It wouldn’t be hard to fix it. It wouldn’t be hard to go about this the right way—leave you with your groceries and pain meds, tuck you into bed before seeing himself out, and then waiting a couple days to ask you out for coffee. To leave now would mend your trust entirely. 

He considers it even, never one for turning down a potential strategy without considering its merit. But his alpha digs its heels in when he contemplates leaving, pushing every inch of its weight into rooting him in place. 

It doesn’t want him to leave; and truth be told, John can’t bear the thought either. 

The little trust you extended evaporates more and more as the minutes tick by and he shows no sign of leaving. You dance around it for a while, cautiously hopeful that he might be inadvertently overstaying his welcome, and John watches your descent into hopelessness from the corner of his eyes. 

It’s only when he helps himself to a snack from the fridge and turns the television on that you break, sweat beading on your upper lip. 

“John, I think maybe you s-should leave.”

The confidence you muster up to even just say that impresses him. It takes a lot out of you though, your body sagging when the words come out of your mouth, so much tension building up in your muscles that it literally weighs you down.

The hand with the remote drifts down to his side. “What do you mean, sweetheart?” John asks. 

“Well, I’ve—I’ve got it from here.” You switch to a more diplomatic tone, likely wary of worsening the situation you’ve gotten yourself into. Aware that you’ve invited him into your house, that your safe space now has another resident. “I don’t need any more help.” 

Though not as close to his rut as he will be in the coming days, the sentiment still makes him bristle. You don’t need any more help. Rich considering you let a strange alpha take you home not half an hour ago. 

He places the remote down and advances on you briskly, all of a sudden, quick enough that you only notice when he’s right in front of you, surprise overriding your fight or flight response. 

John cups the back of your neck with a big hand and tilts your head up until he can see the puffy, virgin mating gland sitting in the crook of your neck. Thumbs it too, ignoring the way your eyes go wide and horrified, and the way you try to wriggle out of his grasp until he tightens his hand around the nape of your neck. 

“Of course you do, sweetheart. Can't have you wandering around like this—wrong person might try to take advantage.”

Fear makes your pupils dilate. It stinks too, the stench wafting off you. A bit of initial unpleasantness is expected though, and understandable. It’ll be a lot to help work you through the worst of it, but it’s nothing he hadn’t already internally committed to. 

“You’re—you’re not going to leave?”

John shakes his head and smiles. 

Smart girl that you are, you don’t jump to screaming and shouting. Not that the urge isn’t there building in your chest, but you know the odds are stacked against you. You’ve already let him in. 

Your breathing picks up though, and your lip trembles. An anxious swallow follows, then another, throat too dry for you to speak. 

“Why?”

“C’mere, sweetheart.” John takes you by the hand, careful to avoid the bandaged one, and pulls you to the couch, where he takes a seat. “We can only have a frank conversation about this if you promise to be polite and wait your turn to speak. Clear?”

Your lips twitch with displeasure but you nod. 

“My rut’s coming up in a week.” He catches you before you spring back up to your feet, yanking you back down by your arm. “No, don’t try to run; this is happening, love. My rut’s coming up and I’m staying here for it, okay?”

“I can stay someplace else,” you offer weakly, voice breaking. 

His smile verges on pitying. “No, sweetheart. You’re staying here with me for it.”

Your scent goes sour. Ammonium sulfide and allicin. His nose would wrinkle if he’d been expecting anything less than your reaction, but you conform, as always, beautifully to his expectations. 

“You can’t…make me go through a rut with you.” Your throat constricts around the word rut. 

“Yes, I can,” he says simply because that’s what it is. Simple.

In a world of people riddled with guilt complexes and victim mentalities, he stands alone. He has no qualms about taking what��s owed to him, or with shaping the world according to the version of it that lives in his head. That’s how history is made. 

He can’t judge others for their nature the same way he can’t fault himself for his. 

“I thought you said you were in the army.”

“I did.”

“Isn’t this…—this is against the law then, isn’t it?”

“You’re thinking of American law, sweetheart.” He doesn’t bring up any similar protection against forced billeting enshrined in English law. Best to not get lost in the weeds. 

There’s a tick in your eyes that betrays you. John readies himself for a chase when your eyes glance over his shoulders towards the door, but you discard that plan as quickly as it entered your brain. Weighing the odds and finding them not in your favour. 

“I have friends,” you blurt out. “Family. People check up on me.”

“That’s fine, love. When they do, you’re gonna tell them that you’re taking a week off to rest and you don’t want anyone coming by in the meantime.” When you don’t respond, clearly thinking something different, irritation flickers in his chest. “Wanna know why you’re going to do that?”

“…Why?”

“‘Cause you know this could go one of two ways. We could either have a nice time together and I’ll be on my way afterwards…or I could bite that little mating gland of yours now and we can take that option off the table.”

There’s no point in telling you that he’s already made up his mind about that part. The allure of hope is too tempting; he has to give you something to latch onto. 

“Do we understand each other?” he asks. 

Your initial hesitation tells him all he needs to know. This won’t be an easy conquest or a city handed over to spare its citizens pain—you won’t hesitate to put up a fight. 

“Okay.” 

John makes himself at home like a fox laying claim to a rabbit’s burrow. 

Siege warfare. A lifetime in the military has made him well versed in poliorcetics. He knows of how the Romans once conquered the city of Fidene by launching false attacks from four different directions at four different times before breaching the city through a long tunnel that passed under its walls, and how Alexander captured the city of Tyre by building a kilometer-long causeway and besieging it for seven months.

Your phone was the first thing to go, confiscated lest you got any funny ideas about calling someone to rescue you. Not that you need rescuing; in the end, you’ll see that this was in your best interests too. The next thing to do is your laptop, tucked away out of reach until you’ve proved yourself to be trustworthy. 

He cuts off all trade routes and replaces them with his own, Simon showing up at the door the following morning with supplies. When you spot a man at the door, you must think saviour before foe, because you pound on the window facing the porch. At least John had the foresight to lock you out of the foyer before he opened the front door.

Simon cocks an eyebrow. “Noisy mouse, ain’t she?”

He shrugs. “She’ll learn. You got everything I asked for?”

“Check ‘n tell me if I missed anything. I ‘aven’t got time to get anything else today, but I can come back tomorrow.”

“Good man, Simon. Give me a minute, alright, lad?”

John gives the bag a cursory check, but just as he thought, Simon didn’t miss anything. He never does. 

Simon helps him install an electronic lock on the front door from the inside before heading off to work and John spends the next ten minutes programming it while you stare through the foyer door helplessly. The back door gets the same treatment later on, effectively rendering you a prisoner in your own house.

Then he takes stock of the property. 

You’ve made yourself a perfectly respectable home. It has all the charm of a simple family home, nothing like his ancestral estate on the Welsh border; there’s something real here, something designed with comfort in mind. You’ll have to live with summering there and wintering here in the city, but he won’t ask you to abandon the life you’ve made for yourself here. The stove’s at least thirty years old—one of those old brands made to last, likely passed down from a family member or bought secondhand. 

But John takes stock of the layout of the house because the longer he’s there, the more his instincts tingle. 

As well-decorated and maintained as your house is, it doesn’t feel ready for a rut. Too many hard edges and wide open spaces. Before humans became accustomed to single domiciles, instinct would’ve made them search far and wide for a burrow or cave comfortable enough to ride out their cycle. 

Like nest building for omegas, den making is inherent to alphas. It’s programmed in his DNA. Even out in the wild, he’d know how to make one—know what materials to look for in the absence of soft pillows and sheets—and feel that same urge to make a space suitable for his mate. 

Everything in its right place.

He starts by pulling the mattress off the bed frame and dragging it to the corner of the room. It makes your room feel like more of a den, a place to hunker down in, and that’s only reinforced when John pulls out every blanket and pillow from your linen closet and drapes them over the mattress. You don’t have blackout curtains, but he solves that by pinning a few sheets up on your blinds until barely any light passes through. 

Preparing for a rut is a little like preparing for a storm. One has to batten down the hatches to ready themselves for the worst of it. He installs locks on the cutlery drawers and stows the knife block away in the highest cabinet, locking that as well. He thinks of the worst case scenarios and plans accordingly. 

You don’t seem to appreciate his efforts though.

“Why are you—” you start and then abruptly stop, swallowing. “Please stop rearranging the furniture.” 

John pauses, putting the couch down gently so as not to damage the floorboards or upset you with any sudden noise. 

“Well, love, I’m not about to let you do all the backbreaking work, now am I?”

That response doesn’t seem to satisfy you, expression still twisted into a scowl. “Neither of us has to do any work. Why are you moving things around in the first place?”

“You really don’t get how these things are done, do you?”

Embarrassment makes you snappy. “No, and I don’t have to because it’s my fucking house either way. Stop moving my furniture.”

His eyes go half-lidded. Anger courses through his veins like floating down a lazy river. John has never liked being told what to do—it’s a personality quirk that’s been both a hindrance and a help to his career, but in his love life, he’s never allowed that sort of thing to fly. The dissolution of his first marriage speaks for itself. 

He lumbers around the couch towards you and you flinch, walking backwards in the opposite direction. He’s quick despite his size though, hand reaching up and cupping the back of your neck before you hit the wall behind you, and all you can do is stare up at him towering over you nervously. 

“Careful, sweetheart,” John murmurs, holding you firmly enough by the back of your neck that you whimper, only one hand able to press against his chest in an effort to push him away. The other you cradle limply against your chest. “Keep running your mouth like that and I might need to find a better way to put it to use. Ever had your mouth knotted?”

Nothing headier than the idea of pushing to the back of his omega’s throat and letting his knot expand until it’s trapped behind your teeth, keeping you locked on his cock until it’s softened enough to pull out. 

He stores the idea away for later. It wouldn’t do to knot your mouth for the first time during his rut when he doesn’t have the wherewithal to take it slow and keep you centred, but it’s an idea he’ll have to return to at a later date. When he has time to sit you on his lap and comfort you after something so intense instead of thinking only of his own urges. 

Rut isn’t a completely mindless state of being. Even in the thrall of his rut, John will still have enough cognizance to make somewhat informed decisions. It would be dangerous if alphas were susceptible to any influence during such a vulnerable period. Anyone could take advantage of someone in that state. 

There are some things that he doesn’t have complete control over. The closer John gets to the onset of his rut, the stronger the urge to scent his territory gets. 

It starts off relatively innocuous. He touches things more. Grips the doorframe when he enters a room and brushes against the wall when he turns a corner. Anything to leave a trace of his scent behind. But as the days progress and the urge to mark what’s his grows to monstrous proportions, the manner in which he chooses to do so shifts in kind. 

“Did you piss in the shower?” you seethe, fists clenched when you storm into the living room where John is seated at the couch watching Casablanca in black and white. 

He grunts. Nods. 

“You could’ve turned the water on to rinse it out,” you hiss. “Or used the toilet.”

“Not the point,” John says. 

“There was a point to pissing in my shower?”

“Never spent a rut with anyone, have you?” That pleases the lazy beast inside of him, but he’s not in any mood to explain himself. That’s what books are for. He prefers to teach through example. 

“What does it matter? That still doesn’t mean you can piss in my shower.” 

He takes a swig from the bottle in his hand. “Then you won’t wanna go around the side of the house.”

The screech gets all tangled up at the back of your throat, only the memory from the last time you sassed him staying your tongue. John can only smile to himself as you storm out of the room.

For all your resistance, he knows you’re not entirely immune to his presence, same as how he can’t shake the gnawing need to bury himself in you as deep as he can get. He’s a prime specimen of alpha—all thick muscle and dark tufts of hair, belly spilling over the top of his jeans and new notch on his belt from the mass he’s tacked on the weeks leading up to his rut. He’s been around the block enough to know his appeal. 

It’s why John doesn’t worry when you hiss and spit. Views the fuss you put up akin to foreplay, a little rough-housing before the situation gets serious. 

There are tells after all. It’s the way you look at him when you think he’s not paying attention. Furtive glances from the corners of your eyes. Shifting your hips in your chair when he sits across from you at meal times and spreads his legs wide, knocking his knees against yours. Eyes going hazy and lingering on the bulging muscles of his arms when you watch him move the furniture around in your house. 

He thinks sometimes about dragging you into bed early. Getting it out of the way now and getting you used to his touch before his rut sets in. It would be a kindness, in a way. 

But he relishes getting to see you squirm, the pseudo-heat sinking in day by day and making you more persuasive, less likely to bolt when your hand finally heals. Your instincts will do half the work for him. All he has to do is wait. 

Besides, the greater the effort, the sweeter the reward. 

Midway through the week, when his rut is close enough to be a thorn in his side but not close enough to have earned him the right to refuse to come in, Laswell has him come in for some inane reason. 

John still doesn’t trust you enough to leave you alone though, so he calls Simon and asks him to babysit you for a couple hours. Not a half hour later, the man’s on his doorstep, hands by his sides and expression deadpan. Even out of the service, he’s still a good soldier. 

It’s what makes Simon his favourite sometimes, though he’d never tell a soul. John knows it’s not right to play favourites with his men, but in the privacy of his own mind, he can face reality. 

“I won’t be gone long, sweetheart, but Simon’s gonna watch you while I’m out. You gonna be on your best behaviour for him?”

Your eyes cut to Simon and they look dangerous. Calculating. His lips almost twitch in amusement under his mustache. 

“Sure,” you say instead of arguing. It’s more of a red flag than if you had. 

The five hours he spends away from you are excruciating, and his temper suffers for it. These days, at his own insistence he’s been relegated to something of a desk job, but that still comes with its fair share of responsibility. There are certain strategic meetings that he can’t simply decline to attend, and though the hours pass by fast enough, he can still feel your presence like an itch at the back of his head that he can’t seem to scratch.

When he gets home, the itch finally dissipates.

“How was she?” John asks.

“Biter.” Simon holds up a forearm where your bite mark sits livid red against his pale skin. The imprint is deep, nearly piercing right through flesh near the canines. 

John whistles. “She did a number on you.”

Simon shrugs, unbothered. “Left the door unlocked and she tried to run. Fast on her feet.” Never did have his head on straight, that one. John feels no pity for the omega that’ll be his one day, but he has some sympathy.

He won’t discipline you just yet. That’ll be a project for another day—after you’re mated and hitched—and he can take his time training you. For now it’s enough that you’re still tucked away inside the den, not quick enough to outrun his lieutenant. 

Simon leaves with a few crisp bills folded in his back pocket and John claps his shoulder on the way out. 

The time is coming though. Every day pulls the sun thick off the horizon, the water dragging back from the shore. Soon, there will be a wave.

John knows his rut has started when he wakes up one morning as grumpy as a bear fresh out of hibernation. 

The first thing he hears is the sound of his stomach growling. Food. His first conscious thought. His stomach aches something fierce, like he hasn’t eaten in quite some time, even though John vaguely recalls eating supper the night before (though for the life of him he can’t remember what). 

His mind processes all of the information around him slowly and sluggishly, not in a hurry to make sense of anything. His vision still works perfectly fine, but his brain takes awhile to register what his eyes are seeing. Only base impulses make any sense. He sniffs the air to help guide him towards a food source. 

Something warm-smelling comes slinking out of the bathroom quietly. His head snaps in its direction and it freezes in its tracks. Prey. 

He sniffs again. No, not prey. Something different. 

Standing up feels strange, like he’s out of his body. It’s too big somehow. Heavier than he remembers it being. The thing trembling by the doorway doesn’t move as he lumbers over, smart enough to know not to run. He wouldn’t be able to stop himself from chasing it down if it tried to get away, prey or not. 

It flinches when he drops his head, the bridge of his nose brushing against its temple. His scent’s all over this one. He must have come or pissed on it at one point, marking it as his own. His scent clings to its skin, buried deeper than the epidermis. 

It shifts to one foot.

“Don’t…move…” he growls, tensing up. It tenses up too, breathing out short, shaky breaths. 

“J-John?” it says, voice like a bell in his head. It knows his name.

“Hungry,” he says instead of asking how it knows who he is. 

“I…I can make you breakfast.”

He herds it away from the bathroom door instead of answering, staring it down as it walks backwards down the hall and into the room that smells strongest of food. 

The house smells of him only vaguely. It smells mainly of the thing he herds into the kitchen, warm and spicy like cinnamon or cloves. There’s a faint trace of his scent though, as if he’s been here for enough time that it isn’t wholly foreign. His hackles raise at the thought of not being in his own territory though. 

But this must also be his. If you’re his, then your den must, in turn, belong to him. 

You scurry around the kitchen gathering all of the ingredients for breakfast while he stares from his chair, eyes tracking your every move. Part of him waits for you to try and bolt, on edge when you open the fridge and the sound makes his ears twitch. His muscles sit bunched under his skin, ready to pounce and chase. 

When you put the plate down in front of him, you make as if to take a step back, clearly meaning to give him some space. That won’t do. A firm hand on your forearm rectifies that; he pulls you down onto his lap before you’ve had a chance to register what’s happening. 

“Whoa,” you gasp, all turned around. 

The first piece of bacon he tries to pick up slips from his fingers. The next one he manages to pick up goes straight to your lips. “Eat.”

“I’m not—”

“Eat.”

Your cheeks bulge around the mouthful of bacon and eggs when he lifts another bite to your mouth. You chew quickly, swallowing before it’s fully chewed, nervous that his loose hold on his temper might slip. Only after you’ve had a couple filling bites does John allow himself to eat as well.

Some of his sense of self comes back with time. The pieces start coming back together. Your name, where he is, what you’re doing here. It comes back as his belly fills. 

His nature doesn’t allow him to feel pity, but you should at least know what’s ahead of you.

“It’s starting today,” he tells you, breaking the silence. You go stiff in his arms and then swallow the mouthful of food you’d been chewing.

“Today?” you repeat, your voice slightly hoarse. 

“Rut.” 

The word hangs in the air between him and you. John can almost hear your heart start to double in rhythm. 

You nod and whisper, “Okay.” 

The thing behind his eyes stares you down. It watches you chew and swallow your food until there’s nothing left on the plate, until your lips are tacky with grease and you have to suck your teeth to dislodge the trapped bits. 

With his belly full, other needs take precedence. 

It starts with him pressing his nose to the crown of your head, gliding it down to your temple and sucking in lungfuls of your scent the whole way, imbibing your scent. Spicy and musky; still pungent with sweat from the night before since you haven’t had a chance to shower yet, nothing to distract from your true scent. It makes his cock throb against his thigh. 

He drags his nose down your temple to your cheek, nuzzling against the side of your head. Rumbling when you go still, turning your head away from him when he tries to go for your lips, denying him again.

It agitates him. 

“Kiss me,” John growls. Demanding, not asking. 

He pinches your cheeks with his grip and twists your head towards him. The little resistance you offer flickers briefly before being snuffed out when he slots his lips against yours. 

What starts soft turns feverish in a matter of moments. Lips gliding and tongues twisting; the bridge of his nose pressed uncomfortably against yours, the whole kiss a mess of ache and teeth and hungry, greedy need. Spittle drips down your chin and you whine into his mouth when his beard scratches at the sensitive skin around your mouth. 

Need prickles at the base of his spine. For days now, he’s kept his hunger contained when all it wanted was to run rampant. He’s been so good to you—given you days to ready yourself for what was inevitably to come. He never tried to conceal the reason behind his presence in your house.  

And now it’s all coming to a head.

John slides you off his lap and down onto the floor under the table, planting his feet on the ground and lifting his hips to pull his sweats down, letting his cock flop out against his belly, heavy with blood. 

“John, do I have to…?” you whimper, trailing off like even saying it out loud might jinx you. 

“Want your mouth on my knot,” he says bluntly. 

Your eyes are sparkly with tears when he looks down, big and wide and helpless and it somehow just makes him even harder. When you sniffle, a bead of precum dribbles down his shaft. 

“Get it nice and wet,” John grunts, pushing your face into his dick. “It’s going inside you soon enough.”

“Please—” you whisper.

“It can go in dry too,” he warns. 

Your tongue pokes out of your mouth reluctantly, face all scrunched up and petulant, but eventually you do as you’re told. Shy, kittenish licks around the base of his cock, right over his knot. Lazy pleasure ripples up his spine, each drag of your tongue over his soft knot making his vision go blurry and his breath get heavier. Practically panting by the time you kiss a particularly sensitive spot on the underside of his knot.

“My hand’s getting tired, sweetheart—mind taking over?” 

He doesn’t wait for you to answer, letting go of his cock so that it droops, batting your nose on the way down. The affronted look on your face nearly makes him snort. 

Your fingers curl around his cock, lifting it up. It looks brutish in your hand, ruddy and thick, precum leaking from the flushed head and dripping onto your head. If he were a decent man, he’d peel your hand off his cock and replace it with his own, get himself off with a rough, dirty tug instead of leaving that responsibility to you. Spoil you instead with gentle love making, all sweet talk and slow thrusts, decadent, languid kisses pulling your attention away from where it hurts.

But John isn’t a decent man. Not even a good man. 

He lets you lick and kiss it all over until his knot is wet with spit. Every so often your teeth graze his knot, forcing a violent shudder up his spine, and he snarls down at you, teeth bared to get the message across. Don’t push too far. 

He’s indulgent to a point. 

“Suck it too,” he rasps. The hand on the back of your head tightens, angling your face until your lips are stretched around his rapidly filling knot and you have no choice but to gently suck the puffed skin of his knot, your nose pressed against the thatch of hair at the base of his cock. 

His cock aches the longer you kneel there mouthing at his knot. It’d be nice to paint your face with cum—your tongue to start and then your cheeks and chin. A little on your forehead too just to mark you as his. He’s close enough to the edge that it wouldn’t take more than a few well-placed sucks, but his knot is already big enough. Any more and he won’t be able to fit it in you at all, at least not for another hour or so.  

He clamps his hand around the back of your neck and pulls you off, a string of spit still connecting your lips to his knot. “That’s enough.”

You frown, bottom lip jutting out. “You didn’t like it?”

That soothes the tension in his shoulders a little, makes his lips twitch under his mustache. 

“‘Course I liked it, sweetheart.” The weeping tip of his cock is enough evidence of that. 

“Why—why’d you stop me then?”

“I’m gonna come soon, honey, and I’d like the first time to be inside you.”

Your eyes go wide. “Oh.”

It’s a challenge getting you onto your hands and knees after that, divesting you of your clothes too. He very nearly has to wrestle you down to the ground, but exerting even the slightest amount of force makes you instantly acquiesce, likely realizing that you won’t stand a chance fighting him. He shushes you when you choke back a sob, kissing the back of your neck soothingly. 

At least, he hopes it soothes you. 

John runs a hand over your rump and between your legs, finding your center damp and hot to the touch. 

“Well, that’s a bit more inviting,” he says approvingly. “Been wet this whole time, sweetheart?”

You shake your head desperately, shoulders hitching with your quiet sobs. When he dips two fingers into your hole though, it’s soaked. Squelches when he pulls his fingers out and thrusts them back in. 

If he didn’t have more pressing concerns, he’d be tempted to turn over onto his back and tug you down onto his face. That thought lingers for a moment and then takes root. 

“Hold on, love—gotta do this first.”

The mattress springs back when he drops down onto his back. Your back arches when John grabs you by the hips and drags you over his mouth, your knees planted on either side of his head, one higher up than the other from being dragged down the bed. 

“Wait, you never said—” 

The crack across your ass interrupts you. He flexes his hand and then palms that same ass cheek, rubbing over the hurt. If you swear at him, it doesn’t register because his eyes are locked on the slice of heaven between your thighs, transfixed by your dew-slicked lips parting for his gaze.  

“That’s better,” John murmurs, then digs his fingers into your hips and pulls you down onto his face. 

The smell of your sex is drugging, mind-numbing. Musky and warm and fragrant. The hood of your clit is drawn back to expose the swollen bud and it calls to his tongue, a call which he answers in kind, gliding the flat of his tongue over it and smiling to himself when it twitches. 

It satisfies every carnal urge breathing fire and brimstone in the back of his mind. His tongue saws up the seam of your cunt, parting the soft, delicate petals before drawing one into his mouth, humming around the mouthful. The vibrations must feel good because your whole body jolts in his arms. 

When he sucks your clit into his mouth, you nearly wrench yourself right off his face, hands clawing at the bedsheets. Firm hands dig into the flesh of your backside and pull you back down though. 

“Mm…you gonna cum, sweetheart?” he rumbles into your pussy, his words muffled. 

“I—I’m gonna—oh…oh…—” 

Music to his ears. He can tell it’s right around the corner when your breathing goes staccato and your thighs squeeze around his head, forcing him to move one of his hands to keep your legs spread. He can feel your hole clench around his tongue, hips jerking sharply. 

He loves watching a pretty girl come. Loves feeling it on his tongue even more. It doesn’t take much to work you up to it either, likely on a hair trigger since he bolted the doors to your house shut and made himself at home. 

Your upper body collapses onto the bed when you come, hips undulating over his tongue subconsciously, like you can’t help but chase your release. And who is he to deny you when you’ve been such a sweet girl? 

John scoots down the bed to slide out from under you and sits up, wiping the back of his hand across his mouth, smearing your juices from his mouth to his cheek, drops clinging to the bristles of his beard. Trapped there, he’ll smell it for days. 

Good. Better for him if he can. 

Taking his place behind you again, he reaches down between his legs and lines his cock up with one hand, the other holding your hip steady before pressing in one inch at a time, a smooth, slow glide to the halfway mark. You squeeze him like a vice, pussy all clenched up like a fist, too wound up and stressed to relax enough to take him to the root. Even coming has barely loosened you up. 

He topples over you until his chest is pressed to your back. The skin on your back is sticky with sweat, a tremor running through you and making you shake. 

“Easy, sweetheart,” John murmurs into the side of your head, planting a kiss there for good measure. The skin over your knuckles pulls tight when you fist the sheet beneath you. “Can you relax for me?”

“N-no?” It’s said like a question, like you’re looking to him for reassurance, like you need your alpha to help you relax, to loosen you up. 

It’s why he feels no guilt for the situation that you’re in. Trapped under your alpha, about to take his dick to the root. What would you have done if he hadn’t been around to take you home? Any matter of tragedy could have befallen you. 

“I’ve got you.” Talking both to you and himself. 

There’s nowhere for you to go but further up the bed when John forces the rest of his cock into you, gaining more ground with every thrust. That’s how soldiers make strides in new land, conquering new territory with every advance. Rigor and momentum. 

The flesh of your ass ripples with every thrust, hips clapping against your cheeks. He drives into you with a single minded intensity, grunting through each thrust. Reason falls to the wayside. All that matters is knotting and breeding the omega under him. 

Your cries echo through the bedroom in bright, clean bursts. 

He feels virile, potent; it’s his alpha running hot in his veins and his body thick with muscle and the way you all but disappear underneath him, just a sweet and soft omega for him to use and breed. Back arched just enough to let him sink in as deep as he can get. 

“John—” you wheeze. “T-too deep. It’s—unf, it’s, ah…it’s too deep.”

“Full, honey?” he grunts. 

“Y-yeah,” you respond, whimpering through the word. 

“I know, baby,” he says consolingly, contradicting his own sympathetic tone when his next stroke nudges against the seal of your womb. “Not very nice of me, is it?”

“Noooo,” you moan.

“Yeah, not very nice.” His laugh is breathless, mean. “I’ll make it up to you, I promise.”

Coherency is a luxury that slips from his fingers as quickly as it came. Like a shroud falling over him, it cuts him off from everything but what he touches. Even your mating gland is forgotten in his fervour, its siren song going mute against the backdrop of the blood pounding in his ears. 

His knot pops quick. Half a dozen more thrusts in and he feels it thicken and swell until he suddenly can’t pull out. It punches the breath out of him, making him bear down on you, trapping you both on his knot and under his weight. 

“Oh—oh—oh—” you gasp, overwhelmed. 

He hooks his chin over your shoulder and plants his hands on top of yours, twining your fingers together, an intimacy so staggering that he can feel it thrum through your body, your frame trembling underneath him. 

Knot thoroughly plugged inside of you, he can only grind his hips forward, nudging that same tender spot over and over until your pussy draws up nice and tight around him, dragged unwillingly to another orgasm. He sees stars when your channel squeezes around his cock, milking him for all he’s worth. 

Overwhelmed, your heart rate spikes and your scent intensifies, permeating the room and lodging itself into the deepest recesses of his being. Your hands claw up the mattress, ripping the sheet off the left corner, and you yelp when you realize that you can’t pull off his knot, truly trapped.

John’s hindbrain interprets your squirming as trying to get away and he reacts instinctively, forcing you down to the mattress until your arms collapse under you and pinning you there with his body. 

“Where d’ya think you’re going?” he growls, mouth pressed to your ear. 

You shudder, walls tensing up around his knot and making him spurt another wad of cum into you. 

“Oh god,” you whisper, grunting softly when he forces more of his weight onto you, the mattress depressing under your combined weight. 

Sticky, tacky skin. Laboured breaths. Dark. Tunnel vision. Everything narrows to a single point. In the crook of your neck, your mating gland pulses. He presses his tongue to your neck and drags it through a trail of salty sweat. 

The vice grip around his knot has him swimming in and out of consciousness, vicious instincts clawing up his throat. It thins the barrier between him and his alpha, one no longer distinct from the other. 

“Are you—are you going to bite me?” you ask through panted breaths. 

His alpha considers it. That’s what he is now, at least. Its consciousness has usurped his, or moulded with his, or risen to the ranks of human. It tilts its head through him though, two beasts sharing a body and an appetite. 

It runs its tongue over its lips. He does the same.

“Not yet.”

Voracious. 

No matter how many times he cums or makes you cum, it’s never enough. 

He still has to rest though. Much to his consternation, the body demands it, so he falls asleep with you resting against his chest or under the crook of his arm with your fist curled over his belly, and wakes to the damp clutch of your centre pressed against his thigh from when you rolled over in the middle of the night. Then wakes you up by grinding your hips down against the hard line of his thigh, sweet talking you through an orgasm that leaves you thick-tongued and cross-eyed.  

Days pass that way. Blunt fingers; rake of tongue. Skimming his mouth over the valley of your tits and down the channel between your legs, gorging himself on the slick dripping from your pulsing hole. Scraped a bit raw from his beard, so he’s careful now; spreads your folds with his fingers before thrusting his tongue all the way in. 

He comes back to himself every now and then, some memories easier to recall than others:

Your cheek smushed against the shower wall, hands clawing at the tile while he drives into you from behind, rivulets of water running down your body. 

The feeling of your throat flexing around his shaft, your eyes watering when your nose nearly grazes his pubes. Pulling you off his cock to let you breathe and leaning down to press his forehead to yours. 

Pinching your cheeks to open your mouth after cumming in order to watch it melt on your tongue. 

Indulging in kisses messier than sex itself, lips going swollen and numb, eyes so masted that they’re barely even open. Each glide of your lips liquid and svelte. 

Always wanting more and more and more. 

Heavy footsteps following you into the kitchen as you scurry around looking for something to eat, wary glances thrown over your shoulder to keep track of him. Always keeping him in your line of sight. Smart girl; clever enough to know not to turn your back to a predator. 

Occasionally, he loses track of you as a person again, thinking of you like an extension of himself instead. Your name disappears into the recesses of his mind, replaced by concepts like omega, mine, pup—

You cover his mouth with your hands to muffle his words and he bites your fingers one by one until you pull them away. 

And it keeps—

going and going and going and going

—thoughts shaking loose from his head, one by one; hours disappearing into thin air, nothing real except the omega on the end of his knot. When it whimpers, his chest puffs out and his breathing goes laboured, his only concrete thought to fill it with more of his cum, make sure that it takes. 

It will, if John gets his way. 

And he always does.

Another season over, this one different from the rest. 

You’re still in bed when he surfaces from his rut, low back cracking and popping when he sits up. His muscles will ache for days after this, the aftermath of any good rut lingering in the body longer than the rut itself. 

John scrubs a hand down his face and cracks his jaw open for a good yawn, stretching everything out. When he looks down by his side, he finds you curled into yourself, cheek resting against the back of your hand, sleeping soundly.

You’re so tuckered out that your toes don’t twitch even when he drags his finger down the line of your back, stopping at your sacrum. The slope of your ass underneath the bed sheet is tempting, inviting him to part your legs and settle himself between them again, but he’s put you through enough over the past few days. 

Later, he’ll want to check between your legs and see how much of his cum is still painted between your thighs. Either way, he’ll have to run you a bath with Epsom salt for you to soak in. 

That’ll have to wait until after breakfast though.

Right on cue though, his stomach growls. No amount of preparation for a rut is ever enough—not once has he ever come out of one feeling refreshed. It’s always aching joints and empty stomachs and bruises where bruises usually shouldn’t be. His age only makes it all the more noticeable. 

His future ruts won’t always be this way. Not when his hormones are tempered by his omega’s corresponding heat. In the future, proximity and cohabitation will align your heat and his rut cycles, making the whole ordeal far more pleasant. One to stabilize the other. You’ll put in for leave at the same time and slip into it quietly, like slipping into a gentle, welcoming stream. 

That’s a thought for another time though. For now, John pulls himself out of bed and saunters towards the bathroom, intent on running a quick shower before fixing himself something to eat. 

He takes a brisk shower under cold water, scrubbing his chest and letting the soap run down his legs for no longer than ten minutes before shutting off the water. It’s a shame that it washes your scent off of him, but he’ll rectify that later when you’re up.  

The smell of bacon frying in the pan permeates the kitchen, the sound of it as emblematic of morning time as birds singing in the trees or the soft sound of the radio on in another room. A cool breeze spills in through the cracked open window. 

It’s nearly time, but not quite. 

He waited because he wanted this to be deliberate. Intentional, as everything he does always is. 

It wouldn’t have been as meaningful in the throes of his rut. Easily chalked up to instinct or error, rather than seen as intended from the very beginning. 

An hour or so later, you start to stir. Though his instincts aren’t as sharp as they were in the midst of his rut, he can still hear the bed creak in the other room. 

The bedroom is bathed in light when he returns. In the center of the bed, you’ve turned over onto your back, the light cascading over you making you look almost angelic. His heart throbs in his chest. 

One day, he might even love you. 

“You awake?” John asks, resting his knee against the edge of the bed and slowly climbing over you. When you blink a couple times and nod, he leans down to draw you into a slow, drugging kiss. 

The taste of your mouth is familiar now; he’s tasted it so many times over the past few days that it’s etched into his memory now. 

“Hm? Yeah,” you sigh, then meet his eyes. You must register something there because you pause, squinting up at him. “Are you… Is it over?”

John nods. It’s easier to just say yes than qualify that the rut hormones haven’t fully left his system yet, still present though in much smaller quantities. He’ll still be quick to anger for the next few days, in no shape to return to work just yet, but eventually his system will flush those lingering traces of rut and he’ll be back to his normal self. 

You smile, relieved. “Okay…that's uh, that’s good. Do you…do you mind if I rest a bit longer before I leave?”

“‘Course, sweetheart.”

He palms the side of your face, brushing the wispy baby hairs out of the way. All his life and he’s never seen something prettier than you. 

“In fact,” John murmurs, canines aching when he runs his tongue over them. “You can stay as long as you’d like.”

You must catch the double meaning in his words because your eyes go sharp. “Huh?”

His eyes flicker down to your neck and it hits you like a battering ram. 

It’s too late though. He gathers your wrists in his palm when you try to bat at his face, immediately going into struggle mode, and pins them down over your head with ease. With his other hand, he holds you by the neck and turns your head to one side, exposing the delicate skin of your neck. 

“John—wait, no, no—waitwaitwait, please—you said—”

Legs kicking out, back nearly arching off the bed, you put every last bit of your fight into trying to throw him off, only for him to force you back down, barely a grunt passing his lips. Then he ducks his head into the crook of your neck.

“John—John, please!”

John bites down. 

Under his teeth, your gland splits. 

The moment of connection is just as divine as he imagined. When your gland breaks under his teeth and your blood oxidizes in his mouth, his world reconfigures itself around this new reality, one where you flow through his veins like blood and swim through his mind like thought. 

He sees now what he missed before. All this time, he’s assumed that fate has railed against him, intent on him remaining alone. 

What he understands now is that—

(you whimper under him and arch up into his body, saliva gurgling in your throat)

—fate has always been on his side. 

After Ragnarok, the earth will once again bob out of the saltwater, dregs of ancestral seafoam lapping at the sides.

(he gnaws at the Yggdrasil’s roots)

In this life, nothing has ever been handed to him because he has needed to fight for it. Of course fate would have taken that into consideration when creating his mate. Baptism by fire. He never would’ve been satisfied with simply being handed his intended mate. He needed to leave the imprint of himself like chiselling into stone. Maker of his own fate.  

When he pulls back, teeth unlatching from your shoulder and blood leaking from the wound, you stare up at him through misty, filmy eyes, tears scorching hot lines down your cheeks. 

He can appreciate the shock this must come as. You thought you’d get off scot-free after all—just a few days of being fucked and knotted and then sent on your way—not kept like bounty from a sacked city. You are a prize though. His hard earned prize. 

His moral compass doesn’t allow him to see this as a pillaging. Not when his actions are led by his heart.

You raise a shaky hand to cover the wound on your shoulder, wincing when your fingers brush the raw skin there, coming back saturated in blood. “You—you bit me.” 

John hums. “It’s alright, sweetheart; it’s over now. Nothing to worry about anymore.”

“You said—you promised you wouldn’t,” you bleat. 

He shakes his head, voice still soft when he responds. “Never said I wouldn’t, sweetheart.”

“You said you’d leave. You promised you’d leave.”

“Aw, honey, you wouldn’t do that to an old man, would you?” He lies down beside you, pulling on your heartstrings like a marionette. Plenty have called him a decent soldier, but no one has ever called him a good person. “Why make me leave when you could have someone in your corner instead?”

Tears like diamonds on your cheeks. You’re the most beautiful creature that John has ever laid eyes on; there’s no wonder why he had to make you his. Had he turned around in that hospital and walked out that door after hearing your voice, life would have been less complicated but it would have been dull, colourless. He would have woken up today with his mind at ease, but his heart would have been empty. 

Now though—

“We’ll be good for each other,” John says, moving his hand over your throat, loose fingers simply resting there. Just enough to feel the thrum of your pulse under his palm. “I’ll prove it to you.”

He feels you swallow beneath his palm. It is easy to see why you might doubt his words.

But in the back of his mind, his alpha purrs, satisfied for once in its life, and when he tightens his fingers around your throat, you go still, all of your trust gathering there in the palm of his hand. He can live with that.

So long as he has you, he can live with anything.

[lunarmothim]

Think I might finish my best friend/roommate Gaz fic….

[lunarmothim]

Y’all I have had a rough go of it these past couple of weeks and this community hasn’t quite cheered me up but it has brought me some comfort.

So thank you. I’ll be back to interacting and probably writing at some point once I get past the funeral and start to figure out my normal again.

[lunarmothim]

every time gaz is replaced with konig in fics, not only does an angel lose its wings but I also projectile vomit everywhere.

[lunarmothim]

fig. 2. teeth in crooked neck | Kyle 'Gaz' Garrick x Reader

MASTERLIST · AO3

Ten years is a long time to wait for the love of his life. So when you come to him to ask for his help with your heat, what can Gaz do but accept?

or: the forced mating omegaverse au

tags: Size Difference, Size Kink, Omegaverse, Explicit Sexual Content, AFAB Reader, Dubious Consent, Forced Bonding/Mating, Heats & Ruts

His fortune turns when your name flashes across the screen of his phone for the first time in weeks. 

“Hey love,” Gaz says, answering on the first ring. “Haven’t heard your voice in awhile.”

“Hi Kyle,” you sigh, and it’s like life rushes back into him all in one word. 

It’s been a few weeks since you last spoke, the last time being a few days after Gaz returned from a work trip overseas. Since then though, he’s been in the city consistently, making your absence come as a gaping hole in the middle of his life. 

The first thing you do is apologize for the weeks of silence. “Sorry I haven’t reached out. Work was crazy for a bit, and then—…ah, it doesn’t matter. Sorry though.”

“That’s fine, love. Bit calmer now?”

“Uh…yes and no,” you answer cryptically. “That’s, um…that’s why I wanted to call you actually.”

“Yeah?” he prods, curiosity piqued. It’s second nature to always wonder what you’re up to. If it was possible to live in someone’s head, he’d make yours a second home.

“Are you free for lunch tomorrow?”

He puts you on speaker phone so he can check his calendar at the same time. “I can move some things around. Can’t tell me whatever it is you wanna talk about right now?”

You’re quiet for a moment before you speak again, voice a little tinny through the speaker “I just…it’d be better if we could talk face to face.”

Words like those never bode well, but Gaz shakes it off, giving you the benefit of the doubt. It might just be embarrassing or sensitive news that isn’t easily disclosed over the phone. He’s never begrudged you your privacy before; it certainly isn’t going to start now. 

Besides, whatever it is won’t be private for long. 

“Sure, love. We can have lunch. What time?”

There are things he associates with time—seasons, death, taxes. Faces too, when they change with each time he sees them, months separating his visits and meaning that each time he comes home, there are new lines and new wrinkles in familiar faces. Piercings that weren’t there before. Tattoos and pregnancies and blemishes and drooping cheeks. 

Your face, however, is a constant. Not just in that it never seems to change, but that it never leaves his mind long enough to be forgotten. 

After all, how could it leave for even a second with what you are to him? 

He’s gotten that question before. What do you think you’ll do when you find your mate? When you come across an omega that smells just right, so delicious and ripe that you have no choice but to sink your teeth in and hold? 

Gaz doesn’t have to imagine. He’s known longer than most. It’s been more than ten years since he first met you—ten years since his keen teenage nose caught the tail end of your scent and followed it down the hallway and around the corner until he could put a face to the smell. 

His memories after that moment come in snapshots. A passing teacher dragging him into an empty classroom after recognizing the look in his eye, pupils dilated and mouth agape, his whole body thrumming with desire. Sitting in the principal’s office with his hands in his lap, fists clenching and unclenching while waiting for his mother to join them, the other adults in the room watching him with blatant distrust, as if he weren’t a child too; as if this wasn’t new and overwhelming and terrifying. His mother doing her best to console him in the car on the drive home, Gaz both too old and too young for the torrent of emotion washing over him. 

He blocks that week from his memory lest those same emotions surge up and paralyze him in his tracks. It gives him nothing but grief to remember that day. If the agony of an unconsummated mate bond weren’t enough, the sheer indignity of being treated like something to worry about even to this day comes as a crushing blow. 

It’s taken a lot to move beyond those years. 

It isn’t something Gaz would wish on anyone else. His life has been shaped by a very specific kind of longing. Agony in the shape of a neck. His burden since youth has been to stave off the hunger pangs, but that hasn’t always come easy, and it’s come at a cost. 

In the months following that day, he formed a kind of tentative friendship with you, trying not to let the devastation overwhelm him when you never seemed to recognize his scent as your mate’s. To just be in your orbit was better than nothing at all. 

He lasted all of a year at the same university as you before dropping out and enlisting, his instincts steadily becoming too powerful to ignore. The military was where he learned to manage the hunger—long, sleepless nights and rigid protocol hardening him, reinforcing his weak points. Learning to live with a certain kind of absurdity, and sucking up the urge to argue when given asinine tasks like mopping up rain water in a thunderstorm or being put on pencil sharpening duty. 

Since then, time and distance have helped him soothe the ache and leash his instincts. If he couldn’t be your mate, he could be your friend at least, and he’s taken to that role with zeal. 

Hunger still clings to the inside of his rib cage though. Cramped hunger crouched beneath his lungs. All breath, all pneuma. Tight clustered and tumorous. 

These days he’s just better at managing it. 

A day after your call, you meet on neutral territory, a coffee shop around the back of a busy street in Shoreditch, a neighbourhood he’s only visited a few times in years past when you felt inclined to drag him to the Sunday market. It’s not terribly busy for mid-morning on a Saturday, but the steam wand keeps hissing in the background and the music is cranked up a few decibels higher than Gaz would usually like. The whole place smells of hazelnut and toffee. 

You though—you smell like something indescribably delicious. Floral and fragrant, so succulent that his mouth waters when he inhales a lungful of your scent. Sweet like dandelion wine. 

Time has made it easier for his heart to cope with not having you, but not his hunger. 

You make pleasant conversation for a few minutes before addressing the elephant in the room, avoiding it at first in favour of talking about old friends and family—you ask him how his sister’s PhD defence went and light up like a thousand watt bulb when he tells you that it was successful—anything to avoid the real reason for inviting him to lunch. But there comes a point when you have no choice but to suck in a deep breath and finally get to it.

“I need to ask you for a favour.”

“Okay.”

“It’s a big one,” you warn him.

“Okay,” Gaz repeats, smiling. His acceptance comes easy because there’s nothing he wouldn’t do for you.

“I wouldn’t—God, this is so awkward,” you start, a heavy sigh steaming up from the back of your throat, head collapsing into your waiting hands to hide your face. Anything to avoid looking at him. 

Gaz sits and waits patiently for your courage to return. Unlike you, he doesn’t fidget or cross and uncross his legs. His urges are strictly regimented, impulses beaten out of him after years of exposure therapy, so to speak. 

You pick your head back up and his heart thumps in his chest. Mostly beaten out of him. 

“Please don’t feel like I’m pressuring you into this.” His lips twitch with a suppressed grin. “I’m only asking because you were the first person I thought of, but I can always figure something else out, or go to, um…—go to a heat centre.” 

He straightens at those words. “Heat centre?” 

“Yes. My, um—” You go quiet again, the words not coming easily to you, but his mind is already racing, mouth dry when he considers the implications of what little information you’ve already offered up. “I’ve been on suppressants for a really long time. Ever since high school. I was supposed to get my prescription renewed with my doctor this week, but I’ve only been seeing her for a few months, so when she realized how long I’ve been on suppressants for, she…—it’s apparently not healthy to be on them for that long.”

“Not healthy,” Gaz repeats, his rational mind somewhere else. 

You shake your head in confirmation. “No. She said long term suppressant use can lead to different cancers and other health complications, and that I should’ve been spacing it out rather than just…suppressing my heats altogether.”

The shrill whistle of blood through his ears muffles all but your words. 

It barrels into him at full tilt. Drives the breath from his lungs and the thoughts from his head. 

“Your heat is coming up,” he finishes for you, lasering in on the microexpressions flitting across your face. Blinders on. Nothing else in the world matters as much as your next words. 

You swallow. Look away. “Yep,” you chirp, voice catching in your throat and breaking. 

A chair scrapes loudly against the floor when someone nearby scoots back. 

“You aren’t going to a heat centre?” 

“…No.”

His heart beats so hard against his ribs that his chest nearly hurts. 

“You want me to help you through your heat.” He doesn’t have to ask; your trepidation says as much, and he’s always had an eye for details. 

“I know this is awkward, and I wouldn’t ask you if it wasn’t an emergency.”

Gaz reaches across the table instinctively to take your hand. “No, love, it’s fine. You know you can tell me anything. I’m glad you came to me first.”

Glad hardly touches the depth of the emotion coursing through him. Honoured comes closer. It’s not like he’s never thought about you in heat before, but he’d been away so often and for such long stretches of time, that he assumed you’d gone the heat centre route. He would’ve known if you’d gotten an alpha to help you through it—would’ve smelt their stench on you whenever he was back in the city. 

But as grateful as he is that you entrusted him with this knowledge, it also nearly takes his breath away. 

“You’ve never had a heat before?”

It almost seems unfathomable. He’s had plenty of ruts before—a couple of times with a partner, usually another alpha or a beta—and never once assumed that you’d gone your whole life without experiencing a heat. 

You shake your head. “No. I got on suppressants as soon as I presented and it was just easier to live life without having to, you know…deal with heats and all of that. Just seemed like a hassle.”

His head is spinning. He grips the edge of the table to keep himself upright, but it’s almost not enough. At any moment, he might tip right over.

He won’t ask if you’ve ever slept with someone before. It’s none of his business. Even if it were, he wouldn’t want to know. 

Besides, even if you have, they haven’t had you in a way that mattered. There’s no mark on your neck or ring on your finger, and you’ve never spent a heat with someone else. 

Never until now, that is.

The answer is right on his lips when you cut him off at the pass. “Don’t answer now. I wanted to ask you in person, but I don’t want you to feel on the spot.”

“Love, you aren’t putting me on the spot.” Not when the choice is so obvious. 

But you don’t let him finish, holding up a hand to get him to stop talking. There’s a tremor in your hand, your fingers quivering slightly, and noticing that makes him pause. 

“Please just—just think about it,” you insist. 

“…Fine, I’ll give it a think,” Gaz rasps, acting like his whole entire world hasn’t changed in a blink. 

“Thanks, Kyle.” 

Your relief is palpable, so undisguised that he’d be insulted if he wasn’t viscerally aware of how much the conversation has taken out of you.  

You hug him on the way out—a gesture so natural to your friendship that you don’t notice the way he pulls you closer than normal, every inch of your body plastered to his—and he stays for a bit longer, finishing his lunch alone. He needs the time to think after what you just told him, time to digest that news without the blood ringing in his ears.

When he leaves, the sky is different. Silver sheafs of light paint the streets on the walk home, the noise of the traffic and clatter of conversation louder than ever before, the cacophony of a whole world happening around him. But it’s distant somehow, like the trickle of a brook off somewhere deep in a forest. 

He’s on the threshold of a new world, one foot dangling over the edge. For now, he keeps his balance. It remains to be seen in the days to come. 

A late, gold sun bathes the street with ribbons of light and warmth in the early hours of the evening. There’s a bistro across from the building where Simon works the evening shift in the underground parking lot, and they meet there once a week for food and a cig before Simon has to clock in. 

Gaz savours this hour and a half more than most. There’s never a guarantee that Simon will show up; his friendship is a deliberate and intentional act, not easily given but easily taken away. It’s not something that Gaz takes for granted. There may come a day when the other man never shows up again and Gaz eats at a table across from an empty chair. 

He has faith though. Their relationship isn’t so tenuous that every day he expects the worst. More than once, they’ve travelled together—one of Gaz’s fondest memories is sitting with Simon in a piazza in Florence and conversing over espressos and lemon tarallucci. For a time after leaving the military—close to around six weeks, give or take a few days—Simon even slept on Gaz’s couch until finding his own place. 

Suffice it to say, they’re closer than most people would guess. Close enough that Simon doesn’t need to be told that something’s up when Gaz is more brusque with the waiter than usual.  

“Are you ever gonna spit it out or what?” Simon finally asks, a touch annoyed with having to be the one to broach the subject of Gaz’s mood. 

The bigger man sits across the table from him with a mullish look on his face. Cantankerous as always, likely in a mood from a combination of bad sleep and old aches flaring up. He’s always touchier between the seasons, the sudden shifts making his skin go painfully dry and old injuries act up. 

Gaz’s smile is slightly sheepish when it creeps onto his face. “You could tell?”

“‘Course I can. You’ve got stupid look on your face,” Simon grunts, taking a messy bite of his sandwich. Pepperoncini slices and mayonnaise drip from the other end onto the plate. 

The one downside to eating with Simon is having to mask his reaction to Simon’s complete lack of table manners. It's a skill that's come with plenty of practice.

“My—” he pauses, choosing his next word carefully. “A friend of mine asked me to help her through her heat.”

It’s not a topic they’ve ever broached before. His raunchier conversations are usually relegated to Johnny, Soap usually the initiator. Simon keeps his exploits private, cards close to his chest; it doesn’t seem impossible that he has a girl squirreled away somewhere, but Gaz would never know if he did. 

“Ever fucked ‘er before?” Simon asks, blunt as usual. 

Gaz laughs, shaking his head. “No. It’s not like that.”

“But you’re gonna fuck ‘er now?”

“Yes. Maybe. It’s complicated.”

“What’s complicated about fucking an omega through a heat?” He talks with his mouth full for a second before pausing to finish chewing and swallowing. Then he takes another bite, talking through that one too. “Knot ‘er a couple times, wear a mouthguard if you ‘aven’t got enough control, then go home. Simple.”

“It’s not that simple.”

“Why the fuck not?” 

He mulls over the best way to say it before deciding to just mirror Simon’s usual blunt approach. “She’s my mate.”

Simon’s indifference sloughs off all in one go. “When the hell did you bag someone, Garrick?”

His laughter this time borders on derisive. “Haven’t yet, actually.”

Simon stills, staring at him from over his sandwich. More ingredients spill from the bottom and onto the plate but he pays them no mind. The silence stretches on for a while, long enough for Gaz to catch on to the fact that Simon has no intention of responding, either too baffled or appalled to muster up a response or simply waiting for Gaz to justify himself. Likely the latter. 

“We were both too young when we met,” he explains. “Must’ve just presented when I first scented her and everyone told me to wait until she made the first move. Then time passed and…obviously she didn’t, and I didn’t want to pressure her.”

“How young?” 

“Uh…” He doesn’t have to think, but he knows how Simon will respond and that makes him hesitate. “Eighteen?”

“Jesus fuck, Gaz,” Simon groans, letting go of his sandwich in disgust.

“Look—”

“You’ve waited ten bloody years to bite her?”

Simon looks at Gaz like what he’s saying is anathema, like even the thought of not mating his omega doesn’t compute. For him, it probably doesn’t. It’s not the way things usually go. Gaz knows he’s been more patient than most. 

“I didn’t want to force her into a mate bond.” He shrugs. His own sandwich grows cold on the plate, barely a third of it gone compared to the scraps Simon still has left to eat. 

Gaz knows the excuse doesn’t hold water, but for as close as he is with Simon, he doesn’t have it in him to get to the real heart of the matter, the truth that his heart is still bruised. That there’s still a part of him that doesn’t believe this won’t all get ripped away from him in the end. That his own doubts might be the reason it all falls apart. 

“Fuck that,” he scoffs, pointing at Gaz with a mayo and buffalo sauce covered finger. “Have you told ‘er yes then yet? Never mind, ‘course you ‘aven’t, bloody fuckin’ moron. You’re gonna call ‘er after this and tell ‘er yes. Then, on the day of, you fuck her and bite her.”

Gaz rolls his eyes. “I can’t make that decision for her.”

“Someone’s gonna eventually. Has to happen. If it ain’t you, it’ll be some other bloke who gets to fuck and pup ‘er while you sit around with your dick in your hand. That how you want this to play out? Cucked by some bellend who won’t treat ‘er right?”

He nearly gnashes his teeth at Simon’s words, but he’s more civilized than that. He goes stone-faced instead, nostrils flaring.

“What was I supposed to do? Bite her the next time I saw her in the hallway?” Gaz rolls his eyes. “Yeah, that would’ve played out really well for me. Not like I wasn’t on thin fuckin’ ice the whole time with everyone.”

“Been a few years since then.” Simon picks his sandwich back up and takes such a big bite that he squeezes most of the ingredients out, tearing off a chunk of bread and meat.

“Yeah, I’m aware.” His tone is abrasive, but Simon shrugs it off, unbothered by a little vitriol. “Seeing as how I’m the one who’s been suffering through those years. Nobly, might I add.”

“There’s nothing fuckin’ noble about suffering,” he scoffs, upper lip curled. “You do the hard shit and then you get out. No sense in letting it drag on.”

He very nearly argues that point. Has to bite his tongue at the last second to keep from being crueler than warranted. As if suffering weren’t Simon’s main export; his main claim to fame.

He’s better than that though. And, if he were being honest with himself, there might be some truth there. 

When Simon leaves for his shift, Gaz sits there until his coffee goes cold and the manager comes by to gently inform him that they’ll be closing shortly, offering to pack up the rest of his food for home. Gaz nods absently, still miles away in his head.

He drives home in that headspace, mulling Simon’s words over. 

Justice is a core tenet of his. Fairness another. He’s lived his life up to this point guided by a strict set of principles, hardly breaking his rules of conduct unless forced to do so, unless given no other recourse. 

But he’s given so much of himself to the world and asked for so little in return. Is it not fair that he receive this? 

And besides, the beast in his chest rumbles, licking its chops, did you not ask for his help? 

He clicks the button on his sun visor to let himself into his condo’s garage. In the elevator on the way up, he stares at his reflection in the door and chews the inside of his cheek. 

Ten years now he’s sat on his hands and waited for a sign, rejecting the urge to simply take what his beast sees as his. The patience of a monk. Now there’s a light at the end of the tunnel. A white flag waved to signal the end. And rather than take that white flag for what it is and head into the sunlight, he insists on staying put and ignoring the way fate beckons him forward. 

There’s no glory in torturing oneself, no prize to be won for self-abnegation. 

And though his answer was always yes, Gaz allows himself a moment to consider what it would take for him to say no and send you off into the arms of another man. 

He hasn’t got that kind of strength in him. He’s dangled out of helicopters with his head mere inches from the ground, jumped out of a chopper hit by an RPG, fallen through the floor of a building on fire, and been under heavy fire more times than he can count, but that would be the thing that killed him. Seeing you with someone else. Knowing that the opportunity to make you his was truly lost, beyond recovery. 

And he’s tired of the way things are, his sacrificial nature bleeding into every facet of his life. 

There has to be a time for change. 

The next morning, as soon as it’s socially acceptable, he calls you, holding the phone so tight that he accidentally lowers the volume all the way down before fixing it. 

“Thought about it enough. I’ll do it.”

Two weeks until the day.

He circles it in red on the calendar in his office and it colours his peripheral vision every time he turns his head. 

And every night leading up to that day, Gaz puts his head down on his pillow to rest and he dreams. 

Fragmented dream; images of soft thighs and sweat matted hair, lips and tongues pressed together, glutes and buttock squeezing with each thrust, panted breaths getting louder and louder, the air humid and electrified. 

Always, waking at some undetermined hour, jaw clenched, the flameform of a woman left burning in his throat. 

Anticipation whets his appetite. His stomach growls like the beast in his chest and it paces restlessly as the days stretch out endlessly, only stopping when the sun finally dips below the horizon, that time coming each day later and later like some sadistic torture levied on his soul. 

In the weeks leading up to the event, Gaz comes with you to pick up supplies even though you swear that you’ve got it all under control. A lot goes into preparing for a heat. You have to stock your fridge, make your nest, lock away your valuables in case you break anything in the throes of your heat. At the end of your Costco run, the trunk of his car is stuffed to the brim with water bottles, groceries, blankets, wet wipes, chafing cream, sports drinks, and moisturizer. 

At the door to your apartment, he moves to come inside with the bags and only stops when you protest, insisting that your nest isn’t ready yet. His lips twitch into a grin. 

“You don’t want me to help carry everything in?” Gaz asks.

“No, it’s fine. I’d rather—well, just bring everything to the door and I can do the rest.”

He humours you this time because things will be different soon. When your heat is over and he’s no longer just a friend that you can keep at a distance but a red blooded man who tended to your weeping cunt and kissed every inch of your body, things will be different.

Until then though, he can give you this. 

Sometimes he finds himself hypnotized by the tantalizing glimpse of skin that he gets when your neckline pulls and the mating gland sitting in the divot between your neck and shoulder is exposed. 

Every moment in your presence is excruciating now that he knows that the waiting has come to an end. The two week interim period feels almost flimsy, false; the veil has dropped though, and he knows what’s on the other side of it now.

Though his rut is months off, the resonance of your scent must rouse his dormant instincts and throw his hormones into whack because he puts on a couple kilograms with ease, his body preparing for your heat. He overstays his allotted time at the gym by half an hour every session, so lost in his own head that he runs ten kilometres without even realizing it. Sweat runs off him in rivulets, the front of his shirt stained a darker shade of its original colour. 

In the locker room, Gaz sets his towel down on the countertop and stares at his reflection in the mirror. The sudden uptick in mass that he’s put on in the last week is noticeable even to him, his thighs and arms bulkier, and his abs a little less defined with the added weight around his midsection. His skin is smooth and buttery from moisturizing religiously before bed every night, a nice sheen to it. 

He rolls his shoulders back and flexes, preening for the imaginary viewer in his head that looks remarkably like you. 

Johnny would taunt him mercilessly if he could see him now. As if Johnny weren’t twice as vain and pompous as Gaz on a good day. 

He looks good though. Strong. Virile. Capable of seeing his mate through her first heat. If that self-assurance makes him seem cocksure or arrogant, so be it. 

There are plenty of worse things to be. 

“Did you put in for time off?” you ask, still sweaty from a brisk walk through the park to meet him. 

“Yeah. Did it the same day I called you. Took the whole week off.”

Even for as early as it is, the park is busy. Mothers pushing prams jog by in front of the bench the two of you are sitting on, all dressed in the same leggings and puffy vests, headbands holding their hair back. The city has barely woken up from winter’s tight hold, the air brisk and the ponds gelid; small mounds of ice-encrusted snow spread throughout the park like an inverse archipelago. 

In a few more weeks, there might be buds on the trees.

The pretext for spending so much time together in the lead up to your heat is so you can integrate his scent into your system. Gaz barely suppresses a laugh when you give him that excuse. As if you haven’t had a lifetime of acclimation. As if his scent hasn’t immixed with yours by now, and yours with his. 

“I took an extra couple days off after. You know, just in case.” You shrug like it’s no big deal. 

Gaz knows better though. Your ambivalence doesn’t read as wholly true. He can see the way your throat bobs when you swallow and your fingers tighten around your coffee cup. You haven’t made eye contact with him yet despite ten minutes having passed since you sat down beside him. Despite the mild weather, your coat is zipped up to the top, the metal nearly biting into your throat.

You’re doing a bang up job of acting like this isn’t some long preamble before jumping into bed together. He can’t fault you for the fact that it’s all he can think about. It runs through his mind twenty-four-seven, running an endless track that only seems to get easier the more laps he does. 

It’s strange being with you now. Humbling. There’s almost something fascinating in knowing that though you now insist on keeping a polite distance, in a week’s time, he’ll have you flat on your back and whimpering. There’s no harm in allowing you this final bit of grace, so Gaz doesn’t protest, even though—

In a week, you’ll be his.

“Are you nervous?” Gaz asks.

You stiffen, either offended or shy. He settles on the latter when you hesitantly reply, “No. I think we got everything I needed. Um. Not much more to do now other than wait.”

“That’s good.”

“Plus…I trust you.”

His heart clenches at that, stunned into silence for once. 

“You’ve always smelled good too,” you admit. “From what I can tell. I’ve always had a pretty poor sense of smell—really, it’s shit—but you smell better than most people. And I know you’d never hurt me.”

“I wouldn’t,” he stresses. 

You smile and finally meet his eyes. If only he could tell you it with his eyes alone. Nothing could be further from his intentions. If he has his way, you’ll be better off by the end of your heat.

“It’s going to be rough though,” Gaz says apropos of nothing when you go to take a sip, nearly making you spit out your coffee. 

“Huh?” you ask, looking over at him. You wipe your mouth off on your sleeve. 

“First heats always are.” A gust of wind makes you shiver. “You'll probably be worse too, since you put it off for so long—” He chuckles under his breath when your eyes widen. “Sorry, love, I’m not having a go—I’m just being honest is all. Have to know what you’re getting into before it happens; that way you don’t freak out when it’s too late.”

“Too late?” you repeat.

He nods. “Yeah, love. Once your heat hits and my…my alpha takes over, I’m not going to be able to, uh…control myself. I’m going to want to knot you as many times as I can. It’ll be the only thing I’ll want to do.”

All you can do is stare at him, beyond words. Mouth open, teeth separated. One day he’ll have you on your knees like that, tongue out as well to run up the underside of his cock. 

“But I’ll be good to you. I promise.”

He pats your knee before standing up, and you stare up at him with your mouth slightly agape, eyes round. 

“You’re leaving?” you croak, dry throat making your voice crack. 

Gaz smiles. “Gotta head out, love. Got some errands to run. Remember to do your stretches and call me if you need anything before Saturday, alright? And thanks for the coffee.”

He tosses his cup into the bin on his way out of the park, every instinct in him screaming to turn around and go back. It isn’t time though. 

It’s coming, he reassures himself on the walk home. It won’t be long now. 

How does it happen that an alpha can have his omega within biting distance for years and still keep their hands to themselves? He asks himself this question every day, but the answer remains out of reach.  

It takes a strength of will not easily called up. A sense of honour and duty that few can touch, never mind possess. He has it in spades though, chock full of the stuff, and it’s moulded him into the kind of man capable of taking care of you. 

The only thing left unanswered is whether that strength has served its purpose. Whether now is the time to let it go.

He runs his tongue over the point of his canines. 

It’s too soon to tell.

He wakes more alert than any time in nearly thirty years of life, daylight engraved into the side of his face.

Close enough to touch. Gaz’s skin itches when he brushes his teeth and packs his weekend bag with his last few things. An hour—two tops—and you’ll be under him, soft thighs parted and slick hole stuffed full of his cock. Then days more ahead of him to do the same thing over and over and over. 

He drives to your place with a sense of caution that borders on neurotic, coming to a full stop at every stop sign and yield, on the lookout for any reckless drivers lest today be the day that he gets into an accident. There’s no margin for error today. 

The roads are clear this early in the morning though, so he breathes out when he pulls into the parking lot of your building. It’s overcast now, the sun receding behind the clouds. Everywhere around him, life keeps on happening like the world isn’t about to irrevocably change. 

Gaz lets himself in using the spare key fob you gave him a week prior. Even the halls are quiet, the day not yet started enough for people to be on their way out. It’s a Saturday after all. 

His legs seem to move without conscious thought, like he’s being pulled towards your flat, a magnet of opposite polarity. There’s a prickling awareness of another consciousness at the back of his mind. He’s been aware of it all his life, but it’s as real now as it’s ever gotten, the prospect of its omega in heat at the end of a hallway and beyond something as trivial as a door giving it more cognisance, more influence. 

Even from the other side of the door, your scent sets his teeth on edge. 

You answer the door bleary-eyed and sweaty, housecoat cinched tight around your waist and fuzzy slippers making it look like you just woke up. Visibly teetering on the edge of your heat. It’s so obvious and the smell of it so fragrant that Gaz’s instincts kick in and he pushes you back into the apartment, slamming the door shut behind him. His bag drops to the floor beside him. 

“How are you feeling?” he asks, already palming your cheeks and tilting your head this way and that. He tugs down your lower eyelid gently, checking your sclera for anything abnormal.

“A bit hot,” you admit. 

“What’s your temperature?”

“Just a little over ninety-nine degrees. What’s the matter with you? Did you go to med school without telling me or something?” 

A slight temperature is entirely normal for a heat, the body working overtime to support the increased production of estrogen.

“It’s your first heat. I’m taking it seriously.”

You roll your eyes. “It’s not a baby. I don’t think you need to ask me every five minutes if I’m dilated enough.”

He ignores the baby joke because there’ll be danger if he doesn’t. The situation is already tense enough without thinking about you swollen with his pup. That’s a dream for a different day. Instead, he helps you take off the housecoat (which must have been adding five degrees to your internal temperature) and herds you into the kitchen for a cold glass of water.

It helps but barely.

Your first wave of your heat doesn’t crest until mid-morning, and by then Gaz is practically breathing smoke, the scope of his attention shrinking until you’re the only thing he can focus on. When you twitch, his head snaps in your direction, eyes vacant apart from a slight glimmer of awareness. 

It’s getting harder to think through the fog. It’d be worse if his rut overlapped with your heat, but even just being in proximity to an omega in heat—his mate, no less—forces him into an equivalent headspace. Ears peeled for any noises in the hallway outside your apartment. Wary of another alpha intruding on you in this state.

“C’mon, baby, we’re gonna get one last snack in you before it hits,” Gaz murmurs soothingly, urging you up off the couch and into the kitchen. You stumble slightly on your way there and his heart skips a beat.

You squirm in your chair while trembling fingers bring slices of manchego and chorizo up to your lips. His gaze is intense and unwavering. Any desire to glance down at the spot between your legs evaporates when your eyelashes flutter shut and your cheeks bulge as you chew. 

You’re so sweet like this. A tender thing for him to open up and ply with victuals.

“Just a couple more, okay?” he urges, pushing the plate closer to you and shushing you when you whine. 

You turn your head away when he brings a slice of cheese to your lips. “M’full,” you complain. 

“I know, baby, but it’s gonna be a long time before you’ll wanna eat again.”

“You smell weird,” you grumble instead, turning your head into his armpit and taking a deep inhale. 

“What do you mean ‘weird’?” he asks, slightly perplexed.

“Dunno. Different.” You drag another deep breath in. “Did you put cologne on or something? Smells…uh…really good.”

His dick throbs. “No, baby. Didn’t even shower before I came over.”

“Mmm. Good.”

His arm drops to the table, the force of it making the plate rattle. Fuck but how that nearly gets him. He’s not infallible. Eventually something is going to tip him over the edge from sanity into delirium. 

If this is any indication of the days to come, there’s a chance neither of you will come out entirely unscathed. 

It happens gradually, your sentences slowly degenerating and fragmenting, and your eyes glazing over. Even the smell of your skin gets richer. 

The effect that your heat is having on him is staggering. No one told him it’d be like this. No one told him it’d be like unzipping himself and letting you inside. Like sitting still as a fire blazes around him, the flames licking closer and closer to his skin.

Then your fever spikes and all bets are off. 

“Up,” Gaz growls. He doesn’t wait for you to listen, lifting you up from the chair from under your arm and hunching slightly to scoop you up into his arms. 

You moan, clinging to him. “It’s, uh—Kyle, I…I’m really hot.”

His legs are heavy beneath him, lead weights that he has to drag across the apartment, each step tougher than the last. 

Your nest is a soft, sumptuous garden of blankets and pillows and assorted clothes dragged out of the closet and spread across the floor and bed. You must have pulled the mattress off the bed frame at some point in the last two weeks because it’s pressed into the corner of the room, draped in every single sheet and blanket you own. The bed frame sits quite awkwardly on the other side of the room, pushed out of the way so as to not get in the way, and there are foam panels plastered all over to soundproof the walls. 

Clever girl, thinking of that. 

Everything’s been rearranged. He’d caught that you’d dragged a bookshelf into the living room when he came into your apartment, but even your dresser and nightstand are tucked away in the corner of your room. It’s like you took inventory of everything you own and moved everything apart from the barest essentials needed for your heat. 

He comes down onto one knee on the edge of the mattress before setting you down. You come up onto your elbows almost immediately. There’s a look in your eyes that he’s never seen before except in his dreams. Besotted, devotional. In his wildest dreams, he couldn’t have imagined that you’d ever look at him like this. 

You sit up when he comes down onto the mattress, constantly orbiting and orienting towards him. 

“Gonna take this a little at a time, okay, love?” Gaz rumbles. 

“Yeah, yeah,” you rasp, climbing into his lap when he softly urges you up. An arm braced behind him keeps him from collapsing when you sag into him. 

Pseudo-rut makes him a bit dumb, a bit clumsy. He palms the back of your neck a bit too roughly, murmuring an apology against your lips when you whimper before drawing you into a deep, toe-curling kiss. 

His stomach seizes up when he realizes that he’s kissing you for the first time. Ten years of anguish and heartache and delirious need finally culminating in your lips parting against his, the soft melt of your tongue against his when you let his tongue slide into your mouth, his blunt fingers tilting your head higher up. 

Gorgeous, perfect mouth. Kissing it feels like coming home after years away. 

God, he’s wanted it for so long. And God, your mouth tastes good, and when your tongue touches his, his head goes cloudy and his cheeks go hot. 

Clothes fall to the wayside, slowly added to the nest one by one—his pants are shoved into the crease between the mattress and the wall, your shirt tucked under a pillow. He has to reach down to readjust himself through his boxers and your eyes follow the path his hand takes, going half-lidded and hot.

He smirks, only a little bashful. “See something you like?” 

“Uh-huh,” you mumble, barely taking in his words. 

His chest puffs involuntarily, the beast in him preening. 

Touching your bare skin for the first time, Gaz realizes that he’s never felt so moored and ready. This is where he’s meant to be. Every agonizing moment of the last ten years has prepared him for this moment; not even the bite of his pseudo-rut could make him flounder. 

He traces a nipple with his thumb, following the path with his tongue when he lifts his thumb away, round and round the areola until you’re practically sobbing his name. Not enough. It’s still not enough. 

“Baby, I need to get you ready,” he murmurs when you pull at the waistband of his boxers. 

“M’ready now,” you half-snarl, tugging more forcefully, trying to rip his underwear right off. 

Gaz laughs. “No, you’re not.”

You don’t have a choice but to indulge him though. It’s his way or the highway. He’d told you that back at the beginning, after ringing you to tell you that he’d help you through your heat—it had to be under his terms or not at all. 

Your knickers get shoved under the pillow as well. Something for him to toy with later, when you’re tuckered out and not raring to go just yet. It’ll tide him over when you’re too sensitive for him to play with your pussy. 

He barely grazes a knuckle over your clit and you come, hiccupping through your first orgasm. You’re quick to come, like everything up to this point has just been foreplay. 

“Oh lovie,” he coos, pressing his lips to your temple. “It’s alright—I’ve got you.”

You jolt when he thumbs your clit again. Too sensitive. He pulls it away just long enough for you to catch your breath and for the twitches to subside, but when you start to pant again, your smelling ripening in that telltale way, he strums his thumb across it again, tucking a finger into your hole and groaning when he finds it scorching hot.

He dreamt of fingering you all the time back in high school. Thought of sitting beside you in the auditorium during assemblies and sliding his hand up your skirt until you spread your thighs and let him push your panties out of the way; cornering you in the bathroom between classes and pressing his fingers into you from behind, muffling your cries with his mouth; jiggling your pretty clit in the backseat of the bus, draping his jacket across your lap so no one else would see your wet pussy. 

The reality is so much better than he ever could’ve imagined. 

Three fingers and still you beg for more. You’re clamped so tight around his fingers that he can barely move them, not without exerting a bit more force than he’d like. You must like it though because you squeeze around his neck almost intolerably tight when he forces his fingers in.

“Good girl,” he grunts, shoving them back in. “You can take it.” 

“A-alpha?” you stutter. 

Gaz pulls you close, tucking your face into his neck. “Come here, I’ve got you. Just hold onto me, love, okay? Can you do that?”

“Y-yeah,” you breathe. 

His whole body jerks when you bite his neck. Your teeth don’t break the skin, but still he shudders, squeezing his eyes shut. Just barely keeps from telling you to bite down harder.

You have to take another break after you come, limp and satiated. Gaz uses that time to fluff the nest a bit, getting it nice and comfortable. He even leaves to fetch you a glass of water, bringing you into his chest for a nice cuddle while you recharge.

When you start staring too much again, he knows it’s almost time. 

Nervousness has no hold on him though. You came to him because you trusted him to take care of you through your first heat. 

That assurance settles him. Grounds him. There’s no one more equipped to do what he’s about to do because he’s waited his whole life for this. Whether consciously or not, his whole life has been in preparation for this moment, every choice, every heartache, every sleepless night. It’s all been in anticipation of this. 

It nearly undoes him though, despite everything. Despite the weeks spent mentally preparing, despite the strength in his body and the muscle he’s tacked on, despite his own fervor even. 

Because when he climbs on top of you and your thighs part, your hole is wet and waiting, ready for him to use it and leave a little mess behind. Just looking at it makes his balls throb. It almost doesn’t seem right that he’s about to spoil something as pretty as your pussy with his dick. Leave it stretched out and full of come. A little puffy from being knotted so many times. He should’ve gotten you a plug for after, something to keep his come inside of you. 

If his cock wasn’t so heavy, Gaz would be tempted to lean down and kiss it a bit too. It feels wrong to push inside without at least a little send-off kiss, something soft to set your mind at ease before he fucks you six ways from Sunday. 

He doesn’t have the luxury of taking his time though; your temperature is rising again, skin hot to the touch. 

Your patience is thinning too. “Kyle, I can’t wait—I can’t. I need you—” 

“I know, baby, I know.”

He strips off the last of his clothes quickly, boxers getting tossed behind him somewhere, before crawling over you again. The head of his cock looks brutish against your slick opening when he lines it up, but it stretches so prettily when he starts to sink in, gravity doing the work for him. 

Your legs girdle his waist, pillowy thighs catching him when he sinks to the hilt, breasts moulding to his chest. You’re scorching hot inside, a sweltering, blistering wetness that squeezes his cock like a vice. 

“Baby…” 

He sounds broken, eviscerated. Gutted like a gralloched animal. 

Gaz is barely able to move, barely able to pull his hips back and hump forward, the mattress shifting under him. He could probably knot you just like that. It wouldn’t take much to push him over the edge. 

“Ohohohohoh—” you squeak when he grunts low and deep, bearing down on top of you.

Two strokes into the softest, wettest cunt of his life and his resolve fractures into a thousand parts. Shards too splintered to ever piece back together again. 

At the back of his mind, he thought he might be strong enough to resist temptation. Thought he wouldn’t need anything as barbaric as a mouthguard or a collar around your throat to keep him from giving in to his baser urges. 

Strength isn’t what kept his urges fenced in though. Fear is what’s haunted him for the last ten years—the fear that he wouldn’t be enough for you, that he wasn’t allowed to have you for some reason, doubt crawling into his ear like an insect and whispering to him that he had so much more to do in order to prove himself worthy of you, that you needed to be the one to invite him in. 

But you have, haven’t you? 

Two strokes into the love of his life’s pussy and Gaz relinquishes himself to instinct, dropping his head, teeth sinking into the mating gland sitting pretty at the crook of your neck. It gives almost too easily under his teeth. Soft and tender skin, and then the secretions fill his mouth, blood and ambrosia all at once. Sweet dandelion wine and honeyed nectar. 

You tense up around him instantly, a garbled, watery gasp jumping from your lips, and sharp fingernails bite into his shoulders.

“Oh fuck,” Gaz gasps into the side of your neck when he relaxes his bite, head spinning as it all snaps into place, every strand finally tightening into place, draped in fate like samite, ermine, and brocade. “Oh God, baby, I’m so sorry. Oh God, baby, fuuuuuuck…”

“Alpha?” you wheeze. 

“Yeah, baby, I’m here,” he sighs, laving his tongue over the hurt. Your pulse thrums under his tongue, nervous and fast. “You just felt—hng, fuck—felt so good. Couldn’t help m’self.”

“A-alpha, you—you bit me—”

“Sorry, love, I didn’t mean to. Just couldn’t help it.”

“It hurts,” you whimper. You sound like you’re on the verge of tears.

“I know, baby, I know—I’m sorry. M’gonna make it all better, okay?”

“You’re gonna make it better?” you ask, almost pathetically, the tears beading in the corners of your eyes. 

His goddamn heart nearly breaks at the sight of your tears. “Of course I will, baby. Not gonna let anything bad happen to you—not my omega. My mate.”

There’s blood on his lip but not an ounce of regret in his being. Gaz sits up on his haunches, hands digging into your waist when he repositions you. He rolls you over onto your side and lifts a leg over his shoulder, swollen lips splitting open with the stretch, and fuck if you aren’t dripping wet. His head lolls forward as he stares, tempted to put you right back down and drink straight from the source, hook both legs over his shoulders and just go to town. 

But he has a job to do and his knot is already fattening up at the base of his cock, desperate to be wedged in a soft, warm hole. 

One hand palms your belly while the other holds your leg in place as he shuffles forward, turgid cock still slick with your juices. He pulls his hand away from your stomach briefly to readjust his cock, lining it up with your hole against before sinking in, letting the weight of his body carry him forward. 

Your eyes roll back in your head, the whites so white that his teeth ache. Not a hint of iris or pupil. 

He bottoms out this time on the first stroke, the curly hairs at the base of his cock damp with your slick. Warm, wet walls squeeze around his cock, sucking him in deeper, and Gaz curses softly under his breath. 

“With me, love?” Gaz asks.

When you don’t respond right away, he gives your cheek a light tap. “M’okay…”

The first few thrusts are mindful, slow enough to gauge your reaction and ensure you aren’t overwhelmed. His instincts dig like a spike into the back of his head, but Gaz grits his teeth, forcing back the impulse to rut between your thighs like a mindless beast. There’ll be a time for that in the coming days. 

Then he bucks forward a bit rougher, his shoulders tightening, tendons in his neck straining when his jaw clenches. 

Your breath comes short and sharp. “Oh god, oh my god…”

“There we go,” Gaz purrs. “That better, baby?”

“H-huh…?” Disoriented, your eyes roll around in their sockets until they land on him. Recognition comes slow, if at all. Poor thing, so horny that you can’t even think straight. 

“That feel good? That feel better, baby? I’ll take care of everything in the morning—get all the paperwork sorted, tell your parents and friends, everything. Not gonna let you stress about anything. Just have to lie there and take it nice and deep.”

The thought alone nearly makes him come. He’ll do everything by the book in the morning. It appeals to him on a base level, the idea of taking care of everything for you, so entrenched in your life that you don’t even have to think with him around. 

No more holding back, his beast rumbles in his chest.

We’ve always been worthy of this.

The thing under his skin has gone hungry for far too many years. It has known where to go to satisfy itself, but waited instead for the meal to come to it. 

And it has. You have. Wobbly-lipped and desperate for him to bite and hold. 

His pace is frantic now, mind turned off and glutes flexing with every thrust, thighs burning with the effort to keep the rhythm. All that matters is burying himself in you as deep as physically possible. 

Sweat drips into his eyes. Blinking doesn’t help. The air compresses around him, squeezing him to the point of bursting. 

Your pretty tits bounce with every thrust and he has to touch them. Grab them. Mould his hand over them until his palm always remembers what your nipple feels like. He loves the sounds you make when he pinches them and slides them between his fingers. 

“Wanted to touch these for years,” Gaz growls. He cups his hand under your breast, plumping it up all nicely. “Every summer you’d wear these, uh, these low cut tops…and I’d be so fucking hard, thinking about how much I wanted to pull your shirt down and suck on them.” 

“You never—oh, oh, oh—” you start, interrupted when you come again, walls contracting around his length. Gaz has to grit his teeth to keep from coming as well, not ready to come just yet. 

This one leaves you near breathless, too spent to finish your sentence. Your channel milks his cock. 

He wants to hear it though. “What’s that, baby?” 

“You…you never…said anything.”

“Wasn’t sure you wanted me back.” His vulnerability is ripped from him without warning, so used to giving you everything that he doesn’t even stop to think about what it’ll do to him.

You scrunch up your face, pouting up at him and it’s bad for his heart, it’s so bad for his heart how smitten he is with you. “‘Course I did. I just thought—I thought you didn’t—I’m, ah…”

So close to coming again, you lose track of your words, but Gaz understands, and the implication leaves him short of breath. 

So much lost time. So much to make up for. 

He leans down, bracing himself over you again. Your skin tastes salty when he runs his tongue over the shell of your ear. “You gonna take my knot, baby?” 

“Yesyesyesyes—”

“Gonna let me come inside too?”

“Yesssss—” you hiss through your teeth, tears spilling over your waterlines.

“‘Course you are, perfect girl. Gonna let me come inside and knot you because you’re mine. You’re my girl—my omega—my mate—”

It’s right there, barely a klick away. His balls are drawn up tight, thighs tensed and burning, every inch of him poised on the edge, desperate to come. 

When you reach down to grab a handful of his arse, trying to pull him in closer, Gaz chokes on his breath, tipped right over the edge. His groin pulses when he comes, that first spurt so good that his vision goes spotty. 

It’s so good—

God.

It’s hard to think. Hard to breathe. 

The breath is punched out of him, the sudden swell of his knot winding him. It locks his hips in place, the swollen flesh snug in the wet embrace of your cunt. Under him, you gasp for breath, wide eyes staring up at him.

“It’s alright, it’s alright,” Gaz coos, cupping your cheek in his hand. “I’ve got you, love.”

His hips grind forward in absence of any movement. Your walls flutter around his knot, too stretched out to squeeze any tighter. The energy is sucked from his body with his come, each pulse making him shudder and gasp. You must be full to the brim with how much he comes.

When there’s nothing left in him to give, Gaz slumps forward, only his elbows catching his weight, hips pinning yours down to the bed until he rolls over tentatively, making sure to keep you pressed tight to his chest. 

There’s nothing he could say that would be better than just this—draped over you, forehead to forehead, soothing his omega. Rubbing the bridge of his nose against yours. Massaging your thigh when you shift, a little cramp in your hip. 

It comes like second nature to him. It’s always been his favourite part after all—the afterglow. Pillow talk and cuddling; sweet, slow kisses with swollen lips. The fact that it’s with you only makes him enjoy it more.

When his knot softens enough to dislodge, he pulls out of you and strokes your cheek when you whine in discomfort. The sight of your poor, battered cunt makes him wince. 

He wets a hand towel in the bathroom and comes back to find you in the same place as when he left you, dazed eyes watching him curiously. Kneeling at the edge of the bed, he parts your legs to either side and crawls in closer, starting with the mess along your inner thighs and the fold of your butt. 

“Stay still,” he growls when you squirm. You go still at the subtle command in his voice, alert even under the fog of heat.

Your legs still twitch when he swipes the cloth between your legs, wiping off his leaking spend and the slick still wet on your inner thighs, but you hold yourself as still as possible, nearly biting your lip off in the process. 

“T-thank you, alpha,” you whisper, chewing on your fingertip. 

He feels his cock twitch at that, still wet with your juices. Doesn’t take much for you to work him up. 

It isn’t long before your heat crests again and you’re crawling over Gaz, hands pinning his shoulders down to the mattress. He laughs. The sound dies in his throat when you line his shaft up with your hole and sink down in one smooth motion, shutting him up oh so effectively.

Cheeky little thing. 

A few days go missing, only recalled in chunks when he’s a bit more clear-headed. Feeding you fresh fruit and slices of cheese from his fingers as you whined on his knot. Licking his own spend out of you while holding your trembling thighs open, digging his fingers into your plush inner thighs. Sucking your beaded nipples into his mouth while gliding his fingers over your clit, your cunt a bit too sore to take his knot again; not so soon anyway. Carrying you into the bathroom for a quick soak before emptying the tub and bringing you back to the bed. 

All the while, feeling your presence like a phantom limb. Like an extension of himself. Every inch of your pleasure rippling across his skin, amplifying his own. 

If Gaz had known it would be like this—

he’d have moved heaven and hell to have it. 

It’s his now though. You’re his. Mated and bound to him. So intrinsically and indelibly tied to him that no earthly force could pull you apart. 

It’s why now he can feel your mounting anxiety like a prickle at the back of his head. It’s what wakes him up so suddenly, creamy golden light spilling across the sheets and furniture when he opens his eyes to the door to your bedroom ajar. 

You’re in the bathroom when Gaz walks in, touching the mostly healed mating mark on your neck. It’s barely a puckered scar, so subtle that he might have missed it.

“Did you mean to do it?” you ask. It’s not the question he expected, but then again, Gaz isn’t sure what he expected from you. 

He nods though. No sense in lying to you. “Yeah.”

It’s clear now that this was always going to be the natural end, that any tryst between the two of you would always end here, with his mark on your neck. 

He wraps his arms around you and pulls you into him, moulding you to his chest. In the mirror, you look exceptionally fragile, still shaky and brittle from your heat, and it makes his heart ache. 

“I didn’t think I would, but I wanted to. I never would’ve if I had any doubt.”

One day he’ll tell you everything. He’ll tell you why he waited so long, what held him back all these years when he knew beyond a shadow of a doubt that nothing else would come close to this. 

“You didn’t used to smell like this,” you murmur, cold nose pressed into his collar bone. You seal your words with a deep inhale, drawing all of your breath into your lungs and holding it there for a moment before expelling it. 

“What do you mean?” Gaz asks. His lips twitch when you press your nose harder against his skin. 

“It’s different. It changed.”

“I swear it hasn’t,” he laughs. “I’ve always smelled like this.” 

He can feel the way you wrinkle your nose against his skin. “Liar. You used to smell… I don’t know. Maybe like this, but subtler. Fainter.” You exhale again, more contemplative this time. “It must’ve been my heat. Everything smells so much stronger now. It’s like breathing after being sick or something. Like my nose is clear or something.”

Gaz stares at your reflection from over your head while it washes over him. Of course his life would be ruled by a comedy of errors. What might’ve happened had you not gotten on suppressants all those years ago? Maybe nothing. Maybe the past is what it’s always been and there’s no sense in looking back and asking what if things had been better. Maybe regrets are like false idols in that way—there’s nothing holy in worshipping at the altar of them. 

He makes a mental note to keep this from Johnny. Gaz will never hear the end of it if he finds out. 

“What are we gonna do now?” you whisper. 

He lowers his head, pressing his lips to your crown for a moment before resting his chin on top of your head. “Don’t worry, love. I’ll take care of everything.”

[lunarmothim]

how it feels to say the weird thing

[lunarmothim]

ok maybe this isn’t a wild thought BUT

what if gaz was welsh. huh?

idk why but i have always read him in any fic as welsh. maybe it’s a “bring some uk diversity to the team” kinda thing but he just kinda seems like he would be and idk how to explain it but that’s how i read him in fic. kinda like how i read price as scouse (tho i think that’s partly bc of how barry sloane said he wanted price to be scouse and I just said yeah tracks so i at least have a reason for that one) so.

just my thought about my bae gaz for today

[lunarmothim]

Y’all if anyone here wants to let me vent for a minute DM me please. I could use someone to talk to.

[lunarmothim]

I am not okay thank you for asking.

Fuck cancer.

[lunarmothim]

I forgot I posted this but I logged in today and saw it and I stand by it.

Mans sees a baby in a bear onesie and he’s like “ah fuck I need one of those” and before you even tell him you’re pregnant he’s already bought a similar onesie. The little ears! He’s obsessed. Your kiddo is wearing that home from the hospital.

Sorry I don’t make the rules.

IM STILL TOO DEPRESSED TO WRITE

BUT PRICE WHO SEES A BABY IN A BEAR ONESIE AND WELL OOPS YOU’RE PREGNANT

[lunarmothim]

IM STILL TOO DEPRESSED TO WRITE

BUT PRICE WHO SEES A BABY IN A BEAR ONESIE AND WELL OOPS YOU’RE PREGNANT

[lunarmothim]

YOU hates terfs

[lunarmothim]

I still exist just got distracted by a new fwb that maybe makes me wanna end my slut era? Idk he’s had me very busy the last few weeks lol

Updates coming on my fics at some point this week I hope we’ll see

[lunarmothim]

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[lunarmothim]

peristalsis - iii

selkie!soap x reader. depression. suicidal ideation. strangers to "lovers." cunnilingus. analingus. spitting. piv. doggy. missionary. rough sex. breeding kink. mean soap. manipulative soap. smut. . Running away from life to the Scottish Hebrides, you meet a man who won't leave you alone. . Masterlist. Ao3.

previous

The ocean calls the seal to return, and you finally heed the growing chill you’ve been ignoring, as well as the complaints of your nearly-empty stomach.

Starvation is not on your list of preferred ways to end your own life, so you check the fridge Johnny said he had stocked. What you find is disconcerting—hoping for snack foods, pre-packaged conveniences, you instead find a carton of eggs, hard cheeses, condiment bottles. Milk in a jug, green herb bundles, sticks of butter, and an unopened package of bacon.

The freezer is much the same. Bags of vegetables and meats like shrimp or scallops. Frozen loaves of bread. Not even a single carton of ice cream. When the pantry also yields nothing more ready to eat—no chips, no cup ramen, no cans of soup—you give up.

There’s a hierarchy of action you’re willing to take to preserve yourself, organized around a precept of energy expenditure—eating spends less than cooking, so you focus on the former and do not practice the latter anymore.

Even though most food has lost its taste by now.

So you lay down on the couch. Sulking, maybe, but it’s the only halfway satisfying thing left to you. You angle yourself toward the shelf of books it faces in place of a TV; it’s mostly romance novels. Bright pink or blue or violet or red spines facing outward, most of them already cracked and creased down through their titles.

Did Johnny stock those for you too—emptying the shelves of a thrift book store for a woman he knew would be alone—or are they just set dressing for his dream of a honeymoon getaway?

You start thinking about the cliffs by the cove.

They’re not very tall. Maybe three stories. You would feel the impact—and it might not even work. You would lay there at the bottom, in the packed sand, broken. But alive to feel every consequence of it.

You might still die, but it would be slow. Someone could find you, and save you. Probably Johnny. You might be permanently broken—worse off than when you began.

It’s not an option.

You could have just bought a gun if you stayed home. It would have been cheaper, and faster—

Anxious energy needles at your legs and prickles along the insides of your palms; you sit up, agitated. Your stomach bubbles as the acid inside slides around with nothing to eat into. You scowl at yourself and retrieve Johnny’s jacket from the floor.

It’s colder outside than before, when you leave the cottage for the third time that day for the walk to Vatersay village. You can see it from the front door of the cottage, only about a mile away, and as you get going, you find a walking trail cutting through the machair grass leading in its direction.

The sky darkens far earlier than you expect, on the way. You hadn’t thought you were far enough north for that. Absent of city lights, the Hebridean starscape peeks through gaps in the moonlit clouds overhead, winking to life as the sun retreats around the earth’s curve. You pause—even your ennui is no match for the cosmos—looking to see if you can find the arm of the Milky Way, but the autumn sky does not seem inclined to show it to you.

By the time you reach the village outskirts, warm rectangles of yellow light are already brightening the windows against a heavy blue night. You get directions to the pub from an older man walking his dog—Last Cull, it’s called. You find it with a carved wooden sign, adorned with the silhouette of a lounging seal, hanging by the door at the front, and walk in.

Johnny said that less than a hundred people populate the island; when you walk in, at least a third of them must be here, and their collective chatter, along with the sounds of drinking glasses clinking or hitting tables, and the warble of classic rock music, all rush at you at once when you open the door, carried on a wave of orangey lamplight and the smell of hops and a burst of thick, hot air.

It’s more life—more sound—than you were remotely prepared for, and you freeze in the threshold. You stand there long enough that, worse, several heads turn to look at you—

The outsider.

You duck your head, and look at the floor as you direct yourself at an empty stool at the bar. Your purse beats against your leg with every quick step, heavy with a tourist’s excess preparation, and following eyes lance you like pins through a butterfly’s wing.

A man in a beanie and mutton chops is wiping a glass dry behind the counter; he looks at you drolly when you sit down.

“W’can I get you?” he asks, surprising you with a distinctly un-Scottish accent.

You blink several times. “Um…”

The bartender is immediately unimpressed. “Liverpool, love. You drinking or eating?”

You flush. “I’m sorry—um—both?”

He nods. He does not offer a menu. “Right.”

He disappears with the same abruptness of manner behind a swinging door, leaking greenish fluorescent kitchen light around the edges and through the circular window set up in the middle.

Whatever waves you made upon your arrival already seem to have dissipated, ineffectual in the long-term; conversation in heavy Scots flows around you, relaxed and indistinct. The pub is warm with body heat, little groups of islanders pulled in close together around pints and tankards and easy conversation.

These people likely have known each other for years; seen each other grow up. Watched time etch lines across one another’s faces. You can’t really understand the words being exchanged between any of them, but the tenor is familiar. None of it is especially important to say to one another, you know—it’s the back and forth that’s the point. The sway and rock of practiced call and answer. Of knowing, when they say something, that a response will be given, even if the response is something that’s been said a thousand times before.

You run your fingers along the dented surface of the old bar. Shift in your stool. Pick at a sliver of skin coming up from one cuticle. A single drop of oil in the middle of an ocean.

The bartender returns to you from the kitchen, no food in hand. Instead, there’s a new expression on his face—a hammer aimed at your protruding nail. His eyes are narrowed; his brows are drawn together.

“You’re Soap’s tourist,” he says.

“Um,” you say, pinned under the intensity of his stare, “no?”

He rolls his eyes. “Johnny MacTavish. Everyone else calls him Soap.”

“Oh.” You cannot guess at all where this conversation might be going. “Yes?”

“He cooks for me some nights,” the bartender says. “He’s in the kitchen right now. He says dinner is on him, and he’ll bring it out soon.”

“He’s here?” you demand, jaw dropping.

“Some nights,” the man repeats. He picks his drying rag back up, and gets to work on another glass. Your association with Johnny—Soap—seems to have unlocked in him a geniality that would otherwise be inaccessible to you. “Lad was right chuffed when you rented out the croft. Hadn’t seen him that excited in ages. Wouldn’t stop talking about it for a month.”

He hasn’t offered you a drink and doesn’t seem inclined to. Still intimidated, you don’t ask.

“He told me I was his first guest,” you say, worrying at your cuticle.

“Mm-hm,” responds. Then he eyes you. “See why he was so worked up now.”

You stop your jaw from dropping for a second time, but only just—the weight of Johnny’s hand ghosts down your back, aided by his scent radiating from his jacket, released from the fibers it’s seeped into by your body heat.

“How—um, how do you know Johnny—Soap?” you ask, awkwardly.

“If he told you to call him Johnny, call him Johnny,” the man says. “Was his captain, once upon a time. Served together in the SAS. Name’s John Price.”

“Nice to meet you, Mr. Price,” you say.

He grunts. “John’s fine. He been behaving?”

“Um,” you say, entirely unsure how to answer that, when the kitchen door flings open.

“Bonnie!” Johnny exclaims, apron-clad, rosy-faced, and grinning wide.

He’s exchanged his heavy sweater for a lighter, cream-colored henley, sleeves rolled up his broad forearms. Combined with the cinch of the apron strings around his middle, it highlights and flatters the athletic build of his silhouette. The hem of his kilt flutters around his knees as he hurries over.

“Hi, Johnny,” you sigh.

He balances a steaming dish on one hand and carries some silverware wrapped in a napkin in the other. The plate tilts precariously as he directs himself at you, but the food survives as he slides it in onto the bar in front of you.

“Shoulda told me you were comin’ down, or I’d’ve had somethin’ better ready to make!” he scolds, though he’s clearly too pleased to mean it.

On top of a ceramic plate, the glaze spiderwebbed with cracks from age and constant use, three oblong triangles of fried fish rest atop checked wax paper, attended by a large stainless still cup of large wedge fries that you remember are referred to as “chips.” Beside that is a small cup of some white condiment you don’t recognize. Everything looks fresh from the fryer, as if Johnny could not wait one second to long to bring it to you.

“Oy, lad, how come I don’t get that kinda table service?” someone yells out behind you. “M’ I not pretty enough for you?”

A chorus of laughter answers the teasing. You hunch into yourself.

“Go back to your pint, Angus, ya weapon!” Johnny returns grandly. Then, to you, “Here, this is the best thing for it—”

John Price has already stepped far aside; you and he watch as Johnny retrieves a long-stemmed glass from a shelf, and then pulls a bottle of wine from a low fridge. He sets the glass beside your plate and uncorks the bottle—bicep quivering as he works the screw—and then, thumb in the punt, he pours out a stream of white wine one-handed.

“Tossers over there’ll call me mad but Sav Blanc with a fish an’ chips is pure class,” says Johnny. Then, to your horror, he sets his elbows on the counter in front of you. “Go on, have us a bite.”

You stare at him agog. His cheeks are flushed red, and you’re not sure it’s from the heat of the kitchen or—his gaze flicks to your mouth and back—something far less comforting. He stares back at you, grin unmoving—eyes bright and vibrant and too intense to hold contact with for long.

You look down at the meal again. The fish looks crunchy and thick with golden brown crust; the chips are sharp at the edges and dusted with salt and some sort of green seasoning. The smell is impossible to ignore—hot and floury and oily.

You take a chip and dip it tentatively into the white sauce. Johnny’s eyes dance with excitement as they follow the movement. When you take a bite, the bitter tang of tartar meets your tongue and mixes with the mild potato as you chew.

It is only just shy of hot enough to burn but—it’s good. It’s delicious. It’s the best thing, you realize, that you’ve tasted in you’re not sure how long.

You do your absolute utmost to prevent that from showing on your face.

“It’s good,” you say, and take another bite.

“Barry!” Johnny enthuses. “Now have a dram, go on.”

Rather than allow you to pick up the glass like a normal person, Soap lifts it in one large hand—knuckles and wrist peppered with dark hair—and brings the rim to your mouth. You have no choice but to take a sip as he tilts it toward you, or else end up dribbling white wine everywhere.

You must begrudgingly agree, as it passes across your tongue, that it pairs very well with what you’ve eaten.

You nod at him in lieu of another response; the corners of his eyes crinkle. He sets the glass down and slaps the counter with both palms, pushing himself away from it.

“Enjoy that an’ I’ll be back for ya in a mo,’” he says. With a bounce in his step, he disappears back into the kitchen.

John Price throws you another droll look. “You’re never getting rid of him now.”

When he turns away to address another patron, you scowl at his back.

Johnny comes in and out of the kitchen several times, as you pick at the food. Whatever his usual habits as the pub cook, it seems he’s in a magnanimous mood this evening, bringing orders to every table and chatting with anyone who catches his attention.

And a lot of people catch his attention. Island native or not, it seems that Johnny is everyone’s favorite boy—and it’s hard not to see why. He throws bright smiles at everyone who speaks to him, pats shoulders, trades good-natured Scottish ribbing with anyone who throws it his way. He’s familiar, it seems, with everyone he talks to—or he’s good at making it seem that way.

And the effect it has on everyone he talks to is obvious. Weathered faces, the kind that seem to rest at a permanent, severe frown, rise to beam as brightly as the sun after Johnny spends a minute or two checking in on them. Fond eyes follow him around the pub; the conversations at tables he visits keeps a lively tenor even after he leaves it.

You reach for your wineglass and drink deep.

“There we go!” Johnny exclaims, noticing.

He does not leave you neglected, of course—he keeps circling around, looking at your plate, and then at you, and filling your glass when you empty it. It strikes you as rather sweet until he starts availing himself of a mouthful every time—turning the glass so that his lips cover the marks yours have made on it.

When about half of your plate has been cleared, and Johnny is returning from delivering a tray of sandwiches to another table, he comes up behind you and leans in close, hands curling around your shoulders. Mouth brushing your ear.

“Dinner rush is almost done, bonnie,” he murmurs, butter-smooth and low as banked embers. “Then I’m all yours.”

A tremor runs up the nerves in your spine; you sit up straighter when he pulls away, the fine hairs on the back of your neck reaching toward him as if statically charged.

You catch John Price eyeing you again, expression blasé. You flush up to the roots of your hair and avoid looking at him again.

Eventually, the pub begins to vacate, somewhere close to ten in the evening. No city bar, this one, even on a Friday night. You finish three-quarters of the bottle of wine in between turning the fish and chips into mush and crumbs, finally pushing everything away from you as the last stragglers jingle the bell above the door.

Then it’s just John Price, pulling on a coat, Johnny doing dishes in the kitchen, and you, alone, sneakers hooked to a rung on the barstool.

John Price sticks his head through the swinging door. “We still doing Sunday, Soap? Or d’you have new plans?”

“Course doin’ Sunday!” Johnny yells. “Canny wait!”

“Alright. I’m leaving, lock up when you go.”

And with that, John Price gives you a cursory nod, and makes his exit.

Soon after, Johnny exits the kitchen, wiping his hands on a towel, the motions making his pectorals twitch and flex. His apron is gone, the little v of his shirt collar exposing dark, curling chest hair.

The odd pelt—you realize, from your experience this morning, that it’s a seal’s—still hangs around another plaid kilt.

Your heartbeat is hot and heavy in your ears. You stare at him, lips pressed together tightly, a tremor working its way between your shoulders.

He tilts his head toward you, eyes half-lidded. When you meet his gaze again, his smile is set at an expectant angle.

“Drive me home, Johnny,” you finally say, wine and humiliation pulsing through your veins.

He drives you home in silence, and rests his hand on your thigh the whole way there.

You don’t move it. You don’t react, either—even when his pinky flicks against the seam of your leggings, right where it lays against your pussy. He roves his spread fingers and heavy palm all across the length and breadth of your thigh, cresting down over your knee and back up again, squeezing and massaging the fat of your quad.

You don’t say anything. He does not prompt you to do so. The corner of his mouth, when you look to him at your side, catching his profile, is curled.

The silence continues when he pulls up to the cottage—even the wind is light and quiet, as you unlock the door to let the both of you in. The night sky is cobbled with clouds that pass over slowly, letting only slivers of moonlight reach the earth, so inside the croft is dark and murky.

You don’t move to switch any lights on. Nor does Johnny, following close behind you.

Out of sight, it seems your body forgets who—or what, even—is following you. He is only a presence at your back, a body taking up space, and in the darkness, with only your hindbrain to rely on, he could be anyone.

Anything.

You stop in the middle of the living room. He hovers behind you. Not quite touching—but close enough to feel the gravity of him, strong enough to pull you in.

You drop your purse on the couch, and make to shuck his jacket—his hands take hold of the shoulders, allowing you to slide out of it. The deep, even pulse of his breathing is right there at the shell of your ear.

“Bonnie,” he murmurs, husky.

“I’m,” you say, “I’m going to use the bathroom.”

A pause. Then—“Alright,” he purrs.

You escape.

In the mirror above the sink, you look yourself in the eye. What you see is nothing you haven’t seen before—pitiable, needy, pathetic—and it’s nothing you have any desire to confront now. If you think too hard about it—if you ask yourself what you should be asking—there will be no coming back from it.

He’s been dangling this in front of you this whole time. It’s no fault of yours for taking it. This once, you aren’t to blame for what happens next. This once.

You run the cold tap over a washcloth and dab cool water across your face and down your neck. It does little to regulate the heat flushing through you.

If you don’t go out there now, he might leave.

You throw the cloth into the sink basin and open the door.

And Johnny is there, standing right there in front of it, leaning casually against the opposite wall—

Completely naked.

You stop dead.

Gray moonlight falls across his body in a thin haze. The bulky, sculpted planes of it roll with dense muscle and dark hair, which is thick and curly across rounded pectorals and joins in a broad stream down his abdomen. Twisting into a nest at his groin, they cushion a long, wide cock, uncut, half-hard—

That jumps at your appearance.

He meets your eyes. They are silvery and sharp, even in the gloam. Drags his gaze down—leveling it with your tightening nipples. Then he reaches to his side and twists the doorknob to the bedroom.

It swings open. Empty bed in the doorframe.

His cock jumps again. A diamond-drop of moisture beads at the tip.

“Go on,” he murmurs.

You walk in, barely aware of your own footsteps. His bare feet cross the floor behind you, and then the door shuts again.

He does not say another word as he approaches you; you do not turn to face him. You stand as if restrained in place as large, warm hands skim the dip of your waist, slope easily down your hips and up again; he pinches the hem of your sweater and lifts. You raise your arms, lost in the fugue of your pounding heart; he brings it over your head, and tosses it to the side.

Rough hands smoothing over your bare skin, almost like sweeping away dust. He unhooks your bra with startling dexterity—fingers slide beneath the straps and loosen them down your shoulders. Hands dipping down your chest, edging under and replacing the cups around your breasts.

His thumbs press your nipples in, circle around them; you gasp, flinch back against him, and feel his cock, fully erect, nestle in the cleft of your ass. He huffs a laugh into your hair.

His hands return to your waist, and they slide down, pressed open against your sides, as Johnny goes to his knees behind you. He grasps the waistbands of both panties and leggings and—face centimeters away from the globe of one ass cheek—pulls both down in one smooth, soft sweep.

It feels like being skinned. Your heart beats a hammer in the arteries against your throat. You nearly lose your balance, tilting when you lift one foot out of your clothes, before one of Soap’s hands return to your waist to give you ballast. Holding you up like it’s nothing. He squeezes the meat of your hip tenderly, massages the give of it with the tips of his fingers, skin warm and rough against yours.

The moment you’d first caught sight of Johnny in the airport, he’d slotted cleanly into a certain taxon of manhood; one need only to examine his morphology briefly—the mohawk, the muscles, stubborn refusal to cover his knees even as winter fast approaches—to understand that his is the lifestyle of the fast-living. He leers. He gropes. He runs down what he sets his eyes on whether his prey likes it or not.

An organism with cheap pleasure on its mind, and nothing more. Johnny’s bull-focused intentions had stunk acrid and obvious the moment they’d fallen upon you—aimed, you thought unceremoniously, between your legs and nowhere else.

So why, as his hands drag up the backs of your thighs, is he touching you so tenderly? Teasing you open, rather than prising you apart. Touching you as if he’s in no hurry to do anything else.

It feels like an insult. It feels like mercy you didn’t ask for. Without thinking, without knowing you’re going to do it—you slap his hand away.

“Is this going to take all night, or are you going to get around to fucking me sometime soon?” you snap, galled.

An indrawn breath. His or yours, you’re not entirely sure.

Then he rises up, shoves a hand hard between your shoulder blades, and you topple forward onto the bed, flailing, landing face-first, as Johnny knees up behind you.

“So that’s how you want it, then,” he says. Nonchalant. “Aye, I can do that. Come here.”

You don’t have time to scramble away before rough hands grab your hips and yank them back, pulling you up onto your knees, and with no more preamble Johnny shoves his face into your naked pussy from behind. Immediately hot and star-bright; thumbs hook into your outer folds to spread you open moments before his tongue burns a stripe from clit to perineum, no slow build, no warm-up, before he starts eating you out like he’s starving.

You shriek from the sudden contact, hips jerking, but his hold is iron, and the more you resist the more he tightens his grasp, fingertips digging down near to bone. He licks at your folds, at the dips between them, as if he’s pulling swipes of you away on every taste bud, imprecise, mouthing your cleft as if he means to swallow it whole.

When you reach back with one hand to grab his hair—to hold him where he is or shove him away, you’re not sure—he releases one hip and shackles your wrist in his fingers, bending your arm at the elbow and pinning it to your lower back.

“You asked for it,” he growls against you, “and now you’re gettin’ it,” another dig of his tongue around your entrance, “so don’ fuckin’ complain.”

He pulls away and abruptly spits on your asshole before diving back in. With the thumb of the same hand around your wrist, he smears it around, dipping just inside at the same time his tongue breaches your cunt; you feel teeth press against your perineum for a breathless moment before he lets up, and then he prods your clitoris with little jabbing licks, forcing his way up under the hood that fails to protect it from his onslaught.

You have a free hand—you reach back to slap at him again. The theory of insanity proves true; one wrist joins the other, and Johnny uses his own weight to move you as he likes, arms curled over your hips, rocking your entire body against his mouth, lips smacking against you as he alternates between licking up the slick that abruptly starts welling around your entrance and sucking your labia between his teeth.

He grunts and snarls after every brief surfacing for air, every time his tongue touches you again, as if every new taste of you in his mouth is better than the last. His hands tighten into vices around your wrists as he buries in deeper, groaning, shoving his face against you so hard it thrusts your hips forward, which he greedily drags back, and then he flutters his tongue against your clit as if to punish you for his own forcefulness.

“Johnny—” you cry, “Johnny, slow down, slow down—!”

A climax swells within you before you have any time to prepare for it, a closeout curling in so fast that it hits you before you can brace. Johnny thumbs your ass again and suctions his lips closed around your clitoris, tearing a scream from your throat, ripping your orgasm even further out of you as you suddenly, violently convulse.

It jerks you in his grasp, as if whipping you, and then, as fast as it came at you, it recedes; you sag, dizzy and gulping air, but Johnny’s mouth opens around your pussy again as if nothing happened, tongue and lips losing none of their frantic voracity.

“Johnny,” you whimper, “Johnny, I came, you can stop—”

“Don’t give half a shite, am no’ done,” he snarls, accent thicker than you’ve heard it before.

Your breath shudders out of you as he runs the edges of his teeth up your folds, and then, briefly, the flat of his tongue circles your asshole, before dipping back down into the heat of your cunt. He catches your clit again in a quick succession of sucking kisses, loud and wet and pulling at it so hard that tugs at nerves all the way down your legs, spasming through your calves.

Your breath thins in your lungs, escaping you in high, reedy whines, and finally, he pulls his mouth away—only to replace it with his hand. He transfers your crossed wrists into one grasp, wedging all four fingers between the split of your cleft and shaking it vigorously, like a dog might with a small animal clamped in its jaws. He follows this with several rapid slaps against flesh that is already screaming with overstimulation—

And then the head of something hot and hard parts you, circling to find its target, and with as little preamble as he began Johnny shoves his fat, rock-hard cock into you, all the way to the base in one harsh thrust.

It shoves the air from your lungs in one go, leaves you no room to breathe in before he grabs your wrists again, like reins, pulls halfway out, and rams back in again, setting a brutal pace, his thighs slamming against the fat of your ass at a rapid staccato that shakes the old bedframe on its creaky legs.

He barely pulls out as he fucks you this way, thrusting short and hard, your face crushed against the bedsheets as he uses your arms to pull you back against him to meet every thrust. The fattest part of his cock catches your g-spot over and over, bright and hot as iron pulled from a fire, and you can’t even get enough breath in your lungs to do more than whimper every time his hips meet yours.

“This is wha’ she fuckin’ needed, hen, aye?” Johnny snarls. “Hissin’ an’ spittin’ like a stray cat, didnae know wha’s good fer it, jus’ needed a big cock in ‘er wet cunt, didnae she?”

A long, shaky moan is the only response you can give. Fast, fast and hard—he bucks against you wildly, violently, sending shockwaves up your body that jounce your breast and ripple across your blazing cheeks. Your mouth hangs open at a loose angle—if you try to close your teeth, you might accidentally bite into your tongue—

He releases your wrists, and your arms fall hard to the bedspread. Then he bends over your back, planting his hands in the spaces over your shoulders, making a cage with his his body. It changes the angle of his thrusts, lets him force his way in even deeper, kissing the head of your cervix. You climb your hands up the bedspread, claw at his wrists with your nails, but you might as well be a curl of wind trying to knock over a pillar of stone.

“You can bitch an’ whine all you wan’ at me, bonnie,” he says, a nasty thread in his tone, “but I know mean pussy just needs some pettin’ to make it nice again, don’ I, now?”

You try to struggle under him, search for some sort of purchase in the sheets beneath you, and for a moment you think he’s making space to let you; his weight retreats as you rise to all fours, but then one solid, beefy arm closes around your neck in a chokehold. He brings the both of you up, settling you over the cradle of his thighs as he sits back on his heels, clamping your back against his chest.

His free hand snakes down between your thighs, finding your clitoris again with rough, abrading calluses. A hard, grinding roll of his hips, upward and forward, pushes it up into his touch, like the crest of a wave, but gravity gives you no escape on the downwell; he pushes and pulls you as he likes, heel of his hand digging hard into the sensitive edge of your mons.

You scrabble with your hands for something to hold onto—you find the brackets of his wide thighs, wiry with dark hair, and dig your nails into hard, tensed muscle. He only laughs in your ear, speeds the rhythm of his hips, pinches your clitoris between his fingers and drags it around.

“Told ya, bonnie,” he gloats, taking the lobe briefly between his lips, “she wants it—” and he pushes his cock in deep, shaking his hips “—bad as he does.”

He reaches further inward and splits his fingers around his own girth, pressing upward—as if he intends to shove them in too, and choking for air as you are you think deliriously that they might just slip in, no resistance, aided by the wetness free-flowing now around him, dripping in long streams down the inside of your thighs.

Inescable—no matter what you do, it’s nothing to him. You thrash against him, whining through gritted teeth in frustration, but he only moves with you, anticipating every direction you might blindly throw yourself in to get away. You cry out in wordless fury, slapping whatever parts of him you can reach, but it doesn’t matter. There is no purchase for you anywhere, nothing you can use to grab back any sort of control.

He’s too big. Too strong. You finally begin to comprehend it in a way that had been impossible before. Looking at him from a few paces, Johnny is easy to take in; easy to summarize and dismiss when you can see the whole of him at once.

But now, at your back—he feels vast. Enormous. An undulating wall of a hard body flexing against you, mooring you to it, all heat and sweat and sharp, animalistic grunting as it pistons into you from behind. The hand manipulating your clit is wide enough to cover your pussy entirely; the pillar of his body doesn’t so much as shudder as you struggle, instinct overriding desire as you try to escape the lightning-streaks of pleasure he carelessly sends through you.

You are too primed from your earlier climax to possibly last, and Johnny seems to feel it—you flutter and clutch around him, the sensation almost painful, but when both your hands fly to the one between your legs he only increases the pressure.

“You gonna come again, bonnie?” he sneers into your ear. “Jus’ tiring yourself out, poor baby. Fightin’ it so hard, an’ it’s gonna happen anyway.”

It does—he starts slapping your pussy again, right above where his cock stretches you to your limit, quick and sharp, and you break with ragged scream, arms flailing out uselessly, nails finding his forearm around your throat.

“Johnny—” you cry out, “Johnny!”

“Fuck,” he groans in your ear, “steamin’ Jesus, fuck—”

Suddenly he pushes you away from him, and you flail again as you land face-first into the pillows. His cock slips out of you entirely, even as you’re still clenching around your orgasm, but you have no time to react, either to mourn it or be relieved, because Johnny grabs you by the thighs, flips you over in one motion, and drives back in again before it ends.

“Fuck, bonnie, so good, fuck, do it again—”

He throws your legs open, leaving your calves to shake in the air as he fucks you faster. You nearly fold in half under the force of his thrusts, knees hovering nearer and nearer to your ears. Each slap of his hips against yours ricochets up your body, and, with nowhere else to go, back down—you ring like a bell, shaking all the way into your marrow.

“Soap,” you whine, “Soap, it—I—I can’t—”

Suddenly he grabs your face in his hand, so tightly he squeezes your cheeks together, pushing out your lips, and he lurches forward to get in your face. Fury blazes from him.

“I told you,” he snarls, “to call me Johnny.”

It shocks you so much that freeze up, going completely blank. The dark, sharp lines of his brows arch dangerously over flashing eyes.

He shakes your face. “Say it.”

“J—” you slur, unable to shape it in your lips properly, “Johnny.”

His nostrils flare wide. Fury is replaced by triumph. “Good fucking girl.”

He slams his mouth against yours.

The first time he’s kissed you, and he gives you no chance to participate in it. He purses your lips with the pressure of his hand to meld with his, opening your jaw wide enough to thrust his tongue behind your teeth. The force of it presses your head back into the pillow. It’s an attack; it’s an onslaught. And—if the grunts and groans Johnny makes in his throat as he does what he likes with your mouth are any indication—

It’s what he’s really wanted this whole time.

Everything else, he’s enjoyed. But this—his mouth on yours, lips moving together, saliva pooling and seeping between the seams—is the prize he’s aimed for all along.

It touches something inside of you. Something tiny and ugly. A thing that you’ve wrapped up in nacreous layers of shame and guilt, lodged in your soft tissues, and tried to forget about.

It sends your arms to wrap around Johnny’s neck, fingers digging into the shifting muscles of his shoulders. You close your thighs around his waist, crossing your ankles, and roll yourself up into every meeting of his hips with yours.

He moans, higher, and drops his full weight over you. His belly meets yours; his chest crushes your breasts under his. He uses the full brunt of his weight to rut into you, crashing his hips against you, stealing the breath from your lungs—

It’s an old trick you’ve learned from small experience, inhaling when you feel the rush coming—as if climax blooms in the lungs rather than the clitoral head, and filling your alveoli gives it no place to expand. It’s useful to prolong satisfaction, to stave off the end.

Johnny does not give you opportunity try. The only thing he allows you to occupy your mouth with is his, and as hypoxia thins out your bloodstream—as you begin to struggle for air—you go rigid with your third climax beneath him.

However long it lasts, you don’t know. It freezes you in place, in time. It wrenches your head back, arching your spine, tears one long, broken cry from your throat.

“Fuck yes,” Johnny gasps, feeling you clamp down so hard around him it seems you may never release him. He moves to bury his face in your throat. “Fuck yes, fuck yes, fuck—yes—”

His tempo falters, signaling the end—

Realization—“Wait!” you find some presence of mind to cry out—“a condom! We didn’t use—”

“It’s got a’go somewhere hen, an’ I’m no’ wastin’ it on yer belly,” he snarls, “just—just—yes—fuck—”

Then his teeth come down on your neck, hard, as his hips beat against yours, and then he buries himself to the root with one final, full-body thrust. He shakes his hips flush against yours as he groans long and loud, cock pulsing inside you, wet heat flooding you in jets, so full that it spills back out to drip down between you.

He pants hard into your shoulder. Your own breath labors, vision swimming.

A cloud covers the moon outside. Johnny makes no move to pull away from you—instead his arms wedge beneath you, banding around your back, and he rolls you both to your sides. You feel him kissing the sting his teeth left on your neck, as you lay there together, sweat cooling on your naked bodies.

Eventually, he pulls back enough to look at you. You have no time to arrange your expression, no idea even what you might want to present to him; whatever he sees on your face makes him smile, crinkling the corners of his eyes.

“There’s my bonnie,” he murmurs, and the next kiss he gives you is soft and very sweet.

Your lips rise to meet his without you thinking about it.

He strokes your back very gently. Sooner than yours, his breathing evens out. Even as he softens inside of you, he keeps his hips against yours.

“Johnny,” you whisper.

“I know,” he says. “I know. Just a little while longer. Can you do that for me? Aye, you can, I know it.”

You should say something about spermicide. Plan B. But the look in his eyes is so soft, so content, that you put it away for later. You just hold his gaze as he looks at you like you’re everything that could ever make him happy.

He kisses you again. Soon, the heaving of your chest abates. Exhaustion pours through you in one drenching wave; you turn your head to yawn.

“Go to sleep, bonnie,” Johnny croons, pressing his fingers into the soft part of your lower back. “I’ll clean us up, aye? You just sleep.”

You don’t have the energy to fight anymore. Soon, you’re slipping away—you’re aware for long enough to feel it when he finally pulls away from you, when he runs a warm washcloth between your legs, and then when he slides back into bed beside you and pulls up the covers.

Then you’re gone.

Sometime after midnight, you half-wake.

The moon has moved far enough across the sky that its light floods the bedroom through its one window, casting everything in silver. Your eyes open slowly, blurred with sleep; Johnny is still beside you.

He’s sitting up against the headboard; eye-level with you is his waist, covered by the thin bedsheet. You draw your eyes up his body slowly—there, his navel, dark hair curling around it. There, his chest, full pectorals rising and falling slowly with calm, even breath.

When you reach his face, you find him looking down at you, corners of his mouth curled. You meet his eyes—

The moon reflects in them. Disks of shifting light in both pupils.

Some part of you, buried in your hindbrain, shouts with alarm. It’s far away, cottoned with sleep. Muffled enough by the soreness of three full-body orgasms to be ignored.

Johnny reaches out and drags the back of one finger along the wounded part of your neck. Touch feather-light.

“Why are you here?” he asks.

Vaguely, you remember that you’ve answered this question before, but that doesn’t feel consequential. Any part of you that could protest is still lost to sleep.

As is any ability to dissemble. The truth—the thing you attempted to abandon, that has followed you regardless—slips out.

“Nobody wants me,” you whisper.

So quiet you fear he won’t hear you, and ask you to repeat it.

But Johnny tilts his head. The curl of his mouth softens to something almost kind.

It doesn’t quite get there, because a gleam of satisfaction that you cannot name colors his shining gaze.

“I want you,” he murmurs.

His broad hand covers the crown of your head, and he strokes your hair. The tide of sleep comes back in, and you know nothing more.

chapter 4 early access

[lunarmothim]

peristalsis - ii.

selkie!soap x reader. depression. suicidal ideation. strangers to "lovers." . Running away from life to the Scottish Hebrides, you meet a man who won't leave you alone. . Masterlist. Ao3.

previous

You sleep long enough that, when you wake up, you have enough energy to cry.

It’s a big one. The kind of cry that threatens to turn your throat out, with how hard you sob. Alone in the cottage, far away from anything resembling civilization, you wail like wounded animal, choking on your own tears and mucus, losing track of your body buried underneath the covers—

But it happens at a remove. You watch yourself implode from someplace deep inside, not entirely sure why it’s happening at all—but long past trying to figure it out.

This is how it’s been for a while. There’s nothing special about it anymore. Nothing urgent. Most of the time, you are a blank space of a person, a vacuum where joy or rage or fear should be, but occasionally some maelstrom or another kicks up to fill it in, and your only course of action is to ride it out until it ends.

You’ve stopped trying to fix it. And you’ve stopped hoping anyone else can, either.

So you cry, until at last, you’re empty again. Or you’re too tired to continue. The difference is negligible, but functionally irrelevant. Once it’s done, you get out of bed.

The pressure in the shower is as weak as Johnny reported, but the water is indeed warm when you turn it on; you stand naked under the flow, arms hanging at your sides.

The day stretches itself out before you with nothing to occupying it, just as you’d planned. Nothing to work towards; no effort to put forward. Nothing, thanks to your choice of locale, to feel guilty about not seeking out.

A day of peace and utter quiet.

Suddenly—violent banging, somewhere in the cottage. It startles you; you jump so sharply at the noise that you smack your wrist on the soap caddy attached to the shower wall. The banging comes again—annoyed, you realize with no little bemusement that someone is at the front door.

You wrap yourself in a towel and hobble out of the bathroom to answer it, a piece of your mind on your tongue, dart-shaped and ready to fly—

Of course it’s Johnny.

Johnny, big and burly in a sweater, kilt, and pelt once again, two paper cups balanced in one large hand and a grocery bag hanging from the other. Whose dark brows shoot up his forehead as his eyes travel with surprise, and blatant appreciation, down the dripping length your body.

“Well, good mornin’, bonnie,” he purrs.

“What,” you grunt. A cold breath of wind chooses that moment to force its way through the door, gasping across the shower water still running in rivulets from your hair to the rolled edge of your towel. Goosebumps erupt from your bare skin in millions of simultaneous pinpricks—you flinch bodily at the chill.

“Ah, hell’s bells, don’t just stand there,” Johnny says, following the wind. “It’s freezin,’ go on, let me get in, hurry.”

You let him step inside, for some reason, and he shuts the door behind him with the heel of his boot. He wastes no time after that, heading to the kitchen to set down his things.

“Brought breakfast!” he says cheerfully. “There’s this bakery on Barra I thought you’d like, fresh doughnuts and coffee. Dunno how you take yours, but there’s sugar in the pantry and cream in the fridge.”

“I don’t want breakfast,” you say.

“What? ‘Course you do. I’m no’ takin’ you seal-watchin’ on an empty stomach.”

He starts unpacking the grocery bag and setting things on the counter while your jaw hangs open. Several things occur to you to say—I never agreed to that and what the hell is wrong with you, for starters—but your stomach growls at him before you can. The aroma of fresh-baked pastry wafts through the kitchen when he opens one box, and he turns to grin at you, cheeks dimpling.

“Do you get dressed, bonnie,” he says. “It’ll still be here when y’get back.”

It is less polite than he perhaps intends it to be, given that his gaze travels appreciatively across your bare shoulders. You cross your arms fruitlessly over your chest and, nothing else for it, retreat to the bedroom, feeling his eyes on you the whole way.

You return to the kitchen after having pulled on wool leggings and the same fleecy sweater from the day before. Johnny, one hip set against the counter, has a cup of steaming coffee in one hand and a half-eaten cruller in the other, crumbs at the corner of his mouth.

“Got anythin’ heavier?” he asks around a chewed-up mouthful. “Gets cold out there.”

You look down at his bare calves, broad and taut and covered in a down of dark hair. “You seem alright.”

“I’m used to it,” he says, shrugging—the muscles flexing under your gaze.

You purse your lips. “I don’t have anything.” You hadn’t intended to leave the cottage overmuch.

You approach the counter. Johnny does not move a centimeter, forcing you to stand close as you pick through the two boxes of doughnuts and feel the body heat radiating off of him, displacing the scent of fried dough with his musk.

“That’s all right,” he says. You’re close enough to hear the way his voice hums deep in his chest. “I can keep you warm.”

You snatch a plain glazed from the box and take two very large steps away from him. The hair on the back of your neck lifts as you press against the sink behind you. If he notices your reaction, it doesn’t seem to bother him in the slightest—he lifts the cup to his lips and drinks, eyes sliding closed with simple, obvious pleasure, dark lashes curling against his cheek.

You take the brief respite from his gaze to stare at him. In the morning light, on a full night of sleep, you can almost believe that whatever you’d seen in him yesterday had been nothing more than a misfire of exhausted synapses. An overlay of a dream; a circadian prompt to rectify nearly seventeen hours of sleeplessness. You’d been cold, and tired, and hungry. That was all.

You bite down on your doughnut, not really tasting it. The nerves along your spine twitch and contract around the memory of his flashing gaze.

His eyes open again, and he smiles at you. “Good?” He flicks a look at the single bite you’ve taken, looks at your mouth, and then waits for your reply.

“It’s fine,” you grumble. Then, “How did you get here? I didn’t hear the truck drive up. Do you live close by?”

“Sometimes,” he says. He looks pleased that you’ve asked, that you’re interested at all, and you immediately regret inquiring. “Live on a boat, me. Moored in the cove right now.”

“A…boat,” you say.

“Aye.” A wisp of dark hair, something he must have missed when he gelled his mohawk this morning, flutters as he nods. “Nice and cozy. Not as grand as all this, mind.” He gestures around with coffee and doughnut at the less than five hundred square feet of the cottage. “But it’s still a sight nicer than some other places I’ve slept.”

He’s likely hinting at his military service. “Okay,” is all you say, unwilling to entertain it.

He smirk—undeterred. “We’ll take her out once you’re ready.”

“I never said I was going.”

Dark brows lift. “Got somethin’ else planned for today?” he asks, incredulous, as if he never imagined you wouldn’t want to hang out with him.

“No, I—”

You wrack your brain. You have no intention of explaining to this complete stranger that the last thing you’d wanted to do, when you booked this trip, was really anything at all—and in fact, you hadn’t even considered that that might be something anyone else would care much about.

Much less proactively address.

“No,” you repeat, sulking.

Johnny considers you, chewing. His eyes do not stray, this time, to places they don’t belong; but there’s an insight to them. A sharp awareness. A perception in his gaze that is just as undressing, as if whatever is going on with you is visible to the naked eye.

“I figure,” he says, slowly, as if to coax, “you put your wee shoes on, an’ I’ll pack this back up, and we take it along.”

“You don’t have to do this,” you grouse. “I don’t need you to, like—be my tour guide.”

“Aye, but that doesnae mean I don’t wanna,” he retorts, smiling.

He shoves the last bite of cruller in his mouth and gazes patiently at you as he works it with his jaw, the muscles flexing along his temples as he chews.

Exhaustion, your constant companion, stares you down alongside him. It would take so much more energy to fight him than to go along with whatever he has planned. Energy you just don’t have anymore. And going along doesn’t mean you have to pretend to enjoy yourself—it’s not like you care enough about Johnny’s self-esteem to conjure up a happy face to show him.

You can go, and be a bitch about it, and once you do maybe he’ll realize you’re not at all worth the effort he’s making, and then finally leave you alone.

“Fine,” you say, which is how you end up on a fishing trawler headed south toward, ostensibly, a colony of breeding seals.

It’s an old vessel—that much is obvious. Its edges and corners are dull with the passage of time and constant maintenance, scuffed by innumerable passes-over with cleaner and cloth. Mildew competes with the aroma of fresh varnish as Johnny leads you onto the bridge, which is mercifully closed in from the ocean wind.

The interior is mostly wood of a warm, orangish variety—you can’t tell if that’s a decision made with aesthetics or function in mind. The space comprises a kitchen, surprisingly well-appointed with a stove, sink, countertop, and fridge, and a small sitting area with both couch and booth seating. Surrounding windows allow in the grey light of the morning.

“Bought it off an old bloke on Lewis,” Johnny says, taking his place at the wheel, which is in a little alcove off the kitchen.

If you’d thought steering a boat would have curtailed his chatting, you’d have been wrong—he seems to have no trouble with that and talking, incessantly, at the same time, as he pulls the vessel away from the cove and into the open water.

“All his family moved to the mainland, he told me, an’ this is after generations fishin’ these islands, even makin’ it through the Clearances! No money in it anymore, he said, not like you could make in some office somewhere countin’ someone else’s money.” He checks something on the dashboard in front of him, but it doesn’t distract him for long. “Held on for a while, but people just kept leavin,’ an’ he was gettin’ too old to go out on his own. Got such a good price on it, I think he was just happy someone else was gonna take up the tradition.”

“Did he sell you the cottage too?” you ask, and then dig your nails into your wrist for encouraging him.

“Yup,” he says. “No one else wanted it, but me? I saw somethin’ special about it.”

He turns to smile at you—no doubt pleased you made the connection. You avert your gaze.

“Imagine someday I’ll have my own family here,” he continues. “Good place for it. Nice and slow, not like city living. Can hear yourself think out here. Perfect place to have a few wee ones.”

“If people stop leaving,” you mutter.

He turns to you again. “I’m no’ worried about that,” he replies. He’s still smiling. “You came here, after all.”

You have nothing to say to that.

The trip is a short one—Johnny brings the trawler alongside an island he informs you is called Mingulay, a square mile smaller than Vatersay’s tiny dot in the North Atlantic. Unlike the latter, he says, this island has not been inhabited since 1912, and has been completely reclaimed by the ocean and its wildlife.

After he drops anchor offshore, Johnny disappears down a steep flight of stairs below deck, which he had not offered a tour of, and emerges a short time later with a large, bulky coat.

“Didn’t I tell you?” he says proudly, holding it out by the shoulders. “Here, turn ‘round.”

You pause in the middle of reaching for it. You don’t know exactly why you comply—it occurs to you that if you grabbed for the jacket, he could simply not let go of it, and you would end up exactly where he wants you anyway. So you lower your arm and, resigned, give him your back.

He steps up behind you. Warmth pours off of him, more than you think any human body should be able to generate.

You hear him inhale, deeply, as he brings the jacket to your back. As you slide your arms into the sleeves, you feel his exhale on the nape of your neck, teasing through individual follicles of hair.

“There w’go,” he murmurs, much closer than you expected.

You can hear the low hum of his voice in his chest; his hands linger on your shoulders far longer than they need to, heavy, big enough that his index fingers brush along your collarbones.

When his hands make to slide down your back you step away from him and fumble to zip the jacket up; he chuckles lightly behind you. When you turn to face him, his lips are curled—smug.

“Alright then,” he says. “Let’s get out there.”

He rows the two of you to shore in a small kayak, two pairs of binoculars in your lap as you huddle away from the wind. You’ll be walking to the haul-out, he says—getting too close to the breeding grounds, which he calls a rookery, would spook them, possibly causing a stampede.

“It’s grey seals we’re gonna see,” he explains as the two of you pick your way across the rocky landscape. “Not the biggest haul-out you could see, some colonies get into the thousands, but we’ll have it all to ourselves.”

He insists on taking your elbow every time the two of you cross particularly uneven terrain, even though you don’t need it. You think he takes your attempts to shake him off as proof of your lack of balance, because he grasps you all the tighter every time.

“I’m not a child, Johnny, I can walk on my own,” you finally snap at him.

“Just bein’ a gentleman, bonnie,” he replies nonchalantly. He does not let you go.

As you get closer, you hear the seals before you see them, and when their voices reach you across the open island, you stop dead.

Groaning, grunting, hissing in a cacophonous chorus. Some part of your hindbrain double-takes, reshuffles itself—some ancestral instinct always on the lookout for predation. If you’d been given a chance to guess what a colony of mating seals might have sounded like, you’re not sure you could have guessed what they sounded like.

Certainly not like what you hear now—

Like people.

Johnny grins at you when he notices. “Aye, it’s a right ruckus, innit?”

He leads you up a small rise, where he has the two of you settle belly-down over the machair to overlook the wedge of rocky coast that the colony has claimed for its own.

And when you finally see it—it’s underwhelming.

Perhaps two hundred long, fat bodies, in varying shades of brown and grey, lay indolently along the rocks, in groups of three or four, some heavily galumphing from one place to another while others roll occasionally from side to side. The shifting winds catch their scent and blow it uncaringly into your face; you nearly gag at the admixture of dead fish and ammonia.

It doesn’t escape you that this is a rare thing to witness; you are not wholly immune to the fact that you are only a hundred meters away from something most people only encounter on a screen. It’s just that without a swell of awed music in the backdrop, or a narrator’s breathless wonder at the miracle of pinniped life, what’s left for you to observe is a population of wet, stinking animals, shitting where they lay, vocalizing without cease while they laze about doing basically nothing.

Johnny does not seem to notice your disillusionment; he hands you one pair of binoculars, and directs your attention to activity along the shoreline. You follow to where he’s pointing; one larger seal is hassling a smaller one, which snarls at the aggressor as it thrashes around with its substantial bulk.

“Little one there—” Johnny says, “that’s a female, probably obvious. Big one knows she’s ready to mate, can smell it on her.”

The female bares her teeth and lunges at the bigger male, which flinches back but holds his ground.

“Doesn’t look like she agrees,” you mutter.

“She’s just givin’ him a hard time. She’s all in heat, see? Just makes her cranky,” Johnny says. You feel his eyes on you, and lower your binoculars to look at him. “She’s got to fight to feel all in control.”

You flush. “Right.”

“You don’t think so?”

“No,” you say. “He’s—he’s just bothering her.”

He gazes at you for a moment, contemplative. Corners of his mouth quirking upward. He does not reply for a long moment, long enough that you have to avert your gaze from his.

“Nah,” he finally says, and you don’t think you’re imagining the low, sultry note in his voice. “She wants it bad as he does.”

You scowl, uncomfortably perceived, and return your binoculars—the pair is still facing off, gurgling and growling at each other. The female is slim, almost sleek, unlike most of the other seals populating the rookery.

“Is she sick?” you ask.

“Hm? Oh, no, she’s alright. The mums lose a lot of weight when they nurse. Takes three weeks, and they don’t eat in the meantime.”

“Jesus.”

“Be nice if the dads ever brought ‘em a bite, aye?” Johnny agrees. “Deadbeats, the lot of them.”

The two of you survey the colony in silence for a moment. As the morning wears on, the cloud covering thins overhead, allowing cool sunlight to filter through. The temperature doesn’t rise in response; begrudgingly, you tug Johnny’s jacket a little tighter around you.

Then, suddenly, his hand lands on your back, between your shoulder blades.

“Got some pups over there,” he says. “Look, by the kelp.”

You find them; smaller bodies, white dinged with wet sand and dirt, lounge near their mothers or wriggle with aimless difficulty. They’re fluffy and round as plush toys, with shining black eyes and noses, and once Johnny’s pointed them out you can differentiate the higher, sweeter pitch of their cries from the overall cacophony.

“Sometimes,” Johnny murmurs, “search and rescue’ll get called out because someone thought they heard a baby crying. Some kid stranded or lost, right? Turns out to be a baby seal.”

“That’s kind of scary,” you say.

“Aye,” says Johnny. “Always makes me think that’s where the old legends come from, about seal people or mermaids.”

A small ways away, some of the mothers lay with their pups far into the surf, letting the waves break over them. You watch as one mother thunks her large head overtop of her pup’s as the water rushes toward them; the pup wriggles, and then, as the wave engulfs them, it begins to thrash, whipping up a panicked froth.

“Time for swimming lessons already?” Johnny muses. “Seems early.”

You’re horrified. “She’s going to drown it!”

The hand still on your back pats you consolingly. “Just watch,” says Johnny.

The wave reaches as far up the shore as gravity allows, and then begins to recede. The pup’s thrashing calms as the air meets its face once again; the cow allows the pup to lift its head, and after a few sputters, the pup seems no worse for wear.

“They’re hardier than they look, bonnie,” Johnny says.

His hand, heavy and warm even over his borrowed jacket, slides down from your shoulders to your lower back, and then he rubs, slowly, side to side, as if to comfort you—but the knobs of your spine contract at his touch.

“Last of the births this season, looks like,” he says. “Mum’s getting ready to leave—probably not the only one.”

Something hard drops into your stomach.

“They leave their babies?” you ask.

“Aye. Once they’re done nursing, they mate, and then they go.”

You look back at the other cows with their pups. One baby has its muzzle to its mother’s belly, quivering and suckling, while she lays with her head on a patch of grass. She looks uninterested—more, she looks disinterested. As if how voraciously her pup is nursing has nothing much to do with her, and she’s bored of even having to think about it.

Bored—and already looking forward to the next part of her life without a baby in it.

“That’s horrible,” you say.

“They’re solitary animals, bonnie,” Johnny says, not ungently. “The only time they’re really all together is for this.”

A line tightens between your stomach and throat, and you feel it start to build between your ribs. A tremor—foreshocks. The wind picks up, bringing a sharp chill off the ocean and up the rise that cuts into your stinging eyes, abrades the naked skin of your hands and the exposed part of your neck.

When you look through your binoculars again, you wonder how many of the pups you see have already been abandoned.

“Aw, bonnie,” Johnny says. There’s a kind of pity in his voice that has your hackles raising.

“I want to leave,” you say, yanking away from his touch and shuffling down the incline. “Take me back to the cottage.”

“Bonnie, it’s okay!” Johnny protests, rolling to his back to look at you as you stand. “The pups make it, they figure out how to fend for themselves.”

You glare at him, vision blurring. “All of them?”

Some part of you knows you’re being irrational—knows that nature is a cruel home, and that many children face worse fates than the seal pups. Abandoning the young, the needy, is no aberration; it is, in fact, far more the standard than the human practice, which lingers for decades—

Most of the time.

Johnny has no response. He holds your angry gaze, brows drawn low, mouth pressed into a thin line. It’s the first time that cocky aura, which seems to rest in every fine line on his face and every angle at which he holds his body, is completely absent.

He isn’t reflecting your anger back at you, though—he’s internalizing it. Letting it hit him, you think, and trying to use it to figure you out.

You do not want to be figured out.

You scoff again. “Take me back,” you repeat, and then you start walking in the direction you came, without waiting for him to follow.

Johnny drops you off in the cove, and thankfully does not linger this time before he departs—he bids you farewell after rowing you to shore, contemplation on his face, and then leaves you to yourself.

You retreat, seeking the cottage’s empty quiet.

As you perch on the couch you listen to the radiator hum—the wind blow over the reeds in the thatch roof—your own heart beating a drum in the arteries of your neck.

Percussive. Quick and hard. Like heavy knockers on a door. Pounding as if to burst through.

You realize you’re still wearing Johnny’s jacket, and you throw it off, disgusted with yourself. You get up and pace, and try to ignore it lying in a heap on the floor.

You do something you swore you wouldn’t do the moment you set foot on the island—you turn your phone back on.

True to Johnny’s word, there’s no signal. You picked this island, this part of the world, for a reason; for the past several years, a slow exodus from the British isles has vacated the need for dedicated cell towers or satellite or internet access, especially given that the only ones who remain are too old now to want it or need it or know how to use it.

It’s isolated. Cut off. Left behind by anyone with better options, and only clung to by those trying to preserve the only way of life they know.

Some kinder part of you belongs with that demographic; the part that was telling your mother the truth, before getting on the plane.

The rest of you holds your phone up and starts walking around.

In the furthest corner in the bedroom, you find a single bar of signal. A tiny chip of connectivity—a thin, frayed thread. Something you lied to yourself about cutting.

It’s a weak connection. Unstable. It could take a while—you stand there, waiting.

The screen dims. You tap it again.

Blank.

You unlock it, look through your apps. Wonder if maybe your notifications are bugged by your new SIM card.

Nothing—

No one.

You whip around and, with a cry, pitch the thing at the far wall—it hits the stone with a crunch, falling to the floor in pieces.

You’re out of the cottage then in a mad dash, door slamming behind you, driving yourself back into the wind. Far away—you want to be far away, far from everything, so far that nothing could possibly reach you. You trudge down the path toward the beach, banding your arms across your chest, shivering in the cold, and yet you hardly feel it.

Not worth it. No point. Waste of your time. Energy. All of it. Stop trying. Stop wanting. Nothing. Nothing. You want nothing.

You’re halfway down to the shore, not really knowing what you’re going to do when you get there, when you catch sight of a body on the sand.

You gasp, a sharp breath down your larynx, and freeze in a dead halt.

The body is completely still.

A swimmer? A diver? It’s dark, like it just pulled itself out of the ocean—or washed up—

Then, it moves. A twitch, a ripple across its bulk, and your chest rapidly decompresses.

A seal. It’s a large seal, lounging alone on the beach.

You stand motionless. You’re very close—much closer than you and Johnny had been at the rookery. You hadn’t contended with the sheer size of the animals, tucked safely up and away from them, but there is no illusion of distance now.

It’s the biggest one you’ve seen today, you’re sure of it. Bigger, you think, than most adult men. Its pelt is a riot of every shade of grey, splashy, like liquid paint thrown across a canvas. Black speckles scatter overtop of marbled white and cool slate, and down the center of its back is a broad, dark line, soft at the edges, which reaches all the way up to the top of the seal’s head.

The bull—it must be male—turns over. It lifts its head, and opens its eyes—

Fear suddenly zips up your spine as it looks right at you.

You stumble backward and trip on your own feet, landing hard on your ass. Johnny’s care with keeping enough distance from the colony rushes back to you, along with the warring couple’s bared teeth.

They can’t move that fast on land, right? They aren’t interested in people, right?

You scramble backward. It’s so much bigger than you ever would have imagined. If it got to you—threw itself over you—it could crush you with its weight alone—

The bull watches you placidly. Unperturbed.

You pause.

Its small eyes are dark and glossy—watchful and focused. The whiskers on its muzzle twitch a little as it takes you in. It breathes, deeply and evenly, huge body expanding and contracting at a slow, calm tempo. Its—his—nostrils flex, widening and narrowing, as he blinks docilely.

Unafraid.

If anything—curious.

Then he snorts, and wriggles in place. It startles a laugh out of you, more reaction than humor. Still watching you, the bull lowers his head back down, resting it again on the sand.

Your heartbeat abates. He doesn’t move again—nor does his attention leave you. Slowly, you sit up.

Wary. No sudden movements.

He doesn’t react; only continues to watch you.

You draw your knees up. Wrap your arms around your shins, and dust a bit of sand from your leggings. Rest your chin in the crevice between your knees.

There’s an intelligence in the bull’s eyes that is fathoms deep. There is a massive gulf between his experience of the world and yours, millennia of evolution separating your species from his—and yet…as you hold his gaze, you recognize the look in it.

Him, seeing you. And seeing you see him. The pendulum swinging between awareness of each other, and recognition of that shared awareness.

An empty space in the cloud cover passes overhead; sunlight touches the earth, warms it briefly before disappearing again. You wonder a little why this bull isn’t with the other seals.

Johnny would probably know.

“I didn’t come for you, you know,” you grumble at him.

The seal blinks. Awareness notwithstanding, you don’t share any language.

You sigh. “I guess you didn’t come to see me either,” you say.

But you don’t move away.

And you stay like that for a long while, you and he—regarding each other as the wind breathes out across the shore.

next chapter early access

a/n: follow for more seal facts™

Also huge thanks to Lev for trawler listings/info. Didn't explore it much this chapter but Soap's boat will show up more soon :)