#but I can't teach them to do that if all their effort is going into avoiding doing that | Explore Tumblr posts and blogs

yeyinde · 9 months ago

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bos taurus | dogmeat series pt., i

mafia butcher Simon Riley x Reader

You don't question your brother when he sends you to drop off packages to his friends, but when the enforcer for the 141 shows up to teach the small-time dealer selling on their turf a lesson, you realize there are different ways to pay someone back with pounds of flesh.

(OR: your brother owes them, and Ghost is content to let you settle the debt. after all, if you wanted freedom, then you shouldn't have caught the eye of the butcher of the 141, should you?)

18+ SMUT. noncon. objectification. marking. kidnapping. threats of violence. unsafe sex (manipulation into unprotected sex). rough sex. size difference. breathplay. 10k of foreplay. light pussy slapping. overstimulation. mafia au.

SERIES MASTERLIST | AO3

The goal is to be as quick and discreet as possible.

In and out, he says, looping the baggie around his index finger. Inside, a snowfall of white powder settles at the bottom.

Meth this time. Oxytocin the last.

He ties it tight before giving the bag a quick shake, breaking up the clumps. Satisfied with the way it looks, he turns toward you. Levels you with a sombre look, the picture of a concerned older brother.

You almost fall for it. Believe it. But the clouded, flat edge to his gaze undercuts his worry for what it really is. A farce.

“And if it seems sketchy—”

—run.

But your knees are locked, soles glued to the pavement. You can't move even though everything is screaming at you to flee.

The problem, maybe, is that there's nowhere to go. Escape cut off, filled by a body, a man—even though the idea, the mere notion, of thinking this behemoth as human, flesh and bone; blood and tissue, is laughable when he's so clearly a beast. A monster.

He fills up your field of vision. Your line of sight was eclipsed by the thickness of his waist, the broad expanse of his shoulders. Thighs that are as wide as the trunk of a tree. Arms boxing you in. A prison of obsidian. A black shadow.

In the panic that surfaces, surging to the top like an oil spill, you catch a pocket where he doesn't root. A small alcove between the bend of his elbow and the slot of his knee perched against the wall. Enough room for you to—

“Wouldn't do tha’ if I were you.”

His voice seems to shake the earth, rolling out of his broad chest like the low, brassy roar of a lion; a rumbling thunderclap.

You feel sick—

The leather covering his hand is cold when it closes around your arm, grip tight. Bruising. Trapping you with just the slightest effort.

“Go’ a problem, you and I,” he starts, and it's almost conversational. Might be, perhaps, if the clean, sleek outline of his gun inside the unclasped holster around his ungodly thick waist wasn't threatening you more than the grip he has on your arm. “How do you reckon we can fix it?”

You have a meagre twenty dollars in your pocket. Less money for them to take if things go awry. If they decide that the little girl standing in for her older brother was an easier target to rob—money and drugs—than to settle things fairly. Money, goods. Hand over hand.

Just like the movies, he'd said.

Just like the movies, you think when he leans in closer, bulk swallowing you whole.

There is a pockmark in the corner of his crooked, misshapen nose and the crease of his eye. A scar, maybe. It's circular—almost perfectly so; a silver-pink moon on the angular ridge of his nose. Uneven, craggy, like crumpled printer paper.

It looks almost like—

You think of the mark on your arm. Soot-stained. The smell of burning hair, tissue. The searing pain.

“I–I can pay you—” you stammer out, tearing your gaze away from the ugly mark on his skin. A cigarette burn. It makes you shudder.

He cocks his head slowly like a big, dumb dog, but there's something eerie in the ink spill of his eyes. The soft matte of a saltwater crocodile staring at you from beneath the murk. Calculative. Hungry.

“Pay me?” He echoes slowly, dragging the words out mockingly. “D’you know ‘ow much trouble your brother is in? For sellin’ ‘ere of all places?”

“No,” you swallow. It feels like your heart is stuck inside your throat. “I–I just—”

“Run ‘is errands,” he finishes cruelly but you can't deny it. “Ain't you a good little sister? Almost makes me wish I ‘ad somethin’ as sweet as you f’myself growin’ up.”

You don't answer. He doesn't seem to be looking for one, really; just empty words to fill space. To echo in your head, barbed wire around any sense of comfort you might have felt. Punishing cruelty.

He has the upper hand, it says. He's the one who makes derisive jokes while you tremble in his grasp, and try to make yourself as small, as unassuming, as possible. Hiding from the predator in plain sight. Hoping he passes you over for something bigger, more calorie-dense; the effort to catch and consume you expends more energy than the return. Hardly worth it in the long run. The comfort of a risk-reward ratio, right?

But he's opportunistic, it seems. A snacking scavenger.

Could eat, it says, like a basking tiger keeping a mouse trapped between his paws, letting it squirm and squeak as he slowly licks his lips. Not enough to fill its belly but enough to satisfy the gluttonous urge a predator has to eat. Sharpening its teeth on flimsy bones. Child’s play.

It's a fitting image, especially with the way he arches over you, looms; fingers looped around the thick of your arm, holding firm, but not—

Not as tight as he could.

It's a loose-fisted grasp. Lazy, almost. He knows you won't run—or, at the very least, knows you won't get far.

You peel your gaze away from his, dropping it to the curve of his shoulders—the width of them is just as dizzying as his height; broad, muscular. Pulling it further down the length of his arm, covered in a thick jacket. Black corduroy. Ashes stain the cuffs. A bulky watch juts out from his wrist. Gold. Glinting even in the grey-blue gloom of an overcast evenfall.

His muscles tense. Hand tightening around your arm, fingers digging hard. Rubbing muscle painfully against bone.

A warning, maybe. Stop looking—

But something else catches your eye. Blood red. The colour of meat. A fresh kill.

The back of his hand has a blooming rose. Petals spread out, unfurled. In the middle, a milky skull sits. Stencilled in boxy, yellow letters is ONE-FOUR-ONE—

You know what it means even as your mind whirs, gears turning, turning; plummeting into a tailspin, making excuses as it falls, dragging your heart down alongside it. An area code. Some special date. An inside joke.

But you've seen the marking around town before. Heard whispers about them from your brother, his friends. 141, they say, and then: mafia.

The real deal, he said, puffing around a joint his friend rolled. It's too tight. He scoffs, and rips it out from between his lips. Shitty roll, man, make another one—

Mob. Mafia. Gangsters. It seemed so extreme, Hollywood. Fiction, fantasy, all rolled into one. Tony Soprano. Ralph Cifaretto. Michael and Vito Corleone. Tony Montana. Larger-than-life men created on paper.

You think your brother thought so too. Child's play. Grown men selling weed to kids for two hundred an ounce. Buying themselves sleek, black cars—G Wagons, Escalades, Cullinans—on the Xanax they sell at clubs, parties. Cocaine. Heroin.

Nothing to worry about.

Then his friend went missing.

Sent out on a routine delivery to drop off cocaine to well-dressed men in suits outside of a local butcher shop. A normal, nondescript Tuesday.

But he wouldn't answer his phone. Texts were being delivered, read, but no chat bubble appeared. Nothing sent back. Calls went straight to voicemail. He wasn't at home. Wasn't at his mum's. No one saw him. Heard from him.

Your brother didn't call the police. Didn't report him as missing.

It's just not what they do, he said. You don't involve them. Ever.

The most shocking part of it was that no one saw anything. He just vanished. Disappeared—stock an’ all, your brother angrily spits—without a trace, picked up off the streets.

If it was the police, someone would have said something by now. They're hardly discreet. And a rival—

Well.

The biggest problem was that your brother was blindsided by his own small-time success. An accumulation of little wins bolstered his confidence. Overfed his ego. This fallout was tunnel vision. A refusal to see the bigger picture.

Or the storm clouds looming on the horizon.

You'd heard of the 141 in passing. Little quips, anecdotes from the passel of friends that congregated around your brother—often getting high on the couch and watching old cartoons; sharing a joint back and forth between gossip.

Through rheumy eyes, they'd talk about the real gangsters in town—much to the irritation of your brother—and swap tales of run-ins and feats they heard from a friend (of a friend, of a friend). Most of the guys were known already. Soap and Gaz are the biggest names that cropped up on the streets through reputation alone. Both fighters for a gym. MMA, mostly, but whispers of street fighting and extracurricular activities weren't uncommon.

Liked the thrill of it, they said. But the worst was a man simply known as the Ghost. An enforcer for the 141—a fucking butcher, more like, Liam cut in, jaundiced eyes widening—the guy who took care of problems.

“Can't be,” your brother scoffed, lifting off the couch to reach in his back pocket for his wallet. A small anthill of white powder poured into the glass table. “They don't get involved in our shit—”

And for the most part, you're sure that's true. Dealing to the same circle of people—outreach spread through word of mouth—seemed paltry in comparison to the scale of an operation that had a money laundering gym. But the problem was that your brother lacked common sense. His ego often got in the way of foresight. The shadow greed casts blocking out the bigger picture.

Like—

Territory is territory—regardless of what's being pushed.

You wish there was a modicum of surprise when his friend turned up. Barely recognizable. Sent right to the morgue as a John Doe.

Most would see the marks on the man's skin—the distinct lack of blood—as an indicator to abandon ship, find the boss, beg for forgiveness, and maybe even try to strike up a deal. But—

That picture is hidden under his anger. Greed. Selfishness.

He sends you instead.

You're somethin’ they ain't expectin’, he said. Won't mess with you.

Right.

He catches the realisation dripping down your brow—beads of sweat gathering at your hairline; anxiety, fear, churning your stomach—and hums. Cocks his head to the side.

“Was expectin’ ‘im t’show up, though—” he murmurs, hand tightening around your arm. The pressure, the sting, is eclipsed by the gnawing sense of dread biting viciously into you. “Told ‘im if I caught ‘im sellin’ on our streets again, there'd be trouble. Thought we ‘ad an agreement after ‘is friend. But—”

His eyes cut to yours. It feels like a knife to your guts, sinking into soft tissue. A pain you can't breathe around.

Won't mess with you, you think, and then viciously—sadly—he knew. Was warned by them and still sent you out. Let you take his place for whatever comeuppance they decided he deserved.

It should shock you. You almost wish it did. Desperately clinging to the threads of surprise that slip through your oily fingers, grasping onto the nothing but empty air. Numbed to the resignation that trickles in.

Of course he would leave you here to save himself. Letting you fend off whatever they threw at you alone. Leaving you trapped between a brick wall and a wall of a man.

The excuses are there. They pool on the tip of your tongue—it isn't me, don't do this, it's my (stupid, selfish) brother you want, not me—but you swallow them down and try not to wince at how quickly they dissipate when you do. It doesn't matter in the end because whatever you have to say won't negate the drugs in your backpack. The empty house you'll lead them to—your brother probably squirrelled away somewhere until this blows over. Half-hopeful you'd call him and say everything is fine, the deal went smoothly. You're on your way back. Or that the debt he racked up with them is settled by you.

It's half-hearted when it slips out again, caught between resignation and dread. A brittle whisper. A prayer—

“I can pay you. Whatever he owes, I can—”

He's already shaking his head.

“Too late for that, birdie. ‘sides, I don't want your money.”

He moves back, rocking on his heels to put a small measure of distance between your bodies. In that scant space, he drops his gaze, sweeping it over you. His eyes darken.

When he pivots them down, catching yours, you can't stop the shiver that crawls up your spine.

That calculative gleam is back.

“But I think we can work something else out.”

Something else turns out to be ushering you into the backseat of an old Ford pickup.

The door whines when he opens it. Rust flaking off, falling to the ground by your feet. Your mind reels. Spins comparisons to falling snow, dried blood.

He hauls you in with his hand wrapped around the nape of your neck, thick thigh sliding between your own to boost you up. The protest—a mindless, reactionary squeal at being manhandled—only makes him chuff. A brief flex of his fingers around the skin of your neck is the only warning he gives before it pulls away, and wraps tight around your waist. His thigh flexes, muscle drawing taut as he shifts his foot up to the running board, lifting your feet off the ground and seating you fully on his leg like a child.

(In his hands, you feel like one, too.)

The motion makes you slip, back glueing along his broad chest with a shallow thump. You feel the rumble of his laugh trembling up your spine before you hear it.

“Careful,” he drawls, oiled with amusement. “Might slip.”

Anything you could say in response is choked back when he bumps the corded steel of his thigh into the seam of your legs, pushing tight to your clothed cunt. His intention is unmistakable this time. Unignorable. And with the rasp of filtered, balmy air against your crown; the pull of a groan when you rock back into his groin, the noise still slicked with mirth, you feel a knot of dread spool tight in your belly.

Something else is dragged back to the forefront, coiling like wisps of smoke around you.

And you knew. It's shocking, you think, but not necessarily a surprise. To call it a dichotomy would be lying to yourself, and so, you settle against it. This notion that what he wants—wanted—is flesh. Not money. Not retribution.

Not to talk things out like you'd hoped he’d try (grabbing onto the idealistic thread, holding it tight to your chest); bringing you in and forcing you to convince your—stupid selfish greedy—older brother that quitting was the only option. Dangling you—baby sister—over his head in an appeal to his emotions. Familial bonds. Love.

That thread is cut. Snipped.

Probably severed when they first came to him with an offer. No strikes against him and yet—

The idea of using you to make him bend was expunged from the drawing board. It's not even a plan b, or c, or z.

And—

You knew. Have known. Maybe that's why it's so easy to swallow around the panic when it lances through your chest, climbs up your throat. You can think and feel and breathe around this dagger in your back like it was there the whole time and you've only just noticed it now.

Nothing but a small, whispered oh in the roiling polyphony of your emotions.

It sits there as he manuevers you into the passenger seat of his truck, your head spinning around the indescribable sensation of being woefully cognisant despite the paralysing fugue pressing against the bubble of stark awareness that keeps it at bay. It manifests itself as a numbed sort of shock. Or more accurately—

Indifference.

Defeat.

His hand brushes your cheek, the snag of dry leather against humid skin tugs uncomfortably at your flesh, stinging as they dance down to your jaw, the delicate line of your vulnerable throat, skimming over the curve of your breast—

And it's too much. Too present. Too real.

Autopilot. Dissociation. Derealisation. All of these concepts slip past the bubble of hypervigilance, skidding the surface like a pebble thrown over a lake. Out of reach as he unashamedly gropes you, barely making an effort to mask his actions as just buckling you in.

You pretend, though. Curl your fists around the sides of the seat, fingers digging into the worn foam. Head lulling back on the headrest. Eyes fixed out the window as he walked around the front, head and shoulders still visible in the windshield despite the height of the truck. It makes your heart leap, stuttering in your chest as the absurdity of his size is brought back into focus. Too big, you think. Grossly so.

There's a moment when you think about running. Toying with the idea of sliding your hand over the lock, pulling the door open when he's too busy on his side to notice. It'll give you an advantage—a head start. Enough time to slink through the dense forest of concrete buildings lining the industrial zone, and into somewhere safe. Help, a behemoth is chasing me—

But the door clicks. Swings open with a squeal of rusted metal just as your fingers twitch toward the handle. Hope evaporates with each lurch of the cab as he climbs inside, metal creaking under his weight when he settles in the seat.

From the corner of your eye, you can see his head tip. Chin angling toward you. Staring. Assessing.

When he speaks, you feel the words like cold fingers dancing maliciously down your spine.

“‘pected you t’run.”

It's said idly enough. Nonchalant. Tone even, if a little cruel, and you wonder if this is some test. One that you passed—and failed—in equal measure.

He doesn't look away. It takes less effort than you wish it did to peel your lips apart, to breathe in the stale, mulch scent of the cab—something overgrown, rotting, and damp—and mumble:

Where would I go?

It seems to amuse him. He hums around a mouthful of mockery before turning away, pawing at the ignition. Gloved hand curling over the wheel.

“Smart girl.”

You don't feel very smart. In fact, you feel very small. Stupid. Maybe you should have taken a stab at it—running. Tried, at least, to save your own life before the jaws of the beast closed over you like an iron bear trap around your ankle. Fought like hell. Clawed and kicked and screamed.

When most kids read the back of a cereal box, you learned about secondary locations. You know better than this.

But the truck sputters to life in a belly-deep rumble, hacking up soot into the air as he pulls the lever into DRIVE. The fight inside of you—however ephemeral it might have been—dies inside the smoke spilling out of his exhaust. Gone so quickly that you begin to wonder if it was even there at all—

Must be, you think, eyes listing outward. Keen. Mapping the twists and turns—a futile effort in the end: he doesn't bother hiding where he's taking you, and you've been down these old, grim streets more times than you can count.

It doesn't surprise you much when he turns down the street leading to the butcher shop. An old relic that still carries the marks of a booming farming town before it fell victim to industrialisation. Concrete skyscrapers in place of lush cornfields. Warehouses over old barns, ranches. Cattle, meat, produce—it all used to be a mainstay here but now hides under layers of steel.

The dark windows of the small shop gleam with hazy smears of neon blue, red, when you pull up, catching on the array of rowdy bars across the street. All clubs that belong to the 141. A playground of drugs, sex. More money than you'd ever see in your lifetime.

It's an uncanny juxtaposition to the quiet, assuming street right across from it. Barber, butcher, accountant firm, antique store. All dark inside and bathed in the smeared stream of glimmering neon as lights flash in the fading glow of twilight.

He pulls up to the curb in front of the shop. A bold move if the streets weren't so empty. Lifeless. The clubs won't be open for four more hours. Everything else follows the same nine to five as the rest of the world. The shops closed an hour ago, and everyone in town seems to know not to linger here after dark.

The air seems to stagnate in your lungs when he cuts the ignition. Slips the key into his pocket.

“Don't get any funny ideas in tha' pretty little ‘ead o’yours.”

“Funny ideas,” you echo, toneless. Flat. It rolls out with your exhale. Words that might have been smarter to swallow down. “Like following a stranger to a butcher shop?”

“Lippy little thing, ain't you?” He scoffs. The truck creaks when he shifts. “Ain't go’ no one t’blame but yourself. Told you what would ‘appen if you kept sellin’ in our territory. You should ‘ave known better.”

“That was my brother.” The words slip out before you can stop them. “Not me—”

“‘ow am I suppose t’know that? You were sellin’ where I told ‘im not to—” he has the gall to shrug. Spit these careless words at you like it wasn't life or death. “That's all there is to it, birdie.”

“That's not fair—”

The truck groans under his weight, shaking from side to side as he leans over to push his door open before turning back to you, rolling his eyes.

“Life ain't very fair, is it?”

The acerbic words are flicked out from between his teeth; an apathetic, droning curl clinging to each syllable. He doesn't care. Won't. What happens to you next is your choice, and yours alone.

And he's just doing his job—

“When I get out of ‘ere, you ain't gonna do anythin’ funny—”

His hand lashes out. Gloved fingers close over the thick of your throat in a blink. Fear lags by a beat, giving him enough time to sink his fingers over your neck, and when it catches up—heart rabbiting in your chest, thudding in your ears; roaring as your pulse thunders beneath the press of his thumb—he’s already got you in his hold. The width forces your chin to lift, stretching up to accommodate the curl of his hand around you.

Trapped like a rabbit. Cattle to the slaughter.

He tilts his head down, keeping his eyes on yours as he forces your crown into the headrest, chin lifted up. It's uncomfortable. The curve of your neck cuts off your airways. Constricts your breathing to shallow gasps. An ache grows in your nape.

The swell of panic, fear, in your eyes makes him hum. But there's nothing echoing back. An absence of light in the deep, placid pits. It looks like still water. A stagnant lake.

It's unnerving how dispassionately expressive his eyes are. Wild, wild. Vats of ink. Pools of obsidian. Ringed in red-lined ivory. Long, ashen lashes dusting over the smears of charcoal under his eyes. Sleepless nights, maybe. Fatigue. The corners are tattooed with coal, leaving behind a thumbprint in the crease.

But empty. Barren. No light.

Like black holes. Eating everything around it. Devouring all that gets too close, but giving nothing in return except a bottomless crater in the bruised-plum nebulous of space around it.

You're not sure you like it. You can't look away.

But in staring back so hard (getting pulled in deeper and deeper), you catch the twitch in his left eye. A shallow spasm. It throws off the symmetry when he blinks, one eye a sliver of a second behind. Desynchronized in a way that seems so—

Unlike him.

Disjointed.

You blink in response. Perfectly synchronous.

His lid twitches again. Just once. Brief. Pale, pink eyelids drop, unveiling a nebula of indigo veins on the smooth, thin surface as they roll down to half-mast over his eyes, now narrowed slightly in contemplation. Thought.

Whatever is happening in his head can't be good. It causes a ripple over the lake. Little rings rebound outwards.

He looks away first. A quick slide of his eyes to the corners, glancing out of the passenger side window. Whatever catches his attention is unknown to you. The anchor on his hand around your throat keeps you still. Immovable.

(Every instinct in your body compels you not to look away from him because nothing outside could ever be scarier, more dangerous, than him.)

A second later, he breathes in through his nose. The fabric of his mask is pulled into his nostrils from the force, forming little black holes under the crooked arch.

You hadn't really given much thought to his appearance outside of big, massive. But there's a strange asymmetry to the slopes and valleys beneath the balaclava. Trying to map his face, fill in the blanks with just black cloth and vague, lopsided outlines, is impossible. There are too many gaps. Too many missing pieces. You can only wonder, then, what he looks like under it.

Monstrous, you hope.

It's just a coincidence that he looks at you the moment the thought passes, but you flinch like a naughty child getting caught doing something you shouldn't when the heavy, dour weight of his impenetrable stare is levelled at you once more. Your heart stutters. It's loud in your ears. In the truck.

You wonder if he can hear it just as loudly as you do—

Another blink, and his gaze flickers down, settling on the gap between your lips, watching the little tremble they make with each shallow hiccup of air you greedily suck in. His head tilts to the side, eyes never leaving your mouth even as he leans down, masked lips brushing over the beading sweat gathering on your hairline.

It's a brief touch. A taste. You tremble when he pulls back, fingers tightening around your flesh.

His eyes are lavascapes.

“Are you, birdie?”

You almost forget what he's asking. The conversation hidden between the scant beats it took for him to measure your worth with the blistering intensity of his stare, and the tumult of your feelings still looping around each other in your belly. Knotting up tight into a ball. There's fear, of course there is.

But the rest—

You'd rather not think about.

The grip on your throat eases just enough for you to shake your head no to whatever he is asking. Doing anything funny, you think, scrambling at the tangle of memories flipping past, trying to connect the pieces to a puzzle you've already forgotten.

It must be the right response. Or maybe it's another question like before, a test where there’s no right answer.

Run, stay.

Smart and stupid.

But it seems to appease him—marginally. His eyes crease. Tightening. His other hand folds over your throat, sliding until his palms kiss the sides of your neck in a near-perfect symmetry.

Something frissons across the blank, placid lake of his expression. Another ripple. A shudder. He leans in for a moment, nose touching the apple of your cheek, and when he breathes in, it’s sharp, reedy. Cold air ghosts over your skin. Long, pale lashes flutter when you swallow.

He hums quietly under his breath before peeling back. The flatness to his gaze is back; a cold, impenetrable distance widening like a chasm as he uncoils around you. You almost fall for this—this indifference. An icy nonchalance. But you've been eating the minuscule quirks of him just as ravenously as he's been devouring yours.

There is something there. A fracture, maybe. A splinter.

But what leaks through from the other side isn't anything close to warmth. It's—

Hunger.

The shift in your throat draws his molten gaze to your neck, still wrapped tight in his firm grip. Your reflection blooms in the vat of black; eyes wide, all white. Pupils narrowed to a pinprick. Mouth slack, corners tugging downward from the pressure of his hand. The tilt of your head. His thumbs press under your chin, pushing you back further until it feels like your neck might break—

He stops. Shifts. You puff out a shallow breath.

What looks back at you is unremarkable in the murk. A sliver of fear. A slip of unease.

Eye of the beholder, you think when his breath chuffs out shallowly through the mask. When that hunger is ground down to a raw, esoteric fissure hairlining the black of his eyes. The widening expanse of his pupil.

You wonder if it's your fear that itches under his skin, dredging up something predatory in his hindbrain. The urge to chase. To bite.

But the nearly indiscernible flicker of his gaze has you brushing that idea aside when it snags on the expanse of his hand coiled around your throat. Easily swallowing it whole with just his palms.

You're not a small thing, but the indomitable size of him makes you feel insignificant.

You think he feels it, too.

His fingers flex over your nape, stretching. Pulling. It pushes the flat of his palm into your throat, ridges crushed against your trachea. But you can still breathe. It's shallow. Hoarse. A touch painful. Dizzying in a way that makes you feel like you're on a rollercoaster. A teacup ride that just spins and spins and spins—

The gap closes. A sliver of air snakes down your throat. Muscles flexing, shifting. Struggling to swallow around the pinch of his hand. A harrowing task when you feel the gloved fingers link to the first, then the second knuckle, tying together in a too-tight, impossible, noose around your neck. Thumbs overlap. Fingers slide into place. It forms a chain of his hands with no gaps between them. Not a single sliver of skin shows from under the leather of his gloves.

He makes a sound when they meet—a nasal groan in the back of his throat, mouth clenched shut so the air has no choice but to tear through his nose. It's raw. Fractured. The devastating moan of a tiger nuzzling at its meal.

Your vision blurs. A black fog presses into the edges, seeping over the arch of your peripherals. Dripping down slowly over the hazy smear of the man. The way the ochre sun peeks over the angular roof of the accountant's office illuminates his back and casts swaths of shadows over his front. Drenching him in murk.

Despite the flickering darkness shuttering over your sight, you don't blink. Even as the tears prickle at your eyes, they stay open. Fixed on him. Black holes, you think, watching as the fever marbling those obsidian pools recedes. Cools.

He makes that noise again. Softer this time. A purr from deep in his chest. A breath. And then he peels back. His hands go slack. His shoulders slumping back into the lax, easy spread from before as you gasp hard, nearly choking on the flood of air that roars down your throat.

Your cheeks feel hot for a moment, and then cold. Icy. You don't have to touch them to know that you're crying. That the deluge clinging to your lashline spilt over, dripping messily to the collar of your shirt.

The placid lake is back. In the stillness, you heave. Mouth hanging open, chin quivering. His thumb lifts, slides over the curve of your chin. You don't feel it. Numbed, maybe, by the brief kiss of hypoxia. But you see it. Watch as he slides it up to the jut of your lower lip, the black, angular tip tickling over your skin. He follows the seam between skin and lip, tracing it to the corner of your mouth. It's slick. Drool pools in the crease, dribbles over the top of his finger. His eyes drop when he mops it up, catching it on the pad.

He makes another noise. An arid rasp bubbling between the soft tissue behind the roof of his mouth and the back of his tongue. It's ugly. The shiver you try to fight back slinks through.

His hand peels away from your neck, movements lax. Slow. The unwinding gait of an idling tiger in no real rush, no hurry, because there's nothing in the frigid Arctic that can touch him.

You watch him with flared eyes as he brings his thumb to his clothed mouth, and rubs your spit into the fabric of his mask.

His eyes don't break away from yours once.

Your spit doesn't stand out against the black of balaclava, but the idea of it burns through you. Throwing you headfirst into a dazed stupor. Dizzy. Confused.

Satisfied with whatever it was supposed to mean, he clambers out of the truck before coming around to your side. Distantly, you're sure this is what he meant by funny ideas when he passes the headlight, head straight and eyes gliding around the empty street. An opening to run. You know where you are. It would be easy to flee. Hide in the construction zone just ahead, tucking yourself into the tightest corner you can find until help arrives.

Help, though.

Officer, please. I got caught selling meth in the mob's territory and now they're going to skin me alive. Please hurry—

Right.

They'd rather help bury your body than get in the way of the mafia. Gangland violence isn't their concern unless it tumbles out into the street. Fat wallets keep even the most compassionate person quiet. Willing to turn a blind eye.

You'd be thrown in a cell. Or dropped off at their doorstep.

Either way—

You won't be coming back alive.

There's nothing to steel, harden, when he pulls the door open, your nerves long since ground down to fine powder. Nothing to fight against, either. He hauls you out of the truck, hands firm on your skin. Bursting blood vessels easily between his fingers. Barely any effort at all to crack your bones.

The moment in the car seems miles away when he pulls you in front of him, hand curling over your nape. Any flicker of humanity rendered out when he pinches you tight and shoves you forward. Dragging you back to the butcher shop by the scruff of your neck, leading you down a narrow set of stairs to the basement where pale white carcasses hang from hooks on the ceiling. He laughs when you tense. When your heels dig into the brown-stained linoleum.

Ain't gonna hang you, he mocks, fingers dipping punishingly into the sides of your neck. “Not yet, anyway—”

It brings little comfort when he drags you to a room in the back, kicking open the door with the toe of his boot before pushing you inside with a nudge against your nape.

It's dark. Walls covered in stains; mould, mildew. Something you hope is just rust. A single mattress is shoved into the corner; sheets stained with sweat and grime. Tinged a pale brown. Two pillows sit at the top, lopsided and matted with use. Threadbare. A twisted, black heap of fabric sits at the bottom. Wisps of cotton poke out from the cigarette burns.

A pair of muddy, black boots sit against the wall at the end of the bed. A basket of clothes—jeans, black shirts, black sweaters—is piled on the wall across from the door.

The room smells of stale sweat and old cigarettes.

You don't want to be here. The thought is abrupt. Immediate. Unease prickles along your nape, warmed and damp under his gloved palm. Between the look of the room—the floors stained the same suspicious brown, the rumpled bed in a corner—and the smell, you know this is not a place you want to stay. To be trapped inside with a man cut from Everest; whose hands are more dangerous than the sharp end of a knife.

He must feel the tension brimming beneath your skin; the spark of adrenaline surging through your veins. The clamp of his hand on your nape digs in tighter. Holding firm.

A breath tumbles out, thickening with mockery. “Like I said,” he leans down, pressing the mountainous width of his chest into your spine. The accentuation in your size difference, how big he is in comparison to you, makes you feel like prey. Small. Brittle, thin. He eats you whole. Spares nothing for later. “I wouldn't do that if I were you.”

Another nudge and you're pushed further into the room. He leans away, foot shoving back on the door until it snaps shut with a noise that cuts through the gossamer that spun around you, bifurcating reality from dream. The haze is wafted away, and all that remains is a barren room with a lumpy mattress, the smeared stain of rotten blood coagulating on the floor, and his body boxing you in. No escape.

The rumble of his chest shakes loose the cobwebs spooling across your thoughts. A brush of humid air ghosts along the line of your jaw, dampening the skin below your ear as he leans in close, too close, and purrs:

“Go on now. Strip for me.”

Each scrap of clothing you slowly roll off of your body is exchanged for a slip of information about him—who he is (Simon Riley, the name rumbled through the split between his teeth; a low, brassy purr as his eyes gleam in the dark, drilling into the expanse of skin unveiled to him)—and what he wants—

Nothing, he tells you, lifting one massive shoulder up in a half-hearted shrug. Jus’ what's owed to me, pet. For stickin’ my neck out f’you.

You don't think he did. Not really. But you're harshly reminded of the unsubtle threat. The gun balanced on his massive thigh. So wide, so big, it seems to make it look smaller in comparison. Tiny. A toy.

Child's play.

It's made worse, somehow, as he lounges. Sprawls out on the bed, legs spread, pulling taut on the jeans that stretch around the thickness of his upper thigh, bunching around his calves in a half-tuck inside his black boots. Arms flexing. Folded over his broad chest. He rolled the sleeves of his black shirt up to his elbow, showing off an impressive tapestry of harsh, faded black ink. Crisscrossing lines. All asymmetrical. Guns, barbed wire. A bullet with a wide, toothy grin—

All of it knits together; woven into a tangled mass of muscle. Of man, hidden under scar tissue. Rope burns on his wrists cut so deep that the skin is permanently dented in. More cigarette burns hidden inside the mess of ink. Jagged lines—from a knife, maybe; bullet wounds.

His skin tells stories of a terrible life. Ink spills over the worst of them, but they're visible under the fading charcoal. A series of burns—acid, fire, chemical—and raw, torn skin. He looks like he's been mauled. Pressed into the cold metal of a wood chipper until chunks of flesh were taken out. But even with these deep gouges, craters of missing tissue, he's big. Bulky. Soft—like a tiger. Predatory muscle tucked away under a thick layer of fatty tissue.

The pillowed pouch of his belly, the softness around his biceps—

It belies the danger underneath. The steel.

But as scary as it is, it has nothing on his eyes.

Glinting in the dim room. Dark pools of obsidian that follow each movement with an almost clinical keenness. Sharpened to a razor's edge.

They might be pretty, you think, if they weren't so intense. So liquid. His eyes gleam like wet ink, languidly rolling along his lashline as you clumsily shed your jacket, your blouse. Shoes, socks. Pants. Until you're in nothing but your panties.

Swallowing around the influx of panic that flutters like little birds beating their wings against the soft walls of your throat, you slip your fingers into the hem, now or never, and—

And you hesitate.

There's a difference between undressing willingly and doing so to save your life. It should spurn you on—survive, survive, survive—but you freeze at the apex. The summit is within reach.

You know what happens when you climb it. Cross over the invisible threshold.

What you've been trying to ignore this whole time, ever since he shoved you into the room with a huff, taking his perch on the edge of the bed, legs spread wide, but in such a terrifying state of vulnerability, nearly nude, you can't any longer. Can't avert your gaze to the stained linoleum in a thinly veiled effort to keep from glancing at the thickening bulge lying prone against his thigh.

His—

Well.

You knew what he wanted when he grabbed your face in his hand, squeezing your cheeks until your lips pursed, puckered for him to run his finger along the inseam. Prying your teeth apart. Rubbing his finger over your tongue, eyes dark—full; black holes pulling, tugging you in, dragging you closer to the event horizon framed in a ring of arsenic—and locked on to the sight of his gloved knuckle disappearing into your mouth. Wanting. Hungry.

You knew. And now—

Committing to it is legions above what you’re mentally prepared for. Nausea brims, churns your stomach. Unease curdling inside of you like rotten milk.

You don’t want this. But you don’t have a choice, do you?

That notion, the idea, prickles along your nape, raising the fine, peach-fuzz there until it stands on end.

You freeze. Movements still as every muscle in your body tenses. Coils. You can't do it. Can't—

A huff is dragged out of his chest as he sits up, knocking the gun carelessly to the mattress. His eyes daggering, sharpening into needlepoints, as he stares at you.

“Gotta do everything f’myself, do I?”

A grunt and he’s up. Pulling himself to his feet with nothing but the flex of his abdominal muscles.

There's no reprieve. Not a moment graced to gather your bearings before he crosses the distance between you. Once a comfort, a chasm, now conquered in a single stride.

The tips of his gloves are cold when they brush over your skin, sliding down the slope of your waist until they meet the hem of your panties. The last piece of modesty you have—

But he doesn't wait.

You're aware that this isn't a non-consensual thriller where the lead looms over the hapless love interest, eyes blazing with passion and need. That each interaction is drenched in a thick, palpable tension tethering the two together. Urges coalescing. Threads pulling taut, magnetic, dragging them closer and closer to the brink until they tumble over.

This is reality. And he doesn't stare into your eyes with an all-consuming desire as he slowly removes that last scrap of fabric keeping him from devouring you. No.

His skin-warmed fingers push under the elastic band with a rough shove, curling into the fabric until it tightens across your pelvis and thighs, and then he huffs, annoyed, and pulls. Pulls—

Until something gives.

The lace yields to the tension in his flexing bicep, and scrapes over your skin as it rips apart in his hand, threads snapping. Popping.

It hurts. Stings. You hiss, but the noise is ignored when he peels the ruined scrap of fabric from your legs, shoving it into his back pocket with a grunt of satisfaction. He looks back to you, eyes rippling like the dark, ink-black surface of a lake during nightfall, and coos, mocking and mean—

“Not s’hard, was it?”

He leans closer to you, a hand skimming up your spine before his fingers curl around your nape, keeping you still for just a breath before he pulls you into him with too much force. Your hands lift, palms slapping against his thick stomach when the movement nearly topples you over and threatens to break your nose on his chest.

“Makin’ me do all the work when y’supposed t’be payin’ me back? Ain't very nice o’you, is it?”

He touches you like he's taking stock of your worth. Grabbing a heavy, rough palmful of your beast in his hand, squeezing. Testing the weight, the softness, how supple you were between his fingers like he might with a piece of fruit. Meat. Prodding into the flesh, feeling the ripeness there. Gauging whether or not it was a piece he wanted to keep.

It's demeaning. Humiliating. He treats you like cattle; presses into the elasticity of your muscle, examines every inch of your skin for blemishes. Scouring for imperfections. There's no softness in the way he grabs handfuls of your body—squeezing your breasts, pushing them together, rolling your nipples between his thumb and forefinger; pinching your belly, your sides, your waist; curling his fingers under your thigh, lifting it until it hitches over his waist, cunt exposed and pressed tight to the bulge trapped in his jeans. Your ass is handled rougher than the rest. Each cheek sitting in a hand, squeezed and punched and spread embarrassingly wide.

He ruts into you as he does it. Pushes the thick, fat length of him into your belly, rolling his hips against you with a heavy, ragged puff of air.

He feels big.

Everywhere, of course—it’s not so much his height, but the absurd width of him that really digs into your hindbrain, crossing all those intricate wires until they're tangled up, knotted together. Seeing his thigh, the same scale as a tree truck, slotting between yours—a mere branch by comparison—makes your belly flop. Turn over itself.

The muddled wires spark. Heat pools between your hips.

He could crush your head between them like a bear pushing its paw down on a watermelon.

It's fear and heat.

The two work in tandem, forming a seamless cohesion, as they flit down your spine, brimming up the urge to sink to your knees, the need to roll over and show your belly. A paradoxical desire to both run and be chased.

You're not sure if he's tendering your meat to eat later or if this is the usual type of foreplay he engages in, but once satisfied you're softened up enough for him, he shoves his fingers between your thighs with an abrasive hum that reverberates through his belly, tickling your palms.

“Tired o’waitin’,” is what he says when your head jerks up, eyes widening in shock. Terror. Horror. “Don't look so surprised,” he huffs, dryly. Voice a rough scrap over your cheek. “What'd y’think was gonna ‘appen?”

“Wait—” but he doesn't.

His fingers twist, pushing through your folds to graze your clit. It isn't gentle. It's sudden, quick. You gasp more from shock than pleasure; the rough slide of leather feels strange on your flesh, and your head is too muddled to separate fear from bliss.

Despite that, your body heats. Reacts to his touch. Your lower lip wobbles. You bite back another sound that crawls up your throat when his knuckle catches on your clit again, the pressure just shy of too much.

The burn, the fever, melts the unease. Shallow gasps spill out. Your cunt clenches, fluttering around nothing—throbbing, growing sticky, slick; achy and empty—when he starts to glide his digit between your folds. Little sawing motions drag each groove and stitch of his gloves over your pebbled clit, each thrust of his hand between your thighs making heat pool between your hips. It's done so clinically, so detached, like his hand rubbing over your leaking pussy was nothing to him. An action to get done, a task to complete.

It's the shame of that, the embarrassment, that makes you want to weep. Your fingers dig into his chest, nails pulling uncomfortably on the pleated bumps of his jacket as you grip the fabric right between your fists, clinging to him like a newborn fawn—all wet-nosed, teary-eyed; knobbly knees threatening to buck.

“S–stop—” you mewl when the monotonous rhythm melts into something harder, more intense. Heart thudding in your chest, heat burning you up as he turns his hand, palm up, between your sticky, shaking thighs. He rubs his hand back and forth, curling his middle finger up when he passes your hole, tip pushing against your leaking rim.

The friction aches. The stretch stings. The leather feels strange, foreign when it pries your folds apart and dips inside of you.

You don't like it. It's too much—

He makes a sound—a tut—when you pull away from him, standing on the tips of your toes until the blunt curve of his finger slides out of you. He sucks his teeth in a mockery of disappointment before digging his fingers, hard, into the sides of your neck. A warning. You whine. Whimper—

It goes unheeded. And when you press your thighs tight together, shivering at the slip-slide of your skin rubbing against each other, he growls. The noise is inhuman. Animalistic.

Your act of deviance comes with a swift, bruising punishment.

His fingers tighten on your neck once again. A warning squeeze as he reaches down with his other hand, grabbing your hip. It keeps you still, immobile, as he bullies his boot between your feet, kicking your legs apart. You're not expecting it. When you stumble, he huffs in amusement. Can't hold yourself up? Want me that bad, huh? Needy fuckin' thing, ain't you?

You don't get a chance to respond. His palm splays wide over your hip, leather creaking as he flexes, stretching his fingers out, tapping some soundless beat out against your skin. Touching you like he's owed the privilege. The right. And in many ways—

Go’ a problem, you an’ I

—he does.

Brute strength, and an unmatched, almost laughable, dearth in your physicality ensures that he has the upper hand—even without the gun he left on the mattress; darker and flat, a full matte compared to what you were expecting.

(They're always so shiny in movies, aren't they?)

The threat of it—dull as it might be—roots you to the spot as he slides his hand down, thumb brushing over your belly button, dipping in; pressing until your stomach starts to ache—

It peels away when the whine wells up, sloping down, down. Teases your mound with the tips of his fingers, gentle swipes along the sensitive seam of your belly and pelvis, the sensation is an odd tickle that pulls at your navel, pulses at the apex of your thighs. You mewl—a slow, soft thing that barely makes it out from between your teeth—and he lets his hand drop. Palm flat against the soft flesh of your mons, fingers reaching, spreading, until they curl over your folds. Index and ring finger tucked tight into the hollow bend of your pelvis and thigh. The tip of his middle rubs gentle strokes over the skin above your clit. It's a whisper of pleasure. The idea of a touch.

Mindless, your hips flit, following his hand—

“Needy.”

It cows you. Douses you in icy shame. There's barely any mockery in his even, observant tone, but you feel it unfurl over your shoulders all the same.

He doesn't give you a moment to think, to let the ripples of humiliation take over, forcing you to pull away, hide. His fingers trail over your hood, the pebble of your clit. The sensation, the cool undertone in the leather of his glove, is unlike anything you'd felt before. The thick stitches in the fabric catch on your flesh, nerve endings flaring in pleasure. Heat blooms in your belly.

It feels good.

You gasp, head tipping back. His hand winds around your waist when your knees buckle, catching you with a rasping huff—

“Feelin’ good, ain't you?” He pulls you tight to his chest, finger rubbing circles around your throbbing clit. Your cunt clenches, empty, and you whine, needing something more. Something to fill the ache inside of you—

His finger slips. Slides easily between your folds, parting your lips around the thick of him until he reaches your drenched hole. The sounds it makes when he taps his finger against your fluttering core makes your toes curl. Has heat blistering over your cheeks, down the slope of your neck.

It makes him groan. The low growl makes you throb, clenching in needy little pulls, pulses, as his finger dips into the slick dripping out of you.

“Suckin’ me in,” he grunts, and pushes his finger inside, thrusting up to the last knuckle. Palm tapping against your folds as his index and ring finger close to give him more room to sink deeper into you. The messy, slick squelch is loud, rolling over the mewling gasps that tumble from your lips.

Heat floods your belly at the belly-deep groans he lets out when you squeeze around him.

“Stranglin’ my fuckin’ finger, birdie—”

He leans down, knocking his forehead against the side of your face. It's more intimate than you were expecting. Jarring. The proximity plays a twisted game inside your head—the urge to run, to roll over coalescing into a paralyzing tailspin. Rooting you to the ground when the warm, damp knit of his mask grazes your cheek.

The intimacy of his head on yours is eclipsed when you can feel the shape of his mouth through the fabric.

It's softer than you expected. A plush, fleshy give when he presses his lips against your skin. And—

A gap.

On the side of his mouth, there's a gouge. A pockmark. You feel the gap, the absence, of his flesh when he rolls it over your cheekbone. You try to read the asymmetry of his face—mapping all of these misshapen parts; his mauled lips, the crooked nose that digs into your skin and leaves behind a tacky smear of condescension when he breathes out through his nostrils in a heavy puff of air—and convince yourself that you're doing it so you can bring these patchwork pieces to the police later.

Survival, you think, your head tilting back as he noses down your neck, tickling along your skin.

(And when your cunt flutters around the rough, thick drag of his finger petting along your walls, you add: a bodily reaction. That's all it is.)

He takes another lungful of your scent before he rocks back on his heels, pulling away from you. Straightening up. Looming above you once more.

“Now—”

He pulls his finger out of you slowly and you try not to whimper at the empty feeling that brims up. The way your hips rock toward him, seeking and eager. Wanting.

Needy, just like he said.

Just a bodily reaction—

He holds his hand up to the dim light flickering over his head, fingers spreading apart as he takes in the glossy shine of his middle finger.

The gleam of it makes your ears feel hot. Shame pools in your belly as he makes another noise—a groan, deep and low, in the back of his throat. Eyes darkening as his pupils bloom, eclipsing his irises in an endless pool of black. They flicker toward you, listing half-mast in a way to leonine, so predatory, that it shudders through your bones. Run, run—

His hand flexes around your waist when you twitch. A warning. A threat. You tremble when he leans in, masked lips brushing over your cheek once more. Breath ghosting through the fabric, tickling the inside of your ear.

He smells of war. Of fire and brimstone. Napalm and nitroglycerine. You want to close your eyes, look away, but you can't. His proximity alone roots you to the spot. Turns you into a prey animal, frozen on instinct alone as he prowls around, creeping closer. Maw stretching wide, drooling dripping off razor-sharp canines—

“Let's see if y’worth all the trouble.”

—and he bites.

Knocks his palm into your sternum, roughly shoving you down on the mattress.

His hands fall to the button of his jeans. “Ready?” He asks, but doesn't seem to care about your answer. Opts, instead, to fall to his knee beside you. It pulls on his zipper, tugs it all the way down with a sharp, metallic sound that cuts through the stagnant air as each ring of teeth is pried apart.

You can't help it. You look. Dragged there by something primal, magnetic—the morbid curiosity to see the monster for yourself as it tries to take a bite.

And almost immediately, you wish you hadn't.

The spread of pale skin, dark curls jutting out from the split of his jeans, makes everything feel more real, and moving fast. Whiplash quick. Happening in a blink:

The shift of fabric as he pulls the mask up over his lips, letting rest on the crooked bridge of his nose. A flash of his mouth, mangled. Mauled. Full of ugly, pale pink scars. A gap where tissue once knit his upper lip together. The bite of crooked teeth as he brings the sticky, wet tip of his glove to his mouth, sinking in. Pulling. Tugging. The roll of skin—a rose, a gun, a skull—all encased in barbed wire; thick rivers of blue-green veins.

Another pull and it's free. Dangling between his teeth for a moment as he reaches up and shoves the jacket off his shoulders. Rolling and thick. Wide. A broad chest. Soft belly. There's an inch of flesh around the expanse of him—biceps, thighs, calves, chest, stomach, shoulders—but it's a buffer for the corded, streamlined muscle beneath. A layer of fatty tissue.

Like a tiger, hiding its dizzying musculature beneath a thick, loose pelt.

When he moves, it flexes. His shoulders roll; muscles bunching together, pulling taut under soft skin. The jacket slides off. Falls to the ground behind the mattress. Forgotten, discarded. The glove is next to go. Dropping from between his teeth, landing just beside your ankle with a muted thud.

He follows after it. Ink spilling over his lashline as his eyes drop, staring at the roll of his skin tucked on the outside of your thigh. Trailing up to your knee. Your hip. The split of your cunt beneath your other leg; knee tucked to your chest.

A flash of something, a flicker, is the only warning you get before the back of his hand is nudging the glove off of your skin, replacing it with the rough, calloused grip of his palm.

You jerk at his touch, flinching back—

He's intimidating above you like this. Leaning back on his haunches but still as tall as you are standing up. The sheer absurdity of his height—his width—is dizzying. Gives you vertigo when you look up.

His throat shifts when you move. A swallow. Coarse stubble grows down the column of his neck, dusting over his lower jaw, chin. The rest is swallowed by the balaclava bunched around his crooked nose.

He's not—

He's not handsome.

A smattering of crisscrossing scars, burns, skin pocked and gouged out in deep pockets along his flesh—the slide of a knife carving away at him, you think; digging down to his marrow—all take away from any sense of modern attractiveness you might feel for him with his broad, jagged nose and full lips.

But there's something rugged about him. Untamed. Wild. Appealing in a dangerous way.

You don't know if you would have let this happen under different circumstances. If this minacious beauty of his would have worked on you enough to want it outside of this awful, almost unfathomable trade.

He's too big. Wouldn't even fit inside of your house—

The graze of his thumb on your angle knocks the thought loose, and you're dragged back to the heat of his hand. Rough and coarse; palms slightly damp from the glove. It tugs on your flesh as he draws it up, a rubbery sort of pain as it catches on the soft, dry skin of your ankle. Your shin.

He follows behind a second later, pulling himself into the mattress with a huff, knees shuffling forward as he crawls over you. The jostling rocks your body. Makes your breasts shake as he lumbers on the bed, hand still sliding up, up, until his fingers curl over the bend of your knee.

The bed dips under his weight. Your body sagging, rolling into the divot beneath his knees. Tucked under him. Loomed over. He stares down at you through the cutout of his mask, eyes liquid in the gloam. Pools of melting, dripping obsidian. Black holes. Event horizon—

You look away before it drags you in. Submissive. Softened under the harsh burn of his flat, wide stare. He chuffs when your nose brushes over the thin skin of his wrist, mouth sliding over the thick, pulsing vein stretching down from his inner arm and curling into the bend of his hand. Your lips purse, and he makes that noise again.

Quietly amused, and—

He shuffles forward until the backs of your thighs are pulled over his, spread out on his lap. Bare. Open to him.

And he looks.

And looks.

Hungry, you think. Quietly amused and hungry—

The notion is wrenched out of your head when he shifts his weight. Watches the folds of your pussy open for him as he pulls your knees wider apart, head dropping between his massive shoulders, gaze drilling into the split of your thighs. Gasping at the sting, the sudden stretch, does little to deter him from shoving your leg down until the outside of your knee touches the bed. Muscles straining. Pinching. It hurts; hipbones twinging in agony.

But the embarrassment burning through you singes all the pain.

You're spread open under him. Bare. Legs tangled around his waist, stretched wide around the width of him. Ankles knocking into the hard plains of his lower back each time he shifts.

“Fuckin’ hell—” he grunts. Snarls. The word ripped up from the back of his throat, forced through the twisting channels of his nose. Nasal and ugly when it scrapes out between his teeth. “Gonna ruin this pretty pussy, birdie.”

It's a threat. A promise. You twist, mouthing your protests into the warm skin of his wrist.

There's something about his voice—that airy, brassy tone—that strikes a chord deep inside you. Makes heat pool between your thighs, leaking out in a syrupy mess—

His hand peels away from your knee, sliding down your sticky, damp inner thigh until his knuckles graze the sensitive slip of skin sitting between your outer lip and hip. That ticklish, belly-fluttering sensation blooms in your groin as he rubs his scarred knuckles over the crease, catching the slick gathered there on his thick, meaty thumb.

“Fuckin’ soaked,” he groans, shifting his fingers until they cover the whole of your cunt, cradling you in his hand. He holds you like that for a beat, eyes locked on the way you're swallowed up by the broad stretch of his palm.

The rough drag of his skin over your folds feels good. An all-encompassing heat spreads over your tender flesh from the curve of your ass to the bump of your mons where his middle finger rests, almost touching the strip of skin between your loins and your belly. Held in his grasp. Cradled in his palm.

Your thighs twitch. A shallow jerk as your knees try to bend over his hand, but you can't. With his thumb and pinkie tucking into each crease between your outer lip and leg, it keeps you from closing your legs. Hinged by the wide, flat cup of his palm.

And it shouldn't bludgeon through you the way it does. All heat. All want. Need. A growing ache you can't think around.

(bodily reaction, you think even as the image of his hand—big with thick fingers, scarred knuckles; streaks of faded, ashy ink etched into milky, veined skin—laying over your pussy, swallowing it whole, sears into your mind—)

“Can feel your little cunt,” he grunts, feeling the pulse, the little throbbing pulls of your muscles as they twitch at the sight. The feeling. Clenching down around nothing. “Greedy little thing, ain't you, birdie?”

Anger paints his words as he rasps them out. A teeth gnashing, jaw clenching frustration that needles into the scorn, the fury, forced out between the tight seam of his crooked teeth.

You don't understand it. Can't, maybe.

But it's tucked away as quickly as it appeared, shifting into an ugly, mocking derision. Dry. Acerbic. His teeth flash, lip pulling upward in a sneer—a snarl—before he hums, sliding his hand down. The drag of his damp, rough fingers over your swollen folds has your knees falling open wider around his thick thighs, baring yourself willingly to him.

Want it bad, don't you? He mocks, and the sound of his voice alone has your pussy clenching tight, belly fluttering around the abrasive scrape of his tone. Brassy and full. Gritty. You whine, hips inching up—

His hand peels off of your slit. The rush of cold air drags another whimper out of you, hips pushing up to chase the heady, molten feeling of his skin on yours. And he's amused by it—a laugh echoes out, crackling in the hollow of his throat at your desperation—but you're too achy, too hot, to feel the simmer of humiliation nipping the apples of your cheeks.

He's not even making a real effort to pleasure you, to make you feel good, and yet—

Your hips twitch toward him in needy, mewling cants; please sits on the tip of your tongue, cradled between your teeth. Slips out on a shaky, breathless gasp when he meets you on the next buck of your hips, palm slapping over your wet slit.

The crack echoes through the room. Rough, dry skin on soaked flesh.

And it shocks you more than it hurts. The sting is there, of course, but it's just an afterthought to astonishment. An eye-widening disbelief masking the way your cunt smarts, throbbing from the slap. Nerves muffled behind the burn in your eyes, the searing heat pooling in your sinuses.

Wrenched open, unblinking as you stare up at him, your eyes begin to sting, to water. You blink, and feel something hot trickle down your cheek. A tear. His eyes snap to it. Pupils narrowing to a pinprick as he watches it slide down your face, little droplets clinging to your jaw.

“Poor baby,” he mocks, tilting his head as he tracks the teardrop. “Better behave.”

Behave. Like he's admonishing a child and not an adult.

It morphs; rots. Becomes yet another thing you shouldn't feel feverish over. The slick, sticky feeling grows between your thighs as your cunt flutters at the humiliation of it all.

And deeper—maybe—the bastardized sense of care—

(Punishment is affection in its own, special (awful) way and you've been aching for something just like it, haven't you—)

It's pushed down. Swallowed. And you know in the back of your head that if you keep eating these feelings, you're going to be sick. But you can't stop. Barely breathe around the idea of them sometimes—

“Tha’s’it,” he coos like he knows. Sees them bright and burning behind your irises. Little flickers of need, a smouldering want that you'll never grasp at yourself.

So he gives it to you.

The rough slide of his hand, all scarred and dry and calloused, scrapes over your slit once more. A full, flat stroke upward until your clit bumps into the ridge of his palm. Then down, down—

His fingers spread. Ring and index prying your folds apart as he pushes up once more, opening your seam to slip his middle finger through the slick, sticky mess that drips out of your burning cunt.

“Gonna be good f’me?”

The slide of his fingers drags the tip up to the bump of your clit. You stare down at it, fixed on the jut of his ink-black knuckles threading through your folds. The crease of his nail as he slips his fingers up higher, pad pushing over your pebbled clit. They're dirty. Grey-black under his nails. Congealed with dirt. Blood, maybe.

Your stomach churns even as your hips lift. Eager, searching. Hating yourself each second of it. It's gross. Disgusting.

You want his dirty, thick fingers inside of you—

“When I ask a question—” the tip circles over your clit. A shallow roll that pools heat between your thighs. “I expect an answer.”

“Y–yes,” you stammer out, hips flexing against his hand. Seeking more of that white-hot bloom of pleasure he brings with each pass of his finger.

“Good girl—” and you hate how it burns you up from the inside out. “Wasn't s’hard, was it?”

The retort is bitten back with the slow swipe of his finger drawing tight, small circles around your clit. His fingers are rough, scarred. Too dry. The abrasive drag over your soft sensitive flesh makes you whine—a drawn-out whimper nestled between clenched teeth.

It's too much.

Too harsh. Too sharp.

He rolls your clit under the pads of his fingers in jerking half-circles. Puts too much pressure on the bundle of nerves than you ever would—your touches are always soft, sickeningly sweet; gentling your flesh until you cum—and the sting, the burn, of it makes your toes curl. Body burn.

It's good.

And that's the problem.

It shouldn't be. His touch shouldn't make you so wet, growing slick and sticky between your spread thighs, bare to his hungry, prying gaze. Shouldn't make you moan. Hips twitching with each stroke of his fingers—

And then he peels away from you, but the time to mourn the loss of his touch, the fear of losing this trembling ember pleasure, is snuffed out when he presses his wet, slick fingers against the inside of your knee. The touch is intentional. Insistent. He makes an impatient noise in the back of his throat before pushing it down to the mattress. The twinge of pain swallowed up as quickly as it forms when he drops to his elbows between your thighs, forearms curling under your legs, and tugs you sharply into him.

Heat floods your belly when the backs of your thighs press tight to his broad, muscular shoulders, but it's nothing compared to the sight of him on his knees between your legs. It's so obscene you nearly weep—

And then he leans down and licks a long, broad swipe of his tongue over your cunt.

You hadn't expected it, maybe. His mouth on your pussy, his broken, jagged lips sealing over your pebbled clit. Going down on you seemed too intimate for what he was after. His end goal. It does nothing for him at all—

You realise your mistake when he dips his tongue into your hole and his hips jerk forward. Unconscious. Eager. Seeking. The shifting drags his jeans down his hips, and his cock slips free.

Most of the cocks you've seen—in porn, pictures, art—jut out from the person's groin. standing at attention, the nasty comments used to say. Jokes whispered on the playground. But his falls. Droops down between big, folded thighs. Skin marbled in shades of red, peach. Deep gouges dot his upper thighs, some sinking deep enough to reach bone. More scar tissue than flesh.

—than man.

It looks raw. Fresh. Some injuries not too dissimilar to the Wagyu hanging in the front of the storeroom, on display and oh, so out of place in a town where the richest man must be just a hair above the poverty line.

On paper, anyway.

You swallow, avoiding his gaze as he pauses, dark eyes watching you with his mouth pressed against your seam. Unmoving. Still as a predator between your thighs, cock visible between the bow of his torso, jutting sickeningly from mangled legs as you gawk at this hideous thing that makes several, half-hearted attempts to spring up towards you, spitting clear, milky liquid all over with each jerk. Tugged down by its own weight. Too heavy to fight against gravity like the rest of the cocks you've seen have done—

Normal cocks, you amend. Textbook.

His is anything but.

Ugly, you think again, stomach churning. Roiling. Obscene. An odd thing considering what you're looking at but all too fitting with the way it droops, big, flared head drooling pre-cum all over the bed in long, dangling stands that prickle over your jaws—half nauseous, half hungry, too. Saliva pools in your mouth even though the sight of his cock scares you. Fills your belly with dread. Misery.

It looks like a bruise. Skin smeared with purples, reds. Patches of pink. Long, thick veins run up from the fattened, full base to the divot of his frenulum. Thick. It hangs low. Drips.

He raises slightly and shoves his hand down between his thighs, big hand curling over the fat base of his cock. His grip is tight around himself, and he strokes up, from base to tip. It squeezes more precum from the flushed, fat head, and dribbles between your spread thighs in a thick, pearlescent puddle.

It makes your mouth dry. That twinge in your jaws coming back. Festering. You wonder if he'll make you take that thing in your mouth. Choke you on it. Taste his precum—

“Fuck,” he snarls into your cunt, hand jerking over his cock. “Keep lookin’ at my cock like tha’, birdie—”

You gasp at the rough grunt, the way it seems to tremble through your sensitive flesh. More, though, from the way he sounds. His voice brassy, rough. Unkind, but the words bloom a fresh heat behind your navel.

His voice does things to you. Things you're not allowed to like.

Those thoughts are knocked from your head when he bows down again, eyes still fixed on you, and seals his wicked mouth over your cunt. It's hard to compare it to anything else other than being devoured. Eaten in the truest sense of the word.

His tongue splits down your seam, tip digging into your slick hole. A groan bubbles up at your taste—the soft, fluttering clench of your body trying to drag him in deeper. Needing him deeper. A huff of air ghosts over you, dipped in the same derision as earlier but the harsh slap of skin on skin, his hand working furiously over his cock, makes you acutely aware of how much this affects him.

“Taste good, birdie,” he grunts, and then sucks your fold into his mouth, laving it with his tongue and teeth until the skin is tender, swollen. “S’fuckin’ good—”

Your breath catches when the crooked arch of his nose presses taut to your clit. Pleasure twisting in a dizzying pirouette inside your belly, winding tighter and tighter—

His nose jerks up on your clit. Lips moulded to your seam, you hear him rasp eyes on me, birdie. Don't fuckin’ look away—

The rough snarl trembles through your body, sinking its teeth into the coil until it snaps under its jaw. Your knees snap around his head as your release locks your joints tight. His name, Simon, a hoarse cry on your lips. You barely have time to bask in the ripples of pleasure throbbing through your body before he rips away from you with his teeth bared, and his chin wet.

“Fuck—!” he snarls again, shoving your knees apart as he lifts his massive body up from between your thighs. “Gonna fuck you, birdie. Gotta be inside your tight cunt—”

He towers over you, grinding his cock into the apex of your thighs. The drag of his cock—a little damp from being stuck inside his jeans all day; balmy—against the dry skin of your belly makes you shudder. Shivering beneath him as he huffs through the mask. Head bowing. Dipping to look at the way his cock slaps down on you. Cockhead nudging above your belly button, dribbling a small puddle of pre-cum that gets smeared into your skin when he rocks back on his haunches.

His hand wraps around the thick base of his cock once more, squeezing tight as he grips himself above you. It makes the head swell, engorged with blood. Thickening in his hand as globs of pre-spend leak out onto your belly. That feeling in your jaws comes back—nauseous and wanting.

He leans back with a hum. “Like my cock, eh, birdie?”

The crass words bring a fresh bloom of heat simmering in your veins, creeping up your collar. Like doesn't really cover what you feel when you stare at it—his inked hands running along the long, veined shaft—and the unsettled feeling in the pit of your belly rears when he nudges forward, the weeping head of his cock bumping your mound.

It's humiliating how much want floods through you just looking at it. At him. Disgust, dread, desire.

You don't answer. Not that you really need to—

Your silence is loud enough.

“Don’t worry,” he murmurs, the rasp thick in his throat. “M’gonna give it to you, pet—”

And he does just that. Slips the head of his cock down the slope of your mound, letting it graze your clit until you're panting, whining softly for more, and pulls it over your slit until his pre-cum is smeared over your drenched folds. You know exactly what this is even without glimpsing the ugly burn of his possessive desire smouldering in the back of his eyes—ownership. Greed. Hunger. It revels in the stain on your skin, from belly to slit; his, all his. Outside and soon—

In.

It shocks a creeping sense of worry into you. “Wait, what about a condom—”

He snorts, ugly and caustic. “What about ‘em?” He taunts, and it's flat. Playful.

“You should—”

He drags his gaze away from the pearlescent smear of his spend on your folds, your clit, and the even, placid look in that stagnant lake tells you everything you already knew.

“I've never—” you start, wincing at the kernel of fear lacing your hoarse words. “Not without a condom—”

It's the wrong thing to say. Near cataclysmic. He drops his head back with a groan that rumbles out of the slope of his throat, sounding like the rip of a chainsaw.

“Firsts for everything,” he purrs, and he nudges your entrance with the bare, weeping tip of his cock.

“But—”

His hand lifts, catching your jaw in the too-wide span of his palm. The force makes your teeth clack together.

“Need me to gag you, birdie?”

You swallow. It's not much of a choice. Gagged and fucked raw, or—

Just fucked raw.

No gag. No condom. You fight back a shiver and wish it was all just from fear.

“No,” you murmur, like you have a choice. “No gag.”

“An’?”

“Um. No–no condom, either—”

It's not enough. "What are you gonna let me do to this pussy, birdie?"

You know what he wants. What he's angling for. But there's a line, you think. A delineation between unwilling participant, coercion, and giving into the need that slinks down your spine, and rots inside your belly.

(Being forced to ask for it isn't permission, but what happens when you want it more than your next breath?)

The shame can come later, you think, and feel yourself give in.

"Cum—cum inside me—"

“Good girl, birdie.”

You hate what that does to you. How eagerly your body reacts to the dark possessive curl in his eyes when you do something he likes.

He nudges your entrance again, this time with purpose. Intent. A heavy pressure pushing on your rim. Too tight, you think, and the sting of the first inch he feeds—forces—into you burns, pulsing behind your navel. His tip isn't even in yet, and it's already too much.

You think about telling him so, offering up your mouth instead, but he leans down on his forearms, and catches your lips in a bruising, biting pantomime of a kiss. A blood-soaked parody with more teeth and tongue—sinking into your lips, nipping hard until the skin splits; catching all that spills with his tongue.

With his weight pressed against you like this, there's nowhere to run when he cups your throat in his hand, winding the other up above your head, forearm tight on your crown to cage you in. And then he shifts. Bears his hips down on yours until the fat head of his cock pops inside of you.

Your squeal is chewed up between his teeth, swallowed down with a rumbling groan.

Caught beneath him, trapped, he works himself into you demanding, heavy thrusts. Each inch burns more than the last. A stinging stretch that brings tears to your eyes. It's already too much and it's not even half. Barely even the tip.

“Can't—” you slur into his wet, demanding mouth. “No more. I–I can't—”

The breath rushes out between his teeth. Your watery eyes drop to the divot above his canine. A permanent snarl. A condescending sneer.

“You can,” he says decisively, words ground out from between crooked teeth. He presses them to your cheek, nipping at the skin under your eye. Possessive and wanting—

(Hungry for something you can't name—)

“And you will.”

—Or maybe you just don't want to. Can't look at the thunderous need draped over his mangled, battered face without thinking of the rumble in your chest that echos back against his thundering call—)

Stupid, foolish thing—

The dark promise of his words isn't a threat until his hand tightens around your neck, nails grazing your skin, and he adds, all of me, birdie as he grinds his hips into yours shallowly. Broad chest expanding with each ragged inhale. Cementing his taunt with a steel edge as you try not to come undone beneath him.

You'll take every fuckin’ inch—

He pulls back until only his glands stretch you open, and you know what's coming when his fingers grip the sides of your neck tight. Holding on. Anchoring you to the bed as he nudges his forearm tighter between your skull and the wall, a protective hold.

Before you can tense up, bracing for it, or even cry out no, please, don't, you can't take it, he huffs, and then slams his hips forward, splitting you open on the fat stretch of his thick, too heavy cock.

Maybe it's hysteria, delirium, but the blunt press of his length against your tender, sore walls balms the ache, the sting. The deeper he pushes, the less it hurts. A paradox that leaves you whimpering under his hand, heels digging into the broad stretch of his waist as you struggle to decide if you want to kick him away or pull him closer.

A war you don't have the power to win when he surges forward, burying himself to the hilt with a growl that shakes the fragile tendons surrounding your heart. Fear, misery. Pleasure, pain. It admixes. Coalescing into a dizzying sense of fullness, unbearable pressure. Catastrophic in its heaviness as your mind reels, struggles to come to terms with the gut-wrenching, heart-aching uncertainty of how you're supposed to go on without having him seated as deep inside of you as he can get. You've never known emptiness before him. Before now. Mere seconds ago.

And now, the thought of it leaves a palpable hollowness itching behind your ribs. Festering. Rotting tissue and bone.

“Simon,” you choke, sobbing his name out under the firm press of his hand. “Simon—”

But he knows.

His arm curls over your head like a crown, and you can easily forget the pinch of each thorn when he holds you tight. Protectively. Possessively. Securing you in his arms before he lifts up, palm sliding over the mattress, touch tender against your cheeks, and then settles it on the indent of your knee. Widening you for him as he spreads his thighs under yours until you're opened up for him.

Those dark eyes are dragged down to the split of your legs where his cock disappears into your slick, swollen cunt. You follow it down, gazing at the impressive width of his stomach bowing over you until they land on the jut of skin pushing out from a messy smatter of damp curls around the base of his cock.

The coarse hair of his groin unfurls as it sticks to your wet lips, and he rolls his head back over his shoulders he heaves through the too tight stretch of your walls over his length. You feel the pulse of him inside of you, thudding like a heartbeat. It blooms molten under the feverish weight of his lidded, dark gaze.

“Fuck, birdie,” he rasps, and it's scorched. Charred. “Look at you—”

As the world is condensed, narrowed down to nothing but the near impossible stretch of his cock seated as deep inside of you as he can get, he leans down, scarred, mangled lips brushing cruelly over your ear, and whispers, see? Told you'd take me.

Every fuckin’ inch.

Your hand jerks to your belly, fingers dancing over your navel as if to feel him there, bulging from under your skin. Nearly hysterical as you try to come to terms with the pulsing, white-hot ache of him inside of you, slowly acclimating to his girth, his length.

He grunts when he sees what you're doing, eyes flaring as your fingers skirt around your navel.

“It's—” you shudder, gasping for air. “It's too much, Simon, I can't take it—”

He rolls his hips with a groan. “m’cock too big for you, birdie?”

His usual cadence is flat, droll, but an unmistakable sense of masculine pride, a deep, egotistic sense of satisfaction, drapes itself over his brassy words. Glueing to the scorching rasp of his voice in a way that makes you unerringly certain that he likes it. Likes that his cock is too big for you. That it hurts.

“Y’can take it,” he prompts, forcing more of himself into you until something snaps. Splits. Makes room. Carves out a space for him to fit.

The brief flash of pain is soothed when he's seated deep. That same paradoxical balm making itself known as he flattens his hips into yours with a noise—half a grunt, or a growl; a lazy, pleasure-soaked snarl. You're not sure what it is, but the sound knocks the air from your lungs, igniting inside of you like a spark inside a tinderbox.

It's only when his balls are flush against you that the same masculine pride brims up again. Primal. Animalistic. The urge to present your soft belly rears up suddenly, and it's only stifled when he grunts again, looking down at you with lidded, black eyes.

“Now, be good and let me fuck your tight cunt.”

He's not looking for assent. Nothing you could say at this moment will sway his mind one way or the other. There's a nasty spool of determination welling up like blood on a pricked finger. Beading up to the surface in a clean, neat droplet as he rolls his broad shoulders, and shuffles into a comfortable position on his haunches between your spread thighs. The motion jostles his cock in a way that makes your breath hitch with each jerk.

It's not painful. Not particularly. But you're overwhelmed by the sensation of utter fullness in a way you've never experienced before. Each grind of his cock against your overly stretched walls deeping that incipient feeling of anxiety brewing in your belly that one wrong move and you'll tear. He's just—

Too big.

And despite his claims—or rather, in spite of them—you don't think you can do it. Don't think you can take him. It's too much. It feels like being turned inside out and then put back into place. An uneasy sense of discomfiture blooms with each too-tight, too-sharp tug of his cock pulling taut on your rim.

Almost deliriously, you think you can feel the pulse of his cock inside your goddamn throat.

“Simon—” you start on a tremulous breath but he cuts you off with a hum.

“Relax.”

You can't. Can't—

“Fuckin’ hell, bird,” he rasps, leaning down suddenly until his face was pushed tight into the curve of your neck, breath shallow on your thudding pulse. “Stop squirmin’ ‘round me like tha’ or I'll cum right fuckin’ now.”

Your heart stutters. Gallops painfully in your chest. His words make you dizzy because for as much as this feeling of him, his cock, inside of you dances on a delicate precipice of being more than you can feasibly handle and somehow the most incredible thing you'd ever experienced before, you hadn't considered how he'd feel.

Inexplicably, it pleases you.

There's something so strange—so extraordinary—about bringing a man like him, like this, to his knees. Pleasuring him by just heaving through the white-hot stretch of his cock inside of you. Making him bury his head in your neck, groaning about how he was gonna fuckin’ bust, pretty thing, fuck—

It was a powerful feeling.

Unwarranted, maybe. But incredible, nevertheless.

“Fuck,” he grunts, and you feel his throat work around a thick swallow. “Gonna fuck you, birdie. Gonna fuck this pretty cunt so fuckin' hard until you beg me stop—”

And he does just that. Rears back from your neck, and settles again between your thighs—quicker this time. With an urgency that makes you whimper when his cock grinds against your walls hard enough to bruise.

When he finally pulls out until only the flared head of his cock remains, you knot a fist into the thin pillow, clinging on, and latch the other onto his hip as if that could somehow stop the vicious promise in his eyes about poundin’ you into the goddamn mattress. There's a flash, a brief flicker of his eyes, and then he thrusts back inside of you with a grunt that makes your belly clench, and your back arch.

True to the promises he gave, it's brutal. Violent.

Any pleasure you feel is leached through osmosis. A tether bound around his own.

His arm is shoved under your back, angling your pelvis up. Thighs dangling over the thick spread of his own, ass seated in his lap. He drives into you, thrusts deep—grinds his hips until your moans break into hoarse screams, whimpers. Makes your eyes roll so far back, all you see is black even when you blink your eyes up at him.

He carves a spot deep inside of you with each delirious piston of his cock, pounding into you with brutal thrusts, and then holding tight when his balls slap against your ass. Digging the head of his cock into the seal of your womb until it aches behind your navel. Each breath feels like glass in your lungs—

“Tha’s it,” he slurs in your ear, mouth damp against your skin. “Take my cock so good, pretty birdie. Little pussy was made for it, weren't you? Tight cunt all mine—”

His gruff words tug on that tether until you're wrapped around him like a bow. Following him down this endless spiral as he slams inside of you over and over again, cooing in your ear about the sounds you made for him, pretty cunt so fuckin’ wet f’me, birdie, hear tha’? all f’me—

“Cum f'me, birdie. Want this pussy cummin’ ‘round my cock—”

“Can't—” you gasp, arching into him, desperate and needy. It rides a line between pain and pleasure; a needlepoint you wobble on. “Need—”

You try to reach down, to touch your clit, but grinds his hips into yours with a snarl. “Cum ‘around my cock, birdie.”

“Touch me—”

“Fuckin’ hell—”

It edges on too much. Pain and pleasure teetering on a knife's edge, split apart by a line the width of a razer. Looping and tangling around each other until you can't differentiate between the two. But it makes sense, you suppose, staring up at him arched above you like a black cloud of smoke. All hunger and fire. Consuming, devouring, everything in its path. A wildfire.

Butcher, you think again when his hand wraps around your throat. A mimicry of what he did in the truck, forcing your eyes on him. Your life tucked neatly against his palm.

These hands take lives. It's what they're made for. All scarred, and thick. Scar tissue and bone. Muscle and cartilage. Meant to render meat of cattle. Slaughterhouse in the shape of a man. Consumption personified.

But where there should be fear, all you feel is an echoing sense of hunger. Leatherbound to each other, maybe—

The look that passes over his eyes as he stares down at you, cupped in his palm, seems to fit perfectly into the fractured gaps inside yourself you try so hard to ignore. And what doesn't—

Well.

He'll make room to fit.

You reach up, curling your fingers around his thick wrist. His eyes flash, but he doesn't slow his thrusts. Doesn't stop. Just watches as you peel his hand away from your neck, bringing it up to your mouth.

On his palm, there's a piece of skin that's unblemished compared to the rest of his worn, burnt hands. A strip just big enough for you to sink your teeth into.

And you do.

“Fuck, Birdie—!” The snarl is ripped from his throat. His thrusts grow harder, sloppier. Each bit of strength in his muscled hips and thighs is used to pound into you until your vision blacks out. It hurts. Aches. Your heels slip down, catching on the broad expanse of his lower back. And you tighten them around his waist, pulling him closer. Deeper. “Fuck, Birdie, fuckin’ cunt was made f'me, wasn’t it? So cum on my cock. Now—”

Whining, you shake your head. “Can't. I can't. I need—”

You don't get to finish. With a huff of anger, he rips his hand off of the mattress, leaning back on his haunches, and shoves his hand between your thighs, scarred fingers stroking over your pebbled clit. It's rough. Sloppy. His anger hums through his body, skewering into you as he glared down, gaze swinging like a pendulum between the split of your thighs where his cock disappears into your swollen cunt, his fingers rubbing over your clit, and back up the hand around your neck, the tears staining your cheeks.

There's an edge to his thrusts. A viciousness in the way he pistons his hips into you. Dark eyes catching every flicker—each wince, gasp, moan, whine all meticulously catalogued and exploited. He finds the spots that make your hips jerk, twitching both toward and away from him. Angling into the ones that have your eyes rolling back into your head, drool dribbling past your slack lips as you gasp his name out into the dank, humid air.

It smells of sweat, sex, and him. Something brutal, bloody, and dark. Rotten leaves. Charred forests after a rain shower. Dangerous. Tinged with a slight acrid, chemical stench—benzene, oxidizing iron. It drips down your throat, and drenches your lungs. Staining you from the inside out.

And he exploits that, too. Leans in, and breathes heavily against your upper lip, your cheek. Drowns you in his scent. His sweat beads along his jaw, droplets raining down over your brow. Soaked in his essence. Unable to see, smell, or touch anything that isn't him.

With his hand over your mouth, teeth sunk into his palm, all you can taste is him, too. Leather. Gun oil. Blood.

The ravenous look in his eye sharpens, turning into deadly points.

“Such a pretty fuckin' bird.” He rasps, the words shattered, mangled in the back of his throat. They carry the scent of blood when you breathe them in, and you wonder if he forced them through glass. Pushed them out with his bloody fists.

You bite down harder in response, keening through the white-hot pain of his cock spearing deeper than before, stretching you past your limits. The taste of blood on your tongue, the rasping snarl pulled from his chest, his fingers toying with your clit, push you over the edge once more. Again and again, and again, and—

His hand peels away from your oversensitive clit, dropping down to the mattress beside your face. He follows quickly after several impossibly deep thrusts that shove you higher up on the mattress, pressing in until his balls sit flush against your ass, cockhead battering against your cervix, and he groans—deep and liquid—when he comes, spilling inside of you. Rooted deep, cock twitching, Simon drops to his elbow beside your head, smothering you under his weight as the tension in his body bleeds out.

Your teeth stick to the divots in his hand, and the sensation of ungluing them from the wounds you gave him makes you shiver. Slowly, you roll your tongue out, chasing the drops of blood, and breathe heavily through your nose as he burrows deeper inside of you, chest shuddering over yours.

“Fuckin’ hell,” he rasps, hips jerking into yours with a slap that echoes through the room. “Little tease, ain't you?”

Even with his cock softening inside of you, it's still thick. Fat. Stretching you open as he yawns out above you, bloodied hand dropping down to cup your neck again, forearm resting heavily between your breasts. He raises slightly on his elbow, black eyes glinting in the shallow dark of the room. Piercing as they drill into your sweat-slicked face.

It aches when he moves. When he presses his hips harder into yours, the muscles in your legs throb as his broad waist splits them apart. Your feet dangle, sliding uselessly down his back, over his ass, before coming to rest curled around his thighs. Melting into the mattress, tender and sore and all chewed up—

You feel like a massive contusion instead of a person. A pestle. His.

The thought makes you shiver, and his eyes flash in triumph like he knows.

The feeling of him pulling out of you draws a whimper from your lips. The drag on your sensitive, bruised walls is a strange mix of tender pleasure and pain. He chuckles at your mewl—dark and low; the sound of nightmares, you think. Crackling sap on charred wood.

You try to pretend it doesn't make you shudder, but the way he hums in response dashes the feigned oblivion before it can form. All you can do is heave on the bed, and watch him through narrowed slits as he leans back on his haunches once again, head cocking to the side. His dark eyes fixed on the split of your legs. The ache in your cunt growing sharp under his molten stare.

“Fuck,” he rasps, the shallow groan pulled out from between clenched teeth. You wonder if the mangled curse was unintentional. Ripped from his throat before he could clamp his jaws around it—a crack in the facade. A hairline splinter in the indomitable mask he wears.

Your heart lurches. None of this makes sense, but your head is too muddled, too syrupy, to think much at all. A quandary for later when he throws you from his bed with a harsh slap on your ass and a and don't think about doing this ever again.

But you don't think you can move. “Give me a minute,” you start on a trembling breath. “And I'll—”

His brows move but his eyes stay fixed on your sore cunt. You can feel him leak out of you, spilling on the mattress in thick globs. The sensation makes you shiver.

“You'll what?”

It looks like he has to forcibly tear his eyes away from you, reluctance forming a cold, angry crater between his brows. The brunt of his ire—white, burning—makes you want to supplicate yourself at his feet, roll over on your belly and show the beast you mean no harm.

(Run, and run far—)

He huffs. “You'll what, birdie?”

It takes a minute to find your voice through all the panic clogging your throat. “I'll leave, um—”

He peels away from you with a loud, rough snort, and drops to his his elbow beside you. Hands curling possessively over your waist, fingers tight. Unyielding.

“Not goin’ anywhere, birdie. Told you, didn't I? You're mine.”

“I'm—”

“Go to sleep.”

He pulls you roughly to his chest until your head is pillowed on his shoulder, and then rolls on his back, keeping you cushioned at his side. You try to move, but his arm wedges under your neck, curling over your shoulder. Trapping you to him.

The panic wants to come now. To rage against the shackle of his embrace, to run home and scrub your skin until it bleeds. But the exhaustion collapses over it all until your eyes feel too heavy to hold open. Too painful.

As you drift, aimless and dreamless, his voice cuts through the fog. “Gotta learn ‘ow to cum with nothin’ but my cock inside of you sooner or later, birdie. Or you won't be coming at all—”

It sounds like a threat. A promise. You fall asleep with the words echoing in your head, his arm an anchor around your waist.

He wakes up hungry.

A gnawing in his belly pulls him from the thin doze he fell into after fucking you three more times—with your face pressed into the mattress, ass in the air for him to rut against like a beast; teetering over his hips, the spread of them too wide for your thighs to split over leaving you precariously unbalanced and shifting your weight above him as neither knee sat comfortably on the mattress; and on your belly with him crushing you to the floor under his bulk. The memory of which makes his spent cock stir, twisting limply against his damp, sticky thigh. Matted down with drying cum, sweat, the slick wetness of being buried inside your messy cunt.

Filled now with his cum.

He groans low in his throat as he thinks about it. The sloppy way you let him take you over and over again until you couldn't keep your eyes open anymore, passing out before he finished. Letting him fuck his cum inside of you as you whimpered in your sleep—

Perfect little thing, aren't you? So good to him.

Simon can't remember the last time he fucked someone, much less when it was this enjoyable (an understatement, of course; in the back of his head, wheels spin round and round as he tries to come up with a plan to keep his cock buried inside of you at all times while still doing his work—), and the overflow of unquenched lust churns in his belly. A hunger he can now slake on your willing body. In the silence, he purrs—

But the effort, the exertion, dredged up a different need inside him.

Simple hunger. An appetite.

He could eat—

his eyes slant toward the top of your crown in the dark, and he amends it, quickly, to: in more ways than one.

He'll go home in a minute. Make himself a steak from the prime cut he butchered a few days ago, leftovers that no one had any qualms about when he took several pieces home with him.

(and really, why would they argue with the butcher who keeps their wallets fat and their bills paid?)

It was left on the counter earlier before he got the call that your brother was making another move. Now a perfect room temperature as it waits for him to come back. Cook it the way he likes—

Rare.

The perfect grill is a nice char on the outside, but bleeding red on the inside. Basted in duck fat and garlic. A sprig of rosemary in the pan, but not touching the meat. Just enough to give the juice that earthy, sweet flavour. Let it rest for ten minutes under foil with the rest of the fat poured over it from the pan. Served as is with maybe a dash of salt and pepper on the side.

Simple. But incredibly difficult to perfect, he finds.

Everyone tries to make it fancier than what it needs to be, but at the end of the day, meat is meat. And going from picking scraps from the garbage outside of the Italian butcher on the corner to ordering his own pretentious filet mignon still gives him a sense of unease. Whiplash, perhaps. Nothing to something—how about that, Tommy?

Maybe that's why he prefers to raise and butcher his own cattle. A never-ending supply of meat for him to sink his teeth into even if this whole thing goes belly up and he's back to begging for morsels on the corner. Tommy hiding in the shadows with a baseball bat waiting to ambush the richer men who happen to feel altruistic that day.

This practice bled over into his current occupation, too. The basement of that same Italian butcher shop he used to sneak expired sausage from out of the bins is now his home base of sorts. A money laundering front of the 141. Headquarters for them to congregate in secrecy upstairs. And here—

A torture chamber for those who tried to cross them. Strung up on meat hooks like the cattle they eat, the ones he feeds them, until he makes up his mind on what he wants to do to them.

It's where you should have been, he supposes, thumb brushing a spot of dried blood on your shoulder, right below a nasty bite mark on your forearm. The ring nearly black from the clotted blood pooling in the indents. It matches several others on your thighs—top, insides, back—and neck, belly, collarbones, sternum. All chewed up. Marked by the butcher.

In working for the old Italian man who ran the shop when he was eighteen, he learned that most of the butchers preferred to mark their carcasses when they came in. A little x on the fat to signify they'd be the ones carving up the prime meat.

He didn't think you could handle his knife, so he gave you his teeth instead. But the implication is clear.

His.

It's overkill considering his reputation, and the claim he already had on you. Because even before this, back when he saw you through the window of his shop as he was moonlit as a legitimate butcher and businessman instead of the enforcer, the brute, everyone already knew he was, his interest was clear. You were off-limits. His to deal with.

And while Price refers not to get involved in small-time street dealers, the warnings Soap and Gaz impressed onto your brother should have been the end of an irritating situation and not the beginning of a fuckin’ headache. But no. He had to push. And push.

Until Price gave the order to take care of it.

And that he did.

(With the added benefit of killing one bird and keeping the other in a pretty cage.)

Price probably won't like his solution, but Simon racked up enough favours to keep a little pet of his own. Been a good boy for a long, long time now, and he supposes he's owed a bone.

Or a sweet thing tucked tight to his side having passed out some two hours ago after he slaked his dizzying thirst on you over and over again even though it doesn't feel like it's been enough.

It's rare that he has an appetite for people. Even rarer that he lets this meagre hunger consume him like this. But there's something about you that makes his teeth ache in the same way they often do whenever he's hungry for meat.

He wants to devour you. Consume you. Eat you alive and save nothing for anyone else to taste.

(So—

Price will just have to let him keep you, won't he?)

The mattress vibrates under him. His phone buzzing with an incoming text. He reaches over, pulling it close enough to read the notification on his screen. It's from Soap.

All her stuff is on your porch.

He hums, but doesn't reply. Simply opts to drop his phone on his belly, and tug you closer to his broad chest. He'll wake you in an hour, and the stirring in his groin tells him it'll be for another round. Maybe he'll take you in the freezer. Make you cling to the hook hanging down from the ceiling as he fucks you like that. He has a pair of ties for ox, lamb legs, that he can loop around your wrists and heft you up on.

It'll hurt, he's sure. The binds weren't designed with comfort in mind, but he can easily bear your weight as he pounds into you from below, your pretty legs wrapped tight around his waist.

The image, the thought, alone has him thickening against his thigh. He reaches down, gripping the base tight in his hand as he pulls you even closer, burying his nose in your crown.

At the very least, he wouldn't be lying when he told Price he strung you up.

Three rounds—on your back, your hands and knees, perched above him like a pretty goddess he stole away from a temple—and he still isn't satisfied. Fuck. He breathes in your scent and doesn't think he ever will be.

He'll get you out of here, take you home. Make you the steak he likes for a late dinner, rare and simple—the same one he gave your brother weeks ago when he dragged him into the shop, strung him up on a hook, and demanded payment for his disrespect.

Who'd have thought that his payment would be you?

(fitting, though, since he'd had his eye on you for a while now—)

He nudges you when his phone chimes again with another message doubtless from Soap telling him all your things have been tucked away. Matters dealt with.

“C’mon,” he grunts, running his hand down your spine. “We’re leavin’.”

You blink at him slowly. “Leaving?”

He nods. “Get dressed.”

You're quiet as he turns, reaching for his jeans left in a heap beside the mattress, but he hears the hitch in your throat. The click when you swallow. Unbothered by it, he turns, giving you his back as he wedges his feet inside the trousers, pulling them up his legs.

The bed shifts behind him. “I—I can walk back to my brother's—”

The hope in your voice is a delicate thing. Fragile like fine china. A pretty, vulnerable tchotchke meant to be seen, admired, but not touched. Not handled roughly.

Unfortunately for you, he's never had much of a gentle touch.

When he throws a glance over his shoulder, he's not surprised to find your arm folded over your bare breasts as you kneel on the mattress, your palm resting flat between your parted thighs, wrist and forearm covering the slip of heaven between them from his greedy, prying gaze.

It paints a startling picture, he finds. One with you looking thoroughly ravaged. Taken. But presenting it in a soft sort of sensuality meant to make a man feel both hot under the collar and like an unrepentant voyeur.

Pretty bird, he thinks, and feels his cock stir.

He rises swiftly, hiking up his jeans around his thighs as he goes, and then turns to you with a heady desire to crush that gossamer of hope between his greedy hand like a silken cobweb that will stick to his fingers.

“Not goin’ to your brothers,” he says, pushing his tongue against his cheek to stem the ache burning in his muscles.

You shiver, eyes growing wide, frenzied with fear as you stare up at him. The shift of your throat when you swallow makes pre-cum dribble out of his fattened cock. He's never really had much of a taste for it, but he's overcome with the urge to see you cry—

“Where are we going?”

Amid the ache in his loins, the flickering fantasies of your pretty, lachrymal face gazing up at him helpless, hopeless, and needy, he catches the edge of panic when you speak. The razor-sharp tremble of fear.

But buried amongst it, hidden in the bruised look you give him as he towers over you with his cock bulging in his slacks and his eyes burning with want, he finds a keen sense of eagerness amongst the rubble. Agog, almost.

And fuck. If that doesn't do something awful to him.

“What?” He taunts, cocking his head to the side as your breath grows shallow and your eyes wide. “Did you think that was enough to pay your debt, birdie?”

“What? You can't—”

“Don't like it—” he lifts his shoulder up in a cool, indifferent shrug, enjoying the dismayed expression that falls over your brow more than he should. “—go to the police.”

“The ones on your payroll?” You spit, eyes flaring wide like an angry cat. “You—”

Several things might have continued in place of your choked, angry sob, but it's swallowed down as pragmatically as it was the first time he cornered you earlier today. And as beautiful as your ire is, he finds the cornered look on your face to be much more pleasing. Prettier.

“C’mon, bird,” he mocks, holding his hand out toward you with a tick of his lips. “All your stuff is at home. Don't be stupid.”

“Stupid?” You gasp in indignation, but there's a bruised look in your eyes. A wounded thing that makes his breath hitch in his lungs for reasons he can't really ascertain, but just knows that he likes it. Likes it a lot. “This is—insane.”

Again, he shrugs, but the indifference this time isn't the same manufactured callousness meant to inspire fear. The conversation is stale already. Grating on him. He's not used to having his orders ignored or questioned. What he says usually goes—either through association or reputation, or just the fact that no one has ever come close to filling the same measure of space as he does—and questioning him like this makes him feel too much like a boy, and not enough like the living ghost he pretends to be.

“You can't do this. It's not right.”

An appeal to his humanity. Cute. He huffs, reaching down to fasten the button of his jeans. The sound the zipper makes cuts through the room. “You're mine, birdie. Better get used to it.”

Catching your eye as he says it was only meant to reignite the kindling fear you have of him from extinguishing. A scared prey animal was a better pet than an angry one. But the look on your face catches him off-guard.

It reminds him of a flightless little bird shivering in a child's shoebox. Tiny broken thing his mum warned him not to touch or its mother would abandon it to die on its own.

“Until the debt is paid off.”

A statement, not a question. He shrugs, but doesn't respond. Tilts his head toward the door. “Let's go.”

His lack of reassurance doesn't soften the flint in your gaze, but the prospect of recompense seems to spurn you on. Another wishbone of hope to cling to. And despite himself, he lets you keep it. Lets your little finger wrap around the delicate bone for comfort because as much as you might think there's a fifty-fifty chance of getting the bigger piece, he has no intentions of letting something like that get in the way of his appetite even if you do.

(And his hunger has always been particularly voracious, hasn't it?)

“Come, birdie. Gotta get you home, and fed, don't I?”

#simon riley x reader #simon ghost riley x reader #ghost x reader #series: dogmeat #for only being 19k this really took a lot out of me #simon riley x you #ghost x you #ghostfics

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sage-nebula · 16 days ago

Text

Let's talk about Toriel.

Toriel is a grown woman, a mother of two. She teaches kindergarten at the local school, and volunteers at the local church as part of the choir. She is recently divorced. Her oldest child has recently gone off to college, and her youngest is:

Adopted from a young age

A different species

Known for pulling pranks and otherwise causing trouble, sometimes to great expense (e.g. bath bombs in the toilet)

Despite this, Toriel loves her youngest child as though they were her biological child. She checked out a "how to care for humans" book many, many times over the course of parenting Kris. She drives them to school each day, makes sure they're fed and cared for, and is clearly invested in their social life given how excited she is to learn that they've made a friend. As a newly single mother, she's doing her best.

But let's talk about her being newly single, shall we? She recently divorced her husband, Asgore. Unfortunately, Asgore has not accepted this. Toriel is being stalked by her ex-husband; he keeps giving her unwanted bouquets of flowers, and showing up wherever she goes. He even lampshades this, as though it's funny, when he pops out from hiding in the bushes near the church, after knowing that she would be there. Every time he does this, Toriel responds with obvious discomfort and anxiety, and makes an excuse to get away as quickly as she can. Asgore's behavior seems goofy and "well-meaning," but he is clearly ignoring his ex-wife's boundaries and actively disrupting her living her life by showing up where he knows she'll be, uninvited and unwanted.

So Toriel is recently divorced, with one child off to college, and another child who is clearly not doing well (despite Toriel's best efforts) still at home. She is being stalked by her ex-husband, but in such a way that it comes across as "friendly" or "kind" to everyone else, meaning she can't really make a big fuss about it or she'll look like the bad guy.

Then a new guy moves to town. He's friendly, he's funny, and they hit it off immediately. And unlike everyone else in town, this is a friend that doesn't have a connection to Asgore. (Rudy was Asgore's friend first, after all; it's not as if Toriel can really open up to him about how much his best friend is really putting the ass in Asgore.) This is someone that she can open up to, someone that she can confide in, someone that she can let a little loose with. Because she can't let loose at school, around the children; she can't let loose at church, in front of the wider community; but with a friend, in her own home?

And Sans is non-judgmental. Sans likes her jokes. As mentioned, Sans doesn't know Asgore, so he's not going to be inclined to brush off Toriel's concerns or discomfort because "well he just really loves you" or "he's just being kind." (Not to mention, Asgore also trauma dumped to Sans a bit, making Sans visibly uncomfortable as well, so Sans might even be more inclined to hear Toriel's side.) Sans knows about responsibility, given that this version of Papyrus seems to have issues of his own, and therefore perhaps Sans can relate with Toriel on how it is taking care of someone when you love them, but you don't exactly know how best to help them. Finally, Toriel has someone in her corner, someone who can understand, who she can have fun with.

Toriel isn't one of the main characters, and she's a grown woman and a mother (figure) at that, so I feel like it's easy to dismiss her side of things. Was it great that she was drunk when Kris came home, or that she and Sans continued partying even after Kris tried going to bed? No. But Toriel is a person, a whole entire person with a life outside of being Kris' mother. She's allowed to not always be on her best behavior, and she's allowed to make and spend time with a new friend when she, too, is pretty isolated as a result of her divorce and clearly stressed with the fact that Asgore is stalking her. ("Trying to win her back" is not, it turns out, an excuse for stalker behavior.) Toriel even tells Kris that the house feels lonely now that it's just the two of them, meaning that she, too, has been plagued with loneliness just like the main cast, and that Sans is, perhaps, her Susie.

Toriel is not an awful, uncaring mother because she got a little silly drunk with the first friend that is truly hers since her divorce. She's just a person. And she's allowed to be a person.

#deltarune #deltarune spoilers #toriel #asgore needs to knock it off fr tho #shit's not cute #i feel like it's not at all a coincidence that in ch 4 Asgore stalked her to the church #rattled her so badly she fled the scene instead of taking Kris and Susie to the diner like she initially planned #and then later had been drinking with Sans #she went to Sans to vent and for some friendship and comfort and Sans cheered her up with drinks and dancing #as a good friend would #and like . . . i think that's ok! i think that's forgivable! toriel is a person going through a rough time!#she's allowed to have feelings and friends even if it takes away from her being The Perfect Mom #parents are people. they don't stop being people just because they become parents ffs

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yanderedrabbles · 7 months ago

Note

Yandere soldier with Stockholm syndrome

Part Two of Yandere Soldier

Yandere Soldier - Stockholm Syndrome

Yandere! Solider who can't get you to talk to him. You'll sit curled in the corner of the bed, resolutely looking anywhere but at him.

Yandere! Soldier who brings you books, flowers, even old picture albums he finds stashed at the bottom of your cupboard. And still nothing but silence.

Yandere! Soldier who's beginning to think nothing will ever break it. That he's stilled that vicious tongue of yours forever. Who hates himself for what he's done, but what choice did he have? Yes, he's taken you from your home and family and all that was familiar. But was an interrogation room really the better option?

Yandere! Soldier who comes home with a nasty cut all across his arm. Some dumb kid got smart and slashed him when his back was turned and now he's forced into recovery leave for a week.

At first, you just watch him struggle to change his bandages. But something about his injury, this reminder of mortality, sticks with you. You pluck the roll of bandages straight out of his hand and wrap his injury for him.

Yandere! Soldier who stays frozen while you work, terrified of frightening you away. Who basks in the intimacy of it - your bowed head, the delicate smell of your perfume, the pulse fluttering at your throat.

Yandere! Soldier who has to swallow and breathe before he can find his voice again.

Спасибо

Thank you.

You shrug and let go of his arm. Yandere! Soldier who hates to loose your touch. Who wants to pull you back and force you to cradle his face in your palms. But he doesn't want to ruin this tiny bit of progress.

Yandere! Soldier who fills the silence with his stories. Who tells you about his training, his childhood, the places he's been deployed to and how happy he was to leave them. Who teaches you words in his native language, even if you don't bother repeating them.

Yandere! Soldier who comes home exhausted and aching, who sprawls on the bed with a groan and instinctively reaches for you.

Yandere! Soldier who has to bite back a yelp of surprise when he feels your climb onto his back and straddle his waist. You slowly knead at his muscles, massaging away all the knots and tension and lingering aches.

Yandere! Soldier who has to stifle a moan because it feels so damn good.

Yandere! Soldier who finds you waiting at the door the next morning, still as quiet as a monk. He's immediately suspicious. Are you going to make a run for it? Instead you stand on your tip toes and press a quick, uncertain kiss to his cheek.

Yandere! Soldier who keeps touching the place you kissed him, even when it's hidden under his mask.

Yandere! Soldier who cooks you dinner most nights, even if he's dog tired, even if all you do is push it around your plate.

Yandere! Soldier who brings you news of the city and the war effort. The resistance is faltering, it's leaders hunted and put down like dogs. Part of him hopes the news will make you more pliant. Why fight the inevitable?

Yandere! Soldier who doesn't like the way your eyes get hard when he talks about the resistance, the way you clench your jaw and look away from him.

You mutter something and it takes him a moment to decipher it.

"I should be out there with them."

Yandere! Soldier who tries and fails to contain his anger. Who grabs your jaw and pulls you up to face him.

"If you were out there, you'd be dead. Can't you be thankful?"

You're quiet again after that and he stops bringing it up.

Yandere! Soldier who doesn't leave anything sharp around the apartment, but is still surprised when you ask him to trim your hair. He sits on the bed with you between his knees, carefully filtering the hair through his fingers. You're so close to him - willingly - that it makes him feel almost lightheaded.

Yandere! Soldier who carefully dusts the cuttings off you and is secretly pleased when you don't flinch away.

Yandere! Soldier who isn't sure how to react when you start greeting him at the door. At first he watches you warily, expecting you to bolt the second you can. But for some reason you don't and a part of him insists that you're starting to like it here.

Yandere! Soldier who exercises every evening, his shirt off and his black fatigues slung low on his hips. He likes it when you watch him and he'll usually throw in a few extra push-ups just to impress you. He complains that he doesn't have enough weight around for his workouts and you take to draping yourself across his back when he needs it.

Yandere! Soldier who finds himself craving you, even with your cold silence. Who is constantly aware of you around the apartment and has to force himself to look away.

Yandere! Soldier who turns off all the electricity in the dead of winter and claims it was damaged in the fighting. It's icy cold in old buildings like this and it doesn't take long for it to wear you down. Soon you're curled up against him, glaring at him to keep his hands to himself.

And he does, for the most part.

Yandere! Soldier who wakes up to you sobbing, your face pressed into his chest. He tries to soothe you, but you flinch away. You whisper between the sobs, sounding afraid and hateful and needy all at once.

"I love you..."

Yandere! Soldier who instantly understands what's happened. He's spent the better part of his life in war zones afterall, and it's more common than you'd think. Yandere! Soldier who secretly hoped for this outcome all along.

Yandere! Soldier who soothes you as best he can, stroking your hair until your sobs turn to whimpers. He presses his lips to your forehead and tells you to relax, that this was bound to happen, that's it's not your fault.

Yandere! Soldier who holds you in his scarred arms and knows that he's finally caught you, body and soul. Who says the words you long for but dread hearing.

я тоже тебя люблю

"I love you too."

#gradually falling for him #yandere x reader #yandere #reader insert #yandere scenarios #yandere imagines #x reader #yandere drabbles #yandere oc #yandere soldier #stockholm syndrome

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navydoves · 3 months ago

Text

Can't do these without my help, can you?

✎ᝰ. summary: going out of his way to become your tutor, caleb is right where he wants to be when you invite him over.

✎ᝰ. cw: dom!caleb, tutor!caleb, perversion, semi-masturbation, panty ADDICT, freako caleb, a creampie, dirty talk, just a little degradation, orgasm-denial if you squint, caleb is very needy 4 u and also a little obsessive

✎ᝰ. wc: 4.1k

✎ᝰ. a/n: i'm not particularly interested in caleb as a li, but i hope i did his writing justice. i also wrote this all in one go for u crazy freaks. enjoy!

𖤐

light, fruity, feminine; that was the inviting smell of your room that greeted caleb every time he came over for a session. your walls were adored with small posters of your favourite medias, and over them, warm fairy lights were strung to create a very home-y, gentle atmosphere. your room was a direct reflection of you, someone who was just as inviting and gentle, someone who was just as warm and feminine. he was obsessed.

he's observed you from afar for a while now as the girl who seemed unreachable, untouchable. he would purposefully sit in the row behind you during lecture hall to keen himself in on what you were jotting down in your notes or searching up on your computer. you were never secretive about it, not even when you browsed online stores or your clicked through social media during class.

sometimes he would drop whatever he was doing when he saw you on campus—with your friends or sometimes not. he preferred when you were alone. he never followed you anywhere, no, but he would take mental notes of where you frequented and with whom. he felt like a weirdo at first, staring at you like this and getting to know you well enough to be mistaken for your friend. but that feeling had long past, long after he actually became your friend.

it took a bit of courage and time from him to work himself up to the challenge of simply talking to you, but it was easier than he thought once he actually approached you. you were sociable, kind, so warm. it also helped that caleb knew all of your interests already and was a great conversationalist when it came to things he was passionate about. no, not your favourite band, but you.

he found himself only growing more infatuated with your person as time went on. you entrusted him quickly; he knew he was very charming and welcoming as a person, so when you started confiding in him, details of your personal life, he happily listened. he hated when you talked about previous relationships or other guys you were currently looking at. has all the effort he has put in to get close to you been in vain?? he dismissed those conversations; he hated those men.

it was only when you started talking about your assignments that caleb began to become interested again. something about caleb was that, despite not really trying, he was a prodigy in school. it was the reason why he could get away with gawking at you in class without failing. and now, hearing you complain about classes he had found easy—even while sleeping through them—he realized he had another way into your life. his intelligence was a gift that kept on giving, it seemed.

when he first offered to tutor, you were skeptical. apparently, you had tried tutors in the past and none of them really helped, but caleb assured you that he would be different - that he would actually help. you reluctantly agreed and insisted on paying him despite his refusal. seeing you privately, teaching you, guiding you was more than enough to satisfy caleb in every way, but you were a feisty one.

the first time came caleb came over for a tutoring session, he almost came in his pants just stepping into that fruity-scented room of yours and had to wait until you left for the bathroom to let out a soft groan of pleasure. he wasn't sure why he was so aroused by just being in your room like this, you hadn't even done anything but get most of the questions wrong on your calculus practice exam. there's no reason for his cock to be twitching in his pants like this every time he looked up at you.

the feeling of restraint was a nice one to caleb, though. every time he packed his bag before heading off to your place for a session, he knew he would spend the next hour or two trying not to get his dick all hard. he's felt it before; your form so close to his that the heat radiating off of you sent jolts straight down to his cock, and still, he had to resist getting fully erect. something about being denied that pleasure because he could get caught by you was exhilarating, it made him lightheaded. but he questioned, when was denial going to eat away at him?

caleb was a good tutor, a great one in fact. since the day he was hired, you've improved significantly in all of your most hated subjects. he's turned around the pattern of unreliable tutors you've had in the past, which is why he thinks you decided to continue your sessions even through spring break. on any normal basis, caleb would reject the offer. spring break was his time to leave the campus behind and take a flight somewhere deserted. but for you? he'd stay nailed to your room floor if you so wanted.

"caleb's here!" he chirps happily as he knocks on your apartment door. he hears scuffling from afar followed by the nearing pitter-patter of your footsteps. he watches as the door unlocks and opens for him, you shorter form - clad in shorts and loose shirt - standing behind it with a gentle smile.

"hey, come in. sorry, was cleaning out my backpack." you step aside for him and then turn your back to him as you motioned for him to follow you into your room. that gesture was enough to already get his hormones erratic.

caleb tightens his grip on his bag and uses other hand to wave dismissively while following you to your bedroom. "nah, you're all good. you doing some spring cleaning?" he asks with a playful lilt to his voice. he steps into your room and glances around, trying not to make it obvious to you that he was getting a little antsy.

"uh, something like that," you answer while situating yourself on a cushion behind your small floor table. right next to you, was where caleb usually sat. "i just need my backpack empty for when class starts up again. i get overwhelmed with all the papers but never end up doing anything about it." you lug the backpack in question off from the table pull out the textbooks you were gonna use to study today.

caleb nods at your words and realizes he should be making himself at home too. he drops his bag beside the table and moves to the cushion next to you, glancing over at the textbook name. "more math?" he asks in a laugh.

you sigh in exasperation and shrug. this was the subject most of your study sessions were about. "i can't do any type of math, it's actually kinda funny how bad i am." you wrap one arm around caleb's neck and pull him into a good-natured side hug. "but that's why you're here!"

caleb immediately tenses up in your embrace. oh fuck, this difficult task of not creaming his pants was already proving to be extreme, and he had barely been in your house for five minutes. despite his struggle, he didn't want to pull away from you, fearing you would take it as rejection, but your proximity and scent was already making him dizzy.

thankfully you peeled yourself off of him before he could let a pathetic moan slip out. with a grunt, he shifts himself on the cushion and zeros in his attention to the textbook you opened. he watches you flip through the pages, saying something about the professor being annoying—or was it the work? he wasn’t sure; he was already too far gone.

"s-so, how much work am i helping you with here? ya gonna suck up day one of my spring break dry?" caleb chuckles, trying to distract himself from the ache in his body.

"i won't keep you long," you sigh, "i already feel bad making you help me over our break. it'll be short, don't worry."

he nods again, but your words make him feel conflicting turmoil. he wanted to stay, but the longer he did, the greater the risk of him busting a nut right there on your carpet. he had been suppressing his arousal for months and he was now reaching his limit.

"no it's okay, take as much of my time as you need," caleb responds with a smile that was slightly forced. the will of god himself could not ameliorate the amount of horny caleb had built within him - but caleb was stronger than god in that room.

the next hour consisted of you brushing against him, teasing him, asking him questions in a cute, confused tone. he was losing his composure so quick that an erection was inevitable for him despite the restraint. he placed his bag over his lap so that it wasn't so obvious, but he knew at some point, he was gonna have to take it off. going to your bathroom to relieve himself was also not a solution, considering your bathroom shared a wall with your room and you would be able to hear the groans of your name that he needed to say to be able cum.

"do you want something to eat?" you suddenly ask after you triumphantly finished another practice sheet from the textbook. "you've been here for a while, i can see what i have in the kitchen."

caleb almost jumped for joy. yes, please leave the room, please he can't take it anymore. you're so much. "i-i wouldn't mind it, thanks. take your time, you've been working hard." he watches you smile and nod before leaving the room, leaving him inside alone.

. . . he shouldn't . . . he shouldn't. he had to respect the home you so graciously invited him into and he shouldn't. but the erection in his pants was so overwhelmingly distracting that if he had any chance of being good tutor for the rest of his time here, he needed to relieve himself.

caleb pushes himself off the cushion and lets his bag fall from his lap. he quietly strides to your dresser and has one final moral dilemma in his head before opening one of the cabinets. these were your shirts. he opens another one - your socks. then another - your bras. the bras were tempting, he wouldn't lie, but they weren't what he was looking for. but then he hit the top drawer which looked like a gold mine to him - your panties. he groans into his palm before haphazardly picking up a pink one and closing the cabinet.

quickly, he brings it to his nose and begins palming himself through his pants. fuck, this was better than any jack-off session he's ever had with porn - and he wasn't even really touching his cock. stumbling around like a man drunk, he bends over your bed with his nose deep into the pussy lining of your panties. pre-cum soaked his own underwear and he could only hope that it wouldn't seep into his pants. he needed this; like a man needed water he needed your pussy overtaking him like this.

the pleasure hazing his mind only amplified when he caught glimpse of your laundry hamper in the corner. his eyes blew wide, the purple of his irises gone as his pupils dilated at a new idea. he rushes over to the hamper and digs through the top pieces of clothes with one singular prayer in his mind.

please, please, please.

and maybe his prayers worked, maybe god was actually with him because he found exactly what he was risking his entire reputation for - a dirty, used panty that had all of your natural musk on it, uncovered by detergent and fully soaked with every acidic smell of your pussy. the moment caleb brings the red fabric to his nose, he lets out the loudest groan he's ever allowed himself to do in your house. what he would give for this to be your actual soaking, wet heat covering his face. he was almost tempted to pull out his cock right there and use your underwear as a make-shift pocket pussy, but he thought against it.

you'd be back any minute now. he didn't know what you were making, and it made him nervous. there was a difference in time between slicing apples and cooking those struggle-meal noodles on the stove, and he was none-the-wiser as to what you were doing. but he didn't want to move. he really didn't. he growls at the dilemma, but despite the disagreements happening in his brain his body wasn't moving.

caleb moves the panties back a few inches to get a good look at it. it was stained with a bit of discharge and other feminine fluids that he couldn't be sure of, but that didn't stop him from what he did next. he brings the crotch of your panties to his mouth and clamps down on it, sucking it vigorously in attempts to taste every second that you wore this. there was a tangy taste on his mouth that he learned in that second was the taste of you - and that realization itself made his balls clench up, readying to spill in his pants. he quickly moves his hand away from his erection imprint to stall his orgasm but cries out softly from the denial. thankfully, the cloth of your panties muffled his voice.

everything became a second thought, though, when he heard the change in your footsteps from outside. you were no longer walking on the tiles of your kitchen, but instead the wooden floors of the common room. caleb clambered to pile all of the discarded dirty laundry back into the hamper but kept the saliva drenched panties in his pocket. he shuffled back to the cushion behind your small table and tensed up as your footsteps neared. his heart had never pounded like this, not even during training season back when he was in the army for piloting.

you clicked open the door and smiled sheepishly at caleb with a tray of various finger foods. "hey, sorry for the wait," you hum, "i quickly realized i didn't have full meals on deck to make you so i just opted for like a…. snack tray?" you bent over and placed the tray on the table in front of caleb with an inviting gesture, telling him to eat.

caleb flits his gaze up to you before looking away in slight shame. "no it's alright, i actually had a pretty big breakfast so a few snacks is just what i need." he laughs like normal but there was anxiety simmering within his body at the situation he put himself in. all this for an orgasm he couldn't even have? doesn't matter, he'll have a jerk-off session so intense later that he'll colour your panties his cum-shade of white.

it was the anxiety in his chest, though, that made him flinch at your sudden gasp. he sits up, startled and furrows his brows. but before he could ask anything, you move toward your bed and pick up a discarded pair of pink panties that were laying there.

fuck, fuck, fuck. he forgot to put them back in the drawer and left them there like an idiot. fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck!

before caleb could drop to his hands and knees and beg for forgiveness, you beat him to it.

"i.. am so sorry, i have no idea how long those have been there for. agh, this is so embarassing!" you squeal while snatching them off your bed and throwing them into your top drawer without so much as caring to fold them. caleb looks at you dumbfoundedly with a slack jaw which you took as an expression of disgust. you turn your body away from his direction and shield your eyes from the world as shame boiled within your stomach.

caleb looks around the room like he was being duped. so god was actually here with him, protecting his perversion from ever being know. but yet, while he could get away with unscathed, there was something about your naivety that really created an itch. almost caught, once again; denial felt so good up until this point and he could take no more. he stands and glances down at his still prominent erection before moving behind where you stood. he places his hands on your hips and his chin atop your shoulder, coaxing you to move back against his body.

"i… can't take it much longer, yknow?" he murmurs with an uncharacteristically calm voice. he presses his hips to your backside, letting you feel his large, hard erection dig into your body and letting you know that he was in need. "tell me to leave. tell me to fuck off and i will and i'll never even look in your direction again. i've never had a woman drive me so crazy that i couldn't even step foot in her room without losing my mind."

you tense at both caleb's words and the poking sensation you felt in your back. you almost couldn't believe what was happening - all so fast too. one moment you were pouring stale pretzels into a small bowl for the two of you and the next you were pressed up against your tutor's hard cock. you felt a little speechless.

"caleb… i… i don't know what to say," you whisper, "what is this? what is happening?"

"i don't know how to make this clearer for you," he rumbles, "i feel like a bitch in heat. what you should say is that you want me out of your fucking house and to never contact you again, that's the script here. i'm not paid to be here and fucking lust over you but i am, and i need to go."

the non-existent distance between you two only made it harder for caleb to conceal the extent of his desire. his cock throbbed like it was trying to free itself from the confines of his pants. you took a long time to respond - or at least it felt incredibly long to caleb's distorted mind. but that distortion came to an end when you turned your head back to look at him with those pretty eyes of yours. your expression was unreadable.

"but what if i don't want you to leave?"

𖤐

"fuck. that's my nasty girl. that's my little slut," caleb grunts in your ear. your legs quiver in an attempt to hold themselves up against him at the ninety-degree angle you were in. the only support you were given were caleb's hands bruising into your hips and holding you still as he battered into from behind. every thrust from him threatened to topple you over flat onto your stomach and atop the small table underneath you.

"c…caleb! caleb, agh!" you cried with your head tucked into your chin.

"yes, pretty girl? is it too much for you?" caleb mocked you. "i told you to kick me out, i told you didn't i?" his pace didn't relent at your cries, not one bit. he's waited so long for this. he's waited so long to feel your cunt squeezing him like this. his imagination compared nothing to the real feeling of your slick, fluffy pussy sucking him in and constricting around his cock so eagerly. you were enjoying it too, he could tell. the way you cried out his name like that - all honeyed. you gave into his perversion so easily it almost makes him wish he did it earlier.

"mmngh… fuuuck, you're tightening around me so good. have you also thought about me fucking you senselessly like this? 'cause this pretty pussy ain't letting me go." caleb grins and leans back to get a better view of his cock pounding into your creamed cunt. the sight of his thickness disappearing within you only to come back out coated in more of your arousal left him feeling insatiable. every thrust squelched out shared juices onto the below table and covered your classwork, consequently drenching them in slick and arousal.

"c-caleb, m…my work… fuck… i-i need that," you whine. caleb grins and shrugs; his pace still wasn't relenting and he certainly wasn't moving you elsewhere. your pussy was nice and delicious just like this.

"get new copies," he grunts, "and then you can invite me over again to help you. after all, you can't do these without my help, can you?"

caleb leans over your back and fully wraps his arms around your midsection for better, deeper thrusts. every slide in ensured that every inch of him down to his ballsack was burrowed into you; every slide out ensured that the curve of his cock dragged your pussy walls with it. the noises between your bodies were abhorrently obscene and echoed in your room with each sloppy thrust. you've never been fucked so hungrily in your life up until the monster cock that was caleb's.

caleb kept one strong bicep wrapped around your waist to hold you still while the other moved down to your clit. his fingers deftly played with your swollen nub, moving it in circles and pinching it to help you build up an orgasm. you squealed at the extra sensation of pleasure coming from in-between your legs, it was so strong that you almost buckled over from overstimulation.

caleb simply laughs at you and toys with your bundle of nerves even more. "feel good?" he purrs. "keep me around for these tutoring sessions and i'll give you much more than a few As. i'll give you my cock and reward you for doing so well. do you want that? do you wanna get drunk on my cock for being such a good girl?"

he was taunting you, clearly, but a two-in-one deal of good grades and good dick was tempting. despite being a withering mess who was getting her cunt squashed with each passing second, you managed to suck in a breath and whimper out an answer. "ngh… y…yes, i want that."

"what was that? couldn't hear you, honey," he sneers. "i'm not the type of guy to just take what i want, y'know? i want my girl just as eager as me. do i have to ask you again?"

"n-no, i want it!"

caleb smirks. "that's it. nasty thing ~."

with his ego stroked by your words, caleb increases the speed of his thrusts vigorously. he's held back an orgasm so diligently this entire time for the sake of savoring your sloppy wet cunt. but now, knowing he'll be back here in due time to do this all over again, he no longer has to deny himself the beauty of orgasming inside of you.

you beat him to it. your legs failed you as soon as your orgasm hit and left you limp in caleb's arms. he was strong enough to catch you and hold you up against him which left your legs dangling mid-air. you couldn't even yell or scream as you came, your voice was entirely gone and all that was left were a few weak squeaks coming from your throat. your sweet walls contracted around caleb so strongly that you could feel his struggle to move.

he groaned loudly in your ear and then practically whimpered your name. you were tight since he first sank into your warmth, but this was another level of constriction that he didn't think was possible. his hips stuttered pathetically as they could no longer sustain a rhythmic pattern. he gave out right there. his cock pulsed in you like a second heartbeat as a deep wave of semen filled the hilt of your pussy and gushed out from your folds from the overflow.

caleb went silent as his own voice was stolen by the insurmountable pleasure he was feeling. he was pumping spurt after spurt within you, and he could only blame the months he's lived so pent up. he groans again; eyes water slightly from the intensity of the euphoria. "oh my god…" he whispers.

the both of you wait until the strength of your orgasms subsided before even facing each other. caleb nudges your cheek with his nose but your eyes were closed in exhaustion. with the little energy he had left, he slipped out of your sticky pussy and carried you a few feet to your bed. he laid you down gently and took the time to appreciate the view. the girl he's been obsessing for better half of the year was now fucked and filled, good and well by him. you looked too pretty like this; he was sure he was looking at perfection.

caleb lays down next you on your bed and cups your cheek. he was worried that this was an all too familiar gesture, but having your cervix filled with his cum was probably a little more intimate. as your eyes flutter open to meet caleb's, he smiles and hums.

"you're mine now."

𖤐

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kianamaiart · 9 months ago

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No offense to the magical girl story you're doing, but I'm not sure about it. It's looks good, and you've put effort into it, but I'm just not fond of magical girl stories, like, why do they always go for the teenage girls and not, you know, adults, particularly ones who already understand the concept of responsibility and sacrifice. But good luck.

That's fine. If you don't like the genre, you don't like it

I thought about playing with the idea of an adult magical girl (magical woman?), similarly over it, but it was giving like... bitter millennial vibes which isn't what I'm going for LMAO.

With an adult it felt like "ah this is her job and she hates it haha she's so relatable". But I wanted my story to feel more like "Oh this girl hates her job, which makes sense she's a baby she shouldn't even have a job or all these responsibilities actually". Since this series is somewhat of a parody of the genre, I feel like leaning into the tropes is important. Teenage girls having this burden of protecting the world is one of them.

It also falls into the themes of being a "gifted kid who people have a lot of expectations for" that I want to explore. Growing up too fast sucks, Aika's aware of that and trying to reclaim her childhood

That's why I'm doing it but in general, I think magical girls are usually teenagers because the genre is generally marketed toward tweenage/teenage girls. A lot of film and fiction is either made to sell a fantasy and/or to inspire. What I love about magical girl animes is that they aim to teach little girls that you can to be feminine and strong. Not that I don't think you can't do that with an adult character but we all know it's nice to see characters that are like you, whether it be race, gender, sexuality and in this case, age. A child doesn't know what it's like to be an adult so seeing a kid like them doing cool shit probably resonates more. Then on the flipside, an adult can remember what it was like for them to be a kid/teenager. So having a younger protagonist can still be relatable or even nostalgic for an adult. I think teenage characters just cast a wider net of appeal/relatability for audiences.

I would love to see more media tackle broader age ranges also, but also I get why high school is an, admittedly overused, but popular age range to write.

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tiramissyoucake · 3 months ago

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mama more sinister mark smut pls 🤤🍽️

Sighs and puts on my apron and shamefully goes to the kitchen. Time to burn this shit down again.

Cw: sinister Mark is his own warning atp, fem reader, riding to face down ass up, dub-con? Mark gets to bust inside, use of 'bitch', 'whore', 'slut', dirty talk?

"Faster." Mark demanded, one hand behind his head and the other on your thigh, you've been riding his dick ever since he came back and no matter what pace you went at, he wasn't satisfied. "I said, faster." His hand slapped your thigh, eliciting a pained noise from you.

The slap wouldn't have hurt if your thighs didn't burn from trying to ride him the way he wanted, no matter how fast or slow you went— it was always the same demand. More. More. More. Even as your cunt welcomed his cock with every bounce, every lift and drop of your hips, your body was tired from accommodating him.

"Stay with me, slut." He grinned, finding pleasure in the discomforted expression on your face. "You don't wanna make me feel good?" He coaxed with a buck of his hips, grunting. "C'mon, bitch, make me cum."

You shook your head, hands settling on his chest. "Can't— Mark..! It hurts..!" Your bouncing became less enthusiastic, exhaustedly trying to lift your hips off of his dick, your inner thighs felt too sticky from both sweat and your own pussy drooling at the feeling of his cock.

He rolled his eyes with a groan, sitting up. "gotta do everything myself." He shoved you off of his dick and himself fully, landing on your back he didn't give you a second to sit up. "Ass up, now." He manhandled you, you could only let out grunts and pleas for him to wait but he wouldn't listen.

Sitting up on his knees with your ass to his hips, he shoved your head down into the sheets. "Let me show you how to fuck right, since you're too fucking dumb to follow instructions." He spat with a smile, repositioning his cock back inside you easily thanks to your efforts from riding him, you gasped at the intrusion.

Mark wasted no time, one hand on your head and his other hand grabbed onto your ass, fingers digging into the flesh as he hissed and thrusted wildly, skin slapping against yours in a pace that was quicker than anything your thighs could keep up with. "Yes. Fuck yes. Just like that..." he huffed, licking his lips

The new angle let his cock hit every spot just right, your hands clutching the sheets as you whimpered and moaned into them, stuttered and broken moans spilling from your lips. "M-Mark..! Slow- slow..!! I can't- oooh, t-too mu— UCH?!" Your tone jolted as his hand spanked you, his dick's pistoning uninterrupted.

"Did I not teach you- mmmh..! To be a good whore and take my cock?" He panted, growling through gritted teeth as he leaned further down to degrade you further. "You were made for this."

You couldn't focus on whatever he was saying, not when your body was jolting back and forth with the force of his hips plapping against yours, he loved when you were like this; cockdumb and compliant. "take it, bitch. Mmf! take all of it."

Even when your own orgasm would wash over you, you learned to brace yourself because he wouldn't slow down, if anything your pussy sucking his dick in further made him go faster, throwing your safety out the window as he'd grab your hips and fuck into you like you'd disappear in the next 10 minutes.

"Yes, fuckfuckfuck— 'm gonna cum, you better take it, whore. 'M gonna be so mad at you if you don't~" the playful threat still managed to scare you as you tried to focus on reality through the discomfort of too much pleasure boiling between your legs, propping your ass up on his lap he gave a few more short thrusts before grunting and spilling his cum as deep as he could inside you.

Mark glares down at you with so many emotions, frustration, desire, hunger, all of these were his odd version of love. He nestles his hips deeper against yours to make sure his cum was fully situated inside you. "Feel that? See how good it feels when you take it like a good bitch?"

Every pump from his cock only invoked a sensitive throb from your sopping wet pussy, you were unsure if your body went haywire due to his demands and wanted more or if this throbbing was a sign you'd pass out.

#your stars have aligned .•°✧✦✧#invincible x reader #mark grayson x reader

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str4wb3rrysw3etheart · 3 months ago

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Do you think you could write hcs of the boys at prom? 🥹 (post comic book store fire, since in the lore they didn’t go the first time)

OFCC!!!

Sfw ♡

Cw: suggestive in Petes and bills, bill needs to be pegged/j, usage of slut, Josh has a binge ed

꒷꒦︶꒷꒦︶ ๋ ࣭ ⭑꒷꒦꒷꒦︶꒷꒦︶ ๋ ࣭ ⭑꒷꒦꒷꒦︶꒷꒦︶ ๋ ࣭ ⭑꒷

Bill

♡Did not want to go.. his mom barely let him go, but decided he needed to hang out with someone ..

♡He stands with you in the corner at the food table, eating the occasional snack, and complaining that his tie was too tight (his mom made him dress up)

♡If you try to dance with him, he will blush from embarrassment and refuse, saying that it's dumb.. just make him he's pathetic (I love him)

♡Try to kiss him? Hes bright red. He chewed four packs of gum and brushed his teeth for 30 minutes to prepare for this, but still..

♡He stares.. a lot, he finds you so domestic in a dress, and he feels manly. He yaps about how good of a house wife you'd be..

♡He sulks in the corner if you go off to talk to someone else.. you're litterally his only friend there.

♡Will ask to go to the bathroom (to get lucky..) multiple times. Unless you say yes he gets whiner and whiner each time

꒷꒦︶꒷꒦︶ ๋ ࣭ ⭑꒷꒦꒷꒦︶꒷꒦︶ ๋ ࣭ ⭑꒷꒦꒷꒦︶꒷꒦︶ ๋ ࣭ ⭑꒷

Pete

♡Finds the whole thing stupid, but goes, he doesn't wanna upset the only women to EVER talk to him..

♡Dances with you, and tries to be romantic, but kinda sucks at it.. just making sexual (and slightly objectifying ..) remarks

♡Doesn't dress up at all. He's wearing his normal clothes..

♡Refuses to let you go off with your friends, following you around, not really interested in your friends in the slightest.. what good are they anyway?

♡Tries to ... well.. get lucky with you at the end of the dance (if you want more details thats another fic)

♡If you kiss him he's just a bit too into it.. he sucks at it though.. (teaching Pete how to kiss fic coming up??/hj)

calls you horrendous petnames the whole time (women , sugar, slut)

♡Lowkey he makes you leave early and watches a movie with you instead, complaing that there were too many normies there..

꒷꒦︶꒷꒦︶ ๋ ࣭ ⭑꒷꒦꒷꒦︶꒷꒦︶ ๋ ࣭ ⭑꒷꒦꒷꒦︶꒷꒦︶ ๋ ࣭ ⭑꒷

Josh

♡VERY nervous to go to prom.. he made his mom do his hair, spent two hours cleaning himself up, and practicing how to kiss and what to say in the mirror..

♡Forgets all that he practiced as he sees you, You're the prettiest thing he's ever seen..

♡Tends to eat a lot of food out of his nervousness, so best believe he is by that snack table..

♡When you try to dance with him, he sucks at it. Stepping on your feet and tripping the whole time.. he has clearly never done this before

♡When you kiss him, he doesn't reciprocate at first, freezing up, he eventually leans into it, I'll admit a bit messily, but he's okay at kissing

♡Nervous rambles the whole time, he can't shut up. Normally he goes silent from anxiety, but I guess if he can't give you a minute alone with your thoughts you won't decide to leave him because you can't think about it

♡Once he gets more comfortable, he sweats a bit less, still on edge, but trusts you.. happy to be there with someone he loves.

♡Definitely called you milady at least once. Wanting to cry from embarrassment when you laughed.

꒷꒦︶꒷꒦︶ ๋ ࣭ ⭑꒷꒦꒷꒦︶꒷꒦︶ ๋ ࣭ ⭑꒷꒦꒷꒦︶꒷꒦︶ ๋ ࣭ ⭑꒷

Jerry

♡Actually went there mostly on his own accord , didn't take much convincing when you asked

♡He is still a bit awkward the whole time, but he tries to mask it, acting confident as if he didn't cry over his hair not looking right for you 20 minutes ago..

♡Is most familiar with dancing, he's been to plenty of weddings for family members he doesn't remember

♡When you kiss him, he kisses back almost immediately, but you can feel how sweaty his palms are

♡Actually makes an effort to seem.. normal? While there. Talking with your friends if you bring them over, and being respectful of you wanting space

♡Tries to drink the punch, and it ends up being spiked and is so wobbly is almost comical. He is a huge lightweight

♡Compliments your dress like 15 times, trying to cover up that's why he was staring, and not anything else... nooo...

꒷꒦︶꒷꒦︶ ๋ ࣭ ⭑꒷꒦꒷꒦︶꒷꒦︶ ๋ ࣭ ⭑꒷꒦꒷꒦︶꒷꒦︶ ๋ ࣭ ⭑꒷

#bill dickey x you #bill dickey x reader #jerry stokes x you #jerry stokes #jerry stokes x reader #bill dickey #pete dinunzio #eltingville club #the eltingville club #pete dinunzio x you #pete dinunzio x reader #josh levy x you #josh levy #josh levy x reader #headcanon #dating headcannons

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mariacallous · 8 days ago

Text

Sarah McBride on Why the Left Lost on Trans Rights

Full text of the podcast episode below for those who don't or can't go to the NYT page or listen

This is an edited transcript of an episode of “The Ezra Klein Show.” You can listen to the conversation by following or subscribing to the show on the NYT Audio App, Apple, Spotify, Amazon Music, YouTube, iHeartRadio or wherever you get your podcasts.

President Trump, in his inauguration speech, was perfectly clear about what he intended to do.

Archived clip of President Trump: As of today, it will henceforth be the official policy of the United States government that there are only two genders: male and female.

Starting the day of that speech, Trump began an all-out effort to roll back trans rights, using every power the federal government had and some that it may not have.

Archived clip: President Trump has signed an executive order which declares the U.S. government will no longer recognize the concept of gender identity. Archived clip: President Trump directing the Secretary of Education to create a plan to cut funding for schools that teach what he calls gender ideology. Archived clip: This afternoon, Trump makes a move to ban transgender athletes from competing in women’s sports. Archived clip: Ban on gender-affirming care for transgender kids. Archived clip: Ban on gender-affirming care for transgender inmates in federal prisons. Archived clip: Ban on transgender troops serving in the military. Archived clip: These executive orders, many of them have not actually gone into effect yet, but when I look across the country, we’re already hearing stories of impact. Archived clip: In a time when we are struggling to find people to volunteer to do this, we are begging to be allowed to continue our service, and you’re just going to wash us away. So today I’m not OK. Archived clip: It’s a complete dehumanization of transgender people. Years and years and years into who I am, and I’m supposed to out myself? It’s about privacy and dignity for me to be able to change my passport to male.

A lot of the things Trump is doing in this term have put him on the wrong side of public opinion — but not this.

In a recent poll where Trump’s approval rating was around 40 percent, 52 percent of Americans approved of how he’s handling trans issues. Another poll showed that was more than approved of Trump’s handling of immigration. Far more than approved of his handling of tariffs. And if you look more deeply into polling on trans rights, the public has swung right on virtually every policy you can poll.

Trump didn’t just win the election. He and the movement and ideology behind him had been winning the argument.

Sarah McBride is a freshman congresswoman from Delaware, where she was formerly a state senator. She’s the first openly trans member of Congress, and her view is that the trans rights movement and the left more broadly have to grapple with why their strategy failed — how they lost not only power but hearts and minds, and what needs to be done differently to protect trans people and begin winning back the public starting right now.

I was struck, talking to McBride, by how much she was offering a theory that goes far beyond trans rights. What she’s offering is a counter to the dominant political style that emerged as algorithmic social media collided with politics — a style that is more about policing and pushing those who agree with you than it is about persuading those who don’t.

Ezra Klein: Sarah McBride, welcome to the show.

Sarah McBride: Thanks for having me.

I want to begin with some polling. Pew asked the same set of questions in 2022 and 2025, and what it found was this collapse in what I would call persuasion.

They polled the popularity of protecting trans people from discrimination in jobs, housing and public spaces. That had lost eight points in those three years. Requiring health insurance companies to cover gender transition lost five points. Requiring trans people to use bathrooms that match their biological sex gained eight points.

When you hear those results, what, to you, happened there?

By every objective metric, support for trans rights is worse now than it was six or seven years ago. And that’s not isolated to just trans issues. I think if you look across issues of gender right now, you have seen a regression. Marriage equality support is actually lower now than it was a couple of years ago in a recent poll. We also see a regression around support for whether women should have the same opportunities as men compared to five, 10, 15 years ago.

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So there’s a larger regression from a gender perspective that I think is impacting this regression on trans rights. But I think it has been more acute, more significant in the trans-rights space.

Candidly, I think we’ve lost the art of persuasion. We’ve lost the art of change-making over the last couple of years. We’re not in this position because of trans people. There was a very clear, well-coordinated, well-funded effort to demonize trans people, to stake out positions on fertile ground for anti-trans politics and to have those be the battlegrounds — rather than some of the areas where there’s more public support. We’re not in this position because of the movement or the community, but clearly what we’ve been doing over the last several years has not been working to stave it off or continue the progress that we were making eight, nine, 10 years ago.

I think a lot of it can be traced to a false sense of security that the L.G.B.T.Q. movement and the progressive movement writ large began to feel in the postmarriage world. There was a sense of cultural momentum that was this unending, cresting wave. There is this sense of a cultural victory that lulled us into a false sense of security and in many ways shut down needed conversations.

The support that we saw for trans rights in 2016, 2017 — it was a mirage of support in some ways. Because I think, in the postmarriage world, there was a transfer of support from the L.G.B. to the T. for two reasons.

One, I think people said: Well, the T. is part of the acronym. I support gay people, so I’ll support trans people — it’s all the same movement. Two, I think in those early days after marriage, a lot of people regretted having been wrong on marriage in the 1990s and 2000s. And they said: I didn’t understand what it meant to be gay, and therefore I didn’t support marriage, and I regret not supporting something because I didn’t understand it. So I’m going to, without understanding, support trans rights because I don’t want to make that same mistake again.

I think that resulted in a lot of us — a lot of our movement — stopping the conversation and ceasing doing the hard work of opening hearts and changing minds and telling stories that over 20 years had shifted and deepened understanding on gay identities that allowed for marriage equality to be built on solid ground.

And I think that allowed for the misinformation, the disinformation — that well-coordinated, well-funded campaign — to really take advantage of that lack of understanding. And the support for trans rights was a house built on sand.

I want to connect two things you said there, because I hadn’t thought about this exactly before. You made this point that there’s been a generalized gender regression — which is true. And you also made this point that people had this metaphor in their minds: I was wrong about gay marriage, I didn’t understand that experience, so maybe I’m wrong here, too.

But the one thing that’s maybe different here is there’s a set of narrow policies, like nondiscrimination, and then a broader cultural effort — everybody should put their pronouns in their bio or say them before they begin speaking at a meeting — that was more about destabilizing the gender binary.

And there people had a much stronger view. Like: I do know what it means. I’ve been a man all my life. I’ve been a woman all my life. How dare you tell me how I have to talk about myself or refer to myself!

And that made the metaphor break. Because if the gay marriage fight was about what other people do, there was a dimension to this that was about what you do and how you should see yourself or your kids or your society.

I think that’s an accurate reflection of the overplaying of the hand in some ways — that we as a coalition went to Trans 201, Trans 301, when people were still at a very much Trans 101 stage.

I also think there were requests that people perceived as a cultural aggression, which then allowed the right to say: We’re punishing trans people because of their actions. Rather than: We’re going after innocent bystanders.

And I think some of the cultural mores and norms that started to develop around inclusion of trans people were probably premature for a lot of people. We became absolutist — not just on trans rights but across the progressive movement — and we forgot that in a democracy we have to grapple with where the public authentically is and actually engage with it. Part of this is fostered by social media.

We decided that we now have to say and fight for and push for every single perfect policy and cultural norm right now, regardless of whether the public is ready. And I think it misunderstands the role that politicians and, frankly, social movements have in maintaining proximity to public opinion, of walking people to a place.

We should be ahead of public opinion, but we have to be within arm’s reach. If we get too far out ahead, we lose our grip on public opinion, and we can no longer bring it with us. And I think a lot of the conversations around sports and also some of the cultural changes that we saw in expected workplace behavior, etc. was the byproduct of maybe just getting too far out ahead and not actually engaging in the art of social change-making.

The position for more maximalist demands is that you need to be in a hurry — trans people are dying now, suffering now — and that there isn’t time for decades of political organizing here. And also that maybe it works, or there’s a reason to believe it works.

You’ve been in more of those spaces than me. How would you describe how the more maximalist approach and culture evolved and why?

Well, first off, I think you’re right. It is understandable. This is a scary moment. I’m scared. As a trans person, I’m scared.

I recognize that when the house is on fire, when there are attacks that are dangerous, very dangerous, it can feel like we need to scream and we need to sound the alarm and we need everyone to be doing exactly that. I get that instinct. I understand that people would say: If you give a little bit here, they’ll take a mile.

We’re not negotiating with the other side, though. In this moment, we have to negotiate with public opinion. And we shouldn’t treat the public like they’re Republican politicians.

When you recognize that distinction, I think it allows for a pragmatic approach that has, in my mind, the best possible chance of shifting public opinion as quickly as possible. It would be one thing if screaming about how dangerous this is right now had the effect of stopping these attacks, but it won’t.

You call it an abandonment of persuasion that became true across a variety of issues for progressives. Also for people on the right. And sometimes I wonder how much that reflected the movement of politics to these very unusually designed platforms of speech, where what you do really is not talk to people you disagree with but talk about people you disagree with to people you do agree with — and then see whether or not they agree with what you said. There’s a way in which I think that breeds very different habits in people who do it.

I think that’s absolutely right. Again, we’re not in this place because of our community or our movement. Or because we weren’t shaming people enough, weren’t canceling people enough, weren’t yelling at people enough, weren’t denouncing anti-trans positions enough.

I think the dynamic with social media is that the most outrageous, the most extreme, the most condemnatory content is what gets amplified the most. It’s what gets liked and retweeted the most, and people mistake getting likes and retweets as a sign of effectiveness. Those are two fundamentally different things. And I think that, whether it’s subconscious or even conscious, the rewarding of unproductive conversations has completely undermined the capacity for us as individuals — or politically — to have conversations that persuade, that open people’s hearts and minds, that meet them where they are.

And I think the other dynamic that we have with social media is that there are two kinds of people on social media. The vast majority of people are doomscrollers: They just go on, and they scroll their social media. Twenty percent, maybe, are doomposters: 10 percent on the far right, 10 percent on the far left — the people who are so, so strident and angry that they’re compelled to post, and that content gets elevated. But what that has resulted in for the 80 percent who are just doomscrollers is this false perception of reality.

Take a person, let’s say they’re center left — it gives them a false perception that everyone on the left believes this, and it pulls them that way. And then it gives them a false perception that everyone on the right believes the most extreme version of the right.

It creates this false binary, extreme perception, availability bias. Because all of the content we’re seeing is reflective of just the 20 percent, and it has warped our perception of reality, of who people are and where the public is.

One of the best things about being an elected official is that I have to break out of that social media echo chamber — that social media extreme world — and interact with everyday people. And yes, there are real disagreements, but 80 percent of the doomscrollers or the people who aren’t even on social media are actually in a place where we can have a conversation with them.

When I ask this question, I don’t just mean on trans issues, but: You represent Delaware, which is a blue state — not Massachusetts blue — but blue. If you took your sense of what Democrats want or what the country wants from your experiences in social media versus your sense from traveling around your state, how would they differ?

I think they would differ in two ways. One, they would differ in the issues that we would focus on. What you hear on social media is a preoccupation with the most inflamed cultural war issues that you almost never hear when you’re out talking to voters in any part of the state. What you hear is an understandable catastrophizing around democracy, which you don’t hear nearly as much when you’re out talking to voters.

What you hear about when you’re talking to voters is the cost of living. You hear about the bread and butter issues that are keeping people up at night — people who aren’t on social media or aren’t posting on social media. And so you hear a difference in priorities, but then you also hear a difference in approach.

People are hungry for an approach that doesn’t treat our fellow citizens as enemies but rather treats our fellow citizens as neighbors, even if we disagree with them — an approach that’s filled with grace.

On social media we have come to this conclusion, rightfully so, that people’s grace has been abused in our society. That the grace and patience of marginalized people have been abused. And that is true.

But on social media, the course correction to that has been to eliminate all grace from our politics. It’s: How dare you have conversations with people who disagree with you? How dare you be willing to work with people who disagree with you? How dare you compromise? How dare you seek to find common ground with Republicans?

And when you go out into the real world — Democrats, independents and Republicans — there is a hunger for some level of grace for us to just not be so angry at one another and miserable. They want to see and know that we actually do have more in common. And therefore it gives you hope that persuasion is not only necessary but can actually still be effective.

What does grace in politics mean to you, and when have you either seen it or experienced it?

I think grace in politics means, one, creating room for disagreement: assuming good intentions, assuming that the people who are on the other side of an issue from you aren’t automatically hateful, horrible people. I think it means creating some space for disagreement within your own coalition. I think it’s a kindness that just feels so missing from our body politic and our national dialogue.

I saw it in the Delaware State Senate on both sides of the aisle, whether it’s Republicans in Delaware joining on to be cosponsors on an L.G.B.T.Q. panic defense bill that I was the prime sponsor of. Whether it was the discourse being much kinder and more civil on a whole host of culture war issues — I saw that grace has the effect of lowering the temperature, removing some of the incentives to go after vulnerable people in this country, in our state.

I saw it with my colleagues on the Republican side of the aisle, who didn’t vote for bills that were deeply personal to me, and yet we still found ways to work together. We still found ways to develop friendships.

And look, I know that places more of a burden on me than it does on them. I know that when you’re asking a marginalized person to extend grace in a conversation, you’re asking much more of that marginalized person. But change-making isn’t always easy, and it’s not always fair.

And why would we expect that the extra burdens and barriers of marginalization would cease at the point of overcoming the marginalization, of creating the change necessary to eliminate prejudice and create equal opportunity in our society?

No — that’s where the barriers are going to be greatest. That’s where the burdens are going to be greatest.

It reminds me of a line that I hear less now, but I used to see it a lot, which is: It’s not my job to educate you.

I always thought about that line because on one level, I understood it. It’s probably not your job to educate anyone.

But if you’re in politics, if what you’re trying to do is political change, I always found that line to be almost antipolitical.

Yes.

That if what you want to do is change a law, change a society, change a heart, and you’re the one who wants to do it — well then, whose job is it? And who are you expecting to do it?

It’s an understandable frustration, but it’s the only way forward.

I don’t believe that every person from an underrepresented or an unrepresented community needs to always bear the brunt and burden of public education. I don’t believe that every L.G.B.T.Q. person has to be out and sharing their story and doing all of that hard work. But for the folks who are willing to do it, we need to let them.

One of the problems we’ve had is that we’ve gone from: It’s not my job as an individual person who’s just trying to make it through the day to educate everyone — to: No one from that community should educate, and frankly, we should just stop having this conversation because the fact that we are having this conversation at all is hurtful and oppressive.

Maybe it is hurtful, but you can’t foster social change if you don’t have a conversation. You can’t change people if you exclude them. And I will just say, you can’t have absolutism on the left or the right without authoritarianism.

The fact that we have real disagreements, the fact that we have difficult conversations, the fact that we have painful conversations is not a bug of democracy. It’s a feature of democracy. And yes, that is hard and difficult — but again, how can we expect that the process of overcoming marginalization is going to be fair?

The discourse has taken this understandable critique of society and the way we operate and the burdens we place on marginalized people, and we’ve somehow said: Well, the one place that we have control over whether we allow for that marginalization is in the strategies we use to overcome it. So we’re not going to engage in that because it’s self-oppression.

And I think that is such a self-defeating and counterproductive approach.

We are in the most illiberal era of my lifetime in American politics. And I don’t mean liberalism in the sense of supporting or not supporting universal health care but in terms of due process, in terms of tolerance, in terms of the basic practice of politics and living amid each other.

It has also made me think about the need to clearly define what the practice of illiberalism itself is. What do you think it is?

I think it is the recognition that in a free society, we are going to live and think differently. It is the allowance of that disagreement in the public square and the tussle of that disagreement in the public square.

And that is uncomfortable. That is not easy. And yes, there are going to be people in that conversation for whom it’s going to be more difficult and more uncomfortable. But in the internet world, you can’t suppress diversity of thought. It will always bubble up. But it will bubble up, if suppressed, with an extra bitterness and an extremism fostered in that echo chamber that it’s been suppressed to. It will inevitably bubble up like a volcano. I think that’s what we’re seeing right now.

I will say, while the left made this mistake of fostering an illiberalism based on a false sense of cultural victory, the right is now making the exact same mistake. I think they’re overplaying their hand.

They’re interpreting the 2024 election to be a cultural mandate that is much greater than what it actually is. And if they continue to do that, there will be a backlash to the illiberalism — the cultural illiberalism, not just the legal illiberalism — of the right, in the same way that there’s been a backlash to the cultural illiberalism of the left.

I couldn’t agree with that more. We’re going to get to that.

I want to talk for a minute about the 2024 election and the aftermath. There’s been a lot of rethinking and self-recrimination among Democrats.

One of the comments that got a lot of attention came right after the election when your colleague Seth Moulton, a Democratic congressman from Massachusetts, said: “Democrats spend way too much time trying not to offend anyone rather than being brutally honest about the challenges many Americans face. I have two little girls. I don’t want them getting run over on a playing field by a male or formerly male athlete, but as a Democrat I’m supposed to be afraid to say that.”

What did you think when you heard that?

One, that it wasn’t the language that I would use.

But I think it came from a larger belief that the Democratic Party needed to start to have an open conversation about our illiberalism. That we needed to recognize that we were talking to ourselves. We were fighting fights that felt viscerally comforting to our own base, or fighting fights in a way that felt viscerally comforting to our own base, rather than maintaining proximity to the public and being normal people. [Chuckle.]

The sports conversation is a good one because there is a big difference between banning trans young people from extracurricular programs consistent with their gender identity and recognizing that there’s room for nuance in this conversation. The notion that we created this “all-on” or “all-off” mentality, that you had to be perfect on trans rights across the board, use exactly the right language, and unless you do that, you are a bigot, you’re an enemy. When you create a binary all-on or all-off option for people, you’re going to have a lot of imperfect allies who are going to inevitably choose the all-off option.

What ends up happening is the left excommunicates someone who not only — Seth voted against the ban on trans athletes, but we would excommunicate someone who uses imperfect language — yes, again, not language I would use. But we would excommunicate someone who’s saying that there’s nuance in this conversation and use this language that we don’t approve of — yet still votes “the right way”? That’s exactly what’s wrong with our approach.

And look, Seth is not going anywhere, but for a lot of everyday folks, if they think how Seth thinks or if they think that there’s room for nuance in this conversation and we tell them: You’re a bigot, you’re not welcome here, you’re not part of our coalition, we will not consider you an ally? The right has done a very good job of saying: Listen, you have violated the illiberalism of the left, you have been cast aside for your common sense — welcome into our club.

And then once you get welcomed into that club, human nature is: Well, I was with the Democratic Party on 90 percent of things, maybe against them on 10 percent of things or sort of in the middle on 10 percent. Once you get welcomed into that other club, human psychology is that you start to adopt those positions. And instead of being with us on 90 percent of things and against us on 10 percent of things, that person, now welcomed into the far-right club, starts to be against us on 90 percent of things and with us on only 10 percent of things.

That dynamic is part of the regression that we have seen. Not only that, but the hardening of the opposition that we’ve seen on trans issues.

We have been an exclusionary tent that is shedding imperfect allies, which is great. We’re going to have a really, really miserable self-righteous, morally pure club in the gulag we’ve all been sent off to.

[Laughs.]

I think this goes to your point in a way. After Moulton made those comments, The Times reported that a local party official and an ally had compared him to a Nazi cooperator, that there were protests outside his office.

I was always struck by which part of his comments got all that attention. It was the part I just read to you, but he also said this: “Having reasonable restrictions for safety and competitive fairness in sports seems like, well, it’s very empirically a majority opinion.” He’s right on that. “But should we take civil rights away from trans people, so they can just get fired for being who they are? No.” He was expressing opposition to what was about to be Donald Trump’s agenda.

Yes.

And this space of his divergence, from an issue that had already been lost — the polling was terrible on it — that was where people on the left focused. And his expression of support and allyship, as I saw it, barely ever got reported or commented on. It struck me as telling.

I think it absolutely is telling. The best thing for trans people in this moment is for all of us to wake up to the fact that we have to grapple with the world as it is, that we have to grapple with where public opinion is right now, and that we need all of the allies that we can get.

Again, Seth voted against the bans. If we are going to defend some of the basic fundamental rights of trans people, we are going to need those individuals in our coalition. If you have to be perfect on every trans rights issue for us to say you can be an ally and part of our coalition, then we are going to have a cap of about 30 percent on our coalition. If we are going to have 50 percent plus one — or frankly, more, necessarily 60 percent or more — in support of nondiscrimination protections for trans people, in support of our ability to get the health care that we need, then by definition, it will have to include a portion of the 70 percent who oppose trans people’s participation in sports.

Right now, the message from so many is: You’re not welcome, and your support for 90 percent of these policies is irrelevant. The fact that you diverge on one thing makes you evil.

It also misunderstands the history of civil rights in this country. “You can’t compromise on civil rights” is a great tweet. But tell me: Which civil rights act delivered all progress and all civil rights for people of color in this country? The Civil Rights Act of 1957? The Civil Rights Act of 1960? The Civil Rights Act of 1964? The Voting Rights Act of 1965? The Civil Rights Act of 1968? Or any of the civil rights acts that have been passed since the 1960s?

That movement was disciplined, it was strategic, it picked its battles, it picked its fights, and it compromised to move the ball forward. And right now, that compromise would be deemed unprincipled, weak, and throwing everyone under the bus.

And that is so counterproductive. It is so harmful, and it completely betrays the lessons of every single social movement and civil rights movement in our country’s history.

We have an example of a very successful social movement in recent history with marriage equality. Where would we have been in 2007 and 2008 if not only we had not tolerated the fact that Barack Obama was ostensibly not for marriage equality then, but if we had said to voters: Even if you vote against the marriage ban, but aren’t quite comfortable with marriage yet, then you’re a bigot and you don’t belong in our coalition — where would that movement have been?

The most effective messengers were the people who had evolved themselves. We had grace personified in that movement, and it worked beyond even the advocate’s wildest expectations in terms of the speed of both legal progress and cultural progress. Because we created incentives for people to grow, we created space for people to grow, and we allowed people into our tent, into that conversation who weren’t already with us.

You mentioned the period in 2008 when Barack Obama was running for president, and at the very least his public position — many of us suspected it was not his private position — was that he opposed gay marriage. That was the mainstream position at that point in the Democratic Party, and there was a compromise position they all supported, which was civil unions.

Is there an analogy to the civil unions debate for you now?

In the sports conversation, it’s local control. It’s allowing for individual athletic associations to make those individual determinations, and in some cases they’ll have policies that strike a right balance. In some cases, they’ll have policies that are too restrictive. And I think that is the equivalent to the civil union’s position in that debate.

By allowing for democratic voters, independent voters — even some elected officials — to take that civil unions position, one that met voters where they were, it gave some of our politicians who needed it an offramp so that they didn’t have to choose between being all-on or all-off. And it allowed that conversation to continue and prevented more harm from being inflicted.

I want to pick up on the polling. There’s this YouGov polling from January that looked at all these different issues. There are a lot of issues around trans rights that actually poll great. Protection for trans people against hate crimes: plus 36 net approval. Banning employers from firing trans people because of their identity: plus 33. Allowing transgender people to serve in the military, which Donald Trump is trying to rescind: plus 22. Requiring all new public buildings to include gender-neutral bathrooms: This surprised me — plus seven.

Then there’s the other side. Everybody knows that the sports issue is tough in the polling, but banning people under 18 from attending drag shows — that’s popular. Banning youth from accessing puberty blockers and hormones — that’s very popular. Banning public schools from teaching lessons on transgender issues — that’s popular. Requiring transgender people to use bathrooms that match their biological sex — that is popular.

When you look at these lists of issues, what do you see as dividing them? What cuts the issues that you could win on now from those that have heavy disapproval?

Well, I think that there’s very clearly a distinction that the public makes between young people and adults. There is a distinction that is made in many cases when it comes to what people feel like is government support of or funding of — versus just allowing trans people to live their lives, allowing trans troops who are qualified to continue to serve, allowing trans people who are doing great jobs in their workplace to continue to work.

It all goes back to this notion of: Get government out, let people live their lives, and let families and individuals make the best decisions for themselves. That should be the through line of our perspective, a libertarian approach to allowing trans people to live fully and freely. There are some complicated questions, but those questions shouldn’t be answered by politicians who are trying to exploit those issues for political gain.

I was struck by your use of the word “libertarian” there. Because when I look at this polling, what I see is something quite similar, which is: Americans, by and large, aren’t cruel. Their view here is pretty “Live and let live.”

Yes.

They have different views, which we can talk about in a minute, on minors. But where the question is whether the government coming in and bothering you — “you” being any trans person — they don’t really want that.

What they don’t want to do is change their lives, or think something is changing for them in their society. Maybe those two things are not in all ways possible, certainly over the long term, but there are a lot of places where they are possible.

It seems to me that in 2024 and over the last couple years, what Republicans did very well — their approach to persuasion — was to pick the right wedge issues.

You would think that the entire debate over trans policy in America was about N.C.A.A. swimmers. Like this was the biggest problem facing trans people, the biggest problem in some ways facing the country. When it’s a pretty edge-case issue, and questions like nondiscrimination and access to health care are much more widespread.

What they did was they used their wedge issue, and they’re now attacking those majority positions. Trump is attacking discrimination — he wants people discriminated against. He doesn’t want trans people to be able to put the identity they hold and present as on their passports. Which is not a huge winning issue for him.

So there’s this question of picking the right wedge issues. Is there a wedge issue for you that you wish Democrats would pick?

Listen, I think that we do much better when we keep the main thing. Defending Medicaid in this moment is the main thing.

For everybody.

For everyone, for everyone. And look, I think abortion to some degree had been a wedge issue that was to the Democrats’ advantage, not to the Republicans’ advantage.

But I think we have to reorient the public’s perception of what our priorities are as a party. When we lean into the culture wars and lean into culture war wedge issues, even if they benefit us, they reinforce a perception that the Democratic Party is unconcerned with the economic needs of the American people.

When you ask a voter: What are the top five priorities of the Democratic Party, what are the top five priorities of the Republican Party, and what are the top five priorities for them as a voter? Three out of the five issues that are the top issues for that voter appear in what their perception of the top five issues for the Republican Party is. Only one of their top five priorities appears in their perception of the top five priorities for the Democrats. That’s health care — and it was fifth out of five. The top two were abortion and L.G.B.T.Q. issues.

And I don’t care what your position is on those two issues, you are not going to win an election if voters think that those two issues are your top issues, rather than their ability to get a good wage and good benefits, get a house and live the American dream.

We have to, in this moment, reinforce our actual priority as a party — which is making sure that everyone can pursue the American dream, which has become increasingly unaffordable and inaccessible; that everyone should be able to get the health care they need; be able to buy a home; be able to send their child to child care without breaking the bank, if they can even get a spot. That needs to be our focus.

When we have this purity politics approach to L.G.B.T.Q. issues or abortion, what we communicate, even if we’re not talking about those issues, is those are threshold issues, and therefore the voter reads that as those are priority issues. The only way to convince the voter that those are not our priority issues, that that’s not what we’re spending our capital and time on — but rather on giving them health care and housing — is to make it abundantly clear to people that our tent can include diversity of thought on those issues.

Something that I notice in the broad coalition of groups and people and funders who identify as or support Democrats is that they all want the issue they care most about to be the issue that gets talked about the most. People who fund anything from climate to trans rights, to any of the hotter issues in American life — you could actually imagine a strategy where those groups and that money went to making every election about Medicaid, because Medicaid is just a killer issue for Democrats. And then the people who get elected are better on those other issues, too. But it doesn’t. That money, those groups that are organizing, what they often want Democrats to do is publicly take unpopular positions on their issues.

I think all the time about the A.C.L.U. questionnaire that asked candidates, and in this case Kamala Harris, whether she would support the government paying for gender reassignment surgery for illegal immigrants in prison. Even if your whole position in life is to make that possible, the last thing you’d want is for anybody to claim it out in public. You would want nobody to ever think about that question ever at all.

And it’s something I’ve heard Democrats talking about more after the election — just rethinking on some level, this question of: Is the point of all this organizing to get politicians to commit to the most maximalist version of your issue set? Or is the point of this organizing to somehow figure out how to win Senate seats in Missouri and Kansas? So you have very moderate Democrats who nevertheless make Chuck Schumer the Senate majority leader rather than John Thune.

I think that there is an incentive from money and from social media — and those also go hand in hand sometimes with grass-roots donations — that incentivize the groups to want to show their influence and their effect by having politicians fight the fights that they want them to fight in ways that feel viscerally comforting to their own community that they’re representing.

I get that. I understand that. One, we have to be better as elected officials in saying no, in saying: Public opinion is everything. And if you want us to change, you need to help foster the change in public opinion before you’re asking these elected officials to betray the fact that they are, at the end of the day, representatives who have to represent in some form or fashion the views of the people that they represent.

At some point, you will represent the people’s positions — or they will find someone else who will. So it is just an unsustainable dynamic for the groups to continue to ask elected officials to take these maximalist positions, to ignore where their voters are. They have to do the hard work of persuasion.

There’s always going to be a tension between the groups and elected officials. Everyone has to do their own job, but there has to be some degree of understanding.

I always think this is such an interesting question for politicians to work with because there is the internal and the external push to authenticity.

Yes.

We don’t want these poll-tested politicians. And it’s also your job to represent.

Yes.

On issues personal to you, on issues not as personal to you, how do you think about balancing “They elected you” versus “You are their servant”?

Look, all of these decisions inevitably require a balancing of my own views, my own principles and the views of the people that I represent. But I think one thing you always have to do is you have to go: OK, here’s an issue that I feel very strongly about. If I vote against this, what are the second, third and fourth order consequences of voting against or voting in favor?

You might abstractly agree with something as an ideal, but if you were to pursue that or implement that policy, it would have, in the medium- to long-term, a regressive effect because there’s a backlash to pushing too hard or taking too maximalist of a position by the mainstream in our politics.

One of the problems we’ve had is that we have said: Not only do you have to vote the way we want you to vote, but you have to speak the way we want you to speak.

And I always have said, even when I was an advocate: If we can get the policy vote that we want and the compromise we are accepting is essentially a rhetorical compromise, that is a pretty darn good deal.

Again, we have to be willing to have these conversations out in the open. We have to recognize that there’s complexity, there’s nuance — and that means not just in the policy space but in the political space. That it’s authentic, to say: These are some really difficult conversations, and sometimes I’m going to get it right and sometimes I’m going to get it wrong, and sometimes I’m voting exclusively with what I think is the right thing to do, even if my voters disagree. But also, sometimes I’m going to have to take a balanced view of this. And that’s democracy.

I want to pick up on speech. It’s true on trans and gender issues — it’s also true on a bunch of other issues in the past couple of years — that a huge number of the fights that ended up defining the issue were not about legislation. They were about speech.

I’ve always myself thought this reflects social media, but the number of people who have talked to me about the term “birthing persons,” which I think virtually nobody has used, or “Latinx” was a big one like this — there is in general this extreme weighting of: Can you push changes of speech onto the people who agree with you and possibly onto society as a whole?

And the strategy worked backward from the speech outcome, not the legislative outcome. How do you think about that weighting of speech versus votes?

There is no question in my mind that the vote is much more important than the rhetoric that they use. We have discoursed our way into: If you talk about this issue in a way that’s suboptimal from my perspective, you’re actually laying the foundation for oppression and persecution.

Maybe academically that’s true, but welcome to the real world. We are prioritizing the wrong thing, and it’s an element of virtue signaling — like: I’m showing that I am the most radical, I’m the most progressive on this issue because I’m going to take this person who does everything right substantively and crucify this person for not being perfect in language.

It’s a way of demonstrating that you’re in the in-group, that you understand the language, that you understand the mores and the values of that group, and it’s a way of building capital and credibility with that in-group. I think that’s what it is.

It’s inherently exclusionary. And that’s part of the thing that’s wrong with our politics right now. All of our politics feel so exclusionary. The coalition that wins the argument about who is most welcoming will be the coalition that wins our politics.

I think that’s such an interesting point, and I think probably true.

I’d also be curious to hear your thoughts on this: I think there’s a very interesting way that speech and its political power confuse people because it’s two things at once. It’s extremely low cost and extremely high cost.

Pronouns, for instance, are a very easy thing. And basically, if you won’t use somebody’s preferred pronouns, I think you’re an [expletive]. That’s my personal view of it. But trying to execute a speech change where everybody lists their pronouns in their bio, where every meeting begins with people going around the circle and saying their name and their pronouns — that feels very different to people.

It seems small. You don’t have to pay anything out of pocket, you don’t have to go anywhere — and yet the language we use is very, very important to us.

Yes, I think you’re absolutely right there. And I think the thing with pronouns, too, is a prime example of where we’ve lost grace, though.

Me calling people [expletive] is not graceful? [Laughs.]

Well, no, no. I think there is a difference between someone who’s intentionally misgendering someone and people who make mistakes.

Yes, totally.

And I think that there has been, whether warranted or not, the perception that people are going to be shamed if they make mistakes.

But then I think you’re absolutely right, too, that there is a distinction between treating me the way I want to be treated, and everyone changing their behavior and requiring this sort of in-group language that exceeds just calling the person in front of you what they want to be called.

And I think it gets to something we were talking about earlier. There are two pieces to the politics of this. One is fairly popular, at least for now, and the other is a much tougher lift.

I think most people have that basic sense of politeness. If you want to be referred to in a certain way, yes, I might slip up. But if I’m being a decent person, I’m going to try.

Yes.

Versus the move from pronouns to the move for calling things cisgender — that was a much bigger effort that in some ways wasn’t described as such.

And I feel like there’s been a dimension to the politics here where things that were very academic arguments became political arguments, and then people were a little bit unclear on what the political win would be.

To destabilize the fundamental gender binary that people understand as operating is touching something very deep in society. Versus treating other people with respect and courtesy and decency and grace is a much easier sell. And I think it’s OK to want to do the former, but I think people kept mixing up which their actual project was.

At the end of the day, the thing that we lost is that we’re just talking about people trying to live their lives, trying to live the best lives they can.

We got into this rabbit hole of academic intellectual discourse that doesn’t actually matter in people’s lives. We got into this performative fighting to show our bona fides to our own in-group, and we lost the fundamental truth that all of those things are only even possible once you’ve done the basic legwork of allowing people to see trans people as people.

When you allow trans people to be seen as human beings who have the same hopes and dreams and fears as everyone else, once that basic conception of humanity exists, then all the other things, all the other conversations sort of fall into place. Language inevitably changes across society, across cultures, across time, but it is a byproduct of cultural change.

And I just think we started to have what maybe were conversations that were happening in academic institutions, or conversations that were happening in the community, and we started having those out in public on social media. And then we demanded that everyone else have that conversation with us and incorporate what the dominant position is in that conversation in the way they live their lives.

And that’s just not how this happens. Let’s just talk about human beings who want you to live by the golden rule. Let’s just talk about the fact that trans people are people who can be service members and doctors and lawyers and educators and elected officials, and do a damn good job at that.

That is the gateway to everything else, and it has always been in every social movement.

The place where not just the politics but also the answers are complicated is around children.

We talked about the N.C.A.A. swimmers and the edge-case nature of that. But schools are broader. And a lot of what the Trump administration is doing, a lot of what you see Republicans are doing in states, is around schools and minors. And that’s tougher.

Parents want to know what their kids are doing. On the one hand, if you’re a kid with gender dysphoria, taking puberty blockers early matters. On the other hand, there are a lot of things parents don’t let their kids do young because they’re not sure what they’re going to want in a couple years.

How do you think about that set of issues? The leave-them-alone approach makes a lot of sense for adults. But we don’t leave kids alone. Kids exist in a paternalistic system where their parents and schools have power over them. So the question of policy there becomes very profound.

Yes. First off, I think in that instance we rightfully acknowledge the important role that parents play in decisions for their children.

Look, you can recognize that there’s nuance here. You can say that there needs to be stronger standards of care, that maybe things got too lenient.

But ultimately politicians aren’t the people who should be making these decisions. The family should be making these decisions. The family, in consultation with a doctor, should be making these decisions.

And I think that is a fair balance in recognizing the need for every child to get medical care and also the right of parents to make decisions, including health care decisions for their children.

But in some European countries right now, you do see the government setting tighter standards. There have definitely been a lot of arguments about whether or not the research was good, whether or not the research was ideologically influenced.

So there’s some government role here, some role for professional associations, some context in which families and doctors make these decisions. What is that role?

I think you just hit on that distinction, which is that in many European countries, the distinction between the health care system and the government is fuzzier. In many cases, you have government-operated hospitals.

Here, you have health care systems. You have standards of care developed by providers in those medical associations. And that is where those decisions should be left up to, in terms of establishing the standards of care. And then when applying those standards of care, allowing the practical application of those standards of care to happen between patients, families and providers. Because it’s fundamentally a different kind of system.

I think the critique and the fear from the right that I hear is that some of these same dynamics — toward pushing out people who question the evidence, toward there being things you can say and things you cannot say — took hold. And that the results of that can’t be trusted — that everything you said is happening in politics is also happening in medicine and elsewhere.

We actually started to see a pretty difficult but important conversation within WPATH, the World Professional Association for Transgender Health, about the standards of care for youth care before government started intervening. They started having a conversation about how to adjust the standards of care, recognizing perhaps that they needed to tighten them.

And that’s true across health care: Standards of care across different forms of care are constantly evolving.

That conversation was starting to happen. You cannot tell me that it’s the role of the government to pre-empt those conversations. Those conversations should not be settled in legislative bodies by politicians who aren’t looking at the data, don’t understand the data and certainly aren’t objectively interpreting the data.

And look, the conversation changes when people understand what it means to be trans. Because I think right now we think of it as a choice. We think of it as an intellectual decision. Like: I want to be a girl. I want to be a boy. And I want to do this because of these rewards, or I don’t want to do it because of these risks.

But that’s not what gender identity is. It is much more innate. It is a visceral feeling. It’s not the same as whether you get a tattoo or what you have for dinner. It’s not a decision. It’s a fact about who you are.

I think the challenge in the conversation around gender identity that differs from sexual orientation is that most people who are straight can understand what it feels like to love and to lust. And so they’re able to enter into conversations around sexual orientation with an analogous experience.

The challenge in the conversation around gender identity is that people who aren’t trans don’t know what it feels like to have a gender identity that differs from your sex assigned at birth.

For me, the closest thing that I can compare it to was a constant feeling of homesickness, just an unwavering ache in the pit of my stomach that would only go away when I could be seen and affirmed as myself.

And I think that because we stopped having that conversation, because we stopped creating space for people to ask questions, for people’s understandable — perhaps invasive, but understandable — curiosity to be met with an openness and a grace, not by everyone, but just the people who were willing to do it — we stopped people having an understanding of what it means to be trans. And it allowed them to start to see it. Or it allowed for their pre-existing perception that this is some sort of intellectual choice to manifest.

And in some cases, the perfect “discourse” started to reinforce that.

Say how.

We started to get to this place where you couldn’t be like: I’m born this way.

We policed the way even L.G.B.T.Q. people or trans people talked about their own identities — to be this perfect sort of academic —

Why can’t you say “I’m born this way”? I’m not saying you’re saying it, but this is a thing I’ve not been aware of.

There was sort of an academic perception that people should have agency over their sexual orientation and gender identity, even if it’s not “innate.” And there was this acceptance of a mainstream perception of sexual orientation and gender identity that was a one-size-fits-all narrative around L.G.B.T.Q. people that didn’t necessarily include people whose understanding was more fluid or whose understanding evolved over time or those who feel like they want to transgress gender norms because of a reason that’s not this innate sense of gender.

And when you take that capacity for us to authentically talk about our experience away from us — because it’s not academically the purest narrative that creates space and room for every single, different lived experience within that umbrella — you give people justification to say or think: This is a choice, and if it’s a choice, the threshold to allow for discrimination becomes lower.

I’ve known a number of people who have transitioned as adults.

The degree to which most of us avoid doing anything that would cause us any social discomfort at all times is so profound — how much we live our lives trying to not make anybody look at us for too long.

It must be such a profound need to make that decision — to come to your family, to your wife or your husband, to your kids, to your parents.

So the right-wing meme that emerged around it — that people are transitioning because they opportunistically want to be in another bathroom or in another locker room or get some kind of cultural affirmative action — always struck me as not just absurd but deeply unempathic. Not thinking for a moment what it must mean to want that that much. So then it’s interesting to hear you say that there was a pincer movement on that.

I’m sure there is agency, and people make decisions here. But the pull from inside of everybody I’ve known is really profound. Usually they’ve been trying to choose the other way for a long time — and eventually just can’t anymore.

That’s exactly what my experience was.

It’s funny because sometimes there’s discourse that the only reason I’m an elected official is because I’m trans. I see on the right this notion that I’m a diversity hire.

But it’s like: Well, voters chose me. It’s kind of an insult to voters that they didn’t choose me because they think that I’m the best candidate or reflective of what they want, but they just chose me because of my identity.

But it also just undersells such a larger truth, which is that my life would be so much easier if I weren’t trans.

I’m proud of who I am. I’m proud that this is my life experience for a whole host of reasons. But this is all a lot harder because I’m trans.

Are there moments where I get a microphone or — if I were a nontrans freshman Democrat, would I be sitting here? Maybe not. Maybe I would, but maybe not. We probably would be having a different conversation.

But navigating this world as a trans person has always been — and even more so now — it’s incredibly hard. And all any of us are asking — or at least all that most of us are asking — is to just let us live the best life we can. A life with as few regrets as possible. A life where we can be constructive, productive, contributing members of society.

You might not understand us. It is hard to step into the shoes of someone who is trans and to understand what that might feel like. But I spent 21 years of my life praying that this would go away.

And the only way that I was finally able to accept it was: One, realizing this was never going to go away. Two, becoming so consumed by it that it was the only thing I really was able to think about because the pain became too all-encompassing.

And three, the only way I was able to come out was because I was able to accept that I was losing any future. I had to go through stages of grief. And the only way I was able to come out was to finally get to that stage of acceptance over a loss of any future.

It’s really scary, and it’s really hard. And right now it is particularly scary and hard.

And to your point earlier, most people are good people, and they just want to treat other people with respect and kindness. But unfortunately, in this moment, in our politics — we were recently at something where someone gave us some information, and they said that when a voter was asked to describe the Democratic Party and the Republican Party, it was “crazy” for the Republican Party and “preachy” for the Democratic Party.

I think that undersells something that’s more true, which is that a voter will look and say: The Republican Party is [expletive] to other people. I don’t like that. But the Democratic Party is an [expletive] to me. And if I have to choose between the party that’s an [expletive] to me because I’m not perfect or a party that’s an [expletive] to someone else, even if I don’t like it, I’m going to choose the party that’s an [expletive] to someone else.

When you entered Congress, you were quite directly targeted by some of your Republican colleagues, led by Nancy Mace, on which bathrooms you could use — a thing that would not have happened if you were not a trans legislator.

This is the majority party in the House. You have to work with these people. You’re on committees with them. What has your experience been like both absorbing that and then trying to work with people whom you know may or may not have given you much grace in that moment?

The first thing I’d say is that the folks who were or are targeting me because of my gender identity in Congress are folks who, at this point, are really not working with any Democrats and can barely work with their own Republican colleagues.

I’ve introduced several bills. Almost all have been bipartisan. I’ve been developing relationships with colleagues on the other side of the aisle. Part of my responsibility in this moment is to show that when someone like me gets elected to public office, we can do the whole job. And that means working with people who disagree with me, including on issues that are deeply personal.

The folks who are coming after me — I mean, look, that’s been hard. But I know that they are coming after me not because they are deeply passionate about bathroom policy. They’re coming after me because they’re employing the strategies of reality TV. And the best way to get attention in a body of 435 people is to throw wine in someone’s face. That gets you a little attention. But if the person you’re throwing wine on, if they respond by throwing wine in your face, it creates a beef, which gets you a season-long story arc.

I knew that they were trying to bait me into a fight to get attention, and I refused to be used as a political pawn. I refuse to give them not only the power of derailing me but the incentive to continue to come after me.

And this was a prime example of fighting smart that is demonized on our own side. Because the grace that I didn’t get wasn’t just on the right. There was a lot of critique on the left.

I understand that, when you’re a first, people viscerally feel your highs, and they also viscerally feel your lows. But what would my fighting back in that moment have done? It wouldn’t have stopped the ban, and it would only have incentivized further attacks and continued behavior like that.

Sometimes we have to understand that not fighting, not taking the bait, is not a sign of weakness. It’s not unprincipled. Discipline and strategy are signs of strength.

And I think in the social media world, we have lulled ourselves into thinking the only way to fight is to fight. It’s to scream and it’s to yell and it’s to do it in every instance. And any time you don’t do it, you’re normalizing the behavior that’s coming your way.

It’s a ridiculously unfair burden to place on every single human being — to have to fight every single indignity.

But also by that logic, the young Black students who were walking into a school that was being integrated in the late ’50s and ’60s, who were walking forward calmly and with dignity and grace into that school as people screamed slurs at them — by that definition, that student was normalizing those slurs by not responding.

Instead, what that student was doing was providing the public with a very clear visual, a very clear contrast, between unhinged hatred and basic dignity and grace, which is fundamental to humanity.

And for me, one of the things that I struggled with after that was the lack of grace that I got from some in my own community, who said that I was reinforcing the behavior of the people who were coming after me, that I was not responding appropriately to the bullying that I was facing.

When the reality is: That behavior has diminished significantly because I removed the incentive for them to continue to do it. Because the incentive was so blatantly about attention, and I wasn’t going to let them get the attention that they wanted.

You’re reminding me of something I heard Barack Obama say many years ago when he was getting criticized for trying to negotiate, trying to reach out to people who, by that point, many on the left thought he was naive for trying to work with.

And he said something like: He had always felt that the American people could see better if the other side had clenched their fist, if he opened his hand.

I always thought there was a lot of wisdom in that.

Yes, absolutely. Early on in those first few weeks, I had some folks text me as I was responding the way that I was. And they said: You should watch “42,” which is the movie about Jackie Robinson.

I am not comparing my experience to Jackie Robinson’s at all. At all. But there’s a scene in that movie that’s so illustrative of these dynamics: He’s meeting with the owner of the Brooklyn Dodgers, and the owner of the Brooklyn Dodgers is trying to provoke him into anger. And when he sort of succeeds, the owner basically says to him: You have to understand that when you are a first, if you respond to a slur with a slur, they’ll only hear yours. If you respond to a punch with a punch, they’ll say: You’re the aggressor.

If we go in and say to these folks: We’re never going to work with you, because you’re never going to work with us — then we get the blame for never working with them. Not them.

If we go in and we respond to their hatred with vitriol and anger, they’re going to blame us. And that’s the reality of the double standard in our politics. That’s the reality that a first always has to navigate.

Let them put their anger, their vitriol, on full display. Let us provide that contrast with our approach.

Look, it’s not going to always work out, and it’s not always going to create the outcome that you desire. But people need us to demonstrate that contrast to them, for them to truly see it.

I’ve been having a conversation in a very different context than this, but I’m curious to hear your answer to it.

I’ve been having this conversation about whether or not good politics always requires clear enemies. Do you believe it does?

No. I believe that you can tell a compelling story with an enemy. There’s no question. It sometimes is an easy out in our politics.

But I think that there’s something to be said about a politics that is rooted in opposition to an enemy that is fundamentally that regressive. That anger is fundamentally conservative in its political outcome.

Barack Obama — and Bill Clinton, for that matter — did a good job of putting forward an aspirational politics that wasn’t defined by who we are against but by what we are for and about who we can be.

And I think that is a more successful path for progressive politics than an enemies-based politics, which so often devolves to anger. And which, more often than not, facilitates in the medium- and long-term, a regressive politics.

Look, I’m not saying it can’t always be effective politics. But you can have effective politics and good politics and better outcomes with an aspirational politics. With a politics that isn’t just about what it’s opposed to, but about what it can build and about who we can be.

Because I think everyone has their own internal struggle between their own better selves and their better angels and their base instincts.

Much earlier in the conversation I had asked you about liberalism, which was a little bit of a weird question to drop in there.

I don’t really have a question here, it’s just something I’m thinking about. But you actually strike me as one of the most liberal as a temperament — liberal in the classical sense — politicians I’ve talked to in a long time.

And I’ve been starting to read a lot of older books about liberalism because it feels to me that it is an approach to politics that even liberals lost.

Yes.

And one of the reasons I think we lost it — and I very much count myself as a liberal — was a feeling that liberalism’s virtue was also its vice. That its openness to critique, its constant balancing, its movement toward incremental solutions and its skepticism of total solutions — that those had been conditions under which problems never truly got solved. Systemic racism and bigotry festered.

And as it began to absorb that critique, it lost a lot of confidence in itself.

In a way, Barack Obama was the apex of the liberal leaders, and he hadn’t brought about utopia. And so liberalism seemed exhausted.

And I think alongside that, there was some way in which I cannot — I still need to figure this out, but I’ll say it because I believe it’s true: I think there’s something about the social media platforms that is illiberal as a medium.

We now have X and Bluesky and Threads, and none of them are good. They all lead to bad habits of mind. Because simplifying your thoughts down to these little bumper stickers and then having other people who agree with you retweet them or mob you just doesn’t lend itself to the pluralistic balancing modes of thought that liberalism is built to prize. They’re illiberal in a fundamental way.

So I don’t think it’s an accident that as liberalism began to lose its own moorings, illiberalism roared back.

And just one experience I’ve had of this whole period with Donald Trump’s second term is realizing that the thing that we were trying to keep locked in the basement was really profoundly dangerous. Even compared to his first term.

The attacks on due process, the trying to break institutions, the disappearance machine — if you let that all out, things can go really badly.

And there’s something about liberalism that is so unsatisfying. The work you just described having to do sounds so unsatisfying and frustrating. And yet.

I guess just that — and yet.

And yet it is the approach and the system that, while imperfect, is the most likely and most proven to actually lead to the progress that I and so many others seek.

Look, people have one life. And it is completely understandable that a person would feel: I have one life, and when you ask me to wait, you are asking me to watch my one life pass by without the respect and fairness that I deserve. And that is too much to ask of anyone.

And that is. It is our job to demand “now,” in the face of people who say “never.” But it’s also our job to then not reject the possibility for a better tomorrow as that compromise.

I truly believe that liberalism, that our ability to have conversations across disagreement, that our ability to recognize that in a pluralistic, diverse democracy, there will inevitably be people and positions that hurt us. But when you’re siloed and when you suppress that opposition underground in that basement — to use your word — they’re alone in there. And not only does that sense of community loneliness breed bitterness, but it also breeds radicalization.

Liberalism is not only the best mechanism to move forward, but it is also the best mechanism to rein in the worst excesses of your opposition.

Yes, the compromise is that you don’t get to do everything you want to do. But that is a much better bet than the alternative, which is what we have developed now — an illiberal democracy in so many ways in our body politic.

One where, yes, we might have temporary victories, but as we are seeing right now, those victories can be fleeting, and the consequences can be deadly.

Was this always your political temperament, or was it forged?

I have grown and changed. There are things that I did and said five, 10, 15 years ago that I look back and regret, because I think that they were too illiberal. Because I bought into a culture online that didn’t always bring out the best in me.

But I do think that those were exceptions, and even when I was an advocate, I was always perceived as one of the more mainstream respectability advocates. I was always considered someone who was too willing to work across disagreement and engage in conversations that we shouldn’t be having. I was always considered someone who was too willing to work within the system.

And so I think I’ve fundamentally always had the same perspective and fundamentally have always believed that we cannot eliminate grace from our politics and our change-making. And that’s rooted in watching my parents grow and change after I came out.

My parents are progressive people. They embraced my older brother, who’s gay, without skipping a beat. But I knew when I shared that I was trans with them, it was going to be devastating — to use a word that my mother uses. And I knew that if I responded by shutting down the conversation, by refusing to walk with them, by refusing to give them grace and assume good intentions when they would inevitably say and do things that might be hurtful to me, I would stunt their capacity to take that walk with me.

I saw us as a family move forward with a degree of grace toward each other, that we were all going to inevitably say and do things that we would come to regret, that might hurt a little bit, but that if we assumed good intentions and walked forward, my parents would go from saying: What are the chances that I have a gay son and a trans child? — from a place of pity to a place of awe and the diversity of our family and the blessings that have come with that diversity. And that only came from grace.

And then I saw it working in Delaware, passing nondiscrimination protections. I’ve seen it time and time again. And so I have borne witness to change that once seemed so impossible to me as a kid that it was almost incomprehensible not only become possible but become a reality, in large part because of grace in our politics. And yes, because I was willing to extend that grace to others.

Grace, blessings, witness — are these, for you, religious concepts?

They tap into my religion. I’m Presbyterian. I’m an ordained elder in the Presbyterian Church.

But I think they go to something for me that transcends religion and my faith, and tap into my sense of beauty toward the world and my sense of beauty at life and the joy that I get to live this life, that I get to be myself and that I get to live a life of purpose.

I know I’m lucky in that respect, and I want everyone to have that same opportunity. And I have seen that approach and that grace. It has allowed me to be a better version of myself, a happier version of myself, which I think has actually unlocked those opportunities.

That’s interesting. Is it a practice?

When you say that it has allowed you to be a better version of yourself, is that something that you cultivate intentionally? And if so, how?

Yes. I think it’s often an intentional choice.

So many of the problems that we face are rooted in the fact that hurt people hurt people.

And I think that we are in this place where we are in this fierce competition for pain. Where the left says to the right: What do you know about pain, white, straight, cis man? My pain is real as a queer, transgender person.

And then the right says to the left: What do you know about pain, college-educated, cosmopolitan elite? My pain is real in a postindustrial community ravaged by the opioid crisis.

We are in this competition for pain when there is plenty of pain to go around. And every therapist will tell you that the first step to healing is to have your pain seen and validated. While it requires intentionality and effort sometimes, I think we would all be better off if we recognized that we don’t have to believe that someone is right for what they’re facing to be wrong.

I also think that there’s one other aspect of this that I think we have lost, which is the intentionality of hope. We have fallen prey in our online discourse and our politics to a sense that cynicism is in vogue, that cynicism shows that we get it.

And I think one of the things that we have to recognize is sometimes hope is a conscious effort. And that sense of inevitability, that organic sense of hope that we felt in this post-1960s world, is the exception in our history.

And you have to step into the shoes of people in the 1950s, people in the 1930s, people in the 1850s, and to move past the history that we view with the hindsight of inevitability and go into those moments and recognize: Every previous generation of Americans had every reason to give up hope.

And you cannot tell me that the reasons for hopelessness now are greater than the reasons for hopelessness then.

So you’re saying there’s something audacious about hope?

There is something audacious —

Some audacity in it.

You have to summon it. You have to summon it.

Optimism is about circumstance. It’s about evaluating likelihood. Hope is something that transcends that.

And when we lull ourselves into this sense of cynicism and we give up on hope, that is when we lose.

My editor has this habit of sharing these very Delphic sayings that I have to then think about for a while afterward. A week ago, he said to me that cynicism is always stupidity. In the conversation we were having, I didn’t ask him about it.

He is not here to tell me I’m wrong, but I think that what he meant is that cynicism is the posture that we both know what is happening and we know what is going to happen — that we’ve seen through the performance into the real, grimy, pathetic backstage, and we know it’s rigged. We know it’s plotted and planned. And so it’s this knowing posture of idiocy.

It’s that. And it’s easy. It’s easy.

I think that’s the place to end. Always our final question: What are three books you’d recommend to the audience?

To this conversation, I think one of the best books on political leadership and understanding how to foster public opinion change is “Team of Rivals” by Doris Kearns Goodwin. It’s one of my favorite books.

Two, I’ve been reading over time — it’s not new — “These Truths” by Jill Lepore, a one-volume history of the United States that helps to reinforce that so many of the challenges and dynamics that we face in this moment are actually not unique, even if the specifics are, how cyclical our challenges are and our history is.

And then the final one that I’m actually rereading — I read it in the first term of Trump — is “The Final Days” the sequel to “All the President’s Men.” And you realize, reading that, how often it felt like Nixon was going to get away with everything. That he’d stay in office and it would be fine for him. And how many instances that it appeared to be done and that he had won — until Aug. 9, 1974, happened, and he resigned.

And I think for me, it’s a helpful reminder that it often seems impossible until it’s inevitable.

Congresswoman Sarah McBride, thank you very much.

Thank you.

292 notes · View notes

hidden-behind-the-fourth-wall · 7 months ago

Text

Celebration - Professor!Logan x F!Reader (NSFW)

Summary: You celebrate your gratuation with your friends at a small pub, when Professor Logan Howlett comes in. Your plans are forgotten, when your friends make you go talk to him.

Warning: SMUT, like almost Porn with no plot (40% plot/60% porn), sub!Logan (if you squint), but defo dub!Logan, Age gap (not described but there is). So please do not interract if you're under 18.

AN: So I aske dyou all a question a while ago what you'd prefer Professor!Logan or Professor!Peña, and democracy won, choosing Logan :) No beta read all the mistakes are my own... And I am not a history know it all, so apologies if I messed something up. I listened to an amazing Steven Rodriguez writing this, so I recommend this: Like you mean it

Words: 12 875 (let's just establish I can't write anything short, ok?)

The pub hummed with life as you stepped inside, your friends at your side. It was a cozy space, nestled between two old bookshops, with wooden beams that creaked under the weight of a hundred conversations and warm, amber lights casting shadows over shelves lined with bottles of spirits. The smell of hops and laughter filled the air, carrying with it the sweet release of months of hard work and sleepless nights. You, Kate, and Ethan found a booth near the window where the noise was lively but not overwhelming, and you could savour the first celebratory drinks as newly minted graduates.

Kate slid into the seat across from you, her auburn hair falling in waves that shimmered under the pub lights. She raised her glass, eyes glinting with mischief. "To history—and making it ourselves!"

Ethan, ever the practical joker with his sharp grin and mop of dark curls, added, "And to you surviving Professor Logan Howlett’s class with an A, of all things. Who does that? Seriously, cheers to the legend sitting right here."

You couldn't help but laugh, the sound bubbling up with a mix of relief and triumph. The past year had been a marathon of research, late nights in the university library, and the constant weight of expectations. But tonight, it felt like the world had paused in recognition of your efforts.

The conversation flitted between shared memories, plans for the future, and teasing hints of freedom that came with finishing your master’s. Then Kate’s eyes flicked over your shoulder, and she leaned forward, her voice dropping to a conspiratorial whisper. "Don't look now, but the Professor is here."

Your heart stumbled, then thudded in your chest. Professor Logan Howlett. You didn’t have to turn around to conjure the image: intense hazel eyes that seemed to strip the world down to its truths, sharp cheekbones, and that perpetual five o’clock shadow that gave him a rugged, almost cinematic presence. He was a paradox, embodying the kind of strength that could either crush or uphold.

Ethan smirked, nudging you with his elbow. "Go on. Say hi. He can’t be that scary now that you’ve graduated, right?"

A pulse of panic and excitement washed through you, your fingers tightening around the condensation on your glass. Talking to Professor Howlett outside of the academic halls was like stepping into a new, unscripted world. You'd spent two years working under him, first as a student, then as a teaching assistant—your admiration morphing into something deeper, something unspoken.

“Do it,” Kate urged, her eyes wide and teasing. “Or we’ll drag you over there ourselves.” As you sat there and glared at them, the memories of your first class with him came floating around in your head.

The lecture hall was cavernous, its high, vaulted ceilings making the room feel more like a courtroom than a place of learning. Afternoon light slanted through the tall, arched windows, illuminating the dust motes that danced in the heavy silence. Students settled into their seats, shuffling notebooks and pens, whispering speculations about the infamous Professor Logan Howlett.

You were seated in the second row, close enough to see the fine lines etched at the corners of his eyes when he entered, but not so close as to draw unwanted attention. He walked in without hesitation, his stride confident and direct, the leather-bound notebook in his hand looking worn and familiar. His shirt sleeves were rolled up to his elbows, revealing forearms marked with faint scars, as if he had spent years grappling with more than just books. A single glance from him silenced the low murmur of conversation.

“History,” he began, the timbre of his voice deep and almost harsh, “is not a collection of anecdotes to pad out your evenings or score points at a dinner party. It is humanity’s attempt to interpret its own mistakes and, if we’re lucky, avoid repeating them.”

The air seemed to thicken with each word. He scanned the rows, eyes sharp and assessing, daring anyone to interrupt him. Some students shifted uncomfortably; a few glanced at each other, already regretting their choice of elective. You, however, felt your pulse quicken, a spark of defiance lighting somewhere inside you.

“Let’s start with a question,” he said, placing the notebook on the lectern and crossing his arms. “The Treaty of Westphalia. Why is it heralded as the cornerstone of modern statehood, and why is that view so fundamentally flawed?”

A heavy silence followed. It stretched on, pregnant with challenge, and you saw a flicker of annoyance cross his face. Without giving it much thought, your hand rose.

His eyes landed on you, their intensity making you feel momentarily pinned. “Yes?” The single word carried the weight of expectation.

You swallowed, your voice steadying as you spoke. “The Treaty of Westphalia is praised for ending the Thirty Years’ War and introducing the concept of state sovereignty, but it didn’t resolve the deeper conflicts. It merely froze them, ensuring that the problems would fester beneath the surface for years.”

A few heads turned, eyes widening at the audacity of challenging the professor in the opening moments of his lecture. Logan Howlett’s brows lifted, but it wasn’t disapproval that shone in his eyes—it was interest.

“Go on,” he said, the room holding its breath.

You sat up straighter, emboldened by his response. “The Treaty was a political bandage, not a cure. It shifted power among nations but ignored the religious and economic fractures that had fueled the conflict. It set the precedent for power politics without addressing the human costs.”

A silence, sharper now, fell over the room. He stepped away from the lectern, folding his arms across his chest and leaning back as if appraising a painting. A smile ghosted across his lips, subtle and fleeting.

“Interesting perspective,” he said, a challenge threading through his words. “But you’re missing the other side of the argument. Yes, it wasn’t perfect. Yes, it allowed the wounds to fester. But it also introduced diplomacy as an alternative to the perpetual war that defined earlier centuries. Would you rather the conflict had raged indefinitely, bleeding nations dry?”

The corner of your mouth twitched, a thrill running through you as you realised he was inviting the exchange. “Diplomacy born out of exhaustion isn’t sustainable. The treaty was signed not out of genuine reconciliation but mutual weakness. It was a temporary truce, not a triumph of peace.”

He nodded slowly, the light catching in his hazel eyes as if amused by your boldness. “Well argued. But if history were only about pointing out what didn’t work, we’d all be critics instead of scholars. The point is to study why such measures are taken and how they shape the world that follows.”

The room seemed to exhale collectively, but you held his gaze, a silent acknowledgment passing between you. In that moment, you knew two things: this class would not be easy, and you were more than ready for it.

Your heart thudded in your chest as Kate's nudge sent a jolt through you. The warmth of the pub, with its golden glow and the chorus of laughter and clinking glasses, faded into the background as you glanced over at him—Professor Logan Howlett. Logan. The name still felt too intimate to think, let alone say, but tonight, that barrier seems thinner.

He stood at the bar, broad shoulders relaxed in a rare display of ease as he listened to a colleague recount some story, whiskey glass cradled in his hand. The way the light caught in his hazel eyes, illuminating flecks of green and gold, tugged at something deep inside you. He was an enigma: a man whose severity was legendary in lecture halls but who, behind closed doors, revealed glimpses of something more. Something human and achingly real.

You respected him, profoundly so. He wasn’t just another academic; he was the academic, the kind of professor whose passion for history electrified a room. His lectures weren’t just lessons but challenges, daring students to question and confront the world’s recorded past with new eyes. He had inspired you to follow in his footsteps, to envision a life dissecting history’s layers, guiding minds through its labyrinthine tales. You’d spent long nights thinking about that future—lecturing, debating, shaping students’ perspectives the way he had shaped yours.

Yet somewhere along the way, between debating treaties and arguing over the nuances of your thesis, your admiration had blurred into something messier. It was during the late hours of grading papers together, the silence punctuated only by his dry humour and the scratch of pens, that your heart began to betray you. He was different in those moments. Still grumpy, yes, but there was a warmth that surfaced—a sardonic smile when a student’s essay was especially absurd, a teasing jab at your meticulous note-taking. And once or twice, when the moon hung low and the world outside seemed distant, you could have sworn he flirted with you.

But that was impossible. Why would a man like him—sharp, captivating, deeply passionate about his work—pay attention to you in that way? It was foolish to even entertain the thought.

Kate’s voice brought you back. “Go on, before he leaves.”

You glanced at Ethan, who shot you an encouraging grin. You took your glass with you, fingers trembling just enough to make you clench your fist to steady them. The walk to the bar felt long, every step magnifying the flutter of nerves in your chest. You’d faced him in debates, you’d defended your research under his unsparing gaze, but this felt different. This wasn’t a controlled environment; this was the unpredictable space of real life.

He turned as you approached, his expression shifting from neutral to surprised, and then softening in a way that made your breath hitch. His eyebrows lifted just slightly, a fleeting look of recognition followed by something you couldn’t quite name.

“Congratulations,” he said, the rough edge of his voice sending a thrill down your spine. His eyes caught the light, making them appear warmer than usual, and for a moment, you felt like the only two people in the room.

“Thank you,” you managed, feeling a rush of relief that you hadn’t tripped over the words. “It’s… good to see you, Professor.”

“Logan,” he corrected, the corner of his mouth lifting into a half-smile, but enough to suggest amusement. He glanced at the empty space beside him and shifted, subtly making room. “Join me?”

You didn’t need more than that. You slid into the space, feeling the heat of his presence like a tangible thing. The din of the pub receded just a little, replaced by the thrum of your pulse and the stolen glances that spoke of memories shared late at night over half-empty coffee cups and stacks of research papers.

Logan signalled to the bartender, his hand briefly brushing against yours on the counter as he gestured toward your half-empty glass. “A gift,” he said, his voice smooth, low, and rich with that unmistakable rasp, “for making it through the gauntlet and surviving me. Some people never do.”

His eyes lingered on yours, his gaze sharp but softened by the teasing glint that rarely broke through his usual stern demeanour. You couldn’t help the small smile that tugged at your lips, even as the warmth spreading through your chest made it harder to breathe evenly.

The bartender placed a fresh drink in front of you, and you stared down at it for a moment, letting the hum of the pub—the chatter, the golden glow of the lights, the low thrum of music—blur into the background. But it wasn’t the atmosphere that anchored you; it was Logan, his quiet confidence and magnetic pull, the way his focus never wavered.

“Thanks,” you said, your voice steadier than you felt.

He raised his glass, taking a measured sip of whiskey, the motion deliberate as if he were savouring it. His eyes never left yours, the intensity behind them making your skin tingle. “So,” he began, his voice carrying that heavy, deliberate weight, “what’s next? I can’t imagine someone like you doesn’t have the next step planned out.”

You couldn’t suppress the grin spreading across your face. “What makes you think I have a plan at all?” you teased, arching a brow as you lifted your glass to your lips.

The laugh that followed was deep and unrestrained, the sound warm enough to melt the tension in the air while simultaneously sending a shiver down your spine. He set his glass down and leaned forward, his broad frame angling toward you, his focus entirely on you.

“Because I know you,” he said, his voice quieter now, almost conspiratorial. His eyes crinkled slightly at the corners, amusement playing in the depths of his gaze. “And knowing you means I’d bet you’ve got the next thirty years colour-coded and cross-referenced.”

The heat in your cheeks was immediate, and you looked away, biting the inside of your cheek to hide the bashful smile tugging at your lips. It was ridiculous how well he knew you—how effortlessly he could strip away your defences with a single comment, leaving you feeling both exposed and undeniably seen.

“You shouldn’t look so smug about that,” you muttered, though your voice lacked any real bite.

Logan chuckled, the sound low and rumbling, resonating somewhere deep in your chest. “You’re right,” he said, leaning closer, his voice dropping an octave that sent a delicious shiver down your spine. “But it’s hard not to be. It’s one of the things I like most about you.”

The words hung in the air, sinking into your skin, making your pulse quicken. His eyes, dark and steady, locked with yours, and for a moment, the rest of the world seemed to blur into irrelevance.

“It’s why I asked you to be my TA,” he added, his tone softened but no less intense.

The memory of that moment surged forward, vivid and sharp like it had happened just yesterday.

***

His office had been its usual state of organised chaos—books stacked high, papers scattered across the desk, and the faint scent of leather and cologne clinging to the air. The room had always felt like an extension of him: commanding, unrelenting, but with a quiet depth you couldn’t help but admire.

You had entered cautiously, the soft creak of the door announcing your arrival. Logan hadn’t looked up immediately, too engrossed in whatever notes he was reviewing, his brow furrowed in thought.

When he finally lifted his gaze, his sharp, assessing eyes pinned you in place. “Close the door,” he said, his voice gruff but not unkind. You obeyed, your pulse quickening with a strange mix of excitement and apprehension.

“I’ve been thinking,” he started, leaning back in his chair with a creak of worn leather. His fingers tapped against the desk, his eyes studying you with a piercing intensity. “I need a teaching assistant next term. But not just any TA. Someone who won’t nod along to everything I say and write my lectures in their sleep.”

You blinked, caught off guard by the bluntness of his words. “Me?” you stammered, half incredulous, half hopeful.

“Yes, you.” A faint smirk tugged at the corner of his mouth, softening the edge of his expression. It was a rare sight, one that made your stomach flutter. “I don’t usually need help,” he admitted, leaning forward, elbows resting on the desk. “But you challenge me—and that’s not something I’m willing to waste.”

The weight of his words hit you, their meaning sinking in. This wasn’t just an offer. It was an acknowledgment, an admission that he saw something in you worth nurturing.

“It would be an honour,” you said, your voice coming out softer than you intended, tinged with a reverence you couldn’t mask.

“Good.” He stood, crossing the room until he stopped just shy of your personal space. His presence filled the room, his gaze holding yours with a quiet intensity that made your breath catch. “Don’t make me regret this,” he said, but the teasing edge in his tone softened the warning.

“I won’t,” you had promised, the conviction in your voice leaving no room for doubt.

The way he looked at you then—like he believed you entirely, like he knew you would surpass every expectation—was something you’d carried with you ever since.

***

The memory slipped away like smoke, fading into the background as Logan’s voice cut through the quiet hum of the pub. “You know,” he said, his tone carrying that familiar teasing lilt, “most people would kill for a compliment like that from me. And yet, here you are, blushing as if it’s the first time anyone’s told you you’re remarkable.”

The flush in your cheeks deepened, and you ducked your head, trying to hide the effect his words had on you. “It was more than an honour,” you murmured, voice shy but unwavering. “Working with you made me realise how much I wanted to teach. Your classes… They made me sure of what I wanted for my future.”

Something flickered across his face then, a shadow of pride mixed with something you couldn’t quite name. He got closer, the space between you shrinking until you could feel the subtle warmth radiating from him. “Is that so?” he asked, his voice dropping into a tone both playful and low. “I’m glad to hear it. If I inspired even half of what you’re capable of, then I’d say I did something right.”

His words sent a warmth curling through your chest, but it was the way he looked at you—steady, unflinching—that made your pulse flutter. He wasn’t just paying you a compliment; he was studying your reaction, watching you with a heat that felt almost tangible.

The smoky scent of his cologne teased your senses as he leaned in, close enough that the noise of the pub faded into a faint hum in the background. “Careful,” he murmured, a smirk tugging at his lips. “Blushing like that could make a person think you’re flustered.”

“I’m not,” you shot back, though the warmth blooming across your cheeks betrayed you.

He laughed softly, a low rumble that sent shivers down your spine. “Good,” he said, his eyes lingering on you a moment longer than necessary. “Because I like seeing you off your game.”

You swallowed hard, torn between embarrassment and exhilaration. “You’re impossible,” you whispered, trying to muster some semblance of control over the situation.

“And yet,” he said, his voice a low drawl as he raised his glass and tapped it lightly against yours, “here you are.”

The moment stretched between you, heavy with unspoken possibilities. It was a tension you’d never dared to acknowledge until now, and yet, sitting here beside him, it felt like the most natural thing in the world.

***

The night unfolded slowly, the warm glow of the pub sinking deeper into the evening. Despite the bustling crowd, you remained anchored in the space beside Logan at the bar. Each shared glance, each quiet laugh between the two of you, felt like the room itself was narrowing its focus, pulling you closer together.

When you reminded him, more than once, that you could buy your own drinks, he waved your protests away with an easy smile. “Consider it back pay for the TA work,” he said, the corner of his mouth quirking up. “And believe me, you earned it. I’m still convinced you deserve a medal for grading that batch of essays on European revolutions. I don’t think I’ve ever seen ‘Napoleon’ spelled with so many variations.”

You laughed, the sound bright and unrestrained. “To be fair, some of those students were probably just guessing who led the French army.”

“God help them,” Logan muttered, taking a slow sip of his whiskey before his eyes found yours again, softened by amusement. “How’s the thesis holding up under post-graduate scrutiny? Still proud of it?”

“Mostly,” you admitted, swirling the liquid in your glass thoughtfully. “There are a few parts I’d tweak if I could go back. But it did the job, right? Even impressed you.”

“‘Impressed’ might be underselling it,” he replied, his voice quieter now, rougher. “It was ambitious. You could’ve played it safe like most do, but you didn’t. You took a risk. That takes guts.”

The warmth in your chest grew at his words, a kind of pride that felt almost too big to contain. “I learned from the best,” you said softly.

Logan’s lips curved into a faint smile, his eyes crinkling at the edges. For a moment, the din of the pub seemed to fade entirely, leaving only the sound of his voice and the unspoken connection hanging in the air.

The conversation drifted easily between you, shifting from the late-night research sessions you once shared to the quirks of students you’d both encountered. You told him about the time a student had submitted a paper on the American Revolution that inexplicably included a section on The Beatles. Logan nearly choked on his drink, his deep laugh drawing a few glances from nearby patrons.

“Still proud of the next generation?” you teased, grinning.

“Barely,” he muttered, shaking his head before his smirk returned. “So, what now? What’s next for you outside of history?”

“Outside of history?” you quipped, leaning closer, the bubble of energy between you tightening. “Is there anything outside of history? I don’t know, Logan. I’ve spent so much time buried in books, I might as well be a mediaeval monk.”

His eyes sparkled with amusement, but the way he leaned toward you, just slightly, was enough to shift the atmosphere again. “A monk, huh?” he said, his voice low. “Somehow, I doubt that.”

The weight of his words sent a spark racing down your spine, your breath hitching slightly under the intensity of his gaze. Whatever barriers had once existed between you felt thinner now, more fragile. And for the first time, you found yourself wondering what it might mean to finally cross them.

Logan smirked, his sharp eyes tracing the contours of your face, lingering just long enough to make your heart race. “Here’s a real question,” he drawled, his voice low and teasing. “Any current boyfriends? Partners? You know, so I can adjust my expectations for the night.”

The question landed like a spark, setting your pulse racing. You hadn’t expected him to go there, but the weight of his attention and the soft buzz of the evening’s warmth had lowered your defences.

“Ha,” you laughed, sharper than intended, but his grin didn’t waver. “Uni didn’t leave much room for that. Most of the guys in my classes weren’t exactly my type—more interested in keg parties than real conversations.” You hesitated, the alcohol nudging your tongue loose. “And, well… let’s just say it was usually me and my hand at the end of the day. Boys are boys, after all.”

Logan’s eyebrows shot up, his lips twitching in amusement before he burst into laughter. The sound was deep, rich, and genuine, drawing curious glances from nearby patrons, but you didn’t care. Watching him like this—relaxed and utterly unrestrained—made your chest tighten with something unfamiliar.

“God, I wasn’t expecting that,” he said, shaking his head and wiping at the corner of his eye. “You’re full of surprises, you know that?”

“Is that so?” you countered, emboldened by the way his attention seemed to orbit you entirely.

“Oh, it is,” he replied, his voice dipping into something quieter, more intimate. He leaned closer, and the space between you buzzed with an almost electric anticipation.

His hand rested on the bar, the slight movement of his fingers brushing against your arm in a touch so casual it felt deliberate. Your skin prickled at the contact, the warmth of it lingering far longer than it should. Logan was watching you now, his gaze steady and careful, testing your reaction, waiting.

The moment stretched, the tension building with every heartbeat. His fingers moved again, this time trailing lightly over the back of your arm, and the sensation sent a spark straight to your core. You inhaled sharply, your eyes meeting his, and the unspoken words between you hung heavy in the air.

“You know,” Logan said, his voice dipping lower, rougher, “I’ve always liked that you never missed a chance to challenge me. Kept me on my toes.”

“I didn’t think you liked being challenged,” you said, your voice softer now, unable to mask the tremor of excitement beneath it.

“Only when it’s you,” he replied, his tone stripped of humour. There was no teasing in his expression now, only the kind of intensity you’d once seen when he was deep in thought, dissecting an argument. But this was different. This wasn’t about academics or debates—this was about you. His hand moved deliberately, resting fully on your arm, his touch grounding and possessive all at once.

Your heart thundered in your chest as the realisation hit you. Logan Howlett—your professor, the man you’d admired from a distance for so long—was looking at you like you were the only thing in the room. Like he’d been waiting for this moment as much as you had, even if you’d never dared to hope.

“Why now?” you whispered, the words slipping free before you could stop them. “Why tonight?”

His eyes narrowed slightly, a smirk tugging at the corner of his mouth. “Because tonight, you’re not my student.” His voice was a low rumble, rough and magnetic. “And I’m done pretending I haven’t noticed the way you look at me.”

Your breath hitched, the weight of his words settling over you. His touch, his gaze—they made you feel exposed in the best way, like you were finally being seen for exactly who you were.

“And how is that?” you managed, your voice trembling under the intensity of his stare.

Logan leaned in closer, his face just inches from yours, so close you could see the flecks of gold in his eyes. The scent of whiskey mixed with something distinctly him—earthy, warm, untamed. “Like I’m not the only one who’s been waiting for this,” he murmured.

The tension snapped, and before you could respond, he closed the distance, his lips brushing against yours. The kiss was warm at first, almost hesitant, as if testing the boundaries of something unspoken. But as you leaned into him, your hands finding their way to the back of his neck, his restraint faltered.

Logan groaned softly, the sound vibrating through you, and the kiss deepened. His hand moved from the bar to your waist, gripping firmly as he pulled you closer. The heat between you was undeniable, every brush of his lips against yours igniting something that had been simmering for far too long.

“I want you,” he whispered, his voice raw and full of intent.

His hand slid down your side, his fingers splaying against your hip, and his lips pressed into the curve of your neck. The scrape of his stubble sent shivers down your spine, each touch deliberate, each kiss a promise.

Logan pulled back just enough to meet your eyes, his gaze darkened with hunger. “Want to get out of here?” he asked, his voice low, tinged with urgency.

“Yes,” you breathed, the answer spilling out without hesitation.

A satisfied smile curved his lips, and he stepped back to let you grab your phone, quickly messaging your friends. Logan signalled the bartender, his impatience visible in the set of his shoulders as he paid the tab.

Outside, the cool night air was a stark contrast to the heat radiating from your skin. Logan hailed a taxi with ease, opening the door and guiding you in with a hand on your hip, the touch lingering.

The ride to his apartment was both too long and too short. The tension simmered between you, heightened by his hand resting on your thigh, his fingers pressing with just enough pressure to make your breath hitch. You let your fingers trail up his arm, teasing, testing, and the muscle in his jaw flexed as he exhaled sharply.

“You’re going to drive me insane before we even get there,” he muttered, his voice gravelly and laced with heat.

“Good,” you whispered back, leaning in to brush your lips against the edge of his jaw.

His groan was low and full of promise. “Just wait until we’re alone.”

When the taxi finally stopped, Logan paid quickly, his hand never leaving you as he guided you up the steps to his apartment. Inside, the air seemed to shift, the quiet intimacy of the space wrapping around you as Logan closed the door behind you.

Instead of pulling you close again, he surprised you, walking to the kitchen. He returned moments later with a glass of water, handing it to you with a touch that lingered, his eyes scanning your face

“Drink,” Logan said, his voice softer now, the usual teasing edge replaced with something deeper, more serious.

You blinked, momentarily caught off guard by the shift in his tone. “Logan, I’m fine. I’m not—”

“I know,” he interrupted, the corners of his mouth twitching into a faint smile, though his eyes stayed steady, sincere. “But I need you to be completely sure. About this. About us. I don’t want any second thoughts in the morning.”

The weight of his words hung between you, settling like a tangible thing in the air. His expression, open and earnest, made your chest tighten. There was no bravado now, no teasing grin or cocky smirk—just Logan, stripped bare of any pretence, laying everything out in front of you.

You reached for the glass he offered, taking a small sip. The cool water was calming, but more than that, it gave you a moment to breathe, to steady yourself under the intensity of his gaze. He watched you closely, his posture relaxed yet commanding, a quiet possessiveness in the way he moved a step closer as you placed the empty glass down.

“I’m sure,” you said, your voice quiet but firm, the truth ringing clear in your words. “I’m not going to regret this.”

Logan exhaled slowly, his shoulders easing as relief softened the edges of his expression. His hand came up to brush a strand of hair from your face, his thumb grazing your cheek. The warmth of his touch sent shivers down your spine. “Good,” he murmured, his voice low and rough. “Because I want you to remember this. All of it. How I’m going to make you mine.”

Your breath caught at the promise in his words, your pulse quickening as his head dipped closer. This kiss wasn’t like the ones before. This one was unrestrained, searing, filled with the hunger that had been simmering between you both for far too long. His hands found your waist, his grip firm as he pulled you flush against him, your body moulding perfectly to his.

Your fingers slid into the soft hair at the nape of his neck, tugging slightly, and he groaned into your mouth, the sound reverberating through you. The kiss deepened, and he guided you back, his movements steady but urgent, until the edge of the couch met the back of your knees. You sank down, pulling him with you, and he followed without hesitation.

His lips trailed from your mouth to your jaw, lingering there before moving lower, finding the sensitive spot just below your ear. When his teeth grazed your skin, you gasped, the sharp sensation sending a jolt of pleasure through you.

Logan paused, pulling back just enough to take in the flushed look on your face, the way your chest rose and fell with quick, shallow breaths. His dark eyes roamed over you, full of intent and unmistakable hunger, and he shook his head slightly, as if marvelling at the sight before him.

“Beautiful,” he whispered, his voice raw and gravelly.

His hand slid down your side, his fingers splaying out at your hip, the weight of his touch grounding you. He pressed a lingering kiss to the curve of your neck, his stubble scraping deliciously against your skin, followed by the faintest pressure of his teeth. The shiver that coursed through you drew a satisfied growl from him, low and primal.

Every movement, every touch, every whispered word was deliberate—each one a promise. One you felt to your core.

The room buzzed with a charged energy, electric and palpable. Logan’s eyes met yours again, and in that moment, the world seemed to slow. The way he looked at you—like you were something he’d been waiting for his entire life—made your breath hitch and your heart race.

His hands tightened at your waist, his fingers pressing into your sides as he leaned down once more. The kiss that followed was a heady mix of tenderness and intensity, his lips moving against yours with an urgency that left no room for doubt. Logan kissed like he fought—fiercely, unyieldingly, and with everything he had.

Your hands explored his shoulders, tracing the firm muscle beneath his skin, feeling them shift and flex as he braced himself above you. His weight was a steady presence, comforting yet thrilling, a reminder of his strength.

When his lips left yours, they travelled lower, down the curve of your neck, across your collarbone, and lower still. His mouth and hands mapped out your body with an unhurried reverence, like he wanted to memorise every inch of you.

“I’ve been waiting for this,” he murmured, his voice hushed but commanding, his lips brushing against your skin. His eyes met yours again, dark and unwavering, filled with a determination that made your pulse quicken all over again. He was waiting, giving you the choice, the control, his intensity balanced by the care in his gaze.

Your fingers tangled in his hair, surprisingly soft despite its wildness. You bit your lip as his mouth moved along your neck, his lips warm and insistent, nibbling with a mix of playfulness and purpose. You instinctively arched toward him, seeking more of his touch, and he pulled back just enough to meet your gaze.

There was a soft smile tugging at his lips, a tenderness that contrasted beautifully with the raw hunger in his eyes. Then, without a word, he buried his face back into the crook of your neck, the scrape of his beard sending shivers down your spine.

His lips lingered on every inch of your skin, his kisses deepening the sensations until you were lost in him. A sharp nip at the sensitive curve of your neck made you jump, a small cry escaping your lips. His low, rumbling chuckle reverberated against your skin as he soothed the spot with a gentle lick.

“That’s gonna leave a mark,” you whispered, your voice light but breathless.

He pulled back just enough to smirk, his eyes gleaming with mischief. “And it won’t be the only one,” he replied, his tone low and gravelly, full of promise.

Logan’s hands slipped beneath your shirt, his roughened palms gliding over the soft warmth of your skin. When his fingers reached the clasp of your bra, he let out a quiet growl, the sound vibrating deep in his chest. With one smooth motion, he lifted you effortlessly, holding you against him as though you weighed nothing. The sheer strength in the gesture left you breathless, your legs instinctively wrapping around his waist.

“I need you in my bed,” he murmured, his lips brushing against the shell of your ear, his voice thick with longing. “Comfortably sprawled out... while I take my time with you tonight.”

His words sent a flush rising to your cheeks, and you pressed your face into his neck, both embarrassed and exhilarated. Logan laughed softly, the sound a low, rich rumble that sent heat pooling in your core.

“Oh, this is going to be fun, darlin’,” he teased, clearly revelling in your reaction.

“You’re being mean,” you mumbled in protest, your words muffled against his skin.

“Mean?” he repeated, his smirk widening as he felt the soft kisses you pressed to his neck in retaliation. His grip tightened on you just slightly before he laid you down on the bed, his movements controlled yet brimming with urgency. His leg slid naturally between your thighs as he leaned over you, pressing his weight into you just enough to draw a delighted squeal from your lips.

His gaze roamed over you, slow and deliberate, his eyes darkened with desire. There was something primal in the way he looked at you, as if nothing else in the world existed but this moment. His hand moved to your waist, trailing up your side with maddening slowness, leaving a path of warmth and tingling anticipation in its wake.

You shivered beneath his touch, your own hands finding their way to his broad shoulders. The firm lines of his muscles tightened under your fingertips as you explored the expanse of him, marvelling at his strength and the way it contrasted with the tenderness in his movements.

Logan leaned down, his lips brushing against yours in a soft, tentative kiss. The tenderness was fleeting, quickly giving way to something deeper as the kiss intensified. His hand slid up to cradle your face, his thumb brushing your cheek as he tilted your head to deepen the connection. Each movement was deliberate, like he was savouring every second, and when he finally pulled back, his lips hovered a breath away from yours, his voice rough and low.

“Do you know what you do to me?” he murmured, his tone heavy with need. “Every look, every touch... it drives me wild.”

His hand slipped under the hem of your shirt again, the calluses on his fingertips grazing your skin in a way that sent sparks dancing across your body. He pushed the fabric higher, his lips following the path his hands had traced, leaving feather-light kisses along your abdomen. Each touch, each kiss, built the tension inside you, the anticipation becoming almost too much to bear.

You arched into his touch, a soft sigh escaping your lips as his hands and mouth explored you with reverence. Slowly, he worked his way back up, his lips brushing along your collarbone, up the curve of your neck, and finally capturing your lips again. His kiss was firm and consuming, leaving you dizzy with want as his hands continued their journey, touching you in ways that made you feel cherished, adored.

“I want you to relax,” he murmured, his rough hand gently cupping your cheek as his eyes locked with yours. The intensity in his gaze was grounding, reassuring. “Let me take care of you tonight.”

A shiver ran through you at the quiet promise in his words, and you gave yourself over to him completely. He continued his slow, deliberate exploration, his lips and hands igniting a fire that burned through every nerve in your body.

With a slight shift of his weight, he pulled your shirt over your head, his movements unhurried but filled with purpose. His eyes roamed over your newly exposed skin, darkened with desire but soft with tenderness. You’d never felt so completely seen before, so utterly appreciated.

Logan’s hands returned to your sides, his touch brushing over your ribs as he leaned down again, capturing your lips in a kiss that made your heart race. His movements were deliberate, savouring the moment like he had all the time in the world to worship you.

When his lips left yours, they continued their journey, trailing kisses down your neck, along your shoulder, and lower. Each press of his mouth sent a spark of warmth radiating through your body, the sensation heightening with every touch. His hands followed, his touch both firm and gentle, exploring your curves with a possessiveness that made you feel treasured.

“Tell me what you need,” he whispered against your skin, his voice hushed but heavy with intensity. His gaze locked on yours, searching, waiting for your answer, his expression promising he would give you anything.

The vulnerability of the moment made your heart stutter, the quiet intimacy of it wrapping around you like a warm blanket. “I just need you,” you murmured, your voice trembling as the words spilled out, barely audible.

Logan’s lips curved into a faint smile against your skin, his rough beard scratching deliciously as he pressed a gentle kiss just above your heart. “Then I’m all yours,” he replied, his voice a low, gravelly promise that sent shivers cascading down your spine.

He moved you carefully, effortlessly guiding you to the centre of the bed. His arm stayed firmly around your waist, holding you close as though you might slip away if he let go. Every movement was slow, deliberate, his sharp eyes reading you like a book—every gasp, every shiver, every flutter of your lashes catalogued and responded to with tender attentiveness.

His fingers trailed down your skin, warm and rough against your softness, until they found the waistband of your jeans. With practised ease, he unfastened them, and you instinctively lifted your hips, helping him slide them off. He tossed them to the floor, where your shirt had already landed, and then sat back on his heels, taking you in.

His gaze was intense, primal—darkened by a hunger that seemed endless, almost dangerous. His eyes roamed over your form, lingering on every curve, every exposed inch of skin. That look alone made you feel like you were aflame, a heat pooling low in your belly under the weight of his stare. You swallowed hard, feeling shy and bold all at once in your barely-there panties, ones you’d chosen that morning for a little extra confidence, never expecting they’d be seen like this.

“You’re being mean again,” you teased, your voice soft but playful. “You’re still fully clothed.”

Logan raised a single eyebrow, his lips twitching into that damn smirk that made your knees weak. “Mean, huh?” he repeated again, his voice a teasing rasp. Shaking his head, he reached for the hem of his flannel shirt, starting to pull it over his head.

But before he could, your hand shot out, landing on his arm to stop him. “Can I do it?” you asked, your tone soft, tentative, but unmistakably eager.

His smirk deepened, his gaze dropping to your lips before flicking back to your eyes. “You wanna take the lead, princess?” he murmured, the nickname rolling off his tongue like a challenge.

With a quick, fluid movement, he grabbed your waist and flipped the two of you, his strength effortless, leaving you straddling his lap. His large hands rested firmly on your hips, holding you in place. You let out a surprised laugh, swatting his shoulder playfully, but the sound faded when you felt the hard length of him pressing against you.

“Then I’m all yours,” he growled, his smirk widening as you shifted your hips experimentally. The deep rumble that escaped his throat made your breath hitch, a quiet growl that sent a thrill racing through you.

Your hands travelled over the hard planes of his abdomen, tracing the lines of muscle that flexed beneath your touch. Slowly, teasingly, you reached the first button of his flannel and began unfastening it, one by one, revealing inch after inch of warm, firm skin. Dark hair covered his chest, trailing downward in a line that disappeared into his jeans, and you couldn’t stop yourself from running your fingers over it, savouring the roughness against your fingertips.

Leaning forward, you pressed a soft kiss to his lips, then began a slow, deliberate path downward, your lips brushing along his jaw, his neck, and the curve of his shoulder. Your kisses turned to nips and bites, your teeth grazing his skin in a way that had his hips jerking beneath you. When your lips closed around his nipple, biting just hard enough to make him hiss, a low chuckle rumbled through him.

“You’re trouble,” he growled playfully, though his hands gripped your hips tighter, guiding you into a slow rhythm against him.

You brushed his hands aside, smirking down at him. “I’m in control, Professor,” you said, the title falling from your lips like honey.

His reaction was immediate—his eyes widened slightly, darkening further as he twitched beneath you, his arousal impossible to ignore. “Interesting,” you mused, your grin turning wicked as you kissed your way down his chest, tracing the lines of his ribs with your nails, drawing a satisfied groan from him as the faint sting lingered.

Reaching the waistband of his jeans, you unfastened them with the same slow care he’d shown you earlier. Hooking your fingers around the band of his boxers, you gave his hip a light tap, silently urging him to lift, which he did without hesitation. You slid his jeans and boxers down, tossing them to join the growing pile of clothes.

“Looks like we’re uneven now,” he joked, his tone husky, though his focus was entirely on you as your fingers ghosted over his thighs.

“I left your shirt on, didn’t I?” you teased back, flashing him a mischievous smile.

He started to reply, but it dissolved into a groan as your hands moved upward, tracing along the lines of his stomach, stopping just shy of where he was waiting for you, hard and aching. You leaned down, pressing soft kisses to his abdomen, following the trail of hair downward, your lips deliberately avoiding the most sensitive part of him. Each breath that grazed him made him twitch, his hands fisting the sheets as he tried to stay patient.

But Logan Howlett wasn’t a patient man.

His voice was a low, guttural growl. “Princess, if you keep teasing me, I’m not gonna stay still much longer.”

You smirked, brushing your lips lightly along his inner thigh, your eyes flicking up to meet his. “Then don’t,” you whispered, the challenge clear in your tone.

And the way his eyes burned at your words made you feel unstoppable.

"May I remind you, sweetheart, that I’m not a patient man?" His voice was a low, guttural growl, each word strained as his restraint frayed under your teasing. Your lips ghosted up his chest, leaving a warm trail of kisses along the curve of his neck. His skin was taut under your wandering hands, which moved deliberately, sliding over the firm muscle of his chest, down the sculpted planes of his abdomen, until they stopped just shy of their target.

A bead of pre-cum glistened at his tip, a testament to how close you were to driving him over the edge. The sight alone sent a thrill through you—he was teetering on the brink of control, and you loved it. Still, even as his desperation stirred a wicked delight in you, the ache building within your own body was undeniable. You wanted him just as badly. No, more.

Leaning up, you captured his lips in a soft, deliberate kiss, then broke away to whisper in his ear, your breath hot and laced with seduction. "May I suck you off, Professor?"

The sound that tore from him was a low, primal groan—half frustration, half desire—and when you pulled back with a feigned innocence, his restraint snapped. He surged forward, claiming your mouth in a bruising kiss, his hands gripping you with a fervour that made your stomach twist deliciously. He poured his want into that kiss, and you revelled in the way he crumbled beneath your touch.

Your hand slipped lower, wrapping firmly around him, and his sharp intake of breath sent a wave of heat surging through your body. Seeing him bare before you was one thing, but feeling him—his heat, his size, his sheer need—had your own breath catching. The thought of taking him, of having him inside you, sent a shiver of anticipation skimming down your spine.

Pulling back, you locked eyes with him, the dark hunger in his gaze urging you on. Slowly, you brought your hand to your mouth, licking your palm in a deliberately seductive motion. His lips parted as his chest rose and fell heavily, watching every move you made. Your slickened hand returned to him, circling his length with a teasing swirl. His head fell back, a deep groan escaping his throat, as his body surrendered to the sensation.

Experimentally, you brushed your thumb over his tip, collecting the bead of wetness there. Without breaking eye contact, you brought it to your lips, tasting him for the first time. He was salty, heady, but somehow addictive—a taste you could already tell you’d crave. His groan turned guttural as your hand began its slow, deliberate rhythm, stroking him with increasing confidence.

"Logan Howlett," you thought, a flicker of triumph lighting within you. This untamed, commanding man was utterly under your spell, and you hadn’t even begun to show him what you could do.

Leaning in, you pressed your tongue to the base of his throat, dragging it upward in one languid motion. His cock was hot and impossibly hard in your hand, smooth yet throbbing with vitality. You smirked as you murmured against his skin, your voice a sultry hum. "You feel incredible in my hand, Professor. I wonder…" You nipped lightly at his collarbone before trailing down his chest and stomach, closer and closer to where your hand worked him in steady strokes. “…how you'd feel in my mouth."

“Fuck,” he rasped, the word trembling on a breathless moan as you quickened your pace, his hips twitching in response. "You can try it, sweet girl. I bet a good girl like you would love it."

His challenge lit a spark in your eyes. Without hesitation, you trailed your hand to his base, preparing for the length you couldn’t take fully. Then, holding his gaze, you ran your tongue up his shaft in a slow, deliberate stripe, savouring every inch. His breath hitched, and he let out another ragged "Fuck," his head tipping back in unrestrained pleasure.

You smirked around him, your lips brushing against his skin. “I’ve been thinking about this for so long," you murmured, your hand working him with practised strokes as you watched his chest rise and fall, his breathing ragged. His eyes were heavy-lidded with lust, entirely focused on you.

Without breaking your rhythm, you leaned forward and took him into your mouth, your tongue swirling expertly as you enjoyed the weight and heat of him. His reaction was immediate—a guttural groan that made your pulse race. Every sound he made, every twitch of his body, was yours to command, and you planned to make the most of it.

You leaned down, your gaze locking with his as you parted your lips to take him in. The intensity in his dark, lust-filled eyes sent a pulse of heat through you, heightening your desire. Slowly, you enveloped him, letting your tongue swirl around his tip with deliberate, teasing strokes. Every second felt electric, the weight of him on your tongue igniting something primal within you.

Encouraged by the raw, guttural groan that escaped his lips, you took him deeper. The sound spurred you on, your body responding instinctively as you pushed yourself further, the stretch of him filling your mouth almost too much to bear. A choked gasp escaped you as you fought to adjust, and when you pulled back slowly, the suction made him shudder. Your tongue flicked out, lapping up the bead of pre-cum that lingered at his tip, savouring the salty, heady taste with a soft moan.

You let your tongue explore him fully, tracing the sensitive underside of his length with delicate precision. Each movement of your hand at the base added to the sensation, your fingers tightening just enough to draw a deep, unrestrained moan from him. The sound sent a thrill through you, and a smug smirk tugged at your lips. Seeing a man like Logan—always so composed and commanding—reduced to this state of pure need made you feel intoxicatingly powerful.

Unable to resist the temptation, you reached for his clenched fist, guiding it gently into your hair. His hand opened reflexively, his fingers threading through your locks with surprising tenderness. At first, his grip was tentative, his raised brow and the flicker of surprise in his gaze betraying his hesitation. But those eyes—dark, hungry, and more captivating than ever—held a new vulnerability, a raw honesty that made your pulse quicken.

“I want you to show me how you like it, Logan,” you murmured, your voice low and sultry, the deliberate use of his name landing like a spark in the charged space between you.

Something shifted in him. His pupils dilated, and his lips curved into a wicked smirk that made your stomach flip. “Are you sure, sweet girl?” he asked, his tone deep and laden with warning. “I can be... aggressive.” His low chuckle was both a tease and a promise, but the way his hand flexed in your hair revealed just how much your words had affected him.

You felt the heat rising between you, a silent challenge hanging in the air. “I want to make you feel good,” you whispered, your voice trembling with sincerity.

For a moment, his expression softened, the ferocity in his gaze giving way to something warmer. He patted your cheek gently, almost tenderly, before exhaling a shaky breath. “You’ll be the death of me,” he muttered under his breath, before adding in a growl, “Good girl.”

The praise sent a rush of arousal through you, emboldening you as you took him back into your mouth. You started slowly, relishing the stretch as you worked to accommodate him. Your lips strained as you descended further, inch by inch, until the tip of his cock brushed the back of your throat. You paused there, breathing through your nose, willing yourself to relax as you adjusted to his size.

The weight of him was overwhelming, but you welcomed the challenge, pressing forward to test your limits. Your hand moved in tandem with your mouth, stroking the base of his cock where your lips couldn’t reach. Every groan, every strained breath from above you fueled your determination.

When his hand tightened in your hair, a subtle but unmistakable tug, you felt the shift in his control. It wasn’t forceful, but it was guiding, encouraging you to take him deeper. The act of surrendering to his lead sent a wave of heat cascading through you, and you moaned softly around him, the vibrations drawing another sharp groan from his throat.

Logan Howlett, the untouchable, unshakable force of nature, was unravelling in your hands—and you couldn’t have been more proud.

Every sound he made only added to the unbearable ache pooling between your thighs. You were soaked—so much more than you’d ever been before. The slickness, the heat, the undeniable need coursing through you—it was unlike anything you’d felt. Sure, you’d given blowjobs before, but they were nothing like this. This wasn’t a chore or a routine act of pleasure. With Logan, every moment felt electric, every touch feeding the fire inside you.

As your hand and mouth worked together to bring him closer, the growing need within you begged for attention. Slowly, one hand trailed down your own body, seeking some relief, your fingers pressing lightly against the wetness that had soaked through your panties.

But the sharp tug at your hair brought everything to a halt, a high-pitched gasp escaping your lips as you broke away to look up at him. His dark, lust-filled eyes burned with a mixture of amusement and dominance.

“And what do you think you’re doing?” he asked, his tone laced with teasing authority, though the edge in his voice made it clear he expected an answer.

“I—I just thought—” you started, but the wicked smirk that spread across his face silenced you.

“Pleasuring you is my job,” he interrupted, his words sending a thrill through your body. “Go on, sweetheart. Be a good girl for me, and I promise I’ll reward you.”

A rush of arousal coursed through you at his command. Any other man saying something like that would have earned a sharp slap and a swift exit. But Logan? His voice, his touch, his sheer presence—it left you feeling raw, exposed, and more wanted than ever before. You nodded, a small, breathless smile playing on your lips as you returned your hand to his hip.

Lowering your head again, you let your tongue trace a slow, deliberate path down the length of his cock, sampling the taste of him as you collected the salty pre-cum that had begun to drip. His groan was low and guttural, a sound that spurred you on as you began to bob your head, taking him deeper and deeper into your throat with every motion.

But Logan wasn’t content to let you set the pace. His hand tightened in your hair, pushing you down suddenly and forcing your nose to press against the base of his cock. The sheer size of him stretched your throat, and you pulled back with a coughing gasp, tears prickling at the corners of your eyes.

“Fuck!” he hissed, his voice strained. His other hand reached for your chin, tilting your face up to meet his intense gaze. “You okay, princess?” The damn pet name only made your pulse race faster.

“I’m fine,” you whispered, your voice raspy but eager. “You just surprised me.”

He smirked, but the concern in his eyes was genuine, his thumb brushing softly over your cheek. “Good. Use your words, pretty girl.”

“I want to feel you again,” you said breathlessly, your hand resuming its slow strokes along his length. Your eyes travelled to his lips, then back to his smouldering gaze as you bit your bottom lip. “I want to feel you come in my mouth, Sir.”

His eyes darkened at the word, his grip in your hair tightening just enough to make you shiver. “Good. Fucking. Girl,” he growled, his voice rough and full of praise. “Go on, then. Show me just how perfect you can be.”

This time, you didn’t hesitate. You found your rhythm, relaxing your throat and taking him even deeper than before. Saliva spilled down his length, glistening in the dim light as you worked him with a messy, unrestrained enthusiasm. The sounds of his pleasure—grunts, groans, and muttered curses—were music to your ears, spurring you to go further, to do more.

Logan’s hips began to move, his thrusts matching the rhythm of your mouth. The hand in your hair guided you with increasing urgency, his movements growing rougher, more desperate. “Oh, right there, princess,” he groaned, his voice strained as his control started to slip. “That’s it. You’re so fucking good for me.”

You moaned around him, the vibration pulling another strangled sound from his lips. He was twitching now, his cock pulsing against your tongue, and you knew he was close. You focused on his tip, swirling your tongue around it before taking him as deep as you could once more.

“C-coming,” he choked out, his voice rough and breathless.

You didn’t falter. Instead, you tightened your grip at his base, hollowing your cheeks and pressing your lips flush against him as he reached his peak. His hips bucked, and with one final thrust, he spilled into your mouth. The taste of him—salty, raw, and uniquely Logan—flooded your senses, and you swallowed every drop, savouring the moment.

With a soft pop, you pulled back, licking your lips and opening your mouth to show him you’d taken everything he had to give. The satisfaction in his gaze made your chest swell with pride.

“You are fucking perfect,” he muttered, his voice low and hoarse. Before you could respond, he pulled you into a searing kiss, his mouth crashing against yours with unrestrained hunger. He didn’t seem to care that he could still taste himself on your lips—if anything, it seemed to drive him wild.

“You’re not done with me yet,” he murmured against your mouth, his smirk returning as he pulled you closer. “Not even close.”

Once again, Logan shifted your bodies effortlessly, rolling you beneath him until you lay sprawled out, vulnerable and waiting. The weight of his gaze made your breath hitch—hungry, predatory, as though he were revelling in every inch of you before even touching you. For the first time that night, nerves began to creep in, a shiver of uncertainty. You were exposed, clad in nothing but your underwear, your body bared for him in the dim light. But then he looked at you, really looked at you, and the intensity in his eyes made your doubts dissolve like smoke.

“You’re so fucking beautiful,” he murmured, his voice low and reverent, each word laced with longing.

He leaned in, pressing hot, open-mouthed kisses along your neck. His teeth found the sensitive spots just below your ear, nibbling gently, drawing a gasp from you as your back arched instinctively toward him. You were already so ready, the ache between your thighs unbearable. Tilting your hips, you sought to close the gap, to meet him where you needed him most.

But his hand came down firmly on your hip, pinning you back against the mattress with a knowing smirk. “Impatient, are we?” he teased, his voice dripping with amusement. “Looks like I’ll have to teach you some patience. After all…” He leaned closer, his lips brushing against yours as he spoke, “…I am a professor.”

The kiss that followed was searing, his tongue slipping past your lips to tangle with yours. His weight pressed down on you, holding you in place, his length achingly close but just out of reach. You whimpered against his mouth, your body trembling with anticipation, your hands clawing at his shoulders in frustration. When he pulled back to look at you, his smile turned smug. He could see it all—the half-closed eyes, the way your lips chased his, your complete surrender beneath him.

“Look at you,” he murmured, his tone almost a purr. “So ready. And I’ve barely even touched you.”

His lips found your neck again, trailing hot, deliberate kisses down to your collarbone. Then lower. He lingered at your chest, his hands deftly unclasping your bra. The cool air brushed against your hardened nipples for only a moment before his mouth claimed one, his tongue swirling as he sucked, his teeth grazing lightly. The sensation shot through you like lightning, and a low whine escaped your throat.

He chuckled, the sound vibrating against your skin as his hand found your other breast, pinching and rolling your nipple between his fingers. “So sensitive,” he said softly, his voice full of pride at the way your body responded to him. Switching sides, he made sure to give each peak the same attention, his lips and tongue worshipping you as though nothing else in the world mattered.

His kisses continued their descent, leaving a trail of heat down your stomach. Wet, open-mouthed kisses mixed with playful bites that made you hiss—not in pain, but in sweet, agonising frustration. He paused at your hip, nipping the delicate skin there, and your hand flew to his shoulder, clutching him tightly.

“You’re torturing me,” you whined, your voice a breathless plea.

His response was a soft, almost tender kiss against your lips, a stark contrast to the smirk that tugged at the corners of his mouth. “Am I?” he murmured, his fingers slipping lower, brushing against the damp fabric covering your core.

“Oh, God,” you gasped, your head falling back against the pillows as his touch sent a jolt of pleasure through you.

With one smooth motion, he hooked his fingers under the waistband of your underwear and slid it down your legs, leaving you completely bare beneath him. He sat back for a moment, his gaze raking over you with unrestrained hunger.

“So beautiful,” he murmured, almost to himself. “So perfect. So fucking ready.” His lips quirked into a teasing smile. “Does getting me off make you this wet, princess?”

“You’re cruel,” you shot back with a breathless chuckle, only to gasp as he slid one thick finger into you with ease.

“Cruel?” he echoed, his smirk widening. “Oh, sweetheart, we’re just getting started.”

He leaned down, trailing kisses down your stomach and lower, pausing just above where you ached for him most. His tongue darted out, teasing you with the lightest touch, and you bucked against him instinctively. His free hand pressed firmly against your stomach, holding you in place.

“Patience,” he reminded you, his breath hot against your sensitive skin.

When his mouth finally descended, the first touch of his tongue against your clit sent a cry spilling from your lips. He groaned in response, the sound deep and guttural as he tasted you. “So sweet,” he murmured against you, his lips brushing the sensitive nub. “So fucking good. Only for me.”

“Only for you,” you gasped, your fingers tangling in his hair, pulling him closer.

He growled low in his throat, the deep vibration coursing through you like a shockwave. His tongue moved with practised precision, alternating between soft, teasing flicks that left you gasping and firm, deliberate strokes that made your toes curl. Every movement was calculated to drive you higher, to wring every ounce of pleasure from you.

Then, his lips latched onto your clit again, sucking gently before his teeth grazed the sensitive nub, sending a sharp, delicious jolt through your core. The cry of his name that tore from your lips was almost instinctual. “That’s it, princess,” he murmured against your skin, his voice gravelly, warm, and thick with lust. “Let me hear you.”

You couldn’t do anything but obey. His tongue began to work you relentlessly, each lap and swirl pulling moans and gasps from deep within you. “Logan, oh god, yes!” Your words spilled out in breathless chants, and you writhed beneath him, your body responding to every masterful flick of his tongue. Of course, he was skilled—far beyond anything you’d ever experienced. He wasn’t some fumbling boy trying to impress you. He was a man—a raw, primal force—and tonight, he was yours.

When a third finger stretched you, your back arched off the bed as you screamed his name. His answering smirk was devastating. That damn smirk. It would be your undoing. You could feel him—his arousal, hot and heavy against your thigh, already primed for more. Yet he wasn’t rushing, wasn’t hurrying to take you. He devoured you like a man starved, his fingers filling you perfectly, his free hand pinning you down as you squirmed beneath his touch.

“Be a good girl for me,” he rasped, his tone a dangerous mix of command and tease, “and tell me when you’re about to come.”

The ache inside you built to a breaking point, sharp and all-consuming. The pressure coiled tighter and tighter until it was unbearable, and you whimpered, your voice trembling as you confessed how close you were.

And then he stopped.

The absence of his touch was like being plunged into ice water. You opened your eyes, glaring at him with a mix of disbelief and fury.

“Are you fucking kidding me?” you hissed, your voice trembling with frustration.

Logan leaned back on his heels, his broad shoulders shaking with a low, wicked laugh. His smirk deepened as he looked at you, flushed and furious. “You’re adorable when you’re angry,” he teased, leaning down to press a soft kiss to the tip of your nose.

“I’m not adorable,” you huffed, your cheeks burning, both from arousal and his taunting.

“You’re even more adorable when you’re flustered,” he chuckled, brushing his thumb along your cheek.

Before you could retort, he kissed you hard, swallowing any protest. Without warning, his hand returned, and he thrust three fingers deep inside you, curling them expertly. He found that perfect, spongy spot with devastating accuracy, and when he pressed against it, you screamed his name so loudly you were certain the neighbours would know exactly what he was doing to you.

“That’s my girl,” he growled, his voice rough and brimming with satisfaction. “Let go for me.”

One more precise swirl of his fingers, and you shattered. The climax hit you like a lightning strike, blinding and all-consuming. Your body convulsed around him, your hands gripping the sheets desperately as wave after wave of pleasure wracked your body. It was different—deeper, more intense than anything you’d ever felt before.

But Logan didn’t stop.

“Logan, stop, I can’t,” you gasped, your voice shaking as your body trembled from the aftershocks. “I…I can’t—”

“Yes, you can,” he coaxed, his voice soft but insistent. “Come on, give it to me, baby.”

The new pet name broke something in you. Before you could process it, another orgasm tore through you, more overwhelming than the first. Your legs clamped shut around his hand as your body convulsed, your arms falling limp at your sides, too spent to even move.

When the waves finally subsided, you lay there, panting and trembling. “That was… God… That was the best fucking orgasm of my life,” you muttered breathlessly.

Logan grinned smugly, clearly pleased with himself.

“Don’t look so smug!” you protested weakly, swatting at his chest, though the laughter in your voice betrayed you.

He lifted his hand, still glistening with your release, and raised an eyebrow. “No one’s ever made you squirt before, right?”

Your eyes widened, embarrassment washing over you as you shook your head.

“Idiots,” he muttered, leaning down to kiss you softly, his lips gentle and warm against yours. “Seeing you like that…that’s the best damn thing I’ve ever seen.”

His words melted your embarrassment, and you smiled up at him, your hand drifting down to wrap around the hard length pressed against your thigh. His breath hitched at your touch, his control visibly fraying.

“You sure, sweetheart?” he asked, his voice softening, the tenderness in his tone stark against the raw hunger in his eyes. “I don’t want to hurt ya.”

His care, his patience, his sheer presence—it all left you breathless. How had you gotten so lucky?

“I want you inside me,” you whispered, your voice trembling with anticipation. “I want to feel you—and your release—in me for the next week.”

The sharp inhale of breath and the way his eyes darkened at your words sent a thrill through you. “I’m on the IUD, and I’m clean,” you added, and his nod confirmed the same.

Logan leaned in, his lips brushing against your ear as he growled softly, “Then let’s make you feel exactly how much I want you.”

Logan sat back on his heels, the muscles in his chest and arms flexing as he pulled off the shirt he still wore. The faint scars scattered across his skin caught the dim light, a testament to his raw strength and resilience. His feral intensity was softened, for a moment, by the way his hands trailed down your legs, spreading them open with deliberate care. His touch sent a shiver through you, not from cold, but from the overwhelming anticipation that coursed through your body.

Gripping his cock, he positioned himself at your entrance, his gaze flicking up to meet yours. “I’m not small,” he said with a low chuckle, his voice gruff but tinged with tenderness. He knew his size could be overwhelming; with his usual flings, he wouldn’t have hesitated, but this wasn’t just a night of mindless release. This was different. You were different. He cared about you, and that thought made him slow down, made him want to savour every moment.

The swollen tip of his cock slid easily through your slick folds, and you inhaled sharply at the slight sting of the stretch. He was bigger than anyone before, and for a fleeting moment, the discomfort was sharp—but it faded just as quickly, replaced by a moan of pleasure as he pushed deeper. Slowly, inch by inch, he worked his way inside, letting you adjust to him.

“Fuck,” he hissed through clenched teeth when he bottomed out, his forehead dropping to yours. He was buried so deeply you swore you could feel him everywhere, filling you in ways you hadn’t thought possible. “So tight,” he muttered, a small, breathless chuckle escaping him. “Damn near came already.”

He kissed you then, slow and deliberate, his lips trailing down your neck as his hand came up to cup your breast. His thumb flicked over your nipple, drawing a gasp from you as his hips began to move. The first few thrusts were slow, measured, giving you time to adjust.

You looked up at him, and the sight stole what little breath you had left. Logan Howlett was beautiful in his raw masculinity—the glistening sweat on his chest, the way his muscles rippled with each movement, his eyes dark with lust and something deeper. His hands left your breasts, moving to grip your thighs, lifting them to rest on his shoulders as he pressed even deeper inside you. The angle made you gasp, your hands gripping his forearms for stability.

“Faster,” you moaned, your voice trembling with need as you leaned up to whisper in his ear. ”Please”.

He growled softly, his lips brushing against your temple as he pulled back to look at you. “So fucking polite,” he teased, a smirk tugging at his lips before his pace shifted.

The next thrust slammed into you, and a cry tore from your throat, your body arching off the bed as he began to pound into you with an intensity that bordered on feral. He moved with precision, each snap of his hips purposeful as though he was searching for something—and then he found it.

Your gasp turned into a strangled moan, your lips forming a perfect O as he hit a spot deep inside you that sent white-hot pleasure ripping through your body. His smirk widened at your reaction, and his hand moved down to your clit, circling it with rough but deliberate pressure that made your voice rise in a chorus of his name, breathless pleas, and mindless cries of “yes.”

“Come on, princess,” he commanded, his voice low and growling. “Come on my dick.”

You shattered at his words, the orgasm ripping through you so hard your body trembled uncontrollably. You cried out his name, gripping the sheets tightly as your walls clenched around him. But he didn’t stop. His hips kept driving into you, harder and faster, his hands gripping your thighs so tightly you knew you’d wear the marks tomorrow.

“Logan, stop, I can’t—” you whimpered, though your body betrayed you, climbing toward another peak.

“Yes, you can,” he growled, his voice rough and commanding. “Give me one more, my sweet girl. One more.”

When he murmured your name, it was over. Your second orgasm crashed over you like a tidal wave, so intense your legs clamped around him and your arms fell limp at your sides. The sensation of his cock twitching inside you, the warm flood of his release spilling into you, heightened the euphoria.

When he stilled, his chest heaving, he leaned down to kiss you. It was soft, tender, so full of care that it almost brought tears to your eyes. As you blinked them away, his thumb brushed over your cheek, catching the tears before they could fall. He pressed gentle kisses to the corners of your eyes before pulling out of you with a shared hiss.

For a moment, you thought he might collapse beside you, like so many others before him had, but instead, he murmured, “I’ll be back in a sec. Don’t move.”

Too spent to argue, you closed your eyes, letting the haze of exhaustion wash over you. When you felt the warm, damp cloth against your sensitive core, you flinched slightly, startled.

“Relax, baby,” he murmured, his voice full of affection as he cleaned you up with a care that left you speechless. He’d even taken the time to warm the water. Could this man be any more perfect?

“I brought you some water,” he added, holding out a glass as he sat beside you on the bed.

You took it gratefully, managing a soft chuckle. “I don’t think I can move,” you said, half-joking but entirely truthful.

For a brief, vulnerable moment, fear crept into your chest. This was the part you dreaded—the moment where he’d send you on your way, reducing everything you shared to a meaningless one-night stand. You braced yourself for it, but it never came.

Instead, Logan stretched out beside you, his large hand resting on your thigh as he looked at you with those impossibly soft eyes.

“Then stay,” he said simply, his voice rough but sincere. “The bed’s big enough. And not to brag, but I make a damn good omelette.”

The smile he gave you melted every bit of fear in your chest, filling it instead with a quiet joy that made your heart ache in the best way.

You finished your water and curled up against him, your head resting on his chest, his heartbeat a steady rhythm against your ear.

“I think I like that,” you murmured, your voice drowsy but content.

And in that moment, you knew you were exactly where you were meant to be.

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