#leaders in an array

[rabbits-of-negative-euphoria]

proof that “the enemy of my enemy is my friend” is a lie:

Canadian news this week claimed Parliament gave a standing ovation for a man who “fought for Ukrainian independence against the Russians during the second World War”

yeah, remind me again. who was fighting against the Russians in World War II?

right.

The House of Commons just gave a standing ovation to a Nazi.

[bitterrfruit]

milk teeth

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

Jonathan always had a taste for sweeter things. 

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

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

He never considered himself greedy, though. 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What he needed, he thought, was a cub. 

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

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

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

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

Reaching out to your cousin was a last resort. 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

He sucked the air out of you. 

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

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

Worse, when he met your eye. 

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

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

He didn’t. 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Founder? Like, of this whole place?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Who’s this, Freya?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Sit down,” he said. 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Well, yeah, but it’s only because—”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

He tutted. “Can’t have that.” 

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

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

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

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

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

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

Cub. 

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

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

You didn’t know how to answer him. 

“I don’t — I’m not soft—” 

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

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

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

“A boy?” 

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

“Oh — uh, no.” 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Aren’t you?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

“What do you mean?” 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“That’s—”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“What?” 

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

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

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

“Like?” 

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

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

“Why?” You questioned warily.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

It was too easy to slip into a routine. 

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

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

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

And yet, you were making friends. 

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

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

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

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

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

That was the next time you saw Jonathan. 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Sure,” you said. 

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

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

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

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

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

You frowned. “How?” 

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

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

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

You gawped at that. “Her?” 

“Your pussy, love.” 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“I… okay,” was all you said. 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“One of ‘em hassling you?” 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“You’re asking for work, are you?” 

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

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

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

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

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

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

“I just mean—”

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

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

“Okay, sure, I can do that.” 

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

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

“My bedroom,” he said, point-blank. 

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

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

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

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

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

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

“No,” you confessed. 

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

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

There was only one path for you from there. 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

You gave him a weak frown. 

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

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

“Anything else I should know?”

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

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

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

That was the last time you got it wrong. 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“That you, cub?” 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“In y’get,” he grunted. 

You could only blink at him dazedly. 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Yeah,” you placidly agreed.

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

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

There was no rebuffing him, though. 

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

How could you squander such a privilege? 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Another rule on the list, you thought. 

No knickers. 

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

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

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

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

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

New rule. No shaving. 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“All wet now, are you?” 

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

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

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

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

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

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

New rule. No masturbating.

“Okay,” you said sheepishly.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Georgie was slack-jawed. “You mean—”

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

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

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

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

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

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

“I think so,” you said.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Instead, he drawled; “Why not?” 

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

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

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

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

“But — they might—”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What could you do but oblige him?  

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

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

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

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

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

You scoffed, breathless. 

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

He snickered as he shovelled his food into his mouth. 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

It was Philip. 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Your blood plummeted to your feet all at once.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“He what.” 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Suck them,” he grunted. 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Easy, cub, no need to panic.” 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“M’tired,” you slurred, breathless. 

He chuckled. “I bet.” 

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

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

Wednesday came with the threat of rain. 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“What?” 

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

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

“You think Jonathan kicked him out?” 

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

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

“I’m worried,” she lamented.

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

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

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

“I—”

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

“Shit.” 

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

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

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

“I’m sorry,” she whispered. 

“What do you—”

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Where?” 

He chuffed. “Stable.” 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

You just never imagined you’d get in trouble.

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

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

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

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

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

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

“I’m sorry,” you snivelled. 

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

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

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

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

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

“But, I–”

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

“I just—”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“I’m n-not a piglet.” 

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

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

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

A bridle. 

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

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

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

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

So they do. 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Wan’ me to fuck you, I bet.” 

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

“Not this hole, though, eh?” 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

It was venison for supper. 

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

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

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

Corporeality was out of reach for you, though. 

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

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

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

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

“There y’are, cubbie.” 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“No,” you whispered. 

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

“No.” 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Your scruples had evaporated. 

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

Now you looked on that scepticism as ignorance. 

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

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

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

Didn’t you feel so much better, now? 

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

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

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

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

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

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

Not you, though. 

You were special. You were important. 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The terminus of your journey was a pyramid. 

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

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

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

Stepping through the entrance was one of no return. 

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

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

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

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

You heard his breathing before he spoke. 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

You nodded deferentially. 

“Get on your knees, cub.” 

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

“Take it out.” 

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

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

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

“Lick it,” he gritted. 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Slow the fuck down.” 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

You cried as he plunged his cock into you while you were still tumbling out of your climax, folding you in half until your knees touched the floor by your head, and you could feel his cock in your ribcage. 

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

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

You were not suffering in vain, though. 

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

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

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

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

“Fuck,” he groaned, frayed and broken as it rended from his chest, and his head tumbled from his shoulders. “Keep still, cub — fuckin’ hell.” 

You felt his cock lurching in the security of your pussy, his come pumping in surges directly against your cervix, so much of it that you could feel it in your belly and taste it on the back of your tongue. You wondered if he had injected it directly into your womb through sheer pressure alone, and you hoped it would settle there, meeting the ovum that had awaited his arrival. 

You went glassy-eyed as you imagined it, his come taking, swelling and swelling inside you until it was a baby — heaven sent, the perfect amalgamation of you and him — him him him — you couldn’t fathom something so immaculate existing in the world with you. You were sure his baby would outgrow you, viviparous, would burst through your skin and emerge a fully grown person, as deific and faultless as him. 

Selfishly, you imagined it not taking. That he had timed it incorrectly, that his sperm had hunted for your egg and was found wanting — and he’d have to fuck you again, like he promised he would. Again and again, ejaculating in the core of you until your insides had become more him than yourself, body completely usurped by him, organs and all. 

You gasped, shaken out of your come-drunk reverie when he pinned your ankles together with a single hand, straightening out your legs. 

“John, what—” You squeaked, as he pushed your knees to your chin, and he hunched over so that you could no longer see him past your thighs. 

Almost bit your tongue off when you felt him lick up your slit in a flat swipe, immediately bucking to get him away from your already aching and hypersensitive clit. 

“No, s’too much—” you bleated, whining as his tongue smeared over your clit again, and the shock made your brain short-circuit. 

“I know, I know, cubbie—” he hushed, wrangling you until you stilled, and you felt his breath on your inflamed skin, “—it’s important, helps it take, love. Won’t take long, just be a good girl—”

You cried as he sucked your clit into his mouth, knee knocking against your chin, air squished out of your lungs as he folded you in half on the sheepskins. 

But you did as he said, because you were a good girl. Let him suckle on your swollen clit until it was sore, lapping at you with the fervour of a bear hunting honey in a beehive — still felt the flood of his come sitting high in your cunt, pooling against your cervix as he held your legs in the air, and it threatened to pour out of you with every constriction of your pussy. 

“Please—” you wailed, aimless in your begging, because whatever you wanted he had given it to you and then some. 

His hands dug into the flesh of your thighs, keeping himself steady more than you, and you climbed back towards your apogee with a sob and a held breath — released it all at once as he laved his tongue over your pulsing clit, and you came hard enough that you felt yourself begin to black out, such a lack of oxygen in your brain that your vision turned glittery at the edges. 

“J-Jonathan, ah, stop!—” You begged, teary and desperate, and only when you kicked haphazardly into the air did he release the suction on your clitoris and conclude his torment with a chaste kiss on your slit. 

He straightened out with a satisfied sigh, rough and gurgling from his chest, gently lowering your legs and laying them softly on the wool beneath you. 

He planted kisses up the length of you; on your hip, on your belly, on your breast, on your collarbone; crawling up your body until he landed on his back beside you with a whumph. With his expansive hands he scooped you up, and you gave no protest, floppy and exhausted to the point of debilitation — he lay you down on his chest, head balanced between his pectorals, and you settled in with a ragged exhale. 

“Such a good girl,” he murmured into the top of your head as he draped his arms over you, petting your skin wherever his hands landed. “Brave little cub.” 

You deflated, dissolving into him with a pent breath as your eyes fluttered shut, and you could have stayed there, like that, forever. 

He pressed a loving kiss into your hair, languidly stroking your shoulder, and you wondered if your mother was looking for you. 

this fic somehow tripled in length as i was writing it lol. anyway here's the pinterest board for it. <3

[theonion]

Warning that every flaccid member across the globe now represented a ticking time bomb in his hands, cackling Hims CEO Joseph Ludlum released a statement Friday in which he threatened to pull a switch that would activate all the world’s erections at once.

In the three-minute video address, which was broadcast suddenly to millions of screens across the planet, Ludlum dared world leaders to question his resolve and stood before a massive electrically charged array that he referred to as the Universal Engorgement Generator. Sources confirmed that as energy crackled through the minimalist, pastel-colored laboratory in the recording, Ludlum insisted that only if his demands were met could the planet avoid the mass chaos that would ensue if the genitals of countless men were to grow harder than anyone could ever imagine.

[reasonsforhope]

"In an unprecedented transformation of China’s arid landscapes, large-scale solar installations are turning barren deserts into unexpected havens of biodiversity, according to groundbreaking research from the Chinese Academy of Sciences. The study reveals that solar farms are not only generating clean energy but also catalyzing remarkable ecological restoration in some of the country’s most inhospitable regions.

The research, examining 40 photovoltaic (PV) plants across northern China’s deserts, found that vegetation cover increased by up to 74% in areas with solar installations, even in locations using only natural restoration measures. This unexpected environmental dividend comes as China cements its position as the global leader in solar energy, having added 106 gigawatts of new installations in 2022 alone.

“Artificial ecological measures in the PV plants can reduce environmental damage and promote the condition of fragile desert ecosystems,” says Dr. Benli Liu, lead researcher from the Chinese Academy of Sciences. “This yields both ecological and economic benefits.”

The economic implications are substantial. “We’re witnessing a paradigm shift in how we view desert solar installations,” says Professor Zhang Wei, environmental economist at Beijing Normal University. “Our cost-benefit analysis shows that while initial ecological construction costs average $1.5 million per square kilometer, the long-term environmental benefits outweigh these investments by a factor of six within just a decade.” ...

“Soil organic carbon content increased by 37.2% in areas under solar panels, and nitrogen levels rose by 24.8%,” reports Dr. Sarah Chen, soil scientist involved in the project. “These improvements are crucial indicators of ecosystem health and sustainability.”

...Climate data from the study sites reveals significant microclimate modifications:

Average wind speeds reduced by 41.3% under panel arrays

Soil moisture retention increased by 32.7%

Ground surface temperature fluctuations decreased by 85%

Dust storm frequency reduced by 52% in solar farm areas...

The scale of China’s desert solar initiative is staggering. As of 2023, the country has installed over 350 gigawatts of solar capacity, with 30% located in desert regions. These installations cover approximately 6,000 square kilometers of desert terrain, an area larger than Delaware.

“The most surprising finding,” notes Dr. Wang Liu of the Desert Research Institute, “is the exponential increase in insect and bird species. We’ve documented a 312% increase in arthropod diversity and identified 27 new bird species nesting within the solar farms between 2020 and 2023.”

Dr. Yimeng Wang, the study’s lead author, emphasizes the broader implications: “This study provides evidence for evaluating the ecological benefit and planning of large-scale PV farms in deserts.”

The solar installations’ positive impact stems from several factors. The panels act as windbreaks, reducing erosion and creating microhabitats with lower evaporation rates. Perhaps most surprisingly, the routine maintenance of these facilities plays a crucial role in the ecosystem’s revival.

“The periodic cleaning of solar panels, occurring 7-8 times annually, creates consistent water drip lines beneath the panels,” explains Wang. “This inadvertent irrigation system promotes vegetation growth and the development of biological soil crusts, essential for soil stability.” ...

Recent economic analysis reveals broader benefits:

Job creation: 4.7 local jobs per megawatt of installed capacity

Tourism potential: 12 desert solar sites now offer educational tours

Agricultural integration: 23% of sites successfully pilot desert agriculture beneath panels

Carbon reduction: 1.2 million tons CO2 equivalent avoided per gigawatt annually

Dr. Maya Patel, visiting researcher from the International Renewable Energy Agency, emphasizes the global implications: “China’s desert solar model could be replicated in similar environments worldwide. The Sahara alone could theoretically host enough solar capacity to meet global electricity demand four times over while potentially greening up to 20% of the desert.”

The Chinese government has responded by implementing policies promoting “solar energy + sand control” and “solar energy + ecological restoration” initiatives. These efforts have shown promising results, with over 92% of PV plants constructed since 2017 incorporating at least one ecological construction mode.

Studies at facilities like the Qinghai Gonghe Photovoltaic Park demonstrate that areas under solar panels score significantly better in environmental assessments compared to surrounding regions, indicating positive effects on local microclimates.

As the world grapples with dual climate and biodiversity crises, China’s desert solar experiment offers a compelling model for sustainable development. The findings suggest that renewable energy infrastructure, when thoughtfully implemented, can serve as a catalyst for environmental regeneration, potentially transforming the world’s deserts from barren wastelands into productive, life-supporting ecosystems.

“This is no longer just about energy production,” concludes Dr. Liu. “We’re witnessing the birth of a new approach to ecosystem rehabilitation that could transform how we think about desert landscapes globally. The next decade will be crucial as we scale these solutions to meet both our climate and biodiversity goals.”"

-via Green Fingers, January 13, 2025

[authorscurse]

Satoru being swarmed and fawned over by girls isn’t an uncommon occurrence. “I’m just a likeable man!” he replies to anyone who asks him about it. Despite all the attention he receives—from girls and boys alike—he has eyes for just one person.

“He’s so hot! Oh my god!” one girl exclaims, glancing at Satoru and Suguru, who are leaning casually against the school lockers.

“Which one? Dibs on the guy with the bun!” one of her friends chimes in.

“The white-haired guy! Imagine how good-looking our kids would be if they had his eyes and hair but my face,” the girl says, clearly on cloud nine as she fantasizes about their impossible future together.

While organizing your things from your locker, you bite your tongue, not wanting to intervene in the loud conversation of the three girls beside you, even if one of them is already fantasizing about your boyfriend.

“I heard he has a girlfriend,” her friend with ribbons in her hair blurts out.

“Things can be stolen if left unattended,” the raven-haired girl smirks while twirling her hair.

“But he isn’t a thing, is he?” you counter, causing all three girls to turn their heads toward you. The girl eager to steal your boyfriend glares at you, arms crossed and eyebrows raised. You stifle a laugh at her “tough” demeanor, knowing it could easily be broken down with just a few words.

“I’m just saying he isn’t an object. Clearly, you can't seem to see that,” you assert, which only angers her and her minions further.

“Maybe she just wants him for herself, Yumi,” the girl with ribbons suggests, prompting their “leader” to smirk and appraise you from head to toe.

“He would never want her. Why would Satoru Gojo choose someone like her when he has better options?” Yumi states smugly.

“Better options that keep thinking he’s some object to be stolen? What a beautiful array of options that is,” you retort sarcastically, pulling books from your locker. “If you want to take him away, go ahead. But from what I’ve heard, he’s completely too wide-eyed for his girlfriend to even notice anyone else.”

You smile and walk away to your class, leaving them fuming behind you.

As soon as the bell rings, students rush to the door and exit the school. The rain pours heavily outside, causing water to drip through the windows of the classrooms.

“Goodbye, Miss Cawas,” you bid your teacher before stepping out of the classroom. The corridors are nearly deserted, with everyone clearly wanting to stay dry as they dash for the exit.

“Mind giving me a ride?” you hear Yumi’s faint voice ask as you approach the school exit.

“Can’t, I’m waiting for someone,” comes the familiar voice of your boyfriend, declining her request. You chuckle softly, placing one of your earbuds in its case.

As you come into view, Satoru’s smile widens as he waves. A warm feeling surges through you, and you wave back. Your smile quickly morphs into a smirk when you see the color drain from Yumi’s face as you approach them both.

“Hi, my love. Had a good day?” Satoru asks, leaning down to place a sweet kiss on your lips. You catch Yumi’s jaw dropping from the corner of your eye as you reciprocate Satoru’s kiss.

“Oh, hi, Yumi,” you greet her with a saccharine smile. Her eyes drop to Satoru’s arm wrapped securely around your waist.

“Y-you’re—”

“Toru’s girlfriend, yeah,” you interject.

“Y-you’re very lucky,” she says, struggling to swallow the mean and crude comments she clearly wants to unleash.

“Actually, I’m the lucky one,” Satoru laughs, turning to you. “Let’s go before the rain gets stronger.”

“Okay, love,” you reply, caressing his cheek. You step aside as he opens the car door, Yumi still staring at you both, watching your every move.

“Oh, Yumi!” you call out just before getting in, and her eyes snap to you. “Satoru’s eyes do look really pretty, don’t they? Too bad only my kids will inherit them. Have a good day!” You smile sweetly at her before slipping into the car with Satoru.

You watch Yumi’s figure fade from the side mirror as the car pulls away.

“You okay?” Satoru asks, concern etched on his face.

“Mhm, all good,” you say, closing your eyes and letting the warmth envelop you.

The ride is spent in comfortable silence, the only sound being the rain hitting the car roof.

“I think our kids will look even better with your eyes than with mine,” Satoru muses, glancing at you with a soft smile.

“Then with your hair,” you reply, making him nod and smile even more. He takes your hand in his and kisses it, never tearing his eyes away from the road.

You don’t mind that Satoru is fawned over by countless admirers every day. You know very well that he has eyes for you and you alone. And you only have your eyes on him.

[anisespice]

Hey girl got a request,so like let’s say bonten is having a meeting with a new criminal organization gang that came in to come up with a deal,and while we are just sitting in the back looking at our new sparkly items Koko bought us,and the new criminal organization gang calls us out saying it’s disrespectful and rude calling us names..And bonten doesn’t like that one bit..So yeah I want them to react to that

hope it makes sense 😔😍🤺🤺

SAVE ME FROM MY WRITER'S BLOCK, ANON - HERE WE GO, NO MARIO. Hope you enjoy and thank you for requesting~!

pairing: bonten x fem!reader

warnings: mature language, misogynistic undertones (from another gang), implied violence, guns mentioned, reader is criminally oblivious (love that for her), guard-dog!bonten supremacy, sanzu gets his own warning lol and i think that's it.

notes: yall. can you believe i actually wrote this in one sitting? without stopping?? wild concept for me, haven't been able to do that in a good minute *knock on wood*, but i hope you enjoy! more stuff coming soon ♡

tagged: @fantasycantasy , @spacegirl05, @neverlandlostchild , @darks-pet-shadow, @captaincyberqueen

Upon the arrival of the recently developed organization, officially known as Kaiju, things already weren’t off to a great start. They were late, clocked at about twenty minutes past schedule. Excuses poured from them like a broken faucet, blaming their tardiness on traffic, which the members were willing to give the benefit of the doubt, some more than others. Then, they were unprepared. Scrambling about with their half-assed introduction mixed with a sloppily thrown together presentation, it was insulting at worst. 

Here they were, biggest in the game, offering an opportunity to help underground operatives make a name for themselves..and this is how they want to showcase their potential? Mikey waved it off when his number three voiced this flaw, merely chalking it up with inexperience–Everyone has to start somewhere, right? 

But. Finally came strike three. The one thing, the most damning thing they could’ve ever done to have mercy jump right out the window and straight to hell, was when one of their foolish members spoke ill of you. 

It was supposed to be taken as a joke, something controversial in a room amongst men, locker room talk if you would. Unfortunately for him and the rest of his team, Bonten didn’t see it that way. What was said wasn’t important, but the intent behind it was enough to make them hostile. And Kaiju would soon realize it too late despite no one laughing on that side of the room. If anything, the room grew colder. No matter who you looked at, venom consumed their gazes, a deathly aura building from their leader all the way to the advisors. The only reason no one reached for their gun, mowing them down in an array of bullets, was because you didn’t hear the disrespectful comment. 

All gazes shifted over to you briefly, sitting pretty in your little area they set up just for you. They liked having you close by, even during something so mundane as a meeting, watching you happily paint your nails or open up all the shiny new trinkets they bought you. Kaiju should count themselves lucky that you had headphones on, blissfully listening to music, not a care in the world.

And it was going to stay that way. 

By now, the dumbasses before them caught on to their grave error. Especially when Sanzu made a show of santuring over to you upon Mikey’s silent request, swiftly gathering you in his arms and carrying you to the head of the table. You squealed slightly in surprise, headphones slipping off your ears in the process as you held on to the pink-haired gangster, confused smile on your face. “Haru! You scared me!~” 

“Sorry, doll. Boss wants ya to sit right here.” Sanzu gently sets you down on your awaited throne, Mikey having made room by scooting his chair back, welcoming you with open arms. 

Still confused though not complaining, you merely shrugged before making yourself comfortable, snuggling more into the leader before putting your headphones back on. Mikey held you possessively, arms locked around you like a shield, placing a small kiss to your forehead. Message was sent; message soon received. 

Kaiju’s leader began blubbering out more excuses, reprimanding his subordinate in the same breath for saying such a thing about Bonten’s trophy wife–

Guns are drawn instantly and zeroed in on every last one of them. Stunned to horrified silence, as were his underlings, they all stood frozen in fear as they stared down multiple barrels in every angle. Koko scoffed, “You must got a death wish, huh?” 

“She’s no trophy, have some goddamn respect,” Mochi added, earning a sardonic chuckle from Ran. 

“Big ask from idiots who have none. Couldn’t even bother to show up on time, now they wanna make jabs at our [_____]. I say we’ve been more than courteous, wouldn’t you agree, otouto?” 

“Tsk. Let’s just waste ‘em. We’d be doing the streets a favor.” 

“Great idea,” Sanzu and Takeomi answered in unison, the former sounding twice as eager. 

The only ones placid were Kakucho and Mikey, one quietly observing whilst the other made sure you remained ignorant to the situation, angling you in his lap to where you were practically straddling him, phone still in hand as you watched a music video your favorite k-pop group dropped recently. The only sounds in the room were the panicked breathing of Kaiju and your melodic humming to the song. Mikey patted your head, satisfied that you were still your happy self. If any of those bastards made your smile drop even a centimeter, he would have their bodies fed to the dogs. With a small sigh, he and Kakucho eventually made eye contact. Then, he gave a small nod. “You were right. Should’ve killed them after that shitty presentation. Handle it.” 

Kakucho gave a curt nod, then signaled for Kaiju to be apprehended. With guns still aimed at them, leaving them no choice but to grovel for mercy, the Haitanis along with Mochi and Takeomi forced them to march out of the room, and to their inevitable deaths, not wanting to startle you with the sight of bloodshed so early in the morning.

Sanzu was already dialing up reinforcements to help with cleanup and disposal, face beaming as he practically skipped out of the room. Kakucho gave one last look to you, then Mikey, then politely bowed before closing the door behind him on his way out. You jumped slightly, the song ending right when the door slammed shut, making you lift one of your headphones and look around in shock.

“Oh, is the meeting over already?” 

Mikey reached up to thumb your lower lip, then reached up to playfully pinch your cheek. You grinned, gently swatting him away, so oblivious to the men you inadvertently sent to their demise all to protect that very smile. The former blonde shook his head, leaning on the armrest to rest his chin atop his knuckles. “No. Ended up being a waste of time. Don’t think you would’ve liked them.” 

You chortled. “Doesn’t matter if I like them. It’s your business, silly.” 

“Mm, you are our business, angel. And we like you more.”

© 2024-2025 anisespice ッ all rights reserved. likes, comments & reblogs much appreciated!

[sunderwight]

Okay, so the canonically confirmed Cang Qiong peaks are:

Qiong Ding (leader peak, CEO peak, politician/diplomacy peak, admin peak, etc)

Qing Jing (scholar & artists peak, knowledge peak, strategic advisor peak, etc)

Wan Jian (sword guy peak, blacksmith peak, armory peak, etc)

An Ding (logistics peak, servants peak, peak of the cang qiong labor party, delivery guys & messengers peak, supplies & catering peak, etc)

Xian Shu (gender segregation peak: girl flavor)

UNKNOWN

Bai Zhan (shounen anime peak)

Qian Cao (healer peak, pharmacy peak, first responders peak, etc)

Ku Xing (gender segregation peak: boy flavor, ascetic peak)

Zui Xian (alcohol peak)

UNKNOWN

UNKNOWN

So we only have three peaks that are entirely unnamed and unaccounted for. This has pretty good utility if you want to do a transmigration fic where Airplane and Shen Yuan are there as peak lords, but so are OG Shang Qinghua and Shen Qingqiu. You can just give them two of the three mystery peaks, and then there's only one peak remaining for an OC and kapow, you've got all twelve peak lords sorted.

But the question of course, is what should these peaks actually be? What should they specialize in?

Fandom has argued in favor of a Beast Peak, and I actually endorse this idea, although I think specializing in demonic beasts is more of a Bai Zhan and Qing Jing thing. But while we can suppose that between An Ding, Qian Cao, and (probably) Zui Xian the agricultural needs of the sect are being met (or met sufficiently for what they can also supplement through trade), there's no clear existing peak to outsource things like training spirit animals or keeping any livestock that the peak might require. And hey, if there is a Beast Peak, then them also having some expertise in demonic beasts would be interesting.

I think the Beast Peak would slot in most logically between Xian Shu and Bai Zhan.

For the lowest peaks, things get more interesting. While there are obvious roles such as talisman making, barriers, musical cultivation, etc, most of those things seem like they'd either be covered by one of the other peaks (i.e. Qing Jing and musical cultivation) or else would be strange things for the sect to acquire so late, literally after the peak that specializes entirely in brewing.

But, that actually can work out, if we assume that these peaks have taken as specialties things that were previously secondary or tertiary interests to other peaks. Perhaps even owing their origins to particularly capable disciples from the other, more highly ranked peaks who showed such prodigal skill or innovation in that area that they were allowed to establish new peaks focusing on it.

For my money, I'd go with a Barrier Peak, specializing in protective barriers, talismans, and spiritual cultivation that shot off from Qing Jing during some long-prior generation. This peak could also be responsible for guard duties in the sect, basically sending disciples to close off unsafe or prohibited areas, to manage things like access to the various branches of the Lingxi caves, sealing off dangerous items, and (probably) helping to maintain existing barriers, arrays, and other such systems throughout the sect.

I think this peak would be a decent fit for Airplane, as it would once again situate him pretty close to matters of daily sect operations, and put him in position to know a lot of the secrets and goings on beneath the surface of things. So a plausible explanation for his authorial knowledge and insights would simply be, Barrier Peak are the flies on the wall of a lot of high-level matters. If someone breaks into a restricted area, they know about it. If someone wants something hidden, sealed, or disguised, they know about it.

Bonus angst: this would probably mean that the Barrier Peak's head disciple assisted in sealing a young Yue Qi inside the Lingxi Caves with Xuan Su. If that's Airplane, well, that's twisting a knife a bit now isn't it?

Which just leaves peak no.12, which frankly could be any damn thing. After Booze Peak and Girl Peak, the field is wide open. Dance Battle Peak. Transit System Peak. Spiritually Infused Textiles Peak.

My personal favorite, though, is Sex Worker Peak. Not only because that is the most fanfic-y option, but also because it actually kind of makes sense.

The PIDWorld is just chock full of fuck-or-die tropes, which makes there are countless substances, ailments, curses, etc that can only be cured via sex. Not just for cultivators, but also for everyone else in the world. Like imagine you're an NPC magistrate or something just out there managing your district, having only the most tangential connection to the plot, and one day you're going for a walk and you trip and fall and manage to land right in a field full of sex pollen that cropped up like weeds overnight. Because that's just how this shit works, it doesn't wait for the protagonist to exist in order to activate, it's all got to be out there all the time in order to be there when the wife plot happens, and also for various experts to have accumulated all the mandatory exposition points about how it works.

But you're just some normal guy! You don't want to die of Horny, but the best way to clear this up is not just to have sex, but to have sex with a cultivator who is at least moderately good at using the exchange of spiritual energy to purge your body of the sex pollen poison.

Unless you're lucky enough to know someone, you're probably going to be in the market for professional help here, like even apart from all the other reasons people like to hire sex workers. This is a situation that probably happens fairly often and for which "hire someone to fix it and then move on with your life" is probably the ideal solution. As a bonus, a professional sex cultivation expert is probably also going to minimize your risks for unwanted side effect like STDs and pregnancy, too.

So, imagine we have Qian Cao peak struggling under the workload of all these requests for help with dual cultivation. The problem isn't prudery, but that this stuff is so commonplace it eats up time that could also be allocated to things like research and other medical emergencies. Plus, you have political leaders (kings, princes, emperors, etc) always demanding to be sent your "best" disciples to attend to them, when quite frankly their condition is something even an outer disciple could handle in less time than it would take them to travel out to their location, and these fuckers are not-infrequently liable to try and steal your people away into concubinage too.

One day then, much like with Qing Jing and the Barrier Peak, the Qian Cao peak lord of yore gets fucking fed up and is just like, this requires it's own department. Zhangmen-shijie we're starting a new peak. I'm not asking you I'm telling you. It's a medical peak entirely devoted to sex work. My best disciple at sex, who is in the running for Head Disciple status almost entirely because of this shit, is going to be the new Peak Lord. Any time some princess gets her vagina cursed and needs dick badly, the new peak are going to handle it, while I get to finally fucking finish my research into organ transplants.

And the sect leader of that era, knowing what was good for her, was like yes okay rubber stamp that we have twelve peaks now. Twelve's a good number we probably should have done this sooner anyway. What do you mean we don't have that much mountain? Eh, we'll haul some dirt in and make it happen.

Other Sex Worker Peak Thoughts:

Obviously, raising disciples from the age of ten upwards into this kind of work is controversial at best. Depending on tone, a fic author could either accept that grooming children for sex work was a historical practice and examine the fucked-up-ness of it all, or, we could go another direction and make a case that this is generally the peak which takes on older prospective disciples.

After all, dual cultivation is actually good at helping with setbacks and restoring a damaged cultivation base. You could argue for it being the ideal cultivation approach for latecomers. There could even be a precedent for adult disciples from the other peaks transferring to the Twelfth Peak/Sex Worker Peak if they show an aptitude for the work, and for disciples to temporarily join them as part of repairing or preventing damage from qi deviations.

This could also be a contributing factor to Shen Jiu being like, I have to not only be on Qing Jing Peak but also be the absolute boss of Qing Jing Peak with as few people able to gainsay me as possible, because he's terrified of being ordered to pimp himself out.

Not that he would be, though, because I imagine the sexpert cultivators are pretty well aware of how trauma works and who does or doesn't actually have the right temperament for their business, or what jobs within that business. It's their specialty, after all. If someone is going to have a panic attack and qi deviate over doing the job, that someone is not a good candidate for the job, or for these types of treatments overall.

Sometimes Twelfth Peak loses people on account of them falling in love with their clients or deciding to take some king up on his concubinage offers, but it happens less than one might think. After all, it's basically like working for the best brothel in existence. They have rigorous hygiene and healthcare standards, you get access to all the generalized medical care from Qian Cao, travel expenses are covered and you don't have to work out of your home if you don't want to, your food and housing is supplied by the sect, you're trained in cultivation and martial arts, with a shot at achieving immortality, and you don't even have to work every day because the jobs are contingent on what's being requested, not on you making rent money. In addition to physical cultivation, you can also make and sell tons of erotic art or "love tokens" and it will sell for a lot because of the social mystique of sexy cultivators. A pair of twelfth peak lord's panties probably goes for just as much as one of Shen Qingqiu's fancy calligraphy paintings. So unless you really want to live with some dude, switching over to depending on him for your upkeep doesn't seem all that appealing as a prospect.

Additional fun with this idea is that it would also potentially be an interesting peak lord role for either Airplane or Shen Yuan to end up in. Airplane would probably be like, well I guess this is karma for putting so much gratuitous smut in my stories, and then actually manage the hell out of the whole peak and enjoy himself by only taking on the jobs he actually cares to. Not a bad gig, especially compared to his previous grind. On the other hand, Shen Yuan's internal freak out and subsequent attempts to somehow be the Sex Peak Lord while not actually having any sex would be a potential comedy/suspense goldmine.

[scarlethexelove]

Our Omega

Pairing: Alpha!WandaNat x Omega!Reader

Word Count: 5155

Warnings: Smut, Wanda and Nat have a penis, Soft!Nat, Rough!Wanda, Heat, Mating mark, Knotting, Breeding, Someone tries to attack reader but Wanda and Nat stop them, Hints to lactation kink, I really don't think there is much else.

Pt 2, Pt 3

A/n: I really hope this isn't shit. I really liked writing this. Wanda isn't too rough in this one but definitely rougher than Nat. Just sweet alphas who don't treat their sweet Omega like shit.

NO ONE IS PERMITTED TO STEAL, COPY, OR REBLOG MY WORK AS THEIR OWN

The door chimes causing your gaze to lift to the opening door. You’re shocked to see the people walking through the door. The Avengers have just walked through the door of your small bakery. Leading the group is the pack leader along with her mate. Natasha Romanoff and Wanda Maximoff, two alpha’s. The rest of the mostly alpha pack followed close behind. Normally so many alpha’s in an area won’t bother you but with you so close to your heat and being an unmated omega is making it difficult with all of them around. You put on a mask knowing you need to be your best when the most famous people in the world are in your bakery. 

With a wide smile you greet the group. “Hi, I’m Y/n. We have a wide array of baked goods for you to choose from. Just let me know what you would like and I’ll get them all ready for you.” Wanda tilts her head looking at you curiously but you just give her soft smile back. Nat is also watching you but you can’t seem to read her. The gaze of both the alpha’s on you causes a light dusting of pink to cover your cheeks.  The rest of the group looked around to see what they wanted to eat. 

Nat clears her throat. “Everyone wait outside.” She demands the rest. “But I want to look.” Tony whines. Nat turns to look at the rest. “I said wait outside. We will get everyone something.”  Nat’s demanding tone has your inner omega wanting to submit causing you to shrink in on yourself. As the rest go to wait outside the two alpha’s turn back to you noticing you’re dropped head and smaller form. “I’m so sorry mega. I thought it would be easier without everyone.” 

You wanted to be thankful for what she did but at the same time you need to be able to handle a room full of alpha’s if you want to have a successful business. But you know she just meant well by her actions. You lift your head and give her a small smile. Brushing off your previous distress and ready to help the two women with everything they need. 

With less alpha’s in the room their scents invade your senses. One of their scents laced with cinnamon and spices, reminding you of fall. The other smelling of sweet vanilla. Both of their scents are intoxicating already. Both women are very attractive but you know you can’t think like that they are already a mated pair and they probably wouldn’t want an omega like you. So you push it out of your mind and focus on running your business.

“What can I get for you?” You ask the women. They look around for a minute before Nat speaks up. “Two of everything.” You can’t help the look of shock at the woman's order. “A-are you sure?” She gives you a kind smile. “Yes please.”  You nod and start moving around to get everything you need. “Of course. I’ll have everything ready for you in a few minutes.” You move around the area gracefully. Throwing in a few extras as you go. Wanting nothing more than to satisfy the Avengers. 

You can feel their eyes following you but you are in your groove currently. Once you are done with everything they come up to the counter and Natasha pulls out her wallet. You wave your hands and shake your head. “No, no, no. It’s on the house, my treat. You guys do so much for the city. The least I can do is give you guys some food.” Nat shakes her head back at you. “I’m not sure your boss would like that. Also I insist.” She starts pulling out money ready to pay. “I’m actually the owner so I can give you whatever I want.” You tell the alpha. You would normally never talk back to an alpha, especially an Avenger but you want to get your point across. But neither of them are going to take no for an answer. Wanda takes some money out of Nat’s hands and gives it to you. You look down at the cash and back up at the alpha’s. You can tell by the looks on their faces that they will not take no for an answer. So you look back down at the cash in your hand and gasps. “This is way too much.” In your hand is almost $500 dollars, way more than what it cost to get everything. 

Both alpha’s shake their heads. “Keep it. You deserve it.” Wanda says. She has the softest and kindest smile you have ever seen. “I-I-I don’t think I can take this.” You stutter trying to hand some of the money back but neither of them will have it. Wanda takes your hands in hers. “Please take it.” You look at her hands around yours and then back up to her face. A small blush covering your face when you nod. “Okay.” You say barely above a whisper. She smiles before she and Nat take the baked goods, making their way out leaving you shocked. 

That is how your friendship with the Avengers started. After that day you saw at least one of them once a week. Sometimes alone and sometimes the whole team would come in. You built a friendship with each member but as they continue to come a crush on the two women formed. They were always so sweet and kind with you. Nat plays up a big persona of being hard and little emotion but you can see right through that facade. Which only makes your crush grow stronger, but you know you can’t act on it. So you leave it at that just a crush. 

With the Avengers frequenting your bakery your business picks up exponentially. You had to hire more employees to help you keep up. One of those being your best friend Kate Bishop. You thank the Avengers for their business and the fact they have brought in more customers for you. Always trying to give them free food but none of them ever take it. 

Today wasn’t like other days. You had 3 call offs and your heat was quickly approaching. You thought that you had a few more days but as the day drags on you know you won’t make it. You have already called Kate who had the day off hoping she could cover. She of course said she would but it would take her some time to get there. So now you’re fighting your heat and just waiting for her to get here. 

The room is filled with alpha's, some of them pausing to look at you. A hungry look in their eyes as they realize what is going on with you. You want to run and hide but you can’t leave the store unattended so you suck it up the best you can. That is until a wave of burning stabbing pain hits your lower abdomen. You wrap your arms around your stomach, hunching over as you hold in a whimper. You don’t even hear the ringing of the bell as another patron enters the building. Another stronger wave has you crumbling to the ground, a whimper escaping your lips. 

You can now faintly hear a commotion but you can’t focus on the words or voices. You look up seeing an alpha about to jump over the counter when they are pulled back harshly. There is a commanding roar of an alpha that causes you to whine and bare your neck waiting for the alpha to approach. You wish your inner omega was stronger but with your heat here you can’t control it. Two alpha’s approach you quickly crouching down next to you. You let out another whine and strain your neck more. 

“Oh milaya, none of that.” Wanda’s hand cups your cheek. Both of their scents invade your senses, calming you down slightly. You can’t help but nuzzle her hand causing her and the other woman to smile at you. A whimper escapes as another wave of pain courses through you. Leaving the women concerned for you. They have been falling for you just as much as you for them but they were worried you wouldn’t like them back or want to be involved with Avengers. 

Just then Kate rushes in the door, her eyes scanning the room seeing that there had been a scuffle. Concerned for your safety when she can’t see you. She knows your heat is close, that is until she catches a whiff of your scent. She knows that you have gone into heat and how dangerous it is for you to have been here. She rushes around the counter stopping when she sees you curled in on yourself as Nat and Wanda crouch next to you. Wanda’s hand is still on your cheek. She lets out a growl at the woman. She knows that you aren’t in any danger with them but she instinctively wants to protect you while you’re so vulnerable. Neither of them move their concern only on you. 

“Kate, we are here to help. We don’t want to hurt her.” Nat speaks calmly to the other omega. Kate looks from them back to you. She can see you, how you're trying to nuzzle in further to Wanda. She lets out a sigh. “Sorry alpha.” She puts her head down. Becoming part of the Avengers pack as Yelena’s omega has gotten her close to them and she didn’t want to disrespect the pack leader. “It’s ok. I know you are only trying to protect your friend.” Nat moves closer to you leaning down and moving to pick you up. She acts slowly to give you the chance to pull away but you don’t. It makes the woman smile as she picks you up. You quickly wrap yourself tightly around her and nuzzle into her scent gland. Breathing in her cinnamon scent that calms you. 

“I think we will take her to the compound, she will be safe there. I don’t trust that after those alphas coming after her that she will be safe. They could easily follow her home.” Nat speaks to both Wanda and Kate. They both nod in agreement. “Kate, do you have this here?” Nat asks as she holds you closer to her. “Yeah I think I got this.” Kate replies before the door chimes. All three women go on defense growling at the scent of another alpha but all calm when they realize who it is. Kate’s mate Yelena struts through the door holding up her hands in surrender to the three as you whimper in Nat’s arms. 

Yelena smirks at the older alpha when she sees you in her arms, wrapped tightly around the woman like a koala. Nat rolls her eyes when she sees how her sister is looking at her. “Lena!” Kate says bouncing over to her and throwing her arms around her neck pecking her lips. Yelena’s hands placed firmly on Kate’s hips. “Yel help Kate out here we are taking Y/n to the compound. Some alphas attacked so maybe help her clean up a bit.” Yelena looks around at the mess brows furrowed as Nat speaks. That is until she catches your sweet scent. Instantly understanding your predicament and understanding why the three were growling at her as she came in the door. 

“Please be careful you two.” Wanda tells the alpha and her omega, handing Kate some money. Kate looks at the money and then back up to Wanda confused. “For damages.” Wanda explains. Kate is about to argue back about that but the look Wanda gives her tells her there is no room for that. She is second in command of the pack and will not take no for an answer. So Kate gives her a nod moving to start cleaning up the place, Yelena helping her mate clean as the two women leave with you. 

Once the alphas get you to the compound they take you to the spare bedroom next to theirs not wanting to overstep any boundaries you might have. It has been hard for them to fight their inner alphas to not to just claim you as theirs. You’re currently wrapped around Wanda tightly as she walks into the room. She goes to put you on the bed but you don’t let go. “Malyshka can you let go?” She asks softly, but your only response is to shake your head and whine. Being in their arms is the most comfort you have had in a long time dulling the ache.

So the women decide to take you into their own room. If it provides you the comfort you need they will take the suffering to make you feel even the slightest bit better. Wanda sits down on the bed with you still wrapped around her. Your head in her neck as you let her scent drown out your senses. Nat walked away from the two of you for a few minutes before coming back. In her arms is a plethora of blankets. She sets them on the bed next to Wanda. “Detka?” She crouches down in front of you two and says softly. “Can you please come out? I brought you blankets for a nest.” Her voice is still soft, watching you for any movement. 

Slowly you pull your head out, eyes landing on the pile. You hesitantly move not wanting to leave the comfort of the alpha but your inner omega is telling you to build your nest. “Thank you Nat.” You whisper, taking the blankets and moving to a corner of the room. It has been a losing battle to fight your inner omega who just craves the women. But you don’t want to overstep too much so you build your nest in the corner. You crawl into it moving things around till you’re comfortable. 

Being around the alphas has dulled your pain. It is still there but in less intense waves, but the slick has increased. You can now feel it coating your thighs. The two have watched you intently, hard uncomfortable bulges in their pants. Wanting nothing more than to claim you as their own. It isn’t until your small voice breaks the silence in the room that they break from the trance. “Alphas?” You whimper. The women quickly move over to you concerned that something could be wrong. You look up to them with tears in your eyes, scared to ask anything more of them but craving their comfort. 

Wanda’s hand gently cups your face, her thumb rubbing over your cheek gently. “Yes, omega. Do you need anything?” Wanda’s softness makes you purr as you nuzzle. “Please stay.” Your voice is barely above a whisper, but they hear you. The women share a look before they agree. Nat gets in front of you which you instantly cuddle into her side, your head instinctively nuzzling into her neck. Wanda slots herself behind you. Both of them cuddle you tightly. 

Nat notices it instantly, your warm slick slowly coating her thigh. You start grinding against her thigh. Your brain is not even registering it until you let out a soft moan. A look of panic crossing your face when you realize what you are doing. “I-I-I’m sorry.” You try to pull away but their arms wrapping around you tightly keeps you in place. “What do you need mega?” Wanda kisses your shoulder and mumbles. You let out another whine at her words wanting to beg them to use you, breed you, mark you, to become their mate. “We can’t help you if you don’t tell us, sweet girl.” Nat kisses your forehead letting her lips linger there. 

You look up to the woman in front of you. “I want you, both of you.” You whisper. They are both slightly shocked but not entirely due to your recent actions. Nat’s hand cups your cheek. “Are you sure? This isn’t just your heat?” You shake your head no at her words. “Wanted you for a while. Didn’t think you wanted me. I’m nothing special.” You look down out of embarrassment waiting for the rejection, but it doesn’t come. Nat’s finger hooks under your chin, making you look back up  at her. She gently kisses your lips before pulling back your breaths mingling together in the open space. “We want you too, and you are special. You are the most kind and gentle person we have ever met.” 

It’s so quick that you don’t even notice. Wanda’s arms are removed from you and Nat has pushed you on your back hovering over you. “If you want us to stop or you change your mind you can tell us.” Nat tells you gently pecking your lips. “Are you sure you want this mega?” Wanda asks you. You nod your head. “We need words pretty girl.” You look at Wanda who is laying on her side with her head propped on her hand. “Want you.” Was the only words that slipped past your lips. In an instant with red whisps all of your clothes are gone. You look at Wanda a bit shocked, a smirk playing on her lips. 

Soon the alphas' clothes soon follow. Their rock hard cocks springing free of their confines. You feel Nat’s slap against your stomach causing you to look down. Your eyes widen at her sheer size wondering how she will fit. Your eyes then trail to Wanda. She looks even bigger than Nat, not by much but a noticeable difference. You can feel more of your slick coating your thighs as you whine. 

Nat kisses your head as her hand guides her cock to your folds. Swiping through them coating herself in your arousal, her tip nudging against your sensitive bundle of nerves. You let out a moan as she keeps nudging. When she is satisfied, she moves the tip down to your entrance, looking at you for your confirmation that you're still ok. When you give her a nod, she slowly starts to push in. Slowly sinking her cock into your wet and warm cunt. 

“Fuck so tight.” Nat moans as your walls clamp around her member. You’re so thankful for your heat, your slick allowing her to slip in easily. You wrap your legs around her waist as she sinks in further. When her thighs meet your ass you gasp at the fullness. You’ve never felt this full in your life and it feels so right. 

Nat gives you some time to adjust to the stretch fighting her inner alpha to just pound into you mercilessly. Wanda turns your head leaning in to kiss you. Her hands reach between your bodies as she finds your breasts. Her fingers expertly tweaking your nipples causing you to moan in her mouth distracting you from the fact that Nat has pulled almost all the way out before sinking back in. Her pace is slow at first just getting used to you. You feel so good and she doesn’t want to cum too early. 

When Nat feels like she can, her pace quickens. She fucks into you gently, her thrust deep as she angle just right. Hitting your spot deep inside. Wanda’s mouth is still on yours as she swallows all of your moans. Enjoying your full breast in her hands, groping at pinching her nipples as her mate fucks into you. 

You don’t expect the alpha to be so gentle as she fucks you but it feels so good from her. Her caring and soft side showed through with every thrust of her hips. She leans up grabbing your hips watching as her cock disappears into your hole. Entranced by your sweet scent and how you take her so well. How your hips buck into her to meet her thrust trying to get her that much deeper. The outline of her cock bulging from your skin, she presses down and a loud moan is escaping you. She looks back up to watch as Wanda devours you, catching every whimper and moan until you can’t keep up anymore. 

“So pretty and made for us. Taking me so well.” Nat praises you. “So perfectly wrapped around my cock squeezing me so tight. Fuck.” She moans when you clench. Your panting, eyes closed as your orgasm builds. One of Wanda’s hands drifting down between both of your bodies finding your bundle of nerves pinching it between her fingers. You cry out in pleasure and pain as she continues. Both women bring you so close to the edge. Your walls squeezing Nat tight, her grunts and moans filling your ears. Her knot starts to form hitting against your entrance, just begging to fill you. 

Wanda’s hand continues toying with your clit as Nat drives her hips into you. Your legs are slightly shaking around Nat’s hips. She leans back down the more her knot swells. You're both close to cumming. She kisses your scent gland sending small waves of pleasure. Her hips become more erratic when her knot fully forms. Slamming against your entrance. With a few more thrust her knot pops in and her teeth sink into your neck. You cry out in ecstasy as your orgasm washes over you. She marks you claiming you as her omega. Filling you with her cum as your back arches. Grinding into you as white hot ropes of cum fill you. Your cum coating her cock as your walls squeeze her knot, milking her dry. She lets your neck go and licks your wound clean. You look up at her curious and hopeful eyes. She smiles and leans her head giving you access to the opposite side from where Wanda bit. You lean up sinking your teeth in her scent gland. She moans out and you don’t know how it is possible but you can feel a few more spurts of cum filling you. Which just causes you to moan around her bite. You release her and lick it clean just as she had done for you. 

You’re both panting, Nat’s knot locking you together until it deflates. Wanda’s hands move away giving you two a chance to bond. Nat takes the time to gently move you both so that you are on your side. You feel the bond growing strong as you bask in the aftermath. She gently kisses your lips before leaning her forehead against yours. The room is silent until you break it. “Thank you.” You whisper between you two. Nat smiles. “No need to thank me detka. I have been wanting to do that for a long time.” The three of you laugh. It’s funny how you all wanted each other but none of you thought the other would. “Me too.” You smile, your breath still heavy between you two. 

When Nat’s knot finally deflates she removes herself from you. You let out a whimper at the lost feeling empty as your mixed cum leaks out of you. Wanda kisses your shoulder and mumbles against the naked skin. “My turn malyshka. I want you to ride me.” You look back at her, your eyes wide. “I-I’ve never.” You stutter a little having never ridden anyone before. She kisses your shoulder again. “That’s ok detka. You’re going to look so beautiful bouncing on my cock.” 

You feel Wanda shift as she lays on her back. You turn yourself to look at her. She has her hands behind her head and her cock standing proud. You don’t know how she was so patient when you look at her cock. Her tip is angry red and pre-cum has leaked all down her shaft. Her hand moves to wrap around and gently jerk herself. She had wanted to save all of her cum for you to fill you even fuller than you already were. You hesitate for a moment before getting up and shifting. Throwing your leg over her hips hovering over her cock. Her hand is firmly around her cock lining it up with your entrance. You look at her for a second when she gives you a reassuring smile. You give her a small smile before you start to slowly sink down on her. 

Wanda moves her hand back behind her head as she watches you sink down. “Fuck your right Natty. So fucking tight. Fuck even after you fucked her she is tight.” You blush at her words, finally sitting fully in her lap. You didn’t think you could feel this full. Both of them fit you so perfectly like they were made just for you. 

You grind your hips experimentally, the movement causing you and Wanda to moan. You can see the cocky smirk on her face as she waits for you to fuck yourself on her cock. “Fuck I can feel both of your cums leaking all over my cock.” She bucks her hips up, enticing you to move. You groan, taking her hint as you lift yourself up before slamming yourself down. You set a slow and steady pace as you figure out your moments. Bringing yourself up before dropping back down. Wanda enjoys the sight of your breast bouncing every time you sink back down. 

But your pace is a bit slow for the woman. “Ride me like you mean it detka. I want to see you fuck yourself on my cock.” You whimper, nodding your head and picking up the pace. Bouncing on her cock and grinding your hips when you meet her pelvis. The sight in front of her is perfect as the perfect omega rides her. Even at this angle Wanda can see a perfect outline of her cock filling your tight hole. Moaning knowing that you're so full of her and that she is going to fill you even more. 

Whimpers and moans fill the room as you continue to fuck yourself on her cock. Soon you feel hands on your waist as Nat moves closer to you two she helps guid you quicker on fucking her mate. Wanda’s hands moving to your plush thighs digging her fingers into the soft flesh. Starting to buck her hips up to meet you. Fucking you harder than Nat did. 

“Such a whore for us already. Taking our fat cocks in your tight little hole. Look at that.” Wanda presses her hand down hard on the bulge that appears on your lower abdomen. You cry out from the pleasure and her words, looking down to see her cock moving inside of you. Your walls clench her tightly at the sights. “Oh fuck you like that don’t you little whore. Love being fucked by your alpha’s.” Wanda’s moans, her words a stark contrast to Nat’s praises. She is rougher with her thrusts. Showing a different side to each woman. 

Nat turns your head towards her and kisses you hungrily. Wanda sits up planting her feet and thrusting up hard and rough. You love the difference between the two. A gentle Nat and a rougher Wanda. It turns you on immensely more slick coating Wanda’s cock the harder she drives her hips up into you. Nat still helping you fuck yourself down on her cock. 

“Such a perfect cock drunk whore for us. So pretty being our little cum dump, just for us to use.” With every word that Wanda speaks it sends you closer to the edge, your walls clamping down on her. You don’t know how she can keep her rough pace as your walls suffocate her cock. She moans as your walls tighten, her knot forming and pressing against your entrance begging to slip in. Wanda nibbles at your perky nipples. “Want to be bred full of our cum? Fill you with our pups?” You moan into Nat’s mouth mumbling a yes. 

“These tits would look so perfect, full of milk, your belly swollen with our pups.” She bites down on your nipple causing you to break the kiss from nat and cry out. “Mmm.” You whimper, her thrust becoming erratic as your knot fully forms. Nat lets your waist go and Wanda wraps her arms around you thrusting up harder and faster. You didn’t think she could go any harder or faster but it has you moaning louder. Your arms tightly wrapped around her as your nails dig into her back causing her to moan at the sting.

Wanda moves her head to the other side of your neck biting into your other scent gland as her knot slips inside locking you two together. You scream out and throw your head back as your vision blurs, cumming harder than you ever have before. Wanda’s cum joins Nat’s deep inside you filling the void and feeding the desires of your inner omega. Your whole body trembles in her hold as your bond forms. She pulls away, licking your wound. She lets you take the side opposite of Nat’s mark cementing your bond to both women. Small spurts of cum still fill you as Wanda grinds helping you both to ride out your highs. 

When you come down your rigid body slumps into Wanda nuzzling into her neck. Her arms wrapped around you tightly, kissing the side of your head. Her fingers gently rubbing at your back. Your arms loosely wrapped around her exhaustion taking over as you close your eyes. 

“Are you ok sweet girl?” Wanda questions kissing your head again. You hum in response, throat raw from your previous actions. “I wasn’t too rough was I?” You could hear the concern in her voice. So you pull back a soft smile playing on your lips. “No, it was perfect. Both of you.” Your voice is hoarse. You look back at Nat who pecks your lips. You would think that Nat would be jealous of how your body reacted to Wanda but all you can see is the love in her eyes. The stark contrast between the two is something you already love. How gentle Nat praising you as she fucked into you and how Wanda was rougher degrading you. 

When Wanda’s knot deflates they both help you up on wobbly legs taking you to a warm bath and cleaning you up. Your heat subsiding for the moment, a relief you thought you would never have. You’re all now cuddled up in your nest, your head on Nat’s chest, Wanda’s arms wrapped around your waist. Your eyes droop shut as exhaustion from the day's events gets to you. If someone had told you that you would end up being the omega mate to two Avengers you would have laughed in their face but right now wrapped up with them is all you could have ever wished for. The love of two powerful and amazing alphas and they are all yours. “I love you two.” You mumble so close to sleep. Both women were smiling. “We love you too.” Wanda kisses your shoulder and Nat kisses your head. “Our omega.”

[miss-vanta-likes-to-write]

Part 2 to Life Line

(I ain't) Sorry

Pairing: cheater!Price x wife!reader

CW: infidelity. angst. idk is price a cuck now? 18+

Middle fingers up, put them hands high. Wave it in his face, tell him, boy bye (sorry). Tell him, boy bye (sorry) boy bye. Middle fingers up, I ain't thinking 'bout you.

It's been six months since the new rules of John Price's marriage had been established. In public, he is still Captain John Price, a fearless leader, highly decorated, and on track to be a major. John Price was thought to have it all. Two gorgeous children, a darling little girl named Iyana aged six and a charming baby boy named Jackie aged four (who everyone says looks like John made him in the same fashion as a sea sponge. That is to say, through asexual reproduction because they look so much alike).

To top it all off, he had a gorgeous and smart wife who worked with a notable contractor that dealt with information gathering, sorting, and code breaking. Said to be highly requested and sought after to work with military operations, both official and private military based.

Yes, Captain John Price to the public eye, had it all. Despite the blood on his hands, the blackness on his soul and actions, the Lord above gave him a loving family. He was always the man of the hour when he walked into a room.

Right now, though, he didn't feel like a man of the hour that he was thought to be. Right now, he watches his daughter pedal her little pink bike around the front driveway. Her hair ribbons are lopsided, giggles echoing on the wind. It almost sounds and feels like a dream. She's got light up fairy wings, a fairy dress, and tiara, all high-quality custome made in an array of colors and gem stones. It's cute. He thinks it is cute, and it makes his little girl happy. What he can't stand, however, are the pink and white rhinestone cowboy boots. They cost a pretty penny, and she wears them everywhere. She wears them with every outfit.

John hates it. Or better yet, he hates where these items come from.

His son, while he has always been easily pleased, has particularly enjoyed his little hobby horse toy. The saddle has his name painted on the side in deep blue letters that stand out against the deep brown wood.

John hates the damn horse toy and also hates the suspected origins. Both of these things are reminders that his marriage is on the rocks and that it's a reflection of his mistakes. Another man buying his children toys. He has little doubt that it is the same man he is forced to work with.

He leans against the support beam of the front porch, cigar to his lips. He was watching his daughter and keeping also keeping an ear out for his son, who slept in the house. The three of them are waiting for the fourth member of the household. A sleek black car pulls up to the house and Iyana abandons her bike to greet the love of John's life.

You.

His darling, sweet, loving wife, who he wouldn't trade for the world. Even if you are being difficult. It doesn't matter though he's sure this tantrum can't go on forever.

Now you wanna say you're sorry. Now you wanna call me cryin'. Now you gotta see me wildin'. Now I'm the one that's lyin'. And I don't feel bad about it. It's exactly what you get. Stop interrupting my grinding. (You interrupt my grinding)

You shut off the car, and the door swings open. Your saccharine voice carries just about your daughter. "My love! I've missed you!" Nimble fingers push sunshades back onto your forehead as you lean down to sweep her up into a hug.

"Do you like my dress? It came in the mail today!" She shouts, "Daddy helped me into it when we got home from school!"

"It's lovely, my love. You look like a pretty fairy princess." Your eyes appraise her dress and accessories appreciatively. When you finally lay your eyes on John, you offer him a polite smile. "John, I'm glad you could get off early to pick the kids up today."

John isn't focused on your words. His eyes are clearly looking you over, desperatewith want. Since the new rules were put in place and boundaries made known, he has made it clear that he misses you. Each time, you reminded him of the rules and that he was allowed to see other people. You watch as his eyes finally land on the space above your cleavage. Right on the dainty gold chain with only one charm on it.

"You didn't wear that to work, did you?" John grumbles as you walk past him.

"John, am I not allowed to wear jewelry now?" You ask, already over this conversation and wear it is about to head to.

"Sweetheart." He still calls you that. The pet name bristles you, but you tolerate it for the sake of your children. "At least grant me the decency of not wearing his bloody branding in public."

"Iyana, go pack your bag for grand mum's and poppop's house." You usher her towards the steps. She dutifully says yeah and how she's packing all of her new little dresses. Finally, alone with him, you turn to face your husband. "Why does it matter, John?"

A deep sigh escapes him, and he's a bit flustered with frustration. You suppose you'd be frustrated, too, if work was hell. And to be clear, it was only hell because of the new long-term assignments he and several different teams were coordinating on. You raise your eyebrows at him, waiting patiently for his answer.

"It matters because it bothers me." He finally gets out, "it causes me to feel upset."

You take note of the carefully chosen words. Efforts of his therapy sessions peaking through. While you still won't go with him, he goes once a week when he isn't deployed. The habit started a month into your new reality. Shortly after, he began to be a more present father to the kids. Family weekends that he plans (which you suspect he does as often as possible to keep you with him), attending parent teacher conferences and evenings, and just generally paying more attention when he is home. It's great for the kids, but it's too little too late for you.

"Okay, John." You dismiss him and make your way to the kitchen with his footsteps following close behind. The conversation is clearly not over for you both.

"Was work fine today? I didn't see you at the all hands meeting on base." He leans against the kitchen island.

"My schedule was packed, so I sent my junior to fill in for me. Another PMC is contacting the company they requested me specifically." You dig around the fridge searching for a snack. His eyes are on you again. They always are these days. Since you reentered the workforce and quickly rose in rank, you've changed. You're more confident, more stern, and have leaned into the feeling of being desirable again by other men and women. Opportunities flowed easier to you. Your former boss had welcomed you back with open arms. Her exact words were something along the lines of "Mrs. Price, it's good to have you back. Now, the numbers can make sense again, and I can prepare to retire!"

John huffs, "Yeah, I saw. Kate was annoyed the entire time with the poor girl. And she was too afraid to work with Simon."

You find a snack and smile. "How is Simon?"

"You should know." He bites back with a bit of force. His blue eyes shift away from you, "You aren't sleeping with my lieutenant, are you?" It's a soft question you almost miss. He almost sounds insecure at the idea of one of his boys looking at you that way. And with the rules that are now in place, there's nothing to stop you but their friendship to him.

"John... Now, why would I do such a thing?" You sneer and then laugh. "There isn't anything going on between me and Simon."

"Then why won't you speak with me on base?" He furrows his brow. "People are literally looking at you two funny." And the 'They're looking at me with concern' is left unsaid.

"Because he is the chosen liason I picked for your team?" The scoff you let out is near comical, "Don't be so vain, John Price. If I was going to sleep with anyone it would be Kyle as he is the only one that apologized for not saying anything sooner about you fucking around behind my back. Maybe Johnny because he's good-looking. Tragic that they both are loyal to you, a skill they picked up from somewhere. "

His face turns red with agitation. His eyes go back to the necklace and the charm around your neck. It's a small, dainty, gold little heart, and when the light catches it, an engraved series of numbers and letters can be seen faintly. "So if not them, then who?"

"You know who. Don't be daft." You shrug your shoulders, "I'm gonna be gone all weekend after we drop the kids off at your parents. So you have the house to yourself."

"I'd much rather prefer we spent time together." He tries and smiles sweetly at you.

"I can't. My friend is dying to spend time with me, and he insists upon it, or he will simply die."

It's a beat of silence for a moment. Before he looks away from you. "Is he the one who sent those gifts to the kids? Which I don't appreciate, by the way."

"No. I'm not seeing him tonigt." You say leaving the kitchen, "Phillip has to go back to the States tonight. Won't be back till three days before you all move out."

"Could you at least tell that fuck to not give my kids gifts. It's rather rude, don't you think?" He glares.

"Phillip didn't give the kids those gifts. He gave me money, and then I got them things they've been asking for."

"And the necklace?" He asks. He almost seems like he doesn't want to know. But he keeps digging the hole deeper.

"From my other boyfriend." You glance over your shoulder at him, "instead of worrying about me and who I'm seeing. You should worry about yourself."

The tension is only cut at the sound of your daughter calling for help. She wants help with closing her backpack up.

That night after you and John played happy family infrint of his parents, the drive back home was tense. A quiet that could be heard from miles away even as the radio played, trying its best to ease both of your nerves. It's subtle, but you notice how his eyes cut to you every so often.

"Sweetheart."

"The kids aren't with us John."

"Don't be difficult please."

Your eyes hurt with how they roll. "What is it John?"

"I want to know when we can give us another try." He asks quietly, "I miss you." He grips the steering wheel tightly, knuckles turning white. "I don't want you running around that fuck Graves, or whoever else your tend to see. You're my wife and I'm your husband. We should at least try to fix our marriage."

You don't say anything and keep your eyes in the passing scenery. This conversation isn't new. It comes up often and when it does you fight like hell to hold your ground. Another deep sigh and you wait in silence for him to continue.

"I love you, always will and never stopped." He says, and the sentiment is there. The way he says it reminds you of days when you were ignorant to his infidelity.

But then your mind conjures up the rage and hurt you experienced when you first saw what was in that folder the private investigator gave you. The embarrassment you felt when you asked Simon, Kyle and Johnny if they knew. They way that none of them could look you in the eyes for weeks. Or the grief that resurface each time your mind wanders over the memory of how he found someone who was similar to you in appearance from before your first child together.

"John, can we not tonight?" You simply avoid his eyes, "We can still get a divorce or you can deal with the way things are. I'm not revisiting any conversations about us or therapy."

"Are you doing this to hurt me back?" He asks. It's the most direct he's ever been with admitting that his actions hurt you. Before it was always a deflection. He wasn't right in the head after missions, he was trying to cope with the miscarriage, anything but outright saying he was a cheater. The tone of his voice cracks a bit with sorrow, but you don't budge.

"No." You state and turn up the radio, ending the conversation.

The car rolls to a stop in the driveway and you hurry out of the car and into the house. You don't want anymore questions or comments from him about the marriage he ruined. You don't want to deal with any nasty emotions that can't be fixed with the wine and sex that is waiting for you. An hour later you're finishing up packing, the house is quiet. The shrill ring of the doorbell pierces the silence of the house. It takes a moment but you hear John walking around downstairs towards the door. There's a bit of a sick thrill that shivers through you at who you know he will find on the otherside of that door. It won't be Phillip, he had already sent his messages that he would call you when he's back in the states.

You zip up your suitcase, check your hair once more in the mirror. When you get down the steps you're mer with John's more than angry glare that seems more hurt than anything. It's ignored as you pass the living room where he is.

You swing open the door, "Hey sweety."

"Hallo Meine Liebe." You're greeted with a hug from a strong embrace, "I'm hoping the guys will leave us be this weekend. They have been irritating since seeing you today and calling your charm necklace a fancy set of dog tags."

In the living room John closes his eyes as he hears you leave. Your laugh trails on the end of your words. And his heart absolutely aches at the idea of you with another man, much less another one he doesn't really like.

"Kökö, your I.D number is on it. Of course they would say that."

a.n: one more part and then I'm done with this mini series. Thank you all for supporting me.

All Night (final)

[ellephantasm]

Danny phantom x dc

I love the idea that amity park hates the justice league but i also wanna pair it with the idea that they love more obscure or lesser known teams

Like doom patrol is up there with the favorites maybe crazy hane taught danny a bit about how to control his wide array of powers or cliff talks to danny about getting to grieve their past lives while celebrating their new chances. Or danny the street befriending dani and always offering her a safe street on her travels

The outlaws get a good reputation for having an undead as a leader and also for being hunted by the government

Even better if they absolutely love some random almost forgotten teams like the h dial team

[satocidal]

cw: exhibitionism, possessive suguru <3

⋆·˚ ༘ * Now One thing about Cult Leader! Suguru is that he loves seeing your fat tears rolling down the apple of your cheeks, he revels in knowing he did that...

Something akin to a whine escapes his lips as you, his pretty little assistant suck him off, his eyes stuck on your eyes, a hand resting on the back of your head.

The meeting continued as per usual. It had become a slight habit now, a bad habit - you would start mouthing him off, telling him he was wrong about so and so numbers and well, then had have to remind you were just a monkey :(

albeit, his favourite one.

So very simply, with just a single slap to your cheek, softly, just to remind you, he would spread his legs and lean back, not a single care about the array of people who were there at his beck and call - this was important, this was you.

“Ah fuck that’s perfect,” Suguru whines again, acutely aware that he'll punish for making him sound so pathetic in front of all these fuckers later - admiring your movements, the way your head bobbed, the way his juices were coated all over your face. The way you were drinking him in, trying to shove as much of his length possible, a desperate hand begging to be allowed to fondle his balls.

He loved how needy you got.

And that was when the second slap landed, fingers combing through your hair, only to yank your cock-drunk face away, a scoff as he stared at you, "Did I say you can touch me?"

How could you not?

He looked so good. It was aggravating - rewarding - magnetizing, it was everything all at once.

and fuck—you really, really need his cock in your mouth.

A shake of your head, he could tell that head of yours was so empty, contrast to how sharp you were, which was the only thing that had compelled him to take you in

Well, that and the fact that he was a tad bit obsessed with you.

So you withdraw your hand, this time his hand guided you - finally - a beckoning, all his care to make sure you were doing fine between his legs, that you would also enjoy pleasing him, that this was a habit for you too.

Then came the firm shove, slowly, steadily, your nose pressed to his crotch and he kept you there, enjoying the sight. The cold breeze of the living room fan contrasts with the glossy layer of oil he’d rubbed all over you earlier, goosebumps erupting up your thighs and back.

"hold it f'me," he mumbled, a play, pretending he cared about those present, his hand reaching for the papers on the table, toying with the pieces as he urged some man to continue - an apology muttered through his teeth, a faux smile ever present, mind only stuck on the choked whimpers you could pass.

And you held it in always so well, he'd trained you for that after all, you were his best, his cute little assistant - how foolish.

But this was a show.

A reminder to everyone that this pet was his - and while he only smiled when any one of those business partners commented about you - you knew he didn't like it.

Evident in the slight cock of his brow, evident in the way his hips would start bucking - no longer using your mouth to just warm his cock but now fucking it - as a reminder.

For you and for them, often, for himself.

[arcaneauthor]

Skz reacting to you kissing them in front of the other members

Warnings: um some kissing ig? Nothing else really

Tags: established relationships, kissing, so much fluff, seungmin being a little menace like always, I think that’s it

A/n: have this while you wait for my long hyunjin one shot! Also I just started writing skz and don’t fully know how to write their personalities yet so pls be kind🙏

────୨ৎ────

Chan:

I kinda feel like this would be a normal thing for y’all?

Like you would frequently come by the studio while skz is recording to visit him

And you’d always end up giving him a little hello and goodbye kiss

It was always just a peck but you’d think you two were full on groping each other by the way the members start gagging and groaning

They honestly should be used to it by now but they just can’t help but tease their dad leader

Mainly seungmin

“Ew you like kissing old men?”

But Chan’s used to it by now and just rolls his eyes and focuses back on his work

But he can’t hide the smile on his face

He kinda likes when the members tease him, it really makes them feel like family

Minho:

Would definitely turn it into a spectacle

Ik he doesn’t normally like skin ship from the other member that much so many people think he wouldn’t like pda from the reader but I think it’d be quite the opposite

Like I feel like he’d be the type that would grab you and pull you in closer when you try to just give him a peck in the dorm

Like we’re talking turning it into a full on make out session

And he’s fully aware the members are there, that’s partly why he does it

He thinks it’s kinda funny to get a reaction out of them

I feel like there’d be a mix array of both groaning an wolf whistling from the others

Either way he’d just throw a middle finger to the members over his shoulder as he smirks into the kiss

Changbin:

I actually kinda feel like changbin would be a little embarrassed

Like at first he’d kinda forget the other members are there and kinda get into it

And then when he’d hear the reaction from the members he’d pull away with a little blush on his cheeks

Would have that cute little embarrassed smile that he does as he lowers his head a little as he murmurs a “shut up” to the members

(If you’re a stay I feel like you definitely know which smile I’m talking about)

Would totally never admit to anybody that he was blushing

Like the other members maybe Chan would tease him like “aw binnies embarrassed”

And changbin being his loud self would be like “HUH? YOU THINK ID GET EMBARRASSED OVER SOMETHING LIKE THIS?”

Like my mind immediately went to that men in colorful pants vlive he did with Chan and Han when he was yelling at chan for calling him out on rapping his line too fast and he was like “YOU THINK I RAPPED FAST CAUSE I WAS NERVOUS?” Lol

Just imagine him saying it like that if you’ve seen that live

Jisung:

This man would be SHOOK

Like I’m talking about pulling away like he’s been BURNED

Quokka cheeks are flaming red

Why do I almost feel like this man would let out a surprised yelp as if you’ve just attacked him lmao

Looks between you and the members with wide eyes like “did that really just happen?”

unlike with the others I feel like the members wouldn’t make teasing comments towards you guys

They’d just be on the floor ROLLING at Han for getting so flustered

And even though you were the cause of it he’d still hide his face behind you to escape his embarrassment

Hyunjin:

Feel like he wouldn’t get too into the kiss knowing the others are there

But also would definitely lean into you a bit

For some reason I just feel like hyunjin would be an amazing kisser

I mean have you seen those luscious lips??

Anyways that’s a story for another fic lol I’m getting distracted

like Chan I’d feel like he’d get his sassy eye roll going on when the members made a comment

With how much it seems that hyunjin and seungmin play around with each other seungmin would definitely tease the shit out of him

And hyunjin would give him that signature bombastic side eye

I feel like seungmin would keep it going to the point of hyunjin just eventually standing up to literally pounce on him

Seungmin would just be laughing like a maniac the whole time

Felix:

I actually feel like Felix wouldn’t be as embarrassed as you’d think

Like Ik he’s a smol bean but down deep I feel like Felix is actually pretty confident

Not in a cocky way but like he’s sure of himself yk?

Like I feel like he’d just smile into it

Turns it into a bit of a longer but still soft and sweet kiss

Just completely ignoring the noises from the members in the background

Like I think he’d just be in his own little world with you

After y’all pull away he just pulls you to sit facing forward on his lap and hugs you from behind

Has THE brightest smile on his face as he does it

Seungmin:

I kinda feel like seungmin wouldn’t like you giving him pda

Not like to the point of getting angry or anything

But I kinda feel like he’d pull an “ew” face lol

(And I don’t mean this as being bad or anything, I myself don’t really love pda so I get it lol)

But you probably do it to just playfully annoy him

Which is why you’d probably be giggling with the members at him

“I hate you guys” but he’d say it with a smile on his face so you knew he wasn’t actually upset about it

He’d probably give you a long kiss later in his room to make up for it

Jeongin:

He wouldn’t go as far as to immediately yank away like jisung

But he’d definitely be a shy baby

Ik he looks all grown up and stuff these days but I feel like little baby bread is still under there somewhere lol

Like his eyes would widen mid kiss when he really processes that you’re kissing him in front of everyone

The members wouldn’t so much as tease him like with the others as they would moan and groan about seeing their little maknae doing “adult stuff” lol

Poor thing would definitely turn red, covering his face with his hands as he sunk down

Would honestly be wishing the couch would just swallow him up

Probably wouldn’t make eye contact with you for the rest of the night because he’d just start immediately blushing lol

Also would probably keep his distance cause anytime your hands so much as touched the members would tease him about y’all making sure you weren’t “moving too fast”

End notes: well I officially finished this at 5am lmao. Guess I better head to bed🫡

[loveemagicpeace]

🎨🪞Sun signs & things🍹

Cancer people are susceptible to accidents in the home. They are also prone to becoming victims of theft. Cancer, which is ruled by the Moon and has water as its element, can be likened to the shifting tides of the oceans. Like the tides, Cancer is the sign of powerful forces moving under the surface. That surface, however, is quite difficult to penetrate, for Cancerians tend to build up an elaborate array of defenses to hide their deep feelings and extreme sensitivity.

Gemini people are prone to accidents while traveling, especially by air. Their fickle natures also tend to arouse unexpected anger in others, the depth of which Geminis often misjudge. Gemini people do not sit back and watch the scenery go by. As a Gemini, you are endlessly curious about everything and must be part of the busy passing scene. Duality is your most famous trait. You usually want more than one of everything. Things get very dull for you unless you have a constant change of scenery. Variety is your game.

Taurus people have a tendency to get involved in violent situations that have to do with love or money. They often antagonize others and incite the passions of lovers because of their stubbornness and possessiveness. Your greatest strength resides in your tenacity and steady, relentless drive. You look for permanence in career, love, marriage, and home. Living with you isn’t always easy. You can be dogmatic, secretive, stingy, opinionated, and suspicious, and your silent manner may conceal feelings of envy and rivalry.You like to entertain those you are fond of.

Aries people are susceptible to harm from fire and sharp instruments. They are also prone to accidents involving high speed, and tend to get into violent and dangerous situations. Since your nature is to express power, you treat opposition as an annoyance to be brushed out of the way. You are a natural leader who exudes self-confidence. Happily, you are also generous about helping others in a crisis. You have an uncrackable optimism. If success is not immediate, you tend to lose interest and go in search of other excitement. You can be very impatient. You like to be in charge—you want to control your own projects and plans and not be under anyone else’s thumb.

Leo people tend to be bombastic and challenging, ,and often unknowingly provoke others into impulsive violence. They are also prone to being victims of slander. While others wait in the wings, you bask in the spotlight. You don’t have to look for a role to play in life. You’ve found it. When you enter a room you secretly hope everyone will stand up. When real life does not supply all the excitement you need, you try to create your own. Your public image is very important to you. You have an unshakable belief in your luck and quickly bounce back from despondency.

Virgo people sometimes arouse anger and violence in others because of their tendency to interfere, their critical tongues, and their unemotional attitudes. Your emotional life is a constant striving to bring order out of chaos. Although you have a great capacity for love, love alone is not enough for you to be happy. The Virgin stands for purity of purpose. You have higher motives. You want to be of use. You have an excellent memory, an analytical mind, and are known for crystal-clear thinking.

Libra people tend to stir up ill feelings from others in situations having to do with love. Because they are indecisive and sometimes make a declaration of love too easily, Librans both anger and disappoint lovers. They also have a tendency to be fickle and faithless. You’re a born charmer. Ruled by Venus, goddess of love and beauty, you admire loveliness in all its forms, in music, art, decoration, and people. Your energies are focused on melding and combining with other people; you are at your best in personal relationships. You get along harmoniously with people who are even-tempered, particularly those who can laugh in the face of difficulties. You love new projects, unusual people, different ideas, and you’ll travel anywhere.

Scorpio people evoke anger in others by their secretiveness and jealousy.Their sharp, stinging tempers can also enrage others to the point of violence. You live on many levels. While you present a calm and smiling face to the world, you’re ferociously persistent and extremely strong-willed. Basically, you always have a hidden agenda. You’re someone of in- credible depth and brilliance, and your inner psyche is a labyrinth of wheels within wheels, boxes within boxes. When you control you are safe. The unevolved Scorpio tries to control other peo- ple and manipulate situations for its own greed. Above all, you seek to give your life a meaningful pattern, to find a deeper purpose. The complexity of your mind makes it difficult for you to skim the surface; you must uncover what lies beneath.

Sagittarius people are subject to accidents of fire and explosion, especially while traveling. Their strong desire for freedom may also incite jealousy and possessiveness on the part of a lover. Independence is your guiding principle. You are progressive, restless in spirit, eager to get on with the business of living—a free, adventurous spirit who thrives on new ideas and constant change of scene. Sagittarians rarely talk about their feelings—they talk about what they think about their feelings. One reason is that you become bored doing the same things, and boredom is your worst enemy, but another is simply that you must move on— and up.

Capricorn people -Other people may harbor hidden grudges and resentments because of Capricorn’s coldness and reserve. Secrets from the past are often used against Capricorns. As a child of Saturn, you need something to improve and to perfect. Your active mind quickly grasps ideas, and you have an admirable ability to concentrate. You think of yourself as a real person in a real world that allows little time for idle pleasure-seeking. In certain ways, Saturn is an austere and strict parent that lives inside each Capricorn. Essentially, you feel you can depend only on yourself. You yourself must allow the spontaneous part of you to play and run.

Aquarius people are innovative, unconventional, and sometimes eccentric, and are therefore often targets for attack by narrow-minded people. Aquarius also have a tendency to get into unusual situations and take up with oddball individuals. You refuse to compromise or give an inch. You’re a strange mix of an avant-garde thinker whose opinions are written in stone. You can be objective in judgment, for you don’t let emotion get in the way. Your gift is for dealing with all kinds of personalities from every walk of life, no matter what their station or status. Many Aquarius go into politics or become involved in social causes.

Pisces people have a high susceptibility to alcohol and drugs. They are also easily drawn into unpredictable situations and to unbalanced people. Many astrologers say that Pisces is a link to the spirit world and that you who are born under this sign are old souls, for they believe Pisces to have experienced other lives in the past. Your symbol, two fishes tied together swimming in opposite directions, represents conflicting emotions and desires that pull you to and fro. You’re intensely imaginative and addicted to make-believe, and you strive to create a world that comes closer to your own unique vision. You’re a big bundle of feelings. You feel intense joy and happiness when you’re involved in a creative project or a loving relationship. You’re a big bundle of feelings. You feel intense joy and happiness when you’re involved in a creative proj- ect or a loving relationship.

-Rebekah🧚🏼‍♀️🌊🌅

[probablyasocialecologist]

Despite Sparta’s reputation for superior fighting, Spartan armies were as likely to lose battles as to win them, especially against peer opponents such as other Greek city-states. Sparta defeated Athens in the Peloponnesian War—but only by accepting Persian money to do it, reopening the door to Persian influence in the Aegean, which Greek victories at Plataea and Salamis nearly a century early had closed. Famous Spartan victories at Plataea and Mantinea were matched by consequential defeats at Pylos, Arginusae, and ultimately Leuctra. That last defeat at Leuctra, delivered by Thebes a mere 33 years after Sparta’s triumph over Athens, broke the back of Spartan power permanently, reducing Sparta to the status of a second-class power from which it never recovered. Sparta was one of the largest Greek city-states in the classical period, yet it struggled to achieve meaningful political objectives; the result of Spartan arms abroad was mostly failure. Sparta was particularly poor at logistics; while Athens could maintain armies across the Eastern Mediterranean, Sparta repeatedly struggled to keep an army in the field even within Greece. Indeed, Sparta spent the entirety of the initial phase of the Peloponnesian War, the Archidamian War (431-421 B.C.), failing to solve the basic logistical problem of operating long term in Attica, less than 150 miles overland from Sparta and just a few days on foot from the nearest friendly major port and market, Corinth. The Spartans were at best tactically and strategically uncreative. Tactically, Sparta employed the phalanx, a close-order shield and spear formation. But while elements of the hoplite phalanx are often presented in popular culture as uniquely Spartan, the formation and its equipment were common among the Greeks from at least the early fifth century, if not earlier. And beyond the phalanx, the Spartans were not innovators, slow to experiment with new tactics, combined arms, and naval operations. Instead, Spartan leaders consistently tried to solve their military problems with pitched hoplite battles. Spartan efforts to compel friendship by hoplite battle were particularly unsuccessful, as with the failed Spartan efforts to compel Corinth to rejoin the Spartan-led Peloponnesian League by force during the Corinthian War. Sparta’s military mediocrity seems inexplicable given the city-state’s popular reputation as a highly militarized society, but modern scholarship has shown that this, too, is mostly a mirage. The agoge, Sparta’s rearing system for citizen boys, frequently represented in popular culture as akin to an intense military bootcamp, in fact included no arms training or military drills and was primarily designed to instill obedience and conformity rather than skill at arms or tactics. In order to instill that obedience, the older boys were encouraged to police the younger boys with violence, with the result that even in adulthood Spartan citizens were liable to settle disputes with their fists, a tendency that predictably made them poor diplomats. But while Sparta’s military performance was merely mediocre, no better or worse than its Greek neighbors, Spartan politics makes it an exceptionally bad example for citizens or soldiers in a modern free society. Modern scholars continue to debate the degree to which ancient Sparta exercised a unique tyranny of the state over the lives of individual Spartan citizens. However, the Spartan citizenry represented only a tiny minority of people in Sparta, likely never more than 15 percent, including women of citizen status (who could not vote or hold office). Instead, the vast majority of people in Sparta, between 65 and 85 percent, were enslaved helots. (The remainder of the population was confined to Sparta’s bewildering array of noncitizen underclasses.) The figure is staggering, far higher than any other ancient Mediterranean state or, for instance, the antebellum American South, rightly termed a slave society with a third of its people enslaved.

[jjungkooksthighs]

Zenith

♊︎–Pairing: (X-02) Caleb x fem reader

♊︎–Genre: Angst, fluff, and smut

♊︎–Rating: 18+/ nsfw (mdni)

♊︎–Word Count: 17,200 words (31 pages y’all are in for it)

♊︎–Summary: After being torn away from you, your lover finally comes home to you after a mission alone and without you. You soon realize he hasn’t been taking care of himself in his separation from you and take it upon yourself to fix that in the ways that only you can. 

♊︎–Warnings: Possessive!X-02/Caleb, obsessive!caleb, soft dom!Caleb, sub! reader, mentions of blood, slick and pre-ejaculatory production, scenting, dirty talk (lbr I love that shit), praising, handjob, grinding, cunnilingus (oral f), creampie, breast worship (just a tad), breast/nipple play, nipping, sucking, begging, muscle kink, scratching, cum eating, manhandling, cursing, wet and messy sex (he’s hungry alr), size kink, face riding, pinning, lots of marking, fucked against the wall 

♊︎–A/N: I humbly present my first offering to fellow LADS and Caleb enthusiasts that was made with excitement following his myth release and then horniness when I started ovulating this week. I was extremely horny and this…well, this happened. 

The ticking of the clock, once a sound that elicited excitement in the promise of his return, now grates on your ears like the engines of the spaceship that has become a prison rather than a home to you. The clock’s sound, after years of longing fiercer than the sun, was harsh and unforgiving in its continual, ceaseless passing that waited for no one. 

Least of all the love of your life. 

It had been a blue moon the last time you’d been separated from him, but this mission that the higher ups had given you both had been unlike anything either of you had been assigned.

It had come after your paired scouting of the ruined planet of Philos, the life and greenery of the planet now a wasteland of death and scraps. 

You both had been tasked with discerning if the planet were habitable after years of quiet desolation, and after only a single moon on Philos, you had determined that the anger and sorrow of the system had harvested too deeply into the very soils to sustain more than the weeds that grew sadly from the split, fractured soil. 

You try to sleep, the dark canvas of space and array of stars offering you their respects in the dim, slow blinks of the white balls of light that colored the endless expanse before the glass panes of the viewport that act as bars between you and the limitless freedom of darkness beyond. 

That damn ticking. It doesn’t stop. Doesn’t even muffle itself in apology when you throw a pillow over your head as your thoughts fly to the terrible, cold abyss of the worst that could have happened to the only person who held your heart in his hands. 

You toss and turn, body sore and aching from being launched too hard into the metal of the training room walls when the training bot, who had taken the form of a large, mechanized Hoartfrost Wyrmload, had taken advantage of your momentary lapse of action when your lover’s face, twisted in pain, had flashed through your mind when you’d let it wander.

Had it not been for the powered exosuit you’d worn, you surely would have had bruises, much less broken bones. 

To punish you for your failure to clear the training floor unscathed as Ever’s most finely crafted and battle-hardened weapon, you had had to fight for hours in that fluorescently lit room, the loud clangs and broken whirrs of the bots slicing through the air as the black, blade-like extensions of your power cut them through. Sent out in waves, it had been relentless monotony, but you’d had no choice. 

The  organization’s manipulative, calculating leader would never allow you to see your lover-much less protect him from their malevolent experimentations-if you did not do their bidding. 

Only after 202 monsters and a decapitated Wyrmlord had the thick, heavy automated door risen and you’d all but run to your chambers, heart racing in excitement. 

Asta, the ship’s commandant and head of Ever, had told you that the he who your heart desired would finally, finally be allowed to rendezvous with you there after he debriefed the highest ranked officers on his mission that he’d been sworn to keep hidden even from you.

It’s been 2 days, 20 hours, and 2 minutes since his departure and each second feels like a decade in the excruciating torment of his absence. 

You curse under your breath, the sharpness of worry curving your nails inward toward your palm as the blanket your other half had made for you slides from your shoulders when you rise from your bed. Its warmth fails to offer even half the amount that your lover does, but you still cover your shoulders with it, imagining that it is him that envelops you as you pad forward toward the biggest of the translucent panels that overlooks the infinite space of the darkness. 

The brightest of the hot, white orbs of light of the stars looks like two joined stick figures, forever together in each other’s embrace as the two twin bodies who you’d named Pollux and Castor study you. 

It is the Gemini constellation– one that you find your attention drawn to in your lover’s absence. You press your hand against the glass, peering up at the star sign he was created under and praying to it to watch over him while you cannot. 

You liked to think that the stars knew when your lover was near and tried to commune with you in your bottomless worry whenever you were apart from him, for the glow of their light always seemed so much brighter when he was near. When he held you in his arms under them and spoke sweet, wonderful promises into your ear that he always, always kept. 

Right now, Castor and Pollux flare fiercely, almost as if to mock you in the biting, gnawing loneliness that only your lover could soothe. 

His name flits between your lips like an atom through space–quiet but there, refusing to be relinquished. 

The quiet of your chamber soon steals his name, its taunt loud in the seizure of it. 

You pull your blanket tighter around your barely clad body, the thin, short nightgown of black you’d worn to match your sinking spirits leaving much of you exposed to the prickling chill of the chamber that never was warm unless he was in it. 

“Hurry back to me, Caleb,” you whisper to the stars, hoping they will hear your plea, “I miss you.” 

The figures of light nestled within expanse of the endless sky of ebony twinkle as if to tell you they’ve received your wish, and then the only door admitting entry to your chambers directly behind you opens, all the way across the room, makes reverberating rumbling noises that grind your ears in their unpleasant din. 

The clock continues to chip away at time as if you aren’t enslaved to it. 

He’d have come to you by now if he were on the ship, and so you don’t bother to look away from the stars when you grouse, “If Asta has sent you to examine me out of concern for my performance, you can shove that bullshit up your ass.”

You’d become well acquainted with combat, your own code rewritten by Ever over and over again in their pursuit to make a heartless warrior capable only of doling out death and destruction. But your hardwiring had changed the moment your lover had laid his lips over yours, had professed his love so tenderly that it disassembled the walls around your heart and tuned it just to him. 

Footsteps sound from behind you, the thud of heavy boots not lifting a hair of fear on you. Their wearer moves with purpose, never standing still as they cross the open chamber toward you. They do not cease their magnetic pull toward you until they stand behind you, still and unmoving as the planetary systems before you. 

So absorbed in the memory of his smile that brought more light to your world than any moon and in eyes that have entire supernovas swirling within them, you don’t even notice the way your body has already begun to seek the one to the back of you. 

“I was told that it is good manners to speak when you’re spoken to. I don’t need an examination right now. Leave, because no one except X-02 may touch me.” You adjust the soft velvet blanket closer around you, wishing with the might of an entire galaxy that your lover was here with you. “You can tell Asta I’ll execute whatever Wanderer that Ever wants dead in two seconds flat if he just gives me the word. I’ll terminate it in exchange for what I really want.” 

Silence. 

A heart’s beat passes before strong, familiar arms encircle you around your middle, and instinctively, you let their bearer bring you against him. 

Were it anyone else, your impulse to fight would already have rendered them unconscious and in a heap on the floor. 

But you know this embrace. You’ve been swathed in it many, many times before.

Then, with a voice smoother than honey, “And what is it you really want, huh, pip-squeak? Surely it must be me.”

From the very first word he speaks, your entire soul seems to ascend, your attention uncontrollably tugged into those familiar, warm discs of nebulae that make a ring where irises should be that are of purple and pink. 

“Caleb…” You say his name like he’s a cosmos that has bewildered you, gazing up from where he stands over a head above you as one of your hands rises so your fingers can explore him in a gentle orbit along his cheekbone as if to prove to yourself that he’s here, that he’s not some holograph you unwittingly conjured up. 

The usual black visor he wears is gone, the same powered exosuit of black covering him from his neck down. It was the garb that most shook in terror upon seeing, but for you, it inspired only the weightless feeling of joy and joviality. 

. 

The sunset of his eyes bask you in their tenderness as he leans into your touch, a long, drawn out breath falling from between his lips as he relishes in the feeling of softness that only you can summon in a universe so twisted and cruel. 

“I’m sorry it took me so long to come back to you, pip-squeak.” He apologizes, the guilt caging each syllable while he tilts his head down so their sin is left at the crest of your forehead, his arms coaxing you more insistently into him so that not even the air can come between the two of you. “You were in my every thought whether I was awake or in hypersleep. Every second I spent away from you, I wanted to be by your side. I wanted to be with you in any way I could.”

His larger hands that rest on your abdomen move around the atmosphere of you, around each side of your waist, urging you to turn and face him. He rotates you as if you’re his very axis, and the truth of his confessions utterly disintegrates the sadness that had begun to pressurize between your ribs— that had begun to make even breathing a hard thing to do. 

In its undoing, however, the bottled up emotions you’d kept so carefully contained spiral out of control, overwhelming you such that you–without even a fraction of your strength–strike your fist against where his heart throbs for you. 

“You stopped responding to my messages and calls exactly at hour and minute 22:02. I thought something had happened.” Your eyes start to burn with the tears that threaten to escape, your fingers finding the edge of his jaw before you take his chin between them. He crumbles at your touch, his expression shifting to one of shame over his err as he lets you maneuver him closer like you’re the center of his gravitational field. “You aren’t allowed to do that to me, Caleb. I…I-” your voice deserts you, the tight lump that has formed in your throat forcing you to try to swallow past the worry that had been gripping you with the intensity of a thousand hands. 

I can’t lose you. 

His dark brows stretch toward each other, concern shooting through his eyes in their versions of meteorites before he rests his forehead against yours. “I’m here now, pip-squeak. It’s alright.” His fingers dig possessively into the soft flesh of your waist as if you might disappear if doesn’t hold onto you tight. “I want you to know that I lost contact with Ever when I went too far past the protofield protecting the ruined kingdom of Philos. It somehow fried my communication systems, pip-squeak.” His voice cracks under the weight of being alone, of being ripped away from you while he’d been able to do little but be Ever’s volatile weapon who it kept from exploding by using you as its collateral. “I couldn’t contact you no matter how many times I tried. When I returned, I demanded to see you, but they threatened to hurt you if I didn’t brief them on what had happened down there.” 

“You of all people know that I can handle myself,” you sniffle when the first tear falls, his irises tracking it as it descends down your cheek. Long, metallic digits of his right hand find it before it can douse his foot in your sadness as you croak, “I can handle anything so long as I am with you.” 

Your sadness, surely, is his Roche limit in how cataclysmic it is to him. Enough to make him want to collapse everything until only the two of you remain. But there was no escape from some gravitational phenomena. Phenomena like Ever that had invaded every corner of the universe and would never cease to persecute you until he tore it all down for you.

And to do that, he needed to get stronger. No matter what it took.

“I know, honey. I know that better than anyone. But I have to be Ever’s dog to keep you safe. You are their prized possession–but more importantly, mine.” He adds after a pause, irises locked onto your next tear on the other side of your face. He catches this with the same hand where no sensation kindles his receptors any longer–with the knuckle in the middle of where a human finger would have been– the cool wetness of your emotions putting his systems into alert. “Do you remember what  I told you when we went down to the remains of Philos together, Y/N?”

You nod against him, too choked up to answer beyond that even if you tried. 

You both had crash landed on that planet, only his metallic wings and the tortuous pain they caused him saving the both of you when your cruiser’s engine had failed. He’d become unconscious after using his body as a shield against terrain that had slowly been doomed to death by a planet that’s energy source had abandoned it. It had been your kiss that woke him, the distraction of your tender lips almost enough to negate the agonizing pain that stabbed into your every cell like pointed icicles from where your palms had been connected through the transfer port in your mechanical suits.

You’d felt the grimace and contorted expressions against your lips while you’d siphoned the sounds of his suffering into you, wishing with every fiber of your being that you could have taken all of it into yourself. 

So many times you had been forced–trapped– in the experimental glass pod, unable to do anything but watch while the only person your heart longed for had suffered, his heart-rending bellowings unfathomable and unescapable even when the prickling syringes and needles tried to erase your memories. 

Always they remained and lingered, just like the name you’d given him.

And his pain… it was beyond anything any creature should have been capable of bearing—an unholy force that consumed every part of him, twisting his insides, grinding his being into pieces. It wasn’t a simple ache or throbbing wound. It was as if every nerve in his body had been frozen and shot with ice, each pulse of agony a jagged shard of frigidity, carving deeper and deeper until he could no longer tell where anything was. 

But he never failed to recognize you and he had not hesitated to hold you close in his arms, cradling you there as if you were the most precious thing in his eyes as you both careened into the landscape of decay and desolation. He’d willingly taken the brunt–or rather, the entirety–of the fall for you, the idea of any harm coming to you more horrifying to him than his own death. 

His unconsciousness had become his enemy, his worst nightmare exerting itself upon him in a reaper’s scythe that brought only your sharp screams and wails, your lifeless, broken body in a heap while he’d held you against his chest. His own sorrow had flowed forth like a waterfall in the stream of crimson tears down his face, the grief and suffering breaking every part of him into pieces that attacked and impaled themselves into each other over and over again. 

He’d only escaped that haunting, horrible hell of darkness and cold worse than any winter was by following your voice that beckoned him back towards the soothing, warm light of life that he only found meaning in when you were the his moon that drew the waves of being forth, his very epicenter attracted to your beautiful, gentle core. 

In what once had been a lively, vibrant meadow rested nature’s cemetery. Only the sickly, warped weeds sprouted beneath him where you’d somehow managed to drag him against a dead trunk of a tree that had been split in half by the sickness  that had ravaged this land. 

But there you were, on your knees between his with your kind, nurturing lips planted between the part of his hair as you’d hummed the remains of the song he’d sung for you since you were children whenever he needed to calm you down. 

It was a song only you knew. A song that needed no words when your eyes could speak them so much clearer than any letters could hope to try to describe the meaning of. A song that, like a black hole, called forth everything that you both were to each other. It channels it all together before transforming, evolving, changing it into something so much more than any word could express. 

He’d confessed to you there, in that meadow on Philos–a once human inhabited planet that required massive amounts of energy, power, and sacrifice of one sovereign for many–what both of you had been held captive from admitting for so many years prior, your memories chipped and chaffed by the needle of Ever’s scientists that, until he’d grown strong enough to serve as a better candidate, had stuck into you. 

In effort to find a way to contain you, to control you, the head of Ever had assigned only one person to ever be your partner when sent on missions meant for bloodshed and annihilation of the monsters it had created. 

And oh, how hard he had fallen for you. It was as inescapable as trying to free himself from gravity. 

You grounded him. Enveloped and surrounded him in every sense of the word with your cute laughs, your pretty smiles, your glimmering eyes, your voice of silk that, even when you told a bad joke, still trilled softly and dulcetly in his ears. You were everywhere in his head and yet, so far away, as untouchable as the clouds in the sky up until that fateful day in the meadow. 

There, he’d let the confessions burst through his chest like some supernova, the bond you’d built together with him birthed anew under the crushing weight of what had been–and what could be–when he’d pierced through the deep space of the forbidden and uttered, the undeniable and undisputable.  He’d only ever wanted to be in your world, for he’d for so long yearned for a place beside you that was not one of imagination or observance from a distance. 

After all, he had been doomed to that tortuous fate before becoming your hunting partner when he’d been stuck behind that horrible glass wall with you trapped on the other side. 

And when he’d coaxed you close in that meadow, those same arms–one cold,  rigid, and bionic while the other was warm, pliant, and fleshly– led your front against the strong, chiseled chest covered in the dark fabric that lovingly clung to what little of his human body remained,  he’d declared a different kind of need–one that wanted to devour you from where you’d sat atop of him. 

You’d never forget the way his mouth had sought your ear, his breath hot against the shell of it as he’d said something that would lay eternally with you every time you closed your eyes. Every second that was spent in the shivering rigidness of his absence. 

“I want to feel your warmth, your heartbeat…Everything…I want you to stay with me…Forever.”

When he’d nuzzled his cheek against yours, coveting every moment of touch that made every single one of his receptors charged with what felt like electricity zipping through his body, you’d let him, the obsessive flare in his eyes sparking something baser in you that only ignited deliciously more when he touched you like you were his entire world and looked at you like you were a celestial creature descended from the sun, the moon and the stars. 

No amount of testing or experimentation on you could erase that memory. He’d made sure of it, hiding that, among what remained of your memories with him, inside a small pocket of a void in your mind that even Ever could not touch after many attempts spent honing his power for your sake. 

Only two months and two days have passed since then, but he’d turned your world upside down and become the equator of your system far, far before then. It was as if your kiss had been the unavoidable calamity that had made his desires collide and converge, their amalgamation too powerful for him to resist in your magnetic pull whenever he saw you, smelled you, thought of you. 

And now, as he stands before you as solid as the glass at your back, that same reaction, set off by every atom that made you up, has you repeating those words he’d spoken to you by the remains of that charred yet living tree stump on Philos. The same stump had had the beginnings of moss attached to it, the two bodies of alternate forms helplessly clinging to each other even after their environment had been unforgiving to them. 

Under the intensity of those nebulous eyes powerful enough to make you fall to your knees, you repeat what your lover had professed so ardently to you, his yearning dressing the guilt that is draped under his eyes. It is enough to take your breath away when his long, mechanical fingers wrap around your wrist where you had been dragging your own digits down towards his lips. 

He leads your digits to them, the pads of your own fingers steered along the edge of his mouth before they follow the outline of his lower, fuller lip. It has become cracked in the aridity of whatever planet he’d been sent to, and you wet your own as you stare, unabashedly at his. 

Embarrassment that had once perched heavily over your shoulder at the very thought of him no longer does in the nest he’s made in your chest, and so the words fly free when he draws your digits over and along his thinner upper lip to his defined Cupid’s bow. It, too, is dry and begging for the nourishment only you can give. 

“You are dehydrated, Caleb. You weren’t taking care of yourself again,” you whisper, the nerves in your still human digits crackling with sensation when he pilots them so they catch and carry the plumpness of his lower lip down, his saliva seeking you before the pink of his lip returns to contain it after your fingers have been conducted toward the corner of his jaw so you can hold him there. 

Your touch sends sparks down his spine, and he relishes in the warmth of you that no sun could ever hope to emit as he closes his eyes, nudging into your hand while he utters, “That does not matter to me when there are more important things that require my attention.” 

The meaning of that is not lost on you, and you knew well the lengths he would go to shower you in every iota of his devotion as vast as space itself. His calibration had, for a long time, been warped in its centering all around you, and so descript was it that he often forgot to attend to his own needs as long as yours were. You’d since figured out a way to navigate that, for it burned you to see him neglect himself for your sake. 

“I’m thirsty, Caleb. Carry me to the kitchen, will you?” You ask, affection flowing forth like water when he gives a smile that could light up any room at your request. You encircle your arms around his neck, needing this closeness just as much as he does after being away from you too long. 

“You don’t have to tell me twice, pip-squeak,” his hands travel down from where they’d been resting on your hips, ginger and gentle as they glide from your sides downward past the curve of your backside to their destination on the backs of your legs. 

When he’s wound his fingers around the underside of your thighs, it takes little effort for him to hoist you up against him, your legs automatically wrapping around his waist like he is your own charging port. Unlike you, part of him has been fused with metal, his right arm lost to Ever’s unassailable greed for perfection in creating life that was as dangerous as it was perfect. 

Created to serve as your precursor–your corrupted guardian and watchdog–your body had been spared over the trials done on his so that you could be the organization’s angel of blood and slaughter. 

With you held closely in his arms, he crosses the distance of the open concept chamber complete with a long, rectangular coffee table made entirely of glass that is accented by two black leather couches in front and behind it. On the far side of it are two lounge chairs, one smaller than the other, arranged next to each other and facing the viewport with its wide view of the stars and dark sky. The larger one is worn and has small tears in its armrests from where he’d gripped them so hard during many dawns and dusks spent either with you in his head, on his lap, or between his legs. 

On one end of the parlor is an impressively sized bedroom, grand bathroom, and boudoir, the last of which he’d built himself using his Evol, his sweat, and his hands. On the other end of the sitting room, there is a sleek kitchen of chrome appliances, grey cabinets, and a sizable island of white marble that looked like the moon’s dust had settled across it. 

It is here that your lover brings you, unwilling to let you go even for a moment as he strides to the refrigerator and waits patiently for you to open it. 

In the short time he’d gathered you in his arms, you’d been swept astray into the whirling domain of his eyes, and when he arches a brown brow upward in a teasing move that gets your pulse quickening, you pry your sights away from him. 

Like he is your own force of momentum, your inertia is swift to alter its state and you open the refrigerator door, quickly procuring the pitcher of apple juice he’d prepared for you the morning he’d left. The note written on a sticky note still remains stuck to its side, the words ‘Made with love for my special, beautiful girl whom I miss dearly’ smudged from the oils on your fingertips as you’d held it.

 Only a quarter of the amber colored liquid remains, for you’d been unable to resist the sweet taste that reminded you so much of him when it fell across your tongue. He doesn’t question your choice of drink when he notices the bent edges of the sticky note that must have been anxiously fiddled with by your fingers while you’d waited for him. 

Instead, he teases you once again as he turns to place you on the island behind you. “Missed me, didn’t you, pip-squeak?”

“You taught me that missing someone is wanting them to be with you even when they can’t be. And every minute you were away, I wished for you to be here with me, by my side.” You confess, the frigid and hard stone under you a stark contrast to the calefaction he radiates. Not wanting to let him go, you ask, “By the way, can you get me the glass I left at the edge of the counter? My arm isn’t long enough to reach it.”

Your admission has his blood rushing to his face, a grin that even Cupid would have been jealous of crossing his face. 

“But of course, my lady,” he bows his head in obedience, the playfulness jumping off each vowel tugging at the chords of your boundless feelings for him. “One glass for the pretty girl coming right up.”

As if every second of your touch had charged him up, he dutifully reaches around you for the apple-shaped glass you’d left out earlier. The small action has him leaning forward, his hot breath fanning against your lips. Like this, you can tell that the usual lively color of those lips of his that are vibrant like a flower’s petal in spring had lost some of their vivid pigmentation, the lack of proper nutrition stealing it from him. 

It makes your stomach twist, even the basic tenets of self-care eradicated from his mind when all but you dwelled in it during the times he was separated from you. 

With the cup in tow, he rises back to his full height, oblivious as usual to his malnourished state that only befell him when he was away from you.  Anger worms its way through you, an anger that would bury itself in you until you’d found a way to save him from the assholes that sent him on that godsforsaken mission and did this to him. 

“How much do you want, pip-squeak?” He inquires, taking the pitcher from you and pouring the sparkling juice forth from it. 

His voice cools the ire that had been slithering inside your stomach, but jealousy over a damned cup that had apprehended his attention away from you makes you possessively squeeze him between your thighs where he stands. 

He makes a surprised sound at that, the sound making you ascend as it tumbles from his cracked lips. 

Your resolve hardens as you watch him selflessly tend to you through the stream of juice that conforms to the shape of the cup he’d crafted for you. 

“Give it all to me.” You tell him, impatient for his attention again to be attached to you. 

The burbling stops, and finally, those eyes of his rush toward yours like fucking meteorites.

“I told you before, pip-squeak,” His fingers constrict around the neck of the pitcher, the glass cracking under the pressure of him as he sets it down, “If it’s my unique scent you want,” with his other hand, he brings the cup of juice under your lips, “a uniform filled with memories,” he tips the cup just the slightest bit toward you, your mouth parting to accept the cold, tart liquid over your tongue, “or even the authority to command me,” the last few words siphon something hungry in you despite the liquid that is beginning to fill your mouth, the slender, metallic digits of his other palm slipping around the back of your neck to tilt your head back so more of the juice can spill between your lips with its sweet tinge, “I’ll make sure you get everything you could ever ask for.”

You hold eye contact with him like he might vanish if you don’t keep him held under the whirling pressure of you, tipping your chin back more as he encourages you with the hand he holds you with while he keeps you close, just as unwilling to be too far away from you. 

The sight of you–your legs spread with him nestled between them and your wet, soft lips accepting what he feeds you as you let him lean you back, willing and pliable for him–makes the still-fleshy organ in his netherregion harden where he’s confined in his powered exosuit.

He observes you with captivation starring the corner of his purple-pink orbs, watching the honey-colored juice disappear into the cavern between your lips as it pours forth into you. Each mouthful of it down your throat has him feeling as though his internal temperature has begun to overheat, a different kind of steam demanding to be let out when the last of the contents of the drink flow into the chamber of your mouth. 

You don’t swallow this one. 

Rather, you lift one of your hands, making a come-hither gesture with your finger while intention–magnifying and polarizing–harnesses him to you like a magnet. 

He knew you more intimately than you knew yourself, and so the realization that dusks over his countenance casts you into the heatwave of his fierce, intense emotions once reserved only for his mind. 

As tall as he is, his shadow shades you in the soft light of the moon that sits in the distance of the dark realm outside as your lover’s front falls forward, one of his hands closing around the edge of the counter as he husks. “You’re a bad liar, pip-squeak. You can’t fool me. You want me to drink from you that badly, huh?” the glass he’d been pressing against your lips is put down, his irises dipping from yours to your mouth before his index comes upon one side of your cheek where his thumb spans your other, his other knuckles urging your chin up so that you can’t escape the all encompassing gravity of his affliction for you. His hot breath fans your lips as he draws inevitably nearer, “You can be such a silly girl, and yet-”

Waiting for him to come to you is an eternity you can’t possibly bear, and when finally he closes the distance between you– two masses of matter inextricably colliding and crashing together as you seek each other’s every molecule in a searingly passionate kiss–the natural release of the liquid you’d been storing for him is diffused into the chasm of his mouth, his groan short-circuiting you as he deepens the kiss, the fusion between you expelling reason and logic until all there is is him. 

More you give and more he takes, his long tongue flitting over yours while he explores you like it’s the first time.   

Against your mouth, he breathes, “You’re irresistible to me. I can’t stop myself from falling for you. Every. Single. Time.” The words are passed between voyages of his mouth as he returns, over and over again, to his origin point of you, fire licking up at you from where he’s connected to you. 

His fingers depress themselves into your flesh as if you are the foundation he needs to stay afloat in the depth of his all consuming weakness for you, the slight pressure that action imposes on you making your lips pucker against his where you feed the still crisp juice to him. Stray trails of it dribble down your chin, your neck and then between the valley of your breasts that strain against the low v-cut nightgown hardly even reaching past your ass. 

You’d chosen it knowing it was his favorite of the many he’d stitched and sewn himself just for you. He’d taught you a great many things about feelings, emotions, and that little thing called desire, and you’d begun to see just how much-with the tiniest of actions or words- you jumbled his impulses and want that only you could rewire, rewrite, and reshape. 

“Caleb,” you grapple for the leather strap overlaying his powered exosuit below where the amber colored crystal is embedded at the base of his neck, his mouth claiming yours as you pull him closer, needing him everywhere and anywhere you can have him in the visceral summonings only he can make well up within you. Your shallowing breaths and spit swirl together in the clash of your tongues and teeth, neither of you able to resist the other.

He swallows what makes it past the ring of his lips, hungry for more even when your lungs begin to burn from lack of air, and in their enviousness,  rip you away from him. 

Like the wane of a moon, his eyes have gone dark when he breaks the seal of his mouth over yours, the string of saliva bridging you to him refusing to snap until he straightens, his index smearing the remains of his own essence over your upper lip as he utters, “My name isn’t a safe word, pip-squeak. Saying it won’t make me stop.” His hand slides into your hair while the other now has the counter in an iron-grip as he battles to control himself, his lips coursing toward the edge of your mouth where his finger had been. The pink of his tongue slips from between them to lap up in a long, wet stripe as he collects the pleasing, saccharine remnants of apple juice that had escaped. “You just make me want more.”

Your eyelids flutter at the sensation, his words making heat bloom in the apex between your thighs that you hadn’t even realized you’d begun to rut against him in search of friction where they are still wound, with the rest of your legs, around his waist. 

“Y-you made it spill,” you stammer when that knowing muscle betwixt his lips is brought under the edge of the other side of your own. There, he leaves the slick of his saliva from his tongue’s travels downwards as he gathers the taint of sticky, sugary remains on you there, too. 

“You think that was an accident, baby? It wasn’t.” His hand slinks toward the back of your head so he can take a handful of your locks and gently guide you down until your back meets the hard plane of the counter. Reduced to a weightless mass in the omnipresent skies of him you could forever exist within,  you can do little but wait for him to maneuver you, your own digits holding on tighter to the leather strap below his neck where he hovers above you because somehow, someway, you needed to keep yourself by him, the void of space observing you from outside the glass walls of your chambers both a hope and a curse. 

“Mmm… Thank you for feeding me. That was good,”  He hums, the transparency of his yearning there in his eyes, showing the basest part of him sequestered in the far reaches of his orbs while he continues his devoted descent, the passage of his mouth one that follows the winding paths of the existing tracks of liquid that had traveled south along your throat and chest from earlier. Each time his soft lips land, the hot of his tongue is there to scavenge for your taste that has become deliciously mixed with that of apples. Between them, he tells you, “I missed you so much, pip-squeak.”Craving more of you, he keeps driving his mouth to the ocean that is you, the wet sound of his kisses on your flesh and devoutness of his touch making everything else sink away. 

Before they can completely desert you, you need him to know something. You hardly stutter his name out in a poor excuse for his attention, but it is enough for him to pause, his mouth ghosting the spot between your collarbones where’d he’d been laving the pink muscle along the trails of the sweet liquid that had converged into one before dripping down your chest. 

“What is it, my sweet girl?” He questions, tilting his head to the side so the ebony of his bangs falls just over the one eye that he usually sweeps free of his fringe. “Did I do something wrong?”

“You’re not allowed to leave me like that again. It felt like one half of me was missing. Like there was an empty hole in my chest the entire time you were gone.” You tug him down with you, the metal of the roboticized fingers of his right hand bracing him by one side of your head while his other cradles the back of your skull. His breath hitches when you confess, “It was like that hole sucked up all of the happiness and good in my world because you were not in it.”

Before him, you’d been a stranger to all but death, your swords sharp and your orders from the scientists at the lab unforgiving. But despite missions of bloodshed and piercing, terrorizing screams, everyday you’d both watched each other from behind the see-through wall of your glass cages. You’d listened to his stories and musings raptly while inextricably drawn to his side like he was the center of all gravity, your palms separated by the barrier between you when you weren’t trapped in your glass pod. 

He had always been the only source of sensation or sentiment, and in him, you’d found what only he could give: home. 

He can feel the vulnerability that has locked your muscles in place, so he croons, “I’m here now. Nothing will take me away from you ever again. We will always be together.” 

“Promise me,” you don’t let his words drift away from you, the echo of a vow made when you’d both been much smaller surfacing in the back of your mind, “Promise me again, Caleb. I won’t forgive you if you break it.”

Something flickers behind the window of his eyes. The tenderness that colors his voice dulls everything but him, even the clock’s ticking muted when he answers, the blizzard of the air pushed away when the summer of his breath blows along your chin from where he looks fondly down at you, “I promise, my one and only.”

When you relax beneath him, your ligaments freed from their invisible chains, you use the grip you have on the leather strap to lead him to your waiting lips, the sincerity of his words tangible in the featherlight brush of his lips over yours that makes your heart skip a beat. He must hear that,  because he deepens the kiss as if he can circumfuse all of his love into you through that action alone. Insistence takes over, and you relish in it when he slots his mouth harder into yours, not willing to release you from the endless expanse of his ardor for you until oxygen–the damned nuisance–tears you away from him once again.

His breaths are short and shallow while they coalesce with yours, his chest heaving above you where your other hand–the one not already clutching the thin strap below his throat–rises so your fingers can carefully trace the outline of his lips that are fine and fair, almost like satin. No longer are they dry, the sheen of your spit there, embracing them in your care for him while he stares lovingly at you. His lips are so malleable, so nimble as your digit glides across them, his mouth pursuing your hand as if to forage for more of your warmth. 

“Affection?” You pose the question, a fledgling still to the ways of showing the indescribable ways he makes you feel when you’d spent so much of your life behind a glass case. 

His orbs soften under the silver light of the moon that all but makes him glow when he affirms, “Affection. Do you need me to shower you in affection, my one and only?”

Your fingers gravitate down his chin, his throat, the upper plane of his chiseled, muscled pectoral where his own heart pounds fiercely and quickly, like it, too, is trying to reach for you; like it, too, preens happily under your touch and attention. Your own thrums against your ribcage to the same hurried rhythm as if in a dance of passion, neither able to step away from the other. 

Swept into that symphony of sensation that only he could orchestrate, you don’t hesitate when you answer, “Yes. As long as it is you, the answer will always be yes.” 

You watch his veiled control crease his thick brows and diverge his lips, a fragmented breath leaving him when the hard, cool, robotic fingers of his right hand circle around your forearm to direct your open palm up, the sculpted realm of his body hidden by the mesh of his suit where his chest is before the rigidness of alloy encases his throat and shoulders. 

At the base of his throat that alloy is carved out to contain a golden crystal, and it is here that he lets your fingers hover, waiting for you to tap it so you can press the series of holographic buttons only you know the right combinations to. 

“Humans show affection in many ways. But there are ways they do it that are only done when they have found their other half…their one and only.” The metal of his hand ascends up your arm until his palm is pressed against the back of yours, the interconnected phalanges of his fingers bending around yours as he tells you, “Kissing is one way of it. But to let the one person you share the deepest of bonds with feel and see you–all of you– so they can accept and welcome that, too…that’s another way. And I want you to do that with me, my precious girl. I want you to accept every part of me.” 

With his digits wrapped around yours, your index lightly pushes against the crystal nestled between the two notches of his collarbones, the familiar amber light of the holographic panel coming to life before you. You don’t need to look down at it anymore, opting instead to glimpse the nebulas of his eyes that glint intensely at you while your fingers move with practiced ease over each of the three symbols amid the pyramid displayed before you. 

After you’ve hit the final one, there’s a series of chinks and chimes, the nanotechnology embedded in his suit fluorescing in particles of purple that ripple outwards from around the crystal, the flow of light extending outward from it as the black mesh and alloy disintegrate everywhere the light falls like a tide of violet over the glorious sculpture of his body.

Inch by inch the canvas of him is bared to you, neither of you hearing the thud of the abandoned crystal hitting the ground beneath you when the art in front of you captures all of your attention, the polar pull too strong for you to resist even if you wanted to when your eyeline veers down his body in a mouthwatering view that has both sets of your lips slickening. 

Years of modification, missions, and maintained training regimen had corded every bit of him in muscle, his abdomen etched into six defined, sharp blocks across his middle. Framed by two more below, he’s a well-made mosaic of a human being. Even his pectorals are cut seamlessly in their curvatures that cling to the rest of him, his broad, strong shoulders accenting it all where the left arm connected to them looks as if it has been stroked entirely with thick thew from his bicep to his forearm. From the back of his hand, thick veins branch out, the raised lines offshooting up his forearm. 

Where flesh and that same muscle should have wound down his other arm, the metal of a robotic replacement remains. Like a restoration piece, it attempts to match its mirror in the sinuous, sinewy make that no longer can receive feeling beyond pain. 

He senses the subtle squirm of your fingers where they now rest against his sternum, your basest receptors  within itching to rediscover him. 

 “Go on, pip-squeak. Feel me,” he implores, trailing the hand of yours that he still holds down across his pectoral until your palm rests just over the strong, erratic palpitations of his heart, “This is all yours. It always has been.” 

The beat of the organ beneath your hand pushes your own along, your fingers becoming curious travelers that wander along the mountainous range between his pectorals, the smaller pads of each of your five fingers crossing along, under, and around every contour and curve of him upward from his defined collarbones to the blocks of muscle lining his abdomen. Somewhere along the way, his hand detaches from yours, his knuckles turning white where grips onto the counter so you’re pressed between the pleasing warmth of his body and the cold foundation of the countertop. 

Each stroke of your fingers along the plains of his chest has his breaths deepening like each touch both satisfies and starves him, and when your fingers roam down a little too far past the slabs of thew settled over his stomach, that’s when he nestles his nose into the crook of your neck, his balmy breath sweeping over the sensitive area on the side of your throat as he inhales the essence of you before he checks, “You want to go there, my darling? Are you sure?”

You had never cared to know what pleased a man before him. But years of tension and longing for this man before you had built up inside you and made you overflow and fucking brim with want that could only be fulfilled by him. 

No one had ever asked what you wanted, much less if you were clear on what it was you even thought you wished for in the first place. 

But he had. He always had. 

That is why your own digits drift downward until they amble along one side of the impressively large shaft standing at attention between his thick, muscled thighs, fingers skimming along the ridges of his proud cock. 

“Fuck,” he curses when you reach his base, only able to get half of your hand around him before ascending. “You really did miss me, didn’t you, my sweet girl?”

“Can I show you?” You turn your head, lips searching for his where they linger along your sternocleidomastoid muscle lining the side of your throat. You peer at him with innocent doe-eyes that are enough to make him into your slave if you wished it. “I know how because of you.” You squeeze him lightly–deliciously– under the bulbous head of his cock, transfixed by the way his eyes become hooded while your hand descends down back to his engorging base just the way he’d taught you to.

Unable to ever deny you when you look at him like that, he breathes out, “You know you can do whatever you want to me, pretty girl.” His handsome expression contorts into one of contained pleasure, his brows pulling together and mouth falling open when you handle him just a little faster, your thumb spreading the newly rolled beads of pre-cum over the mushroom-shaped tip of his length that made your own mouth and sex cry out of need for him. 

“This body is yours, baby.” He emits a long, drawn out sound of pleasure when you stroke him there and back, your other fingers brushing at the swelling bulbs of his balls beneath his sumptuously sized cock. You feel, fascination pooling in your core, the way the veins that wrap around his member have begun to jump excitedly under your touch, and gods, did the man in front of you look delicious when in the throes of rapture only you could bring. 

Watching him was addicting. It was like a drug that you could never, ever, stop taking, your brain and very blood now so dependent and entrenched in the sights, sounds, sensations, and thoughts of him that it could no longer fire correctly unless your fix was with you–or inside you. 

“Mine.” You repeat, your hand picking up the speed you rub him up and down with, your other fingers curling around one of his engorging balls and massaging it before giving the same attention to the other. He inclines his head as if in deference, irises loyally bowing down to yours, for he is utterly weak to your ministrations. 

Your voice and touch are his aphrodisiac, and in his absence, he’d become so very starved for you. 

“You’ve become so good at this, haven’t you? You’re going to make me cum for you if you keep going like this, pretty girl.” He pants laboriously, concentration painting its way across his face when you tighten your grip around him, the vice of your hand making the top of of his length weep, its wetness drawn down by you every so often when you wind and twist your hand around his large, fleshy head before dragging it back down. “Feels so fucking good, pip-squeak. I taught you too well, didn’t I?”

“I had a very good teacher,” you agree, your legs securing around him harder in your keenness to bring him closer because as near as he is, you need him more than the air that hovers between you while you rub at his testicles with one of your hands and other, becoming a vice around his cock, gropingly glides along his length without pause–without abandon– your joined flesh making obscene sounds of his slick and wetness as you please him. 

His breaths become heavier the faster you go, knuckles going whiter than snow as he fights to contain his release that he can feel quivering in the base of his balls all the way to the curving arc of his cock that reaches for you in its beautiful, long curvature. 

He’s so fucking close. He’s just at the fucking edge of the precipice of his release, but that end that suspends itself over him now is not the one he had envisioned upon his return to you. The appetite he had for you made him hunger for another, more carnal means. One that only you could parch the cavern of his mouth from. 

No, he needed you in a different way. He could wait. He was no stranger to that when it came to you. 

“Yeah? Well as much as I want to cum for you, pretty girl,” both of his larger hands seize your wrists, pinning them above your head, his cock pressing against the wailing apex between your legs as he tells you, “You did so well to feed me earlier, and now I want more. I’m so hungry, pretty girl. And only you can satisfy me.”

“Hungry?” You moan when he gives a purposeful roll of his hips into you, the tip of his fully erect cock a little ways under his belly button yet the rest of him sliding deliciously along your folds. 

He chuckles low when you moan at the way his cock slides against the button of nerves above your folds when he undulates those toned hips of his again. 

“Yes, baby. Starving.” The space around your arms shifts and invisible streaks erupting through it before the colorless, leaden matter set alight by embers shoots down around your forearms and hands, his Evol over gravity tethering you in place so his hands can wrap around your thighs, pulling them over each of his broad shoulders so he’s got your ass resting against his sternum and your sex inches from his waiting mouth.“I told you before…I want everything you are willing to give me. That includes your sweet, delicious honey.”

You don’t resist him. You’re exactly where you want to be right now while his irises lower to where you’re bare for him. He sucks in a breath, staring like he’s looking a fucking meal, “You left yourself bare for me…what a needy girl. But you know, I like my girl needy for me. That’s hot.”

He inhales deeply through his nose, your intoxicating scent making his eyes roll back before those heavy tendrils of his power, receptive to his hunger, pull at the edges of your nightgown. They slowly tug it up your body, each sliver of skin you present to him making his salivary glands water as he swallows around a suddenly dry throat. And between his legs, his cock hardens impossibly more when the fabric of your nightgown crests over your perfect, pert breasts, the peaks of which are stiff and demanding of his attention. You’re already glistening with wetness for him, the evidence of your arousal evident in the sheen of it that coats your cunt from your earlier illicit activity. 

“pip-squeak…you’re so beautiful.” It’s a remnant of his usual voice that comes out, for you’ve stolen his ability to breathe not for the first time, and certainly not for the last. “Please let me have you right here on the counter in our kitchen. I’ll make you feel good just like I always do. I’ll take such good care of you, baby.”

Ever mindful of you and your wishes, he gives you the chance to decide. And ever the light to his shadow, you could sooner reject him than the moon could halt its wayward journey around the solar system. 

“I’m all yours, Caleb.” You muster, your own words rushed under the current of his eyes that garner every bit of your attention. 

“Do you have any idea what you do to me when you say that, my sweet girl?” The pink of his tongue peeks from between his lips, stretching and elongating before it gently passes itself along the slit of your sex, licking up in a long, wet stripe before it curls back into his mouth, the thick glaze of you covering it before it disappears between his lips. “You make me want to please you so fucking much. I won’t be able to stop until you’re a moaning, writhing mess for me.” His eyes darken as the essence of you spreads itself across every taste bud, his fingers coiling harder into your thighs. “I’m going to eat you out until I am satisfied, my sweet girl. Until you fill my fucking mouth with your precious come.”

He doesn’t give you time to respond after that, for he attaches his mouth to your cunt like a man starved, his mouth becoming a circle of searing suction that demands everything you have. The tang of you is unlike any savory substance he’s ever had across his palate, and mixed with the sugary drippings of apple juice that had coursed down from your breasts to your belly to the thin thatch of hair that his nose is now buried in, you’re a mix of delicacy and sin that he will never tire of supping. 

“C-Caleb…ah-” You stutter when that expert of a tongue of his sidles between your folds, lapping you up like he’s a dog. 

“Mmm, you taste so fucking delicious, baby,” he hums against your sex, the metal of one hand glinting in the silvery moonlight as he slides it up the supple curves of your body until his fingers are wound around your breast. There, he kneads into your flesh, loving the show of expressions dressed in your satisfaction that you bear to him while you are made the receiver of his gluttony. “Your tits are so perky and perfect just like the rest of you. I love how they fit in my hands, pretty girl.” The strong muscle that he glides between your labia there and back makes a sweltering heat begin to pool in the basest part of you, the fingers he has on your breast running over the dusky bud of your areola before they roll it between them. “I can’t wait to put my mouth on them later.”

Your spine arches at that, the beauteous arc of that making him ache between his legs as he ravenously suckles you like you’re a meal he’s happy to wolf down, your very essence slathered across his tongue where he flattens it between your soddened lips, dragging it up and over your hole that clenches around nothing while he consumes you with the vigor of a man drunk on the high of you. 

“Yes, fuck…more, pretty girl. Feed me more,” his words are muffled with his mouth still swathed around you, the flat of his tongue splaying itself over your hole only to twist around it in frenzied rotations to draw out more tears of your need from it. “You’re so fucking good.”

Freer than water over the brim of a cup, your voice spills from your throat, “P-please, Caleb…Please.”

With your pleas drawn forth from you, thirst saturates his orbs as he sucks you between his teeth, the sounds of his slurping causing an even fiercer wave of desire to engulf you as your sex sheds even more slick for him. He catches it all onto his tongue with fervor, the resulting sigh of his satisfaction joining the filthy sounds of your passion that you make together.

“You want this tongue inside you, baby?” He mouths from where his mouth is melded to you, “What my sweet girl wants is what she will get.” His last word is swallowed by your cunt when the tip of his tongue slips into your hole, and he slowly sinks into you inch by delicious inch. You keen at that, and when he flicks it against your walls side to side, it makes the warmth of bliss surge up through your fucking veins from where he’s fixed to you with each devastating flick of it along your plush, velveteen insides that welcome him eagerly. 

There’s nothing languid about the way it writhes along the soft cushion of your walls, the movements of it wild and fevered like he can’t get enough of your addicting flavor as he uses the possessive grip he’s got on the pillow of your thigh to impel himself deeper inside you while you tighten around him. With his tongue still lodged within you, he mumbles, “Be a good girl and wrap your legs tighter around me, baby. I want to feast on you as much as I can. Can you do that for me?”

The vibrations of his voice are carried along his tongue and straight into the bundle of nerves nestled deep within you. You barely manage to comprehend his request, your brain malfunctioning under the burrowing of his tongue farther into you so you’re stuffed unbelievably with the wet length of him while he palms at your breast, twiddling your nipple between his thumb and index while heat coils in your core.

In the absence of your mind’s input, your walls constrict around him and your body obeys him, your thighs closing around his head to keep him lodged between your legs, your ankles crossing over each other so your heels can secure and lock him in place.

“There you go.” His words are smothered by your cunt as he dines on you, “That’s it, pretty girl.” He guzzles you between his lips, tongue grazing and gliding over each and every edge and lineation of your silken basin until no part of you has not been left lathered in his saliva while his other hand joins its counterpart so on your neglected breast. 

You feel those familiar tendrils of his Evol holding your hips in place, even his own power refusing to relinquish you while his hand cups the underside of your tit, thumb dragging itself along your nipple while his artificial palm fondles your other. 

You cry out at the series of sensations that don’t pause or let up, his eyes misting over in the haze of his desire that demands every bit of you as he breathes in your inebriating aroma that drives him fucking mad. 

You call out his name, begging for him once again, and it earns you another twirl of his tongue around the tunnel of your pussy as he intones, “I know, pretty girl. I’m making you into a desperate little mess. But don’t worry, I’ll make you come soon, baby. I want you to cream all over my face just as badly as you do.” He draws in a deep breath of you at the same time that vulgar tongue of his swivels inside you, his fingers playing with the buds of your nipples while you moan loudly as the coil in your core tautens. “You’re getting close already, huh, baby? It makes me feel so good to be able to listen to you sing for me while I pleasure you. Shit...I just can’t get enough of you.”

You entice him even nearer with your legs, squeezing him between your thighs by way of answer, your words lost to the pleasure that steadily begins to wind around your lower abdomen all the way to your brain. Your hips try to buck against him in search of more friction, but his Evol keeps you in place, unable to move while he tongue-fucks you, swallowing every now and again the taint of your own appetence. 

He notices that small movement of your hips, listens to your resulting whine when you are halted from that endeavor, because then the tendrils of his Evol that had been binding you still from above and below your waist start to conform to your shape, the makeshift digits acting as hands that support you down your back and ass rather than tethering your hips in place. 

“Ride my face, pretty girl,” he instructs as the hot length of his tongue penetrates the tight ring of your hole, immediately striking you frenetically along your walls while he’s swaddled in the vice of your cunt that clenches around him. “Remember what I taught you.” 

His encouragement fires the sparks of your action, and you immediately follow his directive. Your hips roll into him, the border of your lips catching on his nose and just barely hitting the edge of the bundle of nerves crowning your cunt while his fingers gently trace the pebbling outline of your nipples. Your mouth soon falls open to emit the wanton sounds of your blissful rhapsody. 

Headiness makes the air heavy between you, your back bowing at the tantalizing thrill that he arouses in you while he continues to flit his tongue in rampant, gyrated motions inside you while you grind yourself against his face like he’d told you to while he praises, “Just like that. You’re doing so well for me, baby. You’re so nice to suck on while you’re using my face to feel good.” 

Over and over you oscillate your hips against him, for each time producing a faster, fevered rhythm in the back-and-forth of the hot muscle of his tongue against you while he swills your piquant quintessence into his mouth. His hands never stray from your breasts, devoted to the peaks of your tits that have peaked under his constant attention. His irises smolder you in his zealousness, and you can’t escape the wildfires they make you burn with as he lavishes his love on you. 

Inevitably, the coil of need that had been building inside you threatens to burst, and he knows it, because when he buries his face even farther into you, angling his chin in this way and that so he can lave his tongue up the far end of your walls before pivoting it provokingly at places you didn’t even know existed in the trench of you, he feels the way you grip onto him harder, your sex contracting harder around him while he coos, “Yeah, fuck, I’m so hard for you, baby. Keep going.” 

Your hips hasten their pace, chasing the ecstasy that twines itself tighter in the base of your belly with every sway of them along the lower half of his nose, cheeks, and mouth. Your breaths have become shallow, barely a figment of what they once were where you whimper for him. The globes of your breasts heave up and down even with his hands still covering and rubbing at your rigid peaks while you rock yourself shamelessly on him, deliriousness spewing into him as you careen toward your end. 

“Tell me how good I am, baby.” His voice is smothered by you, his tongue drowning most of the syllables in the depths of you, “Tell me I’m the only one who can make you into a wet, dripping mess that wants no one but me. Let me hear your voice, pretty girl, and I’ll give you what you want so badly.”

You grind like a craven creature  along the bridge of his nose all the way down to the end of his chin, the gleam of your taint left in your continual passage atop of him, your entire system flushed with the same frenzy he takes you with. 

Coherency has forsaken you now, its forebear of wantonness left to overwhelm you in its place. 

It is why you moan out, “You’re so good to me, Caleb. So, so good. Better than anyone could ever be,” you throw your head back, and he sees the whites of your eyes when his tongue streaks faster than a comet back and forth within your plush galaxy that he could spend years exploring, words slurred from your efforts as you soddenly cant your hips astride him while avarice incarnate churns your core and cunt. “No one can fuck me like you, touch me like you do, or kiss me like you do. No one, and absolutely no one, can love me as you do.” 

The words are but echoes of a chant he’d been your maestro for, aiding and directing your notes of enthrallment for him while he’d pitched you into an impassioned  dance your body had responded only to him with. 

Your answer activates something feral in him, his pupils blowing wide and nearly absorbing the circlets of compressed morning dawn in them. Metal fingers take your chin between them, maneuvering your attention back to him and all you can see are the dimmed nebulae of his eyes as the space above where you both have become one distorts and distills. The tendrils of his Evol divaricate and break through it, reaching down until-

“Only I can have you like this. Now look at me when I make you cum, baby. I want you to remember this memory of me between your legs and never, ever forget it. You’re going to recognize me by sight, smell, touch, sound…everything.” Your eyes snap open and latch onto him when the cumbrous, corpulent striations of his Evol, all at once, press down on your clit in a feeling akin to hundreds of tiny palpitations and pulses against the bundle of nerves as he manipulates gravity solely for you. Your gasp is garbled and your hips jerk and jounce at the sudden flux of sensations, and then his other hand is there, on your hip, to help you keep going while his tongue makes schlepping noises where he fervently frisks it up and down in rapid succession within your clinging walls. “Such a good listener you are. I need you to cum in my mouth now, pretty girl. I need you to feed me your honey.” 

Your mouth falls open in an ‘o’ shape, the sonorous scream that resounds from you making even the walls tremble in its volume as your body obeys his directive and your world goes white with the shattering of the tension he’d founded in you. From its springs a fierce, fiery pleasure that floods you from he’s fused with you, the torrid, intense waves of it washing over you from the tips of your fingers to the ends of your toes that cramp and curl behind his back. 

He fucks you through your orgasm, the ribbons under his control winding down your sex slithering around and between his lips before they nuzzle the flowerbed of nerves buried far into you. The hot length he threshes about in your silken channel moves with an inhuman speed as the other hundreds of tendrils of his Evol ruinously ravage your clit over and over again while you wail and whimper for the man beneath you, your cunt cinching and spasming around him. 

Your essence gushes forth like a lewd stream into his anticipating mouth where he’s still got it moored to you, groaning deep and low where he receives you before he’s relaxing his tongue and opening wider to thirstily drink up the saccharine juices you have made for him. 

“Keep coming. Fuck, keep coming for me. I love your taste. Need it every fucking day,” he sloppily swallows your slick down, “Give me every drop, baby. I want your taste to linger in my mouth forever.”

You don’t have to be told twice, the tendrils ceaseless and unabating in their pressure as they depress themselves over the most sensitive parts of you without pause. They leave no area unclaimed, rushing and lapping at you everywhere over and around your clit and g-spot in their own kisses to you that make their master jealous.

Their master, who pushes his hips into the counter, halting the small undulations they’d been making into it while he observes your euphorically erotic performance just for him. Their master, who squeezes himself between the counter and his body where his cock splutters with pre-cum, a pervasive twinging of an ache declaring its longing for you even when he stifles it with the small, constringing threads of his Evol that force his orgasm down into the base of his balls. 

More you spill into his mouth as if a dam had been broken between your legs while he guides your grinding pussy there and back along his nose to his chin, the reservoir of his mouth receiving your release while you gush uncontrollably between his lips. 

“Such a tasty cunt,” He drains you like you’re the fountain of his very life, each movement of his Adam’s apple bringing with it the sound of his gratification in the low groans he lets out. When the flow of your juices begins to slow, each of those colorless ribbons of his power disintegrate,  his tongue retreating into his mouth so he can sip on you again and again– insatiable for you as an emaciated, famished male who hasn’t fed for weeks. 

His want is there, each time he draws you in, and it writhes in the irises that dilate and expand as he besottedly ogles the blissed, fucked out expression that has you mewling, the unbelievable intensity of your climax leaving you feeling as if you’re suspended entirely in some astral dimension that only your lover could augment before you. 

“Thank you,” he says it in some kind of daze, like the tart twang and tangy scent of you have clogged his mind of any reasonable thought while he languidly cleans you up, “Thank you so much, my love.”

Fondness makes your heart swell for him, and you’ve forgotten that the ribbons of his Evol still keep your arms tied down and entirely too distant from him. 

“Caleb,” your voice is hoarse from your earlier outcries, “I want to touch you. Can I?”

Your plea has the tendrils binding your arms to the counter dissolving and releasing you, your request brushing past the brume of the trance that you’d put him under while the other strands of his Evol encasing you around your pelvis diffuse into thin air. 

He cleans you with his tongue, entreating whatever remains onto it, your thighs slackening and opening around his head in the feeling that has been sapped out of you.

Once he’s sure he’s devoured every last morsel of the dinner, lunch, and breakfast that he’d made of you, his hands return to your sides to carefully ease you back down onto the counter so you’re laid against it once more. 

“You do not need to ask me that, my love. I love it when you touch me,” He licks his lips, the lewd daubing of your taint embracing the wet length of him as satisfaction morphs his handsome features when the last of you is lathered across his palate. “I live only for you, anyway.”

His confession makes your cheeks flush a shade of red even rubies couldn’t hope to compare to, and it only becomes a mightier shade when you blink up at him with those long, obsidian-like lashes of yours while he uses the back of his artificial, roboticized hand to wipe away the glistening sheen of your essence that still sullies his chin and nose before the pink muscle in his mouth slips out to relish in that, too. “I would do anything for you because I love you. You know that, don’t you?”

Familiar heat simmers between your legs, and you extend your slightly shaky arm toward him, fingers outstretched in effort to make contact with him while you answer, “You would never let me forget.” As tall as he is, he’s too far away even though he’s stood against the countertop, your own legs now dangling on either side of him. 

You whine at his unwanted farness despite your thighs that tremblingly try and fail to clamp him between them, and the resulting chuckle of amusement makes wings take flight in your chest as he responsively tilts his front forward, head lowering a little so you can dotingly cradle his cheek in your hand.

“What do you want, pip-squeak?” He rests his head in your hand, his knuckles of his other hand tenderly trailing down the underside of your arm to feel more of your smooth skin while his other, bionic one braces him against the counter so his chest hangs closely above yours. 

“You.” Your answer is fetched forth by the attracting force that is him, the debris of hesitation eradicated under the nebulae in his eyes that spin with adoration and devotion solely to you. 

“You have me, sweet girl,” he coos. “You always have.”

You’d never been good with words. Still, he made you want to be. 

So you try to show him what you mean another way, bending one elbow under you so you can surround yourself in his musky, masculine scent of iron and grass. Like this, you can’t miss the fully engorged, painfully erect member between his thighs that’d he’d left neglected out of his devoutness to you. 

You whine at the sight of him, fingers twitching impulsively at the sight of him as he tells you, “I know that look in your eyes, pretty girl, but I won’t last if you touch me there right now. I need you too much right now.” 

An emotion your language simply didn’t have a means of expressing makes the whole of your heart twinge and pang for him, your fingers drifting down from his cheek so they can maunder down his neck to where pliant flesh meets rigid, hard metal. The daintiness of your touch makes him shudder, and his carefully shrouded vulnerability exposes itself in the shadows within the corner of one of his eyes as your fingers nimbly meander down the dark plating of iron where his receptors can’t feel you anymore–nonetheless, you don’t stop until your palm lays against the back of his. 

“You once said that humans who love each other can mate their souls together if their vessels become one.” Your digits curl inward, filling the space he’d left open for you between his metallic fingers while his other digits reverently follow the curve of your shoulder blade to the dip of your spine. “I want that with you.”

His breath is snagged away by you, and he still sounds so very winded whenever the imaginings he’d had of you are replaced with the reality that is so, so much more beautiful than anything his mind could conjure. 

“Are you certain, my one and only?” He asks breathlessly while you bring the artificial phalanges of his iron hand to your lips, kissing each where human joints would be in the middle of every single one of them. 

Ever considerate of you and your own will, his question only whisks forth the truth of many moons and suns spent basking in the rays of his care and affection. 

“These past two cycles without you made me realize that there is only one thing that has any meaning to me in this place, Caleb, and that is you,” You profess, turning his hand over so you can intertwine your fingers with his. He interlaces his with yours, each fitting perfectly next yours like they were designed just for this purpose. All the while, he admires every bit of the spread of red dusting over your cheeks while you say, “Make love to me until our spirits mate for life. Until we can’t remember what it was to be without each other.”

The kindle of your voice sets him alight with pining that refuses to be doused until his very being is joined in the heat of passion with yours, and he stiffens unbelievably more between your parted legs while the bulbous head of his enlarged, swollen cock leaks his pre-cum that has you wetting your lips, your tastebuds secreting saliva at the delicious sight of him. 

“As you wish,” he faithfully utters before using the union made by your hands to help you sit up. His other digits faintly course down your spine, pebbling your flesh as they go. The soft pads of his fingertips don’t disappear until he reaches the small of your back where the globes of your ass hide you from him. “My moon and my stars,” those calloused digits fasten around your thigh, “My one and only in this life and the next.” 

You watch him bring your intertangled hands to his mouth, the shape of them pledging themselves to you in the fleeting, deferent kiss he impresses upon the back of yours before he ensconces it over the corded thew of his shoulder, doing the same to with your other.

“However you’ll have me, I’ll come to you. And I will make all your wishes come true. Every single one of them,” His bionic, metal hand joins its counterpart along the home of the backs of your thighs so  he can entwine you around his toned torso one leg after the other. While he does this, he angles his head to the side, the hotness of his breath blown against the shell of your ear while he murmurs, “I made a promise to you that I’d bring you to a paradise that is just for us. Whether it is my body or being that takes you there, my sweet girl, you’ll find it with me.” The torrid territory of his mouth skims the cartilage of your ear as he admits, “After all, you have been my Eden from the first time I looked upon you in that garden of tubes, glass, and monitors.” 

“Take me, then. Make me entirely yours so that we can always be together.” You declare, wrapping your legs and arms resolutely, unwaveringly around him. 

His control snaps, and from its remains, his want takes over. 

“Finally,” The word is hurried, rushed from the base of his throat when he easily lifts you up against his body and turns to hastily trudge away from the counter, his mouth tangling with yours in a mess of teeth and spit, the wet smacking of your lips all that you hear past his groan when you move your hips against him, your sex skirting along the tip of the several inches of his infatuation with you before your spine hits a wall, an untamed intent rearing in his eyes when he surfaces for air to husk, “Take it off for me, pretty girl. You won’t need that little nightdress before, during, or after what I’m going to do to you.” 

You heed him, peeling it off your body where it had been bunched atop your breasts and discarding it somewhere behind him unceremoniously while his irises roam and ravage your completely exposed form to make heat ignite everywhere they raze. 

“Caleb,” you whine, entranced by the unbridled, unadulterated lust that conflagrates in his orbs, stoking you in his desire. 

“You looked so pretty for me when you were getting off on my tongue earlier, my love. I would have come against the counter just from watching you, but I couldn’t let myself. Do you want to know why?” He mutters, adjusting and raising you up before the streaks of his Evol quickly clamor around your lower half so he can release you with one of his hands to take his massive, veiny and girthy length into it. “One: you were so beautiful while you enjoyed yourself on that countertop. I couldn’t bear to stop when you looked so tempting. Two: I wanted to come home. I wanted to cum inside you.”

Possessiveness has him slapping his head against your core to sodden you in his own essence, your pussy contracting around nothing while you shed more tears for him there. 

He exhales shakily,  prodding at your entrance with his tip. “You’re so wet for me, pretty girl. My spit and your juices look so pretty on you.” He lines himself up with your drenched hole and he sighs satisfactorily at the way you gaze at him from under a fan of dark lashes, “I’m going to fuck you until all that you know is me, my love. Until all that you can think about is me. Until all you can remember is me.” 

You clasp your arms around his neck, touching the bridge of his nose with yours, “That sounds like paradise to me.”

With your consent, his Evol bears you down onto his cock all in one fluid motion, the delightful fullness and friction from him bottoming out within you making your eyelids flutter while the both of you elicit the vocal sounds resonant of your rapturous union. 

“Fuck,” he curses, “You feel like a dream.” He husks, the invisible tendrils under his control holding your hips in place and turning you weightless while he nearly draws himself out of you only to bury himself back into you to the hilt nice and deep. “No, you’re better than a dream. And you’re all mine. Say it, pretty girl. Say you’re mine.”

“Y-yours,” you stammer when his warm, wet mouth encloses you where your shoulder meets your neck, sucking you between his teeth hungrily as the blood that rushes beneath it is coaxed to where he mars you while he thrusts debasingly into your pussy. 

“I have to remind you that I belong to you, baby, and leave traces of me all over you. You’ll look so gorgeous with my marks all over you.” Up your neck he travels, leaving flowers of red and pink in his wake while he crosses the orchard of your neck to the other side, the veins of his cock brushing against your walls caressingly as he picks up his pace needfully. “When you look at them, you’ll see that I chose you. That I’d only ever choose you. ”

Your walls embrace him tightly at that, and it earns a long, drawn out groan from where his mouth captures yours, teeth gnashing and tongue thrashing against yours in his insistence.

“I want it. Want you,” You mewl into him, your head falling back when his skilled maw descends to dote on your chest, the hot length of his tongue licking around and then over the pliant area of your nipple. He draws a line of spit with it to your other, taking it into his mouth so he can taste you while he plunges powerfully into you with his bulging cock that rubs deliriously against you.

“I’ll give it to you, pretty girl. You’re taking me so well. You feel so good,” He grits his teeth at the divine and damning sanctuary of your body, hastening the drive of his length into you even through the denial of his own end and continual shunting of it with his Evol that swells his balls and member to the brim in the buildup of his captivation for you. “I was made for you, pretty girl. And you were made just for me.” 

Through the haze of your lust that he fills you with, you can vaguely ascertain that he’s fuller than usual, that the network of veins and ridges constellating his much thicker cock pulsate sporadically while he tries to mask it with a bite onto your tit, teeth sinking into you that will surely impart a series of crescents there in the shape of him. 

“Caleb-” You barely get his name out before he shoves his throbbing member harder into you so every bit of him is seated in you, his pace quickening with each purposeful drive of his cock inside your willing and waiting cunt that clamps around him as if to keep him there. 

The slap of his heavy balls against your ass are obscene even to your own ears as his tip kisses your cervix with each quickening thrust, each one turning your thoughts to mush while his eyes flash feverishly up at you from where he’s got your tit bound between his lips. 

“Command me,” he orders, teeth territorially leaving their impression over and around the peaked bud of your other breast while he slams his length into you even faster as he sets a brutal, merciless rhythm, your whimpers wrenched from your throat while he drools around you, spit gleaming licentiously in its viscous venture down your belly. “Command me to let go for you, baby. Tell me to give the seed of my love to you that you’re going to carry inside this pretty pussy of yours.”

You can’t even think anymore, your words lost to the unwavering, relentless pistoning of his pulsating, swollen member that knocks against your g-spot each and every time he pounds into you to make the heat that has spread in your core smolder and flare with an intensity that even a wildfire would fail to contain.

Fingers of steel that can no longer detect sensation grab your jaw in an iron-grip, the manic glint in his eyes sending you deeper into the flames of felicity while his other hand flattens against your belly to feel himself where he protrudes against you while rams himself into your silken channel. “I said,” he punctuates each word with a lurid lurch of his hips, “Command me.”

His order summons your voice from the bowels of your body, your baser being temporarily avulsed from the depths of yourself as your mouth falls ajar when the palm against your stomach turns so the pads of his index and middle fingers can zealously stroke the cluster of nerves of your clit, the heel of his hand pushing into the sensitive area just above the thatch of hair overlying your sex to make his intrusions even more decadently depraved. 

“Let…l-let go for me, Caleb,” you incoherently babble, “W-want your…want your seed inside me.”

His eyes darken, and then he hums, “Mmm, I knew you would listen. You’re such a good girl. I’m going to ask you to do one more thing for me. Can you do that?” 

You nod, not trusting your voice to last with how he splits you apart until you don’t know where you start and he ends, tits jiggling and jostling where the colorless striations of his Evol don’t pin you in place against the wall while his fingers render aberrant patterns over and on your sensitive bundle of nerves cresting your cunt. 

“Fall apart on my cock and succumb to me, baby. Milk me fucking dry.” His fingers push down along your engorged nub while several invisible streaks of the power under his control stretch around and between his digits to consort with him like extensions of his own hand, brutally impelling themselves against your bloated button of nerves in tandem with the catastrophic whirl of his fingers against it. ”Show me how much you love me while I fill you up with mine.” 

You dazedly watch his lips move, the meaning of them slow to find you while he ravishes you with his cock with a final, fatal, calamitous blow that hits you in all the right places, not a single part of you devoid of his length as your body obeys him. Your walls spasm and convulse around him as you let out a piercing cry of his name and hot, blinding, white pleasure uproariously makes you its fortissimo. 

He’s bewitched by you as you move like a melody caught in slow motion, each breath a note drawn out, deliberate, aching with anticipation. The rhythm built inside you–a private symphony–pulsing low and deep like bass beneath the velvet sky of the dark. You were the strings of a musical instrument and he the composer, your body arched in perfect sync with the rising tempo. When your climax comes, it is a full crescendo–raw, electric, soul-deep–the kind of moment where the world falls away and only the music remains, echoing in your bones long after the final note fades. You don’t just feel pleasure–you become the song, and in that instant, you and he are infinite.

Your voluminous, glorious orgasm sends him into his, and he fucking bursts, shooting his molten seed inside you with a reverberating rumble of groan that sets your blood afire. 

“That’s right, pretty girl,” he encourages, “You’re so gorgeous when you lose yourself on top of me, my love. Keep going. I won’t let a single bit of me out of you.” 

You do as he says, even your labored breaths clinging to each other as he ruts his hips into yours, helping you to ride out your orgasm until your walls have stopped fluttering around him in a euphoric ballad while his mouth secures itself to yours, mingling his saliva and breath with yours in a messy string of kisses that don’t cease until his fingers find the backs of your thighs so he can languidly summon his Evol into the ether just to hold you nearer against his chest. 

Still he fills you, each white spurt lovingly caressing parts of you that you didn’t even know you had. 

So stuffed full of his cum, a sliver of it slips down your thigh, but several streaks of his power push it back up inside your cunt, keeping it all there while you try to hold the rest of his release within you. 

Your limbs tremble from the intenseness of your illicit activities, but it is a pleasing kind of numbness that is left in his wake while your hands dangle from the back of his neck, fresh red lines made from your nails now adorning him there that he wears proudly.

He waits until you’ve caught your breath until he asks, “Are you okay, pip-squeak? Was I too much?”

You smile at him, a different kind of feeling flittering through your chest when his eyes light up at you while you say, “There’s no such thing as ‘too much’ with you. I loved it…and you.” You attempt to card your quivering, jellified fingers through his tousled, mussed hair and he preens at the action. 

He croons, his own smile reaching his eyes when he rubs his nose against yours, “That’s what I like to hear. I love you, too, you know.” He gives a soothing squeeze to your strained and still quaking muscles along your thighs, “ Do you need me to give you a massage? You may not be able to use your legs for a little while, pip-squeak.”

Your cheeks burn at that last part, the inclination to hide your face in his neck where he’s shining with the sheen of sweat awfully provocative right now. “That does sound appealing, but you have not properly eaten yet. You need to.”

He arches a brow, and incredulous, he retorts, “What are you talking about? I just did. And it was delicious.”

Impulsiveness wins over your still recovering rationale, and you claim his Adam’s apple between your teeth while you challenge, “That’s not a real meal, mister. I’m not going to let you starve because of me. I love you too much for that. You can make us both something and we can eat together. I’ll tell you about the dreams I had of you while you were gone. How does that sound?” 

That piques his interest, and then he’s heading toward your bedroom with you tucked safely in his arms while he offers, “Sounds good to me. But I think a shower is in order after that. I need to clean you up.”

He watches your irises dip down where you’re both still connected, chuckling to himself when you give an inquisitive look. “And you plan to keep that inside me while you do?”

“Oh, pip-squeak,” he muses, “There are many ways to make sure it stays where it belongs. And if you lose any of it,” He takes the bottom of your earlobe between his teeth, “I’ll just make sure you give you some more.”

Familiar heat stirs between your legs, and you playfully nip over the notch of his Adam's apple while you say, “You’re insatiable.” 

“Only for you, my love,” He passionately professes through a pleased grunt, “So, what do you want me to make for us?”

“Anything as long as it is made by you. You can choose for me. You know what I like better than I do.” Your answer honestly as your lids grow heavy, and when you lay your head against his chest, you can hear how his heart is tuned to the same beat of yours. “My only request is something with apples in it. They remind me of you.”

“And what is it about them that reminds you of me?” His tone is the timbre of music in its peaked curiosity, the plop of his feet against the floor a soft backdrop against it as he peers amorously down at you. 

 Crisp where he needed to be, soft where he allowed, with a tartness that showed when life bit too hard. The scientists and commanders of Ever thought they knew him after one passing, scrutinizing glare, but they missed the way he carried seasons in his soul– the sunlight, the storms, the long patient ripening. And like an apple, he held your truth at the core– not always easy to reach, but real, and worth it.

You confess the musings you��d long harvested in your heart, they flow easily when he looks at you like you’re his entire universe. Each word nurtures in him a happiness that beams from those brilliant eyes of dawn and sunset that are merged together in them, and he effuses that comfortable warmth through your every bone, cell, and atom, your body fusing itself to his in a manner of seeking that went far beyond the flesh and mortal coil. 

Hours pass and he never drifts from you, unable to leave his moon and stars. Time is but a poor construct in his presence, because he instills and imparts in you the rich, vibrant wonders of life that manifest down to his every breath. 

When your bellies have been sated and he’s carefully washed you of the sweat, spit, and slick you’d unconditionally made for each other,  he takes you to bed. There, his fingers–magnetized to you–lulling each tensed, overused muscle of yours into relaxedness from where he’d lain you atop of him before tracing the outline of your every curve while whispering sweet nothings into your ear where it had been nestled into the crook of his neck. 

You’d given in easily into the tantalizing tug of sleep, for he’d enticed all of your energy and ability to move properly, the devout worship of his digits–both of metal and of flesh–too divine not to surrender to. 

When your even, measured breaths brush at his throat and your eyes have fallen closed, that’s when he presents his mouth against your temple, surreptitiously delivering a vow of his fealty, loyalty, and faith while you sleep peacefully–blissfully– in his arms. 

“Rest well, my one and only. I promise to you that in life and in death, we will never be apart.” 

Your peaceful expression lures him into his dreams, wanting to be with you there, too. 

The black void of space soon swarms him, his body robbed of its weight as he falls toward a scorched, scarred planet iriscable in the flame of its doomed fate. He’s been torn away from you again, and when he attempts to move, to try to find you, his appendages each fail him, each bereft and depleted of strength. 

Dismembered drones, Wanderers, and synthetic droids plummet past pieces of what once were cruisers, the lone, untouched ship of steel above him an abandoned refuge to the holder of his heart who dives toward him unflinchingly and determinedly as you cry out his name. 

Your kindling touch, when you furl your arms around his neck, restarts his every nerve and it’s all he can do to warn you of the imminence of his decay, your consuming connection corrupted by the same source that made you for each other of which he’d been trying to protect you from.  

There’s nothing but conviction in the pools of your eyes when you confess that this–being with him– is where you want to be. That the world being wrought in disastrous destruction is not scary, but losing him–going on to exist in a place where he is not– that is a nightmare you could never bear. 

There, in the pit of space, he makes his final promise to you, sealing it with a deep and devouring kiss that even the sun and moon commit to memory in the passionate profession of your love to the galaxy beyond. Then, the powerful intensity that your souls burn with for each other finally, fatally combusts into an inferno of light and matter. 

Like two stars that can’t be contained in their destiny to be together, the spark of your connection explodes, and then, he knows only you as the brilliant phosphorescence your union creates swirls and whirls around you, a supernova of destructive proportion coupling you with him forever that is felt through the far reaches of space. 

Subconsciously, he ensconces you in his arms just a little tighter from where you both lie with each other in your bed, your name spoken as a servant addresses their goddess. 

And unknowing yet just as perceptive to him, you press yourself against him just a little more insistently, his name a pleading prayer as it flits past your lips while you slumber on in the solace only he could ever bring.

[rabotimagines]

"HARMLESS" GN BOT! Reader x Optimus, Prowl, Jazz, Ironhide, light Yandere! Scenario

Summary: He'd been walking down one of the ark hallways when he'd heard a noise that drew his attention down one of the more secluded pathways. He'd followed the sound to figure out who was back where they shouldn't be only to find you self servicing.

Warnings: Noncon Voyeurism. Noncon recording in Jazz's section. Smut ahead. Minors DNI 🔞

Genre/Theme: Light Yandere/More Obsessed vibes tbh, catching crush/Obsession masturbating. Smut.

G1! Characters included: Optimus, Prowl, Jazz, Ironhide

Notes: Jazz is the only one here whose accepted the fact that he's a freak. The others are in varying stages of denial. Autobot reader. Valve and Spike are used since BOT reader.

Pronouns: You, your, yours

Optimus isn't trying to sneak anywhere he was simply- curious. Honestly, he was expecting to maybe find the twins up to some pranking or something of that nature. The wall is thick and tall enough that Optimus is just hidden naturally. He smiles to himself at the thought of spooking one of his friends or comrades, so he let's himself- indulge in the little fun. It was harmless, after all. He's up against the wall, ready to interrupt whatever tomfoolery when his optics catch on an opening before the turn. Optimus peers in curious when a sound happens again- and almost stumbles backwards and lands on his aft.

You- panting, optics bright, servos readily stroking over your plating. Array popped open with spike and valve on full display for anyone to see. You were self servicing right here almost in front of Optimus. Heat hit Optimus's fuel lines so quickly he was half worried he'd risk actual sudden ignition. Optimus knew he shouldn't even feel this way about you- it wasn't even- he was your leader for Primus sake! He was the prime he wasn't supposed to be- a pervert! But something- something about you just made his systems lock up and his mind wander in places it hadn't gone in vorns. Made Optimus think in a way he shouldn't. In a way, he couldn't-

The soft sound of you groaning at your own administrations violently locked Optimus back to what he'd unknowingly just walked into. Optimus watched stunned as two of your digits slipped into your valve rather easily. Your other servo lightly trailed along your spike, which was twitching in the air and leaking lubricant all over yourself from want- Optimus had to force his engine not to loudly rev in anticipation The sound urged to reverberate through his own frame at the sight.

Optimus knows he can't but- but with you like this right in front of him for his optics, he can't not think about it. Optimus wants to spike you - he wants to so bad. He'd have to stretch you. Optimus was admittedly rather large- overall. (You could even be in his frame size class, and he'd still have to prep you-) He wonders if your optics would brighten like that one time he'd praised you for a battle decision. He'd fold you in half, using his servos to drag you back down his spike in time with his own thrusts. He'd praise you over and over again if you reacted so sweetly. Regardless of how much of his spike you'd actually be able to successfully take.

Optimus knew the more responsible course of action would be to take your spike in his valve instead. But Optimus startlingly finds he doesn't want to be responsible with you. He wants to spike you so badly- your noises getting louder cut his own quick fantasy short, Optimus's attention zeroed in on you. You started bucking your hips against both your working servos desperate for Overload. Optimus has the very fleeting thought of revealing himself and offering assistance before he watches you spill transfluid all over yourself with a full frame shutter.

You gasped in vents of air as the charge trickled over your plating in fits- and Optimus lately realizes his smoke stacks were puffing smog when the smell of ozone hits his olfactory. Optimus has to force himself to move, but once he does, he leaves so quickly he's worried you might've heard him. This leaves Optimus plagued by what he should not have seen in the first place. His entire day is filled with the imagery of you- panting, optics bright, servos on your array- and he has no clue how he manages to finish the little amount of paperwork that he had. Optimus doesn't let himself self service. He can't- he won't- it was so wrong. You didn't even know Optimus saw the whole thing- that he saw you so- indecent.

He's plagued by one more thought of you taking his spike- your hips bucking against his, and Optimus gets up and forces himself to the washracks. It was rather late anyway there shouldn't be any mech using it. He walks in and promptly stops because there is someone using it, and Primus, it's you! With solvent running down your frame casually washing yourself with no worries. He meets your optics (after his optics had trailed much too long on your frame), and you casually greet him, then go back to your rinse. Completely unaware of what offensive imagery had just barreled through Optimus's processor.

Optimus didn't wait to promptly step under the closest washrack and turn the solvent on the coldest possible setting. Not even flinching when his frame is doused in a freezing temperature. Optimus finds he has to exert his will to keep staring at the wall and not steal any other glance at you.

... Primus, he needed to get a better hold of himself.

-

Prowl following the sounds in the off-limits area had come with purpose and indent. He'd been readily prepared to scold any of the usual troublemakers for getting up to something they shouldn't have. Clearly, that's what this was, with whoever trying and failing to keep entirely quiet. There was certainly an attempt, and Prowl would not have noticed if he were any of the usual autobots. But Prowl was always alert, and now he's here slowly trailing along the wall. He'd known there was a small indent hidden from the hallway for someone to hide or lean against. Prowls optics catch on a small opening in the wall that allows him to spy who-

Prowl stops dead in his tracks when he sees you- he almost walks the last two steps and reveals himself to you when he actually processes your expression. Optic ridge tight, mouth open panting, optics bright- Prowls line of sight trails down your shuttering frame before they widen when they land on your pressurized spike. His gaze snaps farther down instinctively when he catches movement and sees your valve.

He also sees the false spike in your valve.

His doorwings hike so high so quickly that Prowl can feel the snap of air on his own neck cables. He can feel his own optics burn brighter and his logic center suddenly goes rouge and attempts to calculate subduing measures on you- Prowl wasn't going to subdue you- you weren't a threat- just as he dismisses the calculations you groan rather loudly. The action triggers the subduing success calculations to turn back on, and Prowl watches you hilt the false spike back in your valve. Valve stretching to accommodate it and hard spike leaking lubricant at your own heightened arousal.

Prowl- Prowl needed to leave now. It had to be you of all mechs. If it was anyone else, Prowl would be able to rightfully interrupt this debauchery. But the fact that it's you- You softly panting with your array on full display and demonstration- Prowls processor is stuck, and he feels like if he stares too long, he'll risk a minor circuit crash. Prowl still doesn't know what it was about you that made his system stutter like it does. But Prowl knew that whatever it was- it was unhealthy. It wasn't  harmless- it was far from it. Prowl shouldn't think about you like this- He has to force himself to look away from your array again. Prowl had barely managed to push you out of his processor the other day, and now he's seeing you like- you groaned, and Prowls door wings vibrated a touch at the sound.

Prowl takes one long last look at your pleasured faceplate before promptly turning on his pede and briskly walking away. Prowl makes his way back to his office and sits, and finishes his entire daily paperwork log so quickly he's stuck sitting in his office staring at a blank datapad. Now, the other problem he had to solve. How is Prowl to... inform you that you're not allowed to self-service outside of your habsuite.

Prowl knows you have that false spike in your subspace. He knows he could call you in right now and make you empty your entire subspace on his desk for him. Say some of the autobots were smuggling... contraband. If you didn't drop it, he'd frisk you for it. Regardless, it would be put out on his desk, and Prowl would scold you and properly punish you. Prowl would use it on you. Force that false spike in your valve again and again and watch you fall apart while his own spike ached against his modesty panel. He'd make you overload all over yourself until all you could say was his designation.

His processor supplied the image of you sitting on his desk, with your legs splayed open on either side of you. Transfluid all over the front of your chassis from your overworked spike. With Prowls own spike sitting heavy against the mesh of your valve...

Prowl has to force himself to turn and go on break. Which leads to him walking like he's on his way to kill a mech and subsequently scaring anyone out of his way as he makes his way to his habsuite. Prowl overloads into his fist so hard his battle computer resets itself from the heat. When it turns back, his logic center started by running through the success he'd have getting himself alone with you and your potential routes of travel around the ark... It takes a shameful amount of effort to dismiss the prompt...

The stasis cuffs Prowl always keeps in his subspace feel absurdly heavy.

-

Ironhide is like Prowl, he'd come expecting to have to drag a troublemaker or two out and lay into them. He's not usually light on his pedes, but he'd had to learn to be after this many vorns at war. So he makes his way over ready to drag an autobot out like a buzzing scraplet if he needed to. But he stops when he hears a sharp invent that could have been pained? The sound sets his plating shifting the wrong way, and he gets even quieter and reaches a tentative servo against his subspace. Ready to pull his blaster out if he had to blast like pit as soon as he turned that lil' corner.

Ironhide's optics catch movement, and his gaze is drawn to the little broken patch of wall that gives him a small but wide enough gape to easily pear in and see what was on the other side. Ironhide stops and actually focuses on it only to recognize just who's plating that was- You failing to stifle a moan sends Ironhides plating ruffling for an entirely different reason. Oh, sweet slaggin- Ironhide has to bite his glossia so he wouldn't curse a storm under his own vents. Really? Here? Now? You were actually doing this?! You little pervert!

Ironhide- Ironhide knew whatever he felt about you was- well, fragged to put it lightly. He'd been online for frankly too damn long, and he'd never felt like this before. (And that only made it freak him out even more.) Yeah, he'd loved and crushed and fantasized, but whatever you were doing to his systems was something else. The blasted amount of feelings you were giving Ironhide was a pain in his aft on a good day. On his bad days, he couldn't focus on anything else, but his processor conjured charged fantasies- like he was a fragging youngling who'd just learned what interfacing was.

Ironhide sure wasn't about to let that stop him from doing his job, though. He was gonna drag you out and put you on chore duty for a week for this- You failing to stifle a groan that only turned muffled halfway which made Ironhide focus back on you through the gap and Ironhide swallowed hard. You had your digits shoved into your own mouth, thrusting them in again every time you thrust your spike into your other servo. You moaned against your own digits, your own desperate servo sending a bit of oral lubricant down your chin.

Arousel spiked in Ironhides frame so damn fast he didn't even have a chance to deny the HUD prompt before his array snapped back of its own accord. Ironhide bit his glossia, glaring at his now suddenly very fully ready to go spike. Ironhide cursed hard in his proccessor at his own frames utter betrayal. You whined around your digits, and Ironhides will shattered like glass. His servo cupped and immediately started stroking his own spike. Fine- fine! Ironhide would let you have this harmless dirty little secret. Even if he shared it a little bit with you-

Ironhide took the sight of you in- Optics bright, mouth making a mess all over yourself with your own digits, Spike hard and probably aching- Ironhides spike throbbed and he made sure to match the pace on his spike with your own servos speed. Ironhide pressed slightly against the wall, imagining it was you. Instead, he could press into the ground. Pit- Ironhide could take two the last two steps and do it right now- (He wouldn't- he couldn't.) Just two easy steps, and he'd scold you for being a pervert. (With his own spike already dripping-) Ironhide could punish you for it- he should punish you for it.

Ironhide would make you get on your knees and he'd have you swallow his spike. Put something better in there than your own desperate digits- you groaned on your own digits, and it was scarily easy to imagine you on his spike instead. Ironhide overloads to the sound of your own overload- he has to set his jaw tight, so the heavy groan that wanted to roll out of it wouldn't give him away.

Ironhide then realizes he's made a mess on the wall with his own transfluid and quickly grabs the rag he keeps in his subspace for oil. He wipes his mess up as quickly as he can before turning and making his way back to the main hallway. Ironhide might not get you for self servicing- but he can definitely scold you for slacking when you're supposed to be on the job. So Ironhide waits around the corner for you to come out on your own accord. 

... Ironhide realizes he can't deny this much longer before some other part of him breaks.

-

Jazz is naturally light on his pedes after vorns of making sure he stays that way. He doesn't even have to stop before he's leaning up against the wall instinctively when he hears another soft set of sounds trying and failing to stay quiet. So Jazz does what he does and sneaks over to find out what's what. He half wonders what he's gonna interrupt so he leans to peak between a gap to see a peak of whatevers being hidden from him- and Jazz almost immediately gives himself away like some kind of rookie at the sight of you with your interface array popped open.

Jazzs spark stutters and arousal starts pumping through his system like it was his function. As soon as he realizes it's you- You self servicing- a delighted smile curls on his face, and he leans farther against his little gap to get a better view. Oh, Jazz is lucky! he's so lucky-

Jazz had long accepted the admittedly almost obsessive hold you had on his spark and processor. After a few internal debates, he'd elected his feelings for you while wild were also genuine. So Jazz just needed to squash down the more- intense urges, and he should be fine. Jazz was never the type of mech to shy away from vices. Whether it was a harmless perversion or the unsavory things he needed to be or do as the head of special operations. Jazz had no objections in indulging in his romantic desire for you. (He just needed to make sure it didn't consume him whole while he tried to woo you properly.)

Jazz could interrupt and scold you teasingly and offer a servo, but Jazz knew you wouldn't be likely to want to keep going after being interrupted doing what you thought was private...

So he decides he'll take the harmless- (what you didn't need to know wouldn't hurt you.)  opportunity and activate the record function setting on his visor. He didn't want to miss this- Your servo stroking along your twitching spike, other servo running along your frame touching and grasping at the gasps in your plating. Giving Jazz a proper show of you tentatively touching yourself. Jazz wonders what your spike would feel like in his valve when you buck your hips against your own hold. Jazz then has to bite down on his bottom derma so he wouldn't groan at the sight of you spreading your legs unknowingly, giving him an optic full of your obscenely dripping valve.

Jazz reigns in the wild urge to jump you- to offer to help because he knows the act would ruin any process he'd made getting closer to you even just as a friend-Jazz leaned even closer, focusing on your digits teasingly brushing against your own mesh and anterior node. Jazz found himself wanting to bury two digits down to the knuckle in your valve and hear what sound you'd make. Would you manage to stay quiet like you were now, or would you moan for him? You panted out quick vents and noises that were still so restrained due to where you were. Your servo jerked your twitching spike quicker, causing more soft and barely audible sounds.

Jazzs own digits started to dig into the gap of his inner thigh armor. Moving to run along there against the dips of his own array panel. He'd pop his aching spike out, but Jazz didn't want to even chance ruining any little sound you might make with his own noises. Or the sound of his own lubricant- this was all you, baby. All for him-

Jazz has to dig his digit pads into his own thigh- scratching the paint right off when he watches you overload. You looked so good- So perfect. So sultry. So perfect for him-

Jazz has to force himself to hit end on the recording when you start to rise and move to quickly clean up. You'd be coming his way in a moment, after all. So Jazz casually stalks his way back to the common hallway he'd started at and moves to finish that report he'd originally been filing. He's definitely just going through the motions, though. His processor replaying his new prized recording over and over for him behind his visor.

He's self servicing to it as soon as he tucks into his habsuite for scheduled recharge. Jazz is already making notes about how you touched yourself and how he could keep that little information tucked away for later. Jazz, let's himself imagine spiking you in your little area and giving you a proper valve overload, making your optics bright and your vents shaky. Jazz then imagines riding your spike and filling him up like he'd filled you up. He imagines sucking your spike- tasting your valve. Jazz had already accepted that he wanted you in every way you'd let him, so he has no problem indulging further and further.

Jazz overloads hard watching you overload a second time. And Jazz has to bite down on his own knuckles to not set Red alerts hallway sensors off. Maybe... Jazz could adjust your work schedule and give you just slightly more free time than you have right now. Would be a shame if your little hiding spot went... underutilized.

Jazz just hoped he'd be quick enough to catch you next time, too.