#sheep without a shepherd | Explore Tumblr posts and blogs

bitterrfruit · 3 days ago

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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

#yes this is my second fic title involving teeth leave me alone #john price x reader #captain price x reader #cod fanfic #call of duty fanfic #cod smut #bella writes

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amoristt · 4 months ago

Text

the night falls like heaven

part 2 (x)

「 ✦nam-gyu/reader ✦ 」 tags: sfw // hurt/comfort, pining, nam-gyu's pov, lots of angst in an edgy way, very light drxg mentions,

a/n: this'll be a 2 part mini series! so excited to get this started ugh tysm to anon who requested this word count: 9.2k | songs i listened to (x) (x) original request (x)

・❥・Nam-gyu was not a man of many regrets.

If he had to count, he could fit them all on one hand. Mostly from when he was a teen. Younger and somehow even more impulsive than he was now, drinking through money like water and getting into fights he’d never remember. The worst of them all, however, was one he hadn’t thought would really eat at him. It was unlike himself to get hung up over a girl of all things, but good lord, he was hanging. Strings and all, like a marionette, bleeding and sore at the joints.

Tough to swallow couldn’t even compare to the feeling of when that specific regret suddenly pops up in the same room after years of abandon. If he hadn’t been so down bad, the sight of you would have only ruffled up his feathers enough to remind him of a better time, but in God’s honest eyes, those feathers of his had been ruffled since the dawn of the very instant you left. The door hadn’t even had a chance to hit you on your way out, nothing but dust and tears in your wake. He was stuck fast, left to his own devices, bouncing between wondering why he let it go so bad and whilst also begging God himself to make you stop being such a bitch.

But the worst part, the worst part is that even now you still carry this aura of over it all around you. Self-respect colliding with the want to be loved was never an easy tango to dance, all steps just pulling and pushing and trying to snuff out useless feelings and red hot passion. But you twirled until he did what he did best and nudged you to the brink of your breaking point. All that sweet, sweet adoration drained from your face and he saw it- dignity. He saw it on you on your way out of his apartment, storming past him with biting tears in your eyes. And now, years later, he gets to see it again from across the room.

You’re sitting on a high, high bunk you’ve claimed as yours, people watching. Other than the initial moment you’d seen him in the bubble of people, you haven't bothered sparing him a second glance. It was a beautiful moment- your eyes widening, stopped dead in your tracks before you were on the move all over again. He’s sneaking glances through the corners of his eyes, watching you over his shoulder, and you can’t even give him another second of your day. And the thing that really bothers him is that he knows he can’t stop.

Out of everyone in this room, your distant presence is a fiery beacon in the darkness and he’s an angry, bitter moth. It’s in his very nature to circle and flutter one step behind, seeking the light, burning at its touch. Singed wings and an endless sneer. If only he could just stop touching the heat, he would surely move on. But he just can’t, and the fact that you can pisses him off so much it makes him lose his breath at times.

He wished, with the very core of his entire being, that you were weaker. Or, at least, stupider. Maybe then you would have lived up to his expectations and showed up to his door, or at his club, teary eyed and lonely without his superior presence around. He could see it behind his eyes at night, the waver in your voice when you’d beg him to come back into your arms, and more importantly, back into your bed.

I told you so, he’d say, with that shit eating grin and a hand on your waist guiding you out from the cold.

A forlorn, guideless sheep in need of your shepherd. He could be that for you. If only the word boyfriend didn’t make him shudder with every last fiber of his being. If only that specific little thing wasn’t your breaking point. Your face haunted him- that halo around your irises fading into something far away and charred when he’d had the nerve to actually laugh at you for it. You were grabbing your things and leaving, and he sat watching every moment in clips. It wasn’t anything, back then. You were just mad, in a few days you’d be right as rain climbing into his lap and peppering kisses along his throat. You’d be back, he was sure of it.

But then the days turned into weeks. And then, to his distaste, those weeks faded into months of silence. He started to catch himself looking for you in crowds, visiting places you’d frequented at just to linger around like an awkward ghost in case he spotted you through the shifting crowds. But you were gone- vanished.

Fine. You’ll never see me again, asshole.

Those words had been etched into the very walls of his cranium since they’d left your lips in a scathing hiss. Such nasty words, but they shook with every consonant.

Among your pride was a healthy blend of honesty. You had been true to your word- he really did never see you again. Wiped your slate spotless of anything Nam-gyu.

And it drove him fucking crazy. It made him sick to his stomach in a way he did not think was possible. It was out of control- he couldn’t stop thinking about you, you, you. He missed you more than he didn’t, and he was angrier at himself than he’d like to admit. So instead of admitting, he funnels all that anger into the very shape of you. Drags in the idea of you, his memories of you and shoves them down, down, down, until he truly did think he hated you, after all.

Until he’s clenching his fist so tight he’s drawing blood and telling himself he’s better off now, without some whining bitch in his ear begging him to stick that boyfriend pin into the thinness of his skin. Thinks that without you hanging on his arm all the damn time, he could really go out and have some fun. He thinks, and he thinks and he thinks until he’s thought too much and suddenly he loves you again and he misses you so bad it’s crushing him under the sheer weight of your absence.

So, Nam-gyu does what Nam-gyu does best once again, and he drowns himself out with the bitter taste of drugs on his tongue and the sear of alcohol in his blood.

It all stops.

For a time, anyway.

You always found ways to seep back into his mind one way or another. Songs that would only make it a second in before he was mashing the skip button. A tv show you’d watched together surviving on the screen roughly a whole minute before it’s switched off. Sometimes it was when he saw something he knew you’d like- a shitty video or meme. Other times you came to him in whispers while he laid out on his own living room floor, out of his mind watching the blank ceiling above him twist and writhe under his spotty vision with a needle poking out of his arm.

But, most times… Most times you would slither your way to the forefront of his mind just before bed. The touch of you, the smell of you.

The shape of you underneath him. Hands and quiet breaths. He could still hear the noises you made ringing in his ears, stored away in his memories just to taunt him when he was indisputably alone. Soft skin, even softer thighs. Always so warm, and so wet. So willing. You would come to him while he curled over himself in bed, drunk on porn and memories.

And afterwards, when Nam-gyu had finished, he would throw his head back onto his pillow and ignore the way it felt like there was a lump in his throat. And that would piss him off even more, because fuck, you should be there with him. Laying by his side running your hands through his hair until he’s falling asleep balancing on the fine line of afterglow and dozing off.

But you aren’t. You’re doing fuck all with who knows in places he’s never been to, places you probably begged him to go but he couldn’t even remember the name of. You hadn’t answered a single one of his texts, you hadn’t picked up a single call and everytime he hears the first couple seconds of your stupid voicemail he wants to crush his phone in his hands. Vexation was a slippery slope into the fires of fury- rage was like a parasite under his skin, eating away at what little rational thinking he had.

Voicemail after voicemail. Text after ignored text. Anger was the hardest stage- rage grew horns on the crown of his head and it turned him into something he couldn’t recognize. Or, something he refused to recognize- desperate and heartsick.

It was supposed to be you. Not him.

He filled the endless gaps of you with drugs often and women when he could. For a short time it would work and he would wonder why he ever let someone else get him so, so low. But then the drugs would wear off. The random woman in his room that he never bothered to learn the name of would grab her clothes and saunter out the door. He stopped letting them stay the night. He could never sleep, stared at the ceiling until 5am wondering why he still felt like shit. He would be right back where he started, sitting on the couch, staring at the door watching you leave over and over again.

You stopped updating your socials, quit hanging out with the few people that bounced between his and your crowd, successfully scrubbed him of your life entirely. After a year, he resorted to asking around if anyone had seen you. The answer, as always, was a firm no. It was a corrosive feeling, a constant churn and thrum within the cage of his ribs. It made him even more unrecognizable to himself. Made him invite women into his lap just to shove them away when they didn’t smell like you, or sound like you. Or laugh like you.

It had been so, so perfect before. It was fun, and it was hot all the time, and sex with you felt like heaven was a place on earth. Why couldn’t you see that? Why did you have to go and ruin it with your words and pleading eyes? Nam-gyu doesn’t roll like that. You knew that. He’s a free spirit, he tells himself. No chains, no labels. No holding him down. Even if it was at the feet of this gorgeous, gorgeous body and a honey sweet voice that just always seemed to know what to say. Beautiful eyes that always watched, a smile so saccharine, whispering words against his ear so dirty it made him shiver just to think about.

The world was too vast to be held down.

But, truth be told, he was held down.

He is held down.

When you walked out of his apartment those years ago, he never left that spot, chewing his nails and anxiously spinning the ring on his finger, watching you go. He started seeing it behind his eyes. Replays it, changes the course, wonders where he’d be right now if he’d just said something different.

Finding you at the games was like divine intervention. It had to be. Some higher power had crossed his path and plopped you right in front of him. With rolling eyes and a deadpan stare at anything except for him, sure but you were there and you weren't going anywhere anytime soon. God had heard his drug induced prayers of stupor.

Now it was all about waiting. Waiting for the right moment to dive in and recapture you within him and he’d be right back to drinking you in at every chance he had. He’d do it differently this time, do it right so you’d cling to him and wonder why you ever wanted to leave at all. Make you wonder why you were so stupid to have been so stubborn when everything you could ever need was in the palm of your hand. He was sure of it. That strong, bullheaded expression would blitz is something vulnerable in his hands. A lurch of excitement riveted under his skin among the nerves.

For now, he waits, and watches. Your presence could never go unnoticed by his dark eyes.

It’s unfortunate for him that Thanos takes a notice to you, too. It’s hard not to, really, when every time he follows Nam-gyu’s locked line of sight it always leads back to you- this little sweet thing perched up at the peak of the bunks alongside the back, watching the room with this bored stare between mundane yapping with other players.

“Someone you know?” Thanos’s voice had this subtle drip to it, this underlining excitement that Nam-gyu picks up on almost instantly. His expression stays cool, mostly uninterested despite the way he can’t seem to pry his eyes away from you even as he answers.

“Yeah.”

“Who is she?”

And then he’s stuck. Because his mouth opens for a split second to say, my ex, but he can’t quite say that, now can he? But he also can’t say an old friend either, because you simply weren’t. What you two had was something else entirely- a new plane he struggled to navigate, lovely when things were good, a hellscape when they weren't. The lines were always so blurred, fuzzy with sex and warm laughter.

He decides on something mostly true. “Someone I used to hang out with.”

“Girlfriend?” Thanos’s brow raises with his chirp, leaning forward with clear interest.

“No.” It comes out quick- too quick, and too heavy. Tinged venom with more baggage than even he could handle at times. Thanos catches it on impact and whistles.

“I see. So you won’t care if I go chat her up? Hm?”

“Don’t bother. She’s not like that.” Nam-gyu’s scoffs before he can stop himself, this unsettling seed of jealousy planting itself in his chest.

“Hm… I guess we’ll see, huh?”

You’re dismounting from your bed and climbing onto the stairs when Thanos jumps to his feet, and Nam-gyu can already feel that itchy panic starting to blotch away at his skin. His hands, his cheeks. That seed takes its place within him bearing vicious roots.

“Man, don’t bother,” He’s touching at Thanos’s sleeve, his shoulder, anywhere he can to try and gather his friend’s attention. “She can be kind of a bi-”

All it takes is a swat to Nam-gyu’s chest to stop him dead in his tracks, words dying his throat. Shut down, watching his friend take quick steps to you, Nam-gyu following close behind to witness. If only he could be firmer, never demanding, always suggesting. Always rolling over and showing his soft underbelly at Thanos’s whim. Instead, he lets his lips press into a tight line and let’s it all happen right before him.

You’re on the bottom step and taking a seat, and you see the rapper approaching before he gets a word in, but your eyes skip over him entirely and settle onto Nam-gyu’s. Distress is building in his muscles, but he’s making damn sure to keep himself in check.

“What’s a pretty girl like you doing all alone? You want a friend?”

Up closer now, sharing your space, he sees all the things he’d been missing so deeply throughout the years. You still look just as he remembered- still bearing this expression of bemused coolness, still having these all seeing eyes that seemed to cut right through him.

“A friend?” you hum, and your voice threatens to pull him in like gravity. “You wanna be my friend?”

If jealousy could sprout through his skin, it’d be an ugly beast of horns and claws. But it can’t, so instead, it takes shape in the way Nam-gyu’s eyes are flicking between yours and the rappers, hands wrapped up in his sleeves.

“Stick with me, yeah? I promise to keep you safe. My number one priority.” And Thanos is patting his chest, flashing those painted nails. Makes Nam-gyu’s chest tighten, his stomach growing sicker by the second.

Damn, you can see it, too. There’s no denying the way he’s cringing behind that distant smirk, and he doesn’t think to hide the way he’s twisting his rings on his fingers. When you click your tongue, he knows what's coming.

“Stick with you, hm… Sorry, but I try to work alone. Partner’s tend to, how do I say…” Those eyes of your slice through him all over again, honing into him when you finish your sentence. “Disappoint me.”

Fuck. Disappointment. Oh god, how that sears into Nam-gyu’s skin. The way you look the rapper up and down, visually sizing him up, would make his heart leap into his throat if he were under that same scrutiny. He never understood how you could always be this intense with such a sweet, sweet face. Kindness was certainly a luxury and he missed it, that never ending fire that kept him warm.

“I can change that for you,” Thanos sings. “I’m a legend here for a reason.”

“Legend? I’ve never heard of you.” Your brows raise in amusement.

“You will. Thanos.” He puffs his chest out and nods, a half cocked grin playing over his lips. “Guy’s like me, we don’t disappoint.”

The man actually finds the nerve to reach down and pluck your hand, bringing his knuckles to his lips. Nam-gyu feels red hot scorching through his face but he’s locked in place, watching it like a car crash. Relieved when you yank your hand free and shove it into your jacket’s pocket. It’s the only good thing out of this entire interaction, he finds, especially so when Thanos’s smirk falters into a tight surprised line.

“Don’t go and do all that. Guy’s like you will always disappoint me.” You lean back against the wall of the step, vexation evident over your features. “How about you talk to me again after the next game, yeah? Maybe I’ll feel different. Thanos.”

You always were so good at slamming the door in people's faces, always brought Nam-gyu joy to witness you shut down the advances of some poor loser trying to gain your affections. Thanos knows he’s been hung out in the cold, too. Barking up the wrong tree in the wrong neighborhood in the wrong country. So, he takes a loose step backwards and shrugs.

“Your loss.” He sighs, and Nam-gyu follows him all the way back to his bunk in brooding silence.

Wringing his fingers, he can’t help himself when casts a glance over his shoulder to find you one last time before you’re obscured behind metal frames and moving bodies. When he does, he feels a rush of heat in his cheeks when you’re already stuck fast staring right back, watching him go. He’s silent when he sits down at his little corner of the dormitory, silent when Gyeong-su is harping praises at Thanos. Silent, even, when Thanos says he’s determined to bring you to his side of the map.

However, he noticeably tenses when Thanos mutters, “What a babe, huh? I should go visit her after lights out.”

Almost immediately there’s hands on his shoulders, pushing and nudging him, demanding his attention. The deepest of sighs leaves the rapper, ducking his head to find Nam-gyu’s eyeline.

“Come on, man. Don’t be pissed, it’s in my nature, boy. Be honest. You into her?”

“Me and her…” Nam-gyu swallows. “We used to mess around.”

“Lucky you.” Thanos’s is shoving Nam-gyu’s shoulders again. “You cut her lose?”

No, she cut me loose. But Nam-gyu can’t bring himself to say that, the words lost and barred at the tip of his tongue. In the silence, Thanos takes it as confirmation.

“That’s so cold. If I had her, I’d never let her out of my sight. Sheesh.”

Nam-gyu can’t even form words at all, anymore, irritation and envy wrapping tendrils around his throat and snuffing him out. Your earlier words spin through his brain like a carousel- come find me after the next game. Were you being serious? Were you just saying that to mess with him? He knows you- he knows your tone better than he even realizes, but he suddenly can’t decipher what’s honesty and what isn’t anymore. Jealousy blinds him, thick lenses leading him in all sorts of binds.

He should have talked to you. He should have made the first move and made sure the first time he was breathing your air was alone. Now he’s anxious, he’s resentful, and he’s humiliated for some reason he can’t quite place. It doesn't help when he can’t resist the urge to look at you one last time, just one for the road, and you’re chatting idly with a man lounging on the other side of the steps you’re currently sitting on. There’s a five foot gap between your bodies but Nam-gyu doesn’t care- the anger that rips through him is blind, you may as well have been fucking the man right in front of him.

It’s all he can see, tunnel vision encompassing him all the way until the moment lines start to form for lunch. Stewing in his jealousy, a bitter taste blooming over his tongue, he doesn’t jump in line because he’s got an appetite, but simply because you were rather eager to fill your belly. He tails you, matches every step and still has to jump out in front of a random player from taking the spot directly behind you.

You notice him with a fleeting look tossed over your shoulder, eyes darting from the corners of your eyes and then forward, still as a statue. Desperate to not interact.

Nam-gyu can’t help himself.

“You into Thanos?”

You audibly laugh at him, and the sound makes him shred the inside of his cheek.

“Maybe. What’s it to you?”

Everything. It’s everything to me.

You look up at him over your shoulder, watching him through your thick lashes with scorn written all over those beautiful irises. There’s a flash image of you- a memory, tangled between the bedsheets, looking up at him with those gorgeous eyes and tear stained cheeks with his hand wrapped around your throat. It’s quick but it hits him like a sucker punch right to the gut. He sucks in a sharp breath. He wants to touch you- he almost does, but the line moves forward a beat and you’re moving with it away from his hesitating fingers.

“I’m just asking.” He’s trying to be coy, but you can see right through him.

“You worried, Nam-gyu?”

That hits him like a sucker punch too. He’d forgotten how his name sounded on your tongue, how it rolled off so perfect and pretty even when you were pissed at him. Sometimes specifically when you were pissed at him, this bubbling anticipation running through him in waves, your passion always the spark lighting the fire in his belly.

“I’m not worried.”

“You are.” Clocked him, again. Peered into the windows of him and saw that angry ocean of spite and regret behind his eyes. “I know you are. I can see it on you.”

“Not worried.” Nam-gyu shrugs, but he can’t meet your eyes anymore.

Another sigh ghosts from your lips, but it’s quieter, defeated, almost.

“I’m not interested in your friend. I’m not interested in anyone.”

And then, he says it. Quietly, as if he doesn’t want you to truly hear.

“...You seemed interested.”

“So you are worried.” You’re crossing your arms and he stares down into your hair, shoving his hands into his pockets. “What if I was? You clearly had nothing to say about it. You were right there- you didn’t tell him we had history? Or did I mean that little to you?”

You’re mad. Holy shit, you’re still so mad at him. But then his brain scrambles to tell him the good side of things- anger is not indifference. So in some ways, maybe more than others, he’s still in that little dome of yours ratting around amongst your thoughts. Means that if he does this right, it would mean something to you to be better this time.

His lips press into a tight line. He should have talked to you, and now it’s biting him in the ass. It seemed like everything always bit him in the end. And he always let it happen, watched and never interfered. You drive the nail you’d plunged into him even deeper when you throw his words, from all those years ago, right back in his face. That last thing he had said to you before you, or the idea of you, had become a black hole.

“You know what, Nam-gyu? What was it you had said? Oh- uh, why don’t you focus on yourself and I’ll focus on me, yeah?”

It stings. It stings so bad that he physically recoils from the sound of his voice on your tongue, words spilling that just don’t seem right coming from you. Bitter resentment rises in his throat, this reflexive coping mechanism to bite back overtaking his senses. He wants to say I shouldn’t have said that. He wants to say, hear me out. But what ends up leaving him is just as ugly as the rest of his feelings.

“Jesus. You’re still a bitch.”

The very instance those words tumble from him, he’s already regretting it with every fiber of his being. Even more so when you pluck your bento box from the guard and spin on your heels to glare absolute daggers into the very pits of his soul.

“Get over yourself. I’m glad we had this talk, it was very refreshing.”

This time he does jump to stop you, shaking his head and squeezing his eyes shut. “Just listen-”

“No.”

He doesn’t hide the way he watches you scamper off to your little ledge, hopping up onto your bed and enjoying your vantage point above all else, focusing on your meal. The man you’d been chatting with earlier is in the bed next to yours and that’s just fucking great. The guard has to pry his stare off of you, and a bento box is practically shoved into his chest, urging him out of line.

Nam-gyu hates the stone anchoring in his guts. Almost as much as he hates how his appetite never quite returned. All food tasted the same when you left, nothing compared to what you’d used to make him.

The bento box was no different.

That night, sleep avoided him. There was something keeping him awake- buzzing under his skin no matter how many times he’d rolled over and shifted himself into a new position. Of course he knew what it was- it never really left him, after all. The fact of knowing you were across the room, all alone in your bed, was this incessant knock in the back of his skull tapping him back into reality whenever he found himself comfortable enough to doze off. His mind was stuck on you, as always, wondering what you looked like right now.

Did you sleep the same as before? Laying on your side, hair messed over the sides of your face and splayed over the pillow, those heavy lashes of yours kissing along the bone of your cheeks. He always told himself that it was you who was attached, that he was some great being and you simply touched the stars through him. How wrong he had been to think that, when the entire time he’d fit so perfectly against you, he a piece to your puzzle.

How wrong he had been, because when he’s staring up idly at the ceiling, he thinks of the better days in his life. Always, always, it was you. Thinking of you sitting pretty in his passenger seat, watching out the window as the world blurred by in rushes. The wind blowing through your hair, your necklace catching the glint of the sun. You’d feel his eyes on you and you'd turn and smile at him so darling, so lovely, that he thought it could heal. Remembering when you’d walk into a room, shining like a beacon just for him. You’d find his lap, find his hair, find his lips against your own and you’d cry his name like a prayer.

He was an idiot to have thought he was the something in the nothing- it was you.

Even when he finally drifted off into sleep were you still infecting the very membrane of his mind. In his dreams, you were just as warm as you had always been. Bated breaths, hanging onto every word that left his lips, fingers that longed to touch and stroke and feel. His heart slowed to a peaceful beat, and his body curled into his pillow and blanket, trying to recreate the shape of you in his arms. For a time that evening, it worked.

But then he woke up, and Thanos was leaning over his bed asking him if he was dead, and all those wonderful moments he’d relived were gone in a rush of bright lights and endless chatter bouncing off the walls of the dormitory. Like an addiction, the first thing he thought of when he sat up, was you. Thought about you all the way through the winding staircases and into a giant room with rainbow’s painted over the hard floor. So lost in thought that he almost misses it when the speaker starts instructing them- a 5 player minigame race.

Teams of five. Okay, he could do that. Easy. Gyeong-su, him, Thanos. That was already three.

It’s natural instinct when he starts to search for you in the bubble of people, his fourth member, even though he’s more than sure you’re all too excited to send him packing. The way you had looked at him at dinner the day before, he wasn’t sure if you’d even entertain a conversation with him at all, let alone join their team. But this is beyond an argument- beyond him trying and failing to lull you in, this is life and death.

“Hey, there’s your girl again.” Thanos spots you first. He follows Thanos’s line of sight and sure enough, there you are, standing with your hands shoved into your pockets with this far away expression he can’t quite read.

His girl. It would make him shiver, if he wasn’t already on the brink of tweaking.

“Let’s go see if she’s changed her mind.”

Thanos is running his hands through his hair and popping the collar of his tracksuit, a particular bounce to his step when he bounds right for you. Just as the first time, always on the lookout for yourself, you spot him coming before he gets to you. Already you’re annoyed.

By the time Nam-gyu slithers up beside him, you’re already turning Thanos’s first wave of advancements down, a snark to your tone and a glint in your eyes.

“I’m good, thanks though.”

Thanos blinks, looks left and then right. “You’re good? I don’t see a team?”

“I’ll find one.”

“You got one right here,” He pats his chest again, before he slings his arm over Nam-gyu’s shoulder haphazardly. “Come on. You’ll be safe.”

The intensity in which you roll your eyes is fierce- an expression Nam-gyu really had only thought he could draw out of you. To make matters worse for his friend, you don’t even bother with saying no again. Instead you merely wave a dismissive hand and turn on your heels, meandering into the crowd.

“You were right, Nam-su.” Thanos’s face drops and he unwinds his arm from Nam-gyu’s shoulder. “Not getting anywhere with that one.”

Nam-gyu is so focused watching you, that all he murmurs is, “It’s Nam-gyu.”

“Yeah. Nam-su, Nam-gyu. Look over there.” He has to force himself to look away, following Thanos’s point in the other direction you’d gone. A girl with short black hair stands off to the side, eyes traveling and sizing up all her potential team mates. Thanos pops his collar again, a hound dog chasing a brand new scent. “Let’s go see what she’s up to.”

For the first time, Nam-gyu doesn’t follow him. He says, you go, you go, and lets Thanos wind himself up all on his own before watching him go. He’s much more concerned with you and your team, this sense of anxiety starting to bud in his gut.

He finds you like a moth to flame. Your shoulders slump at the sight of him, tired and irked.

“Not this again.” You groan. “What, do you think you’re gonna come sweeten me up and I’ll say yes? I’m not playing on your damn team.”

Nam-gyu shakes his head and steps in front of you when you try to turn away again. His nerves are on the rise, and so is his temper. You draw it out of him like nothing else, he can’t stop himself.

“Why not?” He asks, looking down at you with furrowed brows. You cross your arms, barring yourself from him.

“Because I’m not.”

“This is no time to be stubborn. You don’t know what the next game is. You might need guys on your team.”

“I plan on it. There’s other men here other than you and whatever the hell his name is.”

Other men. Nam-gyu’s mouth dries up, his fingers already wringing in his sleeves. His jaw tenses with his temper, teeth grinding.

You didn’t need other men, not when he would do anything under the sun to keep you safe. Anyone else may just let you die. Can’t you see that?

“Why are you being-... Being like-...” He stops himself. Holy shit, his brain actually fires off the warning shot and he stops dead in his tracks staring at you in bewilderment. You adopt this expectant glare, a spiteful uptick to your lips that darkens your eyes.

“Say it.” You sneer. “Go ahead, say it. I’m being a bitch, right?”

The word fights against his lips to get out. You’re waiting for it, at the edge of your seat, fully ready to take it in and chew it up and spit it out right back at him. But he bites it back and he swallows it down into his chest because this means something to him. Because it might mean something to you.

“Being like this.” He stammers. “I’m trying to keep you alive.”

Your eyes widen just a fraction. “Keep me alive?”

“Can you really trust anyone here? You know me.”

“I do know you.” A flash of something provoked and somber rivets within your eyes. Anger mounting, your heart colliding with your brain in real time right before him. “That’s exactly why I won’t be on your side.”

If he’d had his foot in the door before, you were properly shoving it back outside. He doesn't know what to do, so he does the first thing he can think of as a creature of impulse, and unfortunately when it came to you that meant he was all hands.

“Wait-” He catches you just as you’re turning away, tries to bulldoze over your defiance and smooth out all the harsh edges of your protests with the broad flats of his palms. Fingers clutching your tracksuit at your shoulders and then he’s realizing that he’s touching you for the first time in years. Your skin from underneath your jacket is just as warm he remembers, your eyes are just as doe-like at his touch too. Stubborn and ornery but overflowing with passion and static energy that settled into his bones. He needs it, he needs it. The obsession of you hits him in waves of yearn.

He needs you more than air, he thinks.

“Get your hands off of me, right now.” But you aren’t tearing him away- so maybe that’s progress.

“Come on.” He ducks his head, shoulders slumping, and it physically hurts him to feel this desperate. “Stay with me.”

Oh, you don’t like those words one bit. They hit your eardrums and your eyes narrow in slits, and then yeah, you’re reaching up and catching his wrists in his iron grip before ripping his paws off your jacket. It takes a long moment for you to speak, but when you do, he swears he can hear the devil amidst the heartache.

“You know that I can’t stay with you. Never again.”

His hands twitch to touch you again- anything to keep you there for a moment longer.

“Come on.”

Sadness like pits swirl in your eyes, drags your lips into a frown. “You gotta’ stop Nam-gyu. I can’t do it.”

An awful, awful mass grows in his stomach when you turn your back on him. Gets bigger with every inch you build between you and him, threatens to take over entirely and swallow him whole right in the middle of that room. If it did, and he was to be gulped up by the void, perhaps he wouldn't have to feel like this any longer. And he wouldn’t have to watch you disappear behind all the moving bodies.

He was weaker than he was three years ago. You made him weaker. Back then, if you’d been so sure of yourself he found it rather easy to deter you. A beastly way about him when he would have just ripped you by the hand and brought you over to his team and made you sit the hell down and just stay with him. Something possessive, something under his skin at the thought of you sharing the same air as anyone other than him. You used to be so malleable in his hands- but he knows, now more than ever, that that was truly never the case. You let yourself be pliable. You let yourself fall to him. He could never, not even now, make you do anything. Not really.

That’s the part that burns him to the peaks of his soul. That strength about you. You’re so much stronger than him, with an energy iron so it’s like running headfirst into a wall when you’d no longer graced him with your softness. Such a double edged sword, that will of yours. That attitude and the passion made him feel alive. Cold and disposed after you’d properly slammed the gate right in his face. No leverage, no space for him in your heart any longer.

It’s cold, Nam-gyu finds. Lonely without you.

And then Thanos goes and invites some random girl with a poor attitude (that isn’t yours) and an even weaker buddy. He tries to tell him- remind his friend of the potential disadvantage but like always all it took was a dismissive wave to get him to screw his lips shut. Rolled over, tongue caught in his throat, weakened.

He spends a majority of his time waiting for his teams turn arguing with Se-mi and tossing gazes over his shoulder to keep a very keen eye on you, only to find a sneer growing on his features after seeing you chatting with the same player as earlier, the man with the bed next to yours. Laughter and smiles roll from your lips as natural as breathing air, and he’s nudging you with his arm and you’re letting him with this expression of pure amusement.

That should be him.

That ugly face of betrayal peeks through the cracks all over again, with guilt and anger and regret following in tow close behind. Sitting on his shoulders like little devils, spinning and racing through his body in waves. If you saw his face- you’d never suspect it, but his hands shake in his lap. His jaw tenses so tightly his teeth could burst into powder. Squared shoulders and an endless drag to his lips. Something in the sight of you enjoying that guys presence is reminding him of all these shitty feelings he’d been faced with when you two were together- well, no, not together, he remembers- and then he’s even angrier. Angry at you, angry at that random ass player you were talking up, angry at himself for letting it get here in the first place.

Thanos pops open his necklace beside him and draws a fun little pill from its contents, and Nam-gyu makes it a mission to get his hands on one of those sweet little pick-me-ups. The pill is bitter on his tongue but he swallows it down in delight. And it works, too, because the moment the colors start to glow and fuse together and all sounds become this echoing fishbowl of noises, you’re vacated from the corners of his fuzzy mind. For a time, he’s at peace all over again, lost in the blurry joy.

By the time he comes down, he’s already back in the dormitory.

Though it takes a moment for him to realize it, he’s taking inventory of all the surviving players. One by one, watching them fill the room and find their creaky beds or their little groups. Most were distraught, though some were particularly perturbed. It takes a couple teams before he understands that what he’s really looking for, naturally, is you. He’s always searching for you, even when he knew you weren’t searching for him back.

That’s the change, and it dawns on him like a rapture. He’d never had to care before- you were always this constant in his life, something that would always bounce right back if he tossed you aside. He didn’t give a damn if it upset you, he didn’t give a damn if it ate away at you like termites through wood. But now he does, and he gives so many damn’s they’re driving him crazy.

Any moment spent sober and lucid were moments entirely taken up by you.

Any moment now you’ll come strutting through those doors, head held high and gunning it to make sure Nam-gyu knew exactly how much you didn’t need him.

But then ten teams turn into twenty, and twenty five into thirty.

“How many teams were there?” Nam-gyu asks with a voice steadier than even he expected. Thanos doesn’t need to question anything, watching the doorway all the same.

“Fifty-six.” Se-mi hums from her spot, leaning back against the steps.

Thirty eventually turns to fifty.

Too much time has passed, and you’ve still yet to pop out through that doorway. He double checks those who’d already shown their faces, hoping to find you through the cracks of them, but you’re simply not there. There’s a shovel digging pits and moats into his stomach. Another wave of players trickles in and he scans them all over the same, only to feel that hollowness inside him grow once more. They saunter to their beds, to their little groups, taking up space and taking up air that should belong to you.

Where the hell were you?

“Only two teams left,” Thanos hums. “Where’s that girl of yours?”

Nam-gyu can’t force himself to answer this time around. So, instead, he presses his nails between his teeth and nervously shifts his weight from left to right. Though he shrugs, the anxiety within him was palpable, all lines and tension that he tried to bury with nonchalance. But it wasn’t working, and felt like he was being ripped apart from the inside out.

Mind racing, thoughts circling him like birds over fresh kill. The final team walks through the doorway, slow as zombies, shifty eyed and hurriedly rushing to their beds. His eyes sit on the door, waiting, waiting.

No one comes through.

His shoulders fall limp.

You didn’t make it.

“That’s a shame.” Se-mi sighs, the sound swimming in Nam-gyu’s ears.

Loss, real loss was a foreign feeling within his chest. He’d seen it described in the movies, in songs, this soul eating all consuming weight that blanketed over bodies and crushed, but nothing could have ever prepared for the blistering moment it wrenches itself within the confines of his heart, within the deep ache of his bones. It didn’t settle properly in his throat- his body trying to force the alien ripple of dread stitching itself right between his ribs. It hurts- his lungs can’t take in air. His breath wheezes past his lips in shallow pants, unable to tear his eyes away, like at any moment you’ll suddenly materialize right before him.

He presses his lip into a tight line and digs his nails into his palms, anything to release a fraction of the agony festering within his body.

Brain on fire, shaking hands and the image of you dead in a thousand different flashes, a sting to his waterlines that has him scrambling to shove his fingers against the thin skin.

Don’t fucking cry. Don’t fucking cry.

“Bad luck. Sorry, boy.”

All the skin on his body has flushed red and sticky. He ducks his head down towards his lap, desperate to hide within himself, even more desperate to hide this part of himself from the watchful eyes of his group. He should have just made you join them. Should have thrown you over his shoulder and wrapped an immovable grasp around your arm and held you hostage until everyone had a team and then you’d have no one else to turn to. No one else, nothing else except for him.

He can’t even hear his friend’s counterfeit empathy over the swell of his heartbeat in his ears. His body is too heavy to hold up, his arms dragging as lead, his head even heavier on his shoulders. Uncanny urges to tear at the skin of his face overcome him and he has to bury them into his hair in release, roughly running his digits through the black locks, trying to breathe and breathe and breathe. A lump the size of a boulder burrows into his throat.

Cracking his eyes open to peek down at his lip, squeezing them shut when his vision is wet and blurry. His lower lip trembles until it’s caught in his teeth, biting hard into the skin.

Don't fucking cry.

Why did you have to be so stubborn? If you’d have just let him take care of you this one fucking time, you would be alive right now. You should be alive right now- pissed and glaring fury in his direction but breathing and taking up space and existing-

“Ah, they made it. Here I thought they were all goners.”

Se-mi’s casual tone barely reaches him, but it’s got him frantically flicking his gaze back up to the archway, his hands falling from his face, trying to see through the blotches in his sight. A handful of players take soft steps into the room, all shaken up, all bewildered.

There you are. His racing heart stops entirely.

You’re sauntering into the dormitory like a wounded animal, all hands wringing out in front of you and lines drawn into your frown. For the first time, in Nam-gyu’s eyes, you look small. Frightened. Every step you take has a weight to it he’s never witnessed you bear. And even from across the room, even with rigid tears trapped in the corners of his eyes, he can see the grip of fear on the flat of your throat.

All those jumping thoughts settle into a tunnel vision, you at the epicenter of his quaking nerves simmering down into stillness. He forgets how his chest had twisted as if a knife had been planted between his collarbones, and he forgets how he had almost lost his lunch right there on the floor. All because you’re standing there in the middle of the room hugging yourself, white as a ghost, even paler when you lift your head up and see the way Nam-gyu is trapped in your line of sight.

Nam-gyu see’s it. No hate, no dejection.

Relief- this instant where your widened eyes soften, your frown lifts into a slack-jawed breath of solace. It rocks his world when it hits him and it lights a flame so hot under his skin it’s burning through his veins. All the air trapped in his lungs leaves him at once and he can pinpoint the exact moment all the tensions in his shoulders and back melt away in nothingness. The tears dry, his lower lip released from his gnashing teeth.

The man you’d joined earlier pats your shoulder and offers you a pathetic, wavering thumbs up. You can’t seem to return his dull enthusiasm. In fact, you look worse than Nam-gyu’s seen you thus far. Changed, all wires sticking exposed and sparking. There’s this lifelessness to your body when you climb up the stairs and have to heave yourself up into your bed, crossing your legs and resting your chin on your palms propped up over your knees.

When your eyes meet his, he expects some sort of sign of contempt, or perhaps maybe you’d refuse to meet his gaze entirely. Instead, for the first time since you’d arrived, you find him first.

You offer him a pitiful open palmed wave.

The pearly gates crack open and Nam-gyu feels it again- warmth. Even just a little bit, like lighting a match in a snowstorm, huddling around the flame. He half cocks a smile, and he waves back.

Lunch came quicker than he’d anticipated, and much to Nam-gyu’s dismay, you weren’t exactly thrilled to hop into line. In fact, ever since you’d let him jam his fingers back into your closing door, you’d hardly acknowledged anything other than your lap. Even more so upsetting, that player you hung around tapped your mattress to gather your attention, pointing to the line, sighing in defeat when you’d shook your head.

Jealousy seeps into his wounds all over again, quiet, but equally as simmering. Don’t act like you know her. Little devils tapping away at his psyche. She doesn't need you to check up on her.

But then again, he realizes, maybe you do.

His mouth dries when the sound of his thoughts footsteps come running up on him. His greed. His innate ability to leave you unchecked and grappling. That was among the sea of problems Nam-gyu had been struggling to grasp. Here he was, trying to drag you back into the tar pits of his hold and he hadn’t even tried the basics of kindness. The step one of it all. Always taking, taking, taking and demanding more at every swipe. Always expecting, never building.

So he jumps into line before he can second guess himself, and he takes his bento box with a grateful nod and he doesn’t waste a second before he’s chasing the trail of you to your bed. From your high point, perched and unmoving, all he can do is climb the stairs and rest his hands over the corner of your mattress. Your far away gaze lifts from your lap and settles down to him.

The air is different. The landscape of you has changed.

“What is it.” Your tone is uncannily flat, but it’s void of its bite, its drive.

“Can I come up?”

It’s a simple request, but it leaves a shake at the end of his sentence. It’s only natural when he mentally prepares himself for you to slap no onto his forehead, but you scoot over, and he takes the spot so quickly you wouldn’t even have the chance to say no if you thought about it too much. He hoists himself up and over, fills the gap at your side, just as he should have done days ago. He sits the bento box at the crest of your lap.

“What’s this?” Blinking down at the food, you make no effort to pick it up.

“Fish and rice.” Nam-gyu shrugs. “Looks like an egg, too.”

“I can see that. I meant, what are you doing giving me this?”

“...You didn’t get anything.”

As your fingers gingerly touch the container, eyes scanning over the contents, Nam-gyu feels he can breathe easier. This is a win for him- you aren’t fighting him anymore. Still on the edge, always ready to run, but the look in your eyes isn’t pure hatred or outright hurt. A swell of pride overcomes him when you pluck the chopstick and murmur, thank you.

You’re pliable. Now, more than ever.

You eat in silence. He lets you eat in silence, even though peace isn’t exactly one of his virtues. Partly because he doesn’t know what to say to you, but mostly because he’s got this innate fear that he’s going to say something shitty and you’re going to hate him all over again for it. A million words are always shoving and pushing against his lips and he fumbles with navigating them. So, silence, it is.

But it doesn’t bother him. Silence meant that you were simply just there, existing, the one thing he had longed for over the years. He knew, deep in his heart, he’d fucked up when he began to miss the very presence of you. No sex, no drugs, no push or pull, just you. And now he gets to take whatever you’ll give in micro doses, greedy and starved for you. Fighting the urge to pull you into himself where you could never climb out. He refrains- he forces himself to just be there.

No longer could he be the creature he had been all those years ago. He had to be different- not all rough edges and clawing hands, ripping and taking. Or dark eyes watching your every move, or jagged words cutting your flesh with the highs and lows of his tone. Something better, this time. Something for you.

Tomorrow would be a new beast entirely. And, in less than a few hours, the lights would flicker off and bask the dormitory into hues of red and blues. You would lay alone in your all-too-large bed and he would sink into his mattress drugged out of his mind thinking countless thoughts of you, you, you. The distance would feel like miles- he needed you right there, right then, always. Anything other than what he had sitting beside you was a vast ocean.

The bento box appears in front of his lap, half eaten.

“You’re not going to eat it?” Nam-gyu’s brows knit.

“You should eat, too. What, scared of my germs now?” You murmur, and when he meets your eyeline, he sees something familiar in those hues. Something nurturing, sweet. Tender.

Nam-gyu picks up the chopsticks, and he eats. For the first time in years, his food tastes like food.

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