the-hinky-panda - Tumblr blog

[the-hinky-panda]

[the-hinky-panda]

The Winter Series: Part II

Rating: R (mentions of domestic abuse)

Taglist: @bullet-prooflove @kmc1989 @trublu2u @nsr-15

It’s the first time that you’ve seen Aramis angry.

If it hadn’t been for Constance’s presence, her hand on your shoulder, you would have barred the entrance to the shop and not allowed him inside. You know what anger does to men, how it turns them into something unrecognizable. You didn’t want to see the monster he would become; you wanted to remember the kindness. But Constance had been with him, carrying a lantern and no one argues with her when her mind is set. 

“He’s not angry with you,” she whispers in your ear. 

“My experience tells me that it doesn't matter too much who they’re angry with but rather who’s around when they are.” 

Constance sets up a bowl of hot water for the utensils needed to pull the remaining shards of glass out of your palm. “Aramis is different. He’s nothing like George, I can assure you of that.” 

You want to believe it, you truly do. But Constance lives in a world where she has the luxury of marrying the man she loves and who loves her.  Aramis enters the room with two candlesticks and sets them on the table next to the bowl. His jaw is still tense but his eyes are more troubled than angry. It calms your nerves slightly. Constance takes the leather bound kit from him and drops the needles and pinchers into the water. 

“Alright,” Aramis starts to unwrap the cloth you had used to wrap your hand, “let’s see the damage.” 

It had happened around midday and you expected the bleeding to have stopped by now. But when the cloth is peeled away, you can see blood still seeping from the jagged gash. Aramis moves the one candlestick closer to you and turns your hand. You can see the faint sparkle of a couple shards you missed earlier. 

“I’ll get clean bandages,” Constance says and you tell her where to find them in the back room. 

Aramis pulls the small pinchers out of the water and hovers over the wound, planning the best way to approach the shards. “This was no accident. Was it?” 

You start to deny it, to say it was your fault. But then you meet his eyes and they’re so earnest. He wants the truth. You can’t lie to him  and he wouldn’t believe you if you did so you shake your head. 

He sighs in resignation. “I suppose those broken spectacles were also not an accident.” 

You duck your head and wince when the first thin sliver of glass is pulled out of the cut. “No, it wasn’t an accident either.” 

You glance down at the pocket on the inside of your corset where your small round glasses are safely nestled. Your eyesight isn’t bad per say but the glasses help when it comes to reading the scales to ensure the correct amount of ingredients are being used to create your compounds. It had been after Aramis’ first visit to your shop. Someone had told George that a Musketeer had been seen on Red Guard territory. George had been annoyed, not wanting anything to do with the Musketeers around his business. His business. As if it had been his previous generations that opened and ran the apothecary. As if he actually cared one bit about the shop and its contents. 

You hiss when the second sliver is removed and Aramis apologies. Once again you’re touched by his tenderness and concern. He isn’t the one responsible for the injury but yet he’s the one asking forgiveness for the pain. If you weren’t already in love with him, you certainly were now. 

“I believe all the glass is out now,” he says, sitting back in the chair. “Now for the fun part. Do you have anything that will numb the skin for the stitches?” 

“Clove oil might work. I give it to people who have toothaches and it numbs the area around the tooth.” 

Constance retrieves it from the shelf and brings it over to you. After you rinse out the cut one final time, you use a small amount of the oil to rub into the skin along the edge of the cut. The strong spicy scent of the clove fills your nostrils and a tingling warmth spreads through your hand. Aramis already has the needle threaded and is waiting for you to offer your hand back to him. Almost all of the anger has dissipated now from him, his easy, charming good nature now back in place. How you wish things could be different. 

By Aramis’ third visit, the one where he had helped you down from the ladder you used to reach products on the top shelf, the one where he had kissed you so thoroughly you couldn’t think of anything else for a week, George had enough of your defiance to his wishes. You had tried to explain that the garrison paid a sizable portion of the bills and that to turn away the Musketeers would put the business in jeopardy, but it fell on deaf ears. And then your spectacles fell under his boot. 

You had tried using them the next day when Aramis stopped into the shop. He had folded them carefully into a handkerchief and said he would take care of them. And he did. You didn’t expect anything to happen. Your marriage had taught you all you needed to know about empty promises. But a week later he had come by and presented a pristine and sparkling new pair of spectacles for you. Constance had sat in the back of your shop one afternoon and stitched in the small pockets into your corsets to slide the glasses into so George would have a harder time getting his hands on them. It was also the afternoon that Constance let slip that Aramis had spent almost every livre he had to pay for the repairs. 

That was when you had fallen in love with Aramis and started referring to Constance as your friend. That was when you decided you wanted a life surrounded by people who cared for you and not someone you feared. 

“Are you going to tell me what happened?” 

You look over to see Constance giving you an encouraging look. You’re not brave like her, you aren’t used to being genuinely cared for. You still don’t say anything, so she does, showing enough bravery for the both of you.

“He keeps asking for your name.” 

“My name?” Aramis tightens the two stitches that are already in your palm.  “He already knows who I am. And unfortunately, I know who he is.” 

Constance stammers briefly. “Well, he wants the name of the man she’s having an affair with.” 

You feel slight shame at the word “affair” but how could you call what you and George have a marriage? Your eyes meet Aramis’ for a moment and you see a similar emotion in his eyes. It’s like watching someone you love be wrongfully imprisoned. 

 “It’s getting worse,” Constance continues.  “Spectacles are more easily repaired than hands. What’s next?” 

“She’s right,” Aramis says, already more than halfway through the stitching. “If he’s willing to purposefully cause you harm, you can’t stay here.” 

It was like someone brought you out into the sunlight for the first time. You can’t stay here. Then where? The first realization is that it would be someplace safer. Next, it could be with someone who would never harm you, like Constance. Or, Aramis himself. You allow yourself that daydream, of no longer hiding in shadows and existing on stolen kisses and backroom trysts. No longer would you have to hang your head when walking through the streets of Paris, fearing whatever temper was going to take over George. No longer would you fear your own bedchamber and having to sleep next to someone you despised. 

This is what hope feels like. 

But reality quickly comes crashing down. If you leave George, his wrath will be unquenchable. He’ll take everything from you, the shop, your journals, your garden. And if he does discover that Aramis is your lover, he’ll take him from you as well. Hope is wonderful but it comes with too high a cost. You start to protest when the door opens and your heart stops. If George has come back and catches Aramis and Constance here with you, it could be the end of all three of you. But it’s three Musketeers that walk in instead and the relief you feel is immense. You watch the last one through the door, lock it behind him and it’s the first time in a long time that you feel safe. 

It’s your first time meeting Athos, the Captain of the Musketeers, and Porthos. Both men have a serious bearing, professional soldiers. You realize what an imposter George is, a bully in a uniform. Constance had already introduced you to D’Artagnan during one of her stops at your shop and he’s the only one out of the trio that gives you a smile. The other two remain serious as Aramis is tying off the stitching. Athos inclines his head to your palm. 

“Was this done on purpose, Madame Marcheaux?” 

You hesitate with your answer. You say yes and it could be adding fuel to the fire that already burned between the Musketeers and Red Guards. You say no and continue to live in fear of what comes next. Or, you take the third choice, the safest one for everyone. You say it was an accident and end this relationship with Aramis. It was nice while it lasted, it’ll provide you with the memories to carry you through the rest of your cold marriage. It’s nice to think of a better life but it’s just too high a price. 

“The truth,” Aramis says as he wraps his handkerchief around your palm, “will set you free.” 

He’s right, you know he is, but it isn’t that simple. “George is the owner of this shop. He doesn’t care about it which is why he allows me to run it but even that is precarious right now. If I say yes, that he did this on purpose, I could lose the shop. He would see to it that I did.” 

Athos sighs. “And if you say no, you could lose your life. Men like Marcheaux live lives of violence and no one will escape unscathed. Especially those closest to them.” 

You shake your head. “I can’t lose the shop. It’s been in my family for four generations. I can’t let it stop with me.” You slowly pull your hand back from Aramis. “I’m sorry.” 

There’s a resigned silence that follows your statement before Constance breaks it. 

“Then it sounds like we need a plan. One where she’s safe and retains the shop.” 

You give a sad shake of your head. “If only we could.” 

“Perhaps we can,” Athos speaks up. “When is the next Red Guard training that will take Captain Marcheaux out of Paris for a few days?” 

“Next week,” you answer. You and Aramis had already made plans to see each other while George was gone. The storeroom upstairs was slowly turning into a makeshift apartment. If George stationed any guards to watch you, all they would see was a woman who didn’t want to stay in an empty house while her husband was away. 

“Good,” Athos says. “That will give me time to speak to Treville. See what we can come up with.” 

“Treville?” you ask. “As in First Minister of France Treville?” 

Aramis smiles. “He used to just be Captain to us.” 

“And, uh,” Constance worries her lip, “I may have already sent a correspondence to the Queen asking for a meeting.” 

You almost fall off the chair. “The First Minister and the Queen? Are you all serious? They’re not going to help some poor Captain’s wife and shop owner. There’s much more important things for them to attend to than this.” 

“You’re right.” It’s the first time Porthos has spoken the entire night. “There are more important things, like helping someone who’s being treated unjustly. Especially someone who’s a friend.” 

And just like that, hope springs eternal.

[the-hinky-panda]

The Winter Series: Part I

Title: The Winter Series: Part I

Rating: Explicit

Summary: You're the wife of the Captain of the Red Guard and own an apothecary shop in Paris. A chance meeting with a dashing Musketeer changes the entire course of your life, if you're brave enough. (Trigger warning for domestic abuse, infidelity)

Tag list: @bullet-prooflove

You’re used to being on your back. Pinned down, eyes closed, waiting for George to finish so you can wash up and write the latest pieces of knowledge that you’ve acquired concerning compounds, herbs, and alchemy. You try to think about words you’re going to string together, how the slant of your writing will fill the page. Then the illustrations that you’re going to draw, the scrape of the quill against the parchment as you draw the blossoms of the lavender spikes in your small garden. Anything, you think of anything to distract you from what George is doing to you. 

It’s not like that with Aramis. 

He allows you to take control. You keep your eyes open and focus on as many details as possible during these intimate afternoon rendezvous. The words that fill your mind are the descriptions of how his hands feel against the skin of your ribcage as he steadies you, how it feels to lower yourself onto him, to be filled by him. How it feels to have a choice as to when a man enters you. The pictures you would draw of him beneath you, color rising to his cheeks, dark eyes growing darker with each roll of your hips. 

The ecstasy that hits you both is indescribable. That’s when you lose your words and pictures, the world shatters around you. It’s like dying and being reborn in the same moment. 

Peace comes afterwards. You enjoy the quiet that invades the storage space of the shop as well as your mind. Aramis contentedly traces random patterns against your back and side while you lay your palm against his heart, waiting for its pace to match your own. He pulls you closer to him in the pile of the blankets on the floor, presses lazy kisses against your neck, murmuring lines of poetry and adorations. For you, someone who has never run out of words, you find it difficult to tell him that this experience with him is unlike anything you have ever had before in your life. All you can do is try to memorize these moments as detailed as you can before having to return to your world where kindness is just a memory. 

***

“Who is it?” 

The jar of dried peppermint leaves almost slips from your hand at the sound of George’s voice behind you. Your thoughts had been on the previous afternoon’s occurrence, replaying the light touches and soft kisses shared with Aramis while listening to the rain fall on the roof. You slip your spectacles into the inside pocket of your bodice, an alteration that Constance had done for all your corsets to ensure the safety of your repaired glasses. 

“I didn’t hear you come into the shop, George.” You brush past him as you continue to measure out the order for the peppermint. “What do you mean who is it?” 

The strike is quick, fast enough that you never saw it coming and hard enough to knock the scent of mint out of your nose. “Don’t play your word games with me.” 

You can taste the tang of blood in your mouth and you swallow it down. “I don’t know what you’re asking.” 

“Who is the man you’ve taken to our bed?” 

You try to hide the slight tremor of your hands by busying them with wrapping up the satchel of herbs. “You share the same bed as me. If I brought someone else in, I would think you would take notice.”

He leans on the counter and waits for you to look at him. “I did notice..” 

You hold his eyes in a soft defiance. There’s no possible way for him to know. All your encounters have been at the shop, not at your home. George hates the shop, only crosses the threshold to take things that he wants: you or the money that you’ve made that day. You don’t even know if he’s aware of the second floor storage room. “What makes you think-” 

Another strike, against the other cheek this time. 

“What makes you think you can embarrass me in this way?” 

“George-” 

“It is my good graces that allow you to keep this shop open, to allow you your…indulgence of independence. If you want to keep the shop in your ownership, I suggest you remember your place and end this affair before you bring any more shame to my name. If not, it’s being sold to the highest bidder.” A cruel smile curls his lips. “Perhaps that would be in your best interest anyway. I dare say two years is enough time to adjust to married life. Caring for children and managing the shop will be too great of a time constraint for you.” 

You feel the icy grip of terror go through you at the thought of having children with this man. It makes you more fearful than that of having your affair come to light. If this is how he treats you, how in the world will he treat your children? You couldn’t bring a child into a home where they would know the same violence and fear that you do. You swallow down your pride and nod with downcast eyes. “Thank you for your generosity, George.” 

“That’s better.” He moves towards the front door and picks up a small jar of dried nettles. “What is this used for?” 

“Teas. It helps with swelling and gout.” 

He’s looking right at you when he drops the jar, glass and nettles spilling over the floor. You may be able to save some of the herb but the danger of having shattered glass mixed in there is too great. Thankfully, it wasn’t too expensive but you didn’t want him to know that. With a sigh, you pick up the broom and bend down to start cleaning up the mess. You’re reaching for a piece of glass when his boot rests on the back of your hand. You hold your breath, praying he doesn’t put any more pressure on your hand. 

“What is his name?” 

You set your jaw, locking it tight. He’s taken so much from you, he’s not taking this. You’ve found a glimmer of happiness, joy even, and you’ll go to the grave before condemning Aramis to George’s obsession. Your resolve damns you though and your prayers are unanswered as he slowly applies his weight and the shard of glass cuts deep into your palm. 

“A reminder then, of your place and who you belong to.” 

[the-hinky-panda]

The Crush comes home June 2024 ❤️

ARC announcements coming soon! If you’re not already following me on Insta, TikTok, or Threads, please do! 🫶🏻

[the-hinky-panda]

No Matter What

Title: No Matter What

Rating: R

Summary: Everyone has their reason for committing treason. But ultimately, it's for a better future. They just hope they get to live that long to see that future.

Author's Note: It's been a shitty week for me and I've been struggling to write. I have no idea where this came from but here it is. I don't know if there'll be more parts or if this is it.

“Love is not a because, it's a no matter what.” ― Jodi Picoult, Second Glance

You don’t meet with the musketeers in the catacombs. Instead, you go straight to the country, to the monastery. Emotions are going to be high, loyalties tested. Suggesting treason will do that. Porthos, desperate for adventure, will be an easy one to convince to join the mission. Athos, your brother-in-law, is still grief stricken and looking for an opportunity of revenge. He will join any mission that will ease the pain from the loss of his son. You had also helped raise your nephew when his mother passed away in childbirth. He was just as much your son as he was Athos’ and revenge is also a motivation for you. You've been loyal to Aramis and his cause for over the last six years now. It’s D'Artagnan that is the one that could bring this all down on your heads. 

This is why your orders were to immediately report to the monastery. You have all of Aramis’ notes, documents, and evidence. If D’Artagnan decides to turn the three of them over to the king for treason, hope is not completely lost. You will have to be the one to carry through. Being a woman affords you less suspicion so it could be possible to spirit the prisoner away from the Bastille and train him to replace the King. That is why you’re at the monastery in the first place, to tutor him. He will need to behave in the same educated manner that the current king maintains. Reading, writing, art, history, all subjects that had been denied him since he was imprisoned. 

When you arrive at the small farm that houses the Jesuit order that Aramis is affiliated with, one of the priests takes your horse and hands you a lantern. You’re a common face around the monastery, often arriving to deliver news or offer literary discussions. The Jesuits were an order dedicated to enlightenment and knowledge which allowed a woman such as yourself to be an acceptable source of knowledge. It’s brought you comfort in a difficult world. 

“Brother Aramis will arrive later on tonight, if…” 

You nod in understanding. “I’ll wait in the kitchens if that’s acceptable.” 

“Of course,” he gives you a small smile. “There’s a bottle of wine if you wish to help yourself.” 

You give your thanks and head towards the kitchen. There’s still a chill to the night air so you take a seat near the hearth. You’re still sitting there, half the bottle of wine gone despite your watering it down significantly, and a hundred pages read in your book when Aramis arrives. You try to read his face, the firelight casting shadows on his face and making it difficult. He takes the chair next to yours, dropping tiredly into it with a sigh. You pass him a cup of wine and wait till he takes a drink before asking your question. 

“How much danger are we in?” 

“As much as we normally are.” 

“That’s reassuring.” 

He gives you a half smile before turning serious again. “We were right, Athos and Porthos are behind us completely.” 

“D'Artagnan?” 

“Horrified at our treason. But willing to let us hang ourselves.” 

“That’s smart of him. Athos and Porthos both have suicidal ideations so those two problems will take care of themselves. Which leaves us.” 

“Well, me, at least. I don’t think he knows anything about your involvement.” He frowns. “Which brings me to a question that I’ve had for quite a few years now. Does Athos know?” 

You close your book and set it down next to the wine bottle. “Does Athos know what exactly? That I’m a part time tutor for this particular Jesuit order? That I’ve been working secretly with you to replace the king? Or that we’ve been lovers for the past ten years?” 

“How about the trifecta?” 

“He knows of my tutelage. That is all.” 

You don’t tell him how you went to visit Athos a few weeks ago to finally confess to the secret relationship you had been carrying with Aramis. A secret that was soon to come out eventually when you discovered, despite your age, you were with child. Aramis was already making arrangements to leave the order, return to civilian life once more so you wouldn’t face a ruined reputation. A kind but unnecessary gesture you had told him since you had spent the majority of your life as an unconventional woman. But you had wanted to let Athos know before you started to show. 

But when you had arrived, it had been just hours after another kind of news had been delivered. The tidy home had been destroyed. Shards of pottery littered the floor, fabric had been ripped apart, furniture overturned. You didn’t even have to ask what happened, you knew. As you were tidying up, you found the letter that had been delivered in the early morning hours that day confirming your assumption. Raoul, the boy the two of you had raised together, had been killed on the front lines. Even if Athos had been stone cold sober when he stumbled through the doorway that afternoon, you couldn’t bring yourself to tell him your news. That was the moment that had felt like a betrayal. 

“How are you feeling?” 

“Tired.” 

He hums before standing up and offering you his hand. You take it with great gratitude, having spent the last couple weeks apart. There’s such familiarity in knowing where all the calluses are from holding a sword and pistol. The parts rubbed smooth like the rosary beads he uses everyday. The warmth and strength found in his hold as he pulls you to his side, presses his lips to your forehead. You used to worry about the other priests and brothers seeing these displays of affection but your relationship is the worst kept secret in the monastery. And Aramis, with his personality and charisma won over the entire building’s silence on the matter. 

“To bed, then.” 

He picks up your travel bag and keeps his other hand on your waist as you make your way through the quiet halls to the guest quarters where you typically stay during your visits. You smile as you remember the first time you came here, to visit him after he took his vows. You understood why he left the Musketeers, why he retreated here. Penance is typically only achieved through isolation. One night, he lasted one night before coming to your bed, despite your reservations. You had spent four years together on the outside of these walls. Four years and you had resigned yourself that it would be enough, it would have to be enough. But it wasn’t, not even close. 

“Do you remember what you said to me?” you ask when you reach the door to your room. “Our first night here?” 

“I’m not sure, I said many things that night.” He gives you that devilish smile. “I was a desperate man that evening.”  

“Indeed you were.” You step inside and wait for him to close the door. “I had asked you afterwards if you regretted coming here that night.” 

“Ah, yes, I remember that. And I said breaking one vow out of three was still a respectable record.” 

Poverty. Chastity. Obedience. Those were the fundamental vows of a Jesuit priest. “What we’re planning to do though, it’s going to take that record down to one. Certainly treason against the king goes against the vow of obedience.” 

He nods solemnly before reaching to undo the laces in your corset. “I suppose it’s a good thing then, that I won’t be a Jesuit for much longer.” 

You take in a deep breath when the boned garment is tossed into a chair. “Like you were a good one to begin with. A good man, but a lousy priest.” 

He presses his lips against your neck, his hands curling around your waist and pulling you back towards him. “If it wasn’t for you, I’d been an excellent priest.” 

[the-hinky-panda]

Oh, if you're still looking for requests, can I please ask for more Porthos from The Musketeers? Maybe with No. 6 from the Donna’s Wednesday Radio Show Prompt List #27: "She tastes like the sunshine kissing me"

Thank you! 💐🫶

Companion piece to: A Little Adventure

Your kisses feel like sunshine across Porthos’s skin as you bestow them across his neck and shoulders, each one light, each one teasing. Your fingers wrap around his cock again, pumping lightly and he moans as he arches into your touch, the red silk binding on his wrists tightening.

You have him on his knees in the centre of your mattress, his wrists bound behind his back and lassoed to his ankles with aerial silk, restricting his movements. You’ve covered his eyes with a matching blindfold, the absence of sight enhancing the rest of his senses, immersing him completely in the sensation of you. The scent of your perfume floods his nostrils. You smell of summer, of daisies and light.

Your fingertips press at his lips and he opens his mouth obediently, allowing them entry. He can taste you on them, the sweet honey of your arousal and it heightens everything. He thrusts even harder against your hand,  fucking it, chasing his release. He’s close, he can feel it…

You pull away, your fingers withdrawing from his mouth, your hand gripping the base of his dick staving off his orgasm.

“Not yet.” You whisper, your lips ghosting over his as you guide him towards your most intimate place.

He can feel your wetness smearing across the tip of his cock and he whines because somehow it’s too much and not enough all at the same time. You sink down on him and that tight, wet heat envelops him completely, sending him straight to the gates of heaven.

He can’t move, he can’t think, he has to just sit there like a good little fuck toy while you start to rock slowly on his dick.

"Oh sweet boy.” You murmur, your fingers threading through his hair and tugging just a little. “You have to make me come first.”

Love Porthos? Don’t miss any of his stories by joining the taglist here.

Interested in supporting me? Join my Patreon for Bonus Content!

Like My Work? - Why Not Buy Me A Coffee

@Pansexualhailstorm @Missyhoneybee @sweetpeaswife @angelnyx

[the-hinky-panda]

Ten Months as Yours

Colonel Horacio Carrillo x F!Reader

CW:  Angst (reader is CIA and has feelings about it; failed first marriages; talk of Catholicism); smut (oral, m! and f! receiving; PiV, unprotected); 18+ only.

Word Count:  10,951

AN:  This was from an "Arranged Marriage" prompt list. An anon asked for it, and it was supposed to incorporate dates where the couple gets to know each other. I, an idiot, didn't remember that until nearly the end, but if you kind of squint, you can see it.

AN2: Not edited. Not even a little bit.

AN3: Sigh. I dunno, folks. It's whatever.

Horacio Carrillo’s first marriage was standard Catholic fare:  the reading of the banns beforehand, then the long wedding Mass.  Heavy on the incense, crowded church, a red-faced priest droning through the Gospel.  Juliana, his blushing bride in a heavy lace veil, clutching a bouquet of lilies already wilted and brown at the edges in the Colombian heat.

Then, years later, the dissolution of that marriage.  Papers signed separately in the presence of lawyers after an ice age formed between the couple.  Then more years of Horacio being single again, but the time slipped by like water.  He was so busy with work, he hardly registered the empty house he returned to every evening.

Horacio Carrillo’s second marriage is something else entirely.

It’s not, strictly or spiritually speaking, a real marriage.  It’s a bit of maneuvering on the  part of the U.S. government, logistical choreography as part of a larger plan.  To the world at large, Horacio Carrillo is dead:  murdered by Escobar’s men in a trap.  Only a handful of people know the truth—the doctor and nurses at the American hospital who healed him under a temporary alias.  And this man, Johnson, a U.S. Marshal and handler for the U.S. Witness Protection program

Johnson is the sole witness to this so-called marriage, if one could even call it that.  It happens on the cargo plane from Bogota to Atlanta.  Johnson sits in the jump seat across from his two charges:  Horacio…and you.

Horacio doesn’t even learn your real name.  There’s no exchange of vow and certainly no incense or bouquet of lilies.  Instead of a blushing bride, there’s a silent one.  Your mouth is set in a thin, straight line as you listen to Johnson’s rundown of your new life, and every time Horacio chances a look at you, he only sees the tension in you.  Grim-set mouth, clenched jaw…and the white edge of a bandage on your temple, mostly hidden under the sweep of your hair.

Horacio wonders if you’re dead to the world too.  You aren’t DEA or CIA, at least not in the Colombian theater, but that doesn’t mean you weren’t nearby.  The U.S. agencies have their sticky fingers all over South America.

The broad strokes of the situation:  you and Horacio are newlyweds.  You met in Spain and are returning to the U.S.  Horacio is dead, but he’s been replaced by Davide, and Johnson hands over a thick packet of official documents—Spanish birth certificate, Spanish passport, U.S. green card. 

You are also dead, but you’ve been replaced by Gwen.  Another thick packet of documents detailing your fake life as an ex-pat American in Spain.

Each packet also contains a simple gold band for each of you.  Horacio turns it over and over in his hand, contemplates the little twist he gets in his gut to put a ring back on his finger after years of being divorced.

You slide yours on too, but you fuss with it the rest of the flight, twisting it around and around your finger.

“You’re going to Vermont, of all places,” Johnson tells you.  “There’s a mid-sized college there with a lot of international folk coming and going, so you’ll blend in.  The house is handled, and you’ll get a stipend every month, but we expect you to find jobs as quickly as you can.”

Johnson doesn’t even attempt to say how long it will be.  Horacio knows he has to wait out Escobar before he can return to Colombia.  You?  Who can say?

The rest of the flight is silent except for the low roar of the engines and the creak of the netting holding the cargo in place.  Once you land, you stand and follow Johnson and Horacio off of the plane to transfer to a smaller passenger plane that will take you to Vermont.

The final leg of the journey is silent too.

When you deplane in the small regional airport in Vermont, you stumble on the step down from the fuselage.  Horacio catches your arm, keeps you upright.

“Watch your step,” he says softly.

“Thank you,” you reply.

It’s the first words you exchange, and his hand on your clothed arm—that’s the first time he touches you.

-----

Horacio has never been to the United States before, but when he thinks of it, he thinks of what he’s seen in the movies:  New York City, perhaps, with the traffic and skyscrapers and Statue of Liberty.  Or Miami with its white beaches and turquoise water and neon-tinged nightlife.

Vermont is something else.

It’s green.  Everything is so green.  The rounded mountains in the distance, the old trees with huge, spreading branches.  The grass of the lawns in this college town.  Even though it is near twilight, even the shadows are green-tinged as the sun sets.

“At least we arrived in the spring,” you say.  You glance at him, explain that New England winters can be brutal.

The house is small, trim.  It’s a simple ranch but well-built.  There’s a fair amount of land, and the nearest neighbors are far enough away that there’s privacy.

Of course it’s awkward.  You don’t know each other at all, and you’re both in hiding.  Horacio is out of habit with living with another person, and he has to guess you are too.

That first night, the first moment of awkwardness:  when you arrive at the house, there’s two bedrooms, and you both hesitate in the hallway that leads to both.  You’re married on paper (kinda) but who would expect you to share a bed?  But you’re also both exhausted, and Horacio takes in the dark circles under your eyes.  The larger room has a full-sized bed, but the guest only has an uncomfortable-looking daybed.

“Take the master bedroom,” he says.  “I’ll take the guest room.”

“You sure?”  Your words, Horacio notices, are slightly accented, like you’ve been around people like him who speak English as a second language.  He wonders about your past and what landed you here with him.

“Of course.  Take the room.  We’ll talk in the morning.”

You nod, and he glances down at where you twist that gold band over and over around your slim finger.  It’s here, he’ll realize later, that he starts to feel something for you, but at the moment, it’s only sympathy.  You’re trapped in the same miserable situation as him, so sympathy is an easy emotion to access.

“I appreciate it…Davide,” you reply, and you give him a nod, then turn in for the night.  He hears the quiet click of the bedroom door as you shut it, and he turns in too.  The daybed is cramped, and he can’t stretch out completely, but he’s so bone-tired that he’s asleep the minute his head hits the pillow.

-----

The first month, April. 

It’s awkward.  It’s more awkward for Horacio; everything in the U.S. is familiar, but just different enough to make it seem like he’s dreaming.  You’re already an American, and life in an idyllic New England college town is easier for you to settle into.

Living with another person is strange.  Horacio finds that the two of you engage in a civil, stilted dance each day that first month.  You each tiptoe around the other, defer to each other in a painfully polite way.  When Horacio catches you singing along softly to the radio one night, you snap the music off and go quiet.  When you walk in on him in the bathroom once—he was only brushing his teeth, so it is hardly salacious—you apologize and refuse to meet his eyes for the rest of the week.

The two of you don’t really talk, not that first month.  You aren’t supposed to share details about your real lives with each other, so neither of you know how to converse in the weird liminal space you find yourselves.  Your conversations are limited to menial topics.  The weather, the house and yard, what you each want for dinner that night.  You trade off chores, you drift around each other, and it’s like living in purgatory with another ghost.

Sometimes, Horacio swears he can hear you crying softly through the wall that separates your room from his, but you never offer any insight into your feelings and he doesn’t ask.

-----

The second month, May.

Johnson told each of you to find work, and you land a job first:  you get a position at the college.  You ask him, a bit shy, if you can take a certain portion of the monthly stipend to buy some new clothes for your office job, and Horacio’s gut does that twist again.  Of course you need new clothes.  You left wherever with nothing, the same way he left Colombia with nothing.

“Of course,” he says.  “You don’t even need to ask.”

That makes you smile a little, and you make a weak joke about not wanting to be the sort of wife to spend frivolously.  It makes Horacio chuckle.  It breaks the uneasy tension in the house a bit, and he ends up going to the mall with you that weekend as you shop.

There’s nothing like a mall to encapsulate American culture, and Horacio tries to play it cool at the conspicuous consumption on display.  The giant building, the icy air conditioning, the cacophony of sound echoing around the marble floors and walls.  There’s so many people and only a handful of security guards.  When Horacio studies them closer, he sees that they don’t even carry guns—they only have walkie-talkies as they saunter around at a lazy pace.

His life now is a far cry from his life as the leader of the Search Bloc.  And when he glances over at the woman walking beside him, he realizes how far this second marriage is from his first.

But the thought leads to him ruminating about his first marriage and all the little ways he failed Juliana.  This situation with you isn’t a marriage, of course, but it doesn’t stop him from wanting to be better.

So once you are done shopping, he pulls you into the Sam Goody and insists that you buy an album to celebrate.  He catches you singing all the time in the house, listening to the radio, humming or singing along.  When he imagines your mysterious life before now, he imagines an apartment filled with a big stereo and shelves of albums.

“Seriously?”  It makes you smile again, and Horacio thinks you have a nice smile, though he wonders how often people ever get to see it.

“Well, it’s our stipend,” he clarifies.  “It’s not like I’m treating you, really.  I guess it’s not really a gift if it’s ours.”

Another smile, and he stands back and watches as you rifle through the stacks of vinyl records and CD’s, as you pull one out and read the list of songs, then replace it.  You finally settle on one, and the two of you check out, and Horacio pulls out his wallet and pays.

And even if it’s your shared stipend, you thank him and smile again, and it feels like something that he can’t quite name.

-----

The third month, June.

You leave the house every weekday for work.  Horacio finally has some firsthand knowledge of what Juliana must have felt when he left each day.�� He had always prided himself that he was able to provide for both of them, that she never had to work. 

He had never considered how bored she must have been.

He wakes up early out of habit, but you do too.  In the soft pre-dawn light, you go out for a run every day.  Part of him remains Search Bloc; he stands at the living room window and watches for you until you return, panting, your t-shirt ringed with sweat.  He finds he can breathe easier once you’re in sight. 

While you shower and dress, Horacio makes you coffee.  The two of you sip at your coffee in companionable silence, and then you’re off.

It leaves him with a full day with little to do.

He cleans the house, but that takes no time at all because both of you are fastidious and neat anyway.  He maintains the lawn, trims back the unruly rhododendrons.  He bought a weight bench and a set of free weights from a yard sale a few weeks after you moved, and he spends some time lifting in the garage.

That takes him to noon, if he’s lucky.

His afternoons are when he thinks of Juliana the most.  Is this what her life with him was like?  Back then, he used to scoff at the claim that women needed a life outside of the home.  His mother had seemed happy to be a housewife and mother, and he had always assumed that Juliana was the same.  Except the children never came, and Juliana had a degree in fashion design from the university—yet when she broached the idea of a job or even an internship, Horacio had dissuaded her.

He had thought he was being a good husband.  Now, as he sits and drowses to “Days of Our Lives,” he wonders how he had missed the obvious.

But if he’s Juliana in this situation, you are no Horacio.  For one thing, you return home in the late afternoon—he’s never left to eat dinner alone in a too-quiet house.  For another, you immediately kick off your shoes and pad over to where he’s cooking dinner, and you fall into an easy rhythm of helping him finish it off.

Halfway through June, you get comfortable enough to start calling out, “honey, I’m home!” each time you return.

Which makes him smile, every time.

And he’s only a passable cook, but you praise every meal he puts in front of you.  You joke once, say “I should have gotten a husband a long time ago,” and that makes him smile even wider, and it is easy to fall into the fantasy that this easy domesticity is real.  The fantasy only falls apart at night, when you each retire to your separate rooms, as you do every night.

-----

The fourth month, July.

The easy domesticity cedes to something deeper and darker right at the start of the month.

Horacio has never been to the U.S. before, so he hasn’t experienced the usual Independence Day celebrations.  When he asks, you grin and tell him that a good old-fashioned U.S.-style barbecue might be nice, and that’s what the two of you plan.  You and Horacio as Davide and Gwen:  patriotic Americans.

The day starts off great.  The weather is hot and humid enough to feel like Colombia, and Horacio will admit that you look nice in your cut-off shorts and cotton tank top.  He will admit that if you were really his wife, he might never even make it to lunchtime before taking advantage of a quiet house set apart from its neighbors.

The barbecue is nice.  It’s all-American fare:  hot dogs and hamburgers, corn on the cob steamed over hot coals.  You buy an apple pie from a nearby farm stand, and you also make some trifle type dessert, and the two of you wash it all down with ice-cold beer.  By the time dusk rolls around and lightning bugs start to flicker across the lawn, Horacio is pleasantly buzzed.

The town puts on a fireworks display, and as the sky turns a velvety black, the light show starts.  Your house is in the perfect place to see it, slightly set on a ridge, and blossoms of red and white and blue sparks explode across the sky.  Horacio, tipsy, watches the first few minutes, completely mesmerized…but when he turns to say something to you, he finds you missing.

He finds you in the house.  More specifically, he finds you in the bathtub, hugging your knees to your chest, forehead pressed to knees.

“Gwen?” he says, and he feels stupid saying the obviously fake name, but he doesn’t know your real one.

You don’t answer anyway, and he steps into the bathroom.  Studies you closer.  Sees that you are shaking, and between the muffled booms of the fireworks, he can hear your panting breath.

He moves without any real thought.  He knows—or can guess, at least—at what is happening to you.  Horacio has led enough men through enough battles to recognize a panic attack when he sees one, but you aren’t one of his men and this is no battle, so he puts a gentle hand on your shoulder to alert you that he’s there.  Then he climbs into the bathtub with you.

“Scoot forward a little,” he orders softly, and you do.  He maneuvers himself behind you, then pulls you closer to him.  Your back pressed against his chest, and his arms wrapped around you, he holds you close despite the heat and humidity of the day. 

“Just breathe with me.”  He takes a deep, slow breath, feels his chest push against you.  He does it again and again, and after a long while, you start to mimic him. 

The fireworks end, and eventually you stop trembling.  Tucked this close to him, Horacio can see the edge of a thick scar disappearing under your hair, and he remembers the bandage on the plane from Bogota.

He wonders if the moment that caused that scar is linked to this moment now. 

After you calm, and after you sheepishly untangle yourself from him, he urges you to do whatever you need to.  To take a cool shower or go to bed.  That he’ll clean up.  You gaze back at him a long moment, like you’re trying to decide something, and then you nod.  You leave the bathroom and disappear into your bedroom, and he hears that quiet click of the door closing.

The rest of the month is uneasy.  The panic attack seems to have dredged up the muck in your past, the trauma of a life that has resulted in you being in Witness Protection, injured enough at some point to have a thick scar on your head.

Something about this feels like an echo from his first marriage.  Juliana went silent on him too, but for different reasons.  Your silence is driven by an inner turmoil that he can only guess at, and he feels powerless to help.

So he only does what he can.  He makes you coffee each morning before work.  He makes you dinner each night.  He asks gentle, tame questions about your work day, and when you don’t have much to say in that quarter, he tells you that day’s drama on “Days of Our Lives.”

“Stefano DiMera is back,” he tells you one night.  “And Marlena is possessed by el Diablo.”

That’s the sole smile he is able to coax from you all month.  You pick at the dinner he made, pushing it around with the tines of your fork, and repeat, “the Devil?”

Horacio nods.

“Like, Lucifer the Devil?”

“Yes.”

You smile.  “That’s the dumbest shit I’ve ever heard.”

He nods again, smiles back at you.  “It really is.”

-----

The fifth month, August.

Horacio finds a job with a state nursery, and when he applies, he nearly despairs at the cliché of it:  a South American immigrant becoming a landscaper. 

But it’s not landscaping at all.  It’s a quiet, peaceful job.  The summer interns have already left for the year, so Horacio is hired on to help the old-timer, Lawrence.  Lawrence has a thick Yankee accent, says little, but Horacio finds the job a revelation.  He walks the rolling grounds and checks on the saplings that will one day be planted across the state.  They’ll go into parks and line city streets, and it knocks something loose in him.  A job where he’s nurturing life that will potentially live on long after him.  The oak sapling he waters and feeds today could live hundreds of years when he’ll be long forgotten. 

With him working now, you and Horacio switch off on meals.  You teach him how to use the most American of small appliances, the slow cooker.  You make him the most American of working class meals, the one-pot dish.  He makes you the comfort food from his childhood, and together you find an egalitarian balance.

But something about July and your low mental health…it makes Horacio want to do better.  Who knows how long the two of you will end up living like this?  He wants to understand you better, and he wants you to know him, because the two of you exist as the sole inhabitants of this weird, unlikely life as Davide and Gwen.

“Let’s each say one true thing about ourselves,” he proposes over dinner one night.  He’s bone-tired from work—he spent the day mulching rows and rows of tender little Eastern Hemlocks (and he knows the difference now between them and a balsam fir and a spruce).  You look tired too, but at his suggestion, your eyes light up.  Maybe you’ve been wanting some familiarity with him too and just were waiting on him to suggest it first.

So August is this:  getting to know each other.  Dumb stuff, usually.  Favorite colors, favorite songs, favorite foods.  Most embarrassing memory.  Best memory.  Age of first kiss. 

-----

The sixth month, September.

The weather starts to turn.  The nights grow cold, and the leaves transform from all that green to a riot of reds and yellows and oranges.  Work at the nursery slows way down, and Horacio spends long hours following Lawrence’s lead, which means an hour or two of paperwork, then lunch, then quietly reading a book at his desk.

You’re busy with the new academic year, but the weekends are spent doing day trips.  You’re six months into this, and you’re both braver, more willing to travel afield.  You go into the mountains to look at the leaves from a different angle than what you see from your house.  You go to pick apples, and you spend a weekend cooking them into pies, cobblers, and apple sauce.

The dinner-time “one true thing” game ends, and it turns into natural conversation.  It’s so comfortable now.  You chat and laugh and joke, and sometimes he teases you, and it makes you duck your head to hide your pleased smile.  You like being teased, Horacio finds.  You like being the butt of gentle jokes, so he obliges you as often as he dares. 

It’s a revelation to find that he has a sense of humor after all.

Over one dinner, he mentions his first marriage, his first wife.  You ask him questions, and he answers them honestly, and then he asks if you’ve ever been married.

“No.”  You shake your head to emphasize the point. 

“Ever engaged?”

You hesitate, then nod.  “Yes.  A long time ago.”

“What happened?”

You shrug, lifting one shoulder up before dropping it back down.  “Life.  Expectations.  It’s hard to say.”  You take a sip of your water, then settle your gaze somewhere past Horacio, like you’re looking at the specter of your failed engagement.

“I was young and very career-driven,” you add.  “And not many men want that in a wife.”

“I’m sorry.”  He is, of course, and he’s doubly-sorry because he was arguably one of those men.  He kept Juliana at home, stifled her own career aspirations.  A flush of shame courses through him at the memory of his own failings.

Another shrug.  “It was for the best.”

“And now here you are, married to me,” he teases, and yes—you duck your head, but he catches the shy little grin, the curve of your cheek as you smile at the joke.

-----

The seventh month, October.

It’s the first time you’ve actually ordered him to do anything, so Horacio finds himself busy each weekend, decorating the house for Halloween.  There’s ghosts strung in the trees in the front yard.  Fake gravestones jut from the lawn like rotting teeth.  Purple and orange lights are strung around the windows and banisters of the porch, and the two of you set to carving more pumpkins than Horacio thought possible.

But it’s worth it, because your town goes all out for the holiday.  You bought him a costume weeks ago, and when he dresses after dinner, he’s surprised to find you openly checking him out.  Your gaze sweeps from the hair on the top of his head—longer than Search Bloc reg, curling at the nape of his neck—to his shoes, and you take in his vampire costume.

“You look handsome,” you tell him, and he tries not to ogle you in turn and utterly fails, because you’re dressed up like a witch but the black dress hugs your curves, and the ridiculous hat, complete with a floppy brim, does nothing to detract from how sexy you look.

Horacio finds himself sitting on the front porch with you, handing out candy to the children that come by.  And it charms him, how much you get into it, how you guess at what each child is supposed to be.  You read the kids perfectly—you’re sweet with the scared little ones, but you play up the witchiness with the older ones, crooking your fingers and cacking at them.

When there’s a lull in the crowd at one point, he catches you as you shiver, so he pulls you close to him and wraps his cloak around your shoulder.  He never touches you much, but this is blatant, and the moment feels heavy with intent.

You lean into him.  A moment later, he feels your arm wend its way around his waist, under his cloak, so he holds you closer.

The evening continues like that.  The two of you play it up more and more, comfortable with pretending.  Not you and Horacio, and not Davide and Gwen, but a vampire and a witch, and the more you cackle and scare the children, the more Horacio flashes his fake teeth and hisses at them. 

Who ever knew handing out candy in a cheap drugstore costume could be so fun?

When another lull happens, he pulls you back to him, and the motion takes you off balance a little.  You hold him back but lean away from him, searching for your equilibrium, and it bares the smooth column of your neck to him.

Horacio forgets himself.  Davide forgets himself.  The vampire he’s pretending to be dips his head, and he presses the plastic points of his fake teeth into your pulse point, and you give a squeal of surprise, but when Horacio lifts his head to study you, he sees you staring back at him, your eyes wide and dark with obvious desire.

“That’s a good way to get a hex on you,” you warn, but there’s a smile on your red lips, and you don’t release your own hold on him.  You don’t shove him away.

“I enjoy a good hex,” he replies. 

The stream of children eventually dies off.  The bowl of candy has been replenished multiple times, but you fill it one last time and set it on the porch for any stragglers. 

Inside the house, you go from room to room and check the locks on the doors, turn off the lights.  Horacio lingers near the hallway, and when you turn to make your way to your room, he stills you.  He puts his hand on your waist, lightly, and he doesn’t say anything.  The moment hangs suspended as you both stand there, silent.

What does it mean for Horacio Carrillo to take you to bed? 

He has always tried to be a good Catholic (the killing of narcos aside).  He’s never been with anyone other than Juliana, and he feels a tinge of doubt.  Guilt, too.  He’s always prided himself on his fidelity, and post-divorce, he took a perverse pride in the fact that he never took a lover.  That he still honored his vows despite the legal fact that he was no longer married.

He doesn’t mourn Juliana anymore, and he knows that something is growing between the two of you now, but what does it mean?  Would it be right to sleep with you, knowing that this is just circumstantial?  That it may end at any moment?  That if you both weren’t in WitSec, you’d have never met, and might have never liked each other if you had?

Is this thing growing between the two of you only the result of being flung together by circumstances out of your control?

All of those questions rapid-fire through his head, and you seem to see the doubt in his eyes because the moment deflates.  The energy and anticipation sour, and he sees it on your face.  Your soft smile falls, and then you nod to yourself, as if you knew it would happen like this.

Then you smile again, thank him softly for his help handing out candy.  You stretch towards him and brush the lightest of kisses against his cheek, and you step around him to go to your room.

When Horacio goes to bed, it takes him a long time to fall asleep, and he swears you must be awake too, separated only by the wall between you.

-----

The eighth month, November.

Your department at the university puts on a wine and cheese social, and spouses are encouraged to attend.

“We never really practiced our cover story,” he says as he bends over to tie his dress shoes.  “Do you remember all of it?”

“I have a eidetic memory.”

“Yeah?”  He glances up at you.  “You’re full of surprises.”

“Don’t sweat it.  It’s a bunch of tenured professors.  They love to talk about themselves and nothing else.  They are all narcissists of the worse variety.”

But you aren’t entirely correct.  The party is at the house of the department chair, and Horacio finds himself cornered by a pair of fellow lecturers.  They are older women, charming and gregarious, and they sing your praises…and his own.

“I can see why she’s kept you hidden away,” says the taller of the two.  “She said you were handsome but—”

“You make a gorgeous couple,” the shorter one cut in.  “And she’s brilliant, you know, she planned out this—”

On and on they go, cutting each other off, redirecting each other, not letting Horacio get a word in edgewise.  It’s not far off base from how you explained it would go, and when he catches your eye from across the room, you smile but mouth, “you okay?”

He nods, smiles back at you. 

The evening is halfway over when he realizes with a start that he hasn’t cased the room once. 

He hasn’t counted the exits and windows, hasn’t studied the egresses and any obstacles to them.  He hasn’t scowled at each face to try and determine what dirty secret they held, if Escobar or one of his men had compromised them or their family.  He hasn’t studied the lines of their clothing to see who might be hiding a piece.

What does it mean for Horacio Carrillo to lose his edge? 

It’s another question he ponders at night, since the minor disaster of Halloween.  He knows he hurt you by hesitating in that moment in the hallway, but it’s a subtle hurt.  He can see it in your eyes each morning, the way they study his face as if you could perhaps read his thoughts if you watch him closely enough. 

More and more, these questions plague him because there’s no easy answers.  Horacio is used to solving problems, but he’d be the first to admit that many of his solutions were just brute force.  Displays of power.  The Search Bloc has a problem?  Send in men, armed men, men with guns and night-sticks, men with flint in their souls, men with hearts cased in granite.  Send in Colonel Carrillo himself to a clandestine meeting place where a suspect is strung up.  What’s a little light torture and murder when the fate of a country hangs in the balance?

That man is dead now.  Horacio Carrillo received a state funeral, and his empty coffin lies in the mausoleum.  Davide, his replacement, spent the week wrapping tender saplings in burlap in anticipation for the coming snows—all the while considering his place in the greater world and what his legacy may be.

At the end of the evening, Horacio finds you, brings you your coat, holds it out while you shrug your way into it.  When the two of you leave, you pass the pair of lecturers who had cornered him, and their exchange is like a Greek chorus that follows him home.

“He is handsome, isn’t he?” says one.  “She’s a lucky woman.”

The other one scoffs lightly.  “He’s the lucky one.”

You must not hear them because you don’t react.  You only let him lead you to the car, and when he brushes away the light dusting of snow with the snow brush, his eyes find yours through the windshield—and you smile at him.

-----

The ninth month, December.

The university shuts down for most of the month, and Horacio is on an abbreviated schedule a the nursery. 

The two of you have so much time together.

Horacio has seen snow before, but never like this.  Vermont, so green when he arrived, is swaddled in thick layers of white like cotton batting.  It absorbs and reflects sounds in weird ways, and a hush falls over your little home.

Being Colombian, he should hate it.  He should curse the cold and the snow and the quiet, but it does something to his soul.  It soothes him in a way he never would have guessed.  True, the cold is difficult at first, but you take him to the mall one weekend and load him up with sweaters and thick woolen socks, and he’s better after that.

Everything is so calm.  Peaceful.  Horacio has never slept so well in his life, bundled under layers of blankets, even on the uncomfortable daybed.  He sleeps, he doesn’t dream, and he wakes up naturally, in slow measure, to a soft light creeping across his bedroom floor.

Being on break, you still wake up early.  Earlier than him, some days, and when Horacio wakes to the scent of brewing coffee and something delicious baking in the oven, he wishes sometimes that this was the afterlife.  He wants to freeze the moment in time and never let it slip past him.  He wants nothing more, in this moment.

He’s always half-asleep those mornings, but the smell of food draws him out.  One morning, he pads out to the kitchen in his thick socks and startles you when he grumbles “good morning.”  You shriek, then swear, then lightly try to swat him with the spatula in your hands, but he’s still half-asleep, still incredulous that this is his life at the moment, and he takes the spatula from you and pulls you into a big bear hug.

“What’s this for?” you ask.  Your words are muffled against his chest, but after a beat, you wrap your arms around his midsection and hug him back.

“Just because,” he replies.

You spend your days doing puzzles, reading, listening to music.  You watch “Days of Our Lives” with him and you both laugh at the bad cosmetics and even worse acting on the demonic possession storyline.

Your evenings are spent cooking dinner together.  You make the trip into town every few days, and you rent movies and watch them too.  You watch everything together—old Hollywood classics, campy horror, meandering romances.  The two of you sit on the couch side by side, and it takes all of a day before you’re tucked in against his side, his arm firm around your shoulders.

Sometimes he glances down at you and sees your face in profile lit by the flickering light of the television.  Sometimes he can make out the edge of your scar, but he doesn’t linger there.  Instead he takes in the whole of your face—the curve of your cheek, the sweep of your lashes as you blink.  When something funny happens on the screen, you smile, and it makes Horacio’s heart stutter in his chest to see it.

What does it mean for Horacio Carrillo to fall in love?

Another question to ponder.  Another riddle to solve.  He’s losing sight of the man he was.  Maybe that man is completely lost already.  The thought doesn’t unnerve him; he thinks he likes the man he is here.  He likes the man he is with you, the job that coaxes life into being instead of snuffing it out.  He likes wearing cable-knit sweaters and thick socks and eating the banana bread you bake on mornings you don’t have to work. 

He likes sitting on the couch with you and watching a rental VHS of “Beetlejuice.”  He likes the feel of your body pressed against his, and he likes looking down to see you smile.

That’s the night he dares ask for more.

After the movie, you do your usual pre-bedtime sweep of the house—locks, lights—then brush your teeth and go to your room.  The usual quiet click of your door closing.  Horacio, as usual, goes to his room, peels back the layers of blankets, prepares to tuck himself into the cramped bed….then doesn’t.

Instead, he returns to the hallway.  He taps a finger on your door, a soft staccato, and he hears you call out, “Davide?”

“Yes.”

You tell him to come in, and you’re sitting up in bed.  Your eyebrows are furrowed together. 

“What’s wrong?” you ask.

He shakes his head.  How can he begin to explain it?  He’s fluent in English, Spanish, and Portuguese, and his Italian is passable, yet not a single language he knows can capture the maelstrom of emotions roiling through him.  He loves you, he wants you.  He’s afraid you don’t feel the same for him.  He’s afraid you do feel the same for him.  Is this just situational or are you truly the woman he was meant for all along?  Has he gone mad?  Is this some tame mental breakdown, the result of coming close to death and then finding himself, improbably, in Vermont with a woman who also was near death? 

From your “one true thing” game, he knows you’re a polyglot too—English and Spanish and Russian—but that shake of his head to your question seems to transcend the need for language.  You seem to read it exactly, the turmoil in him, and you climb out of bed slowly, make your way over to where he stands by the door.

You reach down and take his hands in yours, and the touch bolsters him.  Reassures him.  He’s Horacio and Davide both, and you’re both Gwen and yourself, and he doesn’t need to parse the two.  He can be both with you.  You’re both complicated people with complicated pasts, but none of it matters right now because the world is swathed in layers of snow, and the two of you are the only two who exist in it.

Neither of you say much else for the rest of the night.  When you turn your head to peer up at him, Horacio tilts his head to kiss you, and it’s like a bolt of lightning when he does.  Maybe he fell in love with you by small moments, but this is the moment that seals it forever:  this first kiss, his mouth on yours, writes your name—your real name, even if he doesn’t know it—on his heart like a line of fire.

You each lead the other back to bed; you tug him, he pushes you, and you fall gracelessly back on the rumpled covers, but each kiss, each searching touch peels back another layer of reserve.  Horacio slides his hand under your shirt and cups the softness of your breasts, pinches lightly at your hardened buds.  You slip your hand under the waistband of his flannel pajamas and grasp his growing erection, stroke it into full hardness as he groans into your mouth.

There’s no art to it.  No seduction.  You’re both starving for each other, ravenous, and you both kiss the other as you each strip out of your layers.  He kisses down your neck, nips at your pulse point like he did on Halloween.  He licks against the hollow at the base of your throat, draws the sweetest goddamned moans out of you, then returns to kiss you, to lick against the inside of your mouth so he can feel the sounds you’re making too.

If he’d known how vocal you were in bed, he would have summoned his courage months ago.

Your mouth is on him too.  It’s another line of fire, each press of your lips on his bare skin.  He finds himself on his back and you astride him.  He reaches up to touch your bared breasts, but you don’t even notice because you lean down, focused only on him.  Your mouth on his neck, along his stubbled jaw.  You kiss his collarbones, his chest.  You bite lightly against his nipples, your teeth making him huff at the sensation, and then your warm tongue laving him.  Further down, a trail of kisses across his belly, which is less firm than it was in his Search Bloc days but you make a pleased noise as your mouth places wet, lingering kisses there.

Then even lower, and this is uncharted territory.  Love-making with Juliana was only ever for the purpose of making children, and while Horacio had convinced her a time or two to go down on her in the interest of foreplay, he never has received head in his life.  Juliana had called it dirty, and he had left it at that.

He doesn’t even register it until he feels your hand grasp him at the root of his cock, then feels the smallest, most kittenish little lick of your tongue against his leaking tip.

“Dios,” he groans out, and then he feels the rest:  your tongue tracing a pattern along the length of him, then a teasing rhythm where you work him into your mouth.  First just the tip.  You lavish him with attention there, suckling against the most sensitive part of him, lapping up the pre-cum that leaks from him.  Then more and more and more; you work him into your warm, wet mouth, and he feels your breath tickling against his groin, feels you breathing carefully through your nose as you take him as far as you can, and then you swallow against him, you hum against him, and it’s nothing like he’s ever felt before.  You press your tongue against the underside of him and you hollow your cheeks, and when your warm palm reaches up to lightly fondle his balls, Horacio’s orgasm breaks around him like a tidal wave.  His hips judder once, twice, and he thinks he warns you, but you don’t move.  You only hold yourself there, and when he comes, you swallow every drop of him, and he wishes he could explain this feeling to Juliana:  that it doesn’t feel dirty at all.  It feels like a sacrament.  That it feels like love.

It's only fair that he shows you his love for you in turn.

Once he recovers, he flips you onto your back and repays you in kind.  He kisses his way down your naked body, makes a note of all the spots that you moan at.  Make a note too of all the scars that speak to a life a lot like his was in Colombia.  He kisses your scars, presses his lips to each raised ridge as if he can take away any lingering pain.

Then he settles between your legs.  There’s no shyness he can detect; you spread your thighs eagerly for him.  You allow him to put a pillow under your hips to tilt your pelvis into a more agreeable angle.

He’s not especially skilled at this.  The handful of times with Juliana had been a race against the clock—a sprint to coax her to orgasm before she gripped his hair and made him stop.  There’s no clock now, so he takes his time.  He settles your legs on his shoulders and he bends his head to your gorgeous pussy, and he takes his time.

He licks against your folds, then reaches down to part them with his fingers.  Licks a slow, tortuous route from the firm bud of your clit to your entrance.  Over and over and over until you squirm underneath him—then he slides a finger into your clenching heat, then another, then a third, and he feels how your pussy twitches against the intrusion, how you grab against his fingers like you’re trying to pull him deeper into you. 

He fingers you in a lazy rhythm, and he circles his tongue against your clit.  That does something for you; you whine out a curse, and a moment later your hand is on his head, your fingers tugging against his hair, so he purses his lips, suckles against your clit, and that turns your whine into a wail.

He wishes he could tell Juliana this too, that this isn’t dirty either.  When you come, he feels a flush of pride at drawing pleasure from your body—your thighs tight against his head, your pussy clamped down on his fingers, and the slick cum that pulses from you, that coats his tongue and lips in the taste of you.

He’s hard again, but he wouldn’t press his luck.  This is more than he ever dared hope for.  He’d be happy to curl up with you now, to fall asleep beside you, but when he lifts his head from where he’s perched between your thighs, he sees you gazing back at him.

“Please,” is all you say, and he knows what you’re asking for because he wants it to.

If there’s an argument about this being two people pushed together because of circumstances beyond their control, there’s also an argument about the two of you fitting together so well.  Because you do.  Your body seems like it was made for his; you fit together like two jagged puzzles pieces.  Horacio settles over you, lowers his body onto yours, and it’s like magic:  his cock bumps against your inner thigh, but he moves half an inch and he finds your wet heat, and then he’s pushing into you, feeling your feverish flesh part and mold to the shape of him, and then your legs are around his waist, holding him to you as he bottoms out inside you.

He stills for a long moment.  He’s unable to move.  It’s not because he’s afraid he’ll come too soon but because he’s afraid he might cry.  Horacio Carrillo is not a man who cries (maybe Davide is), but gazing down at your face, seeing the stunned love written in your expression, he nearly cries at how lucky he feels.  How blessed.  That shootout in the Medellín alley should have killed him, yet here he is.

Eventually, you give him the faintest of nods, and he starts to move.  He’s gentle at first.  He warms you up to the feel of him, and him to you.  You lay one hand on the side of his face, cupping his cheek as he thrusts into you, but the other hand settles over his heart.

He could love you like this forever.  He coaxes a second, then a third orgasm from you, and he watches your face during each one—the way your eyes go wide, then close tight, the way your mouth takes a hitching breath then goes slack as you breathe through it.  The look on your face as it ebbs away, your eyes shiny with tears, and happy little smile curving your lips.

“I want you to come,” you whisper to him.  You must feel the tension in him, and you bear down on his pistoning cock to urge him along.

“Where?” he pants out. 

“Inside me.  Please.  Come inside me.”

He knows you’re safe.  He’s lived with you for nine months now, and he’s run enough errands with you to know that you have that little plastic compact you pick up from the pharmacy once a month.  He sees you swallow the same pill each morning with your vitamin.  But still—he’s a man with his history, so he doesn’t register your contraceptive use in this moment.  The thought comes to him that if he comes inside you, he may make you pregnant, and Horacio is surprised by how quickly the thought urges his orgasm forward.

“You sure?”  At your words, he’s amped up his thrusting, driving forward in deep, strong strokes until he swears he can feel the crown of his cock nudging against the end of you, and the thought takes hold:  you round with his child, the two of you in this bedroom with a child in the guest room converted into a nursery.  At this moment, it’s the tamest of breeding kinks, but in the morning, he’ll realize it’s just more of this perfect life extrapolated.  You not as his pretend-wife but as his real wife.  A child as tangible proof that this isn’t just an incongruous moment in time.

“Yes.  Please.”  You lick your lips, blink up at him.  “I-I want to feel you coming inside me.”

It’s only fair that he obliges you.  You ask so nicely, so he does:  he thrusts three, four times more, then feels his pleasure snap and spark up his spine as he fills you.

Then he collapses on top of you, and a moment later, he feels your fingers combing through his hair, lightly running over his back.

“You can sleep here, if you want.”  You say it shyly, like you think this might just be a physical release for him, so he lifts his head to kiss you and reply that he wants that very much.

Horacio never sleeps in that cramped daybed again.

-----

The tenth month, January.

What does it mean to Horacio Carrillo for the lines between real and pretend to blur?

It means that through Christmas and into the new year, you live as husband and wife.  You live as newlyweds.  You make love in every room in the house, and you spent lazy days tangled up together.  It means you draw straws to see who has to drive into town for provisions, and it’s all a joke anyway because you always go together.  It means your world collapses down into the most basic of human needs:  feeding and fucking. 

It means that between love-making, the two of you share more about your real lives.  Horacio learns about your family life.  He learns that you’re CIA, and you’ve been stationed in Panama post-Noriega.  He learns that it was an explosion, a car bomb outside of your headquarters, that left you with that scar on your head.

You learn about the Search Bloc and Escobar.  You learn about his childhood as the son of a great military leader, and how that legacy shaped his own life and career.

But what does it mean when that line blurs?

It means that when Johnson returns to your lives, everything ends abruptly. 

“Everything is all clear,” he tells you when he turns up one Saturday in the middle of January.  He sips at the cup of coffee you made him, and if he notices the stunned silence of both of you, he doesn’t remark on it. 

“Escobar was gunned down early today.  It hasn’t hit the wire yet.”  Johnson glances at you.  “And the group that bombed your HQ has been cleared out too.  You’ve been safe for a few months, but we didn’t want to upset the situation here.”

“So now what?” you ask, and Horacio feels sick to his stomach as Johnson explains that your old lives are waiting for you and that it’s time to go.

-----

The end comes that day, but not the way Horacio thought it would.

You gesture to Johnson after he gives the rundown on the logistics, and the two of you go outside.  Horacio watches from the kitchen window as you cross your arms against the cold.  You talk, Johnson listens.  Then Johnson talks, you listen.  Back and forth, and by the end Johnson shakes his head, shakes your hand, and returns inside.

“Okay, so change of plans,” he says, and he rubs his hands together briskly to bring the warmth back to them.  “It’s just you and me now.  Go pack and say your goodbyes, and I’ll be back in an hour.”

He leaves, and Horacio watches him pull out of the driveway, and when he turns back to the interior of the house, he sees you standing there.  Crying openly, tears cutting tracks down your face.

“I can’t go back,” you explain, your voice thick with tears.  “I won’t.”

Then you break down into sobs, and it’s second nature to stride over to you, to pull you into his arms.  He tries to soothe you—rubs your back, holds you to him—as you choke out the words.  That you have had a crisis of conscience.  That you wonder if your work in the CIA did more harm than good.  That you think it’s the former, and how you want to spend the balance of your life not doing more harm than good.  That you want to live in a quiet town that is green in the summer and swaddled in white in the winter.  You want to teach, you want to come home to a house with….and you catch yourself at the last minute.  You don’t say it, but Horacio can guess it.

You want to come home to a house with him in it.  You want to come home to him.

“I love my life here,” you amend hastily, but you push away from him, aware he’s leaving and that your life won’t be exactly the same either way.  You mumble something about not wanting to say goodbye, about wishing him the best, and then you disappear down the hallway.  He hears the click of the door and your crying, and it doesn’t abate while he packs. 

When Johnson returns, Horacio taps on the bedroom door, but you don’t answer and he doesn’t push it.  He’s sleepwalking through the moment, numb, so he leaves.  He doesn’t say goodbye.  He only climbs into Johnson’s rental car, and each mile that Johnson puts between you and Horacio only makes the numbness grow.

“Women, huh?” Johnson says as they near the airport.  “That’s why I said they should never take field work.  They don’t have the stomach for it, in the end.”

Horacio grunts a non-reply, but he thinks Johnson is off the mark.  It’s not that you don’t have the stomach for it.  It’s that you don’t have the heart.

-----

February.

He goes from Vermont to Miami, this time around.

Horacio is given a hotel room, and he’s given the orders to just chill for a bit.  Johnson has extricated him from his fake life as Davide, but his old life as Colonel Horacio Carrillo isn’t quite ready for him yet.

There are mountains of paperwork to bring a man back from the dead.  There’s talk of giving him a cushy role in Madrid.  There’s talk of commendations, medals, a comfortable pension to retire on.  He’s done a lot for his country of Colombia, and Colombia wants to reward him.

He sleepwalks through this liminal space.  The not-Davide, not-Horacio time.  He wanders the streets around the hotel and picks at the food he orders in restaurants, and each time he hears a woman speak, he looks up expecting to see you. 

I don’t even know her real name, he thinks. 

Gwen, his one-time pretend-wife.  Gwen, who had a panic attack on her country’s birthday.  Gwen, who questioned the harm she may have caused to another country, another people.  Gwen, who only wants the chance to do a little good now, or at least to do no more bad.  It wasn’t Gwen at all, but he has no other name to use, so he runs through all the lovely little moments he had with Gwen.

Watching for you to return from your daily jogs.  Walking through the falling leaves of autumn with you.  Making you coffee, pressing the steaming mug into your hands each morning.  Handing out candy to the children at Halloween, tucking you under his cloak at the autumn chill.  Watching movies with you as the snow fell outside, then curling up in bed with you, slotting his body against yours, giving you pleasure and taking pleasure from you in equal measure.  Threading his fingers through yours as he arched over you, his eyes falling on the glinting light in the gold band in your ring finger, it’s twin on his own.

What does it mean for Horacio Carrillo to finally make a choice?

Of course he’s made choices before.  Every day, he made a million choices, large and small.  But the big stuff, the giant stuff, the life-shaping stuff—did he have much choice?  His father’s military career pretty much guaranteed his own career in the Search Bloc.  His family’s status pretty much guaranteed he’d marry a Catholic girl from a family of similar standing.  And when Juliana chose to leave him, he really had no choice then, either.

Same with his pretend life of ten months.  He had no choice in being paired with you, no choice in ending up in New England, little choice in working as a man who tended trees.

He imagines you in your shared home, alone.  Johnson explained on the plane that you’d be able to buy the place, that WitSec only rents homes across the U.S.  He explained that this has happened more than once, and that it’s actually not too difficult to let a witness slide into their pretend-life permanently.

The choice comes down to the most mundane thought.  Horacio stands in his hotel room in Miami and wonders, who will make her coffee in the morning if I’m not there?

*****

Winter always loses its charm by the time February rolls around.  The fleecy white snow turns into grey slush, and everything is cold and soggy and depressing.

Davide leaving doesn’t help at all.

You knew it would end eventually.  You didn’t have much insight into his situation, but you knew that the cartel targeting you would be easy enough to neutralize.  They were only there because of the power vacuum left behind by Noriega, and they were poorly organized.

You just thought when it ended, you’d have more time.  Which is one of your fatal flaws, always thinking you’ll have more time.  Your father died from a heart attack when you were in high school, and your mother died from a car crash when you were in college.  You, more than anyone, should realize that time was never a guarantee, yet you always think you have a surfeit of it.

It's not your proudest moment, those final minutes with Davide.  Not falling apart in a wash of tears, and not fleeing to your room.  You should have committed to one extreme or the other.  You should have either calmly explained your decision and bade him farewell…or you should have given in to the emotion of the moment and spilled everything.

Why do you never learn your lesson?  You never had a chance to tell your parents that you loved them before they died.  Why didn’t you tell Davide you loved him before he left to return to whoever he was before?

You know you could find him.  You’d caught his lightly accented English and guessed at South America.  Colombia, if he was hiding from Escobar.  He told you about the Search Bloc.  You knew some people in that theater.  You could find him and tell him that you loved him, but would it do more harm than good?  Doesn’t he have the right to return to his previous life without any baggage from this one?

February, then:  grey, cold.  You go to work.  You teach your classes and hold office hours.  Political science can create real monsters, so you gently try to steer your students towards the path of diplomacy and not war.  Maybe this is how you make amends, if such a thing is even possible.

You go home each evening and pull together a sandwich for dinner.  Sometimes you get take-out, and you eat over the sink.  Sometimes you watch T.V. and sometimes you read, but you always sleep alone with Davide’s pillow clutched to your chest, the lingering scent of him fading away within days.

-----

Then March.  The snow starts to melt a bit, and under some of the trees in your backyard you start to see the little purple and white jewels of budding crocuses.

You resume your runs in the mornings.  The campus shakes off its doldrums too and the students seem livelier.

You made the right choice to stay.  You go to the bank with your real name and get a mortgage.  You buy the house under your real name, and you go to the university human resources and hand over the paperwork Johnston gave you, and it’s weird at first, explaining why you’re not really Gwen, but it shocks you how quickly people adapt to using your real name.

-----

March is still fresh when there’s a knock at your door one Saturday morning.

Your first guess is that it’s a delivery.  Johnson promised to ship all of your stuff from your apartment in Panama City.  Not that you have anything valuable, but it would be nice to have your record collection back.  You don’t want to have to rebuild that from scratch.

You’re already out of practice from your prior life.  You don’t bother to check who it is, don’t look out the window before you open the door, and so it’s a shock to see Davide standing there, his fist lifted like he’s about to knock again.

He drops his hand and opens his mouth, but nothing comes out.  You are speechless too, but you don’t need words to because as he drops and unfurls his hand by his side, you see the way the gold ring on his finger catches the morning light. 

He’s still wearing his wedding ring, you think, and your body moves towards his, you leap into his arms and he’s there to catch you.  You breathe out his name, but he chuckles, pushes you gently away from him.

“No, cariño,” he replies, shakes his head.  “Not Davide.”

“Well, no.  I mean—”

“I’m Horacio,” he interrupts.  You reply with your own name, and he repeats it, almost to himself.

“Everything else was me,” he adds.  “Everything but the name.  What we had…”  He trails off, fixes you with that dark-eyed stare of his. 

“Everything else was me too.”  All of the bare facts of your fake life as Gwen hold little weight to that nebulous everything else:  every joke and shared laugh, your Fourth of July panic attack.  The feel of his hand on your waist when you went apple picking.  The way his hair curled after a shower, and how you loved to run your fingers through it when he fell asleep beside you.  All of it.  Every stupid little moment that most other people would have already forgotten. 

Horacio holds up his hand to show you the ring you’ve already noticed.  “I never took it off.  It didn’t even occur to me to.”

You hold up your own hand.  “Me neither.”

He looks away, squints his eyes as he looks off into the distance, but you swear you can see tears there.  He clears his throat, but his voice comes out rougher than usual.

“I’d like to see if I’m as good a man as Davide was,” he says.  “I’d like that chance, but only if you…”  Another cough as he clears he throat, then continues.  “Only if you’ll have me.”

You reach out and take his hand in yours.  You touch the warm metal on his finger, then the thought comes to you.  You slide the ring off, and you feel Horacio watching you.  On the plane, you each put your rings on yourselves, but that wasn’t how it was supposed to go, was it?

Now, nearly a year later, you take his wedding ring off.  For a long beat, you study it—it’s a simple thing, nothing elaborate.  WitSec wasn’t going to waste money on an expensive ring for a fake marriage, and it already has a shallow scratch in it, likely from his job at the nursery.

Then you lift your head and gaze at him, and without breaking eye contact, you slide the ring back on his finger.  The smile that spreads across his face when you do is enough of a promise as any vows recited in a church, and he repeats the motion with your own ring—takes it off, then slides it back on with intention.

And then, because there’s no priest there to give the order, Horacio bends down and kisses you for the first time as himself, and the first time as yourself, and perhaps you learn your lesson about time after all because the moment you part, you whisper, “I love you” to him.

And perhaps he needed to learn the same lesson because he sighs, pulls you closer to him, and whispers “I love you too.”

[the-hinky-panda]

3 Times Sabatino Thought About Proposing and the 1 Time He Did - Part Four: Cake - Vostanik Sabatino x Reader (feat: Nina Barnes)

Tagging: @kmc1989 @words-and-seeds @novamariestark @whateversomethingbruh @trublu2u @stelacole @@elixae

Part One: Adjustment Period - Nik decides it's time to propose.

Part Two: Sassy - Nik's plans to propose are thwarted by your sister Sassy.

Part Three: Love Language - Nik loses the ring during a footchase.

Sabatino decides to call it quits on the proposal. It’s clear to him at this point that it’s not the right time, that the universe keeps throwing up obstacles for a reason. All he wants is for it to be special for you, but he keeps just fucking it up. The pressure is stressing him out and it’s starting to affect the relationship. You can tell he’s hiding something from you and the fact he refuses to discuss it creates an issue. There’s always been things he hasn’t been able to tell you, you accept that, but this is different.

The pause will hopefully give him a little breathing room.

Things go back to normal; he lives in the present instead of being preoccupied with the future. He starts to have fun again, exist in the moment. The two of you spend the weekend taking some time to reacquaint with each other. His job’s been a little manic and you’ve been working a case with the FBI, you’ve barely existed in the same space over the past couple of weeks. He spends Saturday morning in bed with you, his hands chasing over your skin as he makes love to you in freshly laundered sheets. After dinner you go for a walk on the beach because you’re craving sweet and he’s thinking ice cream.

He lives for moments like this, strolling down the boardwalk, his fingers entwined with yours. There weren’t many of them when he was working for the CIA, now he treasures every single one.

The sun is setting when you come across Nina’s cupcake truck. Your eyes light up, and ice cream is completely forgotten because he knows how much you love her Red Velvet cupcakes and she only has one left. He leaves you sitting on a bench, watching the ocean roll up on the shore. He knows you find it soothing, the crash of the waves, the motion of the water.

“A little bird tells me you’re planning on locking that down.” Nina says, gesturing towards you when he orders the cupcakes.

“I was.” Sabatino tells her as he hands over the cash. “But the universe had other plans, so here we are.”

“You got in your own head.” Nina says knowingly as she opens up two individual cake boxes.

“There’s a lot of pressure to get it right you know?” He explains, his palm running over the nape of his neck. "It was causing a few issues between the two of us, so I shut it down."

Nina rests her elbows on the counter before leaning forward.

“Maybe it’s for the best.” She says with a shrug before picking up an icing bag and tilting the red velvet cupcake towards her. “I mean you’re already falling down at the first hurdle.”

“First hurdle?” He repeats with a bitter laugh. “Trust me, there have been plenty of hurdles and we’ve cleared every single one of them.”

“Uh huh.” She says as she surveys her work on the cupcake. “Then this little one should be no problem.”

She shows him the cupcake and his gaze flickers up to her in disbelief when he reads the words ‘Marry Me.”

“Are you serious?” He asks her, his hands on his hips.

“It’s cute right?” She says before putting it away into its own box. “And it’s perfect for her. She’s low maintenance and this is something a little bit special. Not too showy but personalised. Even you can’t fuck it up.”

He hates to say it but she’s right. He couldn’t have chosen a more perfect moment. The tide is coming in, the waves creeping up the shore and the light is just sublime, that cascade of colours illuminating the beach.

“What do I owe you?” He asks her, taking the box begrudgingly.

“I get to make the cake for your wedding.” She barters with him.

He gives her a look before he crosses his arms over his chest and sighs.

“Fine, if she says yes, then you get to make the cake.” He agrees before pointing his finger at her. “But if she says no, I get free cupcakes for life.”

“Yea that’s not happening.” She tells him, shaking her head. “If she says no, you get a pity cupcake, this one time and that’s it.”

“Deal.” He agrees before turning his back on Nina and focusing his attention on more important things.

You rise to your feet when he appears alongside of you, the individual cupcake box in his hand. You smile as you take it from him. That smile, it lights up his entire world and he knows that this is it, this is his moment.

He has the ring in his hand when you open the box, he watches as you study the writing before you tilt your head towards him.

“Nik…”

He doesn’t get down on one knee. It’s not your dynamic. Your partnership has always been based on mutual respect, meeting your challenges face to face and that’s how he intends to do this. He takes your hand in his, the ring clasped tightly between his fingers.

“Alana, I have loved you since that day you showed up in Afghanistan and every day, I loved you more. I want to grow old with you, start a family with you, I want…” He pauses for a moment, his voice rough as he struggles to find the words. “I want you to be my wife. So, I’m just a boy standing in front of a girl with a cupcake, asking her to marry me.”

You laugh and it’s such a rich, beautiful sound. He hopes he gets to spend the rest of his life hearing it.

“Yes Nik.” You say as he slips the ring onto your finger. “Of course, I’ll be your wife.”

Love Nik? Don’t miss any of his stories by joining the taglist here.

Interested in supporting me? Join my Patreon for Bonus Content!

Like My Work? - Why Not Buy Me A Coffee

[the-hinky-panda]

Check out what my amazing friend is doing!!! So proud of her! And the story is lovely so you should definitely give it a read!

❤️ Sunglasses - A Romance Story - Free On Amazon For Only One Week! ❤️ I’m pleased to announce my short story ‘Sunglasses’ is now available on Amazon. ‘Sunglasses’ is the story of Nina and Manuel and how the misappropriation of a pair of sunglasses turned into a romance. For one week only it will be available for you to read for free. Check it out here: UK: https://amzn.to/3vLNVY7 US: https://amzn.to/3vKHtRi

[the-hinky-panda]

Marry Me: Horacio Carrillo x Reader (NSFW)

Tagging: @kmc1989 @mysun-n-stars @@littleone65 @mydarkestsecretlol @evee87 @georgeparisole @legally-a-bastard @justreblogginfics @multilin21 @witches-unruly-heart @thequeenoftheisleofavalon @spooky-pomegranate

“Marry me.” Horacio whispers into the darkness.

You’re tangled up in his sheets, your limbs entwined with his as you listen to the sounds of Medellín drifting in through the open window. His lips brush over your hairline as he awaits your answer. You prop your head up on his chest, his fingertips pushing a strand of hair back behind your ear.

“You don’t want me as a wife.” You tell him as you shift so that you’re straddling his hips. His hands come to rest on your waist, his cock already hardening. “I don’t want that life Horacio, I won’t settle down and pop out babies, I won’t follow you around the world.”

“I’m not asking for babies and I’m asking not you to settle.” He whispers as his hand clasps the nape of your neck drawing your face close to his.

“That’s exactly what you’re asking.” You murmur as you sink down onto him and any response he has is stifled by the moan that leaves his mouth.

“Marry me.” He asks you again as he wraps a daisy around your ring finger. The two of you are sitting on a picnic blanket on the hill where he had made love to you for the first time.

“You know I can’t.” You had whispered against his lips and he had kissed you anyway, hoping to chase away all those doubts.

“Marry me.” The words ring in your head now as you press your fingertips to your lips before touching them to his shiny black coffin. You stand beside Pena and Murphy as it’s loaded onto a plane bound for Madrid, because Horacio, he’s going back to his widow, the woman he married instead of you.

Love Horacio? Don’t miss any of his stories by joining the taglist here.

Interested in supporting me? Join my Patreon for Bonus Content!

Like My Work? - Why Not Buy Me A Coffee

[the-hinky-panda]

Rochefort: Aramis x Reader

Tagging: @kmc1989 @morganasmissus@lovemissyhoneybee @josefa1980 @missflutterlhamaa @backtothefanfiction @areaderinlove @mrslancelotdulac @keyweegirlie @jessyy07 @magic-multicolored-miracle @kj77 @loving1d123-blog @burningpeachpuppy @pansexualhailstorm

Companion piece to

Ruin (NSFW) - Aramis ruins you, the same way you've ruined him.

Love Letter - Aramis recieves a letter from you that throws his world into turmoil.

You have never told Aramis the name of the man who disfigured you. He’s asked you many times but you have never revealed his identity. You’ve locked away that part of yourself, the person you were back then along with everything else your benefactor forced upon you.

It’s been five years since he disappeared from your life.

A dispatch to Madrid, he had told you at the time, I’ll be back within a month.

That was the last you saw of him until tonight.

You’re at the end of your show, wearing nothing but a set of diamonds when you see him in the audience. His arms are folded over his chest as he watches you with the same expression he wore the first time he told you to undress.

You’d been wearing diamonds back then too.

When you enter your chambers that evening you’ve convinced yourself that it was an illusion, a trick of the light, a flash of a memory. You have them sometimes, it’s an emotional response to what you’ve endured, Aramis tells you.

It’s when you hear the door click shut behind you that you realise that you’re not alone. You don’t have to turn around to know that it is Rochforte standing behind you, you would know his presence anywhere. There’s a malevolence that comes with the man that hurt you, a madness that dogs his heels. You used to love him once, back then you a naïve, silly little girl. You had been seduced by his wealth, his power.

You had been a courtesan when you first met, your services recommended by a previous benefactor.

“I’m told you’re a lot of fun.” He’d said as he began to unbutton his shirt.

“I don’t think you need fun.” You’d told him before taking over, your fingers chasing over the scared muscle of his chest. “I think you need someone who cares about you.”

“Don’t presume to know me.” He’d murmured, his palms covering yours. “You’re nothing but a whore.”

“One that you’ve bought and paid for.” You remind him as your tilt your head up to meet his eyes. “Now I can be nice or I can be very, very naughty, which do you prefer?”

Nice is what he’d chosen.

Someone to hold him, to whisper sweet nothings against his skin, to look into his eyes at the height of climax and tell him that they loved him, that they would always love him. He comes back often after that, weekly at first and then more.

His desire for you was insatiable, he would spend every waking moment in your bed if he could. His passion was consuming, his moods violent. Sometimes you were his love, others his whore. He could be tender, he could be cruel, he could be downright terrifying. There was only one constant throughout and that was the words he had you utter, the ones he couldn’t climax without.

Tell that you love me, say it, say it louder, just like that, I want the guards outside to hear it.

It comes to an end when he asks you to marry him. Up until this point there has always been a possibility of escape, that he will tire of you, find someone younger, prettier. When he pulls out that ring you’re at a turning point, it is every courtesan’s dream to become a wife.

It’s your worst nightmare.

If you say yes, if you marry Rochefort then he will own you completely.

When you refuse him, he grabs you by the throat cutting off your oxygen supply and cuts your face in spite.

“Nobody will want a courtesan who isn’t beautiful.” He tells you as the knife bites into your skin, carving into your flesh. “You’re only choice is to marry me, or else starve on the streets.”

When you’re told that he’s been captured in Madrid, you pray that they kill him. You take the jewels, the dresses and gifts he gave you and sell them to fund Eden. A refuge and safe haven. You promote it as an alternative form of entertainment for the upper classes and before you know it Eden is thriving.

All of that start to crumble when Rochefort’s arm snakes around your waist. He draws you back against him, his firmness pressing into you as his fingers tug at the belt of your silk robe. He buries his face into the curve of your throat, his grizzled cheek scratching across your skin as he inhales.

“Evangeline.” He murmurs his lips brushing over the hinge of your jaw. “I have thought about you every single day.”

You have never told Aramis the name of the man who disfigured you. He’s asked you many times but you have never revealed his identity. You’ve locked away that part of yourself, the person you were back then along with everything else your benefactor forced upon you.

It’s been five years since he disappeared from your life.

A dispatch to Madrid, he had told you at the time, I’ll be back within a month.

That was the last you saw of him until tonight.

You’re at the end of your show, wearing nothing but a set of diamonds when you see him in the audience. His arms are folded over his chest as he watches you with the same expression he wore the first time he told you to undress.

You’d been wearing diamonds back then too.

When you enter your chambers that evening you’ve convinced yourself that it was an illusion, a trick of the light, a flash of a memory. You have them sometimes, it’s an emotional response to what you’ve endured, Aramis tells you.

It’s when you hear the door click shut behind you that you realise that you’re not alone. You don’t have to turn around to know that it is Rochforte standing behind you, you would know his presence anywhere. There’s a malevolence that comes with the man that hurt you, a madness that dogs his heels. You used to love him once, back then you a naïve, silly little girl. You had been seduced by his wealth, his power.

You had been a courtesan when you first met, your services recommended by a previous benefactor.

“I’m told you’re a lot of fun.” He’d said as he began to unbutton his shirt.

“I don’t think you need fun.” You’d told him before taking over, your fingers chasing over the scared muscle of his chest. “I think you need someone who cares about you.”

“Don’t presume to know me.” He’d murmured, his palms covering yours. “You’re nothing but a whore.”

“One that you’ve bought and paid for.” You remind him as your tilt your head up to meet his eyes. “Now I can be nice or I can be very, very naughty, which do you prefer?”

Nice is what he’d chosen.

Someone to hold him, to whisper sweet nothings against his skin, to look into his eyes at the height of climax and tell him that they loved him, that they would always love him. He comes back often after that, weekly at first and then more.

His desire for you was insatiable, he would spend every waking moment in your bed if he could. His passion was consuming, his moods violent. Sometimes you were his love, others his whore. He could be tender, he could be cruel, he could be downright terrifying. There was only one constant throughout and that was the words he had you utter, the ones he couldn’t climax without.

Tell that you love me, say it, say it louder, just like that, I want the guards outside to hear it.

It comes to an end when he asks you to marry him. Up until this point there has always been a possibility of escape, that he will tire of you, find someone younger, prettier. When he pulls out that ring you’re at a turning point, it is every courtesan’s dream to become a wife.

It’s your worst nightmare.

If you say yes, if you marry Rochefort then he will own you completely.

When you refuse him, he grabs you by the throat cutting off your oxygen supply and cuts your face in spite.

“Nobody will want a courtesan who isn’t beautiful.” He tells you as the knife bites into your skin, carving into your flesh. “You’re only choice is to marry me, or else starve on the streets.”

When you’re told that he’s been captured in Madrid, you pray that they kill him. You take the jewels, the dresses and gifts he gave you and sell them to fund Eden. A refuge and safe haven. You promote it as an alternative form of entertainment for the upper classes and before you know it Eden is thriving.

All of that starts to crumble when Rochefort’s arm snakes around your waist. He draws you back against him, his firmness pressing into you as his fingers tug at the belt of your silk robe. He buries his face into the curve of your throat, his grizzled cheek scratching across your skin as he inhales your soft feminine scent.

“Evangeline.” He murmurs his lips brushing over the hinge of your jaw. “I have thought about you every single day.”

Love Aramis? Don’t miss any of his stories by joining the taglist here.

Interested in supporting me? Join my Patreon for Bonus Content!

Like My Work? - Why Not Buy Me A Coffee

[the-hinky-panda]

To Be Loved: Athos x Reader (NSFW)

Tagging: @kmc1989 @incorrect-mcdanno @fandomhype @sherberrrt @sekretwindow @@sweetpeaswife @keyweegirlie @@anele-anomis @caffeinatedwoman @thebejeweledwatercat @jessevans @swanfan17 @burningpeachpuppy @@lit-swallow @@aisling1985 @@duck2005 @missflutterlhamaa @@grlmac @littleone65  @sassyscottishchick @whistlesdowns @magic-multicolored-miracle

There has never been a woman like you, not for Athos, never one that’s loved him so conditionally. You are the only one that who has ever seen behind the mask he wears, who has stripped away his armour and seen the man within.

With you he isn’t a Musketeer, or a soldier or the Comte de la Fere, he’s just himself, a man so passionately in love with you it maddens him.

You’re in his lap tonight, your thighs straddling his hips, your chest pressed against his. Your hands thread through his jaw length hair, tangling in the loose waves as you tug his head back to meet your gaze. His hips thrust up to meet yours, a moan escaping his lips because being with your truly is heaven, it’s the essence of what those hymns are really about.

“You have the most beautiful eyes.” You whisper and a flush creeps across his cheeks.

He’s shamed by how much needs to hear those words from you, how every single compliment you bestow upon him feels like a gift. He has been starved of affection for such a long time and it wounds you to know that he has never received the love that he deserves.

Your thumb traces over the line of his jaw, your lips barely brushing over his as you sink down deeper, taking him in his entirety. You don’t move, you just hold him there in place as he whines into your mouth, his fingers gripping the white translucent fabric you wear between his fingers.

Every single day he is in command and every single night you relieve him of his burden. He has never felt anything like this, he’s never conquered, or taken not until you. When he gives himself to you it is with abandonment, he is yours to do whatever you will.

The ecstasy, it consumes him. It sears through his synapses like a powder keg, tearing at his sanity as his breath hitches and you clench around his cock. Yet still you don’t move, still you keep him nestled in place, needy, desperate, wanting.

“Oh, you sweet man.” You whisper, your lips brushing over his. “Let me show you how you deserve to be loved.”

Love Athos? Don’t miss any of his stories by joining the taglist here.

Interested in supporting me? Join my Patreon for Bonus Content!

Like My Work? - Why Not Buy Me A Coffee

[the-hinky-panda]

Oh my gosh I'm so sorry! How about for Aramis; "She's mean, and she's mine." ?? Hopefully it's a good prompt!

Follows on from upcoming fic 'Five Years'

Aramis’s heart breaks when he reads the letter that you’ve sent him. He finds it impossible to believe the words on the page because only three days ago he was at your home, the sun shining down on his bare back as he made love to you underneath the apple tree.

I don’t love you, I never loved you. You were just a flight of fancy, something to pass the time while I waited for my true love to return to me.

His thumb chases over the cursive indents of your hand, the smeared ink he knows comes from tears. He doesn’t understand why you would do this to him, to yourself.

When he turns up at Eden, determined to receive an explanation he is surprised to find you are no longer the mistress of the house, that you’ve signed all of your holdings over to Collette, your business partner.  

“She wanted to make sure that we were still provided for.” She tells him as he sits at the table the two of you have dined upon many a time. You’ve laughed at this table, you’ve cried at the table, you’ve done unspeakable things to each other on this table. “That he couldn’t touch anything once they were married.”

“Who?” He rasps, his chest aching from the weight of the emotion he holds deep inside himself. “Who has she left me for?”

“Captain of the Red Guard.” Collette says and something inside of him snaps. “Rochefort.”

Love Aramis? Don’t miss any of his stories by joining the taglist here.

Interested in supporting me? Join my Patreon for Bonus Content!

Like My Work? - Why Not Buy Me A Coffee

@kmc1989 @morganasmissus @lovemissyhoneybee @josefa1980 @missflutterlhamaa @backtothefanfiction @areaderinlove @mrslancelotdulac @@mxaxrxlxy @keyweegirlie @jessyy07 @magic-multicolored-miracle @kj77 @nsr-15 @loving1d123-blog

[the-hinky-panda]

Ruin: Aramis x Reader (NSFW)

Tagging: @kmc1989

You used to be a courtesan, Aramis has always known that about you.

Aramis had always suspected your benefactor was a duke. It was the extravagance of the perfume you wore when he first met you, the jewels that had adorned your throat. He remembers the taste of violets on his lips as he kissed the nape of your neck, the tightening in his chest knowing that it was another man’s preference.

You wear jasmine these days. It’s a lighter fragrance, one that reminds Aramis of the first days of spring as he makes love to you in a room that has only ever known pleasure. His thumb traces over your lips at the height of rapture, his dark eyes locked on yours as he stills his motions, holding himself deep.

“Not yet my love.” He whispers as his lips brush over yours. “I’m not done with you yet.”

His fingertips trail over the scar that mars your cheek, the one your duke carved into your skin the night you dared to leave him. He’d meant to disfigure you but it only added to your beauty, especially in the world you had carved out for yourself.

Eden is what you call the house you own, the one that your girls work out of.

Every night you host a show, a circus of sorts where you showcase the talents of the women under your tutelage. It attracts a niche of benefactors, men and women of a certain persuasion, who enjoy an alternative means of entertainment.

If they’re interested in the more sensual delights, an arrangement is made as long as the girl is willing. You won’t force your women into service, not the way you had once been.

“Oh Evangeline.” Aramis murmurs, his fingers entwining with yours as his hips arch, sinking even deeper into your tight wet heat. “I’m going to ruin you, the same way you ruined me.”

Love Aramis? Don’t miss any of his stories by joining the taglist here.

Interested in supporting me? Join my Patreon for Bonus Content!

Like My Work? - Why Not Buy Me A Coffee

[the-hinky-panda]

In The Dark: Porthos x Reader

Tagging: @kmc1989

The night Bonnaire makes the deal with the Cardinal you find Porthos on your doorstep. There’s a look in his eyes, one that you’ve not seen in a very long time. When he sits down in the chair in front of the fire you can tell he’s a broken man. He runs his fingers through his unruly curls, his large form rocking slightly as he stares into the flames.

“Talk to me.” You request as you kneel in front of him.

He raises his head, his dark eyes meeting yours and you see the devastation in him, the frustration, the rage.

“Porthos…” You say softly and it’s that tenderness that breaks him.

With everyone else he can hold his shit together but with you he shows his weakness, his vulnerability. The whole thing comes spilling out in stops and starts because the agony of this, the weight of it, it’s just too much to bear.

“I’ve heard stories about those ships as a child. Hellish ones, unspeakable ones.” He tells you, his voice rough as he rubs one hand over the other, his gaze growing distant. “The reason they keep them shackled is so they don’t jump overboard, because that, that is better than watching your friends, your family, your children die of starvation, of sickness, of hopelessness.”

Christ it feels like he’s bleeding out, the agony it seeps out of his entire being as he thinks about his mother, sold into captivity from West Africa. He thinks about what she must have endured, how it killed her in the end.

“He had a fucking shopping list, Analis.” He finds himself hissing. “He doesn’t even see them as people, they’re a commodity to him, cheap labour for his tobacco plantations. And the Cardinal…”

He shakes his head because he can not vocalise the loathing he has for that man.

“There is no justice in the world.” He tells you with tears in his eyes. “None what so ever.”

When you take him to bed that night, he’s wrung out, despondent. He captures your hands as you undress him, clasping your palms to his bare chest as his forehead comes to rest upon yours.

“I just need to hold you.” He whispers against your lips. “I need you to remind me that there’s some good in the world, that it’s not all misery and pain.”

He spends the night tangled up in you, his face buried in the curve of your throat as your fingers comb through his hair. This is his safe space, his sanctuary away from the world.

When you shift to extinguish the light, his embrace tightens.

“Don’t blow out the candle tonight.” He murmurs, his lips brushing over your skin . “I can’t stand to be in the dark.”

Love Porthos? Don’t miss any of his stories by joining the taglist here.

Interested in supporting me? Join my Patreon for Bonus Content!

Like My Work? - Why Not Buy Me A Coffee

[the-hinky-panda]

Also… apparently Crush counts as historical fiction because it’s set in the 90s. Just in case anyone else wants to feel old today. 😂

[the-hinky-panda]

The Drowning Kind: Part III

Sean rarely sleeps. His secrets, his plans, always keep his mind in constant motion. Examining all sides of the task at hand, making uneasy alliances with untrustworthy people makes sleeping a luxury. Closing his eyes, being vulnerable, have given him multiple nights of insomnia. 

But not with you. 

The first time the two of you spent the night together, curled up together on the river bank, under a blanket he stashed in the kayak, he was shocked to discover that he had fallen asleep. The stars that he had been staring up at had mostly disappeared, fading away in the early morning light. You, however, were still curled against him, head on his chest, still sleeping soundly. Your ribcage moved under his hand with each breath you took and he realized immediately that he loved you. He would do anything to keep you safe, keep you near him, this little slice of peace and authenticity. 

That was two weeks ago. 

He’s only missed seeing you three nights during that time. He hates to admit this but he’s getting used to sleeping a few hours each night now and finding it harder and harder to do so when you’re not in his arms. Last night was no different, in fact, even more so now that you fixed up this fishing shack and dragged a futon in here. It’s the first time the two of you have slept in anything resembling a bed and even though he can still feel the steel bars digging into his back, he doesn’t want to move a muscle. 

He feels you start to wake up, little shifting movements in an effort to squeeze yourself closer to him. He does move this time, turning slightly so he can run both his hands over your bare skin and bury his nose where your neck and shoulder meet. He can feel you smile, your cheek pressing against his ear as you run your fingers through his hair. 

“Good morning.” 

He hums in response, pressing kisses along the column of your neck. The scent of jasmine and eucalyptus, your scent, fills his nose and he wants nothing more than to carry it with him for the rest of the day. He’s used to keeping secrets but he’s growing tired of keeping this one. The world he sees is nothing but violence and bloodshed. This love has to be hidden and every day that passes, the more that secrecy feels like the real crime. 

Your back arches when he draws one of your nipples into his mouth. Your blunt fingernails dig into his scalp when he drags his tongue over the hardening nub. A moan is ripped from your throat when his teeth graze over it. 

“Fuck, Sean.” 

He slips a hand between your legs and finds you already soaking wet, his fingers sliding easily inside of you. He wonders if he’ll ever get tired of this, of you. His track record has always been spotty at best. Relationships pursued to kill time, boredom, or to create alliances. But then you walked into his life and turned everything on its head. He’s felt a want, a need, that he’s never felt before. You can’t go a day without the water, and he can’t go a day without you. It should put the fear of God into him, having something with such power over him, but it doesn’t. There’s an odd comfort in it actually. 

Your hand wraps around his already hard cock, a steady pressure and stroke. Now it’s his turn to moan. 

“Please, Sean.” 

As if he could deny you anything. He slides his fingers out of you, pulling your leg over his hip. He captures your mouth with his as he enters you, swallowing down your moan. The noises you make, the intensity of your hold on his shoulders, arms, and back lead him to believe that no one ever loved you like this. That this is just as new a sensation to you as it is to him. This is the moment that he realizes you love him. The realization is enough to halt his movements, to stop time long enough for you to release your grip on his shoulders. You end up holding his face gently in his hands, your pupils still wide and black. 

“What’s wrong?” Your voice is breathy, desire drenched but there’s concern bleeding through. Color starts to seep back into your eyes and worry creases your forehead. “Sean?” 

“I love you.” He chokes on the words, this barbed-wire secret that feels like it rips his throat when he speaks it outloud. It’s admitting his greatest weakness and he’s never been comfortable with that. But it’s out there now, handing in the air between you and it seems far more intimate than being buried inside you. He’s shown you his heart. 

Your smile is relieved, beautiful. “I love you, too.” 

And that is Sean Renard’s biggest, most damaging secret he has: he’s fallen in love.