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violentdeliiights · 23 hours ago

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milk teeth

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

Jonathan always had a taste for sweeter things.

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

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

He never considered himself greedy, though.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What he needed, he thought, was a cub.

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

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

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

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

Reaching out to your cousin was a last resort.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Not an answer. “So… like, a commune?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

He sucked the air out of you.

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

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

Worse, when he met your eye.

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

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

He didn’t.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Founder? Like, of this whole place?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Who’s this, Freya?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Sit down,” he said.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Well, yeah, but it’s only because—”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

He tutted. “Can’t have that.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

Cub.

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

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

You didn’t know how to answer him.

“I don’t — I’m not soft—”

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

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

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

“A boy?”

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

“Oh — uh, no.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Aren’t you?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

“What do you mean?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“That’s—”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“What?”

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

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

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

“Like?”

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

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

“Why?” You questioned warily.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

It was too easy to slip into a routine.

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

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

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

And yet, you were making friends.

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

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

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

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

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

That was the next time you saw Jonathan.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Sure,” you said.

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

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

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

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

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

You frowned. “How?”

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

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

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

You gawped at that. “Her?”

“Your pussy, love.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“I… okay,” was all you said.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“One of ‘em hassling you?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“You’re asking for work, are you?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

“I just mean—”

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

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

“Okay, sure, I can do that.”

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

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

“My bedroom,” he said, point-blank.

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

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

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

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

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

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

“No,” you confessed.

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

“Such a quick learner, cub,” he said.

There was only one path for you from there.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

You gave him a weak frown.

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

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

“Anything else I should know?”

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

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

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

That was the last time you got it wrong.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“That you, cub?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“In y’get,” he grunted.

You could only blink at him dazedly.

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

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

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

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

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

“Yeah,” you murmured, “from Harriet.”

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

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

“Yeah,” you placidly agreed.

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

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

There was no rebuffing him, though.

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

How could you squander such a privilege?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Another rule on the list, you thought.

No knickers.

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

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

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

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

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

New rule. No shaving.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“All wet now, are you?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

New rule. No masturbating.

“Okay,” you said sheepishly.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Georgie was slack-jawed. “You mean—”

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

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

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

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

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

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

“I think so,” you said.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Instead, he drawled; “Why not?”

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

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

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

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

“But — they might—”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What could you do but oblige him?

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

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

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

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

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

You scoffed, breathless.

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

He snickered as he shovelled his food into his mouth.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

It was Philip.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Your blood plummeted to your feet all at once.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“He what.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Suck them,” he grunted.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Easy, cub, no need to panic.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“M’tired,” you slurred, breathless.

He chuckled. “I bet.”

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

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

Wednesday came with the threat of rain.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“What?”

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

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

“You think Jonathan kicked him out?”

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

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

“I’m worried,” she lamented.

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

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

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

“I—”

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

“Shit.”

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

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

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

“I’m sorry,” she whispered.

“What do you—”

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Where?”

He chuffed. “Stable.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

You just never imagined you’d get in trouble.

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

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

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

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

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

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

“I’m sorry,” you snivelled.

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

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

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

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

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

“But, I–”

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

“I just—”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“I’m n-not a piglet.”

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

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

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

A bridle.

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

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

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

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

So they do.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Wan’ me to fuck you, I bet.”

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

“Not this hole, though, eh?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

It was venison for supper.

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

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

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

Corporeality was out of reach for you, though.

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

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

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

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

“There y’are, cubbie.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“No,” you whispered.

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

“No.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Your scruples had evaporated.

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

Now you looked on that scepticism as ignorance.

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

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

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

Didn’t you feel so much better, now?

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

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

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

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

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

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

Not you, though.

You were special. You were important.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The terminus of your journey was a pyramid.

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

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

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

Stepping through the entrance was one of no return.

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

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

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

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

You heard his breathing before he spoke.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

You nodded deferentially.

“Get on your knees, cub.”

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

“Take it out.”

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

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

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

“Lick it,” he gritted.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Slow the fuck down.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

You were not suffering in vain, though.

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

Went dizzy with rapture at the thought of his cock impaling you so deeply, of him coming in the depths of you, of his seed implanting in your womb so that you could have him inside you and a part of you forever. So that you could give him the gift that nobody else was worthy of giving him, because you were special. You were important.

He grunted as much in your ear, breathy and angry and hazy with pleasure; my special girl. Fuck, cubbie, you feel so good. Tryin’ not to break you in half, cubbie. Tryin’ so hard, my good girl, special girl. Gonna give me my baby, aren’t you, cub? I’ll fuck you like this every day until you do—

You watched him in devoted awe once you were able to keep your eyes open — vein bulging in his forehead, burning red in his cheeks, eyes a stormy grey in the darkness of the room. How his brows curled as he chased a final rut, fucking right into your diaphragm, and he pushed all the air out of you as he pressed you into the floor.

“Fuck,” he groaned, frayed and broken as it rended from his chest, and his head tumbled from his shoulders. “Keep still, cub — fuckin’ hell.”

You felt his cock lurching in the security of your pussy, his come pumping in surges directly against your cervix, so much of it that you could feel it in your belly and taste it on the back of your tongue. You wondered if he had injected it directly into your womb through sheer pressure alone, and you hoped it would settle there, meeting the ovum that had awaited his arrival.

You went glassy-eyed as you imagined it, his come taking, swelling and swelling inside you until it was a baby — heaven sent, the perfect amalgamation of you and him — him him him — you couldn’t fathom something so immaculate existing in the world with you. You were sure his baby would outgrow you, viviparous, would burst through your skin and emerge a fully grown person, as deific and faultless as him.

Selfishly, you imagined it not taking. That he had timed it incorrectly, that his sperm had hunted for your egg and was found wanting — and he’d have to fuck you again, like he promised he would. Again and again, ejaculating in the core of you until your insides had become more him than yourself, body completely usurped by him, organs and all.

You gasped, shaken out of your come-drunk reverie when he pinned your ankles together with a single hand, straightening out your legs.

“John, what—” You squeaked, as he pushed your knees to your chin, and he hunched over so that you could no longer see him past your thighs.

Almost bit your tongue off when you felt him lick up your slit in a flat swipe, immediately bucking to get him away from your already aching and hypersensitive clit.

“No, s’too much—” you bleated, whining as his tongue smeared over your clit again, and the shock made your brain short-circuit.

“I know, I know, cubbie—” he hushed, wrangling you until you stilled, and you felt his breath on your inflamed skin, “—it’s important, helps it take, love. Won’t take long, just be a good girl—”

You cried as he sucked your clit into his mouth, knee knocking against your chin, air squished out of your lungs as he folded you in half on the sheepskins.

But you did as he said, because you were a good girl. Let him suckle on your swollen clit until it was sore, lapping at you with the fervour of a bear hunting honey in a beehive — still felt the flood of his come sitting high in your cunt, pooling against your cervix as he held your legs in the air, and it threatened to pour out of you with every constriction of your pussy.

“Please—” you wailed, aimless in your begging, because whatever you wanted he had given it to you and then some.

His hands dug into the flesh of your thighs, keeping himself steady more than you, and you climbed back towards your apogee with a sob and a held breath — released it all at once as he laved his tongue over your pulsing clit, and you came hard enough that you felt yourself begin to black out, such a lack of oxygen in your brain that your vision turned glittery at the edges.

“J-Jonathan, ah, stop!—” You begged, teary and desperate, and only when you kicked haphazardly into the air did he release the suction on your clitoris and conclude his torment with a chaste kiss on your slit.

He straightened out with a satisfied sigh, rough and gurgling from his chest, gently lowering your legs and laying them softly on the wool beneath you.

He planted kisses up the length of you; on your hip, on your belly, on your breast, on your collarbone; crawling up your body until he landed on his back beside you with a whumph. With his expansive hands he scooped you up, and you gave no protest, floppy and exhausted to the point of debilitation — he lay you down on his chest, head balanced between his pectorals, and you settled in with a ragged exhale.

“Such a good girl,” he murmured into the top of your head as he draped his arms over you, petting your skin wherever his hands landed. “Brave little cub.”

You deflated, dissolving into him with a pent breath as your eyes fluttered shut, and you could have stayed there, like that, forever.

He pressed a loving kiss into your hair, languidly stroking your shoulder, and you wondered if your mother was looking for you.

this fic somehow tripled in length as i was writing it lol. anyway here's the pinterest board for it. <3

#stayed up til 4am reading this #not even sleep can keep me from morally ambiguous john price #my midsommar heart is screaming #captain john price #fic rec

2K notes · View notes

violentdeliiights · 5 days ago

Text

all teeth

[masterlist]

Johnny’s on the path to recovery from his traumatic brain injury, but he isn’t his usual self.

demon!johnny x f!reader

5.1k words

cw: smut MDNI, dubcon, mentions of death, mentions of traumatic brain injury, mentions of religion, established relationship, blood, pussy pronouns, guilt, evil johnny, oral f!receiving, restraints, drugging

songs for this one shot: angel - massive attack / hearing damage - thom yorke / headlock - imogen heap

He’s not the same.

He hasn’t been Johnny in a while.

You know when the change happened. You know why the change happened. Hell, you can’t blame him for the change considering he survived a bullet to the brain. Yet, you can’t help but feel cheated.

Cheated because the man you worshipped, the man who you grew up with, the man who kissed your wrists before leaving on his first deployment so he could feel your pulse one last time, the man who cradled your face in his war roughened paws, the man whose family welcomed you with open arms after your own failed you.

Cheated because no one else seems to see the change.

His mother still strokes his cheeks and giggles at his grouchy quips. Simon still rolls his eyes fondly when he barks a lewd joke during boys’ night. Even his psych evals are coming back all clear.

Sometimes you think it’s all in your head. Maybe you’re the paranoid one. Maybe you just can’t compartmentalise that your boyfriend was shot in the head and lived to tell the tale.

He should be dead. He should be powder in a little silver box. There should’ve been a funeral- a day of mourning. A day where you sat and wept in all black beside a sapling with a plaque attached to the front;

Johnny ‘Soap’ MacTavish

1996-2023

Beloved Son, Uncle, Nephew, and Friend

Instead, three familiar men turned up at your door, wearing such guilt-ridden looks that you instantly assumed the worst. Perhaps the worst would’ve been better.

The worst would’ve meant you didn’t have to watch Johnny squirm in pain on a hospital bed. It would’ve meant bypassing months of physical therapy where he had to relearn to use his own hands. Tendons and ligaments frozen in time at the very second the bullet pierced his temple. That small, star-shaped scar signifying the end of your boyfriend’s career. A humiliating turn for the demolitions expert, who could once take apart bombs one-handed and blindfolded, now having to relearn how to pick up an apple.

The worst would’ve meant Johnny died the man you knew and loved. Not whoever- whatever- he is now.

Perhaps, in a way, there had been a funeral. You mourned everyday for the man you had kissed goodbye on the morning of his final deployment departure. You had woken with him in the early hours to kiss his cheek and pat his chest, waiting until you heard the front door close and his footsteps recede down the porch steps to the car before rolling over to sleep again. You counted that as his funeral- the last time you saw your Johnny.

He’d come on leaps and bounds in physio, with Price finding him the best specialists he could and either Simon or Gaz accompanying him. Without his team, you’re sure you would’ve gone under. The prodigious waves that continued to batter you during Johnny’s recovery were more manageable when you had a team to weather the storm with you.

It was this that made you all the more paranoid. How could you even begin to broach this topic to them? How do you look your boyfriend’s teammates in the eye and tell them that sometimes you wish Johnny had died? How do you tell the men who have become like older brothers to you that your boyfriend- the man who you share your bed with, the man who survived death- is not the man you once knew?

So maybe it was all in your head. It would explain why none of them had approached you with the same concerns.

You also feared bringing your concerns to them due to the fact that you couldn’t explain the difference in Johnny. You just knew there was one.

He was still the same loud, brash lad he’d always been- albeit slightly grumpier accounting for the fact he’d been shot in the head. He still held your hand walking through the park, still made you dinner to take to work, still cradled your face with his hands every night whilst laying opposite you. Johnny was still Johnny…except he wasn’t.

His hands were too rough, squeezing the sides of your face with just enough force that your jaw ached afterwards. The sunset walks through the park were accompanied with him muttering under his breath and scouring the fields with narrowed eyes as if he expected a sniper to emerge from behind the cherry blossoms. You found notes all around the flat with scribbles in an unfamiliar language, small pieces of paper hurriedly and haphazardly ripped from his many sketchbooks scattered everywhere. Sometimes you would walk into the bathroom only for him to be standing staring at himself in the mirror, razor in his hand and blood dripping from his face, as if he had nicked himself whilst shaving and was mesmerized by it. Oftentimes he would stand up from the couch wordlessly in the middle of a movie and lock himself in his office for hours, leaving you confused and alone.

There was no concrete evidence to any of this, and you knew that if you did bring this up with anyone they would blame it on the traumatic brain injury he had suffered not some months ago. But you knew Johnny. You had grown up with Johnny. This wasn’t him.

So you’d sat with it. This festering intuition, this rotten thought burrowing into the walls of your psyche, an infection spreading through your bloodstream.

It turned you into a shell of your former self; flinching when Johnny moved his hands towards you, stomach and shoulder muscles constantly tensed as if awaiting an ambush, nights in which you woke every couple of hours to check that Johnny was both beside you and asleep, days where you purposefully stayed late at work to avoid even the thought of being in the same room as him.

The guilt only ate at you further.

Selfish. Greedy. Paranoid. Ungrateful.

That’s what you were. Your boyfriend had survived a traumatic brain injury and you wanted nothing to do with him. He had escaped the clutches of death to come back to you and you’d rather him dead.

Nights were the worst times. In the silence, with your shallow breaths and Johnny’s snoring the only sounds. You never slept facing him, not anymore. Couldn’t bear the thought of your most convoluted, heinous night terrors coming true and having to open your eyes to face them. The gaps between slumber when you awoke from nightmares on a choked breath felt more like lucid dreaming. Eyes stared, piercing the back of your head, daring you to turn around. Each night, you had to control your breathing and teary eyes, curled into a fetal position with trembling hands tucked under your chin. A defensive pose. An animal playing dead.

Actually, perhaps mornings were even worse. When you cracked open your barely rested eyes to find Johnny standing over your sleeping form, cup of coffee in hand and an empty grin on his face. More grimace than smile. All teeth.

Having to pretend you hadn’t felt him staring at you all night. Pretending like your heart didn’t pound like a hunted deer’s every time he came near you.

So many times you had thought about telling someone. Someone who knew Johnny. Someone who knew you. Knew you wouldn’t lie about this. One of his best friends. But he was so sweet to you around them. Hell, he was sweet all the time- too sweet. He acted so normal around them that the paranoia you felt grew to a solid brick in your chest. It sucked the life out of you. Isolated you from your friends, from Johnny’s friends. You hadn’t been anywhere other than work, the house, or the hospital since Johnny’s unconscious body touched back down on UK soil.

And he knew.

He knew that he could act just normal enough that no one else would see what you saw.

You revelled the occasional nights when Johnny would walk into the bedroom of an evening with his jacket half zipped and a beanie covering his scar, knowing that meant boys’ night. You’d have the house to yourself for a night, you’d be able to take an entire lungful of air that wasn’t tainted with the rotting air that seemed to follow him. A frail smile and a peck on the cheek and you’d see him out, watching from the doorstep until he turned the corner of the street. He’d send a wave back, caring to eyewitnesses, but you knew what it meant.

You knew it was him giving you a grace period before he prowled back to the house several pints later. Technically he wasn’t supposed to drink until the doctor gave him the all clear but he justified it with how infrequent those nights were- once a month at most.

Drink always made him more reckless. He was less of a stealthy predator and more of a taunting entity. You’d wake up some hours after his return expecting him in bed beside you only to find him seated on the armchair facing your side of the bed. Dead eyes staring back at you, his once glimmering blues nothing but a deserted tundra. Dead smile plastered on. All teeth.

It was inescapable on weekends. You couldn’t hide at work. Couldn’t just lock yourself in the bathroom. Couldn’t leave the house without him either badgering you or following you out the door. On the weekends he was free to watch all day. Even when you weren’t in the same room. His presence felt too big for the house, attaching to your own soul and following you everywhere. Peace was a dreamt up concept at this point.

It was endless; you couldn’t exactly be the girl to abandon him after a traumatic brain injury and blame his changed behaviour.

Things had escalated in recent days. He’d been more erratic, more snappy. Scribbling frantically in sketchbooks. You’d found books in the freezer one night. A muddy spade in the cutlery drawer the next.

Entering the doorway after work, you’d immediately been hit with a wall of a pungent, rotting smell. It was almost earthy- metallic, cold, sulphuric. The sound of pots and pans clanging together pushed your feet warily to the kitchen where you were greeted with the sight of Johnny’s broad back, his hands obviously busy with whatever was cooking on the stove.

You took notice of the way he leaned on a crutch, something he only really used if he was feeling tired or weary for fear of looking weak if he was to use them constantly despite doctor’s orders.

His ears seemed to perk up, body turning with his head until he caught sight of you. There was that smile. The dead, lifeless one. All teeth.

“Ach, there ya are, bonnie. How was work ma darlin’?” He strode over to where you were rooted to the floor in the kitchen doorway, yanking your face between his palms and fixing you with his dead stare.

“Erm, y-yeah. Was…okay I guess?” Your confusion was evident, narrowed eyes darting between his own and the pans on the stove. He hadn’t cooked for you since before he came home, not counting the sandwiches he sometimes packed for you for work if he remembered, “What’s all this?”

“Well, ‘a was just thinkin’ we havenae had a proper date night in a while, aye? Cooked just for you, ya know?” Cold palms detached from your face to grab your jacket from your shoulders, twisting your body around until he stood behind you with his face tucked in your neck, “A’ve made all this effort, gonna say thank you, bon?”

That black, rotten aura he seemed to carry swallowed you whole. Threatened to suffocate you with its tar-like thickness, concrete sludge blocking your airway. Cold breath hit the side of your face, as if there was no life in him to warm him up.

“T-thank you, Johnny. I’ll just go freshen up, yeah?” Shooting a quick and fragile smile over your shoulder, you shuffled out of his grasp and up the stairs.

Halfway across the landing, his flat voice called to you.

“Don’t keep me waiting.”

—

Trembling hands trying and failing to stab the now-cold dinner Johnny had plated for you, you kept your eyes fixed to the shaking fork between your fingers.

You couldn’t bear to look up and have to look into the frozen void of Johnny’s stare.

Meanwhile, Johnny hadn’t taken his eyes off of you since you descended the stairs to sit at the dining table. His gaze burned into you, scorching your fragile skin. You assumed it was just in your head when you began to feel your skin start to itch.

Dinner had been virtually wordless thus far, aside from the constant barely audible mutterings that you had grown used to since Johnny’s hospital discharge. You’re not even sure he was aware he did it, seemingly a subconscious habit. Sometimes he did it in his sleep, grumbling and growling to himself in an indecipherable language whilst wrapped in the throes of a deep slumber.

You’re sure if Johnny looked hard enough he would probably be able to see your heart physically pounding out of your chest, the delicate skin across your breastbone thumping in time with the fist-sized organ beneath, jackhammering in a wild and asynchronous rhythm.

In a bold move, you glanced up at his face through your eyelashes to be met with Johnny’s tilted head, narrowed eyes and that haunting smile. All teeth.

Swallowing a thick gulp, you dared to tilt your head up, facing his own if even for a moment, “Thank- Thanks for this, love. Tastes…nice.”

The man before you merely deepened his smile and licked his lips, “S’alright, hen. Haven’t seen much of each other lately, ya ken? Thought it would be nice to spend some time with ma lady.”

Your heart fractured at his words. He was right here. The man you loved most in life was sitting right before you and yet…he wasn’t. You were his lady, and he was your man. But this was not your Johnny.

Suddenly your fracturing heart began to slow in pace, similar to the pace of a hibernating animal, slowing their heart to sleep and conserve energy. The edges of your vision grew darker with every blink as Johnny’s face began to skew and blur with your fading sight. A vague Johnny shaped blur rose from his seat at the table, slowly prowling to where you sat despondently.

“There ya go, be a good girl and go t’sleep.”

That smile was the last thing you remember before your lids grew too heavy to keep open and your temple slumped to the table in front of you, narrowly missing the half full plate before you. All teeth.

—

The smell of burning was what eventually lulled your brain back into consciousness. You attempted to bring a hand to your sore eyelids only to be stopped by the feeling of scratching and chafing each time you moved your arms. Cold panic shot through your veins, springing your eyes open involuntarily and snapping your stiff neck frantically side to side.

From your limited range of motion you could tell you were still in the house- specifically the bedroom you shared with Johnny, the framed photo of the two of you from his sister’s wedding some years ago placed on his nightstand. A thick, coarse rope wrapped around both of your wrists, presumably attached to the bed’s metal headboard. From the numb tingling in your ankles and calves, you could only assume your legs were tied to the posts at the end of the bed. You’d been stripped to your underwear and Johnny’s crucifix necklace rested between your breasts, something you hadn’t seen him wear since the day he left for that fateful deployment.

“Ach, hen. Donae be hurtin’ yerself,” Johnny’s flat voice cooed from the doorway of the bathroom, flicking the switch off beside him and drying his hands on a hand towel before slinking around to his side of the bed, “Come on now, bonnie. Nothing’s goin’ tae happen to ya.”

A calloused hand strokes a stray hair from your forehead and you flinch backwards as much as your restrained body allows. That bastard smile is barely visible through the thick tears that are welling in your eyes. All teeth.

“Ach, ma hen, no tears, aye?” He wipes away the spilled tears on your cheeks with a condescending pout, bringing that same thumb to his mouth and sucking the salty fluid with an exaggerated moan.

“J-Johnny, please–” Your voice comes out hoarse, both from fear and disuse, “Please, whatever this is, please you don’t have to–”.

He tsks patronisingly, “See, that’s where you’re wrong, bonnie. I do.” He stands from the bed, stalking to where your feet are secured to the bedposts, “It’ll all make sense soon, ‘a promise. I’m doin’ this fer you. Fer us.”

Reaching behind him, he rips his worn t-shirt over his head, discarding it to the side where you now could pinpoint the source for the burning smell. None of the lamps in the room were lit, with the only light in the room coming from the multitude of candles on every flat surface. Every cupboard, shelf, chest of drawers, even some of the floor, was littered with burning candles. Evidently, you’d been out for a while.

Pulsing fills your ears as your heart begins to pound, so much so that you’re sure you can hear the blood rushing through your veins. A cold sensation washes over you as Johnny steps out of his boxers, still staring at you with that emotionless mask in place.

Tears continuously stream down your face as he plants a knee on either side of your hips, settling on all fours above you. Your lips tremble as he tracks his eyes up and down your body, “Ma lass. Bonnie thing ya are. Get hard everytime I look at ya.” His pervertedness only makes you sob harder, this is the most ‘Johnny’ he’s acted in months.

“Please, Johnny. Please–” You know the defeated begging will get you nowhere. Whatever has taken over your boyfriend’s body and brain has latched its claws into him and is refusing to let go. Puncture wounds filled with black tar. Bubbling blood and evil sludge. Thick coatings of fetid mucus coating his once lustrous and haloed soul.

“Hush, hush. None ‘a that. Now you sit there and relax, aye? Johnny’ll take care ‘a ya.”

Rough fingertips trail down your neck, coming to play with the crucifix resting on your breastbone. His jaw slightly flexes as if in pain and you watch in horror as his fingers start to burn and blister where he touches the symbol.

Resigning to screwing your eyes closed as thick sobs continue to spill from your mouth, you feel Johnny’s other hand trail down your sternum, over the curve of your stomach, fingertips edging beneath the elastic of your underwear to stroke the delicate skin of your hip.

Only…Johnny’s hand is still playing with the silver pendant, and the weight of one of his huge paws still hasn’t moved from the mattress beside you.

Blinking your tear-swollen eyes open, you cautiously glance down only to find Johnny’s torso has now sprouted a second pair of arms, emerging from the skin covering his ribs and smeared in a black, gooey substance. Streaks of this substance are marked along the skin of your sternum where he’s touched you, a trail leading down to where his fingers rest on your hip bone.

A smug smirk, all teeth, carves itself into his face as Johnny witnesses a myriad of emotions flit through your eyes, the windows to your soul baring your every thought. Flaying you wide open for him to gorge himself on the hysteria crashing through you. Cracking your rib cage open to get to the softest, most vulnerable parts of you. Flesh for his feasting.

“New toy for me to play with, aye? Means ‘a can touch you however ‘a want. ‘S not all though, bonnie, look’it.” Suddenly, he retracts all of his hands from you, pushing himself up to straddle your splayed open thighs. Tilting his chin back and closing his eyes, Johnny begins to mumble under his breath- the same mumbling you’ve become familiar with over the last few months. Squirming in alarm, you helplessly watch on as the flames of the candles surrounding you all seem to burn brighter, flickering becoming more intense until walls of fire seem to circle you in, swaying in time with Johnny’s muttering.

All at once, the flames retreat to their original state as two huge black wings unfurl from Johnny’s broad back.

They cocoon you, encasing you and Johnny and trapping you even further to the bed. From here, you can see each of the feathers are slick with a thick oil-like substance, weighing them down and permeating the air with a miasmic scent of sulphur and rot. When his head swings down to face yours, you gasp in horror as his eyes are replaced with two voids, at once hollow and inherently unholy. He barks a crude laugh at the obvious perturbation slashed across your face, teeth now sharpened to whetted points.

He quietens your panicked breathing with a hand- a human hand- smothering your mouth, those black holes piercing through your face, “No, no. Yer gonnae be a good girl. You’ll be screamin’ in a min’, bonnie. Now, if ‘a let go, are you gonnae be quiet?” He nods his head patronisingly as if to coax you into agreeing with him- and gods help you it works. You find yourself nodding if only for the fact that agreeing with him might make him trust you until you can attempt to get yourself out from under him.

“Hm, thought so. Now, just lay there like a good girl and take what ‘a give you. You’ll enjoy it, sweet thing.” His heavy hand lifts from your mouth enough for him to bend his face down to yours, long tongue retracting from his mouth and licking a path from your lips to your wet and salty cheeks. “Fuckin’ delicious.”

You curse yourself as you feel the material of your underwear sticking to you. You don’t want this…you shouldn’t want this. You shouldn’t want this- this thing sitting on your thighs.

Johnny- whatever he is- knows this and smirks as one of his extra hands comes to cup your pussy through your underwear, finding it sodden and molded to the shape of you, “Ach, hen. Should’ve told me ya wanted me before, hm? ‘A can feel how wet she is for me.”

You can’t even find it in yourself to care about the black substance covering his hands as his palm rubs over you through the material. Your clit is puffy and neglected and visible through the cotton, small whimpers leaking from your tear-swollen lips involuntarily. You could come just like this, you think, jumped up on the volatile cocktail of fear and arousal coursing through you and culminating at the pinnacle of your thighs.

He doesn’t make it that easy for you, however, removing his palm and bringing it to his mouth, licking your arousal off of it before moving that same hand down to wrap around his cock. Eyes rolled back in his head, the grunt that echoes from Johnny’s mouth is nothing short of inhuman. It roils from somewhere deep inside of him, rattling off his diaphragm, booming like thunder.

Slick sounds fill the makeshift cavern of Johnny’s wings as he pumps his hand over his thick shaft, bruised and cracked knuckles catching on the curve of your stomach. Those black voids in his eye sockets hone in on the lush skin of your tits, watching them rise and fall rapidly. Another groan reverberates before he seems to lose all patience, taking that same hand and yanking the fabric of your underwear down your splayed open thighs, followed by the cups of your bra.

Now utterly at his mercy, and with no dignity left to protect, you give in the niggling voice in your head telling you to let go. Enjoy it. It’s what he wants. It’s what you want, don’t you sweet girl? To be good for Johnny?

Thick, rough fingertips descend on the peaks of your stiff nipples, pulling and pinching, tugging and flicking until you feel your inner thighs grow damp with arousal. Johnny’s head shoots down to the skin there, tongue immediately going to lap up the liquid, nose pressed against your clit. You see his eyes roll back in his head, matching muffled moans of pleasure escaping you both. He presses dirty, sloppy, open-mouthed kisses to the inside of your thighs, leaving bite marks and bruises in his wake. Pinning you in place with one arm over your hips, he stares up at you between his brows, black eyes fixing you to the spot more than the chafing restraints around your wrists and ankles. You feel the tell-tale roiling sensation in your lower belly, the build up of pleasure shooting through your calves, brain overwhelmed with euphoria.

When you do come, it’s with a sharp cry, Johnny’s lips fastened to your abused clit, nose pressed to the skin of your mons. He coaxes you through it, never once letting up, amplifying the sensation as another slightly smaller orgasm barrels through you almost immediately after the first. Finding some semblance of mercy, he detaches from your clit and presses soft kisses to the skin around your pussy, pulling away just enough to talk directly to it, “Fuckin’ perfect wee cunt. She’s fuckin’ gorgeous.” The dim light provided by the candles allows you to see the glistening of Johnny’s face, the entire lower half of it covered in you, his nose shining with your essence.

Echoing off the thick wall of feathers, your heaving gasps fill the quiet space, overstimulated from Johnny’s merciless assault on your cunt.

“Gonnae fuck you now, hen. That sound good?” He barely waits for you to exhaustedly nod before bringing himself up to stand on his knees in front of you. Spitting into his hand, he again wraps it around his cock before lowering to his elbows, heavy cock slapping against the curve of your stomach. The veins running up the sides are more prominent than ever, tip ruddy and weeping where it rests against your skin.

Swinging his hips down, he rests the tip against your still slick centre, coating it before running it over your clit, each pass making you whimper in overstimulation.

The first push into your hole is a teasing one. A shallow dip into the tide. A furtive glance from across the room. Daring you to follow. His jaw drops open as the head glides in, and he loses all semblance of self control. Johnny’s hips slam to meet your own in one smooth motion. A tree being felled in a silent forest. A nuclear explosion. Fireworks exploding behind clenched eyelids.

A strangled cry fills the room and your brain must be working on a time delay, as you only realise it was you who made the noise when Johnny’s eyes snap to meet your own. The taunting smile takes its place once more. All teeth.

He fucks into you like it’s the last time he’ll ever get to. He’s merciless and animalistic and unforgiving. Grabs your hips in rough palms and yanks them to meet his own.

Presents the nail sized wounds in his hands and feet, saying drink up or I’ll force you.

“Feel like fuckin’ sin. Hot and wet as owt. Jaysus,” His words seem to roll from him subconsciously, heaving gasps interrupting his words as if he too is succumbing to the same fate as you.

It’s never felt this good. Never felt like this.

Like you’re becoming one. Like your souls are aligning. Like sounds are clearer and the stars are brighter and everything smells more intense. Like he’s unlocked a whole other realm of being. A whole other plane of existence.

Your legs are still numb from where the rope has you shackled to one position, but with his hands angling your hips, you can feel everything. Every smack of his skin to yours, every thrust hitting the entrance of your cervix, every vein and ridge of Johnny’s cock.

“We’re gonnae come at the same time, understood? When ‘a say come, you come.” His words are direct and demancing, unquestionable in the way he glares down at you.

Your nod feels involuntary, your head moving of its own accord as he fucks you into a different dimension.

Once again, that roiling in your stomach peeks its head, signaling the imminent release. But you can’t come first. You have to be good.

“Ye know, I– fuck– I wasnae gonna come back to you. I was fuckin’ dead. Shit. Dead and moved on,” Johnny’s words are interrupted by his own gasps and groans, and you struggle to compute them through the haze of pleasure, “Had to fuckin’ make a deal, aye? Had to come back to you. By any fuckin’ means.”

You feel one hand detach from your hip, and then he dips down to hover over your face, lips smearing against your own. The kiss is ruthless and punishing and delicious. His teeth catch the delicate skin of your lip as he shoves his tongue into your mouth, leaving remnants of your own taste on your tongue.

“Ach, fuck, I’m gonnae come. Come now, bonnie. Come.”

His words slip between gritted teeth, both of your faces screwed up in ecstasy.

It’s almost ethereal, the feeling of coming at the same time as Johnny. Feels like this otherworldly dimension he’s catapulted you to is spinning out, wrapping you in each other’s souls.

Until a pain unlike anything you’ve ever felt hurtles into your chest and a wet cough chokes from your lips. When you look down in shock, Johnny’s hand is wrapped around the blade of a dagger, his own fingers coated in blood, and the sharpest end lodged into the space between your breasts. Blinking confusedly, you look up at Johnny in horror to find that awful smile in place. All teeth. “This is the only way we can be together forever. I’m doing it fer you, hen. Fer us.”

Johnny was a good man once, he’d like to think.

Not anymore.

He hasn’t been good in a long time.

He hasn’t been a man in a long time.

#fanfiction #cod fanfic #call of duty #johnny soap mactavish #john soap mactavish #soap x reader #soap call of duty #soap cod #soap mw2 #johnny mactavish #soap mactavish x reader #cod john mactavish #john mactavish x you #demon soap #demon johnny mactavish #sergeant mactavish

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violentdeliiights · 6 days ago

Text

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

MASTERLIST · AO3

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

or: the forced mating omegaverse au

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

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

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

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

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

The first thing you do is apologize for the weeks of silence. “Sorry I haven’t reached out. Work was crazy for a bit, and then—…ah, it doesn’t matter. Sorry though.”

“That’s fine, love. Bit calmer now?”

“Uh…yes and no,” you answer cryptically. “That’s, um…that’s why I wanted to call you actually.”

“Yeah?” he prods, curiosity piqued. It’s second nature to always wonder what you’re up to. If it was possible to live in someone’s head, he’d make yours a second home.

“Are you free for lunch tomorrow?”

He puts you on speaker phone so he can check his calendar at the same time. “I can move some things around. Can’t tell me whatever it is you wanna talk about right now?”

You’re quiet for a moment before you speak again, voice a little tinny through the speaker “I just…it’d be better if we could talk face to face.”

Words like those never bode well, but Gaz shakes it off, giving you the benefit of the doubt. It might just be embarrassing or sensitive news that isn’t easily disclosed over the phone. He’s never begrudged you your privacy before; it certainly isn’t going to start now.

Besides, whatever it is won’t be private for long.

“Sure, love. We can have lunch. What time?”

There are things he associates with time—seasons, death, taxes. Faces too, when they change with each time he sees them, months separating his visits and meaning that each time he comes home, there are new lines and new wrinkles in familiar faces. Piercings that weren’t there before. Tattoos and pregnancies and blemishes and drooping cheeks.

Your face, however, is a constant. Not just in that it never seems to change, but that it never leaves his mind long enough to be forgotten.

After all, how could it leave for even a second with what you are to him?

He’s gotten that question before. What do you think you’ll do when you find your mate? When you come across an omega that smells just right, so delicious and ripe that you have no choice but to sink your teeth in and hold?

Gaz doesn’t have to imagine. He’s known longer than most. It’s been more than ten years since he first met you—ten years since his keen teenage nose caught the tail end of your scent and followed it down the hallway and around the corner until he could put a face to the smell.

His memories after that moment come in snapshots. A passing teacher dragging him into an empty classroom after recognizing the look in his eye, pupils dilated and mouth agape, his whole body thrumming with desire. Sitting in the principal’s office with his hands in his lap, fists clenching and unclenching while waiting for his mother to join them, the other adults in the room watching him with blatant distrust, as if he weren’t a child too; as if this wasn’t new and overwhelming and terrifying. His mother doing her best to console him in the car on the drive home, Gaz both too old and too young for the torrent of emotion washing over him.

He blocks that week from his memory lest those same emotions surge up and paralyze him in his tracks. It gives him nothing but grief to remember that day. If the agony of an unconsummated mate bond weren’t enough, the sheer indignity of being treated like something to worry about even to this day comes as a crushing blow.

It’s taken a lot to move beyond those years.

It isn’t something Gaz would wish on anyone else. His life has been shaped by a very specific kind of longing. Agony in the shape of a neck. His burden since youth has been to stave off the hunger pangs, but that hasn’t always come easy, and it’s come at a cost.

In the months following that day, he formed a kind of tentative friendship with you, trying not to let the devastation overwhelm him when you never seemed to recognize his scent as your mate’s. To just be in your orbit was better than nothing at all.

He lasted all of a year at the same university as you before dropping out and enlisting, his instincts steadily becoming too powerful to ignore. The military was where he learned to manage the hunger—long, sleepless nights and rigid protocol hardening him, reinforcing his weak points. Learning to live with a certain kind of absurdity, and sucking up the urge to argue when given asinine tasks like mopping up rain water in a thunderstorm or being put on pencil sharpening duty.

Since then, time and distance have helped him soothe the ache and leash his instincts. If he couldn’t be your mate, he could be your friend at least, and he’s taken to that role with zeal.

Hunger still clings to the inside of his rib cage though. Cramped hunger crouched beneath his lungs. All breath, all pneuma. Tight clustered and tumorous.

These days he’s just better at managing it.

A day after your call, you meet on neutral territory, a coffee shop around the back of a busy street in Shoreditch, a neighbourhood he’s only visited a few times in years past when you felt inclined to drag him to the Sunday market. It’s not terribly busy for mid-morning on a Saturday, but the steam wand keeps hissing in the background and the music is cranked up a few decibels higher than Gaz would usually like. The whole place smells of hazelnut and toffee.

You though—you smell like something indescribably delicious. Floral and fragrant, so succulent that his mouth waters when he inhales a lungful of your scent. Sweet like dandelion wine.

Time has made it easier for his heart to cope with not having you, but not his hunger.

You make pleasant conversation for a few minutes before addressing the elephant in the room, avoiding it at first in favour of talking about old friends and family—you ask him how his sister’s PhD defence went and light up like a thousand watt bulb when he tells you that it was successful—anything to avoid the real reason for inviting him to lunch. But there comes a point when you have no choice but to suck in a deep breath and finally get to it.

“I need to ask you for a favour.”

“Okay.”

“It’s a big one,” you warn him.

“Okay,” Gaz repeats, smiling. His acceptance comes easy because there’s nothing he wouldn’t do for you.

“I wouldn’t—God, this is so awkward,” you start, a heavy sigh steaming up from the back of your throat, head collapsing into your waiting hands to hide your face. Anything to avoid looking at him.

Gaz sits and waits patiently for your courage to return. Unlike you, he doesn’t fidget or cross and uncross his legs. His urges are strictly regimented, impulses beaten out of him after years of exposure therapy, so to speak.

You pick your head back up and his heart thumps in his chest. Mostly beaten out of him.

“Please don’t feel like I’m pressuring you into this.” His lips twitch with a suppressed grin. “I’m only asking because you were the first person I thought of, but I can always figure something else out, or go to, um…—go to a heat centre.”

He straightens at those words. “Heat centre?”

“Yes. My, um—” You go quiet again, the words not coming easily to you, but his mind is already racing, mouth dry when he considers the implications of what little information you’ve already offered up. “I’ve been on suppressants for a really long time. Ever since high school. I was supposed to get my prescription renewed with my doctor this week, but I’ve only been seeing her for a few months, so when she realized how long I’ve been on suppressants for, she…—it’s apparently not healthy to be on them for that long.”

“Not healthy,” Gaz repeats, his rational mind somewhere else.

You shake your head in confirmation. “No. She said long term suppressant use can lead to different cancers and other health complications, and that I should’ve been spacing it out rather than just…suppressing my heats altogether.”

The shrill whistle of blood through his ears muffles all but your words.

It barrels into him at full tilt. Drives the breath from his lungs and the thoughts from his head.

“Your heat is coming up,” he finishes for you, lasering in on the microexpressions flitting across your face. Blinders on. Nothing else in the world matters as much as your next words.

You swallow. Look away. “Yep,” you chirp, voice catching in your throat and breaking.

A chair scrapes loudly against the floor when someone nearby scoots back.

“You aren’t going to a heat centre?”

“…No.”

His heart beats so hard against his ribs that his chest nearly hurts.

“You want me to help you through your heat.” He doesn’t have to ask; your trepidation says as much, and he’s always had an eye for details.

“I know this is awkward, and I wouldn’t ask you if it wasn’t an emergency.”

Gaz reaches across the table instinctively to take your hand. “No, love, it’s fine. You know you can tell me anything. I’m glad you came to me first.”

Glad hardly touches the depth of the emotion coursing through him. Honoured comes closer. It’s not like he’s never thought about you in heat before, but he’d been away so often and for such long stretches of time, that he assumed you’d gone the heat centre route. He would’ve known if you’d gotten an alpha to help you through it—would’ve smelt their stench on you whenever he was back in the city.

But as grateful as he is that you entrusted him with this knowledge, it also nearly takes his breath away.

“You’ve never had a heat before?”

It almost seems unfathomable. He’s had plenty of ruts before—a couple of times with a partner, usually another alpha or a beta—and never once assumed that you’d gone your whole life without experiencing a heat.

You shake your head. “No. I got on suppressants as soon as I presented and it was just easier to live life without having to, you know…deal with heats and all of that. Just seemed like a hassle.”

His head is spinning. He grips the edge of the table to keep himself upright, but it’s almost not enough. At any moment, he might tip right over.

He won’t ask if you’ve ever slept with someone before. It’s none of his business. Even if it were, he wouldn’t want to know.

Besides, even if you have, they haven’t had you in a way that mattered. There’s no mark on your neck or ring on your finger, and you’ve never spent a heat with someone else.

Never until now, that is.

The answer is right on his lips when you cut him off at the pass. “Don’t answer now. I wanted to ask you in person, but I don’t want you to feel on the spot.”

“Love, you aren’t putting me on the spot.” Not when the choice is so obvious.

But you don’t let him finish, holding up a hand to get him to stop talking. There’s a tremor in your hand, your fingers quivering slightly, and noticing that makes him pause.

“Please just—just think about it,” you insist.

“…Fine, I’ll give it a think,” Gaz rasps, acting like his whole entire world hasn’t changed in a blink.

“Thanks, Kyle.”

Your relief is palpable, so undisguised that he’d be insulted if he wasn’t viscerally aware of how much the conversation has taken out of you.

You hug him on the way out—a gesture so natural to your friendship that you don’t notice the way he pulls you closer than normal, every inch of your body plastered to his—and he stays for a bit longer, finishing his lunch alone. He needs the time to think after what you just told him, time to digest that news without the blood ringing in his ears.

When he leaves, the sky is different. Silver sheafs of light paint the streets on the walk home, the noise of the traffic and clatter of conversation louder than ever before, the cacophony of a whole world happening around him. But it’s distant somehow, like the trickle of a brook off somewhere deep in a forest.

He’s on the threshold of a new world, one foot dangling over the edge. For now, he keeps his balance. It remains to be seen in the days to come.

A late, gold sun bathes the street with ribbons of light and warmth in the early hours of the evening. There’s a bistro across from the building where Simon works the evening shift in the underground parking lot, and they meet there once a week for food and a cig before Simon has to clock in.

Gaz savours this hour and a half more than most. There’s never a guarantee that Simon will show up; his friendship is a deliberate and intentional act, not easily given but easily taken away. It’s not something that Gaz takes for granted. There may come a day when the other man never shows up again and Gaz eats at a table across from an empty chair.

He has faith though. Their relationship isn’t so tenuous that every day he expects the worst. More than once, they’ve travelled together—one of Gaz’s fondest memories is sitting with Simon in a piazza in Florence and conversing over espressos and lemon tarallucci. For a time after leaving the military—close to around six weeks, give or take a few days—Simon even slept on Gaz’s couch until finding his own place.

Suffice it to say, they’re closer than most people would guess. Close enough that Simon doesn’t need to be told that something’s up when Gaz is more brusque with the waiter than usual.

“Are you ever gonna spit it out or what?” Simon finally asks, a touch annoyed with having to be the one to broach the subject of Gaz’s mood.

The bigger man sits across the table from him with a mullish look on his face. Cantankerous as always, likely in a mood from a combination of bad sleep and old aches flaring up. He’s always touchier between the seasons, the sudden shifts making his skin go painfully dry and old injuries act up.

Gaz’s smile is slightly sheepish when it creeps onto his face. “You could tell?”

“‘Course I can. You’ve got stupid look on your face,” Simon grunts, taking a messy bite of his sandwich. Pepperoncini slices and mayonnaise drip from the other end onto the plate.

The one downside to eating with Simon is having to mask his reaction to Simon’s complete lack of table manners. It's a skill that's come with plenty of practice.

“My—” he pauses, choosing his next word carefully. “A friend of mine asked me to help her through her heat.”

It’s not a topic they’ve ever broached before. His raunchier conversations are usually relegated to Johnny, Soap usually the initiator. Simon keeps his exploits private, cards close to his chest; it doesn’t seem impossible that he has a girl squirreled away somewhere, but Gaz would never know if he did.

“Ever fucked ‘er before?” Simon asks, blunt as usual.

Gaz laughs, shaking his head. “No. It’s not like that.”

“But you’re gonna fuck ‘er now?”

“Yes. Maybe. It’s complicated.”

“What’s complicated about fucking an omega through a heat?” He talks with his mouth full for a second before pausing to finish chewing and swallowing. Then he takes another bite, talking through that one too. “Knot ‘er a couple times, wear a mouthguard if you ‘aven’t got enough control, then go home. Simple.”

“It’s not that simple.”

“Why the fuck not?”

He mulls over the best way to say it before deciding to just mirror Simon’s usual blunt approach. “She’s my mate.”

Simon’s indifference sloughs off all in one go. “When the hell did you bag someone, Garrick?”

His laughter this time borders on derisive. “Haven’t yet, actually.”

Simon stills, staring at him from over his sandwich. More ingredients spill from the bottom and onto the plate but he pays them no mind. The silence stretches on for a while, long enough for Gaz to catch on to the fact that Simon has no intention of responding, either too baffled or appalled to muster up a response or simply waiting for Gaz to justify himself. Likely the latter.

“We were both too young when we met,” he explains. “Must’ve just presented when I first scented her and everyone told me to wait until she made the first move. Then time passed and…obviously she didn’t, and I didn’t want to pressure her.”

“How young?”

“Uh…” He doesn’t have to think, but he knows how Simon will respond and that makes him hesitate. “Eighteen?”

“Jesus fuck, Gaz,” Simon groans, letting go of his sandwich in disgust.

“Look—”

“You’ve waited ten bloody years to bite her?”

Simon looks at Gaz like what he’s saying is anathema, like even the thought of not mating his omega doesn’t compute. For him, it probably doesn’t. It’s not the way things usually go. Gaz knows he’s been more patient than most.

“I didn’t want to force her into a mate bond.” He shrugs. His own sandwich grows cold on the plate, barely a third of it gone compared to the scraps Simon still has left to eat.

Gaz knows the excuse doesn’t hold water, but for as close as he is with Simon, he doesn’t have it in him to get to the real heart of the matter, the truth that his heart is still bruised. That there’s still a part of him that doesn’t believe this won’t all get ripped away from him in the end. That his own doubts might be the reason it all falls apart.

“Fuck that,” he scoffs, pointing at Gaz with a mayo and buffalo sauce covered finger. “Have you told ‘er yes then yet? Never mind, ‘course you ‘aven’t, bloody fuckin’ moron. You’re gonna call ‘er after this and tell ‘er yes. Then, on the day of, you fuck her and bite her.”

Gaz rolls his eyes. “I can’t make that decision for her.”

“Someone’s gonna eventually. Has to happen. If it ain’t you, it’ll be some other bloke who gets to fuck and pup ‘er while you sit around with your dick in your hand. That how you want this to play out? Cucked by some bellend who won’t treat ‘er right?”

He nearly gnashes his teeth at Simon’s words, but he’s more civilized than that. He goes stone-faced instead, nostrils flaring.

“What was I supposed to do? Bite her the next time I saw her in the hallway?” Gaz rolls his eyes. “Yeah, that would’ve played out really well for me. Not like I wasn’t on thin fuckin’ ice the whole time with everyone.”

“Been a few years since then.” Simon picks his sandwich back up and takes such a big bite that he squeezes most of the ingredients out, tearing off a chunk of bread and meat.

“Yeah, I’m aware.” His tone is abrasive, but Simon shrugs it off, unbothered by a little vitriol. “Seeing as how I’m the one who’s been suffering through those years. Nobly, might I add.”

“There’s nothing fuckin’ noble about suffering,” he scoffs, upper lip curled. “You do the hard shit and then you get out. No sense in letting it drag on.”

He very nearly argues that point. Has to bite his tongue at the last second to keep from being crueler than warranted. As if suffering weren’t Simon’s main export; his main claim to fame.

He’s better than that though. And, if he were being honest with himself, there might be some truth there.

When Simon leaves for his shift, Gaz sits there until his coffee goes cold and the manager comes by to gently inform him that they’ll be closing shortly, offering to pack up the rest of his food for home. Gaz nods absently, still miles away in his head.

He drives home in that headspace, mulling Simon’s words over.

Justice is a core tenet of his. Fairness another. He’s lived his life up to this point guided by a strict set of principles, hardly breaking his rules of conduct unless forced to do so, unless given no other recourse.

But he’s given so much of himself to the world and asked for so little in return. Is it not fair that he receive this?

And besides, the beast in his chest rumbles, licking its chops, did you not ask for his help?

He clicks the button on his sun visor to let himself into his condo’s garage. In the elevator on the way up, he stares at his reflection in the door and chews the inside of his cheek.

Ten years now he’s sat on his hands and waited for a sign, rejecting the urge to simply take what his beast sees as his. The patience of a monk. Now there’s a light at the end of the tunnel. A white flag waved to signal the end. And rather than take that white flag for what it is and head into the sunlight, he insists on staying put and ignoring the way fate beckons him forward.

There’s no glory in torturing oneself, no prize to be won for self-abnegation.

And though his answer was always yes, Gaz allows himself a moment to consider what it would take for him to say no and send you off into the arms of another man.

He hasn’t got that kind of strength in him. He’s dangled out of helicopters with his head mere inches from the ground, jumped out of a chopper hit by an RPG, fallen through the floor of a building on fire, and been under heavy fire more times than he can count, but that would be the thing that killed him. Seeing you with someone else. Knowing that the opportunity to make you his was truly lost, beyond recovery.

And he’s tired of the way things are, his sacrificial nature bleeding into every facet of his life.

There has to be a time for change.

The next morning, as soon as it’s socially acceptable, he calls you, holding the phone so tight that he accidentally lowers the volume all the way down before fixing it.

“Thought about it enough. I’ll do it.”

Two weeks until the day.

He circles it in red on the calendar in his office and it colours his peripheral vision every time he turns his head.

And every night leading up to that day, Gaz puts his head down on his pillow to rest and he dreams.

Fragmented dream; images of soft thighs and sweat matted hair, lips and tongues pressed together, glutes and buttock squeezing with each thrust, panted breaths getting louder and louder, the air humid and electrified.

Always, waking at some undetermined hour, jaw clenched, the flameform of a woman left burning in his throat.

Anticipation whets his appetite. His stomach growls like the beast in his chest and it paces restlessly as the days stretch out endlessly, only stopping when the sun finally dips below the horizon, that time coming each day later and later like some sadistic torture levied on his soul.

In the weeks leading up to the event, Gaz comes with you to pick up supplies even though you swear that you’ve got it all under control. A lot goes into preparing for a heat. You have to stock your fridge, make your nest, lock away your valuables in case you break anything in the throes of your heat. At the end of your Costco run, the trunk of his car is stuffed to the brim with water bottles, groceries, blankets, wet wipes, chafing cream, sports drinks, and moisturizer.

At the door to your apartment, he moves to come inside with the bags and only stops when you protest, insisting that your nest isn’t ready yet. His lips twitch into a grin.

“You don’t want me to help carry everything in?” Gaz asks.

“No, it’s fine. I’d rather—well, just bring everything to the door and I can do the rest.”

He humours you this time because things will be different soon. When your heat is over and he’s no longer just a friend that you can keep at a distance but a red blooded man who tended to your weeping cunt and kissed every inch of your body, things will be different.

Until then though, he can give you this.

Sometimes he finds himself hypnotized by the tantalizing glimpse of skin that he gets when your neckline pulls and the mating gland sitting in the divot between your neck and shoulder is exposed.

Every moment in your presence is excruciating now that he knows that the waiting has come to an end. The two week interim period feels almost flimsy, false; the veil has dropped though, and he knows what’s on the other side of it now.

Though his rut is months off, the resonance of your scent must rouse his dormant instincts and throw his hormones into whack because he puts on a couple kilograms with ease, his body preparing for your heat. He overstays his allotted time at the gym by half an hour every session, so lost in his own head that he runs ten kilometres without even realizing it. Sweat runs off him in rivulets, the front of his shirt stained a darker shade of its original colour.

In the locker room, Gaz sets his towel down on the countertop and stares at his reflection in the mirror. The sudden uptick in mass that he’s put on in the last week is noticeable even to him, his thighs and arms bulkier, and his abs a little less defined with the added weight around his midsection. His skin is smooth and buttery from moisturizing religiously before bed every night, a nice sheen to it.

He rolls his shoulders back and flexes, preening for the imaginary viewer in his head that looks remarkably like you.

Johnny would taunt him mercilessly if he could see him now. As if Johnny weren’t twice as vain and pompous as Gaz on a good day.

He looks good though. Strong. Virile. Capable of seeing his mate through her first heat. If that self-assurance makes him seem cocksure or arrogant, so be it.

There are plenty of worse things to be.

“Did you put in for time off?” you ask, still sweaty from a brisk walk through the park to meet him.

“Yeah. Did it the same day I called you. Took the whole week off.”

Even for as early as it is, the park is busy. Mothers pushing prams jog by in front of the bench the two of you are sitting on, all dressed in the same leggings and puffy vests, headbands holding their hair back. The city has barely woken up from winter’s tight hold, the air brisk and the ponds gelid; small mounds of ice-encrusted snow spread throughout the park like an inverse archipelago.

In a few more weeks, there might be buds on the trees.

The pretext for spending so much time together in the lead up to your heat is so you can integrate his scent into your system. Gaz barely suppresses a laugh when you give him that excuse. As if you haven’t had a lifetime of acclimation. As if his scent hasn’t immixed with yours by now, and yours with his.

“I took an extra couple days off after. You know, just in case.” You shrug like it’s no big deal.

Gaz knows better though. Your ambivalence doesn’t read as wholly true. He can see the way your throat bobs when you swallow and your fingers tighten around your coffee cup. You haven’t made eye contact with him yet despite ten minutes having passed since you sat down beside him. Despite the mild weather, your coat is zipped up to the top, the metal nearly biting into your throat.

You’re doing a bang up job of acting like this isn’t some long preamble before jumping into bed together. He can’t fault you for the fact that it’s all he can think about. It runs through his mind twenty-four-seven, running an endless track that only seems to get easier the more laps he does.

It’s strange being with you now. Humbling. There’s almost something fascinating in knowing that though you now insist on keeping a polite distance, in a week’s time, he’ll have you flat on your back and whimpering. There’s no harm in allowing you this final bit of grace, so Gaz doesn’t protest, even though—

In a week, you’ll be his.

“Are you nervous?” Gaz asks.

You stiffen, either offended or shy. He settles on the latter when you hesitantly reply, “No. I think we got everything I needed. Um. Not much more to do now other than wait.”

“That’s good.”

“Plus…I trust you.”

His heart clenches at that, stunned into silence for once.

“You’ve always smelled good too,” you admit. “From what I can tell. I’ve always had a pretty poor sense of smell—really, it’s shit—but you smell better than most people. And I know you’d never hurt me.”

“I wouldn’t,” he stresses.

You smile and finally meet his eyes. If only he could tell you it with his eyes alone. Nothing could be further from his intentions. If he has his way, you’ll be better off by the end of your heat.

“It’s going to be rough though,” Gaz says apropos of nothing when you go to take a sip, nearly making you spit out your coffee.

“Huh?” you ask, looking over at him. You wipe your mouth off on your sleeve.

“First heats always are.” A gust of wind makes you shiver. “You'll probably be worse too, since you put it off for so long—” He chuckles under his breath when your eyes widen. “Sorry, love, I’m not having a go—I’m just being honest is all. Have to know what you’re getting into before it happens; that way you don’t freak out when it’s too late.”

“Too late?” you repeat.

He nods. “Yeah, love. Once your heat hits and my…my alpha takes over, I’m not going to be able to, uh…control myself. I’m going to want to knot you as many times as I can. It’ll be the only thing I’ll want to do.”

All you can do is stare at him, beyond words. Mouth open, teeth separated. One day he’ll have you on your knees like that, tongue out as well to run up the underside of his cock.

“But I’ll be good to you. I promise.”

He pats your knee before standing up, and you stare up at him with your mouth slightly agape, eyes round.

“You’re leaving?” you croak, dry throat making your voice crack.

Gaz smiles. “Gotta head out, love. Got some errands to run. Remember to do your stretches and call me if you need anything before Saturday, alright? And thanks for the coffee.”

He tosses his cup into the bin on his way out of the park, every instinct in him screaming to turn around and go back. It isn’t time though.

It’s coming, he reassures himself on the walk home. It won’t be long now.

How does it happen that an alpha can have his omega within biting distance for years and still keep their hands to themselves? He asks himself this question every day, but the answer remains out of reach.

It takes a strength of will not easily called up. A sense of honour and duty that few can touch, never mind possess. He has it in spades though, chock full of the stuff, and it’s moulded him into the kind of man capable of taking care of you.

The only thing left unanswered is whether that strength has served its purpose. Whether now is the time to let it go.

He runs his tongue over the point of his canines.

It’s too soon to tell.

He wakes more alert than any time in nearly thirty years of life, daylight engraved into the side of his face.

Close enough to touch. Gaz’s skin itches when he brushes his teeth and packs his weekend bag with his last few things. An hour—two tops—and you’ll be under him, soft thighs parted and slick hole stuffed full of his cock. Then days more ahead of him to do the same thing over and over and over.

He drives to your place with a sense of caution that borders on neurotic, coming to a full stop at every stop sign and yield, on the lookout for any reckless drivers lest today be the day that he gets into an accident. There’s no margin for error today.

The roads are clear this early in the morning though, so he breathes out when he pulls into the parking lot of your building. It’s overcast now, the sun receding behind the clouds. Everywhere around him, life keeps on happening like the world isn’t about to irrevocably change.

Gaz lets himself in using the spare key fob you gave him a week prior. Even the halls are quiet, the day not yet started enough for people to be on their way out. It’s a Saturday after all.

His legs seem to move without conscious thought, like he’s being pulled towards your flat, a magnet of opposite polarity. There’s a prickling awareness of another consciousness at the back of his mind. He’s been aware of it all his life, but it’s as real now as it’s ever gotten, the prospect of its omega in heat at the end of a hallway and beyond something as trivial as a door giving it more cognisance, more influence.

Even from the other side of the door, your scent sets his teeth on edge.

You answer the door bleary-eyed and sweaty, housecoat cinched tight around your waist and fuzzy slippers making it look like you just woke up. Visibly teetering on the edge of your heat. It’s so obvious and the smell of it so fragrant that Gaz’s instincts kick in and he pushes you back into the apartment, slamming the door shut behind him. His bag drops to the floor beside him.

“How are you feeling?” he asks, already palming your cheeks and tilting your head this way and that. He tugs down your lower eyelid gently, checking your sclera for anything abnormal.

“A bit hot,” you admit.

“What’s your temperature?”

“Just a little over ninety-nine degrees. What’s the matter with you? Did you go to med school without telling me or something?”

A slight temperature is entirely normal for a heat, the body working overtime to support the increased production of estrogen.

“It’s your first heat. I’m taking it seriously.”

You roll your eyes. “It’s not a baby. I don’t think you need to ask me every five minutes if I’m dilated enough.”

He ignores the baby joke because there’ll be danger if he doesn’t. The situation is already tense enough without thinking about you swollen with his pup. That’s a dream for a different day. Instead, he helps you take off the housecoat (which must have been adding five degrees to your internal temperature) and herds you into the kitchen for a cold glass of water.

It helps but barely.

Your first wave of your heat doesn’t crest until mid-morning, and by then Gaz is practically breathing smoke, the scope of his attention shrinking until you’re the only thing he can focus on. When you twitch, his head snaps in your direction, eyes vacant apart from a slight glimmer of awareness.

It’s getting harder to think through the fog. It’d be worse if his rut overlapped with your heat, but even just being in proximity to an omega in heat—his mate, no less—forces him into an equivalent headspace. Ears peeled for any noises in the hallway outside your apartment. Wary of another alpha intruding on you in this state.

“C’mon, baby, we’re gonna get one last snack in you before it hits,” Gaz murmurs soothingly, urging you up off the couch and into the kitchen. You stumble slightly on your way there and his heart skips a beat.

You squirm in your chair while trembling fingers bring slices of manchego and chorizo up to your lips. His gaze is intense and unwavering. Any desire to glance down at the spot between your legs evaporates when your eyelashes flutter shut and your cheeks bulge as you chew.

You’re so sweet like this. A tender thing for him to open up and ply with victuals.

“Just a couple more, okay?” he urges, pushing the plate closer to you and shushing you when you whine.

You turn your head away when he brings a slice of cheese to your lips. “M’full,” you complain.

“I know, baby, but it’s gonna be a long time before you’ll wanna eat again.”

“You smell weird,” you grumble instead, turning your head into his armpit and taking a deep inhale.

“What do you mean ‘weird’?” he asks, slightly perplexed.

“Dunno. Different.” You drag another deep breath in. “Did you put cologne on or something? Smells…uh…really good.”

His dick throbs. “No, baby. Didn’t even shower before I came over.”

“Mmm. Good.”

His arm drops to the table, the force of it making the plate rattle. Fuck but how that nearly gets him. He’s not infallible. Eventually something is going to tip him over the edge from sanity into delirium.

If this is any indication of the days to come, there’s a chance neither of you will come out entirely unscathed.

It happens gradually, your sentences slowly degenerating and fragmenting, and your eyes glazing over. Even the smell of your skin gets richer.

The effect that your heat is having on him is staggering. No one told him it’d be like this. No one told him it’d be like unzipping himself and letting you inside. Like sitting still as a fire blazes around him, the flames licking closer and closer to his skin.

Then your fever spikes and all bets are off.

“Up,” Gaz growls. He doesn’t wait for you to listen, lifting you up from the chair from under your arm and hunching slightly to scoop you up into his arms.

You moan, clinging to him. “It’s, uh—Kyle, I…I’m really hot.”

His legs are heavy beneath him, lead weights that he has to drag across the apartment, each step tougher than the last.

Your nest is a soft, sumptuous garden of blankets and pillows and assorted clothes dragged out of the closet and spread across the floor and bed. You must have pulled the mattress off the bed frame at some point in the last two weeks because it’s pressed into the corner of the room, draped in every single sheet and blanket you own. The bed frame sits quite awkwardly on the other side of the room, pushed out of the way so as to not get in the way, and there are foam panels plastered all over to soundproof the walls.

Clever girl, thinking of that.

Everything’s been rearranged. He’d caught that you’d dragged a bookshelf into the living room when he came into your apartment, but even your dresser and nightstand are tucked away in the corner of your room. It’s like you took inventory of everything you own and moved everything apart from the barest essentials needed for your heat.

He comes down onto one knee on the edge of the mattress before setting you down. You come up onto your elbows almost immediately. There’s a look in your eyes that he’s never seen before except in his dreams. Besotted, devotional. In his wildest dreams, he couldn’t have imagined that you’d ever look at him like this.

You sit up when he comes down onto the mattress, constantly orbiting and orienting towards him.

“Gonna take this a little at a time, okay, love?” Gaz rumbles.

“Yeah, yeah,” you rasp, climbing into his lap when he softly urges you up. An arm braced behind him keeps him from collapsing when you sag into him.

Pseudo-rut makes him a bit dumb, a bit clumsy. He palms the back of your neck a bit too roughly, murmuring an apology against your lips when you whimper before drawing you into a deep, toe-curling kiss.

His stomach seizes up when he realizes that he’s kissing you for the first time. Ten years of anguish and heartache and delirious need finally culminating in your lips parting against his, the soft melt of your tongue against his when you let his tongue slide into your mouth, his blunt fingers tilting your head higher up.

Gorgeous, perfect mouth. Kissing it feels like coming home after years away.

God, he’s wanted it for so long. And God, your mouth tastes good, and when your tongue touches his, his head goes cloudy and his cheeks go hot.

Clothes fall to the wayside, slowly added to the nest one by one—his pants are shoved into the crease between the mattress and the wall, your shirt tucked under a pillow. He has to reach down to readjust himself through his boxers and your eyes follow the path his hand takes, going half-lidded and hot.

He smirks, only a little bashful. “See something you like?”

“Uh-huh,” you mumble, barely taking in his words.

His chest puffs involuntarily, the beast in him preening.

Touching your bare skin for the first time, Gaz realizes that he’s never felt so moored and ready. This is where he’s meant to be. Every agonizing moment of the last ten years has prepared him for this moment; not even the bite of his pseudo-rut could make him flounder.

He traces a nipple with his thumb, following the path with his tongue when he lifts his thumb away, round and round the areola until you’re practically sobbing his name. Not enough. It’s still not enough.

“Baby, I need to get you ready,” he murmurs when you pull at the waistband of his boxers.

“M’ready now,” you half-snarl, tugging more forcefully, trying to rip his underwear right off.

Gaz laughs. “No, you’re not.”

You don’t have a choice but to indulge him though. It’s his way or the highway. He’d told you that back at the beginning, after ringing you to tell you that he’d help you through your heat—it had to be under his terms or not at all.

Your knickers get shoved under the pillow as well. Something for him to toy with later, when you’re tuckered out and not raring to go just yet. It’ll tide him over when you’re too sensitive for him to play with your pussy.

He barely grazes a knuckle over your clit and you come, hiccupping through your first orgasm. You’re quick to come, like everything up to this point has just been foreplay.

“Oh lovie,” he coos, pressing his lips to your temple. “It’s alright—I’ve got you.”

You jolt when he thumbs your clit again. Too sensitive. He pulls it away just long enough for you to catch your breath and for the twitches to subside, but when you start to pant again, your smelling ripening in that telltale way, he strums his thumb across it again, tucking a finger into your hole and groaning when he finds it scorching hot.

He dreamt of fingering you all the time back in high school. Thought of sitting beside you in the auditorium during assemblies and sliding his hand up your skirt until you spread your thighs and let him push your panties out of the way; cornering you in the bathroom between classes and pressing his fingers into you from behind, muffling your cries with his mouth; jiggling your pretty clit in the backseat of the bus, draping his jacket across your lap so no one else would see your wet pussy.

The reality is so much better than he ever could’ve imagined.

Three fingers and still you beg for more. You’re clamped so tight around his fingers that he can barely move them, not without exerting a bit more force than he’d like. You must like it though because you squeeze around his neck almost intolerably tight when he forces his fingers in.

“Good girl,” he grunts, shoving them back in. “You can take it.”

“A-alpha?” you stutter.

Gaz pulls you close, tucking your face into his neck. “Come here, I’ve got you. Just hold onto me, love, okay? Can you do that?”

“Y-yeah,” you breathe.

His whole body jerks when you bite his neck. Your teeth don’t break the skin, but still he shudders, squeezing his eyes shut. Just barely keeps from telling you to bite down harder.

You have to take another break after you come, limp and satiated. Gaz uses that time to fluff the nest a bit, getting it nice and comfortable. He even leaves to fetch you a glass of water, bringing you into his chest for a nice cuddle while you recharge.

When you start staring too much again, he knows it’s almost time.

Nervousness has no hold on him though. You came to him because you trusted him to take care of you through your first heat.

That assurance settles him. Grounds him. There’s no one more equipped to do what he’s about to do because he’s waited his whole life for this. Whether consciously or not, his whole life has been in preparation for this moment, every choice, every heartache, every sleepless night. It’s all been in anticipation of this.

It nearly undoes him though, despite everything. Despite the weeks spent mentally preparing, despite the strength in his body and the muscle he’s tacked on, despite his own fervor even.

Because when he climbs on top of you and your thighs part, your hole is wet and waiting, ready for him to use it and leave a little mess behind. Just looking at it makes his balls throb. It almost doesn’t seem right that he’s about to spoil something as pretty as your pussy with his dick. Leave it stretched out and full of come. A little puffy from being knotted so many times. He should’ve gotten you a plug for after, something to keep his come inside of you.

If his cock wasn’t so heavy, Gaz would be tempted to lean down and kiss it a bit too. It feels wrong to push inside without at least a little send-off kiss, something soft to set your mind at ease before he fucks you six ways from Sunday.

He doesn’t have the luxury of taking his time though; your temperature is rising again, skin hot to the touch.

Your patience is thinning too. “Kyle, I can’t wait—I can’t. I need you—”

“I know, baby, I know.”

He strips off the last of his clothes quickly, boxers getting tossed behind him somewhere, before crawling over you again. The head of his cock looks brutish against your slick opening when he lines it up, but it stretches so prettily when he starts to sink in, gravity doing the work for him.

Your legs girdle his waist, pillowy thighs catching him when he sinks to the hilt, breasts moulding to his chest. You’re scorching hot inside, a sweltering, blistering wetness that squeezes his cock like a vice.

“Baby…”

He sounds broken, eviscerated. Gutted like a gralloched animal.

Gaz is barely able to move, barely able to pull his hips back and hump forward, the mattress shifting under him. He could probably knot you just like that. It wouldn’t take much to push him over the edge.

“Ohohohohoh—” you squeak when he grunts low and deep, bearing down on top of you.

Two strokes into the softest, wettest cunt of his life and his resolve fractures into a thousand parts. Shards too splintered to ever piece back together again.

At the back of his mind, he thought he might be strong enough to resist temptation. Thought he wouldn’t need anything as barbaric as a mouthguard or a collar around your throat to keep him from giving in to his baser urges.

Strength isn’t what kept his urges fenced in though. Fear is what’s haunted him for the last ten years—the fear that he wouldn’t be enough for you, that he wasn’t allowed to have you for some reason, doubt crawling into his ear like an insect and whispering to him that he had so much more to do in order to prove himself worthy of you, that you needed to be the one to invite him in.

But you have, haven’t you?

Two strokes into the love of his life’s pussy and Gaz relinquishes himself to instinct, dropping his head, teeth sinking into the mating gland sitting pretty at the crook of your neck. It gives almost too easily under his teeth. Soft and tender skin, and then the secretions fill his mouth, blood and ambrosia all at once. Sweet dandelion wine and honeyed nectar.

You tense up around him instantly, a garbled, watery gasp jumping from your lips, and sharp fingernails bite into his shoulders.

“Oh fuck,” Gaz gasps into the side of your neck when he relaxes his bite, head spinning as it all snaps into place, every strand finally tightening into place, draped in fate like samite, ermine, and brocade. “Oh God, baby, I’m so sorry. Oh God, baby, fuuuuuuck…”

“Alpha?” you wheeze.

“Yeah, baby, I’m here,” he sighs, laving his tongue over the hurt. Your pulse thrums under his tongue, nervous and fast. “You just felt—hng, fuck—felt so good. Couldn’t help m’self.”

“A-alpha, you—you bit me—”

“Sorry, love, I didn’t mean to. Just couldn’t help it.”

“It hurts,” you whimper. You sound like you’re on the verge of tears.

“I know, baby, I know—I’m sorry. M’gonna make it all better, okay?”

“You’re gonna make it better?” you ask, almost pathetically, the tears beading in the corners of your eyes.

His goddamn heart nearly breaks at the sight of your tears. “Of course I will, baby. Not gonna let anything bad happen to you—not my omega. My mate.”

There’s blood on his lip but not an ounce of regret in his being. Gaz sits up on his haunches, hands digging into your waist when he repositions you. He rolls you over onto your side and lifts a leg over his shoulder, swollen lips splitting open with the stretch, and fuck if you aren’t dripping wet. His head lolls forward as he stares, tempted to put you right back down and drink straight from the source, hook both legs over his shoulders and just go to town.

But he has a job to do and his knot is already fattening up at the base of his cock, desperate to be wedged in a soft, warm hole.

One hand palms your belly while the other holds your leg in place as he shuffles forward, turgid cock still slick with your juices. He pulls his hand away from your stomach briefly to readjust his cock, lining it up with your hole against before sinking in, letting the weight of his body carry him forward.

Your eyes roll back in your head, the whites so white that his teeth ache. Not a hint of iris or pupil.

He bottoms out this time on the first stroke, the curly hairs at the base of his cock damp with your slick. Warm, wet walls squeeze around his cock, sucking him in deeper, and Gaz curses softly under his breath.

“With me, love?” Gaz asks.

When you don’t respond right away, he gives your cheek a light tap. “M’okay…”

The first few thrusts are mindful, slow enough to gauge your reaction and ensure you aren’t overwhelmed. His instincts dig like a spike into the back of his head, but Gaz grits his teeth, forcing back the impulse to rut between your thighs like a mindless beast. There’ll be a time for that in the coming days.

Then he bucks forward a bit rougher, his shoulders tightening, tendons in his neck straining when his jaw clenches.

Your breath comes short and sharp. “Oh god, oh my god…”

“There we go,” Gaz purrs. “That better, baby?”

“H-huh…?” Disoriented, your eyes roll around in their sockets until they land on him. Recognition comes slow, if at all. Poor thing, so horny that you can’t even think straight.

“That feel good? That feel better, baby? I’ll take care of everything in the morning—get all the paperwork sorted, tell your parents and friends, everything. Not gonna let you stress about anything. Just have to lie there and take it nice and deep.”

The thought alone nearly makes him come. He’ll do everything by the book in the morning. It appeals to him on a base level, the idea of taking care of everything for you, so entrenched in your life that you don’t even have to think with him around.

No more holding back, his beast rumbles in his chest.

We’ve always been worthy of this.

The thing under his skin has gone hungry for far too many years. It has known where to go to satisfy itself, but waited instead for the meal to come to it.

And it has. You have. Wobbly-lipped and desperate for him to bite and hold.

His pace is frantic now, mind turned off and glutes flexing with every thrust, thighs burning with the effort to keep the rhythm. All that matters is burying himself in you as deep as physically possible.

Sweat drips into his eyes. Blinking doesn’t help. The air compresses around him, squeezing him to the point of bursting.

Your pretty tits bounce with every thrust and he has to touch them. Grab them. Mould his hand over them until his palm always remembers what your nipple feels like. He loves the sounds you make when he pinches them and slides them between his fingers.

“Wanted to touch these for years,” Gaz growls. He cups his hand under your breast, plumping it up all nicely. “Every summer you’d wear these, uh, these low cut tops…and I’d be so fucking hard, thinking about how much I wanted to pull your shirt down and suck on them.”

“You never—oh, oh, oh—” you start, interrupted when you come again, walls contracting around his length. Gaz has to grit his teeth to keep from coming as well, not ready to come just yet.

This one leaves you near breathless, too spent to finish your sentence. Your channel milks his cock.

He wants to hear it though. “What’s that, baby?”

“You…you never…said anything.”

“Wasn’t sure you wanted me back.” His vulnerability is ripped from him without warning, so used to giving you everything that he doesn’t even stop to think about what it’ll do to him.

You scrunch up your face, pouting up at him and it’s bad for his heart, it’s so bad for his heart how smitten he is with you. “‘Course I did. I just thought—I thought you didn’t—I’m, ah…”

So close to coming again, you lose track of your words, but Gaz understands, and the implication leaves him short of breath.

So much lost time. So much to make up for.

He leans down, bracing himself over you again. Your skin tastes salty when he runs his tongue over the shell of your ear. “You gonna take my knot, baby?”

“Yesyesyesyes—”

“Gonna let me come inside too?”

“Yesssss—” you hiss through your teeth, tears spilling over your waterlines.

“‘Course you are, perfect girl. Gonna let me come inside and knot you because you’re mine. You’re my girl—my omega—my mate—”

It’s right there, barely a klick away. His balls are drawn up tight, thighs tensed and burning, every inch of him poised on the edge, desperate to come.

When you reach down to grab a handful of his arse, trying to pull him in closer, Gaz chokes on his breath, tipped right over the edge. His groin pulses when he comes, that first spurt so good that his vision goes spotty.

It’s so good—

God.

It’s hard to think. Hard to breathe.

The breath is punched out of him, the sudden swell of his knot winding him. It locks his hips in place, the swollen flesh snug in the wet embrace of your cunt. Under him, you gasp for breath, wide eyes staring up at him.

“It’s alright, it’s alright,” Gaz coos, cupping your cheek in his hand. “I’ve got you, love.”

His hips grind forward in absence of any movement. Your walls flutter around his knot, too stretched out to squeeze any tighter. The energy is sucked from his body with his come, each pulse making him shudder and gasp. You must be full to the brim with how much he comes.

When there’s nothing left in him to give, Gaz slumps forward, only his elbows catching his weight, hips pinning yours down to the bed until he rolls over tentatively, making sure to keep you pressed tight to his chest.

There’s nothing he could say that would be better than just this—draped over you, forehead to forehead, soothing his omega. Rubbing the bridge of his nose against yours. Massaging your thigh when you shift, a little cramp in your hip.

It comes like second nature to him. It’s always been his favourite part after all—the afterglow. Pillow talk and cuddling; sweet, slow kisses with swollen lips. The fact that it’s with you only makes him enjoy it more.

When his knot softens enough to dislodge, he pulls out of you and strokes your cheek when you whine in discomfort. The sight of your poor, battered cunt makes him wince.

He wets a hand towel in the bathroom and comes back to find you in the same place as when he left you, dazed eyes watching him curiously. Kneeling at the edge of the bed, he parts your legs to either side and crawls in closer, starting with the mess along your inner thighs and the fold of your butt.

“Stay still,” he growls when you squirm. You go still at the subtle command in his voice, alert even under the fog of heat.

Your legs still twitch when he swipes the cloth between your legs, wiping off his leaking spend and the slick still wet on your inner thighs, but you hold yourself as still as possible, nearly biting your lip off in the process.

“T-thank you, alpha,” you whisper, chewing on your fingertip.

He feels his cock twitch at that, still wet with your juices. Doesn’t take much for you to work him up.

It isn’t long before your heat crests again and you’re crawling over Gaz, hands pinning his shoulders down to the mattress. He laughs. The sound dies in his throat when you line his shaft up with your hole and sink down in one smooth motion, shutting him up oh so effectively.

Cheeky little thing.

A few days go missing, only recalled in chunks when he’s a bit more clear-headed. Feeding you fresh fruit and slices of cheese from his fingers as you whined on his knot. Licking his own spend out of you while holding your trembling thighs open, digging his fingers into your plush inner thighs. Sucking your beaded nipples into his mouth while gliding his fingers over your clit, your cunt a bit too sore to take his knot again; not so soon anyway. Carrying you into the bathroom for a quick soak before emptying the tub and bringing you back to the bed.

All the while, feeling your presence like a phantom limb. Like an extension of himself. Every inch of your pleasure rippling across his skin, amplifying his own.

If Gaz had known it would be like this—

he’d have moved heaven and hell to have it.

It’s his now though. You’re his. Mated and bound to him. So intrinsically and indelibly tied to him that no earthly force could pull you apart.

It’s why now he can feel your mounting anxiety like a prickle at the back of his head. It’s what wakes him up so suddenly, creamy golden light spilling across the sheets and furniture when he opens his eyes to the door to your bedroom ajar.

You’re in the bathroom when Gaz walks in, touching the mostly healed mating mark on your neck. It’s barely a puckered scar, so subtle that he might have missed it.

“Did you mean to do it?” you ask. It’s not the question he expected, but then again, Gaz isn’t sure what he expected from you.

He nods though. No sense in lying to you. “Yeah.”

It’s clear now that this was always going to be the natural end, that any tryst between the two of you would always end here, with his mark on your neck.

He wraps his arms around you and pulls you into him, moulding you to his chest. In the mirror, you look exceptionally fragile, still shaky and brittle from your heat, and it makes his heart ache.

“I didn’t think I would, but I wanted to. I never would’ve if I had any doubt.”

One day he’ll tell you everything. He’ll tell you why he waited so long, what held him back all these years when he knew beyond a shadow of a doubt that nothing else would come close to this.

“You didn’t used to smell like this,” you murmur, cold nose pressed into his collar bone. You seal your words with a deep inhale, drawing all of your breath into your lungs and holding it there for a moment before expelling it.

“What do you mean?” Gaz asks. His lips twitch when you press your nose harder against his skin.

“It’s different. It changed.”

“I swear it hasn’t,” he laughs. “I’ve always smelled like this.”

He can feel the way you wrinkle your nose against his skin. “Liar. You used to smell… I don’t know. Maybe like this, but subtler. Fainter.” You exhale again, more contemplative this time. “It must’ve been my heat. Everything smells so much stronger now. It’s like breathing after being sick or something. Like my nose is clear or something.”

Gaz stares at your reflection from over your head while it washes over him. Of course his life would be ruled by a comedy of errors. What might’ve happened had you not gotten on suppressants all those years ago? Maybe nothing. Maybe the past is what it’s always been and there’s no sense in looking back and asking what if things had been better. Maybe regrets are like false idols in that way—there’s nothing holy in worshipping at the altar of them.

He makes a mental note to keep this from Johnny. Gaz will never hear the end of it if he finds out.

“What are we gonna do now?” you whisper.

He lowers his head, pressing his lips to your crown for a moment before resting his chin on top of your head. “Don’t worry, love. I’ll take care of everything.”

#kyle gaz garrick #fic rec #oh i need him

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