#stream full course meal

[yanderenightmare]

TW: nsfw, noncon/dubcon, kidnapped reader, bondage, somnophilia, oral, light ass-play

fem reader

It’s Valentine’s Day, and I’m thinking about the incel who’s never celebrated with anyone…

Only… now that he has you locked up in his house all to himself, He’s going to have you treat him to all those Valentine's cliches he’s missed out on – all inside the comforts of your new home, of course.

It’s early morning, and he’s got his cock inside you before you’ve even woken up. His thrusts are sleepy, and his voice is drowsy as he says he looks forward to breakfast – that he hasn’t had anyone cook him breakfast in bed since his mom on his tenth birthday. He likes his eggs sunny-side up, his bacon crispy, his toast golden, and his coffee just a little sweet for the occasion, plus a small glass of juice on the side.

After cumming inside you, he tells you not to take too long – that he wants you back in bed, hand-feeding him before the bed gets cold.

When you get back from the kitchen, he’s picked out a romance to watch – patting your place on the bed with a big grin on his face.

The trouble in your chest is a little eased to see him happy. Though it’s sick doing these types of things with your kidnapper – you much prefer acting like his girlfriend than getting your tits, clit, and ass flogged with a leather belt. 

So you curl up beside him like he gestured and hand-fed him like he’d said and laughed and awed at the movie playing out before you as if you were really enjoying yourself. And when he whispers that he’s made you breakfast as well while lifting the tray off his lap to reveal his hard-on, you hold back the wince and crawl under the covers – not a single slight leaving your lips as you wrap them around him and start sucking him off.

He hadn’t bothered wiping it with a tissue after this morning’s first, and so flakes of dried cum and soured bitterness coat your mouth in overwhelming filth, making tears well up and go dripping pitifully down your cheeks – holding back from gagging as you keep bobbing your head all pliantly while using your tongue to lave over his veins.

He sighs in bliss above the duvet, weaving both hands into your hair as he nudges his tip down further into your plush throat, so warm and wet and tight around him, milking him for the meal in his balls. 

He shoots in right down to your belly when your lips kiss his base, petting your cheek while waiting for you to swallow around him. It takes everything in you not to choke on it and puke – but you’ve done it enough times now to resurface only breathless as you lay yourself to rest against his chest.

He says he’s got you a gift after having let you rest up for a little while – and drags a gift bag from under the bed. You receive it, forcing a shy smile – knowing not to expect a plushie and a heart-shaped box of chocolates but hoping for it nonetheless.

“I thought, since we can’t go outside, we’ll just have to make the most out of it in here...”

The contents of the bag make you swallow thickly – wide-eyed and goose-fleshed with trepidation. 

It’s all red – but that must have been the only thing Valentine’s about it…

Red silk blindfold, red ball gag, red rope, red fluffy cuffs, and a butt plug decorated with a heart-shaped ruby.

“And as for your gift to me,” He breaks your stillness, taking your face in both hands as he lifts it to level his – giving your pout a kiss that breaks with a wet smack. “All your holes all day long is all I want.”

You’re a picture. Bite marks on your breasts, a ring of teeth around your sore nipples – also on the inside of your thighs – along with full handprints welting the soft flesh. On your back with your hands beneath you, kept there in their cuffs – legs raised and spread, tied up in the red rope – mouth sucking on your ball, all muffled whining as you wiggle – blindfold soaked a deep burgundy from the tears streaming down your face. 

Your poor ass spread on the plug he’s eased inside, all cutely swallowed around the heart-shaped ruby glistening in the slick seeping from your pussy as he fucks you hard and fast and unrelentingly with a hand held tightly around your throat – moaning Happy Valentin’s Day!

BNHA – Shigaraki, Denki, Deku

JJK – Mahito

HQ – Tendou

CSM – Denji, Yoshida

#yandere x reader #yandere #yandere x you #yandere imagines #yandere smut #yancore #jujutsu kaisen smut #jujustu kaisen #jujutsu kaisen #yandere jujutsu kaisen #yandere jjk #jjk smut #bnha smut #yandere bnha #mha smut #my hero smut #yandere demon slayer #yandere aot #yandere bllk #yandere blue lock #yandere attack on titan #yandere kimetsu no yaiba #yandere my hero academia #yandere boku no hero academia

[yeyinde]

SEA FEVER | Sailor!John Price x Reader

When he invited you to see his ship, half of it was—admittedly—a euphemism. A thinly veiled come-on. A facsimile of romance. Who wouldn't, after all, want to drift out to the open ocean, making love—or some sad version of it—under the stars on a clear night? And he thinks that might be fine. Maybe it's all you want from him, anyway—just a night. A moment. A memory to keep.  But John's always been greedy. The kind that wants, and wants. Once would never be enough, and he knows that if he sunk his teeth into you, a bite would never satiate his rapacious appetite, never quench the hunger.  And since he can't make a meal out of a morsel, he'd rather starve. 

tags: fluff, angst, unapologetic pining, obsession at first sight (but then love follows), blink and you'll miss it awful coping mechanisms (self-isolation, self-exile) and brief allusions to trauma (unresolved because this is about fucking the physical manifestation of the ocean, lads; it ain't about healing), egregious sea themes, a Newfie and his Newfie-isms, whirlwind romance; questionable sailing choices warnings: 18+ | allusions to smut but everything is brief and vague and more about the Feelings™ than the act, explicit male solo though but also very brief and about the Pining™. word count: 25k notes: unconventional leading man (haggard sea boy) romances local travesty (ambiguous, wishy-washy bartender) in a love affair no one asked for. That's what this is. Enjoy. 

*Suggestive themes are signified by a sailor's knot above the paragraph for those who want to read this, but don't care much for smut. SFW will begin with an anchor and wave divider above it. NSFW & SFW shown below:

—PRICE

The storm off the coast of Newfoundland is stronger than he'd anticipated. 

What starts as a bleak looking cloud on the horizon quickly churns the waters into a rough, sickly looking grey that rocks against his vessel without any respite. The cabin is in utter disarray within seconds of being battered by waves that seem to grow in size with each harrowing shade of charcoal blue the sky turns. 

A few warnings from local trawlers in the area, ones quickly turning into the nearby harbour, and a firm reprimand by the Canadian Coast Guard when he radioed back and asked if anchoring was a feasible option (oh, sure, b'y, the man said, his thick Maritime twang hiding none of his derisive scorn. If ye wan'na meet y'r mak'r, it's a safe place to capsize, luh. We'll risk our arses in the morn' when y'need savin', we do. If there's anythin' left of ya that needs savin', anyhoo), he's quick to follow their example. 

But, unfortunately, not quick enough. 

The sudden squall tears through his hull with a vengeance, ripping the sails from their perch with a gust of wind that seems determined to play chicken with the efficiency of his ballast tanks (a pyrrhic victory for Captain and her unquenchable bloodlust for trying herself on just how far she can list before rocketing back upright). He knows with full certainty, and innate experience traversing through the Gulf Stream when he was younger and much more foolish, that the damage is nearly catastrophic. Nearly, of course, because while it clipped his sails, he has engines to bring him back, limping, to the coast the Guard directs him to. 

"See there, y'er ten clicks away, b'y. Sending coordinates in a minute, now."

He's reminded of the warnings given by gnarled, old sailors who told him about the dangers of solo-sailing as he tries to be everything all at once to get his ship to the harbour they directed him to. Asking him, how can you be the captain, the navigator, and the watch all at the same time? When do you sleep? The answer, of course, is barely, but Price likes the freedom of being on his own. The isolation at sea isn't for everyone, but he takes to it with an ease that seems to defy all the gods of the ocean until he stands triumphant in his own domain, on his own ship. 

Until now, that is. 

Until he's battling with a handicap in the ocean. 

But somehow—luck, maybe—he limps his way to the port where he finds fishermen helping latch the vessels to the marina in the harbour. 

Shaded in a dreary grey, the port looks grimy and desolate from his cabin's porthole. A few wooden shacks on the beach are painted in faded primary colours and bear the quintessential marks of a seaside town—seashells, sailors knots (Carrick bend and Ashley stoppers), seahorses, and anchors. Without the dour grey of the downpour, he thinks it might be charming in a way. Quaint. There's a market to the west of him where stacks of lobster cages sit. Men in wellies and rubber dungarees shout orders amid the chaos of the storm, and he takes a moment to gather his things in a rucksack before he joins them on the deck. 

This late at night, there isn't much anyone can do but hunker down and hope for the best. The men point him in the direction of the closest inn—the only one, another jokes—and he tries not to think about how badly damaged Captain will be in the morning. His own stupidity, of course; he knew there was a storm coming but he underestimated how vicious it would be. 

With a nod of thanks, he sets off. 

Brushing against the Eastern coast of Canada was meant to just be a simple drive-by back to Liverpool. Barely a stop, really. Just a scenic route so he could spend his thirty-ninth birthday over the sunken wreck of the Titanic before continuing on the nearly week-long journey across the Atlantic. 

But instead, he celebrates it with a bottle of rum, and a ship on the verge of sinking—stuck, now, in Nova Scotia until he can find a mechanic to patch her up before he sets sail again. 

He sends a quick text to Soap about the delay—stuck in Canada, fuckin' hurricanes—and tries not to dwell on the sudden ease in his guts at the prospect of not going home anytime soon. 

(There are worse places he could be for his birthday, he thinks. Like Liverpool.)

The port he anchored his vessel to is a bottleneck between the last stretch of land for some hundreds of kilometres and the vast, ungiving ocean.

It isn't much to look at—just an empty boardwalk shaped like a horseshoe with most of the shops closed down for the season (or permanently, if the ramshackle state of them is anything to by), save for a grocer, an inn that takes up most of the middle section of the pier, a fisherman's village on the inlet with locals buying the wares from the lush waters filled to the brim with lobster and Atlantic salmon, a seafood restaurant, a cafe that moonlights as a pizza parlour in the evenings, and a pub—but it's enough for now. It's quaint, he thinks, even in its seasonal destitution. 

The buildings are all painted in faded primary colours that are washed out in the heavy rain that falls from some coastal hurricane just touching down in Labrador. 

It's one of those small seaside harbours that have seen better days. One with an economy wholly dependent on passing sailors just to survive, and he feels the despondency in the air like a thick, humid fog clinging to the skin of his neck. Fading signs. Peeling paint. There's damage to some of the buildings from a hurricane that must have swept through some several seasons ago, but the funds to repair are almost nonexistent, and so it sits. Festers. A broken reminder of how deadly the sea can be, even on land. 

The herringbone pier creaks under his weight as he walks the sandy trek from the marina beside the village to the inn (no vacancy, it reads, with middle letters flickering ominously), and he grapples with the unease that fills him at being on solid land for the first time in months. A strange, unshaky gait, as if the cartilage in his aching knees turned to liquid while he was at sea. 

It doesn't bother him too much—by the time he recalibrates to the weight of land pressing down on his soles, it'll be time to leave. 

Maybe. 

("It'll pass," the innkeeper sniffs when he asks about how long these things usually last. "Give 'er a week or so, and she'll blow right by. Might cause some floodin' in Halifax, but we're on the opposite end of 'er. Should be fine.")

It smells like rotten fish, blooming algae, and old frying oil—a typical thoroughfare for most of the harbours he's saddled up to in the years he's been traversing the open ocean. He breathes it in and finds himself already missing the potent loam that brims from the seawater at night. Salt, humus, brine, eelgrass; the ocean smells distinct in its rot. This, then, is a pale ersatz. 

He's been here for a short, few hours already, and still can't seem to adjust to life on land. To the smells, the sounds, the people—not that there's too many of them around here. Price would be surprised if this town's population was higher than three hundred. 

But it's stifling all the same. 

And cold. 

Being at the very tip of the Atlantic ocean, the weather is a near constant gloom. Grey, lacklustre skies smeared with thick, black clouds looming in the horizon like an omen. Salt-saturated air. It's a strange amalgamation between a chilling breeze from the sea and a dense wall of humidity even this late in September. It's uncomfortably thick under the veiled sun—a pale yellow hidden behind streaks of grey cloud cover. 

The best description for this little place is dreary. 

One he thinks might still be true even without the hurricane looming in the distance; a constant, inescapable chokehold within reach. 

In the interior of the small fishing village, people chatter aimlessly about everything except the hurricane (but he supposes that with the frequency of them happening, there isn't much else to say about them except, ah, fuck, again?). He finds a modicum of comfort in their strange twang—a mangled bastardisation of Irish, Scottish, and something unique to the barren, eastern coast of Canada. It almost feels like home, strangely. Like someone dropped him in the Canadian version of Cork, Ireland. 

The people he meets in passing as he drifts aimlessly between the shops, picking up something for dinner and a set of clean clothes, are friendly in an almost aggressive way. 

Then, of course, there's you. 

You weren't expected. A catastrophe in the making, one that he can see coming from a mile away. It's something he has a keen intuition for—being able to sense the kind of trouble that will make leaving harder than it has to be—and he knows better than to entertain this little fantasy, but there's something about you that makes him keep coming back. 

Maybe it's the booze you ply him with; top of the shelf despite adding it to his tab under a bottom barrel price tag. Or the fact that no one has been able to replicate the perfect whisky sour he had down in Barbados, but—goddamn—you come very close. 

Or maybe it's just exactly what it is:

Loneliness. Distraction. 

He's a man always on the move. One who hasn't kissed land in months. And you're—

Well. 

You're the prettiest thing he'd seen since a rainbow cast a glimmering ring on the horizon eighteen kilometres off the coast of the Philippines. 

He isn't old. Not in the way that matters, but the sea has a way of chipping people apart; ageing them in ways that land just can't replicate. He's not yet forty, but sometimes he wakes up after barely missing a brutal storm in the middle of the ocean, and he feels like he's almost sixty. Battered body, bruised and broken; sunscorched. Salt-weathered. 

You, though, make him feel his actual age. As if he's some young, dumb lad who ought to know better but doesn't care. Flippant in the way only the people in Liverpool can be. Young of heart. Dumb of mind. 

And fuck—

Thinking about that place, those goddamn idiots in the pub who didn't know what quiet meant, makes him realise just how much he misses it. Not home. Never home. Home is the sea. The ocean. Home is this little place between land. A wild, untamed beast. The place where, when he was eighteen and smitten, he threw his heart down to the bottom of that unending chasm of midnight blue. 

But you make him homesick, and he thinks he ought to resent you a little bit for it.

(He doesn't, of course; doesn't think he could ever hate you for making him feel even though he should because you make leaving harder than it's ever been, and he doesn't know what to do about that.)

It starts over a glass of whisky. 

He's no stranger to being the foreigner, the tourist. Price is a tall man with broad shoulders and a permanent smear of sunburn across the bridge of his nose, no matter the season. With his unkempt beard of wry umber curls, his deep timbre that sounds more like the battered engine of a classic, American muscle car, a sea-weathered gaze, and his penchant for a stiff drink and an unfiltered cigar, he has a tendency to stand out. 

(Or so he's been told.)

So, when you round the corner of the bar, brow ticking up in intrigue as he wanders in, sun-beaten and salt-slicked, he isn't surprised to hear you murmur:

"Not from around here, are you?"

Still. It makes him huff. "How'd you guess?"

Your other brow joins the first. "This town has a permanent population of maybe sixty people. I like to think I know every single one of them. You, however, I don't know."

"That so?"

You nod. "Yes, sir—"

And fuck. The way you speak, softly but with a rawness in your tone that's completely void of any false pleasantry, seems to notch somewhere in his ribcage, however dusted it is with barren white cobwebs.

"No. No sirs here," he finds himself saying, unprompted, and a little adrift from his usual character. He likes the importance that comes with being known as an authority figure; respected—the responsibility gives him something to do, and John has never really known how to be anything other than a leader, even when he shouldn't be. 

(Especially when he shouldn't be.)

"Then what should I call you, stranger?"

He shrugs one shoulder in a lofty reply, but doesn't give you his name. Not right away, anyway—he also thinks he likes the mystery of being a stranger in a strange land—but you don't press. Your hands lift, palms facing him, in a mockery of surrender. 

"Okay, stranger. What can I get for you?"

"Whisky," he says, a touch gruffer than he should be considering how nice you're being, but he's also never been the sort to care much about social niceties. "Neat. Bottle of spring water on the side."

Out of the corner of his eye, he sees you mouth the words back to yourself, a little smile clipping the corner of your lips. Bottle of water. It makes him huff again. 

"Good business to mock your guests, is it?" 

It's your turn to shrug. "Only when they don't give me their name."

You're quick in a way he doesn't expect. Snappy. Unpolished. But considering the way you walk around the bar, snatching up a bottle, and then a glass without even sparing a glance to see what's in your hands, it tells him you're familiar with this place. I know everyone, it screams. 

It's an inference—but he's always been rather good at those as well—that you've been here a while. Maybe this place is home to you. Maybe it has always been. 

Growing up in a dilapidated port town must have rubbed off on you in all the wrong ways. Waspish but still deferential to your elders. Quick with your words. Taking everything to the chin without a flinch. 

You grew up around sailors. Around men who can't seem to stand still on land long enough to call any place home. And he almost pities you for it. Almost. 

But he doesn't know you well enough to care. 

So, he doesn't. 

Motions, instead, to the cigar case he lays flat on the table after fishing it out of his front pocket with a small murmur to see if it's alright if he smokes inside. Places like these are so far behind on bylaws, he doubts anyone would blink if he smoked indoors, but it's better to be safe, he reasons, than to find himself on the curb nursing bloodied knuckles and a black eye. 

(One too many nights down in Manila taught him well enough.)

You nod, then look around the empty pub. "Go ahead. I don't think anyone here will mind."

It makes bark out something that sounds too shorn around the edges, too frayed and unevenly cut, to be a laugh, but it still makes your lips quiver, pulling up in a smile. 

"Glad you've got my back." 

He leaves it open. An empty space for you to fill in, give him your name. A proper introduction. 

Price isn't too surprised when you don't, and instead use two, well-practised fingers to slide his drink over to him, not spilling a drop. There's a flash of teeth. A mockery of a smile. 

And then: "drink up. First one is on the house."

"Well, aren't you charming."

"It's just good business," you quip with a little more teeth. "Gotta stay above the competition."

It pulls another bark from his chest. The second in less than ten minutes. He can't remember the last time he laughed this much, however lumpish and unrefined it might be. 

"It's working," he adds, tipping the glass in your direction. "Might come back for a round yet." 

"Just don't be a stranger." 

He should have been. 

Living a large majority of his life floating aimlessly in the vast expanse of the open sea has given him several insights into who he is as a person, as a man, and what makes him tick. The situations he was forced into, almost all of them being life or death, make him acutely aware of himself in a way that only those who have trust pushed past the limits of their mettle know. 

Price is good at spotting danger. Looming storms. Rogue waves. Reefs jutting out in the middle of the ocean.

And everything about you is dangerous.

He knows himself well enough to know that you're his kryptonite. His weakness. That those glossy eyes, your stubborn pride, your spitfire mouth, are all things pitted against him. All designed to make him suffer as much as possible. 

You're more dangerous than running out of fuel near Australia. Almost getting capsized off the coast of Sri Lanka. Surviving a sudden hurricane in the waters around Mexico. 

You—

You make him yearn. You make him want. 

You make him think about things he swore off of when he was eighteen and set sail around the world all on his own. 

For the first time since he left Liverpool in a boat he named Captain, Price thinks about home. Solid land beneath his feet. 

Dangerous, indeed. 

And despite everything warning him away, he goes back. 

Blames it on a litany of things—all half-truths that are only marginally easy to swallow. Things like: it's been ages since he had a stiff drink, and this is the only pub in some ten kilometres, or so. The only licence he cared enough to renew is his boating permit, and he isn't even sure if his driver's licence from Hereford is valid anymore. Never bothered much to check. 

He needs to get out, anyway. Has to find someone to fix the leak he'd sprung crossing the Labrador Strait. Needs to get more fuel. Enough to last him until he can get to Maine. 

And where else is he going to find anyone in this town to do all of that if not at the pub?

It's practical. A necessity. 

(And if he wears his nicest shirt that only barely smells sunbleached, then no one has to know.)

No one. Except you, that is. 

You wave to him in what's quickly becoming known as your usual greeting. A slight widening of your eyes, as if you're surprised to see him. Then a small quirk of your lips that always accompanies the briefest flash of teeth. If you're not busy making a drink, you lift your hand up, fingers loosely curled over your palm. A lazy wave. 

He echoes it all back with a sharp nod as he takes his seat at the bar. His usual, too, because despite having not been a marine since he was twenty-six, he still has the training he picked up ingrained in his marrow. Back to the corner. Exits in his periphery. 

(Old habits die hard, he thinks, and feels his heart leap to the base of his throat when you grin at him from over the counter, wide and infectious—)

He needs a smoke. A stiff drink.

There's an ashtray laid out on the table in front of him, a coaster with an empty glass. You're quick to rectify that, sidling up to his spot with a bottle of whisky tucked between your palm and thumb, a bottle of water secured in your grasp by just your pinky looped around the nozzle. 

"You should try my whisky sour," you murmur conversationally—like this is normal. Commonplace. 

It is in a way, he notes. But there's something much too domestic about the way you take him in. Fluffing pillows. Resting a cool hand against a warm forehead. Sweetness bleeds into his teeth, makes them ache. He needs to rinse it away before he gets a cavity. 

"Mm," he mumbles, fingers curling around the glass. The whisky is only slightly chilled—the way he mentioned he liked days ago—and he wonders if you took it out of the cool, let it sit on the shelf, waiting for him. He doesn't know how he feels about the idea of that. Of being waited for. Expected. "Not a fan of that nonsense."

Your head tilts to the side. Narrowed eyes reading him. Trying to sear through the layers that accumulated over the years, thick growths. Barnacles bunched around his body from stagnancy. He wonders what you think you see when you look at him. 

Wonders, then, why he cares so much about what the answer might be. 

John hides it all in a swallow. A gulp of whisky that never stops burning no matter how many times he washes his blues away with a swig of it. Lights a fire in his throat that catches and spreads through his chest, all the way down to his belly. Smoky. Ashes. He wheezes through the burn of it. Let it strip his insides, taking all the pollutants with it. The ones that build up whenever he catches sight of soft, coy smiles, and warm eyes. 

Dangerous if left unchecked. 

"You never know," you say, and he's already forgotten what you were talking about originally. Too many dips into the margins. Too much reading between the lines. "You might like it if you try."

And he knows, immediately, that he would. That he'd order whatever fancy drink you whipped up for him tonight with lemon and liquid cane sugar and a pinch of salt to cut the sweetness (your secret ingredient), and would do it for the rest of his life if he could. Would drink himself into cirrhosis just to see the way you smiled when you made it.  

He swallows it. Chases it down with water. He's always been rather good at that—running. Avoiding the things that make his heart thud, and the back of his neck prickle. 

So, he says: "nah, m'set in my ways." 

And you smile, let him flee. "If you say so." Then, with eyes that drop to the three wrinkles in his collar, and the ambiguous stain on the breast pocket of his shirt, you add: "don't you look nice tonight. Who're you trying to impress?" 

There's an itch under his skin. He paws at his pocket for his cigars. You meet him in the middle with a lighter in your hand, held out to him when he jabs the butt of one between his teeth. He needs the distraction. Needs nicotine to quell his nerves. Smoke-stained apathy. Just enough to soften the urge to do something ill-advised. To say something uncharacteristically flirty, like—

You. If you'll have me. 

(And then desperately. With a quiver in his voice, and blood in his throat; if you'll let me. I'll be so good to you, so, so good—)

"Mechanic," he rumbles, words muffled and gruff from around the end of his cigar. The way the flames catch the softness around the ring of your irises makes him ache in all the wrong ways. "Boat mechanic, specifically. To help fix up Captain."

"Captain?" You echo, brows rising. He leans forward, pushes the tip into the fire; inhales to let it catch. 

"M'ship," he rolls the word around a mouthful of smoke. "My first love."

"Ah," you say with a smile that tugs on the corners of your eyes. "She must be a thing of beauty, then." 

His mouth is already forming the affirmation—yes, she is—and the question—why do you think that?—but you beat him to it with a softness that hints at more, that lays itself bare on the grimy, acetone bleached tabletop:

"To make a man like you so smitten."

And Jesus Christ. 

What is he meant to say to that? How is supposed to respond with his heart in his throat, and pulse in his ears? 

He's too old for this shite, he thinks. Then, not old enough. Not nearly old enough—

"Right," he grumbles, gruff and unfriendly, and everything that's meant to make you stay away for good, to look at him like the sorry sap of an empty man he is. But there's a tint in his words. A blood-drenched fluster. 

You catch pieces of it, and smile behind the counter as you pour another drink. 

"Anyway," he's grasping at anything with knotted hands, something to take the edge off of his nerves. To put distance between this, you and him, and all the things that will eventually come after it. "This mechanic. Know where I can find one?"

The derision that dances across your pretty face has heat blooming in his chest. 

"Look around. This is basically a town hall meeting tonight."

He likes the way you ride sarcasm and sincerity so finely that he always seems to oscillate between believing your words or wondering if you're making a mockery of him. Most of the time, you seem to be—if only to get a rise out of him. To draw out his sense of humour, mordant and drier than a desert. One that pairs quite nicely with your own. 

(Another tip to the scale he tries not to think about.)

So he doesn't. He huffs instead as he ashes his cigar, and reaches for the glass with his other hand. 

"Well, ain't you funny." 

You are, of course. Of course. He thinks about the things you say to him when he comes down for breakfast at noon and dinner well after the sun has set beyond the horizon, making a meal out of the lobster rolls you make for him in the kitchen, the tuna sandwiches. The garlic shrimp. The salmon and rice. Idle comments about the locals—or lack thereof—and their spotty reputation. The history of the town. Of your Province. 

"You love it."

And God help him, he does. He does. He likes the way you drag snorts out from the depths of his chest, clearing out empty cobwebs, and filling the barren space with warmth. Or something like it. Everyone he's met so far always seems to want something from him, but you don't. You don't even make him pay for the extra heaping of lobster you pile on his plate even though he's heard you say it was an extra five dollars to a passing sailor. 

He seems to be your exception, and he doesn't know why. 

(Or maybe he does, but looking at it too closely fills him with dread. The kind he only feels when he finds out a storm cell is headed toward him. When he has to anchor down in a bay and settle the sickness in his guts as Captain is viciously thrown from side to side.

The morning after when he has to clean up the broken pieces and examine the extent of the damage, it's always filled with a sense of moroseness. Uncomfortable, in a way, like the aftermath of a vitriolic row, a devastating argument when he emerges with a sense of uncertainty, no longer quite sure he was justified in the things he said, the anger he felt. But too prideful to apologise. The awkwardness of navigating the ruins of calamity with a sense of regret that blooms alongside his lingering anger.)

So, he does what he does best:

"Not in your lifetime, love." 

He runs. 

Because lying has always come easier to him, hasn't it?

The mechanic is an old man with an accent thicker than his own. 

He speaks entirely in regional colloquialisms that Price can't make sense of. Even when he makes it known that he has no idea what the fuck the man is on about, he just breathes out his nose, as if to say, what can't ye understand about me words? and continues in the same mishmash of something that might be English, but honestly—John doubts it very much. 

Still. He's quick. He checks the hull, the mast. The engine. Checks off a list as he goes, muttering to himself (himself, because John stopped listening after the third, what? Come again? I can't understand you, mate that went entirely ignored save for a few, luh, buddy, I knows yer not stun but yer gettin' me right rotted, ye'are), and then slaps the side of Captain, nodding to himself. 

Three weeks, he says, words stretched out and stressed, like he was speaking to a child. 'ave 'er all fix'd up in t'ree weeks, b'y. 

Three weeks. 

It's in line with the seasons, too. If he times it all just right, he could be eating jerk chicken, curry, and oxtail soup in Jamaica soon enough. It would be stupid to go against the Gulf Stream (something he knows from experience when he was younger and dumber and thought he knew better), but a short stint across the Atlantic to Bermuda would suffice. Then once he's finished, he could set sail to the Azores, and then to Gibraltar, or Portugal, back up to the UK. 

Well, then. 

It's set. 

He hands the man a deposit, and tries not to think about the hourglass looming in the distance. 

Or you. 

(He always has to leave eventually. This, he knows, is no different.)

A routine forms. It's not terrible—not at first. Just an itch in the back of his head, talons raking across the inside of his skull, right behind his eyes. 

It's fine, he reasons, taking his spot at the bar while you bat away grabbing hands reaching for free beer, more booze. In three weeks, this place will be a memory replayed in his mind when the stretch of ocean idles, and loneliness sets in. A soft comfort for him to break into pieces, into regrets and spots of unhinged laughter when the isolation in a wet, unfathomable desert sinks its maw into his psyche. 

He'll resent himself, he's sure; curse the winds and the squalls that threaten to tear his boat into pieces. The idle sense of listlessness that comes with seafaring long distances. 

He's done it enough times to know that between the inexorable sense of freedom and insignificance in the gaping maw of an untamable beast, he always hates himself a little bit for not taking someone with him. 

Solo-sailing is ill-advised, but he's always been a stubborn bastard. Too prickly to be good company, too gruff to care. 

Maybe he'll ring Gaz when gets close to Europe to see if he's up for a stint jaunting through the ocean to see the Caribbean with him. Or Soap if Gaz is still hunkering away with the military. 

(You—

He doesn't think about that. Carves the thought out of his hand as quickly as it forms.)

But even so—

You're a constant on his mind. The first solid presence he's had in months, too. 

Despite his cantankerous disposition—sometimes he finds himself snarling more than conversing; sometimes he has this urge in his blood to lash out, to push things away just to see how far they go—you navigate his mercurial temperament with ease. His shorn, gruff words bounce off of your skin and fall to the countertop where you pick them up between delicate fingers and throw them right back at him—all with a smile. 

See, you seem to say. Nothing you can do will push me away so just shut up already and drink your fucking whisky, old man. 

He doesn't know if he believes you. Or the phantom echo in his head. 

"You're shedding," you murmur, drawing his attention back to you. At his raised brow, you lift your hand up in front of him, thumb and forefinger pinched together. 

It's only when his vision steadies that he sees the single strand of hair wisping up from between the tips of your fingers. A coarse hair of dark brown with lightened tips. 

His hand lifts to his beard, roaming over the wry curls peppered, unkempt, around the bottom half of his face. His moustache is overgrown, eclipsing the entirety of his lips. He feels the wetness from his whisky staining the ends.

You laugh when he pats along his cheek and jaw, as if he could find the missing follicle amid an unruly basin of knotting hair. 

"Ah," he rasps. "Guess I'm in need of a shave."

It's not a priority anymore. Hasn't been since he left the Navy, or when he realised how troublesome it was to try and shave his face while crossing the Atlantic. It just stopped being something he cared much about. 

But he feels the long ends catching on the rough patch of skin around his knuckles. Straggly and whitening at the tips. 

"Maybe," you quip with a shrug, and he can't really place the note in your tone that tries to linger between feigned indifference, but misses the mark entirely. 

You don't say anything else as you drop the fallen strand into the bin behind the counter, but as the night progresses, he catches your eyes straying toward him more often than usual, lingering on the expanse of his covered jaw. Something flashes in those depths—intrigue, maybe; curiosity—and John tries to convince himself it doesn't matter even as he pulls out money from his wallet at the crux of the evening when everyone has gone home, save for himself and you. The only two left in an empty pub. 

It shakes him, somewhat. As if he's only realising just now how normal this has become. For him to wait for you. To walk you to the edge of the boardwalk, where a little cottage sits across a sandy embankment. Home, you told him once. The first night he kept pace with you just to keep the conversation going. 

Never been anywhere else but here, you said, a touch wistful. Must be amazing, then. Going anywhere you like. Always at sea. 

He swallows down something bitter at the memory. Something aching and acrid. Yeah, he murmured when the silence stretched on for too long and he saw the apology forming on your lips. Nice. It's—it's good, yeah.

The years have muted the resentment he felt toward his home. His father, in particular. He doesn't think he's ready to step back into Hereford—maybe not ever—but he might be ready to see the old bastard's grave. Drop a couple of flowers down. 

The memories he has are embedded in thrown cast iron pots. Fist-sized holes in the wall. Sealed with bitterness, resentment.

He didn't know how to summarise all of that into something digestible for you. So, he didn't. Doesn't. 

(Can't, maybe. Won't.)

You'd stopped aiming for personal and instead focused your attention on the things that made him snort. Made him laugh. He can't remember the last time he had a moment to breathe. Land makes him feel claustrophobic. Itches under his skin in a way that drums up the instinct to flee. Or fight. 

But with you—

It's easy. 

It awakens something in him, too. Something that has been there all along, maybe. Lingering on the periphery. One he tried hard to ignore as it raked down his skull, leaving false starts in his bones. 

There's an attraction there, seeding in the gaps between your bodies. One that becomes harder to ignore as the days pass. And how could there not be, when you're pretty in a way that makes him flounder. That makes him want to bend you over the counter just to see what expressions he could pull out of you with a mere touch. The sounds—

Fuck. You'd sound so pretty, he thinks. Has thought. Many times in the sanctuary of his hotel room that stunk of algae and smoke. Images of you splayed out on the sheets, begging him for more—

His hand goes back to his jaw. Feeling the years of accumulated indifference beneath his fingers, and needing something—anything—to take the heat in his belly, the tremble of his hand, away. To keep the thoughts of you at bay, locked up tight for no one else to see. To know. 

John doesn't walk you home that night, opting instead to duck into a drug mart beside the inn, hands burrowed in his pockets, eyes lidded. Narrowed, almost, as he takes in the rows of cheap plastic he'll inevitably find at sea. 

He stands in the aisle for a moment, taking in the mix of English and French on the boxes, and trying to come up with reasons for why this is a good idea—outside of the way it felt to have you look at him with lowered lashes, flickering from his chin, to his jaw, to his cheek: imagining what might be under the bushel of thick, unruly hair. 

It doesn't surprise him that he comes up empty. That his head is filled with nothing but the illicit image of you leaning over him—

Stupid. 

He grabs the first box he sees, crumpling the cardboard from how tight he's clenching his fist. 

It isn't the first time he's thought of you like that, but it is in your presence. With you staring at him, filling in the blanks his uninspired memory couldn't conjure up. Talking to him, too—bloody fucking hell. 

All frayed whispers of: you alright, John? You sure? Well, if you say so. 

There's anger writ across his brow, more so at himself for thinking these things, for feeling them in the first place, but as he stalks toward the counter, frown buried behind a mess of overgrown, unkempt hair, and eyes narrowed into pinched lines, he's sure he makes quite the sight. Must, if the little jump the skittish man behind the register gives when he drops the box with a growled how much? is to go by. 

John's never been good at handling his anger. Trickle-down toxicity, maybe. He's sure some fancy therapist would be overjoyed to tell him all about it—about how he's never had a good role model when it comes to biting his tongue. Never had to, when his last name is enough to pass tests, climb ranks. 

Mean and drunk, his dad was.

And Price—

Well. Sometimes he feels himself getting there, too.

But this. This. It feels different. 

He's not nearly as angry as he is flustered, and like anything he isn't used to, he lashes out. 

John is sure they don't tip at drug stores, but he conveniently forgets his change in place of an apology when he storms out of the shop, ignoring the hesitantly called, uh, sir…? as he goes. 

It's fine, he thinks and tries not to let his mind wander into uncharted territory, musing about what you might have said. Might have done. 

Swatted at him, undoubtedly. Said something scathing about him being a prick for no reason. Put him in his place, kept him there. 

But he doesn't think about that at all. 

John stands in front of the grimy mirror in his hotel room with a brand new razor in hand, staring at himself, and wonders if you'd shave it for him if he asked. If you'd keep him in line during the long stretch of the ocean where everything is an endless crawl of muted grey-green, and take him down to the bathroom in the boat, one that's barely big enough for himself to fit comfortably, and perch him on the toilet while you tended to the too-long wisps of curls growing over his cheeks. 

The thought is an algae bloom in his chest. Ethereal, beautiful. But beneath the marvel of nature's potent splendour lurks a deadly danger—one toxic in its domesticity. 

Still. He latches onto it. Curls his worn fingers around the edges, clinging to rotting driftwood. 

He likes the way it fits in his chest. The shape of you moulding along the barren brackets of his ribs; slotting in like a puzzle piece. It's winsome. Dangerous. But he's always like a challenge. 

Always liked the way some things were meant to hurt. 

(And you—you look like you were made to ruin.)

Hair rains into the stained basin with each cut. Filling the chips in the porcelain, built up from years of carelessness and indelicate hands, until a light dust of burnt umber sits like a layer of snow across the surface, hiding the blemishes below. 

Each inch shorn off seems to regress him in age until he's less an unkempt seafarer, a wild man who feasts on tuna and loses his mind in the middle of the sea, and more like the thirty-something-year-old who still has decades ahead of him to try and regain his footing. 

The contrast is jarring. 

He runs the back of his hand across clean skin and nearly startles at the feeling of something touching that part of his face that was hidden for so long. 

He's reminded about something his dad used to say—nothing like a shave to make a man feel new again—and isn't sure how he likes the sour twist in his gut when he feels the truth in those words, however hollow and artificial they might be. 

The face that stares back at him is different from the one who wore a military uniform all those years ago. Cheeks sunken in. Hollow. Thinner from months at sea. His complexion is darker, sunkissed and tinged slightly red. A permanent sunburn, maybe. He thinks about the woman from Ghana who warned him with a finger pressed softly against the apple of his full cheek about skin cancer. Melanoma. 

Wear sunscreen, she stressed with a shake of her head that sent gorgeous locks of midnight black spilling over her bare shoulders. It reminded him of the deepest parts of the ocean that he crossed. Endless puddles that looked like little jars of ink across the vast expanse of the sea. You're too pale not to be wearing some every day. 

(After he left—twinned hearts torn asunder—he found a bottle of sunscreen stuffed inside his rucksack. It was the only time he can remember crying in some twenty-odd years—)

That man feels almost as distant as the sea is to him now. A memory. A moment when he was willing to carve off the best parts of himself just to make room for the loneliness; the self-flagellation in the form of isolation. What he'd thought he deserved. Maybe still does. 

He isn't sure what thoughts were rattling around inside his head at the time to make him leave the best pieces of himself with a woman who seemed too good to be true, but still wanted him, of all people, by her side. Those, too, feel far too distant to grasp. 

His hand is worn down. Knuckles more scar tissue than skin. Welts lined the inside of his palms—thickened flesh made from grabbing the ends of rope too many times to count as it reeled out of his grasp, cutting deep and cauterising the wound all at the same time. He should have known better, maybe. But when his anchor was tumbling down into an abyss, unattached to its cleat in the middle of the ocean, time for thinking was negligible. Nonexistent, almost. 

The accumulated scars—some from land, most from sea—discolour his skin until it's patches of ivory, pale pink, and mounted brown, all slightly hidden under a thin crop of wry topaz hair. 

His nails are short and lined with boat oil. Dirt. The beds are yellowing from nicotine. 

He scratches the rosy skin of his upper cheek where it meets the cut of patchwork mutton chops. His signature style when he was Captain. When he was responsible for more life than he knew what to do with or knew how to protect. 

(The men he couldn't save always seem to stack higher than the ones he did.)

John sees fragments of his old self in the mirror. Pieces of an incomplete puzzle he thought he left scattered on the battlefield, and then tucked inside a box when he handed in his medals for a trawler (a trawler for a sailboat). The fit is tight. It sits uncomfortably over his new skin—scarred and sunkissed—and he gives himself a moment to wonder about where he'd be in life now had he stayed behind. 

But a moment feels too long. Not long enough. 

He brings the razor up to his cheek and cuts the rest of that man away. 

He isn't him. Not anymore. 

(Hasn't been for a long time.)

The skin of his cheeks sting from the bitter evening winds billowing off the icy Atlantic and he's reminded why he kept his beard overgrown and thick when he was out at sea. 

November is a cruel month, he always found. Cold. Desolate. This close to the ocean, and he feels the chill deep in his bones, even though several layers of leather and fur. It's enough to make his teeth chatter. 

The fur lining the collar of his Levi's jacket does little to stem the vicious onslaught, but he makes a point to bunch his shoulders closer to the bottom of his earlobes in an effort to salvage some heat. Not that there's much to spare. 

But the walk from the inn to the pub is blessedly short, and the brief cold gives him enough time to clear his head. To think about turning back. Stopping whatever it is he thinks he's doing. 

He isn't a young lad. Not anymore. 

He knows this, of course. Knows it enough to feel the ache in his joints. In the raw scar tissue that is always a little tender in colder weather. Still. It wasn't enough to stop him from washing his clothes in the coin laundry of the inn. Buying fabric softener and forest-scented detergent from the grocer. A beanie (toque, he supposes, though he's never heard anyone out East use that word), some cologne—the expensive kind. Tom Ford, the lady at the cosmetic counter said. You look like you'd like this one best. 

He didn't ask why. She didn't tell him. 

It smells good, though. Like new leather, vanilla, and tobacco—a strange concept considering most of the time people couldn't stand the smell whenever he smoked, but maybe that's only in cigars and cigarettes. 

There was a moment when he stood in the washroom, buttoning up his freshly laundered (and newly purchased) shirt when he felt like a fraud. A goddamn muppet. 

This isn't him. He reeks of smoke, salt, and sun-dried sweat. He scrubs his clothes clean with extra shampoo inside the shower on his boat when they start to smell a little too pungent, even for him. He doesn't shave. Barely showers—

Who needs it when he can just anchor on a reef, or a distant, uninhabited island and take a dip in crystalline waters for a few hours? 

He feels—

Stupid. 

But he can't deny there's something a little invigorating about slipping a clean body inside clean clothes. Dressing up like some young lad taking his girl out to see a film, grab a burger to eat. Maybe bum around Liverpool until he had to go back to the barracks. 

He bit his tongue until he tasted iron and slipped on his jacket. Pulled the beanie over his head. Sprayed some cologne on the sleeves. And then kept his head low to avoid anyone's eyes, even though no one in this town has really bothered to get to know him like you had. 

John just feels a bit like a swindler. This isn't him. 

Fancy shirts. Clean jeans. Boots. A new leather jacket. Cologne. Barefaced. It all feels like a hollow pastiche of some clichè role he's trying to fill. Leading man, or something stupid like that Soap might jostle him about. 

Who're ye tryin'ta be, Cap? Tom Hardy, aye?

Fuck. Fuck. He should leave, just go back to his inn—

But the door is already opening. You're looking up, taking him in, and then—

Nothing. You offer a slight nod. No smile. No wave. And then you're looking away, eyes dropping back to the tabletop you're always cleaning despite the stains and the stickiness never going away. 

He expected worse, maybe. His hand reaches up as he steps inside, feeling the uneven skin beneath his palm. Rugged craters. Knicks from the blade when he got too close to his skin. Scars, maybe. Patches of hair he missed. 

He wonders what you thought when you saw it. Chiefly disappointed, perhaps, that whatever image you had in your head of him, all clean-shaven and dressed up, wasn't quite the same as reality. There's a sinking sense of disappointment in his guts, but it's almost minuscule compared to the relief of knowing that you don't care. Maybe it'll be enough to quash whatever has been rotting in the crevasse between you. Crush whatever idealistic notions of him you have in your head. 

John would rather you were bitterly disappointed now than realise it after. Regret. A mistake. It's good. Fine. 

It's only when he takes his usual seat does your head pops up again, eyes cutting across the counter to stare at him. 

And—

Shit. 

The way you look at him knocks the air from his lungs. The deep appraisal, the shock, the curiosity, and the—

"Wow," you whisper, eyes widening. He isn't sure what you think, but he knows that look in your eye; a keenness. Sees it sometime staring back at him in a cup of amber when you don't notice him looking. Shit. Shit.  

He clears his throat, uncomfortable under the intensity of your stare, and tries to soothe his nerves as quickly as he can, patting down for his cigars left somewhere in his pocket. In one of his pockets. Fuck—

"Well," you breathe, and he dreads your words immediately, not quite ready to hear them without something in his veins to dull the pinballing emotions in his chest. "Don't you clean up nice. Didn't recognise you at first."

He grunts. "Yeah, yeah. Talkin' nonsense now, aren't you?"

"Nonsense?" You echo, tone subdued, now. Soft. Too soft. He hates the way it makes his chest feel like it's caving in. "What? A handsome man like you can't take a compliment? That's a surprise."

Handsome. 

He feels his pulse in his throat. Heat under his collar. Something spreads across his skin at words, glueing itself down, uncomfortably tight—constricting, smothering—and he fights the urge to reach up to his neck, clawing at it until it's all gone. Peeled off in strips, taking with it jagged swaths of too-hot flesh. 

Your words are painted with too much sincerity, and it drips over his skin—thick and oily—until he's stained in the offering they make. Drenched in the sudden realisation that this is far too much than he can handle. 

That he needs. 

The way you're looking at him—bare-faced honesty, scoured of anything other than a genuity that trickles into the gaps in his crumbling chest, sticky filament made of saccharine promises and a dizzying sense of open affection—makes him heave; chokes him on the embers of that tantalising what if you let echo in the recess of words. 

It isn't grabbing, or taking what he wants. This is you lying flat on the table. His choice to reach for it. To curl his fingers around the bulk of it, feeling the heat in the palm of his hand. 

And he wants. Oh, how he wants—

But it feels a little bit like a betrayal. Self-sabotage from within as his body turns against him. Feelings conspiring with his whims, the ones that force out their pleads between bloodied teeth; yearning as they rattle the cages of this forced prison. Lost in absentia. 

He can't make sense of the tremors that follow, roaring through his chest in a deluge of innominated emotions that seem to shake the foundation he stands on. He reaches, but can't seem to grasp them. Temporal feelings without cause. Intangible. They slip through the gaps in his fingers. Slide off of his flesh as he was trying to catch mercury in the oil-slick palm of his hand. 

John can't make sense of it. Why him? What's drawing you to him outside of carnal attraction? It's always been there—that magnetic pull: his marrow to yours. 

But for the first time since he traded in medals for oars, he feels the pull back to shore. That unquenchable urge to dip his toes into the sand. To keep his feet firm on dry land. 

The feeling of it itches in the palm of his hand. 

And like most things, he doesn't understand, doesn't agree with, he feels the unrelenting urge to lash out against it. Push back. Carve out some semblance of distance between the thing he doesn't understand, and what it's making him feel.

And then he snaps. Bites back against the headiness admixing in the back of his head; noxious, dangerous. It's a discomfort. A slash of clarity that makes him all too aware of himself. Of you. This. Everything. It's too much. 

So easily swayed by a pretty word. What a damn fool. 

The snort he gives in response is a gnarled mess in his throat, all mangled up and shredded on the barbs of his sudden vexation. "Flatter all the poor sods like this, do you?"

It crackles in his chest. Smouldering embers. Dampened by the blood filling his lungs, choking him on what spills out of the shattered levee. 

This isn't—

Isn't him. It isn't you. 

He feels claws raking across the inside of his skull. Sharpened talons digging vengefully into the back of his sockets until it aches. Forcing him, maybe, to see the aftermath of his anger. 

"No," you say, pulling back. Stepping away from him. Giving him space. Not enough, and entirely too much. A sad echo snakes through the crevasse. Glass breaking. Shattering. He thinks of self-sabotage. Tastes it in the back of his throat. "Just you."

It's mean, awful, when he huffs, asks: "yeah? Why bother?" 

"Why not?" You volley back, and he can't quite place the look in your eye. Disappointment, maybe. Something tinged in regret. "Maybe I want to. Maybe I—"

You don't finish. 

Good, he thinks. Good. Stay away. Far away. 

And softer. Softer still—

It's for your own good. Better off this way. Don't turn around. You'll only end up hating what you see. Regretting what you find—

"Don't know what you're getting yourself into." His words are stagnant. Hollow. The consistency of ash between dry palms. He tries to swallow, but can't. Can't. Gives up instead, adds: "won't like what you find, either." 

You hum and it hurts. "Maybe I might. Can't be all bad under there." 

They're sharpened with an edge of sincerity he can't bring himself to acknowledge, not now; not yet, so he huffs instead, and brings a cigar to his lips just so he doesn't have to respond. Doesn't have to engage again. Can't, he thinks, with a cigar between his lips, stuffing his mouth full. 

A pathetic escape. He's never been the type of man to retreat when it isn't the best option strategically. Or when he has no other choice, and too many men on the line. 

But he can't—

(Knife to his chest, you walk away. 

Blade against his tongue, he says nothing to call you back.)

A fissure sits at the zenith that once was a sense of ease, comfort. It leaks a coldness that shakes him to the core when it drifts over gaping wounds and milky-white bones.  

(All of his own making, of course.)

In the midst of it all, he tries to convince himself that this is the right thing to do despite never being a man of altruism in his life, and the lie pools in his empty gut where it sloshes around in the shots of whisky you still pour for him even though he can he see the cruel lashes of his words striking over your expression when you look at him when you think he isn't watching you back. 

Better this way, and he downs a shot just to ignore the merciless echo that asks, for who?

Both of you. Both. 

Because despite what you might think, or whatever little fantasies you made up inside your head about him, he knows they aren't true. They aren't him. 

A man who climbed ranks on the back of his last name. A borrowed legacy with no honour of his own. One who had no qualms about crossing lines that others couldn't until they blurred, until his morality was a sickly grey. 

Until a prison cell in Siberia rewired the fibres in his head, and he was forced to reconcile the unignorable truth that stripped of his rank and the protection he offers there is barely any discernible difference between him and them. The enemy. 

He thinks of Gaz, and the words he uttered become a portend for the calamity of a man who always seemed overly keen to take things too far. 

It's them or us, he used to say. Them or us—even as he tossed an innocent man over the ledge to fall to his death. As he let a child watch him emasculate his father when he knew pride was all they had left, doing nothing in the end but creating another monster for him to hunt down at a later date. Threatened families. Threatened men. Women, children. 

His punishment was nonexistent. Self-flagellation in the form of exile. He cast himself out to sea and pretended it was enough. 

How is he supposed to pretend who is he isn't? How is he meant to touch you with blood writ in the lines of his palm? 

Selfish. Mean. Cruel. 

So, he lets it rot—just as he does with everything else.

There have been others, of course; but Price has always been attracted to older women. Laugh lines and crows feet; swatches of grey kissing their temples. A certain coldness to their touch. An unspoken understanding that everything that is, and will ever be, between them is temporal. Love was just a crutch. A fallacy uttered in the dark to soothe the rugged parts of themselves that worried they might never be enough. 

He can handle women like that. Prefers them. 

The youngest he's ever dated was a woman his own age, and he realised soon after that there was a disparity between he couldn't placate. One that left scars. 

He's a mangled soul in a young man's body. Rough and callous and unwilling to compromise. He's more scar tissue than man, and what can he offer someone idealistic with inexperience and youth except a bitter tangle of hurt that cuts deep. 

But you're an outlier, he finds. Only shades younger than himself, really, but it's not so much your age, but the way you carry yourself. Heart on your sleeve. Aching for love. 

He can't give that to you. 

The last time he tried, he ended up sneaking out on a woman in Ghana, leaving the pieces of him behind that dared to even try. 

He can't offer you anything that isn't temporary. 

And he thinks that might be fine. Maybe it's all you want from him, anyway—just a night. A moment. A memory to keep. 

But John's always been greedy. The kind that wants, and wants. Once would never be enough, and he knows that if he sunk his teeth into you, a bite would never satiate his rapacious appetite, never quench the hunger. 

And since he can't make a meal out of a morsel, he'd rather starve. 

He thinks about leaving six times in three hours, but you carry on as if nothing has happened even though he catches weariness in your gaze whenever you look at him. His glass is filled but the conversations are bereft of their usual cheekiness. The gaps between are no longer filled with his scored laughter or your amused hums. 

You spend more time away from him than you have since he first sat down. The deviation away from what quickly became a bruised touchstone, laden with clumsy fingerprints is jarring, but he can't claim to be upset by your distance when he was the one who caused the rift in the first place. 

So, he drinks. He smokes his cigar. Tries to not think about why his hand itches in a way that he knows can only be sated by sliding his knuckles across the worn wood of the table, linking his fingers with yours. It's a stupid whim. He swallows it down with a shot of whisky that makes his stomach curdle. Seals it with an inhale of his cigar. Forgotten, now. Covered in ethanol and smoke.  

But even with the crowbar in his hand, he can't stop himself from watching you. Eyes trailing along the paths you carve between old wooden chairs, and scowling men waving their hands at the staticky television set, upset by yet another bad call by the referee. 

(He's always thought it was stereotypical to equate Canada with hockey, moose, bears, geese, and maple syrup but so far, he's seen nothing else play inside the pub—aside from a polar bear warning being issued out for northern Newfoundland—but sometimes, the shoe just fits.)

You sift through the throng carrying drinks in your hand and impish grin at the men you recognise. Words he can't hear, ones he isn't privy to, are spoken softly and reinforced with a small grin. Seeing it on your face, pointed away from him; meant only for another, is a white-hot dagger to guts, scraping across his delicate insides. 

The flashes of anger are directed inward. Each stab is a reminder that they once were for him. That had he not gone and ruined a good thing, dangerous though it might be, you'd have been standing in front of him, curbing nonsensical requests over the bulk of his shoulder, unwilling to leave from your perch across from where he sat. 

(Hindsight is a brutal, bitter mistress, but it has nothing at all on pride.) 

He swallows it. Smokes. Pretends he's interested in the game that plays but it's just flashing colour on an oversaturated screen. A foreign language to his ears despite the words on the chyron flickering past in his mother tongue. 

John thinks about packing it in for the night. Heading back to his empty hotel so he can think about you in peace—in vivid, fantastical images of equilibrium; comfort—and finds that might be for the best. For both of you. Some distance to soothe the ache he caused. To reacclimate back to strangers in a dilapidated pub. A sailor and bartender: ephemeral, the way it ought to be. The way it must. 

With his dwindling pack of cigars slipped into his breast pocket beside the lighter he nicked from you ("people always seem to leave them behind in bars," you'd winked, handing him an ugly lighter in the shape of a bear with a pipe in his plastic mouth. "I picked out the one that made me think of you."), he finds himself at a loss for a reason to stay. All packed up. Ready to leave. 

He raps his scarred knuckles on the table, a final farewell that he can feel heavily in his bones, filled with iron as they may be. Still. Still. It's for the best.

Whose, he still doesn't know. His own, undoubtedly, in that selfish sort of way that makes it feel selfless. Like it's the right thing to do even though he bloody well knows it isn't. Won't be. That he'll think about this moment in time when he's all alone at sea and cuss himself out as he readies for a squall. 

John means to leave, but a man gets to you first. 

The man makes a noise in the back of his throat. A complaint, maybe, but it's swallowed by the creak of the floorboards when he sways on his feet. 

"Listen t'me, you—"

But you're not. You make a move to turn around, and he seems to realise you're not paying him any attention. Anger flickers over his slack face, and he's reaching for you with a clumsy paw before John has time to move. The moment he makes contact, fingers skating off the sleeve of your shirt, he's out of his chair, letting it clatter to the ground. The noise is swallowed by all the chaos. Murmurs, shouts. The music feels so out of place in this moment when he can feel his blood run hot, turning molten in his veins. 

"Hey—!"

But your hand is gripping his wrist, pulling him off of you, before John can finish. Eyes narrowed, jaw set, you shake your head once before pointing to the door with your free hand. 

"It's time for you to leave." 

He pitches a fit. Petulant whinging that cuts through the noise. Vague insults hurtled at you, words of complaint that barely make you flinch. 

John's rushing over before he can even think—thoughts all asunder, bouncing around his head in an unrefined mess of shorn noises and fervent anger—but you stop him with a jerk of your head. No, it says. I don't need you. 

And you don't.

The swelling chaos dims and in the aftermath, he realises he's the only one standing. The only one hovering in your periphery as you shove a man twice your size away from the counter when he tries to swipe a bottle as he leaves. 

Everyone is watching, wary, but there's an unspoken sense of understanding amongst them that makes him feel decidedly like an outsider, and wholly out of the loop. 

Where he's from, if you see someone being harassed, you step in. 

Things, apparently, are very different here. 

He catches your eye when you turn back toward the interior after slamming the door shut, and there's a moment where he almost rushes to your side, checking you over for any marks that man might have left behind, but you're shaking your head before he can even lift his foot from the floorboards. As if you know. And maybe you do. Maybe you know him more than he knows himself. Maybe, maybe—

You give him another shake. No, it says, and the soft quirk of your lip echoes in his head, a soft: down boy that makes him bristle. 

It's telling, of course, that he still heeds your wordless command. Hackles lowering, muscles unfurling from their rigid coil. 

Your nod, then, is a soft purr that rolls through his guts like a marble. Good boy. 

John feels leashed when he settles back into his chair. Anchored. All it takes is a nonverbal cue from you, and suddenly, he's tempered. Tamed. 

As if to reinforce the thought, his hand strays to his chin, feeling the scarred, bare skin under his palm. All done because of a simple glance, a fleeting moment of curiosity from you. 

He isn't sure how he likes the fit of it around his neck. Too tight, maybe. Dangerously claustrophobic. But it sits there, untouched. He has no desire to pull it off. To divorce the collar from his neck. 

(Maybe, maybe, he thinks he could get used to the way it feels.)

As he settles in his chair, his eyes never stray from you, standing lax and unphased against the door, chatting idly to the patrons who murmur in tones too low for him to pick up over the rhythmic echo of the sea shanty and the slew of voices in the background, cheers from the hockey game that hasn't quite held his interest long enough for him to know the score. Nothing is amiss, it seems. As if bullying out men twice your size was a regular occurrence—not even newsworthy enough to pull gazes glued to the flashing television, or stop the minutiae of mindless conversations from happening in sparse passels around the pub. 

But it changed something for him. He feels it in his chest, his guts. Something dislodged from the cornice, falling down inside of him in an endless spiral. A sudden freefall. 

He comes to the startling realisation when you look up at him as you pat someone on the shoulder, smiling softly—all forgiven in an instant, the crevasse sealed over in a thick bed of cobwebs—that he wants. Has wanted since he first lumbered into the pub and was met with a raised brow, and a cheeky wink. Not from around here, are you? and he was gone. 

Lost in the swell of you. 

Your mouth moulds around the words, pleading with him over the heads of everyone else, wait for me.

But John had no plans to go anywhere else. 

"I'm okay," you tell him hours later, hands buried in your pockets, eyes gazing up at the midnight blue sky. "Seriously."

There's a multitude of things he wants to say. All threads of lingering, unresolved anger brought on by that man who put his hands on you. Who thought he could. 

Maybe a little bit of it is directed at you, too, for not letting him rip that man into pieces even though he knows it's not your fault. Leashed, he thinks, and rubs absently at his bare neck. 

"Yeah?" He murmurs, voice raw. Eroded down to bare scraps, scorched and pulsing with the poison of anger. He tries to clear it. Swallows down the acrid tang that coats the back of his throat even still, hours later. 

Your head rolls toward him slowly, chin still held loftily up to the sky, and when your eyes meet, he thinks of rogue waves. Capsizing in the middle of endless azure, exposed to elements and predators. To the murky depths below in burnt sapphire.

He swallows again, but it's hard to get anything down when his heart is in the way. 

"Yeah, John. I'm good."

Your words take the shape of a breath, gently ghosting over a scraped knee. It's not meant to convince, but rather soothe, and something about that, about the softness in your eyes and way you speak tenderly, cautiously, as if he might startle, makes him feel hot beneath his collar. Flustered. Foolish. A litany of things he ought not to feel, but does because it's you. 

(Because it's always been you.)

"Right," he grouses, and tries to find his way out of the canyons inside your eyes. 

It's hard to escape when everything looks the same, when it all beckons him deeper. Stay, stay, it whispers over artfully crafted gorges and deep ravines, a stunning beauty that makes nature feel like a paltry imitation of the carvings in your irises. 

In the sandy shores of a small inlet nearly eclipsed by the sea, you turn to him fully, eyes smouldering embers catching in the flush of the full moon, and say, thank you, John. 

He scratches at the collar around his neck, and thinks about throwing away the key.

"What for?" He says instead, brows knitted together—a perfect pastiche of a fisherman's knot. It's rough: words scraped from the thick of his throat, raw and pulsing and dusted in smoke, but you don't baulk at the artificial ire that oozes between his nicotine-stained teeth. No. You lean into it with a smile. 

"Defending me. Trying to, anyway," you tack on with a small huff at his expense, a finger poking at his inflated pride. In jest, of course, but it still makes him frown. "I guess I just got so used to sticking up for myself that I forgot how nice it was to know someone is looking out for me, you know?" 

"Should be expected." 

There's a heat simmering beneath his tone. An underlying sense of anger that hadn't abated entirely yet, just began slumbering. Dormant, but still burning. Still hot enough to hurt. 

"Maybe," you hum, and the blitheness in your tone makes him bristle. Hackles raising. "But it's probably for the best."

"Tell me how none of those fuckin'—" There's a snarl in the back of his throat. He swallows. "None of them standin' up for you is for the best, 'cause it looked pretty fuckin' cowardly to me."

"If they defend me every time something like that happens, then it'll only be worse when they're not around. Most nights, it's just me working. I gotta know how to take care of myself just fine—"

"—shouldn't bloody 'ave to—!"

"—and I need them to know it, too. That if they try anything like that, I'll kick them out. I won't go screaming for help just because they're being rude. I'll handle it on my own because I have to."

It quiets him. Not enough to quell the anger burning in his chest, or the urge to tear them into pieces for sitting back, watching you get disrespected while they throw peanuts at the television screen, and jeer about something as arbitrary as a fucking game, but he finds something akin to understanding. Common ground. 

It makes sense, suddenly, even though it sets his teeth on edge and makes his knuckles itch. 

"No one else will do it for me, y'know?"

"I will."

The words tumble out before he can make sense of them in his head. A disconnect between his mouth and his thoughts, eroded by the smoke leaking into his throat. The fire in his chest. 

A mistake, maybe, because they're futile. Pointless. More so a whim of pride, a flash of possessiveness just to stroke the smouldering embers of the ego you bruised earlier with the tip of your finger. 

(Or maybe they're the afterbirth of his righteousness; that insatiable beast he conceived into the world he swore he'd save—no matter what—only to realise somewhere after leaking madness into the fibres that he was making more monsters than he was culling. 

A lingering remnant of when he bore the burden of the world on his shoulders during a botched pantomime of Atlas.)

You know it, too. "You won't be around all the time, John."

He tastes salt in the back of his throat. It burns when he swallows. When the words that tore through the seam of his lips dissolve into ash, into smoke. 

Your hand on his shoulder is meant to be placating but it feels like a dagger to his gut. 

"I can take care of myself. Been doin' it all my life, anyway."

He can't make sense of it. Can't understand how your words fill the hollow crevasses inside of him until he feels more like a mortal man than an untouchable mountain. 

You bring him back down to the solidness of land, of the earth. An anchor. 

John touches his neck again. "Yeah," he rasps. "I get it. Now, let's get you home."

He thinks about you. 

A lot would be an understatement considering how many times he's taken you to bed, pulled you down into the sheets with him. Tangled limbs. Rushed breath. He thinks of you now, too, with heavy eyes and a little smile, beckoning him forward. 

His own illicit sanctuary. A place in his head where he ruins you over, and over, and over again until there's a permanent stain on the tips of his fingers, the back of his throat. A constant reminder of you—the way you smell, sound, taste—

It's been a while since he had a moment like this, when he could relax, feel himself—already half-hard when he palms himself through his boxers—and just—

Lose himself. Body melting into the sheets. Tension bleeding together into one mass that pools in his lower belly, coalescing into a tight knot in his groin. It spools, pulls taut, when he runs the flat of his palm down the length of himself until he meets the soft flesh of his perineum. 

It's easy to tilt his chin up, eyes gazing at the seashell colouring of the popcorn ceiling, stroking himself in slow, unhurried rolls of his hand, and thinking of you. Your hand on him. Your breath tickling his ear, spurring him on. 

"Come on, John," you'd say in that voice made to bring him to his knees. "You can go faster than that, can't you?"

He responds instantly to the faint echo in his head, grunting at the pleasure that races down his spine. Tugging on that tightly wound knot until it trembles. 

His hand around the length of him is replaced with yours. Tentative, exploratory strokes from frenulum to his thickened base; up, up, a teasing swipe of your thumb across his weeping slit but only enough to make his hips arch off the bed, and then you pull away, down. Down. Over and over again. He thinks of the way your breath would feel ghosting over his temple. The press of your chest when you leave over his shoulder. 

John rocks into it, hips undulating with each pass of the hand that is too gnarled, too scarred to be yours; lost in the fantasy of your presence around him, on him, in him. 

Maybe your other arm would be tucked under the nape of his neck, bracketing him into your body. A safety net. A security blanket. You'd toy with his cheek—twee and gentle; a ginger touch to offset the illicit press of your thumb into his frenulum. Lean over, too, perhaps, and press those inviting lips to his. A soft kiss. Barely a whisper. A brush.

His tongue rolls over his bottom lip, chasing the phantom taste of you that isn't there. He imagines you'd taste like the sea. Briny, but mild. Salted winter melon. A sweetness, too, beneath the tart tang of iodine, but one that was metallic—copper. Iron. 

Pleasure knots in his groin—tighter, tighter, tighter—and even with each stroke a pale imitation of your warm flesh on him, he finds the spooling coil building in a quick crescendo of bliss to be somehow more potent than it ever was. A feverish heat at the mere thought of you. 

It builds. Builds. And breaks—

Your name is a broken snarl in the back of his throat as he spills over himself in thick, molten ropes. Each pulse of his heart floods more liquid heat onto his hand (hot enough, maybe, to burn), and he leans into the sudden deluge of a chemical frenzy ripping through his synopses—all liquid euphoria, static endorphins, and a heady rush of dopamine that makes the edges of his vision blur just a touch when he blinks his tired, heavy, eyes open, staring back up at the off-white ceiling. 

The surge and plummet of adrenaline leaves him feeling fatigued. A bone-deep torpor that comes swiftly in the simmering aftershocks of his pleasure. 

He could close his eyes now and sleep—even with the mess on his hand, come cooling against his heated flesh, growing tacky and uncomfortably wet as it sat there. The idea is more appealing than standing up and washing himself down, and in his sudden languor, he haphazardly lifts his hand away from his still-throbbing cock softening against his damp thigh, and pats the mess on his hand against the extra pillow he doesn't use. It's hardly the cleanup he needs, and he knows washing the dry come from the coarse hair on his thighs and groin is going be a nuisance in the morning, but he can't muster the energy to open his lids past half-mast let alone stand and hobble his way into the washroom. 

(And maybe he doesn't want to see himself in the mirror right now. Doesn't want to contend with the same routine of thinking of you, getting off to the thought alone, and then slinking into the tub for a quick rinse of his regrets. Not tonight, anyway—)

So, he stays in bed, laying there in his own filth, and still thinks of you. With his eyes closed tight, he doesn't have to face the reality of your absence. Of his dirty whim that sullied you in his head (over and over and over again—). His loneliness. 

And it's nice to bask in the glow. To imagine you beside him still. 

John's never been as delusional as now when he can taste the Caribbean sun on his tongue. Feel the salt on his skin. He smells sand. Feels it under his back as he lays down with you curled over him, hand tucked against his chest where it belongs. Dosing under the shaded pyre. You'll catch fish in the morning. He'll take you out to places you'd never been, all of them. Every single one. Until the world is shaded with your fingerprints. 

He's never been much into lyricism, but you make him contemplate the dividing line between prose and poetry, and where he fits between the two. The bridge, he thinks. The gaps between words, the space between letters: heart and soul (and the tangibility of them both). 

He wants to go there with you. 

The vision of you laying with him in sand embeds itself in the weakened link of his splintering resolve, eroding the chain away until it breaks, and the next night finds him sitting in the same spot, drinking the same whiskey, but his thoughts are subsumed by you. 

Without it keeping him at bay, he makes a terrible decision—one he wishes he could blame on whisky, but he's sober in a way he hasn't been in years—but when he looks up at you, twenty minutes past closing after everyone has stumbled out of the pub, something blooms in his veins. 

It's white-hot—hotter than the sensation of being shot in the thigh by a stray bullet when he was still figuring himself out in a battlefield—and dredges up dormant feelings he hasn't made room for since he was twenty-seven and fell in love in Ghana. 

It's cacoëthes. 

(But maybe it's been heading forward this all along. Ever since he saw you tug around a man twice your size, and wanted to bruise his knuckles on this stranger's enamel. The one who dared touch you. Disrespect you.)

John makes the awful choice to kiss you.

It starts with a look. 

The night ends later than usual—a hockey game between the Pittsburgh Penguins and the Ottawa Senators draws a big, rowdy crowd of nearly fifteen people ("truly record-breaking numbers," you quip with a grin) that bemusingly celebrate the Senators' victory and mourn the Penguin's loss at the same time ("it's a cultural thing—Sydney Crosby plays for the Penguin's," you tell him as if it explains everything)—and when he finally pockets his cigars, the sky outside is already dusted with crops of mauve as the hazy sun tries to blink through the thick clouds of gunmetal and charcoal. 

You wave to the fishermen on the boardwalk as they prepare their empty lobster cages for the morning haul, and he tries to think of every reason why he shouldn't be standing with you right now, puffing away on one of his last few cigars. 

There are multitudes, of course, all of them eagerly buoying to the surface, and just as viable as the last. Just as concrete. But that's the thing about desire, isn't it? Reasoning is skewed. Malleable. For each con that is squashed by the claws of fatigue, a pro subsumes in its stead. They add up. The scales tip. And all at once, he's no longer oscillating between no and here's why, but how come. 

How come he can't give in, if only just once? 

But once will never be enough. He knows this. He knows it, and yet—

When John happens to glance at you from the corner of his eye, he finds you turned to him already. Watching him. 

Despite what the furious stutter in his chest at this bare appraisal would lead him to believe, this isn't anything new. 

(Neither is his reaction. The blood rushing in his ears. The hiccup of his heartbeat.)

You've always unabashedly worn your curiosity like this. Open, bare. Letting it moulder on the very ledge of a cornice for all to see when they looked into your eyes. Liquid gems, molten coins. They've always gleamed with a sense of misplaced curiosity whenever they rested on him; seemingly lost in the labyrinth of your thoughts as you tried to unravel the reef knot that is John Price. 

He supposes it's the novelty of a man washing up on shore in the middle of what's meant to be the most boring season of the year—your words, naturally. Nothing ever happens during hurricane season, you mentioned to him once. The maritime is quickly forgotten about until summer when stupid tourists head to Halifax or Peggy's Cove in droves. 

Until him, that is. 

(Until you, as well.)

But the look you grace him with right now is somehow on the precipice of being both foreign and familiar at the same time. A muddled sense of jamais vu that seems to wrap itself around his throat, pressing taut to his pulse. Mocking him. Confusing him. It's all a muddled mess of known and unknown and—

Want to know. Need to.

He knows this look. Knows it as intimately as he knows the hand he used to stroke himself, pretending it was you. Your touch. It's want. It's—

Desire. 

Intrigue. 

You stare at him—unabashedly, as always; lost in your perplexing keenness for him, for the man he is (and the one he definitely isn't)—and John sees that same, misplaced rapaciousness in the shaded valleys and unfathomably deep ravines. It's an almost visceral hunger that seems to eclipse everything else; colouring the topography of your gaze in its wake. The glittering scales of a meandering coelacanth. 

Getting caught looking at him in such a way does little to embarrass you. If anything, having his eyes meet yours seems to subsume want with need, merging the two until all that gazes back at him from that prismatic abyss is desire crushed into diamonds from the absolute pressure that leaks from the black holes in the centre. 

He's been warned before about sirens and sea monsters, but standing in front of him with the raging ocean as your backdrop, he finds he cares very little for portends after all. 

John gives you every chance to pull away, to tell him this is a mistake, that you don't feel the same way, that you couldn't possibly do this, but you ignore all of them. Every single one until his hand is around your waist, the other cupping your jaw, and your breath is on his tongue. 

You make the first move. He doesn't know why that surprises him—you have this way about you that reminds him of rogue waves: an untameable suddenness, brash in everything you do; untempered by man and their flimsy metal cups in the ocean—but when you curl your fingers into the Sherpa lapels of his jacket, and wrench him into your sphere, tidally locked in your pull, he finds himself adrift. Lost. The only thing keeping him steady is you. Your touch. 

Your lips are searing when they bite into his, bruising and all-consuming. He likes the burn of it.

It's a kiss just as much as it is a slap to the mouth. A reprimand. How dare you keep me waiting? And somewhere deep in his chest, something unfurls. Something comes loose. Wants to apologise, wants to beg forgiveness, but the words are stifled by your lips sliding against his, your fingers touching the parts of his cheeks that haven't known the feeling of another since he was twenty and grew it out as long as he could get away with it in the military. You hold him. Anchor him in place as you take, as you badger his body into yours, trying to syphon all of the air from his feeble lungs. 

He lets you, rocking with your demands the same way he would a sudden squall, his body a ship in the vast clutch of your ocean. 

The tip of your nose slots into the corner of his own when you tilt your head into the kiss, tongue sliding, liquid, molten, against the seam of his mouth. Humid breath paints the skin under his eye until it's tacky with condensation, and he wants to feel your breath on him everywhere. Wants to touch the places your breath ghosted over with bare fingers to feel the remnants of what you left behind. 

(He wants it to stain him. Leave a permanent mark for all to see. A sailor claimed by the sea, by rogue waves, and the embodiment of a pelagic calamity in the shape of you.)

His lips part just enough to let the tip of your tongue slide in, to touch his in a gentle kiss. A perfunctory greeting for what will, hopefully, become routine because he knows what you taste like now—seagrass, fennel and yew arils—and doesn't think he has the strength to let it go. A new addiction forms somewhere in the catastrophe of his hindbrain, the same place that yearns for nicotine and alcohol to blur the rugged edges of a childhood he can't quite manage to let go of. One that bled putrid blood into his adolescence, his adulthood. That makes running his first thought in the face of anything that has the capacity to heal. Or sacrifice himself for some greater good he could never really bring himself to believe in, despite the words he preached like a scratched record—we dirty our hands so theirs stays clean. A fallacy, of course, like many things in his life. A broken, fractured homunculi trying to navigate a world it wasn't made for. 

But you soothe those parts, don't you? Palliative comfort in the shape of something that has the measure to hurt, to ruin. 

—and fuck, does he want to be ruined by you—

You pull away from him as if you can taste his debauchery, his need, on your tongue and want to skewer him through the heart with it. The distance feels vacant and endless: a devastating bergschrund.   

You blink at him, eyes heavy and full of promises, of wants. The sight of your red tongue brushing over your wet bottom lip nearly makes him ascend to some spectral plane of existence where nothing but the alluring sight of you lives in his consciousness, and it's only your hushed words—raw and tempered—that reign him in. 

"Come back to my house, John."

It's not a question. He knows it in his bones. Just like he knows it could never be one—never—because doesn't have the willpower to say no. And you know this, of course. Have known it from the beginning when you peeled back the rotting layers, flaying his walls from his skin just to learn his name. 

("It's Price," he growled out, words masticating between clenched teeth. "John Price.")

He wears his want in cinder and ash. Feels the fever under his skin.  "Fuck—," he rasps, throat scorched. Brittle charcoal. The words taste like wood chips on his tongue. "What are we waitin' for then, love?"

The billowing sea breeze howls outside of your small house on the mouth of the inlet, an enchanting soundscape that seems to amplify the soft noises that spill from your lips at his touch. 

You burn like the sun bearing down on the desert of the ocean, and he feels your scorching presence between the split of his shoulder blades, liquifying the knobs of his spine until it pools in the clefts of his back. 

Boneless, broken, he loses all sense of himself as he ruts into you like a man who's never been touched before in his life—clumsy, selfish, and unpractised. Your pleasure is the equinox in the centre of his head, a reachable goal he strives for, but each shudder that leaves the column of your throat seems to shatter him into fragments. He wants, wants, wants: there's a war in his head, in his touch. Greedily, he learns your topography until it's ingrained in his marrow. Until he knows where each dip and fold, every scar and blemish, on your skin sits, waiting for the worship of his touch. 

He yields to you. Offers himself up at your altar—yours for the taking—until his sacrifice is met in seasalt and bliss. It's by this flickering dawn that spills into your bedroom window, the one that faces parallel to the sea—always there, in the corner of his eye—where his resolve is laid to rest on a bier. 

It burns on the pyre when your fingers thread through his hair, gripping tight as he falls into pieces in your arms, buried as deep inside of you as he can get. And it's here, safe in the bracket of your legs, spread wide to accommodate the staggering bulk of his body, he finds both nirvana and damnation—his own personal hell nestled in the crux of your thighs.

"Stay the night," you whisper to him, the command slurred on the tobacco that leaks from the burning tip of his cigar. 

One down, he counts; two more to go. The sight of the dwindling pack seems to notch inside his aching ribs, bruised with the cuts you made into his marrow until a scar in the shape of your name formed, seems like a portend. 

He stares at the brittle pieces of the tobacco leaves in the metal tin like they might divine the ancient wisdom of augers and the seers who gleaned hidden truths and hindsight in a teacup, but all he gets is the heady scent of nicotine for his search. 

"Mm." 

Your hands press against his naked back, feeling the taut muscles flex under your touch before they move around his midsection, fingers digging into the plush flesh of his belly—too much lobster rolls, he'd snarked when your teeth sunk into the softness put there by you; a fullness he hasn't felt since he was eighteen. You knead his skin, thumbing over the indents of your teeth, a perfect tattoo, before you hum in satisfaction, the sound of a cat eating its catch, that makes his spine thrum. 

"Good," you husk into his shoulder blade, teeth peppering nips across his sun scorched skin. "'cause I'm not done with you yet, John."

He shudders. "Fuck, love—gonna send me into an early grave."

It draws a simmering chuckle from deep within your chest. Sparking embers. The heat thrills him. 

"A lovely way to go," you murmur, hands drawing intricate webs over his torso, tangling through the coarse hair that gathers in dark swaths of brown across his body. "And I'll even give you a proper sea burial."

The thought alone strips his soul from this prison of bone and flesh. To be known so innately is a dangerous thing, he finds; so deceptively addicting, so achingly good, and he wants to run from it just as much as he wants to bask in the feeling. 

His soul is hungering for something he's never tasted before—until now, until you—and that unquenchable devotion glues to the very essence of him; a tick burrowing into his skin until it rots. 

He fucks you against the window running parallel to the sea instead. Unmaking himself in the clutch of you until your fingers thread him back into some semblance of a man with a soul made for the sea. 

(A place he wants to go with you.)

The unread tobacco leaves in bone china end up spelling out the end in a red flash on his phone. 

A voicemail is a cruel reminder of the looming deadline on the horizon. 

Fixed 'er up fer ya, b'y. She'll be ready in a night or two. Right time for lobster, too, yeah? Anyhoo, call me when you get this. 

What was once anticipatory now feels too much like being caught under a guillotine. He pretends his hands are not shaking when he calls the man back.

The man meets him by the harbour. 

"Should take 'er out," he says, wiggling a tooth pick between his teeth. "You know 'er be'er than I do. Make sure she's good t'go, ya'know?"

He hums something that might sound like an assent to unpractised ears, but the false starts in his rib cage flares up, a deep ache that rattles through the scarred brackets and leaves the seam of his mouth in a muted snarl of discontent.

Ready to go, he thinks a touch cruelly in a shorn off form of self-harm. Just to make it hurt. Just to feel it agony ripping through the gaps between his bones. 

Right. Right. 

How is he supposed to leave when he left so much of himself inside of you?

"Come with me tomorrow. Want to show you something."

"Oh, yeah?" You murmur, brows bunching together in a way that makes his teeth ache. "And what's that?"

His thumb brushes your pulse. "Mm, 'bout time you met Captain."

Newfoundland lingers in the backdrop for most of the day, rising above the waters in a rocky formation of evergreen against dark blue. 

You spend most of it leaning against the port, eyes wide in wonder at the absence of land, a mere pinprick in the vast sea, and he wonders if anyone has ever taken you out this far. Showed you something this haunting, this mesmerising. 

(Selfishly, stupidly, he hopes he's the first.)

The sea is calm. Almost eerily so, but he basks in the gentle rolls of the waves, the serene waters. It's picturesque in a way, the sight of an old postcard with a basin of pure azure and molten yellow sun, haloed in soft rings of ocean. 

As you fawn at the beauty around you, quiet in your musings, he grabs his fishing pole and sets out to catch dinner. John hasn't looked too deep into coastal fishing laws, but from your soft snort, he thinks it might just be on the side of illegal. Still. The coast guard isn't around, and he doesn't think you'll tell on him—at least not if he catches you a salmon and makes you an accomplice. 

The day dwadles, sun fading into a stunning sunset. 

He catches Atlantic Salmon, and spots a commercial lobster trawler in the distance. When he radios over, they offer a trade. Salmon for lobster. You laugh as the men toss over a cooler full of fat lobster for a wriggling salmon that nearly slips from his grasp. 

It's in this exchange—and a day on the water—that he realises just how much he missed this. This. Being on the water. Dependant on no one but his own knowledge, his foresight. Always just on the side of illegal in coastal waters. Making trades, and bartering for dinner. It's peace. Or as close of an approximation a man like him might deserve. 

A tried and true native of the land, raised on fish and crustaceans, you teach him the proper way to prepare lobster and Atlantic Salmon, sucking your teeth at his lack of spices in his threadbare cupboards. You make do, and he can't remember the last time he had something this good. 

"Just wait," you huff. "When I have a full kitchen with proper seasonings, I'll make you something even better."

There's a tightness in his chest at the prospect of next time. "Can't wait." 

It's a lie. Barefaced and ugly. 

He offers beer instead. Brings out some of his hidden whisky. 

"Not gonna be too drunk to get us back home, are you?"

Home. He is home. Has been since he kicked off from the marina, his hands curled around the leather steering wheel. The bumps of the waves against the hill. 

He wonders what you think about all of this; his kingdom at sea is nothing special. Modest, in many ways. Sometimes the toilet in the washroom leaks. He only really has warm water on Tuesdays. Something with the tides, probably. Spiders have taken a permanent refuge in the closet adjacent to the kitchenette. He thinks he might have some exotic stowaway lurking somewhere, too. A mouse of some kind, maybe, from when he was in Madagascar for a brief interlude. 

The boat is never still, always rolling with the waves. Rocking. He's grown used to the feeling of it. Much too accustomed to always moving, never being still, to ever feel any modicum of comfort on land. 

Thinking about it, about returning back to the inn tonight when the water is this serene, and the moon is this sull, pitches something ugly in his chest. Reluctance. And maybe the urge to show off. To share. 

"Want to spend the night?" 

You make a comical picture with your fingers tugging desperately on the cork of a wine bottle you found under the sink, blinking at him owlishly as you process his request, and he smothers a laugh in his chest at the sight. He knows if he lets it out he'll never look at wine or owls without thinking about you, but maybe you're already ingrained in his head. Stuck there in places he can't reach, can't scrape out. 

"What?" You ask, lightly. "Out here?"

"Why not? We're close to the Labrador Strait, too. Could drop anchor now. Head back in the morning."

"Is it—?" You stop yourself from finishing with a shake of your head, and a sheepish smile. "Nevermind. Yeah, um. Yeah, I'd—I'd really like that, actually."

Is it safe, he knows you were going to ask. The question would have made him roll his eyes, and bark out something that could have been a snort of derision or a condescending laugh. He was a bloody marine, he'd have griped. I know these waters better'n I know Liverpool.

But you didn't. You didn't ask. 

The harshness of the nevermind sounded like a self-admonishment for even asking such a thing. It's possible he's reading too much between the lines, but he likes the implicit trust that bleeds through—a touch of hesitation stifled by the immediate certainty that John will keep you safe. 

He likes the fit of it. The way it curls around his pride. 

"C'mon," he murmurs. "I'll show you around."

"It's small," he grouses, a touch uncomfortable as you patter around the bedroom that's barely bigger than a linen closet. It smells like him, he reckons. All smoke, tobacco, and stale sweat. Nothing pretty—not like your sheets that smell of fresh pine resin, or your room the scent of cornflower. 

The ship itself is considered a luxury on the ocean—old, but meticulously maintained—and its age bleeds through the panelled walls, and the clumsy decor. Built largely for dedicated seafarers, the cabin boasts two bedrooms (the captain's quarters being the largest, and the crewmates dorms still stained with rust from where the nails keeping the bunk beds in place during listing started to erode), a kitchenette, a bathroom, and a small space inside the helm that could be considered a small living room—squinting, of course, required. Still. It's home. It's—

The manifestation of his pride. His loneliness. His wants. 

(The walls are drenched in his madness. Do you see his ghosts when you look around—)

"It's cosy," you volley back, barely paying him much attention as you prod at his bare-bones; his sanctuary. He pretends the words don't stroke his ego in the perfect way. "It must be quite the sight to wake up to a sunrise on the sea." 

"Mm, it is."

It's unlike anything he'd ever seen before. A nearly endless roll of cerulean in all directions that almost blends seamlessly with the cyanic sky. Plumes of sea clouds. Birds swooping overhead. 

Often, he finds curious sea creatures coming up from the depths to investigate his boat. Pods of playful dolphins arching through the waves. A mother whale and her calf, nearly the length of his sixty-foot sailer. Rays. The occasional shark when he's fishing, lured in by the struggles and the flash of blood in the water. The feeder fish congregate beneath his boat, picking at the barnacles growing or the smaller fish gathering there for safety. It becomes its own ecosystem after a while, drawing in Remoras, various sharks, tropical fish, and barracuda. 

He mostly gets avian visitors resting on his hull. Great Albatrosses and Cormorants. The odd Pelican closer to shore. Mollymawks, Northern fulmar. 

The open ocean is a vast desert. Sometimes he goes days without seeing any signs of life. It comes with a sense of peace that is indescribable—an awe deep-rooted in his bones, one tinged with fear of the yawning abyss that rolls out in all directions as he knows, without a doubt, that he is less than a mere pinprick in the sea. Humbling. Awe-inspiring. It all coalesces into an experience he can't put into words. One that he yearns for when he's on dry land. 

One that he wants to show you. To share with you. 

A silly whim, of course. Strangers don't traverse the pelagic zone together. 

He shakes it off. Recalibrates. Tries to centre himself, and shuck the thoughts of waking up to a perpetual sunrise with you. The ochre crest of it illuminates a deep blue sea for miles and miles; bare from pollutants that seep into the aether near the coast. Lights that dim the coruscating beauty above. 

But as much as he thinks sunrises and sunsets are a thing of beauty, he knows there's something else you'll like much more. 

"C'mon," he rasps, words sticking to his dry throat. "Wanna show you somethin'."

You don't hesitate this time. "Lead the way, captain."

(And oh, how the coy honorific rumbles through his marrow.)

That something is the reason he became so addicted to the sea. It's a darkness unlike anything else he'd ever experienced before—a complete absence of light that usually pollutes the sky in the cities, one that people often think is escapable in the countryside away from bustling metropolises. 

That has nothing on the ocean after dusk. 

To describe the sensation would be pitch blackness. A black hole. Everything is swallowed up by it—complete antimatter—until the horizon and ocean merge together in an unfathomable pit of tenebrousness. It looks like spilled ink across a page, everywhere the eye turns is shrouded. Indescribable. 

When he's in an inlet, or off the coast of an inhabited island, he used to turn the floodlights of his ship off just to see what he couldn't see, and it was endless. A vacuum. Terror drenched over him in almost equal measure to the absolute awe that rolled through his chest like a tsunami. 

It was the infinite darkness of space mirrored on earth. An uncanny image. Pure nothingness.

There was more light when he closed his eyes than when he had them wide open. Phosphenes brighter than the world around him. 

A harrowing, everpresent experience that notched false starts into the parentheses of his ribs, and made him ache when he wasn't surrounded by water. 

He keeps only the navigation lights on when he leads you to the deck, and the sharp gasp he hears makes him burn, knowing exactly what you must be seeing. Feeling. 

Even at the very tip of the ocean, barely with your toes in the vast abyss, the absence of light pollution gives way to a stunning artefact in the ancient sky. Nebulae clouds. Gleaming stars. In the distance, he spots the coruscating light of Mars, visible to the naked eye. 

The moon sits in the equinox, casting out a blanket of light over the rhythmic swell of the still-black water. It paints the surface lily white. 

He stands beside you, eyes greedily taking in every flickering emotion across your awe-slacked face. Each expression categorised and filed away. A preview to the experience going inside you as you gaze up at the night sky. 

"John…" it's a hushed whisper, drenched in a reverence so thick, so palpable, he thinks he can reach out and catch the ghosts of your wonder on the tips of his fingers. "It's…"

You trail off, but he knows. He knows. 

His hand brushes yours. "Beautiful, ain't it?"

Wordless, and maybe a little bit speechless, you nod, eyes still fixed on the indistinguishable horizon as your hands slip into his. 

The stars are still caught in your eyes even after he leads you to a small sitting area with steps leading into the water. He warns you about sea lamprey and cookie cutter sharks when you try to dip your feet into the basin, laughing at the small squeak you give when you wrench your toes out of the water, drawing your knees tight to your chest. 

Sharks hunt at night, he reminds you with the same cadence as a conman. 

The sideward glance you give in response to his mirth spumes a strange effervescent feeling in the pit of his chest. Humour for the sake of it. He can easily imagine many nights like this with you, basking in the bloom of the ocean, the splashes in the distance, the steady rock of waves licking against the boat, and it's something that seems to syphon the breath from his lungs, knocking him offkilter for a moment. Skewing his perspective. 

It's odd, he finds, to be so attune with someone so fast. To connect on a level that feels deeper than what it is. It jars him as it shatters through that ironclad resolve he wore around his heart.

"Why the sea?" You ask after a moment, thumb skating through the pebbles of condensation that gathers around your bottle. 

The sight of your wet finger shouldn't be as enticing as it is, but the way you stroke the nozzle makes his stomach burn with a heat he hasn't felt in a while. It's gentle. Soft. He wonders if you'd be that tender with him—

The thought is shattered when you glance at him, eyes searching for an answer hidden in blooming blue. There's muted curiosity eked into the divot between your brow—unconsciously done—and he forces himself to turn away lest he reach out and soothe the wrinkle for you. 

(You never know how much you furrow your brow around him. Price isn't sure if that's a portend, some archaic warning of the inevitable frustration you'll feel toward when all of this is over. When the hurricane season passes, and the waters are once again chartable—

Another thing he doesn't want to think about.)

He chews on the question for a moment, making a show of reaching for the—nearly empty—carton of cigars from his breast pocket (another run to Cuba is imminent, he reasons, and tries to convince himself he's not stalling). Deft, practised fingers pull one out, rolling it between his thumb and forefinger as he measures just how much of himself he wants to give away to you. 

(All of it. Every part—)

The paper absorbs the whisky staining his lips when he skewers it between his teeth, a futile effort to keep the hollowness between his lungs and ribs from aching. He thinks about blaming the curdling weight in his stomach on the thought of a ruined cigar—soaked tobacco won't draw as good as dry—but he knows himself better than that. 

It's the suddenness of your query, maybe, but a part of him had been waiting for this very question from the onset of—this. You, him. Together. It seems to be one of those things that just comes up, doesn't it? An unavoidable collision into abject disappointment. 

In all his past flings—calling any of them relationships feels juvenile for what it was: quick, ephemeral pleasure in a foreign land, always lasting just long enough to patch up his boat; he won't disrespect the partners he had by giving it more potency than it deserved—this had been the epoch. The moment when they realised he was never really in it. That his foot was already slipping over the ledge of his boat, head full of the places he'd go next. Always alone. Without company. 

Some take it in stride. They know not to expect much in terms of commitment, or loyalty, from a man who reeks of the sea, and wobbles on land. They don't begrudge him the briefness of the affair, or the lack of a promise to write, or call, or see them again, some other time. When you pass through here next… always seems to be the sentiment at the cronis. The end of them. It never goes anywhere, but it's never finished, either—because it never really began, did it?

He rarely goes to the same place twice unless he needs to (Barbadian whisky, Cuban cigars, fish and chips in Liverpool for the holidays notwithstanding). 

And despite how many times he's been asked this very same question, usually with less clothes on, he never really has an answer. Not one that's enough. 

"Where else would I be?" He muses instead, blinking up at the indigo sky. It's an unforgiving nothingness up there, too, isn't it? "Workin' some job in an office? Military? Nah, would bore me too much. M'better off at sea."

"All alone?" You fill the gap he didn't realise he left empty. "Isn't that—"

He doesn't think he can bear to hear you say it—

"Yeah." 

—so he doesn't let you. 

His cigar tastes stale. Wet tobacco. Ashes. He draws in a deep hit on the next inhale but it curdles in his mouth, leaks poison into his bloodstream. He feels dizzy with it. Offkilter. 

When he invited you to see his ship, half of it was—admittedly—a euphemism. A thinly veiled come on. A facsimile of romance. Who wouldn't, afterall, want to drift out to the open ocean, making love—or some sad version of it—under the stars on a clear night. 

He'd take you to the spot where land was swallowed wholly by the horizon, until all you could see was the midnight blue ocean pressing down on all sides. Gentle waves rocking the ship. The stars coruscating in the indigo sky like glittering diamonds held up to the light. The murky haze of Juniper in the distance. A splash from a whale breaching the surface. 

It would have been a nice evening. He'd have drinked whisky with you—smuggled out from his secret stash of the best kind you could find in the Caribbean—and taught you how to smoke a cigar. 

You'd have laid down beneath the stars, head swimming with the buzz of alcohol. John would have leaned over you, charting the open awe in your gaze as you stared up at the heavens. 

Maybe you would have tried to ask a question, or marvel at the wonders of the world that might have only ever been seen by you. The first person to take in this view in all of history. Considering the vastitude of the ocean, it would be a real possibility. The very first. He'd give that to you. The first, the last, the only. All yours. 

In return, he'd steal a kiss. Swallowing the question from your lips with a slow, sensual roll of his tongue grazing yours. All coy and soft. Saccharine. You'd taste of whisky. He'd drink you down in several mouthfuls, unable to get enough, until you were keening into the night, begging for more. More, John, more. 

It blankets his thoughts, and the regret he feels at the loss is potent. Fragments of a good night flash before him—your fingers curling around the quilt he laid out on the deck, digging those talons into the meat of his shoulder until it breaks skin: a permanent scar. A jagged, silver meteor across milky flesh; he'd catch a glimpse in the mirror and think of you. Whisper-soft kisses. Your body opening up for him, eager and needy, calling out in a siren's song for more. 

(Who is he to deny you when you beg so prettily?)

Instead it metastasises inside of him. Malignant and pestiferous. Leaks rot into his bloodstream until all he can taste is the petrified residuum of regret, bitter and acrid. 

Some selfish part wanted something nice for himself. A respite from the eventual end careening toward him at a speed he can't avoid. 

The ruined tatters of it simmers in the air. A noxious miasma that seems to shake something inside of you loose. Maybe you see it, too. The loss. The end. The eventuality of a bitter, and quick, conclusion. 

You're quiet even as realisation darkens across your brow. Flattens the awe in your eyes with the cold douse of water to a burning flame. Clumped ash piles around a damp campfire. 

The flames were not smothered slowly, gently, like they should have been, like he wanted them to. No. No. They were snuffed out in a quick end. Brutal and unforgivable. 

And you say: "oh." 

As if you get it, but you don't. You don't because you think about forever when you look at him. It's not your fault, though—never. Because he hasn't said a word about leaving even though it stuck to his teeth, tarry and vile. A resinous stain he chews everyday, blackening his teeth until they rot. 

But he's a coward. A fool. The taste of you is sweet enough to drown out the bitterness on his tongue, and maybe he's using your kindness a bit too much—no. No. Not maybe. Certainly. Definitely. He's using the cloying taste of you as a buffer to everything weeping from the cesspit inside of his chest. 

Then: "oh."

It's almost prophetic in a way. Cyclical in its heartache. 

He wants to apologise, but he isn't sure where to start. How does he say sorry for something of this magnitude? 

He doesn't. He can't.

John lets it necrotise instead. 

"Well," you say after a moment of silence. "When are you—?"

You don't finish. Can't, maybe, and he doesn't begrudge you the inability to utter that succinct finality. Not when he doesn't think he could, either. 

So, he says, "soon."

But you ask: "how soon?"

And he's reminded, quite vividly, of packing his things in the back of his nineteen ninety-five forest green Tata Estate when he was just shy of eighteen. His dad fuming on the porch. 

You're nothing without me, he'd spat. 

He was right, of course. Despite everything he tried, the only place that ever gave him a chance was the military solely for the thinly concealed awe that leaked in whenever he uttered his last name. 

But there was freedom in leaving. In skirting around the army for a place in the Royal British Navy—separate from the shadow of his father, his grandfather, but still riding on their coattails. John quickly found sanctuary at sea. At the unignorable distance put between himself and all the terrible memories in Hereford. 

In the middle of the ocean, that bastard's shadow couldn't reach him. 

And now—

Nothing does. 

How soon, you ask, but the real question should be: how dare you. 

"Mm, a day, maybe—if the weather holds." 

And it will. He's checked the forecast meticulously. Radioed in and asked about that pesky hurricane that seemed to fizzle out without much fanfare afterall. All the answers he got were the same. Perfect window, they say, is between dawn and mid-morning. There's gonna be some heavy winds on the coast, but if you set sail early enough, you'll miss it entirely. 

"Ah," you murmur, and there's just the faintest echo of your realisation at uncovering yet another one of his half-truths. You know he'll be gone the moment he drops you off on the harbour. "Okay."

John doesn't mean to put all of this on you so quickly. Everything just spiralled, spun, until it was a big, tangled mess beneath his feet. Time a mere whisper in the wind. His absence is a glaring black hole that you can't avoid. 

It's all pithy excuses that do little to assuage the weight of everything he'd done, but you take it right on the chin like he knew you would. A sharp nod. The barest hint of a frown. 

That is the only thing you can do, isn't it? Swallow it whole and try not to choke on it because no promises have ever been uttered between him or you. Nothing to substantiate this growing, cancerous lump of emotions that feel too fast and too slow, and too—

Dangerous. Perfect.

In his silence, a crater forms again, and he's reminded how much he prefers the sea to people; gyres to love. The brittle embrace of his cabin to the warm arms of a lover. 

He was made for the ocean. Meant to sink into algae blooms, and discover reefs untouched. To battle waves bigger, more meaningful than himself, and find sustenance on crated bartletts and scored tuna. 

But—

But. 

His hands curl around your waist, pulling you back into the broad expanse of his sun warmed chest. The heat of him liquifies your spine, and you melt, readily, into him with what might be a sigh. 

It's all so quick, isn't it? And yet, he can think of nothing else except the almost perfect torture of waking up beside you each morning. Of suffusing his atoms to yours. 

"Come with me," he murmurs into your hairline, breathing in the scent of you. Loam. Pine resin. Soft and earthy. And that's what you are, aren't you? Made for the land. The earth. Gaia. Terra. Can he really take you from this place and expect you to live like him on the sea? 

You don't answer. He feels the disappointment like a searing knife to his gut, but he understands. Gets it. This isn't the sort of proposal a sane person would make to someone they've known for only a few, short months. 

He wonders if you think he's only saying it to get into your pants. He probably isn't the first—and definitely wouldn't be the last—to make a litany of false promises just to taste you on his tongue, but he means it. Means it with every fibre of his body. Captain is roomy. Has always been too big for one person—too lonely. But it's a heavy question. A big ask. One that he selfishly presses into your hands as he litters your neck with kisses sharpened with the edge of his teeth. Leaving his mark on your skin. A semi-permanent stain only he knows is there. 

It's easy to pretend this won't be the last time when he lays you out on the sheets, fingers digging into your skin as if he was trying to crawl inside of you—and maybe he is. Maybe he wants to. Maybe he could stay suffused to your ribcage for the rest of his life, waking up and falling asleep to the sound of your beating heart, and die a happy man. For once in his life, something that belongs to him that isn't shadowed by ghosts or regret. 

(Something he will never, could never, deserve.)

There's something heart achingly desperate about the way he clings to you. Folds himself over you, murmuring promises and pleas into the bruised skin of your neck. Soft murmurations easily swallowed by the sounds you make as he ruts into you at a maddening pace. All clumsy and unrefined because he refuses to let go of you. Refuses to unglue his skin from yours, his teeth from your neck. 

He's never had it like this—drenched in sweat, pinned in place over top of you like a weighted blanket; sloppy, messy—but he feels the curl of addiction setting in when he feels the hiccups you make when he pushes in just so. When your flesh dents under the tips of his fingers, and he feels your bones in his grip. Each moan, every tremble and quiver somehow magnified in the small cabin that's much too big for one person. 

John wants to take you to this reef he stumbled onto off the Azores. Wants to walk on the sandy atoll, and fuck you under the stars. The first—and only—people on earth to feel the white sand under their skin, to whisper into the inky black of night. 

You'd like it there, he thinks. This lonely, isolated patch of land just barely rising out above the ocean. Filled to the brim with tropical fish, and hammerheads. Sea turtles. Orcas chasing seals in the distance. 

He presses his lips to your hairline, and breathes life into this little picture of you on the shore, whispering promises wrapped in desperation, devotion, into your skin. 

"John," you gasp, and he's not sure if it's a reprimand—please, please, please shut up, stop talking about that because you know I can't, I can't—or a plea—take me, bring me there, please—but he doesn't stop. Can't. He's too invested in this picturesque fantasy, the same one he dreamed about when he fucked his fist to the thought of you. "John, please—"

His veins are filled with blood-red wine. A sudden potent cocktail that makes him dizzy. Drunk on the wisps of ethanol that burrow deeper into his body until it floods his atrium. 

John wants to lean into it. Relish in the white-hot heat of it all. Wants to drag you down into the sand, into the unending sea, and stay there forever, just at the cusp of where land meets water. Your own kingdom in the domain of Poseidon. Children of Phorcys. Pontus. 

You grip him tight, and he thinks like this he could pretend it's not the last time. That when your body shudders beneath him, it's not out of sorrow or finality. 

"John," you say, but he can't bear it. He kisses you instead. Drows in the taste of you until his head spins. Spins, spins—

He wakes up in a tangle of limbs. Your arm strewn across his broad chest, anchoring him to the bed below. Your head nestled in the crux of his armpit, nose pressed tight to the swell of his ribcage. Mouth open, he notes, drooling into wry curls that blanket his torso in swaths of dark umber. 

With you very much cocooned to his side, thigh trapping his pelvis down, he feels the sharp sting of claustrophobia raking talons over the bone encasing his eyes. He's buried under you—your body the soft swell of tumulus—and for a moment he nearly forgets himself. Nearly bolts from the bed, your arms. The room. Running, running—it reminds him too much of being a captive. Tied down. Restrained. Unable to move of his own free will—

But you mumble something in your sleep, the words lost to the blood rushing in his ears, and he finds the pieces of himself he'd lost. Lulled, almost to the point of complacency, by your breaths ghosting across the thick, coarse hair on his chest. Rhythmic. Calming. 

He leans into it. Buries himself deeper. 

You smell of sweat, sex. Fennel. He burrows his nose into your crown, breathes in the scent of you until his lungs burn. He wants them to scar over with just the thick scent of you. To leave a mark so deep, so permanent, that each time he inhales, all he can taste in the back of his throat is the lingering residuum of you. 

There's this earthiness to you that feels like digging his feet into sand, and he wants to slink deeper into the embrace, into you, but there's a lingering forethought in his head that he ought to get up. That this moment of brief comfort will come at a cost, with its teeth bared and wrapped around his bones, and it's a price he can't afford to pay. 

There's an almost cognitive dissonance between what his body wants, and what he needs to do. 

It takes most of his willpower to divorce himself from your clutch, but he does. Slowly. Reluctantly. With his fingers leadened with torpor. 

Regret is the feeling of cold wood under his feet. His arms relieved from the weight of you. Fix it, something inside his chest screams, but he can't. Can't. 

He doesn't look back when he leaves the small bedroom that smells of you. Not that it matters. 

In the separation, he finds he cut a little too much off from himself, leaving more of himself with you than he intended. 

John doesn't expect much. Hasn't, really, since he set sail with his compass pointed away from home, and threw each sorrowful piece of himself into the reefs he encountered along the way. 

It's the same when he gathers everything together in the morning, running through a mental checklist of what needs to be done before he sets off into the mid-Atlantic, hopeful to reach Bermuda within four, maybe five days. From there, it would be nearly fifteen days before he reached the Azores, some nine thousand and twenty nautical miles between the destinations. 

He expects the winds this time of year to be between zero to twenty three knots. Waves, at most, around four to nine metres. He can keep up with it all, he's sure, but he's feeling less inclined to make the trip solo, and thinks, as he trawls back to shore with you sleeping in the cabin still, if he might pick up a small crew in Carolina before setting off. Or maybe he'll take solitude until he heads into the Azores. He isn't sure. The only thing he is certain of is that, for the first time in years, he doesn't want to be alone at sea. 

An oddity, of course. John always wants to be alone. 

(Until you—)

The notion is tucked away into the space inside his head where all the things he doesn't want to think about go to moulder. To rot. The idea that he's more gangrenous parts than man sits idly behind his teeth, a fleeting whim, but that, too, is shoved aside. Buried. 

—like the weight of you on him. His own personal grave, a tumulus—

Another limb severed at artery. Left to bleed. To rot. He considers leaving it out, making it hurt. Salt to the wound he has no intention of healing. 

He cauterises it instead, and uses the flame to spark up his last cigar for the occasion. 

(There's nothing worth celebrating, but he thinks he's due a belated birthday gift to himself.)

The brackish waters in the inlet are muddied with loess, and he considers taking the longer arc into the harbour to avoid the sudden swelling of waves lapping at the sides of his vessel. Pure pride, of course. He's not a captain of a dirty ship—an oxymoron at best and a idling thought that takes the shape of stalling for time—but he trudges forward in spite of the twitch in his knuckles, the urge to notch his wheel just everso slightly to the right. 

It passes, and Newfoundland curves out of the waters in a splotch of green against dour grey. Another overcast morning. The inlet, he'd heard on the radio, is dense with fog trickling down from the rolling hills in the background of this rugged landscape. 

Fog on the ocean isn't rare. With a simple flip of a switch, he changes his visualisation from naked sight to sonar, and leans back on the balls of his feet, blinking restlessly into the thick plumes of smokey-white. 

The cabin door rattles when you open it—the only indicator that you're awake—and the sound sits heavy across his shoulders. A noise he thinks he could get used to hearing. 

"Give'er a shake," he calls, voice ashen, thick from sleep. He hasn't spoken a word since he radioed in to let them know he was moving down the channel. That was nearly two hours ago. 

You appear in his periphery, wrapped up in a shawl he keeps at the end of the bed. One he thinks he picked up when he was working on a shipping vessel in Pacific, just after he'd split from the navy, and was docked for a week in Taiwan because of bad weather. 

It looks good on you. The colours accentuate your features in a way that makes it difficult to focus on the black screen of the sonar, but you make it easier for him when you pad closer to where he stands, yawning around a good morning as you fic yourself to his side, reaching for him. 

You curl against him as he steers into the estuary, one arm tucked around the small of his back, and the other above his groin in a sideways hug. A small shiver wracks through your frame when the chill from the frigid waters sneaks in through the open companionway of the helm, and you burrow deeper into his side, nose nuzzling against his bicep to keep warm. The weight of you is comforting. Steady. 

It's a clumsy dance to free his arm, but he does it somehow without dislodging you in the process, and lifts his arm, steering with one hand through the maw of the Labrador Strait, before he quickly loops it around your neck, keeping you tight to his side. You fall into him in a hurry—maybe from desperation to keep the bitter cold at bay or for some strained, final moments of closeness before he leaves the docks, and you. 

The silence is heavy. A potent cocktail of shaky uncertainty admixing with all the regret he feels for not acting on his impulsive feelings sooner. It sits low, thick, in his guts, and vacillates between mocking him for what could have been weeks of satiating himself on the fill of you, and taunting him for starting this in the first place. 

Especially when he knew exactly how it was always meant to end. 

And in a rather vicious moment of cruelty, that particular ending bobs up from the brackish waters with its stark brown oak pillars cutting through the dense fog. He doesn't need sonar to see the pier in the distance. Three clicks to the west. 

His throat pinches tight at the sight of it—rather irritatingly unassuming in its lacklustre beginnings, but a garish knife to chest all the same. It constricts. He tries to swallow but can't get the weight around his neck to receed. 

He takes his hand off the wheel, scratching at the raw skin along the column of his neck. 

His jostling seems to wake you from your sleepy stare out the window. You clear your throat. He tenses. Guts wringings themselves into a frenzied coil. Don't, he wants to say. Don't speak. Don't say anything—

"Listen, Price," you start clumsily, cautiously. And despite knowing where this is going—some apology for why you can't go with him, for why you're saying no—he makes a noise to dissuade you from continuing. He gets it. He does. It's a big ask to have someone give up several months of their life to traverse the open ocean with a stranger. 

"I know. S'alright, love. I'll—" the words are bitten through when he realises where they're headed. The offer to call. Or write. Things he knows he won't ever get around to doing, but the loose attempt to placate is better than hearing whatever you might say. A selfish need to keep the silence. 

"No, listen," you stress with a huff. He hears the eye roll in your tone, and fights back a scoff at the image. "You're stubborn, you know?"

It's nothing he's never heard before but it still makes him laugh—some broken, ugly thing in the base of his throat. Clawing up his oesophagus. 

After a moment of silence, you nuzzle your cheek against his peck, pressing a soft kiss to the edge of his heart. 

"I'm not a sailor, and this is probably the craziest thing I've ever done in my whole life, but—" his heart leaps, banging against the cage of his ribs, still scarred with your name. 

"—love—"

"—I don't want to just write you. Or—or wait for a phone call. I don't want to—" 

He hears the click in your throat when you swallow. Feels the herringbone floor open up beneath his feet, plunging his aching heart into the empty maw of his stomach. Still. Through the blooming sense of hope tangling vines around his falling heart, he reaches for the water bottle on the console, wordlessly passing it to you to drink. 

You sniff, and it's an ugly, wet noise that sends a shudder through his being. A sound he could hear, happily, for the rest of his life. 

(Sappy, tragic fool—)

"How long do I have to pack?"

If he'd been a lesser man—or maybe a better one; a good one—he would have crumbled. But he's too grizzled to take his eyes off the shoreline, and maybe—just maybe—too fucking scared to. He doesn't want to look down and find this whole thing has been some horrific joke. Doesn't want to see the derision in your eyes as you ask him why you'd ever pick him, a stranger, over the sanctuary of land. Your home, even. 

But he doesn't doubt you. 

It's an odd juxtaposition, John finds, but he's always been the sort to work in strings of abstract hypocrisy, hadn't he? Implicit trust in the men around him, but not enough to ever let go of the urge so just do everything on his own. To shoulder the burdens a man like him was seemingly built to carry. 

(And made to crack under the weight of them; a thousand fissures that were small enough to go unnoticed—until Gaz grabbed him by the lapels, shoving him against an iron door just to keep him from throwing an innocent man to his death for no other reason than his notched sense of safety—but big enough to leak a caustic ugliness into the word that threatened make the men around him bonesick.)

But he isn't thinking about that right now. Or, rather, he shouldn't be—

Because he believes you. He just believes in himself less. 

So, he has to ask. Has to. "Are you sure? Hard to change your mind when you're in the middle of the bloody ocean, love." 

The exasperated huff let out into his bicep seems to be the only answer he'll get from you on that particular topic, but it's not enough. Despite the miffed squeeze you give when he pulls his arm back, resting his hand against your cheek to pull your face back far enough to peer into your eyes, you go along with his demands, soft as they are. Maybe the way his thumb brushes along the curve of your cheekbone quells the stubbornness that brims at having your choice picked apart until it was nothing but bones. All just to satisfy his own internal dilemma. 

Or a mockery of one, anyway. 

"You gotta be sure," he says, and winces when it comes out rougher than he intended. "This is a big leap. It isn't go to fuckin' Tesco's on a Sunday—"

"First of all," you mumble, eyes narrowing up at him. "We don't even have Tesco's in Canada so that comparison is useless to me. Second of all—" and suddenly, all of that bravado falters. Shakes. You glance away from him—in askance, maybe, at your stutter, at his inability to take something someone tells him at face value. 

"Love—"

There's a fire in your eyes when you turn back to him. A defiant tilt to your chin when it lifts. Sure, and firm, and a little bit proud—drenched in the same shade of stubbornness as himself—and the sight is an electrical shock to his system. A jolt to his chest. One that hangs, heavy, around the nape of his neck, the drape of his shoulders. 

"I'm sure," is all you say. 

And it's enough. Inexplicably, overwhelmingly—enough. 

"Now, how long until we set off? I just need to get some stuff in order before we leave, but I can hurry it as much as—"

It goes against every rule in the book to take his eyes off the horizon and his hands off the wheel, especially this close to shore, but he needs—he needs to touch you. To know. To feel the commitment under your skin like an electric hum. 

"However long you need, love, fuck—" his lips are on yours, stifling the rest of what he meant to say in the taste of you. "Whatever you want, whatever you need—" he makes promises he might not be able to keep, but he thinks if he could, he'd steal the stars and the moon, and let you wear them like pretty gems. 

It'll never come to fruition because all he can really give you is a boat and a broken man who is only good at sailing the seas to escape everything that might get too close. None of it seems to matter. Not to you. Never to you. Every wall he's thrown up has been meticulously chipped down, and this, he finds, is no different. 

You lean into him, heedless of the war in his mind, and breathe in deep. Inhaling the scent of stale tobacco, sex, and sour sweat. There's something facetious about the way you hum into the kiss, nails scratching along his crown, as if you're not committing nearly a year of your life to a man you watched crumble at the altar of your feet just for a sip of you. 

"I've always wanted to go to Spain."

He groans a little into the kiss. Can't help the noises that spill out when you start mapping whimsical plans into something concrete. Something tangible. 

(Permanent, if you'll let him.)

"We'll go. Spain, Portugal, Liverpool, Italy, Cuba, Jamaica, Fiji—" he names each place between a searing kiss and keeps one eye open, listed toward the horizon. He says it all in a hush, caught on the tendrils of desperation. Urgency. There's a quiver in his voice. Blood in his throat. "I'll take you anywhere you want to go. Just name it, love."

And you just smile like you know he will. That those words, caked in some amalgamation of earnestness and madness, are a promise. An oath. 

"Anywhere," he swears again, brassbound in certainty, tangled in seagrass. 

Your name scars the brackets of his breastbone. Notched into marrow. He feels it heavy in his ribs when he pulls you closer, wanting nothing more than to sink into you until your veins are filled with him. 

Anywhere, he thinks, hushed in its reverence as the levee keeping everything he let rot cracks in your hands. Always. 

YOU—

There's a certain dreariness that comes from living by the ocean, one that's often difficult to put into words or explain to someone who hasn't spent their entire youth being told, never turn your back on it. Never trust it. 

(It, of course, because somewhere along the line, the sea stops being a place, a thing, an artefact, and becomes an entity all on its own. A living, breathing manifestation with its primordial history, its own mythology, all so distinct from anything someone on land could ever dream up.)

Because despite what you might wish, the sea will never be your friend. It's incapable of distinguishing the difference between affection and malice, and shows its love by dragging you to the darkest depths imaginable until your lungs fill with its briny breath and your drops to the floor, a human-sized whalefall. 

The ocean loves you in the worst way. 

It wants to make a tomb of you. A graveyard of algae covered bones. Bloated and unrecognisable. Picked apart until nothing remains but the ghost of you treading its pool. 

In spite of this, the ocean doesn't scare you as much as it should. It's a constant in your life. Permanent. Careless guard your iron shackles. 

(And maybe it's a little bit deeper than that because you never really understood the difference between obsession, devotion, and fear when they all make you feel the same.)

And being so far out from the rest of the people who live along the very same coast—well. That, too, is hard to simplify. 

Life by an unpopular harbour isn't as busy as someone might assume. With its deadened boardwalks, gimmicky shops, and lack of personality to draw a crowd or any would-be tourists, it stagnantes. The place begins to look like a tchotchke. A painting on a faded, sunbleached postcard rather than a cohesive ecosystem. The cogs are rusted and broken, and the delineation between them and the people begins to blur. 

And maybe that's because time feels slower in this liminal space perched between the sea and the swell of a bucolic dreamland, as if it's drenched in molasses. Bound with a ball and chain. Boring simplicity, perhaps. 

Sloughing along is the most apt descriptor you think of to describe how your tarry-thick time is spent. 

Work life balance loses its meaning when you feel the same at home as you do behind a counter. Listless. Lacklustre. It's hard to find inspiration when you've been to every nook and cranny in the valley. When all secrets have been exposed thrice over, and gossip is as stale as the bread Lucy always brings to the potluck each year.

It's fine, of course. 

Work. Home. Work. Sometimes, you'll drive down to Halifax. Maybe stop at Shoppers Drug Mart and squint at the overpriced brands on the too-white walls. But something brand name at Marshalls for more than you can afford to placate that gnawing sense of unease that comes with realising your life can be summed up in three paragraphs or less. 

Age does that, you find. Because when you're stuck in a place that never changes, when the ghost of your childhood runs along the same trails you take as an adult and feels more bitter than nostalgic, growing older starts to feel like a taunt. A jeer. 

Burdened by the encompassing emptiness of time. 

Somewhere along the line—or maybe from the very beginning—you start to stagnante, too. The overwhelming, unignorable feeling of growth weighing you down forms; barnacles clinging to your skin, softening your flesh as they burrow deep, deep, until striking bone. 

You're fine, you think.

Until him. 

Until a man shows up, hiding kindness behind a surly disposition, and offers you nothing but gruff company. Terrible jokes. Cloying sweetness drenched in nicotine and dusted in ash. 

John Price makes you consider your love of the ocean in a new, tangible way. 

There have been others, of course. People before John who have offered to pull you away from this anaemic corner of the world, making promises of taking you somewhere else. Or ones who offered to stay. To join you in this dreary town. An accumulation of hydrozoan floating aimlessly down this solitary stretch of ocean. 

They've all come and gone, and your answer has remained unchanged. Fixed. No. And if you're being kind—no, thank you. 

Because, really—

When you can't tell the difference between fear and devotion, how are you supposed to know if the ocean fills you with reverence or dread?

So, you stay.  

This place might be drenched in tar, forgotten by the masses in favour of the bigger, prettier cities that share the same oceanic view, but it's home. And your roots run deep (but your shackles are even deeper). 

It's odd, too, isn't it? That home feels less like a sanctuary and more like an obligation. A pact you have to keep. So, you do. And maybe you resent this place a little bit each year, but it's easy to forget all about that when John fits inside the spaces of your ribs that you didn't know were empty to begin with. 

It's good. Good—

—but this is better:

You wake up to the sound of the naked ocean, unencumbered by the shore. It's quieter than you expected it to be, but you suppose without land to get in its way, there's little reason to roar. 

The change in noise—and sometimes, the absolute absence of any at all—is the biggest shift you have to adjust to, but four days into your journey traversing the untamable Atlantic, the sea teaches you things you didn't know about yourself. That maybe there's a certain sort of madness that comes from being so far away from anything remotely resembling land. And a lethargy that's hard to tie down into something concrete. An abstract sense of disillusion, maybe. Bone-deep torpor. 

Something, too, that feels a bit like an atavistic fear of the yawning abyss that never seems to end. It's one thing to stand on land, solid ground, and admire it from afar, or to hug the coast on a cruise ship. Seeing it like this, in all its pelagic glory, is somehow sickening in its terrifying splendour and incredible enough to snake existential dread along the curve of your fragile insides. 

There's awe, as well, but in more muted shades of tyrrhenian. 

Still. You take to the barren sea like a once captive orca who forgot what freedom tastes like beneath its curled dorsal fin. It's exhilarating. And in equal measures, a true shove against your mettle. Your resolve. There's no help so far out to sea. No one to depend on but yourself and this enigmatic man who brushes his lips across your forehead when he thinks you're asleep, and then snarls at the ocean in the morning about not having any cigars as if he knows nothing at all about tenderness. 

It's a comfort you cling to. Embrace until your fingers ache. 

John mutters something under his breath about needing sleep. Whisky. A cigar. A good fuck in a better goddamn bed—and in no particular order, he gripes when you poke his back with your index finger. 

"Thank fuck," he rasps around a cigarette—a shitty fuckin' imitation—and pinches your side when he draws you close. Payback for the jab but it just makes you giggle. "Bermuda is only nine hours away."

"Nine hours," you breathe, surprised. Nine hours. It feels inconsequential. Brief. And maybe that's because time feels different out here. Inconsequential outside of where the sun sat. The only thing that matters about it is its position, and your internal clock begins to shift, turning into a sundial. To hear a length of time outside of morning, midday, noon, afternoon, evening, and night is strange. 

John's gaze flickers over to you hiding something that feels a bit like an appraisal as those burning sapphires run over the length of your expression, catching every twitch. 

His chest rumbles under your hand after a moment. "Excited for land, then?" 

Land. You consider it—his question, and, of course, the weight of it. The way it feels. Tastes. 

It's only been a sliver into your journey, barely anything at all in comparison to the kilometres left to go, but the sea feels as comforting as it does terrifying. The darker patches of blue signifying a depth so unfathomable that you feel breathless thinking about it. About the unquantifiable pressure, some metric tonnes of atmosphere pressing down on those pretty pools of navy. 

In comparison, Captain feels fragile. Delicate. Brittle bones of wood and plastic and foam contending with the vastitude of the sea that sprawls out in every direction. On a map right now, you'd be invisible. The tip of a pen would be too wide to accurately pinpoint your exact location. That massive gap, bigger than the whole of your country, sometimes gives you nightmares. And some nights, the boat lists as it bobs with the rolling waves that never end, dipping down much too low for your mind to ever feel comfortable with. 

The terror is almost equally as present as the awe. Both one-in-the same, almost. And it reminds you of your love for the sea. Where the lines between fear and devotion blur. It doesn't surprise you, then, that some mornings you wake up with something that curls around your head, and feels like divine euphoria, and others—

You can't stop thinking about every shipwreck movie you'd ever seen, especially when you know you'd passed over the same channel the Titanic sank in, that your bare feet stood right over top of a graveyard at a depth that hurts your head a little bit to even think about. 

But—

Land. 

John said you'd be missing it in due time the first hour into your trip, when you were still buzzing with the adrenaline of cacoëthes and watched the shoreline get swallowed whole by blue. 

In fact, he'd expected it. Seemed to keep himself at a measurable distance, as if waiting for you to turn to him and command that he bring you back home. 

A silly thought, in hindsight. 

You're shackled to the sea just as much as you are to him—maybe with a bit more willingness added in. The sea feels like home in spite of the endless dreams of capsizing in the frigid waters. 

And really. 

You can't imagine being anywhere else but here. With him. 

"I'm excited to see Bermuda," you confess, nuzzling your cheek into the warm Sherpa of his jacket. "But more so because I've never been anywhere outside of my own Country. But I like this better. I like being on Captain with you. It's—"

There's a weight in your chest. One that's almost equally composited into the ashen blue of his eyes when they flicker to you, clinging to each word. Each sentiment that spills from your sun chapped lips. 

"It's home, y'know?"

John goes quiet for a moment. Far quieter than you ever expected a man like him to be capable of—someone who got road rage out in the middle of an empty sea, and screamed himself hoarse whenever he had to talk to the absolute fuckin' muppets of the coast guard or passing ships your eyes weren't good enough to see through Fata Morgana—and it almost humbles you in a strange way. Makes you consider the stunning realisation that you've only chipped the surface of his rough, wonderful, insufferable man. In that, a keen sense of wonder brims, bringing with it an insatiable curiosity. You want to strip him down to nothing but bones, and crack them open like the claws of Snow Crab, sipping from the nectar that is his marrow. His essence. You want to map him out in greater depths than you ever dream of doing to the sea. 

His fingers spasm on your hip in a strange clench and release rhythm that makes you wonder if he's holding himself back for some reason you can't ascertain, but eventually, he breaks. His hand tightens, and pulls you closer to him. You feel his nose press against your hairline. Hear the sharp inhale as he breathes you in until his chest expands under your hand. Wide and broad, and filled with the scent of you. 

"Yeah," he rasps, humid breath fluttering across your skin. "It is. For however long you want it—"

"Forever." You catch smouldering blue just before it's eclipsed by endless black. "If you'll let me."

"Fuckin'—Christ—" 

With his words mangled in his throat, they sound more like an animalistic snarl than anything that resembles something human. The force of it seems to rattle through your flesh, dredging against bone like an anchor on the muddy sea floor until it catches. 

"Forever it is, then." It's a promise. An oath. And maybe a little bit of a threat, too, in the way only John can make something so romantic sound so gruff, and when he speaks again, you smell cinder and taste the ash in the back of his throat. Sealed in charcoal and salt. 

"I guess you're stuck with me, then," you tease, smiling when he huffs in a facsimile of exasperation, but you catch the softening in the corners of his eyes, and the low purr of happiness that rumbles out from his broad chest. 

"Can think of worse places to be."

"Like London?" You quip, echoing his words, and there's something heavy in his eyes, something that blankets around the unease that never really goes away even as you acclimate to the sensation of being landless. Adrift. It's something deeper than devotion. A black hole you could fall into.

"Yeah, exactly." He murmurs. You taste salt on his tongue when he kisses you, and wonder how you could ever dream of being anywhere else that wasn't with him.

Home, you find, is where his heart beats next to yours.

#im so ready for bed after this #john price x reader #sailor price #kinda #like um ig hes retired #ish #captain john price x reader #price x reader #i set out to make this as unapolgetically maritimes as possible and failed #we have one (1) Newfie u can't understand and NO ONE at any point offers to go on a Timmies run for ice caps and double doubles #blasphemous #also ur from Nova Scotia (NOT HRM) but that really doesn't matter much tbh i just wanted the “this is supposed to be Lunenburg Lite” vibes #aka Chéticamp #but much more depressing

[nerdytyrantphantom]

morning sex with joel | drabble (18+)

a sequel to cockwarming with joel. 18+ MINORS DNI

your body had memorized what time your alarm would sound. and so like clockwork, you’d awaken an hour early, the morning sunlight streaming through the curtains and illuminating the pixie dust that floated in the air. 

you’d wake up the same way you’d fallen asleep: on your side, with joel’s arms wrapped around you, the soft rise and fall of his chest undulating against your back, and his light sighs ghosting the crook of your neck. apart, neither of you slept, both tossing and turning throughout the night. but together, you two slept like rocks, encased in a blanket of safety and security knowing the other was there. if you had your way, you’d stay like this forever, fossilizing the moment in warm liquid amber. 

when you woke up, you genuinely tried your best not to wake joel. you’d only stroke the toned arm that held you, tracing the scars etched into his skin, counting each freckle that sprinkled the surface. but the longer that time passed, the more you found yourself stirring just a bit, involuntarily grinding your hips against him as your core grew wet with want.

right on cue, you’d feel joel rouse awake and exhale a deep yawn. with a lazy squeeze of your breast, like he was trying to make sure you were right where you left him, nothing had changed – and of course it hadn’t – joel would hum with content and nuzzle his face further into your neck. 

words weren’t needed. his hand would crawl up your chest towards the column of your neck, where his strong fingers would firmly grip. it wasn’t an aggressive or dominating move – rather a way for him to hold you in place as he guided his growing erection between your cheeks.

you’d smirk into the pillow as he gently bucked his hips, using your butt to warm himself up. your stomach somersaulted at the feeling of his cock hardening with each shallow thrust, the tip of him threatening to leak over your supple cheeks. “good morning, baby,” you’d purr, crossing your arms over his, refusing him from letting go of the hold he had on you. you’d arch your back into his touch, rolling your head back over his shoulder in surrender.

after his sleep, joel was full of energy. like a bear awakening from hibernation ready for its first meal, he would become full of carnal pangs, hungry and unsatiated – an appetite that needed to be fed. he’d testingly sink his teeth into your neck, softening his bite the second it became too sharp, and then tenderly lick the flesh that blossomed with a bruise, like he were delicately placing a band-aid. 

while his left hand remained wrapped around your shoulders, holding your neck in place, his right hand would slide between your thighs with lazy curiosity. his fingertips would glide up your lips, spooning up the wetness oozing from your core, before plunging his lubricated index finger into your heat. carefully, he’d massage your pussy, feeling your body buzz and clench around his digit. with a hum of satisfaction, his finger becoming soaked in your juices, he’d slip his middle finger in after it. 

for what felt like eternity most days, joel would do that. just hold your body flushed against him while he explored your insides, maintaining a leisurely pace finger-fucking you raw until droplets of perspiration collected on your forehead and pasted your hair to your face.

when you needed more, you’d tug his hand up to your lips, sucking his thumb into your mouth. “joel,” you’d whine, voice muffled by his finger. he’d continue to let you suck, pacifying your hushed pleas, while his fingers would teasingly move towards your clit. coated in your own juices, he’d wetten the small bundle of nerves with your own slick, drawing lazy circles over it until it was swelling like a flower in bloom. you’d cry out around his thumb, eyes prickling with tears at the pleasure. 

finally, he would speak. “come on, baby,” he’d encourage in a hushed whisper, nosing against your cheek. he’d kiss away the tears of ecstasy that streamed down your face. “tell me what you need, sweet girl.” 

eyes rolling into the back of your head, you’d release his thumb with a pop. “n-need you,” you’d whimper, mouth dry, as the blood rushed to your face. you got drunk off of joel – the sensation of his rough, calloused fingers toying with you like a plaything, the heat of his body radiating onto yours, the prodding of his cock still teasingly rubbing against your ass. “please, joel.”

he’d lower his hand from your lips and caress your jaw, delicately holding you like you were made of glass as he turned your face towards his. “shhh,” he’d coo, lips planting kisses all along your forehead, your cheeks, where your chin met your jaw. “‘gonna get you there, baby,” he’d promise, finally releasing his fingers from your clit and placing his hand on the inside of your thigh.

gently, he’d raise your leg before lining his cock with your entrance. at night, you were accustomed to him slowly working his way in, carefully easing himself inside with no rush or agenda. but now, when your pussy was dripping and begging to be filled, there was no need for patience. with one strong thrust, he’d push himself in until the thatch of hair above his cock pressed against your back.

you’d release a sharp cry followed by a sigh of relief. unable to restrain yourself, you’d shove back your hips, desperate for friction. “fuck,” you’d seethe, your hand reaching over your head to cling to joel’s hair. as your fingers threaded through his thick locks, you’d tug, a silent way of begging him for more.

joel knew what you needed and how to give it to you. he knew how to strike the perfect balance between gentle and rough, how hard he could push himself inside of you, and how to make you melt under a soft bouquet of kisses. and he knew when you were ready for him to guide you onto your stomach, making you parallel with the mattress, so that he could position himself as deep and close to you as possible.

flat on your stomach, you’d raise your hips for joel. what you two shared was a gift of reciprocity; you promised to give joel everything he wanted to take, and joel promised to deliver everything he had. with his arms caged around you, the comforting weight of his body pressed against your back, the wet squelch of joel stuffing you full was the only sound filling the air.

“fuck, baby,” joel would groan, his southern drawl and sleep-laced voice rocking further waves of arousal throughout your body. he’d lift himself up momentarily, watching the way his cock disappeared inside of you, while his palms would trace the contours of your back and shoulders. then he’d fall back down, burrowing his face back into your ear.

this was your favorite joel miller – the one who let you help him come undone and completely let go, living in the moment and allowing his body to be raptured in pleasure, unafraid to speak his mind. you’d listen to the unfiltered hymns spill from his mouth, savoring each word and phrase. “god,” he’d whimper, his body growing weak with pleasure. with his lips against your ear, his voice would travel throughout your body, straight to your heat, further clenching around him. 

as his own sweat dripped onto you, both of your faces framed in wet strands of hair that clung to your skin, he’d continue. “your pussy takes me so well,” he’d murmur, the speed of his words quickening as he neared his climax. “so warm and so wet.” he’d grunt as his hips pounded against you more sloppily, the wet smack of his thighs echoing in the sun-soaked room. “it’s all for me, isn’t it?” he’d ask – a rhetorical question – but one that drove him to the edge when you answered it. 

“yes, baby,” you’d plead, squeezing your pillow as joel hammered into you. the feeling of his body blanketing you was perfect, and despite the heat, you never wanted him to leave. “it’s all yours, joel,” you promised, grinding your hips up to meet his, close to your own orgasm. “always will be.”

a low groan fell from joel’s lips. he bucked his hips into you one, two, three times, before he was collapsing on top of you, your own shock of pleasure radiating throughout your body. as joel caught his breath, still buried against your ear, you closed your eyes and basked in the warmth of his cum filling you up and seeping from between your legs. you savored the moment for as long as it lasted, grateful to be joel miller’s escape.

“god, baby,” he’d pant, his sweat-soaked body still pressing against yours. “you’re so fucking perfect.” then he’d roll off of you, making you chest-to-chest, and pull you against him. with utmost tenderness, he’d swipe your hair out of your face, eyes taking in your tear-stricken ones, your rosy cheeks, swollen lips. 

his mouth would crack into a crooked smile as his fingers tucked your hair behind your ears. “you know that?” he’d ask, pecking the corner of your lips. resting his forehead against your own, he’d repeat it: “you’re perfect.”

#joel miller x reader #joel miller x you #joel miller smut #joel miller fic #pedro pascal fic #tlou fic #drabble

[teyamloving12]

Lemme Ease Your Pain

Warning: NSFW content(MDNI),lactation kink, mentions of post-pregnancy, praising, Olo'eyktan!Neteyam should be a warning lol, etc.

Pairing: Olo'eyktan!Neteyam (23) x Tsahik!Reader (21)

Synopsis: You gave birth a few days ago. Your babies aren't heavy feeders so your breasts become so full. You beg your mate to relieve you of your pain and of course Neteyam doesn't mind.

The entire village was in an uproar, the Tsahik just gave birth to twins. These children would live to know they were the children of the clan leader and the spiritual leader, grandchildren of Toruk Makto and Neytiri, and great-grandchildren of Mo'at. It was an extremely painful experience. You were afraid but all was fine because your mother-in-law and your darling husband were right beside you ever step of the way.

Your babies were beautiful, they looked exactly like the father. Neteyam smiles as rubbed your stomach. You painted harshly. It was not easy. Neytiri uses a wet cloth to wipe off the sweat upon your tired face. "You did well, my daughter!"n Neytiri said. You smiled mournfully because your throat were sore from the screams of pain and agony.

Once you heard the crying of your children you were just fine. Mo'at laid the babe on your chest while Neteyam held the other. A beautiful boy and a girl. Neteyam was overwhelmed by joy. Tears ran down his face and over to the baby's face making him surprisingly laugh. The baby grabbed one of Neteyam's braid and tugged it gently. You smiled at the baby girl that palmed your face with a smile. Neteyam named them Ateyo and Zraina.

A huge celebration was held for them. They bonded with the Tree of Souls. Neytiri massaged your shoulders to calm you down. Your heart was beating fast. Neteyam was a great Olo'eyktan and you tried your best to be a good Tsahik using the training you received from Mo'at and Neytiri.

Although you gave birth a few days ago, your breasts were really sore. The babies weren't heavy feeders which only made the situation worse. They were so full and were begging to milked out. Every night, you would wake up to your top soaking in milk. Neteyam listened in his sleep as you squirmed in discomfort. Neteyam pushed himself up and rubbed your waist.

"Ma syulang, what is wrong? You've been squirming all night.", Neteyam asked. You were panting heavily. He noticed something was wrong. His hands grazed over your top accidentally. Realizing his hand were soaked in milk, he realized the problem.

"Ma Neteyam, I am in pain. Please get me relief!", you managed to speak out how you felt. "What am I saying? That sounds disgusting! I'll do it myself.", you were about to get up until he held you by your hand and pulled you back. "You're my mate! If you're in pain, it is my responsibility to rid of it.", you were shocked.

"But Netey-", you tried to rebel against his word but he silenced you immediately. "Do not disobey me, syulang!", Neteyam whisper-yelled, slightly frightening you.

You sat on the edge of the bed as Neteyam laid his head on your thighs. You were ashamed of the situation you were in. He was your husband, yes, but this was not compared to what you two did when you were younger.

You threw your soaked top across the room. Neteyam stared intensely at your swollen breasts. The beads of milk fell upon his face making him curious. "Their damn babies wasted good stuff!", Neteyam said as he teased your sensitive nipple causing a small moan to slip out. "I've watched an entire nine month period for this, you know?", you were shocked. He wanted to do this. Neteyam was a strange man with multiple kinks.

Neteyam tweaked your nipples making a strong stream of milk to shoot upon his abs. He licked his lips. "Thanks for the meal, mama!", he said before attaching him hungrily upon your leaking nipple. He grabbed the other breast trying to ease you of your pain. You felt weird. Your cunt was aching. It's been months since you had any action. He swallowed the milk that was releasi g from you. It was sweet and flavorful. You came off your breasts making a pop sound.

You were panting. You were soaked. Neteyam could smell your heat at this point. "Come princess, give papa more milk. You wouldn't want me to die of thirst, right?", you knew how Neteyam was in bed. An animal that attacked its prey in the worst ways possible. He bit your nipples making you scream. " You taste delicious, baby! You could give me more, right? Not so hard. Make me the happiest man on Earth. The tips of your ears were turning red as he continued to tease you. "Neteyam you had to stop, the children will wake up!", you said trying to hold back the scream that was at your throat.

He loved the faces you made for him. The fact you were getting turned on by him just sucking out the excess milk in your swollen and sensitive breasts made him feel things. He loved your moans but you looked extremely tired. He stopped. You fell back on the bed. He kissed your neck down to the breasts.

"Gonna get you pregnant again, your milk tastes too sweet to be wasted!"

#aonung x reader #neteyam smut #neteyam x na'vi!reader #neteyam x reader #neteyam x you #aonung smut #avatar smut #neteyam x reader smut #neteyam #atwow ao'nung #na'vi x reader #na'vi quaritch #na'vi x y/n #na'vi x human #tonowari x y/n #jake x reader #jake x neytiri #jake sully x reader #jake sully smut #smut

[cozage]

Hi, can you write a scenario where Sanji founds his S/O (who is secretly an artist) staring the Aquarium's ceiling, and when he looks, he see that they painted a ocean landscape (like the All Blue) on it? I'm not good on explaining, but i think that would be a cute idea.

A/N: ALL THESE SANJI REQUESTS ARE MAKING ME FALL IN LOVE WITH HIM YOU GUYS NEED TO STOP!!! (jk you better not stop he deserves love)

Characters: gn reader x Sanji

Cw: none :)

Total word count: 1k

A Painted Dream

Sanji hadn’t seen you in a few hours, and he began to grow worried. Once he finished cooking for Luffy and Usopp, his mission would be to find you. 

The more he thought about it, the more concerned he became. You had been scarce most of the week, actually. He could really only remember seeing you for meals and for bedtime, which you came late to most nights. 

“Luffy.” He handed over a plate of sandwiches for the captain. “Have you seen Y/N recently?”

Luffy hummed, thinking about the question while he ate. “I saw them at breakfast this morning,” he said with a mouth full of food. 

“I saw them down in the workshop a few days ago,” Usopp offered. 

Of course these idiots wouldn’t be any help. He lit a cigarette and started cleaning up, trying to think about your conversations over the past few days. You almost always showed up to meals late, and you always looked a little disheveled when you arrived. Whenever he went to serve you snacks you weren’t there, and he always got distracted by another crew member before he had time to find you. He hadn’t noticed it at the moment, but now that he was reflecting on it, your behavior had been kind of secretive lately. 

He trusted you, of course, but he still felt uneasy. Moreso, he felt guilty that he hadn’t noticed it sooner and asked you about your day to know what you were doing in the first place. 

He wandered the ship, trying to find you. He asked all his crew mates, but the only helpful info he got was from Franky, who said you borrowed a small scaffold a few days ago and hadn’t returned it yet, and you borrowed a ladder this morning. 

There weren’t many places you could use a ladder inside the ship, so he checked the library first. He found Robin there, but not you. 

“Try the aquarium,” Robin offered, turning the page of the book she was reading. 

He wandered down to the aquarium and opened the door to find you standing before him. Your hair was pushed back in a bandana, and a variety of colored paint was smeared across your face and your arms. You were holding a palette in your hand and a paintbrush between your teeth while you stared upwards, focusing on something above you. 

His eyes trailed up to see what you were staring at, and he let out a small gasp of shock. Fish from the North Blue to his right, the South Blue to his Left, the East Blue on the far side, and the West Blue above him, all swimming towards the center of the room. There, they intermingled freely, swimming amongst sea kings and other monsters you all had seen on your travels. He could feel tears welling up and he furiously blinked to clear them. He didn’t want to cloud his vision of such perfect artistry. 

A sound at the door alerted you to a presence, and your eyes flicked over to see someone in the doorway. Tall, blonde, dressed to the nines. Sanji.

“No!” you cried, running over to him. “No! No! No!” 

You reach him and throw your hands over his eyes, which were glued to the ceiling. “You can’t see it yet! It’s not done!”

He stood in front of you, still as a statue. Your hands were still over his eyes, and you could feel wetness beneath your fingers.

“Sanji?”

You opened your hands slightly so you could see his face, but kept them cupped so he couldn’t see the ceiling. He had tears streaming down his face as he looked at you.

“You made that painting?”

You nod sheepishly. “I was hoping to finish it before you saw it, though.”

He looked at you, surprised. “It’s not done yet? It’s-”

“Just adding the finishing details now. Making it perfect.” 

“Can I sit here and watch you finish it?”

Your face made a pout. “You have to promise not to look until I say so.”

He laughed and took a seat in front of the fish tank. “I’ll keep my eyes on you.”

It was hard, but he did it. He desperately wanted to glance up at the painting, to be lost in the intricacies and name every fish he saw. But he waited until you gave him permission, and he kept his eyes on you the whole time. He watched as you squinted to see, huffed in frustration, and smiled in success. 

After an hour or two, you nodded in satisfaction, and you turned to him. “Okay, you can look now.”

He strode over to you and wrapped you in his arms, and then the two of you looked up at the All Blue you had created. 

“Just when I think you can’t surprise me, you go and do something like this.” He pulled his gaze away from the painting and smothered you with kisses, causing you to cry out in a fit of giggles. 

“You really like it?” you ask, peering up at him. 

“I love it. I love you.”

The two of you stood there, looking up at his dream until your necks were sore, and then you laid on the ground and kept looking up. You listened to him name each of the fish he saw, delightedly pointing them out like a child pointing out shapes of clouds on a sunny day, and thought about how you couldn’t wait for him to finally find the actual one. 

#one piece #one piece scenario #one piece imagine #one piece x reader #sanji #vinsmoke sanji #sanji x y/n #sanji x reader #sanji x you #cozage #✧˚sanji✧˚

[sublimetragedychopshop]

Ever think about those desperate stalker yanderes that are desperate af to get the attention of their “idgaf” darling? I think about them a lot. How the darling doesn’t even bat an eye when they wake up with company in their bed (when they KNOW they locked the door with brand new bolts) just rolling over and get ready for work with a sigh. The tired darlings who apologize to their boss in advance for that weird person that has been standing outside the (store/company building/wherever you work) saying that it’s a complicated situation. Darlings that gaze straight at the camera that they know is being pointed at them. A tired look on their face.

They are just too tired with life’s problems to asses the actual THREAT that is right in front of them (nobody should be this chill when confront with a stalker). Their work makes them unable to make themselves proper meals. Now their yandere always manages to leave nutritious lunchboxes on their counter every morning next to a plate of fresh breakfast. Their family takes most of their money, being told that darling needs to repay them back after years of raising them, which leaves them being constantly near broke. Only for lovely yan to gift them various presents all ranging from luxuries to actual necessities. Of course the sickly sweet nauseous notes the leave with the gifts are hard to read, but reader appreciates every single gift. They really couldn’t afford to be picky. Next was the crushing loneliness of a person living day to day, just trying to afford being alive but not living. The yandere constantly leaves them sticky notes with positive affirmations in their home all the time. Often texting their phone with love messages, and paragraphs and essays about how they love them so much, how no one amounts to them, if someone so much as breathes near their darling then they are as good as dead. It’s oddly comforting in a sick and lonely way.

Darlings who know this is messed up. It’s wrong and sick and NOT NORMAL. they tell themselves that they need to get rid of the yandere but know they can’t. They can’t they can’t they can’t. What are they going to do if their yandere suddenly disappears? What fucking life are they going back to? The one that made them miserable and numb? Besides it’s not like Yan actually has down any real damage to darling. They act more like a house spouse in a way, loving and caring. But so blood thirsty to the people who get close to their darling. Two sides to the same terrifying coin. Nothing that they would be able to prove to anyone. Their yandere is smart-desperate and stalkery but smart.

Darlings who give in after finding the yan in their bed after coming back home from work. It was the third night that they have seen them, not often because Yan said they would melt under your overwhelming gaze. At first they greet you with a smile and a “darling! Your back, I missed you sooo much!” It was almost loving, childish and innocent how they looked. Like you were both a real couple. Without a word you just walked to them on the bed and slumped against them. Arms wrapped around them as you took them down against the bed. Full body going limp from exhaustion. They were surprised at first, but expecting you to just do that (though that have been surprised by your reaction to most things) smiling a little they cuddled you as you just closed your eyes for a little. Relishing in how soft and nice smelling they were, how warm and comfy this position was.

Somehow this brought you to tears, silent tears streaming down your face as you stayed their emotionless. Your hand gripping their clothes to stay as close as possible. God this was fucking pathetic of you, seeking comfort from a fucking stalker? A creep?…… it didn’t matter anymore. If this person was willing to have you, better yet be so obsessed with you that they would die without you, then you would just give yourself to them.

(In the end this turned a little sad but I like it anyway!)

#yandere #yandere shitpost #yandere x you #yandere imagine #yandere ramblings #yandere x reader #poor reader

[shockedemojiatsv]

▪︎■☆Puppy☆■▪︎

☆ 🔞!!NOT SAFE FOR WORK!!🔞

☆ Amab!bot!Ben Reilly / male!dom!reader

☆ 1k words

☆ late and short (mental dilemmas 😔)

☆ contains overstimulation, dubcon, slight masosado implied, puppy play, drinking of seminal fluids, just being mean to my little Benny baby in general :3

°○☆🔞nsfw under the cut🔞☆○°

"Fuck.." You whispered underneath your breath when his weeping cock twitched again. Cum spurting out in salty white blobs dripping from his pathetically overstimulated genitalia. It was cute. Seeing him shiver and squirm and try to act unfazed by his 3rd orgasm. His eyes narrow as he pants, sweat trickling down his face as his mouth shapes itself into a grin.

Oh he's being cocky now is he?

"Is that all you've got?" Ben mutters. Drunken under his pleasure. He wasn't thinking straight. Because he knew damn well what he had said and what it'd bring and the power you had to break this man. No. It wasn't all you've got. In fact, it was simply a taste test. A sample. Nothing more than an appetizer for a full course meal that your lovely little scarlet spider had bit off more he could chew. Into the lions den.

You laugh softly at his response. That was all it took for him to realize the weight of the situation. How badly he had fucked up. Much to his horror, your left hand wrapped around his cock again whilst the other increased the intensity of the vibrator that had hummed nimbly against his prostate into something stronger.

He screams out. Just the way you like it. In a swirled mixture of agony and delight. Uncertainty and certainty.

You could taste off his regret and gratitude in the way he cried. Yes he cried. Tears dripping down his face as he whines to struggle to get out of your touch. No, you weren't going to let him get out of the trap he set himself in. The trap he knew very well he'd be caught it.

"Stop... sto-..stoppp... stop stop stop– stop ittt" He wailed softly. Almost as if he was mourning. You weren't going to end this, not yet. Not with the way your thumb rubbed itself on the slit of his cock, wet from the previous loads that landed itself inside a cup bellow him. It started to harden and he started to cry all over again and it was a pretty sight to see. Like shiny pearls streaming down his eyes.

The soft yet frantic buzzing of the vibrator up his prostate and your hands rutting up and down his sensitive cock has him leaning his head against your shoulder. Gasping. Begging for mercy. Just like last time. And last time. But now, you're confident he'd keep his pretty little mouth shut.

He's crying is he? Yeah and it's just fueling your cruelty. Your desire to break him any further. You grab his tear stained face to look at you better. The nail of your thumb digging into his cheek. He reminds you of a dog. A little puppy. Shrivelring up after getting it's paw hurt from closing the door a little too soon. God and the way he wines. The way his tears stream down your fingers the faster you move your hands.

After a few more seconds and he's close again and he's looking away with a stubborn frown trying to act like he still has any control of this situation but you tighten the grip you have on his face and jerk him off faster. His eyes firmly set on yours while he mewls and cries, the wetness of your hand intensifying as more precum drippied from the hole of his cock and you pressed your thumb their to rub at it.

Apparently that had him cumming all over again, he cries out, literally sobs for your mercy which he knew, efforts were pointless. You weren't going to stop until the wine glass bellow him had filled itself to the brim.

Perhaps an hour minutes passes and he's so tired but you keep on gently whisper in his ear what a good boy he was, what a precious little gem. What a wonderful puppy he was for still cumming so well. His balls still spontaneous after each orgasm he'd offer, the wine glass reaching its fullness.

"Cmon Benny.. you're doing so well, we're almost done... you can do it baby, just one more? Just one more..." You whisper beside him. Laughing when he whines, but it's quiet because his throat is raspy from all of his previous screaming.

He whimpers before cumminf again and spilling over the cup. Which you gently bring up with one hand as you waited for him to ride out the aftermath of his intense overstimulation. He's weak. Frail little thing. So when you put your thumb inside his mouth he doesn't even try to fight back. Not especially when he licks the digit eagerly and looks at you with tired eyes. Pliant and so dizzy.

"Drink up"

You command softly. Bringing the seminl fluid filled wine glass to his lips. At first he sips hesitantly but despite all his efforts his cloudy mind needs something... some sustenance. And the mundanely salty liquid that's slowly pouring in his mouth counts as so. And he drinks it gratefully. Slowly. Of course, he doesn't exactly care to drink it carefully, when he stops sipping for a moment it spills from his mouth down to his chin and onto the floor.

Once he finishes the entire glass his face is a mess. Covered in his own cum, legs trembling, eyes threatening to close and dried tears right on his cheeks.

He trembles. Slightly. When he tries to move but to no avail, the ropes on his body had still stayed. And when he looks up to you one last time with all of his remaining strength you carry his face with one of your hands. And when he falls unconscious, you smile.

Time to give your puppy a cleaning.

Of course, he wasn't an idiot. He had his clever moments and it was more admiring to witness.

#🤯 writes #ben reilly x reader #ben rily x reader #scarlet spider x reader #ben reilly x male reader #ben riley x male reader #scarlet spider x male reader #bottom ben reilly #bottom ben riley #bottom scarlet spider #across the spiderverse #across the spiderverse ben reilly #across the spiderverse ben riley #across the spiderverse scarlet spider #atsv ben reilly #atsv scarlet spider #atsv

[beatrice-otter]

There is FINALLY a women's hockey league that pays its players a living wage. There's been women's hockey before; the National Women's Hockey League was founded in 2015, later becoming the Premier Hockey Foundation. They got bought out in 2023 and rebranded as the Professional Women's Hockey League. Unlike its predecessor leagues, PWHL players should not need to work second jobs to have an income to live on in addition to playing hockey; the PWHL has minimum salaries. All players must make a base pay of at LEAST $35k, which is crap but at least it's crap you could theoretically live on. But most of the players are going to earn more than that, because there is also a team average minimum. The salaries for the whole team combined have to average out to at least $55k, and the top six have to each make at least $80k. But these are base pay rates; they also get a housing stipend ($1500/month) on top of that and a "daily meal allowance" when traveling, and all of these rates are contractually obligated to increase each year (3%). It's still peanuts compared to men's hockey, of course, but it's something you could make a living at, at least. And when you add in the housing stipend, a full-time player is actually making a minimum of $53k/year.*

Anyway! The first PWHL game took place on January 1, 2024, and you can watch the games on the PWHL Youtube page. I hope they do well, because female athletes should be treated (and PAID) better and while "a living wage" might seem a low bar it is still one that women's leagues too often fail to clear. So far, they seem to be doing okay; the January 5th game (Minnesota vs. Montreal) SMASHED the previous record attendance at a women's hockey game. 13k people attended; the previous record worldwide was a game with 8k attendees in Sweden. The North American record was 6k, so this is double that.

The thing that interests me is that they are CLEARLY not branding the teams, they are branding and repping THE LEAGUE. None of the teams have a name other than the city they're from; none of them have a logo of their own, just the PWHL logo; the uniforms are pretty identical, just different colors. (each city name printed diagonally down the front.) I read an article that the teams are expected to each rebrand themselves next year, but I'm still surprised that they're not trying to build up any kind of team loyalty from the start, just league loyalty.

The closest I get to being a hockey fan is occasionally reading hockey RPF (there are a TON of great writers in that fandom, if you've never checked it out before). But I support women's sports, and with games being on Youtube it will be pretty easy to just stream it on my TV (muted) while I go about my evening. I know it doesn't ad up to much in ad revenue, but it's something that costs me nothing. (And it's not like I'd be going to a game in person even if I lived in one of the six cities that has a team.)

*If you're wondering "why do they pay base salary + housing allowance instead of just saying what the whole salary is up front" I'm guessing there are tax incentives to do it that way. It might be either tax deductible for the team or untaxed for the player, or both.

#hockey #professional women's hockey league #pwhl

[koithelittle]

cg!cc!wilbur moodboard + headcanons!!

note; so like half of these? were from a hc post that was unformatted and turns out i messed up the request but i am- i can’t fix it without feeling absolutely horrible so. i turned them into this and just added like way more! i have plans for a couple new fics plus absolutely endless moodboards so be looking out for that! this moodboard was my first and has been collecting dust in my drafts for months. love it tho! otay das aww.

paci creds; littlemothshop on ig!

navigation

other moodboards

taglist; @jjtheresidentbaby @lillylvjy @wilmaslittleflower @whos-nicooo (ask or do to be added!)

- he makes sure your regression is completely private, only the band knows and whoever of your friends knows.

- barely anyone even knows you're dating him, let alone that he's your cg when you're little. it's all very private!

- he has pacis, sippys, and toys all scattered around the house. although there's a special spot for it all, it's just sort of floats around !

- he's big on cuddling you when you're little, especially if you're having a hard time ! he'll hold you, calling you soft names to help you slip into or stay in little space.

- doesn't really mind any name but prefers daddy/dada!

- he likes to set up corners around his house that are safe spaces. pillows and blankets and one of your many favorite stuffies. he also likes to put a basket that has some coloring stuff n toys!

- when he's streaming and you're regressed, he'll usually set you up under his desk, blankets and a stuffie, paci and the switch with your headphones. he'll ruffle your hair and rub your back while he streams, making sure to keep an eye on you while he's talking.

- he's got pretty set boundaries with you. bedtime at a certain time, with quiet time before. baths are always fun! and they're always after playtime so you're a bit calmer !

- loves getting you custom pacis from shops, managed to get a lovejoy themed one and couldn't stop smiling at how happy you were.

- speaking of Lovejoy! he'll take you to band practice alot, little or big! the guys love to help care for you. hold you and play with you! Joe is your favorite, since he likes to let you sit in his lap and play with his beard.

- wil really likes to color with you, but he's also always up to play pretend too!

- keeps close tabs on you and knows your habits pretty well, so he catches when you slip way before you do!

- loves cooking for you all of the time, he knows your safe foods like the palm of his hand so he'll give you a few options to pick from at each meal

- holds you when you sleep, and rubs your back

- favorite names to call you are bunny, baby, and little one!

- his kitchen is packed full of all of your safe foods and favorite utensils and plates! it’s mostly in your favorite color, but he knows it helps you eat and enjoy eating so he doesn’t mind

- he has a little note on his phone that lists your favorite things, big and little. movies, shows, snacks, foods, sweaters of his— etc. he wants to remember everything he can!

- he’s very patient and soft with you, careful with his words and tone.

- he likes it when you lay across him, your head on his shoulder or his lap so he can rub your cheeks and hair. just loves giving you mindless affection!

- favorite part of the day for him is when he’s getting you to sleep. sometimes it’ll be through a vod he puts on, a cartoon or he’ll just sing to you.

- loves sitting behind you with you in his lap as you play. he likes to join in too, of course but sometimes he just likes to watch.

- he likes to color with you and help you find all the colors you need, handing them off to you whenever you ask

- piggy back rides!! although his favorite method of travel for you is holding you on his hip or carrying you when you face him. he just feels safer doing that, like he can keep closer tabs on you.

- whenever you pout or you’re sad, he’ll get you to laugh and giggle by making silly faces or noises but especially likes tickling you!

- reads you a story at every nap and bed time. sometimes he’ll make them up but he really likes the books since he can show you pictures!

- he sits you on the counter or on a stool while he cooks so he can keep an eye on you but still have you involved without you getting hurt or feeling obligated to help. he can do it just fine on his own, but he doesn’t mind you being there!

- he’s more strict when it comes to routines above all else. he just wants to make sure you’re healthy and well cared for.

- he likes to have some age appropriate and easy workbooks on hand, just to give you a few pages to work on while he works. you feel involved and you like filling them out (and he likes checking them so he can put stickers on it and draw a smiley face for good work!)

- he’s a picnic guy, so he’ll gather up a lunch in a picnic basket, pack your little bag and take you out to the park or an empty field or even a pebble beach and just have a lil picnic with you. he’ll read a book or write some music while you color and draw or play with whatever you brought!

- he loves it when you kiss his cheek to make him smile. if he’s ever sad a lil kiss on his nose or cheek or chin will just make him absolutely beam! and then subsequently attack you in kisses and tickles.

- loves calling you baby, but baby bear has a nice ring to it to him.

- jokes he’s your papa bear

- adores when the guys come over to work on music but end up playing with you and indulging you in your pretend play! mark gets really invested when your toy of choice is blocks, he’ll try to build the highest tower but joe always knocks it over. cue a very long bicker match!

- ash likes to color and draw with you. he’ll teach you cool techniques and show you all the fun stuff he can draw!

- joe really likes to play with your calico critters with you, coming up with silly scenarios or putting silly outfits on them.

- wil likes to watch from the sidelines, just gushing at how cute it all is. he has good friends, but an even better love!

- sometimes when he’s bored or lonely (when he’s on tour mostly) he has a habit of doing a bit of online shopping and ordering whatever thing you last mentioned. sometimes a stuffy, sometimes a paci but more often than not, a new toy. he just loves you and the thought of getting to see your face when he finds something for you just makes it even better.

- just overall a very attentive and sweet cg!

#sfw agere #koimoodboards #koiheadcanons #wilbur soot agere #wilbur soot #wilbur soot moodboard #wilbur soot x reader #wilbur x reader #wilbur #wilbur soot x gn!reader #cg!wilbur soot moodboard #cg!wilbur moodboard #cg!wilbur soot x little!reader #cg!wilbur soot #cg!wilbur

[mavrintarou]

[10:42AM] Suna Rintarou

Dropping this quick - need to head out. Will come back and edit it.

Warning: daddy Rin, angst, fluff, and of course, you guys asked and I tried to deliver smut . Rintarou rushes out of the gym, not caring to say goodbye to his teammates.

Only two weeks ago, they discovered that Rintarou had become a father.

Since then, after practice was over, he was gone. Like a ninja.

To see his little girl.

.

Y/n eats her rice porridge, watching Rin cuddle their two-week-old infant. The moment he made it through the door, he ran to the bedroom to change into fresh new clothes before coming to pick up the baby from her cot. She has been sleeping on his chest for a while as he watches his phone.

Who would have known when she found out she was pregnant and announced it to him with joy that he walked out the door and never turned back?

At almost seven months, he shows up – mad and upset that she had disappeared. He had been searching for her for months, only to find out why he had difficulty finding her because she had left the country for Taiwan.

“Suna Rintarou, you walked out on us; you wanted NOTHING to do with us. You have NO right to be mad. Go back to Japan.”

Unfortunately, he did not. He returned the following day, explaining that he wanted to be part of the baby’s life.

“I will take full responsibility.” His green eyes pierce right into hers with seriousness. “I want to be part of my child’s life.”

Y/n had never witnessed such vulnerability in him before as he pleaded desperately to make amends. It was almost unfathomable to her that the same man who walked out on her without a second glance was now standing there, baring his heart and soul. Despite her cursed soft heart, Y/n easily gave in to his plea. “Fine.”

She transferred her job back to Japan. Rin helped her move back where he could have easier access to her during the pregnancy.

Throughout the pregnancy, an unexpected civility existed between them. Y/n made a conscious effort to include him in her doctor appointments, extending invitations that she half-expected him to decline. To her surprise, he consistently showed up, never failing to be by her side.

He gave her a credit card so she could use it, but he has yet to see any purchases made on it.

And that bothered him.

“You should be eating more; you must eat for two now.” He scolded, noticing the emptiness of her fridge. Concern etched on his face, he continued, “I always thought pregnant women were supposed to have a radiant glow; you look like you need five meals and twelve hours of sleep.”

“I don’t have time to cook and clean, so it’s easier to order takeout.” She snapped, “I know I look ugly right now; you don’t need to rub it in my face.”

Rin’s eyes widen in disbelief. “No, no, that’s now what I meant, Y/n. You are not ugly. I’m merely saying that you must take care of yourself…” he clarified, his voice filled with regret. As he noticed the fat tears welling up in her eyes, he sighed, realizing he had only made matters worse. The tears streamed down her cheeks, and all Rin wanted was to hold her tightly, to offer comfort. “Damn it,” he muttered under his breath, closing the distance between them and pulling her into his embrace. He let her cry, berating himself for his insensitivity. After a few minutes, he gently kissed the top of her head and whispered, “can I hire someone to take care of those things for you? Someone who can handle the cooking and cleaning, so you don’t have to worry about it?”

She pondered on the thought, and Rin had assumed it was a silent no until she quietly whispered, “okay, only until baby arrives.”

Mrs. Satomi proved to be a blessing for both Y/n and Rin. A huge weight is lifted off his shoulders when he witnesses the transformation in Y/n’s well-being. He had taken great care in selecting Mrs. Satomi, ensuring she had experience catering to pregnant women’s needs. She expertly prepared meals that satisfied Y/n’s cravings and provided both mother and baby with the essential nutrients. The joy that filled Rin’s heart was immeasurable as he beheld the radiant glow on Y/n’s face.

He would stop by thrice during the week, Saturday or Sunday, if Y/n allowed. He found comfort when she asked him if he could set up the crib in the nursery, and he rushed over with brand-new tools. He suggested they paint the nursery and take care of it all, not wanting her to help or be near the paint smell.

“Can’t believe you’re going to be a dad…” Atsumu mumbled, painting the wall. “Out of all of us, I would not have expected you to be a dad first.”

“Well, can’t have you and Osamu always taking first in everything.” Rin smirked, “you guys need to catch up. I don’t want my baby to be without friends.”

The last two weeks before Y/n’s due date, Rin lay in bed thinking, tossing, and turning. He is excited to meet their baby. He’s excited to be a father.

But through all the excitement, something else is heavy on his shoulders and heart.

His relationship with Y/n.

Throughout their eleven-month relationship, he cherished every moment with her. Y/n was someone he saw a future with and could genuinely settle down with, unlike any of his previous girlfriends. However, when she announced her pregnancy, something within him snapped, and he unleashed hurtful words that he knew he could never take back.

The regret consumed him, and he found it difficult to believe he had reacted in such a way. He despised himself for his actions, unable to forgive the outburst that had tinted their relationship.

She was still cautious around him. He knew she was protecting herself from him and respected her boundaries.

But he needed her.

He wants to be with her.

Rin grabbed his phone and texted her.

Sleeping?

Immediately she responded, no.

Rin’s fingers began typing quickly. Hear me out; the doctor said you still have two weeks left but can go into labor any day now. Can I stay over to ensure that someone is there for you, especially when Mrs. Satomi leaves for the day?

His heartbeat is racing as he waits for her reply.

Okay, I would like that too.

.

Day two of staying over the night.

Rin began to question if staying overnight was really a great idea.

He was horny.

He has been horny for weeks seeing Y/n’s pregnant body.

“Y/n?!” He froze at her bedroom door after hearing her sudden whimper. Swallowing the lump in his throat, his eyes trail from her large breasts, dangerously ready to spill out of place with her nightgown. The end of her gown was beginning to rise as Y/n shifted in bed.

“Rin!” She gasped, taking a deep breath.

He is by her side instantly, afraid to touch her, “what’s wrong?”

“My… calf is cra – cramping… ah!” She lets out a deep sporadic breath.

Internally panicking, Rin knew he needed to stay calm. Taking a deep breath, he reaches for Y/n to calm her down. “Listen – listen to me, we get these muscle cramps all the time, so I’m going to try something that they do when we get these cramps on the court; you trust me?”

In that moment, Rin found her fucken adorable as she nodded, trusting him.

He takes her leg into his hand and massages the muscle with his big strong hands. Y/n tensed under his touch, biting her lower lip to mute her cries.

After a few seconds, she relaxed under his touch, her breath deep but calmer. She drops onto her back and groans, “whatever you’re doing, it’s working….”

Rin sighed in relief and smiled, but that smile faded when his eyes noticed her nightgown had risen, showing her panties. He turns his head, blushing.

“I’m okay… I’m okay now…”

His hand stops massaging her muscle, and he grabs her comforter and gently shifts her leg so he pulls the comforter over her.

A hand shoots and grabs his arm, and he looks at her, “thank you.”

He smiles and leans to kiss her forehead, “you’re wel –“ his eyes widen when she leans up and presses her lips against his.

Her small hand found its way behind his head, pressing his lips against hers.

It was a short kiss.

“Rin…” she whispered against his lips, eyes burning with the same amount of passion as his.

“Please,” he begged, and as if Y/n knew what he was begging for, she nodded.

Rin’s mouth is on hers once more, his knee dropping on the bed as he cups her face. Her hands tugged his shirt until they had to break the kiss to toss the material off. He flips the comforters off her and swiftly drags off her nightgown. Her breasts and her belly were all beautiful to him.

Grabbing her panties, he pulled them off and settled between her legs.

“Rin,” she awkwardly reached for his head, “I… my body has changed….”

“I should hope so,” he grins, kissing just above her protruding belly button. “You’re beautiful, Y/n. Really beautiful.” His fingers graze her wet folds, and he slides two fingers easily into her, thrusting gently back and forth. “You’re so wet…”

Again, her lower lip was trapped between her teeth to prevent herself from becoming a moaning mess. Rin pulls her lower lip free, “I wanna hear you.”

She swallowed before begging, “please… I need you.”

That was all he needed.

Rin positioned himself between her legs after shedding off his boxers briefs. He stroked his aching cock that was dying to be wrapped around her hot walls.

“I need you too,” he breathed before pressing the tip of his cock to her entrance and, slow and gentle, pushed until he was deep inside her. He choked back a groan, “fuck, shit… sorry baby… daddy doesn’t mean to swear….”

Y/n moans, “Rin… Oh God I… I could cum… please move…”

He held her hips firmly and gave soft, slow thrusts. It had been too long, and he wanted to savor the moment but knew himself he was close too. Embarrassingly close.

“You feel so… amazing…” he grunts, “I missed you… I missed you so much…” with one hand, he pressed his thumb to her swollen clit before rubbing it. “Yes… fuck – Y/n… cum – let’s cum together….”

“Yes!” she cried, “faster Rin….”

He sped up his hips but did not go too fast or hard.

Her pussy walls fluttered around his cock, and her cries echo her room, and that was enough to bring Rin himself over the edge.

His hips slow down in movement as they tremble, his cock aching to release cum deep inside her. He catches his breath and rubs her belly.

A few weeks ago, she allowed him to touch her belly, to feel their baby move within her. Rin’s eyes watered up at the feeling of his child.

“I can’t wait to meet them.”

“Me too,” Y/n whispered with a smile on her face.

He missed her smile so much.

Rin withdraws and heads to the bathroom to grab a wet towel, returning to clean her up.

“Can – can I stay with you?” he stuttered, “sleep with you tonight?”

Y/n reached to cup his cheek, “we would love that.”

.

“Don’t spoil her too much, or else I won’t be able to put her down so I can do other stuff,” Y/n grumbles, covering Rin and Emi with a blanket.

“This is daddy-daughter bonding time; it’s okay.” He whispered, motioning for her to lay down beside him. “Come cuddle with us.”

. . .

E/n: he's an ass but I think we forgive him.

@queenelleee @mfreedomstuff @erintaro @callmeraider @chaotic-fangirl-blog @wolffmaiden @cloud-lyy

#haikyuu smut #haikyuu suna #hai #suna angst #suna x reader #suna smut #suna fluff #suna rintarou x reader #suna rintaro x reader #suna rintarou smut #suna rintarou fluff #suna rintarou angst

[harry-styles-obsessed]

Daddy to the rescue

Request: hii! Could you write something with Harry as a dad?! Please and thank you! I LOVE your dad! Harry fics THEYRE THE BEST!!! TYSM ILY

This is a pretty random one and pretty short too but it’s cute sooo enjoy!(:

©️ please do not copy or translate my work.

“Hey,” Harry’s voice was sharp and stern yet remained soft and careful as he gently grabbed his oldest daughters wrist, pulling her gently back towards him. School had just kicked out and his youngest, Lola was happy but tired but his eldest, Sophie was unhappy and clearly struggling through something so had just yelled at you. You were surprised of course but Harry was quick to deal with the situation,

“we don’t shout… do we? Use your inside voice sweetheart. I don’t know what’s wrong if you don’t tell me… we just want to help.” Harry searched her eyes Sophie’s bottom lip trembling as she stared at Harry for a while before finally breaking down into loud painful sobs, Harry pulling the small girl into his arms, holding onto her securely as he rubbed up and down her back “shhh shhh I’ve got you. I’ve got you…” he soothed gently the girls body trembling as she sobbed into his T-shirt her hands fisting at the material of his shirt. “I hate school!” She soon cried out making Harry’s heart drop as he slowly stood up lifting her up with him “hey… shhh… why’s that?” He asked carefully tears streaming down Sophie’s cheeks before Harry took a seat, sitting Sophie down onto his knee as he looked at her, you standing with a very tired Lola in your arms your eyes full of worry and concern. You hated any of them being upset… it tore you to pieces.

“Talk to me…” Harry spoke “please,” he whispered more softly hand rubbing up and down her back. “w-we had to write a story about our best friend..” the girl hiccuped out emotionally “I wrote about Millie…” her shoulders jerked as she tried to control her cries. Harry listened eyes growing more worried and concerned by the second “m-Millie was first to read her story… i-… I wasn’t in her story…. She’s got another best friend… not me…” the girl was completely distraught Harry’s heart aching as he pulled her into his arms

“Ohhh baby girl… oh shhh. Shhhh sweetheart. Hey listen… listen to daddy for a second yeah?” He made her look at him, using the pads of his thumbs to wipe away her tears as he smiled sadly at her “I have lots of best friends! You can have lots too… likewise with Millie… you’re one of her best friends… she has lots… and you do too I’m sure huh?” The girl shook her head eyes full of sadness and Harry sighed sadly, there wasn’t much he could do. He couldn’t go force other kids to be friends with his children and so instead, he immediately thought of a plan B: divert the attention to something else.

“How about mummy, you, me, and Lola go out tonight yeah? Get McDonald’s?” The man offered knowing the little girl always cheered up with a happy meal and a toy the girl nodding her head “yes please daddy.” He smiled and stroked her cheek gently “how about we be extra naughty… you go get your pyjamas on…. Mummy and I will do the same… we can go on a midnight drive yeah?” Of course it was only early but still… it was about making it fun and exciting Sophie’s attention now on the happiness she was about to experience as she sprung up off of his lap sprinting up the stairs to get her pyjamas on “super hero..” you teased with a small smirk before kissing his cheek gently.

~

The drive to McDonald’s was fun, a lot of singing, and Sophie and Lola just being happy. They went through the drive through as Harry didn’t fancy getting spotted by anyone and so he ordered what everyone wanted and once the food had been collected he handed out everything to everyone, Sophie immediately tucking in, her toy being a little Lego superman

“Daddy!” The girl spoke fry in mouth, the man looking back at her “yes sweetie?” “This is for you!” She spoke with a happy smile and he took the small superman figurine “because you’re my superhero!” She exclaimed immediately melting Harry’s heart… oh what else could a man wish for? He had everything he wanted and needed… but the one thing he was especially grateful for was the beautiful little family you and him had created.

#x reader #harry edward styles #harry styles x y/n #harry styles #yn #imagines #comfort #stories #harry styles comfort #harry fluff #dad harry styles #daddy harry styles #daddy harry #harry styles x reader #harry styles x you #harry styles fluff #harry styles sweet. #harry styles angst #harry styles stories #fanfic #harry styles fanfiction #one direction #fanfiction #short fanfic #comfort stories #comforting #family #harry styles x oc #harry x oc #harry x daughter

[worstghost]

König oral/blowjob headcanons because I am feral for this man (f!reader again) this is kinda elaborating a bit on the sub!könig stuff I did. I feel very strongly that he's actually a switch lol.

♡Loves to touch you, not exactly a fan of being touched back unless he's really desperate for it.

♡Loves loves loves praise. You'll lay him back on the bed and kiss down his stomach, telling him how beautiful he looks and how much you love him. He's trembling already, massive cock bobbing against his navel every time you get close.

♡You can tease him until he's begging, sniffling, tears running down his cheeks. He'll whisper a 'Please, liebling, please.' urging you to touch him more. Sometimes he loves being overstimulated, but you two always have a safe word if it gets to be too much.

♡He goes back and forth on control, he loves to be bossed around, but sometimes when he's sitting on the bed and you sink between his knees, he'll get the full perspective of just how much bigger he is and it stokes some sort of fire in him.

♡He loves gently holding the back of your head with his massive hand, apologizing when you gag while trying to fit him down your throat. He does feel bad, but you're doing such a good job, how could he stop you?

♡Weirdly thinks it's impolite to make you swallow his cum, he'd much rather finish on your face and chest. It never takes him long unless you're dragging it out to tease him. He'll falter every now and then when you beg him to cum down your throat, telling him how much you would love it. He couldn't deny you, of course, and fucks your face until you have tears streaming down.

♡He feels so guilty after, and apologizes for being so rough, but you assure him that you loved all of it, and you love him and nothing he could ever do would change that. It takes a lot of aftercare for the both of you to be comfortable again and he promises to return the favor.

♡And he does, happily, greedily. This man eats pussy like it's his favorite pastime. He'll pull his mask up to reveal plush, bitten lips, and a long wide tongue. All pink and sweet, eager to taste you.

♡Loves having you on top, once you're relaxed again he'll lift you onto his mouth effortlessly.

♡Or if you're tired and want to lay back, he's more than happy to slide between your thighs, kissing and licking up to your center. He's messy, sloppy, with his first few swipes, just dying to get started. The more noise you make, the more excited he gets.

♡He truly acts as if this is the only meal he'll get, sliding his arms under your hips and grasping your thighs with bruising strength he's barely holding back.

♡He'll go slow if you ask, but patience is not in his vocabulary. He wants it now, wants you to scream his name and tell him how much you love it. If you get him really worked up, he'll sit up and pull your hips to him instead of the other way around, leaving you to dangle nearly upside down as he mouths at you.

♡He'll hold your leg to his chest, letting you fall open and slide two long fingers in while he sucks your clit. He feels so incredible when you're moaning his name, shaking and whimpering until you cum, drenching his chin and fingers.

♡If you can squirt, you'll never hear the end of it, he wants to make you do it every single time and until you're begging him to let go and give you a second, he'll keep trying.

#cod #cod mw2 #könig cod #x reader #konig #imagine #mw2 #könig x reader #könig headcanons

[lillymakesart]

more episode 5 discussion

tl;dr a continuation of my video dissertation on lilly.makes.tiktoks: (summary) mikio fell in love with mizu, they had their first argument, mama convinced mikio to turn mizu in, mikio did go turn her in. "love poisoned by betrayal" where mikio is the love, mama is the betrayal

i feel like mama's betrayal needs some more reading into in order to truly understand her motivations, because that pipeline going from caretaker to ultimate betrayal is so insane

mikio's petty actions (picking at mizu's insecurities by calling her a monster and taking away the horse he gifted to her) are all in line with a hurt, petty, toxic lover that just wanted to hurt mizu back in the way the she hurt him

what about mama? she has cared for Mizu all these years, had been her mother figure, and even reaped some benefits off of Mizu's arranged marriage. isn't turning her adoptive daughter into the very men she fought all her life to keep her safe from a bit too intense?

to wish such foul ill on someone must have taken years and years of built up resentment and vitriol. maybe if we look at the timeline from mama's perspective the motivation behind her betrayal would reveal itself

Fowler said that mama was Mizu's maid. not sure if this has any significance, but he didn't say nanny or wetnurse. maybe she was simply a maid that worked around the house and only tangentially caring for the baby. life in the estate must have been pretty cushy for her as she was generally sheltered and protected under her lord's care

but then assassins come for the baby, she is caught up in the mess, and she can only stand by and watch as Mizu's life hangs in balance before her. fate decides that Mizu should live, and she is shoved into mama's arms and the man tells her to take the devil child and run, and so she does. she leaves the cushy protected life of being a maid in the estate and becomes a homeless woman on the streets, now burdened with a crying baby and no idea what to do

at some point she turns towards a life of prostitution, which at this I'm guessing is her only option. this life must be terrible compared to her work at her lord's estate. perhaps the stress turns her towards opioids, and she becomes an addict

maybe a messenger keeps in contact with her and makes regular deliveries of money to continue caring for the baby. the money amount could have even been generous, enough to keep them off the streets in a respectable town, but with mama's addiction we all know where the money truly went.

one day the money stops, and mama can't get her opioids anymore. theoretically she could have continued caring for Mizu, but she'd rather work full-time as a prostitute and continue acquiring drugs than care for a child that she never wanted, was never even trained to care for. in fact, this child has brought her life lower than ever before, so of course she'd leave her

the resentment has already built up when Mizu was a child, but it really ramps into full force when she finds Mizu again as an adult

we can see some first signs of jealousy when Mizu tells mama that she "should never do that again, I earn money, more than enough" and mama replies "how honorable you turned out to be." the implication here is that mama thinks Mizu is accusing prostitution of not being honorable. Mizu does not have to suffer woman's work in the way that mama has because Mizu has lived as a man, and was permitted to learn an artisanal trade to earn money with. this is a luxury that mama will never know, and builds on the resentment.

when mama finds Mizu a husband, to the audience it seems like Mizu is the one doing the favor for mama, but for mama, this is the least Mizu could do for her in return for all those years of debased service caring for her. at least with Mikio things could somewhat start looking like mama's old life again, protected in a household, not having to worry about when the next meal would come in, and most importantly, a steady stream of income for drugs

but then Mizu blocks mama's drug money, forcing mama to go out and work for her drugs again (more discussion on this part in the tiktok video tl;dr my theory is that mama never stopped smoking and was secretly going out to work for her drugs and just keeping it a secret). this return to a debasement that mama thought she was finished with really drives home the hatred she has developed for Mizu at this point

from mama's point of view, Mizu is an ungrateful brat that ruined her life, stole her best years from her, forced her into prostitution, and now just when she was starting to get some return for all those years of turmoil, Mizu snubs her again by forcing her back into prostitution

when Mikio comes home that day after the duel, clearly angry with Mizu and looking for ways to hit her back, this must have been a point of weakness for mama where she just couldn't help but divulge the secret of Mizu's bounty. all those years she has held back her resentment and hatred, with no thanks or appreciation for what she has given up for Mizu's wellbeing, must have come crashing down on her as she let the bitterness and resentment win at this exact moment

it's not right, but it does make sense. mama betrayed Mizu in the ultimate way, but she too was once a victim send post

#mizu #mizu bes #mizu blue eye samurai #blue eye samurai #blue eye samurai fan theory #lillydrawsmizu theory #bes fan theory #blue eye samurai mama mizu theory #bes mama mizu theor #blue eye samurai episode 5 #bes episode 5 #blue eye samurai episode 5 theory #bes episode 5 theory

[justlemmeadoreyou]

Thanksgiving

Summary: this ask

Word Count: 1.3k

Warnings: none; thanksgiving fluff, if you will

Harry and you enjoyed a lazy morning together, cocooned in the warmth of soft blankets and each other's company. The sunlight streamed through the curtains, casting a gentle glow on your intertwined fingers. You nestled against Harry's chest, traceing lazy patterns on his chest, your eyes filled with contentment.

“You know what today is?” Harry broke the silence, gently cooing into your ear.

You looked up from your relaxed position, your gaze meeting Harry's with a curious smile. "What's special about today?"

Harry grinned, his eyes reflecting the warmth of the moment. "It's Thanksgiving, love."

Raised in a country where this tradition wasn't celebrated, you found yourself engulfed in curiosity as the leaves turned shades of gold, and families prepared for a day of gratitude.

Your brows furrowed slightly, a hint of confusion in your expression. "Thanksgiving? I've heard about it, but I'm not really sure how it works. In my place, it isn’t celebrated"

Harry chuckled, running his fingers through your hair. "No worries, babe. It's all about being grateful and spending time with loved ones. And since it's your first one, how about we make it memorable?"

Your eyes sparkled "Memorable how?"

Harry planted a soft kiss on your forehead. “How about you and your family join me and mine for Thanksgiving dinner? My family would be thrilled to have you, and it's a perfect way for you to experience the joy of this holiday...”

"You'd do that? I'd love to, Harry! But, are you sure your family wouldn't mind?"

"They'll love having you, just like I do. Trust me, it'll be a day filled with love and warmth."

You slid up his arms, smiling down at the perfect face beneath you. Leaning in, you kissed him softly on his pink, soft lips.

“But…how is it celebrated?”

Harry was so glad that he got to give his love your first thanksgiving experience. He shifted into a sitting position, bringing you with him. "Well, Thanksgiving is a time when families come together to express gratitude for the good things in their lives. It's a day filled with love, food, and appreciation."

"It's different for everyone, but the main event is a big family dinner. People often cook a special meal, including a roasted turkey, stuffing, and various side dishes. It's a time to share stories, create memories, and, of course, enjoy some delicious food."

You nodded, absorbing the information. "It sounds beautiful, Harry. I'd love to experience it. But I don't know how to make any of those dishes,"

"That's where I come in; we’ll make the food together. Or we can do the preparations first. When my mum and sister will come, maybe they can help us”

“Okay!” you nodded your head in excitement, and Harry grabbed you, pushing you down on the bed. He started to tickle you ferociously, and the room echoed with your laughter. The playful wrestling continued for a moment until Harry finally relented, allowing you to catch your breath.

"You're too adorable, love," he teased, his eyes gleaming with affection.

>>> 

As you both settled down, the planning for the Thanksgiving feast began. Harry explained the traditional dishes, and together, you both  started jotting down a list of ingredients needed for the magical feast, before ordering all that was needed.

While immersed in planning, the door creaked open, revealing Harry's mum, Anne, and his sister, Gemma

"Hey, you two. What's all this excitement about?" Anne asked with a smile.

Harry smiled "We're planning a Thanksgiving feast. Y/N’s family will be joining us."

He washed his hands and walked to his mum, hugging her tightly. "It's going to be a proper celebration, Mum."

Anne beamed, returning the hug. "I'm thrilled, love. It's been a while since we had a full house for Thanksgiving."

Harry nodded, before pulling back from the hug, and his mum walked to the kitchen, where you had been washing the vegetables.

Harry hugged Gemma next, and they both walked into the kitchen.

As the preparations unfolded, everyone contributed to the festive atmosphere. Anne was so great at cooking; you made a mental reminder to ask her to teach you some of Harry’s favorite dishes.

The kitchen buzzed with activity. Laughter, stories, and the clattering of pots and pans blended into a symphony of family bonding.

As the aroma of delicious dishes wafted through the house, you were in awe of how much food you had prepared. Harry stole glances at you, appreciating how seamlessly you merged with his family.

When the table was finally set, Harry squeezed your hand. "This is going to be a Thanksgiving to remember."

And indeed, it was. Your family arrived soon, and everyone sat at the table, waiting to say the things they were thankful for, one by one.

“Can I start?” Harry chirped in excitedly.

You all agreed, and Harry lifted his champagne, “I am truly grateful to have each and every one of you gathered here today. Your presence adds so much joy to this Thanksgiving celebration. I'm thankful for the unwavering support of my family, always. My mum and gem, you are the biggest pillars of my life. Thank you for everything you’ve done for me." He smiled at them both, and turned to your parents, “Mr. and Mrs. Y/L/N, I’m so thankful to you for being here today. It’s been so long since we have had a table full of people. Thank you for making my mum happy. And thank you for Y/N; she is the love of my life. I’m so grateful to her, for being in my life. Ever since we met, she has made me so so happy. She is the sunshine for my darkest days, and I cannot thank her enough for all the support she gives me. She’s by my side every time I need her, holding my hand in hers. I love her so much” Harry teared up towards the end, and you held his hand, intertwining your fingers. “To love, to family, and to the beautiful moments we share together. Cheers!”

Glasses clinked, and more toasts followed, each thanking for the cherished memories, the warmth of friendship, and the love that bound them together. Anne raised her glass, expressing her gratitude for the joy your family brought them and the new additions that enriched their lives. Gemma, with a smile, toasted to the enduring strength of family bonds and how happy she was for the great year she had, and how she looks forwards to so many more.

Your parents, new to this Thanksgiving tradition, joined in the toasts, expressing their appreciation for the welcoming atmosphere and the joy of being part of this loving family. As the glasses touched, the room resonated with the collective warmth and thankfulness that Thanksgiving was all about.

The evening unfolded with warmth, laughter, and an abundance of delicious food. As you all gathered around the table, sharing stories and expressing gratitude, you realized that family wasn't just about blood; it was about the love, acceptance, and joy shared around a festive table.

The night concluded with hugs, thank-you’s, and promises to make this an annual tradition. Harry walked to stand by your side, whispering, "Thank you for making this Thanksgiving so special, love."

You smiled, pressing a gentle kiss to his lips. "Thank you for welcoming me into your family, Harry. I wouldn't have wanted to spend it any other way."

a/n: i'm sorry if i made any typos or mistakes! thanksgiving is not celebrated at my place, and so i researched a bit!

lovely divider by @cafekitsune

i hope you like this! please don't hate me

here's my ko-fi if you feel generous

requests and feedback is welcome and much appreciated!!

>>>

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#harry #harry styles #harry styles fanfiction #harry styles smut #harry styles fanfic #harry styles fic #harry styles x reader #harry styles imagine #harry styles one shot #harry styles x you #harry styles writing #harry angst #harry edward styles #harry fic #harry fluff #harry styles angst #harry styles au #harry styles blurb #harry styles concept #harry styles fan fiction #harry styles fic rec #harry styles fluff #harry styles imagines #harry styles masterlist #harry update #harry x reader #harrystyles #harrys house #thanksgiving #happy thanksgiving

[syd-djarin]

Do It For Me | Treat Me Like a Slut, Part 2 | jack “whiskey” daniels x f!reader

For the greatest experience, recommend reading part 1 here. Can also be read as a standalone.

Summary: Jack returns home much later than he said he would. You punish him as you see fit.

Warnings: sub!jack, dom!reader, edging, safeword, some religious undertone references (Christ, taking the lords name in vain, “the Almighty”), a little angst in the beginning, alcohol, inability to tell the truth, mentions of Jack possibly being dead, blood, yelling, crying, anxiety spiral. Excessive, excesssssive use of pet names, (1) use of MOMMY, use of daddy, Jack is called a pretty boy and a good boy. Jack uses pet names for reader too (baby, sweetheart, sugar, etc.) Dirty talk, fingering, masturbation, oral (m and f receiving), face riding, Jack’s big cock, breeding kink if you squint, creampie, size kink, handcuffs, cowboy/southern references, mentions of pain and punishment. Reader has no major physical descriptions. And finally…your honor, they’re in love. LMK if I missed anything.

Thank you @milly-louise for the encouragement.

And of course, y’all already know that @katiexpunk put her sexy magic touch on this and is the best cheerleader and Slutty Smutty Sister. Katie is seriously one of a kind and it is a privilege to know her.

I truly have the best smut support there is. :’) Hope y’all enjoy!

smut below the cut.

Jack busts into your apartment like a force of nature, opening the door like a saloon door in the Wild West. He’s gasping for breath from rushing home to see you – climbing the stairs three at a time, testing his agility harder than any training ever did, simply from the fact that most of the blood is in his cock, eager to see you, rather than in any other part of his moving body.

“Hey baby, sorry I’m late—“ he trails off as he takes in the scene before him.

He finds you sitting at the dining table; candles lit, a bottle of red open on the table, one wine glass full, the other that’s smudged with lipstick empty, and his favorite meal waiting for him. His eyes flutter to you and he’s met with a pair of misty, red scleras staring back at him.

You rise from the table and storm off to the bathroom, your humiliation unbearable. Since you were a little girl, you have always been self-conscious of the way you look when you cry. Like one allergy attack short of an ER visit. Not beautifully poetic the way the girls in movies cry. Full on hyperventilating and snot running out of your nose. Once inside, hot salty tears stream down your cheeks. The pang in your chest knocks the wind out of you, disappointment burning through your body like wildfire, heating your skin.

You thought it might be nice to surprise Jack, to welcome him home from his two-week mission; the longest you’ve been apart since you’ve been together. Be home in a jiffy, sweetheart. Can’t wait to see you. I’ll be home around six, he assured you this morning over the phone, his voice smooth and silky.

Six turned into seven thirty, which turned into eight-thirty, and now here it is – nearing 11 o’clock, each passing hour without hearing from him only made you more upset. You wouldn’t be this mad if had he just called, texted, or hell, he could have sent a carrier pigeon to let you know he’s fine and that’d be late. All of your calls and texts to him went unanswered. You’re not unused to this, given his job and everything, but every time it happens it irks you in a way you can’t control.

But no, he didn’t – his absence acted like a tour bus, giving your mind an entire tour of all of the things that could have possibly gone wrong. What if he was hit by a car? Trapped in an industrial-size freezer? It’s not logical, but like…what if.

Or worse, what if he was dead? Jack wields around his mortality as if it were immortality in his line of work, meaning you worry about him like you get paid hourly to do so. The waiting, the worrying, and the not-knowing spreads under your skin like a fever with each passing minute. You don’t even care about the dinner getting cold, or to be honest, the fact that he didn’t respond to you. You’re past that, you’re emotions thick like a blanket. You just need to know he’s okay. He’s safe. He’s still alive, for fucks sake.

As you waited for him, your knee bobbing under the kitchen table, your thoughts oscillated between the worst-case scenarios, your stomach swirling in unease and dread.

And then –

There he was, swinging the door open, a shit-eating grin on his face as if he had no idea that you’d been expecting him for hours or that you’d made yourself sick wondering where he was.

You pat at your blurry lashline with a tissue, trying not to smear the makeup you worked so hard to put on earlier in the evening. Hurried and heavy boot steps echo outside the bathroom door, followed by a soft knock.

“Baby, can I come in, please?” He gently coos, his voice almost a little desperate, forehead leaning against the door. It’s not locked, but Jack is a gentleman above all and wants to respect your space. Even if it’s his fault you need it.

“Oh, fuck off,” you spit back, your voice wobbly. His heart sinks to the pit of his stomach; you’ve never spoken to him like this before. Normally you’re fairly carefree, and understanding, but the talons you like to keep hidden away are now on full display, brought out by a mix of worry, hunger, and anger.

You look in the mirror again, and your feigned attempts to prevent your mascara from running are useless. Your eyes are now puffy, beyond anything Benadryl or Clear Eyes could help, and even a bit raccoon-like. Great, a cherry on top of an already shit night.

You step back from the counter and lean back against the wall, allowing your legs to slightly give out as you slide down the expanse of it, the fabric of your dress riding up as you do. Your bare thighs hit the cool tile below you, cooling your hot skin. The tears that well in your eyes fall one by one, and don’t seem like they have any plans to ease up anytime soon. You run the back of your hand under your nose and move it to wipe away some of the moisture on your cheeks.

“Sweetheart?” He calls to you through the door, but he’s met with silence. “Baby, I’m so sorry I’m late. I can see how much this night meant to you, and I can tell you worked hard to make it special. I’m sorry I ruined it. Baby, please, open the door – let me see you.”

The sincerity in his voice causes your temper to simmer down. You plant your palms on the ground and push yourself up to stand. You know you look like a hot mess, but you don’t care. Let the fucker see how much he hurt you. Your palm finds the brass doorknob, and you quickly pull the door open, almost taking Jack with it, not realizing he was leaning up against it.

You stand there, arms by your sides, your fists rolled into little balls. Your cheeks are damp, and the stray hands of your hair are plastered to them, glued on by your tears. At first, you look at the floor, before lifting your gaze to face Jack.

His heart sinks when he sees you. “Oh sweetpea…fuck, I am so sorry baby,” he tells you once more.

“You’re late, Jack. Like really fucking late!” you cry out to him, not quite yelling, but not quite not yelling, either.

“I know I am, but baby –” he replies, looking at your lips, avoiding your eyes, before you cut him off.

“Why the hell didn’t you call me or text me? For fucks sake, Jack. I thought you were hurt! Or worse, dead. You could have been lying in a ditch bleeding out and I would have had no idea,” you spill out, spewing fire with your words. “Where were you anyway? Hmm? What had you so preoccupied you couldn’t even bother to tell me you were gonna be – oh I don’t know, five hours late?” You ask, a twinge of snarkiness behind your voice.

You’re only so keyed up because you care about him so much; trying to mask your pain with anger.

He inches closer to you, instinctively pulling your body into his. You resist as first, body rigid, not embracing him back. You’re still mad, but with the way he feels against you, you can’t help but soften. You wrap your arms around his middle, resembling the way a koala bear clings onto a tree. The firmness of his arms envelops you in a protective blanket, pulling you tight to him so you can see the pulse in his neck, lowers your cortisol levels, and cools your heated blood.

“I’ll tell you, but have to promise you won’t laugh,” he says, placing a soft kiss on the top of your head, inhaling the sweet scent of your shampoo. Fuck, he missed you.

“I’m not going to laugh, Jack. Where were you? What the hell happened?” you demand to know once again, stepping back from him, disconnecting your embrace.

“I uh – well, I was trying to save a kitten that was trapped on the train tracks on my way home. I managed to grab it, but as I was hoisting it back up onto the platform, my phone fell out of my pocket. By the time I went back down to grab it, the train was right around the corner…and well, it was crushed. Then I had to navigate my way home without GPS, and I saw an old lady get robbed, so I had to help her. And then there was a runaway stroller…” he says, smiling. He knows your upset, but he tries to lighten your spirits with humor.

That’s his thing. Well, your thing together, you suppose. You’d always ask him how his day was at work, how his missions went, knowing he couldn’t ever tell you the truth. You jokingly said to him one night, “Well if you can’t tell me the truth, make something up, like rescuing a kitten in a tree or something.” You were half-joking, but it just sorta stuck.

You look at Jack and can tell from the look on his face that he is sorry.

“Spy stuff, then?” You ask, clearing the remaining tears from your cheek.

“Spy stuff. I’m sorry baby, I want to tell you, I do, it’s just…the more you don’t know, the better. I don’t ever want to tell you anything that could compromise you, I couldn’t bare it if you got hurt,” Jack says, a sincerity behind his voice.

You see it then – for as much as you love and worry about him. He loves and worries about you, too. He knows his work is a lot, and he can see the weight of him not being able to tell you the full truth has on you. The worry, the pain that lingers behind your eyes.

Your shoulders relax and your face softens. You won’t push him.

You know he’d tell you if he could. You run the pads of your fingers under your eyes once more, clearing away some of the fallout from your makeup. The anger from earlier dissipates.

He’s here. He’s safe.

You reach your hand out to him and allow your fingertips to curl around his pinky. You look up at him with doe eyes.

“Gonna have to make it up to me, cowboy,” you whisper, a seductive tone to your voice. “Behave for me and I won’t be too mean.”

You unhook his pinky and curl your full hand around his wrist, rounding around him, pulling him to the bedroom.

You push Jack so that he is seated at the edge of your shared bed, using your foot to wedge his thighs open, granting enough space for you to stand between them. His sable eyes are the size of saucers, his heart thrums at a rapid rate in his chest. He’s no stranger to it all, hell, he’s a trained killer for Christ's sake, and yet here he is – defenseless under you, at your total mercy.

You could tell him to get on all fours and bark, and he’d fucking do it. He doesn’t know what your end game is, but he’s itching to find out, much like the hard cock that’s quickly eating up all of the space in his jeans.

“You’ve been a naughty, naughty boy…” you say, stroking your finger along the razor edge of his chiseled jaw. A little tsk, tsk sound escapes your lips, and you move to grab his jaw with a firm grip. “What am I gonna do with you?”

He gulps hard, the prominent Adam’s apple in his throat bobbing as he does. You’re not wrong – he has been a naughty boy, oh god, if you only knew, but hearing you say it has him bricked up; hard, and desperate for you, and whatever you want to give him. He’s ready to worship at your altar, ready to get on his knees and beg for forgiveness.

He’s well-versed in taking charge and fucking you til you see The Almighty, but reversing those roles, having you boss him around for a change? He’s never experienced anything quite like it. The Statesman surely didn’t train him for this.

“Remember the safe word, baby?” You ask in a serious tone, momentarily pausing your sexual prowess.

“Oh fuck,” he chokes out. “Y-es, I remember, baby.” Your pussy throbs at the sight of your tough cowboy submitting to you.

“Good boy. Now, you’re gonna keep your hands to yourself. Can you do that for me?” You respond, your voice smoky, laced with pure desire.

He nods and a faint whimper escapes his lips. You squeeze his jaw with your hand, “Use your words like a big boy,” you scold, reciting similar words he used on you not too long ago. Use your words like a big girl.

“Yes ma’am,” he says, voice trembling with need, a twinge of submission behind it.

You can’t help the smirk on your face, taking over the reins and being in charge gives you a new thrill. Now you know what all the fuss is about.

You start undoing the buttons of his Western-style shirt. You’re taking your time, enjoying how each undone button reveals more of his lean body that gets softer the further down you go, but for Jack, it’s painstakingly slow. He squirms where he’s sitting and fights the urge to take over. He’s trying not to paint his jeans just looking at you being a minx.

Rip my fuckin’ heart out baby, is the only thought that crosses his mind.

“Patience, baby,” you purr and give his face a few playful smacks. You reach for his belt buckle, and he hisses when it presses against his rock-hard cock. You retreat, remembering the recurring fantasy you’ve been having for weeks now.

“Pants off, lay on the bed, and wait for me,” you order and he does as he’s told. Truthfully, he’s a little afraid of what you might do if he doesn’t. You walk over to your closet space, which is thankfully out of view from the bed. You take the opportunity to strip down to the silky black bra and matching panties you’ve been waiting to show Jack all evening. You gather the items you came to the closet for and step back into the bedroom.

Jack is lying with his back under a cloud of pillows, his head resting against the metal headboard. He’s almost naked, just like you asked, his thick bulge pronounced in his underwear. You swear you can see his heart thump out of his chest from across the room when his eyes trail over your nearly bare body. His breath catches in his throat when he sees what you retrieved from the closet. Fuzzy handcuffs, and one of your fluorescent pink dildos. He doesn’t mind when you use it on yourself, but he’d much rather give you the real thing. The silicon shape of it taunts him.

You lay the agents of eroticism next to him and crawl up his body to hover over him. He cranes his neck to kiss you but you pull back and place your index finger over his lips.

“Nuh-uh,” you scold. He whines, actually whines, and you have to compose yourself from melting on the spot. You pick up the novelty handcuffs and dangle them in his face, a mischievous and somewhat amused look on your face.

“Gonna put these on ya, pretty boy,” you say with a delicate cadence, almost questioning; giving Jack the room to protest. He’s never been restrained before, at least not in this context. He’s restrained you plenty of times, but you understand he might not like it; especially given the nature of his profession and his need to always be on guard.

But fuck it, if he has a problem with it, he can safe word out.

He doesn’t.

You lock eyes with him as you fasten the handcuffs around his wrists, one end on each, the other tethered to the metal bed frame. Your chest is so close to his face, close enough that his tongue can’t help but dart out and give your tits a little lick, the temptation of it too strong.

You pull away from him and look down at him. “Maybe I wasn’t clear enough the first time. You’re gonna keep your hands to yourself, and that includes your tongue. You’ll take what I give you when I give it to you. Understood?”

“Yes, ma’am,” Jack nods, a smug look on his face. He thinks you’re cute when you’re demanding.

“Better wipe that little smirk from your face right now or I’ll leave you chained up all night, fuck myself silly with this plastic cock, and moan your name the entire time I do it. You won’t get a single taste. That what you want?” You ask, a condescending tone to your voice.

He doesn’t answer you, he just looks at you with lusty, glossy eyes. “What’s the matter baby, cat got your tongue?” you say, and a low growl leaves his chest.

“No, baby. I don’t want that. Wanna fuck you, wanna show you how sorry I am,” he says. You know he could bust out of the handcuffs with a swift tug if he wanted to. You know he could pin you to this bed and have you crying for him, following his every demand. What’s more, you know you’d like it.

But he knows he fucked up, and he knows this is his penance.

You let out a little purr of satisfaction when you see him tug at the cuffs, the rattle of them against the metal of the bed frame. His lack of somewhat self-imposed freedom shows you that right now he’s at your mercy.

You rise to stand on the bed, both of your feet on either side of him, positioned just above his head. The view you’re giving him is obscene, the sheer lace of your panties just barely covering your wet and glistening cunt. You dip your hand below the hand of them and use your fingers to gently nudge the soiled fabric to the side. You run your finger up your dripping seam, collecting your slick on your finger, gently passing over your throbbing clit as you do. A little gasp trickles over your lips. Jack can see the glisten on your fingertips and his mouth salivates, conditioned like Pavlov’s dog at the sight of your juices. He can smell you from where you’re positioned, the sweet scent of your arousal, and the groan he lets out is animalistic, primal. He’s kicking himself for the predicament he’s in, but at the same time, relinquishing control has never felt this good.

“Bet you wanna stuff your thick cock in this pretty pussy don’t you, Daddy. Wanna split me open, stretch me out, and claim me,” you taunt him, your fingers continuing their ministration against your clit, nearing you closer to your release. The filth spewing from your lips is mostly just to tease him, but fuck, if it doesn’t do something for you, too. Mostly because it’s true. You want him so bad, you can only imagine how he must feel.

“Answer me, baby. Tell me what you wanna do to this pussy when I finally let you,” you rasp out, your fingers alternating between slipping in and out of your wet and waiting hole.

“Fuuuck,” Jack growls. He can barely form words, too drunk off the sight of your pussy, watching you work yourself above him. “Such a pretty fucking cunt,” he hisses, “gonna fucking ruin you when I get out of these cuffs.”

“Yeah? Keep being a good boy for me and I’ll let you fuck me however you want baby,” you rasp, a little breathless, sprinting to the cliff of your orgasm,“But, you’re gonna make me come first,” you say, falling to your knees, holding the panties far off to the side of your slit. You position yourself right above Jack’s face, holding your glistening cunt inches away from his face. So close he can almost taste it, but not quite close enough.

“I wanna hear you beg,” you tell Jack, your hands threaded through his hair, pulling it back so he’s face-to-face with your pretty pussy. “Tell your mommy how bad you wanna taste her cunt.”

And shit, it’s raunchy, straight debauched. You don’t even have time to ponder the words that just left your lips, but it felt right. You can tell Jack likes it too by the way he practically falls apart under you, a whimper leaving his chest for the second time tonight, his eyes dark as the sea at night.

When he doesn’t answer you, you tug his hair and head back a little farther, dipping just a little bit lower, close enough this time for him to land a little lick on your wet center.

“Holy fuck baby, shit I need you so bad, please sit on my face,” he begs, “please let me taste you.” You’re more than happy to oblige, chasing reprieve from your aching core. You sit down on his face, your wet folds completely covering his mouth, his nose nudged right up against your awaiting clit. You don’t put all of your weight onto him yet, not wanting to cut off all of his airflow. He pulls away slightly, “Fucking give me all of it, baby. Don’t hold back,” Jack muffles against the skin of your pussy. His voice reverberates, his hot breath is ticklish against your sensitive cunt.

As much as you’re in control right now, old habits die hard, and him telling you what to do for the first time tonight coils the spring of your nearing release tight. You let out a slew of fuck, yes, oh my god daddy, yes, and taking the lord’s name in vain a few times. You’re riding the wave of your orgasm, and it’s so intense, to the point of dizziness. “Oh wait, fuck, think–” you lift off him slightly, just in time to see your release splashing over his face, completely drenching him. You fully move off of him, and look down at him, and he’s a mess. He looks at you with a primal grin to his face, his pupils so wide they edge out the color of his eyes.

“Oh fuck, Daddy. Look at you,” you moan, “covered in me, aren’t ya? Looks good on you. Now swallow it,” you demand.

You don’t have to tell him twice. He drinks up what he can while being restrained and you decide to gift him more by catching the stray droplets on his chin with your index finger and pressing it into his mouth. Jack savors your taste, eyes fluttering shut and practically growls. He’d argue it's the nectar of the gods.

“Shit, baby. You come for me like that and I’ll let you do whatever you want with me, this cock is all yours,” Jack rasps, thoroughly fucked out and under-touched. His cock throbs under the fabric of his boxers, waiting for you to touch him, to milk the soul right out of him.

“Think I’m gonna keep you restrained like this for a bit longer, baby. But don’t worry, since you’re being so good, I’ll put on quite the show for you,” you say, shimmying and kissing your way down the center of his stomach, leaving goosebumps in your wake. You nip across the neatly trimmed hairs that rest at the top of his cock, until you come to over them, your lips hovering just above the band of his underwear.

You look up at him through your lashes, and give him a little knowing smile; you love what you do to him and you’ve barely touched him yet. You slip the fabric off of him, releasing his thick cock; it’s bigger than normal right now, pumped full of so much blood, the prominent vein that runs down the side of it bulging, the tip of it shiny with his pre-come.

Your mouth waters at the sight of him. You’ve always admired his thick, delicious cock, but having free reign over it right now, the power to do whatever the fuck you want with it is almost overwhelming. You dart your tongue out and lick the tip of him, the taste is a little salty and heady. You moan and smile, before opening your mouth wide, releasing your tongue so it’s wide and flat. You grab his cock by the base of him and tap the mushroom head of it over your tongue, little thin strings of salvia trailing between your body and his as you do.

“Fuck, baby. You’re such a tease, killin’ me over here,” Jack moans, fighting his fuzzy restraints.

“Oh Jack, my love. Have you learned anything tonight? You’re mine. I’ll do what I want with you when I want to,” you rasp, opening your mouth wide, diving down deep on to the thickness of him as you do.

“Ah shit –” he cries out, happy to finally be touched, but not expecting you to deep-throat him from the get-go. “So good baby, so good oh my god,” he cries out as he juts his hips up, trying to nudge his cock deeper into your wet and waiting throat, chasing the warmth and wetness of it. You keep working him, it’s sloppy and intense, but so damn satisfying. You’re just happy to have him deep inside one of your holes, filling you in just the way you like.

But you want more. As happy as you are to keep up this teasing, taunting, and kinky show, at your core you just need him to fuck you. You need to feel him deep inside of you, deep enough to remind you that he’s here, he’s alive, and he’s yours. You need him to fuck you so hard that the sadness from earlier in the evening spills out of you, retreats into a corner, runs away, and hides, never to be found again.

“Want me to ride you, pretty boy?” You ask, though you already know what the answer will be. He nods furiously, and if you don’t put him out of his misery soon, he has half the mind to punish you.

“Sorry, baby. I didn’t catch that – use your words, I know how good you are at that; prove it to me,” you command, running your palm up and down the length of his wet cock, working him within an inch of his life.

“Yes, fuck, please ride me. Need to feel your pussy squeezin’ my cock,” he pleads, his patience wearing thin, “Don’t wanna come like this, sugar. Need to fill up that little pussy of yours, know how much she likes that, my come spilling out of you,” he moans. “Look so pretty when I’m spilling out of you, my girl,” he adds.

As soon as he finishes his last syllable, you line him up with your entrance and sink slowly. You gasp when he’s fully inside, your ass flush against him. From this angle, his cock punches your cervix in a way that deliciously teeters on pain and pleasure. You’re seriously considering uncuffing him, letting him ravage you, but ultimately you’re not ready to end your fun.

Your hand finds purchase on Jack’s sweat-slick chest as you bounce up and grind back down on his vicious cock. Your other hand between your legs, rubbing your clit in tandem with the plunging movement of your hips. Each movement fuses both of you together in shared ecstasy.

The flurry of emotions and sensations you’re experiencing at once is overwhelming; your second orgasm impending, the still raw and pent up feelings from your catastrophizing thought spiral that lasted for hours, and the sweet relief of having your cowboy back home with you. Exactly where he belongs.

He’s close and you’re both a little surprised he’s lasted this long. His honey-like drawl spewing out filthy words. The closer he gets the mouthier he gets.

Atta girl, ride this cock like you mean it. Look like straight up sin like this, baby. Fuckin’ goddess. Fuck fuck fuck. Thank fucking Christ you’re mine. Shit. fuck. damn. All mine, all mine.

Furling headfirst into euphoria, you roar out at a decibel that the neighbors on each side of you won’t appreciate the way that Jack is right now. A new flash of heat spreads throughout your body and you see stars behind your fluttering eyelids. You gush around his cock, pussy pulsating and immersing you both in your release.

“Fuck I’m—“ Jack is cut off by his own hoarse shout as he’s bucked into his own bliss, painting your insides with spurts of cum. He���s pretty sure he has died and went where cowboys go; he’s never come this hard in his life. He’s dizzy, borderline disoriented, chasing his breath like it’s a greased pig and he’s the poor chap pursuing it. You lean down and capture his lips in a frenzied kiss, another way of tethering yourselves to each other and back down to earth.

With trembling limbs you reach over to the nightstand and grab the tiny keys to the cliche cuffs still locked around Jack’s wrists. You fumble through unlocking them and you’re grateful that he is still hazy, otherwise he’d be giving you shit for it.

You dismount off of his softening shaft and feel your spent pussy leak down your inner thighs. A filthy idea pops into your fucked out head, your last act of dominance for tonight. You glide two fingers through your combined juices and bring them to Jack’s lips. The second time your fingers have been in his mouth tonight.

“See how good we taste together, baby,” you command, smearing some onto his plush lips. He sticks out his tongue, waiting for your offering. Much to your delight, he is still pliant under your control after you removed his restraints. He swirls his warm tongue along your fingers, lapping up every last drop.

You move off Jack’s chest in favor of tucking yourself into his side. Even though you were in control tonight, the need to be held post-coitus is still present. When he holds you in his strong arms, it’s your sanctuary. He’s not sure you know, but you’re his sanctuary.

Moments of tranquil pass and Jack breaks the silence.

“So…. Mommy, huh?”

END

#jack daniels x female reader #agent whiskey x female reader #agent jack whiskey daniels #jack daniels x you #jack daniels x reader #jack daniels smut #jack whiskey daniels #jack daniels fic #agent whiskey smut #agent whiskey x you #agent whiskey fic #agent whiskey x reader #agent whiskey #agent whiskey x f!reader #reader insert #fanfiction smut #fanfic writing #fanfic #pedro characters #pedro fics #pedro pascal characters #pedro pascal character #pedrohub #pedro pascal #clawing at my cage #pedrostories

[cutiedi3]

Idea of a date

Pairing: Jake Sully, Miles Quaritch, Neytiri, Tsu’tey, Tonowari x reader

Tags: Fluff, established relationship, cuddles

* A/N: Thought I’d start posting again on here! Lemme know if you have a request <3

* JAKE SULLY

* He loves to just hangout. He’d do anything for the two of you to have a moment of silence.

* He’d cuddle you for hours talking about sweet nothings.

* Not before making sure you were properly fed first if course.

* He’d make a meal for the two of you to eat and make sure you were full and would offer to get more food if you weren’t.

* Then he’d grab a woven blanket and you two would cuddled underneath the star. His large frame would be your pillow and he would stroke your hair.

* And if you fell asleep first he’d carry you to the hut to sleep.

* If he fell asleep first you’d both be sleeping outside tonight.

* MILES QUARITCH

* His idea of a date would be training. He just loves to train and stay in shape.

* And he especially enjoys testing the limits of his new body.

* He also likes to train you. He likes to check your stance and if you do well you receive a kiss.

* After a long day of your trying date he’d spend the night pampering you.

* He likes you to know he loves you.

* He’d make sure your comfortable and would message any sure mussels.

* NEYTIRI

* Her ideal date is flying on her Ikran together. She likes to have your arms wrapped around her waist so she prefers you ride with her.

* She enjoys giving you small tours on places around pandora even if you’ve grown up there your whole life.

* She would make sure to stop at the hidden gems.

* Grabbing beautiful flowers to put into your hair.

* She also had you both stop at a stream to get a drink but you always end up swimming together.

* TSU’TEY

* For him it’d be hiding his pa’li.

* He loves to talk you on slow rides as you cuddled him.

* He holds your arms with one of his as the other holds on to his pa’li.

* He likes night riding the most because everything lights up and so does your freckles.

* He gives you ripe fruits and flowers as gifts along the ride.

* TONOWARI

* He loves to do swimming with you.

* Deep dives are his favorite.

* He loves to guide you long the waves and hold your hand.

* He’ll take you to their memory tree as well and shows you his memories and memories he loves.

* He also grabs pretty shells and gives them to you.

* He’d even put them in a necklace for you

#jakesully #jake sully x reader #avatar #avatar way of water #miles quaritch x reader #miles quaritch #neytiri #neytiri x reader #jake x reader x neytiri #tsu’tey #tsu’tey x reader #tonowair #tonowair x reader #headcanon #avatar headcanons