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intheorangebedroom · 5 months

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Tonight you belong to me, prologue

Summary: He comes to you every Friday, in a shady motel on the outskirts of town.

This is the beginning of what you wished had no end.

Pairing: Frankie Morales x fem!Reader (OFC)

Rating: Explicit 🔞

A/N: Happy Frankie Friday, orange besties 🧡 See series masterlist for extensive a/n blurb and especially for trigger warnings. Tread carefully. Ily 🧡 Please be gentle, I'm terrified 🫣

Word count: 5.1k

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Prologue: In The Beginning

He comes to you every Friday.

He gets in after dark. He is gone before dawn.

In this shady motel on the outskirts of town, where no one will recognise your car. The curtains are yellow, and the carpet is brown. There’s a dollar store painting of the Appalachian above the bed, and the tap runs either trickling and scalding or high pressure and cold.

You hated that in particular, in the beginning. Now you don’t care. You don’t wash him off your skin anymore. Not until you’ve got no other choice.

Because he can’t mark you, you’d been firm on that point, he likes to come on your skin.

When he’d finally spoke, that very first time, he’d told you he was Frankie, but you assume it’s not his real name. Which is fine, you didn’t give him your real name either.

“Frankie” had been far subtler than you, regretful, perhaps, you like to entertain the delusion, when he’d hinted that you couldn’t leave any trace on his body.

And, in the beginning, you couldn’t imagine that it would ever matter.

You were wrong.

You were wrong about a lot of things, in the beginning.

—

Friday night. Again.

The swinging door creaks on its hinges to let in the regulars at random intervals. Mostly men, mostly middle-aged, mostly unshaven. Mostly clad in the working-class uniform of jeans, boots and t-shirt. Few of them sit around the round wooden tables. The bar isn’t large, there’s only four of those.

When they come in small parties, the men favour the two pools on the right. They’re lined with blue felt. The casing is made of plywood. No one ever plays darts, no one ever feeds the jukebox. Its electric cord lays unplugged on the floor, coiled like a sad sagging tail.

If they walk in alone, they tend to sit at the bar. Head turned toward the giant television screen hung on the wall to their left, where younger men in more colourful uniforms fight, run, kick or throw balls in all shapes and sizes. Its noise is at the forefront, the middle-aged men’s conversations a low humming sound that falls into the background.

The long and angled bar itself takes up most of the rectangular room’s space. The counter is stripped-down to the bare minimum. Stainless steel, easy to clean, practical. Four beer taps and a gambling machine and beyond the counter, a large mirror with three rows of dusty liquor bottles.

Food is served, occasionally, as evidenced by the paper napkins dispensers and the two yellow and red plastic condiment bottles on each table.

The barman runs the place on his own. You drink here every Friday evening, and you’ve never seen more than six customers at once, you included. Admittedly, you might not be very observant.

Being observant requires endurance, far more than you possess and are willing to deploy and direct towards others. You’re not selfish, not in the least. But you’re tired. You’ve been tired for years. There’s no rational explanation for your exhaustion. No honourable, awe-inspiring, valid ground. You don’t even know what wears you out. It might be sadness, disappointment, or boredom. Or all three in equal parts. All you know is that, come Friday night, your head needs the support of the gray wall behind you.

The creaking noise on your left signals the arrival of another customer, stomping in with a sure gait. Your eyes stay shut. You don’t come to the very aptly named Hole in The Wall seeking the company of other people, whoever they may be.

You come here to hide for a few hours, between the styrofoam ceiling and the dusty carpeted floor. To drink your week away in peace, but not in nerve-racking silence. Alcohol, you found out at a young age, has interesting properties: it blurs out the sharp edges of your dark thoughts in just the right amount.

Back in spring, when you stepped in here for the very first time, you looked comically out of place in your corporate attire, and you did raise quite a few eyebrows from the other patrons. Five months later, they must have learned to see past the charade of your overpriced clothes, because none of them pays you any mind anymore. It’s better than anonymity: it’s casual indifference.

You loosen your grip around your tall cocktail glass and let the condensation drip down onto the cardboard coaster. Reluctantly, you lift your weary eyelids to locate the square napkin lying somewhere on the table and dry your fingertips on it.

That’s when you see him taking a seat at the counter, directly across from your small table.

Years from now, you will still remember the precise circumstances of your first, brief encounter, even though you’re not fully paying attention yet. Nothing indicates tonight will be any different. Nothing suggests you are about to live through a pivotal moment in your existence.

Details will stand out, however. Mostly visual, surprisingly, given the dim lighting of the place. The back of his trucker hat, midnight blue plastic mesh, flattening the dark curls on his nape. The washed out denim of his shirt, worked-in, greenish in the diffuse artificial light, pulled taut across his back, as he sits facing away from you.

The square shape of his shoulders is backlit against the bar’s mirror. Your empty gaze finds the solid slope of his broad silhouette, and you let it rest there, lazily following his movements whenever he picks up his glass. It’s the same comfort you find when you rest your empty head against the hard wall. It’s aimless, inconsequential.

Later, on different kinds of Friday nights, the sight of his muscles bunching as he tugs off his shirt will bring you back to this very moment. The thought will reshape into a sharp, wistful ache deep inside your heart. What would have happened, to you, to him, if he had chosen to stop for a drink at another bar, somewhere further down the road? What if you had done the same, back in April?

For now, your mind is blessedly blank.

Does he catch your reflection in the mirror? Does he feel your gaze on the back of his head?

After a while, how long, you cannot tell, he pivots slowly on his stool, grounded and dense. Slowly, like a mountain would if a mountain came to life and decided to walk into the ocean. He doesn’t turn around completely, just enough to look at you, one of his arms still propped on top of the counter.

The right side of his face is darkened by the shadow from the brim of his hat, but you can make out the pronounced crease in his brow. His eyes are black, and unfathomable, like the ocean at night, but alight with a bright glimmer. They find yours instantly.

Something shifts inside your rib cage, something close to the heart, close to pain.

You feel exposed, entirely bare. Your breathing subsides, you cannot move, trapped in a nightmare-like stretch of time as he glares down at you, immobile, impressive, gigantic. Dark eyes boring into yours. You’re drowning in them.

You don’t want it to end.

Inevitably, he breaks eye-contact, and swivels back toward the mirror. He sits still for a few seconds, before grabbing his glass to finish his beer in long gulps.

You watch him lift his hat and brush his hair to the side with a large hand, and he’s out the door less than a minute later, without so much as a glance in your direction, a conscious choice, given the minute proportions of the place.

He leaves you sitting there, with your brow pinched and your empty drink, struggling to understand the rippling effects of his massive presence on your body and your brain.

You bring your fingers to your chest and rub them over your sternum, where the shifting sensation continues to prickle.

Neither a second drink nor a third helps dull the feeling, but a fourth one is not an option if you want to get home without a DUI.

It follows you into the darkness of the deserted parking lot, on the drive home and into the glass prison of your clinically clean apartment. It’s there when you get into bed, when you lie wide awake at 3am next to your sleeping fiancé, and it’s still there when you wake up, hungover and sore, four hours later.

Nestled between your lungs. The memory of his cold hard stare. Of his soft sad eyes.

It bypasses your most foolproof diversions of painful pleasure and pleasurable pain. Your attempts at hard work and your compulsive distractions. It robs you of your appetite, of your lucidity, of your ability to rest. It corners you in the first floor toilet of your office building on a Thursday morning, on the verge of a panic attack, until you consider calling your sister for help.

Ava would figure it out. She’d get you out of that loop in which you’ve locked yourself up, she’d know what to say. With her crude words and her unforgiving formulations, she’d admonish your silly overreaction and dismissively rebuke your daydreams over a mundane interaction, probably throwing in something about your heteronormative fantasies.

Dude, you’re all worked up because of a staring contest with a rando in a dive bar? she’d say. She’d toss the rhetorical question at your face, you can hear her as if you’ve already sweated through the conversation.

She’s often harsh but she’s always right.

And normally, you’d be seeking that out. For your little sister to bully some good sense back into your nebulous brain.

But something has shifted.

Dark curls, thick fingers, flexing shoulders. Solid arms. Cold, hard stare.

He abraded something on the surface of your skin, and you don’t think you’re capable of withstanding Ava’s sarcasm in your current state.

By the following Friday, you feel so vulnerable you consider going to another place, or not going out at all.

Only, the alternative is worse.

You walk into The Hole in The Wall convinced that your unsteady gait is betraying your apprehension, squinting to adjust to the dim light of the place. The bar is nearly empty, as always, save for a couple of bearded graying men you vaguely recall having seen here before. They all look the same to you, anyway. Another thing you hate about yourself.

The barman tells you to sit while he prepares your drink. The gesture is kind but uncustomary, and it only serves to increase your uneasy feeling.

Within an hour of waiting, because that's what you've been doing, you register with an icy trickle of shame dripping down your sides, you realise he won’t be coming.

That man’s presence here last week is the very definition of sheer happenstance. Nothing more. Nothing else. If anything, you’ve been a nuisance to him, ogling him while he was simply trying to unwind with an afterwork drink.

You’ll never see him again.

And it’s fine. You’ll move on, drift back into drifting, avoiding at all costs to process what happened to you when you met his gaze. The tree hiding the forest.

When you walk up to the counter to order your second drink, the question slips away from you.

“Can I have the same thing the man in the trucker hat had last Friday, please?”

The barman looks up at you from the tray of clean dishes he's pulling out of the dishwasher and he huffs. He’s handsome, by most standards, you notice for the very first time. Very tall, and broad, green-eyed with a three-day stubble. He’s probably a couple of years above forty. His head is shaved bald. He’s manly in a burly, albeit fatherly way.

“Oh sweetheart, d’you know how many guys with a trucker hat I see here every day?”

It’s not meant to make you feel small, his tone is gentle. It’s a straightforward, factual answer.

“What do you wanna drink?” he asks when you don’t answer. “Tired of that G&T yet? Cos I got good beer. This is a beer place, you know? Wanna try a light blonde, to start? Something stronger? An IPA?”

What do you want. You’ve been drinking gin all your life because that’s what your mother always has. Starting at 5pm in the afternoon. Would you, indeed, like to try a light blonde? Something stronger? An IPA, to start?

It’s a brand-new world unfurling in front of you, a yellow brick road paved with what-do-you-wants.

“Sure,” you nod, “I can try an IPA.”

—

The barman goes by the name of Mark. He’s also the owner of The Hole in The Wall, you learn. Bought the place two years ago, after a painful divorce. A cliché, he adds, with a charming, self-deprecating smile.

The interaction’s short and altogether not unpleasant, and the beer, to your surprise, is fresh and enjoyable. It’s much tastier, in fact, than the cheap, tepid gin you’ve been sipping so far. It gets you drunk just as fast, but this time when you leave the bar, your mind is quiet, if not at ease.

The following week, a heatwave hits the Tampa Bay. The melting asphalt sticks to your leather soles, like your sweaty clothes to your clammy skin, like your brooding mood to your dampened dreams. In a couple of days eventually, August will draw to an end, but the summer won’t end with it. It never truly does. It taunts you all year round, a sweltering reminder of how much you hate living here.

And if it wasn’t for the humidity, you’d be jogging the short distance between your car and the cool haven of the air-conditioned bar.

You push the swinging door forward, eyes shut in anticipation of the blinding darkness and you stand in the entrance for a few seconds. The familiar and comforting smell of moldy dust mixed with beer yeast greets your senses as you take in the chill air grazing your naked arms.

And then you reopen your eyes.

He’s here.

Trucker hat, blue jeans, gray T-shirt. Different clothes, same silhouette. He’s sitting at your table, his position a magnified echo of yours two weeks ago, hand loosely wrapped around his pint, seemingly asleep with his head propped against the wall.

Mark looks at you and tilts his head in his direction, wiggling an eyebrow with a silent question of “Is this the guy you were asking about?”

Your breathing’s so loud you think everyone must hear it over the droning television. Mark’s brow furrows with incomprehension at the alarm widening your eyes, and you anchor yourself to his face, walking toward him in slow motion, climbing on the first high stool you reach.

“Hey. You ok?”

You stretch your lips in a wince of a smile.

“So? What will it be today? Wanna try a Free Dive? It’s local.”

You nod in silence, but then he grabs a large glass, and you ask tentatively, “Can I have only half a pint?”

Fuck, your mouth is so dry.

Behind you, to your right, you feel more than you hear the man shift in his chair.

Mark sighs, his left hand paused on the tap handle.

“I don’t have beer glasses this small, sweetheart. Get a pint, the first one’s on me, okay?”

You reiterate your silent nod. He places the beer in front of you, and you swallow the first swigs too quickly. The back of your throat throbs with the fast flowing intake of the cold liquid, or perhaps it’s because of the frantic beating of your heart.

He’s getting up now, you can tell by the friction sound of the chair dragging on the carpeted floor, and your frightened expression turns downright pleading as you hear him close the distance between you.

He’s at your back, sliding his thick naked arm past yours to return his empty glass to the counter. His movements are slow, deliberate. You get a whiff of his scent, a masculine musk, with a faint smell of laundry detergent, it’s wholesome, safety, comfort. You turn your head. He’s looking at you. Looking at you with intent.

He’s so tall you have to lift your chin to hold his gaze. Hard cold stare, soft sad eyes, it’s swirling violently inside your exhausted chest and he’s leaving again already, walking toward the door like nothing just happened.

He pulls it inward and you watch him exit the bar into the dusk light.

Did he come back for you? Are you going insane?

Sixty-seven seconds. Sixty-seven seconds is the time it takes you to decide your next move. The one that’s going to forever change your life. The one that could be everything or turn out meaningless.

“I’ll be right back,” you tell Mark, sliding your handbag on the counter and you stand up to follow him outside.

The sunset sky is a pink shade of orange. Shadows are stretching long onto the asphalt, drawing a distorted world upside-down.

He’s not here anymore, you waited too fucking long. You quickly scan the parked vehicles on the other side of the road to your right, and the parking lot in front of you, but it’s empty, save for your anthracite sedan, a black truck and what you assume must be Mark’s old SUV, because you see it every week.

“Fuck,” you breathe out, pressing your fingers to your sternum.

You look to your left, where the parking ends. There’s a white utility vehicle advertising a plumbing service and a dark blue city car. Beyond them, the lot extends into a narrow stretch of gravel behind the small rectangular building. There’s a pile of junk, and the tailgate of a red truck.

Your hand drops to your side and you start walking toward it, going around the white van.

He’s there. He’s waiting for you by the front of the red truck, behind the building. His hands propped on his waist, head down, hidden under his cap.

You keep walking toward him, the sound of your shoes on the dirty ground grating your ears, but you stop short when he raises his head, fuck he looks even taller at this distance, with his elbows spread.

It’s like he senses your apprehension, or perhaps he shares it, because he folds his arms over his chest, hugging himself.

For the very first time, you can fully make out his face. Strong features, a strong curvy nose, a patchy beard peppering a sharp jaw, and plush lips. Your gaze follows the solid column of his neck down to his suprasternal point peeking above the V-collar of his worn-out t-shirt, before it’s drawn back to his eyes.

He stands there perfectly still for you to detail.

Above you, the sky has turned a rusty blue. The humidity is stifling. It’s Friday the 30th, 2019, 8.17pm.

“What do you want?”

His voice is deep, and low, barely louder than a murmur yet intense, his words full and round.

The question, however legitimate, hits you square in the solar plexus, right under your aching sternum. You fear that if you don’t speak fast enough, he’ll leave you again, alone with the memory of his soft sad eyes and his hard cold stare.

“I don’t know,” you whisper, and god, if it’s true, what are you doing here?

He huffs, and it’s the very sound of disillusion. His eyes grow dimmer, you think you’re not the one darkening them. Unfolding his arms, he removes his hat and takes a step closer, then another. You could touch him, if you reached out with your arm stretched.

He looks at you like he’s already seen how your story ends.

You could back away. You don’t.

He moves slowly, thick body thrumming with undiluted strength and unreleased tension, eyes searching yours, giving you the time to leave, should leaving be what you choose, should you turn around and run before the hanging threat breaks like dark stormy clouds and drench you soaked.

He slowly moves forward until he’s towering over you, until his chest touches your breasts, until the pilled cotton of his t-shirt catches at the satin material of your blouse. His scent floods your senses, he leans down into the curve of your neck and inhales you there, long, deep, unhurried. You hold your breath, still, in turn, for his exploration, nails digging into your palms, heart tripping.

And then, he touches you. With his lips, a feather-like caress over the soft skin under your ear. Your eyes flutter shut, your thoughts are suspended.

“This what you want?” he murmurs.

His words sink under your skin, they harden your nipples, raise goosebumps on your nape in the muggy evening heat.

“Yes.”

The cap falls onto the gravel. His hands go to your hips. Clutching you there with a rough grip and he’s tugging you closer, flush to his chest. He licks up a broad stripe along the line of your throat, pivots with you in his arms and backs you into the side of the truck, you have to grab his forearms to keep your balance.

A guttural sound catches in his throat, like a grunt he tries to hold back, for your touch, for the taste of your skin, for your pliant docility.

Your head rolls back, you’ve gone weeks without a skin on skin contact, and now this man is hunched over you, his body swallowing yours, this stranger who’s infected your dreams with his cold hard stare and his soft sad eyes, his mouth roaming the expanse of your throat, short beard prickling your skin, and the shifting sensation inside your chest drops to your core where it catches fire.

His kisses are lips, teeth and tongue, rough and scraping at you raw in all the right ways, they trail up along your neck, under your jaw, and when they find your lips, he presses you harder into him. He tastes like beer, unfamiliar, you want to get used to it.

The seams of your blouse strain when he pulls it out of your skirt with an impatient tug. His hands slither under the hem and find the naked skin of your back. His palms are strong, rugged and scalding and his fingertips calloused, they make your skin sizzle underneath their pressing, crackle like snapping wood, like fireworks at a summer county fair, like sweet candy wrapping.

You're leaking hot and sticky between your hips, responding with your entire body, opening up for him, letting his tongue in past your lips with pathetic grateful little moans, winding your arms around his shoulders, over the cording muscles of his back, musky sweat dampening his t-shirt. The thick, solid shape of him, that got etched behind your eyelids.

You’re a want and a need and an empty flutter, entangled with him, whoever he may be, his tongue swirling inside your mouth, the scrape of his teeth on your lower lip, his splayed hands covering your back, his knee spreading your legs open.

He’s voracious, harsh in his own need, snatching from you what you’re already willing to give, angling your head with a sharp pull on your hair to deepen his kiss, grunting his approval when you moan at the sting.

Arousal keeps dripping down your fold where his thigh prods firm and brawny against the black material of your skirt that hinders the pressure.

He growls, frustration rumbling low and menacing inside his throat. He grabs your ass and squeezes, thick middle finger pushing against the fabric of your clothes into the cleft between your cheeks and you jolt, leaping forward further into him. His belt buckle bites into the soft flesh of your belly, right where you're burning empty and wanting and shameless for him. You feel him hot and hard against your hip, and he tightens his hold, cages you within him.

He’s big all over, larger than life proportions, you surrender to the fact with your lust-drunk mind, from the height of his frame to the girth of his sex, from his grip on your senses to the sorrow in his eyes.

It blooms inside you like pain, blossoms of mahogany red spreading along your limbs in relentless waves, the power he already wields over you and you don’t even know his name.

You buck between his arms, a first and very last attempt at freeing yourself, unconvincing with the scrap of your fingernails along the pebbled skin of his neck, and you press back into him again, squirming against his throbbing length, offering him some friction.

He pulls out all of sudden, breaking the kiss, and you're left panting, ankles swaying, you’d drop to the gravel without the support of the truck, still sun-warm in the early evening, yet colder than his feverish body.

He shakes his head with a silent no, his shoulders heaving, a wordless warning hissed through his clenched bared teeth. The simmering anger under the surface only makes you want him more, the unyielding restraint shining dark in his eyes.

But it’s over. You know it. He gave you this, and took it back. With shaky hands, you smooth down the wrinkles of your blouse where he’s bunched it in his fists. You lick his taste off your trembling lip. You will not cry.

He shakes his head again, you watch him through welling tears, confused, eyes flickering between his.

Behind him, the city car’s engine revs up to a start, aggressive headlights backlighting him. His throat bobs up and down in chiaroscuro as he swallows hard. You know what you must look like in the crude white light. Supplicant, dependent, awaiting. Disheveled by his hand. Tires grate on the gravel as the car reverses away from you into the night, and with it the headlights, leaving you standing in the brown city night, urban semi darkness, and you see him shut his eyes.

He smiles, a puzzling, sorrowful lift of his plush lips, and a new sort of ache washes over you. You raise forward on your tiptoes to peck a soft kiss at the corner of his mouth. His entire frame quivers for you. A muscle clenches in his jaw, the deepening crease in his brow redefines his traits in shadows.

He leans into you, like he wants you but he doesn’t want to want you, like he’s giving in but not entirely, because giving in would be the end of him, of you.

The flat of his palm to the swell of your breast, and he kneads your soft flesh, slowly at first, growing urgent. The back of your head hits the truck’s window when he pinches your nipple, hard, with two fingers, and you bite down a moan.

He’s engulfing you again, lips latched around your other nipple, tongue swirling and licking through your blouse and your thin bra and you hold on to him, you cling to his frame when he bunches up your skirt around your waist, leather boot nudging your foot to the side, cock throbbing on your hip, slick dripping down your walls.

“Stop me,” his mouth brushes the shell of your ear. It’s not a dare, it’s not a plea, it’s your last chance to back down before the free fall.

Your pulse stutters, you arch into him without hesitation, but he pins you back against the truck with his chest, cupping you through your underwear and he curses into your neck at the sticky leaking mess he finds there.

Your naked leg hitches up rigid and tense against his leg, curled fingers, curled toes, and he hooks his index into the cotton of your panties.

A brief stroke of his knuckles into the soft, smooth dip between your sex and your inner thigh, unexpectedly tender, before he parts your soaked lips with his two middle fingers, coating them in your sticky slick desire, and he sinks them inside your empty cunt.

You crumble around the intrusion, forehead hitting his collarbone, slack-mouthed, a short exhale of a silent “oh.” He brings his left hand to the crown of your head and cradles you there, while his fingers pump in and out of your heat fast and rough. His thumb glides through your folds and starts rubbing at your clit, deft and precise, and you shudder between his arms, you slump into his hold.

He keeps stroking your hair, gentle soothing sounds murmured into your ear as he fucks you raw with his hand, attuned to your moans and your every reaction, gauging what you can take before his fingers curl deeper inside your cunt, merciless, thumb pressing tight circles on your bud at an increasing pace.

Your breathing comes in ragged and short while his intensifies. It’s pouring into your ear hot and overwhelming and you’re dissolving. Sweat beading at your temples, heat raising from his exerted muscles.

You focus on the sensation of his flexing muscles under your clawing hands to stave off your building orgasm, it’s growing bright and blinding, searing and violent but it’s inevitable, and soon, too soon, your release flows hot and sticky into his hand. Your whines resound inside his chest but he keeps going, low husks of shhh, come on now, that’s it, until your trapped body trashes with the overstimulation.

It’s like he can’t let go, pressing his nose heavily to the side of your face, and you struggle to resurface, blood thrumming in your veins, his angry cock pulsating against your hip.

You let out a dry sob when he slides out of you and the rubber band of your panties slaps your sensitive skin. You don’t miss the flat drag of his tongue licking your taste off his palm, you furrow your fingers deeper into his arm with a short clench of your eyes.

“Fuck,” your hear him quietly groan, and his fingers disappear into his mouth.

You want to stay tucked up against him, curled up into his hold. You could live the rest of your life there, you think, between his hands and his scent, between his chest and his truck.

You lock your ankles and your knees, hoping they will not fail you and you stand, pushing away from him and into the side of the truck. You readjust your skirt, slide it down, palm it smooth. Brush the damp hair from your forehead with the back of your trembling hand.

In your peripheral, he’s leaning down, picking up his hat from the ground and combing his fingers through his hair before he sets the cap back on his head.

You look up dazed and heavy-lidded and you brace yourself before meeting his gaze, cold hard stare, soft sad eyes, and he says,

“I’m Frankie.”

****

Bonus (having déjà vu? that's normal 😝 Gonna use this gif at the end of every first chapter I manage to yank out of my crazy in love brain):

Taglist (thank you 🧡 if you don't wish to be tagged anymore, just drop me a DM 🧡): @elegantduckturtle @mashomasho @lola766 @nicolethered @littleone65 @the-rambling-nerd @saintbedelia @pedrostories @trickstersp8 @deadmantis @hbc8 @princessdjarin @harriedandharassed @girlofchaos @gracie7209 @mrsparknuts @mylostloversbookmarks @its-nebuleuse @flowersandpotplantsandsunshine @all-the-way-down-here

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intheorangebedroom · 4 months

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Tonight you belong to me, chapter 1

Summary: He comes to you every Friday, in a shady motel on the outskirts of town.

Guilt is a wild trip, but so is desire. How the hell did you end up in this divvy motel? And now, what's next?

Pairing: Frankie Morales x fem!Reader (OFC)

Rating: Explicit 🔞

A/N: Happy Frankie Friday, orange besties 🧡 PLEASE, see series masterlist for extensive trigger warnings. Now I'm off to disappear for another month, heehee. To anyone who celebrates anything, happy whatever you celebrate. Ily 🧡

@frannyzooey And to you, Kelli… Thank you 🧡 Thank for your help on this chapter, without you it wouldn’t exist. Arguably, without you I wouldn’t exist (my gothic ass) and without you I would certainly not be writing at all. You’re the kindest, most generous, most beautiful person I’ve ever met, you shine so brightly and I love you more than all the Frankies from all the universes put together 🧡✨

Word count: 6.5k

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Chapter 1: Dirt

Guilt, you’re about to find out, is an interesting feeling.

A viscous, gluey business that sticks to your skin and clings to your frame. It’s a prickling tickle under your armpits, a rigidity in your legs. It’s a tightness in your shoulders, and it pulls on your face. It has a density, and it’s tangible, not only do you feel it, you see it in every mirror, every reflective surface.

A pervasive, shape-shifting torment that unfurls gradually, and comes in many colorful shades, when you begin to take in the gravity and the ramifications of your actions.

The first wave is darkened by fear, black as petrol, trickling down your insides when he says his name.

Frankie.

Like an invitation, an opening. Gaping, abysmal, pulling you in and you remain silent, struggling on the edge of it, grasping for balance. Drawn in, but too stunned to let go and dive in yet.

It’s a violent crimson, next, shame creeping over you when you walk back inside the bar to retrieve your purse.

Facing Mark is difficult, but talking to him is beyond your strength. You gesture toward the handbag waiting for you on the other side of the counter. He hands it to you in appraising silence, judgmental, surely, and you smile, or you wince, you can’t even tell. With shaky hands, you fumble inside it for your wallet, his green gaze strained on your face.

You know that your entire appearance gives away the narrative of what just took place in the back lot of his establishment. Your face is flushed, your lips swollen, your hair undone. Your clothes are rumpled and in his eyes, you will from now on and forever be this woman.

After what feels like several minutes, he takes pity on you, and reiterates his offer. You’re good, he says. Sweetheart. The first pint’s on him.

You don’t stay long enough for a second drink, however.

Back outside into the muggy night, you crumble onto the passenger seat of your car. The polyester lining of your skirt clings to the bare skin at the back of your thighs, damp with sweat and what is left of your inconsequential desire, and you feel appallingly filthy, bone-deep disgusting.

Guilt washes over you in blue waves of regret, welling under your eyelids when you notice that the red truck is gone. And with it, the gaping, abysmal possibilities of another you, reinvented with him.

The shaking starts as you’re driving, trembling hands gripping the steering wheel. A brutal, chilling comedown, guilt experienced in bright and blinding yellow at the belated realization of your betrayal.

How easily, how rapidly you forgot, trapped under Frankie’s gaze, coming undone between Frankie’s hands, that your life isn’t truly yours. That it has never been. You’re not on your own, no matter how much you long to be. You have never been afforded the privilege of independence, nor do you possess the necessary strength to break free from your family.

And who has Frankie betrayed? What faceless, nameless woman has he gone back to? Remorse blends in with envy and resentment, painting green ring-shaped stains in your peripheral vision as you get out of your car and into the lobby of your building.

Eyes to the floor, you step into the elevator, this oversized coffin lined with mirrors reflecting your image with a silent scoff. There’s dust from the gravel on your leather pumps.

Inside your apartment, the clickety-click of your heels on the tiled floor bounces off the walls of your skull. You hate that sound, eminently cold and giving away your presence.

The living-room television is on, probably set to a news channel, most likely broadcasting a financial show in which white men over 50 listen to the sound of their own voice and debate about obscure economical regulations you’re supposed to care about.

Adrian’s already here. Uncharacteristically early. Friday evenings usually mean late night poker or whatever his own excuse is to get away from your cribless home.

Hoping to go unnoticed so as to avoid him, you take off your shoes, but it’s too late. He calls out your name from the kitchen, his intonation surprised but cheerful.

Head hanging low, heartbeat picking up, you make a silent dash for the upstairs bathroom, remorse so pungent you fear no shower can ever wash it off your skin.

Under the scolding high-pressure stream, you scrub your body raw with a soapless loofah, but there is no scrubbing away the feeling of those hands over your skin.

Eyes drifting closed, you lean your forehead against the anthracite marble of your Italian shower, and let your chest heave around a suppressed sob.

Guilt, shame, and remorse are powerless to outweigh your want, undeterred, unabated, unquenched.

Back in the parking lot, it had been a moment before you were able to push away from the side of the truck and stand upright. He stood there, silent and immobile in front of you. Waiting, as if to shield you from the street and the rest of the world. Silence hanging charged and heavy between you, as you wouldn’t offer your name in return.

When you started moving toward the bar’s entrance, he stepped aside, and that’s when your body moved of its own volition. You took his hand in yours, palm against palm, trembling fingers wrapped around his knuckles.

“Can I see you again?” you asked, pleaded, begged. You didn’t recognize your voice.

He swallowed hard, shook his head at you for the third time, and squeezed your hand in his bigger one.

“I don’t think so. You know that’s not a good idea,” he said.

—

Grief settles like dust over the first weeks of September.

You are surprised, almost shocked, to observe how little your life has changed. You get up in the morning, you shower and get dressed, drink coffee, go to work. You attend meetings about maritime trade regulation, sitting at your father’s side, go over endless spreadsheets detailing import-export profit and loss, you pretend to understand them, and you pretend to care, like a pretty human puppet.

You come home at night, skip dinner when you can. You lie in bed next to Adrian. You seek out warmth where there is none. You perform sex without satisfaction.

There has been no question asked. No suspicion, no doubt cast.

You wear the same clothes, drive along the same roads, walk around the same hallways.

And no one seems to notice that you are different. That you experienced imperious want and incandescent pleasure. That you carry a secret. Nestled, dormant and quiet, between your lungs, like a wild and unknown creature.

Whatever part of him you welcomed inside you transformed the hollowed spaces of your existence. It redefined the void, creating a place of your own where to curate your new desires.

His lips on your lips, your body molded into his, and pressed against your hips, an unfulfilled promise for more.

In the palm of your hand, the ghost sensation of Frankie’s hold, now forever gone and lost, and your highlighted loneliness feels like a barless prison. On your own, always, again, to divert the old familiar pain of being you.

Weeks go by. The guilt recedes, and sadness takes its place, like clockwork, like physics. Like a new sort of weight coating your limbs. A nostalgic longing without any object.

In the idle moments of your day, when you’re stuck in traffic, in a meeting, or in a conversation, your mind wanders back to him. The solid slope of his shoulders. The strong span of his back. Muscles bunching up under your grip. His scent, his curls, his taste. An organic trace seared into your being.

His rebuttal, after he’d given you so much, felt less like a rejection than like a refusal to heed a deeply rooted instinct.

His stare was no longer hard and cold. It carried only sorrow and loss.

Does he think of you like you think of him? Does he miss the contact of your skin, or the abandon of your kiss?

Did he walk away from your embrace with something to keep, like you did?

Day after day, summer fades into fall, the change hardly perceptible through the consistently sweltering weather.

Day after day, focusing becomes tricky, finding sleep more and more difficult and your train of thought turns downright maniacal.

Ava’s calls go straight to voicemail.

More often than not, you start drinking as soon as you come home to fence off the tears of exhaustion, hoping Adrian won’t notice. Another line you had promised yourself never to cross, and under the combined effects of the alcohol and the antidepressants, you feel drowsy and dizzy, increasingly disconnected from your reality. A nagging sting settles on the left side of your lower abdomen. But you don’t mind the pain as much as you mind turning into your mother.

Some days, you think you’d like nothing more than to give way, allow yourself to drown into the proven refuge of self-abuse. Whenever you indulge the thought, soothing images spring to mind, oil on canvas, deep green, tender brown. Ophelia, crowned with wild flowers and rings of violets, sleeping peacefully in a shallow stream.

When you finally return to the Hole in the Wall, it’s only with the hope of hindering your impending tailspin.

In the parking, after turning off the ignition, you sit in your car for the whole of five minutes, staring numbly at the dark lot where the red truck had been parked.

Mark’s hesitant greeting puzzles you; by now you have lost most of your ability to read people’s reactions.

You walk to the counter and choose to sit on one of the high stools. Somewhere deep down, you enjoy his distance; you relish the sadistic pleasure of reliving the humiliation you felt standing before him, freshly fucked dumb on a total stranger’s fingers.

Besides, you’ll take the attention, however uncomfortable it may be.

“Long time no see,” Mark says, and you produce a poorly executed smile.

“I don’t know… two weeks? I’ve been busy,” you add as a way of apologizing.

“It’s been a month,” he replies curtly.

You try a brown ale, this time, rich and bitter. He busies himself behind the counter, cleaning and wiping, while you drain your glass in silence. You haven’t eaten all day, and you’re drinking too fast. Nausea laps against your diaphragm. It’s the last missing scene from this scenario: you, throwing up in the toilet of his bar.

You’re considering leaving when he speaks again.

“Trucker hat dude came by.”

Your head shots up and you glare at him, eyes widening under your pinched brow, a new wave of sickness nudging further up. He gauges your face, twirling a towel inside a pint glass, waiting for your answer, but when you give him none, he goes on.

“Did he…” he starts, and his eyes slowly go back and forth between yours, “he didn’t hurt you or anything? Cause if he did, if you wanna press charges, I can—“

“No,” you cut him off, “god no, I’m fine. I’m perfectly ok,” you add unnecessarily when his gaze narrows.

He pauses for a moment, like he’s the only one who can judge if you are, indeed, perfectly ok, before he faces away from you to put back the clean glasses on the lower shelves behind him.

When he’s done, he turns back around, props his hands low on his hips, and for the first time since you’ve entered the place, he stands perfectly still.

“He’s been asking about you.”

Between your lungs, the creature begins to stir.

“He came back,” you say, surprisingly matter-of-factly.

“Yeah, that’s what I said. Asked if you come here every Friday.”

Piece by piece, your mind starts swiveling, sluggish and blunt after being successfully dulled out by the past couple of weeks of excessive drinking. You picture his tall figure standing in the small bar, perhaps he sat on the stool you’re sitting on now? Did he lift his cap to comb his hair with his fingers before he spoke?

Mark is talking again, and it’s a conscious effort to bring your attention back to his words.

“Asked if you always come on your own. If I know your name.”

“I never told you my name,” you panic, “what did you tell him?”

“I see your name every week on your AmEx Gold, sweetheart, but I kindly told him to go fuck himself,” he scoffs.

His sardonic tone snaps you out of your drifting daydreaming. Your face immediately hardens. You sit up straight, drawing further away from him and he seems to change his mind. He’s softer when he speaks next.

“Look, I don’t know what’s the lowdown between you two, you understand? And anyway, I’m not in the habit of discussing my regulars with just about anyone. That kinda goes against the job’s ethics, you know what I mean?”

You shrug away the rational, albeit patronizing explanation with a huff of annoyance. You feel more alert than you have in weeks.

“When was that?” you ask.

“Last week. Thursday, I think.”

“Shit.”

Mark lets out a heavy sigh, resembling that of an exhausted father, and he opens the cash register.

“He left a note for you.”

—

An address. Written in all caps, black ink on a white piece of paper torn from a lined notebook. No phone number, not date, no time… and no name. Just the address. Under the feeble cabin light of your car, the paper looks old, like it’s been carried around tucked inside a wallet for years, and time has turned it yellow.

The coordinates on the dashboard GPS are identical to the ones on the paper. They were identical back in the parking, at the bar, when you typed them in; they were identical at every single red light you stopped at and checked. And they’re still identical now, glowing in blue letters, cold and synthetic, above the message You have reached your destination.

You raise your head again and stare at the building in front of you.

It’s a motel. One floor, L shaped, slightly sloping roof. With wrought iron details, a porch hanging low and square wooden pillars demarcating each room, nine of them in total. On the right, underneath a bare bulb, a large ice machine gleams like a beacon for lost time-travelers, next to a pay phone with a cut-off cord and a missing receiver. On the rear end of the building, to the left, above what looks like the reception, a 4 feet tall sign spells MOTEL in red neon letters.

At its height, the place probably looked nice. But that was a rough 55, 60 years ago, you estimate. Now it’s nearly derelict, with visible cracks streaking the yellowing walls, several broken drainpipes, and a missing number on the door of room 7.

If you cared about these kinds of things, you’d figure that the diversion of the main road further south is responsible for the motel’s decaying state.

Your attention is elsewhere, as usual. The parking lot is deserted, save for three vehicles. The red truck is here, parked a couple of places away to your right. Engine off. Empty.

The drive here from the Hall in the Wall was nearly an hour long. The car cruised along poorly lit, narrow two-lane roads, lined with luxuriant vegetation, dense and confining in the pitch darkness of the suburban night. You’ve lived in Tampa your entire life and have never set a foot in this part of the Bay Area. Technically, you’re not even in Tampa anymore.

He’s inside one of these rooms, somewhere. Waiting for you, and that thought alone makes your breathing difficult and your hands clammy.

What now? What’s next? Are you supposed to walk up to the reception and ask about him? A tall man wearing a trucker hat? Frankie?

And what will happen, once you’ve found him?

This is ridiculous. Sordid. It’s gone too far, whatever that is. A motel outside of town. The worst possible cliché. The most degrading place.

Between your lungs, the creature is clawing at your chest.

You shift nervously on the creaking leather seat, exhaling long and shaky, no longer repressing the memory of his sturdy fingers curling inside your warmth, of his tongue swirling inside your mouth. The instant intimacy of your furtive encounter, that turning point, when he briefly relinquished his control.

A chorus of voices rumbles like tumbling boulders inside your head, a cacophony of rules and guidelines, tacit and unspoken, ingrained and internalized. But with every passing minute staring at the bright motel sign, your resolve grows surer.

The yellow curtains ripple behind the rectangular window of room number 2 and you quickly pull the key out of the ignition. Grabbing your phone from the dashboard, you stuff it inside your purse, which you slide under the driver's seat.

Eyes locked on the curtains, you make a fast-paced beeline to the door. Around you, the night is bustling with the sounds and noises of the invisible wildlife. Revealing nothing, containing so much.

With a quick rattle of your heels, you step under the porch, hand extended and ready to knock on the door when it opens for you.

Oh he’s broad, so much broader than you even remembered, blocking the entire doorway with his frame, blue jeans, black shirt, and this goddamn hat that’s already haunting your dreams and your nightmares.

Looking down on you, irate, defiant, daring you to push him aside and enter. Behind him, the room is plunged in darkness. Above you, the porch lights cast a warm hue on his face, that fails to soften his expression. The crease between his brow is deeper than your fears.

You take a step closer, on instinct, but he moves to the side as if to avoid any contact with you and you enter the dark bedroom, carried by your momentum.

Guilt will come back to you later, sporadically, in episodes, but for the most part, you forfeit it wholly when you cross the threshold of room number 2.

He closes the door behind you and flicks up the toggle switch near the door frame. Two quaint lampshades blink to life on the headboard, casting a warm, subdued light. There’s no AC, or he hasn’t turned it on, and the atmosphere inside the room is already stifling, charged with his scent.

“Took you long enough. Thought you wanted to see me,” he grunts, and the creature purrs inside your chest.

“I did. I do.”

Stopping in the middle of the room, you turn around to face him. He’s standing tall and firm and mighty, feet planted apart on the carpeted floor, arms crossed over his chest. Yet you note his hands are splayed across his biceps, as if he were attempting to hug himself.

Perhaps that’s when you convince yourself Frankie is not his real name. Somehow, it makes it easier to believe you’re not the object of his ire.

“Your friend didn’t tell you–”

“He’s not my friend,” you interrupt. “I only got your note earlier. Tonight.”

You let the implication sink in and your gaze travels down to the dip at the base of his neck and back up. The square, yellow bedroom provides you with the brightest environment you’ve ever had the leisure of observing him in.

He’s beautiful, stunning, really, with unique and complex features. Almost pretty, but in a reluctant way, as if it was irrelevant to the life he’s chosen and led. His face speaks so loud, washed over by so many emotions, frustration, doubt and anger, and that lingering sadness in his dark eyes that tugs at your heart and twitches your fingers.

“What’s your name?” he asks, tilting his chin in your direction.

Janet Leigh’s face pops up in black and white inside your mind, driving through a curtain of strident violins, skittish eyes flicking between the road ahead of her and the rearview mirror.

“Marion,” you answer, inexplicably.

“Marion,” he repeats, and you know he knows you’re lying.

Unable to hold his gaze, you look away to the side, and he gives you time to take in the surroundings. The medium size bed with a stained, synthetic bedspread, the practical, shipped furniture, an angular chair and a desk surmounted by a rectangular framed mirror, the antique cathodic TV set hanging from the wall in the corner. The brown carpet. The yellow curtains. The painting of the Appalachian.

And whatever your face says then makes him huff.

“Not what you expected? How did you think this was gonna be? How do you think these things go?”

You look at him again, stunned, lost, hurt maybe, that he should recognize you for what you don’t want to be.

“I don’t know. I’ve never done this before,” you tell him in a small voice.

He shakes his head, like you aimed to wound, and unconsciously, your fingers find your sternum, jittery, anxious to appease this wild creature scrabbling against your rib cage.

“I shouldn’t be here,” he mutters hoarsely, shaking his head again, or still, “and you shouldn’t be here either, this is bullshit.”

And he’s right, once more, he is right, neither of you should be here. All the lines you walked, all the rules you abided by, meeting expectations and doing as you were told, and you still end up here, on the outskirts of town, in this gloomy motel. Facing this stranger, begging to surrender to him, with your heart in your hand and your life on your lips.

Eyes strained on his, you move closer, cautious, with your palms upward, as if he were to jolt and scurry away if you were too sudden. If you tame him, perhaps you will tame the wild creature between your lungs as well.

Drawn to his skin, you brush the tips of your fingers along his bicep, and the taut muscle thrums under the freckled, tanned surface of him.

He’s holding his breath, hardened face, hardened stare, deepening crease, and your fingers skate up along the slope of his arm until they meet his hand.

He’s difficult to catch, you think, even when willing to be caught, but it’s now very clear what you want for yourself. You want him.

It matters not that he belongs to somebody else. If you’re here, it’s because he wants you too. Despair and desire have brought you together, combined, conjoined, converging.

Your hand travels round to the back of his arm, soft and feather-like, up under the hem of his t-shirt, lifting his sleeve. His eyes are boring into yours. You lick your lips, slowly, and lower them to his skin. A light kiss, testing, tender and wet, and underneath it, a tremor.

There’s a terrible density to his body. He’s tension and heat. Pressing your parted lips to his shoulder, you let your tongue peek out between them. You take in the tangy taste of him, it travels through your body like lava, like syrup, heavy and sticky and sweet and it pools down between your hips.

He’s completely still, eerily so. Emboldened, hopeful, you tug on his t-shirt, tentatively at first, and when he doesn’t stop you, when he unfolds his arms, you pull it off his frame, the hat coming off with it. You suck in a sharp breath at the sight of his naked head full of curls, lush and tousled. You want to run your fingers through them. You know that’s probably not a good idea.

His chest, broad and solid, fills your vision, and your hands fly to his sternum where you press them, chasing something invisible, roaming up the plane of his chest, as delicately as possible. Your fingertips drum lightly along his collarbone, as if you were seeing him with your hands, as if all your senses were necessary to take in the whole of him.

His frown turns imploring, his breathing shallow.

“Tell me your name,” he murmurs, his deep baritone a pleading husk.

“You can call me whatever you like,” you answer, lifting his hand and taking his two first fingers into your mouth, eyelids fluttering. You cradle them with the flat of your tongue, brushing against the callous tips of them, saliva flooding your mouth around the salty taste. A moan escapes you, imperceptible, and his jaw ticks around a curse, something you don’t make out, something in Spanish, you’re too dazed with want, too dumb with thirst.

Fire licks up your spine when he moves, fast and sure. His hand tangles in your hair and he sharply tugs your head back, his fingers popping out of your mouth with a hanging thread of saliva. His face has become a threat, a warning, a promise. He’ll give you what you want until you regret asking for it.

His mouth crushes yours, teeth colliding, and his tongue is inside you, swirling and licking.

Like a dam that gives, his strength breaks and sweeps over you, crushing you into his chest with his hold and his kiss, fingers gripping your hair, your ass, and you let him have it, let him bruise your flesh with his need, scraping your fingernails up his arms, on his back.

You’re smiling into the kiss, with relief and eagerness, squirming into him and he hardens his hold before releasing you, swift and sudden, grabbing your blouse and pulling it up in a feverish movement that you follow, lifting your arms like a docile little girl. A seam of the silky fabric rips around your shoulders. You don’t notice it.

His face dives into the crook of your neck, the scruff of his beard grating your skin, and he sinks in his teeth, sucking hard and feral, and at first, you melt into it, before you remember. You force his chest away with both palms, whining, urgent, plaintive, “I can’t– can’t have marks,” when what you really want is to be covered in him.

It makes him chuckle, and it sounds like a growl, so terribly dark, so profoundly disillusioned, that you shiver in the heat of his body. He squeezes your breasts through the thin cotton of your bra, it’s brutal and it hurts like retaliation.

“Get fucking naked, Marion.”

Drawing away from him, you start working the button and zip fly of your skirt with fumbling fingers, blood beating fast and booming in your eardrums, while he toes off his shoes and undoes his belt buckle. Hard metal, the same one that was scraping against your belly when he was crushing you into his red truck, into white-hot pleasure.

His skin looks amber and smooth under the mellow lighting, the harmonious muscles you guessed under his shirt on the very first night highlighted in shadows. A soft belly, and a long, sideways scar on his left side. Would he tell you the history of his wounds? Will you ever have the chance to ask?

Your skirt crumples at your feet, you’re lost in the sight of him, arms falling limp at your sides. Self-consciousness skirts the edges of your lust. This body that you neglect and ignore at best, despise and mistreat if given the chance, will it be worth anything to him? Will he want you like you want him? With determination. Without dignity.

When he pulls down his jeans and his boxer briefs in one deft motion, your eyes widen, but he’s grabbing your arm already, spinning you around like a doll and throwing you onto the bedspread. He climbs on the bed after you, the mattress dips with his weight.

His firm hands spread your legs; he’s manhandled other bodies before yours, the skill evident with his dexterity, the experience obvious in his assurance, and you want to be all of them at once, lovers and enemies.

His hand rubs over your damp panties and you buck into it, trying to raise yourself on your elbows to turn around. You want to see his face as he touches you, see his reaction at the evidence of your arousal, you want to watch his eyes when his cock breaches you, but he presses a large hand between your shoulder blades and pins you into the mattress with a grunt.

He’s unlike anyone you’ve known before, brisk and rough and domineering, and you blush at your inexperience, at his irreverence, when he yanks your panties to the side and spits on your folds. The sheer obscenity feels like a reward for coming this far.

Sprawling your arms forward, bunching the slippery fabric of the bedspread in your fists, you brace yourself, the round tip of his cock lining up at your entrance.

He shoves himself inside you to the base, and you cry out at the blinding intrusion, the strength of his thrust hauling your body forward on the bed. With a harsh grasp, he slides you back down on his length and you bite down another cry, flesh gushing through the splayed fingers clutching your hips.

Crouching over you, he presses his forehead heavy against the back of your head.

“Don’t move,” he hisses through clenched teeth, “don’t fucking move.”

His cock pulsates angry and swollen inside your throbbing pussy, his chest pressing down on your back with each uneven, shaky breath burning your nape.

Sitting back, he wraps his right hand around the strap of your bra and twists it around his fist, pulling on it for leverage as he begins to fuck into you. The thin elastic bands bite into your shoulders, raspy vibrations echoing from your throat straight into the bedding with each of his rhythmic pushes forward.

He’s too much, too fast, too sudden. And he picks up the pace, forcing your right leg up with his knee and angling up his strokes, reaching deeper inside your core. He’s going to puncture your body from the inside, and you contract tight and rigid around his length, writhing underneath him, until he leans into your neck, close to your ear with a command, voice low and gravelly.

“You want it, just fucking take it, then.”

That wild thing inside your chest is swelling, madly swirling, your slick floods around his drilling length. Closing your eyes, the side of your face smearing makeup on the bedspread, you nod with just enough strength to exhale a breathless yes.

Yes. Yes, you want it, just like so. You want to be used, shattered, obliterated by this man.

And so you relent. Curling your fists and sinking your fingernails into your palms, as the pain turns to pleasure and he rams into your taut heat, rams against your cervix, bending you backward, spine ready to snap with each forceful shove.

The room is filled with the explicit sounds and noises of your emerging dirty secret. The relentless smack of his hips against your ass, the lewd squelch of his cock slamming in and out of your cunt, the creaking bedding, his feral groans, your grateful moans.

He’s miles away from you, but that’s what you came here for, drain the sadness from his eyes, make it yours, understand. If you’re only going to have him once, then you want it all.

But his rhythm is faltering already, and it stops abruptly. He releases his grip on you and pulls out with a loud curse, leaving you empty, for all those things you never wanted in the first place to fill you up again.

You feel his knuckles brushing against the swell of your ass as he strokes himself into his release. He loses his balance, and braces his hand next to your face to catch himself as come spurts hot and rich into the curve of your arched back.

He slaps his cock into the cleft of your cheeks once, twice, pumping out the last drops of his spend, and he collapses next to you, with a grunt when his back hits the bed, his chest heaving with exertion.

Unshed tears weigh down your eyelids. Your heart rattles against your rib cage, frantic and irregular. Your blood is thick as molasses, of amber and gold, coursing dense and languid down your limbs, but your nerves are crackling like electrical wires of blue and purple.

The creature between your lungs has tripled in size and your sore cunt throbs with your suspended orgasm.

Sunk into the mattress, you’re unable to round your back or turn your head towards him. Everything hurts. Everything is alive.

Reaching back blindly, you dip the tip of your fingers into the pool of his spend, and bring them back to your lips. Tasting him with delight and a quiet, strengthless moan.

The mattress moves with him as he shifts on the bed, and you feel the warmth of his large hand covering the expanse of your lower back.

Before you can relax into it, he flips you on your back with an easy strength, and you wince with the sudden change of position. What a mess you must look like, flushed face, sweat-damp hair, clotted mascara.

He’s heavy, in his straddle of your thighs. He brings his hand to your mouth, and you open up for him, pulling out your tongue to lick his come-coated palm, wrapping your lips around his fingers as they glide over the hot wet muscle. You swallow his essence with fluttering eyelids, grateful, tears rolling down your temples.

The soft light catches at the sheen of sweat gleaming over his chest, like he’s made of gold, leaning over you like a magnificent and merciful god, like you’ll grant him everything, and you bask into his radiance, your lips pursed into a new smile around his digits.

The frown that hasn’t left his brow softens ever so slightly. His throat bobs, corded muscles, pebbled skin, the tension barely relieved. His fingers slip out of your mouth and come to cup your chin, so gentle your mind fails to comprehend. His touch lingers, warm and relenting and it becomes a caress, trailing down the line of your throat and coming to rest over your beating pulse at the base of your neck.

“Are you real?” he asks, sorrow blurring his dark eyes.

“I don’t know,” you murmur, beading sweat, beading tears. “Make me be.”

He breathes in deeply, and perhaps it’s the first time in years he breathes in so freely.

“Okay,” he nods.

Slowly, with the tip of his tongue darting between his parted lips, he tugs down your bra to the side. His calloused palm finds the soft swell of your breast, and his warmth radiates through your skin. His hold strengthens, he pinches your nipples with his two first fingers, the ones you took in your mouth earlier, harder, until your mouth goes slack with pleasure and with pain, and you keep smiling at him through it all.

Loose, trustful, pliant, you watch as he drags your panties down along your damp skin and spreads your thighs. He pauses, eyes on your core and you lie still, exposed and opened, feeling no shame.

His curls, matted with sweat, are stuck in locks to his forehead. Where was he, when you were still hopeful? Were you too young for him, then?

He dives between your hips, and his teeth bite into the soft skin of your inner thigh. You jerk, palm pushing feebly onto the crown of his head and he freezes, eyes shut, like he doesn’t have enough willpower to let go, like too much of his control has already waned and thawed.

“Please,” you coo, “please. I’ll get in so much trouble.”

And your heart sinks a little with apprehension because, surely, he’ll scoff at you again, but instead he just lets go, bringing his fingers to your swollen folds to part them.

A small whimpering sound escapes you when he latches his lips around your clit, but the sensation is nothing like what you anticipated. Of his previous roughness, only the bruising digging of his fingers into the plush of your hips remains.

His mouth is warm and soothing, a liquid caress, the touch from the tip of his tongue precise but gentle. He shifts with a soft groan, applying more pressure and you keen, head trashed back into the bed. Instantly, he adjusts his grasp, pulling you closer to his face, suckling on your clit with more insistence.

The smooth skin of your calves brushes over his shoulders, your heels digging into the muscles of his back and you’re reminded of that first night again, when he swiveled around to meet your gaze, soft sad eyes, hard cold stare. Your orgasm builds up fast, embarrassingly so, encouraged by his heavy breathing fanning the soft curls on your mound.

The wild creature melts into your blood and flows down to your core, branching out to every nerve from the top of your head to the tip of your toes. And when you come, you come sharp and bright, with your hand clasped over your mouth to muffle a loud mewl and your back arched from the bed.

He forsakes his restored restraint when you recoil from the overstimulation, hardening his hold and fastening his mouth over your cunt to lap up your release, tongue diving in, greedy, burning your walls.

You’re still shaking with the aftershock when he releases you and rises above your trembling body. Lying his forehead on your belly, heavy head, heavy breathing, sweat dripping on your skin, he stays there until his breathing slows down, falling in rhythm with yours. You reach down for his hair, threading your fingers through his curls, at last, and he gives in, leans into the tenderness of your touch.

A stray tear slides down into your hairline and it’s over, he’s gone, standing up, his broad back turned to you, gathering his clothes and dressing up.

The notion of the world around you resurfaces. Outside, tucked away in the heart of the night, countless other wild creatures dwell and carry on, moved by fear or desire, and you lie still in that crushing knowledge. Soon, you will have to leave this bed, confront your solitude to theirs.

You roll to your side and curl up on yourself, drifting with the soft droning from the sleeping creature between your lungs and the sweet soreness thrumming between your hips.

He’s at the door, putting his hat back on, when you call out his name.

“Frankie.”

It passes your lips for the very first time, a long kept secret, a forbidden vow, a usurped oath, and immediately you want to say it again. You want it to be real. You want it to be yours.

Frankie pauses and tilts his head towards the bed without facing you completely.

“Thank you,” you say.

He opens the door to a draft of air wafting in, charged with the salty, humid scent of the faraway bay. He’s about to cross the threshold, and disappear into the night, when he speaks.

“The room is paid for til morning. I’ll see you next Friday.”

****

Additional note: I woke up on day and decided to build a multiverse of orange bedroom Frankies 🧡 For those who've read PTMY, can you spot all the clues? This Frankie is really pissed off, though, but I kinda like it. I hope you'll like it too 🧡

Taglist (thank you 🧡): @elegantduckturtle @mashomasho @lola766 @flowersandpotplantsandsunshine @nicolethered @littleone65 @bands-tv-movies-is-me @the-rambling-nerd @saintbedelia @pedrostories @trickstersp8 @all-the-way-down-here @deadmantis @hbc8 @princessdjarin @harriedandharassed @girlofchaos @gracie7209 @mrsparknuts @your-voice-is-mellifluous @mylostloversbookmarks @readingiskeepingmegoing @lovesbiggerthanpride @youandmeand5bucks-blog @sarcasm-theotherwhitemeat @southernbe @blackvelveteen1339 @anoverwhelmingdin @casa-boiardi @nandan11 @jessthebaker @pedroshotwifey @angelofsmalldeath-codeine @noisynightmarepoetry

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