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You were tired. It was a bone deep exhaustion from a shift spent waiting tables, feet aching as they carried you up the stairs to the small room you rented. It wasn’t anything like the house you grew up in, nor was it the home you spent your adult life in, but it was yours.
What it was was a space that you’d never been punched in. No one spilled your blood in that room. You never cried yourself to sleep in that room.
It was yours.
The keys rattled loudly in the dimming night as you turned them, breaking the silence that settled over dusky sky. Much of the city was winding down for the evening, preparing either to spend the late hours in with their families or out, finding a hole in the wall to slip into and dance.
The rich smells of cooking flooded your senses as the door swung open instead of the stale air you expected.
“Welcome home,” Alastor called from the small stove in the small one room apartment, warming your heart. “I hope you don’t mind.”
“I don’t,” you slipped into the room, locking the door behind you. With the block of apartments and city streets, it easy for him to slip in and out of your apartment, far easier than it had been in the big house, looming over the proper neighborhood streets.
The rich smells of Alastor’s cooking melted the stress off your shoulders. It should feel wrong, coming home to your man cooking for you in the rented room you paid for with your own money but it wasn’t.
Because it was Alastor.
“Cher?” Alastor’s hand ran up and down your arm, fingers tracing trails.
“Yes, Al?” you asked, sleep threatening to steal the last of your moments with Alastor.
“I cherish our times together. It brings me great joy to hold you in my arms like this. To sneak away with you.”
It sounded like a break up. It was all the things you’d heard tell of men saying before they said they found someone else or that what they had wasn’t working for them anymore. It sounded like after losing everything in your life, you were about to lose the one thing that made it all worth it.
The fear must have been clear on your face. Alastor looked down and then shifted, rolling you onto your back. You were caged in, his knees on either side of your thighs and his elbows on either side of your shoulders.
“Alastor?”
“Breathe, Cher.” His breath washed over you, comforting you. “I am asking, would you do me the honor of allowing me to court you? Of allowing me to love you in the streets, not just in the shadows of night and the privacy of our homes.”
“Can we?” You looped your arms around his shoulders, using them to hold you above water so you didn’t drown in their warm brown depths.
“It’s been nearly two years. You're out of mourning. It wouldn’t be unacceptable for you to step out with a man now, if you wanted to.”
“I want to,” you said, “with you.”
“Are you certain?” Alastor asked, though he spent years investing in making sure you would always pick him.
“I am,” you said, though you knew why he asked. People would talk, not just that you were still a fresh widow but that Alastor wasn’t of proper society, as some would call it. You knew well that he walked the blurred line between black and white. “We’ve waited so long for this, gone through so much for this.”
“Dinner then, tomorrow?” Alastor asked. “And a film?”
“I’d like that.”
Alastor leaned down, kissing you with reverence. His arm snuck under your back and then he rolled, taking you so that he was lying beneath you. It wasn’t the place for a woman and yet, Alastor allowed you it.
“I love you,” Alastor said, running his hands up your back only to caress down, fingers trailing over your ass.
“I love you,” you whispered back, feeling the length of him press into you.
“Can I have you tonight?” Alastor asked as his hardness twitched between your bodies. “We’ll keep quiet so no one hears.”
“Please?” You asked, leaning down to kiss him.
In a few short moments, he was pressing the blunt head of his cock up into your weeping opening. Your back arched as you straddled him, thighs twitching while you sank down his length. Your nightgown pooled against his legs, the straps hanging limply off your shoulders.
Alastor watched your exposed breasts move with every gasping breath you took. The moonlight filtered through the gauzy curtains, lighting up the skin in a way that made his mouth water. The cool night air had your nipples pebbled, pulled into tight points.
Your wet heat surrounded him, seeping down his length as he filled you slowly. He watched as you came alive, as you always did when he filled you. Heat flushed your cheeks and you shuddered when you nestled yourself down into his lap.
He knew he needed to pull from you, to put on one of the condoms but he couldn’t will himself to leave your body, to tell you to wait as you slowly lifted along his shaft and sank back down on him.
Instead, he pulled you down, kissing you deeply. In one smooth shift of his weight, you were on your back once again. His large hand wrapped around your leg, pulling it up around his hip. The bed creaked as he pushed into you again and again, each thrust stroking pleasure to life.
Though he swallowed your moans, leaving only the bed to hint to your neighbors what you were doing. It was fine, it wasn’t a high class building. Working men and women lived here, living their lives and minding their own business.
You reached your peak, legs wrapped around Alastor and fingers woven between his, pinned to the bed. He swallowed the sound that would have been his name as it poured from your throat until he was pouring into you.
It was the talk of the town when it was first noticed that Mr. Alastor Moreau was picking you up at your door instead of meeting you in town to escort you during your weekly shopping trips.
It felt good to walk hand in hand through the city streets. It felt good to hang off his arm when he would take you out to dinner or out to the cinema. Each week that passed, it was a moment of your life that was rewritten.
People talked, as they would. That you were with a man like Alastor, a man who’s skin was a hair too dark, a man who’s hair curled when it got humid would have been socially fatal if you hadn’t been married and widowed once.