Chapter Text
You, sent out beyond your recall,
go to the limits of your longing.
Embody me.
—Rainer Maria Rilke, trans. Joanna Macy
We can’t keep doing this, he likes to say, but he never ends it. He never meant for it to happen, you’re sure. You didn’t mean for it either. You’re falling asleep to the sound of him scribbling Needs further explanation on an essay he’s grading, your thighs still tickle from his beard, and you really don’t know how this keeps happening, it just does.
He must be lonely, you figure. Or sad. Or going through some sort of mid-life crisis. You’ve seen the pictures of his sons in his office: the younger one, the lanky redhead, grinning in a boarding school uniform, and the older one, a carbon copy of his father, off on summer holiday adventures in his university jumper. Barely younger than you.
And there’s the wedding ring he doesn’t take off. You tried reading the obituary in the library when you were supposed to be doing research and only got as far as “...passed thirteen months after a diagnosis of glioblastoma…” before you felt sick.
You’ve felt that ring inside you while you’ve fallen apart on his fingers. You’ve licked the warm metal clean after.
He’s probably making the same calculations about you. He probably wonders what fucked you up so bad that you’d rather spend a Friday night watching a man old enough to be your father make you chamomile in his delicate old teacups. What made you the kind of girl who gets wet seeing Brilliant point in his handwriting on your papers.
Whatever. If that’s what he’s thinking when he’s staring at you, at least he’s staring at you.
We can’t keep doing this, he says while you straighten his shirt in the dim office lamplight, but it just means not here.
We can’t keep doing this, he says while his cock presses deep enough to bruise, but it just means he’s close.
Sometimes you wonder if you just remind him of himself. Excellent historicization, he’s written on your latest essay. Your literature professors are probably sick of telling you to revise, cut to the criticism already, leave the historical details to the historians. There’s a fresh draft, cleaner, already edited in your laptop. You knew as soon as you wrote that paragraph that it was just for him.
“Are you trying to woo me or something?” You grin at him, tapping the note.
He sets a flowery cup of peppermint tea down for you. “Maybe I’m trying to convince you to change your field.”
“I’m not cut out for history.” You’d taken his class as an elective, after all. A change of pace from your normal literary seminars and creative workshops. You hadn’t expected to like it, let alone like him.
“What makes you say that?” Head tilted, he studies you with his two-toned eyes. “You wrote the best seminar paper I’ve read in ten years.”
Ten years. Ten years ago he was married, a father of two, already tenured, and you were… well. Doing whatever stupid teenage shit you were doing ten years ago. Your face feels hot while you think of something to say, avoiding his gaze, staring at the collection of matchbooks he keeps in a bowl on the center of the table.
“Because I’m a writer,” you point out. “You’re used to reading what historians write.”
Baelor seems to mull that over like you’ve said something profound. It’s odd, the way being in his kitchen seems to pry apart all your usual defenses. You’re so cold in the classroom, so analytical, so exact in everything you say. A dog with its teeth bared. Growling and barking so no one can see how frightened you are of being wrong. But here, with the light over the stove casting a tender glow over his face, you open your mouth and some half-baked thought comes spilling out.
He’s softer too, a half-smile on his face like you’re some sort of precious thing. “I’d like to read your work.”
“You wouldn’t like it,” is your knee-jerk reaction. The lines of his forehead crinkle as the smile fades.
“Why not?”
You shrug and sip your tea. “It’s just different.”
It’s not that you only write bleeding heart poems about him. Sure, you do, sometimes, but you wouldn’t care if he read them. It’s all the rest that you don’t want him to see. The threads that show up like fragile pieces of flesh under a layer of armor. The loneliness. The insecurity. The existential dread. You know there are parts of him that he’ll never let you see. You’re allowed to keep some of yourself hidden too.
It’s always fucking raining in King’s Landing. Always flooding the cobblestone streets. Instead of soaking your shoes and trudging home after your seminar, you find a seat in his lecture hall. He doesn’t see you amidst the sea of strung out undergraduates taking frantic notes while he moves through his slides. You don’t mind. It’s nice, sometimes, just to listen to him.
“You’ll have noticed that our readings for this week come from anthropologists, not historians. It is true that the pre-Andal period is usually considered prehistoric, but I think we would do well to remember that the early Andal people we’ll be reading about next week did not arrive into an empty void; rather, they stepped into a pre-existing culture.” He gestures to the image on the projector, ancient art spiraling over cave walls. “We know from their art and preserved burials that the First Men likely had complex relationships, storytelling practices, and religious icons. I want us to look at these engravings from about ten thousand years ago in the Mountains of the Moon. What might we say about the people who had created them?”
The sounds of rainfall and laptop keys pitter-patter throughout the hall while he leans against the podium. A gentle smile plays across his face. Not smug. Just curious.
“This isn’t a trick question, I promise.”
He fiddles with his hands while he talks. Flexing, tapping, twisting his rings. It’s charming. Unconscious. You think about it while you touch yourself later, making yourself come like it’s a punishment.
After you wash your hands and stare at yourself in the mirror for far too long, calling yourself a fucking pervert and every other name you can think of, there are two unread texts waiting for you.
Did you not have an answer to my questions in lecture? Or were you hoping I wouldn’t notice you?
I know you would have had something poetic to say.
Fuck. Okay. Maybe a little smug.
Two in the morning and your flat is haunted by the smell of a candle that burned out an hour ago. He calls, knowing you’re awake. You’re a pair of insomniacs who only seem to go to bed at a decent hour when you’re sleeping together.
“I was thinking about what you said the other night,” he says. “That there’s a difference between what you write as a historian and what you write as a writer. ”
“I guess… it’s the difference between academic and creative. Impersonal versus personal.” You’re not as eloquent as you wish you were. But you hear his curious hum, the sound he always makes when you’re treading toward a point and he wants to hear more.
“You don’t think history can be personal?”
“Maybe. But there’s more to hide behind.”
Silence on the other end. And then, “Keep talking.”
“I don’t really have a thesis here,” you admit. Even if you did, you’re too tired to spell it out in any sort of cohesive way.
“Then you’ll find one. Keep talking, sweet girl. I want to listen.”
So you do. You talk and talk and talk, spinning in circles and never quite landing on a point. You lose your train of thought. Somewhere along the way, you diverge into ranting about an article you’d read for class, about which table in the library is your favorite, about the trip you wish you could take to Dorne if your stipend weren’t so fucking abysmal. You’re sure you’ve bored him, you’re sure you’ve put him to sleep, but each time you stop yourself he’s humming on the other end of the phone. Keep talking.
Knees against the aged hardwood floor of his office. His fingers tense in your hair. It’s late enough that you can tell what phase the moon is in, hanging low over the crested rooftops of the University halls. But he still grits his teeth together while you run your tongue over the veins of his cock. Only the softest grunts echo low in his chest. You look up at him through watery eyes, choking yourself on him, and he’s the most beautiful thing you’ve ever seen.
You’ve never met a man like him. A man who listens to you talk for hours on end. Who wants to listen. A man whose cock you want to suck, because gods, he’s handsome, he’s tense, and the way he blushes while you go down on him makes your chest burn with a sort of pride you’ve never had before.
“Fuck, love,” he chokes out, his hand on your head going taut. “Sweet… sweet girl, I—”
And then his head drops back, all the muscles in his neck glinting in the moonlight. You savor every last drop of him, every sensitive twitch, until he’s pulling you off and up onto his lap. There’s saliva and come dripping down your chin. It glistens in his salt-and-pepper stubble after he kisses you.
“We can’t keep doing this,” he says, but there’s a breathy little laugh in his throat and the lines around his eyes are gleaming at you, so you just laugh along with him and whisper yes, yes we can.
“Are you there, sweet girl?”
There’s a crunched-up beer can in the gutter. Headlights and neon signs reflect off the aluminum. It’s a little mesmerizing. A small distraction from the gnawing ache in your chest.
“Are you alright?”
You’re not. You’re high and alone and not dressed for the crisp autumn night. You don’t know where your friends went. Fuck, you don’t even know where exactly you are. You’d stepped out of the club to breathe and now you’re curled up on the curb like a stray dog, tears and glitter running down your cheeks. Baelor’s disembodied voice drifts past you like a ghost before you remember that you’d called him.
“Are you there?”
“Can you come get me?” Your voice is so small. “I don’t… I want to go home.”
“Where are you?” Something clatters on his end. His keys, maybe. Your hazy eyes catch the time on your phone. One thirty in the morning, and he’d picked up right away.
“Flea Bottom.” Your head whirls as you search for a street sign. “Um, Gin Alley.”
“I’ll be there in fifteen minutes.”
He’s pulling up in just under ten. You practically fling yourself into your arms, babbling apologies through your tears.
“You’re alright? Look at me. Did someone do this to you?” He holds your face in his hands, eyes flickering over you, checking for damage. There's an edge to him that you've never seen before. As if the hands that hold you so delicately could just as soon snap someone's nose in your defense.
You shake your head, making the whole world spin again. You wish you could say yes. Wish you could blame it on someone slipping something in your drink or feeling you up, but the only problem is you.
“I’m just fucked up.”
You expect to be reprimanded. You want him to be angry. If he is, he doesn’t give you the self-deprecating satisfaction. He just shrugs off his coat and drapes it over your shoulders.
“Let’s get you home.”
Home. Not back to my house. Just home. You’ll forget that bit when you wake up tomorrow. For now, you roll that around in your head over and over while the radio airs a news story about birds’ changing migratory routes in the Stormlands he drives you home.
There’s a half-drunk cup of tea keeping a pile of papers company on the kitchen table. He pours you a glass of water, makes you drink it while he takes you upstairs and sits you down on the bed. Your sweat-stained clothes end up in his laundry hamper, replaced by an old King’s Landing University shirt. You’re staring listlessly at the floor while he fetches a damp washcloth from the bathroom and dabs away your ruined makeup. Warm damp. The kind of comfortable temperature that means he’d stood by the tap adjusting the water until it wouldn’t shock you. It’s so much more than you deserve.
“I’m sorry,” you say for the hundredth time, and once your mouth opens you can’t stop yourself. “I didn’t mean to be a mess, I just get so… it’s so quiet sometimes and I hate it. I don’t know what’s wrong with me.”
“Nothing is wrong with you.” He unfurls a pair of socks and slides them onto your feet. His lips press to your kneecaps. You could shatter from the softness of it.
“Something is, though,” you insist. “I feel like a monster.”
He’s silent for a long time. “You’re cruel to yourself.”
So are you, you want to tell him. He buries himself in articles and research on a weekend like it’s a form of self-flagellation. Like enough sleepless nights will help him atone for whatever he feels guilty about. He buries himself in you. Fucks you as if it’ll purify him, but how could it when you’re just as bad? Irredeemably self-destructive, the pair of you.
Your shaky hand reaches for the collar of his shirt. A silent ask. Make me forget this. But he intercepts it and kisses the inside of your sweaty palm, melting your lust away like rain over snow.
“Come here. You’re alright.” Lights go out and he eases you into bed, keeping his hands anchored around you as if you’ll disappear if he doesn’t. “My sweet girl. Smart girl. You’ll be alright.”
And maybe you will. There are times when you nearly believe that. Mid-afternoons in his office, curled in a faded armchair, you doze off while he parses through an article at his desk. The light trickles through the old window panes just soft and just warm enough to blanket you. There are mornings when you wake up first and get to fix him coffee (really, you just like using his fancy machine). He keeps a container of your particular creamer in his fridge. You bring him matchbooks to add to his collection.
It’s sweet. Soporific. The kind of domesticity that almost fills the emptiness inside you. When you sit down to write, the page fills with lines about folding socks. Matchbooks. Heterochromia. Hands stained with ink.
You put on real estate show reruns while you try to thread enough of those images together to make a halfway decent poem. Strange how you can actually sleep next to him, instead of staring at the ceiling and spiraling like you do back in your flat. You’re half-dreaming, just holding on long enough to see which quaint Riverlands cottage the couple chooses, when—
“Thought they’d choose the second house.”
“Fucking hell!” Scared out of your skin, you thought he’d fallen asleep an hour ago. His laughter fills the room like a shock of warmth in the early winter air. He’s so beautiful with all the lines of his face framing his smile, silver-streaked dark hair grown out and mussed from the pillows. Fuck off, you mutter. You’re grinning too.
when are you coming back?
You’re an embarrassment to the women’s restroom queue. A line of the prettiest girls you’ve ever seen, chatting or giggling or drunkenly figuring out how to operate a digital camera, all shimmering in each other’s presence, and you’re texting a graying man who’s at an academic conference. Your lack of camaraderie is probably setting feminism back twenty years. You’d said yes to a night out because you’re young, you’re fun, you should be doing something young and fun on a Friday night, but now you’re one too many drinks in and sulking against the wall. You stare at the phone until he responds. The girl behind you is actively breaking up with her boyfriend on the phone and you can’t even bring yourself to eavesdrop.
Return flight gets in at 9:45 tomorrow night.
can i see you then?
You’re so fucking desperate. A week without him and you’re in heat, howling for attention. A group of girlfriends stumbles out of the restroom and finally, you’re nearing the front of the queue.
I’ll pick you up on my way home.
ok!
i miss you
It’s like typing it out makes it sound even more miserable. You’re about to triple text, lighten the blow with some quick diversion. He responds faster.
I miss you too. I’ve been thinking about you.
What are you doing tonight? Tell me about your day.
Your knees almost give out. Trying to blink your eyes into instant clarity, you manage to pull yourself together.
at th pub
with friends :)
Are you safe?
yeah i’m fine just bored
ive had more fun just sitting in your kitchen
i love your kitchen
At this point, your thumbs are moving of their own accord. You’re typing out something about how you love his matchbook collection, you love his stupid grandmotherly teacups, you love falling asleep to the sound of him marking up papers, you love him—
I know. That’s where I picture you when I think of you.
My beautiful girl.
Throat suddenly dry, you feel fire in your core and a heat to your thighs that makes you hazy. The fact that he probably doesn’t even mean to be turning you on only makes it hotter. But fuck, you can’t help it, the sheer nice-ness of it makes you want to ride him within an inch of his life, right there in that kitchen.
And then, of course, he has to drive it home.
I hope I dream about you tonight.
Slamming the stall shut harder than you mean to, you take three tries to latch the door and then fumble to pull your top down. The lighting’s low and the picture turns out a little blurred, but you send the image of your pretty tits and your drunken smile without an ounce of the shame you ought to have.
wish you were here <3
You’re both insatiable after he returns. A dusting of snow makes the cobblestone streets slick and lures you the warmth of his house on weeknights when you really ought to be answering emails and polishing drafts for publication. You’ve barely crossed the threshold, snowflakes still melting on your coat, when he’s kissing you senseless. A muffled greeting gets lost somewhere in your smile.
Fireplace ablaze and turning the whole living room ochre, it doesn’t take long for you to thaw. Something crinkles as he presses your back into the couch cushions. You grab a stray pile of papers from under you, nearly tossing them aside before you open your eyes and blink.
“Is this mine?” Lust-drunk and thinking in slow-motion, you can still recognize your own handwriting. Had you given him an essay draft to look over? The uneven lines don’t seem like the usual literary criticism you ask him to review. You catch a handful of words—held in the matchbook of you… divining ink stains… all the dark matter of the universe—and then you realize.
“Fuck, did you read this?”
“You left it behind last night,” he murmurs, kissing down the lines of your throat.
“I didn’t mean to.” Fuck, fuck, fuck. Surely, he can see right through you now. All the cracks you’ve tried to plaster over, all the longing you’ve tried to hide. Not just for him, but for… something gentle. Stable. Something hopeful and bright that you’re not sure either of you know how to find.
His mouth back on yours, he pulls the papers from your hands, leaving a papercut on your pinky that bubbles with red instantly. “Ow!”
Whatever anger might’ve kindled within you dies as he takes your finger and sucks the blood away. Fuck, you love him like this. Starved and needy. Blown pupils making both eyes look entirely black. He asks with his hands and his mouth and you give, clawing at your clothes until you’re bare for him. You’re a pair of moonlit animals. If he’s already seen all the shameful pieces of you that you bury in your work, then there’s no point in holding out.
Pressing you back into the couch, Baelor bows his head to suck at your tits. Teeth graze against your nipples. Hungry. Insistent. You know what he wants as soon as he trails downwards, but you’re too impatient and too empty to let him.
“No, fuck—” you whine while he worships your inner thighs, even though the prickle of his chin over the sensitive, soft skin makes your spine arch off the cushions. “Please fuck me, I want your cock, please—”
“This first.” It’s firm. You can writhe and complain as much as you want, but when he spreads your legs and inhales the scent of your cunt, you know you can’t stop him.
He’s so diligent when he eats you out. It’s another form of study for him. Whatever makes you moan and tense gets repeated, honed in on. Tongue lapping at the hot core of you, his nose brushes up against your clit and your whole body goes taut with the shock of it. But instead of pulling back and letting your edge fade, he only nuzzles deeper.
A hand slides up your thighs to your stomach. You grab it and squeeze hard enough to cut off circulation. His rings stamp into your skin.
“Please—please fuck me now,” you’re moaning, begging, desperate to be full of him when you finally come. “I’ll do whatever you want, I fucking… I fucking promise, I just need it—”
His other hand opens you up. No resistance, only the pressure and stretch of three long fingers, you break for him and choke at the sensation of it. Combined with the tug of his lips over your clit, it’s enough to make you cry and come like the mess that you are.
“Sweet thing,” he’s humming as he eases you through it. “Good girl. Thank you.”
Thank you? You’re struggling for breath, and he’s fucking thanking you. You’d laugh at how sweet it is, but you finally clear your eyes enough to get a good look at his face, and… gods. He’s feral. That wasn’t for you. It was for him.
You grab at his face, pulling him near until he finally lets you kiss your own juices off of him. Salt and sweat washes over your tongue. You’re so blissed-out that you don’t hear the music of his belt, don’t feel the pressure against your cunt until his thick cock is easing inside you, slowly, making you feel every inch until his hips sit flush against yours.
“Is this what you need?” His voice is a string pulled dangerously stiff. You manage a weak mhmm, bucking against him insistently, but he doesn’t move.
“No. Look at me.” He wipes your eyes with his thumb, bringing you back to your body, back to him. “There she is. Talk to me, sweet girl.”
“I just want you.” Unrefined nonsense swirls through your head, all centered around him. “You’re so… so good, how can you… how can you be good to me?”
A shallow, experimental thrust makes you clutch at his sculpted biceps. “My angel. You’re easy to—”
“I’m easy?” Neurons finally firing fast enough to tease him, you grin at the blush that spreads across his crooked nose, over the lines of his cheeks, down to the old scars that are peppered across his chest. The drag of his cock inside you is torturously slow.
“Easy to be good for,” he finally manages to choke out once he regains control of himself. “You make… you make this so easy.”
That means something you can’t quite decipher. Right now, you don’t care. You just clench your cunt around him and spur him on, teeth clashing against teeth as his thrusts get faster and faster.
He doesn’t fuck you like he’s trying to be good. He fucks you like he’s trying to figure out just how far he can push you. How much he can take. Like he wants you to tell him slow down, enough, please be gentle, but you don’t. You take it all and still want more.
My girl, my angel, so good for me. The praise melts into you. Gods, you need him to finish. He’s getting sloppy, barely pulling out before he presses back into your cunt. The sound of it is disgusting and delicious. You’re soaking the couch, soaking him, leaving drool on the corners of his mouth when you kiss him, and he just keeps going.
“You’re so fucking beautiful,” you cry out while he chases release, “you’re—”
Wherever that thought was going, you don’t get to finish it. His hand, the one that still smells like you, barely presses against the base of your neck. Your head drops back. Everything goes white hot and loud. The pain of overstimulation makes the orgasm bittersweet in the most savory way, striking through your whole body and leaving you raw. All your brain can process is how full you are and how warm, how strong he is.
“Oh, fuck, sw—sweet girl,” he stutters, and you know he’s getting close. You grip his arms hard enough to bruise and beam up at him through fresh tears. He’s so perfect like this, sweating and straining and vulnerable. It makes you want things you shouldn’t want.
“Inside?” You whisper, sweet as a song, and that’s what breaks him. A guttural sound, half-laugh and half-sob rips from his throat. He buries his cock so deep inside you that you can’t feel where you end and he begins. The warm flood of his come spills and spills and fills you in a way that’s hot and primal and perfect.
It feels right.
“Was it good?” You manage to ask while his cock goes soft inside of you. Your hands play with the coarse tufts of his hair that are overdue for a cut.
“You always feel good.”
That makes you preen a bit. It’s not what you mean, though.
“I mean my writing. Did you like it?”
“It felt like you.” It’s not a yes, but it makes you glow more than a simple yes ever could. “Alive. Intense.”
You turn your head so you can see blue and brown; your heaven, your earth. “It didn’t scare you?”
“Beautiful girl,” he furrows his brow, quizzical and almost amused, “why would you scare me?”
The truth of it is, you scare yourself.
There’s the void that seems to follow you everywhere. You’re used to that, though. You know you’ll feel it in your chest when all the noise of the day dies down. It manifests in your writing unbidden. It’s so familiar you might as well name it, put a leash on it, drag it around with you and feed it leftovers from your plate. And maybe it bubbles up, like it had that night outside the club, but for the most part it’s an unfortunate background noise.
The want, though, that’s… new. Something you don’t know how to describe. Ravenous. Unhinged. It burns through you and leaves you weak and raw.
It’s not that you want him in disgusting and depraved ways, though that’s part of it. No. You want to hear the story of every matchbook in his bowl. You want to know where he got the scars on his chest. You want to know if they have something to do with the military medal that’s framed on his mantelpiece. You want to learn the names of the people in his pictures. You want him to tell you about his sons, what they were like as boys, what they want to do with their lives.
You want him to take off that wedding ring. You want him to take you on a proper date. Dinner. Drinks. A shitty film. You want him to kiss you where people can watch and then take you home, and you want that home to be a place where both of you live. A place where there might be a picture of you on his fridge.
You want everything with him. In the best ways, in the worst ways. Everything.
He’s been marking up papers for an hour and you’ve probably just been staring at him for the past thirty minutes. Letting your mind wander. The sunset is turning his office rosy and warm, even though the ancient radiator can barely keep your fingers from going numb when winter gets this frigid. His blue eye seems nearly violet in this light.
You cast your gaze outside. In the courtyard, figures wrapped in scarves and heavy coats cluster and scatter. One on a bench springs up to greet another. They intertwine and melt, heading off towards a lecture hall hand-in-mittened-hand.
Baelor hmms about whatever he’s reading and you can’t help it, you lean over his desk and kiss him before either of you realize what’s happening. His pen clatters to the floor. Strong hands cradle your face. It’s gentle, easy. No lust, just soft lips on yours and the leather-and-paper scent of him filling your lungs.
When you pull away, there’s a dazed look on his face. “What was that for?”
“Dunno,” is your sheepish answer.
His gaze flickers toward the door, ever so slightly ajar. He’s quiet, contemplative, and also a fucking loud thinker. The warmth seems to seep out of the room in the space of a few seconds. You read his mind and feel something fragile and needy inside you snap.
“We can’t keep—”
“Will you stop fucking saying that?”
Blue-brown eyes go oceanic with hurt, but you’re already shoving your books in your bag. Not this. Not again. You can’t keep listening to the same tired line. Maybe it used to excite you. Now it’s a crutch he leans on and you just want to pull it out from under him.
“Just tell me if you don’t want me,” you spit, as though you wouldn’t come crawling back to him like a kicked dog even if he did. “You don’t need to make up excuses.”
“Stop that.” He’s stern all of a sudden. “You’re acting like—”
Fuck. You know what he wants to say, even if he catches himself before he lets it slip. It makes your eyes sting with frustration.
“Like what?” You push. “Say it.”
He sighs your name like a curse. Fuck it, you think. If he can’t bring himself to hurt you, you don’t mind hurting yourself.
“Fine, I will. I’m acting like a child.” You’re crying in earnest now, hoping that your tears sparkle just enough to make him guilty. “You’re here too, you know? It’s not just me. Either you like fucking pathetic girls or you’re just as fucked as I am, take your pick.”
“That’s not fair,” he snaps, though you feel like you’re being perfectly fair to both of you. “You’re a smart girl, you understand that there are consequences to something like this.”
“What is this, then? Your midlife crisis? Am I the treatment for whatever’s fucking wrong with you?” It’s cruel, cold, ripped from the ugliest depths of your heart. “Whatever. Suffer, then.”
He doesn’t call after you. His colleagues give you odd looks as you hurry out of the building and gods, the cold hits you in just the right way. One solid punch to the gut, forcing all the breath out of you. You hold the tears back. You walk all the way home without falling to pieces on the street. The emptiness is there to keep you company, your loyal little ghost. You’re glad to feel it. That fierce ache in your bones. You’d started to miss it.
You apologize. Because of course you do. You spend all of two days angry at him, and then you’re scrambling to clean up your mess before the withdrawal hits you like a train.
i’m sorry. can we talk? i was so wrong.
No, you were right.
Can I see you?
He doesn’t say what you were right about. He only whispers I’m sorry while he sucks at your neck, I’m sorry while he mouths against your breasts, I’m sorry when he turns you over and strokes the back of your head while he fucks into you. Please… please stay, when you’re sobbing through the overstimulation. Stay with me, when he starts to falter, chest stuttering against your back, his nose wet when he kisses against your shoulder. Please… fuck. Sweet girl. Can I come inside you?
You cling to him when he makes tea after. The kitchen tiles bite with cold against your toes. He presses his lips to your hair while the water boils and sways from side to side. Always oscillating. Always in-between.
There’s a new mug set out for you, a plain white one with his son’s university crest on it. “What happened to your teacups?”
“I dropped them,” he admits, pausing for a moment before he continues. “I’ve always been too rough with my hands. My brother used to call me Baelor-breaks-things when we were little.”
He’s never talked about his brother before. It’s the tiniest opening, a door inside him barely left ajar.
“I don’t want to break this,” he murmurs. “I don’t want to break you.”
“You won’t.”
You don’t know that for sure. Or maybe you’re the one who will do all the breaking just to spare him the pain. For now, you let the rise and fall of his chest measure the passing seconds. Fractured messiness pressed together. Almost whole. With your eyes closed amidst the sound of rain on the eaves, you can almost imagine that everything you’ve ever longed for is right here.