Annie Appreciation Post✨

WHAT THE FUCK IS THIS

WHO IS USING THIS

AN APP??? THEY HAVE A FUNCTIONING WEBSITE

THE LAST FUNCTIONING WEBSITE

Claim : Alpha!Johnny

⇢ Synopsis: When a pack offers up you, an omega, to Johnny as a show of ‘good faith’, he knows he needs to get you out of there. The tricky part is introducing you to his all alpha pack and making it clear that he doesn’t have a claim on you and that you’re free to choose any mate you’d like. As your first heat living with Johnny looms, tensions rise. 

⇢ Pairing: alpha werewolf!Johnny x omega!reader ⇢ Genre: smut, slow burn, crack.  ⇢ Warnings: a/b/o au, abo class systems, power dynamic focus, mentions of werewolf men being creepy to omegas, arranged ‘union’, sugar daddy Johnny, fingering, oral (f receiving), sex, overstimulation, mentions of oncoming heat, mentions of masterbation, general shenanigans, size kink, big dick Johnny, virgin!reader, etc… ⇢ Word Count: 18.4k ⇢ Tropes/AU’s: werewolf au, a/b/o au, alpha nct, 

a/b/o NCT masterlist can be found HERE

Your bed is cold but you can’t find the energy to do anything about it. All you can do is stare at your ceiling, words repeating over and over in your mind: today’s the day.

You’re leaving one world of confinement to enter another. However, instead of a pack knocking you down and reminding you over and over again of your inferiority as an omega, you’ll have an alpha mate doing it. And the largest alpha in his pack no less.

Your pack had said they chose him because of his size. Strong babies, strong lines they’d insisted, as if it would have anything to do with them. You doubt you’ll see any of them again seeing as your new ‘mate’ lives in the heart of the downtown of your city, whereas your pack prefers the space of a manor house on the far outskirts. Besides, do you ever really want to see your pack again?

Today at noon, as a show of good faith and unity, your pack will all but gift you to an alpha who you’ve never even met. An alpha from a pack of alphas. 

You don’t even know what that entails and you don’t want to think about what it might mean in terms of your heat. Some packs adopt a more polyamorous lifestyle, throwing omegas around like a joint at a bonfire, is this what you can expect for your life?

Burying your face in your pillows, you fear the worst.

Keep reading

We all know what erectile dysfunction is but literally no one is ever taught what vaginismus is and it can cause people to feel extremely lost, broken, and cause people to take their own lives. Raise. Awareness.

my god, this is some good stuff

𝐚𝐧𝐝 𝐲𝐨𝐮 𝐬𝐡𝐚𝐥𝐥 𝐧𝐨𝐭 𝐧𝐞𝐞𝐝 𝐭𝐨 𝐟𝐞𝐚𝐫 𝐦𝐞 — 𝐚.𝐜.

summary: you take care of lena, clean up around the house, and always leave dinner for him when he gets home late. and among constant and never-ending change, you are andrew's northern star.

pairing: andrew cody x babysitter!reader

word count: 13.3k

warnings: read carefully! age-gap dynamics, reader is said to have recently graduated college, i basically ignore anything from the show that wouldn't make sense in my perfect little world. smut—arm humping, oral sex, penetration, the tiniest bit of breeding if you squint real hard.

author's note: and here she is. also known as shea wants to write about doing things to pope's arms.

you used to complain if someone called you their nanny. you’re just a babysitter. this would not—could not—be your full time job. it’s just so demanding. you love the kids you take care of but the idea of saying that you’re a nanny makes it a little more real. like you wouldn’t be able to get out of this, despite how hard you’re trying.

you just don’t want to be a babysitter forever. 

but the first time mister cody introduces you as lena’s nanny, you don’t think you mind it all that much. 

babysitters are temporary—girls in high school looking for money to pay for coffee and nail appointments, covering date-nights and overtime at the office.

nannies are permanent—it’s a career. you’re responsible for the kid pretty much twenty-four hours a day. kids with nannies are rich, mom and dad too busy at work to be at home. from the little you deduced, nannies buy groceries and make three meals. they go to doctor’s appointments and organize play-dates with other nannies. 

you do some of those things for lena. her uncle tries to take her and pick her up from school when he can, and when he calls to tell you that he won’t be able to make it every now and then, he sounds so sorry about it, you don’t know what you can do to reassure him that it’s okay. lena’s young, she doesn’t care about stuff like that so deeply. and she likes you, which helps matters a lot.

you had finished the last few classes you needed to graduate a couple months ago. before that, you’d have to tell mister cody no, i’m sorry occasionally, something that you really didn’t like doing. he seemed like he had enough going on without the babysitter cancelling.

and besides, after you had told him that your classes were done, you were supposed to tell him that you would be looking for a real job, something with your degree, that he should start looking for a real nanny for lena. you were supposed to politely, yet firmly allude to how you’d been scrambling with classes, finishing assignments in the car in between picking up his niece and after she’d fallen asleep at night. how you missed an important lecture because the pediatrician’s office was running behind an hour and lena’s grandmother wasn’t available to take her.

instead, the second you had met his eyes (which were terribly green and incredibly sad), you had folded, and told him you’d be available whenever he needed. and you thought maybe that would garner you a smile—and you’d been wrong. he had looked your way for about five seconds, muttered thank you, and walked away. 

and maybe if you could resist those terribly green and incredibly sad eyes, you wouldn’t have wound up as a full-time nanny. life could always be worse—that’s the motto you’ve grown up with. there are so many worse things in oceanside than spending every day in a pretty house by the beach and taking care of a quiet little girl. 

if not anything else, you could start making payments on your student loans, if you wanted. mister cody paid you in cash, and he paid you way too much, probably his way of apologizing for how much you had stepped up in the last couple months. but again, you didn’t really mind anymore. maybe if it was another family, you would care more about finding a real job.

but you like lena. you like her uncle, too, you think, as much as you can like a man who is virtually silent and stares at you like he’s boring into your soul when you’re making dinner. you like him because he’s good with her, you can always tell he’s trying his absolute best, his hardest with her. (it doesn’t help that he’s cute—cute in the way that strays are, like you wish you could fix everything wrong with him and reassure him that he’s doing enough, and tell him to stop staring and just come tell you what he’s thinking instead.) 

the first couple months were the hardest. lena wasn’t eating, wasn’t sleeping. she hated school, hated all the things she had still cared for when her dad was alive. you’d tried bribing her with trips to the beach, the playground, ice cream with extra fudge and sprinkles. all the things that kids liked. but she wasn’t just a normal kid—and it seemed that you and her uncle were the only ones who understood this. 

you didn’t realize you had such a maternal instinct inside of you. maybe it’s because the other kids you’d babysat in your life had been brats, sticky handed toddlers going through the terrible twos and making your life hell while you were trying to pass your classes. lena is the opposite. 

she’s the saddest child you’ve ever met, and you know nothing that you or her uncle do is going to fix it overnight.

but progress comes in stages. the first step had been getting her to want to eat again. you’d sat on the couch next to her, watching a nature documentary that her uncle had probably left playing on the tv.

(he is a whole other can of worms—he doesn’t sleep or eat that much either, and one time you had come in really early to get some work done before getting her to school. he’d been awake, watching something just like this, at five-thirty in the morning. and when you’d asked him when he’d gotten up, he had shrugged, and murmured something that sounded suspiciously close to i don’t sleep. that’s your next mission, because you can only focus on one at a time.)

“you hungry, sweetie?” you didn’t want to be pushy. she wouldn’t like that, would only retreat further into herself. you wanted her to come to you when she was ready to eat. lena shook her head and focused back on the television. “okay. well, if you get hungry later, i’ll eat with you.”

lena says okay in her quiet voice, holding onto a stuffed animal and staring ahead. you wait a couple of hours—there’s always something to do in the house. you clean up, wiping counters and sweeping while she stays on the couch. you check in every now and then to make sure she didn’t fall asleep. 

and then, thirty minutes before her new bedtime, she comes and sits on the chair by the dining table while you’re wiping it down.

“can we get pizza?” she asks, and you nod right away.

“of course we can. what kind do you want?”

another thirty minutes later, the pizza’s there, and you’re both eating slices of pepperoni and spinach. you’ve formulated your plan for the rest of the night—her uncle’s still not home, which means you can crash on the couch or stay awake. you decide to stay awake, since there’s no follow up text from him. if he wasn’t going to come home tonight, you’d expect the standard, concise message; won’t be back tonight. is lena okay? 

and you’re stupid, because you think it’s sweet that he always asks if she’s okay. like you wouldn’t call him the second something went wrong, like he doesn’t believe that you’d trust him with that information before anyone else. but there’s no texts tonight from the contact you’d saved as andrew cody (lena’s uncle). 

lena’s finishing her last slice and you’re cleaning up when you hear it—the rumble of his truck pulling up to the house. then a minute later, footsteps and the front door opening.

“what’s all this?” he asks, and you have to remember to find the words. 

you don’t know why that happens when he comes around—you’re usually great with dads. maybe it’s because he looks tired, more tired than usual, at least. his copper curls are messed up, like he’s been running a hand through his hair all night. lena’s uncle is always stiff, but it seems worse today, somehow.

(another thought seeps in, an uninvited guest in your mind, about how you’d really like to take care of him. he just needs some sleep, a little peace of mind. that’s it. you’re still trying to figure out the best way to give it to him.)

“we got pizza, uncle pope,” lena fills in, setting down the last piece of crust you knew she wouldn’t finish. 

“there should be enough for you,” you add, smiling at him. he doesn’t smile back, but you’re used to that at this point. and you can tell what’s about to come. “lena, can you go brush your teeth and get your pajamas on for me?” 

she nods and climbs off the chair, running into her room. 

“it’s past her bedtime,” he starts, taking a few steps closer to you. “and pizza for dinner-”

you interrupt him, even though you probably shouldn’t. you close up the box, setting it on the island and you go back to wipe the table.

“she’s not eating, mister cody,” you put the paper towel down, getting your bearings in order to face him, make the dreaded, never-ending eye-contact. “when kids don’t eat you have to meet them halfway. i thought this was better than her going to bed without eating at all.” 

he keeps looking at you. you think you should be a little nervous, but you don’t get like that anymore. flustered, sure, but not nervous—lena’s uncle is just kind of a starer, and you’ve gotten used to it by now. 

“i’m sorry. i’ll run it by you next time, i promise. i just wanted her to eat something.” he’s silent for a while, like he’s processing what you said. 

“yeah. okay. thanks.” 

you smile again, a small one. the kitchen’s clean now, or at least as clean as you can get it. you’re sure that when you’re back in the morning, it’ll be spotless, which you can only assume is one of mister cody’s nocturnal activities. you have a routine before leaving—you say goodnight to lena, make sure you didn’t leave anything behind, and tell her uncle you’ll see him in the morning.

he doesn’t normally say anything back, maybe a grunt of acknowledgement. so you’re surprised tonight, when you grab your bag and your keys and hear—

“have a good night.” 

“you too, mister cody.” 

+

it took time, but you’ve gotten her schedule better. she eats dinner with you now, whatever semi-healthy thing you can think of with the stuff in the pantry and the groceries you picked up while she’s at school. her uncle leaves money for that sort of thing—an envelope filled with hundred dollar bills. it’s labeled lena’s babysitter in stiff, neat handwriting and he told you to use it for copays and ice-cream and anything else that lena needs. but it feels wrong to use his money when he already overpays you, so you just use your own. 

you thought he might not have noticed that the envelope isn’t getting any thinner, until one morning when you arrive and see him counting the notes in it with his head down. now you’re the one staring—watching his arm flex and the muscles move as he flips through the bills. he wears the same kind of shirts every day, short sleeve button-ups, and every day, you are subject to watch his forearms while he does whatever he does. it’s a cruel and unusual punishment.

the worst had been when you needed a box down from the cabinet, the one with the muffin tins and cookie cutters. he had appeared behind you and taken it down for you in seconds, carrying it to the kitchen for you. you had been staring then too, uncomfortable and slack-jawed and wondering why his arms had your mouth dry. (you know the answer, it’s just better to live in denial, you think.)

“good morning, mister cody.” you set your bag down on the sofa, heading inside to get started on breakfast. you open the fridge, taking out a carton of eggs and orange juice and avoiding looking right at him. you don’t need to be flustered before seven-thirty am.

“you haven’t been using this money,” he states. you wish you could figure out what his tone means—there’s no inflections, no emotion simmering behind the words. it’s just cut and dry, stating a fact.

“well, i-” you turn back and look up from the stove and your words die on your tongue. he’s standing up, looking right at you, a fist full of cash like he’s going to make you use it one way or another. a single vein running through his arms tenses. your gaze flickers from it to his eyes quickly, looking at you like he wants you to start listening to him.

“i, um, i had enough.”

“you should use it.”

“but you already gave me a lot, so i-”

“i want you to use it.” the way he says it, it’s not a request. 

“right. i-i will. is lena awake?”

“she’s getting ready.”

“great. thank you.” you turn back to the eggs with a flushed face. and even though you’re not facing him anymore, you can tell he’s still staring at you. 

“i might not be back tonight.” you turn around and meet his eyes again. terribly green, incredibly sad. you’re too far now to see the brown, but you know it’s there. “i…i’ve got some work. it’ll be late, if i do.”

“thank you for the heads up. i, uh, i’ll crash on the couch then.” you think he might say something else, but you’re not sure. it’s silent for a moment, while you get the eggs onto a plate and hurry into the hallway to get lena.

she comes out first, carrying her backpack. you follow with her hairbrush for once she’s done eating, getting her already packed lunch out from the fridge to sort into her bag. there’s a whole routine that you had learned when you first started babysitting her, and now it’s just a way of life. filling up her water bottle, checking the calendar on the fridge to make sure there’s nothing you’re missing, pulling her jacket from the closet if it’s cold outside.

you get the bottle out, glancing back at her uncle. he’s leaning in while lena takes a bite of the eggs, probably telling her that he won’t be home, and to have a good day, and all the other things you’re sure he says to her. then they hug, and you feel like you’re intruding.

he picks up his keys, which rest in the small blue bowl by the door where yours sit too. and without thinking, you call out after him.

“have a good day at work.” he doesn’t say anything back, but he looks at you before he leaves. you don’t even know what he does for work.

“ready for school?” lena shakes her head no like always.

+

the days are long, but the weeks are short. you bring lena to school, but they have a half-day, so there’s no point in going home for the day if you need to be back in a couple of hours. so you head back to mister cody’s place, focusing your attention on cleaning the remnants from breakfast. you check the fridge, making note of how much fruit and milk you have left, scribbling onto a piece of paper for later. and for once, you listen to him, taking a single bill out of the envelope and putting it into your wallet. there’s other hundred dollar bills in there too, ones you need to deposit.

it hasn’t been making sense lately. a lot of nannies live with their families because it avoids the wastefulness of paying rent for an apartment you hardly ever visit. you pay internet and electric for a one-bedroom that’s empty the entire day. and now that you’re done with classes, you don’t even need to work on anything late at night or even at lena’s house. you carry around a book with you, and you think you’ve even left a couple on the coffee table, just for the future. 

you don’t know why you still have your apartment. well, you know why—mister cody has never mentioned you moving in. and he probably never will, because he doesn’t want you to. but it just doesn’t make sense the more you think about it. you show up between six and seven and sometimes you don’t go home until ten. sometimes you don’t go home at all.

after making your list, you rack your head of things you can do to occupy lena’s time today. the library has a weekly reading, and there’ll be other kids there. you like to pick things so she can get some company from kids her age, so she’s not only stuck with you and her uncle all the time. 

closer to when school gets out, you get in the car, bringing in your emergency bag with a change of clothes and your toothbrush since you’ll be staying the night. it’s not an entirely uncommon occurrence, which is why the bag, and a couple others like it, is always ready to go. you go to the bank first, depositing everything except the single hundred-dollar bill you took today. then you drive by the park, see if they’re having any of those pet-therapy sessions today. and then finally school to pick up lena.

the rest of the day goes how you planned. you forget how exhausting it is keeping a little kid entertained for hours on end, unsure of exactly what her uncle pope and his brothers do with her sometimes, when you struggle to fill up a couple of extra hours. the grocery store—where you splurge and buy ingredients to make stove-top smores because lena asks and you’ll take your wins where you can get them—then the library, where you take out a couple of books for lena to read at home and smile when she’s talking with some of the other girls there, then the playground for an hour, before home for dinner.

you make spaghetti while she finishes her homework, and review her homework while she changes into pajamas. and then it’s time for the routine she loves so much, just like her uncle, a nature documentary about penguins while you toast the marshmallows on a fork. 

an hour later, lena’s asleep in bed, and you’re scrubbing hardened chocolate off the counter next to the stove. you don’t want more work for her uncle when he’s back, and you’ve learned lena’s a heavy sleeper, so you get to cleaning. it’s not like, as pathetic as the thought is, you have anything better to do. 

and then about two hours after that, it’s eleven-thirty. it’s right around the latest that mister cody has ever come home, so you’re pretty sure he won’t be back tonight. 

the only thing you have to look forward to in your apartment is the shower you take after a long day. you’ll have to make do with the shower inside the room where mister cody sleeps, since lena’s is close to her room and filled with products for an eight year old, and at the very least, you need adult shampoo and soap. 

the room is bare—you would have guessed it’s a guest room if you didn’t know better. you’re not nosy, but you look around, trying to see if there’s anything there that makes the room her uncle’s. you know there’s still another bedroom, the one her parents used to share, since lena sometimes goes in there when she can’t sleep. so this was a guest room, and now it’s mister cody’s, and now you’re lurking in it.

besides for a closet full of clean-pressed button up shirts and organized shoes, you can’t discern anything that makes this room his. there’s not a single thing out of place, from the garden-variety decor that someone else had picked to the artwork to the sheets. the bathroom is more of the same, the entire place having that lemon-cleaner smell to it. 

you turn the water on and strip, trying to avoid thinking about how you’ll be sleeping on the couch after this. and even inside the shower, you stare at the two-in-one shampoo bottle and the old spice body wash—old spice. who would have thought?—like you can’t believe what you’re looking at. you inhale the scent for longer than you need to. wrap yourself in a clean towel that doesn’t belong to you. brush your teeth with his spearmint toothpaste. and then you open your overnight bag, and find nothing but sundresses and bathing suits.

it’s past midnight, and you’ve grabbed the wrong bag. you need to get up in about six and a half hours to get lena ready for school, and you’re not positive you have the correct bag in the back of your car. 

hesitantly, you open one of the dresser drawers. there’s black and white t-shirts folded precisely, tucked in evenly. one drawer up there’s folded socks and boxers. 

you chew on your cheek. he did say that he won’t be home tonight. there’s no way he would know you took anything if you ran a load of laundry as soon as you woke up and folded it after morning drop-off. he might not even be home until the afternoon or evening, for all you know.

your tiredness makes the decision for you. the couch isn’t that comfortable, and you refuse to sleep in the shirt and jean skirt you spent all day in. you take a white shirt and black boxers, and then sneak back in for a pair of black socks because the living room is cold at night. and then you set your alarm, turn on another documentary—this one about hummingbirds, wrap yourself in the throw blanket on the couch, and close your eyes. 

andrew comes home at quarter to three. it would have been a lot sooner—he doesn’t like leaving you alone here at night with lena if he can avoid it—but he doesn’t always have control over it. a bullet had grazed deran and he’d spent two hours cleaning up that mess, and then they had to organize their splits before leaving. he had to make sure to stay for that—he needs the cash to pay you, rent for baz’s place, money to put into lena’s savings account. 

but he hates leaving you alone in the apartment with lena. not because he doesn’t trust you, but because he knows now it’s not safe, not without him there. he likes to get you home early but it’s rarely the case, and then he feels like he should pay you extra since he’s making you drive home alone in the dark.

telling you to stay is a better option. you can sleep in his room—it’s not like he’s going to sleep in there anyways. but he doesn’t say that, doesn’t need the nanny thinking there’s something wrong with him too. so he settles for telling you to stay the night, and letting you decide where you’ll sleep. 

you always pick the couch. and sometimes, he’s not back early enough, sometimes you’re already up making breakfast or gone out for the day with lena by the time he’s back.

 but tonight, you’re asleep on the couch. he sets down the bag with the cash on the couch, hovering over you. the television is still on, stuck on a are you still watching? screen, covering up a photo of some birds. a breath leaves him when he realizes you’re watching what he always watches. you’re knocked out—he can tell since the front door opening didn’t wake you like it sometimes does. you’ve kicked away the blanket you usually use, and he thinks for a second he should just cover you up and let you sleep.

but he doesn’t. he stands over you, staring at your sleeping form. he doesn’t like it—how pretty you are when you sleep. it’s a distraction that he can’t escape, knows that the next time he closes his eyes, he’ll think of you. that the next time he sits on this couch, he’ll be able to smell your skin. you snore softly, chest rising and falling evenly. 

and then he notices it—the plain shirt, black socks with a familiar logo. are those his boxers? and now he definitely can’t look away. he puts the pieces together—your hair is wet, meaning you must have showered and then put on his clothes before coming back out here. if you were going to do all of that, why didn’t you just sleep in his room?

yes, pope decides, he needs you to sleep in his bed. he needs the couch anyways, since he won’t be sleeping, so he might as well bring you inside. 

he lifts you carefully, not wanting to stir you accidentally. his shirt is a little big on you, hanging off your shoulder. you stay sound asleep the entire short walk to his bedroom, not stirring even when he sets you down. you must have been really tired, but that makes sense, given the fact that you’ve been out all day with lena.

he thought about sticking a tracker on your car, but the first time he was taking care of lena, after baz, you had shared your phone’s location with him so he could keep track. you had offered it, voluntarily, saying something about how that’s common with babysitters now, and that you never go anywhere without your phone so he won’t have to worry about you leaving it at home.

you thought reassuring him that he would always have lena’s location in his phone would make him feel better. and maybe it had, but he’d never mentioned it again after that day, never brought up if he actually checked it or not.

(it’s not like you would know if he was using it, it doesn’t work like that. deran had explained it to him.) he did check it, pretty frequently, actually. he checked it after you’d leave when he got home, after lena was asleep. he’d watch your little circle drive home and pull into the parking lot of your apartment complex. it wasn’t as bad of an area as it could be, but it wasn’t that safe either. he liked to check it every now and then too, middle of the night, saturday evenings when he was home with lena and you got to leave early or had the day off.

he assumed, somehow, that you’d be in bars or parties at your college, maybe. but when he looks at your location late at night, you’re always at home. he checks other times too—but he’s just trying to keep you safe. (that’s what he tells himself—that finding another babysitter than lena liked and that he trusted would be a hassle. he needs to keep you safe.)

but it doesn’t seem like you like any of that stuff. he’s never seen you drink the beer in the fridge, though you offer one to him every now and then. you’ve met smurf and deran and craig before, like when you’d go to drop off lena before one of your classes, back before you had finished school.

you were smart—he knew that much. that was the kind of good example he needed around lena, someone who had gone through school and finished. he didn’t know what your degree was in, but it must’ve been something smart, something important. you were always typing on your computer and reading books. whatever it is that you studied, he wants someone in lena’s life that can help her with that stuff, stuff he doesn’t know much about, when it’s time.

you were smart enough to turn down every joint or bump that craig offered. you never accepted a drink from smurf that didn’t come from a can that you opened yourself. and baz used to tell him that you were just a local college kid, that you didn’t have any family nearby or anyone to occupy your time, really. 

it didn’t make sense—pretty girl like you. he would have thought you had a boyfriend, but if you do, you’ve never brought him around. and if he didn’t live with you or live at that coffee shop you liked that was down the street from your apartment, then he didn’t know if you even had one. maybe he shouldn’t spend any time thinking about your hypothetical boyfriend, but that’s just what comes up sometimes when he thinks about you for too long. like right now.

you look peaceful lying in his bed. your eyes flutter quickly like you’re having a dream, and he sits on the bed next to you, watching you sleep. your hair falls across your face, and his finger twitches. he almost moves his hand to brush the hair away, but he decides not to, settling for just watching you for another minute or two. 

the bed creaks slightly when he gets up. no one uses it much, so it’s a little weary. he doesn’t think the noise is anything, but your eyes blink open. the door’s open, light from the living room illuminating a sliver of the space.

he thinks he should get out before you can ask any questions, but he doesn’t, hovering over the bed while you look around. 

“andrew?” and god if it doesn’t sound different coming from your lips. you’re too tired to remember that you usually stick with mister cody, which is so formal it hurts. it sounds real, sincere, not filled with fear or anger or anything else. you haven’t even said anything and he thinks he’s losing his mind. 

it’s just the way you say it. there’s no question attached, no demand, no sacrifice. just you, making sure it’s him. 

“that couch is bad for your back,” he says. 

he knows it is, the couple times he tried to lay down and stare at the ceiling. he’s always sore, muscles screaming and joints aching but he knows how to ignore it. he doesn’t think you should start feeling like that. feels angry at the very idea that you would be sore after spending a night on the couch, taking care of his niece, looking after baz’s house. doing all the things that he’s too busy to do.

you take care of things. you do a good job too—figuring out how to get lena to eat and sleep again. making sure her routine doesn’t go awry just because he’s gone on a job all day. you remember things that he doesn’t even know about—activities with kids after school and how the school has soccer practice starting soon. you think a couple steps ahead when it comes to lena, and sometimes, he doesn’t think you see it as a job. 

like when you make enough breakfast for the three of you. leave dinner on a plate inside the microwave with a note on the counter. when you clean like it’s your house, make sure things stay in the place they’re supposed to, which is so much harder when there’s a kid around. he’s not stupid—it’s why he gives you so much money each week, shoves an envelope into your hand despite your protests. why the first thing he does after he gets his cut is make sure you get yours. 

and as hard as the thought is to swallow, he doesn’t think he could do all of this without you. 

“mmh-” you agree, making a soft noise. he wishes he could engrain it into his brain and replay it whenever he wants. “i thought you don’t sleep?” you ask, and he sees your lips turn up into a smile. he wishes the lights were on.

“i try,” he replies, realizing that he’s still hovering over you. he wonders why you weren’t scared the moment you woke up. “sometimes. i try.” 

“do you wanna try now?” you ask, whispering. and he goes silent—because what is he supposed to say that? 

you reach out in the dark for his hand, and he flinches, taking it back. but you don’t retreat, reaching out again until you’re grasping his fingers. 

“try for a couple hours. i set an alarm,” you say, and the way you say it, it doesn’t sound like a bad idea. you have a way of convincing him, or maybe it’s just late and you’re tired, and your sleepy voice isn’t helping matters. nor does the fact that you don’t seem even remotely concerned that you’re inviting him to come sleep on the bed next to you.

you sit up a little, and he regrets even staying as long as he did. you need your sleep, unlike him. you’re still holding onto his hand, and your skin is warm on his. it couldn’t really be, but it feels like it’s burning his, where your palm rests against his, where your fingers twist with his. 

“hey,” you start, slow and soft. “don’t think about it. just sleep for a little.” 

“yeah,” he says. “okay. a little.”

you move over, and when he lays down—back straight against the mattress, staring up at the ceiling—it’s warm where your body was resting. you’re still holding onto his hand, not letting go. your grip is loose enough that he could free his hand easily, and even if it wasn’t, he could overpower you if he wanted.

but he doesn’t want to. and somewhere between your slow breaths and how you rub his knuckles, running your soft skin against dozens of old scars—because that’s his punching hand—andrew falls asleep.

you can hear it, his breaths getting steady, evening out. your hands stay together in the middle of the bed, between you, and you wonder for a split second how you’re going to deal with this in the morning, how you’ll make sense of this in daylight. the semblance of a professional relationship you had maintained this entire time might turn into dust in a couple hours. and then you breathe in andrew’s comforting scent, clean linen and saltwater, and fall back asleep.

the best thing about this house is the light and the waves. golden rays pour in through the half-way open blinds and you can hear the ocean crashing against the rocks in the distance. it’s the perfect way to wake up, even if it is six-thirty and your alarm is going off in the living room, where your phone must be.

you need to get up. you don’t want lena to wake up from the noise, even though you know she won’t—that girl can sleep through anything. it’s a problem for when she’s older, when she goes to college and there’s no one besides a roommate to make sure she doesn’t miss class. even half-asleep, you smile thinking about it.

and somehow, when you look on the other side of the bed, it hits you that it wasn’t a dream. andrew is asleep next to you, still in whatever clothes he was wearing throughout the day. a short sleeved button up and pants. you’re surprised that he didn’t fall asleep with his shoes on. 

he looks very calm when he sleeps. the lines of tension on his forehead and around his eyes are soft when he’s like this, his hair a mess and cheek smushed against the pillow, against your hand.

he’s still holding your hand. it makes a certain kind of warmth rain all over you, flooding you from inside out. he’s on top of the covers and you’re under the throw blanket, and you don’t remember doing that, which means that he did.

an exhausted, half-asleep andrew cody covered you up before he fell asleep on top of the covers. he fell asleep holding your hand and your chest hurts because he won’t wake up holding it still, since you need to go turn that stupid alarm off. 

he never sleeps, you know this. he’s never been asleep when you show up early, never heading to bed when you leave for the day. this bed is pretty much always made, sheets never rustled and not a pillow out of place because no one sleeps here. you hope you can start changing that.

you don’t want to pull your hand away from him. it’s so simple, so sweet that you can’t bring yourself to do it. that this whole time, andrew just needed someone to sleep beside him. you rest your head back on the pillow, continue staring, creepy as it is. you’ve never been able to study him like this before, have never been close enough. 

the hand holding onto yours is softer than you’d imagined. the veins running through his forearm are thick and tense, even when he’s like this. you think it might be from how tightly he’s holding onto your hand, like even in his sleep he’s worried he might lose you somehow. 

andrew cody has freckles—all across his arms and on his hands too. there’s a splatter of them across his nose and cheeks, places where he must have gotten burnt as a kid, maybe when he was lena’s age. the tips of his ears flush pink while he sleeps, and he snores. all things that make you smile, things that are so personal you feel your face getting warm, like you shouldn’t have access to that information. 

you need to turn that god-damn alarm off, before it wakes him up. you think you’d rather die than disrupt the few hours of peaceful sleep he’s getting right now. so you wriggle your hand, trying to find the best way to get it out of his grip and make sure you don’t wake him in the process. nothing’s working, even in his sleep he’s thrice as strong as you. the generic alarm tone keeps going in the background.

you lean in, pressing a chaste kiss to andrew’s cheek, whispering that you promise to be right back. and for a split second he moves around, and you regain control of your tingling hand.

the bed creaks a little when you get up, but you do it slowly so it’s not too loud. walk to the couch as fast as your bare feet will take you, looking down and realizing you’re still in andrew’s socks.

(his shirt and boxers too, but you’re choosing to ignore that for now. if someone walked in through the front door in this moment, it would look like you and him were something other than a guardian and babysitter. you think you’d actually enjoy trying to see him explain to his brothers why you’re in his clothes head to toe. you might like this more than you think you did.)

you can hear the ocean again once the alarm is turned off. it’s a beautiful thing to wake up too, you think, pulling open the curtains and looking outside on the street. people are on runs, doing yoga on the beach, watching the sunrise with their dogs.

and inside, andrew cody is sound asleep.

the first part of your day is waking up lena. she grumbles and takes five, sometimes ten, minutes to get up after you go in there. in that time, you set out clothes for her and then head back to the kitchen. you have a habit of making sure her backpack has everything—the colorful pens she’s always telling you about and yesterday’s homework. if she forgot something at home, the school would call andrew, and then andrew would call you, and you hate adding more work to his life. so, you make sure it’s all there before she leaves.

then breakfast—eggs and toast if you’re running late, pancakes if you got there early. it’s seeming like a pancake sort of day.

you make the batter and then pull out the bag of chocolate chips and head back to lena’s room. you use the semi-sweet morsels as an incentive to get her up, which works like a charm. while she’s changing and brushing her teeth, you make three pancakes. two for lena, and the first one you peeled that’s never quite as good is for you. 

lena comes to the table to eat her pancakes, and you tell her to stay just a little quieter than usual because her uncle pope is still sleeping.

“really?” she asks, and you feel something inside of you twist in discomfort. as if you had imagined before you met him, maybe he was sleeping, that maybe this was something recent. you smile at lena.

“yeah, sweetie, really.” 

you bring lena to school, come back home, and check on andrew—who is still sleeping. you cover him up with the blanket you’d slept under and then make three more pancakes and some scrambled eggs. there’s no bacon in the house or you would have made that too.

you scribble it on the grocery list and then head back inside the bedroom, carefully perching yourself on the edge of the bed and maybe a little too comfortable, too quick, run your fingers through his messy hair. he sighs against the pillow and it makes you smile immediately. you keep going, fingers not stopping until you see his eyes fluttering open. you don’t want to make him uncomfortable, though you don’t want to stop either. 

“i made breakfast,” you say quietly. andrew looks up at you, and then to your slept-in side of the bed. he moves, sitting up in the bed and you take back your hand tentatively. his hair is soft like you’d imagined.

 he wipes his face with his hands, rubbing at his eyes. and when he looks at you, you feel any prudence that once was inside you melt away. well-rested, sleepy andrew cody, waking up in the bed you shared last night, while you tell him about the pancakes you made for him. you couldn’t have imagined this, for some reason, which makes it feel all the more real. 

“what time is it?” he asks, in a gruff, sleepy voice.

“almost nine, i think.” he looks up at you quickly.

“lena?”

“i brought her to school already. you-you were sleeping. i didn’t want to wake you.” 

“when did you get up?” 

“six-thirty. my alarm. remember?” you do remember telling him about it before you fell asleep, one of the last things you had said in a conversation that feels like it was light-years ago. 

“yeah.” you know better than to expect anything right now. he’s always been quiet, sentences curt and expressions relatively blank. you’ve had a few hours to simmer in it—think about what’ll happen tomorrow and next week and what it means to sleep in the bed next to the man whose niece you babysit. he just woke up a few minutes ago.

“well, there’s pancakes. and eggs. there’s no bacon but i’ll go get some later-”

“did you eat?” you catch his eye. perched on the bed next to him, you can see more than just green. brown too, around his pupils. not nearly as sad as they had seemed yesterday. 

“yeah. i had one.” 

“just one?” you don’t have an answer for that, but unusually confident, you stand up. 

“i’ll have a bite of yours if you come eat with me.”

and though you couldn’t have imagined it last night, you end up leaning against the counter with andrew, splitting bites of chocolate-chip pancakes (yours drenched in syrup, his comparably dry as a bone), and luke-warm scrambled eggs. 

he washes the dishes, and you put them away. it’s incredibly domestic. 

“i’m sorry about your clothes,” you say, sliding a plate back into the cupboard. “um, i’ll wash everything today.” you had to bring it up at some point.

and then andrew turns to look at you. head to toe, he stares, gaze flicking up and down for what seems like eons. you don’t have a guess for why, maybe he’s trying to decide if he’ll accept your apology.

(he’s trying to memorize it, capture it like a picture in his brain, seal it up and hold onto it forever. how you look right now—his white shirt, with nothing underneath, which must be why he can see the outline of your breasts when you turn to put another dish away. his boxers, that you bunched up around your waist, his socks, one rolled up around your ankle and the other halfway up your calf. did you go to the school drop-off in his clothes, too?)

“and i can wash your jacket too, i’m sorry. it was kind of cold and i don’t know where my hoodie is. i-i’m sorry.”

he turns to look at you again. you seem worried, chewing on your cheek, waiting for his answer.

“don’t wash the jacket,” he says, and turns back to the sink. he doesn’t want it to stop smelling like you, but you don’t need to know that.

“yeah. sure. i won’t. sorry again, andrew.” 

his heart thuds in this chest at the realization that you might never go back to calling him mister cody. 

the two of you finish the dishes. he wipes up the counter while you put away lena’s things, and then he grabs his keys and puts on his shoes. you stand there watching, feeling awfully close to something like a wife watching her husband about to leave her for the day. and when you open your mouth, you can’t stop it from coming out.

“do you know when you’ll be back?”

“i’ll be here for dinner. can you pick up lena?” he doesn’t want to leave you, but there’s about ten texts and three missed calls on his phone that he needs to deal with. when he shrugs his jacket on, it does, in fact, smell like you. it might be enough to keep him calm the rest of the day.

“yeah, of course. well.. i’ll go start the laundry.” a vision of you peeling off your—his—clothes plagues his mind momentarily. “i’ll see you later?” you say, smiling hesitantly. 

and without thinking too much about it, andrew comes up close to you, leans in a little awkwardly, and kisses your forehead.

“i’ll see you later.” he leaves you there in his shirt and socks, blinking stupidly at the door. 

+

andrew does come back for dinner. you make an attempt at chicken parm at lena’s request, which really just turns out to be a sort of chicken parm-casserole situation, but lena likes it and the garlic bread tastes good, so you will call it a win for now.

while you’re simmering sauce and frying the cutlets, your mind flicks through everything you know about lena’s uncle. he’d never once been anything but nice to you—nice is one way to put it. polite is another. courteous, appropriate, reserved. 

one night you had been waiting for him so you could leave, and he’d come home with lena’s other uncles. you had introduced yourself and smiled nicely, and when you left and gotten into your car, it hadn’t turned on. you remember debating if you should go back inside or just call triple a and wait, but somehow, andrew had known something was wrong. he had come out a few minutes later, told you that he would drive you home while his brother stayed at home and that he’d be back in a minute. 

he’d dropped you off at home and told you he’d come get you in the morning. and you had slept anxiously that night, wondering what was wrong with your car and how much of a disturbance it would be to andrew to come get you. 

but after the two of you had dropped lena off at school—again, disturbingly domestic—he brought you back to the house. and without any words at all, he worked on your car while you sat and watched. you held a flashlight when he needed it, and he said it shouldn’t happen again when he was done. 

and you guess that’s the kind of man andrew cody is.

true to his word, andrew comes home in time to eat dinner with you and lena. after dinner, since it’s friday, you let her have a brownie and a half, the ones you’d made earlier that day. you have one too and you offer one to andrew, but he shakes his head, and you’re only mildly disappointed.

you haven’t been home, so you’re wearing one of the dresses from the wrong overnight bag you’d brought here. (your disappointment goes away when you notice that he hasn’t stopped staring at your exposed thighs since the minute he walked through the door.)

lena watches a cartoon before bed and you try to clean up the rest of the kitchen, but it’s hard, since andrew’s done most of the leg-work already. he tucks lena in and you gather your belongings—and true to your word, you did laundry and put his clothes back in the exact place you found them. 

(you did steal another pair of socks, but you hardly think he minds now. he kissed you goodbye this morning like he was actually your husband, or something, and every minute you spend in this house washing dishes and scrubbing counters next to him is not helping. he stares at the straps of your dress like he could slip them off your shoulder with his mind, like it’s the only thing he’s thinking about. you don’t mind.) 

“she’s out,” he says, coming back into the living room. you’re sitting on the couch, knees tucked to your chest while you change the channel to one of those documentaries you’ve been so fond of recently. you turn to smile at andrew and he comes and takes a seat next to you. 

“that’s good. i can go soon.” but you make no effort to move, staring at the screen in front of you. this one is about sea-life, shades of blue flooding ahead of you both. 

“you can stay,” andrew says, quiet like always. “if you want.” his voice is deep and gravelly, and the words he says scratch an itch somewhere deep inside of you, and the relief is visible on your body. you sink a little further into the sofa, knees falling next to andrew’s, thighs touching. 

“if that’s okay with you.” you whisper it, as if saying it too loudly might make the entire idea crack open and fall apart.

you two stay like that for a while. you don’t know when, but andrew swings an arm around your shoulder, and you rest your head against his chest, collapsing into his comfortable grip. you can hear his heart beating, can feel every breath he takes. his hand brushes the top of your shoulder every time you breath, and his other hand is clasped with yours. you watch schools of fish and pods of dolphins, and you think that any other night, you could fall asleep like this. 

“andrew?” you ask, still staring straight ahead. you brush your fingers over his knuckles like you had done last night, and you can feel his hand tense under your touch, until it finally relaxes. “do you want to go to bed?” 

“yeah, kid,” he says. “let’s go to bed.” 

and you’ll be damned if the domesticity doesn’t kick you in the stomach, sucker punch you in the chest and knock all the wind out of you. andrew turns the tv off, puts the remote back in the right place. and then he picks you up, and you make a quiet noise of surprise, underestimating him momentarily. you should know better.

one hand wraps around your legs and the other around your back, bridal-style (fitting, you think), and he sets you down on the creaky bed. you worry, how loud it’ll be and how you’ll have to be quiet but then andrew hovers over you, nothing but a tiny lamp brightening up the room, and you lose your train of thought.

“you sure you wanna do this?” he asks, that rough voice again. like you’ve thought about anything else for the last twenty-four hours. you nod quickly, bringing your hands to his chest, and then his arms, fingers tracing the sinewy veins and thrumming muscles up and down on both sides. his eyes shut while you do it, breaths getting heavy and deep. but you keep going—it’s only fair. you’ve only thought about it a million times. 

“does that feel good?” you whisper, and he lets out a quiet, almost painful groan.

“y-yes,” and you smile, fingers moving on their own while you lean in for the kiss you’ve been waiting for. 

andrew’s mouth is hot, and his kisses are like fire. as soon as your lips touch, he pins you all the way down, his body weight on top of yours. he kisses you the same way he had held your hand last night, the same way he held you on the couch, like you’ll slip away if he stops for even a second. your lips start to ache, but you moan quietly into his mouth, letting him swallow them while you still stroke his arms. one day, you’ll crawl into his lap and play with his hands until he’s sick of you, but today, you need to feel him. 

you can’t do much from your position, but you can wrap your legs around his waist, one hand going towards his chest to pull at his shirt. he takes it off in one motion, yanking the fabric at the back until it comes off, messing up his hair while he pulls it. your free hand goes there, running through his hair again. you use it to steady yourself, gaining leverage while he keeps kissing you like there’s nothing else for him to do. like his life depends on it. he thinks it just might.

“an-andrew,” you get out in gasps, moving your mouth away for a second. “i need to breathe,” you pant, but he doesn’t stop, kisses your cheek and your jaw and buries his face in your neck. you feel the skin there between his lips, then his teeth, and you grip hard on his arm while he keeps going. you want him to keep going, you want to see the marks he leaves tomorrow and every other day. you want everyone to look at you and know that he’s the one who left them. and you think your wish is about to come true.

your fingers let go of his arms and he groans against your skin—there’s no words but you know he didn’t want you to stop. instead you guide them to both sides of his face, staring up at him and then bringing him back in for another kiss. you think you’d be perfectly content to do this forever, that you could spend hours, days, weeks in bed kissing andrew cody. that you’d be stupid to ever leave this bed, leave this house, when there’s a man here who kisses you like each touch of your lips is a prayer, like he’s here to worship. 

he’s not hesitant anymore, not wondering if you’re going to pull away and walk out and ask to pretend this never happened. you keep your hands on his face, and then work down to his jaw and neck, clasping your arms around to keep him in place. 

and his mind is empty. he thinks he should know what to do with you, with your labile body flush against his, all the things he’s been thinking about for the last months, if not at least what he was thinking since this morning. you’re still in your little dress, one of the thin straps fallen over your shoulder and dangling on the skin of your upper arm. he pulls away and you whine, another noise he wishes he could capture somehow. it’s a melody, one he wants to keep hearing. 

you wish he hadn’t stopped the kiss, and you expect him to lean right back in after you both catch your breath, but he doesn’t. andrew’s hovering over you, eyes fixated on your shoulder, staring intently at the strap of your dress. 

“andrew?” you whisper, the hand on his neck rubbing the tense skin there, wondering if you could get your kiss back. “is something wrong?”

his lovely eyes flicker up to you, staring while you swallow and wait patiently. maybe you’d been too eager, maybe he was having regrets—after all, you’re the nanny and he’s the dad and maybe you’d been too presumptuous in assuming that he wanted you as badly as you wanted him—

“no. nothing’s wrong.” you sigh a tiny breath of relief, it comes out before you even notice. but andrew is nothing if not perceptive, and he wraps his hand around your back and lays you back on his bed. 

“why did you stop?” you question, flustered and embarrassed as the words come out, sounding like a spoiled child. but you suppose you had been spoiled these last few hours, getting everything you wanted—his hot touch, breathless kisses, the ability to finally see what the veins on his arms feel like under your palm. 

he doesn’t answer your question, just flicks his eyes back to your shoulder. and then he leans in, pressing an open-mouthed kiss to the end of your collarbone, tracing more kisses down through the length of your shoulder, stopping when he reaches the skimpy cotton of your dress. you take deep breaths, watching it happen in front of you. he repeats the same with the other side, pulls the strap down like he’s unfolding a gift, kisses your skin like you’re his present. and you think you are.

there’s nothing between you two except your thin dress, and you pull on it eagerly, trying to get it off, when his hands come and stop on top of yours.

“you’ll rip it,” andrew says, fingers going towards the zipper in the back, undoing it slowly.

“i don’t care,” breathless, eager, unable to wait even another minute to get what you want. he pulls the zipper all the down, your dress falling off as your shrug out of it. 

and you want another kiss, you want his touch, you want something, anything—but all you get is andrew staring at your naked body. and you think somehow this is worse than anything else, anticipation burning in your belly painfully. your thighs feel sticky and sore and your underwear is soaked through. and all he’s done is kiss you. 

“you’re perfect,” he says quietly, and you feel your entire face burn hot. you don’t think you’ve ever felt like this before—and you know how andrew is. he doesn’t lie, he doesn’t say things he doesn’t mean. 

you tilt your head up, pressing your lips to his for a moment, a soft kiss in contrast to the ones from earlier.

“so are you,” and you kiss him again, smiling against his mouth. he feels it, though he doesn’t smile back. and when he pulls away, he looks down at you, naked and willing in his bed, smiling up at him and telling him he’s perfect, when you don’t even know half the monster he is. “you are,” you repeat, watching andrew’s eyes as he thinks a million thoughts in his head, carries a million burdens on his shoulders. “even if you don’t believe me. i think you’re perfect.” 

you feel cheesy saying it, though you know there isn’t another man in the world who needs to hear it more. you can hear him make a noise of protest, like he doesn’t think you mean it, and incredibly desperate for him to believe you, you sit up.

your hands go to sturdy shoulders while you try to get him to move, until he’s sitting back against the headboard and you can crawl onto his lap. he’s silent, watching you as you do it, exposed body flush against his skin, and yet, you don’t feel scared. you don’t feel embarrassed, or worried. you just want to make him feel good.

you start with a kiss to his jaw. andrew’s body tenses under yours, the slightest bit of contact making him groan and buck up, his hands tight on the soft skin of your waist to keep you both steady. you work your way down to his neck, pressing kisses everywhere in your path. 

“do you want to know what i’ve thought about you?” you ask, though you don’t wait for an answer. you kiss down his chest, stopping at the strong muscles of his chest and the old bruises and scars that cover some of them. “i thought that you’re so good at taking care of your family.” you move down to his abs, more kisses, hearing more noises from andrew that you never would have thought he would make for you. he takes shuddering breaths, not replying to you but grunting from pleasure while you keep going. “i thought that you’re so good to me. that i don’t have to worry since i know i can always come to you.” you think of your car and the money he gives you and how you woke up in bed despite falling asleep on the couch. 

finally you make your way to the waistband of his jeans, undoing the belt with surprisingly steady hands. he reaches down, his hands covering yours for a moment, but you stare up at him with your glassy eyes, not even pulling the entire belt off, just enough to get you what you need—what you want. and then you undo his zipper, tug down his boxers, and take his girthy length into your hand, stroking up and down while still staring up at him. 

“can i take care of you, andrew?” and you don’t realize how it must sound to him, his head thudding back onto the pillow. you press a gentle kiss to his leaking tip, both hands wrapped around his dick and stroking while you wait for your answer. 

“y-yes, yes-” and you don’t wait any longer, taking as much of andrew into your mouth as you can fit. you drive your mouth up and down, your hands twisting around the base, everything wet and warm and sticky from your spit. and you think you would do this forever, that you would do this everyday if you could hear the noises he makes and how his body takes the pleasure you give him. you gag around him, feeling his hand snake into your hair, pulling you off gently. you smile up at him, though you’re sure you look like a mess, hot tears running down your cheeks and lips shiny and wet. 

but you don’t stop—licking up and down until you bring him back into your mouth. you can feel how embarrassingly wet you are right now, can feel yourself leaking onto your thighs and the sheets, wanting friction as badly as you wanted to make andrew feel good right now. and then you hear it—andrew’s moan, louder than any of the other noises and full and from the chest. he bucks up into your mouth and you take it, ready to hear what he sounds like when he finishes, when he pulls you off of him. 

“andrew—” you whine, as though you were the one about to come. he pulls you up, naked bodies pushed against each other, and kisses you until you feel light-headed.

“not until you do,” he murmurs, and you feel dizzy all over again.

“but i’m not done,” still eager to kiss the rest of his body and tell him how good he is, until he starts to believe you. you wrangle out of his loose grip, knowing full well if he wanted to stop, he could have. he could pin you down and do whatever he wanted to you and you wouldn’t be able to fight him, a thought that makes you feel like you’re going to faint. but you resume quickly, starting at his shoulders—stopping to admire all the sunspots spattered there—and starting your journey again, working down his bicep and to his freckled forearm, the ones you stared at whenever the opportunity presented itself, the one you thought about all the time.

andrew doesn’t know about that, and you’re not sure you can bear to tell him. it feels too revealing, despite how you’re naked on top of him, your breasts pressed against him and wet pussy on top of his hard, leaking dick. but sure—that’s what you get nervous about. 

you stop and trace all the veins with your fingers, feeling him pulse underneath you, repeating on both sides. he’s got his head tilted back, soft groans filling the empty space between you as you keep going. if they’re this sensitive for him, you can only imagine what it would feel like for you, especially the one leading down to the middle of his wrist—and then the words slip out before you can realize you had said them out loud.

your face goes hot again. he looks up at you a little confused, and you have to stop yourself from collapsing and burying your face into the pillow next to you.

“andrew?” you ask, shy and embarrassed and yet not stopping yourself at all. 

“you… you like my arms?” he says, and you feel your face heat up.

but so many things have happened already that you couldn’t have even dreamt about twenty-four hours ago, so you think it’s worth a shot. (that’s a lie. you have dreamt about this, so many times that you’ve woken up in your bed covered in a cold sweat, that you’ve burned through a vibrator and ruined pillows imagining what it would be like to rub yourself against his veiny arms. you guess you’re about to find out). 

your fingers trace the length of them again.

“i like everything about you,” you say quietly, understanding just how silly you sound. “but we don’t have to do anything.” you try to cover your tracts, worried you’ve just messed up the incredible time you’ve been having so far littering his body with kisses and feeling butterflies in your cunt from the fact that andrew will be inside of you soon. 

“how would you-” andrew starts, and you watch him carefully as he gets out the next few words. “do it? how?” and it’s just cut and dry way he speaks, though it’s really going to your head (and other places) right now. 

“well, i-”

“show me.” oh. 

you feel yourself pulse and throb in response to his words. even below you, you can still feel how hard andrew is. you try to start positioning yourself, but you must be moving too slowly for him, and you feel his hand on your ass, grabbing you and pushing you up to his chest, face to face. he lays his arm next to you, watching your naked body as you try to balance yourself between it, his free arm on your hip, keeping you steady. 

when you lower yourself, just an inch or two, just until you feel the ridge of his forearm and you can decide what to do after realizing that you are, in fact, doing this, andrew curses under his breath.

“fuck, you’re so wet.” he can feel it. feel you, on his arm, leaking, for him. you take a deep breath, pressing your hands against his chest to keep your balance, moving your hips up and down slowly. and your eyes flutter shut because fuck, if it isn’t better than every fantasy you’ve ever had.

you hadn’t known that your pathetic attempts to recreate this at home would have never lived up to the real thing, and now you realize you’ll never be able to go back to anything else but andrew, that no one else could make you feel this way. months of pent-up desire leave your body as you rock yourself against him, finally getting the stimulation you’ve been craving.

when you open your eyes, just for a second, you see andrew, his eyes glued to where your pussy meets his arm, his breaths heavy and deep, like he wouldn’t look away from the sight before him for anything.

and then you feel the veins rub against your clit, and your eyes roll back into your head. you keep going, trying to muffle your moans and sighs, but you can’t get the image out of your head—andrew staring at you, like he wanted this as much as you’ve wanted it, like he needs to see you cum like this. you start going faster, the friction and the slide from your juices making it easier and the veins rubbing at you just the right way—

he leans in, putting one of your peaked nipples into his mouth, flicking his tongue against it, before letting go and repeating the same with the other one. but it’s really when andrew starts talking that you’re pulled over the edge, his hand hot on your back.

“please,” he says, and you feel yourself falling into it, hanging onto every raspy word, so much better than you could have ever dreamed, “-i-i need you to cum for me. i need to feel you, i need to see it, please-”

and you do. you always listen to andrew, all the white-hot tension wound up in your belly releasing, flooding your entire body with the relief you’ve been wanting all night. your body tightens up, stopping, but he moves you with the huge hand on your hip, makes you rub on him all through it, pulling your body like you’re a toy for him.

your mind is empty while your toes curl and uncurl, thighs aching and sore in this position. andrew ushers you towards him, and you collapse on his chest, heaving and sweaty and tired—and the realization hits you that he hasn’t even been inside of you yet.

he kisses you while he has you trapped in his arms, your eyes shut as you breathe him in, moan into his mouth and let him swallow it. 

“y-your arm,” you get out, realizing you’re not speaking in coherent sentences. “i’m sorry-”

“why?” he asks, and you shut up instantly. “didn’t know you liked them that much.” 

he laughs quietly, a sound you have only heard a few times. you laugh against his chest for a moment, before pulling him in for another kiss. this time, it deepens, and he gets you on your back in front of him before he pulls away. you stare up at him, mind empty and chest heaving, seeing how his eyes stay on your tits, and you reach up, putting your hands on his chest while he hovers over you.

“it might hurt,” he says, and you feel your entire body tighten, your walls clench at his words. there’s nothing but truth behind his statement—it’s not meant to be arrogant or boastful, he’s warning you. it’s going to hurt, you know it is—you could barely fit half of him in your mouth and it took you both hands to be able to comfortably stroke him.

but the way he says it elicits a fire in you, and suddenly you need him now, no matter how much it hurts. 

“i don’t care, andrew, please,” you beg, staring up at him. he still hovers, licking his lips and staring at your how tits bounce while you beg him to fuck you—a thought that he cannot process, even with you splayed out in front of him. he brings his arms out, fingers teasing your sensitive nipples until you’re covering your own mouth to avoid being too loud and you think you’re going to black out. (even in the dim light you can see the shine on his forearm from you, and the memory of it takes over your mind like a twister.) 

“i have to stretch you out first.” the words possess your body like a demon. andrew takes your knees and spreads them apart, and no matter how hard you try to close them, you can’t compete against him. when he slides in one huge finger, your eyes roll back. he slips in so easily, the noise is obscene. the second finger goes in just as quickly, but there’s more resistance. two of his fingers are at least three of yours (if not more, you think, and then you want to faint again). the stretch is delicious, your pulsing walls realizing that this has been what you’ve been craving all along. that no toys or pillows or fingers of your own could ever compare.

when he slips a third finger in, he doesn’t change the pace. just keeps pushing them in and out of you like you’re a toy he’s testing the limits with, seeing how much you can take before you break. there’s no instructions for you besides to sit back and take it—and your toes curl and your head spins at how good he feels. the stretch hurts, but you want it so badly, you hear yourself crying out and saying incoherent things. you think you see andrew smile from where he is, watching your cunt suck his fingers in, his entire hand coated in your juices.

and when he hovers over you, bringing his tip to your entrance and prodding against you for a moment, you think you’re in heaven. he’s so flushed, tips of ears and his cheeks pink, sweat coating his body, just like yours. you can only imagine how hard he is, how you’ll get to feel how hard he is soon enough. his eyes stay at your pussy, pushing in, just barely, but you need more. you bring your hands to his arms, holding onto him while he slides in, and when you feel him push all the way in—so much bigger than you could have imagined, three of his fingers is nothing compared to this, nothing, nothing, nothing—he’s on top of you and kissing you. 

whatever noises you make are tuned out—your ears are ringing and you can’t hear anything besides andrew’s grunts and moans as they come into your mouth. you keep kissing him, pulling on his lower lip and feeling his tongue on yours, but your entire body goes slack when he starts on a brutal pace, pulling all the way out and slamming into you. the bed is creaky, and the only noise besides it is the obscene one—the squelch of your soaking wet cunt taking andrew all the way, the repetitive slap of his skin meeting yours. you feel everything—the pressure of his hands while he holds you incredibly tightly, the fullness in your cunt that makes it feel like you can’t breathe.

and then andrew kisses your lips and makes a noise that makes you leak even more, and you know you’ll be just fine.

“i-i want-” he starts, and you feel him slow down the pace slightly.

“please, andrew,” you beg, and he resumes, fucking into you with an intensity that reminds you how badly he wants you, how long he’s wanted this. it reminds you of every time you caught him staring, every time you smiled at him wondering what he was thinking. and now you think you know—maybe he was thinking about something like this.

“i want another one,” he says into the skin of your neck, feeling him lick the sweat there and kiss the skin. “i want to feel it while i’m inside-” and god if you can’t comply. you want to do every single thing he tells you for the rest of your life, you don’t want to make another decision without andrew cody. 

he changes the position, pulling out of you for a second and making you whine again. (spoiled, you think, he’s spoiled me for anyone else forever.) he holds both of your knees up and spreads them wide and wraps your arms around them, keeping them in place. and then he slides back inside of you in one swift movement, making your eyelids flutter shut. he doesn’t get right on top of you, leaving space between you that makes it impossible to lean in for a kiss, and you keep whining, impossibly and irrationally angry that you can’t kiss him, wondering why he wants you like this, when you feel his fingers circle your clit slowly—then quickly.

your head falls back onto the pillow. andrew can feel you pulsing around him, walls clenching every time he rubs your sensitive clit, and that’s what he wants, that’s what he needs, wants to feel you cum around his dick and squeeze him even tighter than you are right now. wants to see how you look completely fucked out, wants to see if you can give him a third. (he’ll get it, he decides, later. he’ll give you a chance to breathe, get you water after this. all the things he would do to take care of you, just like how you deserve, how a husband would take care of his wife.) 

because at the end of the day, isn’t that what you two basically already are? you couldn’t be a girlfriend, because you have to get comfortable around a girlfriend. 

no, he thinks, watching your fucked-out, flushed body take him like you were made for it. you already know him, know what he likes and doesn’t like, know how to make him feel good like you had been inside of his head already. you have been inside. you’re all he thinks about. that’s a wife, that is something that is forever, what the two of you have. 

he doesn’t realize how hard he’s going, how fast, or how you’ve been squealing with your entire body tensing while he was stuck in his thoughts about you. this time when you finish, it explodes through you, the electric current staring from your core and spreading to every finger and toe. you jolt, legs shaking and head heavy, the after effect rolling through you while andrew keeps fucking you, keeps going even though he should probably stop. you’re incoherent, writhing and crying and feeling completely numb and like your entire body is burning all at once. 

and when you blink open your watery eyes at andrew, smile sweetly and reach out for a kiss, one that he happily gives you, you say it quietly.

“i love you, andrew.” and you feel his thrusts stutter, his body weight almost collapsing on you. you feel andrew cum, feel it filling you up while you listen to his quiet moans and run your hands over his tense muscles, saying sweet things that he can barely understand in this state. 

he rolls over minutes later, not pulling out until you were done kissing him. the room is filled with nothing but your heavy breaths. you need a shower, and you need to sleep.

you curl up on andrew’s chest like you had been on the couch what felt like a lifetime ago. you play with his fingers and he runs his other hand up and down the expanse of your arm. you can hear birds outside—and you know you need to get up soon, but you can’t find any words. 

“you think that was enough?” andrew asks, and you look up at him with a confused expression. he looks at you with so much sincerity you feel like crying. your andrew.

“what do you mean?” you ask quietly, still not sure what he’s even talking about. your head is spinning and your eyes are tired—every part of you is tired.

“we can go again after you get some sleep. it might take more than once.”

“andrew?”

“you don’t have to worry about it. i’ll figure it out. i won’t stop until i put a baby in you.”

♡ thank you for reading

strangers | part 4

summary: you never would've snuck out of bed last night if you had known it would lead to this—becoming a pawn in joel's sick, depraved game, playing the role of both victim and accomplice. how can the sparing of your life feel so much like a death sentence? how can you ever forgive yourself when your hands are as soaked in innocent blood as his are? how can the kind, gentle man you thought you loved, turn out to be such a monster?

!!PLEASE READ WARNINGS, THIS IS A VERY DARK FIC!!

I've tried to label this fic as detailed and as boldly as possible. I will not be held responsible or bullied off the internet if you choose to read this potentially upsetting/triggering work of fiction anyway.

warnings: joel miller x f!reader, 18+, smut, age gap (reader is college-aged, joel is mid-50s), no outbreak au, serial killer!joel, dark!joel, !!GRAPHIC!! DESCRIPTION OF MURDER AND BLOOD, NON-CON PIV (gonna say rape just in case, reader does not verbally consent), JOEL IS A SICK FREAK WHO GETS OFF ON KILLING, lying/gaslighting, manipulation, stalking, heavy dose of Joel POV, fingering, pussy slapping, edging, breathplay, degrading language used in an unsexy way, consumption of blood, Joel comes on your face, brief mention of somnophilia, reader has hair long enough to grab, reader can be carried by joel, development of stockholm syndrome, pet names (baby, darlin', babydoll, sweetheart), story inspired by "preacher's daughter" by ethel cain, vaguely set in the 70s, please respectfully let me know if i missed anything and i will rectify the tags

word count: 11.5k

a/n: this is a dark one, folks. if i haven't lost you already, i might lose you after this one. if this is the stop you get off on, i'm okay with that :) thanks for coming along for the ride. we've still got places to go from here, i'll be glad if you do decide to stick around. i feel very fortunate that the conversation around this story has been positive and respectful and i look forward to keeping it that way <3

divider by @saradika

series masterlist/moodboard

read this chapter on ao3

The office looks so different in the daylight.

The key to the room you’ve been staying in is still the only one missing from the corkboard, but the previously empty coffee pot is now half-full of this morning’s brew, and the ominous ticking of the clock is now mostly drowned out by the sounds of an afternoon football game, playing loudly on the television in the little lounge. 

Joel has only let go of your hand twice since you left town—once to help you up into the truck, and once to help you climb back down. Your fingers have remained interlocked otherwise, even while he was driving, even right now, as you stand in front of the desk and wait for somebody to respond to the sharp sound of the little golden bell reverberating throughout the room. Joel hits his fingers against the top of it again, with a little more agitated force this time, but still, no answer.

“I know this ain’t a five star joint or nothin’, but goddamn…” Joel grumbles, leaning around to peer into the room where, by the sounds of it, a touchdown has just been made. “Hey, buddy! Lil’ help in here?” He shouts, and the sudden intensity of his voice makes you jump. The volume of the game diminishes almost immediately, and a scrawny-looking teenage boy emerges from the lounge, wiping Cheeto dust onto his jeans.

“Sorry about that, sir. Eagles game, you know?” the boy tries to jest, but Joel only hums in response. “Anyway, what can I help you guys with?”

“Was wonderin’ if you might know anythin’ about a girl named Chrissy who was workin’ the night shift in here last night?”

“Chrissy? Sure, she’s pretty new around here, but I’ve worked the mornings after her a few times… Why do you ask? Is she in some kinda trouble?”

Not yet, she isn’t. 

“Nah, nah, nothin’ like that,” Joel reassures, then maneuvers you to stand in front of him. “Quite the opposite, actually. She helped my lil’ girl out last night when she wasn’t feelin’ too well. We’re awfully grateful to her, ain’t we, sweetheart?” He prompts, nudging you in the back. 

You nod, but keep your head down, fiddling with the hem of your dress. 

“Oh! That’s right. She, uh, left a note on the coffee table in there, saying something about keeping an eye on the girl staying here, and the, um…” You flick your eyes upwards as the boy’s sentence trails off, and watch him look Joel up and down once, swallowing hard. “Yeah, just the girl. Guess that was you, huh?” You avert your gaze again quickly when he addresses you, feeling your pulse quicken in panic.

“Mhm, sure was,” Joel answers for you. “That was awfully… kind of her, bein’ so concerned like that. Anyway, we just thought we’d stop by, see if she was around so we could give her a proper ‘thank you’, but I take it she ain’t here anymore? Any idea where she might be this time o’ day?”

The boy expels a sigh, tapping his fingers on top of the counter while he thinks. “I mean, I don’t know her too well… But I know she’s got another job at this bar down the road, The Rattler Room. I think she trades her nights between that place and here, wouldn’t be surprised if she’s got a shift there later tonight.”

“Well, how ‘bout that,” Joel says, clapping his hands on either one of your upper arms. “Guess we know what we’re doin’ about dinner tonight, don’t we, sweetheart?” Goosebumps raise on your skin even in the warmth of the office, and a nauseous feeling swirls in the pit of your belly. You feel somewhat fortunate that Joel wasn’t actually looking for a response from you, because if you were to open your mouth right now, you can’t guarantee that the minimal contents of your stomach wouldn’t come spilling out all over the muddy-colored carpeting. You would’ve never gotten out of bed last night, never tiptoed into this suffocating little room and asked the friendly-looking freckle-faced girl for help with your stupid idea—or hers, as Joel seems to think—if you had known that you would be putting more than just your own life at risk. You know what’s coming next, why Joel wants to hunt her down and stalk her like the predator that he is, and it’s all your fault.

“Let’s get goin’ now, baby. Thanks for your help, son, ‘s much appreciated.” Joel grabs hold of your hand again as he leads you out the door, and you nearly trip over the threshold as he tugs you across it.

He has a sick kind of spring in his step as he drags you back to the room, licking his chops and wearing an amused expression as he shucks off his boots and collapses onto the bed with a groan. You stand at the foot of the bed, frozen, as he grabs the remote off the bedside table and flicks the little square television to life. 

“Whaddyou wanna watch, babydoll, huh? Signal’s kinda spotty out here, but one’a these channels has gotta be playin’ an old Western or somethin’...” You just blink at him, dumbfounded, watching him surf through the staticky channels as if the previous five minutes had never happened. Joel had just started the countdown on the remainder of Chrissy’s life right before your eyes, and all he wants to do now is… kick his feet up and watch some fucking TV? 

“What do you mean, ‘what do I wanna watch’?” You ask, unable to hide the disconcerted edge in your voice.

“Baby, it ain’t a difficult question. Gotta kill time somehow, don’t we?” Joel turns his head in your direction as he addresses you, but otherwise keeps his eyes glued to the television screen, which now seems to be stuck on a snowy channel filling the room with loud, unsettling white noise. “God—dammit,” he curses, smacking the remote against the palm of his hand a few times. Your stomach churns both at the way he beats the inanimate object for its disobedience, and at his ironic choice of idiom.

“Kill time until… what?” 

Joel looks up at you from under his lashes, halfway rolling his eyes at you before giving up on his endeavor altogether and clicking the TV screen into darkness again. “Did you think I was just makin’ shit up last night? You’re gonna bring her to me. Not right now, ‘course. Later, when the sun goes down, we’ll head on over to that bar. I’ll buy you some dinner or whatever kinda shitty food they have, but dessert’s on you, you get me?”

Your vision starts to go a little dark around the edges, and you feel unsteady on your feet as the grim reality sets in that he wasn’t just prattling off some depraved fantasy to you last night, he wants to make it real. He wants to spear a hook through your abdomen and cast you out to sea, dangle you in front of something empathetic and pretty and fragile and lure her straight into his gaping jaw. You can hardly live with yourself as it is, the way you’ve already been so consumed with survivor’s guilt for the past twenty four hours that you can feel the physical weight of it on your soul. But actually being responsible for adding another girl to his collection, your hands just as soaked in her blood as his would be? It will fucking break you. It won’t just be the images of the polaroids that will haunt you, it’ll be the shattering sounds of their screams, the metallic scent of their blood, the nauseating visions of their contorted bodies that will be your own tangible memories now, seared onto the backs of your eyelids because you were there. You’ll never get a decent night’s sleep for the rest of your life, and you won’t deserve one.

“But… you—we can’t take her. It can’t be her.”

Joel sits back against the headboard, crossing his arms, like he wants to see where you’re going with this. “No? Why not, babydoll?”

You cross your arms back at him, widening your stance in order to look more sure of yourself. “Well… That kid. He saw our faces, right? When Chrissy doesn’t show up here again tomorrow night, the police will question him, and he’ll tell them that we were asking about her. They’ll know we had something to do with it.” 

Joel scoffs. “Yeah? Well, maybe they will. Then what’re they gonna do about it, hm? Two of us’ll be long gone by the time tomorrow night rolls around.” He knocks down your logic as easily as he would a house of cards, and you can’t think of anything else to say that might be able to convince him not to do this. The thought of it alone is like a drop of blood in the water, and once he’s gotten a whiff of it, there’s nothing you can do to stop the frenzy. 

“B-but—”

“But what, sweetheart? How long d’you think I’ve been doin’ this, hm? Think I don’t know the rules of the game by now?”

He has a point. Joel has managed to evade capture for this long, surely he isn’t going to start slipping up now. He probably has his ritual down to a science, knowing exactly which type of girl to take, the right place to get the job done, and how long he can stick around for afterwards before his face shows up as a crude drawing on the evening news. The only thing on his mind now is the exciting prospect of being able to get his rocks off in just a few hours, while yours is running a mile a minute thinking about the lifetime of trauma and guilt you’ll be setting yourself up for if you do this, how many different ways it can go wrong, and what could happen to you if it does. 

“Here, c’mere, baby,” Joel beckons, spreading his legs and patting his hand on the mattress between them. “You’re thinkin’ too much about this. Lemme show you how easy it’s gonna be, hm?”

He raises his brows at you when you don’t obey immediately, and you reluctantly crawl onto the creaky bed toward where Joel’s toned arms are reaching out to you. He grabs onto your waist when you get close enough and pulls you against him, situating you so that your back is pressed against his front. He wraps his arms around your middle, and rests his scruffy chin on your shoulder.

“You remember passin’ that bar on our way into town today, don’t you, babydoll? Had a big ol’ neon sign out front, a bright green rattlesnake waggin’ its tail back ‘n forth?”

“Um…” You close your eyes, trying your best to sift through the memories of everything you had seen during the drive. But it’s proving difficult, especially with the way one of Joel’s rough hands is sliding down your belly, finding its way underneath your dress and settling overtop of your panties. He begins to circle his middle finger around your clothed bud, and you hate the way it makes your breath hitch.

“C’mon, think for me, sweetheart. You remember, don’t you?” Joel prompts, a condescendingly teasing lilt in his voice.

A blur of neon green streaks across the backs of your eyelids, and you do remember, kind of. A divey looking place with a few motorcycles and pickup trucks parked out front, relatively isolated and unassuming aside from its kitschy signage.

“Mhm,” you hum, and it comes out more like a whimper. “I… I remember.”

Joel’s swirling finger picks up its pace, increasing the pressure against your clit as he continues to quiz you. “Yeah… And a few miles down past it, there was that abandoned lookin’ lil’ neighborhood, right? Houses were ‘bout fallin’ apart, all the yards were real overgrown… You remember?”

This, you can picture more clearly. It had reminded you of your own starved out hometown, every street lined with boxy two-story houses covered in peeling paint and climbing vines. Some of the homes so decrepit-looking, with their crumbling foundations and boarded up windows, and yet still with an assortment of sun-bleached children’s toys littering the front porch, a wind-chime still singing even if nobody was around to hear it anymore.

All you can do is nod in conformation, too afraid to make any more noises that might sound like you’re actually enjoying this, like it feels good, like you want him to keep going. Fuck.

“That’s where we’re gonna do it, baby. So you gotta listen real carefully, okay? Gonna tell you the plan, ‘n I want you to repeat it back to me, alright? Can you do that, babydoll?” Joel tugs your panties to the side as he questions you, exposing your damp core to the air conditioned room. “Fuck, look at that…” He muses, now using two of his fingers to spread your puffy lips apart and admire the way they glisten.

“Uh huh, I… I can,” you confirm breathily. 

Joe’s fingers travel downwards, focusing their ministrations around the rim of your leaky hole instead. “Here’s what we’re gonna do, sweetheart… Gonna head down there, park the truck ‘round the side. I’ll give ya some cash to go sit up at the bar, ‘n I’ll hang around in the back, keep an eye on you… You’re gonna chat up lil’ miss Chrissy, tell her all about how I snatched you up, made you mine, won’t let you leave my side… You’re gonna use your manners all pretty ‘n nice, and ask her to please, please take you back home, help you get away from that big, scary, mean old man who hurts you so bad—“ He presses a thick finger inside your opening, and you can’t help but moan at the burning intrusion. “Just don’t tell her how much you like it, huh, babydoll?” 

“Y-you… You want me to tell h-her… All of that?” You ask, confused that Joel would instruct you to tell her the truth, when so far, he’s been hellbent on hiding from the world who he truly is, only bearing his teeth when provoked, like a caged animal.

“Mhm, want you to tell her the truth, sweetheart, everything. Not like she’ll be able to do anythin’ about it later, hm?” Joel grabs onto your chin with his unoccupied hand, and shakes your head for you. “No, she won’t. Tha’s right, baby…” He laughs darkly, and you understand his intent now—to taunt you with an opportunity to finally be able to ask for help, to force you to pantomime what could be a real chance at escape, knowing that nothing will come of it. Joel begins to piston his finger in and out of you, and he holds you tightly against him as you squirm and sob.

“You’re gonna work your magic on her, and she’ll take such pity on you, sweet lil’ lamb that you are, of course she’ll take you back home… You’re gonna give her directions to that row of houses, have her take you all the way down to the one at the very end of the street, ‘n I’ll be followin’ close behind in the truck the whole time. Two of you’ll get outta the car, and then—” He sinks a second finger into your warmth alongside the other one, and you make a pained little noise at the stretch, arching your back against him. “Then I get to have my fun,” he snarls into your ear.

You didn’t realize how much tension you’d been holding in your body until now, until Joel had begun using his skillful fingers to render it all down, along with any rational thought you’d had left. You want to fight, want to spit and bite and scratch and push yourself away from him and never let him touch you there again, but you can’t. Your limbs feel weaker and weaker as the muscles in your abdomen draw tighter and tighter, and all you can do is melt against him, let him siphon out all that worry and pain and trauma and replace it with pleasure, at least just for a little while. You’ll grapple with yourself about it later.

You can feel the rumble of Joel’s voice against the skin of your neck, but you don’t register what he says, too consumed by your own pleasure to hear him. You just continue to mindlessly buck into the movements of his fingers, until he yanks them free from your walls and issues a sharp slap to your aching cunt.

“I said, repeat it,” Joel hisses, and you yelp at the sting, your hips stuttering as they continue to chase after nothing.

“S-sorry, ‘m sorry, Joel, please—” You pant.

“You want me to keep goin’? You wanna come? Then repeat it back to me, babydoll, all of it, or I ain’t givin’ you shit. Need to know that you understand, that I can send you out there to bring me some fresh meat and you ain’t gonna fuck it up.”

“Okay, okay, okay, um… Fuck—” you curse as Joel slowly reinserts his fingers, resuming their beckoning motion against that spongey spot deep inside that makes you dizzy. “I-I’m gonna… Tell her… About you…”

“Uh huh, tha’s right… What about me, baby?” He encourages, his fingers working their way back up to the pace they had been moving at before he had deprived you of them.

You try to wade through the dense cloud of fog in your mind, your ability to think slowing down as the heel of his palm stimulates your clit with each rhythmic thrust. “T-that you, um… That you took me, you h-hurt me. And I’m gonna ask her to… To take me home—” “Good, good girl…” Joel praises. “Doin’ such a good job, almost there, babydoll. What comes next, hm?”

You take in a shuddering breath, closing your eyes tightly as you force your brain to recall the steps he had just walked you through. “I make her d-drive me to, um… To that house—”

“Which one, baby? Lots’a houses on that street, which one did I say?” Joel stills his movements, holding your pleasure hostage while he waits for your answer. You try desperately to twist around in his hold and continue to chase after your high, but his grip around your jaw remains ironclad. 

“The one on the… The corner?”

Slap.

“Ain’t what I fuckin’ said. You think I want everybody drivin’ by to be able to hear her fuckin’ screams? Try again.”

You cry out, your abused little hole constricting around nothing. You dredge the depths of your short term memory, desperate to come up with the right answer.

“At the end! T-the one at the end,” you shout, and you’re rewarded with the replacement of his fingers, petting against your walls with just the right amount of speed and force that he knows will have you seeing stars with just a few more strokes.

“There we go… And what’s the last thing I said, sweetheart, hm? Last thing I need you to do…”

You draw a blank, your head filled with nothing other than almost there, keep going, please, please, please. You whine, bracing yourself for another swat to your sensitive cunt as you force yourself to admit, “I-I don’t… Don’t remember.”

Slap.

A debauched, animalistic cry leaves your lips, one that you can’t bring yourself to feel embarrassed of at the moment. “Yes you do, baby. Not gonna let you gush all over my fuckin’ fingers ‘less you tell me. Think. Can’t do shit if the two’a you get to the house and just twiddle your thumbs in the car, can I?”

“N-no, I gotta… Get her out of the car… Right? Is that it?” You’re heaving, completely breathless and covered in the dampness of your own sweat and arousal. At this point, you think you’ll say whatever the fuck he wants to hear if it means he’ll reinsert his fingers and finally let you fall over the edge.

“That’s right, sweetheart…” The hand that was gripped onto your jaw migrates downwards, wrapping itself around your neck. He presses his thumb and forefinger into either one of your pulse points, and you feel like you’re floating as he resumes the movements of his soaked fingers, drawing your orgasm closer and closer to the surface again. “One last thing… Tell me what I’m gonna do to her, hm? Then you can come, baby,” Joel growls, and you can feel him pressing his hard length into your back as he does. 

His voice sounds muffled, like it’s coming from underwater, but it resonates clearly enough for you to understand what he’s commanding of you. A whine forces its way through your constricted throat as you plead, “D-don’t make me, please just—” “Say it, or you’re gonna be watchin’ me do it with an achy, unsatisfied cunt leakin’ all over the fuckin’ floor. ‘S that what you want?”

You don’t want to watch him do it at all. A more sensible part of your brain knows that this is all so wrong, that it’s sick and horrifying and completely deplorable, but the pleasure-seeking part of it doesn’t really care right now. Joel is playing with you like a doll, pulling your strings and posing your limbs as he molds you into his perfect victim. He’s breaking you down, slowly but surely, and although you can feel it happening in real time, he’s proven to you time and time again how defenseless you are to his manipulation, how just a few gentle words and swirls of his fingertips can have you falling apart against him, so that he can put you back together just a little bit differently than you were before. 

“N-no,” you whimper ashamedly.

“Then say it.”

You swallow, and you can feel the cartilage at the front of your throat moving against his hand as you do. “You’re gonna… Kill her,” you rasp through half-full lungs, the words hardly meaning anything to you at all with how close your release is, being dangled in front of you just barely out of reach.

“Sure fuckin’ am,” Joel growls through gritted teeth. “Gonna enjoy every second of it, too, ‘s been so goddamn long. ‘M fuckin’ starvin’ for it, babydoll, you got no idea… Can’t wait to watch that lil’ bitch bleed.”

You ignore his perverted rambling to the best of your ability, the rocking of your hips becoming more spastic as the movements of Joel’s fingers increase in intensity, alongside his own excitement.

“C-can I… Please, Joel—” you beg hoarsely, your own voice sounding distorted and far away as you fuck yourself on his hand. 

“Yeah, babydoll, come for me, such a perfect fuckin’ girl…”

Both of Joel’s hands maintain their pressure as the knot in your belly tightens, then unravels all at once. You come undone on his fingers, the motel room filling with the obscene sounds of your wetness and your pathetic mewling as you drench Joel’s hand. He shushes and praises you through your climax, his fingers only ceasing their onslaught once your twitching body finally relaxes and slumps against his broad form. 

Your skin feels cool, tingly all over as the blood rushes back into your head. Joel pulls you into his lap, bending your knees close to your body so that he can cradle you like a child. You must be crying again, because he’s using his knuckle to wipe moisture from underneath your eyes as you shudder against him, reality coming crashing down around you again all at once.

“You’re so good for me, baby, such a good girl… It’s gonna be just fine, you’ll see. It’ll get easier every time we do this, won’t seem so scary anymore…” Joel rubs your back and kisses the top of your head, and you let him believe that you are crying for fear of the brutality you’ll have to bear witness to tonight, and not because you’ve dared to feel pleasure at the hands of the person who will be doing the brutalizing. You feel so fucking ashamed in your post-orgasmic state, but you’re so dehydrated and exhausted that you don’t really have enough energy to scold yourself right now. 

Joel holds you close as he rocks your curled-up form, and you feel too weak to resist the way your eyes begin to flutter closed, the release of tension making way for your poor night’s sleep to finally catch up with you. 

“Get some rest, babydoll, gonna need it. I’ll wake you up when it’s time to go,” is the last thing you hear before you allow yourself to succumb to the temptation of sleep. 

—

You were never supposed to find those polaroids. 

Could Joel have taken the precaution of dumping his box of jerkoff material into a ditch somewhere before you could ever get the chance to find it on your own? Of course. But he didn’t know if he might need it again, if he might someday find himself with another itch that only his little collection of keepsakes could scratch. He had kept them hidden from you for a reason, tried to toss them in the trash and convince you that they weren’t worth getting curious about for a reason—because things were going perfectly well, better than it had gone with any of them. Joel had never planned on adding your photo to the pile.

He had known you were different, that you were the one, from that very first night you’d spent together. You’d been nothing but polite, grateful, and appreciative, even when he’d slid beside you in bed and stolen a taste of all that sweetness you were made of. 

His whole life, Joel has searched for someone like you—someone to submit to him, to rely on him, to need him. That latter trait is the most important one, and the one that all the others seemed to be lacking. They liked feeling cared for and protected, liked bleeding his wallet dry while they spent a few weeks using him as some kind of rebellious experiment to piss off their parents one last time before they moved out of the house. But none of them ever made it very long before they decided that they didn’t really need him after all, that the fling was over, that the spark was gone, that they missed the shitty town he had picked them up from and wanted to be taken back. Ungrateful brats, they all fucking deserved it. And now they never get to go home, they get to rot in the fucking ground where their families will never find them, and he gets to keep their pretty pictures all to himself, asserting his control over them even in death. See how much they fucking need him now, when he is the one thing standing in between a cold case and a funeral.

Joel had known you wouldn’t end up like them, because you do need him. You have nobody, whether you’ll ever be able to admit it to yourself or not. You have no friends, no future, and no family, or at least not any left alive that actually care about you. You have no choice but to rely on him. Who knows what would’ve happened to you if he hadn’t stumbled upon you that night, looking so weak and lost and vulnerable and alone? There are much worse men than Joel out there, men who rape and kill just for the sick pleasure of it alone. At least Joel has some method behind his madness. It’s not like he’d invite a girl into his truck and immediately begin to fantasize about what her windpipe might feel like collapsing underneath his fingers.

Or, he didn’t used to. Not when he first started taking them. 

He’d thought the desire had just disappeared on its own, once he’d found you, his perfect little doll. Joel had meant what he said when he told you that he was going to be done after the last one. But then… Then he’d had you pinned underneath him last night, starving your lungs of air, your eyes red and watery as you’d begged for your life, and he’d realized that he missed it. He craved it. Needed it. The itch was still there after all, demanding to be scratched. But no matter how aggravating and persistent it may get, Joel had decided a long time ago that he’ll never use you to make it go away. It’ll never be you. Even when he’d had his hands wrapped around your throat, he’d never planned on finishing the job. After all, how could he ever live without you when he’d spent so long trying to find you?

And this is the one thing he needs you to understand—that he’s never letting you go. Joel had thought he’d gotten it through to you well enough last night, when he’d given you a taste of the consequences the others had suffered when they’d tried escaping. But you must be stronger than he’s been giving your credit for, judging by the way you still decided to fucking act up today with that dumbass little letter of yours. That’s okay, though. He can handle it. It just means you’ll take a little more effort to break down than he’d previously thought. If he can’t convince you that the only version of your life you were ever destined to live is the one with him in it, then he’ll just have to make you think that it’s your own idea to stay, to submit. He seems to have made some pretty good progress chipping away at your resolve today already. At this rate, he’ll have it whittled down to nothing in no time at all, and you’ll be right back to the pliant little babydoll he fell in love with all that time ago. The one who needs him.

You’ll come back around soon enough, when you finally realize that you don’t have any other choice.

So, maybe Joel is a little glad you found the polaroids. He wouldn’t have ended up here if you hadn’t, skulking around the pool table in the back of the Rattler Room, practically vibrating with anticipation and foaming at the mouth like a rabid dog. He flicks his gaze between the end of his pool cue and where you’re perched at the bar on a cracked leather stool, occasionally catching your eyes when you look back at him nervously. Joel just gives you a nod and a wink every time, and it’s enough to make you turn back around and take another sip of your drink to quell your anxiety. 

You’re probably getting antsy because the two of you have been hanging around here for the better part of an hour, and Chrissy still hasn’t shown yet. But this is just one rule of the game—waiting. Patience. A predator doesn’t go in for the kill the second they lay eyes on their prey, do they? They have to study their movements, make sure they’ve got the little creature right where they want them, with their belly up or their neck exposed or their back turned, and then they pounce. You’ll learn the rules soon enough. With each of these little hunts that you accompany him on, you’ll learn. There may even come a time when you pick out the girls yourself, because you see it as an act of service, of love, satiating his hunger like this. 

The next time you look back at Joel, you move like you’re about to get up from your seat and walk over to him, but he gives you a stern look that says “Stay put.” He jerks his chin upwards, toward where his pretty piece of meat is now emerging from behind the bar. Joel wonders if you believe the web of lies he’d spun about her today, if they were enough to convince you that Chrissy had taken advantage of you, that she’d manipulated you, that she deserves this. He hopes that you do, so that her death might weigh a little less on your conscience, so that you’ll put up a little less fight the next time his itch needs scratching. 

God, that slender neck of hers is just begging for Joel’s blade. His upper lip twitches as he imagines the sight of her deep crimson blood dripping down her ivory-colored skin, her face becoming impossibly paler as her heart flutters out its last few beats before stopping altogether. Joel usually saves his knife for special occasions, when he needs the execution done quick and dirty before her screams wake up the entire fucking neighborhood, or in instances like his last girl, when she just needed to be put out of her fucking misery. But he might use it tonight, just because. Because he’s hungry. Because he’s so fucking hard he doesn’t think he can make himself suffer through the amount of time it takes to strangle a girl. 

Joel watches from the shadows as Chrissy seems to recognize you right away, reaching for your hands across the bar as she says something to you that he can’t make out. Judging by the pitied expression she wears, the way she leans into you, he guesses it’s something like, “I’m so glad to see you. Are you okay? Are you hurt? Do you need help? Do you need me to save you from that big horrible monster who’s making your life so miserable?” Joel rolls his eyes at the imagined conversation. He sets his pool cue back on the rack and takes a seat at a small corner table, keeping his head low as he sips his beer, adjusting himself while he watches the way the tendons in Chrissy’s neck tighten and flex as she speaks. He can practically see her carotid artery pulsing underneath her skin, can already taste the iron on his tongue from the flecks of blood that will inevitably splatter onto his lips when he slices it open.

Calm the fuck down, Miller. It’ll be playtime soon enough.

The two of you talk for another minute or so, and Joel gathers that you must be reciting the lines he’d taken such care to teach you today. Chrissy’s brows furrow, her lips part, and she places one of her small hands over her chest as she listens, as if your rehearsed little sob story is just too much to bear, so tragic and devastating that it’s actually causing her physical pain to hear. She retrieves a paper napkin from underneath the bar, and hands it to you so that you can use it to dab underneath your eyes. Jesus, are you crying? You’re even better at this than he thought you’d be. 

Your shoulders shudder as you finish drying your tears, and Chrissy glances behind her at the clock on the wall, pausing to think for a moment before she turns back to you. Whatever she’s saying, she looks sure of herself, determined, and you nod your head on just about every other word. “Okay?” is the only one he can read on Chrissy’s lips, the last one she says to you before she begins serving the other patrons sitting at the bar. You continue to sip at your drink with your head hung low until she disappears into the back again, and when you swivel around in your stool, Joel is already staring at you. He makes a beckoning motion with two of his fingers, and you hop down from your seat, scurrying over to him as if he were whistling at a dog to come.

“She, um…” You start, checking behind you once to make sure Chrissy is still out of sight. “She said she’ll take her first break early, in an hour or so, and then… Then she’ll drive me home.”

A satisfied grin tugs at the corner of Joel’s mouth. “Alright, ‘nother hour it is, then. That wasn’t so hard, baby, was it?”

You shake your head, avoiding eye contact while you swirl your finger around the condensation from Joel’s beer bottle that’s collected on the lacquered table. You open your mouth like you want to say something else, but close it again quickly, seeming to think better of it.

“What is it, sweetheart, hm?” Joel prompts, curling a rough hand around the back of your bare thigh.

“I just… Wish it didn’t have to be her. She’s really nice.”

So were the rest of them, Joel thinks, until they tossed him aside like a chewed piece of gum. “Nice” doesn’t mean shit to him. Lots of girls are nice. And pretty. But they all fucking sound the same when they’re begging him to stop.

Joel bites his tongue, despite his supply of faux sympathy running dangerously low, and musters up what little there is left of it in order to give you the last little push that you need. “Oh, babydoll… You shouldn’t feel bad about somebody who did you wrong sufferin’ the consequences of their actions. I know she seems nice, but she ain’t a good person, baby, I told you that already—”

“I know, but—”

“But nothin’. It’s already been done, sweetheart, you gotta stop thinkin’ about it so hard. Just get back up there, hm? Be over before you know it.” 

Joel uses his grip on your thigh to spin you around, and sends you back up to the bar with a lewd swat to your ass. He stares at the way it bounces underneath the too-short skirt of your dress, and leans back in his chair as he takes another sip out of his sweating bottle. 

The next “hour or so” passes at such an excruciatingly slow pace, he’s stopped himself nearly a dozen times from flagging down a waitress and requesting another beer. He’ll have to make do with just the one, if he wants to be sharp, present, so that he’ll be able to savor every moment of both the hunt and the slaughter. Joel had forgotten how exhilarating the entire process is, how arousing it is to lurk quietly in the shadows, without the little thing having any idea that he’s there, until it’s too late. 

He bides most of the time by just sitting, staring, thinking. About if Chrissy will be more of a begger or a screamer, if she’ll waste any of her breath trying to plead with him and change his mind, or if she’ll just cry herself hoarse in hopes that somebody will hear her pathetic wailing and come to her rescue. Joel chuckles to himself when he remembers the one who kept insisting that “I have a boyfriend, you know. I bet he’s been looking for me, he’ll be here any minute now and he’ll fucking kill you.” Joel had doubled over laughing as he gestured around to the isolated patch of woods he’d dragged her out to, nearly pitch black and dead silent, save for the pale light of the waning moon and the sounds of her heaving sobs. “Oh, you got a boyfriend, do you? Tight lil’ virgin cunt was tellin’ me otherwise, but nice try, sweetheart,” Joel had taunted. Her photo was one of his favorites—a neck-down view of her kneeling form, featuring her chained together wrists and her filthy hands and knees, dirt-stained from how he’d taken her on the ground one last time.

Well, her first time. Whoops.

He’s got a white-knuckled grip around the neck of his empty bottle by the time he’s pulled out of his trance, the movement of two bodies up at the bar distracting him. Joel’s eyes refocus in time to see Chrissy draping her coat over your shoulders, ushering you out the back door after giving the room a once over. Not a very thorough one, considering she had basically looked right at him and didn’t seem to recognize him, but that’s more situational awareness than he can give most of the others credit for.

Too bad it won’t do her any good.

Joel feels like he’s got an electrical current pulsing through his bloodstream as he gets up from his seat, allowing the two of you a few paces’ head start before following in pursuit. He spots the flame of Chrissy’s red hair as she hurriedly helps you into the passenger side of her shitty Pinto, the door’s rusty hinges squealing loudly into the night. The back parking lot of the bar is poorly lit in contrast to the neon illumination from the rattlesnake out front, allowing Joel to slink behind Chrissy’s car and over to his own truck undetected. He situates himself behind the wheel, making sure to keep an eye on his rearview mirror as he rummages through his backpack and sets the tools he’ll need on the side of the bench seat that you usually occupy—his knife, a length of rope, and his camera.

Just like Joel had promised you earlier, he pulls out of the parking lot just behind the two of you, and keeps a close—but not suspiciously so—distance as he chugs down the poorly paved road, maintaining a speed-limit obeying pace and keeping his headlights off for good measure. He even refrains from having any music playing as he chases after you, the choice partly because he’s too dialed in to bother futzing with the tape player, and partly because he doesn’t want to risk making any noise that would raise even a modicum of suspicion, aiming to disappear into the shadows altogether for the next couple of miles.

Joel is nothing but a ghost, Death himself riding his pale horse into the silent dark, in pursuit of yet another sacrificial lamb to add to his flock. He’s lost count of just how many he has in his possession now, but he never gets tired of the way they bleat and cry and thrash as they struggle to escape his scythe. None of them ever seem to understand that they were each promised to him a long, long time ago, when Joel was already grown but they had only just been conceived. They’d been born onto a path that would eventually lead them directly into his waiting arms, where he would show them love and affection and pleasure and ecstasy and whether they were to reject his offerings or not, Joel would always take what was rightfully his, in the end. 

Joel holds his breath as Chrissy’s car approaches the intersection of the rundown neighborhood, but releases it when she makes the sharp left turn that you must have directed her to take. Good girl. He turns his own wheel more slowly, creeping carefully down the road until he finds a large, overgrown shrub to tuck his truck behind, out of sight from the two little creatures now exiting the Pinto and crushing mounds of dried grass under their tentatively stepping hooves. Joel kills the truck’s engine, his teeth chattering in anticipation as he swipes his tools from the seat beside him and slides himself out from behind the wheel. He reaches behind him to slot his knife underneath his belt, then begins his prowl towards the house with the rope and camera clutched in either hand. 

“No offense, but… You live here? Are you sure?” Joel hears Chrissy ask you, bending over to peer into a hole near the house’s foundation where some of the siding has rotted away. 

That’s right, stay down, just like that.

Joel is only a few paces away now. 

“W-well, it’s um… I h-haven’t really been here in a while, to be honest,” you respond, stuttering your way through the first lie you could think of in order to keep the charade going. You sound like you’re making it up as you say it, but that’s okay. Joel is closing in on his target now, it doesn’t matter if your trembling voice had set off the trap or not. Chrissy is already caught in it.

He’s so close he can smell the redhead’s rosy perfume that she had applied before her shift, can practically see the fine hairs raise on the back of her neck when she hears the snap of a dead tree limb coming from behind her. She lets out a little gasp, and whips her head around just in time to see Joel’s icy expression as he shoves a filthy boot into the back of her knee, making her yelp as she collapses onto all fours. Her hands scramble desperately for purchase in the thicket of dead foliage, but Joel is on her before she can regain her balance.

“Yeah, tha’s right… Down, bitch,” Joel spits, straddling her back and using his weight to push her body flat against the ground. “Hold onto this, babydoll, will ya?” He passes his camera off to you, not taking his eyes off Chrissy’s squirming form as you accept it quietly.

Joel grabs hold of Chrissy’s flailing wrists and wrenches them behind her back, squeezing her abdomen hard between his thighs as he does. “Hold fuckin’ still, ‘less you want me to break some bones while I’m at it,” he barks, but it does nothing to deter her futile efforts. She kicks and bucks and thrashes underneath him, making pathetic struggling noises as he winds the length of rope around her wrists, binding them together. 

“Get the fuck off me! Help me, get him off!” She pleads with you as she yanks against the rope and writhes around in the dirt. All you do is look at her with wide, watery eyes, your chest heaving as you clutch his camera in both of your small, shaking hands. “Are you with him or something? What the fuck is this? Help me, please!” Chrissy shouts, her voice terrified and guttural. 

“Yeah, somethin’ like that,” Joel growls into her ear, before pushing himself up off the ground and using his grip around the rope to pull her up with him. He wraps one arm tightly around Chrissy’s middle, and clamps the hand of the other one over her mouth. “She ain’t gonna help you, she knows better ‘n that... Did such a good job for me, sweetheart, such a good fuckin’ girl… Open the door for me so I can get her inside, now.” Joel watches the muscles in your throat constrict as you swallow hard, your eyes shifting from Chrissy’s terror-stricken ones up to Joel’s as you process his command. He smirks to himself when you do obey, the ribbons in your hair fluttering behind you as you scuttle up the stairs and wrench the door open. 

Chrissy is still shrieking incessantly into the meat of Joel’s hand as he shoves her up the creaking steps, and he supposes that he has the answer now to the pondering he was doing back at the bar—screamer it is. They piss him the fuck off the most, are probably most of the reason why his hearing isn’t as good as it used to be, and why he ends up using his knife more often than he’d like. Strangling is his preferred method—it’s more intimate, more hands on in nature, and makes less of a mess—but sometimes the cleanup is worth it if it means he can get them to shut the fuck up and quit shattering his eardrums with all their annoying fucking screeching that they know won’t do them any good. He’d made a good choice, sharpening his knife earlier while you were still asleep back at the motel this afternoon. Joel wonders when you’ll notice that you’re wearing a different pair of panties than the ones he’d made you come in, having tested the sharpness of his blade by slicing them off of you before cleaning up the mess you’d made with his tongue. 

Joel wrestles Chrissy inside the house, kicking broken glass and sloughed off sheets of yellowed wallpaper out of his path as he walks her into the living room. He turns his head as he instructs you to shut the door, and Chrissy uses the opportunity to bite into Joel’s palm and slam the back of her skull into his temple, hard enough to break the skin.

“Ah!—Fuckin’ bitch,” Joel hisses, forcibly shoving her onto the decaying hardwood floor. Chrissy tries to get up, but he presses the tread of his boot into her chest, keeping her down. He touches a finger to the side of his head, bringing it in front of his eyes to examine the droplet of blood that came with it, along with the indents in the flesh of his hand that are beginning to sprout little crimson beads. “Just fuckin’ askin’ for it, ain’t you?”

Joel looks over at you again, to where you’re standing with your back against the door and wearing the same deer-in-the-headlights expression as when he’d handed the camera to you. You have it clutched against your heaving chest, your eyes impossibly wide as you stare at the scene unfolding before you. He can practically see the gears turning in your brain as it cycles through the options of fight, flight, fight, flight, seeming to have landed on freeze instead. Joel observes you for a couple of seconds, waiting to see if one of your shaking hands will eventually snake its way back to the doorknob, but it doesn’t. Since you know what’s good for you, and all.

“C’mere, babydoll, where I can see you,” Joel orders, jerking his head into the room. Your eyes flutter out a few rapid blinks as you seem to shake yourself free of your petrified state, but your feet remain planted firmly underneath you. You’re standing so rigidly, with your knees locked in place, Joel is surprised you haven’t passed out yet.

“Can’t I just… wait in the truck or something? I’ll stay right there, I promise—”

“You know damn well I can’t take you up on any of your lil’ promises anymore, sweetheart. Besides, seemed awfully interested in how I do things last night, why the sudden change of heart, hm?”

You shift your weight, trying to come up with some excuse while you watch Chrissy try and fail to wriggle herself out from underneath the weight of Joel’s boot compressing her ribcage. “Just don’t do very well around b-blood, is all,” you squeak out pitifully.

Joel rolls his eyes, frustrated at the precious seconds you’re wasting by suddenly complaining about being a little squeamish. 

“Well frankly, baby, I don’t really fuckin’ care. You’re gonna have to learn to get the fuck used to it, I ain’t doin’ this with you every time. Get in here. You can face the goddamn wall, but you’re stayin’ put until this is over, are we clear?”

“Y-yes, Joel, thank you,” you concede shakily. Joel’s eyes follow you as you flit across the room, nearly tripping over chunks of fallen drywall before tucking yourself into a little alcove behind the fireplace and hugging your knees to your chest. 

“Alright… Where was I?” Joel ponders aloud, removing his foot from Chrissy’s chest and crouching down to her level. He grabs a fistful of her shirt collar and yanks her back up to a sitting position, looking down at his bleeding hand and sighing before harshly slapping Chrissy across the face with it. Her head whips to the side from the impact, and he grips onto her bloodied face with his injured hand to turn it back towards him again. “Y’know, I don’t take too fuckin’ kindly to feisty things like you who don’t know their goddamn place. Ain't so gentle with bratty lil’ cunts who think it’s a good idea to fight back, leave their marks on me. Am I, babydoll?” He says the latter part a little louder than the rest, brushing the forefinger of his unoccupied hand across the scar on the bridge of his nose as he speaks. You don’t respond, but he can tell that you hear him, that you know what—who—he’s referring to. “Yeah, she knows… One of her lil’ friends gave me this pretty thing, can you believe that? Suppose she gave me that pretty thing, too.” Joel chuckles to himself at his own double entendre, gesturing to where you’re cowering in the corner. “Poor thing had a friend go missin’ a while back, never knew what’d happened to her. Trail was cold, but she decided to follow it anyway. And Lord, am I glad she did, ‘cause it led her straight to me…”

Joel turns Chrissy’s head this way and that in his grip, enjoying the way she squeezes her eyes tight and flinches as she braces for another impact. She whines and whimpers as his fingernails dig into her freckled cheeks, now smeared with his orange-red fingerprints. “W-why me, then? Why not h-her, how come she gets to live? J-just take her, let me go, I won’t tell anyone,” Chrissy sobs through her teeth, hardly able to move her jaw in Joel’s firm hold. He reaches behind himself and slides his blade out from under his belt, raising it up in front of her face. Her eyes go wide as she lets out a horrified noise, thrashing against him and crying while he examines the way the sharp edge glints in the moonlight coming in from the broken windows.

“Oh, sweetheart…” Joel muses, turning over the blade in his hand a few times before looking up at Chrissy’s terrified face, his expression shifting from something wistful to something sinister, cold. “It ain’t ever gonna be her.”

Joel cranks her jaw upwards and slides his knife across her throat before she can even expel an entire scream from her lungs, the piercing tone of her voice becoming wet and garbled in just a few seconds as she chokes on her own blood. It sprays through the slit in her skin, some of it splattering across Joel’s face and landing on his lips, before coming out as a steadier stream that spills down her pale neck and dribbles from the corners of her mouth. Joel watches on as she convulses and gags, her eyes rolling back into her skull before becoming dead weight in Joel’s grip, and she collapses onto her side when he finally lets go of her jaw, still agape with a silent wail. Her muscles spasm as she bleeds out, the ruby-colored liquid pooling underneath her head and saturating the ends of her auburn hair. Joel licks his lips clean as her wound pulses in time with the beating of her heart, the rhythm becoming slower and slower before fizzling out altogether. It only takes a minute or so for her body to still completely, her gurgling breaths eventually morphing into the death rattle that he’s come to recognize so well. Joel swipes his bloodied blade across his tongue before sheathing it under his belt again, glancing over to where you’re now rocking back and forth, your spine hitting against the fireplace’s stone structure with dull little thumps.

He stalks over to you, ignoring the startled yelp you make as he grips onto your upper arm and drags you to where Chrissy’s cooling corpse is lying in the center of the room. Just like he had done to her earlier, he pushes you onto your stomach and straddles your hips. Only this time, he rucks up the skirt of your dress and yanks your panties to the side, swiftly freeing his painfully hard cock from the confines of his jeans and slotting into you with nothing more than a mouthful of his own saliva to help him ease inside. “Oh, f-fuck, Jesus fuckin’ Christ,” he moans, gripping one hand onto your hip and using the other—the one with a still-bleeding bite mark—to press the side of your head into the filthy hardwood, so that you’re facing Chrissy’s glazed-over expression while he takes and takes and takes. He doesn’t have it in him to be gentle with you, blinded by adrenaline and arousal as he uses you to get himself off. 

“God, you’re so fuckin’ tight when you’re scared,” Joel snarls, snapping his hips into your backside with such force that the clap of skin-on-skin echoes loudly throughout the empty house, nearly drowning out the sounds of your cries. You’ve got your hands splayed out on either side of your head, having dropped Joel’s camera when he’d forced you into a prone position. You make a disgusted gagging noise when the expanding pool of Chrissy’s blood reaches your fingertips, but you can’t pull away with Joel’s body weight holding you in place. You shut your eyes tightly as you sputter and sob, but Joel won’t allow that. He pulls you up onto your knees, pressing you against him and prying your eyes open as he holds your head up by a fistful of your hair. “No, no hidin’ from this, babydoll. You fuckin’ look at her… I do this for you, baby, you see? So that it won’t be you. I just get so fuckin’ hungry, I can’t help myself. I can’t fuckin’ stop. But as long as I live, I swear it’ll never be you. That’s why it’s them instead. You understand, sweetheart? I love you, babydoll, I love you so fuckin’ much.” Joel mumbles the last bit into the supple skin of your neck, sloppily kissing and biting into your flesh, until he isn’t sure to whom the iron taste that fills his mouth belongs anymore.

He gropes and grabs all over your pliant body, grunting curses into your wet skin while he uses your tight, warm hole like a toy. He’s practically been edging himself for the past several hours, starting from when he’d rubbed circles around your swollen clit and used the reward of your own pleasure to manipulate you into doing his dirty work. Joel is surprised he didn’t cream his jeans before now, the release of finally pouncing on his prey and the taste of her blood on his tongue almost enough to make him come untouched. His hips begin to stutter only a handful of thrusts later, but instead of allowing himself to spill inside you like he had last night, he slides himself free of your walls and maneuvers you onto your back, reaching for his camera.

“Smile pretty for me, babydoll,” Joel says, holding the viewfinder up to his eye while he jerks himself off over your used body, his knees planted on either side of your ribcage. The dazed expression you wear looks enough like a smile to satisfy him, and he snaps a photo as he paints your face with his come. Thick white ropes splatter against your skin, already smeared with the blood from his hand and the filth from the neglected floorboards, and you look like the most gorgeous fucking thing he’s ever seen—his perfect doll, his fallen angel, his most precious and favorite lamb, the love of his fucking life. “Startin’ a new collection today, darlin’, since I got rid of the other one… This’ll be the perfect one to start it out.” Joel removes the blank polaroid from the slot, and sets it back down along with the camera to give the image time to develop. He sits back on his haunches as he catches his breath, running his bloodied hands through his damp hair and zipping his spent cock back inside his jeans. Joel stares down at you while you blink slowly, looking ruined with your tangled hair spread out on the floor and your hands resting up by your ears in surrender. Your breathing is slow, shallow, and he trusts that he can leave you there to come back into yourself while he takes care of Chrissy’s body. 

Joel pushes himself back up to his feet with a groan, his knees cracking and aching in protest, and he walks around the first level of the house, peeking into different rooms until he finds one that used to function as a bedroom. There isn’t much left inside, but the wrought iron bed frame still has a moldy sheet draped haphazardly over the mattress. He yanks it free and bunches it up in his arms, carrying it back into the living room and spreading it out on the ground beside the corpse. Joel rips the top hem of the bedsheet from its seams, and wraps it around his injured hand before tying it off with his teeth. He rolls Chrissy’s stiffening figure onto the now-frayed edge of the fabric, tucking it under one of her arms to hold it in place before tumbling her down the remaining length of the linen. He performs the task monotonously and with little strain, as if he’s done so a dozen times, because he has. It doesn’t take very much effort to lift her onto his shoulder; she was already a wisp of a thing to begin with, weighing even less now that nearly her entire blood volume is soaking into the wood beneath where she had been laying.

Joel navigates to the back door of the house, kicking it open with his boot and letting it slam behind him. He walks several yards into the overgrowth behind the house, dodging low-hanging branches and stepping over fallen logs until he reaches a small clearing. He deposits Chrissy’s body onto an area of dried, yellowing grass, before returning to the backyard where he had noticed a dilapidated shed, nearly completely fallen over from several years’ worth of dry rot. Joel grunts as he pries the doors open, and yanks on a rusted metal chain hanging from the ceiling. A single light bulb illuminates the contents of the shed—a decades-old lawn mower, a few bags of grass seed, and some basic gardening tools, including exactly the one he was looking for. He brushes several thick spiderwebs out of the way before grabbing hold of the shovel, and lets it drag behind him as he treks back to Chrissy’s soon-to-be makeshift burial site. Joel digs a shallow grave, not wanting to take the time to complete the entire six feet with you still on your own inside the house, and uses his boot to send her cloth-wrapped body tumbling into the hole, where it lands with a dull thud. He stares down at her bloodied chrysalis, exhaling a shuddering breath as he revels in the final stage of his ritual.

Over the course of his life, Joel has done a lot of thinking about what exactly it is about the slaughter that he finds so titillating. On a particularly sleepless night several years ago, he’d finally landed on the transformation being what arouses him so. Taking a life is not unlike the procedure of sex, he’d realized—there is a start and an end, a before and an after, and an intangible, in between state, where the soul of the other person is slightly separated from their body, placed into the palms of his hands to do with as he pleases. There’s a reason the French came up with that clever little phrase—la petite mort—because sex and death are inexplicably intertwined, at least for Joel. He experiences such a rush, such a release, from taking part in the gruesome metamorphosis in which a girl is transformed into a body, that he can’t help but chase that high again and again and again, even though he always seems to forget that as much as there is the before and the during, there is also the after. 

That troublesome, uncomfortable after.

Joel shakes himself out of his stupor, tossing the shovel in after the body and doing a half-assed job of kicking the dirt he’d excavated back inside the pit. He scatters some fistfuls of grass and a few dead branches on top of the pile for extra camouflage, and then trudges his way back through the woods.

When Joel returns to the house, you’re in the exact same position he’d left you in, just as he’d thought you’d be. He approaches you slowly, crouching beside you and brushing some of your knotted hair away from your soiled face. Your eyes are frozen, as if still looking into Chrissy’s own glassy ones, and you don’t even so much as twitch when Joel pulls a rag from his back pocket and uses it to wipe his arousal and as much of the blood as he can manage off of your skin. 

“You okay, sweetheart? You with me?” Joel asks you, his voice barely above a whisper, as if trying not to spook a small animal. You look almost… shell shocked. Traumatized. Out of your own body. “Talk to me, babydoll, please.” He rakes his fingers through your hair for another silent minute or so, during which time you continue to lie perfectly still. Unblinking. Unflinching. A husk of a girl.

Joel sighs, reaching across your body to grab his camera and the now-developed polaroid. He shoves the latter into his jacket pocket, deciding that he’ll examine the image later, once he reconciles with the unfamiliar feeling in the pit of his stomach—something like remorse, he thinks. 

He slides his hands underneath your body, cradling you in his arms and carrying you bridal style across the living room, over the threshold, down the steps, and along the stretch of fractured asphalt until he reaches the truck. Joel sets you down on your feet so that he can open the passenger-side door, but your knees buckle underneath you almost immediately, requiring him to support your weight while he fumbles with the handle. He lifts you up onto your seat once he gets it open and buckles you in, and you don’t look anywhere except directly in front of you the entire time. Joel smooths out the skirt of your dress, now stained with dirt and blood, and shoves his camera into the backpack sitting at your feet before shutting you in. He crosses in front of the hood and retakes his place behind the wheel, taking a long look at where you sit nearly comatose beside him. You’re here, but you’re not. He doesn’t know where you are, or how to pull you back from it, back to him.

Joel fidgets with his keys, jingling them in his hand in an effort to fill the cabin with something other than a silence so loud it’s making his ears ring. “It’ll feel better in the mornin’. You’ll get used to it, after a few more of ‘em, I promise.” He places his linen-wrapped hand on the side of your head, pulling you closer to him so that he can plant a whiskery kiss in your hair. Joel lets his eyes flutter closed as he breathes in your scent, inhaling a stuttering breath. If remorse is truly what he feels, then that would warrant an apology, he supposes. But it would also require taking action to rectify the wrongdoing that warranted the apology in the first place, to make sure that it never happens again. And that, he cannot promise.

He pulls away from you, licking his thumb once to wipe a dried smear of blood from your temple. “You wanna get that old map outta the glovebox, babydoll? Decide where we’re headed to next?” Joel prompts.

Silence.

“I’ll take you anywhere you want, darlin’. Long as they got hot coffee and color TV,” he chuckles.

Stillness.

“Well… Alright, then. Next state over it is.” Joel sniffles, feeling around in the dark for the truck’s ignition cylinder, the engine finally sputtering to life after a few misses of the key. Your head falls against the window as the tires begin to rumble over the uneven pavement, and you don’t bother to reposition yourself, even though the sensation of your skull rattling against the glass must be uncomfortable.

Joel doesn’t steer the truck in any particular direction, just away. Away from here, toward the life together in California that he’d promised you, hoping that he can collect all your broken pieces and put you back together along the way.

As it turns out, there are two things that Joel needs you to understand—that he’s never letting you go, and that he will never be able to stop himself. As instinctually as Joel needs to blink, breathe, sleep, he needs to kill. He needs to spill blood and feel it underneath his fingernails and taste it on his tongue, needs to bite into the soft pink skin beneath white wool and feel the precise moment when a creature becomes nothing more than flesh and fur.

And he needs you. Joel cannot live without either one, he’s decided, and so he must be in possession of both.

He regrets the way in which he’s broken you tonight, but not the way that you will be reassembled in his image. 

Transformed.

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i could be a doctor cuz i'd pass out if i saw this irl

THE PITT | 1.15

Joel Miller x f!reader

Rating: Explicit (COMPLETED)

Summary: Part of a band of travelers, your party is slowly picked off one by one, until there are only two of you left. Finding an abandoned cabin in the woods, you decide to make camp there until you figure out your next move. As the seasons change, the nights get longer and longer…

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Epilogue

One Shot: The Future

One Shot: The Afternoon

blink and miss it but someone pointed out bucky’s shamelessly checking sam’s ass out here

Dr Abbot keeping in shape 💪💪

Just wanted to draw Abbot in some casual/sporty outfit