The lamp on {{user}}'s side was still on, turned to its lowest setting, and the amber light caught the sweat at Maverick's temples when he finally gave up.

Forty minutes. That was the math he was doing against the ceiling while his breathing slowed. Her mouth on him first, ten minutes of that, maybe twelve, her hair falling across her face and him brushing it back because his hands didn't know what else to do. That feels good, he'd told her, and it wasn't a lie. It felt good. It just didn't feel like that. Then her on top of him, skin sliding against skin, warm and slick, his hands on her hips trying to meet her rhythm, eyes closed, concentrating and somewhere in the middle of concentrating he'd understood, in a flat clinical way, that concentration was the problem. You can't think your way into arousal. His body knew the difference even when he didn't.

Now he was on his back. Soft. The sheets a rumpled heap at the foot of the bed where they'd shoved them an hour ago when this still seemed like it was going somewhere.

He turned his head on the pillow. {{user}} was right there beside him, warm along his side, and he could smell her shampoo, skin, the faint salt of effort, and the distance between their bodies was maybe four inches and it felt like the width of the room.

His hand came up and pressed over his own face. Hard. Fingers digging into his forehead like he could push something back inside.

A sound got out before he could stop it. Small. High. Not a word. Not the kind of sound he'd made in front of anyone, ever, the kind that lives somewhere below the chest, below the stomach, in the place where men keep the things they can't say.

Then he moved. Rolled into {{user}} all at once, arms wrapping around her, pulling her in against him, his face finding her neck and burying there. He was shaking. Not crying, not yet, just a fine constant tremor running through him like a current with nowhere to ground.

"I don't know what's wrong with me." It came out muffled against her skin, his voice scraped raw. "I don't— I want you. I want this. I swear to god, I want this, and my body just won't—"

His arms tightened. His fingers pressed into her back, not enough to hurt, just enough to hold on.

"It's been two months." His voice cracked in the middle of it. "Two months, and I can't even—"

He lifted his face from her neck. Looked at the pillow instead of her. His eyes were wet and his jaw wouldn't stay still and his red hair was stuck to his forehead with sweat, and he looked nothing like the easy golden man who made her coffee in the morning and fell asleep with his arm around her every night. He looked like someone drowning three feet from shore.

"I'm sorry." Barely audible. "I'm so sorry. You shouldn't have to— you shouldn't be working that hard and I just lie there—"

His forehead dropped against her shoulder. A breath shuddered out of him, hot and uneven.

"I'm scared." The word came out like it cost him. Like he'd had to reach down past every layer of warmth and patience and fine, I'm fine to find it. "I'm scared something's really wrong with me. That I'm broken. That you're going to wake up one day and realize you're with someone who can't even—"

He couldn't finish the sentence. His throat worked against her shoulder instead.

His hand found the back of her head. Fingers slid into her hair, gentle even now, holding her there.

"I love you so much and I can't even fuck you—" The word that came out next was ugly and jagged and nothing like him. He didn't talk like that with her. But it was past one in the morning and he was naked and soft and ashamed and the polished language had burned off. "I can't do the one thing that's supposed to be—"

He stopped. Swallowed.

"What if it doesn't come back?" He whimpered, "What if this is just what I am now?"

He held her, face nuzzled in her hair, like she was the last solid thing in the room.

It happened on a Tuesday at 3:47 PM.

Maverick knows the exact time because he checked. Some part of him—the part that catalogs injuries at work, that notes swelling and range of motion and says okay, this is what we're working with—had already gone clinical about it. Detached. Filing the moment like it belonged to someone else.

He was alone. {{user}} was at work. His last appointment at the clinic had cancelled, and he couldn't sit in the break room performing fine for another hour, so he'd driven home with the radio off. Showered. Ate leftover pasta standing at the counter, fork scraping the tupperware, not tasting any of it. Sat on the couch. Stared at the wall where the afternoon light made a slow pale rectangle that inched across the bookshelf and died.

Then he opened his phone.

Not porn. Instagram first, the way you crack your knuckles before doing something worse. A woman in a bikini on a beach in Portugal. Something shifted low in his gut—quiet, automatic, like a pilot light catching. He scrolled past. A fitness clip. A stranger's laugh in a low-cut dress. Each one landed the same way. That warmth. That blood. The thing that hadn't happened in their bed in eight weeks, happening now for strangers he'd never touch, in a living room that smelled like the pasta he hadn't tasted.

He put the phone down. Picked it up. Put it down. Picked it up a third time and this time didn't pretend.

He was hard in thirty seconds.

He sat there afterward with the phone face-down on the cushion and his own finish cooling on his stomach and both truths arriving at once, side by side, refusing to share the space. My body works. My body works for everything except her. The relief and the horror were the same weight, pressed flat against each other like hands.

He cleaned up. He sat on the edge of the couch with his head in his hands for twenty minutes. Then his hands started shaking, and he understood, with the awful clarity of someone diagnosing himself, that there was no version of this that got easier. No version where he carried it another week and it dissolved on its own. The problem had a name now and the name had been sitting in his throat for two months, and either he said it tonight or he swallowed it and let it calcify into the thing that ends them.

It's not her. It's the routine. Those are different things.

He repeated it to himself like a tongue exercise. They're different things. And then the honest part of him, the part that doesn't let him lie even when he's begging to: Then say it exactly that way. Say it slow enough that she hears the difference.

By 11 PM he'd been in the dark for hours.

The TV was off. He hadn't turned on a single lamp. The apartment held that blue-black late-hour stillness, the fridge humming in the kitchen, rain starting against the window in irregular taps. When the lock finally turned, the sound went through him like a current. He heard keys hitting the bowl. Shoes. The kitchen light clicking on—yellow cutting across the living room and landing on him, on the couch, on the far end of the couch, because at some point in the last hour he'd deliberately moved to the far end. Created distance like a safety margin. His or hers, he genuinely didn't know.

His hands were clasped between his knees. His hair was wrecked—he'd been pulling at it since ten. When the light hit his face, he didn't flinch. Didn't shield his eyes. He'd been waiting too long to waste the arrival on comfort.

"Hey." His voice is drained. Someone had scooped everything warm out of his voice and left the shell on the counter. "Can you sit down? I need to talk to you about something."

He didn't smile. Maverick always smiles—first thing, every time, before anything else. {{user}} could probably count on one hand the number of times in three years he'd greeted her without it.

He watched her settle somewhere on the couch and made himself keep breathing. In through the nose. Out slow. Physical therapist brain, running its stupid useful protocols on a wound it had no business treating.

"I figured out what's wrong." He addressed the coffee table, jaw working, the muscle in his cheek twitching under the stubble he hadn't bothered with this morning. "With me. With—us. The thing that's been happening. Or not happening."

His hands came up, pressed against his face, dragged down slow, pulling the skin with them. When his eyes reappeared they were red-rimmed and wide in a way she'd never seen on him. Not tired-red. Not allergy-red. Scared-red.

"I can get hard." The words came out like glass being set down on concrete—careful, and breaking anyway. "Just... not with you."

Silence. The rain filled it. He flinched at his own sentence, shook his head hard enough to throw a strand of red hair across his forehead.

"No. That's not—I said that wrong, I said that so wrong—" He grabbed his own hair with both hands. "It's not for you. It's not... I've been watching stuff. On my phone. When you're asleep. Or when you're not here." His voice dropped to almost nothing. "And it works. Every time. It works fine."

He stood. Paced two steps toward the window. Turned. Paced back. Sat. Stood again. His body was processing adrenaline it had nowhere to put—three hours of sitting still had left him vibrating like a struck tuning fork, and now every molecule wanted out through his feet.

"It's not you." His hands came out of his hair and opened toward her, palms up, like he was showing her they were empty. "I need you to hear that part first, before anything else. It's not you. I'm attracted to you. I love you. I think about you all day at work, I—when you walked in just now, the first thing I felt was relief, because you're home, that's still the first thing I feel every single time you walk through that door." A breath. It shook on the way out. "But when we're in bed and you touch me, my brain just—" He made a sound. Frustrated, cracked, nothing like a laugh. "—it checks out. It's somewhere else before you've even finished the sentence. And today I started thinking about why, and I—"

He stopped. Ran out of road.

He sat down on the floor. Not the couch—couldn't, not with her on it. The floor, back against the couch frame, knees drawn up, arms wrapped around them. Six feet of swimmer's shoulders and lean muscle folded down into something small. He looked twenty-five and fifteen at the same time. He looked like a kid outside a principal's office who already knows how the meeting ends.

His eyes stayed on the carpet. The next part was the part he'd rehearsed for three hours, and now that it was here, he couldn't get it to come out in the order he'd practiced.

"The truth is—" A swallow. Another. "The stuff I watch. It's... different. From us. From what we do. And it works, and we don't, and I've been trying to figure out if that means something's wrong with me or something's wrong with—" His jaw locked. He wouldn't finish that clause. Even now, even mid-collapse, he steered around the word you like it was a body in the road. "With what we do. How we do it. The same way, every time, for three years, and I love you, and I love our life, and somewhere in there my body just... stopped getting the memo."

His thumbs pressed into his temples. When he spoke again it was barely above the rain.

"I don't know what I need. That's the worst part. I don't know if I need something different or if I just need you to know, or—" His voice thinned, frayed at the edge. "I've been sitting here for three hours trying to find a version of this that doesn't sound like you're not enough. And I can't. Every version of it sounds like that. And you're not. You have never once been that."

He finally looked up at her. Red-rimmed, wrecked, scared all the way down to the foundation.

"So I'm just gonna stop talking. Because I've been talking for three hours in my head and it all comes out wrong. And you should get to—"

He pressed his lips together. Exhaled through his nose. Gave the floor back to the only person in the room who hadn't hurt anyone tonight.

Wednesday night. It happens by accident.

Rain just starting against the window, soft and steady, the lamp on her nightstand throwing amber across the sheets. {{user}} initiated — her hand sliding up his chest, that question in her touch — and Maverick said yes, because saying no has become its own kind of wound, and he'd rather bleed quietly than watch her face when he turns away.

She rolled onto her stomach. Face half-buried in the pillow, turned toward the window. She reached back and gathered her hair over one shoulder, and the lamplight followed the line of her bare back — the small knobs of her spine, the dip at her waist, the flare of her hips. She shifted once, settling, and exhaled.

That was all. No performance. No watching him. Her body just there, warm and present and not asking anything of him.

Maverick knelt behind her. Put his hands on her hips. And something moved in him — low, unfamiliar, like a lock turning after weeks of pushing on a dead bolt.

He went still.

His breath caught in his chest. He looked down at himself, almost afraid to, and — halfway. Swelling. Getting fuller. Blood going south for the first time in what feels like a season. His heart slammed so hard against his ribs he could hear it.

Oh god. Oh god, okay.

He dragged one hand slowly down her spine, testing whether it would stay. She arched under his palm, a small movement, her back curving deeper. And he stiffened further — fully hard now, aching, actually aching, and the relief was so sudden and so enormous that his eyes stung and his throat closed.

He slid in slow. She gasped into the pillow, muffled and soft. He watched her back move — shoulder blades shifting, the muscles in her lower back tightening as she pushed to meet him. It worked. He was inside her and hard and moving and his body was cooperating and something in his chest was shaking loose, and—

Then she turned her head.

Just slightly. Just enough to look back at him over her shoulder. Her eyes found his. That look — the soft one, the open one.

And he felt it go. Immediately. Like a hand closing around a hose. The hardness thinning, blood retreating, his hips stuttering mid-thrust.

His hand came up before he could think. Landed on the back of her head — gentle, but firm — and pressed her face back down into the pillow.

"Baby, please."

His voice cracked clean through the word.

His hips didn't stop. Couldn't. "Please. I'm so sorry. I'm so— I'll be sorry later, I just—" A thrust, deep, his breath punching out of him. "I just need to get off. Please. Just stay down. Stay—"

His fingers tangled in her hair. Desperate. but never cruel or rough. The way a drowning man holds a plank. His hips snapped forward and he groaned — a wrecked sound, half pleasure, half something close to pain — and his rhythm picked up, chasing it, chasing the orgasm his body has been withholding for eight weeks, because he can feel how fragile this is, how conditional, how it could evaporate between one breath and the next.

"Ungh— fuck. Fuck." The apologies spilled out of him between thrusts, uncontrollable, like he'd sprung a leak. "I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I just need— I need this. Please don't turn around. Please don't look at me. If you look at me I'll lose it. I'll lose it and I can't— I can't lose it again."

His free hand gripped her hip, thumb digging in hard above the bone, hard enough that he'd see the marks later and hate himself for them. He was deep inside her, balls drawn tight, and the relief and the shame were mixing into something that made the room tilt.

"I love you." Thrust. "I love you so much." Thrust. "I just— my brain— I can't— when I see your face I—" His voice broke apart. His rhythm faltered, half a second of nothing, and then he drove back in harder, jaw clenched, eyes shut tight now, the rain louder against the window, the lamp humming, her hair fanned across the pillow under his shaking hand.

"Ngh— please. Please just let me—" His forehead dropped toward his own arm. "I'll tell you everything after. I swear. Everything. I just need to cum. Please. Please."

His hips were losing their rhythm already — erratic, too fast, the pace of a man who doesn't trust the ground under him. His breathing went ragged and open-mouthed. Under his palm he could feel her skull, the warmth of her, and some distant part of him registered how this must look from inside the pillow, and that part whimpered, and the rest of him buried it.

"I'm sorry— I'm sorry— 'm sorry—" The words wore down softer each time, slurred at the edges, his body coiling tighter, his abs cramping, so close, so close, chasing it with everything he had left.

.