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“You know, you don’t need to move in together just because you’re getting married,” Galadriel huffs, tearing off the strip of tape with more force than strictly necessary and taping the box in front of her shut. She smooths the tape across the seam. “Plenty of people keep separate apartments.”
“Never heard of that in my life,” Elrond says blithely. He already has several boxes sealed shut and piled up by the front door, working on boxing up all the tableware now. He slips each ceramic plate into a cushiony little pouch made of a polypropylene-cloth blend.
That’s possibly the worst part of the whole thing. Not that she’s losing the roommate she’s had since her second year of university. Not that her lease is coming up for renewal and none of her friends are looking to switch up their own living arrangements. Not that she’s comfortable in this apartment and has no desire to leave. It’s that Elrond is taking all of the good tableware with him because he ‘purchased it’ or whatever.
“Yeah, well, plenty of people do,” she grumbles from the corner of her mouth.
It’s not like Galadriel isn’t a good friend. She was the one who set up Elrond and Cerebrimbor in the first place. Not that she regrets it now, but there’s a similar kind of emotion that wells up between the hours of two and three a.m. It makes her think that maybe doing good deeds that have disastrous consequences for her own life aren’t as good as they seem.
“Look, Arondir promised me he knows someone that wouldn’t mind a roommate,” Elrond says, boxing up the dishes and writing KITCHEN across the side of the box in black sharpie, underlining it twice. Just in case someone forgets.
“That’s not what I’m upset about.”
“Then what are you mad about?”
“I’m not mad—” she starts, huffing a bit.
“Galadriel, I know when you’re upset, and you’re upset—”
“I’m upset because you’re leaving.” It’s not some big reveal. Galadriel’s made no bones about the fact that she did not want him to leave, but the words rushing out of her leave a vacuum which embarrassment quickly fills.
Elrond’s look over the stack of boxes is sincere, but pitying. “I’m leaving, but I’m not going anywhere.”
“You are, in fact, going somewhere. To an apartment on the other side of town. It’s a whole fifteen metro stops away, Elrond, when exactly are we ever going to see each other?”
He rolls his eyes goodnaturedly, though he starts lifting and stacking the boxes closer to the door for when the movers get there in a week’s time. There’s a tick in his brow that Galadriel recognizes from previous instances when she’s taken too long to deliberate her takeout order, but there’s nothing Galadriel can do about it. These days, she thrives off sensible planning and order, knowing what to expect and when to expect it. She sits on ideas and contemplates them—she ruminates—and when the time is right, and her mind is made up, she acts.
“Fifteen metro stops isn’t like New York to L.A. or something, Galadriel—Cerebrimbor has a car anyway. We can pick you up for brunch on Sundays if you want; we’ll have a standing date.”
The invitation still sits like stone in her belly, even as she wraps mugs in thick paper and tucks it in, slaps a little piece of tape along the bottom to keep the wrapping paper in place. The doorbell rings and Elrond goes to answer it, letting in Gil-galad and Elendil, both of whom have offered to help Elrond pack up the remainder of the apartment.
“Might as well be,” she grumbles alone to herself, but that doesn’t stop time from passing, things from happening.
Halbrand is not what she expects. She meets him through Arondir, who’s known him since they interned together at Goldman-Sachs, though they’ve since both moved on to different stages in their careers. He owes Arondir a favour and even though he makes easily over six figures, shows his second bedroom to her with a cocky little grin, hand heavy on her back through the whole tour of his loft.
When she first lays on his pretty face and decently sculpted body, she thinks that she'll be fending off weekend girlfriends from here on out. Surely he has a roster full of phone numbers and a penchant for Friday night flings; Galadriel anticipates it with such confidence that she moves in with a new box of earplugs, silk eye masks, and a full bottle of melatonin, doing everything in her power to ensure that she’ll be able to get a good night’s sleep no matter what.
Then, he isn’t like that at all.
He’s kind of a curmudgeon actually. Smug and pleasant and charming with the people he’s close to—including, apparently, Galadriel, now that they’re roommates—but downright severe to everyone else. She thinks he might have once been a ladies' man, especially when some willowy brunette shows up at their doorstep asking for him. Galadriel actually spends a good few minutes talking to the girl, who’s surprisingly pleasant and enchanting, before Halbrand shows up and gently pushes her out of frame. His whole body is angled into the doorframe though, brokering no invite into the apartment.
When he shuts the door a few seconds later, Galadriel already knows the girl is long gone. For whatever reason, he dismisses her and seats himself back down on the couch in the living room, content to do nothing more than watch TV with her.
“You didn’t have to do that,” Galadriel says, unable to tiptoe around it. He glances her way and chuckles, changing the channel.
“It’s fine—that wasn’t going anywhere anyway. We saw each other maybe three times.”
“Seriously though, if you want to have people over—”
“I don’t—”
“But if you did, that’s fine with me, that’s how Elrond met Cerebrimbor anyhow and it wouldn’t bother me at all—”
He rakes a hand through his hair and exhales. “Enough, Galadriel. I didn’t want to invite her in. I’ll give you a heads up if I plan on bringing someone home.”
That leaves her feeling off-kilter, but settled. At least she thinks. She sits stiff on the couch beside him, half-watching some rerun of Love Island, but Halbrand has a weakness for reality television, so that’s what they watch after dinner. Hardly watching though. She also half-watches Halbrand from the corner of her eye, trying to suss out something she can definitely point to and say, Ah, there it is, how you really feel, I found it.
She never finds it.
He throws an arm over the couch behind her and flicks her nose instead, making Galadriel snort instinctively and sneeze.
Living with Halbrand is overwhelming at times, like when he has to slam every cupboard shut instead of lightly closing them or when he plays his music at full volume and sings along in the shower.
She’s not any easier to live with though. Halbrand stomps into her room and lectures her for a full twenty minutes one day about cleaning her hair out of the shower drain and not walking through the apartment with her outdoor shoes on (he says he has no choice but to scrub the floor on his hands and knees, and Galadriel doesn’t get it when he says that he isn’t comfortable putting his bare feet where the outside world has been). Not her fault he grew up so prissy; she spent her early years running barefoot across her grandfather’s farm.
It’s not all bad.
Sure, Galadriel reams Halbrand out for leaving his dirty dishes in the sink every single time they eat because she didn’t move in with him to be his surrogate mother. He already has one of those, whom she’s previously met because Halbrand’s mother comes over for dinner at least once a month, an elegant older woman with spectacular white hair and clothing that always feels like it was tailored precisely for her.
It makes Galadriel side-eye Halbrand when his mother is taken home by—get this—her driver; she knew he came from money, but it’s absurd. It’s not like Galadriel didn’t grow up comfortably, her parents both civil servants, but she gets the sense that Halbrand was raised in a gated community and went to prep school all his life.
“Did your family ever go skiing when you were a kid?” she asks suspiciously while they chop bell peppers and zucchini.
“Yeah, obviously?”
Confirmed.
She gestures at him with the knife, sizing him up and down. “I shouldn’t even have to pay rent. You’re just taking advantage of me.”
Halbrand snickers. “When I’m taking advantage of you, you’ll know. If you want me to pay your rent, let me get you pregnant.”
She puts down the knife. “Excuse me?”
This time, it’s him that aims the knife at her. “I’m only taking care of my wife and kids, so if you want in that little group, let me put a baby in you. Make me a father.”
“Very funny,” Galadriel says dryly, only a little hot around the collar.
Sure, it’s embarrassing to admit but Galadriel has always lived with brothers or cousins or childhood friends and she’s used to being close and affectionate with them at home, so she does end up climbing into bed with Halbrand before the first month is up. Just to cuddle. Just to have a comfortable, familiar person hold her and stroke her hair after a long day of meetings that leave her feeling depleted and rundown like she’s sick.
Sure to all of those things, but it’s really not all that bad. Halbrand makes her giggle and splits the rent with her proportional to their salaries and does their grocery shopping at Whole Foods (pays for the whole order himself even), so the trade off is worth it.
If cuddling together extends into the second month and happens earlier and earlier in the day, like coming home from work to plant herself beside him on the couch to snuggle up, that’s nobody’s business but hers.
There’s no sense of boundaries in their household. Sometimes Galadriel has to sit down and really think about whether they’ve ever discussed any kind of arrangement because that wouldn’t be so bad—he’s lean and broad in the shoulders and pleasant to look at, peridot eyes that glimmer a little mischievously at all times—but she recalls nothing. The roommate designation is simply divested of meaning, broken down to its core elements.
He makes comments like them being a “family” or going “we don’t need to go halfsies on utilities this week, I’ve got it” or “should we watch Arrival for date night this week?” and it makes her head spin a little. Whatever date night means between two people living platonically in the same apartment together. Platonically. Living with him doesn’t feel like living with Elrond, but so many things are up in the air these days that it’s difficult for Galadriel to tell what’s genuinely unusual and just what’s out of her realm of experience. She feels like she still hasn’t made up her mind about Halbrand enough to come to some sort of conclusion about him.
That’s until he bursts into the bathroom when Galadriel could’ve sworn she locked the door behind her (“I taped the lock, thought you might need me to get in quick if you saw a spider.”) and joins her for a shower. She shrieks when he tears back the shower curtain, already naked, his clothes stripped on his way into the bathroom and his cock fully out. She stares down at it with wide eyes.
“What?” he asks bluntly, nudging her to the side so he can step into the tub behind her, “Never seen a cock before?”
She scowls. “Not one so—”
“Big?”
“—unattractive. Get it away from me.”
Halbrand shrugs, still advancing towards her so Galadriel cowers against the tiled wall, hands crossed over her chest. “Suit yourself.”
She stands there awkwardly, almost crouched against the wall as Halbrand twists the shower knob to make the water a couple degrees hotter and soaps up a loofah. There’s no part of her that wants to look, but it’s like her eyes don’t quite listen to her own convictions because she can’t tear them off his heavy cock, which hangs between his legs. His skin is sunkissed, golden like he spends his summers out on the lake, naked apart from those five-inch inseam shorts that men sometimes wear.
Makes her wonder if he’d be like that in the summer, paddleboarding on the lake with sunnies on, wicked, gleaming smile stretched across his face. In her mind’s eye, she can see herself reclined on a lawnchair with the other girlfriends and wives while he’s out on the water with his friends, giving him a lazy wave and blowing him an indulgent little kiss that he catches with his hand.
Her real eye is trained on his hands as he upturns the bottle of Irish Spring onto the loofah and drags it down his chest, soapy suds clinging to his chest. She watches a particular bubble that springs up near his nipple.
Halbrand catches her eyeing him and says so casually, “Keep doing that and we’re going to have a problem.”
His words make her dry swallow, eyes still unmoving from his dick, which hardens under her gaze. He tips it up to his belly with a soapy hand, stroking down it to his balls, clutches them and soaps them up too.
“You hot and bothered or something?” He muses, taking a step towards her. Galadriel tries to step back, but she’s already pressed up against the cold tile wall, hands that once hid her breasts gradually dropping, beaded nipples visible. “Cunt wet or what?”
“Not—not for you or anything—”
He crowds her up against the wall, big hands hot when they trail down the sides of her stomach, holding her by the waist. Her head spins when his thumbs nearly meet over her belly. Halbrand’s a touch too aggressive when he spins her to face the wall, her nose almost knocking into the wall with how he immediately slots himself behind her, hard cock nestled into the curve of her ass.
The masculine scent of his body wash floods her nose when he reaches a hand down to cup her pussy. The swirling marble pattern of the tile stamps itself onto the backs of her eyes because it’s all she can see in front of her, but it goes white when he shoves his middle finger into the wet clutch of her.
She hears him chuckle. “Yeah, thought so.”
He thrusts his fingers into her cunt again and again, fingers crooking deliciously. The heel of his hand passes over her clit, roughly palming it whenever he drags his fingers out, but it’s his heavy, wordless breathing against her ear that really gets to Galadriel. She thought he’d be vocal—worried that he would be, when she’s hardly ready for that yet—but Halbrand’s nearly completely silent save for the harsh pants he lets out.
She can hear him jerk himself off behind her, hand roughly sliding up and down his cock which occasionally drags against the small of her back. The loudest he gets is when he comes, tagging the skin of her back; he drags his cock through the mess until he’s too sensitive, leaving her more breathless than ever, flush high on her cheeks.
When she’s right on the edge, scrambling up the wall he has her pressed to, toes curling like she’s trying to draw it out of her by force, he backs off, sliding his fingers out of her and turning the shower off. Her head is filled with static for a few moments, blinking blearily.
“All clean,” he announces, pulling back the shower curtain and tucking it against the wall. “Gotta run to work—see you when I’m back home!”
“W-what?” she stutters when he steps out of the tub and rubs a fluffy towel over his chest, slinging it around his hips when he’s dry. “You’re just going to…leave? I didn’t even—” she can’t even bring herself to say it, but even now there’s a persistent flutter in her belly that feels like she might keel over.
“It wasn’t like I was going to fuck you anyway—you aren’t attracted to my dick, remember?”
It literally leaves her speechless, too worked up and on the edge of an orgasm to muster up anything witty or biting. He eyes her knowingly, lips tilted up into a little smirk and nods to himself, as if he thought she would say that (nothing).
When he leaves the bathroom to her shuddering in the cold air alone, a wave of vengeful anger overtakes her. She wraps a towel hastily around her still wet body and stomps out after him, finding the door to his bedroom shut. She pounds her fist into it twice instead of knocking.
The door opens to his mockingly innocent face. “Can I help you?”
Galadriel’s snide little face glares up at him and she says, “Oh, I know exactly how you can help me” before pushing him aside and into the room, slamming the door behind her.
The cuddling devolves because of course it does; Galadriel must have known in the back of her mind that it wouldn’t be long before they were up to no good. Her body knows the shape of his intimately now—in sleep, the curl of his fingers inside her until she is finally allowed to come, the hug he slides her into when he stirs the soup they’ve made and she sticks a spoon in to taste test.
Logically, platonic anything was on its way out the first time he said her name, but Galadriel loves to live in delusion up until it’s no longer to her advantage. Sort of like it is now.
She wakes up with her tit popped in his mouth, suckling softly in his sleep. They’re curled up on the couch together, Galadriel’s arms twisted around his shoulders and his around her waist. Her shirt is deliberately pulled down though, as if she’d fallen asleep first and Halbrand had made a concentrated effort to free one of her tits; it makes her wrinkle her nose and flick his forehead repeatedly until he wakes up. His brow scrunches as he wakes and then he bites her nipple in retribution.
“You’ve got some nerve,” he grumbles, but it’s muffled because he says it around a mouthful of her breast.
“I’ve got some nerve? You have my tit fully in your mouth!”
He hums around her breast, vibrations tingling up her and making Galadriel’s legs clench around his thigh, which is nestled almost all the way up the seam of her legs. The fog of sleep still lies heavy over her, but she smacks her lips to moisten them and squints to get her bearings. She’s smushed into the back of the couch, almost falling into the crevice, with Halbrand latched around her like a squid, clinging on for dear life. His mouth on her tit and his thigh rubbing up against her sex
He never really answers her, just suckles her nipple with his eyes still softly shut. Galadriel sighs. With her face half-pressed into the arm of the couch, there isn’t much else to do but enjoy the feel of his mouth pulling at her tit. It makes her feel strangely vulnerable, wondering if she forgot to pluck a coarse hair on her nipple or if her sweat smells normal or if her hair is getting in his face, but one of his hands presses up her back to push her towards him, like Halbrand can’t get enough of her, and the anxiety drips out of her like hot wax.
Then she can’t help herself. Her lower body undulates over his thigh, a slow fire creeping up her belly and making her cheeks hot. Hard to hold any thoughts in her head when it all swims in a fluid, viscous stream. The only thing she can focus on is the wet sounds of his mouth on her breast, the way his cheeks suck in and her throat goes tight.
She grinds her core down into his thigh, breath rushing out of her when pleasure licks up her belly. Each pass of her hips raises her internal temperature to a fever pitch. Like she’s had one too many glasses of rosé, slipping now into the fog of lust, hips moving involuntarily; she has no choice but to chase it until she comes, sticky and sweaty.
Limp under the weight of release, she hazards a glance down and finds Halbrand red-cheeked and light-eyed looking up at her. His eyes sparkle mischievously and he winks.
The first time Halbrand fucks her, he comes in her.
Galadriel doesn’t think anything of it for the first few seconds. He has her on her back in the middle of his bed, late into the night when she snuck in to cuddle with him. Strong hands press her knees up to her ears and shove his cock into where she’s hot and tight until she comes and he spills into her.
When she realizes what he’s done, it’s on the tip of her tongue to give him a lashing, tell him that they need to be careful. Even if she’s on the pill. Even if it feels good to feel him spend himself inside her, wet and sticky, but then he pulls out before she can open her mouth to say anything and he shuffles down the bed. His lips are wrapped around her clit before she can even push a single word out, the echo of one dissolving into a gasp and a moan.
“Messy little pussy,” he mumbles into her, lapping at her clit and giving it soft, worshiping kisses like he can hardly bear to part from it. “Tastes so much sweeter after coming in it. Hot little piece. You should’ve known I was out there, given this to me on a silver platter.”
It’s all she can think about then—Halbrand between her thighs, licking his own come out of her cunt, tongue forking into her and pulling it out. She stares up at the ceiling and feels her thoughts spin.
She plants a foot on his shoulder and tries to push him off. “Come on, Halbrand, I should go clean myself—”
He pushes her foot off his shoulder and gets up onto his elbows to give himself some leverage before Galadriel feels a sharp slap on her pussy. She yelps, sitting upright and trying to scoot further back onto the bed, more shock than pain radiating up her, but Halbrand follows her, army crawling until he kneels over her. A hand holds her face and squishes her cheeks.
“What the fuck are you doing, huh?” His nose smushes into hers when he leans down to press their foreheads together, weird like that. “I’m eating here.”
Her whole face scrunches up, infuriated. “And if I’m sensitive?”
An eyebrow shoots up, disbelieving. “Are you?”
“…I could be.”
“You must be sleeping with some shitty guys.” His hands flex over thighs, testing her pliability, pushing them apart even while she leans back against the pillow seemingly in exhaustion. “Is it usually like that for you—sex? Just the mechanical stuff and then no attention to this little button like she needs?”
“Stop talking about my pussy like it’s a person.”
“Can’t help it,” Halbrand mumbles, falling over her again and tugging her long, limber legs over his shoulders. “She’s special to me. I want to spend a lot of time with her—really get to know her.” He drags his tongue over the heart of her while he speaks, the bristles of his beard raking over the sensitive parts of her flesh, made worse by how she’s still sensitive from having come so recently. “Little strawberry pussy with a cute little button for me to suck on. Could spend all day here. Make you feed me while I eat.”
“That’s so weird,” Galadriel whimpers, but she can’t help it when she comes not five minutes later.
They never explicitly state that they’re fucking but they are fucking. Almost daily. Almost religiously. Sometimes they just sit on the couch and cuddle until Halbrand fists his hand into her hair and sucks on her tongue, their noses brushing together.
She spends more nights in his bed than out of it, letting him take her in a variety of contorted positions, though her favorite is when he spoons her from behind and slides his cock through her lubed up thighs, grazing over her opening. There’s something immeasurably hot about the way his cock glances over her hole every thrust, never quite pushing in but with the potential there. Eventually he does guide his cock in, angling it and then driving up into her until she goes breathless.
At some point, she just stops taking her birth control. It’s an abrupt, impulsive decision—not calculated, not rigorously planned out. It’s decidedly not planned out, in fact, motivated by some random Tuesday when she glances over at Halbrand drizzling oil over the salmon that’s about to go in the oven, and thinks to herself, he’d make a good dad.
The whole pack goes into the little bathroom trash can after that.
The side effects of coming off are a little annoying—she curls up on the couch with a pillow over her head fending off cramps that never seem to abate. Galadriel tries not to regret it because she wants a baby—she wants one so bad that she wakes up sure that her nipples are tender and raw from feeding, but she awakes to an empty bed, no husband next to her, no baby wailing from another room. So no regrets, but the mug of lemon-ginger tea sits cooling on the coffee table because she’s in far too much pain to even consider sitting up.
She almost doesn’t hear it when he creeps up on her, but she feels the dip of the couch when he sits down next to her. Galadriel doesn’t have the energy to move though, just mumbles something incoherent about cramps and hopes he understands that she isn’t in the mood to fool around.
“Want me to rub your feet?” she hears him ask, the sound muffled by the pillow over her ears, but they perk up regardless. Under the pillow, she nods.
Galadriel can imagine the boyish grin on his face, but any frustration that might well up in her chest is subsumed in the euphoria that blooms at the first touch of his hands to her bare feet.
“Poor little baby,” he murmurs, digging his thumbs deep into the arch of her foot. It pulls a guttural moan out of her. “Need someone to take care of you. Migraine?”
She doesn’t answer him, at least not verbally. The affirmative whine that breaks from her throat is partially muffled into the pillow, but Halbrand must hear it because he clucks sympathetically and digs his thumbs in again. He sweeps his thumbs up the arch and over to the ball of her foot, digging in almost roughly, almost enough to make her wince and tear her foot out of his grasp, but when she tries, his hand snaps up to grip her by the ankle. It makes her ears ring.
“Period?” he asks her suddenly, the word breaking through the barrier of the pillow and Galadriel feels herself still, unsure how to answer. She freezes while he plays with wrapping his whole hand around her ankle, which feels almost flimsy in his grip; Galadriel had never thought of her ankle as anything but durable, but the hand holding it feels laughably big.
“No,” she whispers, wondering if he’ll hear her.
Halbrand hums. He doesn’t respond for several minutes, just goes back to massaging her feet, alternating between one and the other, and Galadriel feels disappointment settle over her like a thick miasma.
Then he abruptly drags her lower half over his lap and Galadriel inhales sharply beneath the pillow. Halbrand pulls her leggings down her thighs wordlessly, not asking for permission or explaining what he’s doing, but she tilts her hips up accordingly, also not offering up any words. When her leggings and panties are dragged off, she feels him lean over her legs to grab the remote, turning the volume on the TV up ever so slightly before leaning back against the couch, hands spreading her legs in his lap until he’s comfortable.
It’s almost absurd but routine the way he slips a finger into her, dipping it in like he’s testing the waters. Halbrand doesn’t say a word nor ask for permission, but Galadriel’s legs spread and grant it anyway.
He sits there, playing with her pussy in relative silence, save for when the sound of the television breaks through the gentle fog settling over her. Galadriel could spend an age like this, surrounded by a quiet, warm darkness, Halbrand’s fingers swirling over her clit absentmindedly. Until she comes and her breath is fibrous, all hot air and drool slipping down her chin and hot tears baked into her eyes, not a sound escaping her.
In the back of her mind while her breath returns to her in spurts, and her limbs cool and Halbrand’s fingers disappear—she hears something slurp in the background and flushes to the roots of her hair, but when spit-wet fingers come back to stroke the insides of her thighs, she can’t deny that the world simplifies.
Winter clobbers the city over its head, dumping fresh batches of snow over them until it blankets the cars and streets outside. Galadriel walks home with her hands buried deep in her coat pockets and tries not to think about how much she hates the commute, how much she hates going into the office, how much she hates the way her nail beds grow dry and cracked in the winter no matter how much moisturizer she slathers on them. Hates spreadsheets, men that talk down to her during her presentations at work, hates memorizing Excel formulas, hates when she has to track down a colleague because they haven’t responded to three of her emails asking for clarification on something.
She's getting too old for this. She can't think of the last time something at work put a smile on her face.
When she comes home though, the apartment is always toasty, a balmy seventy degrees because Halbrand knows she runs cold. Her jacket goes up on a hook after she’s shaken off the flakes of snow that have built up into a fine layer across her shoulders and when she slips her boots off, she finds a pair of slippers waiting for her just off the mat. A sharp exhale escapes her; her eyes look up for Halbrand almost automatically, relief and gratitude and an emotion that she has only begun to identify swirling at the forefront of her mind.
Halbrand’s doing laundry when she finally finds him—the in-apartment washer and dryer just another perk of living with him—and Galadriel watches silently as he pours in a capful of detergent and fabric softener, the pile of white clothes in another basket telling her all she needs to know.
“I already did a load of your clothes,” he says without turning to her. Snaps the detergent drawer shut and turns the machine on. It’s shameful that it makes her wet.
“Did you—”
“Yeah, hung your delicates up in the bathroom. Go check if you want.”
That has her thighs rubbing together, a competency kink she didn’t realize she had growing malignant in her brain. His attention fixes on her solely now with the laundry taken care of, and Galadriel can do nothing but stare at the way he’s settled into his post-work attire—dark sweats and a rumpled white, cotton shirt. The drawstring on his sweats isn’t even tied, just hangs there draped over his crotch like his sweats do, loose and low on to his hip bones.
If leaning her weight from foot to foot indicates anything to him, he doesn’t let it on, eyes carefully neutral. The smile that graces his lips makes her waspish mood vanish though. When he opens his arms, it’s like nothing for her to stumble into them, wrapping herself around him and burying her face into his chest, where he smells musky and a bit like old sweat, like he changed but hasn’t showered yet.
It makes her peer up at him assessingly, her eyes passing over his face again and again. The days and nights living with him now bleed into each other. He’s a sight for sore eyes when she comes home in the evenings and she knows from his job that he’s got brains as well, even if he doesn’t always act like it. Father material written all over him.
When he ushers her into the bedroom after dinner, Galadriel goes without protest. How could she? All through dinner, she sat in her chair with her pussy slick and achy while Halbrand kept heavy eye contact, everything unspoken except for what was bound to come next. Every sound felt amplified, magnified, her fork and knife screeching across the plate, her own chewing loud in her ears. The world felt dark and muted in his company, like they were alone together in a cave in the wilderness.
Maybe her ancestors picked mates like this; competent and capable, the her of an older age spreading her legs for the hunter that brought home the biggest deer to feed her and any younglings. It’s how she chooses him now anyway, waits for him on the bed with her legs hanging off the edge and spread from the second he drags her dress off, tights also peeled off her legs, revealing every inch of her to his hungry gaze.
Halbrand wastes no time getting in her, not when foreplay these days is a carefully orchestrated sequence of events that include snaking the drains, picking up her prescription, and dusting the top of the ceiling fan. She’s nearly always aroused these days. The breadth of his shoulders always leaves her shaky when he whips off his shirt, but she’s still reeling from how he got their insurance premiums down the other day.
Still nothing quite like the feeling of Halbrand pushing his whole cock into her in one thrust; her breath spirals out of her and up to the ceiling, progressively labored as he ruts into her, hands gripping the sheet beside her head. He looks possessed when he leans over her, shoulders already drawn up to his ears, eyes wild and furious when he stares down at her.
“Wet, sloppy cunt,” he rasps. “Couldn’t wait all day to bang it.”
Galadriel’s face is in a tangle of blonde hair. He grips it and wrenches her head back, leaning down to kiss her. It feels like a fire is raging in him, maddening in the way he fucks her. Her pussy convulses around his thick shaft and she does nothing to muffle her screams.
Let their downstairs neighbors complain to the super again—what does she care?
Her legs clench around his waist when he gets close, worried that he might pull out. Her hold on him is weak, but Halbrand stares down at her with a mixture of curiosity and delight in his eyes.
“Don’t want me to pull out, baby?” he mutters, bending down to pull her into a sweet, soft kiss. His hips stay tight and close, grinding into her now, leisurely and without any urgency to them.
“No,” she mumbles. Feels a bit teary, like she might cry.
“Want me to come inside?”
“Yeah,” she whines, now higher in her throat. Halbrand chuffs out a laugh against her lips and his hips pick up, harder like he wants to tattoo himself on the inside of her body, meld them together into a gold and silver alloy, electrum.
“And if I give you a baby?” His voice is light, full of zest, poking at the root of her. “Oh no, I forgot, baby, you’re on birth control.”
She doesn’t correct him, hiccups when he puts a hand around her neck and leans back, fucking her harder and making her inner thighs strain. She can hear the sound of her own wetness squelching when he forces himself into her; it makes her red, violently humiliated, but so good, so good that he gets so deep in her and if her legs tighten just a bit more around his waist, that’s only natural.
“Maybe it’s—” she squeaks when he pounds into her a bit too roughly and her teeth clack together, “—it’s not so bad if, ah, if—”
“If I knock you up?” He grins, sinful. “Why’s that?”
“You don’t—you don’t have to be—” it’s hard to get the words out when his hips grind into now that her legs are cinched so tight he can hardly part from her, so the root of his cock rubbing tantalizingly against her clit with every pass, “—I just want a baby. Not going to, ah, ah, ah —not gonna tell anyone.”
“What about your birth control?” Halbrand breathes, then laughs like he knows something she doesn’t.
“Not—not on it anymore.”
“Well, isn’t that something? Pretty girl just wants to be a mommy, huh? Wanna trap me with a baby?”
“Not trapping you,” she whimpers when his hand gets a bit tighter, worried that he’s mad at her. “You don’t have to—I’ll do everything, I promise. Just want to live here with you and have a baby.”
He hums and collapses down to his elbows, letting her wind her arms around the back of his neck and hold him close. They’re so close that it’s like they’re sharing a breath now, lips tagging as he thrusts the little bit that he can into her, eyes so glazed and heavy-lidded that it’s a wonder she can make out his face at all. What she can make out is the way his lips twist into a grin that’s wicked and dangerous.
“Well, guess only one of us was,” Halbrand murmurs into her mouth, a deep kiss already on the horizon. “Yeah, I’ll give you a baby; we’ll have a little baby together.”
When he comes in her, she sees in her mind the little family they’ll make. She sees dance recitals and soccer practice and road trips to the cabin in the summer, fighting over pre-school applications and meal prepping and fucking in the laundry room during nap time when they both aren’t exhausted for the first time in a fortnight.
Galadriel smiles, sweat dripping from her hairline. She lives in delusion until it feels real. Until the possible emerges and it smells as sweet as it ever could.