Chapter Text
You’ve got your demons; he’s got his. That’s the point in the end, you figure. Nobody pushes, nobody asks too many questions, nobody tries to make a square peg fit in a metaphorical round hole and nobody’s keeping score.
You know his wife is dead. He knows your ex is in jail. The only time you ever bothered establishing any preemptives was making sure you both understood these facts and all that that meant for the two of you in your… arrangement. The first meeting between you was more like fighting than fucking anyway – you were working your usual shift, having had a much more lucrative time at this bar than at the last and since the goddamn Punisher killed your asshole boss as collateral in an attack on the Kitchen Irish. Without half the funds from this joint going straight back into “the family” it was a lot easier for you, the other bartenders and the new defacto manager to pull more than your usual from the overall earnings; still, nothing gold could stay, and you knew it was only a matter of time before someone upstairs untied the knots on the bar and defaulted it back to the bank it was bought from seeing as how any relatives who could claim it were as d-e-a-d dead as the boss himself.
You thought of him from time to time, the miserable old letch. If you knew where he was buried, you’d have long since hauled yourself down there and pissed on his fresh headstone.
The Punisher was something of a national celebrity nowadays – escaped convict, spree killer, polarizing figure. Half the country wanted him strung up for every murder and charged for every piece of destroyed property; the other half wanted to give him directions to their city and dinner for his troubles. He was a hero. He was a villain. He was the devil himself; he was an angel of vengeance.
What he /actually/ was, was sitting in your bar with a ball cap pulled down low and his big boots perched on the foot rail, sending off every signal of “I’m drinking alone, fuck off” he could possibly send. Your coworker had tried to lay down the preliminaries of flirting with the lone, mysterious customer when the rest of the bar settled into its usual ebb and flow of regular patrons and got iced into oblivion, stomping back over and demanding you take the side of the bar with the crabby asshole in the hat. Of course he’d chosen your bar for the anonymity – it was a dive, one that was now blessedly free of Irish mafia presence and now just held the usual flotsam and jetsam off the street – and you respected that.
You’d brought him his second shot when he glanced up at you under the bill of that hat, and you utterly shocked yourself with how well you carried off unaffected indifference. It was him. His mug had been plastered all over the city – what was this fucking idiot doing still in the city!? – and there was no mistaking those nearly coal-black eyes over that nose, somehow still prominent even with the bridge broken into damn near nothingness. Your eyes stayed on his, then on the knuckles of the big hand wrapped around the beer he was still nursing.
It was stupid, how fast you were in bed together.
He’s like getting hit by a fucking freight train, which is to say he’s big and fast but alarmingly light on his feet. You know more about him than you should thanks to the media coverage so you can assume this is a learned skill from his special ops days – the conversation only comes sometimes and you always feel like it’s one-sided, unfair. You don’t even remember if there was a moment where you both verbalized what was going to happen, just that he came upstairs to the office with you when the night was over and fucked you against the wall, the door, the floor, and on the desk before it was all said and done.
Tonight, he texts you a motel address from a burner phone. You know not to save the number – he won’t contact you from this one again.
When your cab drops you off, someone in the parking lot is blasting “Magic Stick.” You knock on the door of the indicated room and you hear his dog bark twice – Max, the gray pit bull he’s had as long as you’ve known him, admittedly not long. He opens the door without so much as a grunt but his hair is wet and he smells like he just stepped out of the shower, generic soap. His pants ride low on his deeply cut hips and you’re only just in the door when he’s got it slammed, locked and chained, making his way over with purpose.
“Hey.”
He gets it out before both of those big hands are on your neck, your jaw and he’s tilting your head back to get his mouth at your skin, his exhale jagged as your own breath hitches in your chest. Max skitters back to his makeshift bed of a towel on the floor, halfway to greeting you when he realizes you’re indisposed; you don’t notice. It’s always like this – like you’re drowning in a desire bigger than yours or his – every time you’re together. You’ve reckoned that this is the only reason this is even happening. It’s not like either of you were at a loss for being able to get laid and yet you’d both chosen not to, either out of lingering feelings of loyalty to long gone partners or a general refusal to be this vulnerable with anyone.
It doesn’t feel like vulnerability for him, or at least you don’t think it would. He’s firmly in charge from the word go and that hasn’t ever changed.
You’ve learned not to wear anything you value too much to meet him; Frank Castle has left not only a trail of bodies in his wake but a veritable valley of shredded underthings to go along with it. Regardless, you still try to beat him to getting your bra off in case he’s even less patient than usual and just opts to tear the two sides apart behind your back. You’d complain – and you do when taking stock of your bras and panties after the fact – but in the moment, it’s hotter than hot. Tonight’s no exception: his hands are under your shirt, rubbing thick callouses up your back until he’s at the clasp and trying to tear it away from itself in a manner that suggested he was once probably pretty good at it, if only he still had the patience.
Swatting his arms away, you reach back and spare yourself another bra-buying trip, shirking the thing off and dropping it onto the floor.
“Don’t know why you even wear one’a those things here,” he growls as both of those massive, scarred hands go straight to your tits, your shirt riding up his forearms.
The feeling of his rough skin against your peaked nipples sends a jolt straight to your clit and you sway a little in his grasp, light-headed with the feeling. He’s not much for preamble and the quicker he can get you out of your clothes, the happier he is; your shirt goes up and over your head and suddenly he’s dipping down to catch your nipple in his mouth as his big fingers deftly undo the button on your jeans, yank them down with your panties going along for the ride. He’s already rock hard and you can feel his nearly unmanageable girth against your abdomen through his pants as he urges you to step out of the fallen fabric.
“C’mon, girl,” he says impatiently, and you’re instantly twice as wet.
You’re not a ‘good girl’. This isn’t the first time your pussy has overruled your better judgment. Fuck the mass murderer who’s wanted in all states? Well, if he’s gonna growl shit like “c’mon girl” in your ear, squeeze your tits in his hands and yank off your clothes like he’s starving and you’re the last meal for miles then yes, you’re going to fuck the mass murderer who’s wanted in all states. As a matter of fact, you’re gonna blow the mass murderer who’s wanted in all states. Your knees hit that dirty carpet and his gruff little exhale of a groan before you’ve even touched him has you swelling and wet, clit throbbing as your core muscles tighten, trying to find some sort of relief that’s not coming just yet.
“Damn,” is all he says, a whisp of a growl past his lips, as you palm his cock through the fabric of his pants, his dark eyes fixed on you down in front of him. The power play here is half of what makes this so delicious – don’t misunderstand, he’s built for this sort of thing, big and agile and preternaturally perceptive to what you need at the time, but the fact that he’s just so good at taking lead translates so sinfully well to fucking.
Someone is playing something with a heavy bass outside your window. It catches his attention for only a moment as you notice his muscles go taut, his guard go up, but he doesn’t stop you when you unzip his pants and pull them down past his hips, catching in a bunch somewhere around his muscular thighs. His cock springs free, bobbing heavily towards you and there’s no hesitation when you go straight in to lick and suck his balls, one hand resting against the hot steel of the muscles in his leg and the other at the base of his impressive erection, keeping it from clubbing you in the face while you work to get both his boys in your mouth.
You’re a very talented girl, it doesn’t take you long.
You feel his shudder under your palms, hear his exhaled growl, feel that big hand fist up into your hair just shy of painfully. There’s an extra shot of excitement at the reaction, feeling this big, monolith of a man start coming unfurled out of his statue state; you’re even wetter at the notion. It’s a game, almost, to see how much noise you can make him make – he’s a talker when you get him going but it’s not easy to get there.
He tastes a little salty still but mostly your senses are occupied with how his damp skin still smells like soap, how he smells like Clean Man and you’re a little irritated and a little turned on. The last time he fucked you, he’d walked to your place and had worked up a little bit of a sweat before he arrived; the way his neck had tasted against your tongue almost made you come from that alone. He’s shaved down slick all the way to the taint – the way you like him, but you suspect it has more to do with his militaristic habit of staying clean shaven than your preferences – and you can’t help but tease your tongue past his balls, test your limits. Straight guys are so weird about this shit.
“Fuckin’ nasty,” he growls out, shifting in what might have been discomfort though the tone implied he was definitely turned on by the idea, and tightens his hand in your hair.
You grin into his crotch and take your shot, tongue laving to his ass for the mere moment he lets you before he’s pulling your hair with firm insistence, moving you back to where he can see you. You peer back up at him from under his cock in faux-innocence.
“Nuh-uh,” he scolds, but his mouth is tugged up at one corner in amusement, “You gotta buy me a drink first, darlin’.”
It’s a joke, or at least the closest thing to a joke the two of you have ever shared, and there’s a moment where you both chuckle and a warmth passes through you. He’s human, after all.
You don’t break eye contact when you open your mouth to catch the head of his cock on your tongue, moaning when you close your lips around his crown. Finally. He tastes the way you remembered and it’s so fucking good, the salt of pre-cum and sweat, that you moan around his flesh. His mouth hangs open stupidly but he’s watching you with those shark black eyes, both of you locked in a stare that neither one is breaking as you start swallowing him down slowly, bobbing down inch by inch, navigating the thickness of his shaft as not to make yourself gag – too early, anyway.
You nearly get nose-to-skin with his abdomen, the blunt head of his cock pressing insistent at the back of your throat, eyes watering when you hear him moan in earnest, voice breaking under the strain of lust that the both of you are beyond lost in. The sound is electric and one of your hands is straight between your legs, not even thinking about the action, hardly realizing it’s happening until you’re running tight little circles on your over-sensitive clit. He’s too lost in the moment to stop you, which he’d normally do – one of those edgers, the types who want to push and deprive, push and deprive like a typical fucking military man, obsessed with discipline – and you take advantage, buying yourself a little relief from the constant thrumming of your cunt in time with your heart, your pulse. He’s going to be the death of you one of these days…maybe literally if you aren’t careful.
The same hand that’s tangled in your hair and that was pressing you down harder a few moments ago pulls you back with graceless intent just short of roughness, his own breath coming in hard jags now as he stares down at you with those blown-wide pupils (not that you can tell, he’s got eyes damn near as black as his hair). You curl your slightly swollen lips into a smirk and open your mouth to smart off but then he’s got you hauled up off the floor and onto the bed, so fast and so smooth you didn’t even have a chance to resist. Not that you were gonna.
He’s a patient man. It’s kind of infuriating. Those big, calloused hands are pressing your thighs apart by the time you get a real sensibility about what’s going on and he’s moving in for the kill, looking you in the eyes without a hint of shyness or self-consciousness as he presses his tongue into your slick, aching slit. The sensation damn near knocks your chipped nail polish off. He’s not a tease, he’s not keeping the contact light but he’s slow, meticulous, rolling his tongue from your opening up to your clit and back again, unhurried. Attentive. What an asshole.
You squirm against him, panting out little moans and whimpers that make goosebumps run up and down his arms with sheer want, trying anything to make him go faster, keep building but he’s dead set on his plan of battle and you’re not going to change it. His groans shift between raw arousal and amusement, nearly chuckles against your hot, wet cunt as he alternates between a soft, flat tongue running slow, agonizing paintbrush strokes against your clit and pressing his mouth into you, entire, sucking lazily like the bastard’s not being hunted by every agency in the country and has all the time in the world to eat pussy like it’s his full time job. You hate him. You’ll stop hating him once you come but until then, he’s scourge of the earth.
You exhale in a growl of frustration, canting your hips to try to get some faster friction until he grabs them both firmly and forces them down to the mattress, a subtle reminder of just how strong he is.
“I fucking hate you,” you seethe through a moan, and he nearly laughs.
The vibrations almost send you over but he’s smart, pulls away just enough to reel it in and keep you from coming. What a motherfucker. You cry out in frustration and swat down at him but miss miserably, far too fucked up on his mouth on your pussy to focus well enough to land a hit. He doesn’t even react, just moves his hands back to your thighs and slips his thumbs to your sex to spread you open just that little bit more, let him get in a little deeper, a little more. He’s moaning soft but rough and the sound alone nearly kills you.
“Fucking hurry up,” you hiss through teeth.
Your mouth is getting dry from the panting, you notice.
“You gonna complain or you gonna come?”
The hoarseness of his voice sends chills up your already lit spine and you grab at his hair, push his face back into your cunt and he obliges with no hesitation, finally hitting the stride you’d been aiming for. Your hips hitch, the roll of your back stuttering with overstimulation, your every moan getting more and more ragged until they’re damn near screams, your hands knotting up the shitty comforter and your nails digging into the fabric. You wanna tell him to put those thick, rough fingers inside you – two at least – but he’s pinning your thighs down hard with both hands, thumbs keeping you slick and open to him, and it’s barely two more hard breaths until he’s sucking your clit and you’re coming, coming, coming.
There’s an affirmative grunt from him as he keeps going, knowing full well how sensitive you are after orgasm, how that kind of pace and contact is too much, but he also knows if he makes you work through the discomfort there’s usually a second one right around the corner. It took him no time to figure that out, and he’s quietly smug about it in his way. Your entire body is one giant, pulsing nerve and it’s pure instinct that drives you to push at his forehead and try to squirm away, anything to relieve the onslaught of sensation from his steady, unfaltering licking of your pounding clit but he’s not having any of it, doubles down his efforts. Over the slid-over hills of your breasts you can see him watching you, eyes darker still with arousal, something almost inhuman in how single-minded he is.
That’s Frank, whether he’s killing gangsters or hunting criminals or fucking you senseless – single minded to the point of ruthlessness.
The building crest of a new wave wracks you from your roots to your toes before you can even register that it’s coming, something more like a shotgun than a pleasant rise and fall.
You’re still catching your breath, swallowing dryly and blinking in bewilderment when he’s on his knees in front of you, so muscular and tan and scarred that it’s hardly like he’s real. Fucking him without a condom is stupid, but your IUD and his complete lack of regard for his own safety render the conversation unimportant and he’s one, two, three pumps of his fist around his cock before he’s pushing up the backs of your thighs to get your legs up and open. This is why he doesn’t finger you when he’s eating you – your pussy is so tight post-orgasm that it’s an effort to sink that big, thick cock in with all the resistance and he fucking loves it, loves how /you/ love it, how much louder you are when you’ve already come.
“Fuck,” you exhale, moving your legs with his efforts but otherwise unable to participate at the moment.
“Yeah,” is all he says back, one hand grabbing your calve as the other angles his cock directly against your entrance.
The blunt intrusion is almost too much, almost too big to handle in your current state and he hisses through his teeth only to exhale in a boom of a growl, feeding himself into you inch by agonizingly slow inch. Every nerve in you is alive with the glory of Frank and there’s nothing else in your mind but the fucking delicious stretch, satiating some primal itch as you try to relax well enough to speed this along, growing impatient. This is why he likes fucking you face-to-face: the angle of your hips and the way he can bend your legs gives him the clearest shot at getting in deep (he’ll turn you over in ten minutes, you know that, and even if he doesn’t do it of his own accord you’ll beg him to – you love the bruising force that he uses when he’s got you up on your knees and elbows). With long, drawn out moans of effort (either from holding back on bucking like he wants to or the tightness of your cunt or both), he finally slides home, bottoming out with his groin pressed into yours, buried deep enough that you can feel him nudge your cervix when he pushes in just the right way.
Luckily you’re one of those women who likes the way that feels, in so long as it’s not repeated and sustained. The occasional jolt is nice in the way that nails on your skin or the pull of your hair is nice. Frank’s got a rare instinct for both doling out and carefully metering pain and he has yet to hurt you in any way you didn’t like; maybe that’s part of the appeal of him. You know beyond a shadow of a doubt that he understands and respects the word “no”. He’s a well-trained dog – someone somewhere spent a lot of time and effort making sure he took orders well.
He pulls out just so and then snaps his hips back to yours in such a way that makes you quiver all the way to your toes. You don’t think much after that, at least not outside of the moment or him. You can smell his sweat from where you are, the combination of pheromones and his recently cleaned skin intoxicating, the clap of your flesh slapping into his with every sharp, hard thrust music to your ears; when he finally leans within grabbing range you’re tugging him down to lick the salt off his neck, his shoulder, your nails down his back and unkempt, wild moaning in his ear.
“Fuck,” he spits out when you dig in harder, “You like that? You want every fucking inch of that?”
You can’t form consonants but your moans are affirmative, nodding as you pant open-mouthed.
“Yeah?” his voice is harsh, possessed, and it makes you gush, “You wanna be fucked like this, hard and fucking fast?”
“Yeah,” you only half-manage, throat dry from all the open-mouthed caterwauling.
This is relatively tame as far as dirty talk goes but holy fuck it gets you close and you know he’s just now getting started. You’ve asked him to call you a slut in bed. He won’t do it. It pissed you off at first when you thought it was some sort of manly-man moral bullshit; it didn’t occur to you until you were trying to goad him into it and he got this look on his face like he had been slapped that maybe his dead wife had liked it too. You don’t press anymore.
The jiggling of flesh with every thrust up has you feeling deliciously corporeal, grounded, every inch of your body attuned to everything he’s doing. He holds that iron grip on your calf and turns his head to press an open-mouthed kiss to the skin above your ankle; for a moment you think he might bite you but he just growls, head hanging as you watch the muscles of his stomach, his hips flex and tighten, flex and tighten, flex and tighten. He’s at a pace nearing ruthless by the time he pulls out, the very sensation pissing you all sorts of off as your walls tighten on nothing but the sound of his voice.
“Turn the fuck over, girl,” he orders, which is pointless since he’s already got you by the hips, all but flipping you onto your stomach.
He’s so fast, there’s almost no time between his pulling out and having you right where he wants you, flat on your chest with your knees in the mattress, ass arched up just enough that he can line up his cock and thrust in deep without hesitation. The ragged moan that’s tearing out of you gets muffled by your cheek against the fabric, your head swimming with the shot of white-hot pleasure that corkscrews up your spine when he’s back in and pounding away, relentless. Those big hands come up and grab your shoulders roughly as he leans over you just enough to brace his arms that way, the weight of him pinning you down into the mattress and giving him the leverage he needs to keep his hips grinding hard and deep against your ass.
“Fuck look at that,” he grunts through clenched teeth, “Look at that ass bounce, goddamn…”
You taste the cotton with your grin, “Uh huh? Like that?”
“Uhhuh,” he spits out between deep groans, “Fuck, girl, you’re gonna make me work for it tonight, huh? You want me to throw my back out makin’ you come again?”
You both pass breezy laughs, the jump of your core making your pussy tighten on him and turning his back into a groan.
“I gotcha, I gotcha,” he groans, shifting his weight and putting one big hand just under the back of your neck to keep you flat while his other arm goes around your hips, fingers searching for your clit.
He doesn’t go straight in for the rub, instead scissoring his fingers around the joining of your lips, the pressure and jolt of sensation making you wail against the starchy comforter. Your back arches hard to give him resistance to slam into, your hands balling up the fabric as best you can without so much as a thought to it from you.
“Keep it arched up like that for me,” he mutters, nearly hoarse through a volley of other grunts, “Fuck, baby, fuck…”
Your moan is half a whine as another shot of pleasure rolls through you; he’s got you right there riding the edge with your pulse pounding and your pussy throbbing when he finally starts rubbing your clit with his fingers flat against you. It takes maybe four tight, fast circles and you’re coming, gushing, wailing. He’s still going hard and fast, fingers still passing across your oversensitive clit until you’re jerking from overstimulating, trying to grab at his arm and push it away, too exhausted to do anything but think about how good he still feels inside of you, how full and satiated and fucked-out you feel.
He moves both hands to your hips and grips them with bruising force to snap them back to him as he gasps, growls, pants. You barely have to coordination to breathe and think at the same time, heat still coming over you in waves, but you move onto your elbows to brace and push back against him, bring him the rest of the way with you.
He laughs, the sound hollow like a gunshot, and snatches you back against him again and again, “Thaaat’s right, that’s right, fuck yourself back on this cock, girl, you’re too good to me…”
He sucks in a sharp breath, voice breaking, “Fuck, take it, take it…”
His military precision falters and his hips stutter against yours as you feel that telltale jerking and spasming, the throb of his cock as he comes inside of you. You’re not sure why you like that so much, but you do. There’s weirder shit to like.
His orgasms aren’t loud, usually more a hiss through his teeth and a long, softer groan of exhaustion; he keeps you pulled flush against him until that throbbing stops and he only idles a few moments longer before pulling out carefully. It’s a detail you wouldn’t share in casual conversation but the usual volume of his come is impressively high – it was how you figured out he hadn’t been laid in a while the first time but now you’re not so sure it’s not just a biology thing, some guys are just big comers – and you can feel it leaking out of you slowly but instead of getting up, you lower your aching hips back to the mattress. Frank gets up with a grunt, scrubbing his hand over his face and disappearing back into the bathroom.
If you get a UTI, you’ll have no one to thank but yourself, so you groan and roll onto your back, preparing to pep talk yourself into standing up. You’re warm, pliant. Everything feels good except the ache in your lower back from having your hips arched so hard and even that’s got a nice, smug sensibility about it. As usual, he fucked you so good you know you’ll be sore tomorrow. That’s why you come here.
The toilet flushes, then the sink runs for a long moment before he’s coming back out, scrubbing his face dry with the scratchy hand towel. This is normal – he’s distant now but not disinterested or dismissive, just… somewhere else. As you struggle to sit up, he reaches out to help you, grabbing your hand and easing you to a sitting position, which you come up from with a long stretch.
“You need a cab or you crashin’?” he asks as you sit on the toilet seat, wincing from the cold contact.
The floor here is cracked and there’s mold on the baseboards, in the shower. You’d rather not sleep in this shithole but you don’t really wanna be alone just yet either.
“I’ll hang,” you respond once you’re well underway with trying to clean yourself up with the cheap paper, “For a while anyway.”
You pause your ministrations for only a moment and chew your lip, spitting out the question before you have a chance to overthink it.
“…why don’t you just come back to my place? It’s free, you can get the hell out of this joint for a couple days.”
There’s practically a sound effect of him freezing in the other room. You don’t have to see it to know he’s doing it, that rigid posture thing he does.
“…that’s probably not a smart idea,” he responds after a long moment before adding, “Not that I don’t like the idea.”
You shrug, trying not to seem bothered, “Just a suggestion.”
It’s not personal, you know that. He just doesn’t want the particular kind of hell that follows him to rain down on you, too.
It’s alright. You don’t want that kind of hell, either. It is what it is.
It isn’t until you’re climbing into the backseat of a cab in the wee hours of the morning that you realize that yeah, you did kind of take it personally. Maybe you won’t answer next time he calls.
The pleasant, worn throb between your legs reality checks you – get real. You know you will.