#ch: elliot honeysett | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

consumedkings-archive · 3 years

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party favors ✤ no-cult au

honeyseed + “this isn't what i meant when i yelled fuck you” requested by @blissfulalchemist and “i’ve dreamt about this” requested by @chyrstis! (i hope you don't mind my combining these!!) sequel that nobody asked for to this oneshot

word count: 5.4k

warnings: mentions of a daddy kink in passing (you'll get what i mean), painfully awkward family dinners, mentions of "putting a dog down" (because ambrose is NUTS), mentions of abusive/neglectful parenting, needy!john, posessive!john, also john thinks that he has to compete with elliot's absentee father all the time so he does dumb shit to "assert" his "dominance". all in all this has no explicit smut but bear these things all in mind pls

The time it takes them to “get vodka” from Scarlet’s house is longer than anticipated, but not as long as Elliot would prefer. She takes a little time to clean herself up in the bathroom while John tends to his car—not that there’s much of a mess, anyway, the house was barely a forty-second turn around the bend—and she brings out her mother’s preferred bottle of vodka (Ketel One) and finds John leaned against the hood of his car, waiting expectantly.

“I can’t believe you didn’t go inside,” Elliot teases, picking her way down the path between the rose bushes and stopping in front of him. John’s hands go to her waist, gripping where there’s still a dull, pleasant ache from their previous activities. “You know, get some more snooping in.”

“Considered it,” he relents, pulling her between his legs so that he can kiss her, “but since I’ve only been up here once before, I figured there’d be plenty more to come.”

Elliot hums, curling her fingers into his now-buttoned up shirt (disappointing). “Very presumptuous of you.”

“It seems I’m making mistakes left and right tonight,” John agrees, nose brushing hers and his hands sliding beneath the hem of her dress, up the backs of her thighs. He makes a low noise and digs his fingers into her skin, adding, “Surely your mother doesn’t need her vodka that quickly.”

“You’d be—surprised,” Elliot replies as she tries to keep her voice even. It’s fairly successful despite the brunette’s wandering hands making her want to squirm. “She’s a beast without it.”

“Ell,” John rumbles, “I think you and I both know that your mother is a beast of her own, period.”

“I’m going to tell her you said that.”

“Oh, please don’t.”

“I like the sound of that.” She says the words against his mouth. “You saying please.”

The brunette makes an intrigued sound, as though the prospect of saying please in other, more sordid ways has greatly interested him. She grins, kisses him once, and then a second time, longer, curling her fingers into his beard at his jawline for a moment as she indulges in the feeling of it all—sated and pleasantly achy, with the humid heat of the night sticking to her skin and the smell of John’s expensive cologne filling her up like a wineskin—before she reluctantly pulls away and makes her way to the passenger side of the car.

“Let’s go,” she says, “I’d like to get my parents out of my house as soon as possible.”

John grins, boyish and wolfish all at once. “Boy, you really did miss me.”

Elliot resists the urge to roll her eyes—but it’s hard not to return the smile, especially considering how earnest he’d been before. Wrong, and insecure, yes; but earnest about a lot of it, which is more than can be said for any boyfriend that she’s had before. Joey keeps reminding her that just because John is beating the bar, which is low set already thanks to said past boyfriends, doesn’t mean he’s actually good for her; but she thinks he is. In a lot of ways, he is. She’s never felt safe with someone like she has with John.

“We should probably talk about the fact that you believed I was cheating on you,” she says as he pulls down the drive. His mouth downturns into a grimace. Joey would be proud of her.

“We could,” he agrees. “Or, we could pull over and make out instead. Doesn’t that sound more fun? You’re already out of your underwear, half the work’s done.”

“John.”

“Look,” he says, lifting a hand to stop her—not that she was going to say anything than an admonishment in the form his name, anyway—and she lifts a brow expectantly. “I didn’t really date, before you. You know that. It was always just a passing, temporary bliss kind of thing.”

Elliot nods sagely, because she does know. That is another part of his allure, that he wants her enough to stay just with her, where he hasn’t before.

“So I’m just not used to it,” he finishes. “Having to worry about if you’re...cheating on me, or not. And maybe it’s really annoying that Jacob gets to see you all the time and I don’t. That’s all.”

“That’s all, huh?”

“That’s all.”

Elliot musters up a sound that she tries her best to make unimpressed and then settles back against the car seat. She’s happy he’s here, even if he came under malicious pretense; and there’s a part of her, too, that’s worried. That maybe it’s a failing on her part to assure him that she likes him, like really likes him, because she tries so hard to keep him and her family separate. Through no fault of his own—it’s all entirely because her mother is dreadful, and she doesn’t even know what kind of man her father is beyond ‘the type what readily abandons his wife and child, periodically over an extended stretch of time’. Doesn’t quite roll off the tongue the way she’d like it to when making an introduction.

She tries not to think at all about Ambrose, if she can help it. She calls him her daddy and her mother says things like well, give your father a hug, Elli, like she’s supposed to want to touch someone who left her alone all this time. It’s the most sacred language, she thinks, touch; the idea of her father shaking John’s hand—a hand which would inevitably be on her body—had been nauseating. What had Ambrose’s hands been doing, this whole time? Where did all of their scars come from? Did she want to know?

John’s fingers brushed the inside of her knee, hooking beneath to rest there comfortably. He was always touching, gripping and tracing and feeling her out, like he’s still not sure if she likes it or not. She tries to make it obvious when she does and when she doesn’t, but she knows he still wonders. Like he’s waiting for her to turn around and say, actually, I don’t like it when you touch me, it’s repulsive and we need to break up right now.

“Awful quiet over there,” he ventures.

Elliot rests her hand over his, dragging the pad of her thumb across one tattooed finger. “Tired out.”

“Yeah?” John hums, turning down the road and back into town. “Getting fucked against the side of a car will do that to you.”

“I hope you’re just getting all of that out of your system before we sit down to dinner with my mother,” Elliot says dryly. The words make a familiar heat crawl back up her throat.

“And your father,” he points out.

Elliot opens her mouth; there’s an instinct to say, well, who knows if he’ll even still be there? That’s all it takes, just a few minutes, or, I’d prefer if he wasn’t there anyway, or, you don’t get it, John, that he’s not really there, it’s a man wearing my father’s face but he’s not there at the dinner table at all, just a fleshbag that calls himself my father. I don’t know him.

But all of these things feel very un-sexy and like it might ruin the mood. So she closes her mouth.

John lifts a brow. He says, “Go on.”

“It’s not really pillow talk,” she replies uneasily. “What if we pulled over and made out instead? My underwear’s already off, half the work’s done.”

“Ell,” he says, parking the car in front of the house and looking at her. Looking, like he could see right into her. Right down into the marrow of her bones. “I want you to say what you’re thinking.”

It’s very annoying. She sighs and says, “Maybe he left.”

John watches her; he seems to be waiting for more. When she doesn’t give it, he prompts, “Sure.”

“And, I would prefer it if he did.” Elliot’s mouth twists. “That’s a stranger in there, if he is. In there. All he is to me is skin and bone that walks and talks like my dad but everything about it—about him—is wrong. Off. Like—”

She stops herself again, and the brunette’s fingers squeeze her knee again, prodding. Prompting. Greedy to know. She’s never been with someone who wants so badly to know precisely what is going on in her brain at all times, but John does.

“Like something put his face on and walked through the door,” Elliot finishes after a minute. She feels a little crazy saying it out loud, and more and more unsexy as the seconds pass, but John leans across the console and reaches up with his free hand to thread his fingers into her hair and kiss her. It’s a slow and unhurried kind of kiss, one that assures her that he doesn’t want to fuck her any less for saying what she’s said.

John says, against her mouth, “Should I take a swig of that bottle before I go in?” and she laughs and kisses him again because it feels like what she said is really fine and alright and not at all an indicator of turmoil.

“She’ll glass you if you do,” Elliot replies. “Come on, let’s get this over with.”

━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━

John is unsurprised to find that Scarlet struggles to hide her disdain for him upon their arrival back in Elliot’s house.

“Oh,” she says when he opens the door and ushers Elliot in ahead of him. “You’re staying for dinner, John?”

“I invited him,” Elliot interrupts, before John can spend the next forty-five seconds figuring out how to politely tell Scarlet that he’d be staying a lot longer than dinner, given that Elliot’s intimates are still deposited in the back of his car. The desire to absolutely scandalize his girlfriend’s mother is almost too strong. “Be nice, mama.”

“Well,” Scarlet replies primly, “I suppose that’s fine.”

“I would hope so. It is my house.”

“It just would be nice, bunny, if we had some family time.”

Elliot’s expression tightens. John can see it there, sitting on just the tip of her tongue, following the vein of what she had confided in him before; that it won’t feel like family time even if he’s there, that it would never feel like family time because Ambrose is her father in name alone.

John says serenely, “Can I make you a drink, Scarlet?”

It’s the magic phrase. He’s a quick learner, and he knows this, and he knows that Scarlet can see exactly what he’s doing but cannot resist the urge to put John in a position of servitude, so she narrows her eyes and says in a saccharine voice, “Sure, honey, why don’t you?”

There are a lot of reasons why he shouldn’t, but he plants a kiss on Elliot’s cheek and squeezes her hip before he takes the bottle of vodka out of her hand and makes his way into the kitchen.

It’s been a minute since he’s been inside of her house—and admittedly, the times that he’s been inside of it before, his attention has been elsewhere; even now, everything in the house looks and smells and feels like her in such a way that it feels like his attention is constantly being pulled to wherever it is she’s standing—but the kitchen is also housing her father, and Ambrose sticks out like a sore thumb.

Everything in Elliot’s house is soft and meticulously manicured. She doesn’t strike as the kind of woman who’s driven by a ferociously attentive eye for detail, but there are plenty of things that he’s still discovering about her, and her penchant for placing things exactly where and how she wants them, making them just the color and shape she likes, is a strong one; each throw blanket, pillow, shade of paint on the wall, rug. Her home is designed to be a soft place to land.

So it’s no wonder that Ambrose Honeysett, whose sharp, angular face and wolfish smile with full, too-white teeth, does not blend in.

“Have a nice drive?” Ambrose idles. He’s smoking in the kitchen. John knows that Elliot hates smoking in her house.

“Oh, I suppose.” Briefly, spitefully, he thinks about Elliot, pinned up against the side of his car, and, Fuck, I love your hands. “Hope County’s not really my choice of backdrop.”

“Mm. City boy,” Ambrose drawls in response. He plucks the bottle of vodka from John’s hands and pours himself a double in to a glass—no ice cubes, no mixer. The man balances the cigarette between his pointer and middle finger as he screws the cap back on. “Elli told us about you. Not sure if I like my little girl bein’ with a city boy.”

John resists the urge to grimace. He instead busies his hands with making Scarlet’s preferred alcoholic beverage (it’s been seared into his brain, you see—“Vodka martini dry, John—that means a drizzle of vermouth, not equal parts, and I want three olives”—and he can no longer see such a drink being ordered by a random in a bar without instantly disliking them) and says, “I’m flattered. I haven’t heard much about you.”

He’s feeling a little emboldened. He keeps replaying the last forty-five minutes over in his head, keeps thinking about how Elliot is already more his that she has ever belonged to her father, and maybe that’s a little deep-set greed in his heard reminding him that he hates sharing. John can see that the words do not skip over Ambrose’s head—not in the least—and the redhead cocks his head to the side and takes a long drag of his cigarette.

“You’re funny, Slick,” he drawls, and flashes a grin, wide and pearly, as he claps John on the shoulder like they’re college buddies. “I think I do like you.”

Well, John thinks, sucking his teeth and feigning a polite smile, that goes for one of us.

Before he can try and figure out Ambrose’s game (and it is, in fact, a game—John knows it when he sees it), Elliot has come into the kitchen and made an exasperated sound.

“I told you, no smoking in the house,” she snips. She gestures with her hands for him to depart.

“Sorry, bunny. Forgive your daddy his bad habits.”

Annoying. John can barely stand sharing Elliot’s attention with her mother, let alone the man that has caused her so much grief for so long. It’s not like Ambrose deserves her attention.

“You’re not sorry,” Elliot replies wearily, “but you will be if you don’t get that out of my kitchen. Scoot.” And then, in an effort to be somewhat nicer: “Please.”

Ambrose laughs, and squeezes her into a one-armed side hug that Elliot grimaces through, and then walks through the kitchen into the dining room and out onto the front porch. John pauses his work fishing a martini glass out of Elliot’s cabinet to turn around and look at her, thinly veiling his amusement.

“What?” she asks, annoyance still bleeding in from her father’s blatant disregard of her house rules.

“Every time I hear him refer to himself as your daddy,” he says, fingers snagging the hem of her sundress, “I just can’t stop thinking about how pretty you’d sound saying—”

“If you’re about to ask me to call you daddy, John—”

“—it to me,” he finishes, grinning wolfishly into the curve of her throat, hands sneaking below the hem of her dress. It’s distracting. How’s he supposed to mind his manners, he wonders—make a good impression on the parents he doesn’t give a shit about (except for Scarlet)—when she’s looking like this?

Elliot makes a little noise. “Hands,” she warns, as John’s fingers dig into warm skin Scarlet’s voice drifting in from the front doorway where she’s talking with Ambrose.

“You don’t even like it a little bit?” He murmurs the words into the hollow of her jaw. “You know... yes daddy, no daddy, please—”

The blonde slaps a hand over his mouth, her eyes narrowed playfully. “I will cut you,” she says. “We’re not negotiating a kink in my kitchen with my parents one room over. Mind yourself.”

John thinks about his slightly-new information—I love your hands—and he thinks about Ambrose smoking in Elliot’s kitchen even though she doesn��t like it, and he thinks about Scarlet—It would just be nice if we had some family time—and he thinks, Maybe I am family now, Scarlet, did you think about that? He gives the back of her thigh a playful slap, delighting in her surprised little yelp, her hand slipping from his mouth.

“John!”

“Sorry,” he says, not feeling or sounding particularly sorry at all despite his words. He grins. My girl, the thought permeating idly through his mind. “Promise I’ll behave.”

Elliot takes his chin in her hands. “Or else.”

“You’re so sexy when you’re threatening me.”

“Shut. Up.”

He grins and pulls her close by the backs of her thighs, until she’s flush against him. There’s nothing he wants more than to lift her up on the counter and have his way with her—but he’ll do as she asks. He’ll play nice during dinner, just like she wants, and pretend like it doesn’t drive him fucking batty.

“Sure,” he murmurs, kissing her jaw, the corner of her lips, and then full-on to rumble against her mouth, “anything you want.”

━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━

Dinner is just as excruciating as Elliot thought it would be. She spends the first half of it pretending to be very interested in what it is her mother has to say about Delia and the other women back in Weyfield are up to (spoiler: it’s almost nothing interesting—it’s all about this one’s son getting kicked out of uni and this one’s daughter wrecking her car and don’t you just think it’s vapid, Elliot, these women who won’t even parent their own children?) and then the last half is spent—not to sound dramatic, or anything—wanting to end her fucking life.

It’s all quite harmless to start off with; John is trying to be his usual charming self, which Scarlet is handily unimpressed by but which her father engages with frequently. It's fine, but it’s got a weird energy to it. Elliot knows that John likely does not enjoy her father (he’s a hard man to enjoy) and certainly has a choice opinion about him given what he knows of his clinical and methodical abandonment of Elliot and her mother. It’s painful enough that she’s told John about how her dad left her alone in a mall at eight years old so he could fuck off for another ten years.

Like he promised, though, John behaves. He talks about real estate with Ambrose (which her dad knows nothing about—he just regurgitates shit he reads in the papers, Elliot knows) and leaves one hand on her thigh while they eat, hidden beneath the table cloth. Occasionally, it drifts upward, skimming the inside of her thigh and dangerously close, and she clears her throat loudly (much to his amusement). All in all, she thinks maybe she’s going to get out of this dinner relatively unscathed, and she thinks, this isn’t so bad.

John is in the middle of listening to Scarlet’s opinion on the Prescott girl’s wedding colors (saffron yellow, yuck, Scarlet thinks) and Elliot says, “Daddy, can you pass me the pepper?”

It’s just a question. She will tell herself this later—it’s just a question, it’s just a stupid fucking question—but of course, it is just her luck that things are not ever just something in her life, because Elliot glances up from her plate to see her father and John reaching for the pepper at the same fucking time.

There’s a very strange, awkward moment where John and Ambrose’s fingers meet at the pepper shaker. Elliot wants to sink into the floor and disappear.

We’re not, she wants to say. We don’t, I mean, I don’t say that, John doesn’t ask me to, we’ve just been joking with it, we don’t actually and if you let me tell you, it’s a pretty funny story when you think about it—

“Well,” John says, and he sounds gleeful, “this is a bit awkward.”

Her father is watching him from across the table. Elliot drags her hand over her face. Of course. Of course John says he’s going to behave and then he does this, he pulls some stupid fucking move out of nowhere because he knows it’s going to push her fucking berserk button and she’ll fume through the rest of the dinner until her parents leave so she can rip his stupid fucking Dolce & Gabbana shirt off and—

Scarlet sighs. “My God.”

“Mama, it’s not—” Elliot sighs. “We don’t—”

“I thought she said Johnny,” John deflects easily, taking the pepper and setting it beside her plate. She has never once called him Johnny, except to be condescending. “Sorry, Mr. Honeysett.”

“No harm,” her father replies. His tone is light, but his expression is not. He leans back against his chair, draping an arm around the back of Scarlet’s chair. “Simple mistake, Lettie, don’t let it wind you up.”

“Untoward,” is what Scarlet says tightly. She has never liked John. She may never like John. And John’s proclivity for button-pushing is certainly not helping his case.

And amidst it all, Elliot’s face is ten degrees hotter, and she thinks, if this is some stupid way of John trying to assert himself I’m going to come un-fucking-glued, and she puts her face in her hands and exhales. Loudly.

“Excuse me,” she announces abruptly, the headache already beginning to pound behind her eyes.

“Bunny, sit down,” her father scolds. He’s been smoking in her kitchen after she explicitly told him not to, and he’s shown up after not being around for who knows the fuck how long, and he still has the audacity to tell her what to do. “It was a mistake. Wasn’t it, John?”

I’m going to kill, she thinks, I’m going to fucking kill the next person who tells me what to do.

“Sure,” John replies agreeably, “a mistake.”

Don’t you fucking push me.

“So sit down,” her father insists. “You get your dramatics from your mother, you know, it’s just a little—”

“Fuck you,” Elliot snaps, and Scarlet blinks rapidly. Immediately, she regrets saying it—not because she doesn’t feel immense relief when it finally comes out of her, but because she wishes she’d said it at a more appropriate time. Is there an appropriate time to tell your spawn-sponsor ‘fuck you’? she wonders. Oh, well. “Excuse me.”

Pushing the chair out of the way, she takes her glass into the kitchen and closes the sliding door that keeps it separate from the dining room. Most of the time, it’s open—but she wants it closed. A clear and unmistakable separation between herself and everyone else.

You get your dramatics from your mother, you know.

“Oh, you motherfucker,” she grinds out between her teeth, scrubbing her hands under the faucet. “Gonna fucking—kick your ass to the fucking curb, you stupid-fucking-dumb-shit—”

The door to the dining room slides open, and then shut. She doesn’t look behind her. She can tell from the waft of expensive cologne that it’s John, and not her mother or father, and she’s not quite sure yet how much she wants to gut him yet.

“Ell,” John says, barely capping his delight at what is, she is sure, his ideal dinner date. “Elli—”

“Stop talking.” She turns the faucet off, dries her hands, and turns around to find him very close. “Right now, John, if you want to keep those pretty teeth in.”

“I thought,” he murmurs as he blithely ignores her threat, “that it was just a funny little joke. You know, because we’ve been joking about it. I wanted you to lighten up a little. You’re so unhappy when your dad’s around, I hate seeing you like that.”

“You fucking—” Elliot sucks in a sharp breath. “You thought it would lighten me up for you to play Freddy Fuckaround out there? It’s one thing to have to tolerate the stupidity of listening to my dad talk to me like he’s got anything worthwhile to say, but for you—”

John kisses her. He takes her face in his hands and he kisses her, and it’s not a simple peck; it’s open-mouthed, his tongue sweeping the seam of her lips as he makes a low noise into the liplock. She reaches up and grips his wrists, but she can’t tell if she wants to push his hands off or keep them there.

“This isn’t what I had in mind when I yelled fuck you,” is what she says against his mouth, and he laughs, breathlessly. “You know that, right? You seem to be getting confused about when someone's talking to you.”

“You’re irresistible when you’re this riled.”

“You said you’d behave.”

“You’re right,” John admits, and nips her lower lip with his teeth just a smidge harder than normal, the sting of it earning him a slap to the side of his forearm. “Ow! Mean, cruel woman.” His eyes narrow. “I ought to bend you over this counter.”

The words flush her with wanton heat. “Stop being an insatiable fuckhead,” she threatens. “Play nice.”

“Hm. Boring.”

“John.”

He rolls his eyes. “Fine. I’ll play nice.”

“Mean it.”

“I will play nice,” he reiterates silkily, dragging his thumb over the slightly sore spot on her lower lip. “For you, my love. This time. I swear it.”

“Good,” she murmurs. Kissing the pad of his thumb, she adds, “If you fuck around again, I’m sending you back to Georgia.”

“I shan’t risk it,” he vows solemnly. There’s a moment where she thinks he might be genuine, and he brushes their noses together; his thumb sweeps her cheekbone now, and he kisses her temple. Those butterflies she feels any time John is unexpectedly gentle with her return, incited even further by the way he noses the hair away to kiss there again.

And then he says, “Your mother is scandalized,” and ruins it.

“Get out of here,” she scolds. “Go—do something. Be useful. I’ll deal with my mother after I’ve had a breather.”

One breather. Maybe two, or five, or ninety; she’s not sure how much of a breather she’ll need to get ready for whatever’s waiting for her back out there.

━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━

The evening is significantly cooler now than it was even during his and Elliot’s little foray out to the Honeysett house, but John can barely register anything; the temperature, the burn of cigarette smoke as he takes a drag of the thing he puts in his mouth so rarely nowadays and typically only recreationally, in some strange attempt to bond with the man who is technically the father of his girlfriend. None of it matters, not really, because the last thing he wants to be doing is this.

Playing nice with Ambrose Honeysett.

Still, the moment feels a bit absurd given their previous little misunderstanding, in that John has to keep stopping himself from laughing at it all, or else Ambrose might think he’s nuts.

“You ever have to put down a dog, John?” Ambrose asks after a minute, tapping ash off the end of his cigarette and glancing inside. The window is open to let in airflow, and in the warm lights of Elliot’s kitchen he can see her clearing plates from the table while her mother drags on about Delia said this and did you know Blair, the other day, was talking to me about that. Apparently, Scarlet has foregone discussion of what she thinks might be Elliot’s sexual inclinations.

John idles, “I don’t know that I have.”

“You know, like a sick dog. Sometimes when they’re mean, you’ve gotta put ‘em down.” Ambrose leans against the front pillar of the porch and takes a drag of his cigarette. “Say, if a dog bites your daughter. Can’t have a dog biting your kid, you know?”

He can feel Ambrose’s eyes on him. It’s a pointed statement. Willfully ignoring it, John replies, “I’ve never had pets, growing up.”

Ambrose makes a hm noise. “Dunno if I can like a man who never had a dog before.”

“My parents were strict.”

Another hm. He shrugs, takes another drag, lets it slip out through his nose rather than his mouth. He looks like a lazy dragon; like he’s going to wind his scaly body around and around the house until he’s strangling it. Elliot’s rubbing off on me, John thinks absently.

“I want my girl happy,” Ambrose says after a minute.

My girl, and maybe you should fuck off, then. “Of course.”

“And Scarlet worries about her,” the redhead continues. “You know, that she won’t find someone good for her. I told you, I like you. I just wanna make sure you’re—you know. Not a bad influence on her.”

John doesn’t say anything. Instead, he takes a long inhale of his own cigarette, in an effort to excuse his responsibility to respond.

“Ambrose, we’re leaving,” Scarlet announces from the doorway once she swings the door open. “Put that dreadful thing out.”

Ambrose flashes a crooked smile. He puts the cigarette out in the ashtray and elbows John like they’re friends. “Ball and chain summonin’ me.”

He can’t relate. He likes when Elliot gets bitey with him, literally and figuratively.

Elliot’s come out, too, having taken a few minutes by herself in the kitchen earlier and then changed into some pajamas—little shorts and an oversized t-shirt. She lets Ambrose hug her like she didn’t say fuck you viciously at a dinner table to him, and then kisses her mother’s cheek and says, “Drive safe.”

She turns back into the house before they’ve even left the driveway, and John follows dutifully. The house is finally quiet; he thinks, at last, at last, I have her all to myself, not because he doesn’t feel like the time they had pre-dinner wasn’t good (it was) but because it wasn’t enough. It’ll never be enough, he thinks.

“So glad he’s gone,” Ellliot murmurs, collapsing onto the bed, rubbing her face. John hums his agreement, working out of his jeans and button-up, planting a warm kiss on the inside of her thigh before he scoots her up onto the bed all the way and settles over her. The blonde looks worlds more relaxed, now—he knows how important it is for her safe home space to be just that—and when he brushes some loose hair from her eyes, her lashes flutter prettily.

He buries his face against the warmth of her neck; kisses there, feels the jump of her heartbeat when he drags his teeth against her pulse-point.

“I’ve dreamt about this,” she says breathlessly. John lifts his head from where he had been busying his mouth and narrows his eyes playfully.

“Dreamt about me driving you batshit during a family dinner?” he asks. “Or was it the part where I told you I was going to bend you over the counter?”

“No, you idiot,” she groans, blushing. “Just having you here.” True to form: “Dumbass.”

“You are so mean to me.”

“Am not,” she replies petulantly. “I am the nicest. The nicest, most flexible—”

“Hm.”

“I was saying, having you here with me. Instead of having to—you know. Run back and forth all the time. It’s hard with work and everything.” She plays her fingers against his chest, tracing ink that she’s memorized with her mouth several times already. “I’m not used to it. Wanting someone around all the time.”

John ducks his head to kiss her. There’s less urgency in this one, this time; but she parts her lips just the same, and sighs against him, and arches up a little when he digs his hand beneath the hem of her shorts, and he says, “I’ll be here whenever you want me to, Ell.”

“Yeah?” She’s breathless, and her eyes are bright, and she rolls her lower lip between her teeth for a second. “Do you mean that?”

“Of course,” he rumbles. He leans in and grins against her skin. “Especially if we’re still gonna negotiate about that—”

“John, shut up and kiss me.”

“Only if you call me Freddy Fuckaround again.”

She laughs, this time, and the sound is so warm and genuine in an evening that has been filled with force pleasantries that John thinks he might like to hear it all over again. Elliot squirms up against him and kisses his cheek and then his jaw, and combs her fingers through his beard.

“Anything,” she promises, “except for daddy.”

#my writing #far cry 5 #fc5 fic #ch: elliot honeysett #ch: john seed #otp: death keep off; i am your enemy #far cry 5 fic #john seed/female deputy #no cult au #it took me like a month but: here it is #i am not taking criticism at this time please and thank youuuuu #this is entirely a self-indulgent piece of work meant to comfort me while i am under duress : ^ )

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