Part 7

Shot and Mouth

Melody looked at him like the next choice was already warming in her mouth.

Then her eyes flicked to the bottle on the table — the clear one he’d almost moved away — and she reached for it when he brought her attention to it. Fingers clumsy. Quiet laugh. Want dressed as thirst.

John caught her wrist gentle, redirected.

He poured a shot glass instead.

Full. Clean rim. Set it in her hand like he’d done it a hundred times in his head. “That,” he said, voice rough. “Sip it. Don’t chase the bottle.”

She nodded, obedient in the way liquor and orgasm afterglow made easy, and lifted the glass.

He moved between her legs.

Couch cushions sliding. Her jeans still tangled at one ankle; he dragged them the rest of the way off and tossed them without looking.

Melody drank as his mouth found her.

Shot glass trembled in her fingers. She took another sip because he’d told her to.

“John—”

“Drink,” he murmured, almost smiling.

She finished the shot in a broken pull, head tipping back, free hand in his hair. Empty glass knocked quiet against the couch. He didn’t stop. Couldn’t. The careful neighbor was gone — only hunger left.

Melody tugged his hair weakly and whispered okay okay, still not telling him to stop so much as asking for air.

He looked up.

Flushed. Mouth wet. Eyes bright with something that looked like relief.

“Another?” he asked, nodding at the empty shot glass, already knowing the night wasn’t done.

Obsession

John was still between her thighs when she giggled down at him — shot glass empty again, eyes glassy, like she’d forgotten the word manageable.

“You’re trying to get me drunk.” She said with a giggle but gave him the glass anyway. She was already gone.

“I know. Is it working?” He asked her as he poured the shot.

The bottle neck kissed the rim. Clear liquor trembling. He held her gaze while he poured, steady, like the night finally made sense.

“A little.”

John laughed.

Low. Rough. Not the polite neighbor laugh. The sound of a man who’d stopped holding back. He set the bottle down hard enough to rattle and pressed the full glass back into her fingers.

“Drink it,” he said, and before she could finish the swallow he was back between her legs.

He’d been aching for this for months. Fence. Mop days. Thin shirts with no bra. Nights he’d watched her sleep under his roof and wanted her with a need that scared him. Paul’s story still sitting in his chest. Every hello. Every just tonight.

“Fuck—John—”

“Say it again.” Voice muffled against her. Obsessed.

He told her all of it then: how he’d stared at her since the first day, how he’d recorded her, how he’d watched her sleep in his house and wanted her.

He didn’t care if it was too much.

She was drunk enough. Loose enough. Already gone enough that the confession could live in the room without her running from it.

Melody moaned around the shot, some of it spilling down her chin.

Then he crawled up her body and kissed her.

“Feel that?” He rocked once, hard. “That’s months of not having you — me losing my mind in the house next door.”

Melody’s hands fumbled at his belt, clumsy, eager, gone.

“Tell me you want it,” he said, obsession raw in his throat. “Tell me, Melody. I’ve waited too long to guess.”

Four Years

“Of course I want it, John. I haven’t had sex in four years.” Her speech was slurred but it was honest. That set him off.

Four years.

Empty of anyone under his roof. Paul behind her and then nothing — until she was drunk enough to say it plain. The number detonated in him. Every stare. Every night he’d wanted her alone. She’d been empty of anyone while he’d been losing his mind next door.

He couldn’t hold back anymore.

He didn’t want to.

He had sex with her right there on the couch, with none of the careful neighbor left in him. She clung to him, shot-drunk and honest, and he didn’t slow down until he was finished.

Breath. Liquor. Sex.

Melody laughed weakly, slurred and loose. “That was… a lot.”

John pulled back just enough to see her face — beautiful, his — and brushed hair from her cheek with a hand that still shook — careful, almost tender after all that force.

“Yeah,” he said, already thinking about four years and tonight and tomorrow morning. “I’ve got more.”

Record Button

He reached for the bottle again.

Poured her another one. Clear liquor catching lamplight. Melody held her hand up — a flutter of enough — and he still gave her the glass anyway.

“Drink.”

Certain. Quiet. Shot glass cold against her fingers.

“You haven’t drank anything.”

Slurred. Honest. Noticing him like she always noticed fairness even when she could barely sit up.

“Shhh. The beer was enough. And I can’t get too drunk. Not when I’m on the lookout for Paul. He could be close.”

He meant the Paul part enough for it to sound true — protective, steady, the version of himself she trusted. Fear of Paul flicked back into her eyes for half a second, then gratitude, then she drank.

Suddenly she drank.

But she wasn’t even able to do it without spilling it all over her chest.

She giggled at the mess, glass tipping, gone. John watched the spill like he couldn’t look away.

He got his phone out.

Too busy wiping clumsily at her chest with the heel of her hand, smearing liquor, making it worse. John angled the screen low, casual as checking a text, thumb steady.

He turned the record button on.

Red dot. Quiet capture. Melody drunk and glittering with spilled shot on his couch. He told himself he needed to remember this — her here, her safe under his roof — and the justification sat easy enough to live with.

“Good girl,” he murmured.

He filmed her a second longer, then set the phone face-up on the side table — still recording, mic catching her breath — and leaned back in to her.

Melody sighed, fingers in his hair, not looking at the phone at all.

John smiled against her skin.

Paul could be close.

For now she was here, and that was the only frame that mattered to him.

For the Phone

On the side table the phone kept its quiet red stare — frame holding her flushed face, the couch holding a night he refused to lose.

Melody’s fingers stayed lazy in his hair. “Tickles,” she slurred, giggling.

“Yeah?” John said. “You make a mess, I clean it up. That’s the deal.”

He shoved the shot glass farther away and pulled her to him again. If the phone caught it, fine; he wanted her more than he wanted to hide.

Melody arched. “John—again—”

“Again,” he agreed.

Not the first frantic rush. He watched her face like a man memorizing. Mouth open. Eyes half-shut. Drunk trust spread under him while the Paul excuse still warmed the air enough to keep him sober.

Somewhere a neighbor’s dog barked and John almost laughed — the block could invent whatever story it wanted; it would never invent this: Melody liquor-shiny under him in a house that finally felt awake.

“Tell me it feels good.”

“Feels—ah—feels so good—”

“Louder.”

“Feels good, John—please—”

He gave her please. The phone caught her cry. Caught his name.

“Mine tonight,” he gritted. “Say it.”

“Yours—” Drunk. Easy. People-pleaser even here. “Yours, John—”

That finished him.

After, he stayed draped over her while the recording drank every sound, like leaving was a language he’d forgotten.

Melody mumbled something sweet and senseless into the cushion.

John reached over, ended the recording with a thumb that didn’t tremble anymore, locked the phone, and slid it under a magazine on the table — file saved between grocery lists and old receipts, private, his, a night he intended to keep.

“Sleep here,” he whispered against her ear. Couch. His chest. “I’ve got you.”

She was already drifting, liquor and orgasms dragging her under.

John held her and stared at the dark TV screen, listening to her breathe. A man who’d finally stopped starving. Already hungry for morning. Already wanting to watch her face again when the house was quiet.

Their Bedroom

She passed out.

Mid-sentence almost — breath going slack against his chest, liquor and orgasms finally winning. John expected that much. Shot after shot. A body that hadn’t had sex in four years and a nervous system that had been running from Paul for days. Of course she dropped.

Now he could have the quiet of her — the part she wouldn’t stay awake for.

He got his arms under her and carried her — bridal weight, head on his shoulder. Guest room ignored. Phone scooped from under the magazine on the way past.

He brought her to his bedroom.

Their bedroom — or what he needed it to become.

Beatrice’s perfume in the closet. King mattress that had held ten years of cooling light. John laid her on the bed carefully — centered, hair fanned on the pillow, body sunk into the old indent.

He stared down at her.

Then he confessed, because for once the words didn’t have to survive her fear.

“Ten years. A man cannot be expected to be with a woman for ten years and watch her light burn out the entire time. I loved Beatrice. Still do. But not as much as I love you.”

Phone propped on the dresser. Record button already red. Wide enough to take the whole bed. He wanted the proof of what he felt — for himself. So the morning couldn’t rewrite it into nothing.

“I love you,” he told her slack mouth, and kissed it. “You don’t get to run from this one.”

He had sex with her on the marriage sheets while she was passed out, more than once and in more than one way, whispering Beatrice’s burned-out decade at a face that couldn’t answer. She never woke. The phone on the dresser recorded all of it.

“I’ve thought about this,” he confessed to the recording, to her. “While I sat in church. While I did dishes. While she slept next to me cold.”

Devotion that didn’t wait for permission she couldn’t give.

He didn’t stop documenting.

When it was over he arranged her limbs gently and let the phone take one last quiet look at what love looked like when fear wasn’t in the room to argue.

Only then did he stop the recording.

Only then did he clean her with a warm cloth, careful as a man who’d gone too far and still believed it was love, and pull the duvet over both of them in the bed that still legally belonged to a marriage that had already cooled.

John kissed her temple.

“Ten years,” he whispered into her hair. “You’re worth every one I wasted.”

She slept on.

He stared at the dark ceiling with his hand on her stomach, already aching again at the thought of her face in the morning, and finally let himself close his eyes on the first night the wedding bed had ever felt like his.

Morning

She woke up somewhere she didn’t recognize with a body next to her.

King bed. Wrong ceiling. Light through curtains that weren’t hers. A man’s heat along her back — then the fact of skin on skin, no shirt, no pants, ache between her legs and deeper places she didn’t have words for yet.

She immediately pulled away.

Opened her mouth. Nothing. The same empty quiet as the party, as Paul — shutdown, not strategy. Sheet clutched to her chest. Breath short. Eyes wide and unfocused the way they got when the world rearranged without asking her first. Naked. Sore. In a room that smelled faintly like someone else’s perfume under sex and laundry soap.

John woke up in time to see her confused.

She didn’t know where she was.

She didn’t know why she was naked.

Panic flickering. Autistic overwhelm rising under hangover. The trust from liquor gone; morning had given her only gaps and a stranger’s marriage bed that wasn’t strange to him at all.

John eased his face on purpose.

Face easy. Voice low. No sudden reach. Hands visible on his own side of the duvet so she wouldn’t spook.

“It’s okay.”

Pause. Let it land.

“You’re safe here.”

Her eyes flicked to his face — John, neighbor, the man who’d counted her breath at the fence — and some of the terror downgraded into bewildered shame.

“Sorry. I think we drank too much.”

He said it easy. Shared blame. A shrug built into the words. Not the full map of the night — just too much drinking. Adults. Accident. A landing she could hold.

Melody’s throat worked. She looked down at her own bare shoulder, at the sheet, at the indent of a bed that clearly belonged to a couple. Guilt crawled onto her face plain as daylight — Beatrice. The child. Family she didn’t want to destroy. Herself for waking up sticky and naked beside a married man.

He could see the guilt on her face.

He did not like that.

Guilt meant she’d pack and leave. John shifted closer by an inch only, still not touching, and made his voice warmer, almost wounded on her behalf.

“Hey. Look at me. You didn’t do anything wrong.” Clean. Direct. “You were scared. Paul. The drinks. I should’ve stopped us sooner. That’s on me.”

He kept the night small enough for her to hold. Left the rest outside the sentence.

Melody’s eyes shone. “Your wife—”

“Is at her mom’s. She left. Remember?” Gentle. “You’re not homewrecking a happy house, Melody. You’re a guest who had a rough night. That’s all this has to be.”

For her. For now.

He reached slow for the edge of the sheet and tugged it higher around her, covering more, careful with her the way she needed. “Bathroom’s through there. Towels are clean. I’ll make coffee. You can take the guest room again if this bed feels weird. No pressure.”

Escape hatches everywhere. Guilt had nowhere clean to sit except on him — and he was willing to take it if it kept her from running.

Melody nodded, small, still pale, still not understanding the full map of her own body, but the sharpest edge of panic blunted. She slid off the mattress wrapped in the sheet like a dress and hesitated at the bathroom door.

“John… did we…?”

He held her gaze and gave her the version that would let her breathe.

“We got carried away. You’re safe. I promise.”

She disappeared into the bathroom.

John sat alone on the ruined wedding sheets, listened to the shower start, and steadied his face with the back of his hand. Coffee next. Careful words next. Whatever it took to keep her under his roof one more morning, one more night — not because he was playing a game, because he believed she belonged here, and he would not hand her guilt a reason to leave.