Disclaimer: Oh, please. If they were mine, I'd shout that from the rooftops.


Murdock loved the taste of women.

Medications were a bitch. The commercials on TV that listed potential side-effects of whatever medication they were hawking? The ones that normal people rolled their eyes at and announced that if the med caused all those sorts of problems, why in the hell would anyone even think of taking it? Those medications.

Murdock kept his mouth shut when guys made those comments. As crappy as those side-effects could be, he knew why.

The drugs he was on weren't advertised on TV, but lots of those side-effects were the same.

The worst part about it was he also knew the reasons those side-effects came about. Dry mouth? Anticholinergics blocking acetylcholine. Sensations of bugs crawling on your arms? Over-stimulation of serotonergic receptors. Erectile dysfunction? Increase of phosphodiestrerase means too much vasoconstriction, which means no erection.

But knowing didn't help.

He'd learned to live with it. All of it. He drank lots of water, didn't drink much alcohol (which would exacerbate the side-effects), minimized scratching even when the nerves in his forearms were firing so much he could barely stand it, and didn't talk about his junk. Don't ask, don't tell applied in lots of different situations.

Plus he occasionally found it difficult to get a prescription for anything that countered that embarrassing side-effect. Lots of the doctors seemed to think that if he was crazy enough to need anti-psychotics, there was no call for him to be having recreational sex like everybody else.

It wasn't the greatest life—no man wants to admit that his equipment wasn't up to snuff 80% of the time he wanted it to be—but the alternatives were worse. Stop taking the meds so he could get it up and that's a ticket back in the psych ward, being forced to take the meds and still not being able to get it up. No way.

So he compensated for it.

He didn't pick up women as frequently as Face—was there anyone who did? Not only did he not have the all-encompassing charm that the conman exuded, there was also the constant worry in the back of his rational mind that he needed his drugs to keep him on an even keel. Missing some because he had a sleepover at a woman's place wasn't a pleasant experience. There hadn't been many times in his life he was overcome by enough lust to forget all the shittiness of his existence without meds.

But there were occasions that he found himself with an interested member of the opposite sex. Then, if he wasn't able to score a little blue pill from Hannibal, and it was one of those nights that his soldier wasn't going to stand at attention, he had to make up for the fact that he wasn't going to be able give her what another man could.

He could, however, give her the best damn oral sex she'd ever had.

He'd honed his technique—honed multiple techniques, to be exact, depending on factors such as whether or not he had shaved and whether or not she was drunk.

Drunk women didn't need finesse. They needed hardcore stimulation to offset the fact that too much alcohol was a downer and made them less sensitive. And although it could take a while to get them off, one orgasm and they were done.

The non-drunks . . . that was his choice, if possible. Since he accompanied Face to lots of clubs and bars, it was rare to find a woman who wasn't; rarer even than the occasional drunk hook up. But it happened once in a blue moon. Then he was able to really shine.

He rocked their worlds.