Rick goes to the Rhees' house and picks up Carl and Judith. He's still slick and shaking from his orgasm, lube trickling down the inside of his thighs. Maggie answers the door with a tired smile, holding Judith by the hand. Glenn is asleep on the couch in a ridiculous position.
Rick snickers. "They wear you out?"
"Glenn's gonna have his hands full when the baby comes," Maggie says with a laugh.
"Daddy!" Judith rushes toward Rick and latches onto his leg.
"Hey there." Rick touches a hand to Judith's head, pushes his fingers through her hair. It seems wrong somehow to touch something so pure after he's been freshly fucked like a cheap whore.
Carl emerges and squeezes past Maggie through the door. "Hey. You were gone a long time," he says, trying to sound casual.
"Yeah, sorry."
Maggie gives Rick a knowing smile.
"Thank you. Again," Rick tells her, embarrassed, like she knows exactly why he's still slightly out of breath. "I mean it."
"It's no problem, Rick. You have a good night." Maggie starts to close the door, whispers, "Bye, Judith!" and waves at her before it closes.
Rick drives them home in guilty silence. Judith is already falling asleep, but Carl sits in the passenger seat with his arms folded over his chest, like he is very disappointed in his father.
The silence is suffocating, accusatory, and Rick can't stand the way it's boiling him alive. "Everything okay?" he asks.
Carl takes a moment. "Yeah. I'm just tired. And Glenn sucks at Call of Duty." He glances over at Rick. "Where'd you go?"
"Out."
Carl makes a scoffing noise, because both of them know if Carl gave a vague answer like that Rick wouldn't be having any of it. "Cool." The sarcasm is strong in this one.
When they get home, Rick doesn't have any trouble putting Judith to bed, mostly because she's already asleep when they get there. Carl is a bit more difficult. As Rick leaves Judith's room, he sees a light on inside Carl's bedroom, probably the fluorescent glow of the laptop screen. The door is cricked open a sliver, and Rick knocks first, because he and Carl have a pretty good 'don't ask, don't tell' policy when it comes to Carl's internet usage, and he doesn't want to walk in on anything he'll want to later unsee.
"Carl?"
"What?"
Rick edges the door open. Carl's not masturbating or looking at anything unsavory—Rick's own guilty conscience fucking with him—just scrolling through his Facebook feed.
"Ten more minutes," Rick says, tipping his chin towards the computer. He feels like he's relying on outdated authority here, because if Carl knew Rick had fucked himself on Negan's fingers not thirty minutes ago he wouldn't listen to anything out of Rick's mouth ever again. And would possibly find a less dysfunctional family to live with, a family with a perky mom and a boring dad who wears a tie and works in a cubicle and definitely doesn't let his son's baseball coach finger his ass.
Carl rolls his eyes and says, "Okay."
As Rick heads down the hall to his own bedroom, he passes by a photo of himself, Lori, Carl, and Judith on the wall, possibly the last photograph ever taken of the four of them together. Lori's eyes seem to scald him as he walks by.
When Rick settles into bed after a shower, he sees Negan's filthy smirk tattooed across his eyelids, flashing in neon whenever he blinks.
Rick doesn't see Negan until Tuesday night. He's lying in bed about half past midnight, restlessly turning over in bed and squeezing his thighs together to temper his raging cock. Negan has unlocked some animal, lustful side of Rick he'd thought was hidden away, stuffed in the recesses of his mind like a box of old clothes in the attic. He hasn't felt sexual desire in so long; all his pent-up kinks and needs have been unleashed in a radioactive burst potent enough to take out a whole town.
He's palming himself through his shorts when he realizes how ridiculous this is. He has a fuckbuddy—that's what they're called nowadays, right? He doesn't have to rub one out to fantasies like a basement-dwelling loner; he can have sex with an actual person. That's a thing he can do now that he and Negan have their little arrangement.
He reaches for his cell phone lying on the night table.
Rick Grimes is about to make an honest-to-God booty call.
He opens up a new message, his heart pounding in his ears. He's never explicitly requested sexual favors before; sex has always been something that just sort of happened in the moment. Asking "hey, can we bang?" is a bit of a mood-killer, and scheduling it (which they'd done the first time Lori tried to get pregnant) takes all the arousal out of sex and turns the act into a chore.
Rick stares at the blinking cursor and tries to think of something witty and casual to say. Nothing comes, so he just writes what he's thinking: You awake?
He hits send before he can panic and rewrite the same sentence in twenty different ways.
Negan is typing, and Rick's heart gallops in nervous excitement, and okay he's taking too long for a simple yes or no oh God why can't Rick have nice things for once in his miserable life—
(12:34 A.M.)
I could cut a fucking diamond with my cock right now get your ass over here
Well then.
Rick throws on a pair of jeans, stuffs his phone into his pocket, and finds his shoes. He has a brief moment of parental guilt for leaving the house unprotected, but there hasn't been a murder in King County in four months, and that was the result of a drug deal gone bad. Carol sees everything—she'll probably see Rick sneaking out of his own house and have some stern questions for him tomorrow. No one's stupid enough to break into the sheriff's house. Rick won't even be gone that long. He might as well be running up to the grocery store to buy milk.
Rick has to stop himself from rubbing at his swollen cock on the drive to Negan's apartment. If he can just keep it in his fucking pants... It really doesn't help that the seat vibrates against his ass. He grips his hands around the steering wheel as though he isn't going to fucking burst into flames. Christ, it's like someone's rubbing the crotch of his voodoo doll.
Finally, he makes it to Negan's place, and he tries to knock in a way that doesn't let on how goddamn turned on he is, and Negan opens the door, grins at him, wearing only a pair of black boxer-briefs so tight they make Rick momentarily choke on his own saliva, and this shit is on.
Negan yanks Rick inside and guides him to the bedroom while pulling Rick's t-shirt over his head, discarding it somewhere on the hallway floor. He steers Rick into the room, and Rick's working on the buttons of Negan's shirt until Negan turns him around and pushes him against the bed in an effortlessly choreographed move. Rick's face and chest are shoved into the mattress, his jeans sliding down his hips, and Negan pushes in, because he knows Rick can take it, knows Rick's already wide open for whatever he wants to do, and Rick groans, because it's so fucking good to be taken apart like this.
"Goddamn, you're tight," Negan growls, a hitch in his voice like he's just as fucked as Rick. "And you're all mine." He's clutching Rick's hips hard enough that he'll have bruises later, his rhythm quick and rough, and Rick's clawing at the sheets and rutting into his thrusts. "I get to fuck your pretty little ass day or night, huh?"
Rick slurs affirmation into the sheets; it's hard to say no to that when Negan's shoving into him just right, cock twitching and pulsing inside of him.
Negan is bent over Rick, hot breath fogging over the back of his neck, and every once in a while his beard will scrape skin, and Rick will shiver, his cock tightening and twitching and leaking.
Negan buries himself deep, grunts a noise that's raw and a little lost, and absolutely fucking ruins Rick Grimes. Rick smothers a moan into the mattress. Negan is hot and messy inside of him, and there's no way he's lasting after that. Rick shudders his way through it, his hips jerking recklessly as he tries to ride out his orgasm. He shakes and squirms, squeezing his thighs together when Negan slides out.
"You're a hell of a lay," Negan says, catching his breath. He's still holding Rick's hips, albeit gentler now, and Rick feels like melting into the bed and calling it a night. "You just can't wait to give it up for me, Rick."
"I've never—It's never been like that before," Rick gasps.
"I told you I'd rock your fuckin' world." There's a snap of elastic, and Rick turns his rubbery body on its side to catch a glimpse of Negan clad in those unholy black shorts (seriously, Rick might have just discovered a deeply-buried fetish). "I don't make promises I can't keep." His body is ri-goddamn-diculous, like he spent a lifetime as an action film star and only recently starting going to pot. There's still a decent amount of tone to him, a burly sort of tightness that Rick is oddly aroused by. And then there's the tattoos and the dark, wiry body hair, which apparently is also a thing that gets Rick going.
When the hell did he get so thirsty for cock?
Negan glides through the open mouth of the bedroom door, and Rick sits up carefully, because his insides feel bruised and shaken up. "Where're you going?" Though he doesn't mind the view; Negan's ass is a thing to be treasured. There should be a monument dedicated to it.
"Might as well kill some time before round two."
"You want—Again?" Rick sputters out. Negan might have fucked Rick's brains out, as well as his fine motor skills, and possibly all the energy he'll have for the rest of the month. He'd really like to curl up in the bed and take a five-year nap. Maybe when he wakes up he'll feel like moving again.
"Don't tell me all that was just a show for my benefit," Negan says, disappearing down the hallway.
Rick climbs off the bed, and his shaky legs give out from underneath him. He clatters to the floor like a clumsy ox.
Negan's head appears in the doorway. "Je-hee-sus, you're a fuckin' wreck," he laughs as Rick picks himself and his dignity up off the floor.
Rick pulls up his jeans and prays for the earth to swallow him.
Negan leans his weight against the doorframe. "You're not gonna stick around for sloppy seconds?" He clicks his tongue, shaking his head. Rick vaguely recalls his shirt ending up in the hallway, so he moves closer to retrieve it, but Negan blocks his path. "That's too bad, 'cause I was gonna open up my bag of tricks. I was gonna suck your cock, Rick. Would you like that? Yeah, I bet you would. Now, I don't do that shit for just anybody. But you, sir, are special."
Rick wants to speak but finds his mouth has gone dry. Over the past two years, "being alive" and "being happy" were two circles in his life's Venn diagram that rarely, if ever, overlapped. But this situation, as fucking bizarre as it is, Rick finds actually makes him happy. He likes having someone who doesn't judge him for all the freaky shit he apparently digs in bed. Someone who doesn't expect intimacy Rick isn't ready for. Someone who doesn't look at him with pity or treat him like a delicate flower. Someone who's been through the same hellscape of grief and loss.
And it doesn't hurt that Negan is wickedly hot and loves pushing at Rick's edges.
Rick opens his mouth, closes it, tries again. He tries to keep his eyes forward, but there's so much of Negan to look at. "I—I have to get back. I left them..." He's a terrible parent. Who allowed him to make decisions?
Negan looks amused and pleased by Rick's resolution—resolution which would be admirable if Rick hadn't left his children alone in the house so he could get his ass pounded by a leather daddy. "No shit?" Negan lets out a low whistle. "You got it bad, Sheriff. Why don't we make things a little easier and I'll come over instead?" If Negan expects Rick to actually answer that, he doesn't let him, giving him a wry grin. "Oh, right, you yowl like a wildcat in the sack! And we wouldn't want Carl hearing any of that. Poor kid probably has enough nightmares."
Rick's certain his face is the shade of a tomato.
"Well, that's what gags are for, right?"
Rick cannot let himself think about that or he's going to have another wildly troublesome boner. He takes a deep breath, lets it out. "I have to go," he says, and Negan lets him pass.
"That's a shame, Rick, but damn if I'm not impressed by your willpower."
Rick picks his shirt off the floor, pulls it over his head. "Don't be."
"You're not like the others," Negan says, following Rick to the door.
Rick glances at him over his shoulder. "There are others?"
Negan grins. "My, my, sir, I do believe you're jealous."
"Keep dreamin'," Rick snorts with a laugh.
"My point"—Negan snags his fingers in Rick's belt loops and tugs him closer, because what is personal space anyway?—"is all those other suburban dads with their mid-life crises and receding hairlines and sagging man-tits, they wouldn't have the balls to do what you're doing. Hell, they don't even have the balls to confront me like you did that day, 'cause they don't wanna see me shut that shit down in front of their wives."
"Like you said, I don't scare easy," Rick says, wriggling free from Negan's hold.
"See you next time, Rick."
The drive home is quiet and pensive, like a four-wheeled walk of shame. Rick keys in quietly, and suddenly he's a teenager again sneaking in past curfew. There are no broken windows, no signs of a break-in. The house is, as far as Rick can tell, undisturbed. He breathes a sigh of relief that's too loud in the stillness.
There's a sound from upstairs, wood groaning underfoot, and Rick reflexively reaches for the gun that isn't holstered on his right hip. But peering around the corner and down the staircase is Carl, looking half-asleep and very confused that he's just caught his father sneaking into the house.
He's also holding Judith, which is a bit of a surprise.
"Dad?"
Rick isn't sure what to say here, so he just says nothing.
"Did you go out?"
Rick nods, says, "Yeah," in case Carl can't see him very well in the darkness. He climbs the stairs. "Everything alright?"
"No," Carl sneers. "She fell out of her bed and hurt herself."
As Rick gets closer, he can see Judith has her face buried in Carl's t-shirt, can hear her soft blubbering whimpers. He reaches for her, but Carl sort of turns away.
"Oh, now you care?" Carl snaps, his voice low and seething. "What are you doing, leaving us alone in the middle of the night? What would Mom think?"
Rick feels something inside himself shatter. Carl inherited a lot of traits from his mother, including her tendency for low blows and cutting remarks intended to fatally wound.
"I didn't think I'd be gone that long," Rick says lamely.
"No, you just didn't think." Carl makes a disgusted sound and hands Judith off to him. "Take her." Before Rick can protest, Carl stomps off to his room and shuts the door.
Rick looks at his daughter, her cheeks red and splotchy from crying, and if he ever needed a sign that this arrangement with Negan is wrong, here it is in huge fucking neon letters.
"I'm sorry," Rick murmurs, holding her close. Judith wraps her tiny arms around his neck, as though fearing he'd let her fall. He rubs her back to soothe her and makes his way into her bedroom. "Your mom wouldn't like me very much anymore if she saw me," he says, gently laying her back into bed. "I don't either."
Judith is fading fast. Rick brushes a hand over her hair, thumb gliding over her cheek. He watches her eyelids droop and eventually close, watches her breathing even out as she falls asleep. She is too pure, too perfect, and Rick hates himself.
Rick takes his phone out of his pocket and stares at the screen for a moment before composing a text to Negan: I can't come over again. I need to be home more. I'm sorry.
Negan shoots a reply a minute later: You're breaking up with me over text? Pussy.
Rick sighs.