It started with a birthday card a month later. A bright yellow envelope tucked in with bills and junk mail, addressed to her in flourishing handwriting, the return address that of one Killian Jones. Emma didn't remember telling him her birthday was coming up. She also couldn't remember the last time someone other than David had given her a birthday card, and his always looked like he had spent fifteen minutes patiently waiting while a group of nanas selected cards for their grandsons just to snag something from the prim and proper section.
The one from Killian was the exact opposite. The cover instructed her to put her finger through a hole in the card and when she opened it, the finger became the huge schlong of a nude Chippendale's dancer. He'd signed the card "Sugar Dick." She sent one back – no occasion needed - that read "I Fuck on the First Date" and signed it "Beej Queen."
From there, it became a thing to pass the time between proper dates (and thoroughly improper dates). Killian would stick something in the mail first thing Monday morning. Emma had started to time her patrol of downtown where the Post Office was located on Wednesdays just after breakfast, returning to drop her own envelope in the mail in the afternoon.
When he was caught in a particularly time consuming leg of the task force put together to dismantle Dreamshade in the wake of Gold's death, he skipped the usual lewd card in favor of something handwritten on a Bangor PD notepad. It just so happened to coincide with the vandalization of play structure unofficially dubbed "The Castle" down at the Storybrooke waterfront. Emma didn't mind skipping the drive a few towns over to an adult store with a surprisingly large greeting card section to pick up their regular manner of correspondence. Not when she was busy trying to interview dwarfy little hooligans whose uppity parents swore would NEVER disrespect the town by tearing down a monument. Between dead-end meetings with special snowflake little shits, she managed to scrawl a note on a Post-It, signed with a flourish and an impulsive "xoxo" that she stressed about for days.
Emma barely managed to keep her eye roll in check when Killian's notes started arriving written on fucking personalized stationery – a scrolling navy blue "KJ" embossed over a gold anchor. Emma toyed with the idea of upping her paper game from the yellow notepad she used at work but she already felt like they were slipping into some other realm where maidens were courted by handsome men who wooed them with ribbons and promises to write while they were away at sea. Killian could deal with her less than ceremonial parchment purchased in bulk at Office Max.
When they weren't in each other's company fully embracing all of the unspoken pleasures of Netflix and chill in her small apartment over the winter or grilling on the back deck of his house in the early spring when they could fit in a visit (before fully embracing all of the unspoken pleasures of Netflix and chill) the letters became both catharsis and confessional.
Killian's written word was just as flowery and expressive as his speech and Emma envied his ability to pour his heart out when the best she seemed to be able to pull off was a light drizzle. He wrote about everything from his job and how important it was for him to honor his brother's memory, to wild anecdotes about playing wingman for Will and the projects he had in mind for the cabin in the woods he'd been slowly fixing up.
By the way, this is your formal invitation to come spend a weekend there with me, Swan.
That's how Emma found herself swearing profusely at the tail end of an hour's drive, crumpling the piece of paper containing directions to the property in Killian's elegant scrawl against the gearshift as she put her car into reverse once she realized she'd missed the turnoff. The cabin was in a clearing but almost completely hidden from the road. Rolling past trees on what she hoped was the driveway, she could see Killian sitting on the large porch, a look of amusement on his face. She pulled up behind his truck and got out, shouting at him over the top of the Bug.
"You can't miss it, my ass!"
He threw his head back and laughed, making a show of getting out of an Adirondack chair and stretching, a strip of belly peeking under the hem of a well-worn tee shirt that hugged his biceps. Like most Mainers, Killian adopted the "sun's out, guns out" motto the second the snow melted even if the temperature was barely above fifty.
"Trust me darling, your ass has been thoroughly missed." He trotted down the steps. "That was quite a recitation of curse words you sent ringing through the woods. You kiss the devilishly handsome man in your life with that mouth?" Stopping just short of his booted feet touching hers, he tapped his lips with a finger.
"Yeah, I do. Have you seen him?" Emma went to peek around his shoulder, squeaking as Killian's fingers dug gently into her ribs. "Fine." Up on tiptoes, she brushed her mouth against his, sliding her hands into the back pockets of his well-worn jeans. It was all the encouragement he needed to trace the seam of her lips with his tongue. She toyed with him, waiting until it tickled unbearably before kissing him back.
In a less private setting, adult Emma might have been embarrassed to be making out with a ridiculously hot guy. One who had already executed his patented move, pinning her against the car door after kicking it closed. Killian's hands were braced on the low roof, hips working in a dirty grind that had her more breathless than his talented tongue could do alone. But teenaged Emma hadn't had a boyfriend - hot or otherwise - or a car, so she indulged in crossing off a relationship bucket list item that hovered chronologically somewhere around the still-unfulfilled "get felt up at the movies" and "go to prom."
She was just about to move her hand from the back of his pants to the front to make things interesting when he pulled away, bussed her cheek and stepped to the front of the car, lightly slapping the hood.
"Let me get your bags."
"Chivalrous of you, Jones, but that would be 'bag' in the singular. And the lever for the trunk is broken." Emma opened the driver's side door, flipping the seat forward and grabbing her duffle, huffing when Killian came and took it from her. She followed him up the new-looking steps and onto the porch as he made his way toward the front door to the cabin.
"Always a gentleman, love. Remember?" He punctuated his statement by letting the screen door close in her face and she flipped her foot up to kick him in the ass once she'd yanked it open and stepped inside, crowding behind him.
The cabin wasn't large by any means. The walls were pine, save for the exposed brick behind a small wood burning stove. A dining table sat to one side of the door and a sitting room to the other. Stairs went up to a catwalk loft. Despite the treed lot, there was sunshine aplenty in the small space and Emma found herself falling in love with it a little at first sight.
Much like its owner.
She'd been doing that lately – trying those scary thoughts on for size. They were coming with more frequency and less deep-seated panic, running through her head as she lay in his bed watching him sleep in the early hours before making the drive back to Storybrooke or when she sat at in her tiny apartment, contemplating for the first time a future with somebody.
"Earth to Emma." Her duffle was gently swung into her leg and her eyes snapped to Killian's. "I said I'm going to put this upstairs in our room then I'll start dinner."
Our room.
She liked the sound of that more than she thought she ever would.
"Tell me about the best place you've lived." Killian was leaning back in his chair, the front legs off the ground. He patted his stomach contentedly as if he'd eaten too much. The truth of the matter is he'd watched Emma hoover her plate of freshly caught fish and potatoes, and casually insisted she take seconds even though doing so left him without another serving for himself. Cooking for her gave him no small amount of satisfaction, as did seeing her get her fill. Besides, there was hot chocolate and fireplace s'mores for later.
She speared a potato and pointed it at him before popping the bite in her mouth, talking around it.
"In the system or out?"
There had been a time he'd wondered if her past would be off limits to him. If everything there was to know about Emma Swan was in a small box, he'd all but run over it with a goddamned freight train by using her orphaned status as a means to hurt when he'd found out she knew details about Liam's shooter. Rubbing salt in that wound was a 100% dick move as he'd written in one of his letters after receiving one from her in which she'd mentioned a foster family. Emma had teased him about his multi-page apology letter, giving him shit about contributing to deforestation and reminding him a fresh start was a fresh start.
Her willingness to start over and wipe his slate clean of sins wasn't something he was certain he deserved but he'd done his damnedest to not make her regret it since.
"Either one? Both? The lady may choose." With a flourishing hand gesture, Killian waited, thinking she'd lived in so many places it would take a minute. He was surprised when Emma barely paused.
"In the system, it was Ingrid. She always had ice cream in the freezer. She'd give me spending money every week like a real mom. We'd go to amusement parks. For a while, I'd hoped she would adopt me. She was alone, too, estranged from her family. But then she got sick. I was shuffled to a different foster home and last I heard, she'd…moved on to a better place."
Killian reached across the table and squeezed Emma's hand.
"I'm sorry, love. That you lost her."
Emma smiled wider than the topic at hand might warrant, and he wondered if she was remembering late-night bowls of butter brickle and allowance spent trying to win a cheap stuffed animal from an arcade claw game.
"Since I aged out, the place I'm in now."
"You mean the place that has no food? Like, ever? Even when you know guests are coming?" Killian's stomach dropped as Emma shoved her foot against his chair and he almost went over backwards, her laugh indicating she wasn't really mad.
"It got you to buy me groceries and cook, didn't it?"
"Darling, frozen pizza from the gas station because nothing in your quaintly miniscule town is open past seven o'clock hardly counts as cooking. And we burned it anyway."
What started out in the kitchen as an impromptu lip sync and a teasing, mimed striptease to Ginuwine's "Pony" on Emma's part turned to a quickie on her couch that hadn't been quick enough. The charred pizza was inedible and they'd kept their hand to themselves as one of the four he'd bought her for future meals went into the oven.
"So what's so special about your apartment now?"
"Aside from the landlord's inability to install a functioning smoke alarm? Because that's pretty special."
Emma stood, gathering their plates and headed into the kitchen. Over the last few months, they'd fallen into a pattern of he cooks/she cleans, and he'd quickly discovered that trying to share any of her side of the burden got him swiftly kicked out of his own kitchen.
"Storybrooke has felt more like home than anyplace else." He could hear her plug the sink and turn on the faucet before walking back to the table to grab the serving platter and bowl. "I mean I really appreciated my first place. It was an absolute hovel but it was mine. No sharing a room or the hot water, and my address wasn't the luxurious backseat of that vehicle parked outside. I was broke as all fuck-out, taking a bus, the train and another bus to a job that paid peanuts. But I was free. Now I'm free, have decent enough paying job and a few friends, and I'm living in a building that could be called charming if you have standards with some wiggle room. I could walk to work if I wanted to. It's…convenient."
"And we both know your standards have some wiggle room if you're with me." He stood and took a healthy handful of her leanly muscled butt meat. She shot him a dirty look as he followed her to the sink.
"You're not doing any dishes." The amount of soap she squeezed into the sink bordered on uselessly stingy – a byproduct of one foster home with a woman at the helm who was both intolerant of children who wasted her household products and fast to rain down a rap to the knuckles with a wooden spoon - and he bumped her hip with his as he grabbed the bottle and added more. He crowded her long enough for a good froth of to make its way up the side of the cast iron, swooped a handful of bubbles out and blew them toward her face as she shrieked.
"You are so fucking annoying, Jones." Wiping her face with her sleeve Emma made quick work of her task and wiped a wet hand on the back of his neck before drying off, snapping the towel against his thigh in delayed retaliation.
"You're gonna kiss that and make it better."
"You wish. And you're also not wrong."
The last part was mumbled as she brushed past him and settled lengthwise on the small couch in the sitting room. Killian grabbed two beers, twisted the tops off and went to join Emma, handing her one bottle and putting the other on the tiny table that could fit no more than a few magazines and a single dinner plate. He picked up her feet and slid under them to sit, pressing his thumbs into the arch of her foot. The sound that fell from her mouth made his cock twitch with interest and he considered abandoning his little intel-gathering fishing expedition in favor of another couch romp, this time sans pizza burning. But Emma wasn't often as candid as she was at the moment.
"Have you considered moving?"
"That's the weird thing about Storybrooke – it's like nobody comes in and nobody goes out. The real estate market is almost non-existent. Fuck, Killian. That feels so good."
He was making small circles on her heel and watching Emma melt into the cushions, feeling another twitch behind his zipper at her words.
Down, boy. We're getting somewhere here.
"What about outside of Storybrooke? You'd have to give up the walk to work but for the right place, a commute may not be so bad."
Killian hoped he sounded casual but his heart was racing. He'd be lying if he said he wasn't hoping to get on the subject of her moving – here, with him – at some point during the weekend. The drive time would be an hour for her, an hour and fifteen for him.
Emma's eyes were closed but the corners of her mouth turned down. And there was an awkwardly long pause before she answered.
Fuck.
"Oh, you know me, Jones. Not one for putting down roots and all that." When she opened her eyes again, there was a flash of something in them he could decipher – hurt? confusion? worry? – before her tone turned playful. "Why? Do my non-existent real estate holdings lessen the potential dowry someone may be able to wring out of David someday? I hope whoever it is, he's willing to accept a kitten from the Storybrooke animal shelter and a scarf crocheted by David's wife."
Emma sat up, the heel he'd been rubbing nearly catching him in the nuts, and Killian was momentarily preoccupied with helping her rearrange limbs to avoid being down for the count romantically that evening. When she slid into his lap, knees by his hips and arms thrown loosely around his neck, he let her take over the bang-up job he'd somehow done derailing the conversation.
"I missed you." Emma breathed the words into his ear, tongue tracing the lobe. He wasn't sure if it was that, the press of her breasts against his chest or the subtle roll of her hips or a combination of all three that had him rocking up against her, and he didn't care.
"I missed you, too." Killian reached up to the nape of her neck, threading his fingers through her hair and pulling on it enough to expose the long column of her throat. He kissed and nipped his way up her neck as she slid back on his thighs enough to trace over his thickening cock through his jeans.
"I can tell." Nimble fingers made quick work of the button fly on his old jeans and brushed against him with one less layer in the way. Emma slid off the couch, knees settling just beyond his feet. She took hold of the hems of his jeans and pulled, Killian lifting and shimmying his hips just enough to allow them to slip past his ass. They disappeared somewhere behind her as she knelt in front of him.
The sun had set during dinner, the cabin now bathed in dim light from a scattering of small table lamps. The glow made Emma look soft and ethereal; a stark contrast to the fire in her eyes as she stripped off an oversized sweater to reveal a skintight white tank top, a black lace bra clearly visible underneath. The muscles of her arms and shoulders were impressive and he knew from her letters that she'd been spending extra time in the gym "working off some frustrations, Jones, but I bet you know how that is." And he did. His own workouts had intensified during the months they'd been doing this long-distance thing.
Killian reached out and traced the lace cup through her thin shirt, pleased when she shifted slightly toward his hand. Cupping her fully, he ran his thumb over the nipple, bending down to bite down on her lower lip when he pinched gently and her mouth dropped open in a gasp.
He didn't have time to follow through with a proper kiss. She drew back and ran her palms up his legs, fingertips falling just short of reaching the bulge barely contained by black boxer briefs. Leaning forward, she pressed an innocent kiss on his inner thigh and the look on Emma's face when she lifted her head was downright virginal, her voice sweet.
"There. That's for snapping you with the towel."
"I don't know, Swan. It still stings a bit. Maybe one more?"
Killian barely had time to finish the question before her head dropped and a wet, warm, open-mouthed kiss complete with swirling tongue replaced the faded sensation of the first. She laved and bit, switching from one leg to the other. The first time her nose brushed against him, he jolted, the second time, Killian couldn't help but slip a hand under his waistband. Emma, always intuitive, abandoned the premise of soothing a non-existent towel injury, licking over the softness just under his fist.
Fighting to keep from throwing his head back and losing himself as she alternated between feather-light teases and skillful swipes, Killian forced himself to stay centered.
"Yes, love. Fuck, just like that."
Emma's eyes flitted between looking up at his face and watching his hand as it moved under his boxers. Never shy, he wasn't averse to putting on a little show in bed and touching himself but he'd never been with anyone as turned on by it as Emma. She gave as good a show as she got, too, and if Killian wasn't mistaken, she had a hand pressed between her thighs to ease some of the ache right now.
The other hand was pulling his waistband down, leaving no barrier between her tongue and his heated flesh. A few times she licked his fingers, providing a slickness that made his quickening strokes easier and categorically filthier sounding. Killian felt a pull deep in his belly and, giving his cock one last squeeze, grabbed Emma's chin and sat up. He kissed her dirtily, pushing her backwards onto the floor, kneeling on his haunches between her knees as he stripped off his shirt.
"Darling, you are a marvel." He quickly pulled off her socks. "Up you go." A lift, not unlike the one he'd done for her, and her jeans and panties were gone. Emma's eyes glittered as they traveled down his chest and abs, resting unapologetically between his legs. He reached down and took himself in hand again, fingers curled loosely.
"See something you like?" Killian canted his hips forward, fucking lightly into his fist, and reached out, brushing his knuckles through her slickness. "You're soaked for me, love." He sank down, moving slightly forward and he chuckled as Emma moaned in anticipation of feeling him sink inside her then huffed when he made no move to do so. Instead, he slid the head of his cock against her clit, slowly at first and picking up speed.
An arm flung over her face, Emma keened and he could only stand a few more passes before he had to have her. Cupping the back of her knee and pulling up to his waist, Killian sunk in slowly, only increasing his speed when her other leg came up, ankles locking behind his back. He was consumed by her and had to bite the inside of his cheek to keep himself from whispering in her ear as he moved over her, their foreheads touching.
I love you, I love you, I love you, I love you.
The cabin was a new place, and new for her meant that by default, sleep was hard to come by. It took time to get used to new noises and all houses had their own soundtrack: dripping faucets, creaking heaters and ambient noise from outside.
Emma was on her stomach in the bed – narrower than the gargantuan slab of cloud at his other house – with the sheet pulled down ass-crack low. The sting of the rug burns from the carpet downstairs sucked but she didn't regret how it got there. She'd take crazy great sex with Killian on a bed of goddamned nails, especially if it ended with a makeshift blanket fort in front of the fire and her fill of hot chocolate and s'mores.
Her fingers twisted in the lock of hair that often found its way down onto his forehead, his face loose in sleep. He snuffled a bit and it reminded her of a weekend she'd spent with him over the winter when he'd been battling a cold. Friday night brought a cacophony of snoring so loud she desperately rummaged through his bathroom at two o'clock in the morning looking for earplugs. When he'd worried the next morning that she was coming down with a cold herself, she explained why she looked wrecked. The look on his face and indignant protest had been priceless when she told him he had sawed logs all night. (I don't fucking snore, Swan.) But it didn't beat the pure denial Sunday morning when she held up her phone, playing the video of him snorting and wheezing. (That is NOT me.)
Emma Swan had gone from one-night stands simply for the purpose of scratching an itch to regular, multi-night sleepovers with the type of man who made sure his medicine cabinet was stocked with swimmer's grade earplugs the next time she came to stay. And now she was in his bed thoroughly fucked out, watching him sleep and wondering how she was going to tell him that the reason she didn't want to put down the roots he apparently thought she needed in Storybrooke was because she'd already applied for a job with the Bangor Police Department.