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sluttywoozi · 3 months

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Nothing Better | lch x reader

A day at the pool is the perfect thing to remind you just how hot your boyfriend is (as if you could ever forget).

Rating: M (18+) | WC: ~5.2k | Pairing: lch x reader | Genre: smut

Warnings: oral r and m receiving, face sitting, fingering, multiple orgasms, prone bone, creampie, breeding kink but just the cum part, cockwarming

Reader Notes: wears a one piece, has a vagina, wap, cries a little

You’re starting to wonder if maybe going to the pool wasn’t your best idea.

It’s not that you don’t like the water - you love to swim - and it’s not that you don’t like the sun (when you have sunscreen on), it’s just that your boyfriend looks a little too good all wet and glistening. You can’t seem to take your gaze off of him, and neither can what feels like half the people here.

You’d be lying if you said you weren’t feeling at least a little territorial, though you know very well that Chan doesn’t have eyes for anyone but you. It’s obvious in the way he keeps glancing over at you from his floatie, checking to make sure you’re still where he left you and smiling softly when he sees that you are.

You’re reading on your tablet, having bought a waterproof case just for this weekend trip, your elbows resting on the ledge and your body submerged in the water. He wanted to get some more sun before it set and you’re trying to avoid the very same, so you retreated to the shady end of the pool while he floated out to the sunny side.

There are children splashing around and shouting but you’ve managed to tune them out, your focus locked on your book as it starts to build up to the climax. You haven’t gotten a lot of reading done so far, not with most of your attention on Chan, but you don’t mind that at all. You like to concentrate on being with him when you’re together, like to stay present and soak in every moment, especially since he started at his new job a few months ago.

He’s been working so hard, putting in long hours and taking on extra projects in an effort to prove himself, but finally, he took a day off and proposed using the long weekend for a staycation. You’re only about an hour from both of your apartments but the hotel is swanky, the beds are cushy, the pool is warm, and you have Chan to yourself.

You can tell he needed the break by the lax set of his shoulders and the unburdened curve of his smile, a stark difference to his demeanor just yesterday. His laughter comes easier too, you can hear it from across the pool as he joins a few kids in a diving contest, tossing neon pool toys into the shallow end and clapping for them every time they burst up with their treasure in hand.

They toss the toys into the deep end and you watch as he cuts through the water, his muscled arms propelling him forward before he dips below the surface. It’s a matter of seconds before he shoots back up, holding four of the neon sticks with one hand and smoothing his soaking hair back with the other.

You know you’re staring but you can’t help it, he’s just so toned and tanned and luscious looking, drenched with pool water and grinning bright enough to overpower the sun. Fuck, why does your boyfriend have to be so hot…

Not that you’re complaining. Far from it, in fact. You know how lucky you are to have found love in someone who’s as beautiful as they are kind, as sexy as they are smart, as handsome as they are funny. Chan is close to perfect, but that’s not why he’s perfect for you.

It’s because he’s the kind of person who will cut short their relaxation time to play games with kids they don’t know. Because he’ll listen to and empathize with your problems before offering to help you find a solution and comforting you if there is none. Because he’s taken the time to learn you inside and out, dedicated himself to loving you and only you, made promises to you and actually fought to keep them.

You trust him with your life, your heart, your body, and you know he feels the same way.

All of that, unfortunately, just makes him even hotter in your eyes.

Hot enough that though you’re nearing the most important part of your book, you’re wondering if you can drag him out of the pool and back up to the room. There are things you want to do to him and you can’t do any of them here.

Thankfully, he’s started to wade over, tugging the floatie behind him and waving at you with an affectionate grin. You set your tablet on the edge of the pool and wave back, beaming as he approaches.

“Hi baby,” he says happily when he arrives, leaning in to kiss your cheek and not even cringing when his lips meet sunscreen instead of bare skin.

“Hi Channie, do you wanna head up soon?” You ask, hoping he’ll catch the undertone of desire in your voice.

He doesn’t.

“Maybe in like an hour? I want to swim some more, is that okay?” He asks so innocently that you don’t have the heart to tell him you want to swallow his cock then ride him into the sunset.

“Sure, yeah, that’s fine,” you nod placidly, pasting on a fake smile and praying he’ll take it for a real one.

He doesn’t.

“What’s wrong?” His brow furrows in concern, his hand wrapping around your upper arm and his thumb brushing over your skin.

“I just- I, um…” You lean in close to him and cup your hand around his ear, whispering, “You look so hot and I want your dick in my mouth, to be honest.”

“Oh,” He breathes heatedly, his hand tightening on your arm before he lets it slip down, his fingers tangling with yours. “We should go then. We should go right now.”

You just barely grab your tablet with your free hand before he drags you over to and up the stairs, pulling you behind him but walking carefully so neither of you slip. You gather your things up quickly, drying off as best you can before he takes your hand again and guides you around the pool to the small lobby of elevators. The kids wave at him as he goes and he distractedly waves back, still ushering you forward.

You think he’d be jogging if the pool rules allowed it.

The air in the elevator is tense, and if the walls weren’t made of glass, you know you’d be pressed up against one of them with his lips on yours. As it is, you can only squeeze his hand while it’s rising, standing next to him as it shoots up to the fifteenth floor and opens with a ding.

“Do you have the key?” He asks urgently, watching as you dig through your bag to find the thin plastic card. You pull it free of the inner pocket and hold it to the mechanism, waiting for it to turn green. As soon as you hear the click of the lock, you’re pushing open the door and tugging Chan through, barely waiting for it to shut to turn and pull him into a kiss.

He tastes like chlorine but you couldn’t care less, all you care about is getting his tongue in your mouth and your hands on his body. His abs tremble under your fingertips with every shaky breath he draws in, and they tense into a six pack when you sink to your knees.

“Baby, you really want to?” He confirms, knowing that your gag reflex is more than a little bit sensitive and wanting to make sure you’re comfortable.

“Yes, Chan, I really want to,” you murmur, your eyes already locked on the growing bulge in his swim shorts as you start to pull them down, letting gravity do the rest of the work. His dick bobs free and you catch it with one hand, your fingers wrapping around the base and squeezing tight as you guide it to your open mouth.

You begin with gentle licks to the head, your tongue dragging over his sensitive skin and lapping at the ridge where it connects to the shaft, your eyes coasting up his body to find his half lidded and already on you.

Now that you know he’s watching, you start to feed his cock into your mouth, moaning when you finally feel the weight of him on your tongue. He echoes you, groaning softly and gazing at you as he reaches the back of your throat. You can’t take him any further, but you know you don’t have to deepthroat him to make it good, not when you’ve made him cum like this before.

He takes in a shuddering breath and rests his hand on your head when you start to bob up and down, swearing and fighting to keep his eyes open as you suction your cheeks around him. You fall into an easy rhythm and let your hand follow your mouth, stroking what you can’t swallow with a tight grip.

You don’t know why you don’t do this more often. Having Chan at your mercy feels almost as good as his cock in your mouth does, and the knowledge that you’re bringing him pleasure is enough to make you feel it too. Your pussy is starting to throb with it, your clit beating in time with your heart as you grip his plush ass with your free hand, pulling him into you and taking him just a bit deeper.

“Feels so good, baby,” he sighs blissfully, his fingers clenching in your hair when you suck up to the tip and swirl your tongue around the head. You hum in response, the vibrations making him groan and tilt his head back, highlighting the tantalizing arch of his neck and the sharp edge of his jawline.

He doesn’t keep his eyes off you for long, his chin tucked to his chest as he watches you lap at the precum seeping out. It’s salty and bitter but you don’t mind the taste, knowing it means you’re doing a good job.

Too good, apparently, because he cups your cheek and murmurs, “Baby, I don’t wanna cum without you.”

Your knees are starting to ache anyway, so you press one last openmouthed kiss to the head of his cock and release him. He takes your hands and helps pull you up off the floor, leaning in and connecting his lips with yours, uncaring of the fact that his dick was just in your mouth.

Chan’s a sweetie like that, though his kiss doesn’t stay sweet for long. He lets go of one of your hands and cups your neck, his thumb pressed to your pulse as he sucks your tongue into his mouth and moans around it.

You’re sure he can feel your heart racing but you’re past being shy about his effect on you, know he loves to feel the physical evidence of your desire for him. He could feel even more if he slipped his other hand into your one piece, but it’s still tangled up with yours and you hate being the one to pull away.

Chan knows this and gently untwines his fingers to grip your hip and steer you to the bed. You’re about to let him tip you back when you remember the fact that you just came up from the pool, pulling away to say breathlessly, “Chan, we’re still soaking wet, we need to get these suits off and hang them up.”

His mouth quirks in a fond half smile in response, the playful roll of his eyes soft and his hands even softer when he uses them to start pushing you toward the bathroom. He practically frog marches you to the sliding barn door, stopping only to swipe his trunks off the floor and working his fingers under the straps of your bathing suit as soon as you step foot on the tile.

You hold onto his shoulders for stability as he peels the wet fabric down, sinking your fingers into his still-dripping hair when he kneels and presses his cheek to your stomach.

“Let’s shower fast, I want you to sit on my face asap,” he sighs contentedly, smooching the soft skin of your belly before rising to his feet with your swimsuit in hand.

You’re struck silent as heat floods your stomach and your cheeks, and he pinches one gently as he laughs, “What, you can be blunt but I can’t?”

“You can be as blunt as you want if you keep saying things like that,” you assure him, reaching over to turn the shower on and fighting back the shiver that threatens to roll down your spine.

“In that case…” He wraps his arms around you and brings you into his chest, warming you with his body heat. “I’ve wanted your thighs wrapped around my head since you climbed into my car in that sundress this morning.”

“Why’d we go straight to the pool, then?” You wonder, mystified.

“You were so excited about your new waterproof case and getting to relax. I didn’t want to ruin the vibe with my dirty thoughts,” he pouts, reaching around you to feel the water and pushing aside the curtain so you can climb into the tub.

“Babe, I have literally never felt more relaxed than I do when you make me cum,” you admit to him as you step under the flow of the shower, tilting your head back to avoid getting your hair wet. “Your dirty thoughts can only enhance the vibe, not ruin it.”

“You promise?” He asks as he joins you in the tub, shielding you from the water. He pumps some body wash into his palm from the wall dispenser before sudsing his hands up and starting to glide them over your body.

You hum happily and murmur, “I promise, Chan.”

Your eyes fall shut but you can still sense him smiling as he scrubs your skin free of sunscreen and chlorine. You feel fresh and clean and slightly dazed by the time he nudges you back under the water before stepping around you and beginning to clean himself off. You wake up enough to wash his back for him, spending an inordinate amount of time on his toned shoulders and digging your fingers into the knots that plague him from hours spent hunched in front of a computer.

He rinses himself quickly and shuts the water off, grabbing a towel from the rack and carefully dabbing you dry before swiping the cotton over his own skin and stepping out of the tub. You know Chan gets out before you so he can catch you if you slip, and you can’t suppress the smile that ticks up the corners of your mouth as you climb over the ledge with his hands holding yours.

He doesn’t release his hold even when you’ve got two feet on the tile, immediately guiding you back to the bedroom and letting go only to hold your hips as you set a knee on the bed and crawl on.

“Don’t get too comfy yet,” he reminds you, leaping up and twisting to land onto his back midway up the bed. It would be funny if he weren’t eyeing you so heatedly, if you didn’t know exactly what’s about to happen.

But with his pretty lips parted and his hands covetous as they reach for you, there’s no mistaking his eagerness for humor. You take in a shaky breath while you shuffle closer, your hands pressed to the mattress as you lift your knee up and settle it on the other side of his neck, leaving you straddling his face.

“Now you can get comfortable, baby,” he says softly, his breath flowing out over your sensitive folds. His eyes are locked between your legs, and as you start to let yourself relax, he lays his tongue out, humming in satisfaction when your pussy finally makes contact with his taste buds.

Chan eats you out often but hardly ever like this, mainly because you find it difficult to completely let yourself go and just feel. You’re always worried about smothering him or being too heavy or if he’s really enjoying it, no matter how much he reassures you.

But there’s something about this time.

Maybe it’s the way his eyes slipped closed as soon as his tongue touched you, like you’re a delicacy he’s privileged to taste. Maybe it’s how he’s gripping your hips and pulling you down, like he wants you to smother him. Maybe it’s the near constant moan vibrating against you, like there’s nothing he’d rather be doing than this.

Whatever it is, you think you finally believe him.

Which is why your thighs untense, letting you rest fully on his face as you bend over and prop yourself up on your elbows, sinking into the feeling.

He just groans in encouragement and wraps his arms around you, digging his fingertips into your skin and urging you to grind. You roll your hips once, whimpering at the sensation of his nose pressing into your clit as his tongue slides inside of you, and that’s enough to get you going.

You set a gentle pace, sliding in little movements back and forth, barely even registering the obscene sounds of Chan’s mouth at work between your thighs. They’re muffled by your body and before long, they become background noise to the ringing in your ears and the rush of your blood pumping in your veins as he devours you.

He doesn’t let up for even a second, shifting his focus instead, his lips wrapping around your clit and sucking in pulses. His tongue taps at the bud incessantly, his moans urgent as if he’s wordlessly begging you to let your release find you.

It’s slow going but you can feel it creeping up on you, your climax rolling in like fog on a chilly morning as you try to beckon it closer in your mind. It pulls you in instead, its blissful vines coiling around you as he whines and whimpers into your pussy.

Finally, the pleasure takes root, blooming within you gently at first before unfurling with ardor, stealing the air in your lungs and the thoughts in your head. Your head falls and your eyes flutter shut, and soon enough, all you can do is kneel there and tremble through the barrage of feelings, the softness of his tongue and the heat of his breath and the reverberations of his groans rendering you helpless.

You’re still shaking by the time you regain the ability for complex thought, and the first thing you do is attempt to climb off of him.

Except Chan doesn’t let you go, he just shakes his head and wraps one arm tighter around your body, bringing the other behind you to prime two fingers at your entrance. He doesn’t even bother speaking, simply grunting around your clit and starting to sink his fingers inside, the slickness of your cunt enough to let them glide.

You melt into him with a moan, reaching one hand down to tangle your hand in his hair and pull as your back arches, trying to guide his fingers to that one spot inside as if he doesn’t always find it on his own.

And find it, he does, his fingertips grazing the erogenous patch and beckoning forth a little burst of arousal that you just know is seeping down his chin. He’ll need another shower after this but you can’t find it in yourself to care, not when he immediately starts building you up again with his mouth around your clit and his fingers buried inside of you.

Your hips respond to his thrusts without your permission, rolling into his every touch, and for the first time, you actually find yourself riding his face. He moves with you, whimpering continuously into your pussy as if he’s feeling your pleasure like it’s his own.

Your head starts to spin, the blaze of white hot euphoria licking at your spine and heating your skin, making sweat prickle where he grips you like a lifeline as he voluntarily drowns himself in you.

Everything zeroes down to the point of connection between your body and his, the only thing on your mind being the high that’s just out of your reach. It’s just a matter of time with his fingers grinding into your sweet spot and his lips wrapped around your clit, with his whines vibrating against you and his skin pressed to yours.

You know he wants you to cum, and that’s part of what’s getting you so close. Chan loves to give you pleasure, views it as both his duty as your boyfriend and his privilege as a man, and he always feels a sense of accomplishment when he can get you there more than once. He’s also just a generous person, a giver, and that doesn’t change when it comes to being with you.

It’s not that you’re not a giver too, it’s just that you know how to take.

You know how to take the bliss he insists you feel, how to take his mouth and his fingers and eventually, his cock. You know how to take everything he wants to give you, and that’s why you work so well together.

It’s like you don’t need words anymore, not when you can read his actions just as well.

And with his actions, he’s telling you to stop thinking and just feel, just let him guide you over that edge, which is absolutely something you can do.

It doesn’t take much at all to clear your mind, a curl of his fingers and a pulse of his lips around your clit sweeping your thoughts away, leaving you muddled with sensation. You hiccup in a breath and sigh out a shaky moan, your thighs trembling on either side of his face as you near the drop off once more.

You let it happen, let him push you off the edge into the deep end and welcome the waves of bliss that wash over you. They’re more powerful than the last, blanking out every word in your brain but his name, all of your focus centered between your legs where he’s still hard at work.

He pushes you through it, digging his fingers into your sweet spot and groaning around your clit as his hand squeezes at your hip. A hot rush of arousal leaves you, and he’s quick to slide his fingers out and open his mouth to catch it.

His tongue swipes at your entrance, dipping in and out as he drinks you down, his body shuddering under yours at the feeling of your fluttering pussy.

By the time it’s over, you can barely hold yourself up. Chan seems to sense this and pulls himself out from under you, gently tugging at your legs until they lay straight with you resting on your stomach.

You feel his touch on your back, a gentle hand rubbing up and down softly as he comes to rest at your side, nosing at your hairline.

“So good, baby. Just what I wanted,” he murmurs to you, and you pick your head up and turn it to face him, blinking bleary eyes at his flawless visage.

“Want your dick in me,” you mumble thickly, watching as his eyebrows furrow contemplatively.

“You’re not too tired?” He questions, and you try to respond but you can only look at his lips and the sheen of you on them.

“So what if I am? Maybe I wanna fall asleep on your cock,” you finally say, half playful, half truthful.

“Like… cockwarming? Would you really wanna do that?” He asks eagerly, and you grin a teasing little grin, happy to have unlocked one of his secret desires.

“Yeah, Chan, I would really wanna do that,” you confirm. “Maybe even today… after you fuck me?”

“Okay,” he beams, pressing a kiss to your nose before springing up with a shocking amount of energy and climbing atop you.

He straddles your hips and sets both hands on your ass, pushing the cheeks apart to expose your pussy to his searching eye. He releases one side to grab his cock and line himself up, slowly beginning to push inside and choking out a breath as he feels your warm wetness wrap around him.

Chan is the perfect size for you, not too big or too thick, but just enough that there’s a slight stretch every single time. You fit him like a glove, like puzzle pieces meant to interlock, and somehow, every time he slides inside of you makes you feel like you’re the home that welcomes him after a long time away.

He bottoms out and it’s like you can finally breathe, even as he stretches himself out on top of you and tucks your hands under his, weaving your fingers together and holding tight.

You’re completely surrounded by him and that’s enough to have you relaxing into the bed, the only muscles activated in your body being the ones holding your ass up for him as he rolls his hips back and sends them forward again.

You love having him this close as he takes you apart, being able to feel his strength in the muscled arms stretched along yours and the toned chest pressed to your back has you wanting him even closer. Given the chance, you just might climb into his rib cage and squeeze right in next to his big, luscious heart. That might be a little much though, so for now you’ll content yourself with being smothered by his perfect body.

The feeling of his dick pressed against your walls to root deep has you reeling, making you thankful for the grip of his hands over yours, the weight of them serving as a reminder that he’s here and he’s got you.

He sets up a smooth, easy tempo, one that reminds you of ocean waves pushing onto and then receding from the shore, filling you with his cock again and again. You miss him every time he leaves but he returns before the emptiness starts to ache, the ebb and flow of him as constant as the tide.

“‘s this what you wanted, baby?” He murmurs into your neck, waiting for your nod to continue to speak. “Gonna let me fill you up? Gonna let me stay inside?”

“Yeah, Channie, want you to fill me up and stay inside me,” you whimper, squeezing your inner muscles around him to emphasize your words, the tight clutch of your cunt making him tremble above you.

“Fuck,” you hear him bite out just before his hips scoop on the next stroke in, the angle allowing his cock to graze your sweet spot. Pleasure zips up your spine, sharp and electric, making your back arch and your pussy clench.

He notices the way you push back into it and begins to aim every thrust there, ensuring that he drags against the internal patch of nerves as often as he can. He’s still going slowly, his movements almost sedate though there’s an intensity to them, one that you know will be enough to undo you.

Chan always gets you there, even on nights where it’s harder to climb that hill, nights where you’re distracted or stressed or anxious. You reach for him on nights like that anyway, knowing that soon enough, he’ll have you so blissed out that you’ll forget what was wrong in the first place.

Nothing could be wrong today, and that makes everything even better, makes his name on your lips taste sweeter, his body on top of yours feel broader, and his cock inside of you hit deeper. It almost feels like he’s reaching the end of you every time his hips buck into yours, the dull smack barely audible with his gasping breaths and shuddering groans in your ear.

The medley of it all has you feeling dizzy, rapturous, like pure affection and desire and devotion are welling up inside you. They’re rapidly running out of room, your chest only so big compared to your love-soaked heart, and there’s little you can do to quell the overflow as it streams from your eyes in tender tears.

You try to swallow down the sob that aches to be let out but your lungs trip on it anyway, and Chan just coos and burrows closer to you with a sweet kiss on the cheek. He knows this means you’re getting close and that he shouldn’t do anything but keep going, though you wonder if he knows that it’s unlikely you’ll cum from just his cock.

He does, of course he does, extricating one of his hands from yours and sliding it down under your body and between your legs. His fingers gather the arousal he’s pushed out with his dick and smear it up to your clit, beginning to rub slow, gentle circles that match the push and pull of his hips.

The feeling is instantaneous, a syrupy burning starting up low in your pelvis before gathering in your stomach, your pussy responding to the sensation by fluttering around him and trying to suck him in deeper.

He doesn’t stop, just maintains his slow and steady pace, patiently working you up to your third orgasm and sucking kisses along the curve of your throat, murmuring to you, “Please cum, baby, please cum for me. It’s gonna feel so good, I know you can do it. When you cum, I’ll cum too, okay? I’ll fill you up with my cum and I’ll stay inside and when we wake up, we’ll do it all over again.”

And what can you do with him begging like that, with his dulcet voice and steadily rolling hips and expert fingers on your clit, except exactly what he wants?

With a whimper you fall to pieces beneath him, euphoria flowing through your veins and dousing your nerve endings, blanking out everything in your mind but his name. It falls from your lips like a spell, like an incantation urging him to shatter with you, the chant constant even as your lungs plead for air.

But it works.

It works and he bursts with a low cry, his cock twitching against your undulating walls, a warmth flooding you deep within as his cum paints your insides white. He trembles above you, the muscles that have been holding him up weakened by pleasure, and soon enough he completely sinks into you, weighing you down to the bed.

“That was so good, baby… Love you so much… Now let’s sleep,” he slurs quietly, just barely shifting to the side so he’s not suffocating you, though he leaves his still hard, still throbbing, still leaking cock buried inside of you.

Normally that would keep you awake, but days at the pool are always draining and you did just cum three times, so you think a little sleep would do you good.

When Chan’s arms snake around you and tug you tighter into his chest, you giggle weakly and murmur, “Love you, Chan,” before letting your eyes slip closed and following him into slumber.

AN: Woohoo!! this started as interlude no. 10 a few months ago but i got like 2k in and lost inspo for it. i picked it back up this week and here we are!

thank you for reading, i hope you enjoyed!! i am eager to know your thoughts and feelings 🙏

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bi-writes · 1 month

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whats wrong with ai?? genuinely curious <3

okay let's break it down. i'm an engineer, so i'm going to come at you from a perspective that may be different than someone else's.

i don't hate ai in every aspect. in theory, there are a lot of instances where, in fact, ai can help us do things a lot better without. here's a few examples:

ai detecting cancer

ai sorting recycling

some practical housekeeping that gemini (google ai) can do

all of the above examples are ways in which ai works with humans to do things in parallel with us. it's not overstepping--it's sorting, using pixels at a micro-level to detect abnormalities that we as humans can not, fixing a list. these are all really small, helpful ways that ai can work with us.

everything else about ai works against us. in general, ai is a huge consumer of natural resources. every prompt that you put into character.ai, chatgpt? this wastes water + energy. it's not free. a machine somewhere in the world has to swallow your prompt, call on a model to feed data into it and process more data, and then has to generate an answer for you all in a relatively short amount of time.

that is crazy expensive. someone is paying for that, and if it isn't you with your own money, it's the strain on the power grid, the water that cools the computers, the A/C that cools the data centers. and you aren't the only person using ai. chatgpt alone gets millions of users every single day, with probably thousands of prompts per second, so multiply your personal consumption by millions, and you can start to see how the picture is becoming overwhelming.

that is energy consumption alone. we haven't even talked about how problematic ai is ethically. there is currently no regulation in the united states about how ai should be developed, deployed, or used.

what does this mean for you?

it means that anything you post online is subject to data mining by an ai model (because why would they need to ask if there's no laws to stop them? wtf does it matter what it means to you to some idiot software engineer in the back room of an office making 3x your salary?). oh, that little fic you posted to wattpad that got a lot of attention? well now it's being used to teach ai how to write. oh, that sketch you made using adobe that you want to sell? adobe didn't tell you that anything you save to the cloud is now subject to being used for their ai models, so now your art is being replicated to generate ai images in photoshop, without crediting you (they have since said they don't do this...but privacy policies were never made to be human-readable, and i can't imagine they are the only company to sneakily try this). oh, your apartment just installed a new system that will use facial recognition to let their residents inside? oh, they didn't train their model with anyone but white people, so now all the black people living in that apartment building can't get into their homes. oh, you want to apply for a new job? the ai model that scans resumes learned from historical data that more men work that role than women (so the model basically thinks men are better than women), so now your resume is getting thrown out because you're a woman.

ai learns from data. and data is flawed. data is human. and as humans, we are racist, homophobic, misogynistic, transphobic, divided. so the ai models we train will learn from this. ai learns from people's creative works--their personal and artistic property. and now it's scrambling them all up to spit out generated images and written works that no one would ever want to read (because it's no longer a labor of love), and they're using that to make money. they're profiting off of people, and there's no one to stop them. they're also using generated images as marketing tools, to trick idiots on facebook, to make it so hard to be media literate that we have to question every single thing we see because now we don't know what's real and what's not.

the problem with ai is that it's doing more harm than good. and we as a society aren't doing our due diligence to understand the unintended consequences of it all. we aren't angry enough. we're too scared of stifling innovation that we're letting it regulate itself (aka letting companies decide), which has never been a good idea. we see it do one cool thing, and somehow that makes up for all the rest of the bullshit?

#yeah i could talk about this for years #i could talk about it forever #im so passionate about this lmao #anyways #i also want to point out the examples i listed are ONLY A FEW problems #there's SO MUCH MORE #anywho ai is bleh go away #ask #ask b #🐝's anons #ai

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centaurisolarflare · 2 years

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König NSFW Headcannons

It’s the quiet ones; it’s always the quiet ones. NSFW, obviously, minors DNI (SFW headcannons here). A lot of x reader babbling because I am down horrendous for this man. Again, this got incredibly out of hand, and I needed to just stop. Enjoy the filth, my loves.

- I wholeheartedly believe this man is amazing at foreplay. Maybe it’s inadvertent, but he wants to experience as much of you as he can for as long as he can. He loves just kissing you and feeling your body move against his, he wants the time to trace over every inch of you. He’s fascinated by the way your muscles and bones move under your skin and he loves mapping out any freckles/moles/marks/scars/etc you have.

- Treats sex like a skill, something he can hone, something he will make himself good at it for you. He catalogs your responses, memorizes your facial expressions, and takes careful note of how each touch affects you. He wants to be deliberate about how he makes you feel; he puts so much effort into learning how your body reacts to him until he’s an expert at taking you apart piece by piece.

- Praise this man. Do it. All the time. Tell him how good he’s doing, how sweet he is, how good he makes you feel, how beautiful he looks. He’ll blush and duck his head, but he thrives on your words.

-- He’ll whine when you grab his jaw and make him look at you. Make him repeat your praise back to you, make him say that he’s so pretty, that he’s such a good boy, make him say he’s yours and yours alone. Make him stumble through the compliments and clench around him when he’s nearly got the words out properly; laugh when he cuts himself off with a gasp and moans and flexes his fingers into your skin, and make him say the praise again.

- Marks. He wants them and wants to give them. He wants dark bruises that are impossible for him to ignore with the way they ache every time he moves his neck. He wants bite marks everywhere and he wants scratches on his back and arms. He doesn’t mind if you make him bleed with your nails or teeth; he wants to keep the stinging feeling for as long as possible. Definitely the type to press his fingers hard against his bruises to feel them hurt and to make them stay longer. When they eventually do fade, he wants you to give him new ones immediately. If you want marks too, he’ll go just as feral on you.

-- Can’t think straight when you unabashedly show off the marks he gave you. Because he knew he was doing then, he knew there’d be marks when he was sucking and biting at your skin again and again. He knew there’d be bruises where he held onto you a little too hard. But you’d moaned so sweet and told him to keep going, to cover you, and how could he have refused? Now, in the light of day, in public, with people around, he can’t help but flinch at the openness you share them with the world. Because people see. Fuck, people stare at the patchwork of mottled bruises and aggravated blood vessels on your neck, your chest, your collar bones. At the line of dark hickeys stretching from just below your ear, down the beautiful line of your throat, across your chest to where they disappear under your shirt. At the clear shape of his fingertips bruised into your hip when your shirt rides up as you reach for something – something you didn’t even have to reach for because he’s right here and the size of a fucking mountain. You just grin and wink when he puts a hand on your side and grabs the thing for you, and he goes beet red because that’s- that’s how you got that bruise in the first place, from his hand sprawled out against you, fingers gripping into your soft flesh, and his head is fuzzy with it as he snatches his hand back. And you go about your business cool as can be, as if you’re totally unaware of the people around and what you’re doing to him. You’re in a grocery store for fucks sake. It’s agonizing and he’s so conflicted because he’s so antsy about the attention, but he also just wants to mark you up even more. People see and they see you with him and they know. They know he did that to you; they know you let him do that to you. They know, and he feels half wild with it, a little drunk with how they know you’re his because you’re showing them you’re his.

-- He likes giving you hickeys even in non-sexual situations too – for example, if you’re sitting in his lap reading, he’s got his nose pressed against your neck and he’s mouthing at the side of your throat and across your shoulders, and you just end up with several bruises sucked into your skin. He just really likes doing it.

- Before being involved with you he actively tried to ignore his body. Being so tall and imposing served him well for his jobs in the military, and his muscles were a product of maintaining that use, but outside of work his build was just something that drew more unwanted attention to him. The first time you got his shirt off you took a stunned moment to step back and sweep your eyes over him, and he was immediately on edge. The nervous feeling, the anticipation of your disapproval, half dissipated when you locked your bright eyes on his with a sharp grin and yanked him down into a hungry kiss.

-- The first time you saw his cock he would have laughed – if he weren’t so nervous – at the wide-eyed, parted-lips look you gave him. He jumped in surprise when you took him in your hand and groaned at the feel of him. He timidly asked if you were alright and nearly laughed again when you rushed out a breathless string of “König there’s no fucking way you think this is average, I’m going to kill you if you think this is normal, I’m literally going to sue if you’re unaware of how fucking big you are, fuck”. He didn’t respond verbally, but shrugged his shoulders as if to say, “how should I have known?” and does start smiling at your incredulous grumbling. Nothing had prepared him for the dark stab of heat through his gut when you looked your pretty eyes up at him and said, with all the earnest sincerity in the world, “You’re gonna split me in half, big boy; I’m gonna feel you for days.”

-- Now he can’t get enough of watching your face as he pushes his cock into you. The way you whine as he guides your hips down. He is mesmerized by the visible bulge in your stomach when he’s all the way inside of you, watching it reappear each time he sinks into you – he pressed his palm flat down on it for the first time and nearly came right then and there when you choked out the most pathetic, keening noise he’s ever heard and scrabbled to grab at his biceps.

-- Fucks you against the wall, holding you up with his hands tight on your waist, sliding you down on his cock like you’re a fucking toy, listening to your punched out gasps each time he fills you.

-- He loves how he has to take his time getting even his fingers inside you.

-- Loves how he can easily hold both of your wrists in one hand and how large his hands look against your body

-- Loves when you’re on top and you settle into his lap, gasping for air because you swear you can feel him in your fucking throat, panting against his neck about how big he is. When you push his shoulders down and splay your fingers out across his abdomen and bounce in his lap. When you make him hold his arms above his head – looking down at him as you take his cock again and again – telling him how good he is, how pretty he looks letting you use him, the stuttered “y-yes ma’am” he manages to choke out when you ask him point blank if he likes getting used like this, if he’d let you ride him until you’re satiated but he’s still hard and aching.

-- Fucked you in front of a mirror – both of you on your knees, you in front of him between his thighs, with one of his arms banded across your stomach, his hand covering your hip, and the other up around your throat with his forearm pressed against your chest – and, fuck, it nearly ruined him to see how his body dwarfed yours. He held you tight against his chest, occasionally ducking his head down to suck busies into your throat and shoulders, but he mostly made you keep your eyes on him through the mirror. Watched the way your breath hitched as he fucked into you, the way you wanted to crumple forwards when he snaked his hand down between your legs but the other hand around your throat kept you upright, murmuring against your ear about how beautiful you are and how you take him so well.

- All the above size kink shenanigans being said, he won’t fuck you until you’re ready for it. No matter how desperate you are, how much you beg him to just put his cock in you already, he won’t. Not until he’s worked you open with his fingers and tongue and he’s absolutely sure he won’t hurt you. He furrows his brows with this cute little frown when you beg him and promise you’ll be fine, like he can’t believe how desperate you are for his cock, and tells you how “no, you are not supposed to be this tight, it will not feel good for you, let me relax you, let me make you feel good”

-- And on that note, he loves you absolutely dripping for him. Slick and hot and already sensitive. He wants you close to crying for it by the time he pushes his cock into you.

- He will shove his fingers in your mouth and press down on your tongue as he fucks you.

- He fucking loves eating you out. Like to an obsessive degree. He’s gotten so damn good at it that it’s impossible to say no. Sometimes when his mind is too busy and too fast, he just wants to lick into you until all he can focus on is how you taste, your hands tugging at his hair, and the sweet noises you make for him. He’s gotten off so many times rutting against the sheets just from having his head between your thighs; the first time it happened he was so embarrassed, and you were just stunned and amazed that he came practically untouched from how much he enjoyed pleasuring you like that, you had to reassure him that you weren’t mad or disappointed and he got so sheepish when you explained exactly how hot it was.

-- This man wants you to sit on his face so fucking badly but he’s too shy to say anything. The moment you bring it up or ask him about it he is hauling you up his body, desperate to get his mouth on you. Doesn’t let you hover, he wraps his arms up around your legs, fingers digging into the soft flesh on the inside of your thighs, and pulls you down until you settle your full weight on him. Eats like he’s fucking starved, cannot get enough of the taste of you. He’ll watch you the whole time he does it, starring up at you with such a blaze in his eyes that it’s honestly a little frightening, he’s so intense about it but he just doesn’t want to miss any of how beautifully your body shakes for him. You’re reminded of his sheer strength when he won’t let you up; he doesn’t even bother with words, he just makes a dissatisfied noise against you and seals you down with an iron grip. You’ll literally have to be crying from overstimulation and yanking at his hair to get him to take his fucking mouth off you.

- I think he’d prefer to give you oral but of course he loves when you suck him off, seeing you look up at him through your lashes and wrap your pretty lips around his cock. Loves watching you struggle to take as much of him as you can.

-- When you first started giving him blowjobs, he had no idea what to do with his hands and even when you told him he could touch and even pull your hair he was so afraid of hurting you.

-- Holds your jaw/cheek and hair so gently, even when his hands are shaking and he’s fucking into your mouth. He’s downright ashamed of how much he likes it when you take him too far and gag, how he loves seeing the tears gather in your eyes when you try to take him in your throat.

-- Loves when you’re mean about it – jerking him off and sucking the head of his cock until he can’t stand it but not letting him cum, popping off him with a filthy wet noise, asking him what’s wrong as he gasps and bucks his hips because you’re rubbing your thumb over his slit and it feels so good but he thinks he’s going to die from it.

- Along that topic, he loves edging and love-hates overstimulation. I think he’s got fantastic stamina so you’ve either got to have him fuck you several times or edge him within an inch of his life. Loves that desperate feeling when you bring him so close to cumming only to back off, over and over again until everything is hazy and all he knows how to do is beg you to let him finish. When you don’t stop after he cums he gets this quick sharp realization that he’s absolutely screwed because it’s too much and now he’s begging you to stop, whimpering and twitching his hips but it’s too much and he’s got tears running down his face and you’re telling him he can cum again.

-- Overstimulates you all the time because, again, stamina, and because he just fundamentally can’t get enough of you. Loves when you’re shaking, clawing at him and sobbing with these little hiccup gasps, and can barely say anything except his name and “please”

- Okay, okay, I said about how he loves watching you put on makeup. So maybe, maybe, one day he’d let/ask you to put some on him. Just to see how it looks, how it feels to have on. He loves the look of concentration you fix on him the entire time, getting a little bashful when you hold his chin and appraise your work before grabbing something for the next step. When you’re done you sit with him as he looks in the mirror and he’s shocked. He wasn’t sure what he expected from this curiosity, but it isn’t heavy, and he doesn’t look like a clown. He looks… pretty. You’ve made him look soft and delicate, like he deserves the shimmer you’ve put at the corners of his eyes and the faint color on his lips. It twists something equal parts visceral and shameful in his gut, but his cock certainty takes interest in the proceedings when you tell him how beautiful he looks and how he’d look even better with the lip-gloss smeared and the mascara running down his cheeks.

- Another thing I alluded to in my last sfw headcannons list: he’s cum in his pants before. That specific time I was talking about I think would be the first time he ever did it and he was fucking mortified. Like, would have run out of the room had you not been literally in his lap. He’s blushing so badly you can practically feel the heat coming off his face. He’s not even trying to talk; he’s just got his head tilted back with his hands pressed to his face. Mortified. He didn’t mean to. Obviously, he didn’t mean to. But you were so close to him, and you smelled so good, and you were kissing him – licking into his mouth like you wanted to consume him, biting at his lower lip, pulling the collar of his shirt aside so you could mouth and nip at his throat, barely giving him time to breathe. He was so hard it was nearly painful and all any of his senses could pick up on was you and he just. He just came in his fucking pants. And now he feels like he’s going to cry. But you’re speaking to him softly and nudging his hands away from his bright red face and you’re smiling at him. Once he calms down enough for you to convince him that you don’t think he’s pathetic he watches, transfixed, as you skim your fingers over the wet patch on his pants and he full-body shivers at the way you’re looking at him – all heat and predatory intent – and he’s still just trying to wrap his head around the fact that you still want him even after he made such a fool out of himself. It’s definitely not the last time it happens, given how much you like to wind him up, and he gets a little more comfortable with the whole thing as you repeatedly tell him how much you like seeing him lose it.

- While we’re talking about cumming, he loves to cum inside you. He buries himself as deep as possible, which is pretty fuckin’ deep, and stays pressed as close as he can the entire time he cums. Then he pulls out and holds your thighs apart with bruising strength and just watches you twitch as his cum leaks out of you. He fucking groans at the sight like you’ve pulled the sound out of his lungs. He’ll push it back into you with his fingers just to watch it leak out again.

- Tall man. Well-muscled man. Hmm. He absolutely does the Knee Thing. If you’re making out laying down and he’s half-kneeling, leaning over you with his weight braced on his forearms, he’ll absolutely be slotting his leg between yours, pressing his thigh firmly against you. The first time he does it instinctively, just by nature of being as big as he is and trying to balance above you but also be as close as possible. He’s amazed that you feel so strongly about such a simple action but when you start to buck your hips against his leg, he vows to always do it. Which means he later figures out he can shove his thigh up between your legs while he’s got you backed against a wall; and because he’s so tall he can force you to drop almost all of your weight on him, your toes barely touching the floor as you squirm.

- So, I also think he’d really like thigh-riding. He loves seeing you so desperate and grinding against him, too needy and impatient to do anything else. He loves how you whine and grab his shoulders and try to get the perfect friction. He’ll move you himself, guiding you with his hands gripping your hips. Loves how you react when he flexes the thick, corded muscle against you. Seeing you fall apart like this kind of makes him understand why you like seeing him cum in his pants.

- He is so incredibly careful with you. The very last thing he wants to do is hurt you, he’d never forgive himself. I think one of his limits is he won’t hit/slap you in any form. Even if you’re into it, he can’t shake the sickening feeling that he’d be hurting you so it’s a go-no. He was shaky but vehement when he told you it was just something he couldn’t do.

- I also don’t think he be a fan of any sort of degradation – he wants to be praised and all he wants to do is praise you. He’d never call you any degrading names.

- Loves lazy morning sex and any instance where you two have time to be slow and he can just hold you and kiss you everywhere he can reach.

- He loves tying you up, loves the trust you place in him when you let him restrict your mobility. I think he’d really enjoy shibari (intricate rope bondage). He likes the artistic and technical aspect of the knots; it’s an almost therapeutic process to create different patterns and restraints across your body. He likes how relaxed and calm you get, pliant as he shifts you around, the dopey-eyed looks and lazy smiles and contented hums you give him. He loves the way the rope looks against your skin, and he loves the marks they leave after. He loves the intimacy of tying you up, the intensity of having you tied up, and the returning intimacy of untying you – he murmurs praise to you as he removes the rope, he presses kisses at each place he undoes a knot, rubbing your muscles and soothing the skin that has marks.

-- I don’t think he’d be particularly into bondage on himself. The most he’d do is a pair of soft leather cuffs, but if he’s ever been captured and tied up or cuffed by an enemy then he will absolutely not like bondage on him.

-- That being said, I think he absolutely fucking thrives with mental bondage. You tell him to keep his arms at his sides and he will not move them. You tell him to keep his wrists crossed above his head and that’s where they’ll stay until you tell him otherwise. You tell him not to move his hips, to keep his hands on the headboard, to keep his mouth open, you tell him anything and he will do it. It doesn’t matter that you don’t actually have the strength to physically hold him down. It doesn’t matter how needy and desperate he gets, how much he shakes and whines, it doesn’t even matter if he’s crying and begging. He’s disciplined and you told him not to move so he won’t move, not one single inch.

- Aftercare king when he’s the dominant one. At a minimum he makes sure you drink water, gets you your favorite snack, makes sure you communicate how you’re feeling, tells you how good you did and how much he enjoyed you, cleans you up, and will hold you for as long as you want. This man will do anything to make sure you’re comfortable and happy.

-- When he needs aftercare, he’d particularly need lots of reassurance. He’s always worrying about whether or not he did well with regular sex so for more intense stuff he needs your soothing words even more. I think he’d really like to have you in his lap with his arms locked around your waist and his face buried in your neck, listening to your breathing or you humming, while you rub your hands up and down his back – the soft noise and the repetitive motion grounds him and he likes to be able to smell the lingering perfume and sweat-salt on your neck. He won’t talk right away but eventually you’ll get to verbally check in with him. No matter how long you stay with him he’s always going to be a little grumpy when you tell him you have to get up and get him hydrated and clean.

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pixiecaps · 4 months

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recapping a bit of what haru said on stream

haru on her stream spoke about how shes had a really awful past five years and all her experiences just from this past year has been incredible. she gave a massive thank you to everyone and that she has no regrets.

“i never imagined i’d be where i am right now and i mean it with all my heart thank you so much. i had a very good time and i hope to have made you guys happy.”

she mentioned that since she was young shes always wanted to make content that makes people happy because she felt the world was missing a lot of love so shes happy to have given the world a piece of her heart. she mentioned how shes met so many incredible people who motivated her to see the good parts of life. to have found even this little bit of sunshine has left her so grateful. she says thank you for all the kindness, all the moments, all the memories, all the words, everything. shes very happy and mentioned this has been a very special experience for her. she reminded her chat that theres always another day and to enjoy life to the maximum, to live, to love, to talk, to hug each other, to be happy always, and that all the beautiful happiness we’ve given her will be returned back to us. she continues to express her gratitude. she mentioned this is one of the most beautiful communities shes ever had the pleasure of meeting in the entire world. she goes on to include the spanish, portuguese, french, english, german, and korean community in that statement.

“there is love in all types of languages and that love needs to be shared.“

she said her words will never be enough to express all her gratitude. she gave a reminder to always keep being kind. her voice falters a couple times from all the emotions. she mentioned shes cried enough and didn’t want to keep crying since she had something to do tomorrow and she didnt wanna have swollen eyes lmao.

she then shares a more personal moment. paraphrasing here.

“after i lost my dad i swear i felt like my life was falling apart. i never thought i’d be able to recover. after that many things happened and in those things, i wasnt destined to meet two people, this is a story i’ll always remember because i wasnt destined to meet these people. … they tell me hey the actor for this little thing didn’t show up and i say no way seriously? tell them to let me be it, tell them please because i want to be with you guys (harus two friends who were apart of the project). and i didnt think they’d agree… and they said yes. and i met two very important people and honestly (starts crying) thank you so much. thank you so much nussa. thanks to you i was able to meet them. i never imagined this would happen i promise you. thank you nussa. it means a lot to me that you decided to put me (into the leo spot). the only major thing in my life, i started being so happy, i started enjoying all the moments in my life as if it were the last, thanks to all this i’m here. and could meet you all. such a beautiful community.” she goes on to keep thanking nussa while crying and saying it was written in the stars. she goes on to say that shes gonna tell this as a story some day to her family, who doesnt know what she does or that she streams, and she’ll tell them about all of this with so much care and love. shes very thankful to have learned so much english and more about so many different cultures. she again reiterates shes very happy.

she also teases that she wants to go to brazil!!!! which… might be soon… and that theres little things being planned so hopefully if all goes well…👀 (an egg admin meetup would go so hard)

NOW GO SUPPORT HER ON TWITCH @ HarumiVT

#qsmp #harumivt

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cinhomi · 10 months

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𝐀𝐅𝐓𝐄𝐑 𝐃𝐀𝐑𝐊

𝐩𝐚𝐢𝐫𝐢𝐧𝐠: boyfriend's best friend Hwang Hyunjin x fem reader

𝐬𝐲𝐧𝐨𝐩𝐬𝐢𝐬: you should've left your boyfriend sooner considering the man of your dreams, his best friend, has always been there for you... but the faithful event you were hoping for finally occurs and you find yourself at his house, in his arms, in his bed.

𝐠𝐞𝐧𝐫𝐞: angst?, smut, fluff, aquaintances to lovers

𝐰𝐚𝐫𝐧𝐢𝐧𝐠𝐬: cheating (but not really, you'll see), reader is in a toxic relationship, explicit descriptions of sexual acts, unprotected sex (it's sexy but use protection babes), fingering, pretty vanilla.

𝐰𝐨𝐫𝐝 𝐜𝐨𝐮𝐧𝐭: 6.4K

I have a thing for sex while it rains, it seems... and like this I post something after months. I'll work this storyline in the future too for Hyunjin, but for now, enjoy!

It's strange how sometimes we believe to be in the right place to later find out we were living in a lie, a product of our fervid imagination, just to not accept reality and the fact that life, or even our past self, played a good and structured not-so-funny prank on us.

These lies we tell ourselves most of the time are a response to our awful experiences, but they can become harmful in numerous types of ways, and we should learn that instead of letting us be tempted by sweet beliefs. When we find ourselves facing reality it's hard to accept it, it's ugly, but ugly things are part of life and we should try and accept them nonetheless, they may reveal themselves as lessons or the best things that happened to us, with various meanings to that.

What pisses people off the most is the "waste of time". And that's how you feel too, like the rest of humankind, angry because you wasted time. You would very gladly prefer to be in the denial stage of the whole thing but it's so evident that you can't even pretend to be doubtful, to question what you saw, to give him a chance to explain himself.

The car is still cold even if you already reached the destination that popped in your mind right after what happened, salty tears adorning your eyes as they cross your freezing cheeks, collecting under your chin, falling on your scarf. The same damn scarf he gifted you after your first two weeks of dating, the one you didn't even like at all, the color you hated, a dull pattern over it… the urge to pull down the car window and throw it outside in the middle of the parking lot soon becomes reality. Wind starts to rise a bit, and you see it dance on the wet concrete for a while before a car passes over it and plasters it on the ground.

Ironic, right? You feel a bit bad after the impulsive gesture, but he didn't hesitate to make you feel the same, so, "screw it".

You shouldn't even be here. You should go to your own best friend, sitting on her way too low couch with its broken springs and cry your eyes out as she yells at you her usual "I told you so!" and "You're an idiot, I knew it from the start!" even if what you really need is comfort, and not to be scolded like a twelve years old while she offers you chocolates and tissues like in some chiché romcom.

That's why Hyunjin's place is just few meters and five floors away from you now. You're actually hesitant to get out the car but when you see your boyfriend's text appear on your screen, asking where are you, it's suddenly not so difficult to take your things and rush to take the elevator, and when you send Hyunjin a message telling him you're in front of his apartment he's quick to open the door. He doesn't say a thing, he doesn't even dare to, he already knows.

He delicately takes your hand in his and guides you inside with a saddened smile, his eyes soft as they watch you attentively trying to search for your tears. God, he wants to kiss them all away, he never wants to see you like this ever again, but he thinks it's probably not the last time… is it? Either way, he'll do anything he can to make the redness of your eyes disappear.

"Go sit on the couch petal, relax for me, hm?" he says in a hushed tone to not provoke your impending outburst. When you're finally hugged by his cushions you feel his presence behind you, his hands going on your shoulders to free you from your heavy coat and bag that he places on his forearm. When he reaches for your scarf his fingers are suddenly met with the cold skin of your neck and a startled "oh!" escapes from him because of the unexpected touch, making you giggle. If only you knew how his heart starts beating faster whenever he hears you like this…

"Where is your scarf? You always wear it, were you in such a rush to leave it at your place?" he's now lowered near your face, breath tickling your cheek as he adjusts your jumper on your shoulders ー the stained one you only wear at home, you didn't even change, how embarrassing. He touches you like frail porcelain and little bumps start to rise on your skin where traces of his touch linger, you wish his fingerprints could bruise your skin.

"I threw it in the parking lot…" you explain, looking at him trying to not make your lips touch while doing so.

A laugh that comes from his chest slowly builds up as he lifts himself and reluctantly distances from your face to go place your belongings on the hanger at the entrance. If only he knew how your heart twists in excitement whenever you hear him like this…

Hyunjin doesn't come back to you immediately. He always makes sure you have enough time to think by yourself first, to gather your words, to decide if you want to cry or yell, and then he sits beside you and goes along with anything you've come up with. It's always been like this until today, every time you came to his place after something happened between you and his best friend, every time he had to gather your broken pieces and try to put you together again. He doesn't know he's always done that beautifully though, making a breathtaking mosaic out of you, making you so splendid and wonderful anyone could say he's your creator.

You hear a distant rustling in the kitchen, the clicking of the bottles in the fridge as he closes it with a thud, two glasses colliding it seems, and his slippers sliding on the floor, approaching you.

"You're lucky petal, I have your favorite today." he proceeds to place the glasses on the way too elegant coffee table and pour the drink with all the calmness in the world. Time with Hyunjin stops. You think that every second spent with him is never wasted.

"I like this clip, it compliments your hair color." he says suddenly, snapping you out of your trance. How could he notice such a thing?

"Really? It's the first time I wear it…" you still mumble a bit, too shaken to let your voice take its natural timbre. Hyunjin laughs again, handing you the drink and carefully sitting so as to not spill everything on his expensive carpet. His body is completely facing yours, knee against knee.

"It's not true!" Hyunjin takes a sip and giggles at your confused expression.

"You had it the first time we met, too. It was perfect with your dress and necklace. Do you really not remember? You looked beautiful…"

What Hyunjin refers to is a random saturday evening of autumn. What day it was, what you were wearing, what you did before meeting in front of the restaurant, you can't remember… but what you can vividly recall is the stinging sensation of the first cold breeze of the season on your cheeks, how crunchy multicolored leaves swirled on the sidewalk, and the city lights beginning to be turned on a bit earlier than usual. Now that you think about it, it was around this period. You remember what perfume you wore, paying attention to what type of impression you wanted to give to your boyfriend's group of friends that you were about to meet for the first time, and you even remember what mascara you decided to use.

But what remained tattooed on your bones the most are the first ten seconds of Hwang Hyunjin taking possess of your vision, because you felt incredibly sick.

If you close your eyes and concentrate you can almost feel the same emotions, when your stomach swirled like it was a washing machine, your head light, and your legs almost giving in making you trip while standing still.

You felt incredibly guilty, disgusted with yourself, disappointed, a monster. Why the hell your first thought was "he's my soulmate" and not something along the lines of "nice, my boyfriend's best friend" you still don't know. Call it destiny, call it sixth sense, you immediately tried to suppress it all.

It didn't help that Hyunjin's slender fingers delicately took your hand to kiss your knuckles with his oh, oh so beautiful lips like an ambassador of chivalry itself, his siren eyes looking up at you sweetly but confidently, making you blush like crazy ー you later blamed your flustered expression to the restaurant's excessive heating.

On top of that, your boyfriend decided to sit at your side leaving Hyunjin in front of you, so you had his ridiculously handsome face in sight for the whole night as you ate your stupid california rolls and tried to elegantly slurp your noodles ー for as much as something like that is even possible.

You talked, a lot, even if you felt your face heat up at every strangely seductive giggling sound he made together with the little bumps his shoes would land on your naked ankles, toying with your heels from time to time. You had so much in common, and after that you only felt complete when he was near you.

Your boyfriend did catch on with the new dynamic though, so unfortunately considering how jealous and a bit possessive he is, you and Hyunjin didn't see each other as often as you expected after that, but you really didn't grasp that it was because he wanted you apart at first, just a series of unfortunate coincidences.

Hyunjin parted from you with a tight hug, lingering his hands on the smaller of your back, adjusting your shawl over your coat and twirling a strand of your hair behind your ear, the moment never fully leaving your memory. He was… perfect, really just perfect, and you couldn't help but feel nauseous when you got in the car with your boyfriend to let him accompany you to your apartment, the thought of another man being more suited for you making you feel like you were cheating. You only felt relieved when you talked about all his friends during the ride and he revealed that Hyunjin is "a bit of a player, y'know, he flirts with everyone and he has those french manners, but he's always been like this." so you thought that maybe your feelings would slowly fade… but they always, always rested down the bottom of your heart, even if you pushed them away forcefully, almost violently.

No one knows you two meet up from time to time now, because one time you found yourself crying in a corner on his shouler. No one knows that you always seem happy and carefree only because you talk with Hyunjin, because he comforts you when you need it without complaining. Not that it needs to be a secret, but you both are well aware that it may result suspicious to meet with your boyfriend's best friend late at night, best friend's girlfriend from his side.

And the fact that you two always seem to attract each other like magnets, so close, with instant connection, it doesn't let thoughts stray further from the idea of something tender existing between the two of you, everyone can see it.

It's just that it's prohibited. Or, to say it better, you were too caught in your lies to even contemplate the idea of leaving your boyfriend and Hyunjin simply didn't want to betray his "friend". But when you started to message him asking for advice, when you later had long calls together, when you crumbled in his arms crying almost weekly, he wasn't so sure about having a best friend anymore.

"I… you really think I was beautiful?"

Your question comes from the heart. The mixture of the memories of that night and his proximity makes heat rise on your face, shyness visible from the automatic action of your teeth catching your bottom lip and your gaze straying from his face to linger on the glass in your hands. The bubbles of the drink fizzle on the surface and for a moment or two that's all that can be heard in the room.

"You're always beautiful, y/n. I told you many times." he says cautiously, putting down everything to wrap his hands around your wrist.

"I don't know how he doesn't make you feel like you are, I don't know why he treats you like this but, petal, you're an incredible woman," he lowers his head to look into your eyes as he tries to explain himself further, "smart and strong. He's an asshole and you should stop doing this to yourself."

Does he know? Does he know what your boyfriend did? Probably not. Hyunjin would never hurt you, he would've immediately told you. You want to make sure though, in case everything that involves Hyunjin is a lie too.

"Why are you his friend then? Why do you keep coming to our house and have dinner as we fake not knowing each other like we really do? Why do you keep on hanging out with him? If you really think he's terribleー"

"Because I want to protect you."

His reply is fast, cutting you off. His stare bores into your eyes and drinks in all of your feelings, like he can see them displayed in front of him. A few seconds of silence fill the room and you suddenly gulp down your drink until the last drop, sprinting up from your seat and escaping his intoxicating presence that's almost engulfing you.

Hyunjin doesn't say a thing. He waits, he can sense that something big happened this time and fuck if he's going to kill his "friend" after this. You were never this silent, you usually would storm inside and throw yourself on him… for as much as he dislikes seeing you like this, he's grateful for your presence, for the feel of your body against his, the trust you put into him. He doesn't do all this just to be a rebound, he already knows part of him is yours and vice versa, so he's simply waiting. Everyone considers him being a romantic man, but really, he just believes in destiny. When Hyunjin first saw you every cell in his body started to boil, goosebumps rising down his nape, the world destroyed itself and was reborn before him, it's impossible that it didn't matter at all.. That was the day he realized he didn't know what "love" meant before.

He watches your silhouette get near the big windows that face the road, little droplets of water striking them. The sound of the rain reaches your ears only when you notice the detail, and soon you see how much water is actually coming down from the sky, your scarf already soaked and dirty laying alone between various cars. You take a deep breath, thinking about your next words, a way to tell Hyunjin what happened without sounding pathetic as you concentrate on the mesmerizing foliage outside, reds and oranges and yellows decorating the city landscape.

"He accidentally left his phone at home since he rushed to his office, I don't exactly know why…" you started to explain, hands fidgeting with your rings, heavy breath obstructing your throat, "and I heard a notification so I went to check right?"

Hyunjin slowly gets up and approaches you, his warmth radiating behind you now, hands resting on your shoulders and caressing them as he listens and slowly gets closer and closer until he's hugging you.

"So, petal? What was it about? Did you find porn?" he tries to guess, but when you shake your head as a 'no' a cold chill goes through his back. Oh, oh no…

"It… it was a message, a very sexual one, coming from a saved contact, I don't even remember the name." you pout, looking down almost in shame even if you're not the responsible one. Maybe it's the shame of having a cheater as a partner.

"I opened the chat Hyunie. They've been sexting for months and from what I could grasp they even met few times…" you can feel tears start to form on your waterline again, a deep ache inside your chest rises when you finally say it out loud. One thing was to acknowledge it, another was to tell everything to the man you've secretly been in love with for a year already. What were you doing exactly all this time?

"Am I really not good enough for anyone, Hyunie? She's… she's so different from me… Am I really a disaster as he says? Why would he do that to me? I've always been a good girlfriend, I even ignored all those mean words and his being immature and the shitty sex!! I put aside my needs to make him happy thinking I was the problem!" you turn around to face him and you're met with his serious expression.

You expected to find him at least slightly surprised by your sudden show of emotions, but he's calm, he radiates calmness. Hyunjin sighs and looks in the distance behind you for a second, blinking ever so slowly, his touch traveling up to cup your cheeks and wipe your angry tears with his thumbs.

That's the final stroke, the gesture that makes you sob and bury your face in his chest to hide.

You aren't broken yet, it's almost as if Hyunjin is physically holding you together. He's trying to smooth the new sharp edges that formed around your heart to not let it be isolated, while hugging you he's working hard to let it be still approachable to receive and give love, he's trying with all he has to prevent a horrible plague that's trying to approach you.

You hold his shirt between your hands, tightly, you're afraid you'll ruin it but you can't stop, you need to ground yourself and try to be strong, but it's so hard to not let him sway you around the room, lullying you as he hushes you and lets his fingers comb your messy hair.

"Leave him."

You freeze.

Did he really say that? Hyunjin never said it out loud. He did make you understand his vision about the situation, he did suggest it with hidden phrases, but so explicitly…

"It's time to let him go, don't you think?" he presses his lips on your forehead, continuing to mumble his real feelings, "You don't need someone who mistreats you petal. You deserve better." he closes them in a kiss that leaves a mark on your soul, making you gasp.

"Hyunjin?" it takes a lot of strength to look up at him. His eyes seem less gentle, brows forming a frown that's not his usual playful one, a bit scary even. The mole under his eye is contracted and his mouth is curved in disgust, just enough for you to understand he's furious.

"Why don’t we put an end to this farce? He didn't even deserve you in the first place, you don't love him, stop doing this to yourself y/n. There's someone who's the right one, for sure…" his tone is desperate, but you want him to say it clearly. You can't help it, if it's to be sure or to satisfy a need you've been having for a while you don't know, but you want him to say it loud and clear.

You know that if he says it now everything will change and it'll be scary as fuck, but if that's a premise for a better life… maybe it's not as scary as you think, it's Hyunjin after all, the man who's looking at you in adoration.

"And what man could possibly want me at this point?" your voice is shaky and uncertain as you tease the confession out of him.

Hyunjin looks away and smiles, a bit frustrated. He wipes another tear away from your cheek and then places his hands on your waist.

"Me?" he fakes the question, smiling softly; "Be mine y/n."

Breath gets caught in your throat as he finally says it. It's wrong that you waited for it, it's wrong that your first instinct is to say yes without thinking about it.

"Hyunjin Iー"

"Ooh don't say you don't reciprocate, petal. I know you too well." he interrupts you, his hold a little tighter. Hyunjin tilts his head to the side, few strands of black raven hair following the motion and slightly covering his eyes. He's beautiful now, even more than in any other moment you've ever been with him. Hyunjin is the most beautiful man in the world and he wants you.

Your phone starts ringing. It's a strange moment to realize your ringtone is kind of cringe, cutting the tension weirdly… but you can't laugh, not right now. Both you and Hyunjin know who it is.

He's right. You should put an end to all this and start to think for yourself, about what you really want, need. This is not wrong. To love yourself isn't wrong, and Hyunjin makes you feel like the person you want to be.

"Do you want to pick up?" Hyunjin takes his hand under your chin again and directs it up to make your eyes meet his, gaze frenetic as he tries to not look at your tempting lips. Everything will depend on what you decide now. And you think quickly, under pressure, and you don't know if it's a good idea or not but you shake your head and hold him tighter, hiding again.

"Y/n, please look at me…"

The phone eventually stops ringing and silence overwhelms you when you can hear his fast heartbeat right against your ear. And it's because of you, it's for you, your heart starts to adapt to his and you almost feel pain in your chest. It's too much, too much…

Ah, that's it.

You get on your tiptoes to pull him down by his collar and make your lips crash together.

Hyunjin drags you towards him as if you kissed thousands of times before, immediately, tongue slipping into your mouth as you grant him access, making it run along yours. You hold his shoulders trying to search for your lost balance and he's quick to walk you towards his bedroom, he isn't even slightly hesitant.

The desperate sighs you two let out add into the sound of your first kiss; it's a relief, something you didn't imagine to need so badly. Hyunjin pushes you further into the room until your legs meet the mattress and you fall on it guided by him, a knee starting to press beside you as he cradles on the bed on top of you. He can't stop kissing you.

Hyunjin clumsily reaches the lamp on the nightstand to turn it on and oh, oh if this is even better than any fantasy he's ever had… seeing you panting with that flustered expression, your legs already crossing beneath him, jumper half lifted up, your hair all disheveled since you quickly reached for your clip and threw it somewhere in the room. You just look breathtaking in his eyes, even more than any other moment he's ever thought about it. He has to let you know. You didn't think he'd turn on the light but maybe you can put aside your shyness for once if it means having this type of gaze reserved to you.

Your hands try to reach his shirt to pull him out of his trance and he resumes his kissing, hands flying on your sides as they slowly, painfully slowly slide down until he's hooking your pants. Hyunjin lowers down to press chaste kisses on the little part of your cleavage that is exposed, going down to your stomach, then your belly, until he darts his tongue out to lick a stripe just above your groin, leaving a longer kiss there while he proceeds to undress you.

The way you feel embarrassed when you remember you're wearing plain, white cotton panties… but it's honestly sending him haywire. The fact that you didn't expect to end up like this, a confirmation that you didn't plan anything to happen, it's making Hyunjin even harder in his confines. You're so wet your juices dampened the fabric, making it almost transparent, and he sighs at the faint outline of your cunt now puffy and pulsing… and he still has to touch you properly.

Hyunjin is honestly the same. You can't see it but waves of excitement run over him so violently he physically trembles and his legs give in from time to time.

“I'm gonna fuck you so good you won't dare to come back to him…” it's whisperes, almost as if he's accidentally thinking out loud but it makes you clench. Hyunjin's fingers start to tease you on top of the fabric, seeing the wet patch getting larger and larger. You can't believe this part of him exists… how many things do you still have to learn about him?

Hyunjin keeps on touching you there but this time he starts flicking, snapping his fingers where you're most sensitive, the tingles that start to make you jolt are strong and they make your breath sharp.

“H-Hyunjin…” your stuttering voice slightly higher as you call for him, he rolls his eyes back.

“Hyunjin please…” you can't help but pant, wrapping your hand around his forearm to try and make him slow down. Is this what those stupid magazines talked about? That sex feels better when you do it with someone you love? So fucking true.

Hyunjin feels on cloud nine. He starts paying attention on your neck tenderly but still with open-mouthed kisses as his fingers subtly slide your panties to the side. “Yeah petal, let me hear you, let me…” his words get lost as he concentrates. Ah, it's uncomfy for him. Hyunjin lifts your legs and carelessly slides your underwear off with a hiss, his eyes closing like they've been blinded by the vision of the Virgin Mary for a second, then maniacally staring at your bare cunt, digits caressing your wet folds mere seconds before plunging into your entrance.

You can only let out a choked moan and push your head back onto his soft cushions, that smells just like him. You're completely surrounded by his presence when his scent is all around you, his fingers move smoothly to work you open and his mouth is now latched around your nipple, his forehead pushing your jumper further up. When the hell did he…

“Is it good?” his voice displaying signs of fatigue, urgency and need buried deep inside him. You know his fingers are long but God if they can reach otherworldly places. It's not the in-and-out motion but the brushing of your g-spot that makes your legs close around his sides and poke his ribcage with your knees; he doesn't mind, your tits keep him occupied enough to make him mindlessly keep going. Hyunjin decides that prefers your chest covered in love marks over any art piece he's ever seen these past years, so nothing can disturb his work in progress. Maybe the work itself.

“‘S good Hyunie, Hyun…” it's difficult to breathe, it's difficult to think straight as the bumps of his fingers touch your insides so precisely, as if you've always done this and he already knew your body by memory.

“Did his fingers ever make you feel like this? Hm?”

The question makes you sigh along with a moan. You shake your head.

“Did he ever kiss you like I do?” and Hyunjin kisses you again as the movement of his fingers fastens. His teeth catch your bottom lip and his tongue slides against yours before he sucks it, drool making it shine where you two meet; passionate and euphoric, it feels like experimenting fireworks. You follow his lips when he detaches, but he just smiles and starts pressing his thumb on your bare clit. “Tell me, petal.”

“N-no…”

Hyunjin feels it, the way you start clenching around him, hard. He almost can't move anymore. So he whispers, just above the squelching of his palm spreading your wetness.

“Wanna go to Heaven with me, y/n?”

How, how can you say no? You need Hyunjin, even more than oxygen right now, he already has you completely. Your hands hurry on the button somehow miraculously keeping his pants together, and you reach his zip and pull the fly, that struggles to slide down ー he's too full.

“Wanna try how a real man makes you feel?”

You nod almost too eagerly and he chuckles within a whiffle. Hyunjin deprives you of his fingers despite your whines of protest and spreads your juices all over his face, tongue swirling on his hand. A low groan comes out from him, his touch moving to your hips where he squeezes, plush skin bending under his grip. It's all in contrast with the look in his eyes as he stares at your face, your reactions, as if you were the most adorable thing he's ever seen.

You're so distracted that when you feel something poke your inner thigh you gasp, and can only stare… his cock springs free from his confines altogether, long, slim and leaking, underside vein pulsating under the pads of his fingers as he pumps himself few times, precum dripping on your groin. Hyunjin's eyebrows are knitted together as he grinds between your legs, his still sticky hand moving your lower body closer so that he lifts you back up to wrap his arms around you, hugging you ever so gently.

His full lips kiss your cleavage and he curses under his breath because of his choice to not take all your clothes off but there's not much time anymore. You close your fists on his shirt, the lines of the fabric changing their shape under your hold while you wait for him, subtly writhing impatiently.

“Hyun please hurry…” not once in your life you've been this desperate for a man to fuck you. It's not because of the wait, not because you're horny, it's just that it's Hyunjin.

“Say it.” his eyes are darker, but they shine with the yellow-ish light in the room. He clears your forehead by adjusting your hair away.

You know what he's doing and it's nothing different from what you did before, in the living room, so you're more than willing to satisfy his request. You try to regain a bit of composure and steady your breath before speaking up, his head twitching together with every movement of yours.

"I want you, Hyunjin. I want you, please.”

A big bright smile spreads on his face as his head drops low, in disbelief. Hyunjin didn't imagine those words would have such a strong effect on him but here he is, blushing and trying to hold back a giggle. When he looks back at you he's serious again, eyes piercing into yours.

“I'm going in, hm? I wanna hear you scream my name through it all. Is that clear petal?”

What you'd give to hear him call you petal until the end of time, he says it and it's like dripping honey, he says it and you melt. The warm pool of pleasure in your belly tightens again as you say a shaky “yes”. You're his delicate, fragile petal.

His tip rests just before your entrance for a second while he takes a deep breath, breaching you gently. It's not a big stretch but his veins are already making your eyelids flutter and your lips part. Inch by inch, Hyunjin makes sure you feel his cock going deep, concern showing on your features as he doesn't come to an halt. He does, eventually, but the time he took to do it seemed eternal. “Oh my- Hyunie-”

“Bet my dick feels better than his,” he smirks between the kisses he's leaving under your jawline, “I bet mine's longer too.”

His comments only add fuel to the fire. He's bigger, he's better, the curve of his cock lands exactly on the spot that makes you black out. As you remember that you're technically still in a relationship your phone rings again. It's a distant sound, it's in another room, covered by yours and Hyunjin's sighs and moans, but he hears it too. Hyunjin stops every movement, hips against yours as he's fully inside you. He lifts himself up just enough to check on you. You look at him too.

You don't exchange any word, there's no need to, because you both arch your lips upwards and meet mid-air for another kiss, tender but messy as he moves backwards to get a starting point to his thrusts. The ringtone eventually dies making room to the faint dripping of the rain outside.

You feel warm, squeezing his cock just right and he's sure he will never let you go, never let you change your mind.

“Pussy ‘s so tight petal, was made for me, ‘m sure,” and he starts moving with consistency, picking up a pleasant rhythm, “you're so fucking perfect.”

His necklace is cold against your skin as he keeps on holding you flush against him, as well as your rings leaving icy lines on his back when your hands slip under his shirt and hold onto his shoulder blades. Hyunjin throbs inside you, drawing loud moans out of you that someone will for sure complain about. He thrusts harder, faster, every second that passes and you can only call for his name, yours being whispered by him against your skin making you shiver.

“Waited so long, so fucking long-” a guttural sound interrupting him, “since that time at the club, wanted to make you mine.” he mumbles, words hardly making sense but you decipher them anyway and when you realize what he's talking about the confused memories of it flood your mind. You, swaying your hips in front of him, grinding your ass on his crotch following the music; Hyunjin's hands right under your breasts guiding you together with him, his breath fanning on your neck, drying your tears completely as those three drinks made your head light enough to not care about any problem you complained about minutes before. It was just you and Hyunjin, all this would've happened sooner if a series of coincidences didn't happen.

“You would've let me take you in the bathroom, isn't that right?” Hyunjin asks, not losing concentration even for a second. “I wanted to bring you here, and fuck the sadness away. Every time, y/n, I wanted to tell you to forget him and be with me.”

You feel him stretch his arm between your bodies, and you feel your swollen bud stimulated again, you both whine against each other.

“‘M with you now Hyunie, want only you, ‘m yours babe.”

He's so fast now, the snapping of his hips moving you up and down the mattress… your words affect him on a visceral level.

“I choose you, I'll leave him for you-”

“Fuck!” he's close, so, so close and your walls tightening more and more and more are making him go crazy. Little beads of sweat decorate his forehead, a caramel-like smell coming from him as the crown of his head dampens and some hair stick to his forehead.

His tip keeps abusing your sweet spot, the kiss you share is feverish, your nails dig into his skin and his hold bruises your soft one. Both your bellies contract and before you can process it you're coming, white pois pattern creating over your blinding vision. You say his name out loud, dragging it together with your last moan as the hardest orgasm ever washes over you. Hyunjin pulls out just in time, copious white ropes of cum landing on your stomach like dripping art. Hyunjin loses track of space and time for a few moments as he comes down from his high, then takes you close to him when he lays next to you. Your heavy breath fills every other sound in your ears as you get comfortable hiding in his muscular chest. Your body spasms, all energy left your body already and your chest rises and falls frantically.

Hyunjin caresses your cheek and kisses your hair. It's peaceful. You just had sex with your boyfriend's best friend and it feels peaceful. It starts to feel a bit cold so he grabs the soft sheets near him and covers both of you.

“When will you tell him, petal?”

The question floats in the air for a while. You start playing with his necklace, making it dance between your fingers. He starts to worry a bit, when you don't answer him, but he decides to be patient, like always.

“After we eat something, I'll send him a text.” you seem resolute, and he's convinced. “Can I stay here tonight?”

He's a bit taken aback, his eyes narrowing in surprise: “Wasn't it obvious? You'll stay here from now on anyway.” and he says it so naturally, you think he's thought about this moment a lot… it makes you smile.

Hyunjin rolls to the side briefly, taking some tissues to wipe yours and his stomach since his sticky cum was still there, and kisses the tip of your nose adjusting your jumper back to its original place before sitting on the edge of the bed and taking his phone, after finally freeing himself of his shirt. His back is slender yet defined, long, his spine making a beautiful curve. Your eyes travel from his nape to his glutes, the ones of a dancer. There's a doubt still in the back of your mind, you need to make it disappear.

“Are you… sad, that you can't be friends with him anymore?”

He doesn't even bother looking at you to answer, he keeps scrolling on the delivery app searching for something you may want to eat, the words he's about to say seeming obvious to him.

“We haven't been friends for a while already. I understood he's not the guy I met years ago, he changed, and I don't like to be around him anymore. Don't worry petal, it's not entirely because of you, I already wanted to part from him but you came into our lives so I endured it some more to stay with you… and it was worth it.” one of his hands shifts position behind him and taps the covers to signal for you to hold it. Your fingers interlace and he looks at you over his shoulder, slowly turning around, his body twisting slightly as he leans back again and kisses you sweetly yet still with some need.

Your breath is now steady, you're relaxed and it feels like Heaven, just like he promised.

"Pizza?"

You giggle and he follows.

“I love you y/n. I love you.”

2K notes · View notes

r0-boat · 3 months

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🪶 anon here! Can I request NSFW headcanons for 5 WHB Kings finding their gn s/o masturbating while calling his name please?

Hello 🪶 anon! I will be happy to do these headcannons for you!

Whb Kings catching gn!S/o moaning their name while masturbating.

Satan

At first he would be trying to look for you. After Sitri told him that you seem to have stepped away somewhere, alone. Annoyance bubbling within him, melting into anger as he power walks down the pristine Halls. He swears if it's Leviathan or Mammon or Beelze-fucker he's going to-

A sound cuts him out of his thoughts. He knows that sound... It is you and it's familiar. Coming toward your room your door not fully closed all the way He takes a peek. His red eyes widen at the sight your fingers desperately trying to give yourself pleasure. Your muffled squeaks are adorable, the smell of your arousal heavily addicting. Yes he could barge into your room and pounce on you but. Why do that? He could fuck you any day he wants... But watching you like this? This will never happen again.

Mammon

So he watched you closely His breath low and heavy, His hand sliding into his pants to palm his erection. He even tries to follow your hand. However, he changed his mind when his name slipped from your lips, flinging open the door so hard it smashed off its hinges.

Before you can even react or even think he ripped off his own clothes grabbing you by the legs before putting it over his shoulders. He's going to make you scream his name evenn louder than your little cute whimpers.

Masturbating or not, he barges in; even as you cover yourself, it's already too late. He has seen everything. And he looks hurt? "Master, if you need me, you could have said so..." Is he not pleasuring you enough where you have to resort to your own hand? No, that will not do. He immediately climbs into your bed, taking your fingers stained with your juices and putting them into his mouth.

"how many times do I have to remind you that I'm yours to do as you please?" He gives you a smile. He's going to have to fuck you even better so good that you'll never have to use your hands again. Perhaps you would want more than just him? Maybe he should call Bimet, Eligos, and Valefor...

Leviathan

Your modesty is as annoying as it is cute. He shall beat it out of you with his dick if he has to. When will you learn that you deserve to be spoiled?

However, before he gives himself to you, He thought to give you a little punishment. In exchange for his cock you are going to tell him all the little lustful thoughts you were having when you were moaning his name. Desires that he will definitely make come true one day

He should be the only one fucking you. However a surge of satisfaction (and a raging boner) runs through him knowing that you were calling his name. And to his knowledge He is the only one watching... He is the only one who saw you like this!

A part of him wants to make himself known, as with each shutter and gasp of his name, Levi whimpers back, wondering what kind of filthy fantasies you could be having to make you react like that; he should be the only one touching you like that! Whatever your fictional version of him is doing, He could probably do that and more! It doesn't have to be a fantasy when you have him!

Beelzebub

But of course he can't just barge in, slap your hand away, and bring himself in between your plush thighs where he belongs. Because that would mean him admitting that he likes you or would want to do that. So he's just going to stand there and watch pathetically stroking his cock in jealousy and wanting.

He should forbid you to ever touch yourself when you're in Hades... He fell apart so quickly with his own hand just by watching you. He doesn't want a hand to go near your privates ever again if it's not his!

Seeing you touch yourself is already irresistible The smell of your arousal filling the air, already guiding him toward you. His mouth is drooling, hungry for the taste of you. And as your soft lips are out his name, He loses it. Hope you're prepared to not walk for the next few days.

"did you miss me that much that your little fingers are making you messy? Don't worry I'm here," He says with a sly smile. The first thing he does is put his mouth on, already messy and wet from your previous solo play. Nice and ready for him to taste. Eating you out after masturbation is probably going to have to be his favorite thing to do from now on. You smell of musk and sex And you taste so good.

Lucifer

He will fuck you silly and doggy while you watch one of his clones masturbate and call you out by your name. That's the clone's cock twitches and jumps as they whimper for you. Beel Go whisper things into your ear. "Do you like watching me get off to us? This is what you do to me"

Beelzebub will even have his clone sniff into your soiled underwear trying to chase his own orgasm. And he could feel and smell everything his clone was doing. He could even feel the arousal from his clone from you watching him.

He will come in straight-faced sit across from you and then say, "I didn't say you could stop."He urges you to continue where you left off. He watches you intently And you feel and nervous rush. "Be not afraid child of Adam do what you are doing before." If it makes you feel less nervous he takes off his own pants his own erection springing into the air.

He watches you intently as you continue taking note on how your fingers and hand play with yourself. As much as it is hot to see you defile yourself it's a great opportunity to learn how to pleasure you. He will take note on every small reaction, every time you clench or buck your hips up.

When the throbbing becomes too much to bear He touches himself now the both of you are masturbating watching each other. He tries to urge you to tell him what you're thinking about earlier when you moaned his name.

When Lucifer feels close he'll come closer, still stroking himself until he's practically over you, one hand still vigorously stroking. He hopes you watch, watch how he pleasures himself, how his hand squeezes and runs over the tip of his cock. Until his cum coats your hand and your bottom half. And that's when he'll touch you smearing his seed all over where you were touching.

#smut #whb #wihib #wihib x reader #whb x reader #what in hell is bad #what in “hell” is bad?#whb leviathan #whb lucifer #whb beelzebub #whb satan #whb mammon #whb smut

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lovebugism · 1 year

Note

AH HI!! so... i love the way you write ditzy!reader, and especially with steve idk it just warms my heart yk? The way they interact 😭 it's so lovely

Since I'm an angsty girly at heart, I thought about a situation where steve gets a teeny tiny bit frustrated with ditzy!reader, but it's just seconds, even less than that but it's enough to make her upset for making him upset but also a super fluffy moment between both of them and steve being mesmerized by her and just so much in love

ahh thank u lovie! pls enjoy!! — steve gets frustrated with his sensitive gf and makes up with her accordingly (hurt/comfort, established relationship, 2.7k)

fictober (㇏(•̀ᵥᵥ•́)ノ)

You keep Steve company during the last half of his shift like you always do.

He’s grumpier than usual, though — all pouty and visibly brooding.

You plop yourself on the front counter of Family Video and ask him what’s wrong, and he tells you that the day’s been hell and he’s just tired. There is no “but I feel better now” like there usually is when he’s upset but doesn’t want you to think it’s your fault.

The “because you’re here” is typically implied.

Not so much now.

You’re having the complete opposite day of your sulking boyfriend. Yours had been dreadfully boring, or at least you say it had been, but you find a million different things to tell him. You’re too excited after having spent so many hours without him, like a dog with a wagging tail. You’ve got the zoomies of the mouth, if you could even call it that.

“—And then I saw the cutest dog on the way over here. His name was Cappy, and he was huge, and the owner was so nice. He even let me pet him, and he literally felt like a cloud— the dog, not the owner.”

Steve is used to this. The whole rambling about nothing thing. He loves it about you, actually. It took him ages to coax you out of that shell after your asshole ex told you that you talked too much, convinced you that no one cared about what you had to say.

You’re more comfortable now, and Steve loves that you are, but right now he just can’t concentrate.

Keith’s been on his ass about inventory all day, and he just learned how to do it on the old, bulky computer this morning — but only after Robin made him an hour late to his shift. Everything’s just too much now. He’s overwhelmed to the point of spontaneous combustion.

For the first time ever, you’re not helping.

“—And, like, I know when we move into our apartment, we’re technically not allowed to have pets, but like… What about a fish? Or a turtle?” you wonder aloud but don’t stop to let him answer. Sitting on the edge of the counter, you kick your feet and flit your eyes to the spotted ceiling. “What if I start feeding the deer in the woods, and they just start showing up at our backdoor? ‘Cause technically—”

“Babe, please,” Steve snaps suddenly when your sneaker knocks his chair. He’s buzzing with anger, and even though it’s not because of you, he doesn’t know where else to put it.

Your eyes go wide at the newfound bite in his tone. He’s not shouting at you, but it makes your heart stop like he is. You feel like a kid again, getting scolded for being “too much.”

“…What?” you squeak.

Steve sighs. A deep, heavy sigh. It doesn’t remove the leaden weight from his chest, though.

“I’m… I’m really trying to concentrate here, and you’re just— you’re making it really hard,” he tells you through gritted teeth, trying hard to keep his composure.

You deflate like a popped balloon. “Oh…”

He can hear the waver in your tone, the way your voice sounds wet with unshed tears. But he’s too overwhelmed — internally raging and selfish with it. His sweltering temper makes his woe feel more important than yours.

“Yeah, so… Can you just— go bother someone else for, like, five minutes?” he asks, fists clenched on either side of the clunky keyboard, his gaze concentrated on the pixelated screen. “Robin’s probably sulking in a corner somewhere. Go find her.”

Your face crumbles like a balled-up piece of paper. Your chest gets all tight, and your eyes start to burn when tears gather behind them.

You’d always been a flower of melodrama — blooming eternally and constantly sensitive. So when Steve cut you off as you fantasized about a family of deer living in the backyard of an apartment you were supposed to share together, it felt like a knife in your chest.

The irrational thought that he no longer wanted any of that with you was fleeting and vivid and burning. Irrational, still.

But now you’re annoying him. He’s told you as much, with an unusual harshness he’s never spat at you before. And now your fears feel much more real.

“I’m bothering you?” you ask him, barely intelligible through the whimper in your throat.

Steve huffs again. His elbows thunk against the desk when he puts his head in his palms, swiping his fingers through his hair like he always does when he’s antsy.

“I just really need to get this done,” he tells you, softer now. He makes himself mad all over again, though, and gets sharper once more. “I need to finish this before I get fired, and then we have no apartment to move into because we have no money, alright?”

There it is. The root of all his anger. A lingering feeling of inadequacy.

He wants a life with you, but all he’s got is a measly Family Video salary — which he’s lucky to have apparently, because he can’t seem to do anything right. It stirs like a fire in the pit of his stomach.

After another deep breath, he finally turns to look up at you. His honey eyes are wet and stern. The chiseled edges of his features are sharp. Gently, he pleads. “I really need to work here, babe.”

You nod, understanding and internally weeping. “Okay. I’m— I’m sorry, I was just— I’ve been missing you all day, and I got too excited, I think,” you confess, wringing your clammy hands in your lap like a scolded child.

“Don’t apologize,” Steve says with a huff, leaning back against the squeaking swivel chair. It’s old and has lost all its cushion. His stiff back aches all the more. There’s no relief, to any of it.

He sits back up again and puts his unsure hands back on the keyboard. “Just— Just go, okay? Let me finish this.”

He leaves little room for argument.

You wouldn’t, though, even if you wanted to. Which you do. You’re just not strong enough.

—————

Steve tells you to go, but you end up in the kiddie corner across the store.

Mr. Rogers puts on a bright red cardigan and sings a tune that makes you feel like crying. You sit on the color-blocked carpet, surrounded by block toys, and clutch a stuffed bunny to your chest. You can’t tell if the vintage VHS is making the screen blurry or if it’s the tears gathering heavy at your waterline.

Robin walks by you, does a double-take, and immediately reports to Steve.

“What did you do?” she interrogates with narrowed eyes, strolling up to the counter with a cart full of tapes to put away.

The hearty tap, tap, taping of the keyboard fills the silence.

Steve doesn’t look at her until he’s finished up the last of his work. Only when it’s fully and finally complete does his hardened gaze dart to her. “What are you talking about?”

“Your girlfriend. She’s upset.”

“What do you mean she’s upset?”

Robin rolls her eyes at his obliviousness. “I don’t know. She’s singing the Mister Roger’s theme song and, like, crying. It’s weird.”

Steve’s brows pinch. His heart does, too. “Crying?”

“Well— not crying, exactly. It’s this really weird blubbering thing.” She fails to explain it so she tries to imitate it. A sobbing, sniffling sort of noise. She fails at that, too. Her scrunched face goes back to normal. “Like that.”

Deadpanned, Steve nods. “Wow, Robin. That was really helpful. Thank you.”

“Just go comfort your girlfriend, dingus.”

Steve still thinks she’s joking. Robin doesn’t lie, but she does have a tendency to overemphasize the mundane.

He goes to see you anyway, though, and doesn’t think twice about any of it — about what Robin said or what he had said to you before that.

He finds you in the kid’s section, in front of the tiny television, surrounded by brightly colored toys. He smiles at the sight of you, exhaling a sharp laugh through his nose.

“What are you doing all the way over here, huh?” he questions to announce his arrival, which you seemingly hadn’t noticed. “This area is usually for kids, ya know? Well, kids and Dustin Henderson.”

He doesn’t sound as annoyed with you anymore. You’re grateful for that much, but you still feel a bit sick about the whole thing.

Your nervous hands pick the cotton of the fuzzy bunny in your arms. You keep your gaze on the television in front of you, but you aren’t really watching it anymore. “I used to watch this stuff a lot growing up. The nostalgia sorta makes me wanna puke. But, like, in a good way.”

Steve scoffs. “Well, maybe we should turn it off then, ‘cause if I have to clean up vomit after the day I’ve had, I might actually go insane.”

He’s kidding. Mostly. The universe tends to be cruel like that, but he’d clean up all your messes a thousand times over if he had to.

He laughs at his own joke as he crouches to sit down next to you. He bends his knees, props his arms on top of them, and looks over at you. You don’t crack a smile for him, which is weird because you always laugh at his jokes. Even the ones that aren’t funny. Especially the ones that aren’t funny.

His smile ebbs to a wavering half-smirk as he knocks his shoulder with yours. “You okay?”

You think for a moment, jutting your lips out, unblinking at the television screen. “No,” you answer after a few seconds of silence. “But I’ll get over it. I think.”

Your honesty makes his heart wrench — like you’ve wrapped both your tiny hands around the beating organ and squeezed. It knocks the breath out of his lungs, a fish so ruthlessly pulled from the water. He tries to speak through the sudden lack of air. “Wh—What happened? Was it… Did I do something? Did you—”

“No,” you cut off his stammering with a firm shake of your head. “I did something.”

“Oh,” is all he says, pink lips pouting and wide eyes darting. “What does… What does that mean? Did you, like, step on a rogue VHS or something? ‘Cause I do that all the time, and technically, that’s Rob’s fault for leaving them out, so—”

You shake your head again, digging your nails into the delicate cotton of the well-loved stuffy in your arms. “No. I was just— I was botheringyou, and now I feel bad,” you confess, all quiet like a meek child who’s learning what it means to be sorry.

Steve — your oh, so oblivious one — goes aflame with embarrassment. He’d been too clouded by his own anger to recognize the venom spilling from his mouth; to understand that it would inevitably hurt you.

With chiseled features twisted in confusion, he shakes his head and stammers. “What? No! You weren’t— You weren’t bothering me!”

You turn to look at him, for the first time since he sat down beside you. Your eyes are glassy and swimming with hurt. You try to keep your trembling features stoic. You don’t want to seem as hurt by it all as you really are.

You feel like you should, anyway. What right do you have to be sad when you were the one being a bother?

“You said I was,” you remind him, still soft but sterner now. “You told me to go bother someone else—”

“Oh, babe…” Steve says, deflating just as you had.

He knows how sensitive you are, how deeply you feel things. You’re vulnerable, raw — it makes everything feel more personal than it really is. It makes grumpy jabs from your dumbass boyfriend hurt like a lemon on a weeping wound.

He tries to apologize, knowing that he hurt you and that it’s not up to him to decide that he didn’t.

“I wasn’t… I didn’t mean to, babe,” he murmurs, swiping a tense hand through his hair and then gesticulating wildly with it. “I was just being a dick, you know? I’ve been super stressed all day and—”

“Don’t apologize. I was being annoying.”

Steve blinks at you with wide, wet eyes — like you’ve hurt him by talking so cruelly about yourself.

“Baby, no. No,” he urges, ducking down to meet your gaze when you look away from him. “I’m just an idiot, okay? I put off inventory until the last second, and Keith’s been on my ass all day about it, and I just— I took that out on you, and that’s not fair, and I’m sorry.”

You shake your head, pursing your bitten lips to the side and twisting the long ear of the bunny between your fingers. “It’s not your fault, Steve…” you murmur, almost inaudibly.

He scoffs. It sounds like a bitter laugh. “Well, actually, it kinda is.”

“I just… I don’t really understand what’s going on sometimes. Or, like, a lot of the time,” you admit with a distracted gaze, eyes flitting everywhere but to the boy beside you. You’re too ashamed to look at him now. “And it’s harder for me to know when I’m talking too much, you know? Or if I’m being super annoying.”

“I know…” Steve nods, trying his best to be sympathetic of you. He loves how soft you are — too much to understand you completely. He loves how gently you treat the rest of the world, how unusually giddy you get in your gentleness.

You swallow through a tightening throat and shrug to pretend your world doesn’t feel like it’s crumbling around you. “And I don’t care about annoying other people— well, I do, but it’s different with you, you know? Other people can’t break up with me for being too much.”

“The idiot that told you you were too much had exactly zero personality,” Steve tells you, mostly because he means it but also to see you smile.

You do, just barely. A grin so soft only someone deathly in love with you could see.

“You’re never annoying me, okay? Ever. I love hearing you talk. I love having you around.”

“Yeah?” you ask him, blinking back burning tears.

“Hell yeah! You’re, like, the best part of my day! The only good part of my day, now that I think about it.”

Biting back a grin, you tease, “Well, what about Robin?”

“Robin made me late today, so we’re kinda not friends right now.”

“That’s mean,” you scold despite the growing smile on your face.

Steve shrugs. “We’ll make up before I clock out. No big deal.”

You go suddenly shy, smiling sheepish and tilting your chin to your chest to peek at him through your lashes. “Are we gonna make up before you clock out?” you wonder quietly.

“Only if you’re willing to forgive me for being an insufferable douchebag,” Steve answers, only half-joking. He very seldomly feels worthy of your softness.

You look at him with it, anyway.

Full on beaming now, you reach across the short distance to wrap him in a firm embrace. The position is only slightly awkward. Sitting side by side with your asses on the hard carpet, your arms wound tightly around his neck — a bit like a snake smothering its prey.

Steve feels grateful to be held so ardently.

His nose smushes into your neck. The sweet scent of your perfume entwines with the warm scent of your sweater. He smiles into your shoulder when it makes you giggle. You pull back from him then, just to steal a quick peck a moment later. Your lips smack audibly against his grin.

“Can we make out before you clock out?” you lilt with a shy smirk.

“…That is the single best idea I’ve heard all day.”

Your giggle fills the empty store when Steve rises suddenly and pulls you with him. He leads you toward the back, tugging you by the hand down the short corridor and rambling all the way. “Keith left for the day, so his office is empty, which means it’s fair game—”

“I am not making out with you in Keith’s office!”

“But his desk chair is crazy comfortable, and also, he’s a dick, so… who cares?”

#published by bug #steve harrington x reader #stranger things x reader #steve harrington x y/n #steve harrington x you #steve harrington imagine #stranger things imagine #stranger things #steve harrington #steve harrington fanfiction #steve harrington fanfic #steve harrington fic #stranger things fanfic #stranger things fic #stranger things fanfiction #st drabbles #stevie drabble #event: fictober!

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youunravelme · 4 months

Text

nothing happened in the way i wanted part 1

author's note: okay so let it be known that my FAV emily henry book is happy place (if you want a deep dive into my personality, if you want to know the inner workings of my mind, read the book) SO with that being said, this fic was inspired by that masterpiece. plus i've fallen down a matt rabbit hole as of late. just a warning, this is a LONG ass fic (74 pages and 30.3k words, not a brag, i kinda regret that it's this long bc my brain hurts) so pace yourselves okay? thank you for being the kindest people ever!! this is finished, but tumblr said what i wrote is too long. so i'm posting it in parts lolol.

summary: a year has passed and you are no closer to understanding why matt ended things and you have every plan of avoiding that thought until he comes back in town for the offseason, then suddenly he's everywhere.

pairing: matthew tkachuk x reader

warnings: ANGST, friends to lovers to exes to lovers, mention of sexual assault, attempted sexual assault, drinking, depression, panic attacks, let me know if i missed something!

after

despite being back in st. louis for six months, summer still felt like it came too fast. your thighs started sticking to the seats from sweat about three weeks ago. summer used to be your favorite season because it meant you had unlimited access to the love of your life, you weren’t sharing him with his teammates or his crazy schedule.

but he wasn’t yours anymore. matthew hadn’t been yours in six months and some change.

the second you entered your parents’ home, you tossed your keys into the bowl and slid your shoes off. it’d been six months since you moved home, and it still didn’t feel like a space where you belonged. you walked into the living room without so much as a hello from either of your parents, both of whom were posted up on the couch. they weren’t talking to each other, just letting the noise from the news fill the room instead of conversation.

“hey,” you greeted, plopping down in the recliner.

“how was work?” your mom asked.

you shrugged, not quite having the words to convey how mundane it had been. you were working on restoring a piece for this rich couple who lived in the same neighborhood as the tkachuks. it wasn’t in too bad of shape, given the fact that you were the one entrusted to work on it. if it was actually something incredibly complicated, your boss would’ve found someone else more experienced to do it.

when you entered art restoration and conservation, you thought it would be mindless. art had always been an escape for you, a chance to remove yourself from your racing thoughts. you thought that by entering the art conservation field, you could add onto something, enhance the beauty that was lost over the years of damage, instead of creating something from your own experiences.

but no one told you how hard it would be after your breakup, that you would have to learn how to pour bottles of chemical solvent into a glass when your eyes were blurring with tears. no one said anything about how you would spend hours hunched over, fixing the problems in paintings that only served to remind you that while you could mend a masterpiece, you were unable to stop and patch up the problems in your relationship. no one spoke about how you would inevitably relate to the paintings that came to you in shambles, the only difference being that clients would pay thousands of dollars for their paintings to be restored to their former glory, your ex let you fall apart alone in a city where you had no friends outside of the ones you’d made through him.

but how could you communicate that to your mother? to your father? both of whom stayed in an unhappy marriage for the sake of optics? how could you tell them that it’s been months and you were still no more over your ex than the day it ended? how could they understand you? they stayed together out of convenience, out of a fear of ending their marriage only to never find someone else.

it had been six months since your relationship ended, and you were no closer to understanding why.

“just a mundane day,” was all you said instead. “nothing to write home about.”

both of your parents hummed.

“did you have dinner already?” you asked.

“was gonna order pizza,” your dad said.

your mother scoffed and rolled her eyes. “no alan, we had plans to see chantal and keith tonight for dinner.”

you wanted to throw up.

you weren’t sure what you were expecting, maybe some loyalty from your parents? though, they weren’t fully privy to all the information about the demise of your relationship with matt, so maybe you couldn’t expect them to stop hanging out with his parents, especially when said parents were such great people.

“oh,” was all you could say.

“you’re more than welcome to order takeout and watch a movie,” your mom commented, like you needed permission to make yourself at home when you were actively living there. “i’m sure ronald would appreciate your company.”

you glanced at the tabby cat who was perched on his cat tree. personally, you had no issue with ronald, but he liked your mom and your mom only. though on occasion, he would allow your dad to pet him.

“i’ll figure something out,” you said.

your mom hummed before she stood up to go get ready while your father stayed on the couch. it was only another ten minutes before he got up to change quickly, and another five before they left the house without so much as a goodbye.

before

you were incredibly aware that you didn’t quite fit in. your mom drove you to school in a beat up 1997 toyota camry which looked incredibly out of place among the bmws and audis. your mom offered to walk you in, but she was wearing her scrubs from her night shift and her face looked tired, so you declined the offer and got out of the car yourself.

it shouldn’t have been as daunting as it was, but your old school wasn’t as prestigious as this one. your previous schools in cedar rapids had been public schools. no one was wearing a uniform, and most of the backpacks worn came from the same walmart in your old neighborhood.

but your parents had decided they wanted a better education for you, even if neither of them had the money to fork out thousands of dollars for a private school. your mom’s parents, however, were loaded. they were more than willing to fork out a small fortune for your schooling under the conditions of your family uprooting your lives to missouri. you were too young to realize what a sacrifice that was, you didn’t notice the snide comments your grandparents made about your father’s choice of career or your mother’s choice in husband.

you didn’t see your grandparents any more than you usually did since you’d moved to missouri two weeks ago. they’d been out of town on a trip to rome up until three days ago and hadn’t reached out to have dinner or hang out at all.

not that you cared at the age of nine, you were more focused on unpacking your room. but now that you were standing in front of the giant school alone, you felt like you should’ve been more concerned with how nice your school supplies were.

a kind woman greeted you at the entrance of the school. she smiled and introduced herself, though you couldn’t hear her over the roaring in your ears. she stood next to a blond haired blue eyed boy who was your height.

“are your parents here?” you weren’t sure how you heard her over the noise in your head.

you shook your head. “my mom had to go home and my dad is at work.”

the woman blinked. “is today your first day?”

“mom, it’s everyone’s first day of school,” the boy groaned.

“i wasn’t talking to you, matthew,” she said, though her eyes never left your own.

“i just moved here,” was all you said, albeit a bit quietly.

“well, you can walk in with us.” She placed a warm hand on your back and ushered you inside next to her son.

you took notice of her nicer clothing compared to your mom’s scrubs or your dad’s tattered khakis, though the woman’s clothing wasn’t as ostentatious as other parents’.

“do you know your teacher’s name?” the woman asked.

you nodded and showed her the crumpled paper in your hand. the night before, you were wracked with nerves and wrote your teacher’s on a blank sheet of paper and doodled around it. even at nine years old, you were concerned that you’d somehow forget. you couldn’t be more grateful for it now.

the woman’s face lit up. “oh how lucky! matthew look! you’re in the same class.”

matthew for his part, tried to look happy about it, but his eyes kept wandering to the hallways, like he was looking for people he knew. you felt bad for even being in this situation. you missed your friends from iowa and the light up shoes you used to wear before you were given a uniform.

matthew’s mom pointed out the classroom that was supposed to be yours and walked both you and matthew into the room. unlike her son, who immediately found his friends to do elaborate handshakes with, you stayed by her side. she was a stranger, sure, but she was more comforting that the classroom of fifteen other nine and ten year olds.

the woman sighed and bent down a little to look you in the eyes. “it’s gonna be a good day, sweetheart,” she said. “mr. terry is a great teacher, he’s really kind.” you weren’t sure how she would know that, but you weren’t going to call her a liar. “and if you need anything, ask matthew. he’s been going here since kindergarten, okay?”

you nodded.

mr. terry walked over and introduced himself. he had dark skin and a bright smile, showing you to your seat. your name was on a card with fun stickers on it. next to your seat, you saw matthew’s name. now it wasn’t necessarily an unpopular name, there were three matthews in your third grade class, so you weren’t holding out hope that it was going to be the matthew you walked into class with. but two minutes later, he was plopping down into the seat to your left.

matthew looked almost startled to see you sitting next to him, but when the shock wore off he gave you a crooked smile and stuck his hand out. “i’m matt,” he said, like you two didn’t walk into class together.

you shook his hand anyway and gave him a shy smile and told him your name, just in case he didn’t see it written on your desk.

if it was even possible, his smile widened. “pretty name,” he said.

after

you’d watched a movie and half of another one by the time your parents walked through the front door. ronald jumped off the couch to greet your mother while he ignored your father.

“oh,” your dad said. “you’re still up.”

“i’m about to go to bed,” you replied, though you didn’t move from the couch.

“dinner was great,” your mom commented. “chantal and keith said to tell you hello.”

your gut twisted at the mention of their names. you loved his family, you really did, but the mention of the family that was almost yours stung when you looked at how your parents acted like roommates on the best of days.

you remembered summer days spent in the tkachuks’ backyard, watching as matt and brady chased each other while taryn tried her best to keep up. you remembered your dad picking you up from their house, and how you begged the entire ride home for a little brother or sister. he looked at your through the rearview mirror and said “we already achieved perfection, why mess that up?”

but you were grown now. you saw how their marriage barely survived raising you, and they were probably being smart by not risking your upbringing just to have another child.

you bid your parents goodnight and headed up the stairs to your childhood bedroom. it looked less like the office it was converted into when you moved out originally. you didn’t fault your parents for taking advantage of your absence, you, like many people your age, had zero intentions of ever moving back in until an unfortunate set of circumstances happened to you.

and that’s what life had felt like lately:

unfortunate.

unfortunate shit just happening to you.

it wasn't late by any means, but you were surprised when your phone vibrated with a text message. maybe it was the fact that you hadn’t really befriended anyone since moving back that had you flinching at the shock of someone other than your parents (or grandparents) texting you.

you unlocked your phone and opened the message, sighing when you read its contents.

emma:

hey girl! just checking in to see if you’re still good for this weekend? no worries if you can’t make it!

you dropped the phone on your stomach and groaned into your hands as soon as they made contact with your face.

years of dating matthew meant you’d grown closer to brady and taryn and by proxy, brady’s fiancée, emma. you’d already committed to being a bridesmaid and bought the dress before your relationship with matt ended. when emma found out, she called immediately and gave you an out, said she wouldn’t take it personal, that she understood if it would be too hard.

but you remembered the countless conversations had about planning your weddings while the both of you watched the loves of your lives try not to kill each other from your spots on the back porch. and you could hear it in her voice, how much it meant to her that you would be there even if she didn’t want to push it on you. it didn’t matter that only one of you was getting the wedding you planned. the bets made on who’d get married first were obsolete now.

you wanted to text her back and say you were busy, but you hadn’t seen her much since her and brady came back in town. when the senators’ season ended in april, he and emma spent some time with her family and attended the playoff games for the panthers. now that the panthers’ season ended two weeks ago, all of the tkachuks were back in town which used to excite you.

now it just filled you with dread.

no, it’s not like you lived in the same tax bracket as matt’s family. you didn’t go to the same grocery stores unless you were tagging along. no, there was a comfortable distance between your neighborhoods and st. louis was filled with two million other people that the odds of running into him were slim.

but your anxiety preferred zero odds rather than a slight chance, and it made the logic that was once screaming at you sound like a small whisper.

you sucked it up anyway, though. seeing emma and the other bridesmaids was better than staying in your room and staring at the ceiling.

you:

i’ll be there! can’t wait!!!

and maybe you used too many exclamation points. maybe you were trying too hard to prove something no one would believe if they took longer than a split second glance at your face. you were a horrible liar, that hadn’t changed. you were just hoping by the time the weekend came around, you’d be too busy to focus on any of the pain.

before

the summer after keith retired, the tkachuks took you and your family on vacation with them to turks and caicos. your parents were stressed initially about the trip, but you were filled with nothing but excitement at leaving the landlocked state you called home.

missouri had slowly wormed its way into your heart. when your family moved, there was never a thought in your mind that you would ever come to love it like you did with cedar rapids. there was no way you’d ever consider this place your home. but then you met the tkachuks.

it’d been nearly three years since you’d first sat in that seat next to your best friend in mr. terry’s fourth grade class. now, you were splashing around in the waves with matt and brady while your parents looked from the shore.

school had been different the past two years, with matthew going to an all boys school after fifth grade while you stayed. it took some adjusting to being without him the entire school day. you didn’t want to think of yourself as codependent, or clingy, but mat was your best friend. it was an adjustment, having to make new friends in the same school.

now that wasn’t to say that you never saw matt. after your initial introductions, chantal offered to take you to and from school if your mom or dad dropped you off at their house in the morning. both of your parents jumped at the idea. your mother, who worked as a night shift ICU nurse, reveled in being able to go home and go straight to sleep. your father, whose job as an electrician required him to be on job sites early in the morning, didn’t mind it either, he had to be up early anyway.

and sure, you had to wake up earlier than you used to, but you got to eat breakfast and pretend like you were a tkachuk most days of the week (with the exception of the days your mom was off). keith would ruffle your hair as he passed you in the kitchen. taryn would race matthew for the seat next to yours.

the tkachuks felt more like your family than your own some days.

especially now when your parents went on a date that keith and chantal paid for while they stayed back at the beach house with you and their children.

all six of you were seated around the coffee table with the game of life laid out in front of you. the evening started out with a game of uno, but that game got out of hand quickly. it took brady reversing the order and hitting matt with a draw four before your best friend lunged over the table to tackle his brother. while keith broke up the boys, chantal cleaned up uno and instructed you and taryn to pick out the least competitive game you could find.

which is how you ended up playing the game of life.

even though life had to be the least competitive game you knew, matt and brady still managed to argue over it, even going as far to rant about how unfair it was that they had to pay for home insurance. keith and chantal had just chuckled and told them to enjoy childhood while it lasted.

you found yourself smiling and laughing along.

you weren’t quite sure who won, or how anyone ever really wins the game of life, but the moment mattered more. taryn went upstairs with keith to get ready for bed while brady helped his mom in the kitchen pop a bag of popcorn. you and matthew were responsible for cleaning up the game.

“are you having fun?” he asked.

your smile was so wide, it hurt your cheeks. “i’m having the best time. this is by far the best vacation i’ve been on.”

“really?” he smiled.

you nodded emphatically. “most of my family vacations have been spent with my grandparents.”

matt grimaced, already aware of the testy relationship your mom had with her own parents. “when’s the last time you saw them?”

you had to think for a moment, while your grandparents technically lived in st. louis, they were often out of town or ignoring your family’s existence altogether. with the exception of the last saturday of every month, when you and your parents were practically obligated to eat dinner with them. you didn’t notice their judgmental comments when you were younger and mesmerized by the giant dollhouse they bought for you.

but you were older now. you knew that there were terms and conditions attached to the cellphone they bought for you on your twelfth birthday. you heard the disdain in their voices when they talked down to your father and mother for their life choices. you weren’t an idiot, you understood that every compliment they gave you was a way for them to make your parents feel inferior in comparison.

you weren’t a child to them, you were a pawn in a game you never asked to play.

“we saw them about a month ago?” you shrugged. “they’re on vacation until halfway through august.”

matt hummed. “i think we’re gonna visit mom’s parents before school starts back again.”

to your credit, you did your best to look happy for him, even if it meant that you wouldn’t see him for a week and a half. you had other friends in town! in fact, you befriended a girl named simone when you started middle school. maybe you could call her when you get back to st. louis?

evidently, your little act wasn’t convincing enough. matt nudged your shoulder with his. “you’ll be fine,” he said. “you’re probably annoyed from how much time we’ve spent together this summer. you need a break.”

you couldn’t help but smile. “i could never get tired of you, matty.”

he blinked, almost at a loss for words, it felt like. but you should’ve known better, because he was holding up his pinky a beat later. “you promise?”

you locked your fingers together. “promise.”

after

it’s just emma and her friends and taryn, you thought. you already know all of these people. there’s no reason to be stressed out.

which, to be fair, your inner monologue was right. you had absolutely no reason to be standing in front of your closet debating what to wear for as long as you had.

before you could stop yourself, you were hitting emma’s contact and putting your phone on speaker. the dial tone rang out through the room while you waited for her to pick up. you were seconds away from ending the call when her phone sounded through the receiver.

“hey! what’s up?”

you exhaled. “i don’t know what to wear tonight.”

emma said your name through a laugh. “we’re not going anywhere fancy, i swear. it’s just dinner and then we’re going to a bar.”

you frowned. “so taryn’s not joining us after dinner?”

“no, she has other plans after dinner anyway. she said she was meeting up with some friends from high school.” as if she could see the hesitance on your face, emma spoke up again. “but you know all the other girls, it’s not like you’ll be hanging out with strangers.”

and she was right, you were in a groupchat with the other bridesmaids and found all of them to be quite pleasant.

“look, if you’re still stressed about what to wear, just wear jeans.”

“okay, but how nice is this restaurant?” you were rummaging through your closet. “because i’ve worn jeans to restaurants that weren’t supposed to be fancy and i found myself criminally underdressed.”

“yeah well, i’m better at communicating than matt is.” a gasp sounded through the receiver, like emma had just realized what she said. “oh my god, i’m so sorry—”

“it’s fine, you’re not wrong,” you said, forcing out a laugh even as your heart painfully squeezed in your chest.

“i really didn’t mean to,” she sighed. “i’m sorry, that was rude of me to bring up.”

you shook your head even though she couldn’t see you. “it’s fine, emma, i swear,” you said even though there were tears pricking in your eyes. “i’ll have to face the music eventually.”

“still, it was insensitive of me to say that.”

you cleared your throat. “don’t worry about it, i’m a big girl.” you pulled the phone away from your face so you could sniffle for a second without drawing any unnecessary attention. “so jean shorts tonight?” you asked.

there was a brief silence before you heard emma’s soft sigh over the phone. “that sounds perfect.”

before

matthew kissed you for the first time when you were hanging out with mutual friends after school in eighth grade. you’d been dreaming about that moment for years ever since sixth grade when you realized matt was handsome and the flutters in your stomach weren’t just from nerves anymore.

both of you were at your friend morgan’s house sitting in her basement. she happened to live in the same neighborhood as matt. so after school, you rode home with the tkachuks like you always did and then walked to her house.

morgan was the first of your friends to get a boyfriend and she wasn’t shy about telling everyone. it was easy to be jealous of her. while you hadn’t known her as long, your other friends had made it clear she’d garnered male attention since preschool. so there was no surprise that she’d announced at school earlier that week that she was dating someone from matt’s school.

hence the party in the basement.

morgan was the one who suggested truth or dare. she had all ten of you circle up on the carpet and sit criss crossed. you were keenly aware of how matt’s knee was touching your own, you could feel the heat even through your jeans. he was leaning back on his hands, with his right hand directly behind your back,in your delusions, you let yourself pretend he was doing it to be closer to you.

“alright!” morgan cheered. “who wants to start?”

no one said a word.

you made the mistake of looking around when you caught morgan’s eye. at the sight of a growing smirk on her lips, you quickly diverted your gaze.

“c'mon, no one wants to go first?” she hummed. “fine, i’ll go. babe,” she started calling thomas babe a week ago. “ask me, truth or dare?”

the only word you could use to describe the look on thomas’ face was besotted. without hesitating, he asked her the question, smiling when she grinned back at him. morgan chose dare, because she wasn’t “boring and lame.”

thomas dared her to kiss him. there was a collective groan when she leaned over and kissed her boyfriend. the second she pulled back, morgan’s eyes flitted over the rest of the group, looking like a tiger about to pounce. the two of you made eye contact and the corner of her lips raised in a smirk that was gone as quick as it came.

you prepared yourself for the worst, recalling how you let it slip that you have a crush on matt. and morgan, while she wasn’t intentionally cruel, had all but shrieked when you told her. so you didn’t think she’d out you to be mean, you wouldn’t put it past her to attempt matchmaking.

but her eyes skipped right over you and focused on simone. “truth or dare?”

“truth,” simone replied.

morgan rolled her eyes. “nerd,” but she cracked a smile anyway.

the game went on pretty effortlessly, you even got brave enough to do a dare (thankfully morgan never got the opportunity to ask you). it ended with morgan asking matthew. the smirk she had earlier, appeared as she made eye contact with you before setting her sights on your best friend.

“truth or dare?” she asked.

you immediately knew which option he was picking, matt never backed down from a challenge and had been choosing dare all night.

“matthew, i dare you to kiss the hottest person in the room.”

your stomach dropped as did your gaze. you couldn’t look anyone in the eye, you didn’t want to see matt kiss another girl, you couldn’t. you wouldn’t do it.

a moment passed when you realized matt hadn’t moved an inch. he was still leaning on his hands, with one stretched behind you. all it took was a quick glance at matt to see him already staring back at you.

“no,” he said, eyes still locked on your face.

morgan blinked. “what?”

it was only then that his eyes left your face to look morgan dead in the eye. “nope. i won’t do it.”

she guffawed. “but you have to!”

matt shrugged. “i don’t want to.”

“but you lose if you don’t!”

he shrugged yet again. “oh well.”

your head snapped up to look at him in confusion. “matt,” you nudged him.

“we gotta go anyway,” he said, before he stood up and reached out to you. you took his hand, albeit hesitantly before he dragged you up the stairs and out of the house onto the street.

a cool breeze was blowing which inadvertently caused you to shiver. matt, who still hadn’t let go of your hand, tugged you further into his side. your heart sank when he dropped your hand, only for it to skyrocket when he threw his arm around you.

“why didn’t you do the dare?” you asked. the curiosity was killing you, even if you believed the real answer would be even worse than not knowing.

matt shrugged like he had been all night. “i didn’t feel like it.”

you blinked at him, staring at his profile while he guided the two of you back to his house. “you’re literally the most competitive person i know. you’ve never intentionally lost a game. last week brady dared you to drink that gallon of milk and run a mile, which, if i must remind you, you threw up not even halfway through.”

matt laughed. “that was funny. but what’s your point?”

“my point is that kissing someone is way less work than running a mile and throwing up. so what’s up?”

he wouldn’t look at you, his gaze fell to the ground where he kicked a rock. “didn’t want it to happen like that.”

you blinked at him, refusing to move your gaze from his profile. “didn’t want what to happen like that? it’s just a kiss.”

he shook his head and stopped walking, grabbing your wrist when you kept moving. matt tugged your arm so you’d turn around and look at him. “it wouldn’t be just a kiss,” he said.

“would it mean more?” you asked, but he didn’t say anything. “matt?” your heart was beating against your chest. your hands shook at the idea of him wanting to kiss someone. you went through the list of people in that room. it wasn’t morgan, he’d told you weeks ago that he didn’t like her like that when you asked. could it be simone? she looked like a goddess on a bad day. her dark skin was flawless and free of blemishes and her faux locs were always perfectly styled. she didn’t even wear makeup on a regular basis.

oh god. did he like simone?

your gut twisted at the idea, of him falling in love with the closest friend you had at school. you could learn to be happy for them, simone was great and matt would adore her if she agreed to go out with him.

you snapped back into it when you felt matt’s thumb rub across your pulse. “matt, would it mean more?”

he shrugged again, still not looking at you, just the part where your hands were joined. “would it be a problem if it did?”

now it was your turn to be confused. “why would my opinion matter? i’m not the one you’d be kissing.”

matt blinked at you once, then twice. “you can’t be serious,” he said.

“what do you mean?”

“you can’t be that blind. there’s no way.”

“matt, what are you talking about?”

he dropped your hand to run both of his over his face and groaned. “there's no way you don’t know.”

“know what?”

matt fixed you with an intense look, one that had you squirming in your shoes a little. in all your years of friendship, you weren’t sure he'd ever stared at you that way before. a hockey game? sure, but you?

“matt what—”

“i like you,” he said as plain as day, like he didn’t just flip your world on its axis.

you blinked, you were pretty sure you stopped breathing. “what?” you whispered.

matt stepped closer to you, close enough that your shoes were touching. “i like you.”

“so why didn’t you kiss me when morgan dared you to?”

“i didn’t want it to happen like that,” he admitted. “didn’t wanna kiss you in front of everybody.”

you could feel the heat travel up your neck and to your cheeks. “and what about now? would you kiss me now?”

“would you let me?”

words failed you, you could only nod. matt hesitated for a moment before pressing his lips to yours. it was clumsy and awkward, and in the middle of the sidewalk two blocks away from his house.

but it was perfect.

after

you ubered to the restaurant before emma could suggest meeting at the tkachuk house. every single one of the bridesmaids knew you and matt were no longer together, all of them banding around you and offering support from thousands of miles away. so you didn’t think any of them would even hint at meeting at the tkachuk residence if they were as considerate as you believed them to be, but you wanted to avoid the sympathetic looks that would be thrown your way.

most of the bridesmaids were there by the time you arrived, the only exception being taryn. the entire table greeted you with bright white smiles, emma stood to give you a hug that you enthusiastically returned.

it felt great to be back in the company of people your age. despite being back in st. louis for quite some time, you still had yet to make any more friends outside of emma and taryn, both of whom you didn’t see that often because of who they were relationally attached to.

unfortunately, you’d lost contact with many of your friends from high school because of the distance. if you could go back, you’d slap yourself in the face for thinking matt was going to stick around longer than simone or morgan.

but how were you to know he would leave and wouldn’t want you to follow him?

you swallowed that question down and took a seat at the table. you sat next to a brunette named stacey, the other seat on your right was left for taryn, you assumed. there were already two bottles of wine sitting in a bucket of ice on the table. part of you considered pouring yourself a glass immediately, but you remembered the plans were dinner first, bar later. so you settled for water.

it was only a matter of maybe ten minutes before taryn was led to your table. you stood up with the rest of the girls and waited your turn to hug her. taryn saved you for last, smiling bright and wide when the two of you finally made eye contact. you squeezed each other tightly as you hugged, unspoken words being communicated.

“now, before anyone looks at the menu, i just wanted to let you know, it’s on brady tonight.” emma held up her hand as mouths began to protest across the table. “he insisted, and we won’t be taking no for an answer.”

and maybe you should’ve protested a little harder to look more sincere, but your job wasn’t paying you well enough to afford a 70 dollar steak and drinks.

the table breaks up into mini conversations while everyone was looking over the menu. you were doing the same when an elbow nudged you from the right. you glanced over at taryn who wasn’t even trying to hide the fact that she wanted your attention, it was something you’d always admired about her.

“long time, no see,” she said. but before you could respond, she spoke up again. “how have you been?”

you shrugged and moved your eyes back to the menu to look busy. “nothing has been going on really, just working.” you cleared your throat and hesitantly made eye contact again. “and you? what have you been up to?”

taryn shifted in her seat, a tell you knew was coming. you weren’t a stranger to where she’d been the past few weeks, you still followed her on instagram, you followed all of the tkachuks on instagram, even matt. so you knew she’d just gotten back after the panthers lost in game five of the finals.

you nudged her with your shoulder and gave her a small smile. “it’s okay, i’m not gonna burst into tears if you mention him.”

taryn smiled. “i’m exhausted, we were traveling everywhere for matt it felt like. it was cutting into my workouts.”

your jaw clenched at the mention of his name, mainly to distract you from feeling the ache in your chest, but you kept a pleasant look on your face anyway. “you still have the rest of the summer for your workouts, though. summer’s barely started.”

taryn nodded but she didn’t say anything for a moment. you started to shift in your seat when she reached a hand out and squeezed your own. “i miss you,” she said sincerely. “it hasn’t been the same without you around.”

“taryn...”

“you know, you’re still in, like, most of our family photos hanging on the wall. mom and dad haven’t taken them down.”

you weren’t sure if that made you happy or brought you pain.

“i begged them not to, you’re in too many memories for us to just forget you.” she cleared her throat and looked back at her menu, giving you a break from the sincere staredown the two of you were having. “they ask about you all the time, but they didn’t want to impose, mom especially. said she’d understand if you never wanted to see them again.”

you tried reading the menu through blurry eyes and pinched your lips together so no one would see them tremble. “i’ve been meaning to get coffee with your mom,” you said, though you both knew it was a lie. you’d made yourself scarce for a reason.

“she’d be happy to see you again, she just didn’t want to overstep.”

you nodded, still not looking at the girl you fully believed would be your sister one day. “i’ll text her.”

the waiter came by moments later to take your orders. thankfully, the tears had cleared up out of your eyes. as soon as you’d cleared your throat, you were telling the server your order without your voice shaking.

you bore the grief well, you thought. you laughed when everyone else did, smiled when appropriate, and asked follow up questions. socializing wasn’t hard, years of galas and charity events as matt’s plus one had trained you well for moments like these, so long as you avoided the eyes of taryn and emma, both of whom knew you better than anyone else at the table.

emma paid with brady’s card like she’d promised earlier. unfortunately for you, that’s when the anxiety started to come back. taryn was leaving after dinner, too young to go to the bars with the rest of you, and according to what emma had told you, she had plans with friends.

the group left together, with taryn waving goodbye as the rest of you headed to a bar three blocks away. your hands were shaking, so you shoved them in your pockets to hide the trembling.

it’d get better once you got a few drinks in you, you told yourself. you’d loosen up soon enough.

emma opened a tab with brady’s card and you immediately started going in. the group started with a round of shots, but you were quickly ordering more than just tequila. it was only a matter of time before your vision started lagging and your brain began buffering to keep up with what was happening.

you were on the dance floor, grinding against a stranger, who thankfully, was keeping their hands to themselves, when emma tugged your arm, giggling. “everyone else has left. and i think it’s time for us to go,” she slurred, a giant smile on her face.

you allowed yourself to be tugged away from the stranger. “how do you know?” you asked, fumbling over your words like trying to catch a bar of soap with wet hands.

emma smiled and pointed at the bar where brady was, you assumed, closing out the tab. seeing him in the flesh had your heart stuttering. the anxiety was kicking back in, hitting harder than it did when you were sober. you hadn’t seen brady since november, or was it december? the months had blurred together just like that one scene from new moon.

but now you were seeing him in the flesh, and he was getting closer as emma tugged you over to where he was. brady was just slipping his card back in his wallet when the two of you got to him. he looked up and smiled at his fianceé before he even realized you were standing there. the lovesick smile dropped but it was quickly replaced with shock before it was transformed into a smile you could’ve painted from memory.

“hey!” he said just loud enough to be heard over the noise. “i didn’t think you were coming tonight.”

if you were sober, you’d see that statement as a warning, preparation for what was to come. you would’ve noticed the way his eyes kept darting to the entrance of the bar, but you didn’t. you were just happy to see him for the first time in a while, feeling the semblance of home you’d been missing for months.

if you were sober, you would’ve remembered that brady and his brother were a package deal. you would’ve known that the nights brady wasn’t spending with emma, he was spending with your ex, and when emma had inevitably texted (or brady offered) her fiancé to pick her up, that he was more than likely already out with his brother celebrating his upcoming nuptials.

if you were sober, you would’ve noticed him walk through the door because your eyes were always drawn to him. you would’ve known it was him by the smell of his cologne, instead of waiting for him to slap his brother on the shoulder in greeting.

if you were sober, you would’ve made a break for it the second he started approaching you, emma, and brady.

but you were drunk off your ass, and all you could do was stand there like a dumbfounded idiot while matthew brendan tkachuk glanced around the room.

brady shifted on his feet a little, bracing for the moment you both knew was coming. the moment where matt saw you for the first time since november 29, when he played calgary. you’d imagine to brady, it felt like watching a car accident happen in real time. to you though, you were the accident. you were the one getting hit by a bus going full speed. you were rooted to the spot, taking in every feature of matt’s face that you’d missed over the last six months, waiting for him to see you.

if you were sober, you would’ve run away by now, knowing that being that close to him would do nothing for you.

but it was too late now.

matt finally glanced at emma, then brady, until his eyes landed on you. the smile on his lips from the song that was bumping through the speakers dropped almost immediately. he recoiled, took a small step back, almost as if he was shocked to see you there at all.

you felt like an idiot.

you weren’t sure how long the two of you stared at each other before you took a deep breath and stared at your shoes.

your hands were shaking again.

you shoved them in your pockets again.

matt’s eyes darted to your shorts at the movement, his eyes scrunched together in what looked like concern, but you brushed that thought off before you could convince yourself he still cared. but you could feel his stare on you, even as you looked around and avoided eye contact. you felt like an ant, with matt’s gaze being the magnifying glass that was burning you with a beam of sunlight.

“do you have a ride home?” brady asked. your head whipped back around to look at him and emma.

you shrugged, already feeling more sober than you were two minutes ago. “was gonna uber.”

matt scoffed. “not happening.”

out of nowhere anger bubbled out of your chest and out of your mouth. “excuse me?”

matt fixed you with a hard stare, one you didn’t shy away from. “you’re not ubering home on a friday night drunk as hell. it’s not happening.”

“i think you lost the right to make my decisions six months ago.” you refused to say his name, refused to know what it felt like to have it back on your tongue even though your heart was crying out to utter those two syllables again.

brady interjected before the disagreement could escalate. “i just wanna make sure you get home safe,” he said. “can i drive you home?”

you glanced at the man you used to know like a little brother. you saw the sincerity in his eyes, the concern.

and maybe it was the love for brady and emma that had you accepting. or maybe it was the alcohol. you nodded your head and let emma lock arms with you as you were led out by the tkachuk brothers.

you found yourself in the backseat where you used to hold hands with matt when you went on double dates with brady and emma. the two of you used to tease the younger couple when they did literally anything romantic. if brady so much as grabbed emma’s hand, the two of you were gagging in the backseat “choking on their pda” all while knowing brady and emma have caught you in more compromising positions before.

but it wasn’t like that this time around.

you slid into your usual seat in the back before emma could offer up shotgun to you. maybe if you were more selfish, you’d accept, but you weren’t going to let your friend sit away from her fiancé when you could just suck it up.

the space between you and matt felt too suffocatingly small and yet it still felt like you were on two opposite sides of the globe. you thought about taking a risk and throwing yourself out of the moving vehicle, but there was still a wedding you were both in. you needed to figure out how to tolerate being around him if you didn’t want to cause a scene later in the summer.

you just had to make it to the end of july, then you could go back and pretend like december 16th never happened, like the past nine years of your life never happened. like you never fell in love with your best friend, like you never met him and his mother in fourth grade, like your parents never moved you to st. louis. like there weren’t traces of your failed relationship in every scrapbook in your parents’ house, like he wasn’t tied to every significant moment of your childhood.

you felt like the bundle of christmas lights that you’d sworn you put back in an orderly fashion the previous year, only to pull them out and realize you had an entire project on your hands to detangle them all.

except in the end, none of the lights worked anyway.

you could hardly remember a time where your life wasn’t deeply intertwined with matthew’s. you thought it’d lead to something, to marriage, to raising kids together, to celebrating his retirement, buying a home close to his family, and growing fat and old together.

you hated the idea that you went down that road only for it to be a dead end.

brady pulled up outside your house. you were unbuckling your seat belt and throwing the door open before he’d even put the car in park. you were doing your best to get to the front porch before anything else happened, but as hard as you tried, you were still a little too drunk. you were stumbling up the driveway and to the front door, all the while trying to figure out which key was the key to your house.

a car door slammed in the distance before footsteps followed.

you knew the sound like you knew the sound of your mother’s sadness. you would’ve recognized his footfalls anywhere.

in your haste and anxiety, you dropped your keys. you squatted down and nearly tipped over at the rush to your head. matt’s hand shot out before you could grab the keys while his other hand grabbed your elbow and pulled you into a standing position. he led you to the front door and with ease, found your house key. he unlocked the door but didn’t move to open it. you could feel his stare on the side of your face, but you refused to look back.

his touch on your skin felt like it was burning, and part of you wanted to rip your arm out of his grasp, but you couldn’t.

you just—

couldn't.

matt said your name quietly, but you just shook your head, willing the tears to go away. he didn’t get to see you cry, didn’t get to know that his actions had absolutely wrecked you. he tried again, but you inhaled and jerked your arm out of his reach before you opened your front door, grabbed your keys, and shut it in his face.

you barely made it into your bathroom before you threw up.

before

you were bouncing on your toes at the airport. matt’s plane landed fifteen minutes ago, and you were anxiously waiting for him to round the corner.

matt’s first year with the ntdp made your relationship a little difficult, though, you thought it would be harder than it was. modern technology definitely made it easier on you. matt would call you just about every other night, and if he couldn’t, matt was texting you whenever he had the freetime.

the last time you saw each other was when you and the tkachuks spent your spring break in ann arbor to visit, and that had been over a month ago. thankfully, you’d managed to convince your mom to let you check out of school early to wait for him.

“someone’s excited,” taryn teased, bumping her shoulder into your side.

“honey leave her alone,” chantal chided. “we’re all excited.”

“i’m not,” brady grumbled. not even a beat later, keith was slapping the back of his head.

moments later, matt walked around the corner with his bags in hand. you fought every urge to run to him, deciding he probably wanted to greet his family first. and he did, you watched as he hugged his mom and dad first, moving the taryn, before punching brady in the shoulder.

you were nervously playing with the hem of your school issued plaid skirt as you looked on, suddenly feeling out of place. but it didn’t linger because in a blink of an eye, matt’s arms were wrapping around your waist and tugging you into his chest.

a sigh escaped your lips, one you didn’t even know was held hostage in your chest. maybe you were being dramatic (you were almost 16, after all), but it felt like the part of you that was missing was just returned.

“missed you,” he mumbled into your neck.

you couldn’t help the smile that graced your lips.

matt didn’t let go of you, even when everyone started walking towards the car where keith parked. your hand was tightly grasped in his own, forcing brady to carry the other bag matt couldn’t. to make up for it, you offered to sit in the back of keith’s escalade so brady could have more leg room. matt ended up grumbling about it, but it was clear he wasn’t going to let you sit in the back next to taryn when he hadn’t seen you in weeks.

“i ruined my perfect attendance streak for you,” you said as you traced the veins of his hands.

matt smirked. “i messed up little miss perfect’s squeaky clean record? how will you ever get into college now?”

you ripped your hand from his and shoved his shoulder, barely restraining yourself from cussing him out. “shut up,” was what you settled for because while taryn and brady had most definitely heard their fair share of curse words, you didn’t want to be the one on the receiving end of chantal’s disapproving look, even if it meant keith would be fighting for his life to hold back laughter.

all four of you, keith and chantal excluded, all but scrambled out of the car when it pulled into the garage. you and matt grabbed both of his bags before bum rushing into the house and up the stairs to his room.

“leave the door open!” chantal called from the first floor.

you didn’t need to see his face to know matt was rolling his eyes.

“i’m tempted to ignore her and just slam and lock the door,” he grumbled.

you dropped the bag you were holding and guffawed. “you wouldn’t. you love your mom.”

matt dropped his bag and immediately took the opportunity to grab you by the waist. “and i love you.”

you almost giggled, but you didn’t want to make a fool of yourself so you beamed instead. the first time he said those words was a few months ago over facetime and it still made you giddy as it did then.

matt pressed his forehead against yours. “you’re not gonna say it back?” he asked.

you blinked, still smiling. “what?”

“you're not gonna say you love me back?”

you shrugged, knowing it would get under his skin. you knew the consequences. “hm,” you hummed. “do i need to?”

matt rolled his eyes so hard you thought they might’ve gotten stuck in the back of his head. “quit being smart.”

and maybe you should’ve given up, maybe you should’ve let it go and say those three little words you’d said countless times before. but teasing him was way too much fun to pass up when you hadn’t seen him in months. so you pursed your lips and hummed again. “i seem to recall you saying you liked how smart i am. something about being the beauty and the brains?”

and out of nowhere, taryn popped her head in. “well matt for sure wasn’t going to be the beauty, and he’s never been the brains,” she smirked.

matt let go of you and marched over to the door, all but slamming it in her face.

“matthew brendan tkachuk! that door better be open!” chantal’s voice carried up the stairs had you lunging across the room and whipping open the door in a hurry.

“sorry mrs. tkachuk!” you called out before turning around and glaring at your boyfriend. “you’re a menace.”

matthew smirked and pulled you close enough that you were chest to chest. “but you love me.”

“i love you so much.”

after

the hangover you had the next morning was probably the worst you ever remember having. well, until you remembered the night matt broke up with you, that was the worst one.

you turned over in bed, picked up your phone, and saw multiple texts from emma and brady alike, both ranging from “it was great to see you” to “i’m so sorry about last night.” you groaned and dropped your phone back on the nightstand.

last night, when you thought about it, hurt more than it should’ve. you saw him for the first time in the flesh and it looked like he was fine, like he didn’t completely upend your life six months ago when he ended things. part of you wondered if he could see through you, through the illusion of your happiness and to the core where you were just as fractured as you were december 17th.

the rest of the weekend continued with you doing little to nothing but eating and binging trashy reality tv shows. when your alarm went off on monday morning, you contemplated calling off, but got dressed instead.

“you look like hell,” was the first thing frankie, your mentor and boss, said to you. because of the nature of your relationship, you felt comfortable flipping him off, even as he passed you a cup of coffee. “rough night?” he asked after watching you take a hefty sip of the hot beverage.

“rough weekend,” you grumbled.

frankie gave you a small smile and patted you on the back as the two of you walked to the workspace. “wanna talk about it?”

you recognized performative kindness when you saw it. while you firmly believed frankie cared about you and your wellbeing, you also knew he didn’t want to hear the sob story of how you ran into your ex drunk at a bar, at least, not at 8am. so you shook your head.

“i looked at some of your work on the bradshaw family’s piece so far, and i was impressed. i do have some notes, but for the most part, you’ve been doing a great job.”

you did your best to smile gratefully, but you weren’t sure it translated. “i really appreciate your guidance on this, and the trust you have to let me work on some of these projects.”

“you’re very talented,” he said. “you ever thought about creating something for yourself or someone else?”

there wasn’t a word to describe the noise that came out of your mouth. was it a nervous laugh? a squeak maybe? you didn’t know, and neither did frankie.

“what?” he asked. “why is that so scary?”

you shrugged as the two of you made it to the workspace. normally, you would start by pulling out the supplies you needed to begin working on the bradshaw piece, but if frankie met you at the door, it was because he wanted to have an impromptu meeting first.

“i feel like i’m good at fixing things,” you said. “maybe not creating something from thin air.”

“you have so much talent,” frankie replied. “i hate to see it wasted on fixing and preserving someone else’s work when you could be doing both. it could be your art that people hang in their houses and pay thousands of dollars to preserve.”

you nodded, but kept your eyes on the table, studying the wood grain and tracing the pattern with your finger.

“i don’t think i’m capable of that anymore.”

frankie reached over and squeezed your shoulder. “just think on it, okay? couldn’t hurt to just think on it.” he walked out a moment later, giving you space and time to queue up music and get started on the day.

you opened spotify and pressed the play button on your liked songs without even thinking about it. not even two seconds later, you regretted your decision. the soft tones and beats of frank ocean’s thinkin bout you echoed through the room and slammed against your chest. you immediately switched the song and found a classical playlist to listen to instead.

but the tune wouldn’t get out of your head.

not two minutes later.

not thirty minutes later.

not after your full eight hour shift spent hunched over your workstation.

not even on the drive home.

frank ocean’s voice permeated every fiber of your being.

it was simone who first showed you the song in high school. you remembered liking the melody enough, but you didn’t get the lyrics. and why would you? you were in love with your best friend who loved you back. even though you were fourteen and too young to even think about marriage, you knew matthew was going to be the person you ended up with. it was him or no one.

and now it was no one.

now, you listened to the song play over and over in your head, the lyrics resonating with you deeper than ever before.

you pulled into your driveway, completely unaware of what cars were parked in the street. they’d never mattered to you before. why would they now?

you sat in your car for a few minutes, taking a deep breath while you worked up the courage to go inside. when you finally got a grip on your emotions, you opened your door and grabbed your bag. you were too busy fumbling with your keys to notice anything amiss until you were on your porch and a pair of shoes came into sight.

“hey.”

it took everything in you not to scream. you dropped your keys and nearly dropped your bag. matthew stood on your front porch with his hands in the pockets in his shorts like he was innocent of any pain or suffering he’d caused you. he was in a pair of shorts and a t-shirt, and you hated yourself a little bit for thinking he’s attractive like that.

“what’re you doing here?” you hated how hoarse your voice sounded, like a low quality audio recording where things sounded muffled and broken.

“your dad wouldn’t let me in.”

“good.”

matt sighed and ran a hand down his face. “can we not do this?”

“not do what?” you asked. “not act like you ended things for no damn reason?”

“if you—”

“we dated for nearly ten years and you decided to end it over a five minute phone call. and you still think you’re entitled to my time?” and maybe you should’ve been kinder, maybe you should’ve been more civil. but you hadn’t seen or heard from him in months (until a few nights ago) and he just turned up out of the blue? expecting you to do what? forgive him? move on?

matthew said your name delicately, but not in the way he used to, like saying your name was a luxury he was honored to have. no, he said it like you were going to break, like you were fragile, like he wasn’t the sole cause of your pain. “please—”

the anger was draining out of you quicker. you were exhausted between work, and frank ocean’s stupid song, and the other night.

“what do you want?” your voice cracked on the last word. “wanna ruin my life a little bit more? put the final nail in the coffin?”

“no,” he shook his head fervently. matthew took a step towards you and looked something close to devastated when you stepped back. but it didn’t make sense, he ended it, he had no right to look or feel that way. “i just wanna talk.”

“six months,” you said, doing your best to keep your voice clear. “you had six months to say something. what could you possibly have to say now that you couldn’t then?”

“i know we didn’t end on the best of terms—” he started, but it was cut off by your scoff. you turned your head away and used your palm to wipe at your eyes before you crossed your arms over your chest. “—but i don’t think we should let this ruin brady and emma’s summer. we’re gonna see a lot of each other and i don’t want things to be tense around them.”

you took a minute to really look at him. blonde frizzy curls, blue eyes that wouldn’t leave your face. he hadn’t changed one bit.

one summer, you’d attempted to count the number of freckles on his shoulders. you got up to 87 before you gave up.

and yet you felt like you were standing in front of a stranger.

there were so many things you wanted to say, so many things you’d dreamt of screaming at him, but now that he was here, in front of you, asking something of you, you felt drained, tired. you used to crave his presence, now it felt like a leech.

you loved him, but he was sucking the life out of you.

so you nodded. you nodded and said “okay,” before you walked inside your front door and left your heart on the porch.

you pressed your back against the door and slid to the ground, pulling your knees to your chest. there was no telling when you started crying, or when your dad joined you on the floor, hugging you as close to his chest as he could.

“why wasn’t i enough?” you sobbed into your knees.

your dad petted your hair before he pressed a kiss there. “you’re more than enough, honey. but you can’t make anyone love you if they’re not willing to.”

“he used to!” you wailed. “he used to love me!” then, in a smaller voice, “what changed?”

a beat of silence, then your father’s somber, quiet voice. “maybe he did.”

before

“so what are your plans for after high school?” ms. meyer, your high school guidance counselor sat across from you at her desk. her stare was kind, but unwavering.

you’d already applied to notre dame, knowing that’s where matt committed. so when you answered, it was confident. it had been your plan since matt said yes to the school. “i’m going to notre dame and majoring in art history.”

“do you have any back up schools?”

you nodded. “ucla and the art institute of chicago.”

ms. meyer pursed her lips. “you know all of those places are highly competitive, right?”

“my transcripts and resume are impressive and I did really well on the SAT and ACT. i think i’ll be able to get in.” and you were, you were pretty confident as they come when it came to academics. any school would’ve been lucky to have you, that much you believed.

ms. meyer nodded. “i understand ucla and the art institute, both of those schools have incredible arts programs, but why notre dame? it doesn’t seem to fit with your aspirations.”

“oh,” you laughed under your breath. “that’s where my boyfriend is going.”

your guidance counselor blinked. “you’re incredibly smart and gifted, i’d hate to see that talent wasted when you could be developing it elsewhere. what do you want?”

“i want to be with matthew.”

ms. meyer sighed and gave you a sympathetic smile, you weren’t sure why though. you’d never been more sure of anything. “honey, can i be honest with you?” she didn’t wait for your response. “you have so much talent, so much to offer, i’ve seen many girls come in here, putting off aspirations for their significant others only for that relationship not to last.”

“i know we’re young,” you started, already feeling the heat rise up in your chest. she didn’t know anything about you personally, she didn’t know about you and matt. “but we’re gonna make it, i swear.”

ms. meyer nodded. “of course you are.” she cleared her throat and adjusted the papers in front of her. “so, notre dame...”

after

you weren't exactly sure what compelled you to do it, but at dinner a few nights ago, your mom had asked about what happened to simone, your friend from middle and high school. so you reached out, though it made you feel like you were contacting someone to join your mlm.

it legitimately surprised you when simone replied to your facebook message. the two of you made plans to get coffee on saturday.

and now it was saturday.

you weren’t getting coffee until 9:30, but you were awake and staring at your ceiling at 7. you’d done the due diligence of stalking simone’s profile, so you knew she was married with two kids who looked just like her. she worked as a data analyst for kroger and her husband was a public defender. she met her husband in college and they got married shortly after they graduated from grad and law school respectively.

if you were a better woman, you’d admit you were jealous. jealous that she got what she wanted in the end. but when you put that aside, you still felt overwhelming happiness at her station in life, regardless of how yours turned out.

you kept scrolling through her social media until it was eventually time for you to get up. you stayed to facebook, not even wanting to bother with going on instagram and accidentally stumbling across one of the tkachuks’ posts.

it was 9:10 when you finally finished getting dressed and ready. you came down the stairs and threw a goodbye over your shoulder before grabbing your crossbody bag and your keys and running out the door.

despite your sprinting and nearly running red lights, you were still five minutes late. you came into the coffee shop, gasping for air after sprinting down the sidewalk from your parking spot.

the second you entered the business, simone’s hand lifted and she smiled brightly, calling you over almost immediately. she stood to greet you, and like no time had passed, pulled you in for a hug.

“it’s so good to see you,” she said. “wasn’t sure if you still liked an iced chai latte, but i got one for you.”

“oh my god, yes,” you gasped before taking a seat and taking a sip of the beverage.

she kept smiling, which made you feel lighthearted for once. most people kept looking at you with pitying eyes, but simone saw you for more than the grief of the last six months. she had to know about it, she just had to, but you thanked her for not bringing it up in the first minute of your conversation.

“how’s work going?”

you shrugged. “it’s mostly tedious, but it’s been fine. what about you? working for kroger? that’s a huge deal.”

simone shook her head. “it’s just a means to an end, a way i can pay for my family’s lifestyle.”

“but are you passionate about what you do?”

she shrugged lightly. “it’s a job, it’s not my life. not everyone is going to work a job that fulfills them. my husband? he loves being a public defender, and he’s good at it. me though, as fun as analyzing data all day sounds and as helpful as it is, getting to have a job that doesn’t come home with me is probably my favorite part of it.”

you nodded along like you understood. and maybe you didn’t do a good enough job at being convincing because simone sighed.

“i wanted to wait to ask this, but i can’t hold it in any longer. how’re you holding up?”

it took you several seconds to answer her question. your mouth open and closed multiple times. “i— i don't know.” you sank back into your seat and picked at your cuticles. “it’s been a shitty few months,” you admitted. “you’d think i’d be over it by now.

simone shook her head and leaned in, arms braced on the table. “you two were together for a decade, what’s a few months in comparison to that?”

you shrugged. “i saw him the other night, when i went out drinking with the other bridesmaids. it was like, i don't know, i got dunked in an ice bath or something. he looked completely unaffected and i couldn’t breathe.”

simone whispered your name.

“but i’m fine!” you asserted. “i’m trying to be.”

simone nodded. “so what do you do now?”

you could’ve kissed her feet for the change in topic. “i’m working in the art restoration and conservation field.”

simone blinked. “you’re restoring art? do you like it?”

you shrugged. “most days, it can get repetitive, but that’s what i like.”

your friend sighed and fixed you with a soft, sympathetic look. “but is that what you want to do for the rest of your life? restoring someone else’s art? doing something repetitive? you are so talented, i hate to see you wasting that talent restoring someone else’s work.”

“it’s not a waste! it’s incredibly difficult and some things deserve to be preserved.”

“but some new things deserve to be created.” simone leaned in closer, her forearms braced on the table. “i think it would do you some good to start creating something again, even if it’s shitty. and you think you aren’t ready, just try something new. a new bar, a new hobby, a new man, something new.”

your stomach twisted at the thought of going on a date with someone other than matt, but simone was right. it had been six months and he seemed to be doing fine, it was your turn to start moving on, to find yourself again.

so you nodded. “we should do this more often,” you said. “i’ve missed you.”

simone smiled. “i’ve missed you too, i’m glad you’re home.”

you talked for another hour about everything the two of you had missed over the years of you being elsewhere before she had to leave and relieve the nanny at home. simone hugged you goodbye and texted you her new number before she left the coffee shop.

the drive home was quiet because you were pondering the things she’d said. you weren’t sure you were ready for making your own art, you sure as hell weren’t ready to go on a date. but maybe you should try.

maybe you were ready to put yourself first for once.

before

the biggest argument you’d had with matt was after you found out he wasn’t playing at notre dame at all, he was going to play for calgary.

you felt so stupid for committing to that school when you should’ve known your boyfriend was talented enough to skip it altogether. maybe you should’ve taken a gap year, then you wouldn’t have to be doing even more long distance in two different countries.

the two of you never argued, or maybe never was too strong of a word. you hardly ever had a disagreement if you thought about it long enough. most of the time, you suppressed the disappointment and the anger, shoving it to the side because you were surely being dramatic.

but now you were standing off to the side, waiting for your name to be called to cross the stage at your high school graduation, and you wished you’d said something to convince matthew to delay settling into his new calgary apartment with one of his teammates.

but you swallowed your disappointment and pride and just dealt with the fact that he wouldn’t be there.

it was fine.

just high school.

you were snapped out of your reverie when your name was called. you smiled and walked across the stage. when you dreamt of this exact moment, you always thought you’d walk with grace, that all noise would cease to exist as you honed in on the sheet of paper you’d spent the last 13 years working towards.

but it wasn’t like that.

because you heard one specific voice above all the others. as your principal handed you the diploma, your eyes searched the crowd and saw him.

matthew standing up and yelling with his family next to him. he had a sign, the words you couldn’t read because there were tears forming in your water line. he was pointing at you and kept yelling and clapping, hooting and hollering like it was his full time job. your parents were smiling, though they were seated, and your grandparents were stone faced clapping like they were at the masters tournament.

so you kept your eyes on him, even as you walked back to your seat. you might have stumbled, tripped even, but all you could see, all you could feel was him.

you were back in your seat by the time the person calling out the names spoke again.

“please hold your applause until the end.”

you could hear his scoff, even from your seat.

your leg bounced for the rest of the graduation ceremony. you didn’t even register the turning of your tassel. you just couldn’t wait for it to be over so you could be in matt’s arms.

as soon as the ceremony concluded, matt was shoving his way past families, nearly taking out an elderly gentleman in his quest to get to you. on the other hand, you were being pushed to move farther away from him as the procession of students filed out of the gym. you kept looking over your shoulder to find him, but it looked like brady had caught up to him, wrangling his older brother to follow the crowds outside.

“outside!” brady pointed.

you nodded.

as soon as you got through the gym doors, you were booking it outside into the sunlight. it blinded you momentarily, but you whipped your phone out seconds later to see if matt had texted you where he’d be. you pulled up his contact and were seconds away from calling him when arms wrapped around your waist and lifted you up into the air.

a squeal left your lips until he set you down a moment later. you spun around in his arms and before you could say anything, matthew was kissing you like no one else was around.

when the two of you finally needed air, you pulled away. “i thought you were in calgary!”

matthew scoffed though there was a large smile on his lips. “you thought i’d miss my favorite girl’s graduation? calgary can wait, your high school graduation only happens once.”

“i’m glad you’re here,” you whispered.

“me too, baby.”

unfortunately, matt pulled away so you could hug your parents and even your grandparents who were standing off to the side. taryn and brady pulled you into a group hug afterwards, with taryn going on a tangent about all the fun things the two of you would have to do before you left for school.

but brady was taking your graduation cap off your head to ruffle your hair as matt grabbed your purse and took your car keys out. keith and chantal were offering to pay for a celebratory lunch while your grandparents gave an irish goodbye. your parents were smiling, you were tucked into matt’s side, and brady and taryn were bickering and—

everything was perfect.

you wanted to freeze that moment, that sensation in your chest, take the saccharine feeling and bottle it up and store it on your bookshelf.

and if you could’ve, you would’ve savored the sensation of matt’s lips pressed to your temple while both of your dads discussed the best route to get to the restaurant.

but you had no idea how the future would turn out.

you thought matt was forever.

after

you were on a double date, or at least, hyping yourself up to go into the bar and meet up with simone, her husband, and a friend of theirs. you didn’t want to be a bitch, but you also didn’t want to send yourself into a panic attack. simone had suggested just entertaining something with someone, didn’t even have to be serious, it could just be sex.

you could do that, right?

just casual sex?

the thought was nauseating. you’d only slept with matthew, no one knew your body like he did and—

you stopped yourself before you could go down that rabbit hole.

your hands shook as you stepped out of your car and locked it. maybe you should’ve gotten an uber, but then again, you weren’t really planning on drinking like that. you were hoping you’d still be sober enough to go home.

the music in the bar shockingly wasn’t as loud as you expected. it wasn’t the bass bumping, ass grinding bar like the ones matt used to take you to after games. even still, your palms started sweating as you looked around. you spotted simone’s natural hair across the room and made your way towards her.

her husband, stephen, stood to greet you first, followed by simone, then lastly your date. a guy named andrew who was a partner at his firm, the youngest on his team.

his handshake was firm, but there were no calluses on his palm. his hair was slicked back with what you guessed was a pomade.

he was so unlike matthew it was alarming.

but maybe it was for the best.

you smiled and took your seat next to simone, you sipped on the water in front of you.

“we didn’t want to order drinks without you just yet.”

“thank you,” you mumbled just loud enough for everyone to hear.

“it’s nice to finally meet you,” andrew started. “simone spoke highly of you. she said you’ve been friends since middle school.”

you felt bad because simone didn’t really say much to you about him. if you were a gambler, you’d assume it was because she didn’t want you to back out. you barely even knew him and you were already comparing him to matt.

which wasn’t fair, you knew that. andrew deserved to be a human without the baggage of your last and only relationship determining how you viewed him.

you would try, at the very least for simone. at the very most, you’d try for yourself.

“nice to meet you too. i heard you’re a partner at your law firm? how is that going?”

oh god. you were so bad at this. asking about work on a friday night?

but he smiled. his teeth were perfectly straight and white. you'd bet your last dollar that he'd never needed braces, not like you did.

you hated yourself for thinking of the gap between matthew’s teeth.

“it’s going well,” he said. “lot of work, but i managed to get enough done this week that my friday was free. i wanted to meet the ‘best artist on planet earth,’ according to simone.”

“oh i don’t know about that,” you flushed.

simone scoffed. “don’t downplay yourself.” she turned to look at andrew. “you should see the art she created in high school as a teenager. it was so impressive.”

“what medium do you like working with the most?” he asked.

“mostly acrylic.”

andrew’s eyes lit up. “do you have any photos of your art? i’d love to see your work.”

you shook your head, feeling a little embarrassed at all the attention. “i don’t really paint like that anymore. i work in art conservation now, not a whole lot of time to create something new.”

“that’s such a unique career! what does your average day look like?” andrew leaned forward a little and took a sip of his water.

you told him a little bit about what you did. about how you spent hours hunched over a painting and fixing the smallest problems in hopes it would satisfy the client.

“you must’ve gone to some prestigious art school for that. if you don’t mind me asking, where did you go to college?”

your spine stiffened. “university of calgary.”

and just like you anticipated, his face twisted in confusion. there was no logical reason you should’ve gone out of the country for a regular school. it would be one thing if you went to an art institute, but you didn’t.

“why calgary?” he asked. “seems a bit random, if you don’t mind me asking.”

you shifted in your seat and wouldn’t meet anyone’s eyes. it wasn’t until you cleared your throat in a sorry attempt to get the lump out, that you spoke. “it’s a long story,” you said. “thought i had a future in calgary.”

andrew, to his credit, knew when to not ask questions and changed the subject immediately.

the rest of the night passed in a blur. you were only halfway present, your mind reeling at how you wasted those years in calgary waiting for a man who would dump you as soon as he moved to a warmer state.

he, quite literally, left you in the cold.

andrew offered to walk you to your car, an offer you accepted because it was dark and st. louis.

“i had a great time tonight,” he said. “it was really nice to meet you. you’re even better than simone and stephen said.”

you gave him a small smile. “it was nice to meet you too.”

andrew shifted on his feet. for a moment, he didn’t look the part of the youngest partner at his law firm, he looked like a boy. “i was hoping maybe you’d want to do this again? maybe get some dinner?”

your throat felt like someone had force fed you cotton balls. but then you thought about how pathetic your life had been the last six months, how pathetic it was going to be when you flew to new jersey to be in the same bridal party as your ex.

you refused to be pathetic any longer.

which is probably why you smiled (albeit shakily) and said yes.

before

you were bouncing on your toes in the hallway as you waited for matt. it was a brutal game, and he spent a good portion of it in the penalty box, mostly for minor things, but one incident was for fighting. which wasn’t atypical, but you’d never seen him that keyed up before.

and given his reputation, there were any number of things that could’ve caused the fight itself. two weeks ago, matt had fought someone for being too forceful with one of his teammates, which after years of watching the game, was on par with the sport and your boyfriend.

because he fought so much, you weren’t necessarily surprised whenever he did. sure, you flinched when he was punched, knowing how badly it would bruise, praying to whatever higher power existed that he would still have all his teeth. but usually, matt wasn’t trying to fight everyone on the ice at all times.

tonight was different.

safe to say, you were a little anxious waiting for him to come out.

you weren’t exactly sure about what was said on the ice to get him so riled up. the worst you’d seen was when someone on the other team said something about taryn. you used to think that was the angriest you ever saw him. and it was.

until tonight.

you could feel the energy rolling off of him in waves as he exited the locker room. usually, after a win, matt is relaxed and easy going, but despite the victory from tonight, he was tense and pent up, frustrated even.

“hey,” you said, meeting him halfway.

matthew didn’t respond, just dropped his bag and wrapped you up in a hug, tucking his head into the space where your neck met your shoulder.

“you okay?” you asked.

he nodded. he squeezed your waist once before letting go, taking your hand instead. “ready to go?”

the car ride was silent minus the music matthew had playing through the aux. his hand rested on your thigh, though the grip was particularly tighter than normal, especially after a win. part of you wanted to ask, the other part not wanting to spoil the rest of the night with your curiosity.

but this was the man you loved. and it hurt you to see him this upset.

normally, you would’ve left well enough alone, but you were going back to notre dame in two days and didn’t want to spend the rest of your time walking on eggshells around him. you couldn’t help him if you didn’t know what was wrong.

“what happened?” you asked when the car came to a stop at a light.

“nothing,” he grunted.

“your team won and you’re still grumpy, matthew. so tell me, what happened? i want to help you.”

“there’s nothing to help.”

“matthew,” you groaned. “i’m only here for two days, can you just be honest with me? i don’t wanna waste the rest of my trip with you being upset when i can help you—”

“then go back to indiana!” he all but yelled, ripping his hand off your thigh so he could shove it through his disheveled hair.

your jaw dropped. in all the years you’d known matt, he'd never talked to you that way. and you weren’t starting a bad habit by letting him think he could ever do it again. you unbuckled your seat belt and grabbed your bag. you tugged on the handle of the door. “i’ll see you at home,” you said.

matt scoffed. “don’t be dramatic.”

“i’m not being ‘dramatic,’ matthew. you’re being an asshole.” you braced yourself for the cold as the door opened and let in a cold breeze.

matthew called your name, but you ignored him and slammed the car door shut. it was a little petty, considering how matt had berated his siblings over the same thing.

a car honked, probably because the light had turned green and matt was still sitting at the light, looking at you.

a cold wind blew and for a moment, you thought about hopping back in the car with matt, but he was pulling away and your pride wasn’t ready to take a hit just yet.

his car sped away until, with an efficiency you only wish you had, he parallel parked in a spot just up the road.

“get in the car,” he called, slamming his car door shut. “it’s too cold for you to be proving a point.”

“and what point am i trying to prove, matthew?” you asked over your shoulder.

you kept walking.

“would you please stop walking and just get back in the car?”

you kept walking.

a hand reached out and grabbed your wrist, you might’ve shrieked had it not been gentle, had you not recognized the scent of matt’s cologne.

gently, he turned you around.

“baby, just get in the car. you don’t even have to talk to me. don't even have to look at me if you don’t want to. i’ll sleep on the couch or something, but it’s not safe for you to be walking home alone.” he ran his thumb back and forth over your pulse point in a soothing manner.

you kept your eyes on his hand. “what happened during the game?

he sighed, shoulders sagging like they were tired from carrying the weight of the world. “they were talking shit.”

you blinked. “and that’s different....how?”

with the hand that wasn’t holding your wrist, matthew pinched the bridge of his nose. “they were talking shit about you. saying you deserved better and shit.”

“matthew, you know that’s not true—”

“they called you names.” his voice was dark, angrier than you'd ever heard before. “things i’m not comfortable repeating.”

a shiver went down your spine, for matt to be that upset made you uncomfortable. you didn’t want to think about what they said, you didn’t want to dwell on it any longer.

“well,” you said, voice feeling small and weak in your throat. “well, we know it’s not true, so it doesn’t matter.” you tried to make your way back to the car, but matt’s grip on your wrist stopped you.

“but it does matter,” he insisted. “what they said, i get it wasn't true, you and i both know that. but i’m not gonna let anyone talk shit about you, i don’t care who they are.”

your eyes finally met his own and in the blue you saw determination and conviction there. you started towards him and wrapped your arms around his waist.

“i love you, matty.”

he kissed the top of your head. “love you more.”

after

“where are you going?” your mom asked from the couch.

your dad looked up from his james patterson book to squint at your outfit: a square neck black dress. “are you going out?” he chimed in.

you felt sheepish, like the fifteen year old girl going on her first solo date, no parents picking her up because matt just got his license. “remember that guy i went on a double date with?”

“with simone and her husband?” you mom asked.

you nodded. “we’re going out again, just us tonight.”

your mother gave you a small smile while you dad kept staring. “have fun, sweetheart.”

your dad, however, put his book down and looked at you above the rim of his glasses. “are you gonna be okay?”

“alan, this will be good for her!”

but your dad’s eyes never left your face. “you’ll call if you need something?”

“andrew’s a good guy, dad.” or at least, you were assuming so. you’d only met the guy one other time and he seemed alright.

but you could see the look in your father’s eyes, you could hear what he wasn’t saying.

so was matthew.

you swallowed and nodded at your parents. your phone pinged with a notification that your uber was outside. “i’ll be back.”

the drive to the bar was silent. usually, you wouldn’t have taken an uber, but you were unsure how drunk you would get tonight. the date could go well, it could be everything you wanted, even if all you wanted was matthew.

but you were prepared for the worst. you were prepared to drink until you couldn’t see straight just to get through the night.

andrew was a nice guy, but he wasn’t who you wanted.

and you hated yourself for it.

the uber pulled up to the bar. and simply because he didn’t kidnap or talk to you, you gave the driver five stars.

andrew was waiting at a high top table for you, a glass of water ready to go. you waved at him and carefully made your way across the room, avoiding people and drinks and people with drinks.

“hey,” he greeted.

you gave him a small smile. “hi.”

“was traffic bad on your way here? i wasn’t sure, given that it’s friday and what not.”

you shook your head. “not too bad.”

c’mon, think of something. say something. anything.

“crazy busy tonight, huh?” you wanted to facepalm. that was what you came up with? all the words in the world and that was what you—

“yeah,” andrew cut off your mental tirade. “i think some famous guys are here tonight, heard murmurs of it.”

you nearly broke out into a cold sweat. “d-do you know who?”

andrew shrugged. “i didn’t ask, i just heard someone talking about it when i was getting a drink.” then, like he finally realized, he snapped. “do you want anything? i can grab it for you.”

you gave him your drink order with a smile. he tapped the table with his knuckles before promising he'd be right back.

you traced the grain of the table with your finger, allowing it to feel the grooves and water stains left from other customers. it felt awkward, sitting by yourself with no one to talk to. andrew said he'd be back, but the bar was busy, it could be ten, fifteen minutes before he'd come back.

your phone buzzed.

simone:

how’s it going?

you smiled despite yourself.

you:

he’s nice. he went to get me a drink.

you put your phone down to look around the bar. it was busier than normal, or at least, what you thought was normal.

you were scrolling through your social media feeds when andrew finally came back. he had your drink in hand with a smile on his face.

“sorry, the line took forever,” he said.

you glanced at the bar to see a small crowd of people. “doesn’t surprise me,” you said. “friday’s are usually busy.”

“yeah especially when there’s two hockey players in town. heard someone at the bar talking about it, thought you might wanna know. simone said you were a fan?”

your stomach dropped to your feet. you took a hefty sip of your drink to avoid andrew seeing a frown on your face. there was a chance that it was a blues player still in town, but your gut knew better. if you were a betting woman, you'd bet your last dollar on it being brady and matt.

you wanted to throw up.

instead, you chugged the drink.

“whoa, you okay?” andrew’s eyes widened a little, maybe in concern, but there was something about the smirk on his face that said otherwise.

you gave him a shaky smile. “just fine. can i get another drink?”

he smiled immediately and got up to get you another.

and another.

your vision was blurring a little when you tried to cut yourself off, even as andrew was sliding another glass in front of you. you threw the drink back again, not even blinking at it.

matt and brady could be here. it was too soon to see them again, you weren't prepared to see them again. maybe if you drank enough, you’d black out and forget all about tonight.

but then andrew was grabbing your elbow, he was leading you towards the door, encroaching upon your personal space. his lips were on your neck, whispers of what he had planned for you.

your skin crawled, you wanted him off of you, but your arms were sluggish, you were tripping over your feet and he was the only thing holding you up.

“no,” you slurred. “lemme go.”

but he either didn’t hear you or was ignoring you because he kept dragging you to the door.

then the panic set in.

it felt like it came out of nowhere, but maybe the surmounting panic was always there like a loyal friend. you tried squirming out of his grip, shoving at his chest, but the panic was building the longer he held onto you. your head was shaking furiously, your mouth doing its best to protest, but it was like the alcohol made your tongue heavy.

“lemme go—” you tried shoving one more time before you heard a shout in the distance.

“hey!” you weren’t aware of the people around you being shoved to the side, you were unaware of the rage surrounding you. you were unaware until andrew was ripped away and you were being shoved into another body.

“matt hey—”

brady. you were right, brady was here.

god you loved brady.

“brady?” you slurred, smiling lazily up at him. “you’re here! why’re you here?”

with one arm, brady kept you pressed to him, but he wasn’t acknowledging you. his eyes were focused on his brother holding the collar of your date.

oh. your date.

there was no rhyme or reason for the feeling of horror that washed over you when you realized what almost happened before matt and brady showed up.

you were gonna throw up.

or pass out.

you weren’t sure when you started hyperventilating, but it felt like the walls were closing in. was the music always this loud? was matt always that loud when yelling? you wouldn’t know, he hardly ever yelled at you—

“hey,” brady’s gentle voice sounded it your ear, but it was like you were hearing it from underwater. “hey, breathe, it’s okay. you’re safe now.”

the funny thing about hyperventilating is no one wants to be hyperventilating. it’s similar to worrying in that telling someone to stop worrying is ineffective. brady telling you to breathe wasn’t helping because it wasn’t like you wanted to be light headed and struggling to get oxygen.

your mind was just racing with the thoughts of what almost happened.

were your hands shaking? or was the world just rocky? was it the alcohol? why did andrew give you so much? was he planning on—

oh god.

“matt!” brady’s voice again sounding like a deep echo in a cave, one you could barely hear. “matt, i think he got the point, she needs you.”

did you?

but it didn’t matter what you thought, because you were being gently pulled into a pair of arms you would’ve recognized anywhere. you could be deaf, blind, and mute, you could’ve had your nose plugged so you couldn’t smell his aftershave and you still would’ve known it was matt. his arms were the only ones that felt like home.

maybe it was the way your head tucked under his chin perfectly, or the way you could hold your own hand when you wrapped your arms around his waist. maybe it was the way matt tried to fit you into his ribcage whenever he hugged you.

“hey,” his voice was quiet, hoarse from the yelling probably. “you’re okay, i’ve got you. nothing’s gonna hurt you, not while i’m here.” his lips were on the top of your head, mumbling the words into your hair.

“he—he was gonna—”

matt was shushing you, running a hand up and down your back. “do you wanna go outside? get some fresh air?” you nodded against his chest, a place you used to lay your head on at night.

matt walked you outside, brady not far behind. he was supporting most of your weight. you were still incredibly drunk even if the event that just happened sobered you up a little.

your hands were still shaking, your knees a little weak, though you weren’t sure what the original cause of that was. if it was from alcohol, the sleazy date, or just being held by your ex, you weren’t sure.

what a year tonight has been.

your heartbeat slowed down as you listened to matt’s. his hand continued to rub your back in long lines.

“you’re okay,” he continued to say. “i’m not gonna leave you. you’re safe right here, baby.”

your heart soared at the pet name until gravity kicked in and you were right back where you started.

rock bottom.

you pushed away from matt, now that your heart rate had decreased. you stumbled a bit from the lack of stability, but you managed to right yourself before matt could get his hands on you to help you balance.

“you okay?” he asked.

“no,” you mumbled, shaking your head despite the world feeling like it was spinning too fast already. “no. i’m not okay.”

matt took a step towards you, it was like watching a film in slow motion, seeing his face fall as you immediately took a step back.

“baby i—”

“stop! stop calling me that!” you yelled even as your words slurred, throwing your hands up in the air before pulling at your hair. “you—you don’t get to call me that, not anymore. and you certainly don’t get to ride in like some white knight coming to my rescue either!”

“what’re you—” he cut himself off before running a hand down his face. “he was going to hurt you, i wasn’t going to let that happen!”

maybe it was the alcohol that made you more honest than normal. “why? you don’t seem to care what happens anyway?”

“what the hell are you talking about? i would never let someone hurt you, not if i can stop it.”

“but you had no problem hurting me? leaving me in a country alone?”

matt’s jaw dropped. “you can’t seriously be comparing the two. he—he almost—he had every intention of—” but he kept cutting himself off. and by the looks of his clenched fists, it was hurting him more just thinking about it.

and he was right, what almost happened with andrew and what actually happened at the hands of matt were two different things, but it hurt more from matt, the man who swore he’d be at your side, to love you through it all. he’d dropped you like a bad habit and was expecting everything to be normal again? like you hadn’t spent over half your life completely in love with him?

you sighed, your shoulders sagged, all fight evaporating your body once more. “thanks for help, i’ll see you around.” you turned on your heel and nearly ran into brady, whom you forgot was even there.

“let me drive you home,” brady said. “‘s the least i could do.”

brady at least let you sit shotgun this time, with matt in the back. and when he pulled up to your house, matt was the one to walk you to the door like he had many times before.

“can we talk?” he asked. “sometime this week? or next? or whenever you're free?”

you looked at him, really looked at him. his hands shook at his sides and you longed to hold them in your own to steady them like he did for you earlier. “why’re you doing this to me? why can’t you just leave me be?”

matt stared at you before he pressed his lips together. he looked off to the side almost like he was looking at brady waiting in the car or a scrap of self control, or maybe just the right words to say. “i don’t think i’m capable of letting you go.”

your voice caught on the words in your throat. “i need you to try, matt. because i can’t keep doing this. you can’t call me baby when i’m not your baby anymore.”

he nodded. “just one conversation, i promise.”

you should say no. you should just let it go, but you didn’t think you could deny matt anything if he really asked for it. “okay,” you said. “just one conversation.”

#matthew tkachuk imagine #matthew tkachuk x reader #matthew tkachuk #nhl imagine #nhl imagines #nhl blurb

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girlfictions · 11 months

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I cannot even begin to tell you how hollow it sounds when you cry and shit yourself over dead Palestinian children while a few days ago you were celebrating the deaths of innocent Israeli children and saying they deserved it, calling BABIES colonizers and cheering on the wholesale rape and kidnapping of women and children who have yet to be released. I guess childrens lives only matter so long as they aren’t Jewish.

Usually I wouldn't bother engaging with Zionists because it's not worth the energy but this is actually a great learning opportunity for other people to see exactly how the Zionist narrative works.

"I cannot even begin to tell you how hollow it sounds when you cry and shit yourself over dead Palestinian children"

Absolutely insane way to start off your message. Just pure dehumanisation of the nearly 3,000 children who have been murdered since October 7th, not to mention the 1,434 children who have been killed by Israeli forces from 2008 to October 6th 2023. I am not "crying and shitting myself" over dead children, I am mourning them. I am grieving for them and the lives they should have rightfully lived. I am aghast that thousands of children have been killed while the world watches.

"a few days ago you were celebrating the deaths of innocent Israeli children and saying they deserved it, calling BABIES colonizers and cheering on the wholesale rape and kidnapping of women and children who have yet to be released"

Show me exactly where I said anything even remotely close to this egregious statement. Every one of my posts about this situation has been tagged with #palestine, so it should be easy to prove your claims. I have never celebrated the death of an innocent child because I am not a complete fucking scumbag. I have never called a baby a coloniser because I am not stupid. I have never, ever cheered on the rape and kidnapping of women and children and it's disgusting that you'd even accuse me of doing so. These blatant lies are honestly shocking; why do you feel the need to put words in my mouth? Is it because your narrative falls apart without it? Or are you just projecting how you feel about Palestinians onto me?

"I guess childrens lives only matter so long as they aren’t Jewish."

What a pathetic attempt at moral posturing. And, of course, the classic Zionist move of accusing those who support Palestine of anti-Semitism. Never mind the fact that 500 Jewish protesters were arrested for calling for a ceasefire at the U.S. Congress last week, or the hundreds more, including rabbis, who were arrested just yesterday during another ceasefire demonstration. I get it — you're losing the PR war. It's hard to get away with supporting a genocide when there are millions of us bearing witness, so you've resorted to sending hysterical, vitriolic anons. I hope you realise no matter how desperately you try to paint this situation as anything but a one-sided massacre, nobody believes you. We will fight for a free Palestine and we will see a free Palestine.

من النهر إلى البحر

#palestine

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stealthetrees · 4 months

Text

So this is more of an AU of the fandom AU where the Coruscant Guard live in a shitty run down building that’s falling apart. But Commander Fox finds this unacceptable so he clears out a warehouse used for storage and builds a shiny new headquarters. The original building they fix up, but only the lobby, a couple offices, and the med bay so troopers on senate duty can stay there due to its proximity to the senate building. Their new building they can go nuts with, adding all sorts of stuff that they arnt allowed to have.

An entire room is filled with tv monitors so they can slice into security cameras around the planet and see everything. They get a nice rec room, an area for the engineers to play around with ideas, even an office for the medics to make you talk about your feelings. A server room is dedicated solely to storing and orgonizing blackmail collected on pretty much everyone worth mentioning on Coruscant.

But after one secret building, what’s another? Areas of strategic importance are carefully chosen and a new headquarters is established nearby. They are each given code names. The original building is still Headquarters, the new main building is the Barracks. The Office is where they run intelligence and investigations from. IT Department is next to the industrial district. The Kennals are much lower than some of their other buildings, a small station set up to monitor the rancor infestation (Thorn moves down there to become a cowboy after he “dies” on Scipio). The Lobby is set in the lower civilian levels as a way to help the people who arnt rich enough to bribe politicians into getting what they want. The Med Bay started as just somewhere for big surgeries, physical therapy and prosthetics, but which the “generous donations” they acquire it grows into a hospital for civilians as well, completely free, and they start hiring nat born doctors, surgeons and nurses while paying them well and proving a great work environment. Adding a therapist office helped a lot of troopers as well.

The system takes a long time to build and works perfectly. Until Fox figures out Palpatine is a Sith. It’s not actually world shattering news, but it does give him a panic attack after realizing Palpatine though Fox already knew, because he had threatened the chancellor with a slug thrower instead of a blaster. Through questions to his batch mates with Jedi generals he learns that Sith can influence people’s minds and decides that in order for the clone rights bill to pass Palpatine needs to die.

And die he does. The rest of the conservative senators are swayed by a mix of blackmail, bribes, and bomb threats. The bill does pass, and most of them are instantly arrested for sentient rights violations, assault, and various other crimes because government property can’t serve as a witness in a civilian court of law.

The timing of all this could not be worse, as two of Fox’s batch mates where on planet, Cody and Wolffe, and they loved to stick their noses in his business. Which means when a lot of Corries are injured in the fight with the senate guards and private security while trying to make arrests, Cody and Wolffe help get them back to Headquarters, because it’s much closer than the Barracks. But Headquarters has a very small med bay because so few troopers use it. So they are over crowded and run out of bacta.

Also Cody gets turned around in the hallway and discovers how bad the rest of the building is. So Fox has a choice to make. He grabs Cody and Wolffe and drags them outside and back to the GAR barracks while texting Thire and telling him he has an hour and a half to make Headquarters look lived in. Then Fox opens a one way comm line with every Corrie so they can keep the story straight as he answers his brothers questions.

Fox commits to the bit so hard they believe the Guard is suffering horribly from abuse and budget cuts while in reality they just steal money from what ever rich person they have the freshest blackmail from. He could just tell them all the illegal things he’s been up to, but Fox would rather die than tell someone more than they needed to know.

#unhinged fox au #he grabs a shovel and keeps digging himself in deeper #it will backfire eventually but not until he’s gotten rid of the Pikes #star wars #commander fox #coruscant guard #marshal commander fox #corrie guard #corries #corrie stuff #commander cody #commander wolffe #the clone wars #tcw #sw tcw #commander thorn #commander thire

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ineylesian · 6 months

Text

— FELL ON BLACK DAYS

AVENTURINE X FEM! READER

AO3 | NAVIGATION

WORD COUNT — 9.5k

WARNINGS — spoilers for penacony’s storyline, enemies (??) to lovers, slowburn fr (it gets good i promise) mentions of genocide, mentions of child exploitation (not explicit), weapons & violence, smut, fem anatomy reader, sub!aventurine, mentions of traumatic events, one bed troupe

SUMMARY — Risk. It’s the word Aventurine lives by, a motto that claws at your heart when he’s gone. A reality that spills tears when he closes the door to your apartment, leaving only the ache of your heart in his absence. A danger that never guarantees the next time he chases his destiny will not be his last.

You will never fight to change it, because that’s all it is. Destiny.

AUTHOR’S NOTE — AHHH i love aventurine so much he made me write again <333 i will defend this man to the end of the earth i swear. also holy word vomit, this is officially my longest piece!!

“BREAKING NEWS: Reports incoming that the International Peace Corporation has been seen with an employee suspected of Avgin origin from the planet Sigonia-IV. All habitants from this world were thought to have been wiped out or lost to the galaxy, so the appearance of this mysterious individual has grasped the attention of–”

The broadcast slowly fades into the background, overtaken by the synth and snare of a song that lightly shakes the ground at your feet.

Sometimes you’re better of dead–

“Oh, you think you’ll be an asset? You’ll have to learn to make tough decisions on the go here if you want to succeed, so tell me…”

There’s a gun in your hand, it’s pointing at your head–

“You want to help this clan? Help claim this world and rid it from the remaining filth that roams?”

There’s a piercing screech amidst the bar, the high pitched wail of the speaker blasting the music fighting against the volume. A few seconds pass before the song picks back up again, a few lyrics skimmed through.

Which do you choose, a hard or soft option? (How much do you need?)

In a West End town, a dead end world, The East End boys and the West End girls–

“...”

“Before your initiation, you must make a prayer to the winds and mountains. Do you swear to devote your thoughts and beliefs to them, and reclaim the glory of Sigonia-IV?”

We’ve got no future, we’ve got no past

Here today, built to last–

“I swear.”

The bass fades and you’re left standing amidst a crowd of chatting people, some high on buzz, others passed out beside the restroom. Your eyes slowly fix forward, coming to a halt as the masses shift in formation, curving in a circle around the biggest table in the casino. Lined with forest green felt and red chips, hands bang against the surface joined in a cry of frustration.

“God damn it. This is rigged!” A player screams, hot-faced and teeth grit. “YOU!”

He stomps his way around the table, stopping at the dealer’s chair, failing to gain any attention despite the magnitude of his boots on the floor. In retaliation, the man takes a fistfull of the dealer’s hair, spinning him violently around and grabbing the collar around his neck.

Seldom have there been times where you didn’t see him in this sort of setting, a man with glasses that carried the same orange tint as the drink in his hand, die mounted between his fingers as he speaks with a wealthy patron. His words weave like velvet on a fine tailored suit as he invites you to play a game of chance, and before the game has even begun, you’ve lost.

His name is Aventurine, and, just as his reputation precedes him, the corners of his lips turn upward as you enter his field of view. He is never one to be down on luck.

“Sir, I’m going to have to ask you to exit the casino. The drinks have riled you up a bit too much, and I’m afraid you’re no longer sober enough to keep playing.”

The smell of outlandish alcohol hits your nose in a foul wave as he turns, rudely shrugging your hand off of his shoulder.

“And who do you think you are? Protecting this weasel like that.” You take a step back as he advances, completely abandoning his grip on Aventurine as his gaze focuses on the emblem tailored to your shoulder. “You’re in on this scam too, aren’t you? Fuckin’ IPC, always looking to take money from people.” A sizable crowd has gathered at this point, and with that, guards are quick to stand at your side. You tilt your head to the side, extending a hand to gesture at the coat draped over his empty chair.

“You may gather your things and leave now, sir. Refusal to comply will result in you being forcibly removed.”

A few more seconds of seething stares pass before he grumbles an insult toward you and rushes to gather his things, attempting to push the guards following him away. You sigh, turning to the dealer, who is now comfortable in his chair, feathered hat placed neatly on his lap as he shuffles the pool of cards pushed his way.

“Alright folks, now that’s over with, how about another–”

“Mr. Aventurine unfortunately won’t be able to join you all this round.” You quickly cut him off, laying the newly layered deck of cards onto the table. “May I have a word, please?”

The blonde takes a glance between you and the rest of the patrons at the table before nodding, allowing a charismatic smile to decorate his face as he slides the cards forward.

“Of course. Miss Antonia, would you please find another dealer to step in for the remaining games?”

He gathers a kind nod from a nearby waitress, before turning to follow you outside of the casino. As the door opens, strong drafts of icy wind blow against your face, and you hear a shiver from behind.

“Sheesh, couldn’t we at least have talked inside? I didn’t come prepared to stand in the cold…”

You send a look his way, and Aventurine’s hands rise, lips pursed in faux apology. He pushes his glasses farther into his nose bridge as you lean against the casino’s exterior wall, shielding yourself from the chill. It’s clear he’s not taking you seriously, stifling out a yawn and rubbing his eyes before he even spares you a glance.

“Here to lecture me about the, wait…” His eyes suddenly narrow, honing in on your uniform. “Who are you?”

You remain silent, watching as he taps a few fingers against his forehead, thinking. The talisman of the IPC’s Strategic Investment Department sits firmly laid into your uniform. A smoothly carved onyx, inferior to the cornerstone you know he possesses and certainly lacking in power. His eyes linger on the stone for a few moments, biting the inside of his cheek as he tilts his head back up.

“Never seen that stone before..” He says after a few seconds, voice substantially lower. “What rank are you?”

His gaze is opaque, on guard. You resist the urge to bite your lip, figuring lying in this kind of situation wouldn’t be the best decision. Subconsciously, you bring a hand up to your stone, adjusting your coat flap before bringing it back down.

“P39.”

His eyebrows form a sharp line, but his lips remain flat. The lens behind thick shades linger on the stone, burning into the lights that reflect off of the darkness. He’s never seen someone who isn’t a part of the Ten Cornerstones wear something like this, so who are you?

“If you’re here to try and convince me to do something, I’m not interested. I’ve had enough orders drilled into my head since I came to Jarilo-VI.”

His forefront is confident, but you can see the hand that lingers at his side, struggling to stay put. It reeks of mild uncertainty, and a lack of security. He doesn’t feel safe when he’s not in control.

“I’m here to tell you that your assignment’s changed.” Your response is straight and to the point. There’s no room to betray any underlying feelings of guilt you may have from years passed. “You’ll be with me and my team, we’re going to the Loufu in three days to sort some business out. I suggest you finish your deals here before we go.”

“Well then.” Aventurine clicks his tongue, mild annoyance riding the smile that forms on his lips. “Let’s acquaint ourselves then, shall we? You must know who I am, so please allow me the pleasure of returning the favor.”

A small passage of frosty air rises into the atmosphere as he breathes, hand extending in formality. You take it, slowly shaking, taking in the defensive rise of his shoulders. It seems he has zero tolerance for strangers.

“Nice to meet you, Aventurine. They call this stone the onyx.”

–

The Interastral Peace Corporation only takes workers to be strong-minded and just as toughly willed. In the Strategic Investment Department, greed is a virtue, and wanting nothing but it all is a prayer. Those who earn their spot as a cornerstone will stop at no means to chase their desires.

Aventurine values risk, but he always loves to have control in his corner. Without control, the chips in his hands are of no use, and his bargains crumble beneath him.

A gambler's true nightmare, sitting right between his eyes.

Your relation to him is a true mystery, despite all of the digging he’s been doing after arriving at the Loufu. Despite the numerous deals you’ve closed together, he still fails to know anything about you, other than the fact that you have quick wit and fascinating knowledge of the universe. He won’t dare approach you directly, his inhibitions are too high and he knows too little.

However, there’s something off about you and that stone of yours. It’s unlike anything he’s ever seen before.

“Does the IPC really need that many funds to perform a vitality check on the Sky-Faring Commission? From what I remember, this is nearly triple the amount of last year’s fee.”

“Well, Helm Master, from what our reports say, you had agreed to the accumulation of interest based on reports of safety in the Loufu. Based on recent events, there has been a substantial raise in alarm concerning the safety of the citizens here. We hope you can understand.”

Aventurine unfolds his hands, sliding a glossy black dossier over to the woman known as Yukong. After skimming over the first page of analysis, she sighs, and places her hand over the cover.

“Is it possible that we could touch bases on this later this week? I need time to look over these documents and discuss them with my team before making any decisions.”

Biting back a groan of exasperation, you nod, politely shaking her hand and bowing your head when she stands. What you thought was going to be a quick excursion of debt collecting had turned into two long weeks of debate, and you’re starting to lose sleep. After Yukong exits, you run a hand through your hair, allowing the flow from the outside to flood your ears..

You can admit, the place they chose is certainly impressive in its theatrics, blooming with tall fountains of pristine water and a live band of foxians playing classical music on a mahogany stage.

After a few minutes of jotting down notes you find yourself leaning against the bar’s edge, elbows cool against smooth wood. Your thoughts swirl like the vibrato of the woman singing a cover of a local song in a language unknown to you, but it’s calming, and you begin to itch with the desire to order a drink.

The waiter polishing glasses near you seems to pick up on your wants, quietly gesturing with her hand that she’ll take your order.

“A Rose in Rain, please.”

She makes your drink at an astonishing speed, sliding the glass next to your hands with a smile. You stare at the royal blue liquid sitting at the rim, contemplating if the hangover will be worth it.

Aventurine eyes the finger that rests along the base of the glass, humming quietly to himself. He figures there’s no better way to get to know someone than through a few drinks.

“You gonna drink that or keep staring at it?”

You turn your head, watching as he slides onto the barstool next to you. He raises his three outer fingers, ordering a small glass of Wintry Garden before turning to face you.

It’s been a long month with the Cornerstone. His approach remains restricted, evident in his snippets of sarcasm that he still doesn’t trust you. Your situation is… unusual, so you tolerate it. However, there still lies a fear within that he’ll go deeper than what’s for his own good.

“Do you usually drink? Or are you afraid to spill your guts?”

His words drip with conviction, blindly accusing you with the corners of his mouth tilted upward. It’s been too long, and he still doesn’t know a damn thing about you other than the stone you wear. He needs to flip this in his favor, fast.

Aventurine’s fingers drum against the bar’s edge as he picks up his drink, taking a small sip. The slight tilt of his head inclines you to start yours too, drinking half of the tall glass in one swig. His eyebrows raise in surprise when the drink hits the table, taking all but a few seconds to completely down the entirety of its contents, a resounding clink following.

When you don’t rush to finish your own drink, Aventurine chuckles, crossing his arms as he turns to face you fully. He’s eyeing you, daring smile plastered on his face.

“What, scared?”

He’s challenging you. And it works, since your drink is empty and you’re ordering a second round in a matter of seconds. Fizz sluggishly bubbles down your throat, followed by rich spots of thick, clear syrup.

A few drinks is all it takes for you to begin feeling lightheaded, pressing a palm into your eye to try and alleviate the nausea. Aventurine is at least 6 drinks in, setting down his next with an exaggerated sigh. Raising his hand for another, he lightly dings his glass against yours, the scent of redsunset sauce high on his breath.

“Let’s talk, Onyx.” He remarks, placing his hands on the table as the bartender comes over. “What’s the real deal with you? How come I haven’t seen you anywhere in the IPC and you show up in my faction one random day?”

You cough, attempting to clear your throat before you answer. It’s tough to keep your resolve with the amount of alcohol in your system.

“Maybe you’re just not perceptive enough, I’ve always been around.”

It’s clear he doesn’t like your answer. Another drink down.

“How many years have you worked for the IPC?”

“Almost 4 now.”

“What’s the entrance project that got you into the Strategy Department?”

You hesitate, and he grins, satisfied. This interrogation is going as planned.

“Well then? I’m sure it couldn’t have been that bad, unless you’re more dangerous than you seem.”

It’s your turn to down a drink, wiping a small trace off of your chin as you think.

“Izumo.” You answer, short, watching as his fingers clasp tighter around the glass in his hand. Surprise.

“You really expect me to believe that?” He scoffs, a tinge of fire evident in his voice. “No one goes to Izumo any more, not after the slash.”

“You’d be surprised at the sheer amount of people that go to Magatsu no Morokami to uncover history. The IPC has their eyes set on valuable relics left behind from the war.”

He leans forward, dangerously close to your face. Past the thick orange lens of his aviators, you can see the irate spark in his eyes, alight with a plethora of shades you’ve never seen before.

“It’s not wise to lie to your superiors.”

You back away, sliding your card across the counter to the bartender. The moment Aventurine gets up to follow, you stop in your tracks, holding a small drive in his direction. You have some tricks up your sleeve, too.

“You’ll change your mind.”

He pauses, slightly bent over in a stupor of alcohol.

“Best keep your cards close to your chest, Aventurine. Snooping in places you don’t belong bodes bad fortune.”

His mouth opens, but no words come out. Slowly, he takes the drive from your hand, leaning back onto the bar’s surface, eyebrows knit in thought. The world is suddenly too loud and amidst a flurry of harmonic bellows and blinding lights, you disappear.

—

INTERASTRAL PEACE CORPORATION, STRATEGY INVESTMENT DEPARTMENT HQ | ONE MONTH LATER

“I guess I should apologize.”

Several weeks of absence. You look up from the papers on your desk, watching as Aventurine places your drive back on your desk. He straightens back up, waiting for you to respond.

“Understandable.” You answer, finalizing a document with a quick signature. “I would have had my apprehensions too.”

“Still do, but it’s better to work with someone you tolerate, right?”

You look up. He shrugs, eyeing the papers you have scattered around.

You had given him a flash drive with your report on Izumo, or, at least, a report on it. Sometimes things are left best buried. Still, Aventurine is certainly not stupid, and you know that. The final version of the report is vague and full of small incidents that contrast the planet’s true history There are inconsistencies, but he seems a little less hostile for the time being.

“Whatever you’re hiding from me, I intend to find out in due time. But I can’t do that if we’re at odds.” A hand is extended your way, held a little less straight and professional. “Let’s just try and hate each other a little less, huh?”

Fighting the urge to roll your eyes, you take his hand and shake it for the second time. Aventurine smiles at you, a little less pointedly, but still on guard.

“Friends it is, then.”

His grip tightens slightly at the proclamation, leaving your veins seared and eyes wavering. As if you just made a deal with the devil. Your gaze drags along the fancies of his coat, figuring this is just another gamble he’s won. Something closer to certain death; the passion for it intrigues you.

Sooner or later you’ll suffer the consequences of a lie, you tell yourself. There’s no good outcome when striking up an agreement with a gambler, especially one like Aventurine.

Especially when the gambler is holding a knife to your throat.

The blade is cool, barely holding back from your trachea. Leather gloves hold a fistfull of your hair, shoving you down onto the filing cabinet you were sifting through moments before. Your eyes dart around, only able to see the edge of his shoe pressing against your ankle and the papers you dropped scattered across the floor.

“Just as I thought we were getting along.” His spits, words slithering around your chest and settling around your neck. “It was only a matter of time before you slipped up.”

Confusion spreads across your features, and Aventurine scoffs. His shoe digs deeper into your achilles, and you stagger against the metal.

“What the Hell are you talking about?” Your words come out choked, gasping for air against Aventurine’s hold.

“That man, the one you had a long conversation with at the meeting tonight? You two seemed to get along.” Aventurine’s breath runs short out of anger, grip scalding against your skin. “You know him, don’t you?”

You close your eyes, tracing the night’s events back several hours. You only recall shaking two men’s hands, one being the esteemed Doctor Ratio’s, and the other the reason why you were down in the IPCs archives. He was dressed nothing short of what a gentleman would wear, offering you many commending words as he spoke of the recent inflation concerning the astral economy. However, you didn’t miss the brilliant stone embedded in the shell of his tie, reflecting vibrant colors you’ve only seen once in your lifetime. And neither did he.

“Pretty stone isn’t it?.” Aventurine continues, pressing your hands against the wall you’re shoved against. “I’ve seen it a lot throughout my lifetime, but I’m sure you know that already. Silly me, forgetting how easy it is to conceal them.”

He reaches for your shoulder, and you push back, using the slightly stagger of his feet to grab the blade’s edge, violently smashing your head into his and spinning him around. His blade traded for your stone.

“I’d like to know…” His fingers flip the stone around, taking in the colorless mass, like a void amidst the stars. With a quick swipe of his hand, a lighter is held to it, engulfing the black in a dance of pale fire. Aventurine shakes the rising smoke off of him after a few moments, and your eyes narrow.

“...Why you have this?”

Turquoise meteorite, a brilliant blue stone infused with veins of a green just as bright. A kind of beauty that could only be found on Sigonia, tailored in a way only an Avgin could. The crafter spoke of a tactic that could hide the stone’s true color, while keeping its spirit alive with you still.

Blood drips from your hand, staining your clothes a deep crimson. Gritting your teeth together, you slice a sleeve of your dress shirt off, slowly wrapping it around the wound.

Aventurine stands, still, fury riding his waterline. His glasses sit beside his feet, hues of purple and blue wavering in the dim light. His hand slowly clenches, in and out, smoothing the cooled piece over his palm.

“What now, Katican?” His voice is quiet, gently ricocheting off of concrete walls. “Came to settle one last score, fulfilling your dream of tracking down the last Avgin? Oh, I bet you’re itching to use that knife right now.”

You step to the side, shaking bloodstained papers off of your feet. The knife drops to the ground, scraping cruelty against the ground as you kick it to a corner far out of your reach. A sharp intake of breath follows, and he steps back.

“I’m no Katican.” Your tone is low, locking eyes with Aventurine, his gaze darts from the knife to you. “The stone was a gift from an Avgin I saved during the second extinction.”

The air is stale, prickling with fear as you pass. Aventurine stands tall, but you know all too well that his greatest fear has come alight in this very room. The thought of coming face to face with a Katican chases him in his nightmares each dusk, a terror looming over his head akin to a raging storm. For once, he’s speechless, completely dumbstruck, mind racing to comprehend all that you’ve bestowed upon him. So little said, yet so great a burden unveiled.

You would be right in telling him that such information is better left buried. Yet Aventurine knows only how to shatter the destiny that calls for him, and monumental change has left in its wake.

He opens his mouth to speak, yet words fail him. The hand holding the stone sits slotted behind his back, holding on to it as he would a birthright. A piece of his past that would never bless him again, sitting in the shade of Sigonia’s darkest nights, mimicking a color that does not belong to it. He wants to scream, take his knife and shove it so hard into your chest that it comes out on the other side.

“I am on your side, Aventurine. I always have been.”

After forcing himself to swallow, he straightens up, but you’re already gone.

Distantly, a heavy thud hits the floor.

–

TUMBLEWEED, SALSOTTO.

“I’m Daisy, here this morning with Tumbleweed’s daily weather report. As usual, there’s sun about. However, a rude awakening is coming at around 6pm, as a pretty hefty thunderstorm is coming our way. Make sure you carry your umbrellas! And remember, as our beloved Fleetworld Marc says, thunder only happens when it’s destined.”

Destiny. The word lingers in your head as a pang of hunger hits your insides. Placing your last suitcase beside your bed, you set off for your hotel room’s kitchen. Reaching over and opening a cabinet, you groan when it reveals itself to be empty.

Shrugging your coat over your shoulders, you pocket your room card. However, when you open your door, you’re quick to step back, feeling your heart rate spike instantly in shock.

“Uh…” You take a few short breaths, regaining your composure. “Can I help you?”

The man standing before you is no other than Aventurine, chin receding as he looks at you with evident confusion.

“Can I help you?” He retorts, flipping his hotel card up to the light. “This is my room.”

You pull the exact same card out of your pocket, and the two of you share looks of bewilderment. After reading over the numbers on your card for what felt like the 50th time, Aventurine sighs, long and drawn out.

“Well, this isn’t what I imagined when the front desk told me they could fit a room in for me.”

“I’ll go ask–”

You’re cut off with a swift wave of his hand.

“Don’t bother, I already did. They’re fully booked for the next week.”

Before you know it, both Aventurine and his bags are heading into your… your room. Exhaling, you mutter a quiet “okay..” and follow him inside. However, he’s quick to stop you once you make it past the bathroom, exaggeratedly pointing toward the wall to your right.

“This has to be some kind of joke, right?” Aventurine laughs, pulling his glasses off as if attempting to see better.

His gaze is fixed on the bed sitting across from you. The single bed, accompanied with a single nightstand and a TV. In that moment, you both share a second groan, and Aventurine palms his face.

“I’ll figure this out.”

In a matter of moments, he’s gone, suitcases set haphazardly on the ground beside you. After a few minutes of thought, you head to the bathroom, soaking your hands in cold water. A brief inhale follows the icy chill that drags over your face, and you silently curse destiny.

A few hours pass before Aventurine returns, shirt slightly ruffled, annoyance clearly displayed upon his features. The click of boots melds into the soft step of socks as he enters the kitchen, and you silently pass a bowl of fried rice you had been able to scavenge from a local grocery store over. Running a hand through his hair, he nods your way, sliding into the stool across from you and stopping the bowl with his fingers.

“As you could have guessed, there are zero people in this whole building willing to switch rooms with us.”

“Ah, yeah. Tourists are usually snobby.”

A hum signifies his response. Silence encompasses the room as a blanket would, save the soft clangs of silverware on bowls. You fix your gaze on the granite countertops, following intricately woven lines of mixed stone and drawing patterns in each section you come across. Becoming so immersed in the cracks, you don’t even notice when Aventurine passes you twice, once with his bowl, and once without. Seconds turn into minutes as you stare at the sheet of stone, only taken away from thought when he returns to the table, dressed in a black set of silk pyjamas.

“What’s your story?”

Your eyelashes flutter, taken aback by the sudden inquiry. Raising your head, you push the now cold rice to the side and glance at the man across from you, fingers interlocked in wait.

You’re shocked at the simplicity of it. The lack of accusations are a breath of fresh air when it comes to his words, typically cold fronted and dripping with malice. You would expect him to be angry still, perhaps even worse, giving that you lied, but you can feel the genuine curiosity lingering within. He seems to want to understand.

“I joined the IPC when I was young, almost ten years ago.” You start, fighting the urge to snap away from his gaze. “In my second year, word was out that there was trouble on Sigonia. It was thought that the IPC had it under control, but everyone knew there was something else coming.”

You pause. Aventurine remains quiet, attentive.

“I took it upon myself to convince my superiors to send me to Sigonia, despite their warnings. But… the work we did there, it wasn’t enough. I could help no one under the bounds of the IPC, so I sought out the Katicans. No more bounds. I was on the inside, where I could do things my own way.”

“Such lovely people, weren’t they?” He questions, apathy leaking from deep within. “Didn’t have a single care in the world other than themselves. They wanted to see everything burn, the women, children.”

“I have never seen a deeper hatred than what lies within them.”

You stop, again, toying with your fingers. Aventurine’s silence beckons you to proceed.

“I could only help so many, and they all ended up dying anyway. There was no escaping them, they were ruthless.” Your voice trails off, shaking your head slightly at the recollection of dark days in the wasteland they call Sigonia. No horrors match the ones that took place there. “I couldn’t imagine what you went through, any of you. And still, you’re alive.”

A word softly chants in your head. Destiny.

“Ever since I was born, I knew what was made out for me was never good.” Aventurine says, a hint of irony in his voice. “I fell on black days without knowing what it was like to live on the other side, and it’s been like that since.”

Flashes of your past mix in with current thought. You remember them, the Avign children, clinging to scraps of life even when it was evident their lives would soon end. Their eyes, just as brilliant as his, drowned by crashing waves, yet afloat on the prayer of hope. You imagine Aventurine was just like them, and you understand. Anger breeds and it seethes.

“How do you control it?” Such a simple question, yet so many answers.

“I put it all into risk. Every single last bit of it. I gambled, and I won.” His pointer finger gently hits the table, and he raises his hand to wave it through the air. “I survive, and I bet again.”

“A bold motto, I must say.”

A small smile graces his features, shrugging lightheartedly.

“Luck seems to be on my side.”

You look to the side at the sound of a crack, noticing that rain has started to fall. The sky is obscured by deep grays, and the rumble beckons you to the sliding door separating you from the balcony. The crash of drops on concrete is soothing to your ears, bestowing a peace upon your heart you’ve failed to find for a while now. The serenity thickens as Aventurine steps to your side, the hues in a ring of his eyes reflecting the storm outside.

“I didn’t rain much back then.” He muses, gaze following the slow drizzle of fallen streaks on the balcony’s edge. “A privilege I can keep alive, now that I see it so often.”

You look to the side, meeting Aventurine’s eyes halfway. The corners of his lips turn up as he looks past you, covering his mouth as he stifles a yawn.

“Almost forgot about the bed.” He laughs, running a hand over his lower face. “You can have it, I’ll be okay on the floor.”

“Absolutely not!” You counter, head tilting in defiance. “I’ll be fine on the floor.”

“That would be extremely impolite of me.”

“As it would be for me…”

“Will you please just sleep on the bed?”

“I brought extra pillows! I’ll be more comfortable than you on the floor.”

Aventurine stops, sending you a half lidded look. You walk over to your suitcase, swiftly pulling the two large pillows you packed out, holding them at your sides. He walks over to you, snatching a pillow out from one of your arms before walking toward the bed.

“Or, how about this?” He shoves your pillow on top of the hotel provided one. “We put the extra pillows on the bed, and we both take a half.”

You purse your lips, and shrug in reason. After patting your pillow into place, you climb onto the bed, turning on your side to ensure you’re only taking up half of the bed.

As you land on your other shoulder, you nearly touch noses with Aventurine. He chuckles, eyebrows raising in a teasing manner.

“It’s not often someone gets the chance to be this close to me.”

You groan, tugging the coarse blanket to your chest as you flip to your front. Stifling a few chuckles, Aventurine turns so his back is facing you.

Within a few minutes, quiet snores begin to drift through your ears. You sigh, and roll your eyes. And yet, only peace visits you in your dreams.

–

There have been few nights of your stay in Salsotto without rain. You’ve grown accustomed to the melodic pad of morning to the erratic roar of the night. This night is different, however, as dew is high in the air but the clouds of the afternoon are white, tainted with swirls of pink that bode better weather.

You fumble with the pearls on your neck, carefully positioning them so they rest on your collarbone. All IPC events require a clearance of wear that is above the standard grade of formal, nothing short of extravagant, explaining the fine tailored suit you wear over your dress. Ivory on cream, a palette that bodes well when making business deals.

Heels click on pavement, Tumbleweed’s National Museum in sight. Golden lights cast the establishment in an elegant glow, and the stream of classical cello welcomes your ears as you approach. Welcoming smiles are given your way as you enter the building, and you start a long night of shaking hands and business chatter with the esteemed mechanical aristocrat Screwllum.

Leisure chats of the Genius Society’s next project flow in and out of wine chutes, with gentle opera joining new deals of funding. Another hand shake bodes your farewell to a philanthropist from the Herta Space Station, and you take a seat at one of the tables nearby, attempting to gather your thoughts. Sipping on a glass of sparkling rose, you start jotting down tonight’s business proposals onto your phone.

“Having fun?”

You look up, offering a smile toward your temporary hotelmate as you pull the chair next to you back.

“Was wondering when I’d run into you, Aventurine.” You say, clinking glasses with the blonde. “How many deals have you clinched tonight?”

“More than you, I bet.” You scrunch your nose, folding your arms after sliding your phone his way. Aventurine takes a look through your notes, smile expanding on his face as he progresses.

“...And it seems I would be right.” He exclaims, holding up two full hands. “Don’t feel bad. It’s the natural charm.”

“Mhm. Super natural, and not annoying at all.” You quip, earning a light jab in the shoulder.

Your past two weeks with Aventurine had proved to be an easier feat than you had thought. Beside the snoring (that you had learned to tune out), he had served as a good source of company, squandering your worries of lingering grudges as you spent more time around one another. You were grateful he had the will in his heart to see the reason behind what you had done, although you were a little surprised to see that he had forgiven you with such ease.

Now, to you, he seemed to be an easy soul forced to carry burdens that were undeserving of him.

“Hey.”

You’re roused from your thoughts by the gentle tap of Aventurine’s foot against your heel. He cocks his head, and you’re suddenly aware of the soft serenade filling the room, sung by an artist famous for this piece.

“Let’s get our minds off of business for a while. Care to dance?”

He straightens his jacket before standing up, beckoning you to do the same. You accept the hand outstretched, threatening to roll your eyes as Aventurine lays his other on your back, guiding you to the floor.

“Trying to show off?”

Aventurine slowly spins you into a shroud of spotlight, laughing when your eyes go wide from the precision of his arms slowing you back down.

“Of course.”

A look is shared between the two of you, and the dance begins. You recognize the piece, Seid Umschlungen, Millionen! (Be Embraced, You Millions!), and fall into a sort of waltz, slow, quick, slow. Your feet move in a symphony of chirping violin and cello vibrato, swirling carefully around other dancers as you step from box to box.

The music quiets in a moment of repose, and you slow, winding your hands around his neck as you sway, in wait.

“What’s with the long face?”

The question catches you off guard, as you weren’t aware that your thoughts had reflected off of your face. Lips pursing, you wonder whether taking the chance and ruining the moment is worth it, but the question nags deep within, festering like a cancer that will not cease until it is freed.

“Do you forgive me?”

Strings echo and rise; Aventurine fits a hand behind your back before spinning you into dance. His eyebrows are furrowed lightly, as if your question had caught him off guard in some sort of way, but you both knew it was coming. Trust is an uncertain entity, not easily won or wagered, never certain in whether it’s attained or lost. Forgiveness is a trial for trust, and within inquiry lie a question of deeper truth that never made it to the surface

Do you hate me, Aventurine?

There have been many times in the passing days where you’ve been questioned about your time in Sigonia-IV. A test to determine whether your actions deserved merit. Recounting stories of countless lives you worked tirelessly to save at the risk of your own. Gallons of blood stained on your hands from the guilty, those whose karma ran the empty river beds of the desert red.

So much, and yet nothing at all. It’s as if life is out to play some game of twisted fate, as you see all of the lives you could not save in the man right before you. The brand slightly hidden by his collar and wispy blonde, jewelry glittering at his wrists, irises that shine in the darkest of nights. Bewitching, yet so alive.

“There’s nothing to forgive.” He says, after some time. “You did a brave thing, I would be a fool to condemn you for it.”

Elation. It’s the feather touch of his hands, graceful in the way they dip you, nearly stopping time as you lay suspended. Your eyes lock, and you nearly drown in the glow of lavender and maya that stare back. Slowly, you feel one of his hands leave your back, dipping in his suit pocket and coming to rest in your vision.

“Their memory is always alive somewhere. It’s up to us to keep it.”

You’re lifted to stand, and, amidst a rather slow spin, Aventurine pins the turquoise meteorite you’d thought was long gone onto the span of dress fabric above your chest. The resounding smile shared is trust.

You twirl and sink until the song comes to an end, stopping in a hold of hands and interlocked legs as orchestra is overtaken by voice. In the midst of fading spotlight, your breath evens out, and you find yourself following the gambler’s hand to escape the noise, elbows brushing on a balcony railing as you stare out into the fading daylight.

The sky is tinged with the baby blue of afternoon, arising into a deep interweave of violet and blush. A small, red casino chip flips between Aventurine’s fingers, rolling to sit between his pointer and thumb in short pauses.

“Got any tricks up your sleeve, gambler?”

Aventurine tilts his head to the side, invigorated by the rise of your lips, challenging, daring. The game you propose has risk, but what is life without taking leaps blind? Aventurine is sure he can see you now, after all.

With a flip of the chip and a wave of his hand, the red disappears, and a cool sensation lands firmly on your lips. His face is inches away from yours, fingers gently pressing against the chip that severs the distance between you.

“There are tricks to any risk, as long as you know what you’re doing.”

You raise your hand, sliding the chip from your mouth and palming it. When he doesn’t move, you tug on his collar, chin tilting upward to press your lips to his. The sensation is warm, gentle, as if you tread on ice that threatens to shatter. Honey sears your tongue, and you revel in the touch of his lips, soft as the velvet of his tie.

The moment is all too short, yet your mouth feels numb as you break away. In a moment of silence, you take the hand that sits lightly clamped around your wrist, sliding the chip in his palm and closing his fingers.

“I think I’ll be gambling a lot with you, Aventurine.”

His face moves closer, and you look down for a moment, noticing the hand that sits behind his back.

“I look forward to it.”

–

INTERASTRAL PEACE CORPORATION, STRATEGIC INVESTMENT HQ | TWO MONTHS LATER

Knock, knock.

“Coming.”

The door opens in fluid motion, revealing a room cast in gloom, tan shade, blinds drawn.

“Hey, Aven.” You sigh, placing a chaste kiss on the blonde’s cheek. “Long day?”

“Long day.” He mirrors, offering to take the stack of papers off of your hands. You accept, slipping into the chair across from his desk. “Are you done for today?”

“Mhm.”

Aventurine sits in his desk chair, shrugging the navy coat he sports onto the back. You stretch your arms behind your back, watching as deft hands undo the cross hatched tie representing the cornerstones from his collar. As he sets the piece down, his office phone starts to buzz, and he groans.

“Hello, this is Aventurine… Uh huh, what time?” He draws circles into ebony, holding the phone to his shoulder as he reaches for a notepad. However, as he clicks the pen in his hand, he nearly drops the phone, clearly startled. “Can you repeat that? Si- okay. I’m coming.”

In a flurry of movement, he stands, tie and coat snatched.

“We have to go, right now.”

His tone is impatient, brimming with anxiety and unwilling to contest. You blink a few times before following him out of his office, grabbing his coat to hold onto as he fits his tie back to his shirt. The walk is silent, save a quiet “thank you” when you hand the coat over and the click of shoes on tile. Your nerves rise as you move, watching the way he frets with his gloves, tugging on the ends repeatedly.

In a matter of minutes, you arrive at the boardroom of the IPC’s Strategic Investment Department, stopping at the edge of the table as Jade turns around, followed by a concerned looking Topaz.

“Ah, Aventurine. What a surprise, I was sure not to include your name in the list of attendees tonight.“She sends a look to the white haired cornerstone, before directing her gaze to you. “Unfortunately, ranks below P40 are prohibited from attending this meeting. Guards, please see her out.”

You push against the guard that seizes your wrist, but are unable to resist as more come to his aid. After having the door shoved in your face, you’re dragged to the hallway outside of the meeting hall, forced to sit in wait.

30 minutes. Another 30. An hour before the doors open, with Aventurine first, Topaz following close behind. He rushes past you, eyes on the ground, gone within seconds. Concern etches your features as Topaz runs up to you, lips pursed in distress,

“Aventurine-” She pauses, hand on her chest as she catches her breath. “Please go after him. You’re the only one that he’ll see now, after what just happened.”

“What happened?”

At your inquiry, she shakes her head, nodding her head toward the direction Aventurine took off in.

“It’s best you hear it from him. But, please, go see him tonight, he needs someone who’s close to his heart.”

Worry is quick to seep into your features, but you nod. A quick visit to his office and you’re off, taking the next jet off of Pier Point, to Klimt Republic. Weaving through streets and bullet trails full of life, you arrive in the heart of Klimt just two hours later, standing on the penthouse floor of an apartment complex worth more than the entire block you’re on.

Knock, knock.

Silence. You hesitate, and knock again.

The shuffling of feet hit the floor, and you wait in anticipation, hands firmly at your sides as the noise stops. After a few moments, the door slowly opens, and you sigh in relief.

Aventurine stands, slightly hunched against the doorframe, hair disheveled, eyes red and irritated.

“Aven, what happ-”

A pair of hands seize your wrist, tugging you inside and slamming the door behind you.

“Not now.” Your eyes widen at the plea in his voice, whole with a basal need that makes your chest tighten. “Please, just, make me forget about it right now.”

He looms over you, yet the shadow he casts is the antonym of threatening. Fear reeks off of him like vodka, as tears brim on his waterline. The feeling spreads to your skin like wildfire, and you feel him shake as you take his face in your hands, breathing shallow and scared.

The first taste of his lips is sweet, but the salt of his tears is quick to sink in. Clumsy and trembling, your bodies rock and hit walls as you make your way to his bedroom. You throw his coat to the side as he does yours, pushing him down onto his bed as you break for air.

Aventurine’s hair flows out around him as he falls onto the mattress, shrouding him as a halo would. You chase after him, littering his neck with soft bites that elicit soft groans from the skin beneath. You unbutton half of his shirt before diving for his collarbone, reveling in the whines that respond as you nip and bruise.

His hands reach for your pants, and you stop him before he can reach for your panties.

“Ah-ah, hands behind your head.” Your voice pools out smooth, running a hand down his shirt. “Just relax and let me take care of you.”

Gently pinning his hands above him, you let go, and he complies. You reward him with a kiss, messy and careless, pulling a string of saliva between your lips when you leave them. Your free hand pushes hair out of his eyes while the other works on the zipper of his slacks, watching as his fingers lock together as you apply pressure.

A shudder leaves Aventurine’s lips as you pull his boxers down, hand gently running along the length of his dick. Teeth tug at lips as you spit on your hand, working at his cock while running your free fingers along your folds. His neck lifts up as your hands move faster, and you grin, choking the noises that threaten to spill from your mouth at the display before you.

A sight like heaven, an angel laid out for worship. Aventurine’s skin is coated in a soft sheen of sweat that shines in the dim light, hand laid over one eye whilst the other remains barely open. Under the mix of hues that resemble wild fields of flowers, blush coats his cheekbones, a light to the darkness that blooms on his neck. The vulnerability of it makes your heart soar, and you feel a fire ignite in the depths of your being that fails to stoke.

The hand that toys with your clit lifts, prodding at Aventurine’s mouth as you lower yourself on his cock. Muffled whines vibrate around your fingers, and you moan at the fullness that envelops you. You swirl your fingers in his mouth, biting on your cheek as his tongue wraps around them, sucking on the sweet taste of you.

His hands abruptly reach up, fingers winding and tangling in hair as they pull you down, replacing fingers with lips. The sensation is hot, as if an unquenchable balm has set your skin alight.

“Feel good?”

“What kind of- ughh- question is that?”

You clench around him as if it's instinct, and Aventurine calls your name as he would a prayer. His moans are akin to song, divine in melody, alluring in a way that shuts your mind off from anything else but him. One of his hands leaves your hair, fingers clumsily clamping around your own, holding you like fine china.

The stretch of his dick does little to quench the hunger within, you crave more, a devout worshiper crying a hymn of need. Your motion becomes erratic, a twist of limbs and friction that siphons tears that streak down your cheeks, falling to mix in with the sweat on your lover’s face.

“Gonna-” Aventurine chokes on his own words, eyes shut harshly as he blinks back ecstasy. “Cum.”

Your words are lost to you, only managing to groan in response as Aventurine pulls you back to him. His lips seal over yours in a searing kiss, arms winding around your back to hold you still as your orgasm shakes you. White light flashes through closed eyes as you spasm around his dick, mixing with the cum that leaks inside of you.

The room is quiet, save the howling wind of night and the dance of unstable breath. Blankets shuffle as you drop to Aventurine’s side, allowing him to drape your discarded shirt over your bare chest. Time seems to cease as you meet his gaze, touch serene as the plains of distant worlds as he encourages you to come closer. You accept, eyes closing for a moment, feeling the warm fan of his breath over your nose.

“The IPC is funding a project to excavate Sigonia.” The silence breaks, peace shatters and your eyes snap open. “Turquoise meteorites are rare, so they’ll scrape the whole planet dry until every last piece is gone.”

Your face falls, corners of your lips pulling downward. Aventurine’s eyes are half lidded, seemingly already accepting the fate of the planet he calls home. He refuses to look your way, eyes focused somewhere past you, the sorrow spreads and leaks into your soul as it opens further. A place so full of hatred and loss, yet a place that he will never be able to let go of. It burrows within the deepest neurons, refusing to snap and forget.

“You have to say something, Aven.” You pull at his face, forcing him to meet your gaze. “Whatever you have to do, I’ll help you.”

“The IPC doesn’t have time to listen to Avgin.” He sighs, hope stale on his breath. “Not even if it's the last one alive.”

You still, fingers falling to rest against his cheek. Aventurine’s eyes close, brows furrowing lightly against pale skin.

“Sigonia will fall, and only Kakavasha will remain.”

Defeat. It seems that what events occurred in that meeting room left no room for conversation. Guilt flows through your veins like it’s replaced the red, and your chest aches, latching onto the horror that no doubt holds sovereignty in his head.

Kakavasha. Blessed by the heavens yet cursed by the living world. Such a beautiful name that deserves no hell it endures.

Amidst the quietude, Aventurine’s hand slithers under the blankets, latching onto your wrist. He traces skin, knuckles brushing against your own, coming to rest intertwined.

“Can we try something?”

You nod, and your hand is slowly lifted to the air, palm against palm between your chests. You’ve seen this motion back on Sigonia, yet it’s always remained distant to you, and the words echo in obscurity.

“I’ll go through it once, and we can do it together.”

You nod, once more. Aventurine closes his eyes for a moment, reciting a prayer lost to you in time.

“May the Mother Goddess thrice close her eyes for you… keeping your blood eternally pulsing. May your journey be forever peaceful… and your schemes be forever concealed.”

A brief pause passes. You sigh in unison, and lock eyes. A voice whispers within the depths of your mind, and you smile.

The memory is always alive somewhere. It’s up to us to keep it.

“May the Mother Goddess thrice close her eyes for you… keeping your blood eternally pulsing. May your journey be forever peaceful… and your schemes be forever concealed.”

As the last words drift off of your lips, you bend your fingers, slotting them between his. Aventurine shares your sentiment; hope flashed in the gentle smile that graces his lips. Your eyes wander, and notice that a single tear trails down his face, disappearing into his skin as it rolls.

Outside, you hear the crack of thunder. You pull Aventurine in, and in your clutch, the downpour begins.

–

Some months later…

The chatter of voices on the phone rouses you from sleep, rubbing a hand over your eyes in annoyance as you come to. Light spills through drawn curtains and open glass doors, filtering the room in hues of honey and hazel.

“Mhm. Alright, I understand. Let’s schedule the interview for today.”

Songs of canaries and mourning doves flow through the air, and you sit up, raising a hand to block out the sun’s gaze. Aventurine sets his phone down on the bedside table, stifling a yawn with his hand. You roll onto your side, hand propped up onto your chin as you soak in the sight of your lover.

His hair is slightly ruffled from sleep, bangs astray and cast into his eyes. Only the top button of his sleep shirt is buttoned, leaving lean, sun kissed skin on display.

“It’s rude to stare, you know.” You roll your eyes, allowing him to pull you in for a kiss. “Morning. Sleep well?”

“Mhm.” You hum, knowing full well tonight has been one of the worst nights you’ve slept yet. Aventurine sees right through you, but chooses to say nothing, opting to pull you forward so half of your body drapes over him.

Today Aventurine leaves for Penacony. And, seeing as he was called in for a meeting, he’s probably leaving even sooner now.

He seems to read your thoughts, offering a comforting peck to the corner of your lips in apology. Your hands card through his hair, head resting against his collarbone.

You have your apprehensions about Penacony, having heard whispers on the streets of mysterious disappearances of people in the world’s famous dreamscape. The IPC has had a limited number of run-ins with the family, leading you to assume a recent grounds of suspicion has arised, and Aventurine was chosen as the solution. In his eyes, it’s just another gamble of life or death.

You’re roused from your thoughts by a tap on your cheek, making you look up at him.

“Don’t worry about me, sweetheart.” His words do little to soothe you, but you listen regardless. “The risks I take are always foolproof.”

Risk. It’s the word Aventurine lives by, a motto that claws at your heart when he’s gone. A reality that spills tears when he closes the door to your apartment, leaving only the ache of your heart in his absence. A danger that never guarantees the next time he chases his destiny will not be his last.

You will never fight to change it, because that’s all it is. Destiny.

His phone rings, and the two of you groan before he gets up and tells the person on the other line that he’s on his way. You watch from his side of the bed as he throws his clothes on, grabbing two packed suitcases from the side of the bed before bending over to give you a kiss. The touch of his lips is bittersweet, nearly taunting as it is over before it even begins. You peck him again, running a hand over his hairline to straighten his bangs.

“Be safe out there, Aven.”

He smiles, so radiant it rivals the sun and all that it shines on. You think yourself blessed to see it survive.

“I will. Luck is always on my side.”

And he leaves. You turn to the window, awaiting the rain.

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