#I had just returned with carryout for dinner

[tr-p-antoninvs-pivs]

ASCEND FROM THE STYGIAN DEPTHS AND FEED

[forest-hashira]

Naked in Osaka

hi friends! this is my submission for @pixelcafe-network's "challenge friday" that they do every other week! the prompt this week was a random song selected by shuffle, and my assigned song was "Naked In Manhattan" by Chappell Roan, and after a bit of debate (& some help from friends), i decided to go with shoko for this fic. it's a quick thing, but it was fun! i hope to write more for female characters in the future, and this was a good jumping off point 💜

read on ao3 | wc: ~2.6k | cw: gender neutral reader (no pronouns used, but implied fem reader based on song lyrics), alcohol consumption, making out, implied smut at the end (kinda?), implied first sapphic experience (thus the pride divider), shoko calls reader "cute", minor background stsg

“Please leave your message after the tone.” Beep.

“Hey Sho, I know you just landed, and I know you're probably busy, but I would love to see you, so call me when you can.” 

You sighed softly to yourself as you ended the call, tucking your cellphone into your pocket. It wasn’t exactly a surprise that you’d gotten Shoko’s voicemail – she’d been out of the country on a trip and had only just gotten back – but it was still a bit of a disappointment. You hadn’t been able to see her much since you’d graduated from Jujutsu High together, since you’d moved to Osaka just a few weeks later. She was good about returning your calls and texts, so you tried not to think about it too much.

Despite how infrequently you got to see your friend in person, she never really left your thoughts. In fact, you probably thought about her more than was normal. The two of you had been pretty close in school, spending a lot of your time together, especially when Gojo and Geto were off on missions or otherwise wrapped up in each other. You’d been friends with the boys too, of course, but your one on one time with Shoko was where you formed all your best memories of your school years. Around third year was when you realized your fondness for the other girl may have been more than just platonic, but you never allowed yourself to dwell on it or bring it up to Shoko, telling yourself it was no different than the way the boys felt or acted around each other, so there couldn’t be anything weird about it.

Then again, the boys had gone on to start dating after graduation, and last you’d heard they’d gotten engaged, so… Maybe it was worth revisiting those feelings again.

The sound of your phone ringing pulled you out of your thoughts, and when you saw Shoko’s contact picture – a slightly blurry selfie she’d sent you nearly a year ago while she was out getting drinks with her friends in Tokyo, her cheeks a little flushed and a soft smile tugging at her lips – on the screen, you felt your cheeks begin to burn, as if you’d been caught doing something you shouldn’t.

“Hey.”

“What are you doing tonight?” Shoko asked, and you couldn’t help but smile. Your conversations with her never really seemed to stop or start; instead, it was more like you’d been having one long conversation with her from the day you’d met.

“Nothing,” you told her, idly beginning to pace your room. “What’s up?”

“Figured I’d come see you if you were free. That okay?”

You bit your lip for a moment, suddenly feeling very flustered. “I-I, uh… Yeah! Yeah, that’s fine. That sounds great, actually.” It was obvious even to you that you were stumbling over your words, and you cringed slightly at how weird you sounded.

Shoko only chuckled quietly at you. “Careful,” she teased, “if you act too excited you might give me a bigger head than Gojo.”

That made you laugh. “As if that could ever happen.”

“You’re right,” she agreed, her words airy with laughter. “Does that udon place down the street from you still do carryout?”

“Yeah, as far as I know.”

“Cool. I’ll cover dinner if you’ll cover drinks.”

“Wine or sake?”

“Surprise me.”

She hung up without saying goodbye, though that wasn’t unusual. You glanced at the time, and though you knew you had a few hours before she’d be there even if she’d already been on the train when she called you, you already felt like you were running out of time for all the things you needed to do before she arrived. 

After a few moments of internal scrambling, you figured out a rough order of operations: popping into the liquor store to grab Shoko’s favorite wine, then a mad dash to make your apartment presentable, then finally a shower before she arrived. The trip to the store didn’t take very long, and you tucked the two bottles of wine you’d grabbed into your freezer to chill while you cleaned and got ready. 

Thankfully, your apartment wasn’t as much of a mess as you’d convinced yourself it was, so cleaning it didn’t take long at all, and you were able to hop in the shower within an hour of getting off the phone. The last thing you wanted was to smell when you saw your friend for the first time in over a year, and you knew you were sweating from nerves. It was ridiculous to be nervous about seeing her, you knew that, but this time felt different, somehow. Maybe it was because you’d been wondering earlier that day if you really did have feelings for Shoko.

Whatever the reason was, you were desperate not to smell like nervous sweats.

After thoroughly scrubbing yourself with your best-smelling body wash, you hurried to your bedroom to get dressed. Overwhelmed with options, you threw on some underwear and paced your room, feeling like a nervous teenager.

It’s just Shoko, you reminded yourself, sitting down on your rug. She’s not gonna care what you’re wearing as long as you’re wearing something. A soft groan escaped you then, and you flopped onto your back and covered your face with your hands.

Your pity party came to an abrupt end when your phone chimed. Pushing yourself up just enough to grab it from your bed, you saw a text from Shoko, letting you know her train was about to arrive, and that she’d be at your apartment in half an hour at most. 

The message made your heart flip in your chest. How long have I been laying here? How long was I in the shower?? Instead of letting her in on your internal panic, you shot back a simple “see you soon!” text, then leapt up from the floor, scrambling to find clothes that were comfortable but also somewhat presentable. Eventually you settled on a pair of pajama shorts and a loose t-shirt, then stepped into the bathroom to make sure your hair wasn’t a complete disaster.

You’d only just finished putting your hair out of your face in a way you were satisfied with when you heard a knock at the door. Heart skipping a beat again, you took a deep breath to steady yourself, then hurried to answer the door.

Shoko stood there with a small smile on her face, an overnight bag slung over her shoulder and the takeout in her other hand. “Long time no see,” she greeted, stepping inside as you moved aside. “Is it cool if I go change real quick?” She set the takeout on your table as she spoke, then turned to you and arched a brow slightly.

“Yeah, of course. I’ll get the drinks out and everything while you do that.”

Her smile widened the tiniest bit. “Perfect.”

She made her way to your bathroom with her overnight bag, and as she shut the door, you pulled a bottle of wine from the freezer and two glasses from the cabinet. They weren’t fancy, and they didn’t match, but you told yourself it was better than drinking out of plastic cups.

Once the glasses were out, you opened the bottle, pouring a fair amount into each of the glasses, though one had a bit more; Shoko’s tolerance had always been a bit higher than yours, so you were sure she would want to drink more than you did to make sure you had the same buzz. 

You had just started pulling the takeout from the bag when Shoko came back from getting changed, and your heart fluttered a bit when you saw her. She wore a tank top with a big picture of Gudetama in the middle and a pair of yellow shorts to match. It reminded you of the pajama sets Gojo had gotten everyone when you were in high school – Cinnamoroll for himself, Kuromi for Geto, Badtz-Maru for Shoko, and Keroppi for you – though you knew it wasn’t the same set from back then, since she wore a different character now. 

“You’re staring,” Shoko teased, bumping you lightly with her hip once she was standing beside you. “Do I really look that hot in my pajamas?”

Though her words left you feeling more than a little flustered, you just scoffed at her and rolled your eyes. “They remind me of the ones Gojo got us when we were in school, that’s all.” 

“He got me these ones, too,” she said with a small chuckle. “They were for my birthday last year.”

“Why’d he pick a different character than the one he picked when we were in school?”

“He said the penguin reminds him too much of Megumi now,” she said with a shrug, and you both laughed. You could see the resemblance too, though; both had the spiky black hair and the deadpan expression, and imagining Gojo telling the boy that nearly made you die laughing all over again, but you kept it to yourself for the moment.

Just as comfortable in your home as she was in her own, Shoko opened a few of your kitchen drawers, grabbing soup spoons and chopsticks for the both of you. “We should watch a movie while we eat.”

“What do you want to watch?” you asked curiously, carrying the takeout to your living room and setting it on your coffee table.

“What was that American movie we watched all the time in school?” she asked, following after you with the utensils and wine. “It was about those high school girls who wore pink.”

“Mean Girls?”

“Yeah, Mean Girls!” she grinned, setting everything down before sitting on the floor, gesturing for you to join her. “God, I don’t know how we never got sick of that movie.”

“Because Regina George was hot,” you replied without thinking about it.

The words drew a laugh from her, and she bumped you with her shoulder. “Glad I’m not the only one who thinks so.”

A small, relieved chuckle left you at her teasing words. “I’m sure we could stream it somewhere if you wanna watch it again.”

“Please, I could use a good throwback.” She took a long sip from her glass, then opened the lid on her bowl of udon.

With a nod, you grabbed the remote for your TV, sipping from your own glass as you flipped through various streaming services looking for the movie. Eventually you found it, not even caring that you had to pay to watch it; it was worth it to have a night in with your friend, especially when you knew it would make her laugh and smile more.

Once the movie had started, you finally got into your own food. You smiled when you saw that Shoko had gotten your order perfect without even asking. She’d memorized it in school, but it made butterflies flutter in your stomach a bit to know that she’d never forgotten it, even after so much time apart.

For the most part it was quiet as you watched the movie, only the soft sounds of occasional slurping and the faint clinging noise of glass on glass when Shoko topped up your wine glasses. Every once in a while, one of you would make a small comment or joke, or you’d quote the lines along with the movie before bursting out laughing. It felt like being back in school, huddled in one of your dorm beds, sharing drinks from a flask shoko had managed to sneak on campus.

At some point, you set your glass down after finishing the contents. It had been your second glass – or maybe your second? Shoko had topped you up enough times that it was hard to be sure – and was enough to have everything feeling a little fuzzy around the edges. Leaning back against your couch, you turned your head towards the other woman, smiling to yourself as you watched her, rather than the movie.

She’s so pretty… even prettier than when we were in school. When did she get so pretty?

“I’ve always been this pretty.”

Shoko’s words startled you a bit, and though it took your brain a moment to catch up, you realized she was responding to your thoughts. Only… you must have said all of them out loud, rather than just in your head. The realization had your face burning with embarrassment. “Oh my god, Sho, I—”

“It’s okay,” she assured you with a smile. She settled into the same position as you, turning to face you a bit. “‘M glad you think I’m pretty. Always thought you were cute, too.”

The whole world came to a screeching halt around you. “…You did?”

“Yeah,” she said easily, brushing her hair out of her eyes. Her words weren’t slurred, but you could see that her movements were loosened a bit from the wine. “Thought you knew that.”

“No, I… How would I have known? You never said anything.”

“I saw the way you looked at me. Thought you’d only look at me like that if you knew.”

You blinked, confused, and more than a little worried. “…How did I look at you?”

Her expression softened at that. “The same way I caught Gojo staring at Geto when Geto wasn’t looking, before they got together.”

The words sent a mixture of shame and hope swirling around your tipsy mind, and before you could really contemplate your next move, you heard yourself asking, “Can I kiss you?”

Shoko’s cheeks flushed a bit, and she nodded, shifting closer and wrapping her arm around your waist. Your eyes widened as she came into your space, and when you felt her breath on your lips, your own finally started cooperating with you again.

“I’ve never kissed a girl before.”

“I’ll teach you,” was Shoko’s only response before she kissed you. She was surprisingly warm, and it only took a second for your eyes to slip shut and for you to melt into her, returning her kiss eagerly. As she kissed you, everything else in the world faded away, the only sensation you were aware of was the feeling of her lips on yours.

It didn’t take long for her to press in closer, tilting her head a bit to deepen the kiss. Stumbling and a bit inexperienced, you did your best to move with her. She held you closer with the arm around your waist, her free hand coming up to cup your cheek, guiding your movements the tiniest bit. Time slowed and stretched out, the moment between you endless in the best possible way. You weren’t entirely sure when her tongue came into the mix, but next thing you knew you were parting your lips to let her in. 

A small sound escaped you as she deepened the kiss further, turning slightly to press you both into the couch a bit more. Still struggling to keep up because of the alcohol in your bloodstream, the movement threw you off a bit. Reluctantly, you pulled away for a moment, needing desperately to catch your breath. 

Shoko smiled down at you as you panted, faces only inches apart. “How was that for your first kiss with a girl?”

“I really wanna kiss you again.”

She laughed softly. “Is kissing all you wanna do tonight?” She arched a brow curiously, her thumb tracing your bottom lip lightly. 

“I don’t know how to do anything else,” you breathed, “but I'd love to learn.”

“Looks like I've got some teaching to do, then. Lesson one: kissing with tongue.” She leaned in again, capturing your lips in another passionate kiss. You were more than willing to let her take the lead, though; there was no one else you’d rather have teach you everything, anyways.

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[gothpanda]

A Little Bit of Attitude Ch.27: Christmas

WORD COUNT: 7.2k

A/N: Enjoy! Comments are highly appreciated! ❤️

WARNINGS: none

TAGS: @madamsixx​ @emariehorror​

Read On Ao3

Previous/Next 

December 11th, 1982

"I still don't get why you wanted to eat in your shit apartment when we could've gone somewhere," Sammi complained, twirling her plastic fork to capture linguine noodles in the carryout plate. They sat beside each other on the old sofa, Sammi praying it wouldn't break again. Nikki swallowed his spaghetti, kicking his feet up on the grimy coffee table. "Because maybe I just want to be in a quiet place for my birthday," Nikki answered with a smirk.

"Oh, is that why you abandoned the guys in San Diego?" Sammi asked, matching Nikki's smirk. "To be in a quiet place eating Italian food… with me?"

"Exactly. Besides you can admit you're happy to see my face. I won't tell anyone,"

"Shut up. I was happy because you surprised me at work. It's not like I miss you or anything," Sammi mumbled, smiling shyly away from Nikki. The two ate in silence with the music playing at low volume, songs range from 79 to this year playing on loop. 'Waiting for a Girl Like You' began playing, gaining Nikki and Sammi's attention, passing glances at each other.

"This is a cute song," Sammi admitted, placing her food on the coffee table, standing up as she walked over to the small kitchen sill.

"Of course you'd like the love songs," Nikki teased, sipping on his cold beer.

"Oh shush. You write love songs all the time too. They're just disguised as heavy rock for the tough boys," Sammi said over her shoulder.

"You aren't wrong but don't be telling that to magazines when we're famous,"

Sammi unzipped the dividing pocket of her black purse, slowly taking out a tiny red gift bag. Sammi looked at Nikki continue mindlessly eating, thankful he didn't notice anything. Sammi held the bag behind her back, standing right in front of Nikki with a dopey smile that made Nikki raise an eyebrow.

"Whatcha doing?" Nikki asked. Sammi whipped her arms forward, holding the gift bag between the two of them.

"Happy birthday!" Sammi exclaimed.

"You got me a present?" Nikki asked, putting his cardboard plate down as he took hold of the present.

"Well yeah I had to or else I'd feel bad,"

"You didn't even know it was my birthday 'til a few hours ago," Nikki said with a smile.

"And who's fault is that, Mr. Secretive?"

Nikki shook his head, removing the white tissue paper to find a flat navy velvet box sitting at the bottom. Nikki threw the gift bag aimlessly, scrunched eyebrows as he opened the box, revealing a black onyx crystal stone pendant. Nikki carefully pulled out the necklace, admiring the silver rope chain for it. "Wow, Sam. This looks pretty cool. When and where did you even get this?"

Sammi sat right next to Nikki. "As soon as I got off work. There's a cool witchy hippie store that opened up. The guy who sold it to me said the stone is supposed to absorb negativity and turn it into strength and protection. I just thought it looked cool," said Sammi, shrugging her shoulders. "Do you like it?"

"I love it. Thank you, Sammi," Nikki said, smiling dearly at Sammi, glancing down at her lips. He didn't know if he should kiss her, not know what to do in general with the young girl. So instead, Nikki gave her a hug and kissed her temple. "I hope this gives me all the protection I need,"

December 13th, 1985

Covina, California

Sammi looked down into the boiling pot of water, checking to see if it appeared perfect for the macaroni noodles she needed to pour in. Shrugging her shoulder, Sammi grabbed a bowl of uncooked noodles, pouring in carefully, and adding salt into the water. She turned the timer for 8 minutes beside her then paid attention to the ground beef that was beginning to sizzle on her left, stirring it to not burn any sides. The onions were already entirely browned to Mrs. Bass's liking, reminding Sammi to sprinkle in the proper seasonings for pastitsio before the beef was too cooked. Sammi grabbed the salt and pepper shaker, shaking both vigorously as the meat was folding in on the skillet.

"Don't forget the cinnamon before the tomato paste," Mrs. Bass said behind Sammi, smiling at her daughter as she entered the kitchen. Sammi looked over her shoulder, matching her mother's smile and reaching for the pantry's ground cinnamon to her right.

"I won't. I am your only child that in fact knows how to cook," Sammi said to Mrs. Bass as she put a measuring cup of water by the stove. Mrs. Bass kissed Sammi's cheek in gratitude for helping make the Greek lasagna, knowing how long it took to cook the special dish. Simultaneously, Sammi poured in the cup of water and tomato paste into the ground beef, giving one final stir of everything before letting it simmer alone. Mrs. Bass looked over Sammi's shoulder to see if everything was going smoothly, knowing she could trust Sammi to make dinner.

"I know but I have to still be a mother and tell you what to do. I already shredded the cheese before you came," Mrs. Bass said, stirring the boiling pasta. Suddenly the backyard door in the kitchen opened fast, Athena walking in with a somber face. She didn't appear to be in the mood for a family dinner, wanting a stiff drink in her hand.

Mrs. Bass smiled when seeing Athena, opening her arms for a hug. "Athi! You're early,"

"Hey, Mama," Athena said, kissing her mother on the cheek but no smile to give. Sammi leaned against the kitchen island, smiling at Athena but not getting one in return. Athena only glared at Sammi, inching closer to the stove to see what was cooking. Sammi only kept her polite smile until Athena walked out into the living room without another word. Mrs. Bass acted as if nothing was wrong, getting the béchamel and cheese from the refrigerator.

"Hi to you too, Athena!" Sammi shouted from the kitchen, facing the stove to turn off a burner, carefully grabbing the boiling pot to drain out the pasta. Mrs. Bass scrunched her eyebrows together, studying Sammi's face.

"Is something wrong between you and Athena?" Mrs. Bass asked, spreading a thin layer of butter on the deep casserole dish, waiting to assemble it. Sammi just shrugged her shoulders, passing the macaroni noodles to her mother.

"She's just mad I didn't tell her about my little field trip to Vegas, and I think something went wrong in her love life," said Sammi, pouring in the ground beef then macaroni into the deep dish.

"In that case just give her some space if she's hurt about love. But also don't mind her moods just because you didn't say something to her," Mrs. Bass said, waving her hand in a shooing motion, almost like Athena should let her anger go. Mrs. Bass added the last touches to the pastitsio, putting it in the hot oven to cook for nearly an hour. "You have your own life. You can do whatever you want,"

"Yeah I know. She's just being a brat to me for not telling her," Sammi said, washing her hands. Mrs. Bass tried to withhold a chuckle, wiping her hands from any food on them.

"Be nice to your sister! She's the only one you have forever. Now go relax while I make a salad for everyone," Mrs. Bass ordered, pointing for Sammi to leave the kitchen. Sammi followed her mother's words, slowly strolling into the living room. Athena sat alone with a magazine in her hands, the television playing Three's Company in low volume. Sammi dropped herself on Mr. Bass's recliner, tucking her legs under herself, hitting her chin on her knuckles as she looked at Athena. Athena could obviously hear Sammi and feel her presence, peeking over the corner to see her sister stare.

"What?" Athena barked, looking back at the gossip magazine to only see Motley and other bands spread out the pages. Athena rolled her eyes at Nikki's picture, tossing the booklet on the coffee table.

"Nothing, nothing. I just wanted to know what was going on with my sister. Especially since you didn't bother to say hi to me," said Sammi.

"Maybe because I have nothing to say to you. Ever thought about that?"

"You're seriously going to be mad at me forever? Because I don't really care at this point,"

"Of course you wouldn't care. You're as selfish as your stupid boyfriend," Athena accused, lowering her voice so their mother wouldn't hear. Sammi only frowned and rolled her eyes, slumping more in-depth into the recliner.

"At least I have something with someone," Sammi mumbled, staring at the tv.

"Oh fuck you," Athena said, folding her arms to her chest. Sammi glared at Athena, hugging her arms like her sister.

"I'm not selfish because I hang around with Nikki. I don't have to tell you everything,"

"You said you were done with him," Athena pointed out.

"And you've said Emma was being overly dramatic about your relationship," Sammi rebuttal.

"Are you only on her side to get back at me? Why are you even bringing her up?" Athena asked, narrowing her eyes to Sammi.

"Karma tastes so good right when a sibling doesn't shut up about your love life? And no I'm not. She was my friend first before your girlfriend, or should I say ex-girlfriend,"

"You're such a bitch," Athena mumbled. Sammi shook her head, taking a deep breath in.

"Again, are you going to be mad at me for not telling you about Vegas?" Sammi asked.

"Again, you said you were done with that guy,"

"You are so annoying. Can you just answer the question,"

"I'm mad you don't tell the truth to us anymore. We were so good for a moment and then you did a 180 again. Except for this time where you have us around," Athena said, grabbing the remote to change the challenges. Sammi blinked for a moment, scrunching deep between her brows.

"What?"

"Tommy and I finally had you being on our side where we told each other everything like it always was. Remember? Right before you became a selfish brat in high school. Then all of a sudden when you get with him, you do 180 and keep secrets,"

"You're one to talk about being a brat. Aren't the older siblings supposed to be the more mature ones?"

"Whatever. How about you just stop talking about him okay? Because trust me no one wants to fucking hear it," Sammi stared at Athena for a moment, bouncing her leg up and down fast.

"His name is Nikki," Sammi said before marching out of the living room and heading up to her old empty space. She shut the door and fell on the naked bed, closing her eyes as she sighed out.

*

Dinner was relatively quiet for the Bass family. Mr. and Mrs. Bass sitting at each head on the table while Sammi and Athena were across from one another. Sammi and Athena didn't want to look at each other, looking down at their food or their respective parents. Mr. Bass went on about co-workers who couldn't do their jobs right while Mrs. Bass gave her little advice. It wasn't until Mrs. Bass brought up the question of her husband's Christmas schedule that Sammi's ear perked up, remembering what she needed to do.

"Um I'm glad you brought up Christmas, Mama, I need to tell you guys something," Sammi said, wiping away any food from the corner of her mouth. Her parents and Athena's eyes were all on her. Athena frowning deep while their parents kept no hard looks, only curiosity on them.

"What is it, Sammi?" asked Mr. Bass.

"I'm not gonna be here for Christmas," Sammi said, pressing her lips together. Her eyes shifted to Mr. and Mrs. Bass, eyes shot up while Athena frowned deeper.

"Oh? And where will you be?" asked Mrs. Bass, holding her hands together on the table with amusement.

"Idaho," Sammi smiled, taking another bite of the food she cooked tonight.

"And what's in Idaho? Or who for that matter?" Mr. Bass asked, smiled. Athena dropped her fork and knife on the plate, crossing her arms tightly against her chest.

"Nikki invited me to spend Christmas with him and his grandparents. They live in Idaho in the middle of nowhere. You guys aren't mad I'll be missing Christmas, right?" Sammi said with worry.

"Oh no, Sammi! It'll be fun! You'll get to have a white Christmas for once," Mrs. Bass says, reaching over to squeeze Sammi's hand. "Of course I will miss my little lovebug. We'll have a personal Christmas for when you come back,"

"Do you have enough warm clothes? I wouldn't want you freezing up there," Mr. Bass asked, taking a bite of his food. "Open land near Canada is just the perfect place for snow,"

"Yes I do. Nikki warned me to buy a lot of winter clothes. He said it can get to 7 degrees. I bought a whole bunch of coats for the trip,"

"Wear extra socks. If you have the flu when you get back, I'm going to have a word with Nikki," Mr. Bass with humor, pointing his fork at Sammi as he looked over his glasses.

"And when will you be leaving? How long are you going to stay over there?" Mrs. Bass asked.

"The 23rd. It'll give Nikki enough time to rest from his Florida flight and pack again. He wants to stay until the 30th so we don't deal with crazy airport traffic on the way home," said Sammi, glancing up at Athena as she ate her food.

"Sounds like a good plan. Hopefully, you two don't get any delays from the weather," Mr. Bass said. Sammi only smiled and continued to finish her food, glancing up to see Athena sulking in her seat.

"You don't think it's weird that Sammi's going to spend a holiday with him? She's supposed to be with family. Not a random guy," Athena said, pursing her lips out and sucking her teeth as she glared at Sammi. Sammi matched her sister's eyes, keeping a tight grip on her fork. "I mean you two haven't even met him,"

"He's not a random guy. We've met Nikki before on a few short occasions. Seems like a nice young man. Quiet but still nice. And I trust Sammi's decisions to be around him," Mrs. Bass said.

"See Athena? People like Nikki," said Sammi, sucking her teeth.

"And Athena be respectful. Nikki is your brother and sister's closet friend, you can to say his name," said Mr. Bass

"But I don't like him! And I don't like Sammi ditching us to go and play house with a rock star," Athena barked in Sammi's direction.

"Athena!" Mrs. Bass shouted frowning.

"I'm not playing house! Nikki's grandmother said he could bring a friend and he asked me,"

"A friend or a girlfriend? Because what grandmother just suggests that unless Nikki talked them into it?" Athena asked.

"Nikki isn't my boyfriend. And it's called being nice and hospitable to their grandson. Something you know nothing about with your ugly attitude," Sammi said.

"Samantha, that is enough," Mr. Bass uttered under his breath.

"And when did Nikki ask you? Was it in Vegas or maybe another time you snuck away to see him without telling anyone? Was it after Tommy caught you two in the elevator together or before?" Athena asked.

"Why should I tell you? I thought you didn't want to hear it?" Sammi said in a mocking voice.

"And I told you to stop talking about it! No one cares!"

"Fine then bud out of my life and shut up!"

"Fine!"

"Girls!" Mr. and Mrs. Bass yelled in unison, causing each daughter to look at one parent. "You two shouldn't be arguing like this. Athena, apologize to your sister," Mr. Bass told Athena.

"What? Why?!"

"Because you're being rude to Sammi about matters that do not involve you. If she wants to be around Nikki, then leave her to it. You shouldn't be giving relationship advice in the first place," Mr. Bass said, pressing his lips firmly together.

Athena rolled her eyes. "No. I'm not apologizing for giving my opinion about Nikki,"

"Athena, you have the right to an opinion but your father is right. It's her and Tommy's decision to be around Nikki. If your sister wishes to spend her time with that boy, then that's just how it's going to be," Mrs. Bass advised in a soft voice.

"You two don't even know him! He's not good! He's crazy and mean to everyone!"

"Jesus. You sound just like Amanda," Sammi mumbled, pushing herself out of her seat and grabbing her half-finished plate.

"Well, maybe she had some points!" Athena shouted out to Sammi as she left the dining room. Sammi threw away the rest of the food in the trash, trying not to drop the glass plate in the sink, keeping in mind how it could break. Mrs. Bass cautiously walked into the kitchen, placing a hand on Sammi's shoulder. Sammi only stayed looking out the kitchen window, trying to eavesdrop on what her father was telling Athena.

"I know it may seem like this can last forever, but Athena will come around," Mrs. Bass reassured.

"And what makes you so sure of that, Mama?" Sammi asked, meeting her mother's gaze.

"Because she's your sister. You only have each other,"

"Yeah well I'm not going to hold my breath," Sammi said, turning on the faucet for warm water and began washing the dishes.

December 23rd, 1985

Van Nuys, California

Sammi yawned out loud, laying down on Nikki's clean sheets as she waited for the man to finish packing his winter bag. Nikki smirked at Sammi's sleepiness, beginning to feel the excitement of spending almost a week with his two favorite people, well three. Nikki grabbed the checklist he wrote down on the plane, double-checking in his mind that everything was already packed.

"Excited to see your grandparents?" Sammi asked, resting her head on a pillow. Nikki sat down by Sammi, moving his suitcase to the middle of the bed.

"Yeah. I haven't seen them in what feels like forever. Especially spending a Christmas with them. Are you still nervous about meeting them?" Nikki asked, laying against the silk pillows.

"A little bit. I know you said that they'll love me but I've never met someone else's family like this,"

"Oh come on. You've done the whole meeting the parents with your old boyfriends before?"

"Not really. Hate to break it to you but I rarely had boyfriends in high school or even before I met you,"

"Bullshit! I don't believe you,"

"I'm serious! Vince has been my only real boyfriend, and I barely even saw his family when we were together,"

"Damn. Well if it makes you feel better, you're my only girlfriend meeting Nona and Tom. Also the first to meet Deana but she doesn't count for shit," Nikki said, scrunching his brows together at Sammi's quizzical grin. "What?"

"I'm your girlfriend?" Sammi asked, raising an eyebrow. "This is news to me,"

Nikki rolled his eyes, clearing his throat as he looked away from Sammi. "I think it's pretty clear to everyone that you're my girl. Don't act so surprised,"

"Okay! I won't act surprised. Boyfriend," Sammi said with a shit-eating grin.

"So what was little Sammi like in high school to not get a boyfriend?" Nikki asked, pinching Sammi's cheek. Sammi playfully shoved Nikki's hand away from her, acting annoyed even when not.

"Almost like when you met me except quieter with way less attitude. I just studied. Played volleyball. Stayed with my clique all four years. Worked when I was bored and wanted money. I had guys to mess around with but it never lasted more than 2 months," said Sammi. "What about you? What were you like in high school? I bet you had girls throwing themselves at you, wanting to try a bad boy out," Sammi asked, resting on her stomach.

"Well remember, I didn't finish high school. Mainly I would get into fights with guys who stared me down, and steal their girlfriends when they were bored. Be around random guys who didn't want to be in school. That's it. You think we would've hung out in high school?"

"Nik, we're five years apart. We wouldn't be in high school together, that would be illegal,"

"Can you just answer the question without pointing out the obvious, Ms. Bubble Burster?"

Sammi rolled her eyes. "Fine. No, I don't think we would have in high school at all. I hung out with the popular sporty girls whose favorite pastime was being judgy. I would've stayed far away from you unless you became friends with Tommy. Maybe have a secret crush on you,"

"Ouch. Why don't you rip my heart out while you're at it? Right after I called you my girlfriend", Nikki asked, clenching his chest, making Sammi laugh at him.

"Oh shush you'll be fine. Just wait until we're both in Idaho and you'll forget about it," Sammi said, crawling over to kiss Nikki lightly on the lips.

"Speaking of which, I should call the cab already. Are you sure you've packed one hundred percent?" Nikki asked, pushing himself off the bed and zipping up his filled suitcase.

"Yes I am. I'm not going to be freezing my ass off the entire time we're there. I'm ready to sleep for the entire plane ride," Sammi said, stretching her arms over, walking over to Nikki, where she wrapped her arms around his waist from the back. Sammi pressed her chin on Nikki's back, hopeful that the few days can make Nikki forget about the little thing that strained them. He hadn't spoken about it when they called each other, but Sammi told herself that Nikki was a big boy who could take care of himself. She just needed to keep telling herself that.

Middle of Nowhere, Idaho

Sammi held her breath as Nikki drove down the dark, icy roads, scared whenever the rental pick up truck felt like it would skid off into the snowy fields. Nikki knew how to go in this weather, but it didn't stop Sammi from her fear, Nikki glancing every so often to see Sammi's face. He laid a hand on her thigh, whipping his head when Sammi winced away from his touch.

"Both hands on the wheel," Sammi pointed, frowning as she looked out to the white surroundings. Nikki wanted to object but still listened, placing his hands at ten and two.

"Babe, I've driven down these roads more times than you can count. The truck has its brand snow tires and the roads are clear as day," Nikki reassured. "We're going to be fine,"

"That still doesn't ease my mind. You're driving in the dark. And aren't you scared about the black ice?"

"Nope. I'm driving at a nice and for once slow speed to be careful. Besides we're not that far from Tom and Nona's place,"

"How can you even tell? Everything looks the same," Sammi said, changing the radio when static began playing.

"Ya see here city girl, you have to look at the trees and other things to know where you are. You recognize the landmarks of everyone's farm," Nikki said with what Sammi thought could be an Idaho accent. Sammi rolled her eyes, trying not to giggle at being called a city girl, knowing it would encourage Nikki.

"We get it, Country Boy, this isn't L. A or California anymore. The place where there are buildings and people. Maybe even some street lights to see what's going on,"

"Exactly. This country boy knows where we're going. Plus, I gave my grandparents a wood carven sign last Christmas to put in their entranceway," Nikki smiled almost cocky, laughing boyishly at Sammi's annoyed face.

"You're such a little shit," Sammi mumbled, taking off her seatbelt and scooting close to Nikki, putting her head on his shoulder. "Wake me up when we're there,"

"Alright, Sleeping Beauty,"

*

"There's my son! Tom come on, they're here!" Nona yelled out into the two-story farmhouse, standing on the brown wooden wrap-around porch. Tom pushed open the fence gate door, zipping up his heavy coat. Nikki drove through the bumpy pathway that Tom cleared up, laughing every time he and Sammi jumped in their seats. Nikki pulled up close to the front porch, flipping off the ignition, headlights turning off. Sammi jumped out of the pickup, eyes looking down with amazement at her boots, stepping onto the ankle-deep snow. Sammi tried to walk on perfect balance, realizing how difficult it was to maneuver on the ice. Nikki helped by lacing his mitten fingers around Sammi's hand, smiling at Nona and Tom.

"Hi, Nikki!" Nona said in excitement, giving Nikki a big hug on the porch steps patting his back to get rid of any fallen snow. Nona quickly took note of Sammi, wanting to match the same affection she had to Nikki for Sammi, but waited for Nikki to introduce the girl. The couple finally took cover under the porch, Sammi keeping quiet with a soft smile. Tom gave Nikki a quick hug, wanting to head inside to feel the fire he just started.

"Hey, Nona. Hey, Tom. There's someone I'd like you to meet," Nikki said, squeezing Sammi's hand. "This is Sammi. My girlfriend," Sammi waved at the older couple, nervous but noticing how they both smiled happily at the two.

"Hi! It's so good to meet you two. Nikki's said so many things about you guys," Sammi said, reaching out for Nona's hand. Nona shoved Sammi's hand away, wrapping her in a tight hug, cupping her cheeks to look at Sammi.

"Well aren't you just the prettiest. I'm happy to finally meet you," Nona said, kissing Sammi on the cheek. Nona almost passed Sammi to Tom, the older man hugging the small girl at a fast speed. "Nikki has said some things about you too. How about you ladies head inside, Nik and I will get the luggage," said Tom, squeezing Sammi's shoulder.

"Are you sure? I don't mind helping Nikki out myself," Sammi asked as Nikki and Tom carefully stepped down on the frozen steps.

"Oh don't be crazy, let the men do the heavy lifting. I'm sure you're starving. I have chicken pot pies staying warm in the oven," Nona said, softly holding Sammi's arm, leading her into the country style home. The house felt warm, cozy with old wooden style furniture and a brick fireplace. Nona pointed at the coat rack near the door as she disappeared in the kitchen, Sammi scanning the home. It was decorated for Christmas, a green garland wrapped around the staircase with lights. The smell of pine-scented the front of the house, the Christmas tree decorated with white and red bulb ornaments in the living room corner. The gifts Nikki sent out a week before already arranged perfectly under the tree. Sammi sat down at the dining table right in front of the kitchen, peeking over to see if Nona needed help with anything. The chicken pot pie smell wafted through the air, making Sammi's stomach rumble with hunger. Nona placed a hot ramekin on the placemat in front of Sammi, setting an olive green cloth napkin and silver fork.  

"Thank you, Mrs…?"

"You don't need to finish Mrs part, just call me Nona like everyone else. Would you like some iced tea to drink?" asked Nona, fixing her circle-shaped glasses.

"Oh no, I'm good for right now. Thank you so much for dinner. It smells amazing," Sammi said, crack opening the pastry pie crust with the fork, hot steam escaping its shell. She blew on the food in an attempt to cool it, not wanting to burn herself. With one bite, her eyes shot wide to Nona, chewing the juicy chicken.

"Wow, this is really good. I've never had chicken pot pie before," Sammi said, wiping her mouth with the napkin.

"Really? What does your mom cook for you and your siblings then?" Nona asked, placing the rest of the chicken pot pies for Tom and Nikki, sitting right by Sammi.

"She's from Greece so basically every kind of food from there. But I'm definitely adding this to my list of recipes when I get home," Sammi said, taking another bite of food as she could hear Nikki and Tom walk into the home.

"So I assume you're a little chef," Nona asked. Sammi nodded with food in her mouth, looking up beside her when Nikki and Tom entered the dining room. Nikki sat right by Sammi, taking off the wool gloves and breathing to warm his fingers up.

"Nik, you didn't tell me Sammi liked to cook. I'm going to have fun with her on Christmas eve dinner," Nona said with a smile, walking into the kitchen to quickly grab a jug of iced tea. Nikki only began eating, starving from the lack of a proper home-cooked meal that belonged to Nona. Tom started to eat at his own pace.

"That's because Sammi only cooks when she wants to be nice to me," Nikki said, taking another piece of chicken pot pie. Sammi stuck her tongue out at Nikki, making Tom chuckle a little.

"Sounds like Nona when I first met her. She'd only make her specialties when I'd bring her flowers as a thank you," Tom said, grabbing the iced tea that Nona offered him.

"That's because it rarely happened," Nona teased, admiring the happy people eating the food she prepared with love. "The food turned out great for everyone?" Nikki, Sammi, and Tom all nodded in silence, enjoying the savory, creamy dinner.

"Like always, Nona," Nikki said, earning himself a kiss on the crown of his head. "You're not gonna eat?"

"Oh don't worry about me, Nik. I'll be fine," Nona said, sitting right next to Tom.

"So Sam, tell us a bit about yourself? Do you work or are you in school or both?" Tom asked, sipping on the iced tea. Sammi wiped the corner of her mouth, standing up straight in her seat.

"I was in school. I graduated in May and decided to take a year off. I'm actually a secretary at Elektra. Nikki's manager helped me get the job," Sammi answered.

"What degree did you graduate with? Nikki's went on about how you're a smart girl," Nona asked, smirking when Nikki glared at her with subtle annoyance.

"Biology with a minor in Chemistry. I was aiming to become a vet, but I'm not so sure anymore,"

"Well don't worry about not being sure, you're young. You have a whole life ahead of you to decide what you really want," said Tom.

"And with smarts like yours, you'll be just fine!" said Nona, slowly collecting Tom and Nikki's empty plate. Immediately Sammi jumped from her seat, tucking her and Nikki's empty glasses between her arm, grabbing empty ramekins. "Oh, you don't have to clean up, Sammi!" Nona said, about to take the dirty dishes from the young girl.

"I insist, Nona. Take it as my way of saying thank you for letting me in your home," Sammi said, smiling at Nona as the two walked into the kitchen. Sammi carefully laid the ceramic dishes into the sink, looking around for any dish soap.

"It's Tom's turn to load the dishwasher, sweetheart. You can just leave dishes there," Nona said, placing the glass cups and the other dishes. "I'm glad Nikki is looking good after the whole Deana incident. He does look a bit skinny though," Nona said, pouring a glass of iced tea for herself. Sammi leaned against the sink, folding her arms as she remembered the event and let out a sigh.

"I really didn't know how to react when I saw her. I'd never seen Nikki look so shocked and numb before. He broke a whiskey bottle right in front of her," Sammi said, looking down at her winter boots.

"Nikki had a right to be shocked and angry. She may be my daughter, but sometimes I just want to shake her for treating her son so poorly. He's lucky you were there," Nona said, giving Sammi a quick sympathetic grin. "Nikki needs someone there to lift him up. I know he can be a little hard on himself,"

"Well, I'm happy to be there for him. But can I ask a question?" Sammi asked, Nona, nodding for approval. "How was Deana like with Nikki when he was younger? He hasn't really told me anything. It's kind of like pulling teeth with him sometimes,"

"Deana was like a swing with Nikki. She'd say how much she loved her son but then leave him here or put him on a bus by himself. Nikki always wanted to be with her, but I think once he turned a certain age, Nikki could see the truth. So he didn't want to be around her,' Nona said.

"And what about his sister or 'half' like how Nikki always says?"

"Oh, she'd stay with Deana. We rarely had her stay with us like we did Nikki. But of course, if you ask Deana about any of this, she'll say that Tom and I convinced Nikki to be mean to her. All we did was just remind Nikki the door was always open when he wanted to getaway. I love that boy like he was my own son. He pretty much is our son,"

"I think it's amazing how much you both raised Nikki. I know it's made me realize how lucky I am to have my mom and dad,' Sammi said, smiling with sad eyes. Nona patted Sammi on the arm, leaving her cup in the sink right on time for Nikki and Tom to enter the kitchen. "Nikki, perfect timing. I was just about to take Sammi to the living room, and show her some of your baby photos," Sammi shot wide with a grin at Nikki, seeing his frown of embarrassment.

"Uh, I don't think Sammi wants to see any old photos of me," Nikki objected, sliding his arm behind Sammi's back, escorting her out of the kitchen. Sammi turned on her heels, stopping Nikki with a hand on his chest.

"Oh no, on the contrary, Sammi would love to see old photos of you," Sammi said, smiling at Nona. "Come on, a few photos of baby Nikki. Please?" Sammi asked with puppy dog eyes to Nikki.

Nikki huffed out. "Fine, but I'm showing them. Don't want you pulling the ones I hate out of thin air," Nikki told Nona, guiding Sammi out of the kitchen. Tom smiled at the two, kissing Nona on the cheek.

"Does she get the grandmother's approval?" asked Tom, starting to set up the dishwasher.

"I think she does. I can already see a difference in Nik," said Nona.

Nikki and Sammi walked into the cozy living room, freshly vacuumed carpet and Santa Claus statues placed randomly. Sammi sat down on a soft brown loveseat, taking off her heavy boots, glancing at the many framed photos scattered around. The fireplace began losing its flame, Nikki chucking in another log to keep the warmth going, shuffling the burning pieces with the fire iron.

"Oh my god, look at you!" Sammi exclaimed, seeing a yearbook photo right on the fire mantle. Nikki appeared around seven years old in the picture, giving a tiny smile to the camera in his best attire. His hair looked like it was ready for the military, a short blondish square buzz cut that showed Nikki's big forehead. Nikki withheld a groan, wanting to chuck the photo in the fire. "Aww, you're so cute! Nice hair cut by the way," Sammi teased, poking Nikki with her elbow.

"You can thank Tom for that. I hated when my hair looked like that, and it looked like that for years," walking down the mantle to show more photos of young Nikki (or Frank).

"But why? It looks adorable on you," Sammi said in a mocking tone, smiling at Nikki. Nikki pushed up his black hair away from his face, facing Sammi to show his bare forehead. Sammi's loud laugh escaped her lips, finding Nikki's embarrassment amusing to her. Nikki glared right at Sammi, cocking his head to one side. "Does this answer your question? I have a big ass head if you haven't already noticed," said Nikki. Sammi balanced on tippy-toes, kissing Nikki right in the middle of his forehead, then a kiss on the lips. Nikki blushed, dropping his hair, tickling Sammi's face.

"I like your big head. It adds character even though we all know you have plenty of that," Sammi said, stepping away to continue the galley of Nikki. Sammi could see Deana in some of them, looking like a normal mother with her parents by her side.

"Yeah yeah. Keep complimenting me, and maybe I'll upgrade your Christmas gifts," said Nikki, rolling up his sweater's sleeves. Sammi smirked and raised an eye, strolling her way right to Nikki, placing her chin on his chest.

"Well, I like your big head. And I love your big rough hands. And I especially love your big hard-"

"Nona! Tom!" Nikki shouted, hugging Sammi around her shoulders as he smiled at his grandparents like a little boy almost getting caught in mischief. Sammi hugged Nikki, trying not to turn crimson red from the thought Tom and Nona heard her, smiling at the two. "We were just talking about going sledding tomorrow,"

"Tomorrow is perfect for sledding. You can show Sammi the hill you and I would always go to when you were young," Tom said, relaxing on the floral velour recliner.

"That sounds like a great idea, but it's getting late and we need to tell you two about the room situation," Nona addressed, shifting her eyes Nikki and Sammi, pushing up her glasses. Nikki scrunched his eyebrows at Nona, Sammi staying silent. "Now you two aren't married and will be sleeping under our roof. So Nikki you'll be in your old room upstairs, and Sammi in our guest bedroom down here," Nona said, resting her hands on her hips.

"Oh come on, Nona. We aren't going to mess around, we're adults, not teenagers," Nikki objected, pursing his lips out.

"It's alright, Nikki. This is your grandparent's house and they have rules, so we have to follow them. That's just the way it is," Sammi reassured Nona, patting Nikki on the chest. Nikki scoffed, shrugging his shoulder as he let his arm fall from Sammi's frame.

"It's settled then. Sammi, come with me to the room. Nikki, be a gentleman and bring in Sammi's suitcases," Nona said, looping her arm around Sammis and pulling her into the hallway, smiling at Nikki. Nikki only huffed, looking at Tom raise his hands as if he was clueless, enjoying every second of the family.

*

The guest bedroom was small, reminding Sammi of her bedroom in her first apartment. The double bed was placed against the wall, a white iron bed frame that looked as old as the house. An oak armoire facing the door, where Sammi had her suitcase hidden away, stood in the corner. Sammi was already beginning to fall into a deep sleep, the moonlight cascading against her skin from the small window. A soft creak sound slowly made Sammi wake up, barely opening in her eyes. Then a male body jumped on the bed, hiding under the cover. Before Sammi could make a sound, Nikki covered her mouth, quietly laughing at her surprised face.

"What the fuck, Nikki?!" Sammi whispered, feeling Nikki wrap his arms around her waist.

"What? I got lonely up in my room. I missed having a warm body next to me. I haven't had one since Vegas," Nikki whispered, hiding his face in the nape of Sammi's neck, leaving tiny pecks.

"Nik, I don't want to get in trouble with your grandma. We're not married, remember?" Sammi reminded Nikki, bringing his face back to her line of vision.

"And whose fault is that huh? I did ask, remember?" Nikki asked, mocking Sammi's tone, kissing her on the lips. Sammi chuckled at Nikki, feeling her cheeks turn pink. "You have to admit it's fun sneaking in like this?"

"Whatever. You can stay, but make sure you wake up early to go back to your room," Sammi said, cuddling deeper into Nikki's chested, smelling his cologne on his long sleeve sleep shirt.

"Yes, dear," Nikki said, relaxing for some sleep.

December 25th, 1985

Christmas morning

"Okay, we got one last present under the tree! Who's the lucky winner?" Tom announced to the small group, all wearing their pajamas still. Nona in her recliner, while Nikki and Sammi sat on the floor by her. Everyone had been given an equal amount of gifts, five from each person with the added 'Nikki  and  Sammi' to Nona and Tom. Tom grabbed the small red metallic present, reading the name tag from arm's length. "To: Sammi, From: Nikki. Merry Christmas, Princess," Tom readout, shuffling through the torn gift wrapping, passing the box to Sammi. Sammi scowled quizzically at Nikki, ripping the pretty wrapping without a care of how lovely it looked. A thin black velvet box was revealed, making Sammi question more. Nikki only gave a smile, feeling prideful at what he got her. Once opening, Sammi gasped as she saw the necklace. A beautiful black heart pendant on a thin silver chain with tiny red rubies outlining the heart. The stone was custom made to be in the shape it was; Sammi carefully pulling out the necklace to hold for everyone to see. Nona was fast to recognize the stone, glancing at the necklace Nikki was wearing.

"That's cute. You two will be matching," Nona said, smiling proudly at Nikki.

"Do you like it?" Nikki asked, delicately taking the necklace from Sammi, clamping it around her neck.

"Yes! It's so pretty!" Sammi gleamed, kissing Nikki on the cheek and hugging him tightly.

"Now you'll also have powerful protection," Nikki said. "Merry Christmas,"

"Thank you," Sammi smiled, touching the necklace as she noticed Nona and Tom looking lovingly at the pair.

"Well if that's all for gifts, I'm going to start breakfast! Hope everyone is ready for pancakes!" Nona announced, carefully getting up from the recliner. Tom immediately helped at her side, taking hold of one arm. Nikki noticed the slowness of his grandmother but knew she wouldn't have admitted to anything.

"And don't worry Sammi, I'm helping out this time," Tom said as the old couple left to make breakfast.

"Are you loving Christmas so far?" Sammi asked Nikki.

"Yeah I can honestly say this has been the best Christmas I've had. I'm happy you're here to celebrate it with us," Nikki said, kissing Sammi on the lips and holding her hand.

"Of course. Maybe next year, Nona and Tom can come down to L.A for a 'warm' Christmas. Have them see your growing goth castle," Sammi suggested.

"I would love that," Nikki smiled, sighing out loud with contentedness, bringing Sammi into his chest as they watched the snowfall from the window. Everything felt perfect.  

[caps-gal]

Comfort Food

You opened the lid of the foil and cardboard container to inhale the scent of the spaghetti, your stomach growling loudly as you rode the elevator up to the floor where you worked. You liked how the restaurant didn't use a bunch of plastic and styrofoam for their carryout, too. It was delivered in an open top box and you were encouraged to recycle.

It had been such a shitty day, and this spaghetti was honestly a lifeline.

Drama much, Y/N? your inner bitch asked.

Get fucked, inner bitch, you replied. To yourself.

Coz that's how you were rolling that day.

It had been one of those 'kick-you-in-the-crotch-spit-on-your-neck-fantastic’ kinda days: you had overslept, missed your train, skidded to your cubicle with seconds to spare and no coffee, and then before your computer had completely booted, your phone had rang and you were called into your boss’ office.

You sighed and navigated the cubicle maze, tapping lightly on his closed door.

“Come in!” you heard him call tersely.

Sounded like you weren't the only one having a day. You opened the door gingerly. “You wanted to see me?”

“Um, yeah? Where's my budget report?” he asked snidely.

“Oh!” you said in surprise. “Well, it isn't due until Friday, so it is not finished yet.”

“I need it tomorrow, Y/L/N!” he snapped.

“The meeting isn't until Monday. You asked for it for Friday by noon. I have the email,” you said calmly.

“Well, the meeting was moved up to tomorrow. Apparently Ms. Potts has to go out of the country,” he said in yet another unpleasant tone.

“I was not made aware of a change, Brent,” you said, beginning to lose your calm.

“What am I, your secretary?”

“Of course not, but while we may have gifted people in this building who can read minds, I am not one of them,” you snapped back.

“I would advise you not to take that tone with me,” he sneered. “Now go get busy. I want that report by 8 am.”

You left his office without another word, leaving his door open as a petty, passive/aggressive F.U.

Such was the life of the Office Manager for the Intelligence Analysis Department in Avengers Tower. You had to have low-level clearance to get past the first floor without an escort, but you got kicked around like a soccer ball on a playground because you weren't actually an analyst, you just did everything else in the department. You did draw the line at fetching coffee. You had some standards.

OK, you had a standard.

So you started to frantically compile the salary, expense and discretionary budgets from the current fiscal year, added to that the numerous budget increase requests, additional position requests, training budget -- you were going to be here all night.

And every single person in the department needed something from you desperately and urgently. You were actually considering hiding in a closet with your laptop to try and get things done.

You had a reminder pop up that you had a meeting at one. The day just kept getting better.

You figured you better go and grab your lunch if you wanted to eat before the meeting. You'd be cutting it close as it was, but you hadn't had breakfast so you were already so hungry you were considering eating your own ear wax.

You hurried to the break room to grab your lunch and -- Are ya fuckin’ kidding me? you thought as you stared at the spot where you had placed your lunch. Your lunch that had been clearly labeled as YOUR LUNCH!

You must have had a look of anger and disbelief on your face because a co-worker Randy said, “Lunch thief strike again?”

“Seriously? What the hell? Who steals food that is clearly labeled? And really, does it matter if it has a name on it? DID YOU BRING IT TO WORK? Then don't eat it?” you ranted.

“Sucks,” Randy said. “You'll have to order in or something.”

“I have meetings,” you said with disdain. You sighed deeply and turned to buy a candy bar or something from the vending machine and -- “Oh, come on! Out of order? Really?”

You stomped off to get your computer and a notepad, heading to the meeting early. Maybe there would be muffins.

There were no muffins.

Three hours, two meetings, one bathroom break and no snacks later, you finally returned to your cubicle.

You needed carbs.

Screw it, you thought, pulling up Berluti's website to place a delivery order. You added bread and a bomboloni to the order.

When the security desk called to tell you your food had arrived, you almost cried in relief. You hurried down to pay the delivery person, tipping generously and smiling happily at the guard before returning to the elevator.

It was almost 5, and while most people seemed to be wrapping up for the day as you passed their cubicles and offices, you knew that you still had hours of work ahead of you. Still, you had spaghetti, extra meatballs, soft yummy bread and a decadent dessert. You could do this.

You had spaghetti.

You were walking past the conference room when the door flew open and a man stormed angrily from the room, plowing into you and not even stopping to say a word of apology.

And he knocked your life-saving spaghetti out of your hands. You hadn't closed the lid tightly and it opened and spilled all the way down the front of your clothes to land in a wet plop on your shoes.

You stood there, frozen in place with your jaw slack. Your suit, blouse and shoes were no doubt ruined. There was spaghetti all over the floor around you. You looked around for the bag with your bread and bomboloni and found it behind you, crushed under the foot of your assailant, butter and chocolate smashed out of the bag.

You realized as you dropped to your knees to try and clean up some of the mess that you had started crying. You were covered in food, none of which you could eat, starving, had nothing to change into and couldn't leave until you had finished that stupid report for your stupid boss who couldn't even be bothered to tell you that the meeting had been moved up!

You didn't realize it, but you had been muttering all of this aloud -- your inner monologue had gone rogue -- and outer!

“I have a Bachelor's degree in Accounting, a Master's degree in Public Accounting, am a CPA and a Certified Forensic Accountant and I am doing budget reports for a jackass who can barely write his name!” you continued muttering, not noticing that someone had dropped down and was helping you clean up.

You finally saw hands through your tears when yours bumped into one. You gasped and looked up and into the bluest eyes you had ever seen.

“Oh, shit,” you whispered. “I am so sorry, Captain Rogers, Sir.”

He smiled at you and said gently, “Don't worry about it. That Senator didn't like what he heard in the meeting. I'm just sorry you got caught in the crossfire, as it were.”

You scooped up the worst of the mess and started to get to your feet and Rogers jumped to his to offer you his also spaghetti-covered hand. “Thanks,” you said quietly, bending to pick up the mess and the bag of ruined bread and pastry, hiccuping a sob at the lost bomboloni.

“I'll call maintenance to come and clean up the rest,” Captain Rogers said.

“Thank you, Captain Rogers. I appreciate your help, really,” you said with a watery, tremulous smile.

“You seem like you're having a really bad day,” he said gently.

You shook your head slowly. “Nothing compared to what you deal with. Just being a whiner.”

He smiled kindly. “Did I hear you say you didn't have a change of clothes?”

You nodded. “Probably. I didn't even realize that my internal griping had gone external. Sorry.”

He held his hands up in a warding motion. “Not mad! Just wondered if you want to come up and get cleaned up and I'll find you something to wear.”

“That's really nice, but I doubt we shop in the same department,” you replied.

He laughed and he held out his hand. “I'm Steve, by the way.”

You shook his spaghetti-covered hand and said, “Y/N. It's a pleasure to meet you, Sir. Though tidier and less humiliating circumstances would have been my preference.”

“Ah, none of that 'Sir’ stuff! Call me Steve.”

“Oh,” you said, surprise. “Thank you, Sir.”

“Gotta work on that,” he said with a laugh. “Come on.”

He stopped at a desk to ask someone to call maintenance to clean up the pasta mess and then led you to the elevator, asking Friday to take you to the residence level.

“You can clean up in my room and I'll go see if Nat or Wanda have anything you can borrow,” he said as he led you through a comfortable common area.

“Oh, ah,” you began.

“Don't worry, he's the original Boy Scout,” a female voice reassured you.

“Ah, Nat, I was going to see if you could help out. Y/N is an intelligence analyst and had a pasta mishap when I upset Senator Lawton and he ran her over in the hallway.”

“I'm not an analyst --” you began.

“Come with me,” she said. “We'll get you taken care of.”

Steve watched you walk away with Nat and could not take his eyes off you. He didn't know what it was about you, but he had seen you around the building and had no reason to speak to you so he had 'pined from afar,’ as Bucky was fond of telling him.

He pulled the receipt from your dinner from his pocket. He had grabbed it from your trash so that he could replace your order. It was only fair since the Senator had been pissed off by his refusal to toe the line.

It had nothing to do with him having a crush on you since you had beaten him to help a little girl that had been separated from her caregiver and knocked over by a careless bike messenger. You had been so kind and sweet to the child, soothing her tears and helping her to find her grandmother. He had wanted to talk to you that day but what could he have said?

Being Captain America had not given him game, as Sam was so fond of telling him.

So he had creeped on you, as Nat was fond of telling him.

He got out his phone and ordered from Berluti's, taking a shot and ordering double the food, hoping you would invite him to join you.

“So,” Nat began, “how long have you known Steve?”

“Oh, I don't know him. I mean, I know him but I don't know him. I know who he is, but I've never spoken to him before. He's just being nice.”

“Well, our Steve is a nice guy,” she agreed as she opened the door to her room and walked in.

“I’ll take your word for it. His persona seems nice, but I would imagine that none of you can be understood just from news stories and press conferences,” you answered as you followed her into her room. It was decorated much more softly than you would have expected in soothing tones with lots of pillows and comfy furniture. “Like I would have expected you to be all clean lines and metal and modern art from your public persona. But this is a really warm, inviting place.”

“Thank you! And you're right about most of us, but Steve -- he really is that good. He has a stubborn streak a mile wide, but he's a good man,” she said, sounding pleased. “So, how long have you been an intelligence analyst?”

“Oh, I'm not! Captain Rogers must have misunderstood. I'm just the office manager,” you were quick to point out, not wanting anyone to think you were misrepresenting yourself.

“Really? But you're a forensic accountant. Why wouldn't they utilize your abilities?” she asked, sounding shocked.

“How do you know that?” you asked in surprise.

“I make it my business to know about the people that come into this building every day. And you're the only forensic accountant in the building. Why don't they have you working money angles?”

“Preaching to the choir, sis,” you answered without thinking, then gasped and covered your mouth when she laughed.

“There we go,” Nat said. “Was starting to think you didn't have any spirit.”

“He tries hard, but Brent hasn't broken it completely,” you sighed.

“Well, I don't like the fact that we have an asset being wasted,” she said, sounding perturbed.

You shrugged. “I am but a cog,” you said with a laugh as she handed you some workout clothes.

“Will these be OK?” she asked.

“Yeah, they'll be amazing. I do not want to sit in spaghetti all night. Especially since I'm starving! Smelling it all night would be torture.”

“If you want to wash up there are towels and wash cloths in the linen closet in the bathroom,” she said.

“You are a goddess!” you gushed. “Thank you so much.”

“Just don't let Thor hear you say that!” she said with a chuckle.

You smiled and went in to clean up and Nat pulled out her phone.

Nat: OK Operation Get Steve the Girl is go. I'm talking to her and she's a delight

Bucky: Whoa! Details!

Sam: Damn, does Steve know?

Nat: Yeah, he finally got the opportunity to Prince Charming her

Nat: We'll meet up after she leaves

You came out of the bathroom then and said, “I love Berluti's but damn it feels good not to be wearing it! Seriously, thank you so much. I'll wash these and get them back to you as soon as I can.”

“Oh, no hurry. But maybe we could hang out some time? Wanda's always with Vis and Pepper is always just gone. It's be nice to have another woman around in this sausage fest, y'know?”

“Pepper! Potts! Oh I need to get my report done. But I would love to hang out! Wanna grab lunch or something this weekend?” you asked with a smile as you headed out the door.

“That sounds great! I know where to find you, I'll come by and steal you for lunch soon.”

“Sounds amazing! Thanks again, this is so nice of you!”

You hurried back to your desk, worry about your report catching up with you. And, holy shit you were hungry. You got busy gathering the data that you needed for the report. You had begun the process but since you thought you had three more days before you had to turn it in for Brent to take credit for, you had worked on it in between other duties rather than focusing entirely on it.

You had been busily typing, entering figures, creating tables, typing in HR codes to position requests, and generally making the report bulletproof. Brent didn't keep you as his underling because he liked you; you were very good at your job.

Your stomach started grumbling again. You looked down and said aloud, “Look, you just need to be quiet. I know you're hungry but there's no food until we finish this report for the Jackass.” Then you started to go back to work and thought you smelled Berluti's. “Oh my God, can I be so hungry I'm hallucinating smells?”

Steve stood a few feet behind you, caught between sighing like a teenage boy with a crush and giggling at the way you talked to yourself. He cleared his throat gently and watched you spin around, hand on your chest in surprise.

“Sorry!” he said, holding up his hands once again in a non-threatening pose, one hand holding a bag of take-out.

“Oh! Captain R -- Steve,” you said when he raised an eyebrow.

He smiled at you then at the use of his name. “Hey, since it was kind of my fault that you had to absorb your dinner through your skin,” you chuckled at that and he smiled at the warm sound, “I thought I'd replace it.”

“Oh my God, you did? I think I'm in love!” you said as you hopped up from your chair. “Yummm I feel like Pepe Le Pew floating along after a scent. Except mine is Berluti's.”

Steve laughed and said, “Let me just separate out my order from yours.”

“Oh, you got some, too?” you asked.

“Yeah, it just smelled so good.”

“Do -- do you wanna eat with me in the break room?” you asked hesitantly. “I mean you're probably busy --”

“No! I mean yes! I mean, I'm not busy. I'd love to have dinner with you,” he said with a shy smile. Rogers, you are such a dork!

“Well, that sounds like the best thing to happen to me all...year,” you said, returning his shy smile.

Nat, Sam and Bucky watched the two of you on a security camera monitor, popcorn in hand.

“She's as hopeless as he is,” Sam said, tossing some popcorn into his mouth.

“Nobody’s as hopeless as he is,” Bucky said, shoveling some popcorn into his own face.

“I think they're cute,” Nat said with a smile, switching the camera over to the break room. “And I hope they hit it off, because I like her.”

“You just want another girl around,” Bucky accused. “You already outnumber us.”

“Only in IQ points, Barnes.”

“Ouch,” Sam hissed. “Turn the sound up. Let's see if he nudges her a meatball with his nose.”

So his three best friends watched the two of you have dinner and awkward conversation together, delighting in Steve's painful chit chat topics and your equally gawky rejoinders.

It was magical.

[hellospunkiebrewster]

Flight Risk - Part V

Author’s note: I realized an issue with the previous chapter that I posted yesterday when going over all the stuff I’ve had written for this one. The newscast should have said the day before yesterday, not yesterday, for the day of the attack. Anyhow, here it is, Part V. As always, I love you guys! Some minor suggestions of sex in this chapter. Catch up here:

Prologue - Part I - Part II - Part III - Part IV

All characters belong to Pixelberry, not me.

Summary: Liam decides what to do in the wake of the attack on his home. Riley takes a day off to help him cope.

Tags: @madaraism, @mfackenthal, @theroyalweisme, @viktoriapetit, @hopefulmoonobject, @captainkingliam, @captain-kingliamsqueen, @syltti78, @pbchoicesobsessed, @queencatherynerhys, @jamielea81, @bobasheebaby, @ranishajay, @blackcatkita, @jlouise88, @choiceswreckedme, @hamulau, @umccall71, @darley1101, @gardeningourmet, @ayo-minty-jess, @drakelover78, @jayjay879

Every great institution is the lengthened shadow of a single man. His character determines the character of the organization. 

Ralph Waldo Emerson

--

The apartment is quiet and empty when Liam returns after tutoring Elizabeth. He is a bit out of breath as he winds his way around the clutter of furniture in the tiny room and grabs Riley’s computer before hurrying back downstairs to the Cheng’s apartment. Taking a quick moment to catch his breath, he runs his hand through his hair. He knocks briskly at their door, to be greeted by Elizabeth’s mom.

“I’m very sorry Mrs. Cheng, I left a book of mine here.”

She steps aside to let him in, nodding lightly. He pauses briefly at the dining table, “Maybe Elizabeth took it to her room by mistake, do you mind?” Mrs. Cheng motions to the hallway, there’s a single closed door at the end of it. She crosses her arms before she walks to the kitchen and continues making dinner. Liam taps on the door, quietly.

“Come in.” Elizabeth calls from behind the door. The door isn’t closed all the way and he pushes it open, not moving to step inside.

Liam clears his throat and speaks, “Elizabeth.” She looks up and her eyes widen. She scrambles out of her bed, pulls her hair down from its messy bun, and smooths it down.

“Mr. Rys? I, um, hi.” She still looks startled and she bites her lip.

“Do you know anything about YouTube?” Elizabeth inhales quickly and a small laugh escapes her.

“Yes.”

“Could you show me how to set all that up?”

“...Yes?” He watches her dark eyes, confused and curious.

“Now?” he asks. She glances behind him and checks to see if her mother has began setting food out on the table. She hasn’t, there’s time.

“Sure, it shouldn’t take that long. You do know how to use a computer don’t you?” She giggles.

“I’m not that old.”

“Hey, you’re the one who asked me if I know anything about YouTube. So first, you’ll need a username. Something that is short and to the point, maybe explains what your videos will be about. What will your videos be about?”

“About me. About Riley. About being king.”

“About being what?” She’s looking at him like he’s lost it a bit, barely holding in more laughter.

“I guess you’re in the know now.” He laughs a bit as he scratches his eyebrow. “I’m actually the king of a small Mediterranean country.” He laughs, it sounds absurd. In the current setting it was bizarre, the doorframe of the bedroom of a girl he tutored in American History in Chinatown. She’s looking at him dreamily.

“Oh god, what country is this? I feel like I’m in a movie suddenly and no one told me. Are all the guys there so-” she stops herself, blushing.

“TheRealLiamRys,” she says suddenly after she recovers. “Celebrities use that format for their Twitter handles. If you’re what you say you are, you’re definitely a celebrity, like some sort of hot, male Queen of England.” She gasps and claps her hands over her mouth.

He thinks on it for a moment. “It’s actually quite fitting, given what I want to put on the videos.”

“It’s settled,” she takes the computer from him, putting it on the small cluttered desk in her room. She starts typing, navigating to the website and creating the account. She gives him a quick rundown on recording a video with the computer and how to upload it. Elizabeth explains the importance of adding tags, in order to make your video easier to find when people search.

“That’s it?”

“Yea it’s really that easy, you old people just need to listen when we tell you how to do it.”

“Thanks, I’ll see you tomorrow. And uh, about me being a king, you’re one of three people who know where we are,” he says. She pretends to lock her lips and throw out the key. He smiles and pulls her sideways into a hug, placing the tiniest of pecks on her temple, as he picks up the computer and hurries out of the apartment, rushing back upstairs. Her arms fall to her sides, limp, her gaze follows him as he leaves her apartment.

--

Riley calls her boss as she walks back from the picking up take-out. Liam usually finished tutoring around seven and she tried to have something resembling food in the house by then. He tried on days he didn’t tutor, but growing up royalty didn’t lend itself to being great at life skills. Riley asks for the day off tomorrow and her supervisor obliges, reassuring her to take all the time she needs for whatever emergency she was dealing with. A nonprofit certainly paid her barely enough to afford living in the city, but at least they treated her like a human being.

She carries the bags of food up the five stories, making note that the next time they moved they had to be on a lower floor. That or they would have everything delivered. She thinks for a moment when she arrives at their door; she doesn’t know what she should say to Liam when she sees him. She wants to tell him it’s okay with her if he wants to go back. When she opens the door, he’s not home yet. She puts the food on the table and goes to the kitchen to get plates. She hears him burst through the door.

“Liam!” she calls from the kitchen. “I got us Indian.” She pops her head out of the kitchen and asks, “what would you like to drink?” Liam doesn’t look up, instead he has his head bowed and he’s reading something on her computer.

“Liam?”

“Hmm? Oh uh, just water.”

She leaves the kitchen without plates, silverware, or their drinks when she sees his face. He’s deeply focused and worry works a deep crease between his eyebrows.

“Liam, is everything ok?”

“I think I’ve figured it out.” He stops his thought there and keeps on clicking and reading things on the computer. She reaches out and puts her hand over his free one and the touch pulls him from the screen and his eyes meet hers for the first time since he left late this morning. His face relaxes when he takes in her gaze, one of the sides of his mouth pulls back into a small smile. He looks down for a moment and then back up at her as he closes the computer. She waits for a moment, waiting to see if he’ll continue.

“I asked for tomorrow off, you know, so I can be around for you. If you want to talk or anything.”

He nods but there’s something else going on in his mind. She can tell. She begins to pull the food out of the carryout bag.

“Actually that’s perfect. We can go to the city clerk’s office.” Her heart stops and she drops the takeout container of rice to the table. She looks from him to her left hand, the delicate ring. She’d nearly forgotten about it with everything that happened today. When she looks back at him, his eyes are full of hope, love, and passion.

“Riley, let’s get married tomorrow.”

--

The floors of the city clerk’s office are made of old checkered tiles, the surface is slightly warped and Riley runs the toe of one of her shoes along the ledge nervously as they stand at the counter. The clerk slides Liam’s identification back to him before sliding the marriage license under the glass behind it.

“So that’s it, we’re married?”

“Not quite sir, there is a twenty-four hour waiting period. Then you can have your marriage ceremony. If you’d like, we do them here, you’d just have to come back tomorrow. That is, unless you get a judge to exempt you from the waiting period.”

“And how do we do that?” Liam asks through the glass, looking anxious.

“Are you active military and being deployed? That’s usually the only reason they allow.”

“Not exactly.” Liam presses her for more information and eventually persuades her to allow them to plead their case before a judge. She motions to a door and buzzes them in. After waiting a quarter hour, a judge invites them into his office. Liam’s hand presses into her lower back and he leans to whisper in her ear.

“You look amazing today.” Riley smiles and leans her head against his. She smooths the cheap cream satin dress down, embellished with gold flowers. It was something she had from forever ago, before they met. It wasn’t anything special and it certainly anything close to what he was used to seeing her in. He holds her seat for her, before sitting in his seat next to her, across the desk from the judge.

“Mr. Rys, Ms. Collins, I understand you wish to forego the waiting period for your marriage. Unfortunately, I can only extend that to people in certain circumstances.” The judge looks over their application in front of him, barely looking up at them.

“You see sir, your honor,” Liam begins, “I am the king of a small Mediterranean country, Cordonia. Riley is a New Yorker that I fell completely and impossibly in love with when I visited this city for the first time.” He reaches over for Riley’s hand and runs his thumb over her knuckles. “My friend whisked her away to our country nearly a year ago so she could go through this completely antiquated tradition of the social season, where I’d select a wife and eventual Queen. She unfortunately became the target of a conspiracy.”

The judge has shifted from sitting back, looking a little annoyed at their request, to sitting forward. His elbows rest on his desk and he’s listening intently to Liam’s story.

“When we realized we wouldn’t be able to clear her name in time, I gave an ultimatum to my parents, the former king and queen. They refused to take it so we ran away. I’m sure you heard a bit about an attack on a palace in Europe? My country is hurting and bleeding in my absence and I can’t make a statement, return, or even dream of regaining their trust before I marry this woman.”

The judge nods, smiling. “I’m not sure if anything you said is true young man, but I know my wife would kill me if she heard I denied your request. She’d think it was incredibly romantic.”

Riley and Liam look at each other. Riley feels so happy that she’s struggling to keep all her emotion from bubbling out of her. She feels tears in her eyes. She turns back to the judge, “...so you’re?”

“I’m granting your request to waive the waiting period, yes.”

That night Liam strokes Riley’s hair as she falls asleep curled against him. After the civil ceremony, they’d returned to their apartment and Riley proclaimed that they had to drink all the wine in the apartment, just as they would’ve drank all the wine in the palace had they gotten married in Cordonia. They ended up tangled up together and pressed against most surfaces on the apartment as both of them struggled to keep their hands off each other now that everything felt so official. She wanted to scream it out loud, to tell all their friends, but instead buried herself entirely in him since they couldn’t. The food delivery guy got quite an eyeful of Liam when she asked for his wallet so she could tip him.

He feels so incredibly happy and light for the first time in months. She was his and he was hers. He looks across the apartment to the coffee table where her laptop sits. Inspiration strikes him and he gently pulls his arm from under her. He pulls his boxer briefs on and finds a shirt of his in the closet, buttoning it up. He ties a tie and pulls on the jacket he was wearing earlier that day. Liam digs in his nightstand and pulls out his glasses. He sets them on his nose as he walks across the apartment, retrieving Riley’s computer from the table and sitting at the small wobbly dining table.

He opens the video recording program that Elizabeth had shown him. He takes a moment to look at his face on the screen before pressing record.

“Ladies and gentlemen of Cordonia, it is I, Liam, your King.

“I must first extend my deepest condolences and wishes for those affected by the attack on the palace. I feel if I had made this statement earlier, been more transparent with all of you, this could have been prevented and avoided. That is a decision I will live with for the rest of my life.

“It’s not usual for a monarch to admit to making mistakes, but I have made a number. I only hope that you all realize I did the things I did because I love Cordonia and refuse to be manipulated any longer in a fashion that could hurt my country and my people.

“I left Cordonia the night after the Engagement Tour ended. Myself and Lady Riley left the country on a flight to New York City. The scandal that Lady Riley has been wound up in is a complete and total fabrication to prevent us from marrying. During the engagement tour, Riley and other members of the court worked tirelessly to clear her name, only to have the mission fail at the zero hour.

“With no hope of having her name cleared, she planned to leave Cordonia to take up her old life in New York, without me. However, being so unbelievably in love with her, I couldn’t bear to say goodbye. I gave an ultimatum and, even as king, I was met with such resistance and vitriol from members of my very own family and the court.

“I know you have no reason to believe me or to trust me ever again as your monarch, but I hope I can help expose the horrific deeds of members of the nobility. Should you all trust and believe in me, I will return with Lady Riley, my wife. Please, Cordonia, my heart still beats for you and I find little peace outside of my home with all of you. Allow me to show you the lies of the nobility so that you can make that decision for yourself. This is my most important duty.”

--  

Riley woke up in an empty bed for the fourth time in as many nights. Groggily, she rolled over to take in the rest of the studio apartment. It was dark, the muted orange of the city lights glowed through the thin, cheap curtains that hung in their apartment. She squinted against the sleep still present in her eyes and saw the dim light across the small apartment. Liam sat at their wobbly table, the faint blue glow from her laptop barely illuminating his face. He had a cup of tea at his side and his glasses on, glasses he only wore when he read something and really needed to focus. She’d found him this way for the last four nights, in deep concentration, pouring over news and online responses to his series of statements. She hears the faint click of the electric kettle and he briefly rises, moving soundlessly to the kitchen counter to pour himself some hot water and place a new tea bag in his mug. As quietly as he moved to the kitchen, he was back in his seat by the computer, reading. Riley marveled at how he was able to avoid all the creaking floorboards of the old apartment.

Any and all efforts to get him to return to bed each night proved unfruitful. He simply would dismiss her, promising he’d return in a few more minutes and never did. She would wake up each morning, finding him still in the same spot. The back of his thumb would brush over his lips like it did when he was deep in thought as he read thread after thread and article after article on the subject of the current state of his homeland. He sometimes jotted down a note of a name or opinion, rarely more than a couple of words. Riley would glimpse at his notes, scattered thoughts, as she rose from bed each morning and padded over to the kitchen to prepare a pot of coffee. They made little sense on their own.

She gets up from the bed, making her way over to where Liam sat at the table. He doesn’t look up or notice her, as usual, until she speaks.

“Liam, honey, come back to bed.”

He looks up at her, over his glasses, as if it surprised him she was even in the apartment to begin with.

“I’m sorry Riley, did I wake you?”

“The absence of you is what woke me. Please come back to bed.”

He’s looking at the screen again, jotting a couple of words, before turning his eyes back up to her.

“Love, I’ll be back in a couple of minutes. I promise.”

“You said that last night and the night before.” She hopes she doesn’t sound annoyed and that her concern carries over in her voice. She supported whatever this was wholeheartedly if it helped him stop blaming himself for the events of four days ago. This obsession of his only seemed to drive them apart. The frequency of his touches decreasing, his kisses distracted, and his conversations one-worded and short. Riley worries she is losing him every time she wakes up alone. That he’s stolen away just like they did weeks before. They got married only days before and he was feeling more and more distant.

“You have to sleep.” She’s moved beside him, close enough to touch him, and runs a hand through his hair. Her other hand finds his cheek in the darkness and draws him to face her, pulling him from the screen. The blue light of the screen dances off of the ring he gave her when he proposed. After a moment, he sighs and leans into her touch.

“I know, my love, I know. I’ll be back in a couple of minutes.” He sees her raised eyebrow, skepticism painted on her every feature in the dim blue light. “Ten tops,” he adds.

“I think it’s time for us to go home.”

“But we are home.”

“You’re not Liam, Cordonia is your home.”

[walkerismychoice]

Sticky Situation (Damien X MC)

Book: Perfect Match

Rating: Somewhere between PG/PG-13 I Don’t really know

Word Count: 1640

Author’s Note: This part 3 in the series chronicling my head-cannon of Damien and MC’s relationship up to present day, explaining why they have never been more than friends. I am loving the re-blogs, feedback, and comments I have gotten on the first two parts so far, so please keep it coming. Part 1 and 2 are linked below.

Part 1: For Safety | Part 2: Man of the Hour

Almost a week had passed since the party at Kai and Nadia’s apartment. Damien felt a little sting of disappointment each time he checked his phone and there wasn’t a text from Kai. He didn’t know what he was expecting from a woman in a long-term relationship. It was just that she had been so eager to give him her number, and to get his in return. Maybe she was just trying to be polite, but he thought they had hit it off pretty well and had a lot in common. He could text her, but he was scared of rejection, even just as friends. Maybe he would go the roundabout way and text Nadia. She was fun to be around too but a little less intimidating because there was nothing more than a friend vibe there. He could just ask how she’s been doing since the plea deal was accepted, no big deal… Maybe tomorrow.

=====

“So Nadia, have you heard from Damien at all since the party?” Kai asked expectantly. They didn’t exactly make concrete plans to hang out or anything, but she kind of got the impression Damien wanted to see her again. Odds are, if he hadn’t texted by now, he probably wouldn’t, and this was bumming her out.

“No he hasn’t, were you expecting him to?”

“Well, you told him we should all hang out, and I said the same thing before he left and he seemed into it.”

“I could invite him to our movie night tonight. I am a little tired of being the third wheel with you and Kyle.”

“Oh, are you interested in Damien? I thought you said he wasn’t your type?” Kai felt a twinge of jealousy at the possibility of her cousin dating Damien.

“Don’t worry, I can’t deny that he is hot, but I picture him with someone more… like you. I know you’ve claimed him, even if you can’t have him….yet,” Nadia teased playfully.

Dammit, why did Nadia have to know her so well? “Stop Nadia, the only man I have a ‘claim’ on is Kyle.” Despite what people say, it is possible for guys and girls to be just friends.”

“Okay then, if that’s what you choose to believe, I will definitely be inviting Damien tonight.”

=====

Kai checked her phone and saw a text message notification from Kyle:

Hey Babe, I have to go out with some clients tonight, so I won’t be able to make it.

Kai tried to be understanding. Big law firms were notorious for working their young lawyers to the bone, often expecting them to work 60-80 hours per week. But it seemed like Kyle was cancelling plans more and more often, expecting Kai to come running over when he finally got home around midnight.  Kai felt more like a booty call lately than Kyle’s girlfriend. But she also knew Kyle was close to becoming a junior partner in the firm. Hopefully this dedication would pay off and Kyle would have more control of his career and his schedule in the long run.

“Kyle cancelled on me again. It will just be you, me, and Damien tonight.”

“Looks like, I’m back to being the third wheel again.” Nadia laughed

“Nadia the joke is getting old.”

“All right, I’m done…for now.”

There was a knock on the door. Kai opened it and there was Damien looking softer and more casual than usual in an effortlessly sexy way. Kai really needed to learn to stop being so affected by him. He was carrying two large carryout bags that smelled heavenly. “Hi Damien, come in.”

“Nadia told me you both liked Thai food so I stopped at Bangkok House on the way.”

“What exceptional service! I think we should have you over more often. Did Nadia tell you that was my favorite restaurant?”

“No actually, that is my favorite restaurant too. I guess that’s another thing we have in common.”

“That’s refreshing. Kyle is more of a meat and potatoes guy, so I don’t go there as often as I used to.”

“Speaking of the devil,” quipped Nadia, “Kai just told me that Kyle had to cancel tonight. More food for the rest of us!”

Kai shot Nadia sideways look, She knew Nadia wasn’t Kyle’s biggest fan, but Nadia was hard to please. She was supportive of their relationship most of the time, but every once in a while she would throw in those little jabs, and it bothered Kai.

After dinner they sat down to watch a movie. Nadia hurried and grabbed the loveseat leaving the couch for Kai and Damien. Of course she would, thought Kai as she made sure to move as far to one side as she could. She noticed that Damien did the same. Whether it was because he wanted to make it clear he was only interested in being friends, or that he wanted to respect the fact that Kai was in a relationship, Kai wasn’t sure, but she was grateful either way. She didn’t need any incidental touching making her have feelings.

“What should we watch? How about The Notebook?” Nadia suggested.

“No!” Kai and Damien practically shouted in Unison. Kai was not about to watch a tearjerker romance with Damien right next to her, and apparently Damien felt the same. “Have you seen Orange County?” Kai asked Damien.

“Yes, it is one of my favorite Jack Black movies! Sounds perfect.”

“Okay,” Nadia conceded. “You two win this time, but next time it’s my choice.”

=====

That first movie night had been so much fun that they decided to make it a Friday night ritual, and had kept it up almost a year now. Sometimes they would go out, and other nights they would stay in and relax. Kyle joined a few times, but it became rare that he had a Friday evening free from client obligations. He had even started having more frequent weekend trips, which he assured Kai were necessary to secure the big clients.

Nadia and Damien went on their own dates here and there, but pretty much nothing lasted more than three dates for either of them. Kai was selfishly relieved when these relationships didn’t pan out. She practically felt single with Kyle’s work schedule, and didn’t want to sit home by herself every weekend. And if she was honest with herself, she was jealous any time Damien showed interest in another woman. She was able to bury her feelings and be happy being friends most of the time. But any time another woman came in the picture, Kai was reminded the feelings were still there.

=====

Damien loved the friendship he had developed with Kai and Nadia. He had been kind of a loner before they came into his life, and they made him realize he actually enjoyed being social with the right people. He buried his romantic feelings for Kai as best he could because she had become such a constant in his life, and he didn’t want to do anything to risk her friendship. She was still with Kyle and made no indication that she would be leaving him any time soon. Every once in a awhile, Kai would say or do something that left Damien wondering if there were mutual feelings, but nothing clear enough to let Damien risk putting his feelings out there.

Damien had never been a fan of Kyle for obvious reasons, but he was trying to trust Kai’s judgement. It was really hard for him to be objective with all things considered. However, as time went on, and Kyle got busier at the office, Damien was noticing a pattern he had seen many times before. He didn’t want to jump to conclusions and tell Kai that Kyle might be cheating, but he was pretty sure Kyle was cheating. He could just investigate it himself, but it was too risky because Kyle knew who he was.

So here Damien was on a Monday evening, waiting at a neighborhood dive bar for his private investigator friend Mike to arrive with some intel.

“Damien! Long time no see!” Damien stood to greet Mike as Mike shook his hand and gave him a clap on the back. “I’m glad I could be of service, but would it kill you to call me every once in a while just to drink beer  and shoot the shit?”

“Sorry Mike, you know I’m a bit of a recluse. It’s nothing personal.”

“Yes, I do know. Which leads me to question, how did you get wrapped up in this woman’s personal business? I take it you weren’t asking for a consult because the case was difficult. I just sat outside of this Kyle guy’s apartment for a few hours the last three days and I got plenty of evidence.”

Damien took a look at the photos, and they were clear as day; Kyle was cheating on Kai. In each of the photos, a petite, fair-skinned redhead, opposite of Kai in so many ways, appeared with Kyle. There were several photos of the pair entering and leaving Kyle’s apartment building. In the last set of photos, Kyle and the woman were shown kissing before Kyle sent the woman off in a cab. Even though it was what Damien had expected, it was still shocking to see the proof. He didn’t like the guy, and didn’t think he was right for Kai, but he didn’t want to see Kai get hurt either.

“Wow. There it is. Now I just have to figure out how to tell Kai without devastating her.”

“This woman must mean something special to you Damien. I do not envy the situation you have gotten yourself in, but good luck. Can I convince you to drown your sorrows in a drink before you get to figuring that all out?”

“Thanks Mike, I could use a drink…or maybe 5.”

[tyson-berry-blog]

Morgan Rielly #3 - Take Care

@paraykhoe asked: Hi bud I'm here with a request!! If you like the idea would you please consider writing fluffy Mo Rielly talking with the reader about taking care of herself? Like eating/drinking water/sleeping a healthy amount. Because I struggle with that and also.. mo is great and I like stuff like that. Please and thanks you if you do write it, I don't mind if you don't want to tho! 💙

I’m sorry that this has been sitting in my inbox for so long. I’m really trying to get back into some sort of schedule but it’s been hard lately. I hope you enjoy!

Work was your life, plain and simple. It wasn’t that you wanted it to be that way, but your work ethic had been one of the only constants in your life and after putting yourself through college, well you weren’t planning on letting up anytime soon. You had been fortunate enough to have several grad school options to choose from, including the University of Toronto where you received your undergraduate degree. That meant that you got to stay close to some of the most important people in your life, one of them being your boyfriend Morgan. He was incredibly supportive of your career and didn’t want you to give up on your dreams. He was worried though, that much you picked up on. While you didn’t live together, you were over at his often enough that sometimes it felt like you did. He was concerned by the seemingly endless hours you worked and how you seemed to be running yourself into the ground. It was finally after a few weeks that he decided to try and talk to you about it.

You were returning to your apartment from campus at what could only be considered the early morning when your phone started ringing.

“Hello?” you tucked the phone between your shoulder and ear so you could unlock your door.

“Babe?”

“Morgan?”

“I’m sorry, did I wake you?”

You looked down at your clothes, “no...”

“I don’t know if I’m relieved that I didn’t wake you, or worried that you weren’t asleep.”

“Shouldn’t I say the same to you? Why are you awake?”

“Time zones babe, we’re three hours behind and we had a game. What’s your excuse?”

You huffed, “I was working too.”

“Are you just now getting home?”

You were silent.

“Do you even have time to sleep? Don’t you have the early classes on Fridays?”

“I have plenty of time.”

“Don’t lie to me.”

“I’m not,” you insisted. “I can shower really fast, get in bed and get three-ish hours.”

“Three hours?! That’s crazy, you need sleep.”

“I’m fine Mo. It’s been crazy around here recently. It should settle down soon.”

“As soon as I get back, I’m making you take a nap with me.”

“I’m not a child Morgan.”

“Didn’t say you were.”

You had moved into your bedroom and were debating whether or not to shower now, or wait until morning.

“I’m just worried about you.” Morgan’s voice drew you back in to the conversation.

“I can take care of myself.”

“Didn’t say you couldn’t. I’m allowed to worry, I care about you.”

You went to turn the shower on, “I care about you too.”

Morgan yawned, “I can hear the water running so I’m going to let you go. I love you.”

“I love you too.”

You hung up and plugged your phone in. You took a shower at a record-breaking speed and climbed into bed.

It was the sunlight hitting your face in the morning that woke you up which was weird because you were supposed to be up before the sun.

“Shit!” you bolted upright. “I’m late, fuck.”

You scrambled to get ready, opting to just grab a granola bar for breakfast. You didn’t have time for anything else.

Fridays were your best days in terms of classes because you had the fewest. You were done by two which allowed you to get home at a decent time. Morgan was also supposed to be back that evening which gave you something to look forward to. You had plans to grab dinner and spend the weekend at his place.

You looked at your watch and figured that there was enough time to take a quick nap before you needed to drive and meet him.

Similar to that morning, it wasn’t your alarm that woke you up. Loud knocking at your door was responsible.

“I’m coming!” you shouted.

You pulled the door open to reveal Morgan whose hand was raised as if to knock again.

“Oh good, you’re alive.”

“You’re back early.”

“Uh no,” he showed you the time on his phone, you had slept through the afternoon. “We landed two hours ago and I texted you but never got a response, so I called and no answer so now I’m here.”

“Right. Let me get changed and we can go.”

“Or…we can stay here.”

“Mo please, it’s a mess here. Seriously, give me fifteen minutes and I’ll be ready to go.”

“It doesn’t have to be here. We can go to mine, let’s just stay in.”

“You wanted to try that new burger place, the one Auston recommended.”

“We can always see if they deliver, or we order for carryout and I bring it back.”

“Are you sure?”

He smiled gently, “of course. We can rent a movie, eat until we physically can’t consume anymore food and go to bed early like old people.”

“That sounds nice,” you couldn’t help your own answering smile.

“Let’s go.”

“I still need to grab my stuff.”

“Okay, can I come in?”

You opened the door wider for him and went into your room to grab your laptop. You found Morgan snooping through your kitchen for a snack.

“When was the last time you went grocery shopping?”

“I can’t remember,” you answered offhand, too busy looking for your computer charger.

“Can’t remember? What do you eat?”

You motioned towards the pantry where your protein bars were.

He walked over and picked one up, “really?”

“Don’t have time for much else.”

He dropped it back in the box, “we’re going shopping this weekend.”

“I mean it’s not like I don’t have some food. There’s stuff in the fridge.”

“We’re going grocery shopping.”

“Fine.”

“Thank you. You ready?”

You nodded, let him wrap his arm around your shoulders and lead you towards his car.

“I do this because I care,” Morgan said once you were both I the car.

“I know. Thank you.”

“Of course. I love you.”

“I love you too.”

[easyfoodnetwork]

Eric Rivera Is Playing the Game 

Selling pantry items, like spices, has helped keep Addo afloat.

Despite everything, the Seattle chef has found a way to successfully run his restaurant Addo — and he has some advice for the rest of the industry

Eric Rivera does not run a traditional kitchen. At his Seattle restaurant, Addo, the menu, cuisine, and concept change constantly. So when Seattle restaurants began to close in an effort to stop the spread of COVID-19, Rivera was already ahead of the game.

Rivera was 4,000 miles away giving a culinary tour in Puerto Rico when Washington Gov. Jay Inslee declared a state of emergency due to rising COVID-19 cases. In between staging meals and teaching his guests about the island’s culinary history, he set up his phone as a hotspot and began emailing clients and staff to rearrange the coming weeks of planned dining events and promotions, determining which could be salvaged as takeout and which needed to be completely restructured or worse, canceled.

On March 11, Rivera returned to Seattle and a calendar with reservations booked well into the next year. Addo used the Tock app for dinner reservations, but soon began using it to schedule carryout instead. Addo’s lunch catering, which amounted to about 30 percent of his business, was no longer feasible since all the high-end tech offices in the area closed, so Rivera began to make easy-to-reheat take-home meals to accommodate those newly working from home. He made and sold pantry items, like CSA boxes, yeast kits, and fresh-made pasta. He even hired his own delivery drivers to avoid working with gig-economy food delivery apps, which he believes take too much from both restaurants and drivers.

Adjusting to changes at the drop of a hat is common in most kitchens, but it’s something Rivera was used to well before he started working in restaurants. In the late aughts, Rivera ran his own mortgage insurance and financial services business when the Great Recession hit. He was an early success by most American standards, running his own offices in Washington, Oregon, and Idaho. “There’s this game-of-life kind of thing — you’re raised to believe that you need the nice house with the picket fence, the car. Checkmark, checkmark, checkmark. I had that when I was 24.”

Rivera recalls being at Costco picking up office supplies in 2008 when he got a call from an employee; they wanted him back in the office immediately. Rivera was surprised by the urgency. “No man, leave that shit there. We’re done,” his employee said.

“What? What do you mean?”

“We’re done. Everything’s closed, all the lines of credit. Everything’s done.”

Rivera felt he had to “learn to play the game.”

Rivera’s customers vanished almost immediately, and his business dwindled. He was forced to shift primarily to insurance. He was depressed. To save some money, he started cooking all of his meals at home and blogging about his successes and failures in the kitchen, mostly posting pictures of his process. He quickly amassed a bit of an audience and built a dialogue with some of the followers who were curious about the recipes he shared. “So then it became like more of a serious infatuation that I started to have,” he says. “It’s sort of what started to get me out of that spot.” Motivated by how quickly his skills had developed, he began to consider a career in food, and in 2010 he attended culinary school at the Art Institute in Seattle.

Acclimating to unfamiliar surroundings was nothing new to Rivera. His father was in the military for 30 years, and, as is common with that profession, the family moved around a lot. In order to build a bit of stability, when Rivera was 7 his parents chose to settle in Olympia, Washington — just over 60 miles south of Seattle — for a few years, and his grandparents left Puerto Rico for the Pacific Northwest to help with the kids. Growing up in Olympia, which was 82.5 percent white in the most recent census and more than 90 percent white in 1990, was challenging for Rivera’s Puerto Rican family. Fellow transplants to the Cascade region will tell you about the Seattle Freeze — if they haven’t already adopted it themselves. “In Seattle, in Washington, being passive aggressive, it’s an art form here,” Rivera says. “However, in my culture, if you have a fucking problem with somebody, you tell them in two seconds. You tell them to go fuck themselves. It’s over, it’s done with.” Rivera remembers the move to Washington as an uncomfortable transition. He recalls going to school and quickly realizing he and his family stood out from his predominately white classmates.

Rivera felt he had to “learn to play the game,” as he puts it. Beyond the regular curriculum of a student, he remembers playing the part of a young anthropologist, trying to learn about his peers’ preferred music, movies, food, and anything else that would allow him to fit in. “My grandpa would sit me in front of the TV and be like, ‘Sound like them, not like us!’ Meaning get rid of the accent, learn their shit.” However, while adapting to his surroundings, Rivera learned to embrace his own culture more fully. His grandfather taught him to cook at an early age. It wasn’t always easy to get the right ingredients, but he still managed to make Puerto Rican food, even in Olympia. When his grandparents eventually moved back to Puerto Rico, Rivera spent summers on the island and learned to move between the two worlds.

Rivera is selling rice, beans, and other Puero Rican pantry staples online.

The Addo space has transformed from restaurant to storage facility.

After culinary school, Rivera started working in restaurants, spending three years in Chicago as the director of culinary research operations with the Alinea Group. Early on, he began to see cracks in the way the industry was run. After an injury, Rivera was forced out of the kitchen and went without pay for months; again and again, he had to fight for meager raises. “The games you have to play are bullshit,” he says. “You have to go to the kitchens and stage for free. Dude, people that are younger and that come from different cultures and backgrounds can’t afford that — are you kidding me?”

After seven years in the industry, Rivera was ready to do his own thing, on his own terms. In the summer of 2017, he started running a chef’s table out of his Seattle apartment. He was unsure if diners would be interested in such a stripped-down eating experience, in which Rivera covered all aspects of service, but he was confident in himself. At the same time, he was running pop-ups out of any space he could get in town, cooking on panini grills in the back of coffee shops if need be. The hustle and desire to expand eventually led him to seek out his own space in the Ballard neighborhood of Seattle. He called it Addo.

Addo was an unconventional restaurant from the start. Although the chef’s table still existed in the new space, and you could still reserve space for a birthday party as you would at a more traditional restaurant, Addo relied on themed dinners booked months in advance. The menu changed based on current events, trends, and whatever popped into his head: He served a Pacific Northwest meal based on the grade-school computer game The Oregon Trail and multi-course dinners themed around Harry Potter. In an Instagram Live interview with Tom Colicchio in June, he described his process: “It’s truly head on a swivel. There were nights when we were a dine-in restaurant that we were doing three to five things a night because we had to. Here’s steak night, here’s a 20-course tasting menu, here’s Puerto Rican food, here’s a pasta thing we’re doing and there’s another thing.”

Puerto Rican food became a more significant part of Rivera’s professional life when, months after launching Addo, he expanded with Lechoncito, a side business that specializes in perfectly crispy and moist lechon, chicharron de pollo, and the famous jibarito inspired by his time in Chicago. Like Addo, Lechoncito also started as a pop-up, with a brief stint inside a whiskey distillery, but now Lechoncito food is sold through Addo a few times a month.

Although Rivera has mulled over the idea of making Puerto Rican food his primary focus, he appreciates that by having it as just one of the things he does, he’s not beholden to fickle food trends that could celebrate the cuisine one day and forget it the next. “[Puerto Rican cuisine] doesn’t stand out, because it’s just me talking about it or yelling about it, telling people how cool it is. That can only go so far,” he says. “There’s not enough people representing it or [who] know what they’re talking about ... thats why I have to be this fucking guy, that has to operate at this really high level to get that badge that says, ‘He knows what he’s talking about, he’s worked at a place with three Michelin stars.’”

Still, there’s a loyal clientele for Lechoncito. On a recent Sunday, Rivera greeted regulars and fawned over their dogs as they arrived to pick up orders of a sold-out whole-roasted pig, big-as-your-head chicharrones, and arroz con garbanzos. And since mid-July, Puerto Rican food has become an even bigger business for Rivera.

On July 9, at a roundtable for Hispanic business leaders, Goya CEO Robert Unanue praised President Donald Trump, quickly leading many, including Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, to call for a Goya boycott. Rivera saw an opportunity.

Rivera has a knack for social media, which he uses to create content for events, speak out about problems in the restaurant industry, or just post pictures of delicious food and cute dogs. As the Goya news and the hashtag #GoyaBoycott spread, he tweeted about his ability to ship pantry staples like sofrito, sazon, and adobo across the United States. Within hours, these tweets had been retweeted thousands of times, and Rivera made around 1,000 sales in the days following. These days, Addo resembles a warehouse space, with Rivera and a couple staff packing up spices, dry goods, and even house plants while Bad Bunny plays and the Puerto Rican flag hangs visibly from the front door. Online, Rivera jokingly calls himself “Amazing Primo,” a play on Amazon Prime.

“We’re punching above our weight class now,” Rivera says of Addo’s pandemic operation.

Despite the struggles restaurants across the country are facing as they adjust to pandemic restrictions, Addo is busy. Rivera credits his staff, who went from cooking and serving to packing boxes and printing shipping labels, for Addo’s survival. “Is it what I want to be doing? Absolutely not. But I don’t think you have a choice sometimes, and I’m just really grateful we have an option to keep this going ... if anyone was set up to be able to be pivoted, it was us,” says Ingrid Lyublinsky, Addo’s director of operations. “We’ve been doing it since the get-go.”

Addo chef John McGoldrick likens the constantly changing circumstances to the animated show Rick and Morty: “We’re just like a bunch of Mortys and chef Eric is Rick, sending us down a new portal every day.”

Although operating as a makeshift bodega may not be ideal for every kitchen, Rivera believes this is where restaurants are headed if they want to compete as major changes in the industry loom. He has even offered free Zoom classes to chefs about how to widen the scope of their restaurants, including tips on social media and running their own delivery or shipping. “We have less than seven employees, but we’re punching above our weight class right now with scaling things out and being more accessible to more people,” he says.

Rivera has grown increasingly frustrated by the response to the pandemic from many industry leaders. He believes big names and owners of chain restaurants will bounce back, leaving many smaller restaurants behind, as well as restaurant staff and BIPOC (Black, Indigenous, and people of color), who will have to find new avenues of work or face deepening pay discrepancies. “There are people who are getting stimulus, getting enhanced unemployment, but you have undocumented workers who aren’t getting anything,” he says. “And they’re being pushed back into the fire immediately without any help.”

On Twitter, Rivera has called out well-known Seattle restaurateurs like Tom Douglas and Ethan Stowell, who shut down restaurants permanently and laid off hundreds of staff. More recently, Rivera criticized pushes to open restaurants as COVID-19 cases are rising once again. Rivera tweeted on June 11: “There are other options for dining but the consumer will drive things back and greedy owners will compromise their staff to serve them. There are no leaders in this industry. There are no voices that can make these points stick.”

“If I was a dude with an accent that made jibaritos and chicharrones on the side of the street, no one would give a fuck.”

While recent months have brought the cracks in the industry to the forefront, the pandemic is not the direct cause of many of them. Rivera takes issue with an industry built on what he believes is an antiquated system of constant investment and expansion. “A lot of chefs, who are frankly losing their asses right now, are going to realize it’s not wise to seek so much investment, those deals with the devil, in order to push themselves into the stratosphere of the industry,” he says. This system, Rivera says, perpetuates the problems within the restaurant industry and benefits only “old, rich white men.”

Rivera’s tweets have earned the attention of the famous chefs he’s called out; some have even reached out to him. Colicchio invited him to an Instagram Live conversation about his experiences in the restaurant industry. And in an episode of the Dave Chang Show podcast, Chang said of Rivera, “Everything he’s saying is not something I always agree with, but I respect his viewpoints on a lot of things. If you look at what he’s doing it’s anything and everything, that’s what you have to see cause we have no idea what’s going to work. You got to try it all and make mistakes and adapt, make mistakes and adapt.”

Rivera recognizes that his own privilege has contributed to some of this success. “I knew what I had to do in order to play the game for people to listen to me,” he says. “If I was a dude with an accent that made jibaritos and chicharrones on the side of the street, no one would give a fuck.” However, he wants that game to change. “First, they need to get the fuck out of the way. They need to just get out of the way,” he says, referring to the old guard of primarily white men. “I don’t want to see another white dude traveling around the world discovering food. I’m tired of the Christopher Columbus shit.”

Rivera isn’t convinced that a return to some level of “normal” after the pandemic will solve many of his issues with the industry, including the financial barriers for BIPOC-run restaurants and the treatment of back-of-house staff in big-name restaurants. However, he’s inspired by younger generations of cooks and writers, like Alicia Kennedy and Illyanna Maisonet, for speaking out about the changes that need to happen, and credits them with “[helping] me establish how to be a voice, if you will, without just saying ‘fuck you’ every two seconds.” And six months into the pandemic, Rivera is still playing it day to day, ready to pivot once again whenever the need should arise. As he packs up spices, thinks up new to-go meals, and updates his website, he hopes that, at the very least, what he has done in his kitchen resonates in a food world that’s in dire need of a drastic pivot of its own.

Alberto Perez is a freelance writer currently based out of Seattle, but he’d rather be back in Texas eating tacos. Suzi Pratt is a photographer based in Seattle.

from Eater - All https://ift.tt/36lJt39 https://ift.tt/30qG27w

Selling pantry items, like spices, has helped keep Addo afloat.

Despite everything, the Seattle chef has found a way to successfully run his restaurant Addo — and he has some advice for the rest of the industry

Eric Rivera does not run a traditional kitchen. At his Seattle restaurant, Addo, the menu, cuisine, and concept change constantly. So when Seattle restaurants began to close in an effort to stop the spread of COVID-19, Rivera was already ahead of the game.

Rivera was 4,000 miles away giving a culinary tour in Puerto Rico when Washington Gov. Jay Inslee declared a state of emergency due to rising COVID-19 cases. In between staging meals and teaching his guests about the island’s culinary history, he set up his phone as a hotspot and began emailing clients and staff to rearrange the coming weeks of planned dining events and promotions, determining which could be salvaged as takeout and which needed to be completely restructured or worse, canceled.

On March 11, Rivera returned to Seattle and a calendar with reservations booked well into the next year. Addo used the Tock app for dinner reservations, but soon began using it to schedule carryout instead. Addo’s lunch catering, which amounted to about 30 percent of his business, was no longer feasible since all the high-end tech offices in the area closed, so Rivera began to make easy-to-reheat take-home meals to accommodate those newly working from home. He made and sold pantry items, like CSA boxes, yeast kits, and fresh-made pasta. He even hired his own delivery drivers to avoid working with gig-economy food delivery apps, which he believes take too much from both restaurants and drivers.

Adjusting to changes at the drop of a hat is common in most kitchens, but it’s something Rivera was used to well before he started working in restaurants. In the late aughts, Rivera ran his own mortgage insurance and financial services business when the Great Recession hit. He was an early success by most American standards, running his own offices in Washington, Oregon, and Idaho. “There’s this game-of-life kind of thing — you’re raised to believe that you need the nice house with the picket fence, the car. Checkmark, checkmark, checkmark. I had that when I was 24.”

Rivera recalls being at Costco picking up office supplies in 2008 when he got a call from an employee; they wanted him back in the office immediately. Rivera was surprised by the urgency. “No man, leave that shit there. We’re done,” his employee said.

“What? What do you mean?”

“We’re done. Everything’s closed, all the lines of credit. Everything’s done.”

Rivera felt he had to “learn to play the game.”

Rivera’s customers vanished almost immediately, and his business dwindled. He was forced to shift primarily to insurance. He was depressed. To save some money, he started cooking all of his meals at home and blogging about his successes and failures in the kitchen, mostly posting pictures of his process. He quickly amassed a bit of an audience and built a dialogue with some of the followers who were curious about the recipes he shared. “So then it became like more of a serious infatuation that I started to have,” he says. “It’s sort of what started to get me out of that spot.” Motivated by how quickly his skills had developed, he began to consider a career in food, and in 2010 he attended culinary school at the Art Institute in Seattle.

Acclimating to unfamiliar surroundings was nothing new to Rivera. His father was in the military for 30 years, and, as is common with that profession, the family moved around a lot. In order to build a bit of stability, when Rivera was 7 his parents chose to settle in Olympia, Washington — just over 60 miles south of Seattle — for a few years, and his grandparents left Puerto Rico for the Pacific Northwest to help with the kids. Growing up in Olympia, which was 82.5 percent white in the most recent census and more than 90 percent white in 1990, was challenging for Rivera’s Puerto Rican family. Fellow transplants to the Cascade region will tell you about the Seattle Freeze — if they haven’t already adopted it themselves. “In Seattle, in Washington, being passive aggressive, it’s an art form here,” Rivera says. “However, in my culture, if you have a fucking problem with somebody, you tell them in two seconds. You tell them to go fuck themselves. It’s over, it’s done with.” Rivera remembers the move to Washington as an uncomfortable transition. He recalls going to school and quickly realizing he and his family stood out from his predominately white classmates.

Rivera felt he had to “learn to play the game,” as he puts it. Beyond the regular curriculum of a student, he remembers playing the part of a young anthropologist, trying to learn about his peers’ preferred music, movies, food, and anything else that would allow him to fit in. “My grandpa would sit me in front of the TV and be like, ‘Sound like them, not like us!’ Meaning get rid of the accent, learn their shit.” However, while adapting to his surroundings, Rivera learned to embrace his own culture more fully. His grandfather taught him to cook at an early age. It wasn’t always easy to get the right ingredients, but he still managed to make Puerto Rican food, even in Olympia. When his grandparents eventually moved back to Puerto Rico, Rivera spent summers on the island and learned to move between the two worlds.

Rivera is selling rice, beans, and other Puero Rican pantry staples online.

The Addo space has transformed from restaurant to storage facility.

After culinary school, Rivera started working in restaurants, spending three years in Chicago as the director of culinary research operations with the Alinea Group. Early on, he began to see cracks in the way the industry was run. After an injury, Rivera was forced out of the kitchen and went without pay for months; again and again, he had to fight for meager raises. “The games you have to play are bullshit,” he says. “You have to go to the kitchens and stage for free. Dude, people that are younger and that come from different cultures and backgrounds can’t afford that — are you kidding me?”

After seven years in the industry, Rivera was ready to do his own thing, on his own terms. In the summer of 2017, he started running a chef’s table out of his Seattle apartment. He was unsure if diners would be interested in such a stripped-down eating experience, in which Rivera covered all aspects of service, but he was confident in himself. At the same time, he was running pop-ups out of any space he could get in town, cooking on panini grills in the back of coffee shops if need be. The hustle and desire to expand eventually led him to seek out his own space in the Ballard neighborhood of Seattle. He called it Addo.

Addo was an unconventional restaurant from the start. Although the chef’s table still existed in the new space, and you could still reserve space for a birthday party as you would at a more traditional restaurant, Addo relied on themed dinners booked months in advance. The menu changed based on current events, trends, and whatever popped into his head: He served a Pacific Northwest meal based on the grade-school computer game The Oregon Trail and multi-course dinners themed around Harry Potter. In an Instagram Live interview with Tom Colicchio in June, he described his process: “It’s truly head on a swivel. There were nights when we were a dine-in restaurant that we were doing three to five things a night because we had to. Here’s steak night, here’s a 20-course tasting menu, here’s Puerto Rican food, here’s a pasta thing we’re doing and there’s another thing.”

Puerto Rican food became a more significant part of Rivera’s professional life when, months after launching Addo, he expanded with Lechoncito, a side business that specializes in perfectly crispy and moist lechon, chicharron de pollo, and the famous jibarito inspired by his time in Chicago. Like Addo, Lechoncito also started as a pop-up, with a brief stint inside a whiskey distillery, but now Lechoncito food is sold through Addo a few times a month.

Although Rivera has mulled over the idea of making Puerto Rican food his primary focus, he appreciates that by having it as just one of the things he does, he’s not beholden to fickle food trends that could celebrate the cuisine one day and forget it the next. “[Puerto Rican cuisine] doesn’t stand out, because it’s just me talking about it or yelling about it, telling people how cool it is. That can only go so far,” he says. “There’s not enough people representing it or [who] know what they’re talking about ... thats why I have to be this fucking guy, that has to operate at this really high level to get that badge that says, ‘He knows what he’s talking about, he’s worked at a place with three Michelin stars.’”

Still, there’s a loyal clientele for Lechoncito. On a recent Sunday, Rivera greeted regulars and fawned over their dogs as they arrived to pick up orders of a sold-out whole-roasted pig, big-as-your-head chicharrones, and arroz con garbanzos. And since mid-July, Puerto Rican food has become an even bigger business for Rivera.

On July 9, at a roundtable for Hispanic business leaders, Goya CEO Robert Unanue praised President Donald Trump, quickly leading many, including Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, to call for a Goya boycott. Rivera saw an opportunity.

Rivera has a knack for social media, which he uses to create content for events, speak out about problems in the restaurant industry, or just post pictures of delicious food and cute dogs. As the Goya news and the hashtag #GoyaBoycott spread, he tweeted about his ability to ship pantry staples like sofrito, sazon, and adobo across the United States. Within hours, these tweets had been retweeted thousands of times, and Rivera made around 1,000 sales in the days following. These days, Addo resembles a warehouse space, with Rivera and a couple staff packing up spices, dry goods, and even house plants while Bad Bunny plays and the Puerto Rican flag hangs visibly from the front door. Online, Rivera jokingly calls himself “Amazing Primo,” a play on Amazon Prime.

“We’re punching above our weight class now,” Rivera says of Addo’s pandemic operation.

Despite the struggles restaurants across the country are facing as they adjust to pandemic restrictions, Addo is busy. Rivera credits his staff, who went from cooking and serving to packing boxes and printing shipping labels, for Addo’s survival. “Is it what I want to be doing? Absolutely not. But I don’t think you have a choice sometimes, and I’m just really grateful we have an option to keep this going ... if anyone was set up to be able to be pivoted, it was us,” says Ingrid Lyublinsky, Addo’s director of operations. “We’ve been doing it since the get-go.”

Addo chef John McGoldrick likens the constantly changing circumstances to the animated show Rick and Morty: “We’re just like a bunch of Mortys and chef Eric is Rick, sending us down a new portal every day.”

Although operating as a makeshift bodega may not be ideal for every kitchen, Rivera believes this is where restaurants are headed if they want to compete as major changes in the industry loom. He has even offered free Zoom classes to chefs about how to widen the scope of their restaurants, including tips on social media and running their own delivery or shipping. “We have less than seven employees, but we’re punching above our weight class right now with scaling things out and being more accessible to more people,” he says.

Rivera has grown increasingly frustrated by the response to the pandemic from many industry leaders. He believes big names and owners of chain restaurants will bounce back, leaving many smaller restaurants behind, as well as restaurant staff and BIPOC (Black, Indigenous, and people of color), who will have to find new avenues of work or face deepening pay discrepancies. “There are people who are getting stimulus, getting enhanced unemployment, but you have undocumented workers who aren’t getting anything,” he says. “And they’re being pushed back into the fire immediately without any help.”

On Twitter, Rivera has called out well-known Seattle restaurateurs like Tom Douglas and Ethan Stowell, who shut down restaurants permanently and laid off hundreds of staff. More recently, Rivera criticized pushes to open restaurants as COVID-19 cases are rising once again. Rivera tweeted on June 11: “There are other options for dining but the consumer will drive things back and greedy owners will compromise their staff to serve them. There are no leaders in this industry. There are no voices that can make these points stick.”

“If I was a dude with an accent that made jibaritos and chicharrones on the side of the street, no one would give a fuck.”

While recent months have brought the cracks in the industry to the forefront, the pandemic is not the direct cause of many of them. Rivera takes issue with an industry built on what he believes is an antiquated system of constant investment and expansion. “A lot of chefs, who are frankly losing their asses right now, are going to realize it’s not wise to seek so much investment, those deals with the devil, in order to push themselves into the stratosphere of the industry,” he says. This system, Rivera says, perpetuates the problems within the restaurant industry and benefits only “old, rich white men.”

Rivera’s tweets have earned the attention of the famous chefs he’s called out; some have even reached out to him. Colicchio invited him to an Instagram Live conversation about his experiences in the restaurant industry. And in an episode of the Dave Chang Show podcast, Chang said of Rivera, “Everything he’s saying is not something I always agree with, but I respect his viewpoints on a lot of things. If you look at what he’s doing it’s anything and everything, that’s what you have to see cause we have no idea what’s going to work. You got to try it all and make mistakes and adapt, make mistakes and adapt.”

Rivera recognizes that his own privilege has contributed to some of this success. “I knew what I had to do in order to play the game for people to listen to me,” he says. “If I was a dude with an accent that made jibaritos and chicharrones on the side of the street, no one would give a fuck.” However, he wants that game to change. “First, they need to get the fuck out of the way. They need to just get out of the way,” he says, referring to the old guard of primarily white men. “I don’t want to see another white dude traveling around the world discovering food. I’m tired of the Christopher Columbus shit.”

Rivera isn’t convinced that a return to some level of “normal” after the pandemic will solve many of his issues with the industry, including the financial barriers for BIPOC-run restaurants and the treatment of back-of-house staff in big-name restaurants. However, he’s inspired by younger generations of cooks and writers, like Alicia Kennedy and Illyanna Maisonet, for speaking out about the changes that need to happen, and credits them with “[helping] me establish how to be a voice, if you will, without just saying ‘fuck you’ every two seconds.” And six months into the pandemic, Rivera is still playing it day to day, ready to pivot once again whenever the need should arise. As he packs up spices, thinks up new to-go meals, and updates his website, he hopes that, at the very least, what he has done in his kitchen resonates in a food world that’s in dire need of a drastic pivot of its own.

Alberto Perez is a freelance writer currently based out of Seattle, but he’d rather be back in Texas eating tacos. Suzi Pratt is a photographer based in Seattle.

from Eater - All https://ift.tt/36lJt39 via Blogger https://ift.tt/30orTHX

[nic-and-annie-in-france]

Normandy

(long post warning)

It was a short train ride from Paris to Rouen, but the atmosphere completely changed from one city to another. Instead of the stately Haussmannian apartments and broad, straight boulevards, Rouen had narrow cobblestone streets and rickety-looking half-timbered houses.  Our Airbnb studio adhered to Rouen’s dress code: it had exposed beams, exposed brick, and wide windows. It was as cozy as a hobbit hole and perfect for the carryout pizza dinner we ate there on our first night.

We got up early to begin exploring Rouen the next morning. It was sunny but chilly and foggy. Because of our visit to the Monet museum in Paris, we knew that Monet had painted a cathedral in Rouen several times. Within five minutes, we found a church that looked just like the paintings we had seen. We strolled around the quiet courtyard, enjoying the hint of mystery that the fog gave the church. After consulting our map, though, we realized the cathedral that Monet painted was still a half-mile away. We felt silly for the mistake, but still really enjoyed this church (which was actually an abbey), and wondered how the cathedral could be any more awe-inspiring than this place. When we visited the actual cathedral, we didn’t fully appreciate it because we were spending all our attention on avoiding an aggressive panhandler who was accosting each and every person in the square. So, the abbey holds a fonder place in my memory than the cathedral does.

In my preparation for the trip, I learned that Joan of Arc spent some time in Rouen, and that she played a significant role in Rouen’s tourism industry. But apart from the vague memory of a Wishbone episode about her, I knew next to nothing about Joan of Arc before coming to Rouen. We saw a few plaques around the city inscribed with things like “This is where Joan of Arc’s abjuration happened,” and “This is where Joan of Arc was imprisoned,” so little by little we learned more about her story. Then, we went to a museum (for lack of a better word) about her life. The building itself was where part of her trial took place, but that was the only thing about the museum that was authentic to the time period. Her story was told by videos of reenactors, projected so that they looked like they were really moving about the space. The idea was that we were watching Joan of Arc’s posthumous second trial, where witnesses were called and arguments were made to determine whether she was really a heretic or just wrongfully sentenced. I almost always prefer authentic artifacts over copies or reconstructions in history museums. But I thought this “museum” did a great job of compensating for its lack of extant artifacts from Joan of Arc’s life with engaging storytelling. I left the museum wanting to know a lot more about her life. I guess Nicolas did too, because he checked out an ebook about her that same night.

Our second full day in Rouen was dedicated to hiking and enjoying the outdoors. After spending our Christmas break in exclusively big cities, I realized that hiking is one of my very favorite types of sightseeing, and it was something I wanted to try to do more of in this trip. The trouble, though, is transportation. Before the trip, I spent more time and energy than I care to admit poring over maps and timetables to try to find the simplest way to some trailheads near Rouen. Every bit of the preparation was necessary. Two of the four bus stops we used were displaced from their normal spot because of construction going on nearby. Once we were riding the bus, I obsessively switched between Rouen’s public transit app and my hiking app to make absolutely sure that we got off on the right stop. We made it through the whole day with no transportation crises, which felt like a major accomplishment. And the hikes were wonderful!  We walked up a hill to see a panoramic view of the city, and as we were going up the path, I realized that it had been quite a while since my feet had walked on grass. On our second hike, we walked through the cutest village, passing a chapel, horse farms, and bed and breakfasts until we entered some nearby woods. We could almost trick ourselves into believing that we were walking through a slightly flatter Kentucky.

Towards the end of our hike, we entered a still-smaller village composed solely of very expensive-looking homes. As we walked by a hedgerow, a prissy little dog bounded through a gap in the hedges to greet us. We said hi to the dog as we passed, and kept walking. But the little dog followed us, all the way to the next house. I thought the dog would eventually return home, but Nicolas was worried that the dog would get lost, or that we would be accused of dog-napping. We decided to turn back and try to quietly coax the dog back into its yard. The dog, smiling stupidly all the time, refused to acquiesce at first, but we finally got the dog to go home.

This dog episode, and the few other times I have interacted with people’s pets in France, always reminds me that I have no clue how to talk to dogs in a foreign language. Surely “Bonjour” is too formal to say to a dog? But then again, if I’ve never met the dog before, is “Salut” or “Coucou” too presumptuous? Of course, a dog can neither speak French nor English, so what difference does it make? But if a French person hears me, will they be weirded out to hear me speaking English to their dog? It’s a conundrum.

After Rouen, our next stop was Le Havre. It was much less charming than Rouen, but then again, it was a beach town in the off season. We stayed in a slightly shabby beach condo, which we especially appreciated for its free washer and dryer. We spent one of our days in Le Havre sightseeing: we visited its impressive modern art museum and its public library, which looks exactly like a giant roll of toilet paper. 

The other day we spent taking a daytrip to the nearby town of Étretat, known for its white cliffs immortalized in some Monet paintings. Étretat was quaint and tiny; we saw most of it in a 30-minute walk around town. We brought a picnic to the rocky beach and ate it under the watchful eyes of the seagulls. We spent a lot of time staring up at the sheer white cliffs. Several times now we’ve recognized a building or landscape from a famous painting, and it’s an experience that never gets old for me. I especially enjoy seeing the places depicted in impressionist paintings. So much of impressionism is based in the idea of representing a fleeting moment in time—the weather, the time of day, the effect of the wind and the light—rather than a thing or a place. So in this sense, I still can’t say I’ve seen what Monet or Pissarro saw and painted, because I wasn’t present for that exact moment 100 years ago. Nevertheless, it feels very special to have captured my own fleeting moment in my brain, a moment that still has an element in common with something Monet saw with his own eyes. After lunch, we took the trail up the hill to the top of the cliffs. It was a beautiful, breathtaking walk. And the weather was better than we could ever have asked for. We even felt the need to put on sunscreen!

The last place we stayed was Caen. Nicolas was feeling a little dizzy and nauseous the day we arrived there, and we were both tired of constantly walking around, so we scrapped our itinerary for the day and stayed in our Airbnb. It was a tiny loft under the eaves of an old apartment building in the historic district. We kept hitting our heads on the sloped ceilings, but the views from the skylight windows were amazing. We spent the day relaxing on the pullout couch. Given my overachiever, workaholic tendencies, it pains me sometimes to deviate from the plan, or to not do all the things in a new place. But it felt good to be a little spontaneous and listen to our bodies’ need for rest. Because of this change of plans, I can’t say I know very much about the city of Caen. But when we went out to buy some groceries for dinner that evening, we got to see two abbeys built by William the Conqueror. These religious buildings were a lot different from the ones we had seen elsewhere in France. The stone looked orange in the evening sunlight and the steeples were really, uh, steep. According to the sign in front, William wanted to marry his first cousin, but the Church didn’t like that, so he offered to build the abbeys in exchange for the Church’s approval of the marriage. The marriage happened, and the abbeys survive to this day. I’m sure there’s more to Caen than one-limbed family trees and bribery, but that’s all we got the chance to learn about.

The next day, we set of for the train station early in the morning, and we took a 15-minute train ride to Bayeux, a neighboring small town. There, we saw a medieval tapestry recounting the story of William the Conqueror and the Battle of Hastings (why does that sound like a Harry Potter spinoff?). From what I had been exposed to at UK, I knew that I wasn’t super interested in medieval studies, but the tapestry (as well as some medieval things we saw in Paris that I didn’t write about) rekindled my interest in that time period. It’s worth mentioning first that the tapestry is less of a tapestry—there’s no weaving involved—and more of an embroidered comic strip. It was displayed in a dimly lit, V-shaped room long enough to display all 230 feet of the embroidery. An audioguide explained what each panel depicted, occasionally drawing our attention to certain details of the construction of the embroidery. At the end, there were more exhibits explaining the context of the “tapestry”: how it was made, how it is preserved today, what else was going on in France in the time period, etc. All in all, it was much cooler than I expected. The embroidery itself is an impressive work of art, and it tells the story of William the Conqueror in a dramatic fashion. The novelty of it was part of the fun, too. No disrespect to altarpieces, but we’ve seen enough of them to last us a long time; a thousand-year-old history text in the form of a proto-comic book, by contrast, was quite the sight to behold.

After lunch in Bayeux, we took a guided tour to the nearby beaches of Normandy. The tour was intended for Americans, as it was conducted in English and went to three main American points of interest: the American cemetery, the Pointe du Hoc, and Omaha Beach. On the tour, we met three women from Tampa who were taking a “girls trip” around Europe. We had been hearing snippets of American tourists’ conversations all around Paris, but it felt good to finally socialize with some of our own for a few hours. Our guide was a Dutch-Indonesian man who told us a little bit about the Battle of Normandy and told us a lot about the moderately successful Dutch hip-hop group he was in during the 80s and 90s. I did learn some new things, though, especially at Pointe du Hoc. It was the site of a German stronghold that American Rangers captured by scaling the seaside cliffs and taking out German heavy artillery stationed there. When we visited, we got to explore an underground German bunker, something I never expected to be able to do in my life. Above ground, the craters left by aerial attacks were still there, but grass and yellow wildflowers had regrown over them, giving the place the sloping, manicured look of a golf course rather than a battlefield. Together with the seaside and the cliffs, the whole place was eerily beautiful. To me it was a physical representation of the axiom that time (maybe with the help of tourism money) heals all wounds.

Our final day of sightseeing was spent at Mont-Saint-Michel, the village that becomes an island at high tide. We took a Flixbus there from Caen. It was hard to see the road from our seats, but based on the amount of times the driver honked at other people on the road, I think our lives may have been in danger a time or two. We arrived safely, however, then walked about 45 minutes from the parking lot to the town itself. We stopped several times as we walked to admire the view: a rocky hill jutting up from the flat floodplain into the sky, the spire of the abbey at the top reaching ever upward. The view was stunning, but the strong winds on the plains carried the even stronger smell of cow patties with them. After a few minutes the smell became overpowering, but at least it reminded us of home.

The commune itself was a quirky place. The narrow streets, lined with quaint-looking but overpriced little restaurants and shops, spiraled upwards to the abbey at the top of the mount. My favorite part was walking around the ramparts, which allowed us a little more room to breathe, and gave us views of the farms on one side and the English Channel on the other.  There were seagulls everywhere, and they sometimes flew against the wind so that they hovered in place like a kite. We spent the first little while wandering around and enjoying the atmosphere: whimsical, as if such an impossible place could only exist by magic…and yet, intentionally made to seem that way. I did my best to suspend my disbelief.

Our day at Mont-Saint-Michel was, amazingly, our only rainy day in our two weeks of traveling. We spent as much time as we could indoors as we explored the abbey, but eventually we ran out of inside activities we could do that we were willing to pay for. We decided to head back a little early to the welcome center on the mainland. We took the opportunity to sit somewhere soft, decompress, and use some free wifi (which our Airbnb in Caen lacked). Rivers in the desert.

Our day of travel back to our home in the Alps was supposed to be a long one, but I didn’t mind this because we enjoy reading, writing, or watching Netflix on the trains. I had also planned for us to arrive back in Cluses early enough that we could take a bus back home rather than walking. But you know what they say about the best-laid plans of mice and men.  Halfway through our first train ride, we were delayed because of an electrical malfunction at a station further down the line. The conductor came on the loudspeaker several times telling us several different estimations of waiting times. We transferred to trains on parallel tracks four different times as the plan changed. When all was said and done, we arrived in Paris two hours and 46 minutes later than we had anticipated, which meant that we had missed our train going from Paris to the Alps. Our train was not the only one to be delayed, so we waited in many lines to talk to many customer service representatives about getting home.  Because it was winter vacation—high season for alpine skiing—our options for returning home weren’t great. Eventually, we decided to wait two hours for the next train, where I would get a seat but Nicolas would have to stand. On this second train, there was yet another delay of about 20 minutes. This put us in danger of missing our connection to our third train. Fortunately, however, the conductor let us know as we approached our stop that the third train was guaranteed to wait at the station for people with connections. This was the last of the difficulty, and we arrived at Cluses safe and sound. Needless to say, we missed the last bus home by a long shot, so we had to walk the two miles to our apartment instead. 

This last day of vacation was clearly not my favorite day we’ve spent in France so far. But I was very thankful that this whole ordeal happened towards the end of our time here and not at the beginning. At this point, I have a good understanding of how trains and train stations work here, and I’m more comfortable using my French in complicated situations.  Several times throughout the day I tried to imagine my reaction if this had happened on our first day in France while we were lugging around our big suitcases and trying to get to our town for the first time. I probably would have cried, died, and/or gotten on the next plane back home.  We had a bad day, but at least it showed me the ways I’ve learned and grown.

[thegirlsinthefirehouse]

Descendants, Chapter 17

-----

“You’ve gotta be kidding me,” said Abby, putting a hand on her hip.

“The Shadow People, really? And you’ve never thought about mentioning this before?”

“Not kidding Abs,” Holtzmann said, picking up the PKE meter from off the bed and placing it carefully in a bag along with the other things she was packing in an old shoulder bag from her dad. If there was one thing Abby was never without, it was any of her ghost hunting equipment. And it had somehow all ended up in the bag with Holtz’s tools.

“I never got to explore the possibility, but I do remember being a kid in that school and hearing the older kids talk about ghostly shapes on the walls. Sort of like Peter Pan and his shadow. They would move constantly throughout the school, like they were looking for something or someone.”

“And you never saw them while you were there?” asked Abby.

“Too busy,” shrugged Holtzmann. “I was going to be the first kid with a motorized skateboard. I had plans everywhere, Abs.”

Abby looked at her wife like she was about to say something, but she refrained.

“Your skepticism is noted, but I really-- I really never saw them,” said Holtz with a shrug. “Maybe something out of the corner of my eye... but I could never verify that with a school of elementary aged kids running amok around me. And I never thought about breaking in.” She picked up the bag and put it on across her shoulder. "Well, you were tiny and breaking back into your daily prison probably wasn't high on your list," said Abby. Holtz nodded.

“But I’ve always been curious,” said Holtzmann. “And I’ve never been to an elementary school after dark.” She wrapped her arm around Abby's waist. “You don’t worry about a thing. I’ve got it all covered.”

“That’s what I’m worried about,” said Abby, crossing her arms.

“You just take care of the little one and stay behind me.”

“I’m pregnant, not helpless Holtz,” huffed Abby.

“And it’s my possible ghost hunting mission and you’re only going to look pretty on my arm.”

“Your arm candy huh?” said Abby, smiling a little. Holtzmann leaned in and kissed the side of Abby’s neck.

“You’re always beautiful.” She patted the side of the bag. “Now let’s go catch a cab and see if we can break in before nightfall.”

-----

Holtz and Abby had gotten downstairs to the hotel lobby when Abby had to go to the restroom again. It was while waiting that Holtzmann had noticed a familiar figure standing outside the hotel, dialing his cell phone. She headed for him.

“I know we’re missing dinner, but you didn’t have to--”

“I’m not,” Dean Holtzmann said, putting away his phone. “No carryout containers. I didn’t even turn on the stove.” He gestured to the small bag on his back. “I’m going with you.”

Holtzmann was very surprised by that. “Dad--”

“No arguments,” he said pointedly. “You’re going to a semi-abandoned property where there could be not only the paranormal activity you want to see, but the potential for looters and god knows what else.”

“This isn’t our first rodeo. You do realize how many decrepit old buildings we go to in New York?”

“I am aware Jillian, but I’m still going. But I’m going to let you tell Abby I’m going in her stead.” Now Holtz was seeing where this was going. It was cute, really. Her dad was being protective of his grandchild. She couldn’t see this going real well with her wife though. Holtz adjusted her glasses and put a hand on her dad's shoulder. "Dad, seriously. It would be better if Abby went instead of you." Dean grimaced, his frown lines creasing across his face. "I don't think it would be in the best interests of all of us if you take Abby with you. She’s four months pregnant with your child Jillian. Those buildings are not that safe." "Abby knows what to do in the case of a paranormal entity. She makes it her joie de vivre to punch ghosts back into the ghost realm."

“Yes, but you don’t have your equipment and you don’t have backup. At least, most of your equipment. Who knows what you might find in there?”

“A few dust bunnies to add to my collection. They’re so precious.”

“Or copper thieves.”

Holtz sighed. This was going nowhere.

“Dad...”

“And I do have one thing in my favor,” said Dean. He gestured to the keys in his hand. “Now you won’t have to call for a ride.” Holtzmann grimaced at that. He did have a point...

“Fine, but Abby is still going, just in case. I might need her.”

Dean Holtzmann sighed. “I guess it’s good that there will be two Holtzmann’s going then, eh?” Holtz just sighed and lowered her head. This was going to be a long night.

-----

Abby had been more than a little suspicious when Dean had shown up at the hotel, even more so when Holtz said he was driving them to the school. She was fairly certain she knew what the both of them was thinking, and sort of felt pity for her wife who now had three people to worry about.

Well, two and one third. She rubbed her baby bump and listened to Holtz and her dad talking about things. She was quite amused at the story Dean was telling her about how Malinda had tried to sneak Jillian into a dress for the 1st grade class picture, but she had managed to slip out the house without them knowing early that morning with not only her backpack, but a peanut butter and jelly sandwich, chips, and a juice box. She had taken the picture with wild everywhere hair, mismatched shoes and socks, jean shorts, and her favorite yellow t-shirt. Holtz laughed and said the favorite thing about the outfit was the rainbow suspenders that had matched the shirt. Abby could just imagine little Holtzmann with skinned knees and band-aids on her fingers hopping off the stool after the picture and asking the photographer if she could take apart his camera to see how it worked.

It was dusk when they pulled into the old neighborhood where they had used to live. Holtz pointed out where their house had been again. It had been torn down a couple of years after her dad had sold it to downsize. It had hurt Holtzmann a little to see it go, but she had the beginnings of a promising career at CERN, and had no reason to reside in Baltimore.

Funny how things changed over time, although she still had no reason to want to return permanently to her hometown. New York was her home.

Two blocks over, they came upon the elementary school. It had been a nice place at one time, but age was beginning to show. Holtzmann grimaced as she noticed the broken windows after they had parked across the street.

“You may be right about the looting, Dad.”

“I’m almost certain they’ve probably been busy getting all the ‘good’ they can get out of the place,” he said with a grimace as he held open the door for Abby. “It’s just sitting here empty.”

“It does have a bit of a creepy vibe,” said Abby, leaning on the door. “Holtz?”

“PKE is registering off towards the deep end, and we are definitely picking up some unstable electromagnetic fields,” she said with a grin. She pumped her arms up in the air. “Whoo! Let’s go.” She knocked her fist on the hood of the car. Abby was right behind her as she started to walk away from the car.

“I’m assuming that’s a good thing?” asked Dean, looking a little concerned.

“No, that is an excellent thing,” said Holtzmann, turning around to look at him and gesturing. “Come on Dad, we’re hunting ghosts tonight.”

-----

It turned out that breaking into her old elementary school was not as hard as she thought it would be considering all Holtz had to do was go up and push on the front gate. There was not even a security system on any of the buildings, nor any lock and key. The chains and locks were all laying on the ground, rusted to the point of being unrecognizable.

“No wonder someone said all you had to do was walk in,” said Dean. He grimaced as he saw the condition of the floor in the main building. The tile was starting to come up in some places, and it looked like it was intentionally broken in others. Holtz was walking not that far from them, checking the Geiger counter. Abby walked over and took the PKE meter from her. She wanted to get a reading from inside the building once they had entered. She blinked for a moment. She could have sworn she saw something out of the corner of her eye.

“You feeling that?” asked Holtz.

“Temperature drop, yes,” said Abby. “Although it is fall and there are broken windows.”

“Mmhmm,” said Holtz absently.

Abby frowned. She felt uneasy, but couldn’t form what was bothering her into words. She rubbed her wrists. One symptom she was definitely not enjoying in her pregnancy was the fluid retention that was causing her to have carpal tunnel issues. It was making everything in the lower arms just ache at random times. She rubbed up and down her forearm some more.

“There’s definitely something here,” said Abby. “Was it always like this?” Dean Holtzmann shook his head. “It was a bright, friendly elementary school. At least, when Jillian was here.”

“Spook factor is not being helped by the oncoming evening,” gestured Holtz to one of the windows in the hallway.

“Should there be mist in here?” asked Dean, walking towards what would have been the secretary’s office, greeting people as they came in. “Oh wait, it disappeared.”

“Manifestation,” grinned Holtz. “I think we may see something tonight Dad.”

“Hopefully we’ll be seeing some fried chicken at a diner later,” said Abby.

“Already?” asked Holtz. Abby nodded. Holtz wrapped an arm around her and kissed her temple.

“We’ll make sure to feed the kid later.”

“And blueberry waffles.”

“I think those are more of an Abby thing than a baby thing,” Holtz said, looking around for a moment before pulling out a flashlight. She hissed under her breath.

“Holtz?” asked Abby.

“I think I saw one Abs,” said Holtzmann. “Flitted away fast.”

“Distinct form?” Abby asked. “Or--”

“Shadow,” said Holtz. “Always a shadow.” She grimaced. “Why didn’t I ever ask more questions?”

“Like from an adult?” asked Abby, looking around. Holtz shrugged as they walked around. Her dad was going into one of the classrooms with his own flashlight.

“There had to be some sort of local myth or legend.”

“The kids probably knew more than the adults did,” said Abby. “Did you ever know how many--?”

Holtzmann shook her head, but then she stopped.

“Six.”

Abby looked at her as Holtz flitted her flashlight to the ceiling. “You remembered something.”

“Possibly,” she said. “I don’t know where the thought came from though, which disturbs me.” She frowned and looked around.

“I didn’t even think about that there could be mold from a leaky roof or old lead paint. You probably shouldn’t have come here, Abby.”

“Like I would have just stayed at the hotel while you were out hunting ghosts,” said Abby, pulling out her phone and using it as a flashlight. It was getting dark enough that she couldn’t see much with just their one light.

“Yes, but you should have.”

Abby ignored her wife and started veering off from Holtz. Inside the building was very rough. There was a lot of damage on the inside to the paint and wood paneling on the walls. Teenage vandals probably, judging by the spray painted messages on any sort of large surface they could find. A large set of rusted lockers lay on one end of a long hallway. When she saw something out of the corner of her eye again, she flinched.

“Yo Abs!”

Abby turned around and looked to where Holtz had gestured to the ceiling. A familiar green substance was dripping down onto the wall in front of her.

“Oh yeah, your Shadow People are definitely here,” said Abby. Holtz nodded and almost reached out to keep Abby from touching the substance, but refrained. She knew she’d need to pick her battles this evening. And it wasn’t like they didn’t deal with the stuff nearly every week.

“What is... that?” they heard from behind them. Dean was standing there, using his flashlight to get a better look at the slime.

“Ectoplasm,” said Holtzmann. “Leftover residue from ghostly and other paranormal appearances.”

“Oh, that stuff you always tell me your co-worker gets doused in.” Abby laughed softly. Poor Erin did get more than her fair share of it, and it was always a pain to clean up. Dean moved closer to get a better look.

“Interesting stuff.”

“I should show you some of our samples at the lab,” said Holtzmann. “You’d hate to see the black slime. If you ever thought I was terrible on clothes, that stuff practically eats them for breakfast. We have to keep changing out its container because it eats through them.”

“Not to mention eroding your soul,” said Abby, moving towards what she thought was an empty classroom. The PKE meter was giving her a reading that something was there as she entered the space. She wanted to tell Holtz later that maybe they needed flashlights in them so they could see in front of them while still taking readings. There had been a light breeze in the classroom when Abby had entered, but she had chalked it up to a couple of broken windows she noticed off to the side. But when the wind picked up, it sent old schoolwork and pieces of the old ceiling tiles flying all around the room, really capturing her attention to the sheer force of it. She had to cover her face with her arm and duck down to keep them from hitting her.

“Holtz!” The wind picked up even more, and it was all Abby could do to keep from completely hitting the floor to avoid being hit. These ghosts were definitely putting on a show.

“Abby!” said Holtzmann, coming running into the room. The wind automatically stopped, sending everything back crashing to the floor.

“Okay... that was weird.” Holtz helped Abby back up to her feet. “Why did the wind stop when you came into the room?” She ran the PKE meter over Holtz, who gently pushed it away.

“I’m not carrying any spooks or ghouls if that’s what you’re wondering.” She paused, looking worried. “You ok?”

“Fine,” said Abby, dusting off her knees. “I--”

A yell got their attention and they both rushed back out into the hallway. There was a fine mist settling over everything. It had an unearthly glow to it, which made the color of it discernable.

“All hail the mighty glow cloud,” joked Holtz. She frowned when she looked over to Abby and noticed she looked troubled.

“Abs, you okay?” Abby gestured to the walls. They all had ectoplasm dripping down them in sheets. Dean Holtzmann was standing in the middle of the mist, trying to stay away from the walls.

“I’m assuming this is not a good sign?” he gestured.

“I’m starting to think the entities are really not happy with our presence here,” Abby said, looking at Holtz. “They may not be as benign as you were hoping they would be.”

“And here I was hoping we could just spend the evening making out at my old elementary school,” drawled out Holtz, smirking. Abby pushed on her shoulder.

“So what do you want to do?”

“I’m thinking about those waffles,” sighed Holtzmann. She rubbed a hand across her face, grimacing.

“Dad, maybe--”

Both Holtz and Abby looked over to where Dean was standing. He was absolutely still, barely even moving. There was something surrounding him when they shined their light on him.

Shadows. They stood out against the glow of the mist.

“Oh boy,” Abby said under her breath.

“Dad, stay still,” said Holtz, panicking a little. She pulled out something she had hoped not to use. She had made her dad his own personal proton handgun much like her own, just in case of an emergency a few years ago. There hadn’t been any apocalypses in Baltimore recently, so he really hadn’t been much of a need for it. She had to unbury the shielded box it was in from under 17 rolls of fabric.

“Keep a beam of light on them!” yelled Abby.

“You think?” said Holtz, listening to the gun as it purred a little as she turned it on.

“No, but it gives him a little something to concentrate on,” she said softly as they began to inch closer. The shadows seemed frozen in place in the light of their flashlights. Abby took several readings, fascinated. There was something going on there, and she couldn’t figure out what.

That was until Holtzmann got close enough that she nearly stepped on one. With a quick yelp from Holtz, the shadows surrounded her, covering her entire body in darkness. Abby made a quick grab for the flashlight and gun in Holtz’s hands. They quickly dispersed at Abby’s touch, much to her surprise. The brunette was disgusted as she tried to wipe off the sleeves of her sweater on her jeans. They were covered in ectoplasm. But the shadows were gone from their vicinity. She looked over to Holtz’s dad, who was still trying to gain his composure.

“Dean?”

“Yeah, I’m fine--fine.” She handed the handgun and flashlight to him. He shined it on his daughter.

“Jills?” said Abby softly, pulling her close and stroking her hair.

“That was... not a field test I wanted to experience,” said Holtz. “Being surrounded by ghosts is not a party trick I’d like to do again.”

“Worse than being squashed by a big white balloon?” Abby said, trying not to smirk.

“At least I can hear,” said Holtzmann, pulling out of her wife’s grasp. She shook all over, as if to sling off the creepy feelings.

“Glad you’re alright Jillian,” said Dean.

“You too Dad,” said Holtz. She looked over to Abby, who was in contemplation.

“Did they touch you?”

Holtz shook her head.

“Just... surrounded you?” asked Abby, leaning her head to the side.

“Yup,” said Holtz. “Just a large swatch of blackness for me.” She grimaced when she noticed Abby’s sleeves still had ectoplasm clinging to the fibers.

“But apparently they did you.”

“I touched you,” said Abby. “I was worried you might get possessed and--”

“Say no more,” said the blonde. They both gave each other a pained look. Possession was not one of their favorite subjects.

“So you put your hand through my protective barrier of ghosts and they didn’t do anything to you?”

Abby snapped her fingers. “That’s it!”

“What’s it?” asked Dean, who had taken to shining his flashlight around the hallway to keep an eye out for the shadows. Holtz took back the gun and other flashlight from him.

“Protective,” said Abby. “That’s why they didn’t touch you. They were protecting you, Holtz.”

The blonde looked perplexed. “Whaaaaaaaaaat?”

“The Shadow People,” said Abby. “I don’t know this for sure, but you were a student here. Even though you’re an adult, they may have still recognized you. They didn’t-- they’re not evil, I think. They wanted to protect the children who came to the school. And I think they’re still trying to, which is probably why the teenagers can still get away with the vandalism.” She pointed at all the graffiti in the space. “It’s all speculation, but I’d imagine they’ve been restless since the place closed down.”

“That’s kind of--” began Dean.

“Sad,” finished Holtzmann. She twirled a loose curl. “They’re anchored here and everyone is gone.”

“Right,” said Abby with a nod.

“So you think these ghosts were watching over the children for years?” asked Dean.

“We’d have to get into the school’s history to even make a guess, but I’d imagine you’d find some sort of story about someone dying on these grounds. Perhaps a natural disaster of sorts?”

“The school burned down two years after it was built,” said Dean. “I do remember hearing about that.”

“That could be the reason why they’re here,” Holtz said. “They died saving the children, and they’re still trying to.”

“Hence why Holtz was unaffected by the ghosts,” said Abby. “They were making sure she was alright.” Abby gave her a small smirk. “Even if she is all grown up.”

“Pffft, please. Like I’d ever be a real adult.”

“You’d better sweetheart, or Abby’s going to have two children to look after,” mused Dean. The statement made Abby laugh a little and wipe one of her sleeves off on Holtz’s shoulder, who looked disgusted at the green slime.

“They haven’t reappeared yet,” stated Holtz, looking around. She took the PKE meter back from Abby.

“The mist is gone too,” said Dean. “Do you really think they were trying to protect you?” Holtz shrugged.

“I--”

“We were. We remember Jillian,” said a voice. Holtzmann turned around quickly when she realized the voice was coming from an all too familiar source.

“No no no Abby...” said Holtz, running up to Abby frantically. Her face was blank, as what usually happened when she was taken over by a ghost. But with the baby and...

“We will not hurt them,” said the voice. Abby seemed to grimace.

“Your beloved is yelling at us.”

“With good reason,” said Holtzmann. “Give them back to me, please.”

“You have in your possession something we need.”

“What?” asked Holtz quickly.

“Your weapon,” said Abby, pointing at the gun in Holtz’s hand.

“You want to leave this place,” Holtzmann guessed.

“Yes,” said the voice, a little deeper this time. “We are tired. And there are no more children here.”

“They abandoned you, didn’t they?” frowned Dean.

“No one believes anymore,” stated the voice. Which was true in Holtz's opinion. People just didn’t want to see what was in front of their faces sometimes.

“You were a happy child,” said the voice, lighter this time. The fact that Abby’s face wasn’t changing with any of the statements was making Holtzmann antsy. She also knew her dad was growing anxious behind her. She needed to keep him calm too.

“Was I?” said Holtz. “I don’t remember you.”

“We protected you,” said the voice of not Abby. “The older boys did not like you and tried to hit you.”

Now that, Holtz did remember. She had tried to ignore them, but...

“We kept them away,” said the voice again. “When you would cry in the bathroom at their words.”

“Jillian?” said Dean. He sounded surprised.

“It... it was part of life,” said Holtz. She didn’t really want to bring back the past right now. She needed to think about the present, in which a group of ghosts had control of her wife and child. She needed to get them free. She stepped forward.

“What do I need to do?”

“Outside,” said the voice. “Away from the school. We need to break free.”

“Alright, let’s go,” said Holtzmann, gesturing. “Field trip!”

Holtzmann and Dean followed Abby slowly outside. Once out near the streetlamps on the school grounds, five shadows suddenly surrounded the three humans on the asphalt of what would have probably been the teachers’ parking lot. They sprang up out of the ground, still only appearing as shadowed figures, but now they seemed more real.

As real as you could be floating above the ground. “We only have a little time,” said Abby. “We can not--” “Be too far away from your manifestation point,” said Holtzmann. “You will want to return.”

“Yes,” said the voice of not Abby. “Shoot us with this weapon and we can move on.”

“But--” began Holtz with a grimace. “It will--”

“We know,” said one of the ghosts through her wife. “We are ready.”

“Well, never say I’m not up to shooting a ghost,” said Holtzmann, looking at her dad. She pulled the trigger and the blast from the proton handgun let out a stream of red energy, which hit each and every one of the shadows in the chest, their forms exploding in pure white light in rapid succession.

“Thank you,” said the voice. “We will be able to move on.” A ghostly shadow popped out of Abby, making her pitch forward. Dean grabbed Abby around the shoulders and helped her stay upright, despite her going weak in the knees. Holtz quickly shot the last ghost before turning back to her lover. She was relieved to see Abby looking a lot more normal.

“Abs, we’ve got to quit doing this.”

“How--how did we get outside?” said Abby. She was rubbing her head with a wince. Holtz came over and poked her on the shoulder. “I should have really left you in the hotel room if I had known you’d get possessed by not one ghost, but six.”

“S--six?” gulped Abby. She grimaced. “We’d better not tell Erin.”

“I am definitely not mentioning this to Erin or she will yell at me again,” said Holtz. She looked at Abby, worry written all across her features. “Are you okay?”

“I-- I’m not sure,” said Abby. “Kind of woozy, but that’s obvious. My brain feels like mush.”

“We should take her to see a doctor perhaps?” stated Dean. Holtz powered down the gun and handed it back to her dad, who put it back in his bag, along with the flashlight he had been using. Abby leaned into Holtzmann. The nuclear engineer was very glad to be able to pull her wife close.

“I’m fine,” said Abby. “At least, I will be once my head feels like it's screwed back on correctly.” She frowned, rubbing her hand across her baby bump. "Are they okay?" asked Holtz.

“I don’t think there’s anything wrong. I haven’t felt... I haven’t felt anything,” she said. “If there was something wrong, I would think I would know.”

“That is reassuring since they did promise me not to hurt you,” said Holtz. Abby looked dubious at that. "They promised you?"

"That they did," said Dean. "Do ghosts do that?"

"Not normally no," said Holtz. "They normally just like to screech at us and throw us around like water balloons."

Dean sighed and shook his head. "I always knew the work you did was dangerous, but seeing it first hand is another thing." He started to pull out his keys. "Where to now?"

“We can figure out what we want to do on the way back. But for now, we’re going to get that fried chicken. I'm starving after sending six ghosts to the afterlife.” She looked at the state of their clothes and frowned. “Maybe after we freshen up.” -----

Later that night, Holtz heard her phone go off softly. Abby was asleep beside her, but she was up nibbling on a drumstick left over from their late supper. Holtzmann had been scrolling through some articles about her old elementary school but answered the call.

"You're a go for Holtzmann's House of Leisure."

"You running a house of ill repute is a scary thought Holtzy."

"You know it," grinned Holtz. She always loved hearing from Patty. "Talk to me."

"Your dad was right about the school's history," said Patty. "It did burn down not long after it was built. It was an accident having to do with a coal stove. 18 people died. But get this, six bodies were never identified. They weren't teachers or even parents. It was speculated that they have been immigrants passing through who stopped to help." Holtz shifted the phone to her other ear when she felt Abby move beside her. "Damn, I definitely would have thought they'd be teachers."

"You definitely need to come back and document everything. It'll be interesting to see your point of view. And get your dad to do it too."

"Will do," said Holtz. She threw the leftover bones back into the styrofoam container and got quietly out of bed. She went to the bathroom and closed the door.

"And the other?"

"From what I can find," said Patty. "Womb hauntings usually have to do with a ghost taking over before a child is conceived. I read a few stories about where a deceased loved one takes over a woman's womb in order to stay with them, but other than demon spawn, there's really not much out there. Paranormal events are still hard to collect." She paused for a moment.

"Abby is fine Holtzy."

"I know. I just worry," said Holtz. "I think we've been lucky so far. I remember reading in one of the paranormal groups that pregnant women are more receptive to the paranormal." Holtzmann sat down on the edge of the bathtub. "Considering out of all of us, she's always been the truest believer... I'd hate to see that even more heightened. I'd never get her away from work."

"And now you're overthinking things," said Patty. "But you're right about the fact that Abby would enjoy the ability to sense a ghost without equipment."

Holtz groaned at that.

"Maybe you're right, I am putting too much thought in this," she said. "They kept their promise."

"I'm sure the whole thing was scary," agreed Patty. She was sitting on her bed at home, looking at her computer screen. She was wearing a pair of mint green pajamas with hearts on them. The lights of the city were bright through her large bedroom windows, which were the delight of the apartment. She stared at them for a few moments before looking down at Cheyenne, who was asleep beside her. Patty caressed Cheyenne's cheek.

"I can't even imagine Cheyenne having to deal with that."

Holtz didn't say anything for a moment. She glanced at the back of the bathroom door where their clothes still hung from the night's adventures. "I think I'm going to go stuff myself with some more waffles and get some sleep."

"Good plan," said Patty. "Good night Holtzy. Go hold your wife." "You too," grinned Holtzmann as she hung up the phone. Patty chuckled and did the same.

"Oh, I plan to." She sat the computer on the bedside table and turned over, pulling Cheyenne into her arms. <– Prev | Next –>

[fallwritesfiction]

Prompt: 017. weapon Fandom: RWBY Pairing/Characters: Pyrrha Nikos, Winter Schnee Rating: Mature Wordcount: ~700 Summary: Pyrrha reflects on how she got to where she is now. Part of the Beacon University AU Notes/Warnings: professional MMA fighter Pyrrha, military officers slash heiress Winter, drug use (not Pyrrha or Winter), shitty parenting, Pyrrha Nikos is a boss, some uncertain amount of Boreas (Winter/Pyrrha)

When she was sixteen years old, fresh off of her latest victory on the Young Warriors circuit, Pyrrha Nikos came home to find her parents high out of their minds. Her father proceeded to inform her that she was going to make them rich, that she was going to pay them back for being born by enabling them to live in luxury.

This kind of conduct was utterly foreign to her. Her parents had always been far better than the horror stories she had heard of other fighters' home situations. She chalked it up to the drugs, but she didn't forget. She had become just a weapon to them, and that would not stand.

At dawn on her seventeenth birthday, she gathered everything she held dear, packed it into a suitcase, and headed for her bank. After making very, very sure her parents no longer had access to her funds, she bought the next plane ticket west.

She learned some hard lessons, that first year in Vale, but she learned them well. No one but her parents had ever thought her stupid. Now, she has her own apartment, has her own money, her own life.

"Deep thoughts?" Winter asks, coming around her side. Her fingers, always cold, brush over Pyrrha's side.

Pyrrha turns to regard her. Winter Schnee. Heiress to the Schnee Dust Company. Pyrrha can admit she's unsure what they are to one another. She cares deeply for Winter, that she can say for sure. Winter returns her regard, if the way she tends to Pyrrha's post-fight scrapes and bruises is any indication. They touch often, and far more casually than Winter is inclined to allow others. Their dinners often have only minimal lighting and low, affectionate voices; Pyrrha smiles more with Winter than she has with any man who's ever courted her. Winter has been in her bed - just in her bed, not in her body - more times than Pyrrha can easily count. Pyrrha thinks, on the rare occasions she stops to contemplate it, that Winter is courting her, but taking it very slowly. She doesn't dare ask.

"Too deep," Pyrrha admits.

She bends her head the scant few inches it takes to touch her lips to Winter's. This, too, muddies the waters, though not as much as one might think. She kisses Blake as well, when they're both relaxed enough. Though she can't often bring herself to ask for it, Pyrrha thrives on contact, craves it. Winter gives her that freely.

Pyrrha thinks she may be in love with her.

When they part, there's a dazed look on Winter's face. She quickly wipes it away, but Pyrrha's already seen it, sees it every time they kiss. It's part of why she's content to wait her out, to see if their relationship will cross a boundary that makes it more clear what they are.

"You found your way back," Winter says, echoing Pyrrha's words to her after she came back from her first combat assignment.

Pyrrha smiles. "I did." She raises her hands, cupping Winter's face and kissing her again, because Winter did find her way back, but she so easily might not have. "So did you."

Winter's fingers wrap around her wrist, and this time she takes far longer to erase the dazed look on her face. "I'll... continue to find my way back to you, Pyrrha."

It's the closest to a confession they've come in the two years they've been doing this. Pyrrha strokes her thumbs over Winter's jaw, then steps back. She offers Winter a small smile when their eyes meet. Not now, she thinks. Maybe soon, but not now.

"Are you staying tonight?" Pyrrha asks.

"If you don't mind," Winter says, ever thoughtful though Pyrrha has never denied her. Then again, that is very much Winter Schnee; her bags also stay in the guest room even though she shares Pyrrha's bed, and she insists on paying for meals whenever she stays.

"I don't mind," Pyrrha tells her.

Her parents would be furious at the thought of her in such limbo with Winter. They would want her to either marry the woman - and therefore gain access to her wealth and privilege - or break away from her and seek a different partner. But Pyrrha Nikos made the decision years ago that she is not just a fighter, not just a weapon. She is her own woman, and she will choose her own paths to happiness.

"I ordered takeout," Winter says, lacing her fingers with Pyrrha's. "The restaurant we found on Main and 97th recently instituted a carryout menu, and it was simple enough to have it delivered." Winter details their order, and it's perfect, as always.

Pyrrha lets herself be led, and reflects that this may be destiny.

for @thecassmtz for their birthday

[suchastart]

heeey. so I saw ur Blind Percy fic thing and it's probably long since retired, but i absolutly fell in love with it. could u maybe write the next part?

I am in love with you and also with this AU. Here we go!

click for blind!Percy au tag here! also feat. art by our fave Meg!

*

Annabeth eats lunch. Goes to class. Manages to wrestle her attention into submission; she asks questions of her professors, takes notes, participates in group discussion. She does not doodle meaningless green eyes in the corners of her outlines. She catches the bus home. She kicks her shoes off by the door, drops her bookbag by the couch. Takes in a slow breath.

Her roommate, Piper, looks up, and is immediately all attention.

“What?” Piper pushes her laptop onto the couch beside her and is on her feet in a second. “Oh my god, what happened?”

“Nothing,” Annabeth says. Escape routes: kitchen, bathroom, bedroom. She takes a step back, but Piper’s already got ahold of her wrists, and there’s nowhere to escape when a slow smile blooms on her face. Annabeth doesn’t even try to restrain her own smile–it slips easily onto her face, pulls a blush along with it. The butterflies in her stomach awaken. “I have a date.”

Piper blinks. “What?”

“This guy I met after my kids’ therapy session last month, I promised I would ask him out if I saw him again? And I literally bumped into him today, so.”

“So you asked him out?”

“For tonight.”

Squealing, Piper throws her arms around Annabeth’s shoulders and squeezes tight. Annabeth holds on as Piper asks about how long it’s been since her last date (too long, because when has she had the time, and when has she ever been so interested), and what she’s going to wear (jeans? dress? a cute… something?), and what they’re going to do (uh). The anxious, excited butterflies take a trip far north, where they sit, heavily and with no remorse, on her chest–

Has it been too long? What is she going to wear? What are they going to do?

“Nope,” Piper says, pulling back and pressing her hands against Annabeth face. She pushes until Annabeth’s cheeks puff up. “No. None of that. Come on, bring back that freaky wordless excitement. When are you going out?”

“Uh.”

Piper laughs. “Oh my god. You’re hopeless.”

*

“It hasn’t been too long, stop it,” Piper says.

Hey, it’s Annabeth, she texts. You want to go for dinner at 7?

“You’re going to wear this,” Piper says, after looking through Annabeth’s closet, and her dresser, and her dirty clothes basket. Annabeth’s outfit consists of: a worn pair of dark-wash jeans, still tight and rolled up at the hem; a silky, strappy top pulled from the back of her closet, the color of thunderclouds and hastily ironed; and comfortable black wedges. She feels like she looks okay; she’s aware that it’s probably not important that she looks okay, because Percy is somewhat vision impaired, if not blind, but she feels like he might appreciate it if she went through the stress of getting dressed up? And even if he weren’t, why shouldn’t she look okay? Wouldn’t he be able to tell, regardless?

God.

Love to, Percy texts. Where to?

“You’ll go eat at Kostas’, and then after, you go from there,” Piper says.

Kostas’? Annabeth texts. It’s around the corner from the hospital. They have really great Greek food.

“But where after?”

“Wherever you want.” Piper turns the curling iron off and fluffs Annabeth’s hair in the mirror. “If you come back here, though, just… put a sock on the door?”

“Stop,” Annabeth says, tossing her lipstick on the counter and pushing Piper from the room. She tries not to think about bringing Percy back to her room. She doesn’t even know him, but… “Get out of here.”

Piper leaves. Annabeth stands, somewhat wobbly, at first, in wedges that she hasn’t worn for a while. She fixes her makeup–light, and simple, if a little dark on the lipstick–and adjusts her top, and fluffs her hair. She takes a few strides back and forth across her room. Stares into the full-length mirror. Pulls up her jeans. Unrolls and then rerolls the hems. Turns to look at her butt a few times, at a few different angles.

Okay, Percy texts. The chime of the new message startles her, and she absolutely does not lunge for her phone, resting on her bed. I’ll meet you there.

*

Like she told Percy, Kostas’ is a small Greek restaurant near the hospital they both seem to frequent. It’s  pretty busy this time of evening, but Annabeth manages to flag down the owner, a nice, harried man she’s befriended that’s named, of course, Kostas, and tells him that she’s on a date with a guy who has a seeing eye dog. He is happy–happy for her, what a beautiful girl, what a smart and kind girl! He is also happy to secure her a table next to the wall, a little out of the way from the counter and the line of customers waiting for their carryout.

I’m here, she texts Percy, glad her butterflies have taken up a more comfortable, excited, and anticipatory spot back in her stomach. Right where they belong. Why is she so excited? How is she so excited? See you soon!

She takes a sip of her water and watches the people waiting for their dinner. Watches a little boy press his face to the glass display, stare wonderingly at the prepared flaouna and samali, the little rolls of tulumba. She studies the menu, and taps her fingernails against the table, and takes yet another deep breath of garlic and onion, fish and olive oil and feta–

The bell on the door rattles violently against the door.

Annabeth looks up–most of the evening customers waiting in line and some of the staff all look up–and there Percy stands, breathing heavy, his big dog by his side. He’s wearing jeans and a clean blue button-down and his sunglasses, and his hair is still such a mess, and Annabeth is still so terribly charmed.

“Sorry,” he calls, stepping inside. “Was in a bit of a rush. Sorry.”

Annabeth gets to her feet and hurries toward him. She doesn’t know if that’s polite, or if it’s alright to reach for him, or just announce that she’s here? Should she hug him? Is that too much? Too soon? Too desperate? Too anything? Is she thinking too hard about this?

So she gently touches his elbow, says, “Percy! Hey. It’s Annabeth.”

“I recognize your voice,” he says wryly, turning towards her touch. “I’m… hey. Hi.”

He’s a bit pink-cheeked, and he’s grinning, and Annabeth finds herself smiling helplessly in return. The things he does to her heart already. “Hi.”

His dog sniffs at her leg.

“This is Mrs. O’Leary,” Percy says, reaching down with his free hand to rub at the dog’s head. “She’s a hellhound.”

Annabeth laughs. What else can she do–she is already so far gone. Here is a cute guy who likes her, who smiles at her like he doesn’t know how to do anything else, who has a dog. “Can I pet her?”

“Yeah, of course.”

Kneeling, Annabeth brings her hands up to Mrs. O’Leary’s abundance of scruff. She’s a huge thing, and has entirely too much black fur that she can sink her face into. She smells like dog food and blankets and the city, like dog breath, like peanut butter. She pants into Annabeth’s face as she pets her, and Annabeth gives her a good scratch behind her ears in greeting. “Hello, Mrs. O’Leary.”

“Named after my kindergarten teacher,” Percy says. “I wanted to marry her.”

“Was naming your dog for her the next best thing?”

“Of course.”

Annabeth smiles. She stands, and hesitates again–they should sit down now, but does she guide him? Is that rude? Should she tell him where to go, or take his arm, or expect Mrs. O’Leary to show him where to go…? Would it be harder for Percy and his dog with the crowd, or does he expect her to help…?

“I can hear you thinking,” Percy says, reaching for her hand. “I’d rather eat than stand around, if that’s alright.”

“Sorry,” Annabeth says automatically. She squeezes his hand. His palm is warm, and his fingers are calloused, and she is lost, briefly, wondering where he’s gotten callouses from, before he nudges her forward. “We’re just over here,” she says.

“Good. I’m starving. You have any recommendations?”

They sit. Annabeth, across from Percy and next to Mrs. O’Leary. The shaggy hellhound lies easily on the floor, and Percy nudges his dog with his foot, touches the edges of the menu as if reading it.

“Oh,” Annabeth says. The menu! She should… read it aloud? Maybe he’s researched it? “Have you been here before?”

“My buddy Grover and I come here sometimes, but I’m not too hot on seafood.”

“You should’ve said something!”

“Nah, I like the gyros,” Percy says. He reaches over and touches her knuckles with the tips of his fingers, and she warms up to her shoulder, feels heat in her face. He presses her hand. “Stop worrying.”

Annabeth smiles. Releases her butterflies, lets them loose, allows them to riot in her heart as hard as they can. Percy’s stupid, beautiful smile is enough to lose herself in. “Okay,” she says.

He smiles. Squeezes her hand. “Okay. What should we order?”

[billydmacklin]

A Guide To Our Beach Town: Cape Charles, Virginia

I know it’s odd to be posting a beach-centric travel guide after summer’s over, but Sherry has been fielding so many questions lately about what to do in Cape Charles that we wanted all the answers in one place. Now people can just drop in on this post for all the details. And boy, are there details (have you met me? If not, hi, I’m John “Thorough” Petersik).

So if you’re thinking of making a visit to our favorite little beach town (which was also recently voted #3 Happiest Seaside Town by Coastal Living!), or are just curious about why we chose this place to renovate two vacation homes, this post is for you! We’re covering some fun activities for the family, our go-to meal places, and other reasons we think Cape Charles is the perfect place to unwind and soak up some pretty memorable sunsets.

Where Is Cape Charles?

Cape Charles is located near the southern tip of Virginia’s Eastern Shore right on the Chesapeake Bay. The Eastern Shore is a small, rural portion of the state that’s separated from mainland Virginia by the Chesapeake Bay. Cape Charles is a small town (the historic area is roughly a six block by six block square) that sits on the peninsula’s western coast… meaning you can sit on the beach in Cape Charles and watch the sunset right over the water. Highly recommend that.

It’s about a 2.5-hour drive from our home in Richmond, which culminates in crossing the Chesapeake Bay Bridge-Tunnel, a 23-mile long stretch of several bridges and two tunnels that offers quite the impressive welcome to the area (gorgeous water views). It’s also accessible from the north via a quiet drive through Maryland (it’s about 4 hours from Washington DC). Or, if you need to fly, the Norfolk International Airport is just across the bridge-tunnel – about 45 minutes away.

The town is relatively unknown and only in the last 5-10 years has it been experiencing an upswing as people have discovered it as a low-key alternative to your typical beach town, which means lots of homes are getting fixed up, new restaurants and shops are opening up, etc.

It has been really amazing to watch this town spring back to life and be revitalized, beautified, and enjoyed. Especially because the historic area is home to hundreds of beautiful 100+ year old houses, many of which needed a lot of love, and many of which have been lovingly restored. And our two are tucked right into the middle of it all.

The Beach

First lets talk about the beach, because it’s what sold us on Cape Charles (and it’s usually our go-to place every time we visit). It’s uncrowded, low-key, and easy to get to. Since it’s on the Chesapeake Bay, not the Atlantic Ocean, the water is calm and shallow.

At high tide you can walk out several dozen yards and still be barely waist deep in most parts (I’m sitting in the photo below, so the water is only about 18″ deep there) and at low-tide you can park your beach chair right in the water to keep your feet cool. It attracts lots of families like ours because kids can play for hours in the water without us parents having to fear the break of a big wave or the pull of a sudden riptide.

Our kids have spent HOURS splashing around, riding on floats, or even hunting for hermit crabs (yup, you can find them walking around on the sand in low tide).

Yup, these are all little hermit crabs we collected one evening at low tide. They’re such a novel thing to discover with kids, and they can put them in a bucket to watch them swim (and even witness them switching shells if you’re lucky!) and then toss them back in the water before heading out.

I you crave a bit more activity when you go to the beach, Cape Charles Beach is great for kayaking, stand up paddle boarding, fishing, jet skiing, or boating. On a windy day you’ll even see kite boarders. If you don’t have your own, there are a couple of rental places, like SouthEast Expeditions and the Oyster Farm at Kings Creek.

The other great thing is that PARKING IS FREE AND PLENTIFUL! You can park right along the beachfront street, Bay Avenue, with no problem – even on most summer weekends. No circling the block to find a spot or having to pay for metered parking. We LOVE that fact. There are also public restrooms with showers behind them near the big “LOVE” sign at the corner of Mason Ave & Bay Ave, and on summer weekends there’s often a delicious taco truck and an Italian Ice stand parked nearby.

Where To Stay

For such a compact town, there’s a surprising variety of options for your stay. We should first mention that there are vacation rentals through sites like HomeAway and Airbnb, which can be great for long stays, like a full week. The one shown below was even featured on HGTV! Just be mindful that those sites often return results outside of the historic district (but being inside the historic district is where you’ll get the most proximity to the beach, shops, and restaurants). So just double check that it’s actually in Historic Cape Charles if you plan to walk to shops, the park, the beach, restaurants, etc.

There are also a lot of bed & breakfasts in Cape Charles, like the Bay Haven Inn (below), Cape Charles House, and Alyssa House to name a few. We had the chance to visit several during a holiday open house event and they’re all beautiful with great historic details.

Another great option, especially for shorter stays, are hotels. The two in town are both AWESOME, but very different. Hotel Cape Charles is a modern “zen-like” hotel with loft style rooms (think: exposed brick, reclaimed wood, and those glass balconies that you see in the photo below). They also have fun perks like golf carts and bikes that are available to guests. We stayed there one night while tiling the pink house and loved it!

By contrast, the newly opened/restored Northampton Hotel has water views (it’s closer to the beach) and a more historic/Southern feel (like a giant front porch with a haint blue ceiling where you can have coffee and breakfast, with lots of traditional and ornate details like wallpaper, detailed molding, etc). There are also some more bargain-priced hotels and motels just outside of Cape Charles if you just need a place to plop your head at night.

Lastly, Kiptopeke State Park offers campsites and a few cabins (even a yurt!) nearby – as does Cherrystone Campground. Both are also waterfront, so you can enjoy the beach there without coming into town. But we’d definitely recommend venturing into Historic Cape Charles just to check out a few of the places we’re about to talk about below.

Where To Eat

The restaurant scene in Cape Charles is, well, not quite a scene yet. But that doesn’t meant there aren’t plenty of good meals to stuff in your face hole. Most of the commercial action in Cape Charles is concentrated on Mason Avenue, the town’s de facto “main street.” But our favorite dining spot is actually a short distance away, called Shanty. It’s a casual seafood place, complete with an oyster shell parking lot and an old boat out front full of plants. It has a ton of fresh fish tuna, shrimp, and oysters (for either lunch or dinner) as well as great options for non-seafood lovers and children as well (chicken fingers, quesadillas, burgers, etc).

It’s on the water so you can catch great sunsets, and in the summertime they often have live music on weekends. It’s popular with locals and visitors, so if you want to avoid a long wait it helps to come early (before 5:30 is the best time to aim for), or get a reservation (typically you have to call the day before to score one). Or just put your name on the list and they’ll text your phone when your table is ready – so you can walk around outside or even play corn hole out back and watch the boats in the marina while you wait.

Another favorite of ours is Deadrise Pies, which is a pizza/Italian place operated by the Shanty folks.

It’s also super kid-friendly, has great outdoor seating, and is also really nice when you need some easy carryout. We often get pizza and take it to eat on the beach at sunset! Some argue that Gerry’s Ristorante outside of town has better pizza (we like ’em both) but Deadrise wins for location and ambiance.

A newer favorite of ours is Cape Charles Brewing Company, which serves food and has great outdoor seating. We ate at shaded picnic tables while the kids played corn hole and ladder golf nearby and it was perfect!

Kelly’s Gingernut Pub is also a good option for kids, and people recommend Hook-U Up and The Oyster Farm for nicer adult date-night dining excursions, but since we’ve always got kids with us we haven’t tried them yet.

Our go-to spots for breakfast are the Cape Charles Coffee House and the cafe at The Northampton Hotel (above), or you can eat more casually at Rayfield’s soda fountain. We like to grab lunches at Gourmet Alley or Tim’s Place too. There are also other staples outside of town (like fast food and carryout Chinese) and in other exciting news: it looks like we’re getting a couple of new bakeries soon!

Where To Treat Yourself

A satisfying meal is all well and good, but one of our favorite parts about Cape Charles (and, well, life in general) is DESSERT. And if you’re more into the “grown-up desserts” (aka, drinks) we’ll cover that here too.

Reigning dessert champ in Cape Charles is Brown Dog Ice Cream. This charming ice cream parlor with an ever-rotating menu of flavors was named among the “Top 10 Best Ice Creams in America” by TripAdvisor. They’ve got plenty of classic flavors, but I always love their experimental ones with names like Lemon Curd Coconut Hot Milk Cake and Peach Raspberry Goat Cheese Crumble (the one below with sprinkles is Caramelized Fig with Mascarpone & Coco-Ginger Dust). And you can get any flavor as a milkshake, malt, float, or an ice cream sandwich too.

The new kid in town is Peach Beach Shave Ice Shack, which was started out of someone’s shed. They shipped in an authentic Hawaiian shave ice machine to make finely shaved treats that are distinctly better than your typical snow cone. Plus, the interior is super charming! They’re only open in the summer season for the most part, but they’re awesome on a hot day.

A less known, but also less expensive dessert option is CC Kool Eatz, which is hidden in a residential area on the north side of the historic downtown district (at the corner of Jefferson & Strawberry). They have some great soft serve with little tables to enjoy it outside. We also got a new candy shop this year, the Cape Charles Candy Co, which was opened by the family who was featured in the episode of HGTV’s Beachfront Bargain hunt that our house photobombed!

As for places to grab an adult beverage, in 2018 Cape Charles got a brewery, a distillery, and a cidery. Sherry likes to call it the trifecta of hipster spots to grab a drink – and they each have some pretty great atmosphere and that craft-brew feeling. As I mentioned above in the food section, the Cape Charles Brewing Company serves meals for the whole family and has lots of outdoor space as well as craft beer (flights, samplers, etc). We haven’t been to Buskey Cider on the Bay yet (an offshoot of a Richmond cidery!) but it has lots of board games and outdoor games (think oversized Jenga) on their outdoor patio. The Cape Charles Distillery is a decidedly more grown up space that sells upscale whiskeys, bourbons, moonshine, and vodka.

And if wine is your thing, Chatham Vineyards is just up the road. They even offer a “Paddle Your Glass Off” tour where you kayak to the winery on a guided tour and then get to sample some wines when you get there.

What ELSE To Do

You’ve hit the beach, stuffed your belly, and enjoyed the sunset. Now what? Cape Charles is certainly a quieter beach town than those you may think of with a boardwalk, mini golf, arcades, and outlet malls (although there is one of those beaches right across the bridge). So our “to do” list here usually involves a lot of relaxing, walking, and exploring.

The town’s main street, Mason Avenue, has lots of charming shops – including beach souvenirs, decor, clothing, jewelry, vintage furniture, art, wine, and more. Some of our favorites for browsing are Chuckletown Productions, The Boardwalk, Destination 23310, and the gift shop at The Northampton Hotel (seen below).

There’s also a large park that’s centrally located in the historic district (yup, it’s actually called Central Park – just like our old favorite in NYC). It has a large public field for tossing or kicking a ball around, a walking path, a playground, and tennis courts. We use it most for the playground and every Saturday in the summer they host live music in the gazebo and people bring lawn chairs and food/drinks to enjoy on the field while they watch the musicians play.

We usually end up doing a lot of walking around the downtown area to check out all of the houses (especially if we remember to bring the kids’ scooters). But if you want a more natural hiking spot, the Cape Charles Natural Area Preserve is a shaded boardwalk through the woods that’s just a short drive from town (I run there in the mornings from our beach house). Further out of town is the Southern Tip Hike & Bike Trail which is a wide 5-mile paved trail that terminates into a Nature Center that we haven’t visited yet, but we hear it’s good for kids (it and Kiptopeke State Park have more trails too).

We also really enjoyed a visit to the Barrier Island Center about 15 minutes up the road…

…and we took a day trip about an hour north to Chincoteague Island this summer to see the wild ponies. That was INCREDIBLE. We took this tour, but we hear there are a bunch that are good.

Cape Charles is also great for fishing, crabbing, boating, and golfing – but none of those are pastimes of ours so we’re not really qualified to advise on them. But there’s a free fishing pier in town and just outside the historic district are two signature golf courses (one Nicklaus, one Palmer – that means something right???).

When To Come

Someone asked recently if there’s anything to do in Cape Charles in the off-season. The answer is “Yes!” but also with a little bit of “no.” While the town is truly at its best in the summer months, it is still fun to visit in the Spring, Fall, and Holiday season too. Heck, we’ve had beach days – including going in the water! – as early as April and as late as November!

There are lots of activities and events in the off-season, so it’s probably best to plan around one of those. We’ve come for the garden tours in April, a trunk-or-treat event in October, and their holiday main street celebrations in December (complete with Santa and free movies at the historic theater – last year they played Home Alone and it was awesome). We also came for New Year’s Eve this year, where they dropped a decorated crab pot to ring in 2018! Doesn’t get much more small-town-quirky than that.

The only thing to note is that business hours get a bit funky in the off-season with shops and restaurants being closed more often (or even completely), so it’s always a good idea to call before heading out anywhere. Don’t trust any website to be updated! We have found the January through March months to be especially slow, but if you’re just looking for some quiet time it could be perfect!

I’m sure we missed some stuff – especially since new things are popping up every few months. We’ve got a cute little bookstore in the works down the street, and I just noticed a sign for another upcoming bakery. We hope you guys have a great time if you ever decide to slip through Cape Charles! And if you ever see us out and about while you’re visiting, please come say hello and tell us what we’re missing on this list! Ha!

The post A Guide To Our Beach Town: Cape Charles, Virginia appeared first on Young House Love.

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[endlessarchite]

A Guide To Our Beach Town: Cape Charles, Virginia

I know it’s odd to be posting a beach-centric travel guide after summer’s over, but Sherry has been fielding so many questions lately about what to do in Cape Charles that we wanted all the answers in one place. Now people can just drop in on this post for all the details. And boy, are there details (have you met me? If not, hi, I’m John “Thorough” Petersik).

So if you’re thinking of making a visit to our favorite little beach town (which was also recently voted #3 Happiest Seaside Town by Coastal Living!), or are just curious about why we chose this place to renovate two vacation homes, this post is for you! We’re covering some fun activities for the family, our go-to meal places, and other reasons we think Cape Charles is the perfect place to unwind and soak up some pretty memorable sunsets.

Where Is Cape Charles?

Cape Charles is located near the southern tip of Virginia’s Eastern Shore right on the Chesapeake Bay. The Eastern Shore is a small, rural portion of the state that’s separated from mainland Virginia by the Chesapeake Bay. Cape Charles is a small town (the historic area is roughly a six block by six block square) that sits on the peninsula’s western coast… meaning you can sit on the beach in Cape Charles and watch the sunset right over the water. Highly recommend that.

It’s about a 2.5-hour drive from our home in Richmond, which culminates in crossing the Chesapeake Bay Bridge-Tunnel, a 23-mile long stretch of several bridges and two tunnels that offers quite the impressive welcome to the area (gorgeous water views). It’s also accessible from the north via a quiet drive through Maryland (it’s about 4 hours from Washington DC). Or, if you need to fly, the Norfolk International Airport is just across the bridge-tunnel – about 45 minutes away.

The town is relatively unknown and only in the last 5-10 years has it been experiencing an upswing as people have discovered it as a low-key alternative to your typical beach town, which means lots of homes are getting fixed up, new restaurants and shops are opening up, etc.

It has been really amazing to watch this town spring back to life and be revitalized, beautified, and enjoyed. Especially because the historic area is home to hundreds of beautiful 100+ year old houses, many of which needed a lot of love, and many of which have been lovingly restored. And our two are tucked right into the middle of it all.

The Beach

First lets talk about the beach, because it’s what sold us on Cape Charles (and it’s usually our go-to place every time we visit). It’s uncrowded, low-key, and easy to get to. Since it’s on the Chesapeake Bay, not the Atlantic Ocean, the water is calm and shallow.

At high tide you can walk out several dozen yards and still be barely waist deep in most parts (I’m sitting in the photo below, so the water is only about 18″ deep there) and at low-tide you can park your beach chair right in the water to keep your feet cool. It attracts lots of families like ours because kids can play for hours in the water without us parents having to fear the break of a big wave or the pull of a sudden riptide.

Our kids have spent HOURS splashing around, riding on floats, or even hunting for hermit crabs (yup, you can find them walking around on the sand in low tide).

Yup, these are all little hermit crabs we collected one evening at low tide. They’re such a novel thing to discover with kids, and they can put them in a bucket to watch them swim (and even witness them switching shells if you’re lucky!) and then toss them back in the water before heading out.

I you crave a bit more activity when you go to the beach, Cape Charles Beach is great for kayaking, stand up paddle boarding, fishing, jet skiing, or boating. On a windy day you’ll even see kite boarders. If you don’t have your own, there are a couple of rental places, like SouthEast Expeditions and the Oyster Farm at Kings Creek.

The other great thing is that PARKING IS FREE AND PLENTIFUL! You can park right along the beachfront street, Bay Avenue, with no problem – even on most summer weekends. No circling the block to find a spot or having to pay for metered parking. We LOVE that fact. There are also public restrooms with showers behind them near the big “LOVE” sign at the corner of Mason Ave & Bay Ave, and on summer weekends there’s often a delicious taco truck and an Italian Ice stand parked nearby.

Where To Stay

For such a compact town, there’s a surprising variety of options for your stay. We should first mention that there are vacation rentals through sites like HomeAway and Airbnb, which can be great for long stays, like a full week. The one shown below was even featured on HGTV! Just be mindful that those sites often return results outside of the historic district (but being inside the historic district is where you’ll get the most proximity to the beach, shops, and restaurants). So just double check that it’s actually in Historic Cape Charles if you plan to walk to shops, the park, the beach, restaurants, etc.

There are also a lot of bed & breakfasts in Cape Charles, like the Bay Haven Inn (below), Cape Charles House, and Alyssa House to name a few. We had the chance to visit several during a holiday open house event and they’re all beautiful with great historic details.

Another great option, especially for shorter stays, are hotels. The two in town are both AWESOME, but very different. Hotel Cape Charles is a modern “zen-like” hotel with loft style rooms (think: exposed brick, reclaimed wood, and those glass balconies that you see in the photo below). They also have fun perks like golf carts and bikes that are available to guests. We stayed there one night while tiling the pink house and loved it!

By contrast, the newly opened/restored Northampton Hotel has water views (it’s closer to the beach) and a more historic/Southern feel (like a giant front porch with a haint blue ceiling where you can have coffee and breakfast, with lots of traditional and ornate details like wallpaper, detailed molding, etc). There are also some more bargain-priced hotels and motels just outside of Cape Charles if you just need a place to plop your head at night.

Lastly, Kiptopeke State Park offers campsites and a few cabins (even a yurt!) nearby – as does Cherrystone Campground. Both are also waterfront, so you can enjoy the beach there without coming into town. But we’d definitely recommend venturing into Historic Cape Charles just to check out a few of the places we’re about to talk about below.

Where To Eat

The restaurant scene in Cape Charles is, well, not quite a scene yet. But that doesn’t meant there aren’t plenty of good meals to stuff in your face hole. Most of the commercial action in Cape Charles is concentrated on Mason Avenue, the town’s de facto “main street.” But our favorite dining spot is actually a short distance away, called Shanty. It’s a casual seafood place, complete with an oyster shell parking lot and an old boat out front full of plants. It has a ton of fresh fish tuna, shrimp, and oysters (for either lunch or dinner) as well as great options for non-seafood lovers and children as well (chicken fingers, quesadillas, burgers, etc).

It’s on the water so you can catch great sunsets, and in the summertime they often have live music on weekends. It’s popular with locals and visitors, so if you want to avoid a long wait it helps to come early (before 5:30 is the best time to aim for), or get a reservation (typically you have to call the day before to score one). Or just put your name on the list and they’ll text your phone when your table is ready – so you can walk around outside or even play corn hole out back and watch the boats in the marina while you wait.

Another favorite of ours is Deadrise Pies, which is a pizza/Italian place operated by the Shanty folks.

It’s also super kid-friendly, has great outdoor seating, and is also really nice when you need some easy carryout. We often get pizza and take it to eat on the beach at sunset! Some argue that Gerry’s Ristorante outside of town has better pizza (we like ’em both) but Deadrise wins for location and ambiance.

A newer favorite of ours is Cape Charles Brewing Company, which serves food and has great outdoor seating. We ate at shaded picnic tables while the kids played corn hole and ladder golf nearby and it was perfect!

Kelly’s Gingernut Pub is also a good option for kids, and people recommend Hook-U Up and The Oyster Farm for nicer adult date-night dining excursions, but since we’ve always got kids with us we haven’t tried them yet.

Our go-to spots for breakfast are the Cape Charles Coffee House and the cafe at The Northampton Hotel (above), or you can eat more casually at Rayfield’s soda fountain. We like to grab lunches at Gourmet Alley or Tim’s Place too. There are also other staples outside of town (like fast food and carryout Chinese) and in other exciting news: it looks like we’re getting a couple of new bakeries soon!

Where To Treat Yourself

A satisfying meal is all well and good, but one of our favorite parts about Cape Charles (and, well, life in general) is DESSERT. And if you’re more into the “grown-up desserts” (aka, drinks) we’ll cover that here too.

Reigning dessert champ in Cape Charles is Brown Dog Ice Cream. This charming ice cream parlor with an ever-rotating menu of flavors was named among the “Top 10 Best Ice Creams in America” by TripAdvisor. They’ve got plenty of classic flavors, but I always love their experimental ones with names like Lemon Curd Coconut Hot Milk Cake and Peach Raspberry Goat Cheese Crumble (the one below with sprinkles is Caramelized Fig with Mascarpone & Coco-Ginger Dust). And you can get any flavor as a milkshake, malt, float, or an ice cream sandwich too.

The new kid in town is Peach Beach Shave Ice Shack, which was started out of someone’s shed. They shipped in an authentic Hawaiian shave ice machine to make finely shaved treats that are distinctly better than your typical snow cone. Plus, the interior is super charming! They’re only open in the summer season for the most part, but they’re awesome on a hot day.

A less known, but also less expensive dessert option is CC Kool Eatz, which is hidden in a residential area on the north side of the historic downtown district (at the corner of Jefferson & Strawberry). They have some great soft serve with little tables to enjoy it outside. We also got a new candy shop this year, the Cape Charles Candy Co, which was opened by the family who was featured in the episode of HGTV’s Beachfront Bargain hunt that our house photobombed!

As for places to grab an adult beverage, in 2018 Cape Charles got a brewery, a distillery, and a cidery. Sherry likes to call it the trifecta of hipster spots to grab a drink – and they each have some pretty great atmosphere and that craft-brew feeling. As I mentioned above in the food section, the Cape Charles Brewing Company serves meals for the whole family and has lots of outdoor space as well as craft beer (flights, samplers, etc). We haven’t been to Buskey Cider on the Bay yet (an offshoot of a Richmond cidery!) but it has lots of board games and outdoor games (think oversized Jenga) on their outdoor patio. The Cape Charles Distillery is a decidedly more grown up space that sells upscale whiskeys, bourbons, moonshine, and vodka.

And if wine is your thing, Chatham Vineyards is just up the road. They even offer a “Paddle Your Glass Off” tour where you kayak to the winery on a guided tour and then get to sample some wines when you get there.

What ELSE To Do

You’ve hit the beach, stuffed your belly, and enjoyed the sunset. Now what? Cape Charles is certainly a quieter beach town than those you may think of with a boardwalk, mini golf, arcades, and outlet malls (although there is one of those beaches right across the bridge). So our “to do” list here usually involves a lot of relaxing, walking, and exploring.

The town’s main street, Mason Avenue, has lots of charming shops – including beach souvenirs, decor, clothing, jewelry, vintage furniture, art, wine, and more. Some of our favorites for browsing are Chuckletown Productions, The Boardwalk, Destination 23310, and the gift shop at The Northampton Hotel (seen below).

There’s also a large park that’s centrally located in the historic district (yup, it’s actually called Central Park – just like our old favorite in NYC). It has a large public field for tossing or kicking a ball around, a walking path, a playground, and tennis courts. We use it most for the playground and every Saturday in the summer they host live music in the gazebo and people bring lawn chairs and food/drinks to enjoy on the field while they watch the musicians play.

We usually end up doing a lot of walking around the downtown area to check out all of the houses (especially if we remember to bring the kids’ scooters). But if you want a more natural hiking spot, the Cape Charles Natural Area Preserve is a shaded boardwalk through the woods that’s just a short drive from town (I run there in the mornings from our beach house). Further out of town is the Southern Tip Hike & Bike Trail which is a wide 5-mile paved trail that terminates into a Nature Center that we haven’t visited yet, but we hear it’s good for kids (it and Kiptopeke State Park have more trails too).

We also really enjoyed a visit to the Barrier Island Center about 15 minutes up the road…

…and we took a day trip about an hour north to Chincoteague Island this summer to see the wild ponies. That was INCREDIBLE. We took this tour, but we hear there are a bunch that are good.

Cape Charles is also great for fishing, crabbing, boating, and golfing – but none of those are pastimes of ours so we’re not really qualified to advise on them. But there’s a free fishing pier in town and just outside the historic district are two signature golf courses (one Nicklaus, one Palmer – that means something right???).

When To Come

Someone asked recently if there’s anything to do in Cape Charles in the off-season. The answer is “Yes!” but also with a little bit of “no.” While the town is truly at its best in the summer months, it is still fun to visit in the Spring, Fall, and Holiday season too. Heck, we’ve had beach days – including going in the water! – as early as April and as late as November!

There are lots of activities and events in the off-season, so it’s probably best to plan around one of those. We’ve come for the garden tours in April, a trunk-or-treat event in October, and their holiday main street celebrations in December (complete with Santa and free movies at the historic theater – last year they played Home Alone and it was awesome). We also came for New Year’s Eve this year, where they dropped a decorated crab pot to ring in 2018! Doesn’t get much more small-town-quirky than that.

The only thing to note is that business hours get a bit funky in the off-season with shops and restaurants being closed more often (or even completely), so it’s always a good idea to call before heading out anywhere. Don’t trust any website to be updated! We have found the January through March months to be especially slow, but if you’re just looking for some quiet time it could be perfect!

I’m sure we missed some stuff – especially since new things are popping up every few months. We’ve got a cute little bookstore in the works down the street, and I just noticed a sign for another upcoming bakery. We hope you guys have a great time if you ever decide to slip through Cape Charles! And if you ever see us out and about while you’re visiting, please come say hello and tell us what we’re missing on this list! Ha!

The post A Guide To Our Beach Town: Cape Charles, Virginia appeared first on Young House Love.

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[truereviewpage]

A Guide To Our Beach Town: Cape Charles, Virginia

I know it’s odd to be posting a beach-centric travel guide after summer’s over, but Sherry has been fielding so many questions lately about what to do in Cape Charles that we wanted all the answers in one place. Now people can just drop in on this post for all the details. And boy, are there details (have you met me? If not, hi, I’m John “Thorough” Petersik).

So if you’re thinking of making a visit to our favorite little beach town (which was also recently voted #3 Happiest Seaside Town by Coastal Living!), or are just curious about why we chose this place to renovate two vacation homes, this post is for you! We’re covering some fun activities for the family, our go-to meal places, and other reasons we think Cape Charles is the perfect place to unwind and soak up some pretty memorable sunsets.

Where Is Cape Charles?

Cape Charles is located near the southern tip of Virginia’s Eastern Shore right on the Chesapeake Bay. The Eastern Shore is a small, rural portion of the state that’s separated from mainland Virginia by the Chesapeake Bay. Cape Charles is a small town (the historic area is roughly a six block by six block square) that sits on the peninsula’s western coast… meaning you can sit on the beach in Cape Charles and watch the sunset right over the water. Highly recommend that.

It’s about a 2.5-hour drive from our home in Richmond, which culminates in crossing the Chesapeake Bay Bridge-Tunnel, a 23-mile long stretch of several bridges and two tunnels that offers quite the impressive welcome to the area (gorgeous water views). It’s also accessible from the north via a quiet drive through Maryland (it’s about 4 hours from Washington DC). Or, if you need to fly, the Norfolk International Airport is just across the bridge-tunnel – about 45 minutes away.

The town is relatively unknown and only in the last 5-10 years has it been experiencing an upswing as people have discovered it as a low-key alternative to your typical beach town, which means lots of homes are getting fixed up, new restaurants and shops are opening up, etc.

It has been really amazing to watch this town spring back to life and be revitalized, beautified, and enjoyed. Especially because the historic area is home to hundreds of beautiful 100+ year old houses, many of which needed a lot of love, and many of which have been lovingly restored. And our two are tucked right into the middle of it all.

The Beach

First lets talk about the beach, because it’s what sold us on Cape Charles (and it’s usually our go-to place every time we visit). It’s uncrowded, low-key, and easy to get to. Since it’s on the Chesapeake Bay, not the Atlantic Ocean, the water is calm and shallow.

At high tide you can walk out several dozen yards and still be barely waist deep in most parts (I’m sitting in the photo below, so the water is only about 18″ deep there) and at low-tide you can park your beach chair right in the water to keep your feet cool. It attracts lots of families like ours because kids can play for hours in the water without us parents having to fear the break of a big wave or the pull of a sudden riptide.

Our kids have spent HOURS splashing around, riding on floats, or even hunting for hermit crabs (yup, you can find them walking around on the sand in low tide).

Yup, these are all little hermit crabs we collected one evening at low tide. They’re such a novel thing to discover with kids, and they can put them in a bucket to watch them swim (and even witness them switching shells if you’re lucky!) and then toss them back in the water before heading out.

I you crave a bit more activity when you go to the beach, Cape Charles Beach is great for kayaking, stand up paddle boarding, fishing, jet skiing, or boating. On a windy day you’ll even see kite boarders. If you don’t have your own, there are a couple of rental places, like SouthEast Expeditions and the Oyster Farm at Kings Creek.

The other great thing is that PARKING IS FREE AND PLENTIFUL! You can park right along the beachfront street, Bay Avenue, with no problem – even on most summer weekends. No circling the block to find a spot or having to pay for metered parking. We LOVE that fact. There are also public restrooms with showers behind them near the big “LOVE” sign at the corner of Mason Ave & Bay Ave, and on summer weekends there’s often a delicious taco truck and an Italian Ice stand parked nearby.

Where To Stay

For such a compact town, there’s a surprising variety of options for your stay. We should first mention that there are vacation rentals through sites like HomeAway and Airbnb, which can be great for long stays, like a full week. The one shown below was even featured on HGTV! Just be mindful that those sites often return results outside of the historic district (but being inside the historic district is where you’ll get the most proximity to the beach, shops, and restaurants). So just double check that it’s actually in Historic Cape Charles if you plan to walk to shops, the park, the beach, restaurants, etc.

There are also a lot of bed & breakfasts in Cape Charles, like the Bay Haven Inn (below), Cape Charles House, and Alyssa House to name a few. We had the chance to visit several during a holiday open house event and they’re all beautiful with great historic details.

Another great option, especially for shorter stays, are hotels. The two in town are both AWESOME, but very different. Hotel Cape Charles is a modern “zen-like” hotel with loft style rooms (think: exposed brick, reclaimed wood, and those glass balconies that you see in the photo below). They also have fun perks like golf carts and bikes that are available to guests. We stayed there one night while tiling the pink house and loved it!

By contrast, the newly opened/restored Northampton Hotel has water views (it’s closer to the beach) and a more historic/Southern feel (like a giant front porch with a haint blue ceiling where you can have coffee and breakfast, with lots of traditional and ornate details like wallpaper, detailed molding, etc). There are also some more bargain-priced hotels and motels just outside of Cape Charles if you just need a place to plop your head at night.

Lastly, Kiptopeke State Park offers campsites and a few cabins (even a yurt!) nearby – as does Cherrystone Campground. Both are also waterfront, so you can enjoy the beach there without coming into town. But we’d definitely recommend venturing into Historic Cape Charles just to check out a few of the places we’re about to talk about below.

Where To Eat

The restaurant scene in Cape Charles is, well, not quite a scene yet. But that doesn’t meant there aren’t plenty of good meals to stuff in your face hole. Most of the commercial action in Cape Charles is concentrated on Mason Avenue, the town’s de facto “main street.” But our favorite dining spot is actually a short distance away, called Shanty. It’s a casual seafood place, complete with an oyster shell parking lot and an old boat out front full of plants. It has a ton of fresh fish tuna, shrimp, and oysters (for either lunch or dinner) as well as great options for non-seafood lovers and children as well (chicken fingers, quesadillas, burgers, etc).

It’s on the water so you can catch great sunsets, and in the summertime they often have live music on weekends. It’s popular with locals and visitors, so if you want to avoid a long wait it helps to come early (before 5:30 is the best time to aim for), or get a reservation (typically you have to call the day before to score one). Or just put your name on the list and they’ll text your phone when your table is ready – so you can walk around outside or even play corn hole out back and watch the boats in the marina while you wait.

Another favorite of ours is Deadrise Pies, which is a pizza/Italian place operated by the Shanty folks.

It’s also super kid-friendly, has great outdoor seating, and is also really nice when you need some easy carryout. We often get pizza and take it to eat on the beach at sunset! Some argue that Gerry’s Ristorante outside of town has better pizza (we like ’em both) but Deadrise wins for location and ambiance.

A newer favorite of ours is Cape Charles Brewing Company, which serves food and has great outdoor seating. We ate at shaded picnic tables while the kids played corn hole and ladder golf nearby and it was perfect!

Kelly’s Gingernut Pub is also a good option for kids, and people recommend Hook-U Up and The Oyster Farm for nicer adult date-night dining excursions, but since we’ve always got kids with us we haven’t tried them yet.

Our go-to spots for breakfast are the Cape Charles Coffee House and the cafe at The Northampton Hotel (above), or you can eat more casually at Rayfield’s soda fountain. We like to grab lunches at Gourmet Alley or Tim’s Place too. There are also other staples outside of town (like fast food and carryout Chinese) and in other exciting news: it looks like we’re getting a couple of new bakeries soon!

Where To Treat Yourself

A satisfying meal is all well and good, but one of our favorite parts about Cape Charles (and, well, life in general) is DESSERT. And if you’re more into the “grown-up desserts” (aka, drinks) we’ll cover that here too.

Reigning dessert champ in Cape Charles is Brown Dog Ice Cream. This charming ice cream parlor with an ever-rotating menu of flavors was named among the “Top 10 Best Ice Creams in America” by TripAdvisor. They’ve got plenty of classic flavors, but I always love their experimental ones with names like Lemon Curd Coconut Hot Milk Cake and Peach Raspberry Goat Cheese Crumble (the one below with sprinkles is Caramelized Fig with Mascarpone & Coco-Ginger Dust). And you can get any flavor as a milkshake, malt, float, or an ice cream sandwich too.

The new kid in town is Peach Beach Shave Ice Shack, which was started out of someone’s shed. They shipped in an authentic Hawaiian shave ice machine to make finely shaved treats that are distinctly better than your typical snow cone. Plus, the interior is super charming! They’re only open in the summer season for the most part, but they’re awesome on a hot day.

A less known, but also less expensive dessert option is CC Kool Eatz, which is hidden in a residential area on the north side of the historic downtown district (at the corner of Jefferson & Strawberry). They have some great soft serve with little tables to enjoy it outside. We also got a new candy shop this year, the Cape Charles Candy Co, which was opened by the family who was featured in the episode of HGTV’s Beachfront Bargain hunt that our house photobombed!

As for places to grab an adult beverage, in 2018 Cape Charles got a brewery, a distillery, and a cidery. Sherry likes to call it the trifecta of hipster spots to grab a drink – and they each have some pretty great atmosphere and that craft-brew feeling. As I mentioned above in the food section, the Cape Charles Brewing Company serves meals for the whole family and has lots of outdoor space as well as craft beer (flights, samplers, etc). We haven’t been to Buskey Cider on the Bay yet (an offshoot of a Richmond cidery!) but it has lots of board games and outdoor games (think oversized Jenga) on their outdoor patio. The Cape Charles Distillery is a decidedly more grown up space that sells upscale whiskeys, bourbons, moonshine, and vodka.

And if wine is your thing, Chatham Vineyards is just up the road. They even offer a “Paddle Your Glass Off” tour where you kayak to the winery on a guided tour and then get to sample some wines when you get there.

What ELSE To Do

You’ve hit the beach, stuffed your belly, and enjoyed the sunset. Now what? Cape Charles is certainly a quieter beach town than those you may think of with a boardwalk, mini golf, arcades, and outlet malls (although there is one of those beaches right across the bridge). So our “to do” list here usually involves a lot of relaxing, walking, and exploring.

The town’s main street, Mason Avenue, has lots of charming shops – including beach souvenirs, decor, clothing, jewelry, vintage furniture, art, wine, and more. Some of our favorites for browsing are Chuckletown Productions, The Boardwalk, Destination 23310, and the gift shop at The Northampton Hotel (seen below).

There’s also a large park that’s centrally located in the historic district (yup, it’s actually called Central Park – just like our old favorite in NYC). It has a large public field for tossing or kicking a ball around, a walking path, a playground, and tennis courts. We use it most for the playground and every Saturday in the summer they host live music in the gazebo and people bring lawn chairs and food/drinks to enjoy on the field while they watch the musicians play.

We usually end up doing a lot of walking around the downtown area to check out all of the houses (especially if we remember to bring the kids’ scooters). But if you want a more natural hiking spot, the Cape Charles Natural Area Preserve is a shaded boardwalk through the woods that’s just a short drive from town (I run there in the mornings from our beach house). Further out of town is the Southern Tip Hike & Bike Trail which is a wide 5-mile paved trail that terminates into a Nature Center that we haven’t visited yet, but we hear it’s good for kids (it and Kiptopeke State Park have more trails too).

We also really enjoyed a visit to the Barrier Island Center about 15 minutes up the road…

…and we took a day trip about an hour north to Chincoteague Island this summer to see the wild ponies. That was INCREDIBLE. We took this tour, but we hear there are a bunch that are good.

Cape Charles is also great for fishing, crabbing, boating, and golfing – but none of those are pastimes of ours so we’re not really qualified to advise on them. But there’s a free fishing pier in town and just outside the historic district are two signature golf courses (one Nicklaus, one Palmer – that means something right???).

When To Come

Someone asked recently if there’s anything to do in Cape Charles in the off-season. The answer is “Yes!” but also with a little bit of “no.” While the town is truly at its best in the summer months, it is still fun to visit in the Spring, Fall, and Holiday season too. Heck, we’ve had beach days – including going in the water! – as early as April and as late as November!

There are lots of activities and events in the off-season, so it’s probably best to plan around one of those. We’ve come for the garden tours in April, a trunk-or-treat event in October, and their holiday main street celebrations in December (complete with Santa and free movies at the historic theater – last year they played Home Alone and it was awesome). We also came for New Year’s Eve this year, where they dropped a decorated crab pot to ring in 2018! Doesn’t get much more small-town-quirky than that.

The only thing to note is that business hours get a bit funky in the off-season with shops and restaurants being closed more often (or even completely), so it’s always a good idea to call before heading out anywhere. Don’t trust any website to be updated! We have found the January through March months to be especially slow, but if you’re just looking for some quiet time it could be perfect!

I’m sure we missed some stuff – especially since new things are popping up every few months. We’ve got a cute little bookstore in the works down the street, and I just noticed a sign for another upcoming bakery. We hope you guys have a great time if you ever decide to slip through Cape Charles! And if you ever see us out and about while you’re visiting, please come say hello and tell us what we’re missing on this list! Ha!

The post A Guide To Our Beach Town: Cape Charles, Virginia appeared first on Young House Love.

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[lukerhill]

A Guide To Our Beach Town: Cape Charles, Virginia

I know it’s odd to be posting a beach-centric travel guide after summer’s over, but Sherry has been fielding so many questions lately about what to do in Cape Charles that we wanted all the answers in one place. Now people can just drop in on this post for all the details. And boy, are there details (have you met me? If not, hi, I’m John “Thorough” Petersik).

So if you’re thinking of making a visit to our favorite little beach town (which was also recently voted #3 Happiest Seaside Town by Coastal Living!), or are just curious about why we chose this place to renovate two vacation homes, this post is for you! We’re covering some fun activities for the family, our go-to meal places, and other reasons we think Cape Charles is the perfect place to unwind and soak up some pretty memorable sunsets.

Where Is Cape Charles?

Cape Charles is located near the southern tip of Virginia’s Eastern Shore right on the Chesapeake Bay. The Eastern Shore is a small, rural portion of the state that’s separated from mainland Virginia by the Chesapeake Bay. Cape Charles is a small town (the historic area is roughly a six block by six block square) that sits on the peninsula’s western coast… meaning you can sit on the beach in Cape Charles and watch the sunset right over the water. Highly recommend that.

It’s about a 2.5-hour drive from our home in Richmond, which culminates in crossing the Chesapeake Bay Bridge-Tunnel, a 23-mile long stretch of several bridges and two tunnels that offers quite the impressive welcome to the area (gorgeous water views). It’s also accessible from the north via a quiet drive through Maryland (it’s about 4 hours from Washington DC). Or, if you need to fly, the Norfolk International Airport is just across the bridge-tunnel – about 45 minutes away.

The town is relatively unknown and only in the last 5-10 years has it been experiencing an upswing as people have discovered it as a low-key alternative to your typical beach town, which means lots of homes are getting fixed up, new restaurants and shops are opening up, etc.

It has been really amazing to watch this town spring back to life and be revitalized, beautified, and enjoyed. Especially because the historic area is home to hundreds of beautiful 100+ year old houses, many of which needed a lot of love, and many of which have been lovingly restored. And our two are tucked right into the middle of it all.

The Beach

First lets talk about the beach, because it’s what sold us on Cape Charles (and it’s usually our go-to place every time we visit). It’s uncrowded, low-key, and easy to get to. Since it’s on the Chesapeake Bay, not the Atlantic Ocean, the water is calm and shallow.

At high tide you can walk out several dozen yards and still be barely waist deep in most parts (I’m sitting in the photo below, so the water is only about 18″ deep there) and at low-tide you can park your beach chair right in the water to keep your feet cool. It attracts lots of families like ours because kids can play for hours in the water without us parents having to fear the break of a big wave or the pull of a sudden riptide.

Our kids have spent HOURS splashing around, riding on floats, or even hunting for hermit crabs (yup, you can find them walking around on the sand in low tide).

Yup, these are all little hermit crabs we collected one evening at low tide. They’re such a novel thing to discover with kids, and they can put them in a bucket to watch them swim (and even witness them switching shells if you’re lucky!) and then toss them back in the water before heading out.

I you crave a bit more activity when you go to the beach, Cape Charles Beach is great for kayaking, stand up paddle boarding, fishing, jet skiing, or boating. On a windy day you’ll even see kite boarders. If you don’t have your own, there are a couple of rental places, like SouthEast Expeditions and the Oyster Farm at Kings Creek.

The other great thing is that PARKING IS FREE AND PLENTIFUL! You can park right along the beachfront street, Bay Avenue, with no problem – even on most summer weekends. No circling the block to find a spot or having to pay for metered parking. We LOVE that fact. There are also public restrooms with showers behind them near the big “LOVE” sign at the corner of Mason Ave & Bay Ave, and on summer weekends there’s often a delicious taco truck and an Italian Ice stand parked nearby.

Where To Stay

For such a compact town, there’s a surprising variety of options for your stay. We should first mention that there are vacation rentals through sites like HomeAway and Airbnb, which can be great for long stays, like a full week. The one shown below was even featured on HGTV! Just be mindful that those sites often return results outside of the historic district (but being inside the historic district is where you’ll get the most proximity to the beach, shops, and restaurants). So just double check that it’s actually in Historic Cape Charles if you plan to walk to shops, the park, the beach, restaurants, etc.

There are also a lot of bed & breakfasts in Cape Charles, like the Bay Haven Inn (below), Cape Charles House, and Alyssa House to name a few. We had the chance to visit several during a holiday open house event and they’re all beautiful with great historic details.

Another great option, especially for shorter stays, are hotels. The two in town are both AWESOME, but very different. Hotel Cape Charles is a modern “zen-like” hotel with loft style rooms (think: exposed brick, reclaimed wood, and those glass balconies that you see in the photo below). They also have fun perks like golf carts and bikes that are available to guests. We stayed there one night while tiling the pink house and loved it!

By contrast, the newly opened/restored Northampton Hotel has water views (it’s closer to the beach) and a more historic/Southern feel (like a giant front porch with a haint blue ceiling where you can have coffee and breakfast, with lots of traditional and ornate details like wallpaper, detailed molding, etc). There are also some more bargain-priced hotels and motels just outside of Cape Charles if you just need a place to plop your head at night.

Lastly, Kiptopeke State Park offers campsites and a few cabins (even a yurt!) nearby – as does Cherrystone Campground. Both are also waterfront, so you can enjoy the beach there without coming into town. But we’d definitely recommend venturing into Historic Cape Charles just to check out a few of the places we’re about to talk about below.

Where To Eat

The restaurant scene in Cape Charles is, well, not quite a scene yet. But that doesn’t meant there aren’t plenty of good meals to stuff in your face hole. Most of the commercial action in Cape Charles is concentrated on Mason Avenue, the town’s de facto “main street.” But our favorite dining spot is actually a short distance away, called Shanty. It’s a casual seafood place, complete with an oyster shell parking lot and an old boat out front full of plants. It has a ton of fresh fish tuna, shrimp, and oysters (for either lunch or dinner) as well as great options for non-seafood lovers and children as well (chicken fingers, quesadillas, burgers, etc).

It’s on the water so you can catch great sunsets, and in the summertime they often have live music on weekends. It’s popular with locals and visitors, so if you want to avoid a long wait it helps to come early (before 5:30 is the best time to aim for), or get a reservation (typically you have to call the day before to score one). Or just put your name on the list and they’ll text your phone when your table is ready – so you can walk around outside or even play corn hole out back and watch the boats in the marina while you wait.

Another favorite of ours is Deadrise Pies, which is a pizza/Italian place operated by the Shanty folks.

It’s also super kid-friendly, has great outdoor seating, and is also really nice when you need some easy carryout. We often get pizza and take it to eat on the beach at sunset! Some argue that Gerry’s Ristorante outside of town has better pizza (we like ’em both) but Deadrise wins for location and ambiance.

A newer favorite of ours is Cape Charles Brewing Company, which serves food and has great outdoor seating. We ate at shaded picnic tables while the kids played corn hole and ladder golf nearby and it was perfect!

Kelly’s Gingernut Pub is also a good option for kids, and people recommend Hook-U Up and The Oyster Farm for nicer adult date-night dining excursions, but since we’ve always got kids with us we haven’t tried them yet.

Our go-to spots for breakfast are the Cape Charles Coffee House and the cafe at The Northampton Hotel (above), or you can eat more casually at Rayfield’s soda fountain. We like to grab lunches at Gourmet Alley or Tim’s Place too. There are also other staples outside of town (like fast food and carryout Chinese) and in other exciting news: it looks like we’re getting a couple of new bakeries soon!

Where To Treat Yourself

A satisfying meal is all well and good, but one of our favorite parts about Cape Charles (and, well, life in general) is DESSERT. And if you’re more into the “grown-up desserts” (aka, drinks) we’ll cover that here too.

Reigning dessert champ in Cape Charles is Brown Dog Ice Cream. This charming ice cream parlor with an ever-rotating menu of flavors was named among the “Top 10 Best Ice Creams in America” by TripAdvisor. They’ve got plenty of classic flavors, but I always love their experimental ones with names like Lemon Curd Coconut Hot Milk Cake and Peach Raspberry Goat Cheese Crumble (the one below with sprinkles is Caramelized Fig with Mascarpone & Coco-Ginger Dust). And you can get any flavor as a milkshake, malt, float, or an ice cream sandwich too.

The new kid in town is Peach Beach Shave Ice Shack, which was started out of someone’s shed. They shipped in an authentic Hawaiian shave ice machine to make finely shaved treats that are distinctly better than your typical snow cone. Plus, the interior is super charming! They’re only open in the summer season for the most part, but they’re awesome on a hot day.

A less known, but also less expensive dessert option is CC Kool Eatz, which is hidden in a residential area on the north side of the historic downtown district (at the corner of Jefferson & Strawberry). They have some great soft serve with little tables to enjoy it outside. We also got a new candy shop this year, the Cape Charles Candy Co, which was opened by the family who was featured in the episode of HGTV’s Beachfront Bargain hunt that our house photobombed!

As for places to grab an adult beverage, in 2018 Cape Charles got a brewery, a distillery, and a cidery. Sherry likes to call it the trifecta of hipster spots to grab a drink – and they each have some pretty great atmosphere and that craft-brew feeling. As I mentioned above in the food section, the Cape Charles Brewing Company serves meals for the whole family and has lots of outdoor space as well as craft beer (flights, samplers, etc). We haven’t been to Buskey Cider on the Bay yet (an offshoot of a Richmond cidery!) but it has lots of board games and outdoor games (think oversized Jenga) on their outdoor patio. The Cape Charles Distillery is a decidedly more grown up space that sells upscale whiskeys, bourbons, moonshine, and vodka.

And if wine is your thing, Chatham Vineyards is just up the road. They even offer a “Paddle Your Glass Off” tour where you kayak to the winery on a guided tour and then get to sample some wines when you get there.

What ELSE To Do

You’ve hit the beach, stuffed your belly, and enjoyed the sunset. Now what? Cape Charles is certainly a quieter beach town than those you may think of with a boardwalk, mini golf, arcades, and outlet malls (although there is one of those beaches right across the bridge). So our “to do” list here usually involves a lot of relaxing, walking, and exploring.

The town’s main street, Mason Avenue, has lots of charming shops – including beach souvenirs, decor, clothing, jewelry, vintage furniture, art, wine, and more. Some of our favorites for browsing are Chuckletown Productions, The Boardwalk, Destination 23310, and the gift shop at The Northampton Hotel (seen below).

There’s also a large park that’s centrally located in the historic district (yup, it’s actually called Central Park – just like our old favorite in NYC). It has a large public field for tossing or kicking a ball around, a walking path, a playground, and tennis courts. We use it most for the playground and every Saturday in the summer they host live music in the gazebo and people bring lawn chairs and food/drinks to enjoy on the field while they watch the musicians play.

We usually end up doing a lot of walking around the downtown area to check out all of the houses (especially if we remember to bring the kids’ scooters). But if you want a more natural hiking spot, the Cape Charles Natural Area Preserve is a shaded boardwalk through the woods that’s just a short drive from town (I run there in the mornings from our beach house). Further out of town is the Southern Tip Hike & Bike Trail which is a wide 5-mile paved trail that terminates into a Nature Center that we haven’t visited yet, but we hear it’s good for kids (it and Kiptopeke State Park have more trails too).

We also really enjoyed a visit to the Barrier Island Center about 15 minutes up the road…

…and we took a day trip about an hour north to Chincoteague Island this summer to see the wild ponies. That was INCREDIBLE. We took this tour, but we hear there are a bunch that are good.

Cape Charles is also great for fishing, crabbing, boating, and golfing – but none of those are pastimes of ours so we’re not really qualified to advise on them. But there’s a free fishing pier in town and just outside the historic district are two signature golf courses (one Nicklaus, one Palmer – that means something right???).

When To Come

Someone asked recently if there’s anything to do in Cape Charles in the off-season. The answer is “Yes!” but also with a little bit of “no.” While the town is truly at its best in the summer months, it is still fun to visit in the Spring, Fall, and Holiday season too. Heck, we’ve had beach days – including going in the water! – as early as April and as late as November!

There are lots of activities and events in the off-season, so it’s probably best to plan around one of those. We’ve come for the garden tours in April, a trunk-or-treat event in October, and their holiday main street celebrations in December (complete with Santa and free movies at the historic theater – last year they played Home Alone and it was awesome). We also came for New Year’s Eve this year, where they dropped a decorated crab pot to ring in 2018! Doesn’t get much more small-town-quirky than that.

The only thing to note is that business hours get a bit funky in the off-season with shops and restaurants being closed more often (or even completely), so it’s always a good idea to call before heading out anywhere. Don’t trust any website to be updated! We have found the January through March months to be especially slow, but if you’re just looking for some quiet time it could be perfect!

I’m sure we missed some stuff – especially since new things are popping up every few months. We’ve got a cute little bookstore in the works down the street, and I just noticed a sign for another upcoming bakery. We hope you guys have a great time if you ever decide to slip through Cape Charles! And if you ever see us out and about while you’re visiting, please come say hello and tell us what we’re missing on this list! Ha!

The post A Guide To Our Beach Town: Cape Charles, Virginia appeared first on Young House Love.