#I haven't been around the whole ten years

[ranfused4ever]

A celebration of dancer yibo 💚🩷

[supercantaloupe]

genuinely except for maybe a passing interest in seeing camelot (which is closing too soon for me to do anything about anyway) i haven't wanted to actually Go To New York to see smth on broadway since the music man. i am going to do everything in my power however to go see this cabaret tho

[running-in-the-dark]

-

[confused-pyramid]

Breaking Point

pairing: art donaldson x fem!reader

summary: You and Art were hitting partners (and a bit more) in college, so when you run into him a decade later at the U.S. Open, old sparks reignite...

word count: 3.4k

warnings: SMUT, p in v, oral (fem!receiving), slight marking, drinking

a/n: I watched Challengers last night and then wrote this whole thing in one sitting. Nothing in this is really canon other than Art being a major simp lol so no spoilers for the movie! I usually make playlists (or at least find a few songs that get me in the zone) when writing, so I thought I'd start sharing them here too if people are interested!

You should've known he'd be here. You've been following his career for the last decade since you graduated, and ever since he won Wimbledon last year, he's been tennis royalty, but a small part of you still thought you wouldn't run into him here. At the fucking U.S. Open.

Stanford was a lifetime ago, and you haven't kept in touch with anyone from the college team, but there was always something about Art Donaldson that stuck with you. Ten years later, that hasn't changed.

"It's been so long," he calls out when he spots you from across the practice courts. "I didn't think I'd see you."

You didn't either, and you still haven't decided how you feel about it yet, but when he jogs over to your side, you just shrug. "Guess it's your lucky day."

He smiles, and his teeth glimmer in the bright sunlight. "It certainly is."

The loud thwacks of tennis balls hitting rackets echo around you, but you can't seem to focus on anything but the man standing in front of you. He looks good.

He was beautiful in college too, whether he was training across the net or slipping into your bed, but it feels different now, with so much time apart. He looks like a man now.

"Anyway," Art says, jerking you back to reality. "We should get a drink sometime. To catch up."

He adds the last part almost as an afterthought, but it doesn't escape your notice how his eyes have been trailing up and down your body since he walked over.

A drink could mean almost anything with Art Donaldson, but you're too curious to refuse. "Sure. This weekend, after the semi-finals."

He nods, his eyes glinting with amusement, and you grab your bag from the bench beside you before looping the strap over your shoulder.

You walk off the practice courts after one last glance over your shoulder, and you feel his eyes following along until the doors swing shut behind you.

***

He should've expected this. You were a firecracker in college, and you kept him on his toes every single day you were together, so he really should have known what he was getting into when he met you for drinks that weekend.

Instead, he's one too many beers in, and his buzz is only enhancing the glow of your beauty in the hazy bar light. Your dress isn't even that low cut, but something about the shadows glancing over your strong shoulders reminds him of late nights in the Stanford dorms after a hard practice when there was only one thing he wanted more than sleep.

"You played really well this morning," he says genuinely as he sets his beer back onto the table. "After that first set, Mueller didn't stand a chance."

You flash him a dazzling smile as you shrug, resting your chin on your palm. "I had her after the third game, but thanks. It was a quick match."

Art hasn't taken his eyes off of you since you sat down, and while prolonged eye contact usually makes you nervous, you find that you're actually enjoying the attention quite a bit. Attentiveness was never an issue with him, and you would normally give in to your urges, but there's just too much history with him, and you can't afford to lose focus. Not when the title is so close you can taste it.

"I hear the networks are eyeing you for a commentator post," you say, trying to change the subject.

You trace your finger around the rim of your nearly empty margarita, before lifting it to take a final sip, and you don't miss how his throat bobs as you lick the salt off your lips.

"Uh, yeah," he mumbles, clearing his throat. "It was just some chatter, but I'm not looking to retire anytime soon."

You frown. "Is that right?" He's playing better than ever, but he definitely hasn't been himself out on the court in years.

He glances down, clearly trying to avoid the scrutiny, and when his eyes land on your empty glass, he changes the subject again. "You want another drink?"

You shake your head, knowing that another will lead to a less than fun morning, but he isn't done yet.

"You sure?" His eyes find yours again, and this time the eye contact feels primal. "It doesn't have to be here."

Your eyebrows lift and you tilt your head with a knowing smile. "Where were you thinking?"

"I don't know," he shrugs, before his lips curve up into a cheeky grin. "My room's nice."

You saw it coming from a mile away, but it still pulls a laugh out of you. "Oh, I'm sure it is, but this isn't college anymore, Art. You should get some sleep...focus on your match in the morning."

You push your glass forward and stand up, nodding at him as you turn to leave, but then you see him stand too out of the corner of your eye.

"I'll walk you to your car."

He looks at you with a hint of amusement in his expression, and you can't help but want to play along, even though Art Donaldson was nothing but trouble for you.

You don't respond, instead just stepping out from around the table and walking out the front doors of the bar. You don't have to turn back to know he's right behind you, and when you reach your car, parked in the center of the nearly empty parking lot, you spin around.

He doesn't stop walking until he has you practically boxed in by your driver's side door, his face less than a foot from yours as he tucks his hands into his pockets.

He had pushed his sleeves back at some point in the night, from the humid summer heat of the bar, and you can see the veins on his forearms now, under the dim light of the street lamps.

"This is me," you say jokingly, tipping your chin at your car as he looks at you with an expression you can't distinguish. "I'm good from here."

He doesn't move.

It's not that you expected him to give up so easily; you had just forgotten how persistent he could be.

Art's mouth stretches into a slanted smile. "Do you remember the Davis Invitational? Junior year."

Speaking of his persistence...he had been pursuing you for months, not in any tangible way, but you always knew what he was thinking.

After the invitational, where you and Art had been the respective men's and women's champions, you had gone back to his dorm to celebrate. Three hours and just as many vodka shooters later, he had finally gotten you in his bed. Not that you were complaining.

Art knew his way around your body, and even that first night, he had managed to get you off more times than you can remember.

"What about it?" you shoot back, your eyebrows raising at the insinuation.

"Nothing," he says with a shrug, but you don't miss the humor glinting in his eyes. "You just used to be a lot more fun to celebrate with."

"Fuck you," you spit out, shoving his shoulder harder than you mean to. He barely budges, instead grabbing your hand and tugging you a few inches closer, and suddenly a wave of lust washes over you, making your breath hitch.

You press your thighs together under your dress, hoping he can't feel the heat spreading across your skin, but then his smile turns to a smirk and you know you're done for.

"What do you think?" he whispers, leaning in so close that his lips brush over your earlobe. "Want to celebrate?"

Molten lava pools in your gut and you are only peripherally aware of his hand sliding down your hips to the flowy edge of your dress. His fingers glide over your skin as his hand goes under the loose fabric, before rising up to grab your ass, drawing your hips flush with his.

Your arousal is already starting to soak through your panties, but the feeling of his hard bulge pressed up against you sends you flying back to reality.

You lift your hands to his chest and push him back so that he's a few steps away from you. It's not far enough, but at least you can't feel him from there. "I'm not fucking you, Art."

He shrugs, his smirk only slightly shaken. "Who said anything about fucking? I just wanted to talk."

You huff out a laugh. "You're funny. Besides, I'm too tired for this. I need to rest up before my match."

"What about tomorrow night then?" His lip is still curved up in a smirk, but there's an earnestness in his gaze that surprises you.

"What makes you think you'll still be here tomorrow?"

His mouth spreads into a wide smile. "I always win."

You snort. "Fine. Win your match and we can talk."

You don't miss the grin on his face as you climb into your car and leave.

***

You win your next match in straight sets again, so by the time you're out of the locker room, Art's match is still in play. Driven by a mixture of curiosity and intrigue, you head over to his court and find a seat halfway up the stands.

He has won two of three sets, and he's leading the fourth, so with the prospect of the match ending soon, you use the time to observe him from a different angle.

His form is much better than it was in college, and you've seen him play countless times on TV, but you haven't really let yourself see how good he looks out there. The sinewy muscles rippling in his arms as he lifts them to serve. The rugged sturdiness of his legs as he races back and forth across the court.

You wish you could be down there with him, running your hands over the smooth lines of his abdomen, tasting the drops of sweat as they roll down his body-

The crowd erupts in cheers, and you are thrust back into reality as Art throws his arms into the air with a loud whoop. The scoreboard confirms his victory, and you clap along with the audience as he shakes his opponent's hand and heads over to his chair.

People around you stand up to leave, but you stay in your seat, watching as he grabs his bag and stuffs his rackets inside. When he wipes a towel over his face, his head turns up and his eyes immediately go to you, like he knew you were here the whole time.

Your stomach does an involuntary flip and he flashes his eyebrows at you as you bit the inside of your lip, trying to hold back a smile.

When he ducks back down to grab his things, you stand up quickly to avoid letting him see your blush and follow the rest of the crowd off of the stands.

***

You hear it late that night. Three little raps on your hotel room door, just before midnight.

You're in the finals, and you don't have any friends here to celebrate with, so you were sipping a beer and watching old match recordings when you heard the knock.

There's no one else who would come to see you this late, so you're not surprised when you open the door to find Art, dressed in a tee shirt and comfy-looking pajama pants.

"What are you doing here?" you ask, even though you already know the answer.

Art just looks at you, his pupils already massive. "You said if I win, we could talk." He shrugs. "I won."

"Okay," you concede, opening the door wider to let him in. "Just talking then."

He nods, before following you inside and shutting the door.

"You want anything to drink?" you ask as he trails behind you.

He shakes his head. "I'm good."

You grab your beer bottle from the side table and sit down on the floor, crossing your legs beneath you.

Art sits across from you, his feet in front of him and his elbows on his knees. You were assigned to a modestly sized room, but for someone as tall as him, the space must feel cramped.

"How did the match feel?" you ask, taking a swig of beer.

He thinks for a moment. "It was close at first, but once I shook my legs out, it became a breeze."

"Your legs were never the problem," you say, leveling him with a serious look. "It was always your attitude. Or your confidence."

He frowns, his eyebrows scrunching slightly. "I'm plenty confident."

"You are now," you tell him as you swirl the bottle around in your hand. "You won Wimbledon, you have a reason to be confident."

That makes him smile. "So you're saying my legs are fine."

"Yeah," you say before you can process what you're saying. "You looked good out there."

His smile turns to a smirk so fast it nearly gives you whiplash. "You think I look good?"

You let out an exasperated scoff. "At tennis."

His grin doesn't falter so you roll your eyes at him before lifting the bottle to your lips to take another swig. When you tilt the bottle back down to swallow, his hand reaches forward to take it from you. Your grip on the beer doesn't loosen, so the motion sends you pitching forward.

Your mouth parts with a small yelp as his arm wraps around you, tugging you closer, and before you can process what's happening, his lips are on yours.

If you let yourself think too hard, you would realize that there is way too much shared history and way too much baggage here for this to be a good idea...so that's why you don't.

Instead, you let him pull your body flush against his and when his tongue slides over the seam of your lips, you grant him access immediately. Your shirts come off in quick succession and you gasp as his hands run up and down your body, his strong, calloused fingers grasping at every inch of purchase they can find. Yours reach up to tangle in his messy hair, and when his lips move down your neck, your grip tightens, making him moan quietly against your skin.

Something about being on the floor takes you back to your college days, when you'd both be so worked up after practice that you couldn't even make it to the bed, but that feels too real right now.

"Art," you whisper as he runs his lips and teeth over your neck, before replacing it with his tongue to soothe the quickly blossoming marks. "Art, the bed. Now."

It takes him a second to process your words, but when he does, he loops an arm around your waist and lifts you up and onto the bed in one motion, before pushing you back onto the covers.

By the time your head hits the bed, he's already pulling your shorts and panties down, exposing you to the cool air. His lips follow the path of his hands as they trace up your legs, making you squirm under the hot touch of his rough fingers. He presses wet kisses to the insides of your thighs before spreading them apart and dropping to his knees on the floor in front of you.

"So wet for me," he whispers, almost to himself, before he dives in, his mouth making lewd noises as he licks a thick stripe up your core. "You taste so good."

He lifts your legs over his shoulders to give himself some leverage as he makes a mess between your thighs, licking and sucking your clit into his mouth before fucking you with his tongue.

His grip on your thighs is the only thing keeping you pinned to the bed as you writhe beneath him, trying to not squeeze your legs together from the heat spreading up your core.

His mouth feels amazing and it takes only minutes before you're already nearing the edge. You don't want to come until he is inside of you, though, so you yank his hair, pulling him up and off of you.

He looks up at you through his lashes, and he looks ethereal with his disheveled hair and his chin wet with your slick.

You, on the other hand, look like heaven itself with your eyes half-hooded from pleasure, and he can't help the grin that crosses his face as he licks his lips and climbs over you onto the bed. He lets you taste yourself as he kisses you again, and he lets out a low groan when you bite his lip just hard enough to sting.

"Fuck me," you gasp, your voice too breathy to be actually authoritative. "Fuck me the way I like."

Art grins at your desperate tone and the wild lust in your eyes, committing this image to memory for a later time when you're much further away.

He kicks his pants off as he lifts you both further up the bed, and after covering himself with a condom from his back pocket, he lines himself up and slowly pushes forward.

He gives you a few moments to adjust to his size before slowly pulling out nearly all the way and then thrusting in again.

The slight pain turns to pleasure almost immediately, but he keeps his pace steady so as not to hurt you. You need more right now, so you wrap your legs around him for leverage and flip him over so that you're straddling him.

He groans as his head hits the pillow, and when he tries to sit up, you press your hands to his chest, pushing him down as you ride him. This position gives you a lot more control, and you use it to your advantage as you bounce yourself on his cock, feeling the way he fills you up so fully from this higher angle.

His fingers dig into your hips as he helps lift you up and down, and his eyes are practically feral as he watches the spot where his cock disappears inside of you.

He's the perfect size to fill you up completely, and with each swivel of your hips, you get closer and closer to your climax, which is approaching so fast you can taste it.

You cry out when he hits exactly the right spot deep inside of you, and his eyes fly to yours as your movements start to stutter from your impending release.

Needing to see the look on your face when you come, he pushes your lower back forward so you fall against his chest, before lifting himself up to meet you halfway. With one arm locked around you, he brings his other hand down between the two of you to rub quick circles over your clit. The new angle lets him thrust up into you, and the increased pace of his movements mixed with the speed of his fingers sends you flying over the edge.

Your mouth falls open with a loud cry, and you squeeze him so tightly he's practically seeing stars. You look so beautiful when you come, like a goddess sent down here just for him, and when your eyes meet his, he finds his own climax.

His body jerks forward with the force of his release, and you let him thrust a few more times as he finally finishes inside of you.

After pulling out, he tugs you down to lay next to him, and at first you let him, but the emotions warring inside of you don't stay quiet for long.

You know that whatever this was isn't going to go anywhere. You didn't work in college, and you won't work now, and you don't want anyone to get hurt again, so you have to make a choice. Now.

"I need to get some rest," you say quietly, a tiny part of you hoping he doesn't hear you. "Before the next match."

"Yeah," he sighs after a beat. "Me too."

You let him hold you for a moment longer, before he unwraps himself from your body and sits up, tugging his shirt and pants back on. You tug the sheet back and wrap it around your torso as he stands up and walks to the door.

You're not sure what you're expecting as he goes to leave, but what you get is a silent nod as the door swings shut behind him.

[exeggcute]

the great reddit API meltdown of '23, or: this was always bound to happen

there's a lot of press about what's going on with reddit right now (app shutdowns, subreddit blackouts, the CEO continually putting his foot in his mouth), but I haven't seen as much stuff talking about how reddit got into this situation to begin with. so as a certified non-expert and Context Enjoyer I thought it might be helpful to lay things out as I understand them—a high-level view, surveying the whole landscape—in the wonderful world of startups, IPOs, and extremely angry users.

disclaimer that I am not a founder or VC (lmao), have yet to work at a company with a successful IPO, and am not a reddit employee or third-party reddit developer or even a subreddit moderator. I do work at a startup, know my way around an API or two, and have spent twelve regrettable years on reddit itself. which is to say that I make no promises of infallibility, but I hope you'll at least find all this interesting.

profit now or profit later

before you can really get into reddit as reddit, it helps to know a bit about startups (of which reddit is one). and before I launch into that, let me share my Three Types Of Websites framework, which is basically just a mental model about financial incentives that's helped me contextualize some of this stuff.

(1) website/software that does not exist to make money: relatively rare, for a variety of reasons, among them that it costs money to build and maintain a website in the first place. wikipedia is the evergreen example, although even wikipedia's been subject to criticism for how the wikimedia foundation pays out its employees and all that fun nonprofit stuff. what's important here is that even when making money is not the goal, money itself is still a factor, whether it's solicited via donations or it's just one guy paying out of pocket to host a hobby site. but websites in this category do, generally, offer free, no-strings-attached experiences to their users.

(I do want push back against the retrospective nostalgia of "everything on the internet used to be this way" because I don't think that was ever really true—look at AOL, the dotcom boom, the rise of banner ads. I distinctly remember that neopets had multiple corporate sponsors, including a cookie crisp-themed flash game. yahoo bought geocities for $3.6 billion; money's always been trading hands, obvious or not. it's indisputable that the internet is simply different now than it was ten or twenty years ago, and that monetization models themselves have largely changed as well (I have thoughts about this as it relates to web 1.0 vs web 2.0 and their associated costs/scale/etc.), but I think the only time people weren't trying to squeeze the internet for all the dimes it can offer was when the internet was first conceived as a tool for national defense.)

(2) website/software that exists to make money now: the type that requires the least explanation. mostly non-startup apps and services, including any random ecommerce storefront, mobile apps that cost three bucks to download, an MMO with a recurring subscription, or even a news website that runs banner ads and/or offers paid subscriptions. in most (but not all) cases, the "make money now" part is obvious, so these things don't feel free to us as users, even to the extent that they might have watered-down free versions or limited access free trials. no one's shocked when WoW offers another paid expansion packs because WoW's been around for two decades and has explicitly been trying to make money that whole time.

(3) website/software that exists to make money later: this is the fun one, and more common than you'd think. "make money later" is more or less the entire startup business model—I'll get into that in the next section—and is deployed with the expectation that you will make money at some point, but not always by means as obvious as "selling WoW expansions for forty bucks a pop."

companies in this category tend to have two closely entwined characteristics: they prioritize growth above all else, regardless of whether this growth is profitable in any way (now, or sometimes, ever), and they do this by offering users really cool and awesome shit at little to no cost (or, if not for free, then at least at a significant loss to the company).

so from a user perspective, these things either seem free or far cheaper than their competitors. but of course websites and software and apps and [blank]-as-a-service tools cost money to build and maintain, and that money has to come from somewhere, and the people supplying that money, generally, expect to get it back...

just not immediately.

startups, VCs, IPOs, and you

here's the extremely condensed "did NOT go to harvard business school" version of how a startup works:

(1) you have a cool idea.

(2) you convince some venture capitalists (also known as VCs) that your idea is cool. if they see the potential in what you're pitching, they'll give you money in exchange for partial ownership of your company—which means that if/when the company starts trading its stock publicly, these investors will own X numbers of shares that they can sell at any time. in other words, you get free money now (and you'll likely seek multiple "rounds" of investors over the years to sustain your company), but with the explicit expectations that these investors will get their payoff later, assuming you don't crash and burn before that happens.

during this phase, you want to do anything in your power to make your company appealing to investors so you can attract more of them and raise funds as needed. because you are definitely not bringing in the necessary revenue to offset operating costs by yourself.

it's also worth nothing that this is less about projecting the long-term profitability of your company than it's about its perceived profitability—i.e., VCs want to put their money behind a company that other people will also have confidence in, because that's what makes stock valuable, and VCs are in it for stock prices.

(3) there are two non-exclusive win conditions for your startup: you can get acquired, and you can have an IPO (also referred to as "going public"). these are often called "exit scenarios" and they benefit VCs and founders, as well as some employees. it's also possible for a company to get acquired, possibly even more than once, and then later go public.

acquisition: sell the whole damn thing to someone else. there are a million ways this can happen, some better than others, but in many cases this means anyone with ownership of the company (which includes both investors and employees who hold stock options) get their stock bought out by the acquiring company and end up with cash in hand. in varying amounts, of course. sometimes the founders walk away, sometimes the employees get laid off, but not always.

IPO: short for "initial public offering," this is when the company starts trading its stocks publicly, which means anyone who wants to can start buying that company's stock, which really means that VCs (and employees with stock options) can turn that hypothetical money into real money by selling their company stock to interested buyers.

drawing from that, companies don't go for an IPO until they think their stock will actually be worth something (or else what's the point?)—specifically, worth more than the amount of money that investors poured into it. The Powers That Be will speculate about a company's IPO potential way ahead of time, which is where you'll hear stuff about companies who have an estimated IPO evaluation of (to pull a completely random example) $10B. actually I lied, that was not a random example, that was reddit's valuation back in 2021 lol. but a valuation is basically just "how much will people be interested in our stock?"

as such, in the time leading up to an IPO, it's really really important to do everything you can to make your company seem like a good investment (which is how you get stock prices up), usually by making the company's numbers look good. but! if you plan on cashing out, the long-term effects of your decisions aren't top of mind here. remember, the industry lingo is "exit scenario."

if all of this seems like a good short-term strategy for companies and their VCs, but an unsustainable model for anyone who's buying those stocks during the IPO, that's because it often is.

also worth noting that it's possible for a company to be technically unprofitable as a business (meaning their costs outstrip their revenue) and still trade enormously well on the stock market; uber is the perennial example of this. to the people who make money solely off of buying and selling stock, it literally does not matter that the actual rideshare model isn't netting any income—people think the stock is valuable, so it's valuable.

this is also why, for example, elon musk is richer than god: if he were only the CEO of tesla, the money he'd make from selling mediocre cars would be (comparatively, lol) minimal. but he's also one of tesla's angel investors, which means he holds a shitload of tesla stock, and tesla's stock has performed well since their IPO a decade ago (despite recent dips)—even if tesla itself has never been a huge moneymaker, public faith in the company's eventual success has kept them trading at high levels. granted, this also means most of musk's wealth is hypothetical and not liquid; if TSLA dropped to nothing, so would the value of all the stock he holds (and his net work with it).

what's an API, anyway?

to move in an entirely different direction: we can't get into reddit's API debacle without understanding what an API itself is.

an API (short for "application programming interface," not that it really matters) is a series of code instructions that independent developers can use to plug their shit into someone else's shit. like a series of tin cans on strings between two kids' treehouses, but for sending and receiving data.

APIs work by yoinking data directly from a company's servers instead of displaying anything visually to users. so I could use reddit's API to build my own app that takes the day's top r/AITA post and transcribes it into pig latin: my app is a bunch of lines of code, and some of those lines of code fetch data from reddit (and then transcribe that data into pig latin), and then my app displays the content to anyone who wants to see it, not reddit itself. as far as reddit is concerned, no additional human beings laid eyeballs on that r/AITA post, and reddit never had a chance to serve ads alongside the pig-latinized content in my app. (put a pin in this part—it'll be relevant later.)

but at its core, an API is really a type of protocol, which encompasses a broad category of formats and business models and so on. some APIs are completely free to use, like how anyone can build a discord bot (but you still have to host it yourself). some companies offer free APIs to third-party developers can build their own plugins, and then the company and the third-party dev split the profit on those plugins. some APIs have a free tier for hobbyists and a paid tier for big professional projects (like every weather API ever, lol). some APIs are strictly paid services because the API itself is the company's core offering.

reddit's financial foundations

okay thanks for sticking with me. I promise we're almost ready to be almost ready to talk about the current backlash.

reddit has always been a startup's startup from day one: its founders created the site after attending a startup incubator (which is basically a summer camp run by VCs) with the successful goal of creating a financially successful site. backed by that delicious y combinator money, reddit got acquired by conde nast only a year or two after its creation, which netted its founders a couple million each. this was back in like, 2006 by the way. in the time since that acquisition, reddit's gone through a bunch of additional funding rounds, including from big-name investors like a16z, peter thiel (yes, that guy), sam altman (yes, also that guy), sequoia, fidelity, and tencent. crunchbase says that they've raised a total of $1.3B in investor backing.

in all this time, reddit has never been a public company, or, strictly speaking, profitable.

APIs and third-party apps

reddit has offered free API access for basically as long as it's had a public API—remember, as a "make money later" company, their primary goal is growth, which means attracting as many users as possible to the platform. so letting anyone build an app or widget is (or really, was) in line with that goal.

as such, third-party reddit apps have been around forever. by third-party apps, I mean apps that use the reddit API to display actual reddit content in an unofficial wrapper. iirc reddit didn't even have an official mobile app until semi-recently, so many of these third-party mobile apps in particular just sprung up to meet an unmet need, and they've kept a small but dedicated userbase ever since. some people also prefer the user experience of the unofficial apps, especially since they offer extra settings to customize what you're seeing and few to no ads (and any ads these apps do display are to the benefit of the third-party developers, not reddit itself.)

(let me add this preemptively: one solution I've seen proposed to the paid API backlash is that reddit should have third-party developers display reddit's ads in those third-party apps, but this isn't really possible or advisable due to boring adtech reasons I won't inflict on you here. source: just trust me bro)

in addition to mobile apps, there are also third-party tools that don’t replace the Official Reddit Viewing Experience but do offer auxiliary features like being able to mass-delete your post history, tools that make the site more accessible to people who use screen readers, and tools that help moderators of subreddits moderate more easily. not to mention a small army of reddit bots like u/AutoWikibot or u/RemindMebot (and then the bots that tally the number of people who reply to bot comments with “good bot” or “bad bot).

the number of people who use third-party apps is relatively small, but they arguably comprise some of reddit’s most dedicated users, which means that third-party apps are important to the people who keep reddit running and the people who supply reddit with high-quality content.

unpaid moderators and user-generated content

so reddit is sort of two things: reddit is a platform, but it’s also a community.

the platform is all the unsexy (or, if you like python, sexy) stuff under the hood that actually makes the damn thing work. this is what the company spends money building and maintaining and "owns." the community is all the stuff that happens on the platform: posts, people, petty squabbles. so the platform is where the content lives, but ultimately the content is the reason people use reddit—no one’s like “yeah, I spend time on here because the backend framework really impressed me."

and all of this content is supplied by users, which is not unique among social media platforms, but the content is also managed by users, which is. paid employees do not govern subreddits; unpaid volunteers do. and moderation is the only thing that keeps reddit even remotely tolerable—without someone to remove spam, ban annoying users, and (god willing) enforce rules against abuse and hate speech, a subreddit loses its appeal and therefore its users. not dissimilar to the situation we’re seeing play out at twitter, except at twitter it was the loss of paid moderators;  reddit is arguably in a more precarious position because they could lose this unpaid labor at any moment, and as an already-unprofitable company they absolutely cannot afford to implement paid labor as a substitute.

oh yeah? spell "IPO" backwards

so here we are, June 2023, and reddit is licking its lips in anticipation of a long-fabled IPO. which means it’s time to start fluffing themselves up for investors by cutting costs (yay, layoffs!) and seeking new avenues of profit, however small.

this brings us to the current controversy: reddit announced a new API pricing plan that more or less prevents anyone from using it for free.

from reddit's perspective, the ostensible benefits of charging for API access are twofold: first, there's direct profit to be made off of the developers who (may or may not) pay several thousand dollars a month to use it, and second, cutting off unsanctioned third-party mobile apps (possibly) funnels those apps' users back into the official reddit mobile app. and since users on third-party apps reap the benefit of reddit's site architecture (and hosting, and development, and all the other expenses the site itself incurs) without “earning” money for reddit by generating ad impressions, there’s a financial incentive at work here: even if only a small percentage of people use third-party apps, getting them to use the official app instead translates to increased ad revenue, however marginal.

(also worth mentioning that chatGPT and other LLMs were trained via tools that used reddit's API to scrape post and content data, and now that openAI is reaping the profits of that training without giving reddit any kickbacks, reddit probably wants to prevent repeats of this from happening in the future. if you want to train the next LLM, it's gonna cost you.)

of course, these changes only benefit reddit if they actually increase the company’s revenue and perceived value/growth—which is hard to do when your users (who are also the people who supply the content for other users to engage with, who are also the people who moderate your communities and make them fun to participate in) get really fucking pissed and threaten to walk.

pricing shenanigans

under the new API pricing plan, third-party developers are suddenly facing steep costs to maintain the apps and tools they’ve built.

most paid APIs are priced by volume: basically, the more data you send and receive, the more money it costs. so if your third-party app has a lot of users, you’ll have to make more API requests to fetch content for those users, and your app becomes more expensive to maintain. (this isn’t an issue if the tool you’re building also turns a profit, but most third-party reddit apps make little, if any, money.)

which is why, even though third-party apps capture a relatively small portion of reddit’s users, the developer of a popular third-party app called apollo recently learned that it would cost them about $20 million a year to keep the app running. and apollo actually offers some paid features (for extra in-app features independent of what reddit offers), but nowhere near enough to break even on those API costs.

so apollo, any many apps like it, were suddenly unable to keep their doors open under the new API pricing model and announced that they'd be forced to shut down.

backlash, blackout

plenty has been said already about the current subreddit blackouts—in like, official news outlets and everything—so this might be the least interesting section of my whole post lol. the short version is that enough redditors got pissed enough that they collectively decided to take subreddits “offline” in protest, either by making them read-only or making them completely inaccessible. their goal was to send a message, and that message was "if you piss us off and we bail, here's what reddit's gonna be like: a ghost town."

but, you may ask, if third-party apps only captured a small number of users in the first place, how was the backlash strong enough to result in a near-sitewide blackout? well, two reasons:

first and foremost, since moderators in particular are fond of third-party tools, and since moderators wield outsized power (as both the people who keep your site more or less civil, and as the people who can take a subreddit offline if they feel like it), it’s in your best interests to keep them happy. especially since they don’t get paid to do this job in the first place, won’t keep doing it if it gets too hard, and essentially have nothing to lose by stepping down.

then, to a lesser extent, the non-moderator users on third-party apps tend to be Power Users who’ve been on reddit since its inception, and as such likely supply a disproportionate amount of the high-quality content for other users to see (and for ads to be served alongside). if you drive away those users, you’re effectively kneecapping your overall site traffic (which is bad for Growth) and reducing the number/value of any ad impressions you can serve (which is bad for revenue).

also a secret third reason, which is that even people who use the official apps have no stake in a potential IPO, can smell the general unfairness of this whole situation, and would enjoy the schadenfreude of investors getting fucked over. not to mention that reddit’s current CEO has made a complete ass of himself and now everyone hates him and wants to see him suffer personally.

(granted, it seems like reddit may acquiesce slightly and grant free API access to a select set of moderation/accessibility tools, but at this point it comes across as an empty gesture.)

"later" is now "now"

TL;DR: this whole thing is a combination of many factors, specifically reddit being intensely user-driven and self-governed, but also a high-traffic site that costs a lot of money to run (why they willingly decided to start hosting video a few years back is beyond me...), while also being angled as a public stock market offering in the very near future. to some extent I understand why reddit’s CEO doubled down on the changes—he wants to look strong for investors—but he’s also made a fool of himself and cast a shadow of uncertainty onto reddit’s future, not to mention the PR nightmare surrounding all of this. and since arguably the most important thing in an IPO is how much faith people have in your company, I honestly think reddit would’ve fared better if they hadn’t gone nuclear with the API changes in the first place.

that said, I also think it’s a mistake to assume that reddit care (or needs to care) about its users in any meaningful way, or at least not as more than means to an end. if reddit shuts down in three years, but all of the people sitting on stock options right now cashed out at $120/share and escaped unscathed... that’s a success story! you got your money! VCs want to recoup their investment—they don’t care about longevity (at least not after they’re gone), user experience, or even sustained profit. those were never the forces driving them, because these were never the ultimate metrics of their success.

and to be clear: this isn’t unique to reddit. this is how pretty much all startups operate.

I talked about the difference between “make money now” companies and “make money later” companies, and what we’re experiencing is the painful transition from “later” to “now.” as users, this change is almost invisible until it’s already happened—it’s like a rug we didn’t even know existed gets pulled out from under us.

the pre-IPO honeymoon phase is awesome as a user, because companies have no expectation of profit, only growth. if you can rely on VC money to stay afloat, your only concern is building a user base, not squeezing a profit out of them. and to do that, you offer cool shit at a loss: everything’s chocolate and flowers and quarterly reports about the number of signups you’re getting!

...until you reach a critical mass of users, VCs want to cash in, and to prepare for that IPO leadership starts thinking of ways to make the website (appear) profitable and implements a bunch of shit that makes users go “wait, what?”

I also touched on this earlier, but I want to reiterate a bit here: I think the myth of the benign non-monetized internet of yore is exactly that—a myth. what has changed are the specific market factors behind these websites, and their scale, and the means by which they attempt to monetize their services and/or make their services look attractive to investors, and so from a user perspective things feel worse because the specific ways we’re getting squeezed have evolved. maybe they are even worse, at least in the ways that matter. but I’m also increasingly less surprised when this occurs, because making money is and has always been the goal for all of these ventures, regardless of how they try to do so.

[ahgasegotarmy116]

It's Hard to Believe | Jungkook One Shot

Summary: Getting pregnant with your best friend's baby definetly wasn't a part of the plan... Pairing: f!Reader x Jungkook (fwb, f2l) Word Count: 2.7k Warnings: A tiny bit of explicit and suggestive language but nothing crazy a/n: This is something I started writing at like midnight and it's kinda shit but I thought I might as well post it since I haven't posted in a while (Like five days short of a month wtf?!?!? How has it been that long?!?!) (I just barely checked rn lmao my bad 🥲) p.s. I kinda wanna do a full on series on a concept like this but it'll be different and less fluffy but that won't be happening for a long ass time but yeah lol Requested by a lovely anon 💜

"How am I supposed to tell him?" I ask my friend Sam for the millionth time since I found out. "Y/n just tell him. You guys have been friends for how long?" she asks and it's like I'm having deja vu from both of our responses. "Like ten years" I mumble and pull my sweatshirt sleeves down over my hands in an effort to stop my nervous fiddling but it only makes it worse. 

"Right and you guys have been messing around with each other for over a year now, maybe even more...I don't wanna know" she says while holding her hand up in a way to assure me that she doesn't need the details. "Just tell him. If he's as great of a guy as you keep on telling me he is then I promise everything will be okay" she says and places a hand on my shoulder before she gets up off my couch. 

"Where are you going?" I ask while she shrugs on her jacket. "Didn't you say he's supposed to be here around five?" she asks and I nod my head, checking the clock and seeing that it's already 4:30. 

"Yeah...are you sure you don't wanna stay and say hi?" I ask and she glares at me. "Let me know what his response is to that bun in the oven and then we'll talk. I wanna figure out if he's an asshole or not before I decide to waste anytime on him" she says while lacing up her shoes. 

"Promise me you'll tell him tonight?" she asks and lifts up her hood, getting ready to shield herself from the pouring rain outside. I nod my head reluctantly, that being way more progress than I've made for the past few weeks since I found out. "I promise" I utter under my breath and she smiles, pulling me in for a bone crushing hug. 

"Text me if you need me" she says, worried for what might happen but hoping for the best. "I will...thanks" I whisper and she nods her head before walking out of my door and turning slightly and waving to offer me one last farewell.

I close the door after I see her get into her car and lean my back up against it, steadying myself for a second and taking deep breaths, trying to stop my racing heartbeat before pushing off of it and tidying up before Jungkook gets here to distract myself. 

Sam has been the only one I've been able to count on and honestly the only person I can trust since I haven't told anyone else. She was the one I called when I missed my period and she's the one who brought me a pregnancy test...and then when out and bought me ten more because I couldn't actually grasp the concept that I was pregnant...am pregnant.

Jungkook and I have always been careful and taken all the necessary steps to keep this from happening but I guess we got careless this time. 

Through out this whole arrangement we've made it very clear to each other that we're not sleeping with anyone else but neither of us are looking for any sort of commitment either so that's why this has gone on for so long. 

Like it or not though we're going to be committed to each other in one way or another no matter what because I'm keeping this baby. No matter what he says I'm keeping them. 

Jungkook is my best friend, the one person who has been there for me through everything. He's seen me at all of my highest highs and especially at my lowest lows and no matter what he's never made me feel shitty about it. I know he's not the kind of guy that'll turn on you because of something like this but I can't help but still feel terrified. 

This wasn't supposed to happen but even if this child wasn't made with love from his side...it was made with love from mine. 

I don't know how long it's been since I fell in love with him but I know I shouldn't have said yes to this whole fuck buddy ordeal. I just couldn't stand the thought of him being with someone else so when he offered up the idea I said yes.

I figured that if this was a way to prevent him from getting his heart broken by all those sorry excuses of girlfriends he's had in the past then I guess I'll be okay with breaking mine.

He's been acting different lately though. He's been a lot touchier, asking to come over more often, going out of his way to help me with things, offering to feed me all the time and all of it is making me feel like he already knows. 

Does he know? Have I started showing already? I haven't really noticed a difference in my body yet but he looks at me naked a lot more often than I pay attention to myself naked so I mean I guess he could've noticed right? 

Only one way to find out though...

A half an hour later I hear him take out his keys and unlock my door and soon I'm greeted with a smile that tugs at my heartstrings. 

"Hi baby" he says, using that pet name he's become very fond of since this whole ordeal started. The sound of it after finding out I'm pregnant with his baby has made me a little uncomfortable though since I haven't told him yet. 

Don't get me wrong I love it when he calls me that but I can't help but think that if this goes south that he won't ever call me that again. 

Maybe the hormones have started to scramble my brain already because those uncomfortable feelings are quickly thrown away when I take in the sight of him after he shrugs off his rain coat. A simple black baggy hoodie and jeans engulf his form and the comfy sight just makes me want to curl up in bed with him and forget about everything and everyone.

Just him and I, it's always been him and I. I just don't know if this little one is going to change things. 

I place a hand on my stomach for a second as a way to gain some strength from my itty bitty baby before finally working up the courage to greet him.

"Hi" I greet him softly, walking over to where he's stopped to take off his shoes and when he looks back up at me he smiles again and kisses me. I sigh into it, savoring it for just a little bit longer and when it finally breaks he looks down at me with concern now written all over his face. 

"Are you okay?" he asks, sensing that something's off right away from the just the small change in the way I kissed him. I hesitate for a second then simply hold out my hand for him to take and he does, following behind me as I lead him over to my couch. 

Getting this over with sooner rather than later is my best option right now so there's no reason to delay. 

He needs to know, he deserves to know.

We sit there in silence, longer than he would like us to since I can tell how tense his body has gotten in a matter of minutes. "Y/n you're scaring me" he whispers, not wanting to pressure me but relaying his feelings. 

I take a couple more deep breaths before finally starting. "I need you to listen to me and I need you to please not speak until I'm finished" I say while looking down at my lap, not being able to meet his eyes. 

He murmurs a soft 'okay' and waits for me to continue, taking one of my hands and placing it in his lap. He needs some form of physical contact to keep him grounded since he's not too sure what to expect and I let him, knowing I need some reassurance too. 

Even if I don't know what his reaction is gonna be, in this moment I need it more than ever.

"I guess there's really no right way to go about saying this because this wasn't supposed to happen so I'm just gonna come out and say it..." I start off and he squeezes my hand, encouraging me to keep going. 

"I missed my period...over a month ago...and I haven't had it since then" I say and finally look up at him where he has an unsure expression. It's not one that's mad or disappointed with what I've said thus far which is a good thing but more like he's trying hard to hold himself back so he can keep that promise. 

His hold on my hand hasn't loosened, in fact it's gotten even tighter and that gives me hope that we'll work this out so I take another deep breath before continuing. 

"I tried to kid myself into thinking that it was late but when another week passed by I got nervous. I asked Sam to get me a test and it came out positive. I didn't believe it and thought it was a false positive and so to ease my mind she went a bought ten more from a bunch of different brands and...all of them came out positive" I say and he still looks at me with that same expression, waiting for me to give him the okay to speak and so I do. 

"How long have you known?" are the first words out of his mouth and although they're not negative they aren't necessarily positive either. "About a month now" I say and he nods his head, taking another second or two to formulate what he's gonna say next. 

"I'll support you no matter what you decide" he says and I let out a breath I didn't even know I had been holding in. "I wanna keep it" I say and he nods his head and smiles softly at first and then as the seconds go by it gets wider and wider making my heart beat faster. 

"Am I allowed to get excited now?" he whispers and I can't help but chuckle as tears start to prickle my eyes and give him a nod. "You're excited?" I say, my whole being slowly overcome with emotion. 

"How could I not be?" he scoffs playfully but that answer has me confused. "But Jungkook we're not together. I mean we're not in a relationship, we're just friends" I explain and there's a playful glint in his eyes after I say that that's making me even more nervous.

"You wanna know what I thought you were gonna tell me?" he offers up, slightly changing topics but I look at him in a way to urge him to continue. "I thought you were gonna break up with me" he says and I smile, "Jungkook we're not together. How could I break up with you?" I chuckle in disbelief. 

"Correction, I thought you were gonna break up with me before I even got the chance to ask you to be my girlfriend" he says with a grin and my jaw drops, the dots all connecting as to why he's been acting so different lately. "You were gonna ask me to be your girlfriend?" I utter quietly as if we were in a crowed room and I had a secret for just the two of us.

"I had actually planned on asking you tonight" he explains, walking over to where he had placed his backpack on the floor, taking out a bouquet of slightly squished flowers. "Sorry they're all beat up. I forgot and rode my bike over here so I didn't really have any other option but to put them in there" he says almost as if he was nervous, rubbing the back of his neck and it's then that I notice how pink his ears have gotten. 

He is nervous

I take them from him and smile, waiting for him to say it but he simply stands there and admires me and I can't help but laugh. "What so funny? I told you what happened to them" he utters through pouty lips which only makes me laugh more. "No, no it's not the flowers it's just that...don't you have something to say?" I ask, calming down my chuckles and when he looks at me with the same confused expression I have to try my hardest to keep the laughter at bay. 

"Do you have something you would like to ask me Jungkook" I rephrase it and after a second his lips go from a pout to the shape of an 'O' as he's figured it out. "Oh um, yeah, right. Well I um" he starts off, rubbing the back of his neck again while stuttering and trying to find the words and after struggling for a second I decide to poke fun at him again. 

"Jungkook I am literally carrying your child and you're too afraid to ask me to be your girlfriend?" I laugh, giving him a slight reality check which he scoffs at before responding. 

"I was trying to remember what I had rehearsed to say to you but now that you're being a little brat I guess you'll never get to know all the nice things I was gonna say" he retorts, his voice suddenly taking on a darker tone that sends a shiver through my body and he smirks when he sees my reaction to it. 

He cups my face and rubs his thumb along my bottom lip, making them part and he leans in as if he was going to kiss me but stops just shy of my lips. "Will you be my girlfriend?" he whispers, nudging his nose against mine and making me smile. 

"I'll have to think about that" I play coy with him which he chuckles at. "You know if you weren't pregnant right now I would have thrown you over my lap for that smart mouth" he warns and I smile before leaning in and kissing him for just a second before pulling back. 

"Yes I'll be your girlfriend" I say and nudge my nose against his as well and before I can register it my back is on the couch and his lips are pressed against mine, the kiss not rushed but full of so many words that have yet to be said and he gives in, not being able to hold it in anymore.

"I love you" he says, pulling back and looking down at me to see my expression which is completely dumbfounded to say the least. "You what?" I ask and he chuckles, "Is it really that hard to believe?" he points out and I guess now that I think about it it really isn't.

"I guess we've both been in love with each other for a while now huh?" I smile and his eyes light up at my round about confession. "Say it" he says, and I can feel my cheeks heating up. I hadn't planned on actually saying those three words to him even though I've felt them for so long but I don't want to hold them back anymore. 

"I love you" I whisper and he smiles, "Say it again" he repeats, clearly not believing it just yet. "I love you Jungkook" I say and the little switch up with attaching his name to the end darkens his gaze. "I guess there's no chance in me getting you pregnant a second time right now huh?" he asks, sliding his hand up my thigh and I giggle. 

"No I think that's pretty much impossible but the odds are never zero" I say and he rolls his eyes. "I'm trying to tell you that I wanna hit it raw" he states the obvious while rolling his eyes. "I know I know...and the answer is yes Daddy" I tease, testing to see how that word affects him now that he knows.

He tongues his cheek at that making me bite my lip, knowing that's gonna be even more of a trigger word for him from now on. "Daddy huh? Well I guess that title is a little more fitting now isn't it?" 

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[1d1195]

Ding - Round 2

Read Ding here | ~6.2 k words

WARNING/spoiler there's a scummy guy in this part that tries to be forceful with our MC to go with him back to his place when she doesn't want to. Nothing will happen and nothing will be described in detail but be kind to your mind and heart ♥, trauma, anxiety, pining, and fluff.

From me: I actually know VERY little about boxing and even less about throwing a punch. I do however feel I'm well-versed in sprinkles so do with that what you will. Some parts of this got a little away from me again. I hope you like it 💕

Summary: Harry and Cupcake are both really busy and haven't seen each other in two months. But when Cupcake gets into trouble, she has no choice but to run into Harry.

Harry learned to fight when he was ten years old. He didn’t have his dad around much to teach him. Mum and Gemma may as well have been pacifists and as such, they weren’t much help when it came to defending himself. Harry watched his little girl friends get teased by boys. The same boys that told him he was weird for liking girls when they had cooties. Even if he didn’t (always) like them like that and was just merely defending them. Mum and Gemma may have been pacifists, but they taught Harry to be a respectful young boy. Especially toward girls.

One too many mouthfuls of sand at recess was enough to make him finally do something about it. He was angry. Angry because the girls didn’t like him because he was a boy (although they tolerated him since he was protecting them). Angry none of the boys in his class wanted to be friends with him because he was being nice to girls filled with cooties. Angry that he didn’t have a dad to teach him how to be a boy’s boy.

For a ten-year-old, he was really angry.

Mum took him to a gym—an introductory class to kickboxing. Just to get some of his anger out in an appropriate manner (and so he wouldn’t be sent to the principal’s office during recess again). Harry took a liking to the punching bag. He cried the first time he used it with the help of an older kid who was helping him learn to punch the right way. The poor teen watching him get so frustrated that his punches and kicks weren’t landing right—even though it was his very first time throwing a punch—saw something in him. Alerted his boss, encouraged Harry, worked with Harry every time he came in. He was a great mentor and even though he left only a couple years after meeting Harry to go to university and all that, Harry was forever grateful.

His first amateur match was at fifteen. Then there were only ten rounds at most, and he won by a landslide in five. By then he met Louis—someone who saw the same thing that teen kid saw in him and offered to be his manager. It wasn’t anything serious at the time. Harry was still in school and only using his time after school to get better at boxing. Louis was only a few years ahead but knew enough to help him be great.

By the time he turned eighteen, he had won three state-titles and people were watching him. At least in a way that those who cared about boxing did. Throughout university he trained and got better and won more and more.

Now Harry was twenty-five. He had to be nearing at least a hundred thousand punches since he was ten—eitherthrowing them at someone or at least in training against the punching bag he loved so much. Maybe more. He couldn’t even begin to think or count how he would figure out that number. Harry’s whole life was training, working, and fighting.

The only joys he had outside of boxing were his car and the sweet little niece that Gemma had kindly brought into his life—but that was only a recent change.

Only one other very recent change had left him a bit tongue-tied and flustered. Harry didn’t get flustered. Not since he was ten and knew he could beat the crap out of someone. There was no ringing bell to prepare him to make eye contact with a complete stranger and just feel like he had never ever felt before.

Was it love? Who could say, really. Harry had never loved anyone in his life that wasn’t his family or his friends. It made his stomach flutter like the first time he fought in a ring for something other than a trophy. A mere two hundred dollars on the line, all to get punched a whole bunch of times. Now he was still getting punched a few times over for a decent amount of money, but the thought of that pretty girl and her sprinkles made him unbelievably excited. Knowing she was there really made him feel different.

He knew next to nothing about her, but he was certain he was going to fall for her given half a chance. Even if she gave him a half a chance—a quarter!—he would do everything he could to have her in his life. If anyone else had damaged his car, he might have lost his shit, but there was something about her kind face, her doe-eyed expression in the rainy lamplight that made him rethink his entire life in the span of twenty seconds.

But whatever it was that he felt for her, he knew it started with her ringside. Beside his best friend waiting for the end of the fight that never seemed to end.

Normally, Harry’s matches finished in an average of nine rounds. But he was seated in the corner, sipping water like a hamster from the bottle, while Louis put Vaseline on his face where the cut on his eyebrow split between the tenth and the eleventh. “How you doing?”

“Is she impressed?” He asked.

“Who?”

“Cupcake. She’s sitting next t’Niall,” he was breathing heavy. Good as he was, it took a lot of energy to punch someone for a half hour as it was.

“Who?” Louis repeated, then thought better of it. He shook his head in frustration. “Can you focus on what you’re doing, Harold?!”

Louis didn’t get it. Harry rolled his eyes and sighed. To be fair, she was probably the reason it was taking longer than normal. Not that he minded. As long as she was impressed by the end, of course. Harry was on his feet, shadowboxing briefly with Louis, that boyish smile on his face. “What the fuck is your issue?” Louis hissed at him. “You’re acting like a lunatic!”

It seemed like a cliché to say he was in love, so he refrained from doing so. He felt it spared Louis further frustration as well. Cupcake, Cupcake, Cupcake. It was the only thing his brain could think. Fortunately, the bell rang, signaling the beginning of the next round and knocked a bit of the sense back in his head that had floated away from him on the thoughts of the pretty girl nearby.

His opponent was just as tired (although Harry believed his opponent was more so) as himself. He could see the exhaustion setting in as he held his gloves up near his face blocking a few jabs Harry threw to get the excitement of the new round going. He was waiting, searching, nearly taunting for a window of opportunity. Right as his opponent swung aiming for his face, Harry dodged his punch; smirking as he did. A blinding weak spot, his guard was down for only a fraction of a second but that was all Harry needed.

Poor guy didn’t stand a chance.

Ding.

*

Harry looked like he was going to fall asleep sitting there in the bakery kitchen. He was a bit cut up; his eyebrow, the corner of his mouth, and his cheekbone had little cuts. Soothed with Vaseline, but it didn’t seem to bother him. His eyes were droopy. “Is Niall still around to drive you home?” She asked.

He shook his head. “I can drive,” he murmured.

He wasn’t really looking at her, but her look and tone screamed skeptical. “You look too tired to drive.”

“Mm,” he hummed. She was busy bustling back and forth through the kitchen. Cupcakes were in the oven. She only made a dozen, but Harry didn’t seem to notice it was a small amount. He was sitting at the big table in the middle of the kitchen. A seat dragged in from the office. She had her laptop open in her office running the report she needed while Harry held his head propped in one hand. She busied herself with prepping dough for scones and pastries while Harry tried not to loll off to sleep. She smirked at him.

“I could call you an Uber if you wanted,” she offered. “You don’t need to stay with me.”

His eyes were hardly open. “I’ll get a second wind in a minute,” he yawned. “S’jus’ the adrenaline wearing off,” he explained.

“Does that hurt?” She asked gesturing to the cuts on his (otherwise really perfect) face.

He shook his head. “Stings a little.”

“Will you be sore tomorrow?”

“A little. Stiff really... Why y’want t’give me a massage, kitten?” He smiled flirtatiously. Maybe she should have felt uncomfortable, alone with a man she only just met. But honestly, she thought Niall might be her new best friend and if Niall could vouch for Harry, then she wasn’t all that worried about him. Regardless of him knocking out his opponent with one punch. Truthfully, it was nice of her to walk her to the bakery. It was later than she expected and while the town they lived in was pretty safe, the college safety tips of never walking alone flooded her mind each time she did walk alone. She blushed at his forward assumption, but fortunately she was prepping something and stuffing it in the fridge, so he didn’t get to see. Plus, his exhaustion probably made him even flirtier.

“Thanks for being m’good luck charm, Cupcake,” he murmured sleepily.

“I didn’t know you didn’t need one.”

“Can never have too much luck.”

She smiled, continuing her prepping quietly. Harry watched her for a while. Eventually, his arm dropped to the table, and he rested his head on it. After another moment, a soft snore escaped his lips, and she smiled a little brighter. Only for herself, really, since Harry was asleep. She continued working. She was used to late nights. Maybe he really was going to get a second wind—honestly, she couldn’t imagine boxing and punching someone for almost forty-five minutes with only one-minute breaks in between rounds. Sometimes while she was baking, she would try to do other tasks while the timer counted down to take the treats out of the oven. It always surprised her how long and how short a minute could feel in the same breath.

But while she worked, she was mindful to not make too many loud noises. Harry needed sleep it seemed. She prepped for nearly an hour while waiting for the cupcakes to cool long enough to scoop out the middle and fed the sugary raspberry filling into the empty space. Frosting a dozen cupcakes took all but ten minutes then she packaged them in two half-dozen plastic containers with A Pinch of Sprinkles label taping it shut. Gently, she put her hand on his upper arm, and she really shouldn’t have been so surprised by how taut his bicep was beneath her hand, but she was. He was unbelievably strong, and she was in slight awe and shock of touching him—and he wasn’t even flexing. But rather than be creepy, she gave him a gentle shake. “Hey, Harry... Uh...it’s late. I’m gonna get going,” her voice was soft.

Harry startled almost jumping out of his seat and rubbing his eyes with the heels of his palms. “Sorry, sorry. Wow,” he turned his neck to the left and then right. “M’sorry I dozed off there.”

She shrugged. “Probably needed it,” she assured him with a gentle smile. She pushed the dozen cupcakes forward, across the table. “For you.”

He blinked then looked up at her. “Did you make these for—”

“Well, yes, I made them. You were unbelievably kind to me even though I dented Clay. Plus, you won so it’s like a job well done, you know?”

“You made me cupcakes,” he repeated, his gaze unmoving from her face.

“We really need to work out this whole repeating what the other one says thing,” she felt her cheeks warm as he stared at her, but she smiled, only feeling slightly awkward.

He turned his attention to the two plastic boxes and tilted his head at them. They were identical. His fascination with her precision was immense. “What kind are they?”

“The raspberry filled ones. You said you liked them.”

His gaze went right back to her, and he felt hungry, but not for cupcakes.

Well, at least not the baked good kind of cupcake.

“Thank you, Cupcake. That was sweet of you. I hope it wasn’t too much trouble.”

Her smile seemed to transcend to a feeling of relief. “Not even a little...um... I just have to grab a couple things. Would you... mind walking me to my car? Unless you need to leave right now. I know it’s crazy late. I’ll be okay. I walk to my car on my own usually but it’s always a little creepy. But I feel bad I made you—”

“’Course m’gonna walk you t’your car,” he rolled his eyes. “Besides I don’t want you t’ding Clay again,” he winked to ensure she knew he was kidding. Because yes, he loved his car.

But rapidly, when it came to her, the car didn’t matter in the slightest.

*

She hadn’t seen Harry in two months.

It wasn’t like she was avoiding him. Part of her knew he was a mere social media friend request away. In fact, she was trying her hardest to not stare at the pictures of him on social media, the PR plug for his matches, and all the things that she saw Niall, Louis, and all his other friends shared. But she didn’t want to come off too forward. It seemed weird to be so into a man she only talked to for no longer than ten minutes total.

Besides...she had her routines. Work, family, and more work.

Also, if Harry was really infatuated with her the way Niall alluded to, he knew where her bakery was—he easily could come and find her here. But she did notice there was a tag to her shop on Instagram with raspberry filled cupcakes in the picture. (All it would take is for her to press the Follow button and wait.) While she didn’t know Harry all that well, she assumed he was probably just as busy. Her brief cyber-stalking showed that Harry was often at the gym—although she wasn’t sure which one. He was also an amazing uncle. That much was clear. It warmed her heart, and she would never want to tear Harry away from that kind of time. Family was extremely important to her. She wholeheartedly understood how much his free time was probably monopolized by the little baby.

But it was so strange that she didn’t know him yet there was some part of her that wanted to see him. It was bizarre. She never got all up and arms about a guy. There was work and there was her family. That was it. That was all she could afford to balance. She didn’t need a guy to mess with her routines or upset the balance of her life.

However, every time she walked alone to her car at night now, she wished that Harry was with her to assure her safety—even though she had done it hundreds of times before. The night they met, he walked her in silence, opened her door and made sure she was safely tucked inside. “Good night, Cupcake,” he smiled almost dreamily.

“Good night, Harry. Congratulations,” she responded with a smile too.

Harry’s smile grew and he looked away briefly before patted the top of her car and turned to Clay, put his cupcakes on the passenger seat and moved to the driver’s side. He gave her a wave and pulled out of his parking spot.

It was two months ago.

But after just one month, it was hard to deny she didn’t miss him.

That had to mean something. Just one brief night—not even a date. Most of that night was spent with Harry in the ring or asleep at her kitchen table. Hell, she got to know Niall more that night. But it was Harry’s smile that plagued her thought—crooked and perfect. The way his eyes glittered as he convinced her to follow him with a picture of his niece.

“Are you baking something in here or burning in here?” Maeve asked.

Maeve was her best employee—her right hand nearly every day. More importantly, her best friend. Shaking her head of the thoughts surrounding Harry, she sighed and turned to the oven where her fudge brownies were surely overdone. “Shit,” she whispered.

“I don’t think you’ve ever burned anything. Are you okay?” Maeve asked gently. It was a loaded question. It took a lot of time to dig the answer out of her friend, but Maeve did. She knew asking if she was okay was probably the wrong thing to say.

But if it was, she didn’t mind. Of course she didn’t. Her very best friend was sweeter than all the treats in the display case. “Just a little distracted,” she mumbled grabbing the tray and setting it in the sink to cool off (and hopefully so she didn’t have to scrape the bottom of the tray later).

“Harry on your brain?” Maeve giggled.

She rolled her eyes but felt the way her cheeks warmed at Maeve’s (correct) assumption. Maeve was shocked to learn that her strong-willed friend was convinced by a stranger to go see a boxing match. She couldn’t believe it. Granted, once she saw the picture of Harry, she couldn’t disagree. I think I would let him punch me in the face if he wanted to.

She decided keeping Maeve as far away from Harry as possible was probably necessary.

Rarely did she and Maeve work together. As her best employee and best friend, it was like asking her to hold her child when Maeve was on shift. There was no one she trusted more. So, when Maeve wasn’t there, she often was and vice versa. But every so often, usually at the shift change, Maeve got to see her best friend in her element. “Well, the good news is, you can go think of him at home,” she winked at her.

She didn’t even look at her. “You’re disgusting,” she deadpanned.

Maeve snorted. “That’s not even what I was insinuating. Your mind went directly to the gutter. Good for you. I bet he thinks about you while he’s doing it too.”

“Jesus Christ,” she was blushing brightly now. “I just want to fix the display case and then I’ll go.”

“Any fun plans for tonight?”

She hesitated briefly. “Uh yeah...actually. I have a date,” she mumbled.

“Oh!” It was silent for a long beat. Rarely did she go on dates. There were only a few since she moved into town three years ago. Mostly because the bakery took up so much of her free time. The remaining bit of time she had and didn’t go on dates was because of the guilt she felt. Maeve’s surprise was palpable. It made her cheeks turn pink and she bit the inside of her cheek. “Good,” Maeve smiled encouragingly. “Online?” She asked.

She nodded. “We’ve been messaging back and forth for like...” she shrugged. “Two weeks.”

“Are you excited?”

No. “Yes,” she sighed softly. “Been a while,” she smirked. There was a huge part of her brain that told her she didn’t want to go because it wasn’t Harry. It was like a neon sign had been posted in her frontal lobe reminding her that it was pointless to even consider this date. She should have just requested to follow Harry and be done with it—he would probably drop everything if she asked him on a date. “Just...nervous.”

“It’ll be good!” Maeve said reassuringly. “Share your location with me and text me when you get to where you’re sleeping,” she wiggled her eyebrows suggestively.

“I will be sleeping at home,” she promised snorting through her laugh at her best friend.

Maeve smiled heading to the front and leaving her to finish with her burned brownies.

*

The front of the bakery was dark in color; she was aiming for warmth. The floors and baseboards were dark walnut brown. It contrasted sharply with the wall she wall-papered by hand with a white and brown marble pattern behind the display cases. It made the black chalkboard menus with the same walnut brown frames stand out. The lights were always set to dim when they were on. Her goal was to recreate the feeling of her childhood home—particularly the den where her father set up the most beautiful Christmases. The bakery lacked a fireplace (she joked with Maeve that it was an oven or a fireplace, and the oven did a better job at cooking croissants evenly).

The front of the bakery wasn’t massive. There were five little tables to sit and enjoy their treats if people wanted but it was really a grab and go kind of place. The back had more treats stored so the main room didn’t look overwhelming. The front display cases still contained more treats than anyone could think of eating. I wish I could buy one of everything was heard frequently from the line. Eventually she wanted to invest in coffee but for the time being she liked just her treats and was happy to recommend the coffee place down the road. If she ever got a hold of more space, then she would consider buying all the machines for coffee.

The bakery was honestly warmest when it was rainy. Which was frequent. She was reorganizing the main cupcake display, a tower of three tiers with one of each type of cupcake she made. The raspberry filled cupcake was the one that had been on top for the last two months. Each time it was bought, she replaced it with another. While people raved about her brownies, cakes, and even the croissants, it was the cupcakes that people came for; and so, she took care of the display as much as possible.

“Which one do you recommend?” She turned to the voice and saw a mom and little girl waiting patiently. She smiled fondly.

“Raspberry filled,” she pulled it from the top tier and handed it over. “Try it,” she offered.

“Oh, we don’t want to get you in trouble,” the mom said quickly while her daughter grabbed for it almost immediately.

She laughed. “Don’t worry, I know the owner,” she promised. “Maeve! I’m leaving!” She called but was delighted by the little girl’s approval. Silence, cake and filling on her cheeks immediately, and a delightful look in her eye.

“Have fun!” She called back.

“Enjoy the cupcakes. I also like the lemon vanilla ones.”

“I think raspberry filled is the winner,” the mom smiled.

She nodded, unable to keep herself from grinning back. “A fan favorite.”

*

She should have stayed home. The bad weather should have been an omen. But maybe it wouldn’t have been because she met Harry in bad weather, and everything was fine that night. It soured her mood and made her feel infinitely worse to think about the comparison.

I’m home. Not a great date. I’ll tell you later. She wished she had gone to Maeve’s. Maybe she would have doted on her. But she didn’t want to fall apart the way she planned on in front of her.

:( sorry babe. Sleep tight. Talk to you tomorrow :(

She locked her apartment door and checked at least fifty times that it was truly locked before she moved to her bathroom. Her heart was still in her throat and her eyes felt raw with tears. Maybe she was overreacting.

No.

The rational part of her brain reasoned against her handwaving casualness. She had good instincts. Obviously. If this same situation happened with Harry, then maybe she would have considered it her own poor judgment. It was more reason that someone as terrifying as Harry could have be sweet as her cupcakes that it was her good judgment that helped her get out of there tonight.

She hurried to get out of her clothes. Part of her considered throwing them away. She didn’t want them any longer. She wasn’t sure she would ever wear them again. She turned the shower on as hot as she could stand it and pushed it a little further.

He didn’t hurt her physically. He tried. It was obvious his intent was to force her into the car... or worse. Which was disgusting in its own right. Until that moment in the dark, rainy parking lot, it was almost identical to her moment with Harry. But it wasn’t. Harry didn’t make her feel unsafe. Harry didn’t make her feel threatened. Harry gave her an out even though he wanted to hang out with her. She knew she could leave at any moment and Harry wouldn’t have blamed her.

She rubbed her arm so hard with her loofa in the shower stream it burned for a new reason. Tears blurred her vision and she felt so stupid. So completely idiotic. How could she let it get that far? That was so dangerous. So close she could have been hurt in so many ways that she didn’t want to think about, ever again. She closed her eyes and let the water wash the night away, feeling completely alone and dreadful.

She never wanted to date again.

*

She finished her shower, sniffles plaguing her, and she got into her comfiest pajamas. Her heart was still beating too fast as she crawled under the covers. She felt so ashamed. It felt like her fault. All of it.

There was a tiny rattling in her brain that Harry could have prevented it all. She should have just requested Harry on social media when she met him. If she had, she would have had his number by then. He would have helped her for sure.

Without thinking, she scrolled on her apps, and clicked on the various follow buttons. Every platform she could think of to request his social media friendship—looking like a lunatic be damned. Almost everything had a phone call button now, she could use it as backup if she needed. For good measure she requested Niall too. It was nearing midnight, and she couldn’t bring herself to care. She was scared. Nervous. Heartbroken.

Yet, within moments, Harry returned the request along with a direct message in her inbox.

Thinking of me at midnight, hmm?  😉

She snorted despite her uneasiness. One sentence and she melted. But she couldn’t let him know that. 🙄 it was nice while it lasted. Just going to unfollow you...

Aw, c’mon Cupcake 🙁

Oh alright... No, not really... just can’t sleep. Popped up on my people you may know while scrolling. It wasn’t a complete lie, and she was glad she wasn’t having a phone call. He would have heard her sniffles and then she wasn’t sure she would have been able to stop herself from inviting a total stranger over. Right now, she didn’t trust her judgment fully.

Been dying to press that Follow button, Cupcake. Didn’t want to come on too strong after that first night.

She couldn’t help but smile. The contrast between the night she met Harry, and her present night made her sad but relieved at the same time. I see you enjoyed the cupcakes.

Louis made me run laps for two hours because of you. I ate all twelve in less than 72 hours. Do you put drugs in those? They’re addicting.

Lol, no drugs. Well... sugar. So, pick your poison I guess, right? 😇

Well, thank you, Cupcake. That was delicious. I hope you liked the match too. We didn’t get to talk much. I know I fell asleep 🤦‍♂️ I was really happy you were there.

Her heart felt so warm already. Despite how much she didn’t want it to. Thank you for inviting me. Because she was nothing if not polite. It was really exciting! I don’t know much about boxing. But it’s obvious you’re very good—not that you need me to tell you that. Were you really going to make me look like an idiot and not tell me you were undefeated?

You’ll make me blush, Cupcake. Didn’t think you’d come with me if you knew.

Sneaky... 👀

Just... wanted you there, kitten. I promise. Nothing more... I know I came off a little too strong and I know I was a little...pushy. I would have let you go to your store if you really wanted to... But...

The three dots on his message disappeared and reappeared a few times over.It was cute to imagine him holding his phone thinking about what to type, erasing it, typing it again.

I can’t explain it, Cupcake. I’ve been going CRAZY these last two months. Niall’s calling me a stalker and I haven’t even SEEN you. The sentiment doesn’t give her any bad feelings. Because despite how much she wanted to be guarded, especially after her evening, she couldn’t help but believe him. Trust him, implicitly.

I swear something in the universe pulled me to you... I woke up just in time to see you blowing up my phone tonight 😍😍

She snorted and felt her body warm with his kindness, his gentle adoration through her phone no less. You’re insane, Harry Styles.

About you 😍

Oh my God... Now she really was blushing, but she couldn’t help but notice she felt so much better chatting with him. Well... we can talk tomorrow if you want.

Oh?

I’m assuming you’re tired and I’ve already hogged more than enough of your time at midnight, as you pointed out.

Oh, no.

No way, Cupcake. I’ll stay up all night to talk with you ❤

Her heart felt so heavy. It was unfair. How could she be so stupid? Her dad would have killed her for being so naïve. It was his worst fear while she was growing up. It was everything he always talked her through when she was going through puberty and telling her about boys teasing her. Her dad reminded her constantly that a man has no right to make her feel scared or fragile.

But she could feel his grip on her arm trying to coerce her back into his car. She shook her head of the thoughts, refusing to let him poison any more of her time than he had. She was talking to Harry. She was okay. It was alright. It didn’t happen. She got in an Uber, and she’ll never see him again.

Harry was talking to her. Harry made her feel safe. Harry didn’t make her stomach unsettled with a bad gut feeling. Here’s my phone number if you want it.

Within moments, she had a new text message alert. This is better than an undefeated record 😍

*

The following morning, she felt less terrible about herself and her stupidity, but she never wanted to feel that way again. She was also so tired from texting with Harry for hours. It was nearly three in the morning catching up on all the things he did in the past two months before she wished him a good night. There wasn’t much to report about their lives. They both seemed to be workaholics, but he did offer her some really cute baby pictures of his niece (and a pretty cute picture of Niall falling asleep on Harry’s couch after an intense workout).

While she sipped her coffee—staving off the sleepiness, she Googled self-defense classes. Her dad would have approved. He wanted her to do it back when she was in college, but she refused for whatever reason. She regretted that too.

It was telling that she debated whether she was overreacting for several minutes. If she was overreacting, she would have brushed off the idea of self-defense classes like she did in college. But this wasn’t something to overreact about, right? Before she could overthink it any longer, she paid for the class. Honestly, in that parking lot she was smart to do this. Worst case scenario, for one reason or another, it was the smart decision.

She cycled through the next stage of grief feeling angry and bitter that he made her feel this way. She was incredibly lucky it was raining and slippery and she managed to get away from him in the chilly spring air. He left her so rattled. She was defenseless, so a class was needed.

God, she missed her dad.

Fuck, she missed Harry.

She never wanted to feel that helpless again.

With the class paid for, she put an apron around her waist and headed to the front of A Pinch of Sprinkles and turned the closed sign to open.

*

The following Monday, after a full day of flour, sugar, and plenty of customers, she headed to the gym.

It felt awkward. She hadn’t been to a gym since her college days, and she was already frustrated from her horrific night out. She and Maeve told each other they would go together but they were terrible influences on one another and opted for shopping trips with the promise they would pretend their shopping bags were dumbbells.

When she arrived, she headed to the front desk and introduced herself. She even admitted she felt awkward and the woman behind the desk smiled encouragingly. “I’m Sarah. Let me show you around,” she came from behind the desk and headed toward the side room. “It’s safe here,” she assured her, like she knew. The assurance made her throat tight with emotion and she nodded stoically. “This is the locker room; you can change in here and you can leave your stuff locked up or in the front cubbies and I can watch it. Whatever makes you more comfortable,” she smiled kindly and glanced her up and down briefly. “Do you own that bakery downtown?”

She smiled and nodded, looking at the flour handprint on the thigh of her pants. “Thought I got all the flour off,” she brushed at it with a chuckle. “Yes, I do.”

“My husband is going to think I met a celebrity today,” she laughed. “We love your blueberry scones. They taste like heaven.”

“Aw, thank you so much, that’s so kind. I’ll bring some next time,” she promised.

“Oh stop, I’ll divorce him,” she laughed and headed back for the front desk.

She quickly changed, feeling safe and relieved once more. She brought her belongings to the front and sat in one of the seats across from Sarah’s desk. “Kickboxing is just wrapping up and your instructors will be right over,” there was a group of several other women milling about. Obviously, they at least knew how to be in a gym by themselves. A few came as a small group. Maybe she should have brought Maeve.

While waiting, she scrolled through emails from her landlord, her college alma mater group, and all the coupons she had ever subscribed to. “I have got to unsubscribe,” she murmured to herself. She scrolled through photos of the beautiful little area she lived in now, and as sad as it was to get here, it was nice. Her shop was nice. Despite how scared she was over the weekend, things were good.

The only thing that wasn’t nice was that stupid, awful man.

“Holy shit, he’s hot,” she heard someone whisper. It was peripheral. She didn’t even register it really because she was sending Maeve a picture of the sale that was happening at their favorite clothing store on Thursday. If she paid attention, she might have noticed sooner.

“Ladies, self-defense class, this way please!” The voice was familiar, but she couldn’t place it. Maeve sent about ten heart eyes to her, and she smiled, stuffed her phone in her bag, and waved to Sarah.

“Blueberry scones,” she repeated with a firm nod and followed the line of women. She sipped from her water taking in the banners around the gym and realized too late why Louis’ voice sounded so familiar.

He stood at the front of the room, along with another familiar face.

“Oh shit,” she whispered to herself and turned immediately back toward the desk.

She bumped into another woman who steadied her and kindly looked her over. “Sorry—are you alright?” she was nearly motherly in her demeanor and her head felt woozy. She couldn’t do this. Harry would know.

Why was Harry attending her self-defense class?

“Yes, yes, sorry,” she shook her head. “Wrong—”

“Hey,” Harry’s voice was right there. She stepped out of the room trying to get more air to her lungs and head.He wasn’t attending. He was teaching. This was his gym. The boxing rings in the main room should have been a clue. The sound of Louis’ voice. Oh, you stupid idiot, her brain scolded.

“Cupcake?” Her head responded to the nickname instinctively. Harry’s suspicious green eyes gazed back at her. “What are you doing here?”

--

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[luveline]

Omg ok Jade my love can I request a princess soulmate au with Steve? Where reader is Prince Steve’s soulmate but maybe she’s not royal herself and is struggling a bit with being the future princess?

Almost like similar vibes to some of the loser gf with rockstar Sirius things you’ve done

thank you sm for your request! (sci-fi fairytale au) prince!steve

cw talk of losing weight to fit into a dress 

Prince Steven sits across from you with a bowl of grapes and a pair of embroidery scissors. He's going to stab me, you think morosely. I'm wretched and boring and he's going to stab me and then the stars will give him another soulmate and he'll forget this whole misfortune.

He seems lost for words as you are, or uninterested. You think he's going to talk and he eats another grape instead, hair fluttering in the breeze that filters in from the balcony, his eyes trained on the holoscreen. He's pretty —soft face, softer hair, almond shaped eyes that seem perpetually amused— but more alarmingly, he's fit. Physically fit from years of sports. Royals do all manner of olympiad competition, evident in his toned shoulders and his sun-kissed skin. 

"How's your embroidery?" he asks suddenly. 

You startle, pretending you'd been attending to that rather than staring at him uselessly. "It's going well, Prince Steven," you lie. You've never embroidered before —you have practical sewing skills for darning scuffed trousers and patching elbows, but embroidery is a labour of time. Time is a luxury you haven't had. 

"Steve," he corrects. 

"Do I… Is it really okay for me to call you that? Won't people think I'm presumptuous?" 

"Ten dollar word." He slides the bowl toward you, a beautifully glazed ceramic piece that likely cost more than your month's rent. "Well, they usually let me have whatever I want, and I want you to call me Steve. And to relax. And eat more." 

"I can't. They said I need to fit into my wedding dress." 

"The wedding dress needs to fit you," Steve says, the simple cut of his button down pulled snug to his chest as he leans back in his chair. "Not the other way around. Is that why you didn't eat much at breakfast? Or was it just gross?" 

"It wasn't gross," you say softly. 

"You don't have to do any of that stuff, either, if it's boring." 

You run your finger down the creamy linen stretched between your bamboo hoops. "I don't know if it's boring. I can barely do it." 

"You're too mean to yourself," he says. 

Steve stands and puts his arm behind his head, pushing his elbow until something clicks. Embarrassed by his dismissal, you stare at your hands and fume at yourself when they begin to tremble. 

It's too much. All of it. The cruel Palace attendants who know you're not good enough. Steve and his good nature. The wedding dress, the fine China, your wonky stitches. 

Steve steps to your side. He holds out his hand, and you pass him your embroidery without meeting his eyes. Your mood worsens at the sharp slink of snipping, sure that Steve will cut your pattern from the sketch and tell you to start again. 

"Sorry, your white knot at the back was bothering me. Pass me a slimmer needle? I'll tuck it behind your stitches." 

Astonished, you pass Steve a smaller needle from the pin cushion. His brows creases gently as he works, rewiring the white thread with patience and efficiency. 

"There. It looks really nice, honey. You're a fast learner." He passes you the hoop. You take it a beat too slow and he either doesn't notice or doesn't make a fuss, chucking you under the chin softly. "Don't worry so much. I'll talk to Cordelia about your wedding dress, the idea that you need to fit into it like it's one size fits all is dumb. It's made for you. Like, what are they expecting?" 

"They're probably hoping this is all a big mistake." 

"Did someone say that to you?" 

"Nobody had to say it to me, I can tell from the way they look at…" Steve takes your face into his hand, effectively killing anything you'd been trying to say.  

He seems royal, then. Used to getting his way, maybe, the disapproving lining of his otherwise sweet eyes. You get a flash of a memory, the morning you'd been presented, Steve in his finery with his platinum crown like a beacon in brown hair, you in your best dress, embarrassingly drab in comparison, your hand offered. He'd been meeting with eligible women all week. 

You were there as a formality. Never for a second did you think your soul mark would react to his, lines of light around your opposite wrists. 

To think you'd worried about touching him. You could never imagine how beautifully careful he is, how tender. You didn't know men were like this until Steve showed you, his niceness apparently bone deep and in everything he does. 

"If people are being jerks, you have to tell me." You never imagined how casual and vulgar he'd be either. "What's the point in being a princess if people don't respect you?" 

"I'm not a princess," you say. Your heart is a hummingbird as he turns his hand and strokes your cheeks with the backs of his fingers. 

"You will be. Nothing can change that. You're going to be a princess, and you can do as much or as little as you want, because those dorks left me in charge and I say so. I can decree it, if that makes you feel better," he says, dropping his hand, the phantom of it lingering like static shock. 

"What if I'm not meant for this?" you ask quietly, shy but terrified enough to ask. 

"I was meant for you," he says, tone matching yours in timidity. His sleeves rolled up as they are, you can see the soft light of his soul mark taking a pink hue. "Right?" 

Your soul mark glows a gentle pink to match his. Because you and Steve don't know one another well, not yet, but the feeling is there, thrumming under the skin like a pulse. Not love, not not love, a glowing desire. A want to know him.

There have been moments where you wished he wasn't a Prince, but then there's no guarantee you ever would have met. 

"Right," you mouth, offering him a small smile. 

"We were meant to be together…" Steve bends at the waist, meeting your eyes. He's yet to kiss you in the week since you met, but his touches come braver everyday, the unfamiliarity between you melding into butterflies. His smirk shakes them awake. "So let's be together the way we want to. Think of princess-ing as optional." 

"And you as mandatory?"

"I'm also optional," he says with a warm laugh. "But dinner is not. I need to know what you like, if we're going to get married."

You practically gulp. Right. You're going to be his soulmate, his princess, and his wife. 

"Don't be scared. I'm not cooking it, chef Joyce is." Steve brushes hair from his eyes like a model from the giant holo screens, unaware of his own attractiveness. "I'm a shitty cook. My talents lie in other things," he drawls grandly, "like lacrosse, and neck massages." 

He winks. You laugh genuinely for the first time since you met him, and his face splits with glee.  

—

if you want to request anything for this AU please do! steampunk princess soulmate and her smitten prince is my new fave thing

[gallusrostromegalus]

You can lay blame for this second ask at @hoifne 's feet, I saw their comment on the post and had to:

How did folks react to the moon landing?

"You're ready? No Big Regrets?" Renji asks. He always asks. He'd done hundreds of Konso rituals now that he was doing his mandatory tour of duty in the living world, but he never wants them to feel 'routine', so he talks to the ghosts. Hypes them up a bit for the afterlife, tries to keep his heart in it.

Especially when it's a kid.

"Well, it's not really a big deal..." The ghost Suichi considers. He was maybe ten or eleven years old. Thick prescription glasses, face round with puppy fat, very loved. Love won't stop a freak electrical accident though. Young Suichi is handling his sudden departure really well, all things considered, so maybe love does stop despair. "-but its a bit of a shame that if there's no TV in the afterlife, I won't be able to watch the moon landing."

"Yeah, we're a bit behind the times, but I'm sure one of the mad geniuses in the 12th will invent one sooner than late-" Renji grins ruffling the boy's hair before the rest of the sentence registers. "-The What Landing?"

"The Moon Landing!" Suichi lights up with excitement. "They just launched the rocket yesterday! But in just three days, man will walk on the moon!"

"...The Moon?" Renji blinks, bewildered.

"Yeah!"

Renji points up over his shoulder into the sky, gripping the boy's shoulder, eyes wide. "THE MOON IN THE FUCKING SKY?"

---

The lights of the Fifth division offices reflect blankly off of Captain Aizen's glasses as he attempts to process the news. He is entirely still, save for his eyebrows which are writhing like overcaffienated caterpillars, unable to settle on an emotion to convey.

"The Moon?" Lieutenant Ichimaru squints at Renji even harder than usual, pointing up out the window behind him. "The Moon in the fucking sky?"

"Yeah!" Renji spread his hands. "I didn't believe it either but the humans have managed to work out some neat trick with the way the world turns to like, throw the spaceship like a slingshot..?" he tried to explain.

"So, so there's three guys in a boat-" Captain Aizen tried again, reaching up under his glasses to rub the bridge of his nose.

"It's really more like a sealed metal tube, but they call it a Space Ship because it does sorta sail through space..." Renji tried to explain, holding up the newspaper from the living world he'd brought back to substantiate his claims and also provide helpful images to explain what was happening.

"So there's three guys in a metal tube and they... threw it into the sky so hard that instead of falling it started flying instead?" Aizen tried. "How do they even throw something that hard without Kido?"

"So the men are up in this little itty bitty bit at the top that looks like a cap on a vaccine needle-" Renji pointed at the image of the Apollo 11 rocket. "-All the rest of this is the uh. enormous amount of extremely coordinated high explosives they used to launch it. The. The whole thing is like... It's a little over three hundred fifty shaku and only 12 shaku of that is where the humans are. The rest is um. Air they smooshed so hard it became liquid and then they set that on fire and look at the picture you can see the kaboom!" Renji tried to explain, pushing the paper across Aizen's desk for his captain to read.

Aizen certainly pointed his face at the image and accompanying article, but 'read' may have been a bit beyond him at the moment.

"Oh, is that all it took?" Ichimaru hummed with interest. "Well fuck, why haven't we done that?"

"Oh yes, how very silly that the humans have beaten us at the trifling matter of FLINGING OURSELVES INTO SPACE, WHAT THE *HELL* ARE YOU TALKING ABOUT ICHIMARU??" Aizen objected.

"Well like. Idea's sound. Moon goes around the earth, so a smaller thing should too. And we can absolutely make a sealed metal container and kaboom bigger than that." Gin shrugged, as though this were plainly obvious. "Betchya the clown that runs the twelfth has the stuff laying around- we got a meeting with him later today anyway, why not ask?"

"Oh sure, that's a great Idea!" Aizen beamed. "Why hello Kurotsuchi-taicho, curious news from the human world- do you think you could spare a few parts and several tons of explosives to send some guys for a stroll on the moon?"

There was a moment of silence where Renji and Gin shared an awkward glance (or at least, Renji gave meaningful look to the narrow slits where his lieutenant-commander's eyes theoretically were).

"...he'd agree to that in a heartbeat, if he hasn't started work on his own Spaceboat already." Aizen groaned.

---

"No." Grunted Mayuri.

"No? Why not?" Aizen asked, head cocked to the side like a confused spaniel.

"Look, what the old man doesn't know about budget expenditures won't hurt him!" Gin smiled encouragingly. "Think of all the scientific data you'd get to research!"

"What the old man finds out about budget expenditures after the fact can and will hurt me." Mayuri growled. "It's not cookie money, kitting an expedition to the living world to engineer a spaceship with atomic matter instead of Reishi- No, much more efficient to let the humans do it for us and poach the date from them."

"...Why would we need to go to the Living world?" Aizen blinked, confused. "I can see the moon from the window right here?" Aizen pointed out the window of Kurotsuchi's office.

"What? That moon? You can't go to that moon!" The clownish chemical engineer cackled."

Aizen and Ichimaru stared at him blankly.

"Is. Is the moon here different than the one in the living world?" Aizen asked, bewildered.

"Different? It doesn't exist!" Mayuri laughed, waving his hand at them.

Aizen and Ichimaru stared at him, then leaned back in their seats, looking out the window at the moon, which still looked as physical and present as it ever did.

"...Oh don't tell me you didn't know." Mayuri frowned, pouting. "No, spirit world doesn't have a moon. The thing up in the sky is a Tulpa- there's a "moon" because everyone who comes to spirit world thinks there should be one, and there's so much ambient spiritual energy even weak souls can exert some force on the nature of reality and when millions of them are all certain there should be a moon, a moon manifests. Or at least, a thing that looks like a moon. Doesn't act like one, changes size and skips around it's phases all the time and if it really were a round object in space, that's NOT what a crescent moon would look like."

Aizen and Ichimaru looked back out the window at the "Moon", whose crescent arced a full three quarters of the alleged satellite's circumference.

"Seriously? this is some really basic stuff." Mayuri glared at them in disappointment. "You never noticed that the moon is always visible out any random window at night, no matter what time it is? It doesn't even go east-to-west more than half the time!"

"But. But we have a lunar calendar..?" Aizen muttered, an edge of genuine distress in his voice.

"Oh yeah, the moon *used* to be regular as clockwork- everyone literally set their watches to it." Mayuri shrugged. "Then sometime about eh, two and a half, three thousand years ago? Right around the same time the first captain-class spirits started appearing, the moon started doing this 'Full Moon Thrice A Month If it Feels Like It' and 'Visible At Improbable Angles' nonsense."

Aizen's eyes were wide and Gin's very nearly open with alarm.

"That's uh- that's terrifying?" Aizen sputtered, now outright frightened.

"Yeah, anybody know what coulda caused that?" Gin muttered.

"The going theory is that the precipitation of a new class of spiritually hyperpotent souls like us has caused disproportionate tugs on the desired appearence of the the "Moon", but that's only a theory- my predecessor's predecessor once attempted to send a camera to the 'Moon' for a closer look, but it never actually *got* any closer." Mayuri explained, casually inspecting his fingernails- he seemed to be growing out the middle one for some godforsaken reason. "-Your theoretical starboat would likely far worse."

"...Okay but that's worse. You understand how that's worse, right?" Aizen demanded and Mayuri waved him off.

"No, no hit makes sense-" Gin nodded, and Aizen glared at his lieutenant. "Think about it! There's what, three and a half billion human on earth? Millions die every day, but only a couple hundred ever turn up every day at the intake queue in the 7th, and nearly everyone is from just the one part of Japan. We're one afterlife of many- ugh, could you imagine if the missionaries were sent here?- anyway, our world is nowhere NEAR as big at the Living World, so the moon-moon is just a geographical feature in the living world, and there's only a couple million people living here. We got disproportionate swing, so we pull on the collective conciousness more. It's fine!"

"That's AWFUL!" Aizen shouted, dismayed.

"I mean I think we all understand God is an Asshole, but what are you gonna do about it?" Mayuri shrugged before tapping on the crate beside his desk. "-Anyway, do you want these Polio Vaccines for the rukongai outreach program our not?"

"I- yes. Please." Aizen muttered.

"Good man, sign here." Mayuri tapped the sheet on his desk. As Aizen tried to read over the provisions release paperwork, the small "Electronic Mailer" on Mayuri's desk pinged. "Oh, the word got out- Kyoraku-taicho wants to hold another moon-viewing party for the occasion. Do me a favor and attend so you can explain to him why we can't go to our 'moon' for me? I don't want to go, and I really don't want to explain it to him through a hangover either."

"If you don't wanna go Boss I'll stand in for you. Promises to be a real riot." Gin grinned.

"Yes, you have your young friend, don't you? Miss Matsumoto?" Aizen smiled fondly at his second-in-command.

"Oh, she probably already got her invite- she an' Miss Nan- er, lieutenant Ise are real pals from the academy." Gin laughed. "Nah, I was gonna drag old blind bones along."

"...Captain Tousen?" Aizen asked, befuddled. "Whatever for?"

"Stars ain't exactly braille, y'know?" Gin explained, wiggling his fingers. "He knows even less than we do an' I wanna watch Rangiku and Kyoraku try'n 'splain the whole thing to him." Gin grinned.

"Sounds lovely! Take your shit and get out of my office." Mayuri threatened.

---

Renji exhaled, still bewildered, laying on his back on the grassy hill just outside the 2nd division training grounds, staring up at the moon as it rose opposite the sunset behind him. Or, maybe not? There had been some lecture about how the moon in spirit world wasn't a moon back at the academy that he didn't really remember-

"You sound like you're in the throes of a moral conundrum Red." Shuuhei teased, looking up from the strange contraption he was setting up.

"Huh?" Renji blinked. "Oh, no I'm just- Those guys in the Spaceship gotta be somethin' else, going to die thousands of miles from home."

"What? The Astronauts? They'll be fine! -Probably." Shuuhei laughed. "They're definitely insane, getting in that contraption at all, but they still gotta come home with all the rocks and whatever they get from the moon for the lab techs to look at."

"...How the hell are they getting back?" Renji frowned, rolling up onto his elbow to frown at his senpai. "I thought they blew up all the rocket getting off the planet?"

"They got a bitty rocket in the lunar landing craft that will get them between their ship and the lunar surface, and then they will angle the ship a bit and the moon will fling them back to earth the way earth flung them at the moon." Shuuei explained, not looking up from the weird bass-drum looking object he was messing with.

Renji opened his mouth, realized his friend probably understood it way better than he did, closed his mouth, shrugged, and changed topics. "So what is that thing you had me haul up here?"

"It's uhhh... Experimental. Haven't got a name for it yet." Shuuhei muttered, placing a level on top of it and frowning at the bubble before adjusting the legs bolted awkwardly to the side of the drum. "-But with all this excitement about the Lunar Landing, I realized Tousen-Taicho is... I mean he gets left out of a lotta stuff, y'know? But it's not like he can see the stars, or the spirit-moon, and I don't think he really understands orbital mechanics-"

"I sure fuckin' don't." Renji muttered.

"Yeah, because you're the kind of moron who put a ham sandwich in a VCR-" Shuuhei rolled his eyes.

"That was ONE TIME, and Matsumoto Senpai told me it was a Panini Press!" Renji sulked.

"-and then pressed "Fast Forward", but Tousen is actually smart as hell- I'm the one who can't explain it without gestures he can't see." Shuuhei continued. "...but I can use a camera obscura and reiryoku-sensitive film to sort of take an old exposure image of the night sky. I'm hoping that if I treat the exposed film right, that the light and dark parts will turn into different textures for him to read, like a braille sky."

"Oh." Renji muttered. "That's really nice of you actually."

"I mean, we'll see if it works." Shuuhei shugged, examining the level again. "Hand me the allen wrenches- What about your boss?"

"Captain Aizen? Uh- honestly? He seems a little freaked out by all this and I saw him fuckin' slam the newspaper into his wastebasket when he got back from the twelth." Renji winced. "He's weird like that. Sweet as cake most of the time but then there's these weird flashes of anger... and I'm not sure how much longer he's gonna be my boss."

"As in you got ambitions, or you think he's gonna get fired?" Shuuhei asked, staring at the level again.

"As in 'Tetsuzaemon Iba got in another brawl with his mother about him only being fourth seat when she made captain, and Liuetenant Madarame asked me if I'd updated my resume recently." Renji winced.

"Woof. Talk about a lateral promotion." Shuuhei winced. "Still, the pay raise would be nice. You could afford to take your girl Rukia somewhere up to her brother's standards!"

"IT'S NOT LIKE THAT!" Renji snapped, rolling over and jumping to his feet. "-It's -I'm sorry. It's kinda complicated." Renji sighed.

Shuuhei was silent for a minute as Renji sat back down on the grass, face in his hands. After a minute of fine-tuning the drum to keep it level, he spoke up. "You're more than good enough."

"Huh?" Renji jolted. "Oh, yeah- I'd be doing all the eleventh's paperwork but there's no way it's worse than the fucking rice subsidies accounting board-"

"That's not what I meant." Shuuhei glared.

"...I know." Renji groaned. "It's just. It's complicated, okay?"

"If you say so." Shuuhei shrugged. "Alright, hand me the flat box- thanks. It'll be ready for exposure in a minute, and I want to get it done before those clouds roll in." He gestured at the distant thunderheads threatening to bloom into a summer storm on the edge of the city.

The process was quick- the shielded plate went into the gap under the drum, and the light of the night sky was reflected onto it from a pinhole in the top. Once the metal plates were pulled back, it needed a few minutes to pick up enough light, before Shuuhei pushed the metal shutters back in and locked the plate in darkness until it could be developed.

"It's for taking pictures of the stars, right?" Renji asked as Shuuhei started disassembling the camera. "You could call that plate an Astrograph."

"Hah! Futuristic. I like it!" Shuuhei grinned. "C'mon and help me with this thing before the punishment squad turns up to kick my ass for having a camera within a mile of the second."

[ssentimentals]

seventeen members as love tropes: xu minghao

enemies to lovers

'you're not mine but wouldn't you want to be?'

minghao tries is hardest to stay calm but all these higher ups are making it really hard. he turns to look at you and the sight of your hunched back and bitten raw lips makes him boil. are you two friends? no, far from it. minghao is very aware of the whole 'enemies' agenda that is happening between you both, but does he want to see you like this? nervous, agitated, scared? no. fucking hell, no. he wants to see you burning with passion, wants to see that fire in your eyes whenever you two argue - minghao feels like he's been punched in the chest when he realizes that he's ready to kill just for you to not look this scared.

'can we wrap this up?' he voices out loud, not bothering to hide his annoyance. 'i don't see any point in this.'

'it'd be wise for you to be more polite and remember who you are talking to, xu minghao.'

he sees how you cringe at this, how your hands ball up into fists at the way that man spoke to him. understanding that you are angered on his behalf warms minghao up; it feels incredibly nice to know that you care. he keeps his mouth shut, lets managers drag on about the issue and takes two step in your direction, stopping when your shoulders brush. you tense up at first, sending him a questioning glance but he only stays put to which you reply with a rejected sigh. they lecture him and then start lecturing you and minghao can't just stand still when you're obviously fuming. they are being rude to you and the words are out of his mouth before he can think them through: 'don't talk to her like that.' your sharp intake of breath kind of wakes him up and he stares ahead at all the managers, who all look shell shocked.

'you have no right to talk to her like that.' minghao pushes in a clipped tone. 'she did her best and so did i, our timing got fucked up but it's not our fault. don't speak to her in that tone.'

shortly after you get pulled away by other people and minghao is in for another 30 minutes of lecturing. by the time he finally gets out of that stuffy room, he feels like he wasted ten years of his life on nothing. he sighs, stretches and is about to turn when soft steps stop him. he knows it's you even before you call out his name.

'why did you do that?' you ask, squinting at him. 'why the sudden hero act?'

'it wasn't an act,' he says, rolling his eyes. god, he's so tired. 'but you're welcome.'

'i haven't asked for it,' you spit out, obviously angered. 'i don't need your pity.'

minghao turns around, raising his eyebrow. 'i have never pitied you,' he says strongly, feeling himself getting worked up again as some stupid side effect on you being close. 'can't you just say 'thank you' and move on?'

'i don't need your help!' you hiss. 'i haven't asked for it!'

and - only you can make minghao want to both bang his head on the wall from frustration and laugh like a maniac. he sometimes wants to step closer, pull you into his arms and... he doesn't know. part of him wants to strangle you for being so damn difficult all the fucking time, but another part wants to smash your mouths together so you can finally shut up. minghao is aware of how unhealthy it is just as he is aware of how often your gaze falls on his lips or his biceps. it's good to know he's not the only one who's gone mad. they say it's a fine line between hatred and love and for minghao right now this line is so thin that he barely see it anymore. is it the same for you? he wants to ask, but instead he says: 'why you didn't stop me then? you always could just interrupt me over there but you didn't say a thing. if you don't need my help why i was the one who you turned to when authorities came? you didn't say anything but you searched for me with your eyes, don't even try to deny it.'

five steps. that's the distance that separates you two and minghao thinks it's fitting. he can take two and then you can take two and then maybe you'll play game of chicken on that last step. but you surprise him with taking all those five steps yourself, storming onto him with fire in your eyes that he loves so much. 'you're not the one to talk, minghao. you think i don't know that it was you who asked everyone to wait up for me? who brought medicine to my team when i fell sick?' you try to push him on his chest but minghao easily catches you wrist in his, not letting you move. 'let me go.'

'that's not what you want.' he says in a calm tone that doesn't show all the hurricane which's happening inside of him.

reality of how close you two are standing dawns on you. jerkily, you try to step back but his hold on you is too strong. 'let me go,' you whisper, voice wavering. 'hao, let me go.'

hao. 'that's not what you want,' minghao whispers and lets his other hand wrap around your waist, pulling you even closer to his chest. 'tell me what you really want, angel.' he sees how you shudder at the petname and smiles, leaning in. he lets go of your wrist, locking his arms around you instead. 'you can go if you want.' he leans in, brushing your noses together. 'or you can stay. and i can never, ever let you go. which i think is what you actually want.'

it's brave. it's bold, it's brazen and - it works. your body sags in his arms and you hide your face in his neck, hugging him back. 'prick,' you mutter into his neck, raising goosebumps where your lips touch his skin. 'self absorbed asshole.'

'yeah,' minghao easily agrees, hugging you tighter. 'prick, self absorbed asshole that i will never, ever let you go.'

a/n: this one is a bit vague but i couldn't figure out how to write this for the live of me. i hope this was okay? let me know! - nini

my seventeen works are here

my formula 1 works are here

[yoon-kooks]

the lingerie era | myg

🦋pairing: neighbor!yoongi x reader (f)

🦋genre: smut, fluff, f2l, neighbor!au, childhoodfriend!au, best friend’s older brother, lingeriemodel!reader

🦋summary: Sending Min Yoongi, aka your ridiculously hot neighbor/childhood friend, a photo of yourself in lingerie might be the best or stupidest mistake you’ve ever made.

🦋word count: 10.1k

🦋warnings: fingering, oral (m receiving), corruption kink, gagging, deepthroating...? rough sex w/protection, implied masturbation (m), light degradation, the way oc becomes a slut for his cock so quick, yoongi touches boobies, nipple play, dirty talk, yoongi teasing reader for 4263 years straight bc he's mean

a/n: this is the extended version of the airdrop incident! if you haven't read that drabble already, it's fine bc that scene is included in this one!💖

An onlooker might be wondering why you’re standing outside your neighbor’s door at ass o’clock in nothing but an oversized tee, but the answer is simple. Mistakes were made. You’re an idiot.

Approximately five minutes ago, you thought it’d be cute to send your best friend Mo a photo from your first day at your new job. But it wasn’t just any photo. It was a photo of you in strappy black lingerie, lying on beige silk sheets all glowy and oiled up. You’re gazing up into the camera lens like it’s the dark eyes of a man about to rail you. 

As weird as it sounds to be sending that kind of photo to your best friend, you’ve known her your entire life and she’s always been the number one supporter of your modeling career. In fact, she’s the one who bugged you for the pics in the first place.

You have no regrets for wanting to share the photo with your best friend. You just hate yourself for thinking it’d be fine to AirDrop it since she lives right next door. In your defense, your company is paying for your work phone—the new iPhone—and you were eager to play around with all the random features you won’t otherwise be using. Besides, AirDrop has a small range and Mo is your neighbor, so it was the perfect opportunity to test it out. In theory, she would’ve received the photo no problem—if she were actually home.

But Mo wasn’t home. You’d realized that too late after the AirDrop had gone through to someone else. Mortified is an understatement of how you felt when she sent a text saying, “GIRL;;;; I’m at Namjoon’s place rn;;;; I  am NOT in AirDrop range🥲”

For a good two minutes, you were convinced it must’ve been some creepy stalker who’d accepted your AirDrop… or the sweet elderly lady who lives across the street and occasionally drops off a tray of baked goods. You could totally see her accidentally accepting the AirDrop, only to be blindsided and violated by that photo of you. There’s no way in hell you’ll be able to return her sparkly red reindeer platter from her last cookie delivery. Not after she’s seen you like that.

But then an even darker thought came to mind. And you’d take creepy stalker or innocent granny over that any day.

That’s how you ended up on your neighbor’s doorstep at ass o’clock.

After letting you stand out in the cold for a whole ass minute, he finally answers the door. “He” as in Min Yoongi, your childhood friend slash nemesis, the older brother of your best friend, or, in the simplest terms, your hot neighbor.

And when you say “hot,” you mean really hot. Your innocent little crush on him was cute when you were ten, but the admiration has since evolved into pure lust. You’ve admittedly thought about him in ways you should not be thinking about a childhood friend let alone your best friend’s brother. 

Whenever you catch a glimpse of his big hands, you wish they were on your body, you wish his long veiny fingers would curl inside you, and the tiniest part of you wishes he wasn’t someone you had a long history with. You always feel like you have to be on your toes around him because of that history. Because you know it can all fall apart with one wrong move—like accidentally sending him a suggestive lingerie photo. Oops.

“Yes?” he raises a brow, staring at the way you’re shivering outside his door, the way your perky nipples are most definitely poking through your shirt. You’re sure he sees it all. But given the fact that he’s practically seen you naked, you don’t even bother covering up. What’s the point?

“Did you, by chance, get an AirDrop like five minutes ago?” you get straight to the point. It’s fucking freezing, after all. He could’ve at least asked you to come inside for a sec. You would’ve declined to avoid the risk of temptation, but still.

“Depends,” he hums, eyes still very much on your chest. The boy has no shame apparently. You’re pretty sure he’s dating that pretty brunette you’ve seen sneaking in and out of his house lately, so why’s he looking at you like that? “What was the AirDrop?”

“A picture of me,” you mumble. It was freezing a minute ago, but now your face feels hot. That’s weird.

“Hmm, not sure if the one I’m thinking of is you or not.” The bastard puts on his most exaggerated thinking face—like that emoji with the hand on his chin. You hate him. “What were you wearing?”

“Nothing!” you squeak at him. Both of you know no one fucking uses AirDrop except old people. He’s obviously playing dumb and knows what’s going on. He just wants to hear it from your mouth to make his ego bigger than it already is. “You know what I’m talking about.”

“Pretty sure you were wearing something…” he furrows his brow, unlocking his phone to “confirm” what he saw. You snatch the phone out of his hand, but he seems to remember the contents of the photo just fine. “Ah, yes. Black strappy lingerie, right? I didn’t know you were like that, Y/N.”

“Fuck you,” you hiss as you scroll through and search for the picture in question. AirDrop must have its own stupid section on the phone because you can’t find it anywhere.

“Relax, I already deleted it,” he chuckles at how determined you are. You’re not falling for it. Surely he’s already leaked the photo on OnlyFans. You don’t have a whole lot of faith in Min Yoongi. He’s never been The Nice Guy. “Who were you trying to send it to?”

“None of your business.” He has a girlfriend, after all. Why should he care about who you’re sending those kinds of pictures to?

“My sister?”

“Fine. Yes, her.”

“You’re sneaking around sending nudes to my sister? On AirDrop?” he narrows his eyes. Why does he seem more disgusted at the AirDrop part? You’d laugh if you weren’t so stressed. “She’s in a very committed relationship, you know.”

“I’m aware.” You don’t know what’s worse—him thinking you’re hitting on his sister aka your best friend, or admitting the pic was from a photoshoot for your new job. There are no winners here. Might as well come clean. “She’s the one who asked for pics so she could fangirl over her lingerie model best friend.”

“My little Y/N grew up and became a lingerie model?” He tilts his head, intrigued. He might’ve deleted the pic from his phone, but you bet the image is forever ingrained in that fuckboy head of his. You wonder how his girlfriend feels about him thinking of other girls in that context. You’d feel shitty. He’s a horrible boyfriend. “In that case, I’d also like to show support. Mind if you send the pic ag—” 

You cut him off with a growl. His eyes slowly work their way up your bare legs to your chest to your death glare.

“I kid, I kid.” He waves his hands like a white flag so you don’t pounce on him. But then something occurs to him. His smug look turns into a frown. “Wait, so AirDropping it to me wasn’t ‘an accident’?” he asks with air quotes.

“No, it was a real accident, Yoongi,” you scoff. You can’t believe he thought you’d intentionally sent that pic to him. He’s so full of himself. He’s the last person you’d ever want to see those pics.

“Well that’s no fun.”

“Elaborate.”

“It would’ve been kinda cute if you did it to get my attention,” he shrugs, leaning his head against the doorframe. “Just like when we were younger. Remember how you’d always tug on my arm and pout until I acknowledged you?”

“No, but it’s kinda weird that you remember it.” You finally cross your arms in front of your chest. “It’s also kinda weird that you want my attention when that’s what your girlfriend is there for.”

“It’s kinda weird that you keep up with my love life and know I have a girlfriend,” he fires back at you in his usual arrogant tone. “I’m breaking up with her, by the way. Just in case you wanted to know.”

You pause the petty war for a second. Min Yoongi is breaking up with his girlfriend because you accidentally sent him one (1) risqué photo of yourself? To be fair, you do look pretty hot in that photo. But still! You’ve known the guy your whole life, and all it’s ever amounted to was banter with a hint of feelings and dirty thoughts on your end. You’d always assumed Yoongi thought of you as nothing more than his little sister’s friend. Surely he’s just toying with you right now. Because that’s what fuckboys do. 

That’s what Min Yoongis do.

“Good to know,” you nod, the cold breeze coming back. You better leave now before you do something stupid again. Stupid AirDrop. “Well, I’m gonna go now. It’s fucking cold.”

You drop his phone into his palm, your fingers grazing his in the process. They’re so warm. But your fluffy blanket is warmer. And it’d never betray you.

“Thanks for only being a slight dick about the pic,” you say, scurrying off to your doorstep.

“Anytime,” he smirks. Asshole. “I’ll AirDrop you later.”

“I don’t want your dick pics, sir.” You hear his laugh before closing the door.

A minute later, you get an AirDrop of what you hope is not in fact a dick pic. You accept it immediately. It’s a blurry selfie of him on his bed, flipping you off with an emphasis on how much extra mattress space he has. That has to be the quickest breakup of all time. They don’t call him a fuckboy for nothing.

He accompanies the selfie with a simple text:

Yoongi🗿 [2:03AM] “Your loss”

The rest of the night is spent staring at the extra space next to him on his bed. He’s taunting you. Teasing you. Tempting you to do something you’ll surely regret. Well, you’re not taking the bait. The accidental AirDrop was an honest mistake, but this one would be all on you. Because you understand the risks.

It’s best to keep things how they are between you two.

After a night of tossing and turning, your week somehow gets worse. Your car decides to malfunction fifteen minutes before you’re supposed to be at work. You swear it was working perfectly yesterday. Then again, you don’t know shit about cars.

Your first instinct is to call Mo. You like to think of yourself as a prepared person, but shit happens. And when shit happens, Mo is your person—your one phone-a-friend. But you know she’s with Namjoon, and you know she’d drop everything including him for you—you’d do the same for her. You’d rather not be a cockblock when things are going so well for them.

Alternatively, you would’ve borrowed your parents’ car, but they moved into a nicer place a few years ago and reluctantly left you behind after a lot of convincing on your end. You can handle yourself, you told them. And it was going great—until The AirDrop Incident happened and your car refused to start up for no fucking reason. 

Uber and public transportation are other options, but you don’t have time to wait for those rides to arrive. You need to leave in the next 30 seconds or risk being late. Your new job is on the line here.

And that’s why you find yourself, once again, at Min Yoongi’s doorstep. You hate it here.

He opens the door and blinks his heavy lids at you several times before saying anything. Poor boy. The morning sun is too bright for him, like a cat waking up from its first nap of the day. And yet, he still manages to look so attractive with that messy hair and furrowed brow. You bet the raspiness in his voice is even more seductive in the morning. It is.

“Are we really doing this again?” he asks, pointing his finger back and forth between you and him. At least he’s awake enough to realize shit like this shouldn’t be happening two days in a row. You’re sick of it too.

“I need to be at a shoot in like ten minutes, and my car is fucked up right now, so…” You wish the boy would finish the sentence for you, but he’s just standing there like a smug ass. You’d shove him over, but you’re going to be late and he’s your only option. So you swallow your pride, just this once. “Do you think you can give me a ride?”

He makes some sort of grunt and says, “I’ll be out in a sec,” before shutting the door in your face. You’ll take that over the teasing you were expecting. Must be too early for the banter.

As soon as you get into his car, you realize you were horribly wrong. The false sense of security got you good. Apparently, it’s never too early for banter.

“What would you do without me, hm?” he asks, looking more awake and alive than ever before. Glowing, even. You knew it. He gets a kick out of you needing his help. He’s always been like this. One time when you were seven, your dumb ass climbed up a tree and got stuck up there like a cat. He’d only helped you down after you begged him for ten minutes straight. And although he stood right below you to break your fall in the unlikely event that you slipped, he also had a big fat smile on his face the entire time. He’s the worst.

“I’d manage.”

“I’m sure you would, Y/N.” He doesn’t sound very convinced. Kind of like your parents before they agreed to trust you on your own. “So, what’s this about lingerie and modeling?”

“Got a problem with it?” you challenge him. The very reason you haven’t told anyone else about your job aside from your best friend is that fear of judgment. As far as your parents know, you do modeling for a trendy clothing brand (you do). They just don’t know about your side hustle. You’re sure a guy like Yoongi has no problem with it, though. In fact, last night he sounded awfully eager to support your new job because it just so happens to center around two of his favorite things—tits and ass.

“Not at all,” he hums. “Just curious how it happened.”

“My ex had connections to the company,” you say.

“And you dumped him after he got you a job?” He raises his brow and laughs. What’s he so amused about? “Kind of savage, Y/N.”

“Actually, he broke up with me,” you correct him. How dare he assume you’re the savage one.

“Why would he do that?” he asks, as if it’s not normal for people to break up. Maybe it’s just his protective gene kicking in. He was the same way when he heard about your first breakup years ago.

“He said I wasn’t giving him enough,” you shrug. You’re honestly not too upset about it. It’s not like you had enough time to get attached to him anyway.

“Giving him enough what? Head?”

You glare at the boy even though you really want to laugh. He’s not entirely wrong.

“Sorry.” He does a quick glance at you as he turns the corner. Still smiling, though. “Well, if I had to guess, it had something to do with you playing hard to get.”

“I do not play hard to get,” you say with a firm hmph. 

“You’re certainly not making it easy now,” he frowns. Okay, maybe he has a point. But in your defense, the trait rubbed off on you from Yoongi himself. You spent your entire childhood chasing after him and wound up with nothing. You worked your ass off for any sort of reciprocated feelings from him, only for him to continue to treat you like an annoying child as you both grew older. 

By the time college came around, you were tired of doing all the chasing and thought you’d finally outgrown that neediness for him. You told yourself it was better that way, to keep him as nothing more than a bittersweet childhood memory. And you moved on. For once, you just wanted to be desired and admired by someone as deeply as you’d felt for Yoongi.

And when you think about it, all of your past relationships might have relied too much on the thrill of the chase. You never thought about what came after. You never envisioned a future beyond the chase. That’s why those relationships were so quick to fizzle out. You didn’t give them a reason to stick around. 

You didn’t give them enough.

Yoongi unlocks the doors as he pulls up in front of the building for the shoot. You unbuckle your seatbelt and thank him on the way out like he’s your Uber driver.

But then he goes off script. “When should I pick you up?”

You weren’t expecting a ride home. After your car died on you, you’d immediately changed from your cute ankle boots into sneakers in preparation for the long walk home after work. In fact, you would’ve opted to walk to work too if you had enough time. Like you said before, you can handle yourself just fine. Ever since you found your footing as a model and started living alone, you’ve stopped relying on anyone else.

“No need. I’ll walk home,” you gently decline, kicking your white sneakers up for him to see. 

Still, you can’t pretend like it doesn’t feel nice that the boy offered you another ride. It’s a subtle gesture, but it lets you know he’s watching out for you. There’s at least one person you can count on, even when your best friend and family aren’t around. And that’s already more than you could ever ask for.

“We can grab dinner after,” he suggests, leaning his arms against the steering wheel. You know exactly what he’s doing—playing to your weakness and bribing you with food. Because that’s the one thing you rarely ever say no to. You’ve always been that way.

“Okay, sure. I’ll be done around six.” 

It’s fine. You’ll pay for his meal as thanks for the rides. Then you’re even. 

The first half of the shoot goes well. The lingerie they’ve picked out for you is super pretty, and the assistant said you get to keep your favorite set after the day wraps up. Right now, you’re feeling pretty fucking good despite the stressful night and morning you had. 

During your lunch break, you find some shameless texts waiting for you.

Yoongi🗿 [10:34AM] “My friend would like you to send pics of your wardrobe😌”

Yoongi🗿 [10:34AM] “For science”

For science. Your smile flattens just a little. You get that he’s just teasing you, but part of you really wonders if he’s only paying this much attention to you because of your job and the picture you’d AirDropped to him. All you are to him is a hot body to look at. That’s the only reason he broke up with his girlfriend, isn’t it? 

If you hadn’t been a dumbass and sent him that photo, he would’ve simply dropped you off at work like the silent Uber driver he was supposed to be. And that would’ve been the end of it. There wouldn’t have been a “let’s get dinner after” or a “send pics of your skimpy lingerie.”

And yet, this is exactly what you’d been yearning for since age five—his attention.

If you really wanted to, you could play along and send him a teaser of the lingerie you decided to take home—a polka-dot mesh set that is very seethrough. You could even drop it in his lap when he picks you up later and tell him it’s a souvenir. That’d get his attention for sure. 

But you’re not going to do that. Obviously. Instead, you send him a boring pic of a rack with empty hangers. Because that’s playing it safe.

Yoongi🗿 [12:58PM] “Going nude today?”

Yoongi🗿 [12:58PM] “Or are those micro thongs getting smaller?🧐”

Yoongi🗿 [12:59PM] “Hello”

You wheeze. He’s lucky you’ve known him since birth. If it were any other guy, you’d ghost him for saying shit like that. Then again, he’s only saying it because he knows he can get away with it with you. 

Y/N🐣 [1:00PM] “i have to get back to work now🫡”

When you finally reach the homestretch of the shoot, you’re tired and more than a little hungry. It’s been a long day, but you want to finish strong before indulging in a nice dinner with you-know-who. You decided you want to take him to your favorite new sushi spot. Not because you know he loves sushi but because it’s what you happen to be craving today.

While sitting down on the fluffiest rug your ass has ever felt, you model a pretty white set with lots of ties like a bikini. Just a few more photos to go, and then you can get your sushi with your Uber driver. But then your starved brain starts to fuck with you.

Just off to the side behind the camera, you see a shadow that looks a lot like Yoongi. You know it’s not actually him, though. It’s just a hallucination spawning from your cravings. Your cravings for sushi, you clarify to yourself.

Then the shadow crosses his arms and smirks as you get on your knees and press an innocent finger to your bottom lip like you’re just asking for your mouth to be filled. As soon as the camera captures a few shots, your eyes dart back to check on the shadow. He gives you a thumbs up.

That’s not a shadow.

Suddenly, your cheeks are hot and your chest is pounding. He’s not supposed to be here. How are you supposed to focus when you know your childhood friend is watching? You have all these eyes on your body as it is, but he’s the only one that really gets you flustered. More flustered than your first day on the job here.

“Can we redo that shot one more time, please?” the photographer asks. “Relax your shoulders a bit, honey.”

You drop your shoulders, but that’s not going to hide the way your heart is practically pounding out of your chest that you know he’s got his eyes glued to.

“Actually, can I take a quick water break?” You shoot up from the rug, take a long sip of water, grab your thin little robe, and drag your unwanted visitor off to the side.

“Hi to you, too,” he says, glancing down at the way your fingers wrap around his wrist.

“What are you doing here?” Your shaky tone screams of unease. When he said he’d pick you up, you weren’t expecting him to actually go in like a parent picking up their kid from school. He was supposed to stay put in his car where you’d meet him after work. That was the plan. Not this.

He studies your face as if he’s debating whether or not you’re being serious right now, as if he expected you to be happy to see him. After building up the anticipation for several seconds more, he has the audacity to say, “Just here to show my support for my lingerie model neighbor.”

Why did you even bother asking? You should’ve known. He just confirmed what you’d hoped wasn’t true. He’s only paying any attention to you because of that dirty image you ingrained in his head with that dumb AirDrop.

And to be honest, you’re kind of over it. Maybe it’s just your empty stomach raging, but he should know that this is crossing the line. He’s your neighbor for crying out loud. He’d seen you lose your two front teeth, gone trick-or-treating with you, witnessed your awkward teen phase, and all that other wholesome childhood shit. Sure, he gave you a hard time every step of the way, but his presence in your life and the memories you made together were all you ever wanted to protect. 

That’s why you chose to stay behind when your parents moved away. You were fine with being away from your own family, and you were even fine when Mo started spending more time with Namjoon. But Yoongi has always been a different case.

You gave up on seeing him in a romantic way after realizing it just wasn’t realistic. If you’d let yourself feel that way any longer, he’d eventually have to reject you, and then that would be the end of it. And you’d much rather keep him in your life than risk it all with a dumb confession of unrequited love. He doesn’t love you, and you’re okay with that.

You just wish he wouldn’t make it so painfully obvious that it’s only your body that he’s after. Because that’s when it might be easier on your heart to cut ties with him.

“I work better when you’re not here.” You let go of his wrist and don’t look up from the red mark your tight grip left on his pale skin. You’re not going to let his charm sway you. He needs to leave. Nothing good can come out of him being here.

So he backs away and leaves.

As you tie your sneakers and refill your water bottle in preparation for the long walk home, you let out a big sigh. Looks like you won’t be getting your sushi fix tonight. Stupid AirDrop.

You wave bye to the crew and claim your free lingerie before stepping outside. To your surprise, it’s already dark out even though you thought the sun wasn’t supposed to set until seven. If you squint hard enough, you swear you can see Yoongi’s car parked in the lot. 

So you try not to squint.

But as soon as you walk past the car, your feet make a u-turn until you can see the boy leaning back in his seat, eyes closed and arms folded against his chest. You might still be upset, but you can’t deny how good-looking he is. It’s not fair. The only reason you stop staring is to avoid judgment from anyone passing by. And because you kind of need to talk to him.

You knock on the window on the passenger side.

He doesn’t even flinch.

You knock again. Still nothing. Either he’s dead, or he’s just fucking with you. He better not be fucking with you when you’re mad. Read the room, asshole.

Trying your best not to throw your phone at his window, you instead use it to call him. His phone screen blinds you as it flashes on in the darkness and vibrates against his thigh.

This time you catch the slightest twitch of his pretty pink lips. They’re glowing in the light of his phone screen.

You walk around to the driver’s side and get a better look at his glowy handsome face. “I know you’re awake.”

Now he has a full smile to accompany his closed eyelids, cosplaying as a happy corpse.

You roll your eyes at him and start walking in the opposite direction. “All good, I’ll just walk home.”

The doors unlock real quick. The corpse snaps out of his eternal slumber. “Hey, I was kidding,” he calls out the window. “Come back here.”

For the second time in the past three minutes, you make a u-turn toward his car. But this time, you hop in, hesitant to look him in the eye.

“I didn’t think you’d still be waiting here…” You bite your lip. You wish he weren’t still here. Then you wouldn’t be forced to talk about what happened earlier. It’d be much easier to not talk about your feelings.

“You agreed to grab dinner with me afterward, didn’t you?” He’s acting like you didn’t banish him from the building twenty minutes ago. He’s acting like you could’ve told him to never speak to you again and he’d still be waiting here because of some promise you’d both made earlier in the day. He would’ve been waiting here for you no matter what. 

Maybe you shouldn’t have gotten that upset. Time to go in over-two-decades-of-history-preservation mode.

“Yeah but… I kind of overreacted earlier. Then again, I don’t know how else I’m supposed to react when my neighbor sees me half-naked,” you say, shrinking in your seat. “I still meant what I said, though. I work a lot better when you’re not around because you make it hard to focus.”

You immediately regret admitting that last bit.

“It’s understandable that you get so flustered around me. Kind of cute, too,” he hums like he just won the lottery. Mother fucker. “But I should’ve just been honest with you earlier.”

“What do you mean?” You tilt your head like a lost puppy.

“Someone obviously hasn’t checked their phone in a while,” he chuckles, pointing to the pink phone resting atop the mesh lingerie in your bag. You grab your phone and shove the lingerie deeper into your bag until it’s out of his view. Hopefully, he didn’t notice.

Sure enough, you have more unread texts waiting for you beneath the thirsty ones from lunch.

Yoongi🗿 [6:29PM] “Is the shoot running late?”

Yoongi🗿 [6:29PM] “No rush btw. Just want to make sure you didn’t die in the bathroom or something haha”

Yoongi🗿 [7:01PM] “So should I be concerned or”

Yoongi🗿 [7:02PM] “Just to clarify, I don’t believe you’re deceased in the bathroom”

Yoongi🗿 [7:02PM] “But I am gonna go in and check lol”

Then you realize how late it is. It’s over an hour past the time you told Yoongi you’d be done. No wonder it’s fucking dark out.

Your whole mind is spinning, and you have a lot of questions. You turn to him, and the first thing you ask is, “You thought I died in the bathroom?”

“You were running late, not responding, and, well… I had to check,” he shrugs his shoulders. “I didn’t know the lady at the front desk was going to bring me right to the shoot.” So he had good intentions after all. He wasn’t just after your body—far from it, in fact. He was genuinely worried about you. 

Well, shit. Now you look like the asshole for telling him to fuck off after he thought to check up on you like a guardian angel. He should’ve just said so in the first place. But maybe it’s hard for him to admit that sort of thing, too. You can relate.

You still feel bad, though. Doubt had clouded your better judgment because of your own insecurities. You didn’t believe what he was doing for you was unconditional. But the truth is, he cares about you more than you know. He always has.

Was Yoongi completely and utterly crushed after you’d asked him to leave your photoshoot? Yes. But he wasn’t going to show that to you. After all, as far as you knew, he’d only dropped by to check you out in that pretty lingerie. That’s always been his biggest downfall. He’s never been fully honest with you. It’s understandable that you’d be frustrated with him.

You had every right to be mad at him for interfering with your work. You had every right to walk away right past his car after the shoot. And yet, you still chose to sit down beside him to salvage whatever it is between you and him. It’s always been complicated like this, but it’s worth all the petty bickering you guys do on a daily basis. Seeing you so flustered and cute makes it all worth it.

The last thing he wants is for you to slip through his fingers. Because a world without you would just be weird. And boring. And lonely.

And now you’re rambling on about sushi—his favorite food. You claim you’ve been craving it all day, but it’s not very convincing.

“Hey, the sushi place is the other way,” you frown as he turns left instead of right. “You’re the worst Uber driver ever. I’m leaving you a one-star review.”

“I thought you didn’t like sushi,” he points out, completely ignoring your Karen threat.

“Yeah, when I was like ten. I’m allowed to change what I like, aren’t I?” You make a good point. Maybe your taste buds have changed and you aren’t just catering to his preferences. But it’s in his nature to keep pushing your buttons, to keep getting a reaction out of you. That’s the one thing he knows will never change between you and him.

“You were cuter when you didn’t like sushi.”

“Fuck you.” You turn your head away from him and toward the window to hide your face. He can still see your reflection, though. For such harsh words, your expression is soft. 

It’s funny because that’s what Yoongi has always liked most about you. You’re a tough cookie—you know it, he knows it, everyone knows it—but the best cookies are the ones with soft centers. And he loves to devour and savor that soft side you only seem to show him.

About ten minutes later, he pulls up to a drive-thru you’ll surely recognize. He doesn’t go there often himself, but whenever he does, he’s reminded of those Halloween nights spent scaring the shit out of you before spending his allowance to buy you a kid’s meal with a dumb light-up pumpkin toy. He’s reminded of the time you broke up with your first boyfriend and needed someone to rant to over vanilla milkshakes and fries. He’s reminded of the past two decades the two of you shared together, no matter how silly or short-lived the moments were. He’s cherished all of it.

It might not be the sushi you’d hoped for, but your eyes light up when you see the fast food sign. You lean in closer to him to get a better look at the menu. Today you smell like fruit and—he goes in for another sniff by your neck, purely to identify the intoxicating scent you’re wearing—something floral. 

“Ooh, order me the nugget combo with an iced coffee,” you finally glance at him, mid-sniff, with the eyes of an angel. He knew you’d appreciate the fast food.

“You and your nuggets. What are you? A baby?” he chuckles before being greeted and prompted to order over the speaker. “Can we get a burger combo with iced coffee, one kid’s meal with nuggets and milk—” 

You give his shoulder a small shove. 

He smirks but otherwise continues on as if nothing happened, “—and a nugget combo with iced coffee.”

“So a total of two combos and one kid’s meal?” the employee double-checks.

“Actually—”

“Yeah,” he cuts you off and drives to the pick-up window before you could protest and cancel the kid’s meal order.

“Why do you need a kid’s meal?” you mumble as the employee hands off the big bag of food to Yoongi. You’re so cute when you’re pouty.

“It’s for you, obviously.” He pulls into a spot in the empty lot and takes a sip of his coffee.

“Why do you always treat me like a baby?” That’s the question you ask as you take the kid’s meal box from his hand and start snacking on the few nuggets it comes with.

Because you’re tiny and cute and need to be protected at all costs, he wants to say. Instead he goes with the safer option. “Because you’re my little sister’s friend.”

“But Mo’s rarely ever around anymore. I feel like I’m spending more time with you than her at this point.” That’s true. Her and Namjoon have basically become inseparable. That must suck at least a little for you. 

“I personally wouldn’t let that slide.” As much as Yoongi loves his sister and knows she’d do anything for you if you asked, he also knows you’re not the type to reach out unless you really need to. If Mo understood you the way he understands you, she’d know to check in with you, to send you the occasional random meme in case you’re having a bad day, and to remind you that you aren’t alone. 

But that’s where he comes in. 

“It’s fine, I’m happy for her and Namjoon. Last I heard, she’s waiting for the proposal.” You set down the empty kid’s meal box and move on to your actually dinner. He has to resist the urge to pick the little nugget crumb off the corner of your lips.

“You don’t feel left behind?” he asks. It’s crazy to think his little sister could be getting married soon. Meanwhile, he’s watched you cycle through several boyfriends without much luck. His own love situation isn’t much different, but that’s what happens when no relationship has inspired him to do the things he does for you. Your presence in his life is more than just love and lust. 

Everything you are to him is unconditional.

You shake your head at his question as you glance up at the stars through the windshield. “There’s only one person I’d ever feel left behind by.”

If it’s not Mo or your family, then surely it’s the guy you’ve been chasing after all these years, the guy who teases you because you have a cute pout, the guy who’s been with you every step of the way. The one guy you didn’t want to see your lingerie photos in fear of ruining everything. Surely it’s him you’d be hurt by most if you lost him.

“He’s not going anywhere, Y/N,” he assures you.

You continue to study the stars in silence. There are no shooting stars out tonight, but what you’re looking for isn’t a wish. “Is that a promise?”

He nods. The easiest nod of his life. “That’s how it’s always been, right?”

You nod back. It’s always been you and him. Nothing could ever erase that history you’ve both been trying so hard to protect. There’s no need to play it safe anymore. The history between you and him is stronger than that.

As a way to transition out of the sappy stuff, you reach down and grab the toy from the kid’s meal—a tiny soft cat, probably from a baby cartoon or whatever. You have an awfully big smile on your face for someone who complained about ordering the kid’s meal in the first place. 

Without thinking, Yoongi snatches the cat out of your grasp and dangles it by the tail in front of your eyes. “I’ll be keeping this.”

“I thought you said it was my kid’s meal.” You swing your little paw at him to reclaim your prize, but he’s too quick, holding the cat captive just out of your reach. It’s incredible how easy you are to taunt, especially over something as silly as a toddler toy. Maybe he’s just become a pro at it with over two decades of experience.

After unbuckling your seatbelt, you practically lunge over the center console and lean your weight on the edge of his seat with one hand while the other reaches for the cat, now pressed against the window on Yoongi’s side. He can smell your pretty perfume again, and he’s going to make it last as long as possible.

He brings the cat forward until it’s an inch away from your hand to encourage you to stretch just a tad closer to him. It apparently works, because the hand supporting your body has moved onto his thigh to give you the extra bit of reach. 

If you’re both not careful, you might fall into his lap. He wouldn’t mind it of course, but then you’d feel how hard he’s getting just from having your hand on his thigh like that. Your sweet scent isn’t helping his situation either.

“Say please and it’s all yours.” He lets out an awkward half-cough after inhaling a large dose of your perfume. Very smooth, Yoongi.

You narrow your eyes at him before backing off. His thigh can finally breathe, not that it wanted to. “I don’t need it that bad.”

Aww, you’re acting all tough again. Yoongi slips the cat plush into his pocket with a smirk. “See? Playing hard to get.”

“I swear I’m only like this with you. You drive me mad,” you let out a dramatic sigh.

That’s right. He affects you in a way no one else does. “Good.”

“No, not good.” You wiggle a finger at him as you scan the receipt and pull out your phone. Several seconds later, he gets a notification of you sending him money for all the food.

“You could’ve at least let me pay for the kid’s meal.” Especially after he pocketed the cat.

“I’m just paying you back for all the rides so far.” So far? Interesting choice of words.

“Does that mean you’re going to need another one tomorrow?” He takes another sip of his coffee.

“I don’t know, maybe. I’m getting my car looked at tomorrow morning before work, but…” You have that ashamed look on your face again for having to ask for another ride. You’re not a burden to him. Ever.

“Got it. I’ll be on standby. Just AirDrop me if—”

“Enough with the AirDrop.” You give him another feisty shove and almost knock his coffee out of his hand. Even if the coffee had stained his whole car, he would’ve forgiven you immediately because your smile is so pretty. He’s just happy you’re back to being playful with him. “If I need anything, I’ll let you know. Thank you, Yoongi.”

On the drive home, you tell him more about your job with such a glow. The days might be long sometimes, but the crew has been so sweet, and the photographer “knows how to make you look good.” The photographer could be terrible and you’d still look amazing. There’s no doubt in Yoongi’s mind about that.

You also mention something about special little perks, too.

“Special little perks like what?” he asks, more curious than he’d like to be.

“Guess.” Why are you tempting him like this?

“Does it have something to do with the lingerie in your bag?”

You blink at him like a deer in headlights. Uh oh. “You were supposed to pretend like you didn’t see that.”

“See what?” he plays along. Good save, Yoongi.

You give him a thumbs-up and smile the rest of the way home.

After parking in the space in front of his house, Yoongi takes a five-second look at your car right behind his. It looks perfectly fine. Whatever the issue is, it’s not visible from the outside, but hopefully it stays broken for a while.

“Is it actually broken or did you just say that to score a ride from the handsome guy next door?” he teases.

“The latter, obviously,” you deadpan before switching over to the most precious giggle ever. You’re so fucking cute. “Thanks for the ride, Handsome Guy Next Door.”

“No problem.” He watches, amused, as you dig through the lingerie in your bag to find your keys. He’d turn on the flashlight on his phone to help you see better, but he’s supposed to be ignoring that mesh polka-dotted lingerie. That’s what a good and respectful neighbor would do. 

Fuck it. He immediately breaks down and shines a light on the sheer bralette and g-string (and your keys). It’d look so pretty on you.

You grab your keys and shoo away his shameless horny eyes. That’s his cue to leave things as they are, just as he had the night before. If you wanted something more, you’d let him know. He’s already assured you everything will be fine between you and him no matter what.

Just as he unlocks his door, you stop him in his tracks.

“Yoongi, wait.”

He turns around, a little too eager some might say. You haven’t even said anything else, but he’s already ready to say yes to whatever it is.

You dig around in your bag again. He catches a glimpse of the mesh fabric between your fingers. He’ll take a souvenir any day.

But then you toss it back in your bag and hum an innocent, “Never mind, it’s nothing.”

You’re such a tease. Oh how the tables have turned.

As soon as you close the door behind you, you kick off your white sneakers, and take the teeny tiny lingerie with you to your room.

You saw how quick he was to turn around when you called out to him. You saw how he practically drooled at the lingerie in your bag. He wasn’t ready for the night to end either.

Piece by piece, you toss your clothes aside and replace them with the mesh polka-dotted triangles. Your little nipples are so visible through the thin pieces of cloth. Good.

Then you take a quick bed selfie, just like Yoongi had one night ago. And you lay it all out there. You’re done hiding and suppressing your feelings for him. Because no matter what happens between the two of you, even if the night doesn’t go the way you hope, you’re not going to lose him. That’s what was promised in his car.

So, one last time, you AirDrop him a photo of yourself in lingerie. He accepts it immediately.

Then you text him.

Y/N🐣 [8:18PM] “you asked for a pic of my wardrobe earlier didnt you?”

Y/N🐣 [8:18PM] “btw knock on my door rn or youre a coward😡”

You’re really doing it. There’s no going back now.

You throw a hoodie over your shoulders and leave it unzipped as you pace back and forth in the hall. You always wondered why you get so antsy when it’s just Min Yoongi. It’s literally just the guy you’ve lived next to your entire life. But that’s the hold he has on you. The mere thought of being with him never fails to excite you. Those are the kind of butterflies you get with him.

Your heart nearly jumps out of your chest when you hear his knock. You swing the door open before you can chicken out.

Of course his eyes immediately fall on your chest. He almost forgets to speak.

“What pic were you talking about? Did you send something?” he asks, still very much concentrated on your nipples.

Wait.

“You didn’t get the AirDrop?” Not this again. The granny across the street probably did get it this time. You want to wrap yourself up in your fluffy warm blanket and permanently disable that stupid phone feature once and for all. No, it’s not a stupid feature. You’re just stupid for using it.

“You’re so fun to fuck with, Y/N,” he laughs right in your face. “Yes, I got your cute little photo.”

“Stop teasing me,” you pout. Here you are, trying to look all hot for him, and he’s still finding ways to fuck with you. He’s so mean.

“I could ask the same of you.” Yoongi slips his index finger into your bralette between your breasts. He tugs on the stretchy band until it snaps back against your skin. “Or maybe you don’t realize what you do to me when I see you like this.”

“I don’t,” you play innocent as you pull him inside and shut the door behind him. You’d love to be enlightened about what your body does to him just by existing. A demonstration would be much appreciated. The more detail, the better.

He pushes you back against the wall in the narrow hallway and pins you there. You try to distract yourself by staring at the tiny speck of coffee on his white sweater but a strong hand cups your chin and lifts it so you can’t run from his gaze. His eyes are dark.“It's so fucked up how many times I’ve gotten off at the thought of my little sister’s friend in nothing but lingerie.”

Funny, you’ve always thought it was fucked up of you to lust over him given how close you’d been throughout your childhood. You cringe at the thought of Mo learning about all the unholy fantasies you’ve had of her brother—him fucking you against the wet walls of his shower, him shoving his cock down your throat until you cry, and even him tying you up on the bed and doing whatever he wants with your body. Your delusional self has thought about it all with him.

But now you know he’s felt the same way all along.

You slide your hands up his chest to his neck as your eyes hone in on his glossy lips. For as long as you could remember, you’ve always wondered what Min Yoongi tastes like. In your dreams, he tasted of creamy vanilla milkshakes. But now, in this moment…?

You lean in and press your breasts into his chest, but he pulls back just before you can get a taste of those lips.

“I always knew you had a thing for me,” he smirks. The teasing never stops. But that’s what you’ve signed your life away for. “If you want to kiss me so bad, say it.”

The stubborn you who “plays hard to get” would never admit that. The you right now, on the other hand, is yearning, desperate, and painfully horny. In this state, you’d get down on your hands and knees so quick.

“I want to kiss you, you ass—” Your mumble is cut off by his lips. They taste like the iced coffee from earlier with a hint of salt. You want more of it.

Your tongue gets tangled with his. It’s sloppy, but you’ve had enough of keeping it clean with him. You’ve played it safe for far too long.

His hands grab your breasts as he lets out a low moan inside your throat. Funny how perfectly your chest fits in his large hands. When he gives them a squeeze, you lean into him more. Anything to get more of his touch.

But then he slides a hand down your belly and works a few fingers around the fabric between your legs. They glide between your folds so smoothly.

“Did you get this wet just from a little kiss and touch? Poor thing.” He holds up the proof of your lust before licking it off his fingers with that tongue. “I thought you’d put up more of a fight.”

The next thing you know, your hoodie is gone and he’s carrying you off to your room. As soon as your back hits the mattress, he climbs on top of you, bombarding you with more kisses until you’re out of breath.

Your hands fidget with the hem of his sweater until he gets the memo that you want it off. Seeing him shirtless is nothing new—you’ve seen him casually walk out of the shower in nothing more towel on multiple occasions while hanging out with Mo next door, hence all your the shower fantasies. But in this context, with him on top of you on your bed, the butterflies just keep coming.

As the two of you continue to makeout, you unzip him. It’s your turn to slip your hand into his pants. He’s huge, just like your fantasies. You’re not sure your inexperienced throat can handle it.

“You haven’t even seen it yet, and you’re drooling,” he purrs when he leans back to get a good look at your current status—starved for his cock. “Does my cute little neighbor love having her mouth filled with cock?”

“I haven’t…” Your words trail off when you see his erection in full. Your hands latch back on to it like gravity. There’s no way this’ll fit down your throat without making you gag. You lick your lips.

“Wait, this isn’t the first time you’re—”

“I’ve had sex,” you clarify. “Just haven’t given a blowjob…” 

It still feels weird to admit these kinds of things to your neighbor. You’ve always been more careful and closed off about your sex life than him. Meanwhile, you swear you’ve heard the whimpers and moans of all the girls he’s pleasured on the other side of your wall. You’ve never heard the sounds he makes during sex, though.

“How innocent. Depriving yourself of tasting it for this long.” Now he’s got a big ol’ smile on his face as you lie on your stomach and kiss along his length. “You won’t be so innocent by the time I’m done with you.”

You don’t want to be innocent with him anymore.

When you finally take him into your mouth, it’s easy. You swirl your tongue around as you bob your head up and down him. The taste isn’t nearly as bad as you’d thought. In fact, you kind of like it. Or maybe you’re just too horny to care. 

But then you decide you want to gag. So you push your mouth further down his length. The slightest tickle against the back of your throat practically has your whole body jerk in protest. You pull back and let yourself breathe before wrapping your lips back around him.

“Hey, easy,” he chuckles, holding your hair back. “Deepthroating is too advanced for you. You’re still a baby.”

You’ll let the baby comment slide only because you’re too focused on sucking his cock. You wouldn’t mind doing this all night. It could easily become your new addiction.

“Mm,” you moan as flick your eyes up at him. His mouth is open, panting, still trying to fight off the feral instincts you so easily gave in to. Whatever you’re doing, it’s working. Not bad for a first-time blowjob.

“So good,” he praises as he watches your mouth working so hard along his length. You’ve finally earned some praise from him. After all these fucking years. “Fuck, you’re so good.”

The next time you come up for air, he wipes his thumb along your lip to clean you up before flipping you over onto your back. You’d love to suck the glaze off his thumb, but the selfish bastard does it for you right in front of your face.

“I know you’ve grown quite attached to sucking my cock, but I’d like to know how your other hole feels, if that’s alright with you.”

You nod, knowing just how soaked your g-string got while sucking him off. After wiggling out of it and tossing it aside, you spread your legs out for him like a well-trained slut.

He uses his fingers again to make sure you’re coated enough. You feel two curl inside you. Then a third. His thumb brushes gently over your clit exactly one time.

“Fuck,” you whimper from the jolt of pleasure. He needs to do it again.

But he doesn’t.

So you run your own two fingers around your clit as his slip in and out of you. He watches the rhythm of your fingers going around and around like a hypnotic spiral. That smirk is creeping back up again.

“So that’s how my neighbor touches herrself,” he nods like the enthusiastic spectator he is. “That’s how you touch yourself for me.”

You continue to tease your little bud as he grabs a condom from the ass pocket of his jeans and slides it down his length. Finally. Fucking finally.

Your horny little body pounces on top of him, your thighs straddling him beneath you. His cock presses against your ass as you strip off your bralette and lean over to kiss him some more. You’d leave him a nice hickey, but you hate the thought of Mo bringing it up as “a byproduct of another one of his meaningless flings.”

Instead of thinking about that, you grab his cock from behind and ease yourself onto him. You’re sure his ego just got a boost from the amount of time it took you to adjust to his size.

“Don’t worry, I’m not gonna be That Guy who comments on your tight little pussy.” Asshole.

Then you start sliding yourself up and down his cock. You gasp immediately. It feels so fucking good to finally have him inside you.

The boy doesn’t waste any time, either. His hands work their way up your waist back to your breasts. He gives your nipples a few pinches and is delighted to learn just how sensitive you are over there. You toss your head back with each little pinch.

As the pleasure builds, you feel him thrusting back beneath you. Your ass is practically bouncing off his thighs with each thrust. If you don’t hold onto his shoulders, you might fall off of him, which would be quite the tragedy because you happen to like the feeling of his cock pounding inside of you. 

“More…” you huff against his neck. “Harder…”

At your request, he gets back on top and takes the lead, ramming himself in and out of you. You knew Yoongi was a strong guy, but you’ve never been fucked this hard before. Perhaps this is what years of all that sexual tension have amounted to.

You let out another loud moan, this time crying out his name. You should be afraid of Mo coming back from Namjoon’s and hearing the way you cry her brother’s name with such lust. You shouldn’t show what a dirty little slut you’ve become for him. But you’re mind isn’t functioning anymore. Not with him fucking you silly like that.

“I’m gonna—” you yelp.

He speeds up and pounds harder into you until you’re overcome by your orgasm. The wave of pleasure washes over you as you feel your walls tightening around him.

“Fuck, Y/N,” he groans, feeling just how tight you can go. He should be grateful for your tight little pussy. Especially if his high was as good as yours.

As you catch your breath, your thoughts start to come back to you. You’re certainly not looking forward to the conversation you’re gonna have to have with Mo later. But you know it was worth it. And you know you don’t regret anything that happened tonight. It was long overdue, anyway.

Yoongi, on the otherhand, might still have his head in the clouds because he’s just lying down on your pillow with the goofiest smile. He’s been smiling a lot more lately.

“Do you remember that time you invited me to your little tea party in here?” he asks out of nowhere.

“No,” you lie. 

Of course you remember it. You were probably five or six and you’d just watched some teen show where the main girl asked her love interest out on a lunch date. Your naive self was inspired to do the same, but with your love interest—your Yoongi. And initially he said no because he’s mean like that. That was your first heartbreak.

But then he turned around later and crashed the tea party you’d set up for your sobbing self and your teddy bear. He claimed he’d only stick around for the shortbread cookies, but you’re starting to think there was more to it.

“Well I do,” he admits. “That was the first time I thought you were kinda cute.”

“Kinda?”

“Yeah, kinda cute. Because you were also an annoying little brat, you know that?” This is just slander.

“Well I appreciate you putting up with this kinda cute annoying brat for all these years,” you mutter. “No one was forcing you to.”

“I know, that’s my point.” He pinches your cheek. “Even if I tried to run, you always somehow found a way to cling onto me. Like a leech.”

“Okay, buddy, I’ve had enough of this slander,” you hiss in his arms under the blankets. “If you’re going to say something nice, just say it already. No more of your dumb leech metaphors.”

“You’ve always had a hold on me, Y/N.” He presses a soft kiss to your forehead—the first of many, you hope. “And I feel like a lot happened in the past day, but that’s only one small part of what this is.”

“This” as in you and him.

“Like one page in a history book,” you chime in. “Or like a chapter in a memoir, or the chorus of a song, or—”

He chuckles at your rambling because it’s apparently “so fucking cute” to him. What else would you expect? If one page in the history book is dedicated to the past 24 hours, 10,000 pages are filled with him teasing you, you chasing him, and everything in between. 

Today simply marks the start of a new era.

[dvchvnde]

excerpt; best friend's dad | John Price x Reader infidelity. age gap.

He breaks your heart in Greece. Cuts a jagged line down your middle. Spills your wet, sticky blood over the Naxian marble outside of the Temple of Apollo with just a handful of words.

(fitting, you find: you've always considered your aimless pursuit to his heart some bastardised delusion akin to Icarus chasing the immovable sun—)

And you suppose it's kind. Or as gentle as a man like him could ever let himself be. Still gruff, surly. But you've always loved the sound of his voice, haven't you? That sarky growl reminding you of classic muscle cars, American-made; the low, gritty purr of an old Mustang. Enough to make you shiver, even as he's shaping it around these awful, cutting words. It makes you heart flutter, enraptured as he speaks like he's ripping a bandaid off.

Except that now that wound is being filled with salt. Acid. Cauterising itself from the friction burn when the gauze is wrenched off your skin. A permanent scar right in your sternum. A gaping hole spilling all the ugliness out. You wonder if he cares that it's being slashed across his shoes—no sandals, he griped when you teased him in the airport; I hate the feelin' of sand between my toes—that this madness inside of you is finding a home on the hot pavement, rotting under the summer's sun.

"m'thinkin' about marryin' her."

The her in question is ten years older than him. Pettily, you wonder if this is to compensate for the fact that he's nearly two decades older than you. An obscene age gap, you know. But—

It's Price.

Your best friend's dad. The man you've been in love with since you were sixteen. Falling all over yourself after a dumb boy broke your heart, and he offered to drive you home, silent the whole way there before he stopped, a block away from your house, and told you that boys weren't worth your time. Boys. Boys—

Not men.

Foolishly, you let yourself hope. Let yourself become the very thing they talk about in TikTok videos lambasting age gaps and silly little girls who let older men run them into the ground. Why would a man his age have any reason to be interested in a girl yours? Sickening. Disgusting. You're being lead stray, groomed. But you clung to it still, even as you thumbed through the comments on those videos and found pieces of yourself lying among the rubble.

You've always known what they say about girls like that. And you were just delusional enough to believe that you were different somehow.

And now—

"Gettin' older," he grouses out, and you wonder if she finds the ornery lilt to his cadence as comforting as you do. Or if it rubs her all the wrong ways. "Might be time to settle down."

Shamefully, you wish he'd say, but maybe you can convince me otherwise, climb into my lap, and eat this decision from between my teeth until all I see when I open my eyes is you.

But that's not the John Price you know. Mr Price. Single dad. Widower. Untouchable.

Mr Price who sees you for what you are—smarter than them, he'd said when you broke down in his Bronco after a softball game where everyone, your best friend included, went to an afterparty that no one invited you to.

Quiet, thoughtful, even when you spent the evening afterwards (the fight hashed out between your best friend and you; i'm so sorry and me too) thumbing through old vinyl records he kept in his basement, listening to the classics that kids your age just didn't understand, so why the fuck do you?

Weekends spent bonding over golden cinema (movies just ain't what they used to be; there's no romance anymore, it's all so—vapid; you don't talk like a kid; i've never considered myself one, do you? he didn't answer. you didn't expect him to). Listening to music older than your dad. Niche jokes and texts that read like I saw this and thought of you.

Your fault, of course, for thinking you could trick him into loving you if you played your feelings through Johnny Cash, Vashti Bunyan, Fleetwood Mac, and Smokey Robinson. An impossibility you know now.

Mr Price who knows you. Who sees through the thin skin you wear and into the heart, the core of you. Who must have known since you called him in the pouring rain to pick you up when you got too drunk to drive home. A house party in the suburbs. Waterlogged flats he told you to toss.

Said nothing at all when you apologised with your head pressed against the foggy glass. You never told him that your sorry, Mr Price was for kissing a boy and wishing it was him.

But he must have known.

open book. pages spilling out. silly little girl with your heart cupped in your palm—

So he knows. Has known. Hindsight says this is him letting you down gently before you get any ideas about forever with your diploma tucked into your chest like a shield. A trip to Greece with your best friend and her dad to celebrate the rest of your life looming over you like a thundercloud. Your eye slanting sideways, glancing yearningly back at him.

sorry, but no. look the other way—

And you think fine, fine, whatever, so long as this doesn't hurt anymore—but what comes out is, "oh."

What follows is this:

He says he's thinking about marrying her with his hands tucked tight under his arms. He tells you he wants to settle down with his chin tucked against his chest, four lines rucked across the pinch of his brow. An emphasis, perhaps, on just how serious he is.

You taste salt in your throat. Sand between your toes. The sun blisters against the thin straps of this pretty blue dress that match the melting sapphire of his burning gaze. It's heatsickness, maybe. Or just all the years of want building and building, festering and growing, until it can't climb any higher—forever reaching for god that won't spare you a glance—and—

falling down around you. wings of beeswax and bird feathers.

Solemn, he says, "it's what I should do."

(i saw this and thought of you—)

Your fingers knot into the soft cotton of his dress shirt, pulling the fabric taut between your knuckles until it peels back from the seams, curling between buttons.

You've had too much to drink. Whiskey sour. Scotch neat. Somewhere along the walk to the temple, you snatched a puff of his cigar, the nicotine blooming between your teeth. Head full of cotton too thick for you to think. To retreat.

In the morning, when he refuses to look at you, you'll blame it on the drinks. On the sun. On being young and dumb and untouchable under the Greecian sky.

Daddy issues, you can shrug. You have the diagnoses from every single TikTok psychologist embedded between your teeth. See, mine never loved me and now I'm taking it out on you—

But right now, you kiss him.

Or maybe—

Maybe he kisses you.

It's a mess in your head. Everything turned upside down, all askew because when your lips touch his, he shudders. His chest rumbles under your fingers, expanding with the sudden inhale as he breathes you in. Deep. Takes you into his lungs—all salt-slick, and sunburnt—and groans low in his throat, all want. All heat.

He should push you away. He's your best friend's father. Two decades older than you. Dating another woman who's so far removed from the person you are that she might as well be a different species. Mature. Stoic. Poised. Graceful.

The perfect antithesis to you.

Everything about this must be ringing shrill in his ears: abort, abort, do not engage. He should push you off.

And he does.

After a moment of your greedy, unpractised kisses pepper along the bristles hanging low over his lips, he makes another sound. Angry. Whitehot. His hands slip free from the damp prison of his armpits and latch tight onto you. Thick, hirsute fingers curling over your upper arms, and pushing, shoving—

Your back hits the marble pillar. The air in your lungs punched out.

But when you try to siphon more balmy air into them again, you find an obstacle in your way.

His mouth.

Searing, blistering. Slanting hungrily across yours, devouring. Intense, dizzying. Your head cracks against the wall when he shoves his thigh between the silken softness of your inner thighs, blanketed by the dress that made him swallow when he first saw you in it, eyes darkening like a storm.

(bit short, ain't it? he'd groused, and your friend slipped her hand into yours with a huff. stop being such a dad, dad—)

It slots there now like it's owed the right. Thick thigh spreading yours apart on a gasp, a groan. Corded muscle pressed taut to the seam of you that burns hot. Melted wax. Dripping against his leg. He must feel the way he liquifies you, turns you into putty. It drags a sound his chest. The misfire of an engine.

"Fuck," he breathes, all teeth. Salt. He should be saying, no, stop. go back to your hotel room, and we'll pretend this never happened, silly girl. But he pulls you closer instead, his hand looping around to cradle the back of your tender head in the cup of his palm. A small comfort as he delves his tongue between your teeth. "Makin' me lose my goddamn mind—"

The words are growled against your mouth. You taste the tobacco-smoked fury between his teeth when they sink into your lower lip. Angry, maybe, that you're making him do this. That you had to be who you are, and despite that, he kisses you like you're not.

"Price," you whine, arching into his chest when he pulls at your bottom lip still caught between his teeth. Skin tender, bruised. He ruts into you at the sound, nearly purring. You feel it then. The hard press of his thickening cock against you. Mindlessly gyrating against your hip. The turgid length proof of his desire. His want for you. All you. "Please—"

He folds himself over you. Tucks you into the bracket of his chest, his arms. His fingers are iron bars on your skin, holding you tight to him. Unwilling to let go. His hand on your crown; his fingers gripping your thigh, hiking it up his waist. It's good. Better than all of your meagre fantasies combined. You've wanted this since you knew what want was. When he wandered into the kitchen the morning after a sleepover with a towel slung loose around his hips, his hand scrubbing the damness from the wet tangle of his hair, spilling them down his neck where they disappeared into the thick bed of hair on his chest, his belly.

He paused in the doorway when he saw you sitting at the island, eyes wide and drilling holes into his chest.

"Shit," he'd cussed, gruff and mean with sleep. "Didn't think—"

But you did. Over and over again. With your face pressed against your pillow, fingers shoved into the sticky wetness leaking out of your cunt. Thinking of him. Wrong. Wrong. Terrible—

Dad bod, your friend said with a cluck of her tongue that afternoon. And you feel it under your fists as he heaves. As he eats you alive, whole. Because kissing John Price, Mr Price, is a whirlwind. A maelstrom.

He devours. He conquers. He owns.

He licks into your mouth, petting over your tongue, your teeth, until you can't remember anything else except the tobacco and whiskey tang of him. Heady. An elixir you want to sip from for the rest of your life. Damn him—

He tells you he's thinking about marrying someone else. Then whispers, ash-soft, against your chin that he can't get enough of you.

Grunts, "you need to go," as he sinks his teeth down, hard, into the throbbing skin of your pulse. Laying claim as he slowly comes to.

The coarse hair of his beard rubs your flesh raw when he buries his face into your neck. You can feel the thunder of his heart against the knob of your wrist. The heat of his skin burning through you.

"Fuck," he rumbles again, and you know this time it's for good. Ironclad. But the remorse is paperthin. "Shouldn't have done that, should have—"

"I want you," you whisper through bruised, kiss-bitten lips. "I want you so bad. I loved you since I was—"

"Don't."

The sweat beading along his hairline smears across the naked arch of your shoulder and neck when he moves; a shallow shake of his head. Muted and small. Heavy with reluctance.

The man who meets you when he pulls back is frowning with wet, red-stained lips. His eyes are hardened sapphire reinforced with unbreakable obsidian. There's no inch to move. No cracks to squeeze through.

"This—" he swallows. You hope he tastes you still. Whiskey sour. Scotch neat. The drag of his cigar, the one he coached you through, scoffing when you choked, when you cough. You hope he runs his tongue over his teeth and tastes nothing but you. "This shouldn't have happened."

You don't say anything. Can't. The words are staining his lips.

You nod, slow. Cautious. He tells you he's marrying someone else. Thinking about it. Says this shouldn't have happened—

But he holds you like he can't bring himself to let go. Fingers clutching, clenching tight around you. Possessive. Greedy, even he as he slowly unspools from around you. As he pulls away, scouring his hand down his face with a deep, ragged inhale. Rough, worn fingers digging into his jaw until the knuckles under a dense cropping of umber hair turn white, nails pinking under the strain.

"This isn't—"

You nod again. Soft and slow, but you let your tongue flicker out, chasing the smoke drying on your swollen lips. It stings. The burn makes you think of him. Of his hot, heavy hands on your skin.

His eyes drop down to follow the slip of red that teases out between your teeth, blackening as they trace the new wetness left behind. You can feel him twitch against your thigh.

Your name is a broken snarl trapped in the thick of his throat. You've never heard it like that. Never. It does something. Lights you up from the inside out. Supernova in his arms. Icarus burning, crashing down to earth—

Catch me, Apollo—

He pulls away instead. Detaches from you with a heavy groan, as if the distance that now sits between you hurts him just as much.

The silence is broken by the sound of the crowd just beyond the pillar. You can see the moment it settles over him in the flattening of his eyes, the erasure of all affection that bloomed bright in blue. The terse set to his shoulders. The distance, the space, that grows and grows and grows—

He clears his throat. Mr Price once more. Untouchable. Off-limits.

"You should go," he says, and there's not an ounce of give in the rough flatline of his voice. Fixed. Firm. "You should go back to your hotel room. Come on. I'll call you a taxi."

"And you?"

He sucks in a breath through his nose, nostrils flaring. "Don't worry about me. Just—go back to the hotel room. We can—we'll talk in the morning."

"Where'd you?" She asks when you crawl into bed, the starchy sheets rubbing against your sunbitten skin.

There is a deluge of things you want to say. Things like—

I'm sorry. I love him. I—

can't let go.

"I think I just got my heart broken," you say instead, and wonder when the tears are supposed to come. At the wedding, maybe. But right now, you just feel numb. Empty.

The bed creaks when she rolls over, facing you in the dark. "Really? Didn't know you were, you know, foolin' around with anyone."

"I wasn't. It's—" your dad. But you can't say that, can you?

There's something painfully nostalgic about loving a man you're not supposed to want. A man who cannot, should not, want you back. An unrequited love in a foreign land. Unconsummated in the summer's heart. Sticky, bittersweet heartbreak.

Or, that's what it's supposed to be.

They are not John Price, though. Your best friend's dad. And they didn't kiss you back—

But he did.

And you think it's the worst thing he could have ever done.

[margotw10bis]

Crashing On Crush.JJK 1 [m]

crush!Jungkook x reader

Genre: smut; series; romance; angst

Words: 2.3k

Synopsis: What happens when your first encounter with your crush is Jungkook seeing your ass?

Warnings: sexual tension; alcohol consumption

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Your first encounter with Jungkook was... embarrassing. The truth is that timing isn't really your friend and you had another proof of that.

Your hand digging through your purse to find your goddamn phone that was ringing - you were waiting for a very important phone call after a job interview -, Jungkook, suddenly opening the front door of your best friend's apartment, was welcomed with a very vivid image: your ass and your pussy barely covered by your baby blue thong, up in the air while you were bend over since your bag was on the floor. Maybe a little context is needed here to explain how you could possibly end up in this situation.

Suzi, your best friend you met few years ago on your first day of college, has been begging you to go clubbing. She knows you don't really like it: you don't like loud music, annoying guys trying to hit on every women and dancing in the middle of a hot and sweaty crowd. At the end, you're always bored in the club. But Suzi loves it. She even met her boyfriend in one.

Taehyung and her have been dating for almost ten months now and they just recently moved in together. You can really see how happy Suzi is when she talks about him. She is madly in love with him. And you have seen Taehyung enough to say the same thing about him, even if you're not as close to him as you are to Suzi.

Anyway, let's go back to the most embarrassing moment of your existence.

After hours of Suzi bawling in your ears to go to the club, you've surrendered. She invited you to spend the afternoon at her place after school so you could talk and then get ready together. You were at the very beginning of it: you only had time to put on make-up and your matching baby blue lace bra and thong after your shower when you heard your phone. You knew it was the call you were waiting for. A few days earlier, you had a job interview for an art gallery of Seoul. So, when the first ringtones started, you just ran to your handbag you had left in the entrance.

And there you are. Jungkook facing your pretty ass as he has just passed the door. You gasp when you hear the door and turn around as fast as you can. However, not fast enough to have spare him the show. This is officially the most embarrassing, awkward moment of your life. Especially when you have a huge crush on Jungkook. You haven't met the guy yet but you know he's Taehyung's best friend. And since Suzi and him start dating, you have been following Tae on Instagram. When you saw a pic of the two guys together, you couldn't help yourself and you clicked on Jungkook's profile. By now, you know all his posts by heart and you get so excited when he posts a new photo of him. He is so handsome, so hot. His long black hair, his right arm covered in ink, his lip piercing... Everything in him screams 'I know I made your panties wet'.

But now, while you were looking forward to your first encounter with him tonight - other than the hundred scenarios you've made up in your mind at night dreaming about him -, you've just ruined the tiny, little chances you could have had with him.

You blush so hard that you're sure your whole face is red. Your open mouth doesn't even know what to say and he looks just as surprised as you. You feel so... humiliated that you just grab you bag and escape to Suzi's bedroom. Your heart beats so fast and loud from the embarrassment. How can you face him now?

You vainly try to calm down before answering to the phone. Even the great news of your hiring doesn't warm up your heart. All you can think about is that you met your crush and the first thing he saw was your ass.

What you don't know is that, beside the surprise, Jungkook is kind of satisfied with the view that welcomed him. How can he not be happy to see such a beautiful butt? The baby blue of your thong is such a flattering color for your skin. You looked so sexy. Not so much because of your foxy underwear but because of your body. A perfect body he'd dare to say. At the same time, when he saw the embarrassment on your face, Jungkook also thought that you were cute. He knows who you are: his best friend couldn't shut up about his girlfriend and showed him so many photos of her. In some of them, you were there. Your beautiful smile caught his eyes. And Tae also told him that you were in his apartment before inviting Jungkook to go on without him because he had some stuff to grab in his car. The mere annoyance of being left out by this best buddy instantly vanished when he opened the door. Even now, without the sight of your body, his cock is hard, a pleasant memory of your first encounter.

Suzi looks at you with a questioning look.

"I just had the worse moment of my life!" You tell her

"Stop dramatizing"

"Jungkook is here. And he saw my ass!" You are almost crying but your best friend bursts into laughing. "Suzi, this is not funny! How can I face him now?"

"Well, I think he should thank you, you gave him one kind of a show!" She teases

You gently slap her arm to make her stop mocking you.

"Relax! I'm sure this is not the first time he's seeing a butt. And yours is pretty hot. I'm sure he won't be mad at you. Maybe, it'll even make him interested in you"

What a lucky girl you are! Your crush will only care about you because you showed him your bum...

"Look, Y/N" Suzi says more seriously "You can't hide here. So get ready, and let's go. If you feel too embarrassed, get drunk, you won't think about it"

You wince. Suzi doesn't have the best idea but she's right about one thing: you can't stay here forever. So you pull yourself together and try to gather all the courage you have.

———

After thirty minutes in the club, the loud and unpleasant music slaughtering your ears, you've decided to keep on with your strategy: avoiding Jungkook at all costs. You don't look at him, you stay away from him and you try hard to forget what happened. The only problem is that he makes it so damn hard. He is so attractive in his black shirt and black slacks. The outfit compliments so well his fit body. You get even more annoyed that you force yourself to not enjoy it while a beautiful blond girl is flirting with him at the other side of your group's booth. You can't help thinking "it was supposed to be me!". You've waited so long to finally meet Jungkook and this... incident ruined everything. It's so unfair. You've been crushing on him for months and it's this blond girl who's known him for five minutes who is laughing seductively by his side.

And your best friend is nowhere to be seen. She is probably dancing with Taehyung.

You are so, so mad right now. With you for letting your fucking phone in the fucking entrance when you fucking knew you were waiting for a phone call. With Jungkook who couldn't arrive one minute later. With the whole universe for the legendary bad luck of yours.

You grab your glass while you sigh, and drink up one shot the rest of your cosmo. And it's not a good one. Yep, you really don't like clubs. You really don't like to dance either. More than that: you hate it. But you hate even more seeing this girl flirting with Jungkook so you get up and walk to the dance floor. Thanks to the two glasses of the vodka based cocktail you've drank before, you feel less reticent to move - shyly - your body. Your tight and short navy dress goes up a little when you lift your arms to 'dance'. You are not really seductive at the moment since your moves are not smooth - which your uncomfortable high heels don't help either. But you allow your head to empty. You don't think about anything, especially not about Jungkook's eyes on your ass.

Well...

Maybe you do think a little about that and the alcohol shifts the memory into something arousing. You are wearing the sexier underwear you own. And let's get honest: you chose it because of Jungkook. You were kind of wishing to finish the night with him. You were wishing him to see your ass in this thong. And he did. The simple thought of his gaze on you makes your pussy clench. You've seen his face a hundred time on Instagram and you are still surprised by his handsomeness. He is way hotter in real life. You can't argue his 'I know I make your panties wet' look because you are wet because of him. For him. Your brain full of this horniness, you forget everything, you forget the world around you.

You even forget that Jungkook, the man who is responsible for your condition, is in the same club. And you don't know that he is looking at you. Since you left to join the crowd of dancing people, Jungkook has been observing you. Your slow moves and above all your dress getting higher on your thighs turn him on. Especially when he knows what is underneath your tight dress. He more or less managed to control his erection until now. He stays seated to hide his stretched crotch. But he can't resist anymore. He doesn't even listen to the blond girl next to him. She is hot, for sure, but he doesn't care. She is not as hot as you. He hesitates to join you because he is afraid to make you uncomfortable: you haven't even looked at him since you all arrived here.

But when he sees a random dude looking at you with greed and approaching you, he jumps out of his seat and virtually runs to you.

You feel a strong body behind you. At first, you think it's just a guy trying to hit on you by rubbing himself on you. But then you realize that the person in your back doesn't move. Intrigued, you turn around and gasp by surprise when you see Jungkook. You want to say something but your brain can't make something out. Jungkook notices it and saves you from - another - embarrassing moment:

"Can I have a dance?"

Your heart skips a beat. Thanks to the colored spot, he can't see you blushing, hard. You just manage to nod and he puts his big and warm hands on your waist. It feels so soft, so right that you rant about the barrier of the dress between your bare skins. The feeling is so good, you almost moan. Your hands rest chastely on his large shoulder, too shy to touch him more than that even if you die to do so. His black shirt doesn't prevent you from catching how buff he is.

"This outfit suits you so well" he tells you with a playful smile. You don't get that Jungkook is actually not talking about your dress but about your underwear. Nevertheless, the compliment makes you wet and you press your tights together to avoid any leak. It doesn't go unnoticed by Jungkook who smirks. He loves to see the effects he has on women but he loves it even more on you.

You feel fogged. You don't know if it's because of the alcohol, because of the heat due to the dance and the crowd around you, or because of Jungkook. Your moves are getting messier and sloppier, you barely stand on your legs. Jungkook notices it and he frowns, immediately worried about you.

"Y/N, are you okay?" He asks

"I need some air" you manage to say so low you're not sure if he has heard you or if he has guessed the words on your lips

Jungkook grabs you closer to him to support you and leads you to the door. You wish you could enjoy more the sensation of his body pressed against yours.

The cold air slapping your face, your arms and your exposed thighs makes you jolt. It's not much that the breeze is freezing because it's not - Seoul's June is actually quite hot -, but it's the difference between the suffocating heat of the club and the pure air of the outside. You can't tell if you're feeling better or worse.

"Are you okay?" Jungkook asks once again. He gently cups your face with his large and warm hands. It's so heartening you want to close your eyes and press your cheeks deeper into them. He looks at you straight in the eyes, trying to scan your face. His big doe eyes are so pretty, even with furrowed brows.

"I don't feel too well. I think I'm going to head home. You can go back inside"

"I'm coming with you"

You can't help but feeling two contradictory emotions: your heart warming by Jungkook's kindness and guilt of ruining his night.

"No, you don't have to, I can call a cab"

But he doesn't listen to you, you can see it by the determination in his dark eyes.

"I'm coming with you" His words validating your assumptions.

"My bag is inside"

"Let's go grab it and then I'll take you home"

Well, it was certainly not the way you thought spending the night with your crush...

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[atimeofyourlife]

A family Thanksgiving

This was supposed to be up yesterday, but it took on a mind of its own and instead of the few hundred words it was supposed to be, its nearly 3k. Happy belated Thanksgiving to anyone who celebrates! rated: t | wc: 2847 | cw: period typical homophobia, Steve's asshole parents

The offers from everyone to have him over for Thanksgiving had been great, any other year he would have loved such a choice, but for the first time in a long time, he was spending the day with family.

"But you hate your family." Dustin pointed out when Steve had told everyone about his holiday plans.

"No, I hate my parents. It's my grandma that asked me to go, and I want to see her and my cousins that I haven't seen in like five years. I'm driving myself to Chicago, so I won't be stuck in a car with my parents for hours on end." Steve explained.

"But you're working a late the day before, and I'm not going to cover you so you can drive up early" Robin replied.

"I'm planning on leaving by six on Thanksgiving morning. It's less than four hours to drive, so I'll be there before ten, well nine because of the timezone change. I took the late shift the day before so I had an excuse to drive myself, and my parents wouldn't have any reason to come by Hawkins before. And I drive home either the Friday or the Saturday, ready for our Sunday shift."

Come Thanksgiving day, Steve was somewhat regretting his decision. It had been nearly midnight before he'd gotten home, after a number of people came in just before closing insistent on needing a selection of movies ready for the next day. Then hadn't been happy when the movies they wanted weren't in stock, so they left the place a total mess, causing Steve to stay late to tidy up ready for the opener the next day. Then having to get up around five, so he could get ready and be on track to leave as planned. In an attempt to wake up, he was mostly surviving on a large cup of incredibly strong coffee. He was just counting down the minutes until he could get there.

When he walked in the door, he was immediately wrapped up in a hug from his grandma. "Stevie, it's so good to see you."

"It's great to see you too, Grandma." He returned the hug, melting into it a little. Exactly what he needed after the year it had been.

"Let me take a look at you." She stepped back slightly, giving him a once over. Her hand came up to trace the scar still on his neck from where he had been strangled by the bats and vines. "What happened here?"

"I. It's nothing. It looks a lot worse than it is." Steve replied, trying to get out of the awkwardness of the conversation.

"Oh, if you're sure. If you want to help with dinner, you can join us in the kitchen. But if you just want to rest, anyone who's watching football is in the living room, and the Macy's parade is on in the den."

"It's been a long drive, and I had a late finish last night, so I think I'm going to take a bit of a break. I might come out and help a bit later." He offered.

"Oh, honey. If you don't feel up to it, you don't need to help at all. Take it easy, and we'll call you once everything is ready." She kissed Steve on the cheek, before going back to the kitchen.

Steve made his way through the house, glancing into the living room as he passed. He could see his dad in one of the recliners, and decided against joining them. Wanting to delay the inevitable "you're a disappointment" lecture. He knew his mom would likely be in the kitchen, not actually helping, just drinking wine and gossiping. He moved on to the den, where most of his cousins were. He hovered in the doorway for a second, unsure what to say. So much had changed since the last time he had seen any of them.

"Wait, Stevie?" One of them, Lizzie, said as she looked up to see him.

"Uh, hey?" Steve replied, a little unsure, before he was being swamped in a group hug.

"Jesus Christ, when did this happen? Last time I saw you, you were like a little kid. Now you're a whole grown adult." Another, Mark, said.

After a long catch up, bringing Steve up to date on everyone else's lives, and him giving an abridged highlights of his last few years, they then got into more serious topics.

"Was everything okay after the earthquakes? I tried calling a few times, but I don't know if I had the wrong number because it never went through." Alice, the oldest of his cousins, asked.

"The phones were down across the whole town for a while after, then it was patchy for weeks after that. It was hard to get five or ten minutes without it dropping out. It took me like two weeks before I was able to get hold of mom and dad to let them know that the house was still standing, and that I was still alive." Steve explained.

"Wait, they weren't in Hawkins for the earthquakes?" Harry cut in.

"No, they've not been in Hawkins since February? Like over a month before it happened."

"Oh. They were telling us last night about how awful and hard it had been during the earthquakes, and how they were scared for their lives." Alice replied.

"That's such bullshit. They weren't in the country when it happened, they were in London. They didn't even know that it was Hawkins that was affected until I called them, because all they'd seen on the news was a freak earthquake hitting the Midwest. It hadn't even specified the state. And then they didn't care how I was, if I was hurt or anything, all they were interested in was if there was damage to the house, and how the earthquake could affect the resale value."

"Okay, I call dibs about bringing that up over dinner. I just want to see what shade of purple Uncle Dick can turn." Becca, the closest cousin to Steve in age, piped up. "But were you hurt?"

"Uh, minor injuries. Nothing serious." Steve lied, not wanting to worry anyone. "I was able to start volunteering within a couple of days. You know, helping out at the relief center, helping search for missing people. And when everything calmed down I was helping rebuild and stuff. Just trying to do my bit. But I'm fine now."

"That's good. But thinking of Uncle Dick turning purple, who gets to bring up Fuck Reagan?" Mark asked.

"Stevie's been through the most, I think he should get the chance." Alice replied.

"Uh, I think that would go down about as well as if I told him that my best friend is a dyke and I've spent most of my free time in the last six months sucking off the local drug dealer, who was accused of being a cult leader and murdering three people." Steve said quickly, unsure if he wanted anyone else to pick up what he'd said.

"Was that for drugs, or for fun, or what? Like a hook up?" Harry asked.

"He's my boyfriend. I mean, it helps that I get free weed out of him, but I'd do it anyway." Steve admitted.

"That is something you missed out of your round up. But I love that all of us are some variation of queer."

Dinner was...interesting, to say the least. After saying Grace, they went round the table to say what they were thankful for that year. Steve had to bite his lip to keep himself from laughing as his parents waxed on and on about how they were thankful for their lives and being able to escape the earthquake unscathed. He couldn't keep from laughing when Becca spoke up against them.

"Really? Because Alice asked Steve how he found it after the earthquakes, and he said that he couldn't reach you for two weeks after it happened because the phones were down and you were in London. And you didn't even know that it had hit Hawkins until he called you."

"Steven, why are you telling lies about us?" His mother demanded.

"I wasn't? You weren't in Hawkins when the earthquake hit. You've not been there since February. When I was finally able to call you, you only cared about how the house was, not if I was hurt. And you were pissed that I hadn't called you sooner, despite the fact the phone lines were down for the whole town. I could have died or been injured in hospital, and you wouldn't have known."

"How dare-" His father started, only to be cut off by Steve's grandmother.

"Settle down. There's no need for arguing. I am inclined to believe Steve, because I do remember you telling me that you were going to be spending a few months in Europe at the start of this year."

Both of Steve's parents were visibly unhappy, but they didn't push it any further, allowing the rest of the family to talk about what they were thankful for.

Many small conversations broke out over the table, Steve loving the feeling of being surrounded by family for the first time in a long time. He got pulled into talking to different people, but he did his best to avoid his parents' eye. Not wanting to get trapped by them telling him all the ways he had bothered them since he'd last seen them. But he knew they were up to something, when his father got up before dessert was served.

"Before we have anything else, we do have a big announcement about the future of our family." He said, using the voice he always used when talking to the most important clients.

"You've sucked enough political dick to get what ever tax exemption you were after?" Lizzie asked, before anyone could take it too seriously.

Steve's dad just spluttered in anger as a call of "Elizabeth." Came from at least four different people around the table.

"Ignoring that horrible interruption. What I was going to tell everyone is about Steven's imminent engagement. He is going to be proposing to Melissa Downey, the daughter of my business partner, at Christmas, they've been seeing each other for nearly eighteen months now, and it is going to mean big things for our family."

Steve couldn't respond, processing what had just been said, as everyone started speaking, some offering congratulations, others in confusion.

"That's news to me." Steve said loudly, to get over everyone's voices, once he could form the words. "I'm not planning on proposing to anyone."

"Well, Arthur and I have been discussing it, and it is the only thing that makes sense now, the two of you have been together for long enough, the logical next step is engagement."

"I'm not dating Melissa. We went on one date over a year ago, just after I graduated. It was awful, all she was interested in was if I made enough money to bankroll her spending addiction. I made up a fake emergency to get out of it, and I would rather stick forks in my eyes than suffer through that again." Steve got to his feet, bracing his hands on the table. Knowing he'd been right not to be optimistic that the holiday could pass without incident.

"You will if you know what's good for you. If you don't, it could destroy our business. You wouldn't want to be the reason we go broke, would you? You could end up homeless. Where would you live?"

"First, I have plenty of friends who would be happy to take me in if I had nowhere else to go. It's something we talked about after the earthquake, because some people I know did have damage caused to their homes and I let them stay with me until they could move back in. Second, I don't really care about whether or not you go broke. You don't provide any money to me. You haven't since I started working at Scoops. I pay for all my food, gas, clothes. If you go broke, my financial position won't change at all. And third, I can't propose to her. I'm in a relationship, and we're both very happy."

"Is it that Buckley girl? Or did you somehow manage to convince that Wheeler girl that you're actually worth something? Because I can tell you now, you are going to break up with whatever little slut-"

"His name is Eddie." Steve shouted before he could think it through, and a silence fell across the room. "That's right. Your son is one of those awful queers that you keep campaigning against, to keep them illegal and get them locked up. And you know what? He's easily the best sex I've ever had. Especially when we get high first."

"Why you-" His father roared, his face turning a dark red in anger. "How dare you do this to us? After everything we have done for you. You'd better hope that those friends of yours would be willing to take you in, because you are not living under my roof any longer. You will have until the end of the weekend to collect your belongings, anything left will be burned."

"Except, it isn't your roof, is it Richard? If I remember correctly, I was the one who paid the mortgage. My name is the one on the deed to the property in Hawkins. I just allowed you to live there, rent-free might I add, because it made sense for you to live somewhere close to Indianapolis when your business was taking off. I had been planning to sell up. So I think maybe you should be the one to collect your belongings from that house, because I'm not sure if I want you living under my roof any longer. It sounds life you're almost never there, anyway." Steve's grandma replied.

"But, mother-" His father started.

"But nothing, Richard. I don't know where you learnt your hateful attitude, because I know I did not raise you to be the sort of man that would kick your own son out over something as minor as who he loves. I really thought you were a better man than that."

"It's disgusting." Steve's mother added. "So unnatural, and that disease."

"What is disgusting is your bigotry. I think I want you both out from under my roof, now. So, if you would both kindly leave. And I expect you to move your belongings from the house in Hawkins, as that is now Steve's house, not yours. And you better not touch anything that isn't yours, or cause any damage, because I will take legal advice." Steve's grandmother stood up, anger radiating from her tiny five foot frame. "And, unless you change and apologize for your outdated beliefs, you can forget any inheritance. I will not have any of my money going to support hatred."

"Mother,"

"Leave, Richard. Now. I'm not afraid to get the police involved here."

Steve's parents looked at him with their faces filled with utter disgust, before they turned and left. His grandmother escorting them off the property.

"Are you okay, Stevie?" His grandmother asked after the end of the meal.

"I. I think so. I think I need to make a couple of phone calls." He replied.

"Use any of the phones, dear. Maybe if you know someone who can keep an eye on the house."

"Yeah. I babysit for the chief of police sometimes, so I might call him. He'll make sure nothing happens."

"Good. And, if you're talking to that boy of yours, tell him that he's got to come up here for Christmas. I want to meet him, and make sure he's good enough for you."

"Grandma." Steve protested.

"I'm just saying." She replied before walking away.

Steve shut himself in one of the bedrooms, for a little privacy from the still crowded house while he made the calls. The call to Hopper was quick, just outlining what was going on, and Hopper agreed to keep a check on the house until Steve was back in Hawkins. Then it was the call to Eddie.

"Baby, I wasn't expecting you to call. How's your Thanksgiving?"

"Interesting. My parents decided to announce that I was going to propose to dad's business partner's daughter. They wouldn't accept that I wasn't interested in her so I accidentally came out."

"Shit, I hope that didn't go too bad?"

"Uh, it could have gone worse? Somehow me coming out got my parents removed from the will and kicked out of the house. Because my grandma wasn't happy with them being assholes about it."

"Oh, badass grandma. I kinda want to meet her now."

"I was hoping you would say something like that. Because she has told me that you have to come here for Christmas. She wants to make sure that you're good enough." Steve couldn't help smiling as he talked, somehow the day had gone so much better than he'd ever hoped.

[leclerity]

you kiss him first

Charles Leclerc x Former Childhood Friend!Reader count: 1.1k words summary: Charles and you talk about the reasons why you haven't seen each other in ten years... and there may have been some miscommunications all this time. a/n: another angsty one, with another happy ending, as always - thank you for all the support on the fics so far!

The Monaco air is crisp as you step out of the door, leaving the laughter of your parents and family friends behind. You note you forgot how warm Monaco can be, even in the evenings, and Charles Leclerc laughs, reminding you that you’ve been away for too long.

Certainly long enough for childhood friends to become distant acquaintances, at best.

“It’s weird to think we used to play around these streets,” you say. “We were so stupid. It was dangerous!”

“Well, we were kids.” Charles shrugs. “We thought we knew best.”

He leads you away from his parents’—now mother’s—house and after a moment, you recognise the route as your old path up the hills, to the best vantage points the city could offer. You climb with the expertise of someone whose feet have wandered up the trails a million times before, even if it’s been a decade since the last time.

“I always thought we might get hit by a car someday, but I didn’t care,” you say. “And look at you now, driving cars for a living.”

“Means I get hit by more often than an average person. So, you were right.”

“Right. Just like always.”

“Yeah. You were always right, you know.”

Something about the way he says it, looking at the hill beneath his feet instead of you, sends shivers down your spine.

The further outside the city you go, the quieter it gets. Dozens of memories fly past your eyes, all of the same hike, with the same person by your side, only a child, a teenager.

“What was I right about?”

Charles doesn’t look at you, nor does he answer. You keep hiking in silence and you find yourself getting antsy, fidgeting with a loose string hanging off your t-shirt.

When you get to the top, it’s peaceful. It always has been. You see the whole city from here, all of the lights shining brighter as the sun sets in the distance, and you can’t help but wonder – what went wrong?

So you ask.

He laughs, but it’s nervous. When you look at him, his white shirt sleeves are rolled up to the elbows and the khaki shorts look too expensive against the dirty ground. He’s still got the same pretty face, the dimples in his smile, but he’s a far cry from the boy you grew up with.

“I don’t see the point in talking about it now,” he says.

“If not now, when? It’s been ten years already.”

“Never,” he says. “If I can choose.”

You turn to face him, the sights of Monaco be damned. “Why? We were good, Charles. I was supporting you with your karting, you were supporting me with all the hobbies I ever did…”

“We were good,” he agrees, but it’s almost sad. As if there’s no way back. As if whatever happened, it’s irreversible.

“No, you don’t get to just up and decide you’re never going to speak to your best friend again. You just… You don’t get to do that!”

“You’re right,” he says, nodding. “You’re right.”

“So what’s the issue?! I mean, I thought you were going to be by my side at the altar someday!”

Charles shakes his head, chuckling again, but you can see the watery reflection in his eyes. He doesn’t look at you, and for a moment you wonder what was it that you said that was enough to make him cry, and…

“That was the issue,” Charles says, softly. “I’d be by your side.”

You feel yourself frown. “Isn’t that the whole point?”

“No. It’s not.” He looks at you and you finally see the tears, the redness of his cheeks, and the emotion he’d been restraining for who knows how long. “I didn’t want to be by your side.”

“Oh.”

“Y/N—”

“No. It’s okay. I get it.”

You move a little further from him, pretending your heart hadn’t just been stabbed, but he scoots right back next to you.

“Y/N, let me finish.” When you don’t say anything, he adds, “I wanted to stand opposite of you. That was the issue.”

“Opposite of—oh.”

The past rewrites itself in your head, all those little moments that ever confused you suddenly being crystal clear. You see all the hints you missed or saw and ignored – the refusals to talk about your crushes, the distancing that began when you got into your first relationship, even though it lasted not even two weeks…

And the absence of contact when your family moved away.

“Charles,” you say. “What are you—I don’t understand—”

“You didn’t see me the way I saw you,” he says, “and I couldn’t take it anymore.”

And—in a moment of unprecedented courage—you look him straight in the eyes. “Who says I didn’t?”

A look flashes over your face that tells you he’s experiencing a rewriting of the same kind you experienced moments ago. The moments when you held his hand for a little too long as a kid, when you cheered him on the track even when you were supposed to be on a date, when you listened to him vent about his brothers. You know these moments – and you hope that now, he can see them for what they were, too.

You put a hand on his cheek. He leans into it immediately, as if coming home.

“You know,” you whisper, “I don’t think there’s a moment of my life I didn’t love you. Even the past ten years… All I could do was miss you.”

“Me, too,” he says. “I hated myself for staying away, but I had to. I thought I had to.”

“If you just asked…”

He laughs, again, and it’s nervous all the same – but his hand is on your knee and he’s leaning in, and the air between you is charged. “Asked what? ‘Hey, Y/N, how’s your day? Also, do you happen to be in love with me, too?’ Is that what I should’ve asked?”

“Yes. And I would’ve said yes.”

He sighs; his eyes drop to your lips. “You’re telling me I wasted ten years because I was afraid?”

“Both of us were.”

“So, now…”

You become acutely aware of the distance between the two of you – all it would take is to lean in, ever so slightly, and the friendship barrier would be crossed. As if it hadn’t been crossed all those years ago, before you even knew what love or friendship were.

You smile. “Now you kiss me.”

“Tempting,” he says. “There’s one problem, though.”

“There is?”

Charles’s smile mirrors yours, wide and delighted. “I’m afraid if I kiss you, I won’t be able to stop.”

“Then don’t,” you say, and you kiss him first.

[cheeseceli]

I'll be waiting

Pairing: idol Bang Chan × Gn!reader

Genre: fluff, angst, friends to potential lovers, fic (1.6k words)

Prompt: "Even ten years from now, if you haven't found somebody I promise I'll be around. Tell me when you're ready. I'm waiting"

Warnings: for a short moment there's a bit of unrequited love, happy ending tho. Mentions of insecurity back to the trainee days.

A/n: the longest fic I've ever done, I'm kinda proud of it ngl

Patience might be Chan's biggest virtue, he thinks to himself. By seeing where he's right now and where he was ten years ago, he smiles. He couldn't agree more with that statement.

2014

He still remembers the first time he saw you.

Monthly evaluation. At this point, Chan should already be used to this whole process of the trainee life. However, that day felt particularly depressing to him. Hopeless, he would say.

He had found out that JYP was about to debut a new group. A girl group. And as much as Bang Chan tried to be completely happy for his friends who could finally try and debut, he had to admit he was somewhat jealous. Four years of training and he felt like he was heading towards nowhere.

Still, he tried to practice. He sang the song he would showcase so many times he reached the point of not even feeling the words leaving his mouth. He was so lost he also didn't notice the presence of someone else in the practice room. That is, until you clapped.

Chan turned his head towards you, low-key surprised. He recognised you as the child of one of the Got7's staff. He couldn't remember your name though. He doubted he even heard it at all.

"Sorry" you finally spoke. Your voice was pretty "I'm looking for my dad. Your voice is very beautiful though. You're doing well." And with a thumbs up you went away.

Chan couldn't help but laugh. Now that was random. He could barely process what happened. But you complimented him. It had been a while since he last heard a genuine compliment.

Somewhere inside his mind, he repeated his words nonstop, filling him with motivation and hope. He also was trying to remember to ask your name later.

2016

He did remember to ask your name after all. Y/n L/n. The pronunciation of your name was beautiful, almost like a melody. Honestly, after two years of knowing you, he could affirm that your existence itself was like a sweet melody.

You both became friends, good ones at that. He also found himself developing feelings for you. That was the saddest part of it all in his opinion.

Even though he hadn't known you for so long, he couldn't see life without you. To live without your horrible jokes (that he always found funny), without your sunshine-like personality (even though most people wouldn't describe you like that. Maybe you were his personal dose of light) felt like a nightmare.

However, it felt a bit cruel that he needed to live like that. He wanted to be an idol. You were the one who was his biggest incentive. Then why, to have a romance with you, could bring problems to his career? It was almost as if destiny liked to make chan suffer.

Pick one.

Happily, Chan was patient. So patient that he decided to wait for you as long as needed. He had hopes that any time now, you would come to him. And he would be ready.

Meanwhile, he focused on becoming an idol. He couldn't give up now, especially given the fact that he knew you'd be in the front row, cheering for him louder than everyone else.

2018

He kept his promise: he followed his dream, finally achieving the so exciting debut, and still waited for you, his crush developing into the most sincere love he ever felt.

However, you had other plans. Of course, you were still there for him. You were probably the one who got the happiest with the results of the survival show. You spent countless nights with him on the practice room and in the studio. You were seeing his dream come true in first hand.

But this time, there was someone else besides you: your current boyfriend. Chan really doesn't know why he didn't think this could've happened. Of course, you were dating. You were smart, beautiful and had so much love to give. Someone else would've fallen for you at some point. And it was unfair of him to expect you to be single, waiting for an empty promise.

The saddest part of it was that your boyfriend was a nice guy. It was clear he loved you. He even made an effort to love everyone who you loved, including Chan himself. You were happy around him.

Maybe it was a blessing in disguise. Chan got the job, you got someone to love - someone who could adore you without being scared of the media - and you both still got each other in the end.

Maybe that was what Chan could have. It's okay, right?

2020

The downfall of Chan's patience at last.

Although you both were still as close as you always were, life was leading each of you in your own direction.

You had a job, he had a job. You had your friends, he had his members. You had your own house, he had the dorms. You had your boyfriend, he didn't have a partner. But it was okay because he didn't even have the time after all.

Still, he tried to fall for someone else during this period. Being in this industry for two years now, he had the opportunity to meet a lot of people. Some fancied him, some tried to take a step further in a somewhat relationship. Some even wanted to just have fun. Chan swears he tried to give in most of the time.

Needless to say he failed at every try. He couldn't come close to someone without wishing it was you instead. His short answers were compared to how sweetly he talked to you. He didn't even bother to call people or have long conversations. He knew it was only a matter of time until his mind started the undesired comparison.

Maybe it was what the job required. Maybe it was because of his lack of time. Han disagrees though. Chan remembers how his friend insisted on the fact that his leader wouldn't even try with other people. But it wasn't his fault either, as it was a subconscious thing. Chan's mind was still wrapped around you. And his heart wanted to disagree, but it all goes down the moment he finds out you and your boyfriend, now your ex, had broken up.

Although he tried hard to deny, he couldn't help but still wait for you. No matter if there was a light at the end of the tunnel or if it was only darkness. He would wait.

2022

Something in your brain has switched, and Bang Chan can't say he really liked the difference.

Of course, you were still the greatest person he ever met. You were still his sunshine. But it seemed like you were tired. Your conception of life and love wasn't as bright as it once was and Chan couldn't help but feel worried about it.

For him, who has loved you deeply for over eight years now, to see you giving yourself less credit and affection hurt him. He doesn't know why and when it happened, but your brain was trying to shut down all genuine feelings one could offer to you. You thought you were, maybe, undeserving of it all.

Honestly, to see you slowly losing your light has wounded Chan way more than all his past experiences: from his fear of failure to his disappointment upon meeting your ex boyfriend. Almost as an instinct,he tried to solve the situation. This time, patience wouldn't do.

Without even noticing, he started to love you more. To actually show you how he cared for you, to put his feelings into words and actions. At first, your heart tried to deny any possible affection, but it soon realised it wasn't possible. Not when Chan didn't even hesitate on showing the entire world how you were worthy of love. And not once he showed it as a challenge or a burden. He was by your side, and he never made it seem hard.

The best part of it all was that none of you noticed it. He started to open up to you to try and protect you,and you opened up to him in order to heal and protect his feelings. Maybe that was patience finally showing itself as a virtue.

2024

Ten years later, it finally happened.

Honestly, Chan was still a bit suspicious. There was no way he was actually seeing this, right? Maybe he was becoming delusional after all. Maybe he started to hallucinate because of his desires. But at the same time, it felt too real.

The way you looked at him, that is. It was just a normal conversation between old friends. Between gossips and laughs, there was absolutely no reason for you to look at him like this. So lost in thought, with this shimmer in your eyes that Chan knew way too well. He knew it because he had it too.

It was love. Not the one nurtured by friends or family. The one shared just between lovers. And he was so sure of it because he knew he looked at you in the exact same way you were looking at him right now.

He smiles. For a moment, you're a bit lost, wondering if you lost a joke or an important moment. That, however, makes him laugh. He couldn't believe he just saw you fall in love on the first row.

Ah, he's been patient. Now, he can't wait for you to realise what just happened. Either way, he knows with a smile on his face that he'll be waiting for you.

I promise I'll be around.

Masterlist | you'll probably like: summer with you

Thank you for reading <3 let me know what you think about it!

Taglist (open!): @yuyubeans @dandelions-143

Dividers by @dollywons

Credits for images 1 , 2 and 3