#I hope he is and he is living his wonderful life away from all these crazy guys
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avelera · 7 hours ago
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Parallels between Jayvik and the Phantom of the Opera
I can't believe I haven't seen any discussion yet around the musical theater influences in Arcane S2 so far (besides my one mention of its parallels with Les Miserables).
So as a basic, Phantom of the Opera-loving bitch, can we please take a moment to examine the Phantom of the Opera parallels that are literally shoved in our faces during this opening sequence and what that means for Jayvik?
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Viktor is the Phantom. The show opening outright says it. The parallels are there. They're impossible to miss.
And then, when you dig a little deeper, hooo boy those parallels become even more stark. Especially if you read Viktor as romantically pining after Jayce, which 99.9999% of humanity does.
To quickly summarize, Phantom of the Opera is the story of a deformed genius who falls in love with an opera singer, Christine, and then nurtures her talents, only for her to in turn fall in love with a nobleman, Raoul. The ensuing love triangle is the heart of the plot, with Raoul and the Phantom both vying for Christine's love.
This shouldn't be a hard one to see the parallels for.
Viktor = The Phantom. Literally a genius born with a disfigurement, in this case a disability he sees as a weakness and a disease that is sapping away his life and hope of a legacy. He is riddled with jealousy for the person trying to pull his scientific/musical partner away from him, a person who happens to be beautiful and live a life of privilege that Raoul/Mel could offer to Jayce/Christine instead.
Jayce = Christine. Instead of sharing genius in music, he and Viktor share genius in science. Like Christine, he is tugged between the glittering world of politics and privilege, vs his genius and love at a more esoteric skill, in this case science instead of music.
Mel = Raoul. Literally an aristocrat who is far more beautiful than the Phantom/Viktor, who steals away his partner's attention and offers them a glittering life of privilege in the public eye instead of the wonders of their joint musical/scientific pursuits. Whether or not Mel meant to embody this, or steal Jayce from Viktor, this is the role she fulfills in Viktor's view of the world.
But the most profound moment for me of, "Oh wow, they're doing Phantom of the Opera! Actually, they're not just doing Phantom, they're doing Phantom fixit fic?!" was this:
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Which, if you'll forgive the potato quality of the screenshots, is literally the moment Viktor has his mask knocked away and then cringes in on himself to hide his exposed face from Jayce.
Which... is literally a scene in Phantom of the Opera? Just after "Music of the Night"?
But we're already in Phantom fixit territory, because Jayce doesn't recoil like Viktor expects! Instead, he embraces Viktor and loves him for all his self-perceived flaws.
And then, AND THEN, in a moment that made my Phantom-loving heart sing, Viktor tells Jayce to go!
And Jayce doesn't.
In the final song of the Phantom of the Opera musical, Christine is forced to choose between Raoul and the Phantom. She chooses the Phantom and kisses him. Flooded by remorse, the Phantom then relinquishes her to the man he knows she truly loves, and when Christine hesitates to leave, he shouts at her, "Go!" and then, of course, she and Raoul leave together.
Viktor is expecting that to happen! I think his order to Jayce very clearly implies that he thinks Mel and Jayce are still together. It's the classic, "Go be with the woman you love instead of staying here and dying with me," trope that we see over and over again in dramas.
But Jayce. Defies. The Trope.
Unlike Christine and just about every buddy war movie out there, he stays with Viktor. He chooses his scientific/artistic partner over the life of aristocracy and privilege that Mel would theoretically offer him. He chooses the masked genius with the disability and calls him perfect. He refuses to go when he is ordered to leave. He stays with Viktor until the end.
And I still can't believe that no one else is talking about this!
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hyukascampfire · 3 days ago
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𝑯EART 𝑊ORM ⸺ hueningkai ℘˒´ˎ˗
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  ⨾𓍢ִ໋ ˒˒ 𝚑𝔢art𝚠𝔬rm
[𝑛]. a relationship or friendship that you can't get out of your head, which you thought had faded long ago but is still somehow alive and unfinished, like an abandoned campsite whose smoldering embers still have the power to start a forest fire.
⸺ listen to the playlist .ᐟ ‧˚
〝﹙ 📼 ﹚“I was just... wondering,” you say, blood roaring. "Well, Yeonjun wants me to come over to his place this weekend, and... I’ve never...” Sucking in a quick breath, you just spit it out to get it over with, “Would you be my first kiss, Kai?”  ˛ 、、
wc ➛ 17.9k
𝔭airings childhood bsf!kai x reader (lowkey soulmates?) ⤷ ft. asshole!yeonjun x reader
𝒢 ‎; smut ˒ angst ˒ some fantasy
𝔴arnings angst, family issues, fingering, jealousy (i’m sorry i just love ts), yeonjun really is an asshole, orgasm denial, thigh fucking, unprotected sex (they're stupid!), strength kink a lil bit, breeding kink, possessiveness, creampie, choking... i think that's all, lmk if i missed any
✎୭ ashlynn's note omg. this was such a fun palate cleanser to write. this wasn't supposed to be as big as it is, but it just kept getting bigger and bigger, and i got super into the story. this kai is SOOOO!! yeah. i’m so nervous posting this because i’ve only ever posted TSFAWC, but…. here you areee (^^;; this is not proofread, so if you see a mistake... give me a sec. i'll get to it. hehe
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Though you fan your hand furiously over your face, the little breezes washing over your clammy skin are not enough. The air is thick and heavy with summer’s heat. So thick that you almost feel it each time you swallow. It’s better than just letting yourself melt away, though. The cushion at your back doesn’t help much. It holds your warmth and returns it to you the longer you sit slumped back into it. You suffer it though—you’ve gone too sluggish to move.  
You let a leg dangle over the arm of a chair, watching a hopeful moth dance in the light of the buzzing porch light overhead. It flutters frantically in it, making a grand fight to reach that false moonlight, only to drop away when it realizes that it’s being burnt. You watch it rinse and repeat, relentless and sure, for who knows how long. It’s no special moth—no luna moth or the ones with the pretty pink wings—but the light falls down on it and colors it a pleasant stardust silver.  
You delight in letting your conscious brain turn off to watch it. It lets you forget the sweltering under your skin, and also that Kai had drug you out here. His dad gives him shit when he plays inside, but it’s way too hot to be out here. Isn’t it supposed to cool off after the sun goes down? It doesn’t feel like it. The deep acoustics are drowned out each time a car whirrs by. Playing outside should be the best option, but you and Kai live right on a busy road.  
When the roar of some car going ten miles over the speed limit doesn’t obscure his playing, though, you admire the intricacy of it. His fingers work up and down the neck, jumping frets that you imagine would be impossible to anybody without those long fingers of his. You had always been a loud supporter of his playing, even way back when the most he could play were simple chords, but you became especially so when a few years back he put a guitar in your hands and tried teaching you. Even with his fingers guiding yours, it was quick to learn that the effortlessness with which Kai handles the instrument is hard earned.  
He practices on the acoustic guitar, but that’s not his domain. With houses just a dash across the street from each other, Kai had grown up at your home more than he had at his own. So vividly, you remember the stars in his eyes when he’d listen to your dad’s music. Metallica, The Smashing Pumpkins, Linkin Park, any of it. He had fallen in love with it a long time ago. Your whole life you knew that it was only a matter of time before he was in his own band, chasing his dreams with a boundless mind and an indelible vision of himself on stage. How had that time come so soon, though? You don’t know if the notebooks full of inky lyrics that live wherever he deems inspiration might hit him make you proud or nervous. He’s making good on his dazzling aspirations, and you? 
You speak finally into the air, cutting through heat waves and his music and the night. “Isn’t it weird that we’re not going back to school after this summer?” 
He doesn’t have to even stop playing to answer you. Playing comes to him as a second nature. “Kinda,” he answers, brown eyes flitting up to you. “But it’s not like you won’t be back to it in September. College is the same shit.” 
The leg you’d been dangling and bouncing pauses. That’s right; you’re supposed to be going to that college you’d chosen because it was only a three-hour drive away from here. You pluck at the seat’s threadbare fabric, and the moth, still there, becomes oh-so-interesting once again. When his playing stops, you drop your head back with a cushioned thud and a groan that you wrangle in your throat. 
“Why are you acting like that?” he says, voice gone sharp like accusation. He doesn’t even know the truth, but he’s known you too long.
Can’t you just keep secrets for yourself, sometimes?
Kai, arms clad in a well-loved hoodie even in this dreadful weather, lays the guitar down. You maintain your silence. “Seriously, what?” 
Some secrets have timers, though. This one could only last you until about September, or even August when he realizes that you’re not preparing to return to school. A controlled sigh from your chest isn’t enough to soothe the nerves that sparks. “Nothing.” 
“Secrets, huh?” Kai says. When you do finally look to him, black spikes of hair frame his eyes and the accusation in them. 
It’s a simple poke, but it gets under your skin as sharp as any thorn might. It’s not like you don’t keep secrets from him, and you’re sure he keeps some from you too. But those are the little kinds, the inconsequential ones—like I ate already when asked why you’re not eating or like Yeah, I’m fine when it’s been a bad day. You don’t hide this kind of stuff from each other. Usually, you’d run over to his place to tell him whatever’s bothering you. Why not, when he’s known even the worst details of your life for almost the entirety of it? You’ve been holding this one close to your chest since somewhere around the end of senior year, though. The longer you let it fester, the worse your nervousness snowballs. “C’mon, Kai. Let’s not do this. Can you keep playing?” 
He doesn’t like that, of course. But you watch recognition dawn over his chocolate brown eyes, helpless to stop it. “You’re not going,” he says. It’s not a question nor a suspicion, it’s a bone-dry fact.  
Well. There that goes. You want to tear every hair on your head right out. Why had you even thought you’d keep him in the dark about it? When he’s not out in some garage making music, you two are together. The conversation was going to stroll by at some point; this was only inevitable. His disappointment radiates off him in waves and blisters you. He hasn’t even said anything yet, but you know exactly what he thinks of it. It’s why you kept it from him in the first place.  
Your silence is enough confirmation for him. “Why?” he says. “I thought you were excited to move out.” 
Wincing, you nod slowly. You were. Even went through the whole application process, along with most other kids your age. Ultimately, you never went through with declaring a college. You don’t exactly know why, but somewhere weaseled down in the shadowy recesses of your soul, you know. Taking those steps, the massive and terrifying ones from adolescence into adulthood, meant agreeing that this form of your life was over. It meant that at some point, you’d be moving away from here to where living your days away in Kai’s room would not be a choice. Everybody has to do it eventually, you know that. Kai’s music gig could take off any day, too. He’s going to make it happen. And then what? All this stalling and wishing on just a bit more time would mean nothing, he’d be off and chasing that dream. As excited as you are for it to finally become reality for him, there’s a nasty bitterness that’s budded in your chest, infecting your person.  
Can’t things just stay like this? 
“I was,” you say. It comes out of your mouth heavy.  
“Then why aren’t you going?” he says. Crickets, never seen but always heard, sing their song into the night’s darkness. “You didn’t get rejected. You’re too smart for that.” 
An ache sits heavily somewhere near the center of your chest, maybe over your heart. All those good grades, nights spent bent over a desk and AP paperwork—you’re wasting it. You shake your head. “No... just...” It’s an effort to dress your thoughts in a way that might appease him. A quiet moment stretches with your thinking before you continue, “I don’t know what I want to do.” 
He doesn’t like that, the yellow wash of the overhead light dancing over his taut lips and hard eyes. “Don’t know what you want to do?” he says, bringing his legs up onto the seat to crisscross them. He wears his favorite jeans. They’re heel-bitten and baggy enough over his legs that he can wear them around the house without any bother. “You’ve wanted to be an artist your whole life. You know exactly what you want to do.” 
Your chest only seems to ache harder. When the both of you were only young and hopeful, you both had big dreams. Kai was going to be the face of a metal band, and you were going to be an artist. A painter, potter, sculptor, even doing animation for those big companies like Dreamworks and Disney. You wanted any of it, just as long as you were doing art. You’d even promised him that you’d do the cover art for his albums with interlocked pinkies and flushed, hopeful cheeks. That passion and love wasn’t gone from you, it blazed strong in your veins. This blaze wasn’t the kind that kept you warm and excited to push forward into life, though. It had morphed into something that scalded you when you got too close or started imagining yourself pursuing its call. It’s a taunting silvery glow, no longer a guiding north star. Taunting words of family members stamped down on that hope hard. When you were little, it was said lighthearted and in passing. The older you got, though, the more serious their faces became. They wouldn’t say it outright perhaps, but you hear what they think well enough. Art is a dead-end career.  
Shifting in your seat, you tell him, “I don’t know.” 
“What do you mean?” Kai says. “There are good colleges for that.” 
“I just... don’t know.” 
Shaking his head, he tells you, “But you love it.” 
You do. In its every form, you love creating. But loving it doesn’t mean that it’s right for you, or that you should trust your future in its hands. “I think I can do it in my own time,” you say, finally pushing yourself upright from the cushion. “Don’t wanna kill the passion by doing it for a living, you know?” 
He thinks on that for a moment. “If you love it, you should do it,” he says. 
An awful frustration bubbles in your chest. Kai has always had a clear life path, the steps ahead of him set in stone and waiting for him to follow in them. It’s hard for him to see why you might not want to do the same. There’s nothing that makes you as happy as the fact that he has it all figured out, that he knows just where he’s going and that he’s so incredible at it that he doesn’t have to worry about meeting the requirements, but your path seems obscured and untrodden. Punctuating a deep, resonant sigh, you say, “It’s not that easy, Kai.” 
“If you’re not doing that, then what are you going to do? Are you just going to settle for a nine-to-five?” he says full of accusation, the tapping on his knees gone still.  
A dry laugh, you say, “Maybe I’ll marry a super rich guy and just do my art for a living. No nine-to-five.” 
His face flashes. He’d always been a bit reserved, especially around others, but he bared his emotions freely around you. You hold them dearly to your chest and made sure to do your best to make good on that trust. He says, “You’re more than some guy’s housewife.” 
Cheeks radiating in the heat, you snort. “I know, dork. I’m a rockstar’s best friend. It’s my personal favorite achievement.”  
His face sours when you reach out and pinch hard at his cheek, but he doesn’t pull away or brush you off. The skin there is warmed and clammy. Really, the two of you should go meet the cool AC inside before you suffer heat stroke. But this moment feels so nice—your shoulders feel tons lighter without something to hide. If you had it your way, things would stay like this forever. Just the two of you, sat here like you have so many times before, just taking for granted the time you’ve got together.  
His mouth opens to banter, probably something about how he’s not a rockstar yet or to get you back for calling him a dork. Wingbeat and sterling dashes about your face send the image into a blur, though. You’re a quick mess of limbs and a whipping head, as if it’ll chase the thing away from you. 
“Seriously?” Kai says. You’d climbed halfway over him, elbows digging into him and knee doing a number on his thigh. “It’s a moth. You’re not scared of moths.” 
Lingering for a few moments later to ensure the flying thing was nowhere on you or around you, you hold back a laugh before you climb off him and fix your hair with undignified tucks behind your ears. “He was in my face,” you say around a laugh, because you know it was a bit too much. Nobody likes wings in their ears and spindly legs in their face, though, and you’re in no control of what you do when anything with six legs tries and get too friendly. Even moths.  
“You just wanted me to protect you,” he says. A sarcastic, shit-eating smile tugs at the corners of his mouth.  
“Oh,” you scoff, batting your eyelashes and clasping your hands together all saccharine-sweet. “Yes, Romeo, won’t you kill that bug for me? This girl’s heart just can’t take it!” 
Kai’s nose crinkles, and the playful light twists into a glare. “Nasty.” 
“That’s how you sounded,” you say. “I only reacted accordingly.” Laughing, you kick your legs out over his lap and sprawl back out. He takes the guitar back into his hands. 
As much as you want to escape the mugginess, you’ll survive it for just a little while longer—if only with the force of an indulgent heart. The eternal moments are those you allow to linger.  
⚝⭒ 
Some things, you forget when you’re older. Maybe it’s time’s hand, eroding memories down and stuffing more in the longer you live to experience them. But also maybe because they’re the sort of things you can’t say in the adult world without a laugh in the face and a look from down their noses.  
This memory is one of those forgotten things. It’s moth-bitten and dusty, something you one day folded up in a moving box and decided to never revisit. 
You’d been down at the creek. Kai and you had spent so many summer days there. It wasn’t too far from home, just past the filbert trees and into the shallow neck of the backwoods, but there you were out of sight and free to get up to nothing good. It was a wonder your mom ever let you do it. Kai’s dad didn’t care too much where he went or what he did, but your mom dug her claws in deep. You like to think that she imagined you two would have each other, if anything ever happened. 
Usually, you’d be there holding your jeans up from the stream and Kai would be letting his jeans go dark with it. The bite of water was nice as it washed over warm skin. Fun was a simple thing to find, then. You dug your fingers into the mudbanks and tossed stones way too big to be throwing at each other, just because you two remembered how much the adults hated it when you did. Then, you’d drag tired limbs home avoiding sweetgum tree spikes that had fallen to the ground and dug splinters out from your feet.  
This day, you had been in the blackberry bushes. It was maybe late July or early August, and they’d gotten heavy on their branches. You’d waited until the smell of them, summer-warmed, was sweet and cloying in the air to pick them. With buckets in your hands, you plucked only the fattest berries from their bunches. Your fingers were stained a delightful purple and perhaps a bit thorn raw, but you didn’t mind much then. You plucked for hours, and it was dusk before you could catch it. Dinner was no doubt waiting for you back home. 
“There’s a bunch over here,” Kai had said. He reached a long boyish arm, still awkward and lanky with puberty, up high for ripe bush. You finished off picking before climbing around thick branches sticking out to take a peek. A bunch, there was. 
When you went to drop a handful of them into your bucket, Kai hissed. He’d been snagged by a vicious looking branch, those ones as thick as a finger with thorns to match and you’d warn each other tongue-in-cheek to watch out for that one. He’d worn those ridiculous shorts that day, the ones that looked half pants half shorts with how long and baggy they were, and the claws of the bush had jumped at the opportunity. At first the scrapes were white, but then red blood crawled out and down his leg.  
“Kai,” you said, some parts chiding and some parts just wondering how he’d managed that. You surveyed his leg for a bit, and then determined that he should wash his leg off in the stream. He walked there strong, but of course you noticed the hobble beneath his acting. When you squatted down into the dry grass and cupped water to wash off his leg, you laughed. 
“What?” he had said, holding the shorts up. You covered your laugh with a hand, but it erupted past your palm. You remember the glare on his face very well.  
You still laughed. “You’re stupid,” you had told him. 
“I didn’t see it,” he said. “I tripped over it because it was sticking out.” 
That time when you brought your hands to catch some water, there was a twinkle in its surface. You didn’t notice it for a second. The creek moved fast and you could see a lot of things in its reflection. When it lingered, that’s when your brows furrowed. It seemed to twirl, dancing around like alive over the stones. 
The sound of Kai’s voice remains with you. “Hey,” he had said, strong to call your attention but also wavered with uncertainty. 
When you looked up, there was silver dust dancing around you. 
It was fluffy and whorling, fine silver stardust. It’d moved weightless in the air, as though it barely existed. In the center of it were a few moths. They seemed to be made of sterling powder just as the dust was, and they glowed against dusk’s backdrop. If your memory serves you right, there had been a sweet hymn of coos from them. They beckoned you. Summer’s heat felt lighter, and so did your chest. You wondered where they had wanted you to go. 
Almost afraid that if you spoke they might have fluttered away, you whispered soft and low to Kai. “What is that?” He was stood frozen there, pant leg still scrunched up in his fist. Stardust glowed soft in his brown eyes while he took it all in, you remember. It wasn’t a scared frozen. You weren’t scared, either—rather, it was as if that lightness had found its way into the core of your being and brushed over it with mending hands. 
He whispered back, “I don’t know.” How could he have known? It was absurd. 
Those whisps had beckoned you, flowing toward the deeper woods. The soft moths, their murmuring brushing up against your ears, seemed to wait for you to follow. You remember a pull, soft tendrils wrapping themselves around your heart and the yearning it planted there.  
But there was also this reluctance, a bone-deep answering that had told you: No. You’re not ready. 
“Kai, I wanna go,” you told him. 
You didn’t even need to tell him twice. Berry buckets forgotten; the journey home was a stranger one. When your dad asked why you returned from berry picking emptier handed than you had left the house, Kai and you only shared a look. You pair kept that evening at the creek hidden so well that it became more forgotten than shared secret.  
⚝⭒ 
Once, you had been the type of girl that loved being around family. Some of your favorite days of your life were spent in this living room, T.V. roaring over bouncing conversation. Some of those nights ended in rosy cheeks and laughs, and some ended with words thrown angry like fireworks. You never knew which you’d be getting, but you endured the fear of not knowing because it was a simple love—the basic kind built with biology into you the moment your infant skin touched your mother’s. You endured it because eventually, sleep washed away the bad taste left in your mouth and you forgave them quick, sometimes quicker than you ought to, and things would go on as if it hadn’t even happened. You endured it because you could handle its burden, if only to feel the warmth you feel when it’s a good day.  
Kai was always there—his dad was hardly home, so he found family in yours. When you were younger, you’d been embarrassed he was there for caustic, spitted words and intimate fights. Now, you’re just grateful for his shoulder.  
So, yes. Once, you had loved being around your family. But things feel tenser now, nights spent all together less frequent and when they do happen, they’re tainted by a strange air. You think that this strangeness is new, but an awful worry also makes you think that it’d always been there, that you only feel it now because you’ve grown into your adult mind. A hollow ache stakes its claim in your chest, declaring that it won’t leave until you find that youthful ignorance and joy once more. You think that it might stay there forever. 
Bare feet bounding down the stairs, you make a rare appearance downstairs. The cupboard is only half open to make way for a snack raid before your mom’s voice cuts through the air. You know quickly just by the look on her face that you should’ve stayed upstairs. 
“Hey,” she says, gathering laundry into a basket. “You’ve been applying to jobs?” 
With an anxious belly, you tell her, “Yeah. A few. They’re not really, like, ideal, but I sent applications.” You don’t remember when it got hard to look into your mother’s eyes, but you can’t bring yourself to do so now.  
“Not ideal?” she says. “It’s not like you can be picky. Mcdonalds or wherever, I don’t care, you’re going to need to get a job if you’re staying here.” 
“I know. I applied,” you reiterate around a mumble. You close the cabinets, not so interested in a snack anymore. “I just... I don’t know, ma. I don’t want to do that for a living, going between those sorts of jobs.” 
Face hard and abrasive against the truth you bare, she does that awful taunting smile that makes you feel small. Stupid. “You’re not going to college, so that’s what it’s gonna be. You can’t sit up there and draw for a living. You’ve gotta get into the real world, get some real experience.”  
There’s a burst of hurt in your chest, dazzling and gnawing. She’s getting closer to saying how she really feels about your dreams out loud every day. Your face burns and so do your eyes, knot thick in your throat. “Yeah, okay. Got it,” you say, nodding. You’re at the front door before you even know it, slipping on shoes and fighting the greatest internal battle to will back tears. She’d use those against you, no doubt about it. “I’m going to Kai’s,” you throw over your shoulder.  
Whatever she barks back at you, you’re glad you don’t hear. Bells on some old Christmas decoration hung on the door that had yet to be taken down, even into summer, jingle and wash it away for you. 
Kai’s brows shoot up when he opens the door to your face crumpling. You’d done so well at damming it up, but the wall cracks and the water crashes through once you see him. If it were anybody else, you’d feel icky and attention seeking, but you’d held Kai to your chest through gut-wrenching sobs as much as he’s done it for you. Without question, he takes you into his arms, warm hand running up and down your back. The warm soothing is so familiar. You melt right into it.  
He keeps you there for a long moment. Then, his chest rumbles as he tells you, “Come on.” The walk through the AC to his bedroom is nice. Having a house like Kai’s to come to where it can just be you is nice, too. You step around the mess of clothes and scattered belongings on his floor like you have a muscle-memory roadmap of his room. Boxsprings creak and hard mattress welcome you back home. His room is dark as always, a night-dweller you call him. The array of peeling band posters plastered over walls you two had painted blue some years ago, when it’d been his favorite color, don’t help to lighten it up. He keeps a low lamplight on.  
“She never listens to me,” you say, crying gone to occasional sniffles from your chest. You rest your cheek on your bent knee. 
“I know,” he says. “But at least she cares about you. Pays attention to you.” His voice is soft and deep and right next to you. Always right next to you, there for you even when you might not appreciate it as you should.  
His dad cares too little what he does, and yours care too much. The grass is always greener on the other side, you know it. Still, you hold a fantasy where you’re able to do teenager stuff. Where you’d allow yourself to do bad things, because you weren’t so intent on painting yourself with their will. You two hold eyes for a long moment, your twinkling ones caught in that steady brown. “I just want to get away. Be my own person.” Your words are muffled in the softness of your skin. 
“You had the chance to do it,” Kai says, hand playing with your fingers. “But you didn’t.” 
Holding your legs closer, you lick your lips. What do you say to that? Would it ever be the time to tell him that you did it because you think that your soul is pathetically intertwined with his, and that it might snuff your lifeforce out to even try pursuing life without him? Without this? How do you tell him that you’re so frozen and unwilling to pursue any sort of future because it means accepting that this chapter is over? You clutch childhood to your chest like a wild animal guarding scarce food; you refuse. You refuse to acknowledge its end.  
“Kai,” is all you say, trembled and thick. It’s not just your mother’s words that dig at you and tear to shreds the last bits of what dreaming you had left in you, but so many other reality checks too. This isn’t the first time you’ve heard those sorts of words, urging you forward. You can only dig your heel into the ground for so long before you’re swept away in time’s ruthless, endless moving.  
He understands. Lifting your face with warm fingers against your cheeks, he says, “Hey. How about we go get ice cream, or something?” 
Ice cream does sound nice. “Dairy Queen?” 
Smirk tugged over his mouth, he says, “Yes, Dairy Queen. A blizzard. C’mon, let’s go.” Sliding off the bed, he offers you an urging hand up. 
But you falter. “I don’t know if we can. She’s mad at me. I don’t think she’ll let me go.” 
“Let you go?” he says, eyes narrowed. “She doesn’t have to let you go. You’re an adult now, you go if you want to.” He offers his hand to you again. 
It’s so him, freely going wherever he ordain it. The bullheadedness is very him, as well. Always the devil on your shoulder, he was the root of any rebellious thing you’ve ever done. He could never understand your apprehension, or why getting in trouble was such an awful thing to you. “I have to ask to get money.” 
Brows pinching, he says, “You think I’m not gonna pay for you? You don’t need them to give you money, I’ll pay. I’ll take care of it.” He drags you up from the bed this time. “Live a little. Do you want to go?” 
It was never the punishments or the getting in trouble that you were scared of, though. Disappointment was a scarier word than grounded. Sneaking out and those sorts of things, it’s not like you had angel wings at your back and never considered them. It’s that you are deeply, utterly terrified of changing how they look at you. You begin to tell him, “I do, but—” 
He cuts you off, adamant. “Then do it. Let’s go. If you want to go, then go,” he says. “At some point, your life needs to become your own. It’s not sneaking out when you’re graduated and eighteen years old, it’s going wherever the hell you want. You’ve... You’re gonna end up stuck here, in this town, forever. You don’t deserve that.” 
That sounds like both the best and the worst thing you’ve ever heard. You take his hand.  
⚝⭒ 
Your frozen fingers nurse your ice cream. The cup itself is cold, but the Dairy Queen on your side of town is always thirty degrees below what it should be. It’d always been that way. Even way back when you two couldn’t drive, you’d get dropped off here to escape the melting weather and get a frozen treat with a handful of dollars. Each time, you’d start off sagging with the relief of summer’s weight off your shoulders and left the place shivering and sugar-mouthed.  
It’s really only you two in here. You crinkle your nose when he takes a spoonful. “Out of all the flavors...” 
Unbothered and no doubt expecting you to say it, he offers you a flat, “You get your flavor, I get mine.” He makes a point of taking an extra-long bite. His lips linger around the red plastic of the spoon and his brows rest high in silent challenge.  
The corners of your lips twitch up. “Hmm. Well. I just have a hard time believing that Oreo... or, like, brownie fudge, is right there, and you actually want M&M. I don’t get how M&M your favorite.” A familiar banter falls over your tongues. Your heart buzzes and your cheeks radiate. This is the first you’ve done this all summer, and it’ll be weaning off into fall soon. Any other summer, you would’ve been here on all the hottest days. You hate that Kai’s been so busy with his music; you hate that you can hear the resounding ticks of the clock counting down your time. You also hate that the stubborn depths of you still believe that if you freeze yourself here in stasis that the world will relent and stop along with you. 
You look over the sharp lines of Kai’s jawline as it feathers with his chewing, and the broadness of his shoulders where his jacket stretches around it, and the starkness of his collarbones against his chest and the bobbing of his adam’s apple when he swallows. No, time doesn’t stop. Some of him remains the same, though. In it, you see the boy that had love creeping up on you so long ago, with all its aching and all its hope. That freckle on the column of his neck, the bump in his nose leading down to the button tip that beckons your lips to steal a quick kiss.  
And, those lips. They’re as soft as ever around the discontented grimace he pulls. “M&M isn’t my favorite.” 
With a pursed mouth and patronizing brows arched over your eyes, you say, “Oh, huh. That’s funny, because if my memory serves me right, it’s the only flavor you’ve ordered for the past... six years.”  
Kai husks a laugh at that. “That’s because they haven’t had my favorite for years,” he tells you, scooping up the final bit and then pushing it off to the side. “It was a blizzard of the month that they discontinued. The blackberry cheesecake one. I made peace with it, though. It lives on in my heart.” He grins, arms crossed over his chest and his back settled into the booth seat to let you finish your cup.  
“Blackberry cheesecake,” you say, voice made taunting. Your nod is slow and taunting, too. “Well, forget M&Ms.Why would blackberry cheesecake be your favorite? Ever?” 
His face falters, a moment where something flows over his eyes as if reliving a memory in a few short seconds. Then, he shrugs. “It just is.” 
You roll your eyes. “Whatever,” you laugh. “Maybe my palate is unrefined.” Imagining the tarte fruit in purple swirls of ice cream, you’re taken back to a humid July day and the scent of churned mud.  
The strange memory unfolds itself quick. As if it were waiting for you to find wherever it’d hidden itself away. With a sharp gasp, you say, “Oh my god, Kai. Do you remember that one day? That weird stuff we saw down at the creek?” 
He nods. “Yeah. I was just thinking of that the other day, actually...” 
Less interested in finishing your cup now, you let the spoon rest. “What?” you say, the word peaking in the middle. That day hadn’t crossed your mind once since it’d happened. “How weird is that?” 
Scoffing a laugh, he says, “Weird, yeah. Just as strange as two kids high on fermented berries.” 
That draws a breathy laugh from you. “Is that what you think it was?” you ask him with knitted brows. The berries had been fresh, and you two had popped plenty into your mouth. But no doubt, you’d have spat them right back out if they were that ripe. “I mean, we saw the same thing.” 
“It happens to animals all the time. Squirrells, and stuff.” He lends you a gallic shrug. “We just freaked ourselves out. Like that one time you said you saw the shape of something in the dark and we freaked out. And it was clothes.”  
Well, hallucinating, in tandem, a glowing mist because you two by chance ate fermented berries is a very long shot. However nonchalant he acts about it, he seems to have thought long and hard about it. Enough to reason it away with some far cry explanation. Would you have even been able to get drunk off a handful of fermented berries? And, god, you’re really sure that you’d have noticed. That taste isn’t really one you just don’t notice.  
Whatever. Maybe you were just drunk idiots. That’s a lot easier to swallow, anyway. 
“Okay, but you saw that. Did it not look sinister?” you say. With your spoon back in your hand, you punctuate the sentence pointing it at him. “You freaked out with me, too.”  
An unsatisfied scowl on his lips, he steals a spoonful of your dessert. You don’t even swat him away—your phone buzzes in your pocket. 
Catching sight of who’s calling, you share a long look with Kai. It’s funny, how fast those three white letters scramble you up. When you hesitate to answer, Kai tells you, “Answer.” 
You hope she can’t tell you’re not at Kai’s by the refrigerators’ dull buzzing. It’s an effort to tussle that invasive worry back. You’re at Dairy Queen. Getting ice cream with the boy she’s known since childhood. She should clutch her hands and thank the sky that you’re here, not out in some nasty frat house like you could be. You thumb the green button. 
Her voice comes through the speaker crackled and asking you to run over to do a quick dish load. For a heartbeat you consider telling her that you will and then start rushing home. Instead, you fork out the truth through resistant lips. 
The hangup tone sits heavy on the air between you and Kai. Having listened to the whole thing on speaker, he says, “What was so hard about that? The world didn’t end, did it?” 
The plush of your lip takes a hard gnawing. No, it hadn’t. “I know she’s not going to get mad at me for just going here,” you say as you rest your elbows onto the table. “It’s that they’re supporting me right now. I still live under their roof. The more I go around and insist I can do whatever I want, they’ll start reminding me of it.” 
His face drawn, he lets his mouth twitch to one side. “Yeah,” he muses. “I never thought yours would be the type to kick you out.” 
Kai’s dad had started threating him with getting kicked out years ago, when he first started telling him that he wanted to do music. How many times had he let reluctant tears flow into your shoulder over it? Because music wasn’t a real job? Back then, you’d whispered in his ears that he’d become everything he’d dreamed of and more as your fingers carded through shaggy locks of hair.  
“I don’t know,” you say, humming it out noncommittally. “Is your dad still... y’know?” 
Nodding slowly, his eyes tell. “Yeah. Always.” 
“Because you’re taking the band seriously, now?” you ask.  
“Probably. I don’t give a shit what he thinks about it. If I’m just his goddamn problem, I’ll give him what he wants soon enough.” His eyes blaze with promise of it.  
It takes a bit out of you to not wince. Kai living anywhere but in the house across from yours is wrong. “I don’t think he necessarily wants that, Kai...” You take his hand in your icy ones, the urge to reach out to him thinly veiled under the guise of searching out warmth. He’d always run warmer than you—your personal heater. “It’s probably because he can see that you’re doing it for real. Not just saying it anymore.” 
“Yeah, well,” he spits, “I can’t fucking wait to see what he’ll say to me when I make it. That piece of shit, though, he wouldn’t even care. It’s not like he ever gave a shit about me enough for it to matter.” 
But, it matters to you, you want to tell him. You understand his need to throw it all in his face. Though. “Is that one label going to sign you? The one you were talking about?” 
His tongue darts out to wet dry lips. “They haven’t yet. I don’t know. But I don’t need that money to get out of here, I’ve been working on it.” 
“They will,” you say. “But, where would you go? Not too far?” You try and keep it light and playful, even as your heart aches. 
“Come with me,” he says. It’s painfully blunt, as if it were that simple. “Let’s go get and apartment; you and me.” 
“Kai...” you say. “You don’t have to drag me along because you feel bad.” 
The idea doesn’t sound half bad, though.  
“What?” His face tightens, as if somewhere under the surface your words had scraped somewhere tender. “You don’t have to stay here forever. Please. I want... I want you to come with me. You wouldn’t have to even tell them; just bring all your stuff and go together. We could do it together. Like we said we would.”  
“We were like, five. Everybody tries to pretend running away at five,” you deadpan. It’s a washy attempt at lightening things back up. 
Living with him, moving out together, should feel like everything you’ve ever wanted. And, maybe it is. But, he’s not asking you to live with him the way you want him to. Not in the way that your aching heart wishes he would.  
Kai doesn’t share the laugh you give him. “Yeah, okay,” he says, leaning into the table.  
Perhaps you should consider the potent disappointment he’s terribly masking with a face of indifference, though. 
⚝⭒ 
Slowly, the knots in your belly have worked themselves out. When Kai had dropped you off, they’d been so awful that you felt borderline sick. You sat the whole ride there in his old beat-up truck picking at your nails and rambling to him. He listened to you the whole time. And then when it was time to walk in, it had least felt a little easier to do so with his eyes on you, watching to make sure you made it in safely. 
You’d gotten a job. It’s not too bad, folding clothes out on display. It would be nice if they kept the lights a bit brighter, but you’ll get used it eventually, you hope. 
Most of your coworkers are around your age, but the one showing you the ropes... your heart had fluttered. 
“You’ll get it,” Yeonjun says. The smile you find on his lips once he straightens up from placing product on a display is smooth and smug. Sleek strands of black hair fall over his eyes. You fluster under his gaze.  
With arms crossed over your chest you say, “Yeah, probably.” You reach into the cardboard box for stock to practice on. 
“Where’d you work before this?” he asks, leaning back into a wall to watch you. Suddenly, you make sloppier work of your folding. “Your first retail job?” 
Some obnoxious pop song falls down from the speakers over the store. Nobody’s in here yet, thankfully; you’ve got some time to try and get a handle on everything. “No, this is my first job. I was so nervous walking in.” 
Interest catches in his eyes. It encourages that smooth smile on his lips further. “Don’t worry, sweetheart, I’ll show you the reins.” 
Your mind stalls. The suggestive, sly flicker to it—are you looking too much into it? Maybe that’s just how guys like Yeonjun act. It’s hard to pretend that you don’t see how he’s looking at you, though. It has your belly twisted up in fluttery knots. It’s not like you hadn’t had your share of his type. But, for some reason you’d rather not address, he’s got your heart thumping in your chest. 
He laughs at your fifth attempt to fold up the shirt. When he takes it from you to help, he smells of musk and vetiver. “You going to college near here?” he continues.  
“Nah, just doing this, I guess,” you answer, watching him fold it up to try and soak it up.  
“Really? Why not?” he hums, crossing his arms about his chest. “You seem like a smart girl.” 
Buffering, your blood buzzes in your veins and your cheeks burn. “Dunno. Not really sure what to do. Are you in college?” 
“Nah. I’m trying to figure things out, too.” 
The both of you pop your heads up when the bell rings to announce the arrival of a customer.  
“Yeah,” you say, eyeing him. He’s a few years older than you, no doubt, and yet his life hasn’t fallen apart because he’s not done anything grand yet.  
Time’s hand around your neck loosens. Just a little bit.  
⚝⭒ 
You sit crisscrossed on top of Kai’s bedsheets. He’d thrown the windows open because the AC died, but it’s no help. The hot air wafting about the room sits heavy on your skin. You’d dressed in as little material as possible to let it breathe, bare thighs clad in a pair of loose shorts and a thin tank top, but it’s still miserable. 
Perhaps you two should be going over to yours, but you haven’t had time alone with him for a few weeks now. You hate this busier life, where you struggle to make room for this. 
Your new job isn’t so awful, though. Especially with Yeonjun there. A bout of nerves flows up through your stomach. That reminds you. 
Sitting up a bit straighter, you consider not doing it. In fact, you really shouldn’t. But your mouth moves before you can put a stopper on it. 
“Hey, Kai,” you say. The thickness in your throat makes you believe that your heart’s jumped up into it, caught. God, what are you doing? The unsure waver in your words has you regretting. 
His eyes flicker up to yours. He hums out a, “Huh?” 
No, this is wrong. You mess with the thin cotton strap of your tank top where it’d slipped down. “Never mind,” you tell him, trying to shrug it off.  
That piques his interest. “No, what?” His brow pinches.  
You lick your lips and shake your head. “Nothing, never mind. Really.” 
His eyes search you from where he sits up against the wall. “Tell me,” he demands. 
Really, you shouldn’t have said it in the first place. It was a ridiculous idea. But now you know he’s not going to let it go. And, ridiculously, you say it. “I was just... wondering,” you say, blood roaring. "Well, Yeonjun wants me to come over to his place this weekend, and... I’ve never...” Sucking in a quick breath, you just spit it out to get it over with, “Would you be my first kiss, Kai?” 
Insects buzz outside as he looks at you, frozen in spot. You reject the urge to dart away or throw up. You’re honestly just as shaken as him. But really, who else could you trust with something like that? You don’t want Yeonjun to be disappointed if he kisses you, or to seem inexperienced to him. 
And, perhaps, the hopelessly in love part of you hopes to at least feel his lips on yours at least once. If you’re going to be alone forever in your longing, you just wish that you can have this. 
“What?” Kai says. He looks rattled.  
Of course, he’s shocked. You shift. “Forget I said that,” you tell him, unable to meet his gaze.  
String-roughened fingers wrap around your upper arm. “I didn’t say anything,” he says, voice strained and face less shock-fallen and more darkened. “But... I mean, you want me to teach you to kiss for some other guy.” He spits out the last bit as if bitter in his mouth.  
“You don’t have to do it,” you say. “I just... thought that I might ask you to do it. I don’t know, I’m sorry I said it. I’ll just wing it or something.” His room’s grown ten degrees hotter, if that was possible. Especially where you feel his eyes on your face.  
Almost imperceptibly, his hand tightens around you. He swallows hard. “You want to learn how to kiss?” he says. “Fine. I’ll teach you.” 
In a heart-stopping moment, your eyes snap to his. Brown and familiar, they hold you with an intensity that turns your limbs into jelly. The air is stifling. “What... do I do?” you ask when the silence becomes too heavy.  
A muscle feathers in his jaw, reflected in the low light of his room. It’s quick and so easy to miss, but it tells you everything you need to know about how this is making him feel. How much disbelief he’s in. “Come here,” he says, stilted around the absolute absurdity of it. He pats on his lap. 
You make a hesitant crawl across the bed toward him. It seems as though your elbows might buckle beneath your weight, but you make it despite the odds. A fog settles over your brain when you rest your hands on his shoulders and bring your legs to straddle his lap. 
But you shove it back; you want to live and breathe every last second of this. No matter how unbelievable or blistering it is.  
Breaths fan out over your face. It’s seizing your mind like undiluted liquor. “Where do I put my hands?” you ask him. It’s breathless, the air stolen right from your lungs though your mouths haven’t even touched.  
“There is fine,” he says. His words sound breathless, too. The weight of his touch on you as he runs his own up to support your back is unsure. “And then...” he says. It falls out on your mouth slowly, and then he’s taking your lips onto his. 
The walls melt away, sound does too. All that is real is the taste of his lips and how they move against you. Your lips start tentative, but you try his mouth movements yourself. It feels like a timid dance—it feels like deep, deep down, finally everything is right. That mist, thick and blinding, falls back over you. 
Something changes. Something in it, where you two meet, changes. He becomes hungry. Softly locked lips turn biting and nipping, shaky breaths exhaled slow through your nose. His hands on your back become surer, and one even ventures off to grab your chin. The other holds you to his chest, melded together despite the intense smoke and flame rolling off your bodies. You wonder if he can feel your heart beating a mess there. 
Reluctance paints you both when you pull back. You’re panting deep drinks of air. It’s hard to think; your mind’s run off and sits just out of reach. Licking your messy lips, stained with illicitness, you can only manage to brush your fingers against it to form words. “How... was that?” you say, searching his eyes. You find his pupils blown so wide that they consume the warm brown. You’re ready to jump out of your skin with that look pointed at you.  
Kai doesn’t answer, though. He slams your mouths back together as if starved by just the brief moment you’d parted for air. Nips on your bottom lip and emboldened hands—he moves like roaring water through a dam. A dam that he’d worked hard to fortify, and yet, at a crack it’s all falling down. Fingertips digging through the fabric of your shorts down to your soft hips, his chest rumbles. You feel it reflected in your core, electricity charging there and shooting up your spine and down your thighs. 
You kiss him for all the times you wish you would’ve, but didn’t. The slight rolls of your hips down onto him come easy. You love how it has him making a sound into your mouth and taking the fat beneath his fingers harder into his hands. He helps you. 
He drops his head into your neck. Your head swims for air and he has you shuddering with just the brushing of his nose against the column of your neck. The walls of his room spin around you. “Kai,” you whine, every bit of friction his jeans provide, even clothed as you are, just enough to rile you but not to give you what you need. 
“God,” he growls, thumbs hooking under your waistband. “You always fucking run around dressed in nothing,” he says, letting his fingers linger like a suggestion of undressing you. “Did you do it on purpose? Expect to make me crazy, knowing I couldn’t touch you?” 
And, in those words, it seems that he steals every last bit of breath from you. How often had you gone braless or worn something like this around him? Laid here, in his bed, like that? 
Grown tired of your fruitless grinding, he brings a hand down to support your lower back and says, “Turn around.” 
Though you explode with the prospect of what he might be intending to do or what’s next, if you’re really going to do this, you do so in a flash of eager limbs. His chest is solid against your back, you melt against the feeling of it. He’d become such a man lately, filled out, and you watched it happen. It was hard for your eyes not to catch on muscle-corded forearms while he picked at strings or to not appreciate the timbred rumble of his voice when you’d feel it come from his chest. How could it not do things to you? Now, he’s dragging your shorts down your legs and you’re in disbelief.  
“Fuck,” he breaths out. His fingers find your panties soaked through. “So, you’re the type to get dripping wet.” 
An embarrassed blush decorates your cheeks. Kai drags his index finger in circles around your clit through the fabric as if enamored with how much of a mess you’d made of it. Your hips twitch every time he rolls right over it. It’s strange how he’s got your body acting on its own volition with his touches. Even stranger that it’s your best friend doing it. “Sorry,” you tell him, wavering.  
He continues those terribly slow circles. “Sorry?” he says, chin on your shoulder. He’s got you wrapped up in him, with nowhere to go but to melt back into him and let his fingers work. Free hand on one of your inner thighs digging divots into the plushness there to hold it still, he tells you, “It’s nothing to be sorry about. It’s hot as fuck. You’re so excited for me to touch you, huh?” 
The words wreak havoc on you, feeding the flame that has your belly twisted up tight and the ignition point between your thighs pounding. To hear them coming from him, reserved Kai, has you digging your fingers into his forearm to prove that it’s real. You’d never have imagined him being so... filthy. You imagine him behind falsely nonchalant eyes, devouring you with a perverted mind all the times you’d spent innocently sitting together in this room.  
Your cheeks squish beneath his fingers as he takes your face and turns it to him. He wants to make sure you’re look at him as he asks you, “Do you want me to finger you?” 
Like a record, your brain skips. Between the blunt, lewd question and his hand on you, it’s in overload. How could ask something like that so simply? Stunned as you are, of course you want him to. You want him to do anything to you. You nod.  
Every last nerve and neuron in your system, just below the skin, cry out when his fingers slow down to nothing. “Hmm?” he says, ignoring the chasing of your hips and the opening of your thighs to invite him into paying your poor pussy the attention he’d ripped from it. He wants to hear you say it.  
About ten minutes ago, you lost your mind. It does not return to you now. “I want you to,” you say, chest beating in tandem with your cunt. 
“You want me to, right? Not some dumbass you met a week ago, huh?” he says. “Because you know that this is what it’s meant to be. Me, doing these things to you. Not some twenty-five-year-old piece of shit. He doesn’t deserve you, baby. Understand?” 
His fingers slider under your panties. Dumb brained and cognition gone muddled, you nod. All you can really think about is the moment his fingers slide over you. Fire licks up your lower belly and your insides as he brushes calloused finger tips finally right against your clit. 
Puffed breaths of a scoff raise goosebumps over your skin. “Teach you to kiss so that you can go over there and get his hands on you,” he says, middle two fingertips prodding at your entrance. “As if you were ever anybody’s but mine. You’d come crawling back to me, baby, because it was always meant to be us. He could never satisfy you.” 
His words might alarm you or have you asking questions if he hadn’t pushed his fingers into you and begun curling them with strong, pointed presses, pulling soft mewls and hums from you until he finds a spot that twists up your insides. Even through the palm you press over your mouth, your moans come out more like wavering grunts and croaks. Your thighs quiver and twitch, threatening to snap closed against your own will with each. Only your feet stay planted to the mattress. Like a cone of soft serve under the sun’s blistering attention, you melt down him. Just his frame keeps you upright. 
“Right there, huh?” he says. The smirk on his mouth filters his words into something taunting. “That’s where you like it.” It’s like he’s learning your body step by step, fulfilling all the questions he’d been forced to only guess at before this.  
“Uh-huh.” It comes out whiny and cracks in the middle, but you can’t find even an ounce of you to care right now. If this moment had been a long spiral, a fall from grace, down into a dark pit of forgotten inhibitions, you’ve just hit the bottom. Cheeks blazing cherry blossom pink and with your fingers curling into his pant leg, you don’t doubt that you are a picturesque mess. The kind of mess that’s beautiful because it’s dirty. Your teeth are not gentle on your plush bottom lip. It stings, tugged back and bitten and still a bit swollen with kisses. Perhaps you taste the tang of metal on it, but you pay it no mind. 
Kai redoubles his efforts. Now that he knows exactly how to play you, he’s fucking you on his fingers without mercy. The sounds coming from your cunt were wet, but now they’re different— nasty squelching. The only noises coupling with your pathetic keening. Forget anchoring yourself on his thigh, forget muffling your sounds. Instead, your hands fly to encircle his flexing forearm. Under your nails, angry red crescents dig into the muscle there. What had been a languid, building pleasure suddenly becomes everything. Your breaths run away from you, and you chase them frantically. Deep down in your core, the muscles spasm and rage against his fingers. “H—oh god,” you groan. Even the muscles in your thighs and tummy tighten up. 
“So whiny...” Kai mumbles, voice taut with the effort of eroding you down into pure, blinding-white pleasure. 
And then, in a swoop of mercy, your belly tightens. You hover here, on the precipice of something so consuming and voracious that your muscles and bones reject it, and yet your heart sings. Your eyes and cheeks and lungs and belly burn, the flame charring the edges of you in a beckon. You answer its call. Kai doesn’t mind the snapping of your legs shut around his arm, nor does your bucking or shaking deter him. He just holds you through it, arm like a metal bar around your waist. He’s everywhere, in this moment—the smell of him, leather and utterly familiar, his mouth dusting hot kisses over your skin, his fingers guiding you through orgasm. Where you’d gone silent in the initial crash of it, you devolve into mewls and grunts as you come down.  
He holds you even as you slump against him boneless. Afterglow simmers in your veins and has your brain all lethargic and lazy. Neither of you speak for a while, your pulse thumping a rhythm. His breaths rise and fall against you; it grounds you in this moment where you feel all spacey and gone. You become aware again of how disgustingly sweltering it is in his room, your skin sheened. 
That brainless bliss only lasts you for so long, though. When rational mind returns to you, no matter how you wish it wouldn’t, you’re hit in the chest with regret so hard it knocks the wind out of you. 
How will anything ever be the same after what you’d just done? Stricken still by the thought, you barely register him pulling his fingers out of you. After all your worrying about making sure no wedge comes between you two, look what you’ve gone and done. No; nothing ever will be the same again.  
⚝⭒ 
A couple of weeks ago, you ruined the one friendship you were supposed to have forever. It presses down heavy one you while you sit sprawled out on Yeonjun’s couch, his arm around your shoulder. His phone casts a glow over his features with all the lights out. 
It doesn’t smell like home. He, pressed against your side, doesn’t smell like home.  
Some stupid movie that he’d picked out, yet somehow you’ve ended up the only one still watching it, weaves a hum into the quiet of his apartment. Tangy hurt wells up in your throat. Even the moments when you and Kai would sit in mutual silence on your phones never felt like this. This is different.  
You haven’t seen Kai since that night. He’s been busy getting ready to move out, and you’ve been here most days. How fast all of it had changed. You wish you’d feel whiplashed, left empty, by the drifting that you’d been so terrified of. But you don’t. It’s just been you, locked on land, watching him being taken away by the ocean’s tide with no way to change its course. You tried and screamed to call him back, but now your voice has gone hoarse.  
And instead of watching him go, you choose to look elsewhere. It’s all you can do to protect yourself from the hurt. 
“Hey,” Yeonjun says, finally addressing you rather than whoever’s he’s got in his phone. “Did you bring anything to change into?”  
“I brought stuff to sleep in,” you say, eyeing him. You know that’s not why he’s asking. If it came down to it, you could just steal something from him and pull it on. He means going out clothes. Your jaw tightens. “But nothing nice. Why?” 
He stretches his arms behind his head in a flaunt of long arms and tanned muscle. Hours spent at the gym lent him those; you appreciate the look of it with a watering mouth. Kai had earned his build by hours spent outside with your dad, because his own could care less, helping him fix up cars and vehicles of all ridiculous sorts. You remember when Kai had first gotten his truck—junk on wheels, honestly—he’d spent so much of summer out there getting it running. And, well... the sun-kissed bronze of his skin and frame that came with it, you had no qualms with. 
But those memories only sit heavy in your chest as you’re sat here beside Yeonjun. You banish them elsewhere; you need to let him drift off. If you can’t have each other, and your feelings won’t permit just being friends, then you have to. You want him to do amazing things, and you fear that it’s your presence in his life that will interrupt that. As much as your feelings are real, they are selfish. You, your unsure direction and all your dead weight, should let him go. Because you love him. 
“The guys want to come over,” he tells you, pushing off from the couch. “You should probably into change into something less showy.” 
Less showy. Your mouth drops into a scoff of disbelief, looking down. A pair of shorts and a shirt, showy? You have to laugh, or else you’ll succumb to the strange embarrassment crawling at the back of your skull. What’s he trying to say? Is that what he thinks of you? “What’s that supposed to mean?” you say, face tilted up to him in a twist of distaste. “I’m wearing something comfy.” 
He shrugs, hands shoved into the pockets of his black sweats. “Don’t want to give them the wrong idea about you, that’s all, baby. They’re guys; I just want to protect you.” 
“No,” you say, the word falling out in a barked laugh. “Why would you even be bringing over dudes that you think will look at me like that? Why are you even friends with people that you think are gonna make moves on your girlfriend?” He holds a hand out to you, but your hands stay right where they are: crossed solidly over your chest. 
Throwing that hand up in audacious exasperation, he gives you a look that makes you feel small and petulant—like you’re throwing an overblown fit. And, maybe you are. You should probably just do it; him seeing you as some overbearing or high maintenance girl has that embarrassment flaring like wildfire that’s found dry brush. “C’mon, baby,” he says, a lazy smile on his mouth that gets under your skin. “Let’s just have an easy night. Don’t make it a big deal.” 
Let’s just have an easy night. As if you’re the one ruining the night. Something snarky tries to seize your tongue, but you hold it down. “I thought it would be just us. We wanted to watch the movie together, Yeonjun. Can’t you wait to hang out with your friends? Let’s enjoy our time together; you’ve got your shift tomorrow.” 
“My fucking god,” he groans, running a hand through his hair furiously. “You’re needy, you know that? The neediest I’ve ever had to put up with. I don’t put up with needy, baby. Can’t you just chill out a little? My last didn’t mind when I’d have friends over.” 
Your eyes burn. Your cheeks burn. He’d been with plenty of other girls before you; that, you’re well aware of. It’s been a corrosive source of self-doubt for you. You don’t want that title: the neediest he’s ever had. Don’t want him to think of you as some prude that won’t let him have fun. Just... hearing him bring up the other girls he’d been with before you stings and leaves welts no different from a slap in the face. Feelings of inadequacy shackle you and have you saying, “Fine. I’m gonna borrow some of your clothes.” 
Heavy resentment blooms on your skin where he bends down and presses kisses to your cheek, and then mouth, and then down your neck. “Thank you, baby.” 
And, where those ugly, wilted flowers of it bloom, you hear echoes of something. Something that tells you that Kai wouldn’t treat you like this. But you’ve made your bed, decided to do it yourself, and now you’ve got to lay on it. 
⚝⭒ 
The frat parties are the worst kind of social outing that Yeonjun insists upon. The smaller kinds, more intimate gathering with just his closer friends, you tolerate much easier. You’re not fond of the circles he chooses. Breathing in thick, smoked-out air surrounded by alcohol-coated breaths is not your type of fun night. Somehow, you end up doing that more than date nights. But that’s better than being here. The base rumbles up through your feet and makes your stomach sick, and it reeks of grinding bodies and body odor, and condensation coats your fingers from the red solo cup as full as when you’d first gotten it. 
But, still, you come along. Not every time, but when you don’t, you lay in his bed sickening yourself with images of what he might be doing here. How pathetic is it to attend parties with your boyfriend because you fear that otherwise, he might stick his tongue down the throats of other girls? 
You’re looking for him right now, awkward and left alone. He’d promised to stick around; you had begged him to. That was pathetic, too. You know that you put up with too much. If he loved you, or honestly even liked you, you two would be in the thick of the throngs dancing or off somewhere talking with others. Together. The frantic skimming and weeding of your eyes through the blur of faces is not right. That’s not how he should make you feel. It’s not how Kai would make you feel. 
Well, Kai would never have you here in the first place. 
Venturing out from your little corner, you sift between the bodies of people have a hell of a lot better time than you. Drunken, some you bounce off of like bumper carts. You press your palm over the round face of your cup to spare the floor from spillage threatening to pour over the lip. It’s not like a splash from yours would matter much, though. The linoleum has already been made a fetor mess of dirt off shoes and the sticky sugar of liquor. Your shoes peel from it as you walk. God, what would your parents think of you being here? 
You peek around corners and eye big groups. He’s not in the kitchen when you look there, either. Your stomach feels sick in a knowing way—a gut feeling that doesn’t justify anger or tears just yet, but you know. Right in the center of your chest, you know. 
It’s in some room that you find him. Sat on the floor along with a few faces you don’t know, he pulls from his bottle. And on his shoulder, he lets a girl with shining curls and pink cheeks rest her head. At your busting in on the intimate gathering, Yeonjun’s eyes slide to you. Recognition flashes over them and wars with bleary drunkenness. 
“Hey, baby,” he says. Their gazes all fall on you, but you can hardly see them through blurry eyes. 
The girl lifts her head from his shoulder. She’d caught the memo. 
“I think I’m gonna go.” You make it sound resigned, try to not let them see your shame, but your voice betrays you and crackles. Maybe it’s better to pretend it doesn’t feel like you’ve just been kicked in the stomach and left to reel against the force, but you can’t. You’re nowhere near shocked, nowhere near blindsided, but still you hurt. 
He follows you down the hall. “What’s your problem?” he says, the few, plain words mending and waving into a slurring. 
You’ve got one goal: get to the front door, away from the shitty music and him. His words, sharpened, fall off your skin despite his efforts. What good would fighting do you, anyway? It was always going to end up this way. This is just who he is, and he doesn’t give two shits enough about you to want to change that. 
“Baby, seriously? That made you this mad? I didn’t even fucking do anything. Stop being insecure,” he says. At the gritting of your teeth, he sees an opportunity and pounces on it. “You don’t need to be jealous. I don’t do jealous shit. We can dance, or something. Shit, I don’t know what you want! Just stop throwing a fit.” 
Didn’t do anything? You have to laugh. Maybe you didn’t walk in on him fucking someone else, but that’s not what this is about. Not even a little bit. You’ve checked out, and the fact that he thinks he can make you believe that it’s your fault this time only drives the killing stake in harder. 
Maybe you’re bitter. It claws at your insides—turns your face hot and screams in your face that you’ve been used. But beside it sits a sadness. Not the slow kind, but the quick sadness of hurt. Why hadn’t you been good enough for him to love you? To like you? You’d left behind Kai and rested your new life on Yeonjun’s shoulders. You’d wanted so badly for his approval, or for him to want you. You did your best to try and make this work out because you needed it to. You needed so desperately proof that you could fall in love with somebody else. But your best was not what Yeonjun was interested in.  
Pins and needles prick your skin as you step outside, like jumping into an ice bath. It shocks you out of dizziness. Words surge up and out in a flash flood like hard reality. You spin on him. “Jealous?” you say, choking out a scathing laugh. “The last thing I’d ever let myself suffer over you is jealousy. Get over yourself. I’m going, stay here if you want. I don’t care.” 
“How are you gonna do that, huh?” he says. The flickering yellow of the porchlight paints his features. The shadow of something fluttering around it cuts dark spots in the light, and then a small little moth comes down and jumps around in his face. He waves it off. “Gonna have bitch boy come pick you up? You can’t leech off him forever; he’s gonna get sick of picking up another man’s girlfriend.” It seems like you walking in on that had sobered him up, but his breath still curls out onto your face with the reek of alcohol. “It’s not a big deal. You’re making this a bigger deal than it has to be. Do you not trust me?”  
“You are such a piece of shit,” you grit out. “I don’t know what I was thinking. Ever. I don’t know how I let this go on for so long.” You don’t like him having Kai in his mouth, don’t like him trying to act like you’re conflating things, and especially don’t like that face he’s making. As if you’re acting crazy and overblown. “No, I don’t trust you. You didn’t fuck her, but come on, Yeonjun. Seriously? You think I’m stupid, and I’m sick of it. You thought this would be easy because I didn’t have the experience you have, but I’m sorry. I don’t like being walked over.” 
“If you’re gonna be so goddamn jealous, then maybe we aren’t gonna work,” he says. 
That moth, floating light in the air, is right back in his face. Yeonjun takes two hands and smashes it between a clap of his hands. He shakes its flattened, broken body off his hand. Looking down at it laying there on top of dirt-caked concrete, you get this... feeling. A tickling around your person.  
“See if I care,” you snap, throat aching against the onslaught of emotion and held back tears.  
⚝⭒ 
Rivulets of raindrops dilute the tears on your cheeks. Your hair plasters to your face and your clothes to your body.  
For a week, you’d went about it all as if it hadn’t happened. And then you came here.  
It’d not been this rainy when you first got down to the creek—just a gentle trickle, really. You hadn’t been crying then, either. But, watching the water work at babbling over stone, you let yourself feel it. Here, where you’d had so many good memories. You’ve gone and tainted it, now. But for whatever reason, you’d just wanted to be here. Arms curled around yourself and fingers digging into drenched sleeves, you don’t wipe away the tears or cover the sounds of your crying. You let the stream hear it; it’ll sweep it right up and down the way. Somewhere far off, where you don’t have to feel it anymore. 
You realize that, usually, you’d be over at Kai’s right now. The fact that his room was not the first place you thought you could go to anymore is a punch to the gut. You drop your face into your hands and cry harder. Really, you’ve got to stop doing that to yourself. Thinking of sad things—putting your hurt under the microscope to see it closer. It’d be easier to just fold it up and tell yourself that it’ll pass, and that relationships end all the time. 
It’s not him that you cry over. Well, maybe some of it is. Rather, it’s that you have absolutely no idea where you’re going. Where you are. Finally, you’d built yourself a raft to get off the shore and go out to sea, because that’s what you’re supposed to do, and it’s breaking apart right beneath you. And, stranded and alone in the water, you’ve got no way to get back to shore to build yourself another raft. You’re stranded, and the scariest bit is that you’re doing it all alone. You weren’t supposed to do this alone. You two made promises back then. 
You suppose that a promise is one of those things you were supposed to leave faith in back on shore. 
The raindrops are heavy over you. The fall of it roars against the ground, a torrent downpour. It’s not coupled with whipping wind or flashes of lightning—just straight, still falling. It’s a somber feeling no different from the gnawing in your chest. 
Like chimes, there’s a distant, gentle sound. Maybe water falling over creek rock, but it’s more like suggestion. A sweet sound that you shouldn’t even be able to hear over the rest of it, it’s as if it’s right in your ear. A whisper.  
You fix your blurry eyes with a wet sleeve. Rain falls right back into its place, but you see it: a silvery, whimsy haze. And the moths. They jump and call you, this time. Their glow bounces off the rainy mist against the grey of night’s arrival. Then, all you can hear is the whispering. Where you stand frozen, your feet beg to move. To follow them. 
So you do. 
Their entourage of moondust trails them where they go, wrapping you up and weaving between raindrop and space. You don’t worry where they’ll take you, or even try to wrap your head around this happening again. You just follow, mind glossed over and entranced with how beautiful it is. When you’d seen them before, it’d made you uneasy. Mostly because it looked so unearthly and unbelievable. But this time you just follow. 
A far-off voice, one oh-so-familiar, peaks through the haze. It’s not enough to stop you, but then you hear it again, louder and closer. 
You blink a few times. Once to break away the fog, and then twice to focus your eyes on Kai stood in front of you. His hair lays in wet spikes over his eyes and beads of rain trace the planes of his face. He’s as soaked as you. 
“Kai?” you say. Looking around you, you’ve ended up somewhere in the field between your houses and the creek. But you’ve got no recollection of walking here. Whatever that mist is, sentient or not, had swept you here.  
His voice is strained, but you appreciate hearing it. “Break up with him,” he tells you. 
In his eyes, as you search them, there’s stardust glowing like reflection. Your face twists up. “What?” you say, breath a puff of smoke ahead of you. Summer had come and gotten away from you so fast, and now it’s gone all cold again. 
“Break up with him,” he echos, face solemn. He looks ruffled. 
“Why?” you ask, “And why are you out here?” 
“Because I’m moving out today, and I think I deserve to at least see you before I go.” His eyes look over you. “And... your dad said you went down to the creek.” 
He’s moving out today, and you had no idea. And really, it’s your fault. You’d driven that wedge between the two of you. “I did break up with him.” 
Downpour fills his quiet for a few moments, his face swirling with emotion like the clouds above you. He nods. “Good.” 
There are a few more long minutes between you; just you two searching each other's faces, antsy to say so much that it bunches up in your chests and stalls. It’s what a summer of longing does to you. Even with Yeonjun, even trying to slowly chip away the stitching that had connected the two of you at the hip, you were helpless to stop the gnawing of the love you bear for him. Even just seeing him now, you feel those threads mending back up. God, why does it have to be so hard? 
He just looks at you. For a few beats, he just looks at you. There are so many questions in his eyes. They flit across and turn over, but all he settles on is, “Why?” 
There’s so much you want to tell him. Words pile up to the top, some threatening to spill over. But you know that if you tell him some of it, just to make up for all the time you’d missed out on together, it’ll all come crashing out. And you don’t think you want him to know just how much you accepted, the way you let yourself get treated. So, you shake your head and say, “It doesn’t matter.” 
Kai looks like he wants to push that issue, but whatever look he finds on your face deters him. “Come with me,” he pleads. “I want you to come with me.” 
Your throat tightens. Curling your arms around yourself harder, the rain only coming down on you harder, you say, “Kai, I want to. I want to. I just... I don’t want to freeload off you, because you’re doing great things, and I’m just...” Your tongue darts out to wet your lips, but they’re already as soaked as the rest of you. “I’m just going nowhere. And I don’t want to be a burden, or ever be the reason that you can’t do what you dream of. If staying here means that you become everything that you’re destined to do, then I’m happy with that, Kai. I am.” 
He shakes his head, stumbling toward you. “No, no you don’t get it,” he says, frantically taking your shoulders into big hands. Under his touch, every taut muscle goes slack. You melt. “You don’t get it. You are the music. Every single song is about you. Every single fucking song is about you. I want you to come with me, please. I love you, I have always loved you, and I will always love you, and I thought you’d loved me too, and I don’t want to do this alone. I can’t do it alone.” 
He loves you. Kai loves you. The enormity of it rumbles the ground where you stand on legs you fear might just give in. You flex your fingers to combat the tears pricking your eyes. It doesn’t work; they brim and well up, spilling down over your cheeks. “What?” you say, voice softly breaking. “Kai, I didn’t...” 
“And just when I thought I finally had you, you left me,” he says, throwing a hand up beside him in a big gesture. “You left me! I woke up thinking you’d be there, and that maybe you loved me too, and you had left me. And then you threw me away for some piece of shit, and you stopped coming around.” His chest heaves for breaths. 
Your face contorts. That night, the one where you two had slipped up, you’d fallen asleep curled up against his chest on undiluted contentment. When you woke up, you had panicked. You thought he’d wake up and pretend it hadn’t happened, or he’d be uncomfortable, or even be disgusted and regretting. You couldn’t handle that, so you slipped out before he woke up. It’d been an attempt to protect your tender heart, but looking at the twitching of his lip now, you begin to think it’s the most selfish thing you’ve ever done. He thinks you used him and left him. Your stomach twists. Voice thick, you say, “I’m sorry. I’m sorry I left you, Kai. I thought you didn’t... I thought you didn’t see me that way. I was scared. I’m sorry I hurt you.” 
Brows knitted together, he says, “Thought I didn’t love you?” His hand cups your cheek, warm against the soft frozen skin he finds there. “I’ve... I’ve dreamed of you almost every night of my life. In my sleep, I see you, and you’re happy and glowing, and that damn... mist is all around you. I couldn’t get away from you even in my sleep.” 
Darting between his eyes, soft and reflecting your face back to you, it’s hard to breathe. Kai’s dreamt of you; he’s as sickly in love with you as you are him. Thunder claps, and the ground shakes, and the heavens open up above you, the trumpets belt, and you two are in love. Somewhere deep in your center, you feel it—your soul nodding yes. 
The mist. You know exactly what he’s talking about. “I saw it. That stuff, those moths. The stuff we saw back then.” 
“I did too,” he says, wet spikes of hair bouncing with a nod. “Not that long ago. It was the first time I saw it out of a dream since that day.” 
Back then, you two had only budding, innocent love for each other. Things hadn’t become mangled and lost to confused hearts or expectations. When they’d appeared to you, you hadn’t needed it. This time, you’d followed it. And it had led you here—somehow had led you right to the very spot you needed to so that every last piece might fall into place. For this moment to happen. You know why it did. 
“I’ll go with you, Kai. I’ll go wherever you go; I love you. I’ve loved you since forever,” you say, each and every word massive and lovely on your tongue. “I’m sorry I didn’t say it earlier.” 
So unlike the last times your mouth had met, he brings his mouth to yours with a dazzling clarity. No longer is it confused kisses; he locks his lips against yours with the urgency of so many years being unable to. Kai’s hands cradle your wet cheeks, hold you so tenderly into his kiss. His touch grounds you, makes the moment real. You melt into him—your fingers curled into his shirt as if holding him there so that he won’t disappear like something of an incorporeal dream. He sighs through his nose, kissing you harder. Even if it all were fake and this was nothing more than a feverish figment of your imagination, you think you could die happy just knowing this once. 
But it is utterly real, and utterly yours. You kiss him harder, too. 
When your lungs start to burn and plead for breath, you two pull away from each other. Your eyes flutter open to capture his. Warm and brown and the same ones you’ve stared into so many times before, but not like this, you sink into them. He runs his thumb over your cheek as he sinks into yours. His tongue darts out to lick lips painted with you. In the inches between you, space no longer feels heavy or charged with grievances. Every last unsaid thing had been answered. 
“I have my stuff up in the truck,” he says, breaths soft. Brown eyes dart around your face. “I’ll help you add your stuff to it.” 
You shudder out a breath. Add your stuff to it. A nervous energy settles down over you, but it doesn’t seem so bad if you’re doing it with him. Together.  
“Okay,” you whisper, a balmy secret just like the ones you used to share in small, giggly voices so many years ago. “Okay.” 
⚝⭒ 
Shivers seize you like jittering bones, all wrapped up in a blanket. The velour cushion seats beneath you have soaked up water and become damp, but Kai’s got the heater blasting. You wind around back roads, headlights illuminating the way ahead of you. Stray droplets whip in them, but nothing much. Isn’t it funny how the rain had just stopped like that? That’s just how the weather is, out here. You wonder how the weather might act wherever you’re headed. 
Your teeth chatter as if your jaw had its own will. The two of you had the windows down thinking that the wind might dry you off, but all it’s done is lap at your bitten cheeks. You reach down for the handle to crank it up. You’ve got a long drive ahead of you—either you’ll eventually dry off, or you can pull off at a rest area to change in a bathroom. The wet clothes are really not helping. 
With an arm up on the steering wheel, Kai turns his attention on you. You know that smile. “Cold?” he asks, eyes darting between your face and the road. With the hand he’s not got working the steering wheel, he runs fingers over your thigh. Soft, gentle massages, yes. The number it does on your core is absurd. Each mindless digging into your thighs and brush of his thumb, sparks sputter there. You’ve sat here, right in his passenger seat, so many times before. Day trips up to the lake, the one he’d joined your family camping at for so many summers, all the times he’d driven you to school in this truck, and even just a quick run down to a convenience store for a late-night snack. You’d deemed it your seat. But never once had you sat in it like this. Your heart does a flip. All those times you’d wish he’d reach over and do just this—a small gesture that would’ve been so big then. And it’s your reality, now.  
“Freezing,” you say. A brush of his fingers nearer the apex of your thighs sends you pressing them together and shifting in your seat. “But not everybody runs as hot as you, though, so.” 
His eyes catch the movement in just the split second he looked over to you. “Huh,” he says. He turns to look at you, his gaze flickering with something anew. Something that you’d only ever seen once before. “Is that it?” 
It’s hard to swallow. His fingers brush higher, and higher, feather-dustings of calloused fingertips that sends tingles shooting up your spine at the slightest suggestion of where he’s headed. “Yes,” you say, feigning indignance to cover the shiver that threatens to overtake you. When his fingertips dance at the waistband of your bottoms, it does so anyway. “Kai,” you say, blood hot in your veins. “You’re...driving.” 
His eyebrows pinch into a taunting furrow. “I am,” he says, nodding. “Don’t worry about it, baby. I’ve got us.” 
And he does; fingers slipping under the band of both your bottoms and your panties, he doesn’t even tear his eyes off the road. He’d driven these roads so much, you think he might be able to do it asleep. Even drawing a mewl from you with a brush over your clit, he doesn’t look away more than a quick glimpse at your pinkened cheeks. 
Two fingers dragging up your folds, right over the source of the mess. “You get excited so easily, huh?” he hums. “You like it when I play with you.” 
When he presses those fingers at your entrance, you can’t help but be taken back to that night. It echoes and reverberates through you. Long fingers, strong and punctual brushes against the sweet spot—he was criminally good with his fingers. Playing guitar did more for him than just music. He seemed to know exactly how to utilize those roughened fingers and trained flicks. Your muscles flicker as he abandons your hole for more brushes at your bud.  
Those teasing, sly touches turn to something more serious. His fingers roll over your clit, slow but enough to have you sighing and rolling your hips against the seat belt. But last time had gone just like this, him touching you and receiving nothing. He should feel good, too. “Shouldn’t you pull over?” you sigh, muscles taut. Your breaths come out shuddering and half-controlled, interrupted by the tightness that each delicious swirl provokes. The door takes the brunt of your grip, white-knuckling the interior. 
He laughs, a husky sound that is tinder to fire. He knows what you mean. “Maybe,” he says. “But I think I’m enjoying this plenty. I think I want to see you cum on my fingers again.” 
Fingers pinching and flicking faster, you grow breathy and whiny, hips rolling against the seatbelt and back into the seat. Your muscles, all the way down your thighs and deep in your belly, jump and twitch each time his fingers run over your clit in just the right spot—that tender spot that’s so good that it teeters on overwhelming. The kind that makes you hiss and then want more. “Shit, Kai,” you whine. “Right—there, keep going."  
He doesn’t answer with any teasing words. No, he just doubles down right at that angle and pressure, leaned back into his seat and driving as if he wasn’t fingers-deep in your panties right now. His sculpted profile at total ease—it does something for you. A delicious tightness curls its fingers over your center, promising a sugary ecstasy that you can’t help but chase. Bucking into his hands as best you can, you go quiet. Right there—right there, you feel it. The cusp. Your fingers brush over it, clenching around nothing and squeezing your thighs tight around him. Every last drop of blood in your body reaches for it, singing and dancing through your veins and making you dizzy. 
And then he stops. Your mouth drops open, whiplashed and helpless to its slipping away from you. You whittle your gaze into something sharp and turn to him. “What—why?” you complain. The tide slips further and further and further back, but you still taste sea salt on your tongue. Frustration sets in its place as you feel it go. Seriously, you’d been right there. “You’re so mean.” 
He slows and then with the clicking of the turn signal, he’s off the road and pulling the truck into park on a little secluded side road. Where the headlights pierce the pitch black, nothing but gravel and field surrounds you. He doesn’t kill the engine, instead pulling his hand free from you. 
Your heart, still stuttering with your lost orgasm, kicks back to life as he smears your slick over your mouth, dragging it over your lips and then taking his thumb to run it right over the plush of your mouth. “Am I?” he says, fingers taking your chin to meet your eyes with his. Endless hunger, pupils so blown that his eyes look black, pins you. “I don’t think you’ve seen mean yet, baby.” 
Darting your tongue out to clean your lips, you look at him through your eyelashes. “Show it to me, then.” 
Something dark passes over his face. It has your skeleton jumping out of your body. Then, he says, “Is that what you want? You want mean?” 
Brain gone to mush that can only really think about him touching you, a slow nod is all you can manage. 
The engine’s hum prevails for some long, thick seconds. And then, he tilts his head in a gesture. “Get in the back.” 
Holy shit. You want to sit there frozen in an overwhelming sort of excitement, but his seatbelt clicks undone and you’re set into motion. In a flurry of giggles and clumsy limbs, you climb up over the center console and into the backseat. He slips out of the front seat, not bothering to even kill the engine. 
The door beside you opens in a swirl of cold wind. In nothing more than a blink, a strong hand has both your wrists pinned to the cushions and your back flush against it. Nose-to-nose, his breath hot over your face. “I’ve got plenty of ideas as to how I can warm you up.” 
You appreciate each other’s faces for a beat more, you looking up at him big-eyed and waiting. Kai breaks the moment to attack your neck in a procession of bites and kisses. Your mouth falls into a silent sound. 
“You know,” he says, free hand working your pants off. His eyes are trained on you, though. “I thought about doing this to you all summer. Touching you again.” He moves on to your top, pushing the fabric up until your chest is freed, clad in soft cotton. He eats the sight up. You want to reach down and cup the back of his head or feel his hair between your fingers as he presses his mouth against the soft beginning of your cleavage, but he’s got your wrists firmly planted. So much so, that you wonder exactly how he’s got you so secure with just one hand. Kai is strong, but maybe you hadn’t seen just how strong. Your skin aches under the purple bites he decorates you in. The sight of him—face in your chest and marking you up so lazily—has your teeth abusing your bottom lip. Whatever sounds you might make otherwise would be embarrassing. Kai lifts his eyes to you. “And I think you thought of me, too. Didn’t you?” 
“Oh, god, yes,” you say, writhing beneath him. He’s going so slow. You want him all over you. “So much.” 
He likes that. He takes your pebbled nipple into his mouth through the fabric. Soft grazes of teeth and sucks, you’re burning all over. When he pulls back, he’s left you dark wet patches when the bra had only just dried against your body heat. “Good,” he rasps, taking his big hands demanding and hungry over your torso. They swallow your frame up, soothing skin but lighting it aflame all the same. “Good girl.” 
You never thought just words could unravel you, but those did the job. Not a gasp, nor a sucking in of breath—no, you go silent and brainless, fumbling for rational thought. 
The dropping of your jaw has Kai delighted. “You’re so pretty,” he says. In a swift and powerful hoist, he’s tugging you down the cushions toward him with greedy fingers. He’s got your thighs pressed up to your chest. You’re bent right in half. 
Out of breath, you huff out, “You too.” 
A quick laugh falls from his mouth, lips pulled into a smug tilt. He nips at your calf up by his face. “So sweet, it almost makes me feel bad for what I’m about to do to you.” Reaching down for your panties, he pulls back on the suffocating press for only enough time to drag them up your legs. Those get discarded somewhere on the floor. Who cares about that right now, though? All you can register is the metallic clinking of his belt being undone. It’s got your nervous system twisting up. 
And, those words. Electricity shoots bolts of pure, sizzling revery into your core. What I’m about to do to you. You imagine a great deal of things that he might mean, but still, you think that none could hold a candle against the promise his voice held in saying it. 
Kai presses his body to your thighs and hooks your calves over his shoulders, and it all becomes real. The press of his heavy cock to your folds, the digging of his fingers into your outer thighs, his pretty eyes sparkling with something feral. As real as it gets—more real than anything you’ve ever felt in the entirety of your life. Your hands find perch flattened to his broad chest. 
The position leaving you two no option but to look right into each other, he holds your gaze and begins slow drags of his hot length up and down your slit. Tantalizing, awful, awful drags. When his tip nudges your eager clit, you jolt. And then he does it again. And again. 
“Kai,” you mewl. A press against your hole has you hopeful, and he lingers there for a moment, but doesn’t give it to you. Can’t he just fuck you? You’ve never been more pitifully in need of something in your life. 
“Shh.” His ruts get more daring, smearing your slick up onto your belly. “Take it.” 
You wiggle your toes in the air and make passes at arching yourself into him in search of better friction. He’s got you pressed so suffocatingly into the seat that it does absolutely nothing for you. In fact, he holds your harder and changes tack so that your thighs press together. At the very apex of them, his weeping cock slips through the seam. 
Pressing his cheek into your calf, he watches you. Every gasp and shaky inhale, he watches. It spurs his rutting on, sticky sounds and pants eating up the air. Your nails claw at his hands as, finally, a knot tightens in your core. 
“Yes, please,” you breathe. He fucks your thighs harder. Faster. Every nudge at your clit and hole becomes euphoric. “Kai, baby—I’m gonna—” 
Just as furiously easy as last time, he rips it all away from you. The rushing away of the buzzing and promise of shaking thighs—he takes it from you again. It brings prickling tears to your eyes. “Kai?” you hiss. “Again?” 
His eyes aren’t playful. He pulls your calves back over his shoulders, handling your hips into a better position to press his cock right at your entrance as if you weigh nothing. Face utterly straight, he says, “I don’t think you deserve it, do you? Not after what you did with Yeonjun.” 
A swallow goes down your throat hard. He presses himself just a bit harder into you. Not in yet, but right there. 
When he does begin sliding in, the stretch of it... You cling to him and squirm between him and the warm cushions behind you. Each inch is a heady feeling, all the way up to the hilt of him. He shudders a controlled breath. “You’re so fucking tight, though,” he grits out. “Did he not fuck you right?” 
Slaps of skin bounce off the car interior and between your bodies. He starts off at a brutal pace; you know it’s meant to make your brain go foggy. Squeezing your eyes closed, you manage, “I... didn’t fuck him.” It comes out strangled, voice bouncing as he fucks you into the car seat. 
Thumb tugging your bottom lip down and then dipping into your mouth, he watches the show of your ecstasy down to every last detail. “Yeah?” he says, voice shaking and almost desperate. “Always thinking of me, huh? Such a good little princess. You know exactly where your heart belongs.”  
You want to answer him, even just with a whine or moan. You try to. But with his thumb pressing down on your tongue, enough to pin it to the floor of your mouth, it’s not gonna happen. He tastes salty in your mouth. 
His truck consists of his grunts and whines, and your taut groans for some moments that seem to stretch forever. The planes of his groin grind against your clit when he delivers occasional pointed rolls, but mostly it’s just an animalistic, feverish dancing of your two sweaty bodies, holds growing more frantic the closer you get.  
Thumb wet with saliva; he frees your mouth. The hand trails slowly down your face and your chin, brushing feather touches, until he finds your neck. 
Your eyes fly open, wide. He pressed his fingers into your neck—no real pressure yet, he looks at you through damp strands of dangling hair and says, “Want my fingers around your neck?” His thumb brushes over the buzzing pulse point there. 
“Yes,” you grit out, body bouncing and back raw with friction against the coarse cushion’s surface. Your breath stutters, your mind stutters. Even your blinks stutter, eyelids too lazy to keep up. “Please.” 
The pressure of his fingers there—it frightens you and has you tightening around him at the same time. But you would trust nobody more with your life than Kai. 
He presses his cheek to your calf to indulge in the sight of you like this: underneath him, folded in two, nowhere to go but to take his pistoning hips, cheeks blazing, and his fingers pressed into your windpipe. If the way he becomes sloppier and more desperate in his tempo has anything to say for it, it does something for him. 
“Gonna be my pretty little girlfriend, huh?” he says. His voice is tight—so is your belly. You’re both so close. Hopefully, this time he’ll let you cum. “Take you to every show; show you off to everybody. Fuck.” 
Brain like static and swimming with a pinched flow of oxygen, you slur your words. “You’re—hah—gonna have other girls all over you.” 
The taunting, split-second raise of his brows flips your belly. You tighten him again. If he keeps hitting that spot, tip ramming into the soft spot deep inside you that he’d taken such delicate care of finding last time, you’re going to burst into sparkling flame and firework. He growls, “Well, I’ll just have to knock you up so that they know I’m yours, huh?” 
Holy shit. You like the sound of that. Your nails dig into his wrist around your neck, but you cry out a pitchy, “Yes!” 
“Oh, you like that?” Kai releases your throat to take both your hips. You gulp for air, finding nothing but the thick air of sex and humid breaths, at the opportunity. He’s ramming into you like he’s found a purpose. “Isn’t this the perfect position to do it? Get you pregnant?” 
With every last bit of brain power you’ve got, teetering on the edge excruciatingly close to salvation, you groan a long, hoarse sound. “Fuck, yes! Please, Kai, inside—” A hot trail of tears roll down your temples. 
It’s all he’s got to hear to still inside you. His growl rumbles deep in his chest, holding you in place and filling you with his hot cum deep in your cunt. That feeling, coupled with his short grinds against your clit as he fucks his seed deeper, takes your soul by sinful claws and crumbles it down into nothing. You burst into a shaking, whimpering peak, sucking your lips into your mouth to bare through the sheer twisting of your insides and the flame that consumes up your thighs and cunt. 
He falls on you heavy, face in your neck. Warm kisses against your clammy skin meld with your slow floating down, the two of you a beautiful, nasty picture of fucked out. He stays right inside you—the absolute stillness of him, you think he has no plans of pulling out any time soon. His long fingers card through your sweaty locks of hair. 
Finally, he presses himself off you. You get a glimpse of the window behind him—fogged up and filthy with your affairs. Anybody to see the truck from the outside would know exactly what went on inside, but right now, you don’t care. Not one bit. Your panted breaths drag in nothing but musk and thick, hot air. The drumbeat in your chest tells you that, despite how you feel ripped straight from your body, you are very much still alive. More alive than ever. 
“Warm?” he says, pushing sticky hair off his forehead. He’s a mess, too. His hair is ruffled with your touch, his clothes rumpled the same, beads of sweat rolling down the planes of his cheeks and neck, and his eyes a lazy smolder. As much as he looks like sex personified, a soft smile twitches at his lips. 
You snort. You can’t help but feel giddy, here with him. You’re with him. Nothing has ever felt more right. Unplugged when he pulls out of you, your mess trickles down onto the seat below you. “Yeah,” you say. “Very.” 
Warm is not enough to begin to describe how you feel. In your ears, you hear whisperings. Soft and gentle. Perhaps it was divine intervention, or the fates lending you their word, or maybe just rational thought. It says: 
Home. You are home. 
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✎୭ ashlynn's note how do we feel about this pair? i really didn't mean for this to get so long, but i ended up RLLY liking their chemistry. i had to do their story justice. also, i finished this with kai as a guitarist and then his drummer performance came out... hmm.
﹙🏷️ ﹚@lvrs-street2mmorrow , @soohashits , @f4iryfever , @arcturus444 , @linqed , @serenityism00 , @immelissaaa , @luv4cheol , @lickingan0rchid , @20-cms , @hhoneylix , @beestvng , @hyucktapes , @bewitchless , @prince-jjae , @blankliving , @yaoizee , @stormy1408 , @missychief1404 , if your tag isn't working, check the mentions part of your settings!
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galactic-magick · 1 day ago
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I Love You, I'm Sorry: Viktor x Reader
Based off of this reply on my last Viktor fic:
@lillycore : Duddee, imagine after the final scene between Viktor and Jayce they just disappear (I refuse to believe they both died, I’m just going believe, until it’s confirmed, that they simply teleported somewhere else), leaving reader alone without a chance to confront Viktor and believing they both died. So now, reader is left to pick up the pieces of her closest friend and love of her life gone, while believing Viktor no longer loves her (he does though, he was just a little confused with everything, but he still loves her)
Words: 1.2k
Author's Notes: Thank you all so much for the notes and kind words on my last Viktor fic, it truly means the world to me as a writer to see so many people touched by my writing. I hope you enjoy this equally devastating part 2.
They’re gone. They’re really gone.
No family, no friends, not a single loved one of yours survived this damn war. All this world has done is take, take, take.
You’re haunted by the last time you saw your beloved Viktor—completely unrecognizable. He had turned himself into a monster, disappearing with Jayce trying to save him. You didn’t even get to say goodbye, you didn’t even get to tell him you still love him.
Or ask if he still loved you.
You don’t know what would hurt less, believing he stopped loving you, or believing he did everything he did while loving you.
-
“Why can’t she hear me?” Viktor shouts into the void. He’s been calling your name for what feels like an eternity, his voice no longer carrying to your world.
Jayce puts a comforting hand on his shoulder, “You don’t have vessels to speak through anymore. She probably thinks we’re dead. Well, maybe we are…”
“No, no, this can’t be the end,” Viktor shakes his head vigorously. “I have to get back to her. She...she needs to know I love her. She needs to know I’m sorry.”
He falls to his knees amongst the stars, cursing himself for everything. How could he choose the hexcore over you? Why didn’t he seek you out when he survived the explosion? How did he let himself descend so far into madness that he forgot about your importance to him?
He’s now desperate for you to hear him, pleading the forces that bind his consciousness to this astral plane for another chance. He searches this dimension he’s come to know so well, looking for a loophole or tear in the fabric, but it’s no use. Everything has been closed—his supposed eternal consequence for his abuse of power.
Jayce saved him from himself, a feat he will forever be indebted to him for, but what is the point of redemption if he cannot live it out in his own flesh?
Would there have been a body left for him anyway? Would you still have loved him as the monstrosity he became?
Why must he still be cursed with the full vision of the universe? He sees you continue your life so clearly, but he can’t touch you, can’t speak to you. Your form shines the brightest light he’s ever seem in this dimension, an achievement that is not easily matched. He wonders if you can feel him reaching out to you, some sort of spiritual pull back to him. He will do anything to find a way to talk to you again.
-
You’ve been having dreams—dreams you can’t explain. Ever since Viktor’s disappearance, he’s tormented you day and night, constantly occupying your thoughts without mercy. You can hear his voice, but it sounds so far away you can never make out the words. You just wish it would all stop. You wish you could just erase him and all of the pain from your memory.
Sometimes you still feel a presence, the feeling you used to feel when he was in the same vicinity with you, admiring you from across a room. It’s a familiar warmth that used to wash you with peace, whereas now it makes your heart ache. You suppose it’s a normal symptom of grief, subconsciously denying that he’s really gone.
You start to go through his things he left at your house, beginning with his various textbooks and notebooks he would bring over for studying. Seeing his scribbles and handwriting again brings tears to your eyes, a single drop falling onto the paper as you read.
You blink a few times, seeing a couple of letters on the page start to glow. You must be seeing things, hallucinating from sleep deprivation. You close the journal and open it again, but the glowing letters are still there.
You grab a separate piece of paper and write down each glowing letter, finding fifteen total.
“I - L-O-V-E - Y-O-U - I-M - S-O-R-R-Y”
This isn’t happening. It can’t be.
-
“It’s working! She got my message!” Viktor exclaims.
“How...how are you doing that?” Jayce asks.
“Tiny rips in space—not big enough for either of us to escape through—but certainly big enough to briefly touch that reality,” Viktor pauses, still waiting for a response from you, but it doesn’t come.
-
You close the journal and sob, praying for an end to this misery. Your mind is playing tricks on you, deceiving you to a level you never thought possible. Must you be haunted by this forever? Must you endure the aftermath of this trauma?
You open it once again, the letters still glowing, but they start to fade right in front of your eyes. A new set of letters begin to glow, so you write those down as well.
“I-T-S - M-E - D-A-R-L-I-N-G”
And then another set of letters.
“P-L-E-A-S-E - T-A-L-K - T-O - M-E”
Maybe you’re not imagining.
You’ve heard of magicians who can converse with the dead, and the possibility of other dimensional planes and universes. Viktor himself had some theories about it, although he never pursued proving them. Could it really be possible that your beloved was speaking to you?
“Viktor?” you say out loud. “Are you...are you alive?”
“I - D-O-N-T - K-N-O-W”
The pencil drops from your hand again as your head falls to the table. His consciousness is somehow alive, clearly, but there’s no way he can explain to you where he is and how to get him out one letter at a time. You’re nowhere near his level of intellect—even if he explained how to rescue him like you’re five years old—you fear you still would mess something up.
“Viktor...I can’t do this. You can’t do this to me,” you sigh, daring to look at the words again. “You abandoned me, and now my life is a living hell because of the destruction you helped cause. I want nothing to do with your war and stupid glorious evolution. So if you’re not here to take me away from this life, please go away.”
The same original words start glowing again, brighter each time they sequence:
I love you, I’m sorry.
I love you, I’m sorry.
I love you, I’m sorry.
“Love doesn’t do what you did. Love doesn’t abandon its humanity for power.”
Please forgive me.
“I do forgive you for everything, Viktor. That’s exactly why I need to forget about you, because I will never stop loving you and hurting for it if I don’t.”
With blurry eyes, you close the journal and throw it into the fireplace, regretting it almost immediately. You grab a stick and pull it out, your tears falling onto the soot-stained cover.
“Please, just...find a way back to me.”
I will.
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aerynwrites · 7 hours ago
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God Forbid
Simon “Ghost” Riley x Fem!Reader
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A/N: had this idea in my head and it wouldn’t leave so here you go lol. Sorry for the later than usual post but hope yall enjoy!
Word Count: 2.5k
Warnings: attempted SA, hurt/comfort, canon typical violence, home invasion, breaking and entering, Simon saves the day as usual lol, gun violence, reader using a gun, soft at the end.
————————
You can’t stop the smile that tugs at your lips as you light the candle in front of you, the smell of vanilla and cinnamon hitting your nose once the wick catches and starts to burn. The windows in the living room connected to the kitchen are open, a gentle breeze shifting the gauzy curtains and bringing in the cool autumnal air.
It’s the perfect day.
It’s a Saturday, so you have the day off work. The weather has been wonderful you’ve been listening to your favorite music as you practically glide across the kitchen most of the day baking or moving to tidy up the house. Even now, veggies sit half chopped on the kitchen counter, broth on the stove getting ready to boil and -
Simon’s coming home.
That’s what made it the best day of all.
He had texted you early that morning - long before the sun rose from the horizon. He said he’d be home around dinner time if all went well with flights and such, and you couldn’t help the way your heart fluttered in your chest or the smile that split your lips.
He’s coming home.
He had been away for six months this time - the longest he’s ever been gone. And while you were able to talk to him more often than usual, it just wasn’t the same as him being here. It never was. But you never complained. You knew what you were getting into when you started dating Simon - he had even tried to end things with you early on claiming you “deserve better than a ghost…”
But you’d shut him down and after some tears and reassurances on your part…he’d stayed.
But it wasn’t without conditions.
He tried to keep his work life separate from his one with you. He truly did. But being in the military - being part of the task force he was - it made him paranoid. After a year of trying to shield you from his own worries and fears, he couldn’t do it anymore.
You’d been hesitant when he brought up the fact that he wanted you to learn to defend yourself. You didn’t mind taking the self defense classes he’d signed you up for, even going so far as to accept training from Simon himself. But when he brought up the fact that he wanted you to learn your way around a gun…you’d almost said no.
But the flash of fear in his eyes made you relent. Something had scared him, and nothing scares him. So you’d agreed - silently grateful when he mainly insisted on you just knowing the basic like where they safety is, how to hold it and of course how to fire.
“God forbid you ever have to use one,” he said, voice grim. “But at least now you know how.”
All of it was worth it though.
The joy he brings you when he’s here and the joy you bring him vastly outweigh anything else.
You smile to yourself again as you move back to the cutting board.
God…you can’t wait to see him.
The next while passes by slower than you’d like, the giddiness of his arrival making the arms of the clock seem to move at a snails pace. But as you’re moving to dump the vegetables into the stew, you hear the telltale sign of a the front door knob jingling.
Excitement explodes in your chest and you’re heading for the door before you can blink. It still hasn’t opened, and you let out a small chuckle as you reach the door, imagining Simon fumbling with the keys and muttering curses under his breath. You reach for the door, unlocking it and pulling it open with a laugh.
“I didn’t take you for the nervous type, Si-”
Your words cut off abruptly when you come face to face with a stranger on your door step. Three of them, actually. Tall, muscular, intimidating military types that make a pit open up in your belly. Your fingers tighten on the door, closing it every so slightly as to lessen the opening into your home.
“Oh, uh…can I help you?” You ask, fighting off the dread settling in your stomach.
You can’t pinpoint where it’s coming from, but alarm bells go off in your head as the two men in the back glance at one another for just a moment, whispers you’re unable to decipher leaving their lips.
The one in front is the one to respond, words laced with an accent that you immediately identify as Russian.
“You can, actually,” he says casually, one thumb hooked through his belt loops while the other rests casually above the pistol on his hip. “We need to speak to a Simon Riley. Is he here?”
At the mention of Simons name you struggle against the instinct to freeze up. All of Simon’s warnings from the past flooding to the forefront of your mind.
“If someone ever approaches you asking about me, don’t answer them. Ever.” His voice is firm. “They aren’t asking after me in a friendly way, I can promise you that.”
You smile, trying to feign confusion.
“I don’t know anyone by that name,” you lie, palms getting clammy. “Maybe you have the wrong house? You might want to try-”
A heavy palm settling against the door cuts you off, the man in front of you looking down at you with an evil grin.
“Come now, little one. Please don’t lie - it just makes things harder.”
Panic shoots through you in an instant, and before the man can react you slam the door closed as hard as possible, flipping the deadbolt in place as you run back through the kitchen to where you left your phone.
Loud curses come from the other side of the door, and just as you reach your phone you hear wood splintering from behind you as they kick the door in. You see Simon’s name lighting up the screen on your phone and you answer as you grab the kitchen knife from the counter and move to sprint towards the back door.
“Simon!” You cry out, bumping into the couch in the living room as you hear thudding footstep behind you.
“You need to get to a gun,” his voice is steady, unnervingly so. He must have seen the men approach on the cameras he has installed around the house. “I’m almost there, love, please-”
You can hear the roar of the engine in his truck in the background as you approach the back door. It’s so close, just within reach, if you can just-
Your fingers barely brush the knob before a thick arm is around your waist and in half a breath you’re airborne. It isn’t long, but the shock of your feet leaving the floor, your phone falling from your hand as well as the knife, it makes the impact against the coffee table that much worse.
Air is forced from your lungs as you tumble roughly over the wooden surface, the table toppling over as you crash to the ground. The vase that was in the middle shatters as it follows you, and in a strange moment of delirium you can’t stop the wave of disappointment hat washes over you as the daisies that were in it scatter across the floor.
It doesn’t last long though, because soon your lungs burn for air that you can’t seem to inhale, your eyes move to see the man that had thrown you as he stoops down to pick up your phone, clicking a button and allowing Simon’s booming voice to crackle though the speakers.
“I’ll fucking kill you!” He spits, vitriol lacing every word. “If you lay a fucking hand on her, I’ll kill you myself-”
The man above you tuts mockingly as he approaches you, and you manage to find the wherewithal to rise up, hands behind you as you try to scoot away from him. You notice the other men pacing lazily around the room, seemingly unconcerned with the helpless woman on the floor.
“Now, now, Simon,” he jeers, “You mustn’t be so violent. I simply came for a chat, that’s all.”
The man’s hungry gaze never leaves you, but you don’t deviate from your path backwards across the living room carpet. The end table at the end of the couch is your goal - more specifically the 9mm pistol in it’s drawer, loaded and ready to fire whenever necessary.
In a moment of sheer bravery you jump to your feet, lunging for the table and its contents. The metal is somewhat familiar in your palm, and you manage to it raised at the intruder and the safety switched off, but before you can do much else a skilled fist knocks the weapon from your grasp and you don’t see where either goes as you’re tackled to the ground by one of the other men.
He’s heavy on top of you, squeezing what little breath you had from your lungs rough fingers tangle in your hair. You barely have time to react before blinding pain erupts from your head as it connects painfully with the floor beneath you - once, twice, three times until the assault stops.
Unfamiliar warmth trickles down your face, pain blooming from your nose and out in a spiderweb of pain as the tears finally come. You can just barely hear Simon’s enraged curses over the phones speaker, the entire world muffled as fear and panic and pain set in full force.
You’re going to die.
The man on top of you moves just enough to flip you over onto your back beneath him, the world spins around you, not stopping when your body does, and you have to fight the urge to vomit. The main assailant laughs cruley from where he stands above you, letting out a low whistle.
“You’ve got one feisty bitch, Simon. I’ll give you that…” he trails off for a moment, completely ignoring the curses being spit at him from the other end of the line.
He nods at the man trapping you, and without hesitation you feel his hands move down to the waistband of your jeans.
“I was honest,” the leader drones on. “We’re not going to kill her,” he appeases. “But you’re going to wish we did.”
You can’t stop the wail that escapes from your throat as he undoes the button of your jeans, your eyes immediately moving to check your surroundings for something - anything - that will save you. you feel the hope slowly drain out of you as you shove uselessly at the man on top of you, until a soft glint of metal shines at you from beneath the couch.
The gun.
In a moment of pure desperation, pure panic - a moment of life or death - the classes that Simon insisted you take, force their way through your panicked mind. In one quick movement you thrust your hips upwards, managing to just ever so slightly throw the man above you off balance just as you bring the heel of your palm up into his jaw with as much force as you can muster.
The impact startles him, you can physically hear and feel his teeth clack together from the force of the blow as he lets out a shout. You use his surprise to buck him off of you just enough to scramble to the right. The metal is cool against your burning skin and you turn just as you feel his hands on you once more.
The crack is deafening and your ears are ringing once more as dead weight settles in top of you. a chorus of shouts ring out around you but you can’t react, the body on top of you effectively trapping you to the floor your only weapon pinned between your chest and his.
You seem to observe the world through a fish bowl, the sounds far away and vision distorted as your mind tries to make sense of the visceral fear coursing through your veins. You hear more shouting, louder this time, and more gunshots and all you can do is close your eyes and cry as you wait for the inevitable.
But as soon as it started, it’s over.
Silence backfills what the ringing in your ears doesn’t, until you hear a faint call of you name.
It’s just your name over and over until the weight that’s on your chest lifts and your eyes fly open in panic until stormy brown eyes capture your own as calloused yet gentle hands pull you up from the floor.
Simon…
More tears flood your vision at the sight of the man you love in front of you, a strong arm wrapping around your waist. You can see his lips moving though the haze, but you can’t understand what he’s saying the ringing in your ears still blocking everything out, your panicked mind still scrabbling for control.
Simon reaches up, snapping his fingers next to your ears a few times until you start to register the noise, and when you flinch, he stops - letting go of you only long enough to shed his jacket and bring the soft fabric up to your face.
“Simon,” you say, his name coming out on a sob.
He shushes you softly, wiping gently at what you realize now, is the blood trickling down your face.
“I’m here love, you’re alright, you’re safe…”
Finally you get your limbs to cooperate, hands reaching out to clutch desperately at his shoulders, balling the fabric of his shirt between your fingers.
“A-are they…can they-”
Simon shakes his head, eyes filled with regret and sorrow. “They can’t hurt you. Not anymore. Made sure of that.”
At the acknowledgment of their demise, you break down even more, but this time out of utter relief.
“I’m sorry,” you cry, moving to shelter yourself in the familiar warmth of his chest, “I - I tried. They asked abo-about you and I tried to stop them but I-” more tears interrupt your words and Simon just holds you tighter.
“You did good, love” he assure you, his own voice breaking. “Goddammit,” he mutters. “I knew this was a bad idea, I knew it - I told you-”
You just clutch him tighter, shaking your head.
“Please don’t,” you shudder, fear gripping you again. “Please don’t leave me.”
He drops the jacket opting to wrap both arms around you, holding you tightly against him.
“Never,” He promises firmly, lips pressing to your temple.
He continues to hold you, rocking side to side gently until your cries quiet and you’re able to take full breaths once more. Only then does he pull away, examining you quickly.
“I called the team when I found out what was happening,” he says quietly, hand reaching up to cradle your cheek. “They’ll be here any minute to deal with…all this.”
You nod, wincing at the jolt of pain it sends through your head, making a frown tug at his lips.
“Let’s go get you cleaned up, yeah?”
You nod again, gentler this time, and Simon goes to stand. However, you stop him before he can get up, and he looks down as you wrap your arms around him again.
“I still love you,” you tell him softly, able to read his inner insecurities from a mile away.
He freezes at your words, struggling to accept them before letting his shoulder finally fall.
“I love you too.”
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lottins-only · 2 days ago
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CROSS THE LINE | Jude Bellingham
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pairing: jude bellingham x fem!reader, unnamed fictional RM player x fem!reader
word count: 3.1k
summary: after a fallout with your boyfriend, you find solace in a spontaneous night at the movies, where you run into his golden boy teammate. one thing leads to another and you cross the line.
A/N: first judith fic!! this was really fun to write. (very loosely) based on guilty as sin by taylor swift. let me know what yall think <3
warnings: infidelity (i don't condone it yall its just fun to write morally gray characters 🫣)
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someone once told you there’s no such thing as bad thoughts – that it’s your actions that truly define you.
you wonder what they’d say if they saw you now: sitting up in bed with your boyfriend sound asleep beside you, staring at your phone with a pounding heart, silently hoping, waiting, for a message from someone else.
you wait and wait, but there’s nothing. your home screen stays empty, mocking you. you glance at your boyfriend. his shallow breathing fills the quiet room, steady and oblivious.
he has no idea you came home at 3 a.m. wearing his teammate’s jacket.
you'd stuffed it in the back of your closet as soon as you got home, a relic of a night that shouldn’t have happened. you'd scrubbed yourself thoroughly in the shower, trying to wash away the smell of jude’s cologne that clung to your skin. but it’s still there. not on your skin anymore, but in your mind, stamped into your memory to stay forever. 
the way the flickering lights from the movie theater screen cast shadows on his beautiful face, the fleeting feeling of his warm hands on yours as he handed you his jacket, the full body rumble of his laugh, the feel of his soft lips on yours.
you will never forget. how could you, when that was the first time in months you’d felt seen? desired. wanted. needed. it’s an intoxicating feeling, like stepping into the sunlight after living in the shadows for the longest time.
and now, staring at your phone, you feel it all over again. the pull. the wrongness of it all.
a buzz breaks the silence. your heart jumps into your throat as the screen lights up and a single message appears.
jude: you got home safe?
it’s innocent enough. simple. harmless.
you could ignore it. pretend you didn’t see it. block his number and put an end to whatever this is before it spirals into something else.
but instead, your fingers move on their own accord.
you: yeah. thanks for checking.
you press send before you can stop yourself. you lock your phone and put it on the bedside table before closing your eyes and willing yourself to go to sleep.
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to your credit, none of this was planned. it all starts earlier that night. you and your boyfriend are supposed to have a date night, a rare opportunity to spend some alone time together. you pick out a dress he once says is his favorite and make a dinner reservation at his favorite spot.
but plans change quickly.
“babe, the guys just texted,” he says, barely looking up from his phone. “they’re hopping on fifa in a bit. you don’t mind if we raincheck, right?”
you stare at him dumbfounded as he flops down onto the couch.
“raincheck?” your voice trembles, the tears obvious, yet he doesn’t even glance at you.
“yeah. just tonight, we’ll do something soon,” he says dismissively.
it’s not the first time he’s blown you off, but tonight it stings a little more. maybe it’s the fact that he’s so indifferent to you and your feelings, he doesn’t even care to notice the relationship is teetering on the edge of a cliff. he doesn’t realize that you’re making an effort to save it while he’s unknowingly contributing to its unraveling.
you realized it too late, but you know now you’re not a partner to him, not really. you’re a glorified accessory, someone he can show off for external validation, a dependable constant in his life that’s only there to cheer him on and make him look good while he gives his attention and energy to the things he actually cares about: his friends, his family, and above all, his football.
it wasn’t like this in the beginning, but things changed quickly after he made the move to real madrid and became a bigger star. with every goal, every headline, and every paparazzi photo, you sank further into the background of his life.
you linger for a moment, waiting for him to change his mind, to look up and realize what he’s doing. but he doesn’t. so you grab your bag and leave without saying another word.
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the cinema isn’t your first choice. you wander the streets for a while, debating whether to call a friend or just head home. but you need a distraction, something that can dispel all the thoughts running through your head. so before you know it, you’re buying a single ticket to whatever is playing next.
the theater is almost empty. it isn’t until you sit down and glance at your ticket that you realize you’re not seeing something new, but a re-release of a classic: Goodfellas.
halfway through the movie, you see a figure slip into a seat a few rows ahead of you. a few moments pass, and you feel a pair of eyes boring into the back of your head. it’s distracting, like an itch. you can't bear to ignore it any longer so you turn your head and look straight at the person. the figure quickly shifts his gaze, pretending to be engrossed in the screen. his features are hidden thanks to the hoodie he’s wearing, but his height and broad shoulders give him away as a man.
you hold your gaze for a second longer, just to make sure he gets the message, before turning back to the screen. but your focus is broken after that.
a few more moments pass and you notice the man stand and make his way out of his row. you let out a quiet breath of relief, assuming he’s leaving. but from the corner of your eye, you see the same figure moving toward your seat. your body stiffens immediately. why is he coming your way? maybe it was a bad idea to come to a nearly empty theater alone so late at night.
you watch as he stops in front of you and slightly crouches to not block the view of the screen.
“y/n?” he asks, voice low yet familiar.
“uh, yeah?” you respond warily.
“thought it was you.” he pulls back his hood, revealing the grinning face of jude bellingham.
a wave of embarrassment immediately washes over you. it’s bad enough that your boyfriend doesn’t love you and prefers to spend time playing video games with his friends, but now you have to run into his teammate of all people while you’re publicly wallowing in your misery—his kind, handsome teammate who always makes you flush whenever you cross paths.
this time is no different. your face grows warm as you stutter, “oh! h-hi, jude.”
you brace for the questions: why are you here alone? where’s your boyfriend? why do you have tear stains on your cheeks?
they don’t come though. instead, he gestures to the seat next to you. “mind if i join you? my seat over there was right under the AC; i was freezing.”
you nod. jude flashes you a smile as he takes a seat.
and then nothing. you watch the rest of the movie silently, the only interaction between you being an elbow nudge from him to offer his pack of candy.
he’s completely engrossed. he laughs silently at certain scenes, and in the more intense ones lets out small gasps. for someone else, it might’ve been annoying, but for you, who’s used to your boyfriend’s indifference to everything, you find his enthusiasm refreshing, maybe even a little endearing.
you spend the rest of the movie mentally going through the list of things you know about him : he's the same age as you (your boyfriend begrudgingly posted a birthday wish on his instagram story once), he can't drive (you see him being picked up by a driver whenever you visit valdebebas), he's genuinely nice (he always says hi when he sees you around, and he's politely held a door open for you once or twice), his spanish isn't the best (you once ran into him hopelessly trying to change his order at the canteen, sheepishly apologizing to the annoyed barista before you helped him out), and your boyfriend quietly holds a dislike for him because he's 'attention seeking' ( you secretly think its not his fault that he's charming and easygoing, that he has everyone he meets wrapped around his finger).
when the movie ends and the lights begin to brighten, he turns to you.
"do you wanna get ice cream?"
you hesitate for a moment.
"yeah. i’d love to," you say finally.
you exit the cinema, and when the fresh outdoor air hits you, you ask the question at the tip of your tongue.
"why and how are you here?"
"could ask the same for you," he grins.
"yeah, but—" you begin, but are immediately silenced by the sight in front of you. jude reaches into the pocket of the jacket he's layered over his hoodie and pulls out a dreadlocked toupee. with the straightest face, he carefully pulls down his hood, places the wig on his head, and adjusts it before pulling the hood back up.
you blink.
"you were saying?" the corners of his mouth twitch at your facial expression. without waiting for a reply, he starts walking, leading you away from the cinema.
you walk in tandem, still giving him a confused look. when you catch sight of his (fake) locs swinging along to the rhythm of his steps, you can’t help it; you burst out laughing.
“what’s so funny?” he turns to you, a mock hurt look on his face. “i’m part jamaican, you know.”
you pause your walking, doubling over and clutching your stomach as you laugh. he stands patiently, looking slightly amused.
after you catch your breath and fully recover, you continue walking.
“so that’s how you go places unnoticed?” you ask, still giggling.
“yup,” he says. “otherwise it’s a nightmare. need a bodyguard and stuff.”
you nod sympathetically as you stroll down the quiet street, the soft glow of streetlights casting long shadows on the concrete. jude walks with an easy confidence, his hands in his pockets while you glance over at him and his toupee every so often.
“so,” he says after a moment, glancing sideways at you, “what’s your excuse? why are you at a late night showing of Goodfellas all by yourself?”
your smile falters slightly. you look straight ahead, debating how much to share.
“just needed to get out of the house,” you say with a light tone.
jude doesn’t push, though the way he hums softly in response tells you he notices your answer is only a half-truth.
"what about you?" you ask.
"I like watching movies," he says simply.
when you give him a somewhat confused look, he pulls out his phone and opens the letterboxd app, showing you the extensive list of movies he's marked as watched. you skim through it and you’re surprised by the diversity. the list is seemingly filled with movies of all genres, from classic films to indie flicks. you didn’t expect this side of him, but somehow it makes sense.
as he enthusiastically explains the list, you can't help but feel endeared by the excited look on his face. you have the overwhelming urge to reach out and smooth over his furrowed brow with your finger. but for the first and only time that night, you don't act on that impulse.
you reach a small gelato stand located on a corner of the street, its neon sign glowing softly. jude steps forward and leans against the counter.
“pick whatever you want,” he says, winking as he passes you the menu.
“don’t mind if i do,” you say, raising an eyebrow. you ignore the way his words make you feel—warm and fluttery, like this is a first date between two single people.
after a moment of deliberation, you pick pistachio and hazelnut, watching as jude leans in to order the same for himself.
“you copying me?”
“nah,” he says with a smirk, passing your cone to you from the server. “just figured you have good taste.”
you wander away from the stand, both of you savoring your ice cream. for a while, you walk in comfortable silence. at one point, he removes the ridiculous wig from his head. it isn’t until you reach a park bench that jude breaks the silence.
"you know," he starts. "i haven’t seen you at a lot of games lately. everything good between you and your boyfriend?"
“‘your boyfriend?’” you tease. “why not call him by his name? you guys have beef or something?”
he stays silent.
you gasp half-jokingly. “oh my god! tell me everything, so i can sell the story to the tabloids.”
he lets out a laugh at that.
“you’re ridiculous,” he says, shaking his head, but there’s a glint of amusement in his eyes.
“c’mon, spill,” you tease, nudging his arm lightly. “is he, like, selfish? does he refuse to pass during games?”
jude chuckles, shaking his head again. “nah, nothing like that. he’s a good player. talented, hardworking… you just start noticing things when you’re around someone all the time, you know?”
he says it carefully, almost hesitantly. you tilt your head at him. “notice things like what?”
he shrugs, his gaze dropping to his melting cone. “like… maybe he doesn’t appreciate what he’s got.”
the words hang in the air between you. you don't know how to respond, so you just gaze down at your own ice cream.
"sorry," jude says quickly. "didn't mean to overstep. i just—forget it."
"no, it's fine," you say quietly. "you're not wrong."
you sit in silence for a few moments. you feel him lean back against the bench, and the next time he speaks, his tone is lighter.
"my dad's coming to visit tomorrow," he says casually, an excited undertone in his voice.
"yeah? that's nice. does he come often?"
"not as much as i'd like," jude admits. "he's got my little brother to worry about in sunderland."
you smile softly. “what do you guys usually do when he visits?”
"usually we grab some food..."
he speaks about his bond with his dad, and also his close relationship with both his brother and mother. soon the conversation moves to childhood memories; jude tells you stories about growing up in birmingham, the football academy there, how he met his best friends at school. in return, you share stories of your own childhood, each one met with genuine curiosity from jude. you laugh, the conversation feeling effortlessly easy and natural.
it isn’t until you pull out your phone and glance at the screen to check the time that reality crashes back in. you have a boyfriend waiting for you at home. a boyfriend who hasn’t called, hasn’t texted, hasn’t even noticed that you’ve walked out of his house.
you lick the last remnants of your ice cream and are just about to crunch into the cone when jude gestures toward your chin. “you’ve got a little…” he says, trailing off as he points.
“oh,” you mumble while jude scans your surroundings for a tissue. finding none, he leans in and gently swipes at the bit of ice cream with his thumb.
“got it,” he murmurs, his touch lingering just a second longer than required.
what happens next can only be described as a a lapse in thinking, or maybe something you've been holding back all night. before your brain can catch up with your actions, you grab his hand and bring his thumb to your lips. you lick the ice cream away, your eyes flicking up to meet his.
jude freezes, his breath catching, his deep brown eyes locking onto yours with an intensity that makes your heart race.
"i—" you start, but whatever explanation you're about to give disappears when jude leans closer, his hand hovering near your face, as if waiting for your permission.
you don’t pull away. you don’t want to.
his lips brush against yours, hesitant at first, testing the waters. when you don’t push him away or move back, when, instead, you lean into him, his kiss deepens. it’s slow and deliberate, like he has all the time in the world to memorize every inch of you.
the ice cream cone in your hand is forgotten, melting onto the pavement as your fingers tangle into his hoodie, pulling him closer. the world fades, leaving just the two of you in your little bubble.
when you finally pull apart, your breaths mingle in the night air and jude’s forehead rests against yours.
“jude…” you whisper, but you don’t know how to finish the sentence.
he pulls back just enough to look at you, his expression serious. “tell me if I’ve crossed a line. i don’t want to make things harder for you.”
your heart flutters at the genuine care in his tone. you shake your head. “no, you didn’t.”
he doesn't keep his lips off you after that.
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the next morning, you wake up feeling better than you have in months. there's a lightness in your chest, a warmth that’s been missing for what feels like forever.
you glance at your boyfriend, expecting to feel guilt or remorse. but there’s nothing. no pang of regret, no twist in your stomach. you feel... nothing at all.
you watch him roll out of bed and get ready for training. not a word passes between you as you sit down together in the kitchen to eat breakfast.
“so, what does your day look like today?” you try.
he doesn’t even look up, his attention entirely on his phone, scrolling with one hand while holding his fork with the other.
“i have a meeting at work that’s pretty—“ you start, but he cuts off.
“we’re doing penalty drills,” he mutters without looking up. “need to score more than bellingham so i can wipe that smug smile off his face. did you know he gets paid more than me?”
you just stare at him. you wonder what you even saw in him all those years ago. how had you overlooked the bitterness in his eyes, the envy? how had you missed it all along, his resentment towards anyone who seemed happier, luckier, more successful? his good looking face looks distorted to you now, forever changed to you to reflect the ugliness he holds inside. its as if you’re seeing him for who he really is for the very first time.
your phone buzzes on the table. without even checking, you know who it’s from.
jude: good morning :) sleep well?
you see it for what it is: an invitation to step into dangerous territory, to cross the line once more. a lifeline offering escape from the sinking ship that is your relationship.
you decide to take it.
you type a quick response and set the phone down. your boyfriend is grinning at an instagram reel now, completely absorbed.
you don’t speak to each other for the remainder of breakfast. this time it doesn't bother you at all.
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laurenairay · 3 days ago
Text
A reason to start over new - T. Jost
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Summary: It’s been five years since Lucy has seen her ex-boyfriend Tyson. Can his grandparents’ Christmas party fix their broken hearts?
Happy birthday @senditcolton! This is my fic for your birthday bingo – I had a lot of fun with this one! I chose The Hand Touch, Exes to Lovers, Free Space (Resolved Angst), “You’re Too Good for Me”, and Winter Romance, making it a full bingo! Hope you have a wonderful day Nicole.
A massive thank you to @jostyriggslover96 for reading through this!
Words: 3.3k
Warnings: angst, flashback to breakup, some bad language, self-deprecation.
Title from The Reason, by Hoobastank
~
I've found a reason for me, To change who I used to be, A reason to start over new, And the reason is you.
~
“Oh wow, Val and Jim have really outdone themselves this year, haven’t they?”
Lucy glanced around at the Christmas decorations surrounding them, smiling at her mom’s words.
“Full of holiday cheer, as always!” she nodded.
She took off her thick coat and gloves, glad to be out of the icy air, hanging them up on the rack put out for guests.
“Now honey, if it’s too much, you can slip out back and head home, okay?” her mom said seriously, albeit quietly.
“You said that last year. And the year before that. For the last five years, actually,” Lucy mused.
“And I’ve meant it every year. They might be our neighbours, but you are my baby. And my priority, always,” her mom said seriously.
Not for the first time, Lucy was thankful to have the mom she did.
“And I appreciate it. But I’m going to be fine,” she said, smiling fondly.
“Alright, if you’re sure. You just send me a sneaky text if you change your mind though, yes?”
“Yeah, thanks mom,” Lucy beamed.
The Christmas Eve Party thrown by her neighbours was a tradition she’d attended her entire life, and even though she hadn’t dated their grandson in half a decade, Val and John had always insisted that she still came along. A lingering effect of being childhood sweethearts, she supposed.
“Amy! Gary! Lucy!”
The welcome from their neighbours was warm and effervescent as it always was, and soon enough Lucy found herself swept in by conversation and catching up. She may have gone to college in UBC Okanagan in Kelowna for both her degrees, barely away from home, but she’d lived in campus residence for all four years of her bachelor’s degree and moved out of her parents’ house properly into a small apartment near campus for her master’s degree. It would’ve been easy to move home after guaranteed accommodation ended, but Lucy had wanted to keep the independence she had grown to love, and it wasn’t as if she didn’t visit her parents at least every other weekend.
But it was still nice to be able to talk about her accomplishments with the people that she’d grown up alongside, especially now that she was in the final year of her master’s degree and looking like she was on track for starting the PhD she’d always aimed for.
After a couple of hours, she escaped the crowds in the living and dining areas, grateful for the sanctuary of the kitchen. There were a few plates of cookies and other Christmas treats laid out, and Lucy couldn’t resist reaching out for a snickerdoodle…
…at the exact time as someone else.
She jumped in surprise as a large hand rested on top of hers, not realising anyone was next to her, but as she looked up, she couldn’t but to freeze despite the warmth of his touch. Tyson. It was Tyson’s hand touching hers.
“Oh fuck, I’m sorry, I…Lucy?”
“Hey Tys,” she managed to breathe.
The familiar curls, the big beautiful eyes, the sweet smile, and now a little bit of stubble? He looked good. Of course he looked good.
Tyson quickly drew his hand away from hers, breaking her out of her thoughts.
“Uh, you have it, I shouldn’t be eating baked goods too much anyway,” Tyson said, rubbing the back of his neck a little sheepishly.
Lucy pursed her lips and broke a third of the snickerdoodle off, handing it to Tyson with a raised eyebrow. Tyson huffed out a laugh but accepted the offered treat, sending her a small smile of thanks. Fuck, it may have been five years since they broke up, but he really hadn’t changed, had he?
“So, uh, you still come to these parties?” Tyson asked.
Lucy bit her bottom lip but nodded.
“Yeah, your grandparents insist. I hope that’s okay,” she winced.
“Of course it is,” Tyson said quickly, “They always loved you.”
Well that was something at least. Why did this feel so awkward? Sure, it had been five years since she’d seen Tyson, but they dated from eight years – surely they had more than this?
“I don’t usually come to these. Well, I guess you already know that, if you come every year. I, uh, I have the 24th to the 26th off this year, so I didn’t want to miss another Christmas with my grandparents,” Tyson explained.
“I bet Val and Jim were over the moon when you told them,” Lucy mused.
Tyson laughed softly, nodding. “They were. Mom and Kacey didn’t hesitate to come to Kelowna to join us, so it’s a big family Christmas this year.”
“That’s great, Tys. Really. Spending Christmas with your loved ones is important,” she said softly, smiling.
His smile dimmed a little, but he nodded.
“How’s, uh, how’s your degree going? Gramps said you’re doing a master’s now?”
He knew that? Did he ask? Or did Jim just tell him?
“Uh, yeah. I graduated my bachelor's degree magna cum laude back in 2020 and went straight into starting my graduate program there. I’m a paid teaching assistant for my supervisory professor too.”
“That’s incredible, Luce. Still doing Earth and Environmental Sciences?” Tyson prompted.
He remembered? After all this time?
“Yeah, yeah it is. Focusing in on environmental impact assessment for my master’s thesis,” she nodded, a little stunned, “I didn’t think…I didn’t think you’d remember.”
“Of course I remember. You were always so passionate about your studies – it was one of the things I loved most about you,” he said softly.
“Tyson…” Lucy said faintly, trailing off when no words would come.
He smiled sadly at her, shaking his head.
“Sounds like…it sounds like everything was worth it for you,” Tyson murmured.
~
2019
“So you can’t make it over?”
“No, Tys, I can’t, I have labs to do,” Lucy sighed.
“We haven’t seen each other in so long!”
“I can’t just not go to my classes because you want me in Denver! You know this!” she groaned.
“I know, I know, but it sucks.”
Lucy frowned, even though he couldn’t see her. “You’re the one who didn’t come home for Christmas, remember?”
“The schedule didn’t make sense, and I offered to fly you down?”
“Tyson!” she groaned.
He stayed silent on the other end of the phone, a silence that sent an ominous shiver down her spine.
“So where do we go from here?”
“W-What?” she said, confused at the dull tone of his voice.
“Your priority is college, my priority is hockey, and neither of us can compromise. I would never ask you to compromise, just like you wouldn’t ask me. We have different priorities, clearly. So where do we go from here?”
“Tyson, are you really saying what I think you’re saying?” she whimpered.
“Yeah, I think we should break up.”
“We’ve been together for eight years! You’re the only boyfriend I’ve ever had, the only guy I’ve ever wanted. And you want to break up, just like that?”
“I don’t want to break up, Luce. But what other option do we have? Neither of us can give the other what we need right now. We have to focus on ourselves, don’t we? For our own careers? You have so much ahead of you and I can’t be there to celebrate it. And you can’t be by my side cheering me on from the stands. I love you, Lucy. But this isn’t working anymore.”
~
“Tyson, why would you say it like that? You think it’s been easy for me?” Lucy asked, throat a little choked.
“No, no, of course not,” he groaned.
“Then what do you mean?”
“Look, forget I said anything, okay? It was really good to see you, Luce.”
Before Lucy could say a word, Tyson walked away, leaving her alone in the kitchen with her head spinning. What the hell was that?
For the final few hours of the party, Lucy indulged in a couple more glasses of wine than she intended, sticking solidly by her parents’ sides. She did her best to keep a smile on her face and ease into the Christmas festivity, even when Laura and Kacey said their hellos, but her mind just kept going back to Tyson.
“We’re going to start saying our goodbyes, okay honey? Why don’t you find all our coats.”
Lucy just nodded at her mom’s suggestion, grateful for the opportunity to escape the crowd. Well, she was grateful, until she saw Tyson sitting on the bench next to the coat rack, face flushed and eyes glassy. He was drunk, at least moderately so.
“Ah, fuck, I didn’t want you to see me like this,” he said, voice slurring.
What did he mean by that?
“I’m just getting our coats. We’re heading out,” she murmured, trying to ignore the whoosh in her stomach.
“Already?”
“It’s nearly midnight, Tys,” she said, smiling wryly.
“Well, fuck. Time flies when you’re having whiskey, I guess,” he groaned, putting his empty glass on the bench next to him.
She huffed out a laugh, unhooking the coats when she finally spotted them.
“You look good, Luce,” he murmured, looking up at her through his eyelashes.
“I do?” she blurted.
Damn it.
But Tyson just grinned. “Yeah, you really do. You always looked good, but damn you’ve really settled into your own skin, eh?”
“I love who I am, yeah,” she nodded.
She wasn’t lying, or even placating. Her studies in environmental impact had opened up a whole new side of her she hadn’t even realised was there, and she loved everything about the person she’d become through it. She just hadn’t realised it was obvious on the outside.
Then again, if anyone was going to notice something like that about her, it was going to be Tyson, wasn’t it?
“You’re too good for me.”
Oh fuck.
“That’s not true. Not even slightly,” Lucy said, frowning.
“No? I can barely get a team to keep me, and you’re soaring ahead with your academic career, just like you deserve,” Tyson scoffed.
This was just the alcohol talking. It had to be.
“Tys, those teams are the ones missing out. You’re amazing,” she said softly.
He paused for a moment, before shaking his head.
“If I’m so amazing, why did we break up?”
Because he had to put hockey first.
Because she had to put college first.
Because neither of them were each other’s first choice.
“That’s not fair, Tyson. We were kids when we first started dating. Barely 13 years old. And we were together for eight years! We had an incredible relationship! It just…we wanted different things. Our priorities were different, our passions were different – we might have grown up together, but we’d also grown apart. Your life is hockey and my life is academics, and that’s okay! That doesn’t mean we didn’t have love, yeah?”
The way that Tyson’s eyes filled up with tears made her own eyes water, dangerous lump rising in her throat.
“If I could go back and change it all, I would. I’d choose you. I’d always choose you.”
His soft words tore a sob from her throat and she shook her head. How could he be so cruel?
“Don’t say that. We made the right decision five years ago and you know it,” she whimpered.
Tyson’s face fell at her devastated expression, and he staggered to his feet.
“I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to upset you. I’m sorry,” he said sadly.
And yet here she was, broken hearted all over again.
“I should go. I need to go,” was all she could manage to choke out.
“Lucy, baby, please…”
But Lucy just shook her head, clutching the coats in her hands, shaky smile on her lips as the tears finally fell. “Merry Christmas, Tyson.”
~
“So what happened at the Christmas Eve Party that has you all torn up like this?”
Lucy flinched at her mom’s voice, turning her head to see her standing in the doorway to her bedroom.
“Nothing,” she said quickly.
“Uh huh, and I’m a fairy princess,” her mom snorted.
Lucy couldn’t help but giggle, earning a fond smile as her mom walked into the room and sat down next to her on her bed. Lucy placed a bookmark in the book she’d been reading to give her mom her full attention. She’d needed a little respite from all the preparations to hold her dad’s family for a late lunch, after all the intensity of having her mom’s family over yesterday on Christmas Day, but she’d found herself reliving her conversation with Tyson over and over.
“Sounds like…it sounds like everything was worth it for you.”
“You’re too good for me.”
“If I’m so amazing, why did we break up?”
“If I could go back and change it all, I would. I’d choose you. I’d always choose you.”
So really, her mom coming up to talk to her was a welcome break from all of that as well.
“If you know it was the Christmas Eve Party then you can take a guess,” Lucy said, shrugging.
“I’d rather hear it from you, when Tyson’s involved,” her mom mused.
Well at least her mom was blunt about it.
“We had a couple of conversations, and it stirred up old emotions, old drama. He…mom, he said he’d go back and change it all if he could. That he’d always choose me. What am I supposed to do with that?”
Her mom blinked a couple of times, lips parted in a surprised, before she coughed out a laugh.
“Well I could never accuse Tyson of being subtle.”
“Mom, seriously. This is stressing me out. I can’t stop thinking about it,” Lucy groaned.
“I think that’s an answer in itself, sweetheart,” she said softly.
“What?”
Her mom stayed silent, just nudging Lucy with her shoulder, and Lucy nudged back out of habit. What did she mean, that was an answer in itself?
“Lucy, honey, if you can’t stop thinking about Tyson choosing you above everything else, that means something,” her mom eventually said with a huffed laugh.
“But how can it? He still has his hockey, and I still have academics. Neither of those are going to change any time soon,” Lucy said sadly.
Because at the end of the day, that was the bottom line of it all. Their priorities haven’t changed.
“Just because your both still have your passions doesn’t mean that they have to be your only love. You can have both,” her mom said firmly.
What?
“How can I have both?” Lucy asked, confused.
“Do you love him?” was all she said.
“What?” Lucy said, surprised.
“Do you love him?” her mom repeated.
Lucy opened her mouth, shutting it again before huffing out a laugh. There was only one answer to that.
“Yeah, I never stopped,” she replied.
“Then you can have both. You spent the last five years missing him, and I know damn well that that boy missed you too - neither of you deserve that for another second. You can have both,” her mom said decisively.
She could have both?
How could she have both?
“You love him.”
“I love him,” Lucy whispered.
“Go get him.”
Lucy whimpered as she looked into her mom’s eyes, but she only saw warmth and encouragement. Her mom was right. She loved Tyson. She loved Tyson and if seeing him again this Christmas had taught her anything, it was that she was stupid if she tried to deny how much she missed him. If she didn’t tell him now, when would she?
“He leaves today. I need to go now,” she said suddenly.
“Well damn, okay then. Put on a sweater and I’ll find your snow boots,” her mom grinned.
Lucy felt like she was in a haze as she walked as quickly down the street as was safe, heart pounding as she spotted Tyson loading bags into his grandpa’s car.
“Tyson!”
His head whipped around at her shout, eyes going wide as he saw her walking towards him. Tyson shuffled down the driveway, missing Jim’s fond smile as he himself went back into the house, and the moment that she was standing in front of him, Tyson cupped his hands over her elbows to steady her.
“What are you doing here?”
“I love you,” she breathed.
Tyson whimpered, but Lucy wasn’t discouraged, not when she saw the wonder that filled his expression.
“You love me?”
“I love you. I love you so much and I can’t stop thinking about everything you said the other night,” she blurted out.
“Luce, I’m sorry, I know I upset you but…”
“No, Tys, it’s okay,” Lucy said, shaking her head as she interrupted, “While I stand by what I said, that we made the right decision at the time, maybe we could make a different decision now?”
“What are you saying?”
She could understand his hesitation, really she could. It wasn’t as if she wasn’t coming out with this out of the blue, after five years of nothing at all. After five years of heartbreak and heartache. But her mom was right – she missed him so fiercely and she couldn’t bear the thought of him not knowing that.
“I want us to start over new. I never stopped loving you, not for one moment. We could have both. We could have our passions and our love, and I hate that it’s taken me this long to even consider that? I miss you and I love you and I know you’re heading to the airport to fly back to Raleigh, but tell me I’m not crazy for thinking we could do this?”
Tyson’s jaw dropped as he processed her long rant, and it was only his firm grip on her elbows that stopped her from giving up hope.
“That was a lot,” Tyson said.
She winced. “I know, but…”
“And you poured out a lot of emotion there,” he interrupted.
Lucy kept her mouth shut this time, as much as she wanted to beg him to say more.
“It’s been agony for five years, for so many reasons, but hearing you say that you love me and you want to give our relationship another shot? I just…”
Tyson trailed off, letting out a long breath.
“I understand if I’m too late,” she murmured.
But Tyson huffed out a laugh, raising one hand from her elbow to cup her face in a gentle motion that had her breath hitching in her throat.
“There is no world in which you’d be too late,” Tyson said softly.
“Really?”
“I love you too, Lucy. I never stopped either,” he murmured.
She couldn’t stop the incredulous laugh that tumbled from her lips, smiling back up at Tyson as he smiled at her.
“We’re really doing this?” she asked, giddy.
“Yeah, baby, we are. I don’t know how we’re going to do this, or what it’s going to look like, but we’re both adult enough to know how to put in more effort this time round right, yeah? I’ll fly home for the all-star break, and I’ll fly you out for spring break, and we’ll have video calls that neither of us are going to miss. And everything else. We’re going to make it work this time,” he said, tone serious but face grinning.
“And we’re going to communicate, yeah? When one of us is finding it hard? We’ll find little compromises, as we can’t do the big compromises. We’re worth it,” Lucy added, not caring that her cheeks were aching with her smile.
“Yeah, we are. I love you, so much Lucy,” Tyson grinned.
“I love you too.”
Tyson didn’t waste any time in leaning down to press his lips to hers, their last first kiss.
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smiley-mcdoggington · 1 day ago
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Uhhhh what if Stan called like a year before Bill and Ford broke up but Bill was the one that answered the phone. TW SUICIDAL TW STANCEST!!!!!!
Stan's stiff fingers could barely feel the quarters he dragged to slot into the payphone. Three, one after the other. 75 cents. Not enough for a hot meal, not enough for more than a few miles in his car. Enough to change what was in his wallet from a side to a meal but on their own the coins didn't matter enough. It was okay, he just wanted to hear Stanford, that was worth more than 75 cents.
He felt the bones in his fingers as they pressed into the cold metal numbers - it was supposed to be warm in Florida, why the hell was it so cold? He didn't have to pull out the scrap of paper he'd written Ford's number on years ago - he knew it by heart, even if he kept it in his pocket anyway.
The phone rang twice before it picked up. "Yellow?" Stanford's voice intoned chipperly. No 'Dr. Stanford Pines' residence', no 'What's the purpose of this call?'. It was friendly, familiar. Was he waiting for someone else to call? Had he been waiting at the phone for someone and got his hopes up when it was only Stan?
Stan almost took the receiver away from his ear, almost put it back and wasted another 75 cents when Stanford's voice said, in the most knowing way: "Stanley."
Stan didn't know how Ford knew it was him - was he breathing too loud? Had he muttered something? Was this habit of his catching up to him? Stan tried to force his throat to open enough to let a word slip free, but then Stanford spoke again.
"You want something, don't you?" His voice didn't match the accusation, but it still made Stan wanna hurl.
"No-- I didn't - that's not why I called, I ain't some--" He lied through his ill-fitting dentures until Stanford cut him off.
"But you do want something. You want everything. You want S-- my attention. You want money, you want luck, you want a boat and you want me to drop everything so that my life can become providing you those things, don't you?"
"Moses - No, Ford! That's - I don't." The phone booth around him felt very cramped, and the light inside with the dark outside made it impossible to see outside the tiny space. "I-I just called to talk, okay? Nothing else, I swear." He felt like a kid pleading his case while already laid out on the curb.
"Talk, yes, you're a real talker, Stanley. I always hated that when we were little, you know, it was like I couldn't even get my thoughts out before you were blabbering on, taking all the attention you could grasp for while not saying a single thing of importance. But you can't talk your way out of being a bum, can you, Stanley?"
Stan wanted to hang up but at this point he was sitting on the cold ground letting the cold crawl into his skin and the hook was just out of reach. Ford knew? Some feeble, tiny part of him had always thought - thought if Ford knew how he was actually doing then Ford might care. That he was doing a good thing by not saying anything to Ma so no one would worry. But Ford knew. At least he knew part of it. He knew Stan was huddled in a phone booth spending some of his last quarters on a phonecall before going to find a side road to park in to sleep. Ford just didn't care.
"How much do you know?" The anger tried to reach his tone but the lump in his throat made the question a strangled whisper.
"Oh, I know a lot of things, Stanley Pines." Stanford's voice crooned mockingly, so clear over the phone it made Stan sick. "I know you've been living in your car since the day you were kicked out. I know you've got some interesting people tailing you. I know you've used that trick you learned with your tongue when we were fifteen on more men than you can count for pocket change so you could listen to me breathe for a minute." He said, tone so unaffected it made Stan wonder if the conversation was even real. Then Stanford said something that had his gut rolling.
"I know you didn't mean to break my machine." He said, so casually, as if he'd never thought he did it on purpose. "Of course you didn't - a plan like that to get me to stay close enough you could leech off me? You couldn't even think of something like that, could you, Stanley? No, you didn't mean to, but when it happened it clicked in your little pea brain that you'd get everything you wanted if you just let it be for once. So you let it happen. So I simply repaid the favor - let Dad beat your greasy face in and then throw you to the wolves. Your eyes for an eye, as the saying goes--"
"Fuck you." Stan spat, voice raw, thoughts scattered like broken glass.
"I think you've done enough fucking for the both of us, bruiser." Ford said amusedly. "Don't call again, your existence is a distraction I don't care to feed."
Stan wanted to say something - anything. But then the phone buzzed. Ford had hung up.
Stan screamed, throwing the receiver against the wall of the phone booth before leaving it to dangle while he threaded his hands in his hair. Ford knew everything - he knew everything and he couldn't give less of a fuck. Like he wasn't his brother, once. A brother that apparently talked too much around him but a brother regardless.
Now he wasn't anything to Ford, just a nuiscence on his land-line. Stan could die without a home or a family and Ford wouldn't care. Ford might even appreciate not getting the phone calls.
He thought of the revolver in his glove box with only one bullet. But he couldn't, today, because today's a Wednesday and Ma used to say it was her favorite day of the week because her soap opera that'd been running for as long as he could remember always had new episodes on Wednesdays and Stan and Ford would stay up half an hour past their bedtime to sit and watch the new episode with her. He couldn't ruin Wednesdays.
Could he even ruin Wednesdays? Or would Ma never think about that? Would she be glad, too, to not have the distraction?
He got up, and walked to his car. He couldn't feel his legs, or his hands, but he didn't think the cold had anything to do with it.
He sat down on the driver's side, and looked at his glove box.
Somewhere, on the other side of the country, a man with yellow eyes giggled as he sunk a fork into his hand over and over and over again, watching through the eye of a one-dollar bill as Stanley opened his glove box.
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batboyblog · 1 day ago
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Hi! I was wondering if you're planning to continue the "Stuff the Biden Admin is Doing" series through early January? I'm seeing a lot of hopelessness and (obv) tons of focus on the new cabinet picks, their plan for the first 100 days, etc. And I'm hoping that we can take some time to focus on what (if anything) the admin is using these last few weeks to try and accomplish. Ty for all you do!
honestly I don't know.
when I started it there was just overwhelming zeitgeist that Biden didn't do anything as President, that he was so old he was basically dead, that his brains were soft bananas and endlessly "he promised to get rid of Student loan debt and that just never happened! so why believe anything he says!" all of which was horse shit. So I felt like rather than just bitch about it, I'd do what I could in a very small way to be counter programing to that. But the election was always a part of it? I was always making them with the implied case that Joe Biden deserved re-election which I firmly believe he earned by any objective marker, and after he decided he couldn't overcome the propaganda wave about his age and health, that his Vice-President surely deserved election based on what their administration had managed.
I hope I did convince at least some people to vote for Harris in the end.
any ways, for me posting more as the Biden administration ends would be deeply depressing, dealing with what we're losing and comparing what every week will look like for the next 4 years. Also at this late date, new rules are subject to a review period where the President can freeze and reverse them pretty easily so a lot of anything the Biden team passes can and will be stopped and returned because Trump will become President during the review period. Likewise any Executive Orders Biden's signed during his Presidency can be ripped up on day one of the Trump Presidency
So anything the Biden team gets done before January is very fragile at best and thats sad and depressing
any ways, I think if I'm feeling up to it in January I'll maybe try to write up some kind of overview of the full 4 years of the Biden Presidency and how great it was. And Sadly I suspect I'll get more and more active in covering the trash of the second Trump Presidency
sadly for all of us, I don't think there will be much good news in the years ahead, but I think we have to learn to live with that? um authoritarianism relies not so much on enthusiastic mass support so much as mass apathy, the majority going "ugh there's nothing we can do, why bother paying attention" or "it makes me too sad/upset to watch the news" I see a lot of people pushing vaguely self helpy "take care of yourself" type posts about gardening or whatever as activism and I fear people pulling away from the uncomfortable, from politics and giving up on the idea that change is possible. Someone talked about how middle class liberals in Europe, in Germany in particular after the Revolutions of 1830 and 1848 failed almost totally and the authoritarian conservatives won, these liberals withdrew from political life and became very focused on art, music, domestic life because they gave up and you have in the 1850s-80s a period where conservative elites in Germany have basically all their own way and it had longer term echos. I fear that a lot.
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flowerchild28 · 1 day ago
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Can you please write a Louis imagine based on the song "Midnight Rain" by Taylor Swift?
sure love i hope you like it :)
Midnight rain
Louis Tomlinson imagine
Warnings: none
1.2k
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The rain tapped softly against the window, a gentle rhythm that matched the beat of your restless thoughts. It was past midnight, the world outside cloaked in a moody darkness only broken by flickering streetlights. You sat on the edge of your bed, knees pulled to your chest, staring at the small shoebox in front of you. It was filled with memories—concert tickets, Polaroid photos, a wristband from that music festival. Each piece was a fragment of a story you had lived with Louis.
You hadn’t thought of him in a long time. Well, not like this. The kind of thinking that twisted your heart, made you question the choices you’d made all those years ago. But tonight, something in the air—maybe the rain or the silence—had drawn you back to him.
It was Louis’ laugh you remembered first, that warm, raspy sound that could fill a room and make you feel like you belonged. He had been your sunshine, lighting up the dim corners of your life with his effortless charm and relentless optimism. You loved him fiercely, but you were different people, with different dreams. That was what had led to the goodbye that still lingered in the back of your mind like an unfinished melody.
Back then, you were all ambition and plans. You had a career mapped out, a city in your sights, and a hunger to become something bigger than the small-town life you’d both grown up in. Louis, on the other hand, had wanted stability. He craved a quiet life away from the spotlight, a home filled with love and laughter where the two of you could grow old together.
“I’ll wait for you,” he had said that night, his blue eyes shimmering with unshed tears. “But I won’t hold you back. If you need to chase this dream, I get it, love. I just hope... I hope you know what you’re giving up.”
You had cried too, your heart shattering even as you forced yourself to walk away. You told yourself it was the right decision, that you couldn’t stay in a place where you felt like you were shrinking. But no matter how many miles you put between yourself and that small town, Louis was a constant echo, his voice a ghost that haunted the quiet moments.
Now, years later, the shoebox was evidence of a love you’d once known but tried to leave behind. You reached for a photo on top of the pile—a candid shot of Louis, grinning at you from across a picnic blanket. His messy hair caught the golden light of sunset, and his laugh seemed to leap out of the frame, pulling you back to that summer day.
A knock at your door startled you out of your reverie. You frowned. It was late, and you weren’t expecting anyone. Hesitantly, you padded to the door, the chill of the wooden floor grounding you. When you opened it, your breath caught in your throat.
“Louis?”
There he was, standing on your doorstep, his hoodie soaked from the rain. His hands were shoved deep into his pockets, and his expression was a mixture of uncertainty and hope. The years had added a maturity to his face, but his eyes—those familiar, stormy blue eyes—were the same.
“Hey, Y/N,” he said, his voice soft but tinged with the accent that had once made your heart flutter. “I, uh... I didn’t mean to show up unannounced. I just... I was in town, and I couldn’t stop thinking about you.”
You blinked, struggling to find your voice. “It’s been years, Louis. Why now?”
He chuckled, though it lacked his usual confidence. “I don’t know. Maybe it’s the rain, or maybe I’m just tired of wondering what could’ve been.”
Your heart clenched. He was standing there, offering you the chance to rewrite the ending you’d once been so sure of. But was it that simple? Could you undo the pain of the past?
“Do you want to come in?” you asked after a moment, stepping aside. He nodded, brushing past you with a damp chill that made the room feel smaller.
Louis looked around, his gaze landing on the shoebox on your bed. His lips quirked into a small smile. “Still have this, huh?”
You felt heat rise to your cheeks. “I guess I couldn’t bring myself to get rid of it.”
He walked over, picking up one of the Polaroids. It was a picture of the two of you at the festival, your arms around each other, your faces flushed with happiness. “We had something good, didn’t we?” he murmured.
“We did,” you admitted, your voice barely above a whisper.
Louis turned to you, his eyes searching yours. “Do you ever regret it? Leaving?”
You hesitated. “Sometimes. But I needed to find myself, Louis. And I think you did too.”
He nodded, his shoulders relaxing slightly. “I get that. But I’ve never stopped missing you, Y/N. Not for a second.”
Tears pricked at your eyes. “I miss you too,” you said, the words tumbling out before you could stop them.
For a moment, the room was silent except for the sound of the rain. Then Louis reached for your hand, his touch grounding you like it always had. “What if we tried again?” he asked, his voice barely audible. “No expectations, no pressure. Just... see where it goes?”
Your heart ached with the weight of possibilities. Maybe the timing had been wrong before, but now, standing here in the quiet hum of midnight, you wondered if the universe was giving you a second chance.
You didn’t let go of his hand as you both sat on the edge of the bed, staring at the shoebox together. You laughed softly as you picked up the scruffy wristband from that festival. “Remember this? We were stuck in the rain for hours.”
“And you were furious because your hair got ruined,” Louis said, his voice filled with a teasing warmth. “But you still danced with me in the mud.”
“Because you wouldn’t shut up until I did,” you replied, shaking your head but smiling.
“That’s because I knew you’d regret it if you didn’t. Dancing in the rain with you—yeah, that’s one of my favorite memories.”
His words hung in the air, and you turned to look at him. There was something about the way he was looking at you now, as if no time had passed, as if the years of distance and heartbreak hadn’t dimmed the way he felt.
“You know,” you began, your voice faltering slightly, “I always thought about coming back. I’d get as far as packing a bag, and then I’d stop myself. I was scared it was too late.”
“It’s not too late,” Louis said firmly, his hand tightening around yours. “We can take this slow, Y/N. I’m not asking for promises, just... a chance.”
The rain outside slowed to a soft drizzle, the rhythm mirroring the gentle hope growing between you. You leaned your head against Louis’ shoulder, and for the first time in years, the ache in your chest began to ease.
“Okay,” you said softly. “Let’s see where it goes.”
Louis pressed a kiss to the top of your head, his voice low and full of relief. “I missed you, love. More than you’ll ever know.”
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kumabeom · 2 days ago
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saudade love 🫧
seventeen : i can do it with a broken heart
synopsis : actress!yn and actor!soobin are forced by their companies to date as a publicity stunt to promote their latest releases. however what’s to happen when yn and soobin spend more and more time together even though yn’s closest friend is keeping secrets.
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my sweet love, yn, how i love you oh so very much. how i wish to wake up to your warmth every day. every single day is so worth living, because im able to see you everyday. how you melt away all my problems with your warmth that is stronger than the sun. how you pull me into a hug and i can automatically feel your radiant heat. i feel like im in heaven when i am in your arms.
it’s not that i want you, which i do, but it’s that i need you.
you’re the joy in my life. the reason that im able to go to sleep and wake up without a singular worry in my mind.
but sometimes you’re the reason for my sleepless nights.
the nights that i spend thinking about you. thinking about what we can do together on an adventure with each other.
we’ve spent so much time together, originally it was something i didn’t want. something that you didn’t want. because we both thought we would ruin our lives by going with what our hearts wanted. was it so wrong to love the person i worked with? what if the company found out and they were unhappy with our decision? would be forced to break up?
relationships, all relationships are full of questions. the future is full of questions. at times you’ll question to yourself if you even feel happy with me by your side.
and i won’t be upset if you one day decide to leave my side, why would i be? your future is yours and my future is mine. but for my future, i always want to see you happy. if it’s with me or not.
this all sounds like im trying to part ways with you, but im not. of course not. not when you’re the person i love the most in the world.
when you’re the person who keeps me going. the person who i can always go to when things are not going so well.
my love.
you will always be my love. want to spend every moment with you. want to cherish your love. want to bathe in your warmth.
it’s all so selfish.
to want you. to need you.
but i can’t deny it any longer.
you’re my true one and only.
i know it. and i don’t have any doubts about it.
how can someone like you not be my one and only.
and you’re so unique, i’ll never find anyone in the world like you, yn.
all i need.. is you.
i’m reminded of your love every morning that i wake up and see the flowers that you get me on my desk, fully basking in the sunlight. the second i wake up and there’s a good morning message as soon as i open my phone. when you burst into my room right after i respond, and we just cuddle in bed for a while.
you always wondered why i used to comfort you so much when your alleged scandals were reported by the media..
yn, i always did that.. i always wanted to be by your side because i felt like you didn’t deserve the amount of negative attention you were getting. false accusations, lies, they have the power to ruin you, to ruin everything.
yn, i really love you. i always will.
i promise to you that i’ll always be by your side. i’ll always be the person you can turn to when you need a hug, or when you’re having a bad day. i’ll be that person. i want you to be happy. i promise to make you happy. to continue all the loving acts that i hope are enough to make you feel loved.
i promise myself to you, yn.
oh it was so ironic. the way soobin was now remembering his little ‘speech’ that he was going to use. a red velvet box in his pocket, special necklace inside of it. soobin made it back into your shared apartment, he knew you weren’t there, probably off with yeonjun, already moving on from him.
soobin didn’t want to let his mind wander on you too much. he didn’t want to feel pain from your departure, he was the one who brought it up, and you were the one who betrayed him. he didn’t even try to give himself a chance to miss him, no because why would he miss the person who hurt him so so much.
he placed the box on the coffee table. sitting himself on the couch, the same couch that he had spent with you, the first time that the two of you watched ‘10 things i hate about you’ together. fuck. he hasn’t meant to reminisce on his memories with you. he quickly got up from the couch, entering the restroom, washing off his makeup to remove the icky feeling of it.
you, on the other hand, were also not doing so well. yes, you had turned to yeonjun for help, but it wasn’t anything that wasn’t out of the ordinary. the two of you were friends, and only friends. you knew that and he knew that, the two of you had been friends for so so long that it nearly felt like you were siblings.
you laid your head back, hitting yeonjun’s couch, no matter how many times he asked you to sleep in his bed, you always declined. a thin yet soft blanket covered your body, as much as yeonjun wanted to offer you comfort, you told him that you would rather just go to sleep. yeonjun was smarter than to fall for your bluff, he walked into the dark room, laying down on his loveseat and covering himself with the blanket that he dragged from his room.
your staring contest with the ceiling ended, turning on your side to face yeonjun.
“isn’t it crazy..?” yeonjun speaks up, a tiny smirk on his face, not that you could even see it, it was nearly pitch black. the only reason you even noticed he was walking in the room was because of the very small creak in the floor.
“what is ?” you questioned, yeonjun couldn’t help but sit up, hoping to get a few words out of you.
“i don’t know.. i was just hoping you would spill what happened…”
“you know you could’ve just asked..” you felt your silk pajamas, a pair that you always left at yeonjun’s place in the case of an emergency movie night, beginning to stick to you as you began to feel a little warm. typically when you had a serious deep conversation with yeonjun, you always got nervous, that feeling always occurred because you knew you would have a break down due to whatever the topic was that you would feel so sad.
“what’s wrong, yn? what happened between you and soobin.” yeonjun questioned, taking your advice to ask you straightforwardly, even though you had rejected his request a few hours ago.
“i think.. well i kinda know, i know that yeji set us up.. remember when i said that yeji told me that you needed me..” yeonjun hummed in response, remembering the situation clearly. “well.. you didn’t.. but she took the chance to spew whatever nonsense to soobin.. and at first i kinda understood that maybe whatever she said might’ve gotten to his head.. he was saying that he knows that you and i are a thing, and i turned it down.. and i wanted to be so so patient, but i couldn’t. and at one point i just kind of gave up, i just got really mad and i told him that if he wanted to end our whole relationship then he could’ve just said so.. and then he did..” you felt your eyes beginning to sting, a small sigh leaving your lips after you finished.
“and i don’t know if he really did want to end it, i don’t know if i was maybe being too harsh, or if maybe he just believed whatever yeji told him.. but i also think that, why would he believe yeji.. yeji who had always seemed to know where we were, the same yeji who barged into his trailer that one day, yeji who has been spreading fake rumors about me..”
yeonjun felt his heart drop, he wasn’t sure if what you had been saying was true or if you were just saying something due to your anger. “yn, what do you mean?”
“yeonjun… isn’t it so obvious that it’s yeji..? all of this started when i got with soobin, when we announced our relationship..”
“yn, that doesn’t mean anything, surely you’ve just got things mixed up.. yeji is our bestfriend and i’m nearly sure that she wouldn’t be spreading fake rumors about you..”
“yeonjun.. i get it, but she told soobin something, she’s capable of anything.. she’s not my bestfriend.. not anymore.. not after what she just did. and my whole situation with soobin, she 100% orchestrated that.. there’s no doubt about it at all.” yeonjun sighed, he agreed with you for the most part, except for this whole yeji rumor situation. originally yeonjun was going to tell you that yeji wouldn’t do anything to hurt you, so why would she spread false rumors, but to be honest, he was also certain that soobin was misled by yeji. it didn’t mean that yeonjun felt bad for soobin, afterall he did watch as you internally struggled; attempting to deal with the heartbreak without letting a smile leave your face until yeonjun dragged you to his place.
“yeonjun.” you whispered, he could hear your voice beginning to tremble, this was the beginning. the beginning of your heartbreak, the first few signs that you were truly going through something. the questions placed in your head, the doubts, the worry.. yeonjun hummed once again, letting you know that he was still listening. “we are just friends right ? we’ve never done anything that is weird or inappropriate in stance of our friendship..”
“yn, we are not the problem. you are not the problem. there is nothing we have ever done to seem like we are even remotely interested in each other in a romantic way. if soobin wants to project his insecurities he can. but yn, you’re like a sister to me and i don’t want to ruin our bond because soobin and yeji decided to play games and mess around.” yeonjun was right. the two of you had multiple of boundaries to ensure a sibling like relationship that wouldn’t hurt anyone. neither you or him. you’ve never had feeling for yeonjun.
you hadn’t ever seen him in that kind of light, yeonjun had a moment where he questioned his friendship with you, but that time he realized that you were more than just his friend, rather you were like his sister.
you pulled up the blanket up to your chin. “thank you, jun.. thanks for letting me stay.. and for getting me out of the party, and thanks for always listening to me..”
yeonjun let out an exasperated sigh, “to think he wanted to replace me, but he can’t even listen to you, it’s what i do best.. i literally majored in psychology.”
“.. no you didn’t..” you responded, small giggle leaving your lips as you heard yeonjun’s white lie. that was the reaction he wanted, he wanted to hear you laugh, he didn’t want to see you going through such a rough heartbreak. he knew you had to at some point during your life, but he wanted to help alleviate the sadness you would go through.
you found yourself exactly in the situation that you wanted to avoid. heart throbbing as if it was about to explode, shaky breath. you were sitting next to soobin, on your way to a joint photoshoot. you were nearly 100 percent sure that your staff could sense something was wrong, the lack of affection the two of you were having. not to mention the complete silence in the long car ride. the staff caught on as soon as they saw your bloodshot eyes, soobin’s hand not trying to find its way into yours, even when the two of you were exhausted, you always found away to still show each other love. oh something was definitely wrong with you two.
you weren’t sure if it was the tickle from the brush that was touching up against your cheek, or if it was genuinely the stinging in your heart that was making your eyes water. a tiny tear rolling down your cheek, and soobin saw it from across the room, his hands in the pockets of the suit he was wearing, the same suit he wore on the saudade love movie night. and unfortunately your were wearing the same blue dress that caused your itchy reaction that night.
“oh yn!” the mention of your name brought your attention back to the entire scene, suddenly feeling the wet tear on your cheek as more threatened to spill. your makeup artist rushing to grab a fan, blowing the air into your face, catching you a bit off guard. the tear dissipated, your artist rushing to fix any mistakes that were made. “are you okay? you’ve been out of it this entire time..” you just nodded in response, a tiny reaffirming smile appearing on your lips before leaving nearly immediately. “it’s not the dress, is it? i told the stylists and the company to not force you into it again, but you know how they get..”
“n-no, the dress is okay for now. i think it’s just good to be quick about this shoot..” and just by the sound of your voice anybody could tell that you wanted to cry. your red eyes had also been a bit of a sign that you had been crying, but nobody really wanted to comment on it, afterall the editors would find a way to make you look fine.
“you’re all set !” you whispered a quick thank you, walking over to the white screen, no color anywhere in the room. soobin quickly joined your side, pretending to help you with your dress, spreading it out beautifully.
“can you maybe not?” you whispered, trying your best to keep up a good look. pretending to smile with pure joy at soobin.
“do you have a better idea? we’re dating and as much as i hate to be doing this stuff, i’d like to keep it professional..” soobin kept a clear face, trying his best not to show any emotions. he was upset, the way his narrative was working, the fact that you had the nerve to be the one who seemed so upset.
by the end of the shoot, you were nearly so sure that you were going to have a breakdown any second. furrowed eyebrows as you walked into a closet, finding only yourself and your clothes in there. although you found yourself suddenly pressing your ear against the locked door, hearing your name mentioned.
“was it just me? or did it look like soobin and yn were so.. i don’t know.. but something definitely happened. soobin was like upset the entire time and yn looked like she was about to cry every other second..”
“you don’t think they broke up? do you?” another voice chimed in.
“i don’t know, but as actors, theyre not that good at acting…”
“girl, if you broke up with your lover would you be okay? if you would be then that’s kinda crazy, but either way, somethings you can’t just pretend you’re okay.”
“all i’m saying is that, they’re in a fake relationship either way so it shouldn’t be that bad..”
“fake relationship? you believed that?”
“of course i do, love is one of those things that you can’t act about, and they don’t do a good job ‘loving’ each other.”
“please, honestly i just think you’re jealous.” you finished listening in on the conversation, changing into your clothes, deciding to fully dedicate your job and put your emotions aside. you stepped out from the changing room, accidentally scaring the staff crew that were walking down the hallway. suddenly keeping they seemed uptight, although you just shared a genuine smile with them.
“thank you so much for your hard work..” you gave them a small yet sweet bow, moving past them and attempting to find soobin, noticing him with your manager. you practically skipped your way towards him, your hand immediately finding his, soobin swore that he must’ve missed out on a whole episode of some kind of drama.. why had you been acting like you were actually happy with him..? like you were still dating, i mean you were, just not in the sense that the two of you used to be. your hand in his, his hand held in both of your hands. your manager, kept talking to soobin before deciding to give the two of you some space.
“can you let go, your hands are clammy..” soobin spoke up, before being met with pure rejection.
“no, i cant.. everybody is catching on..” you replied in a dull tone..
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jingooism · 2 days ago
Text
breathless
panic attacks were normal. they were a part of life. or at least that's what joowon had to tell himself. 
he's been riddled with them since he was a child. it started with the yelling between his mother and his father, so loud that even behind his closed door he could hear. his small hands over his ears did nothing to shut out the harsh tones. he began to withdraw, staying quiet and to himself to avoid any confrontation, especially from his father. when his mother dies, it only gets worse. 
then came school, where joowon sat by himself in the corner of the room, quietly hoping that one day someone would sit down with him. it never came. by the time middle school came around he had the reputation of being cold and mean, but little did they know he was like that because of them. 
he graduated school at the top of his class, then college, and now he has a full-time job. given, not the one he would have wanted--if han joowon could be anything it would be a photographer. a nature photographer to be specific. nothing calms him like being near the water. 
his weekends usually consist of long drives to the coast, where he likes to sit on the sand and read by himself. the fresh air and the sounds of the waves always does him a load of good. 
he tries to picture his favorite spot, just close enough to the dunes to not be affected by the tides but still close enough to be able to dip his toes in if he decided to. he thinks of the big uneven rocks that he likes to walk on during low-tide, the small island that only reveals itself an hour a day. he wonders how peaceful life would be if he could live there, away from everyone else. nothing works, though. when he goes to run his fingers through the sand he's met with the cold marble of his bathroom floor. when he strains his ears for the sound of the ocean, all he can hear is the gasps of his own breath. 
it's the worst attack he's had in a while, all because he thought he saw his father in the crowd. his father, who wasn't even in the country, was too busy trying to make connections somewhere that wasn't korea. the gray hair was the same, the harsh line of his spine under a well-tailored suit was the same, everything was too similar. joowon barely got through the rest of his shift. 
which is why now he's here, in his own bathroom, trying to not die. and the small rational part of his brain knows that he isn't going to actually die at this moment, but he can't get past how real it feels. his hands are clammy, his heart rate is through the roof, the walls are closing in. it feels like hell. he rushes to call hyeok, the only person who had ever had success in getting his breathing under control. his best friend picks up after one ring. 
"yah! han joowon! it's been days since you last called. did you forget about me?"
"hyung," joowon gasps into the phone.
"joowon? what's going on, are you okay?" his friend's voice goes serious in an instant. "are you having a panic attack?" joowon can distantly hear the sound in the background of the call fade away, like hyeok is walking away from a crowd. 
"it's bad," joowon admits, slightly ashamed. even though hyeok is his closest friend, he still hasn't been able to beat out the instinctive shame he feels at someone seeing him in a weak moment. "i can't breathe, hyung," he forces air into his lungs and feels not a single ounce of relief. 
"let's calm your breathing down okay? breathe in for 8 counts, hold for 3, and then breathe out of your mouth for 7. like we used to do."
joowon nods like hyeok can see him, and tries. he really tries. and for a second he thinks it might be working and then a loud crash floats through the wall from the apartment next door and his muscles tense up again. 
"are you at home, joowon-ah?" hyeok is starting to sound panicked too, and joowon feels bad for making him worry. 
"yes," joowon whispers. 
"i'm calling an ambulance," hyeok says firmly. 
"hyung, no--"
"no, joowon. i'm five hours away and there's no one else to help you. i'm calling," hyeok cuts him off. joowon feels stupid for even calling him, completely forgetting that he's away on a business trip. "i'll call you right back," he hangs up before joowon can argue.
the seconds stretch into what feels like hours, joowon's heartbeat still stuttering in his chest, fingers digging into the soft fabric of his sleep pants. his vision starts to go fuzzy at the edges when hyeok calls him back. he swipes his phone across the screen to answer. 
"they're on their way," hyeok soothes. 
"okay," he replies quietly, dropping his head between his knees. "just talk to me, please."
"what to talk about," hyeok wonders out loud. "i've been rubbing elbows with annoying business men all day, joowon-ah. my social battery is depleted," he complains. 
"are you drinking?"
"if i didn't i would've went back to the hotel hours ago," hyeok laughs. 
their mindless conversation goes on until joowon finally feels something get lighter in his chest, signalling that hopefully the worst of it has passed. he hears the beep of his door code being entered and the lock turning open. 
"you gave them my code?" joowon asks. 
"it was an emergency," hyeok scoffs. "i don't wanna hear it."
"han joowon-ssi?" a voice calls into the hallway. footsteps shuffle around for a second before they come right up on the bathroom door, two knocks echoing through the space. "han joowon-ssi? this is sfd, we got a call that you weren't feeling too good."
"in here," he says weakly, fatigue seeping through his bones. attacks always make him exhausted by the end. 
the door swings open to show three paramedics, the bright orange uniform looking odd against the neutrals of his home. the older man in the middle crosses the bathroom and kneels in front of him so they're face to face. 
"han joowon-ssi? i'm lee dongsik, and that's park jeongje, and oh jihwa," he gestures to his colleagues. "we're just here to make sure you're alright, okay?" his voice was calm enough to soothe the frayed edges of joowon's nerves. he pulls out a pen and shines it into joowon's eyes, "pupils are even and reactive." he leans a bit into joowon's space, enough that joowon is forced to really look at him and realize just how handsome he is. 
lee dongsik looked older, definitely at least a decade older than him. his hair was slightly long, just past his ears, and fell in shiny black waves. if joowon wasn't mistaken there were threads of silver in it. he's got lines around his eyes and his mouth that tell joowon that lee dongsik has lived a life of happiness, one where he was obviously smiling a lot. he smelled like cheap aftershave mixed with something else that joowon couldn't put his finger on. and now his heart is beating for a whole other reason. 
"can i take your pulse?" lee dongsik asks, hand hovering over joowon's wrist, waiting for his consent. all joowon can think to do is nod.
he tries not to react at the spark he feels at the skin on skin contact, already embarrassed enough that the hottest man he's ever seen is seeing him like this. "do you normally have panic attacks?" dongsik asks, looking at the bulky black watch on his wrist. 
"i've had them in the past, yes," joowon nods. he sees dongsik nod once and place his wrist back down to his lap. joowon mourns the touch immediately and wants to kick himself for it. 
dongsik turns to his team, "looks like things are evening out. we should be fine to load the truck back up," he gestures to the equipment in their hands. they nod with a knowing look and turn around to do as he's asked. 
"do you want to go to the hospital?" dongsik looks back at joowon, gaze fully locked in on his. 
"no," joowon quickly says. "i think the worst has passed."
"let's get you up off the floor then," dongsik grins, something small and bright that shouldn't knock joowon off his ass but does anyways. the older man stands up first and reaches his hand down to joowon.
joowon only second guesses for a moment before taking the hand offered to him and allowing himself to be pulled up. lee dongsik's hands are slightly rough, calluses probably gained from long days on the job. they fit into joowon's own hands perfectly. he tries not to think of it. 
joowon doesn't even want to imagine how he looks to dongsik right now, hair probably mussed, sleep clothes in disorder. he brushes his hair down self-consciously, and doesn't miss the way dongsik's lip twitches up.
"can i have my hand back?" dongsik laughs, eyes falling to where their palms are still fitted together. joowon hadn't even realized, dropping the other man's hand and trying to fight off the blush that he felt start to spread at the base of his neck. "not that i minded, but i do need both hands to write the report," dongsik reassures. 
"not that you--" joowon clears his throat, the words that fell from the other man's lips replaying in his head. not that he minded? what does that mean? is he flirting? "no, of course, yeah that makes sense." he brushes past dongsik into the living room where he sits, still feeling tired from the attack. his heart rate wasn't fully back down and neither was his breathing, but at least it didn't feel like he was at death's door. 
in the brighter light of the living room, joowon sees all of dongsik. he's slightly shorter than joowon himself, with a build that was definitely more lean. his belt was buckled around an absurdly small waist, and his thighs filled out the black work slacks beautifully. joowon feels his ears start to ring again. just his luck that the paramedic on the scene is something straight out of his teenage wet dreams. 
there's a silence in the room that joowon desperately feels the need to fill, wanting dongsik's attention turned back to him and not the notepad he was currently writing on. which is why, like an idiot, he blurts out, "do you come here often?" as soon as the words leave his mouth he feels wracked with mortification. 
dongsik looks up at him, a smirk on his lips, the pen twirling between long fingers, "do i come to your apartment often? sadly, no, i don't." 
oh. 
oh.
"i've been to this building plenty of times, though. it's a shame we haven't run into each other till now."
joowon's head is too busy sounding like a ten-car pileup that he barely registers the words. lee dongsik was definitely flirting with him. joowon flicks his eyes down to an empty ring finger and silently thanks god for it. 
"a shame, yes," he stutters, trying to make his brain work normally. it's obviously failing because dongsik's smile just keeps spreading across his lips. 
"you live here by yourself?" dongsik questions, voice too light and airy to not have an underlying question in it. he looks back down at the notepad and clears his throat before continuing the report. 
"yes," joowon says, hopefully not too quickly. "my friend was the one that called, but he's away on a trip."
"a good friend," dongsik nods.
"only a friend," joowon announces, tongue not in his control. he's not sure where all this forwardness is coming from, but he does know that dongsik's ears are burning, which has to be a good sign. "not that you asked, but..."
"good to know," his gaze meets joowon's again. "you know, just in case we have to ever come back here." there's a mirth in his eyes that joowon finds himself reading into. maybe this almost dying thing was finally paying off. 
"of course," joowon's lips start to turn up. "you know my door code now, so."
"i'll only use it for emergencies, scout's honor," dongsik holds three fingers up and plasters a too serious look on his face. "but try not to need me, han joowon. my line of work isn't one where i want to see you every day," he laughs, showing off the deep smile lines in full force. joowon notes his perfect teeth and the crow's feet that crinkle around his eyes. they make him feel giddy. 
"i'll try," joowon nods. he stands up to reach into his work vest that's hanging nearby, pulling out his officer card with his name and department on it. "here, in case you ever find yourself in need of help," he smiles softly, inwardly cheering when dongsik takes the card and examines it before tucking it gently into his breast pocket. "though hopefully you won't."
"a man in uniform," dongsik purses his lips approvingly, nodding his head. "what precinct do you work with?"
"i'm out of headquarters," joowon answers. dongsik whistles under his breath. 
"smart and handsome? it's almost unfair," dongsik grins, getting up from the couch and closing his notepad. "is this your direct line?" he pats the pocket on his chest with the card.
"my personal and my work phone. feel free to use either," joowon blushes, sticking his hands in his pockets to hide his fidgeting. "though i prefer you use the personal."
"i think i'll prefer that too," dongsik beams. 
a voice comes through on his radio and dongsik responds, his team is being called elsewhere. 
"i have to go but," dongsik looks unsure for a second before gently grabbing joowon's hand in his own. joowon doesn't even have time to process what's going on until he feels the smooth drag of ink across his skin and looks down to see a phone number there. 
"my personal," dongsik explains, color high on his cheeks. "make sure to use it." he opens the front door again and is almost through before he turns back to joowon, who had been looking between the palm of his hand and the man, mouth ajar. "my day off is tomorrow," he winks, throwing his bag over his shoulder and finally leaving the apartment. 
joowon doesn't even have to think about it before he texts his chief that he's calling in sick. 
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honorhearted · 2 days ago
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"Softer doesn't necessarily mean better," Benjamin offered. "I've met all sorts of women -- rich, poor, cruel and kind -- but the ones who are soft are typically little more than grinning puppets. I have no interest in speaking with someone who regurgitates the latest Parisian fashions, or can name a work of art, yet clearly has no capacity to say why the piece moves them." He shrugged. "Experience generates interest. Even if you lashed me within an inch of my life with that tongue of yours, I'd far rather hear you call me a jingle-brained mopus than listen to any flighty, bottle-headed socialite discuss the weather patterns -- without, of course, actually understanding said weather."
Perhaps he was being cruel. Just like Benjamin had unkindly made assumptions about Fantine, it was quite possible that he was doing the same about these women he continuously found within his orbit.
Fortunately, Fantine seemed far more taken by the charms of the ocean than his brief diversion. He found himself mirroring her smile, his eyes crinkling warmly around the edges. "Where is your hometown?" he asked. "I've always lived by the seaside...in fact, staying here is the longest I've ever been away from it. I don't have saltwater in my veins, unlike one of my best friends, but I assuredly miss the breezy air and the rare reprieve of just lazing about along the sand."
Suddenly realizing just what she had said, Benjamin's smile faded and he blinked in surprise. "Oh... You've never been to the sea? Ever?" he asked. With a sheepish little smile, he apologized, "I'm sorry...there I go again, prattling away before fully assessing the situation. Clearly, not everyone lives by water, so it's foolish to assume we all can afford such trips. But I'd be glad to take you, if...i-if you wanted? Though if you don't get sick of the ocean after sailing to America for days on end, that'll be the true testament to your fortitude."
A look of shyness graced her features, and Benjamin felt a jolt rush through him at her kind declaration.
"You would be a wonderful father."
"I certainly hope so," he murmured, his cheeks pinkening with pleasure. "I can never presume to be lucky enough -- perhaps this is all I'm meant to do in this life -- but whatever my true path, I'm trying my best to enjoy it."
Barely suppressing a snort, he agreed, "Father will have to wait. Unless he wants grandchildren out of wedlock -- which, at this point, perhaps he is willing to turn a blind eye -- he'll have no choice but to allow things to take their course."
An amiable silence fell between them, soft and warm, before Fantine pleaded for a bit of companionship. In truth, Benjamin didn't understand why she seemed so ashamed by the request. He'd always been accustomed to sleeping near others -- during boyhood, he was with his brother; in college, his dear friend, Hale; in the war, his fellow officers -- so why would he find it so strange to wish for a bit of company?
"It's not a lot to ask at all," he reassured. "I can barely sleep, if you want the honest truth, so I don't mind sitting up. It's not like I would've been asleep by now anyway." Here, he gently took her elbow, attempting to steer her toward her bed. "Get in," he encouraged. "I'll pull up a chair and wait until I know you're asleep."
Fantine's heckles finally relaxed. She wanted so much to relax and displace her baggage if only for a short moment. Her knuckles were white with how tightly she clutched it, arms aching with the weight of it. It was as if she was scared Benjamin could take it and dig through it; find aspects of her beyond what he already knew and use it to wound her further.
As they tiptoed around one another, Fantine was beginning to realise with more certainty that this man did not wish to do anything of the sort. Where her anxiety rested, Cosette became that bridge between them— common ground to which they could speak honestly.
"I know she will, I want that for her, too." It was something she would never have been able to provide Cosette alone. His interference had become a blessing in disguise; for Cosette at first, but now for Fantine. She did not comment on her supposed input in Cosette's intelligence or development... they had been apart for so long, what little Fantine had managed to provide seemed so long ago now. "I'm not a particularly good marker for knowing if you're charming a woman or not. Do not let me put you off— many women are softer than me."
Fantine listened with genuine interest, the spark of hope bringing life to long since dead eyes. Admittedly, Setauket didn't appeal to her in the slightest. In fact, it invited a familiar sense of nausea; the reason she had become as she had was because of a small, in-each-other's-pockets community. The mention of his father caused an involuntary grimace. If he was as religious a man as Benjamin said he was, then she could only imagine what he would think of a woman such as Fantine— although perhaps her moral failings would discourage the idea that there was anything between them in that way.
"The sea?" she repeated, the slightest smile touching her lips not dissimilar to childish excitement. "My hometown is not far from the sea, but... well, I never got a chance to visit."
Fantine felt a slight blush spread across her cheeks. Every now and then she caught herself hoping, only to reel it back just in case. "You would be a wonderful father." Her head nodded as she spoke, almost trying to reinforce her words. "Your love extends beyond Cosette. I can see how much you care about children and their futures. As for your father, he can continue to wait. I understand your lack of patience to some degree, now." Fantine's smile momentarily grew wider before she allowed her hands to fall to her side.
Finally, Fantine dared to glance up, vulnerability taking its opportunity as she swallowed her pride. "I need to sleep, I know... can..." the words stuck in her throat... "can you sit with me until I finally fall asleep again? I know it's a lot to ask, so I won't be offended if you decline."
56 notes · View notes
pickletrip · 11 months ago
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Did I start watching "For Him" because of the spicy GIFs on my dash? Yes
Is the acting good? Not really, I've seen better uni BLs from Thailand.
So why am I still watching it? BECAUSE NAIL AND HIM ARE WILLING TO TALK TO EACH OTHER AND NOT JUST BRUSH OFF THEIR PROBLEMS.
THEY COMMUNICATE.
My Dear Gangster Oppa could learn about communicating from them.
Look, they are at a restaurant to have a nice meal, Nail sees his ex and is instantly uncomfortable and Him clocks that and asks what's wrong. You know what a regular show would do, Nail would answer " Oh, nothing, it's nothing." But what does Nail do here? He honestly tells Him and Him understands that Nail is still dealing with his past relationship and they leave. Him says it's okay to feel this way and he understands that Nail is still dealing with the shit Jay did to him.
Take another instance from episode 4.
Te is being the usual creepy stalker idiot and tells that Him has done terrible things to Blue. Of course Nail wants to know what's happened so he asks Him without beating around the bush. And Him was honest about why Blue left him. We still don't know all the details but Him says he neglected Blue so Blue left him. He talks about how he needed to get some medical help because of what happened. Do you see how they communicate???! Other shows would have shown Him getting defensive and saying that Nail needn't know these things.
Even after the argument with Jay in the hallway, Him leaves because Nail is clearly upset, they talk over the phone and make up. They don't just leave it for another day and let the bad emotions stew and make each other feel like shit.
This is why I appreciate the show. They communicate. That's the foundation of a good relationship.
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ashraffamilynew · 2 months ago
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Please help secure a future for an entire family - me, Ashraf, my wife Ghadeer, and our lovely innocent son Yamen 👶💙
Vetted by @el-shab-hussein and @nabulsi , fundraisers list Number (#328)
Vetted by @gazavetters, my number verified on their list ( #74 )
Vetted on X platform on this spreadsheet (#391)
Shared by @90-ghost | Shared by @a-shade-of-blue | Shared by @dlxxv-vetted-donations
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Please bring us back to life without war, destruction, genocide or killing because this is what fills our memories after we forget what a life full of hope is like ‼️
I'm Ashraf from the war-torn Gaza. I've lived an entire life under siege in Gaza, facing relentless military actions and life-threatening conditions daily. In October 2023, the conflict escalated drastically, devastating my newly built house, my neighborhood,my workplace, and jeopardizing the lives of my family.
My wife, Ghadeer @ghadeerarqan , and I live in Gaza with our baby son Yamen. My wife gave birth to Yamen during the war, and it is all he has ever known. Yamen has spent the tenth months of his young life without a stable home, surviving a genocide.
I mourn the loss of our safe haven, but more urgently, I need to secure a future for my family away from the constant threat of bombings that have become our grim reality.
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Meet Yamane, our precious tenth-months-old. Who was born during this war, We aspire to provide him with opportunities that surpass our own experiences, fostering a future filled with joy and prosperity.
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This campaign is a call to arms for all who believe in the transformative power of community support. By contributing, you're not just donating; you're actively shaping Yamane's world, ensuring his journey is filled with the promise and potential every child deserves. Join us in making a profound impact on his life
Yamen... he's only a baby. He doesn't understand the fear that grips us, the darkness that engulfs our lives. He just smiles, his eyes bright with innocent wonder, oblivious to the terror that surrounds him. He reaches for me with tiny hands, his laughter a fragile melody in this symphony of destruction. 💔
can we shield him from the reality of this war ⁉️can we keep him safe ⁉️
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Your generosity is a beacon of hope for my family, especially for my little baby boy Yaman👶🩷, who deserves a future free from fear and filled with opportunity.
Thank you for standing with us during this incredibly challenging time. Your support means the world to us, 🌺🩷🌿🕊
But we still need your help to reach our goal. Please continue to share our campaign and consider contributing if you can. Together, we can create a brighter future for Yamane and all children affected by this conflict.
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Vetted by @el-shab-hussein and @nabulsi , fundraisers list Number (#328)
Vetted by @gazavetters, my number verified on their list ( #74 )
Vetted on X platform on this spreadsheet (#391)
Shared by /@90-ghost
Shared by @a-shade-of-blue
Shared by @dlxxv-vetted-donations
14K notes · View notes
tonycries · 3 months ago
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Haunting You - G.S.
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Synopsis. A bIoody trail of vampire attácks, a political marriage, and four suitors you’re forced to choose from - all haunting you. But none as much as the mysterious stranger that makes everything in you scream that you might just be fated for the very thing your kingdom is trying to escape from.
Pairing. Gojo Satoru x Reader
Content. MDNI, fem! princess! reader, king! Gojo, vampire AU, he’s actually ÍNSANE, royalty AU, arranged marriages, creampíes, breéding, fated mátes, FÉRAL down bad Gojo, mentions of bIood and kílling, bíting, óral (fem receiving), spítting, marks (a LOT), fíngering, pórn with plot tbh, overstím, ínnapropriate use of powers, jealous! Gojo, slight inspiration from Persephone and Hades, pet names, swearing.
Word count. 15.8k (HUH???)
A/N. Was listening to Haunted by Beyoncé, and my mind went “ooo vampires.” Hope y’all have a lovely week <3
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In all your years being carefully primed to take over the throne, there have only been two rules you were raised under:
You live by the crown, and you will die by the crown. No matter what. 
To stop the vampires - if your father, the king, fails to contain the bloody trail of killings before his own inevitable death, you have to. Or, more according to those tedious meetings with the table of elders, your husband will have to.
And it seems as if they were well and fully intent on enforcing that last rule as of late - with sharply increasing numbers of attacks on your local towns, the public was growing restless - and so was the royal court. 
You weren’t doing any better either - but for a wholly different reason.  
Maybe it was paranoia, but these days, you found yourself constantly catching a flash of crystal blue in the corner of your eye. Or hearing a sweet, sweet whisper in your ear deep at night. Maybe even a soft run of fingers down your spine as you were readied for yet another ball - hands much too large to be any of your ladies-in-waiting.
Like something was watching. 
Waiting. 
“And then I- your highness, are you listening?”
That familiar, grating voice snaps you out of your thoughts, and you’re gasping in embarrassment as you turn back to the prattling man in front of you. 
“My apologies, Lord Naoya.” you smile tightly, desperate to finish up yet another conversation about his latest cavalry expeditions. Nodding dismissively, “Just tired, please continue with your ah- wonderful tales.”
But of course, when he starts right back from the very beginning to “cover the key points you missed”, your stomach turns when you realize that you won’t be escaping any time soon. Great. Wonderful. Perfect.
God, future suitors your ass. You’d been taught that there’s no such company as “bad company” when you’re an heir to a kingdom, but this has been the fourth royal ball this month - and the biggest one yet. The fourth night you had to listen to another uptight lord show off his sparse battle medals, or another elder snide about how you’d be useless against the dangers of vampires.
You knew it was likely some coping mechanism with the grim deaths this week, but surely the nobles were tired of all this silly dancing? You sure were. 
Gauzy dress just a bit too tight, sighs just a bit too loud than was permitted for the princess, you let your gaze wander across the brilliant ballroom. Those intricate gowns, the huge reflective wall, those little pastries you really wish you could walk away from this conversation and-
Blue. 
Crystal blue.
“Wait! Did you see-” you startle, and it disappears as fast as it appeared. Your heavy skirts sway as you whirl around to uselessly track that odd burst of color, “Did you see that?”
“I know!” Naoya gasps, making you turn your head in excitement. “The light reflects off my medal so gorgeously! Oh, and this one-”
Dammit. 
All through your life, it was this same color that’d been flitting occasionally through your vision, now haunting you almost every day.
You didn’t know where to look to find that familiar blue again - and you didn’t want to stand here waiting to find out. At the very least, your ears have definitely been assaulted with enough talk about horses and how “absolutely enormous” Lord Naoya’s weaponry at the Zenin Estate was.
Compensating, you muse.
The thought helps you plaster on a grin to your face, humming in a saccharine-sweet tone, “It pains me to cut through, my lord.” It really didn’t. “And I’d love to chat more later, but I think I hear my lady-in-waiting calling for me.”
He sputters, breathing out a few profanities under his breath that you catch. An arm raising as if to keep you in place, “Now, wait a minute-”
You’re angling your body expertly to make your dash. Batting your lashes deceivingly innocently, “Oh? What was that?” you cup your ear. “I hear her again- I really do apologize, but feel free to recount your valiant um- fairy tales in a letter.”
“But your father-”
Not waiting to hear the rest of his response, you barely even bother with a polite curtsy before determinedly weaving your way through the stuffy ballroom. Nodding by the nobles greeting you, waving past the throng of young lords that wanted to reel you into more conversation. Your satiny feet taking you anywhere but here - anywhere but where you could feel the still, heavy gaze of something burning into your back as you escaped. 
You just prayed that it was only a miffed Naoya and nothing else.
It was around this time that the orchestra struck up another upbeat waltz, and with most people pairing off on the dance floor, barely anyone noticed you tip-toeing out of the ballroom. 
“God-” you’re letting out a sigh of relief when you reach the long hallway, rubbing at your throbbing temples. “The next ball they host, m’gonna conveniently disappear, I swear.”
You didn’t care enough for what matchmaking would happen in the future anyway, no matter what the elders may tell you. 
Your ballgown swishes with every urgent step through the quiet, dimly-lit corridors. Maybe a bit too quiet. 
Strange. You knew that not many nobles would be wandering around the palace during a ball but, surely you can’t be the only one here? Where were the guards?
Just then, a soft winter breeze puffs against your left ear - and you inhale sharply. “Wha- hello?” you shudder, gaze darting around. “Anyone there?” But when only silence greets you, you’re struck with the sudden thought that the windows along the hallway were closed. 
Where did the wind come from?
The realization has you taut with goosebumps pricking at your skin, your pace increasing ever-so-slightly. Gulping, you round the corner quickly, making a beeline for the closest haven you could find - the library.
Ducking past the towering stone archway, you hastily slam the door closed. It takes you a few seconds to get used to the darkness inside. With silvery moonlight ribbons filtering in through the curtained windows, you could just barely make out the rows upon rows of books you’d pestered your father into lining. Surrounded by heavyset tables, and your favorite, cushioned armchair. Luxurious, yet completely dwarfed when seating the lone silhouette-
“If this is an attack, then I surely don’t mind.”
“Fuck-” you scream, reflexively grabbing the nearest book spine you could reach to throw in the direction of the shadow. “Show yourself.”
Somehow, it’s as if the book bounces off an invisible forcefield, plopping down unceremoniously onto the velvety carpet right in front of the tall figure. 
“And here I thought princesses usually curtseyed.” that deep, honeyed voice cuts right through your heavy breathing. He makes a move to get up - languid, and torturous, as if he enjoyed your agonizing suspense. “Well, maybe I do prefer being pelted by a- hey, that doesn’t mean pick up another book!”
In a split-second, you were brandishing a weighty encyclopedia this time - holding it firmly behind your head in a ready stance to throw once again. 
“Show yourself.”
The man sighs, stepping into a channel of low light. It illuminated his stature - taller than you’d thought, towering well above most of the generals in the royal court. Muscled, yet lean - powerful, the thought strikes you. Magnetizing. 
Someone from outside the kingdom, you observe, otherwise you’d have remembered that cloudy white hair, strands falling over a strange, black blindfold stretched across the upper half of his face. Leaving you only a set of high cheekbones, and a pert, pretty mouth to admire.
One that curls into such a mischievous smirk of neat pearly whites, and a tiny dimple digging into his cheek. “Now, I’ve never had anyone this eager to see me.” He drops into a courteous bow at the waist, expensive blue fabrics rippling. “From the North kingdom, Satoru, at your service, princess.”
Your hand falters - partially because of the heavy weight, partially because you recognised that gold “G” insignia in the middle of this stranger- Satoru’s uniform. The Gojo family. 
That mysterious, estranged kingdom from the Northern part of the country that hadn’t been seen since you were young. You’d heard stories of them - everyone in this vast country had, it was impossible not to. Of their cruel winters and even crueler king, how blood stained every room in his palace. It was rumored he was a monster, and yet, no one ever saw his face - if they did, they never lived to tell the tale. 
You knew your father had invited the king to every single ball out of diplomatic obligation, but he’d never attended. Never even bothered to respond. 
So who was this?
“No one. Just a lowly attendant accompanying my king, your highness.” you’re jolting when he purrs, a brow quirking at just how he knew what you were thinking. “The question ah- showed on your face, my apologies.”
Finding your voice, “Um, I apologize, too, Satoru-” You note the lack of a last name, “-for the book. I can’t imagine being hit with Yaga’s 1001 Methods to Crochet was a very warm welcome.” And like a little truce, you’re placing down the encyclopedia in your hand. Flashing him your most practiced smile, “I bet you’re hiding out here for the same reasons as me, then.”
That draws out a pretty laugh from him, bubbly and boyish. “Mhm, the ladies just refuse to leave you alone, too?”
“Well, more like the lords there.”
He hums, something that sends a chill down your spine. Words just a little strained, “Not much for bragging about horses?” 
And suddenly, you get the urge to snark back, huffing in a way you know your preparational teacher would faint at. “Absolutely not. I’d rather face a vampire than listen to Naoya and the “absolutely enormous” weaponry he uses to-”
“-compensate!”
“-compensate.” the two of you finish at the same time. “I like this place a lot better, it’s quiet- though…” your voice trails off in wonder. “It’s strange, guests aren’t supposed to be allowed in the library unsupervised.” His jaw clenches when your eyes sweep him, “We are supposed to have a few guards here but I don’t know where-”
All of a sudden, it’s like you’re being splashed with cold water. And your words are dying on your tongue when the room drops a few degrees in temperature. 
Satoru is unnervingly still, yet he catches onto your slight shiver. “This damned wind, am I right?” And he’s gesturing at the windows with his head. The closed windows. Words tumbling quickly from those pink lips now, “Anyways- why don’t you sit down-” He prowls towards you, slow, confident. Large hands rest at your arms, they’re pale, surprisingly cold - guiding you easily to sit on the unoccupied armchair. “-since m’being nice enough to let you hide out here.”
His words drip with tease, and you still couldn’t see his eyes, but you imagined they’d be twinkling. No one ever dared to speak to you this way - it was always either thinly-veiled condescension or fear towards royalty. 
Surprisingly, you didn’t mind. 
You roll your eyes, trying to hold back your smile. “Yeah? Well what do I owe you in return for that, Satoru?”
His lips part, as if not expecting this response. Before letting out another sharp cackle at your expense, “Well, why don’t you-” You can’t tear your eyes away from his magnetic figure when Satoru begins unbuttoning his flowing coat to reveal a snow-white shirt underneath. Wrapping it snug around your shoulders in one, fluid motion, a hand of his tilts your head towards him. “-give me your soul?”
The Gojo emblem burns into your back, and Satoru’s deep, almost raspy tone rings in your ears. It sounded like a joke - but looking into his ethereal features, there was no trace of a grin on what you could see of it. And once again, you’re struck by the pure power radiating off of him. 
You hoped it was a joke.
“S-soul’s not for sale.” you manage to choke out, trying to make it look like you weren’t breathing in his metallic, peppermint scent. Heady. Pulling the soft fabric tighter around your cold body, “Steep price for a hideout, don’t you think?”
“S’a discount for you, flower.” his chilling breath fans your face. Letting out hushed, “Heh, you should see the prices I charge others.”
You’re reeling, face burning, “Flower?”
“Because you’re shaking like one, see?” The pads of his fingers move from under your chin to trace up, up, up the goosebumps on your exposed arms. Somehow, you can’t bring yourself to pull away.
Hypnotic. 
And his steps are soundless as he walks over behind you, the moonlight giving him an angelic halo. Haunting, almost. “And you’re just as gorgeous, like a wild rose. Way too gorgeous for the fuckin’ bastards out there, might I add, princess.”
The nerve!
Heart pounding, you turn around to- call him out for his disrespect? Snap back? Accept the compliment?
You don’t know - and you don’t get to find out, either. Because before your eyes can search for Satoru’s mysterious figure, the door to the library is slamming open with a deafening bang!
“Ah! There you are!” your lady-in-waiting’s relieved voice floods your ears. And she’s barging in with no comment about your sudden stiffness, or that foreign coat around your shoulders. “We’ve been looking everywhere for you, your highness. His majesty is just about to make his speech of the night and needs you there.”
Shit, out of all the scandals. 
“I- I can explain.” You’re desperately trying to catch Satoru’s eye to make up an excuse for why you’re alone with a strange man away from the ball, shooting from your seat to look around the library. “We’re just-”
The suddenly empty library. 
“Yes yes, I understand that the balls aren’t exactly your favorite pastime.” The oblivious girl is pushing you towards the door, brown eyes narrowed. “But we’ve got to get going now.”
Despite her wrangling you outside, you manage to sneak a few glances backwards, straining to see if he was hiding in the shadows. Only to be met with a now-rumpled armchair and the still, dark bookshelves. As bare as if Satoru never existed - the only proof of his existence being a sad copy of Yaga’s 1001 Methods to Crochet lying on the ground. 
And yet, you can’t help but feel a pair of eyes on you. 
You feel it all through the short walk back to the ballroom, Nobara’s excited chatter about how finely your all-new coat was made filtering through one ear and out the next. Even when you reach the edge of the dance floor, even when you feel every single other eye in the room on you - you feel it. 
“Um, Nobara.” you whisper, discreetly shuffling the coat off your shoulders. “Please take this to my chambers for me.”
The younger girl is positively bursting at the seams, murmuring conspiratorially to you, “So is this where you were? With who- The “G” what does that-”
“Ah! My daughter!” Saved by your father’s booming voice - though, you wouldn’t consider it too much of a salvation when you’re immediately being whisked away to the high platform your father’s throne was seated on. His arms spread wide to greet you in a hug despite stiff etiquette. 
“You’re late.” he whispers in your ear.
It’s all you can do to manage out a quiet, “S-Sorry.”
Without another word, he’s addressing the congregation in the middle of the dance ballroom again. More ruler than father at this very moment. “My people, we are gathered here today to dance, to sing, to forget about the horrors happening in our beloved nation.” To large murmurs of agreement he continues, “And despite it all, it’s a reality we must all live with. Me, especially, as your king, have a duty to fulfill.”
There’s a beat of silence, and you wonder where this is all going - your father never brought up vampires during a time like this. Never. 
Clearing his throat, “And as we all know, I’m not getting any younger here, unfortunately. Which is why-” He claps his hands once, and three figures - one of which being Naoya, amongst two other nobles you briefly recognized - step forward from the crowd. “Ah- there should be one more- Anyway, after thorough consideration with the table of elders, we have decided to go forward with the betrothal process for my dear daughter here. With the joining of hands will not only be the joining of kingdoms - but the joining of arms, and our people shall prevail as one over the vampires.”
You think you might stop breathing, eyes burning and trained firmly on the ground. This had been a topic of conversation - well, more the elders conversing while you skipped out on every meeting once this discussion was brought up. 
You knew this would happen. You knew. But now? At this very moment? All you can do is stand there and listen while he rattles off. 
“I know four of the- erm, three of the most eligible young suitors of the land will do their utmost to vie for her heart - and her hand. No easy task I tell you.” Your fists clench, head swimming. “And in a week’s time, we will hold the grand ball to announce my successor.”
Shit - a week. A week.
Somewhere in your line of vision you see - you feel that spark of blue. And you’re raising your head to cheers echoing from all around the room, and still no sign of where those eyes are. 
“The next time we meet, will be with the future king and queen!”
Fuck. 
---
That night was spent with a few too many tears, and a consoling Nobara at your side all until daybreak. And if you held onto that comforting, peppermint-scented coat through it all, well, you were only glad that you seemed too pitiful for her to question it. 
Feeling much more composed and only slightly less bitter about the prospect of being married off to a stuck-up noble you didn’t know, you made your way to breakfast the next morning. An affair usually spent with your father, or in the palace gardens - but this time, surrounded by four suitors under the guise of getting to know you. Sizing each other up, maybe. 
“Ah, your highness, good morning!” you sweetly reciprocate the greetings once you’re escorted into the dining room, taking your seat at the very end of the long, mahogany table. 
Sighing you take in the scene - on your left was Lord Naoya from last night, the same sharp grins and shifty eyes as you remembered. Seated beside him was the young duke of the Kashimo clan - hair striking, his battle staff laid out next to him on the table. Intimidating. 
But nothing in comparison to the hulking man on your right, it seemed as if his uniform was on the verge of bursting. Face sullen, letting his pink locks fall into place - Sukuna, you think you remember. 
“Your highness.” Ichiji bows, taking his place supervising the breakfast. “I am afraid our guests from the Northern kingdom will not be able to attend this breakfast today. He sends his deepest apologies. B-but-” His face-paled, looking scarred for life. “-he did have his um- attendant send this note-”
You’re gratefully taking the creamy scrap of paper before the words have even left Ichiji’s mouth, flipping it over to reveal slanted, beautiful calligraphy - Apologies for the sudden departure last night, flower. And I hope you forgive my king for not being here to deter the talk of horses - duty holds both man and beast from freedom. Worry not, we will be seeing your sweet smile again soon. But, for now, give those three bastards a rude gesture from me.
You giggle, tucking away the note. A tiny pang of disappointment hitting you out of nowhere at the lack of that gold “G” emblem anywhere along the table - and more importantly, the white-haired enigma that would follow.
All three men were glowering, yet begrudgingly plowing on with their conversation from before as you settled. Not having the energy to contribute, you listened in. 
“-this would never have happened in my estate.”
“Oh buzz off-” Kashimo interrupts Naoya, before throwing a guilty look your way at his crass words. As if you didn’t say worse. “Apologies, your highness. As I was saying-” he turns back to the man. “Don’t think we haven’t heard of those vampire killings in your court that you tried to cover up, your defense isn’t as impenetrable as you want it to seem, Naoya.”
That causes you to raise your brow - and evidently, Sukuna’s as well. “That so? Little fraud, aren’t ya, Zenin?”
The shorter man sputters indignantly, “You- you little- you call me a fraud and yet you’re the only one who didn’t bother to help investigate last night? Got something to hide, oh king-of-curses?”
“Tch, shut up.” That little nickname ticked something off in Sukuna, and his grip on his delicate fork tightens. Smirk intentionally bared to piss off, “It’s just because when the princess marries me, she won’t have to worry about vampires attacking guards in the middle of a ball.”
Wait, what?
“Yeah right, you and what army because I have an absolutely enormous-”
“What do you mean?” Your smooth voice cuts through their bickering, and all three men freeze, gazes snapping to you as if they’d already forgotten you were there. “I didn’t hear about any killings last night.”
If you thought they were tense before then you weren’t prepared for right now - shoulders raising in surrender, for all their blabbering, not a word was uttered after your accusatory question. After a few beats of silence, you scoff in frustration, turning towards your escort, squirming and avoiding your pointed stare at the very corner of the room. 
“Ichiji.” The man looked like he could positively give anything to blend into the meticulously hand-painted flowers on the wall. “Ichiji, tell me what happened.” 
“P-princess!” he yelps, adjusting his glasses. “I- I’m afraid the king said- please I can’t-”
“Ichiji…”
“P-please don’t banish me-”
You’re on your feet now, cornering the poor man. Mentally, you make a note to give him a raise. Eyes narrowing, “I won’t banish you, but as the future queen I have a right to know, don’t I?”
“...”
“...please?”
And the remaining men had been watching with morbid fascination as you worked your magic. They were already aware that the frail attendant was the weakest link out of them all, but what they certainly did not expect was exactly how weak. 
It only took a single bat of your lashes before his pale cheeks colored an almost-concerning pink. Eyes scrunching shut in embarrassment, as the words spilled from his lips. Neverending and slurring with haste as he speaks in one breath, “Th-three of the guards stationed near the outer corridor and library wing were found killed by a vampire last night before you retired for the night, your highness. Their b-bodies were disposed of, and this in combination with all the recent killings was why the king hurried the announcement for your engagement. B-but, his majesty decreed that this never be relayed to you in order to keep you in high spirits after the betrothal eep-!”
“Is- is that so?” you breathe, eyes wide. Taking one last look at the four speechless men, before walking out of the tall doorway. “I seem to have lost my appetite, I will be heading for my chambers now. I sincerely hope you enjoy your stay, my lords.”
Shit shit shit - how did you not notice? 
Maybe you walked right past the killer last night and didn’t even realize - who knows what could’ve been hiding in the shadows. How did you not realize? How did you not see?
Just then, a thought strikes you - did Satoru see?
---
It’s one of the whirlwind of questions ringing around in your mind even by the time you hear a steady knock on your door. Jolting you upright from where you splayed out on your plush, silken bed, rows upon rows of books on vampires haphazardly surrounding you.
Peering out of your large window, you notice the hues of pink and red painting the sky, a big red sun just dipping below the horizon - shit, when did you even fall asleep? 
“Come in.” you answer, voice scratchy. Rubbing away the sleep in your eyes, you could barely make out the hazy outline of Ichiji standing in your doorway. 
“Ah- your highness, I apologize for waking you up.” he bows. “But master Kashimo will be headed out for a late-night hunt at this very moment, and requested your presence shall you wish it. He noticed that you seemed upset at breakfast, and wanted to make it up to you.”
You take a moment to mull over the question - it certainly was rude for you to just ignore your guests all day. And considering you might just be marrying one of them, it wouldn’t kill anyone to actually get to know them.
“Alright.” you reply, voice even. And your answer seems to surprise the other man, “Tell Tsukumo to get my gear ready, I will be down as soon as I change.”
“Y-yes, princess! I will call for Nobara to help you get dressed.”
As the door shut once more behind him, you threw off your heavy blanket- and your coat? Satoru’s coat, which had evidently been draped around your upper half. Heart stuttering, you didn’t remember putting that on before…
Hm, you had to thank Nobara for that later.
---
Hunting with Kashimo was, unexpectedly, dull. 
“So…” you drag your words, trying to fill the tense silence. “What is it that we’re actually hunting for-”
“Shhh-” you hear for about the third time this past hour. A brow of yours quirking at the way it seemed like the two of you had been wandering the woods belonging to your kingdom’s estate for hours, and you still didn’t know what it was you were supposed to be looking for. 
Alright, perhaps hunting wasn’t the best opportunity to get to know your potential future husband. 
“My lord…” you call out warily, already aware of the duke’s affinity for hunting. “Maybe we should rest for a bit, after all, the stars are out already and the moon is so bright.”
He barely even turns to look back at you, “No time. The woods belonging to your kingdom have some of the rarest species of cursed animals in this country. I must make the most of this week in that case, your highness.”
You brighten at the closest shred of conversation in so long. “Oh, yes, I’ve heard! I also hear they-”
“Shh!”
So close. 
Letting out a resigned sigh, your eyes glaze over as you watch Kashimo trace his thick fingers over animal tracks on the dirt. Suddenly, gesturing for you to follow him as he sped off in another direction. 
It doesn’t take too long for him to stray out of sight. Meanwhile, your legs lag behind in protest - and pettiness, you realize. Grumbling to yourself about how you’d rather have watched paint dry as you’re sure the elders often did. Well, you look at the now-barren pathway, at least now you didn’t have to worry about someone shushing you all the ti-
“AHH!”
And then, all of a sudden - it felt like you were the hunted. 
It’s like every bit of blood drains from your body at the blood-curdling scream. Grip tightening on your bow, you’re jolting at the direction it came from - where did Kashimo disappear off to again? 
Yet, for how much you knew your kingdom like the back of your hand, it’s so dark. The moon barely peeking through gloomy gray wisps of clouds that you don’t know where exactly you’re running to - just that something was tugging. Reeling you in. No destination in sight until you’re crashing face-first into- a wall?
“Hey, flower, where are ya running off to this late?”
Your hairs raise, something visceral in your body jolting. 
Satoru - blindfold and all.  
“Wh- Satoru thank God you’re here.” you gasp, looking nervously over his broad shoulders. “I heard a scream, and I’m worried about Kashimo because he went somewhere over there and-” You’re pointing aimlessly in his direction, before clasping a hand around Satoru’s defined bicep. Tugging, “You have to help me, that idiot even insisted on no guards because of disturbing the wildlife and I’m so worried and-”
Before you can react, big strong arms are enveloping you. And you’re suddenly hit with the smell of peppermint and Satoru - something so sickly sweet tinging the air, it makes you droop limply into his firm hold. Your skin burns when he breathes in, deep. 
“Shhh shhh, I know I know, princess.” he hums, pulling you deeper against his chest. Until you could feel every dip and curve of his pectorals. “You must’ve been scared, right?” At your hesitant nod, “You did good. You did perfect- in fact. Especially putting up with that pretentious bastard.”
The shocked laugh that drags from your throat has Satoru sighing contentedly, an almost-pained grunt leaving him as he pulls away ever-so-slightly. You felt much the same. 
“S’alright, I’m pretty sure it was some animal.” he soothes. He clasps your hands with his, running a damp thumb over your knuckles. “I saw him trudging about disturbing more wildlife over there.”
You breath catches in your chest at just how close Satoru was now, his breath mingling with yours. Pretty plump lips so close - too close. Yet you’re leaning in closer, like you’re drawn by a thread. “Are you sure? Maybe we should-” You gasp, eyes widening when you look down at where your hands were intertwined - red. Or, what you assumed to be red, a saturated, patchy stain on your hands where Satoru’s met yours. He stiffens when he follows your gaze, trying to pull away, but you only hold your grip harder. “Satoru, are you bleeding? Or is this-”
“Not mine.” his voice is hard - and for a second you have to wonder whether this is really the same Satoru. And you swear there’s a little tremor in his words as he explains, “You see, I went out on a little hunt myself, flower.”
Even if Satoru didn’t have his blindfold on, you’re sure his face would’ve been unreadable. That almost-familiar grin of his is strained. Too strained. Yet, his movements are unwavering as he tries to wipe away the blood. “Must’ve forgotten to wipe down, I apologize for sullying your hands, princess.”
“Let me-” you mutter, taking a hold of the coat around your shoulders to wipe away the blood. Uncaring for what you were dirtying at the moment. “I swear you need to take better care of yourself, Satoru. Seriously.” 
And you didn’t see them - but somehow you could just feel the amusement dancing in Satoru’s eyes. Raising your confused gaze up to meet his, “What?”
He only flashes you a knowing grin, “S’jus’, you’re wearing my coat, your highness.”
Your movements pause, mouth gaping open while you try to pathetically spout out an excuse. “I- I didn’t mean to get this coat dirty, oh my god. I didn’t think-”
“S’alright.” he inches in even closer. A smirk grazing those sinful lips of his, “I actually prefer it like that, you look like mine.” Taking a deep breath, “You smell like mine.” 
And before you can ask about his cryptic message, he’s placing a hand at the back of your waist. A very improper hand that would definitely make the elders gasp in scandal. “We should head back to the palace, it’s getting late. I will escort you, m’sure that born hunter of yours is already halfway back too.”
“Carry me.” you blurt out, your body aching to feel more of him. And before you can retract your words - probably sputter a few apologies, you’re being cradled by a smug Satoru. One hand under your knees, the other supporting you like you’re weightless. 
“Heh, a princess carry for a princess.”
“Oh, shut up.” you grumble with embarrassment when he walks forward slowly, your legs swaying in midair. “Want my soul for this as well?”
And you can feel Satoru’s muscles ripple, you can feel the way his breath hitches in his chest ever-so-slightly. Rumbling as he drawls, “More than you’d know.”
“S’that a discount, too? You still didn’t tell me what you charge others.” you quip, remembering the conversation from the night before. 
“Oh, you’ll find out soon enough, your highness.”
You’re quirking a brow, something hot churning at the pit of your stomach at that ragged tone to his words. “I’m onto you, y’know.” You stare up at his clenched jaw, highlighted in the dim moonlight. His long, pale neck, the crevices of his blindfold. For a moment, you wonder what it would be like if you could peek under. “Onto you and your absurdly high prices, Satoru.”
He breathes out a shuddering, overly-dramatic shudder. “Mhm, flower, I should be worried.” Before looking up at the sky - and you wondered just how well he could see through his blindfold. “The moon is beautiful tonight, isn’t it?”
That night, you dreamt of long-winded star-gazing and blue, blue eyes. 
---
“What do you mean Lord Kashimo has left for his kingdom?” you hiss, feeling a faint stab of offense. Seriously, were you that awful at hunting? “He didn’t make any indication of it last night.”
And if your careless words made Nobara beam with slight embarrassment, you didn’t take note of it - too caught up in what you’d just heard. Enough so that it takes her next words to bring you out of your stupor, “Exactly what I said, your highness. The lordship and his court have all vacated their wing, leaving behind only a letter of forgiveness for ending the festivities early.”
“Still.” you murmur petulantly. Setting aside another one of your books on Vampire: Mates, Murder, and More. “It’s strange, I thought he was here for the hunting sprees, if not for me.” Your tiara weighs heavy on your head as you turn to your young lady-in-waiting. “I would like for Ichiji to catch up to Kashimo’s traveling party, make sure they’re safe, and send them my well wishes.”
Ha! Take that elders - you’d show them you’re fully capable of holding diplomatic relations as a ruler. 
“As you wish, princess. Additionally, this-” She’s holding out a small pouch of blue fabric that you’d never seen before. “-was found by your bedside when cleaning and I wished to give it back safely.” Before her polite smile drops into a much more devious smirk, “A gift from one of the suitors, perhaps~?”
You gesture for her to hand it over, the silk casing soft under your touch. Detailed. One-of-a-kind, from what your tedious lessons in the history of fabrics had taught you. You didn’t recognize the patterns sewn onto it as something typical for your kingdom - or any other you’d learned about, really.
“M’not sure.” you whisper. Opening the little purse to reveal a flash of gold - a necklace. Thin and intricate, holding a sapphire pendant in the shape of an eye. 
Blue.
A blue you knew too well - the same one that peeked out from every dark corner, that you saw before you slept at night. The one that’s been by your side for years.
Constant. Now coming to haunt you. 
Chills run down your spine, and your fingers tremble at how life-like it looked. Burning into your very soul. 
“Would you like for me to help you put it on?” Nobara asks, mistaking your shock for difficulty. And yet, you don’t correct her - body moving before your mind to simply nod. 
There was only one clasp on the chain - leaving you to worry about the fit. But when it was hooked around your neck, you found that it fit you so perfectly. Like it was tailored to you - and only you. Why was it so perfect?
Why did it capture the exact color you’d been chasing after your whole life - since before you’d even formed memories? Since you were nothing but a surly, teary-eyed little girl that was crying about the dark, babbling about that “blue flash” that no one else ever seemed to see.
“If that will be all, your highness. I will take my leave.” With a nod and a low bow, you’re left all by yourself in your sprawling chambers. Wondering, somewhat in amusement, whether you’d be let off this marriage pact if all the other suitors suddenly left as well. Hell, maybe you could marry whoever got you this necklace since they apparently know you so well. 
And you swear - maybe it was the fatigue from trekking last night, maybe it was the stress from the past month - but you swear the wind picks up in its chilly bite. Howling just low enough that it sounds like a deep, taunting cackle. 
The necklace doesn’t leave its palace around your neck for the next few days. You still didn’t know who’d gifted it to you - right inside your chambers for god’s sake - and if either of the two suitors remaining knew, they didn’t make any indication of it either. 
Three, technically, but it seemed that the more the days passed, the less you saw of the mysterious king of the Northern kingdom. 
While Sukuna and Naoya had taken it upon themselves to woo you by joining you in your daily activities, he hadn’t even shown his face to you yet. You were sure your father would’ve had him humiliated and thrown out of the palace already if he wasn’t afraid for his life. 
But you didn’t mind, because you saw enough of Satoru to make up for King Gojo and Kashimo. The man seemed well and fully intent to stick by your side, talking yourselves well into the night. 
It was on a night like this - sprawled out along the plush armchairs in the very library you’d met, only a few days after Kashimo’s departure - you asked, “Satoru, what color are your eyes?”
That makes him pause in the middle of his extremely animated story about how he’d caught Earl Yaga in the middle of an artistic dance routine. The baritone of his voice cracking so uncharacteristically as he responds with, “Wh-why do you ask, princess?”
“Because.” you roll your eyes. “In four days m’gonna be marrying, and it might just be your king. Yet, I don’t even know his attendant’s eye color - what type of good queen would I be then?”
You knew it was a flimsy excuse, truthfully you just wanted to see Satoru. All of Satoru.
“Not many have wanted to look into my eyes” 
You tilt your head, “How come?”
“Well, I can assure you that they aren’t half as alluring as yours.” Satoru pushes back your tiara ever-so-slightly to reveal your face to him better, fingers dancing down to fiddle with your pendant. “You’re a strange one, aren’t ya, flower?” he chuckles, face inching closer to yours - and for a moment, you think he might do something else. “Tell me, how are the wedding preparations going?”
Ah, right - the wedding preparations. Your wedding preparations, to someone else. 
Did you want him to do something else?
“W-well-” you pull back from his hypnotic presence. Heart lurching, necklace burning cold into your skin. “Sukuna keeps trying to teach me his very particular diet, I swear I’ve spent much more time with Uraume learning it than with him- they’re a sweetheart though, I can’t complain.” Eyes trying to avoid the intensity of his gaze, “Oh- and Naoya still talks about his weaponry, however, I think his Zenin elders had a word with him because he asked to meet me in the gardens tomorrow evening to actually get to know me for once.”
You brave to take a look at Satoru at the end of his spiel - only to be met with a face you never thought you’d see. His mouth a tight gash, jaw ticking, and you could almost hear the grinding of his teeth.
Terrifying. Magnetic. 
Powerful. 
The library was always cold - but you fail to suppress a shiver at the sudden grip in the air. “S-Satoru?”
And suddenly, at the mere sound of your voice, everything clicks back to normalcy. You’re staring that familiar grin painted onto his face again, musing slyly, “How much d’you wanna bet he’ll ask about your weaponry instead?”
“Oh, shut up.”
It’s only much, much later at night when you’re forced to retire early - Satoru slipping past the library earlier than usual with groans of his “attendant duties” that you realize - he didn’t answer your question. 
---
“P-princess, will you be alright going alone? I don’t think-”
“It’ll be alright, Ichiji, I’m just meeting Lord Naoya.” you wave off the stammering man. Tugging your velvety coat snugly around your body, “Honestly, you act like I haven’t been out in the gardens alone before.”
And it was true, since returning from his little meeting with the Kashimo court, your jumpy attendant seemed even more so - and you didn’t even know that was even impossible. Always peeking cautiously behind corners of the winding hallways, always hovering close by you even when his duty didn’t require it. 
He’d told you - in that quiet, shaky voice of his - that Kashimo was well, and headed straight for his kingdom to fulfill emergency duties. To which you’d accepted - you understood the gravity of responsibility, after all. 
“But- but, your highness!” he gasps, pulling you out of your little reverie. “I don’t think- with the way he-”
A spine-chilling breeze rustles the nearby tree, sending shivers down your spine. Howling in your ears. You squint your eyes against the cold, “Sorry, what was that, Ichiji?”
But the man in front doesn’t speak - fuck, you didn’t even know if he was breathing. Face a sickly pallor, mouth gaping open and shut like he wanted to say something - he needed to say something. Yet, he wasn’t even looking at you, wide eyes locked on something over your shoulder. 
“Are you-” Your body holds you back, feeling two burning eyes on you - and you have to force yourself to look over your shoulder. Only to see- nothing? “-are you alright?”
Seeing nothing out of the ordinary, you’re turning back to face your attendant - only to see him sprinting back down the entrance as fast as his knobbly legs could carry him. 
“I’ll see you tomorrow, then!” you call, hoping it echoed far enough to be heard.
Strange. 
It’s all you can think about for the next half an hour you’re seated on that dainty, painted bench in the middle of the palace gardens, waiting for your potential future husband. And for the next hour. And the next. 
It’s by the time the sun has fully set, when twinkling stars are dotting the night sky that you settle with the conclusion that yes, it seems that Naoya has already made his decision about the marriage. And no it doesn’t end with a wedding. 
“Dammit.” you spit, running a hand through the hair you had Nobara fuss about with. “S’not like I wanted to marry you anyway, bastard.”
And you didn’t - you really didn’t. Whenever you dared to imagine walking down that decorated aisle, Naoya was the last person you saw.
But seated alone and abandoned, trying to cover yourself from the biting chill of the night, you never felt more like an unworthy heir. Fuck, if no one wanted to marry you how would you even dare to think of taking over the throne?
Maybe you should just-
“We have got to stop meeting like this, flower. S’like you’re haunting me.”
“Satoru!” you gasp, throwing yourself into his embrace. You’re reaching up to loop two arms around his neck, “Oh, you wouldn’t believe it. That asshole had the audacity to stand me up.” Pulling back so your face ghosts his, “I got all dolled up just for him to leave me like this. As if I wanted to be with him, I was just trying to be a good- a good h-host and-” 
Suddenly, you’re struck with the realization of how close you two actually are. You could count every crease on his blindfold, pinpoint exactly where every dimple at the corner of his grin was. 
Your hands slide their way down to his sculpted chest, pushing slightly. “-I apologize, this was forward of me.”
But his arms only tighten around your waist - when did they even get there? Large and steady, pulling you back to nuzzle his face into the crook of your neck, your racing pulse. “Stay.” he groans, and he sounds slightly out-of-breath, heavy exhales tickling your ear.
“We can’t be caught like this, Satoru.” you breathe, but that familiar little tug has you shuffling closer. Breathing in that familiar metallic sweet scent you’ve grown to love, “I- I’m getting-” Bile creeps up at the back of your throat, and you laugh bitterly. “I think I’m getting married in three days, y’know? To Lord Sukuna, I assume, since two of my suitors ah- ran away and the other refuses to even see my face.”
His thick fingers dig deeper into the extravagant corset at your waist, “I know. Fuck- don’t I know.”
It’s a steady beat of silence, so still. So tense you could hear every stuttering heartbeat of yours, and strangely enough, you had the nagging feeling that he could, too. 
“You could just marry me.” Satoru’s abrupt confession breaks the silence, and you find yourself sinking deeper into his soft coat. Wrapping yourself up in his heady presence. “Be my queen. You wouldn’t have to worry about duties or elders or- or vampires.”
And the night was still. So still. 
Despite the way your heart races, eyes blinking up in disbelief, you find it in yourself to deadpan, “F-funny. Do I have to give you my soul for that as well?” Oh, some stupid little part of you think you might just have.
And you’d expected Satoru to crack a laugh, to give you a teasing smile while he carried on that little inside joke between the two of you. You’d expected him to no sooner shove you off and talk about it being late. Hell, a part of you even expected this to be some elaborate set-up from the elders to get you caught in such a compromising position with the no-longer stranger from the Northern kingdom. 
But, no. It’s anything but that - everything but that. 
Because the taller man only rasps, nose-to-nose now, “No.” Sounding like his sanity was slipping away from him with every breath, fingers making their dance down to twirl your sapphire pendant between them. “I’d give you mine.”
You can feel his breath fanning your cheeks, head dipping slowly - so torturously slowly. As if he was giving you ample opportunity to run away if you wanted to. But you don’t think you could move for the life of you. 
Instead, you’re dipping closer, gliding the tip of your thumb over his defined cheekbone. Mere millimeters away - just one push. Another hand of yours steadies at the back of his neck, feeling those snowing locks under your fingers. 
One. 
Your thumb dips just under the seam of his blindfold - unwillingly. 
“Your highness.” Satoru’s voice is cold, his fingers lacing with your own even colder. Something eerie. And even with the delicate touch you could feel the power thrumming through Satoru’s body. “This is for you.”
You can only stand there in shocked silence as the moment shatters, and he produces a wild rose as if out of thin air. “Consider it from King Gojo.” Touch searing against yours when he hands it to you, you feel drunk off of him “Perhaps the night is late now.”
Right. The king. 
When you’re walking back in the directions of the palace’s warm lights, you don’t think you’ve ever felt safer. Strangely enough. 
“Satoru.”
“Yes?”
“I’m onto you.”
“You’re onto me.” he’s tucking the bloom over your ear. Before stepping back into the inky pool of shadows beside the entrance you came from. “Sweet dreams, flower.”
That night, when you tuck yourself into bed, you swear you hear a faint whisper of those same three words lulling you to sleep. Over and over. 
Sweet.
Dreams.
Flower. 
---
Floral preservation was one of the lessons you’d been forced to attend growing up in the palace, but even you didn’t know how that wild rose Satoru gifted you hadn’t wilted yet. 
It remained as fresh and prim as the night it was picked, bluish pink petals never fading. You didn’t keep it safely in a bowl of water amongst the other plants and flowers in your bedroom. Somehow, never out of place, always tucked safely behind your ear in the days that followed. Perhaps it was improper to keep it on you even when you were being fitted into an engagement gown to be promised off to another man. But Satoru didn’t complain, and you didn’t either. 
With Kashimo departing for his kingdom early, and Naoya apparently following in his footsteps due to “irrevocable differences”, it was now almost confirmed that the future king was to be Lord Sukuna. Not like King Gojo had made any effort to reach out - and Satoru hadn’t mentioned it either. 
Satoru. 
Things were…the same after that night, and you didn’t know what to make of it.
It must be done, you sigh, wincing at the pinch of the flowing white dress being suited onto you by the bustling tailor. At least it could be worse, even if you’d rather…
“Honestly, young people these days.” Yaga speaks up from where he was fussing with the silken hem of your gown for tomorrow. “I heard of that Naoya brat leaving out of nowhere, princess. My condolences.” 
“Ah-” you startle, not expecting to be addressed. “It’s not your fault, we likely didn’t mesh all that well. I just wish he left a note- Honestly, I’m lucky to even have a suitor left after these six days.”
Another grimace leaves you when you feel another tweak of pins pricking at your skin. The other man hums lowly, “Don’t say that, anyone would be lucky to have you. Anyway-” He gets up from his position kneeling, towering over you to admire his own work. “How do you like it, your highness?”
You let out a gasp when you face the floor-length mirror, “Oh my god, it’s perfect.” The dress was regal, decadent. With flowing tresses resembling a petals, and gilded gold and blue weaved into the fabric. 
Blue. 
“I fashioned it after that necklace and flower of yours.” You unwittingly reach for that familiar pendant, “I ah- forgive the assumption, but I assumed you would be wearing them both at the betrothal ceremony tomorrow, princess?”
Taking another long look in the mirror, you nod, “Yeah. I will.”
---
“I knew it.” he laughs shrilly. “I fuckin’ knew there was something wrong with you. As soon as I saw you butterin’ the princess up in the library, I knew you were a fuckin’ freak.”
The other man only responds with ominous silence, letting labored breathing cut through the bone-chilling air. Clearly unsatisfied, “What? Not gonna talk now? Aren’t ya just in it for the crown like me? Have the bitch, just give me the crown.” Goading now, “I bet you’re not even an attendant are ya- I know what you are-”
His words are cut off with another choked-up gasp, followed shortly by a strained growl. “I know- what you are-”
Red stains the marble floor - a problem for later. 
“I know, King Gojo.” And it’s the last thing he sees. “And you’ll reap what you sow, she’ll never love you.”
Blue. 
“You’ve haunted me too long, flower.”
“Satoru–!” you scream, throwing your soft bed sheets off your body. 
It was burning - you were burning, gasping for the cold lungfuls of air that filled your empty bedroom. Mind bleary, distantly, you register that it’s around daybreak - tiny fingers of golden sunlight just barely dipping through your window - your open window. 
Hastily, you’re tumbling out of bed to slam it shut. Heart still pounding when you take in the mess of flower petals from those congratulatory bouquets you’d gotten. Ruined. Only the stems left in the vases after that sudden, chilling wind. 
“What-” Your eyes dart around to look over your dresser, where you always kept Satoru’s wild rose. And a shiver creeps down your spine when you realize it lay snug tucked behind your ear, safe and sound. Exactly where you didn’t keep it. “-happened?”
You couldn’t settle back into bed after that - couldn’t even think about it. So you find yourself reaching for your wardrobe of dresses, running your fingers along the intricate gown made for your engagement ball tonight. Your engagement to Sukuna. 
If this was the nightmare, and tonight was to be the dream - why did your stomach turn so?
---
It was difficult convincing Nobara to let you keep the wild rose on after getting ready. 
“But that’s so last season.” she bemoans. “No offense, your highness, but even old lady Ogami wouldn’t be caught dead wearing flowers in her hair these days.”
You’re giving her your best puppy dog eyes, “Please, Nobara?”
“No.”
“I’ll let you raid my exclusive wardrobe the next time you want to play dress-up?”
“...”
Which was how you found yourself shoved into a dress that was way too gorgeously palatial, barely even having the time to admire the lush gold and blue decorations around the sparkling ballroom before you were being ushered next to your father on his throne. 
You fiddle with your ringed fingers, feeling more and more like a lamb sent to slaughter - a very opulent slaughter - with each step. 
“I am so proud of you for this week, and you look absolutely divine, my love.” your father whispers into your ear once you’re up on the crushed velvet platform. “I hear from Ichiji that you know, I apologize we couldn’t go through with this marriage under better circumstances.”
You shake your head, giving him a calm smile - you’d already forgiven him, sometimes there was duty far greater than any man. 
“My people, as promised, we are gathered once more to celebrate the joining of two hands - and two kingdoms.” The king projects his voice out to the eager crowd, “Together, these two young loves will face their duty. They will face the dangers. They will face our future.”
The thought had you clenching your fist into the soft fabric of your gown, looking down at your feet in a bow. 
“As I did with my father before me - God rest his soul - the future king and queen will oversee their responsibilities to protect our people from those treacherous vampires. The elders-” he stops short, eyes widening at the empty seats on the balcony - where the table of elders always sat. Abandoned. Chilling. “...have decreed, in accordance with our princess, to introduce my daughter to you all as our future queen-”
Your father gestures a hand your way, and you step forwards to cheers, still not daring to look up. And all you could see were two, gold-toed boots stepping into your field of vision.
“-and our future king!”
“Look up, flower, this is the best part.”
Gasping, you raise your head - Satoru.
“Y-you?” 
He smiles that pearly smile at you, one that makes your knees weaken, “Me.” Before leaning down conspiratorially,  “Better get moving now, the king just declared that the big bad Northern king and the precious princess will have their first dance as a couple.”
It felt like you were moving through a dream as you slip your hand into his, flinching at the feeling of his cold lips meeting the back of your hand.
The crowd of whispering nobles part to make a path for the two of you, and Satoru is so gentle when he leads you into the middle of the dance floor. Weightless on his feet, swiftly placing a burning hand on your waist - just below where the elders would consider proper. 
The other intertwining with yours, you barely even register the slow, romantic tune playing from the orchestra. 
“I bet you have questions.” he whispers, breath fanning your cheeks. 
You take in his tall figure, the rows of medals, gleaming only half as bright as the smile that makes its way onto your face. Hissing, “That doesn’t cover the half of it, King Gojo.”
“I-I apologize. I can’t apologize enough but-”
“Though, I did have a nagging feeling about the fifth time you talked yourself up.” you smirk.
Satoru throws his head back in a loud cackle, echoing through the hushed crowds - no doubt gossiping about this being the Northern king, that fearful beast that ruled over the Gojo family. “I know.” His hand comes up momentarily to brush over your sapphire necklace, “And I’ll spend our entire lives making it up to you, flower.”
Goosebumps dance down your arm, your spine, right down to where Satoru held a firm grip on your hip. You two waltz around the edge of the dance floor, perfectly in time. Through the crowd of grumbling lords, the orchestra, past the table of foods.
“And exactly how long would the rest of our lives be, Satoru?”
Slowing right in front of that huge, reflective wall. 
You couldn’t see his eyes, but his biting gaze was all you could feel. 
Lingering on the blue pendant nestled at your chest, the everlasting wild rose tucked behind your ear, the mirror to your right - where the twin image of you shone. Powerful, gorgeous, everything that a monster like him could never have because he wasn’t standing there right next to you. His kind never could. 
In the back of your mind, you registered collective gasps sounding all around you - the rest of the ball attendees that’d also taken note of the lack of Satoru’s reflection. But your eyes stay locked on him. 
A thumb hooks under his blindfold, and he grimaces. “You really were onto me, huh, flower?”
Tugging. 
Your fingers tighten around his, unable to let the most fearsome of creatures escape from your grasp. “You must’ve been onto me, too, Satoru.”
Pulling. 
All you see is a flash of a regal nose bridge, and the flutter of thick white lashes - before every single chandelier in the ballroom snuffs out at once. Cloaking the room in unnatural darkness, it sends every single knight and noble into a frenzy. 
And then, he opens his eyes. 
“IT’S HIM-”
“A body! A BODY FOUND IN THE ROYAL GUEST SUITE–
“VAMPIRE! STAY BACK-“
Oh, it’s blue. 
That crystal blue. 
And then it’s black.
---
SLAM!
“If you must kill me.” Satoru’s voice sounds from somewhere above you. You blink away the darkness, feeling your bleary gaze try and adjust to that unfamiliar high ceiling, the outlines of hauntingly beautiful paintings on it. His ragged breaths cut through your thoughts once more, hastily folding your hand to grip your pendant. “If you must kill me, then I prefer you do it with your own hands, princess.”
You can’t tell whose hand is trembling more - yours or his. Distantly, you realize you’re being pushed up against a luxuriously padded wall, one you’d never seen before in your life. 
Where were you?
“The Gojo palace- Please-” he reads your mind, voice breaking at the end of his plea. Gasping - and you can discern two elongated teeth at his canines. Fangs, you realize with a shiver. “You may leave if you want to, you may kill me for what I’ve done. My life is in your hands.”
“Satoru.” you soothe in a hushed voice, despite the way your head was reeling. The Gojo palace? “I won’t kill you.”
“But-”
“Satoru, what does this necklace mean?” You beg, and at this point, you’re not surprised that the necklace is from him - because it was an exact replica of the two burning eyes staring back at you. The only source of light right now, glowing a blue you’d finally found after a lifetime. “Why did you-” you gulp, heart lurching. “Why did you hand me your…life?”
Soft lips play right over your rapid pulse, murmuring into your skin, “S’my soul.” A long, pale index of his plays with the pendant. “The only part of my soul that’s living, gilded into a necklace to be kept in the safest place I know. You.”
“But-” you cry out, trying to get another look at his eyes - but your fiancé only kisses deeper at your neck. Nibbling at the thundering beat just below. “But why did you give it to me?”
“Who else would I give it to, if not for my mate?”
Mates - there were a thousand and one books and official documents detailing everything from a vampire’s killing pattern to the aphrodisiac toxins found in their blood. But the research on a vampire’s mate was far and few between.
Perhaps owing to the lack of willing mates that can come out without persecution, or perhaps due to the vampires’ intense rumored mating rituals. But it didn’t go without its own gossip, you were no stranger to the ladies of the court tittering about how morbidly “romantic” it was that mates were akin to soulmates - how it was an invisible string connecting two people to share a life, a soul. 
A vampire’s one and only mate.
Satoru was pinning you harder to the wall now, his pink tongue darting out to lick over your pulse. The fingers holding onto the necklace were now tilting your chin up at him, “Speak to me, flower.”
“I’m your mate?” you whimper, your lips ghosting over his. Already knowing the answer, but fuck you needed to hear it from him. “What does that mean exactly?”
He lets out a pained grunt, pressing his forehead gently against yours. “It means you’re the other half of my soul. My only one, I was born for you.” Pressing a chaste peck on there - and you swear you could feel the nip of two sharp canines against your skin. “The one I’ll fight heaven and hell for, until the very last beat of my cold, dead heart.” Your fingers curl at his shoulders when his mouth moves to the shell of your ear. “The one I’ll kill for, take out every measly scum that thinks they can get with my mate.”
He huffs out a burst of cold laughter when your breath hitches, probably reading over the thoughts running through your mind - Satoru killed them. The guards, Kashimo, Naoya- fuck, maybe even Sukuna. He killed them. He killed them. He killed them. He killed them. 
You shiver, “A-and all the wind? The whispers? I thought it was just you these past week b-but- All my life, that was you?”
You know. You knew. 
Another kiss - this time to the corner of your eye, and Satoru licks a long, content stripe up the big fat tears unwillingly welling up behind your eyes. He groans at the salty taste of you, taking in a long, drawn-out breath. “Yes.”
All it takes is that single word for your entire body to collapse, thankfully onto an awaiting Satoru. He holds your entire body weight with one hand around your waist, the other coming up to swipe his thumb under those tears rolling down your cheeks now. 
He kisses your cheek, “All your life.” The corner of your lips, “And all of mine.” 
Run away run away run away run away-
But you can’t - you don’t want to.
Your lips wobble when he nuzzles down your face, leaving a trail of hot kisses with his cold, cold mouth. “As soon as I learned to use my powers - was just a brat you see - I just had to see my mate. To smell her scent.” He’s inhaling deeply again, hands groping over your engagement gown. “Lo and behold, there was you. A cute lil’ princess around my age, tuckered out and fast asleep.” Lingering at your jaw, the hand tight around your waist pulls you painfully closer. Satoru’s knee wedging itself between your trembling thighs, “Imagine my surprise when she took one look at me and cried. Scared me enough to teleport outta there as soon as you opened that smart mouth, flower.”
And the thought of Satoru - tiny and determined - teleporting halfway across the land only to be yelled at by you has you huffing out a shock of laughter.
“So when I heard through the grapevine about your potential engagement, fuck- I couldn’t have ran out of this palace faster. Was so excited I fuckin’ forgot to teleport, too. Even if you were afraid of the ‘cruel Northern king.’” 
Fuck - that’s right. He must’ve heard your thoughts that time you met him in the library. 
Satoru’s tone drops to a low simper, so close now that you could feel every slight curve of his grin. Every twitch of his fingers sweeping up and down your exposed skin, feeling the delicious thrum of your veins. He could bite you right now - easily.  “And luckily, as I grew up, so did my ability to blend in with the darkness.” Eyes boring into yours, something so vulnerable in them now. “But you found me, you always did.”
“Satoru.” you angle your head upwards. “Kiss me.”
And how could he ever deny you?
You wince at the slight pinch of Satoru’s teeth - his fangs - as he crashes his lips into yours in a greedy kiss. Sliding his tongue over to taste those candied lips he’s been dreaming of for years. 
“Fuck-” he breathes out through his nose, jaw sagging open further to kiss you deeper. “Fuck, princess.”
Strong arms pin you harder against the wall, and you’re blindly reaching out to reciprocate even a fraction of Satoru’s neediness. Just dragging your hips up and down his muscled thighs. Sinful. 
Shit, it was so endearing to him seeing you struggle to touch him this way. And with a flick of a wrist, the candle chandeliers hung high above your heads are lighting up at once. “S’that better, flower?”
It takes every bit of will in you to manage to pull away, yet the thought of seeing Satoru - of really seeing Satoru is what spurs you to break the kiss. Delicate strings of saturated spit snapping in the non-existent air between you two, you take a long look at your new husband.
Fuck, he was so pretty.
You always knew he was. 
But even with his face tilted downwards, within the soft light tinting those snowy strands a sunset yellow - you could make out the pretty pink flush all the way from his glossy, ravaged lips, up, up, up to his delicate cheeks - he looked like the last thing from a monster. 
“No you’re pretty.” he hums, and you’re still not used to him reading your mind. Head nodding downwards, “Just look, grinding on my thigh like such a slut.”
What met you was a dark pool of slick saturating his trousers,  just peeking out over the hem of your dress. It makes you give another lingering, experimental grind.
“Satoru—” you’re letting out a honeyed drag of his name, reveling in the way it makes him swallow heavily. “You can hear my thoughts, right?” Look at me. 
Slowly - but surely - familiar blue meets yours. Half-lidded, pupils blown, and if you didn’t know any better you’d have said there were tiny sparks of lightning at the corners of his long white lashes.
You’ve been haunting me my whole life, Toru.
And it was an accident - it really was, your freshly kissed brain too hazy to slur out Satoru’s full name. But the impromptu little nickname has him dragging forwards like he was magnetized. 
A low growl escaping when he’s kissing you again. And again. And again and again and-
“Say it-” Two hands are tugging at those tedious ribbons tying your decadent gown together. Pulling. “Say it again f’me.” Ripping. 
The more his lips are assaulting yours, the more the dress slips further and further down your shoulders. Tattered. The soft satin leaving goosebumps down your spine as it reveals your neckline - all that skin for him to ruin. To mark. 
“Oh-” you’re squealing when one of Satoru’s fangs prick a bit too hard at your lip. Feeling a hot flow of crimson bleed out, the feeling has you so weak. So drunk. “Quite eager, aren’t ya?”
“You have no idea.” he groans again. Soft tongue moving from swirling around your own to lazily pool your blood on it. And you can’t imagine what about the metallic taste would be so euphoric, but he’s letting out his loudest drag of your name yet. Eyes rolling to the back of his head like he’s just tasted a personal slice of heaven. “Fuck- fuck you have no idea.”
You moan into the kiss when he bites down again on your already-bruised lower lip, “I’ve always wanted to do this-” Slow, slow hands kneading up your waist, at a dizzying tempo matching his mouth down your jaw, your neck. Hips bucking, you feel the outline of something so hard between his legs. “-to kiss you. To-” Tethering on the sensitive area of your pulse, “-bite.”
In a split-second, you’re sinking down into plush silk sheets, swallowing you whole in a king-sized bed you didn’t even realize was in the room before. 
“S-Satoru, did you teleport us again?” you gasp, eyes adjusting to the intricate paintings on the ceiling that you hadn’t gotten to admire before. Of white-haired youths and roses, of cold, dark palaces and- and you. 
You - when you were younger, sleeping peacefully while a little boy watches intrigued from the corner. You - passed out in the library after a long night of reading, two pale hands wrapping a blanket around your shoulders. You - your brows furrowed, head cocked while you pushed past nobles to search for that flash of his blue. You, you, you.
You. 
“I can hear the gears in that pretty head turning.” Satoru grins, still kissing you in a languid graze of lips. “And as much as I love it when you hah- admire my lonely paintings, I’d rather you pay attention to-” A low groan curdles at the back of his throat when he’s grinding his massive clothed erection against the syrupy spot at your core. “-me.”
There’s a dark little huff of laughter and with one last bite at the side of your neck, Satoru’s unapologetically tearing right through the middle of your gown. 
And you know it’s made with the finest fabrics the country has to offer, you know that no normal man should be able to even rip a tiny shred through your dress - but Satoru is no ordinary man.
Your spike of disappointment is quickly overshadowed by cold breath hovering over your exposed tits. “Oh, so perfect f’me.” he’s groaning, deep and primal. Biting down on your hardened nipple, “Ya think those uptight elders your court has- ah, had would appreciate me desecrating their precious princess before marriage?”
Through gasps, you peek down at his wicked tongue, swirling around the sensitive spots of your areola. “Who- who gives a shit.”
“So feisty.” The peaks of your tits are left coated in him as Satoru pulls away. “So addictive.” Pinching your soft flesh between his teeth - just hard enough that you worry he’s out to draw blood again. “So- so-” 
Words are failing Satoru’s sharp mouth as he kisses his way down your body. The valley of your chest, your stomach, your hips.
Down, down, down-
“Fuck, Satoru-” you’re hissing when he easily pulls the pathetic remains of your dress off and onto the floor. The rest of your inner skirts easily following afterwards. “Are you gonna…”
“M’afraid not.” he licks sloppy circles at the skin of your thighs. Tasting, nipping, leaving little marks with his fangs for later. Sloppily soothing his tongue over the tiny droplets of blood beading from the bites, he murmurs stubbornly, “Not until you address me correctly.”
Hesitantly, you reach out a limp hand to thread through his dampening white tresses. Tugging softly to lock those devouring blue eyes with yours, “Please, Toru?”
You get absolutely no warning when he kisses right through that flimsy excuse of your drenched panties to slide his tongue up and down your sopping wet slit. Up and down up and down up and-
“Sh-shit, Toru-” you moan when he’s just dipping the very tip barely past your puffy folds. The fabric of your underwear still sticking to you, “Stop being such a tease, goddammit ngh-”
“Why?” Of course, he toys with your patience even now, addicted to those needy whines falling from your lips. “I jus’ wanna play with my princess’s pretty pussy. What am I getting out of it?” 
You smirk, not even having to move your pretty mouth to know you had him in the palm of your hand already. I’d be your mate for life. 
It’s all you can do to watch with satisfaction as the great Gojo Satoru gasps - gasps. Slick-glossed lips falling into a soft oh! Hazy eyes widening almost-comically, and at full heady attention while he takes a few seconds to mull over your words. 
RIP!
In an instant, your soaked underwear is ripped clean off to bare your dripping cunt for him, wrapped tightly around Satoru’s fingers and disappearing down below to where your imagination couldn’t handle. 
“Oh, such a pretty pussy.” he coos, thumbing apart your puffy folds to admire your lewdly winking cunt. Glistening and so so needy, you jolt when he bullies two long fingers past your sloppy entrance. With your greedy hole swallowing every slender inch of Satoru’s fingers easily, “So needy too. This all f’me?”
As if to prove his point, his pink lips wrap around your throbbing clit, grinding his tongue over the ravaged tip. The harsh texture of his tastebuds rolling over every inch of you he could reach.
“Y-yes-” you squeal, hips bucking down mindlessly to try and match his relentless tempo. “S’only for you.”
“Tha’s what I love to hear-” Satoru’s cheeks hollow when he sucks on your sensitive little nub - hard. “Sweeter than I even imagined, shit-”
Every pump of his merciless fingers in and out of your cunt drags along your gummy walls. Deftly curling to prey at those hidden sweet spots of yours he just knew would wrench out such throaty moans from you - and fuck, Satoru thinks- no, he knows that the sound is is favorite song. 
“You’re makin’ me- hah making me fall in love all over again.” he gruffs out into your cunt. The pads of his fingers pressing into the cushiony ends of your pussy. “Because look how messy you are- how loud.”
You didn’t know if he had mind-control powers on top of mind-reading, because it’s as if you’re on auto-pilot when your lolling head is whirling down to look at the absolute sin made of you below. Satoru - running his mouth a mile a minute to send white-hot vibrations along your clit. His milky fingers buried knuckle-deep to stretch out your poor cunt. Your sweet sweet juices drooling all over them in such an obscene sheen down his palm, his wrist. 
He whines, “Makin’ me wanna-” You jolt when he’s biting down so dangerously around your clit. “Wanna-”
Satoru doesn’t end up finishing his sentence - and he doesn’t have to. 
Because he’s pausing his make-out with your clit to spit once. Twice. A thick thumb swiping at the intentional splatter of saliva marking your skin, before surging forwards even deeper - you didn’t even think that was possible. But Satoru has the tip of his nose rubbing methodical circles against your clit, jaw grinding at the base of your pussy, tongue flattening out your pussy lips.
Messy. Harsh. 
“Oh- oh my god, Toru-” you’re keening at the feeling of his wet muscle trying to squeeze in past the fingers still continuing their assault on your entrance. “It- it won’t fit–”
“Shhh shhh, s’okay, princess.” he hushes, letting another round glob of spit wet your clingy pussy. “You can take it. You will - otherwise how are you gonna take your husband, hm?”
That little comment has connotations that make your plushy walls clamp down vice-like around his fingers - his tongue. And you’re angling your head just right, blinking away the lustful haze in your eyes to spy down at the rapid, jerky movements of his other hand. Devouring gaze dropping down to-
Oh. 
Oh fuck.
It was difficult to even look at the sight below - your panties, soaked and completely see-through with slick and precum, wrapped prettily around what you could make out to be Satoru’s aching cock. Standing proud, twitching wildly with every drag of his fist up and down his glistening length. 
“Fuck-” he groans, taking the opportunity to devilishly slip his tongue past your feeble entrance. “Fuck fuck fuck fuck- y’like this, huh?” Drawled out little praises now muffled as he fucks you on his tongue the way he wished he could with his cock. In and out in and out in and out. Pulling back to eye your gaping hole, “I can feel y’getting wetter for me is it because-” Before surging back forwards, as if he’s addicted. “Because-” Again.“Fuck don’t clench around me that way. Was hard enough trying not to fuck you stupid right there in the middle of the ballroom.” 
You whine, tears flowing down freely at the sheer pleasure at this point. “Y-you-” you gasp, your five fingers splaying out over Satoru’s head. Pushing even harsher, “You hngh- talk too much- m’so close-”
Partially because you really needed those pretty lips back at your heated core, partially because every word tumbling from his mouth had you throbbing embarrassingly, your slick spreading a glossy sheen on the sheets underneath you. 
“Oh yeah? Heh, anything for you, flower.” Satoru grins such a sly, sultry grin and you feel it against one set of your swollen lips. “Absolutely anything.”
In and out in and out. He has his brows furrowed now, concentrated on having every flick and divot of movement pushing you closer and closer towards the edge. Faster. Sloppier. You have half the mind to wonder whether it didn’t hurt - whether Satoru’s tongue wasn’t cramping up from how fast he was going, whether his fingers weren’t tired already.
Out of the corner of your spotty vision, you can see those stuttering squeezes of Satoru’s hand speed up. Trying desperately to match each bullying push of his tongue and his fingers into your overstuffed pussy. 
The thought makes you whine, “Oh my god- Toru, m’gonna cum.” And shit, at this point it’s too much. You couldn’t think - you couldn’t even breathe. “M’so close please.” Barely able to even register anything but Satoru Satoru Satoru-
It’s why you don’t even realize at first when you’re finally cumming - Satoru does, though. He feels it in the way your heavenly walls are closing down on his fingers, clenching around him so tight that it was almost difficult to fuck you through your orgasm. Waves of electric pleasure crashing into you and you think you’re drowning.
“Tha’s it.” he rasps. “Cum f’me like that, tha’s it- thaaat’s it, such a good lil’ wife- a perfect mate.” 
The fingers stuffed deep inside your pussy are being pulled out in a flash - not letting you waste a moment of your heady high before he’s toying ravenously with your swollen clit. Pinching, and rolling between two soft fingers. 
“O-oh fuck, m’-cumming? M’cumming m’cumming-” you moan deliriously, mind just now catching up. Your hips drag your sloppy pussy all over Satoru’s pretty face. Just drenching his noble features with your gushing mess. “Feels too ah- good, Toru.”
And he takes it like it’s everything he needs - everything he’s ever wanted. 
Jaw falling slack to let your juices slide down his throat, tongue lolling out flick your spasming cunt through your high. Unstopping. Unwavering. 
Even when your vision stops tingeing with black at the edges, even when you think you’re sane enough to form a coherent thought. Even when your climax is bating enough that every flick of Satoru’s tongue only sends almost painful thrums of pleasure down your spine.
“W-wait m’done-” you sob, tasting the salty stream of tears splashing down your face now. “S’too sensitive- ngh-”
When he doesn’t show any signs of stopping anytime soon, you try again - this time thinking the embarrassing thought out loud. I…I really want you inside me now, Toru. Please?
And he pauses - jolting, as if some dark, primal part of him had just been called back to life. Tongue still hot on your cunt, fist still greedy around his rock-hard shaft. 
“F-fuck you’re gonna be the death of me, flower.”
And before, you couldn’t get enough of those striking blue eyes, but now you couldn’t escape them.
With inhuman speed, he’s shuffling up the soaked sheets. “An absolute fuckin-” Slick-glossed lips meet yours, smearing along the combination of juices till the lower half of your face was as dripping wet as Satoru’s. “-minx, y’know that?”
“Wh-what can I say?” you tilt your head with a smirk, lips a bit too loose than you’d like - but it didn’t matter anyway, he was in your thoughts. Your mind. “I’m your mate, after all.”
He falls back onto his knees at that sinful little sentence of yours, throwing his head back in a guttural groan. “Fuck- you’re mine alright. See what you hah- do to me? See how this is all your fault?” 
If Satoru expected an answer, then he doesn’t receive it. Because every snippy little retort on the tip of your tongue melts when you get a long, hard look at the angry shaft in his hand. So red and angry. Thick enough that you felt your cunt quiver already.
Delicate with prominent veins that glistened and throbbed down his long, long length with each slew of his vigorous fist. And his tip- fuck, blushed your favorite shade of weepy pink, slobbering a sheen of precum all down his wrist, his tufts of cloudy white. 
And you realize with a jolt that he still had your panties wrapped around him - looking so tiny around Satoru’s massive cock. 
Wordlessly, your hand replaces his.
“W-woah- fuck-” His toned waist flexes with the effort to fuck up into the soft cushion of your palm. “How the- ngh how the fuck does your fuckin’ hand feel this good?”
“You’re so big- fuck, don’t know how I’d- Wait you never imagined this?” you bat your eyes up with faux innocence. A thumb gliding over that deep divot on the very tip of his fat head. “Because I sure have, Toru.” 
Satoru’s heavy balls smack against your arm when he shuffles down his pants even further, now fully letting you go ahead with your agonizing torture. “Shit-” he yelps, eyes screwing shut at the image. “Don’t- don’t say that, holy shit.”
You toy with your scrap of panties, massaging every ridge and curve with it. Just dragging your hand up and down. “Would you rather I think it instead?”
Within milliseconds, two sharp fangs are poised right above your rapid pulse, a hand around your throat. “No- no no no no-” Satoru gasps, sounding like he was at the end of his rope. And it takes him a few blinks to realize his position, immediately moving his lips up to nip at your jaw. “Fuckin’ no.” Hard enough that another red pearl of blood drips out, instantly being sucked up greedily by your fiancé. “Gonna make me lose it before I-I ngh-”
With a pained growl, he suddenly has you sitting so prettily on his muscular lap. Your legs splayed out like such a slut, needy cunt slobbering all over where you were sat right on his demanding erection. 
By the time you’re realizing your helpless position, it’s too late - and Satoru’s already shrugging off the rest of his pants. Buttons hitting the floor when he just tears his flowing dress shirt off. 
“Sh-show off.” you breathe, hands mapping out every dip and curve of the plane of defined muscles displayed before you. So mouthwatering. 
“Can tell that you- ngh think m’mouthwatering, flower.” he grins. One hand kneading and groping the flesh of your ass to steady your drooling cunt to kiss at his thick tip. The other keeping one of your palms stuck to his washboard abs, up, up, up to press at his sculpted left pec. “N’ I know m’heart’s not beating, but I’m much the same. Very- much the- same.”
And Satoru’s spent years waiting, yearning - so he doesn’t waste even a second more when stuffing his cock inside your snug cunt. 
“O-oh. Satoru- Satoru please oh-”
The stretch - fuck, the stretch. The stretch is so much that it feels like you’re being split apart. Just the bare tip of his fat cock being bullied in short, determined half-thrusts. 
And it takes only one, lucky collision into the bullseye of your g-spot and you’re already falling apart. 
“Wait- wait wait wait m’gonna-” you gasp, your nails running down his broad, milky back in jagged red lines when you’re cumming once more. Toes curling, hips convulsing wildly on top of a smug Satoru. “Oh my god, ngh- what’ve you done to me, Toru?”
“Now, let me ngh- let me tell you a little secret, hah- princess.” His hand comes up to cup your jaw, gifting a sweet kiss on your swollen lips. “The best thing about mates?” Sharp fangs catch onto your delicate skin, “They feel sex on a whole other level.”
And then he’s bringing down both hands to spread apart the globes of your ass. Your puffy folds are stretched to their limits when he thrusts up once. Muscled thighs flexing underneath yours. Harsh. 
Ignoring your pleading keens and the slight resistance at the intrusion of his intimidating size, “Hold on, princess- hold- fuuuuck.” Lips latch onto yours, drinking up every heady whine when your poor cunt is being fed every inch by fucking inch. “You’re taking me so well.”
And that you were - your pussy lips bulging and struggling to accommodate Satoru’s monstrous size, but still taking him in so greedily. 
“There we go.” he grunts out, punctuated with heavy rams of hips. Up, up, up until you could feel Satoru’s sobbing tip graze against your cervix - your lungs. “Theeere we fuckin’-” Pushing and pushing until there was no more, until your neglected clit was scratching against his snowy pubic hair. Ass coming to rest at his twitching balls. “-go.”
“You’re in so deep-” you’re blabbering, cockdrunk already. The last few dredges of your high still not wearing off, it takes you a few seconds of Satoru still trying to squeeze his cock even deeper to manage to raise a hand about midway up your stomach. Feeling for that vertical bulge that was him, “-can feel you right here.”
“Oh yeah?”
And like he was testing your theory, Satoru fucks up into your gummy hole in another bullying slam. Watching in wonder at the way that little divot in your stomach crashes around the same spongy cervix he was. 
“Fuck- you’re right.” he hisses. Addicted now. Immediately rocking into you with reeling, long rolls of his hips. “You’re so- fuckin’ right.”
You can’t find the energy in yourself to even yelp in surprise when Satoru immediately changes your positions so that you’re now laying fucked-out on the mattress. His domineering hips pinning you down to use you like some little cocksleeve. 
“God-” he pants into your open mouth, tongue swirling with your weighty one. “God- fuck fuck fuck if heaven is real then this is it.” Each little profanity is decorated with a smoldering crash of his tip into your sweet spot. “You’re the heaven I don’t ngh- deserve, flower.”
That neat bitemark on your thigh is being jostled with the amount of ragged movement, and you wince with pain when it starts flowing again. 
“Oh- oh.” 
Satoru’s like a predator that has cornered his prey, and is spending hours tediously unraveling every single bit of you. 
Sliding two smooth palms underneath your legs, they’re urgently thrown over his large shoulders to fold you down, down, down into the meanest mating press you think you could handle - handle without fucking breaking, that is. 
“So good t’me.” he breathes, long tongue easily licking up that sweet nectar of your blood. “Y’know your cute lil’ brain s’too scrambled to even read right now.”
“H-how can I think when you’re ah! Like- like this, Toru?”
The sudden change in angle makes you scream. It makes you clamor for the headboard, the sheets, your husband when that obscenely perfect upwards curve of his dick is massaging every nook and cranny of your cunt. 
“Yeah? Feels good? Now now- don’t run- away” he’s dragging you down those drenched sheets by the legs like some ragdoll, stuffing you more and more with his painful cock. Fucking you so relentless, like he was trying to worship every little hidden sweet spot inside your dripping cunt. “Say it- no no no, not in your head. Say it.”
And you do - a little over fifteen times when his thick hilt pecks your pussy lips over and over with each thrust when Satoru bottoms out, hitting all the way into the back of your cunt - your cervix, your g-spot - like he couldn’t decide which one to bruise more. 
“S’too good-” you’re gasping. Your overstimulated pussy being molded like clay to the girthy shaft kissing down your cunt. Stretching out your elastic walls until you could almost feel them take shape to his swollen cock. Feel every sensitive spot inside you being overstimulated at once with every burning massage against them. “You’re fuckin’ me way too- too good- ngh- can’t even think.”
But that wasn’t enough for him.
Dipping a thumb down to circle around your clit, white-hot pleasure shoots up your spine when he lets out a deep rumble, “Think I fell in love with you when I- fuck, right then and there when I first- hah saw you all those years back.” speeding up with the sloppy staccato of his rude cock. Satoru’s words slurring now, messed up and half-prepared like the accelerating half-thrusts being bestowed upon your ravaged cunt. Like he couldn’t bear to pull out completely. “The first time you saw me, you were so afraid. Look at you- fuck, jus’ look at you now, princess.”
Each word is like a brand onto your sticky skin, accompanied by harsh smacks of Satoru’s balls against your ass, his sharp hip bones digging into your thighs. Him.
“Toru–” is all you can manage to whine out, a limp hand pulling his face closer to yours. You’re jumping with each swipe at your poor clit. “Toru m’here.”
“And- and yet-” he’s still blabbering, still pussydrunk while he fucks you so menacingly. Fingers sopping wet with their assault on your sensitive nub, “And yet I just- fuck-” He cuts himself off to give your messy hole another thick stream of spit. Coating his long, raw shaft - rubbed red with the way your gripping walls were massaging him so right - making it easier to slide in and out. “And yet, I just had to see you, to see the gorgeous mate I don’t deserve. I couldn’t live without you.”
A single overstimulated tear glistens a track down Satoru’s pretty face - one you kiss away as quickly as it appeared. Nudging open those teary, blue gaze to bore down on you. 
Oh, he looked an absolute wreck - white hair mussed up, stray strands sticking to his forehead. Glossy lips parted, drool pooling at the corner, broken grunts leaving him with each smash of his tip back into your cunt. So blissed out. 
Jolting at your eyes on him, Satoru feels his balls tighten so painfully. Abs burning when his pace stutters with need. 
“You’re haunting me, just as much as I was haunting you, Toru.”
The candles go out. Instantly. 
And shit you’re feeling it first when when hé’s cumming and cumming so hard that it almost hurts. Flashes of white startling behind his closed, glassy eyes. “Shit- shit shit shit shit-” Hairs on your body raising as Satoru’s fingers draw circles on your clit so aggressively. Dragging out your high. Forcing it. “Take it- take it all, my flower. Let me paint this pretty pussy all white.” Violent, almost.
So, really, it makes sense that your third orgasm of the night was the same. 
Just shivering, sinful tingles running from your overstimulated mind right down to where Satoru was stuffing thick white ropes of potent seed deeper and deeper down your tight channel. 
Overspilling with each calculated ram, his cum is oozing out of the corners of your puffy lips with each furious clench of his balls. Too much. 
And it’s all you can do to sit there and take it, feeling the sloppy dredges of cum make a mess slobbering down your thighs and his. Starting up blearily at the blurry paintings on the ceilings. The paintings of you - of a still Satoru that looked down at you with only half as much intensity and pure swirling emotion as he was right now.
Something that couldn’t be painted - but would make such a pretty picture, when his fangs bite into that racing junction at your neck.
You scream a soundless scream of his name, eyes rolling to the back of your head as something warm fills your entire body. 
Leaving your words unheard, your ravaged hole loose to let out slobbering squelches of Satoru’s cum. Blood racing and flowing right into Satoru’s greedy mouth. 
“Princess-” he gulps. Tongue licking up every crimson bead his crazed eyes could spot, body aching when he dares pull away from that heavenly taste. More. “Princess princess princess- you- hngh you’re mine. All mine now.”
And he’s letting out more thick globs of cum straight into your waiting cunt. Body bowing even harder to let it seep into your elastic walls, your womb. So much more than you can take and he just keeps giving. 
It seems like forever when Satoru finally pulls away - and within the glowing blue of his eyes, you can see the red staining his lips, dripping down those fangs, his chin. Staining the silk sheets below - staining you with so much more. 
Before you can stop yourself, you’re reaching up to catch his lips in a bloodied kiss. Your own elongated canines catching amateurishly on his lips. 
Satoru hisses - but he likes it. And you can tell. 
You can read every single hypnotizing thought whirling behind those crystal blue eyes - how he wants to ravish you again, how he wants to worship you. To make you his all over, to have you make him yours. The thought makes you smile as you whisper, “I’m onto you, Toru.”
“You’re onto me, flower.” Catching your lips in a sweet, sweet red kiss. “Forever.”
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A/N. This was SOOO fun to write omg y’all have no idea. If you made it this far then you get a sloppy smooch from me mwahhhh.
Plagiarism of work not authorized.
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bratbby333 · 7 months ago
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i will possess your heart – satoru gojo
-this story contains very heavy nsfw content! please read at your own discretion!-
𓆩ᥫ᭡𓆪 content warnings dead dove fic- heavy stalking, violent obsession, manipulation, forced voyeurism, forced exhibition, drugging, mentions of blood, knives, use of restraints, plot twist, extreme dub-con 𓆩ᥫ᭡𓆪 synopsis for as cocky as Satoru is, it’s oddly fitting. in his mind, everything belongs to him, including you. 𓆩ᥫ᭡𓆪 word count 8k
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Satoru fumbled with a tripod as he positioned his camera onto the stand and proceeded to hit record. He was thorough, making sure his chair was perfectly centered before he sat down, staring at himself in the viewfinder while he fussed with his hair, inhaling deeply. A wide grin cut across his face before dropping back into lackluster neutrality. He looked down at his lap, his fingers ran up and down his denim-clad thighs. He snapped back onto the camera blank-faced before a deranged smile pulled at his cheeks.
Click
January 16th, 4:06 AM
I woke up drenched in the feeling of lethargy again—another night of only an hour’s worth of sleep. Nothing feels real when you hit a certain point. I’m plagued by the shadows, my entire life enshrouded in darkness. I don’t remember what things were like before. Day by day, it’s all the same. I cannot escape it—this anchoring feeling of despair. The emptiness eats away at me. I’m in search of release…of some sort of freedom from this pain. I need to fill my life with meaning, to find purpose in this accursed world…I think I’ll go out for coffee today. People watching brings me so much joy. They seem to live much happier lives than me.
Click
January 16th, 6:38 PM
My daydreams must’ve blended into reality because there was no way I created someone as beautiful as she was outside my imagination. I’m certain of it. She was sitting at the bar of the cafe down the street from my apartment, dressed in business casual—she probably works nearby. How kismet. The coffee was bland, as were most things in my life, but she awoke something in me. I hope I see her again. She somehow managed to clear the cobwebs around my heart. I think my life has finally found purpose. She is my driving force. I wonder what her name is.
Click
January 19th, 6:11 AM
Feeling well-rested today. Four hours of sleep is my new record. I plan to go to the coffee shop again. Back to the place where my eyes were first blessed with the mirage of her…where I first fell in love. I hope she’s there. People are so fun to observe when they don’t think they’re being watched…it’s simple psychology. The Hawthorne Effect. When humans notice they are under observation, they change. So inauthentic. But her? She never notices. She sits so obliviously, allowing me to take her in with ease. So good to me. She’s a breath of fresh air. I hope to work up the courage to speak to her soon. My heart soars at the mere thought of being in her presence once again. It’s so refreshing to feel something after all this time. I’ve been numb for so long, but she has set my heart on fire. She is everything to me, my sole purpose for existence.
Click
January 19th, 8:27 PM
I saw her again today. She didn’t see me. Just how I like it. She typed away on her computer like normal…she’s a hard worker, it seems. Driven and strong. And here I was thinking such beauty was a thing of legend. It's refreshing to have been proved wrong–that rarely happens. Oh, how I crave her. I know she’d make me feel whole again. She can save me from all this, I can feel it. 
Click
January 23rd, 5:13 AM
Only two hours of sleep tonight. But, for some reason, I feel better than ever… I normally do when I find a reason for living, again. It’s her…it must be because of her. She keeps me going; my muse, my inspiration. She’s worked wonders on me already and she doesn’t even know it, yet. I’m going to the cafe again today, I cannot wait to see her. Maybe today I will finally speak to her.
Click
January 23rd, 9:53 PM
She never showed up today…I wonder what’s going on. Maybe she had other things to do. It’s fine, really. I’m annoyed, honestly. I waited around all day. I’ll keep checking until I see her again. 
Click
January 28th, 7:06 PM
My sweet girl has gone missing. I haven’t seen her in quite some time now. This is just ridiculous. The woman I love…is she avoiding me? No, no that cannot be. 
Click
February 2nd, 8:31 AM
I haven’t slept well in days. I’ve been awake for twenty six hours now…my mind feels like it’s filled with static and yet, I feel sharper than ever. I’ve gone to the cafe every day. Still no sign of her. I’m slipping back into my old ways, the darkness is going to return any moment. I’ve begun to hear the laughter in the shadows again. They’re making fun of me, I just know it. I need her…oh, I need her so bad. How could she do this to me? Does she not know how much I suffer when she’s not around? If I don’t see her again soon, I will never recover.
Click
February 5th, 6:21 PM
I finally saw her again today. My heartrate spiked and I nearly leaped from my seat to kiss her, to hold her, sway her side to side in a deep hug. Instead, I slipped a tracker into her purse as I walked by her chair. I must know where she works, where she lives, and what she enjoys in her free time. She slipped away from me so easily…can’t let that happen again. I need to know every little thing about her. She is my one and only after all. It would be ridiculous to love someone so deeply and know nothing about them. She is too beautiful, I cannot let her wander around unsupervised. There are some crazy people out there—you never know what could happen. I can’t lose her. I must keep her safe. I will possess her heart. No one else can have her but me. 
ₓ˚. ୭ ˚○◦˚.
Satoru observed her for months, shadowing her all around town. He knew the woman’s routine like the back of his hand, before he ever learned her name. Sunday’s she went grocery shopping, Monday after work was her pilates class, every couple of Thursday’s she was at the nail salon, and Friday’s were seemingly payday–he picked up on her pattern of going out to nice restaurants every other week. Satoru eventually got an upper-level management position at a company that shared the office building with her job–he is incredibly intelligent and overqualified, after all; they would be foolish to not hire him. Now he could really keep an eye on her.
That was when he finally learned her name–the two of them taking the same elevator. She didn’t recognize him as the man who seemingly had the same routine as her–it’s one of the many reasons why Satoru loved her so much: her naivety. She looked into his eyes for the first time that day, her voice was soft and angelic, and the name that fell from her lips sent waves through Satoru’s body, the same name that would now be coupled with his gasping moans every evening as he stroked himself to the thought of her. 
With Satoru’s new job that brought him one step closer to her, he knew he could no longer watch her in the way he used to. His movements had to be more calculated, putting more distance between them than he normally would or hiding behind the deep tint of his car windows. If she saw his face too frequently, she surely would have caught on. Satoru smiled at the possibility of her never catching on…how she’d greet him with a smile and a friendly hug each time they “coincidentally” bumped into one another, giggling about their lives' odd synchronicities. Such a sweet girl. If only she knew.
He stopped into her job, a small gift bag hanging off his slender fingers, desperate to watch her eyes light up with the sweet gesture of an unexpected gift. He asked to see her, only to be informed by the receptionist that she had the day off.
It was no worry, he didn’t let that dull his excitement. “I’m a friend of hers, brought this in to surprise her. Do you mind showing me to her desk, I’ll just leave it there for her when she returns to work,” he said kindly. The lady working the front desk blushed under his piercing gaze and handsome features, nodding shyly and walking him to his lover’s designated area. 
Satoru thanked her, stepping into the cubicle to place his gift by her computer. His eyes glazed over her workspace. It was decorated with trinkets and family photos. He picked one up, his thumb tracing over her face. His pretty girl. That smile could bring about world peace; it definitely quieted the angered voices in his head. He scanned her desk, a moment of envy shooting through him at the thought of her dainty fingers dancing over the keyboard rather than tangling in his hair. He groaned internally, looking over his shoulder to ensure no one was around, before ducking down, rummaging through his beloved’s drawers. Stowed away in the bottom of the unit was a fuzzy, white cardigan. He brought the fabric to his nose, inhaling deeply, stifling the filthy moan that nearly echoed through the cubicle. He quickly tucked it into his jacket, took one last look around, and headed toward the exit. 
In the safety of his vehicle, Satoru whipped the clothing out from under his wing, bringing it to his face once more. He undid his belt buckle with haste, shoving his dress slacks halfway down his thighs before his large fist swaddled his cock with the fuzzy white cardigan. He nearly sobbed at the contact, the smell of his car filling with her beautifully floral perfume. He brought the free edge up to his nose, taking another whiff as his hand worked furiously against his shaft. He had never finished so quickly in his life, staggered whimpers and choked moans fell from his parted lips as fat ropes shot up onto his abs and chest. His cheeks were flustered a violent red as he wiped his sticky shame away with her top. After he came, then did his clarity, and Satoru’s body ached with the thought of how good it would feel to finally be sheathed within her sticky walls, rather than her soft clothing. I’ll be with you soon. Soon, my love. 
These feelings were getting unbearable. His overactive brain had him teetering on the edge of insanity. He needed more. His imagination was no longer enough to satiate the hunger that gnawed so deeply in his core, the distanced watching and hopeless longing for the love of his life created jagged rifts in his already damaged psyche. He didn’t know how much more of this he could take. A few deep breaths and the promise he made to himself to take action soon quelled his burning desire. But for how much longer could Satoru repress the demon that clawed through his body?
Satoru surveyed her while she ran to the bank, walked her dog, or took her car to the wash. But his most favorite place to watch her was from the bench just outside her bedroom window, engulfed in darkness. Pretty girl lived on the second floor, her silly little brain assumed she didn’t need curtains. She never saw him, but he always saw her. All of her. Drinking in the way her clothes were delicately removed from her pretty little frame, the way she turned and posed in the mirror–so good to him. How her skin glistened after she got out of the shower, the water droplets running along her body in the same way Satoru wanted to. 
He fell into a state of bliss, feeling spoiled by the show he was getting tonight. The lotion that she worked into her body, the beautiful set of lingerie that she dawned. His eyes buzzed around his sockets, elation flooding through him. Gorgeous, gorgeous girl. But his body went rigid and his jaw locked tight at the appearance of another man behind the love of his life. He sat upright, shoulders stiff and heart pounding in his ears at the thought of his sweet being in danger, he cursed himself for not being more aware of her surroundings on her behalf. But when his darling girl turned to the unknown man with a smile, greeting him with a gentle kiss with the lips that were supposed to be just for Satoru, his heart shattered into a million pieces. 
Oh, no. This just won’t do, my love. You are mine. 
Jealousy coursed through his veins while he looked into her room, rage balled in his fists as he watched a random man have her in the one way Satoru couldn’t. Not yet, at least. He must’ve been new in her life, judging by the way his nervous hands explored every part of her skin. Satoru laughed at this–he knew he could please his woman so much better. But betrayal nipped at the back of his neck; how could she do this to him? Had his loyalty fallen on unappreciative shoulders? No, that couldn’t be. Satoru knew she was better than that, he picked her for a reason, after all. She was just playing hard to get. 
You rejected my advances and desperate pleas, and now you throw your relationship in my face. It’s punishment enough that I can’t have you, but I won't let you let me down so easily.
Feeling at a loss, swallowed whole by his hungered desperation, he did what any rational person would. He moved in next door.
ₓ˚. ୭ ˚○◦˚.
Satoru Gojo was your next-door neighbor. He moved in only a few months after you did. You were elated, chalking it up to a lucky roll of the dice that you had met by chance at your job; he had started working for the company that shared the office park with yours. It really seemed like things were on the come-up for you. He was kind, confidently intuitive, funny, and supportive. Mildly egotistical, but it worked for him. He always invited you over for dinner and movie nights and was a strong, dependable shoulder for you to cry on. You had just moved to the city, feeling utterly lost and absolutely gutted about being so far from your support systems now, and he was your first friend. You felt safe knowing he was just a wall away. 
On a random Sunday, you opened your front door to see all the food you loved sitting at your doorstep–weird, you were just about to leave for the store. You turned your head, seeing Satoru peeking out from his cracked door, grinning at you. 
“Was this you, Satoru? You didn’t have to…this is incredibly thoughtful,” you beamed, stepping over the grocery bags to give him a tight hug. “You’re the best, I don’t know how I could ever repay you.” But Satoru did, he knew exactly what you could do for him.
When you needed a ride to work, he jumped in to save you. The two of you worked in the same building after all. It was a crazy coincidence that your new neighbor turned best friend worked just a few floors above you. It’s such a small world, isn’t it? But it worked out perfectly for the two of you. 
There was a month where you were short on rent, and there was Satoru, paying the rest on your behalf. 
You weren’t catching on. Sweet, naive girl. Oh, how he loved you. I need to work harder to get her attention.
Satoru was not a patient man, but for you, he would do anything and everything to get you right where he wanted you, expertly playing the long game. It began with the fated sighting of you sitting in a cafe, and snowballed into something bigger. At first, he only ever observed you, maybe the minor occasion of overstepping, but as time went on, he couldn’t sit idly by. It was time to make his move.
His disruptions in your life started inconspicuously. Leaving for a date? You found your car tires slashed and windows shattered in the parking deck. Now there’s a police investigation. Bummer…gotta cancel the date. Had a guy over? Satoru’s apartment flooded. Weird… that was the second time this month. 
“You gotta talk to the landlord about this, ‘Toru,” you sighed. He had to stay at yours that evening. 
You cried on his shoulder, telling him that some guy stood you up on a date you had been anticipating for weeks. There was an electrical fire in that man’s apartment that night. Must’ve been faulty wiring...or something.
His apartment flooded again. He was back at your door. You welcomed him with open arms, of course. He’s so good to you, the least you could do is help him out, as well. 
Satoru, you’re slipping. That’s too many times in one month. Ease up or she’ll catch on.
Friday night, in a wild happenstance, he bumped into you while you were out with another man, enjoying a nice dinner together. He smiled warmly at the two of you, before politely dismissing himself. His cheery smile dropped into a demented grin once he stepped out of the restaurant as he anonymously called in a bomb threat to the establishment. You were so shaken up at the entire ordeal you practically begged Satoru to stay with you that night. He’d be a fool to turn you down.
Satoru got everything he wanted. You were just a tough nut to crack, is all. No big deal. He loved a challenge. After all, how could you not love him by now?
But nothing was working. You couldn’t catch the hint, even with everything he threw at you. He was always the one there for you, even when you weren’t aware of it. What more could he do to prove that he was the only person you needed? I’m reliable, witty, and loving… how can she not see this? He finally snapped. The last straw? Hearing your pleasure-filled cries while getting fucked by another man, your “boyfriend”. The lewd sounds ricocheted around your room, shooting through the thin walls of your apartment and straight into his listening ears.
Tsk, tsk. Now you’ve done it. Always been such a tease. 
For as cocky as he was, it’s oddly fitting. In his mind, everything belonged to him, including you. And with that, his demented plan was in full effect. He had hoped to spare you, prayed that you would fall in love with him before he lost his composure completely. But your sweet, naive nature had proved to be a difficult wall to break down. 
ₓ˚. ୭ ˚○◦˚.
Click
The sound of your front door’s lock disengaging echoed through the empty hallway. Satoru stepped in, inhaling deeply as he shoved your house key into his back pocket. It was far easier to gain access into your home than he had originally anticipated; he was fully prepared to break in, but all he had to do was tell your landlord you went out of town and you forgot to leave a key with him before you left. The manager of your apartment complex knew how close you and Satoru were, so it was an easy lie to tell. But it couldn’t have been further from the truth. You weren’t out of town, he wasn’t house sitting, and you had no intentions of having company this evening.
Seated at your desk, he opened your laptop and navigated his way to your iMessage settings, ensuring you could only send and receive texts from your laptop. Clicking on the messaging app, he stifled the gag that threatened to escape his throat as he clicked on the thread between you and your boyfriend, his contact name “my love” in your phone. He rolled his eyes, before drafting a quick text: 
-Hey, baby. I have a half-day at work today…dinner and wine at my place tonight? ;)
He grinned at the quickness of your boyfriend’s response.
-I would love that. What time, my love?
Satoru scoffed at the pet name. He doesn’t deserve to call you that. Poor bastard needed to learn his place. Heat rose in his chest, jealousy emanating through his skin as he crafted his response.
-3pm…Can’t wait to see you.
Everything was going according to plan. Satoru glanced at the clock beside him: 11:17 AM. It was time to get set up, he had a big day planned for you, and his first guest would be arriving in a few short hours. 
A knock rang through the apartment as Satoru finished lighting his final candle. He smiled wide, sauntering over to the door. He swung it open, grinning politely at your boyfriend. “...Hey, man…didn’t expect to see you here…” he said warily as Satoru stood to the side and gestured him in, a quizzical look painted on your partner’s face as he stepped through the doorway. The door shut and the lock was reengaged. “Where’s…” but before he could get his question out, his chin was met with Satoru’s right fist.
Satoru made quick work of dragging his body upstairs. He dug through the unconscious man’s pants, pulling out his cellphone. Satoru was disgusted to see that you were his lockscreen. This pitiful man wasn’t worthy enough to be with you. He rolled his eyes, unlocking the man’s phone and sending you a text: 
-Hey, beautiful. Come straight home tonight. I’m making dinner for us. See you when you get off work.
You smiled at the familiar ding of your phone, the notification effectively distracting you from your tedious paperwork. Your heart soared at the message, sighing deeply and shifting your weight around in your office chair. Your hand rubbed at your face in an attempt to hide your blushing cheeks. 
“What is it?” your coworker asked. 
“Oh, nothing. I thought my boyfriend forgot our anniversary cause I hadn’t heard from him all day…but he just texted me saying he’s at my place and is making dinner for us tonight.” A giddy smile couldn’t help but drag across your face. 
Satoru looked at the clock: 3:28 PM. You would be home in an hour or so. Just a few more things had to be done, everything had to be perfect.
ₓ˚. ୭ ˚○◦˚.
Your heart rate spiked as you got closer to your apartment door, keys jingling against your palm as you fumbled with the lock, excitement making your movements a bit clumsier than usual. You entered and kicked off your heels, and as you turned to toss your keys onto the small table in your foyer, you noticed a small card that said “Read Me” placed perfectly in the center of the tray. You were perplexed as your eyes scanned over the note. “Go to the living room” was all it said.
You blushed, a nervous smile pulling at the edge of your lips as you crept to the other room. Your eyes went wide at the sight; deep red roses were placed in the center of the coffee table and every accessible surface around the couch was adorned with beautifully flickering candles. Another note was on the table, your fingers fumbled with the edge of the card as you opened it: “Have a seat, take a sip, and press play.” You settled on the couch, noticing a glass of alluring red wine to the right of the roses. You took a few deep, fulfilling swigs of your drink before grabbing the TV remote. Your face twisted a bit, examining the glass in your hand, the flavor of wine different than the one you were used to. It was a special night after all, your thoughtful boyfriend must have wanted you to branch out this evening. Where is he, anyway? As you pressed play, you called out for him, only to be cut off by your own confusion as Satoru’s face appeared on your TV screen. You watched with perplexity as Satoru recentered his chair, smiled, relaxed his face, and then smiled again.
No…no, no, no. What is this? You were locked in place, the melodious sounds of Satoru’s voice cascaded out of your surround sound system. He looked different though, his eyes were dull and low, his voice monotonous–his alarming difference in demeanor sent a chill down your spine. Your groggy mind inferred that this must’ve been an accident. Maybe it was casted to the wrong TV. I shouldn’t be seeing this…these are Satoru’s video diaries. 
You so badly wanted to tear your eyes away from the screen, this seemed like such an invasion of privacy. But you were entranced, staring intently toward the TV, though you didn’t really have a choice, your body was completely numb now. 
“January 16th, 4:06 AM
I woke up drenched in the feeling of lethargy again—another night of only an hour’s worth of sleep. Nothing feels real when you hit a certain point…” you fought to keep your eyes open, to piece together what the hell was happening, until your body eventually succumbed to sleep.
When you finally came to, you were laid out on your bed, fully nude. Soft grunts lingered in the air as you worked your hardest to refocus your eyes, your head pounding. You shifted your weight onto your forearms, your neck straining as it felt like your brain was filled with lead, eyes searching your bedroom for the culprit of the moans. One glance to the left, a quick look to the right, before you stared straight ahead at the wall directly across from the bed. Your body lurched in fear as your heart sank, the source of the sounds now looking you dead in the eyes: The man you had been seeing for the past couple of months, gagged and tied to a chair, his bloodied face twisted up in agony. 
You tried to call out for him. Your feeble attempts to drag your heavy body closer in order to console him were interrupted as the room was suddenly illuminated with the streaming lights of a projector. Your movements halted as you shielded your eyes immediately, the bright interruption feeling like a flashbang to your sensitive head. 
“We didn’t get to finish my show and tell,” a voice spoke up from the dark corner. 
“Satoru?? Wha…what is going on?” you cried out, tears spilling from your eyes while your hands attempted to cover your modesty. You tried your hardest to sit upright, your head spinning, unsure if Satoru was the culprit or your savior. Your body felt like it was anchored to the floor, your head throbbing with every word that tore through your chest. 
“There’s no need for all that yelling, sweetheart,” Satoru grinned, crouching down next to you. You winced as his hand cupped the side of your face, his thumb brushing away the tears that trickled down your cheeks. 
Click
Metal cuffs clamped down on your wrists before you could even register what was happening. A million unanswered questions spun through the room as you frantically searched through his blue eyes, hoping to find any sort of insight into the torment he was inflicting upon the two of you. 
“This is what’s gonna happen, okay? I need you to listen to me.” His voice was sickeningly sweet, each syllable that left his lips more damning than the last as he dragged your limp body up the bed, securing your wrists to the headboard and angling your body toward the projected video on your wall. A crazed grin lit up his dull face as he raised his hand, pointing the remote toward the projector. “You’re gonna sit here and look all pretty f’me while you watch these tapes, and if you move, if you stop paying attention for even a second…” Your stomach churned at how gently he was able to give such vile instructions. He turned his attention towards your partner, the blade of a knife twirling through the slender fingers of his free hand, “...He’s dead. Understand, angel?” 
You nodded reluctantly, unable to do anything else but comply with his demands. Your head was spinning, trying to digest the fact that this was the same person who had paid your rent and entertained your rants after a hard day of work. You listened as his voice continued to drabble over the static of the projector, recalling how bland that day had been until he saw your face. How he must’ve dreamt of you because there was no way your beauty could exist outside of his imagination. To you, it had been a normal Tuesday afternoon. To him, it had been the start of the rest of his life. 
The longer you watched, the more the realization set in that the sweet gestures he presented to you were not out of the goodness of his heart, but from the darkness of his spirit, driven by his wanton lust. Your face was slack, eyes wide in horror. Disappointment crawled through your chest at your own naivety. How could I be so oblivious? So trusting? 
Satoru’s eyes bored into the side of your face as he sat beside you, his hands rubbing deep circles into your bare thighs, pure elation shooting through his veins at his sweet girl finally having a look into his mind. The look of terror that painted your beautiful face made his heart leap with joy. Satoru’s giddy demeanor dropped as pained grunts emerged from the tethered man against the wall. He stood, closing the distance between the two of them, his fist encircling your boyfriend’s throat. You began to protest, to plead with Satoru to leave him be, but the rage that filled his eyes made you shut your mouth. “Uh uh…eye’s on the screen, my love.” Your head snapped back toward the videos, fat tears rolling down your cheeks as the muffled wailing of your boyfriend filled the room. 
As the final video played, Satoru returned to your side, kneeling on the edge of the bed as he  stroked the back of your head and rubbed at your cheeks. “Can’t you see all that I’ve done for you?” He grabbed your face, digging his fingers deep into the space under your cheekbones, forcing your lips into a pucker. “You belong to me, my love.” A deep growl rumbled through his chest, “You look so fucking beautiful like this.” He leaned down and crashed his lips into yours, his hot tongue bullying its way through your tight lips. Small whines echoed through your mouth and into his, and Satoru greedily swallowed up your sounds with ease. Whimpers of protest came from the wall across from your bed, but they were quickly drowned out by the wet sounds of smacking lips and battling tongues.
He broke away, a thick trail of spit still connecting the two of you. Satoru released your cheeks with a gentle shove, throwing his leg over yours to straddle you. He dropped his head to your neck, his white hair brushing against your skin. You winced as he licked a thick line from your collarbone to your ear. “I finally get to have you,” he whispered, nipping at your flesh, “You ready to give yourself to me, princess?” Your eyes widened in horror, your gaze affixed towards your boyfriend, blood trickling from the fresh cuts on his cheeks. Your head shook side to side, tears brimming in your eyes once more as your thoughts raced through your mind, causing a traffic jam in your throat. “I…no, I can’t…he’s…” Satoru’s palm covered your mouth, a groan erupting from the back of his throat as his eyes rolled deep into his skull. He sat back, staring down at you, his free hand running its fingertips between your breasts. “This has nothing to do with him…It’s just me and you now, my love.” Your head snapped up to stare at your captor as the rough pads of his fingers brushed over your nipples. A stifled moan teased the back of your throat, an exasperated look of fear in your eyes as you stared up at Satoru.
Your cheeks flushed as you held his gaze. He grinned back down at you before rolling the hardened bud between his fingertips. Your chest arched toward him, a shameful hum dancing from your lips as he played with you. A deep laugh erupted from the blue-eyed man at your unintentional reaction, his head thrown back with pure joy as he continued to pull at your nipples. He leaned into your neck once more, his teeth grazing the outer shell of your ear. “I knew it,” he purred, “Knew you wanted me, too. You were just playing hard to get, isn’t that right?” You shook your head once more, your words constricted in your chest. “N-no…I never wanted you,” you retorted, head thrown to the side, attempting to distance yourself from him, but to no avail. The weight of him anchored your lower half to the mattress while your tethered wrists held you in place.
A deep chuckle rumbled through Satoru, “So if I feel your pussy, it won’t be absolutely soaked right now?” A pathetic whimper escaped your throat as you shook your head furiously. The rolling motion against your nipples halted and his hand trailed lower down your abdomen. “Hmm…let’s see then, shall we?” he taunted, tracing your skin before rubbing your folds and dipping into your core. “I knew it…you’re fucking drenched f’me, sweetheart.” He shoved two fingers in, shallowly teasing your hole before withdrawing, bringing his sopping digits between your faces, turning his wrist as the dim light of the room illuminated the wetness, making it glisten ever so slightly. He examined them before meeting your fearful gaze. “Why did you lie?” He sucked his middle digit into his mouth, his tongue lapping hungrily at your sweet juices as his eyes fluttered shut. A hum emanated from Satoru as his other soaked finger pushed past your lips, “Here, have a taste, pretty girl,” his long digit dancing around your tongue. “So fucking sweet. You have no idea how badly I’ve been craving this.” 
“I’ll ask you again, princess…Why’d you lie to me? I thought you were better than that,” he teased, an insincere pout twitching at his lips as he cradled your chin. Your body thrashed as his hands pawed down your body, plunging two fingers deep inside you again. Your back arched toward him, his knee between your legs was the only thing keeping you open for him. “I…It wasn’t..ahh!– I wasn’t lying…I–”. Your words fell on deaf ears as a wicked smile crept across Satoru’s face.
“Shhh…shhh my sweet girl, just lay back and enjoy,” he smirked as he crawled down your body, laying himself flat on the bed with his head nestled between your legs. Satoru’s body no longer shielded you from your boyfriend, your teary eyes darted across his face, a silent apology being sent his way. Small gasps escaped your lips as Satoru continued to pump into you, the tips of his curled fingers toying with your sweet spot. When you stared down at him, the look of pure desire peered back at you, the dampness between your legs skyrocketing at the sight. A scarlet dusting of shame brushed across your cheeks at your clear enjoyment of all this, even though it betrayed every natural instinct you had. His tongue darted out from between his lips, the tip circling your swollen clit as his fingers dipped in and out of you, his movements spurred on by his own desperation.
He was delirious, suckling against your clit while his fingers worked into you with fervor, moans and growls echoing through the room as he drank you in. You so badly wanted to break away, to console your boyfriend who had an unintentional front row seat to you falling apart on someone else’s tongue, but you couldn't bring yourself to stop him, his digits hitting spots inside you that you didn’t even know existed. Pleasure ripped through your body as a tightening sensation crept its way into your stomach. The rattling of your cuffs echoed through your bedroom as you fought against your restraints, desperately wanting to tangle your fingers in Satoru’s hair.
Your hips bucked toward his mouth, your body aching for release as your pelvis thrusted against his flattened tongue. You didn’t dare look away from Satoru, for you knew there was another set of eyes affixed upon the damning scene that was unfolding. He continued to hum and suck and pump into your core as you tightened around him, his slender fingers quickly coaxing your orgasm from your writhing body. Your eyes screwed shut as your gushy walls spasmed around his fingers, your release painting Satoru’s overly-eager face. He lapped at you some more, working you through your orgasm as he cleaned you up with his wickedly talented tongue. 
A deep growl broke through Satoru’s chest as he removed his head from between your legs, the back of his hand dragging across his chin, catching the last of your release before he licked you off of him. He sat upright, craning his neck to look over his shoulder, “Hope you were taking notes,” a smug grin on his face as he addressed your watching boyfriend. He redirected his attention to you. “Did so good f’me, angel. Dreamt of that for so long…” he grinned, his tongue darting out to trace along his lips, hoping there was still some of you coating his face “...I could do that all fuckin’ day.” 
Your shaking chest heaved as clarity settled into your mind. Satoru untethered your wrists from the headboard, shifting your body so that you were on your hands and knees, head positioned toward the wall your partner was leaning against. Strangled sounds rang from your boyfriend’s chest as you finally met his gaze. Humiliation prickling under your skin at the realization of what you had just done. But you had no time to dwell on it as Satoru repositioned himself on the bed.
“He’s gonna watch me destroy you, my sweet girl,” Satoru was kneeled behind you, lining himself up with your embarrassingly soaked entrance. He grasped your hips roughly, sinking into you in one fluid motion. You choked out a sob as you dropped your head in shame.
“You’re so pretty when you cry. He can’t help you…can’t save you. Go ‘head, keep cryin’ for him,” he cooed, his thrusts deep and slow inside of you. Jagged moans escaped your throat as the thick head of his cock brushed into your sweet spot. “He can’t make you feel as good as I do.”
He leaned down, reaching around to cradle your throat in his hand, squeezing tightly as he turned your head to the side, his sharp eyes running up and down your contorted face. “Can’t you see that you belong to me, how my poor heart aches for you? How badly I’ve needed you?” His thrusts were agonizingly slow but incredibly deep, the pressure in your tummy betraying your desire for this to stop. “That’s it, my love. Feel you clenching down on me…you’re getting off on this, aren’t ya?” His hips rocked deeper into you, the new depth had your hands clawing at the sheets of your bed as pleasure worked its way through your trembling body.
“He doesn’t treat you the way I do. He never will. No one is better for you than me, princess,” he seethes, his hand cupping your chin, holding your head up, “Now look in his eyes while I use you.” His pace picked up, pulling you back on to him with his anchored hand around your neck. A broken sob cut through your constricted throat as he fucked into you, the visceral sound of flesh smacking against flesh and whines and cries spun through the otherwise stiff air of your room. He palmed at the fat of your ass, pulling your body to meet his rough thrusts. A choked cry left your lips as you maintained eye contact with your boyfriend, crimson droplets running down his face, mimicking the pattern of your tears. You mouthed a silent “I’m sorry” to him before your eyes shut tightly, waves of sinful bliss pulsed through your body with every mean thrust of Satoru’s hips.
“Gettin’ so tight around me–f-fuuuck–you’re close, huh?” Your face contorted in shameful pleasure as you nodded, your back arching even more to take him deeper. “That’s it…c’mon, my love. Need you to cum on my cock,” Satoru begged, his voice airy as he got lost in your tight, sopping walls. “Show me how good I make you feel.” His words ricocheted around your head as the building pressure in your stomach finally snapped, your legs shaking violently as your orgasm ripped through your body, splattering onto Satoru’s thighs and the mattress below you. 
A few more strokes met your dripping center before Satoru bottomed out inside of you, thick ropes of his pearlescent seed painting your spasming walls. He finally released his tight grip around your throat, your head dropping immediately as indignity plagued your trembling frame. He pulled out, spreading your cheeks as he leaned down, an animalistic growl pulling from his chest as he watched his cum dribble out of your pussy. 
Satoru rubbed soothing circles into your lower back as you worked to regain your breath. “You’re mine,” he whispered. He unlatched the restraints from around your wrists, a coy smile tugging at the corners of his mouth at the purple bruises that marked your skin. He locked eyes with your boyfriend, a deranged smile dancing across his face as he reached for the discarded projector remote. 
Another familiar voice flooded through the speaker, but this time it wasn’t Satoru’s. “...We broke up a few weeks ago. No, no. Really, it’s okay. She was kind of a bitch anyway.” Your pupils widened as you stared back at the man you had just been feeling sorry for minutes ago, rage mixing into the vast sea of emotions you were already feeling while you watched a grainy video of him snaking his arm around another woman’s waist. The two of them were laughing outside of his house before she leaned in to kiss him. 
“My poor sweet girl.” Satoru’s hand brushed lightly against your cheeks, catching tears that you didn’t even realize had begun spilling out. “I didn’t want you to have to find out this way, but I didn’t have much of a choice, did I?”
There were a million other ways he could have broken the news to you, but that somehow wasn’t the most pressing issue at hand. 
“An eye for an eye, right?” The same haunting grin that you’d grown to know all too well spread across his face again, his blue eyes slicing into your ex-boyfriend’s. “I can’t believe that my entire world was in the hands of someone so undeserving…” he redirected his attention back to you and recaptured your cheeks in his hands. He leaned down to meet your gaze, unexpected softness replacing his usual sinister demeanor. “What do we do now, baby? It’s your call.”
Your pulse was ringing through your ears. “My call?” your voice was reduced to a whisper as you repeated it back to him. 
“I’m going to kill him either way, but I want you to tell me how.”
You pondered for a moment, still coming to terms with the chain of events that lead you to this one vengeful moment. 
Satoru stood, sauntering over to your boyfriend, stooping down to his level while his hands hovered over his gag. “When I take this off, I don’t want to hear anything other than remorse come from that pathetic fuckin’ mouth of yours.” Your boyfriend’s eyes shifted towards you, then back to Satoru, as he nodded pitifully. The tie was pulled from his mouth. His words were broken, barely audible. “I’m -” he choked out. “I’m sorry, I -”
Your stomach lurched as a sharp smack met his cheek, the painful sound resonating through the room. “You can do better than that. You got one more try,” Satoru spat, his eyes burning into your ex-lover’s bloodied face as he wrapped his fist around his throat, jostling his head around in a fit of rage. 
“Satoru,” you hardly recognized your tone let alone the thoughts that were racing through your head. The last few hours of your life had been a blur. The words you heard earlier made perfect sense now, “Nothing feels real when you hit a certain point.” You were officially at that point. “Satoru, don’t. Let’s just end this.”
It was the first time you’d ever seen the silver-haired man look surprised. His eyebrow raised, a mix of curiosity and amusement glinting in his eye. “Tell me how,” he repeated. “I need to hear you say it.” 
You were in a dream. Nothing more than a figment of Satoru’s imagination, just like he had said. It was the only thing that made sense to you because there was no way any of this was actually happening. 
“Rip his heart out,” your voice emotionless as you gazed toward the blue-eyed man. Satoru groaned deeply, his dick twitching at the sound of your pretty voice speaking his dark language. The same depraved grin pulled at the edge of his lips as he looked back at your ex. 
“Well,” he smirked, “looks like it’s decided then…” Adoration swam through his ocean eyes as he looked back at you, “I knew I picked the right one.”
ₓ˚. ୭ ˚○◦˚.
Click
The lock of your front door unbolted as your bodies pushed through the door frame, giggling as four glasses of wine danced through your systems. Satoru wrapped his arms around your waist, pulling you into a deep, passionate kiss. “Happy anniversary, my love,” he mumbled against your lips. His hands grasped yours as he led you toward the couch. 
You nestled into the warmth of his chest, his arm secured around you while you gazed around the room. Your head spun from the wine-induced nostalgia that this day had inevitably brought on. You were still in the same apartment, only it belonged to both of you now. A blend of sentimental gifts decorated your bookshelf that the two of you had collected over the last year. A camcorder, pressed red roses, framed vacation photos, and the first set of diamond earrings he’d bought you stowed away in a heart-shaped jewelry box. But out of all of the memories that tied you together, there was one that stood out the most. 
“Should we open it?” you whispered, drawing lazy circles into his shoulder.
You didn’t have to see his face to feel his smirk. He knew his girl and he knew her well. He stood wordlessly, retrieving a jar from the highest shelf. He presented it to you, a smug grin gracing his ethereal features, the same look that was permanently etched into your brain the night he got it for you. 
“Be my guest, princess.” You unscrewed the lid, peering into the jar as the strong scent of formaldehyde tickled your nose. You smiled longingly into the container, the overwhelming feeling of love reverberating through your chest. There was something so beautifully poetic about Satoru’s limerence, the lengths at which he went to steal the heart of another in order to fully possess yours. 
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author note: im so sorry for not posting my sweets,, i had the worst case of writer's block and i was actively trying to work on six different WIPs...i was losing my mind.
this was quite the heavy fic to write...i hope i didn't scare anyone away with it lol
alsoooo!! sending out the biggest thank you to @remlionheart for forcing me to finish this...my editor, my co-writer, the love of my life ♡ ⋆。˚
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