#I love that my filter broke one time in car with my dad and I said 'Is that a fucking capybara?!?' (it was not I think it was a nutria)

[tj-crochets]

Hey y’all! I have another kind of weird question for you. I’m weirdly feeling kind of homesick for like fast food chains from the west coast that aren’t on the east coast, and I’m especially missing being able to get decent like meat-and-rice bowls from a variety of places East coast/southern US people, do you have any recommendations for good chain restaurants* that are not available in California? (for people who weren’t here for my “oh no I’m moving how do I handle cold” posts, I moved from California to Tennessee last year) It does not have to be places with rice bowls, that’s just the main thing I’m missing. Well, that and good burritos?  *I do eat at small local places when I can, but I have uncommon allergies and it’s frequently easier for me to get an accurate ingredients list from a chain restaurant because they have a customer service division. Also it’s hard to get recommendations for local places without specifying exactly where I am lol

[citrus-owl]

Austin - by Blake Shelton Steddie AU inspired by this song

So I'm sharing this everywhere because I desperately want someone to write it So I was listening to country music today and the song Austin by Blake Shelton came on and let me tell you I almost started cryin because of an AU idea that popped into my head for Steve and Eddie Just the thought of a Steve and Eddie who after everything that goes down with the Upside Down, grow closer together, spend all their time together and inevitably start falling hard for each other. And just Eddie not being able to stay in Hawkins because no matter that his name is cleared he is still Eddie "The Freak Munson" and the people of Hawkins will never let him live in peace. The thing is though Eddie starts planning on leaving but he knows Steve won't come with him, he's always saying how he has to stay for the kids and Robin, and Eddie doesn't have any clue how to ask him to leave with him....so he doesn't.

He tells Steve one day that he has to leave that he can't stay in Hawkins anymore, he never meant to stay this long as it is. Steve of course is stunned because he had no idea Eddie had been planning on leaving this whole time. He asks Eddie when he's leaving and Eddie wincing and saying he's leaving in the morning. Steve is devastated, Eddie apologizes of course but he won't change his mind (even as he's breaking his own heart) so he leaves. He leaves that very night before he can change his mind. He knows if Steve asks he'll stay but he can't do that to himself (not after every time his mama stayed after his Dad promised he would change...Al Munson never did) so Eddie does what he does best he runs He's been in Chicago for a year, settled and content with where he's at, though Steve is never far from his mind, and with it being a year since he's left (never calling back to give anyone but Wayne who was sworn to secrecy his number) he in his shitty little one bedroom apartment high and buzzed when he decides fuck it and dials a number Wayne gave him a few months after he made it to the city (Steve having moved out of his parents house and into a trailer right next to Wayne gave Wayne his number...for emergencies of course) He listens as his call rings and rings and finally beeps, he sighs about to hang up when Steve's voice filters through with his answering machine message, he lets whoever is calling know that if they're calling about the car he sold it, if it's Tuesday night he's out shooting hoops, and if it's someone selling shit he's flat broke so better luck next time, if it's anyone else they know what to do, and P.S. if this is Bambi.....I still love you (course he couldn't say Eddie's name but well, no one but he and Eddie knew about that nickname) Eddie fucking drops the phone eyes wide, and heart racing Anyway that's where I've been at all day, and I just desperately want someone to write this

[stillaclownlol]

Aiden BPD headcanonsssss because my dad is being weird and I feel weird too

(Most of these are based on my experiences living with somebody who has bpd, and maybe myself but we won't talk about that haha)

Tw for all the things bpd tends to cover (self harm, abuse, substance abuse, and suicidal ideation, brief mention of cannabis in a medical context)

-definitely a big source of trauma is his parents basically abandoning him for long stretches of time

-Prone to splitting regarding them. When they're not around its so much easier to be like "Whatever, fuck them, I don't care." But when they *are* around, they're always so affectionate, a lot of "it's not their fault they're busy", "they don't mean it", kind of thoughts...it's okay Aiden, people can still love you even if they treat you badly :/

-y'all know he's self destructive. Yall KNOW. He's been in 7 different go-kart "accidents", once broke his hip trying to impersonate Tony Hawk, and he WILL be crashing his car into a tree after binge drinking.

-Self harms as a form of stimulation sometimes. He just gets SO bored. Usually will slam his head on the nearest hard object or cut himself with his compass.

-has been to a "wellness center" (mental hospital) after an episode where when his parents were on a trip, they returned and found him catatonic on his bed, he hadn't gotten up for almost 8 weeks and his mattress was stained with urine. Not to mention he'd gotten extremely sick after eating only Ramen. Called this a "blip" and hasn't done anything like this again, but only cuz he hated the hospital so much :/

-not really good at managing his anger. He gets pissed off easily (his jaw starts clenching), but has definitely eased off with the yelling and picking a fight with the person. May say some things he may or may not regret later :/ might like kick the wall or smth too-

-his feelings of emptiness and boredom get really exacerbated when he tries to sleep, so he just doesn't sleep until he passes out from exhaustion.

-extremely rare, but if he cries its almost never the appropriate time.

-his favorite person (and I mean this in the bpd way not just the usual way) was Ben, now it's Ashlyn. She asks Ben for advice sometimes on how to understand him better. Is trying to get better, but he just wants all of her attention all the time. He could make a soliloquy of all the things he loves about her. She's the one who pushed him to go back to therapy and told him "hey, I think you have somethinh"

-Weirdly protective but in a hands off way?? Even tho he really doesn't handle himself well? He knows his friends can take care of themselves but it doesn't stop him from running through the worst case scenario. Freaks out if people are late, especially if they're punctual. Also really defensive of them, they do no wrong in his eyes (except when they do :/)

-used to push people away to avoid disappointment or abandonment, especially because they needed to move so much. All his relationships were very superficial. Ghosted people a lot.

-Has chronic pain as an adult because of all the injuries he suffered through as a kid, not to mention his shitty posture. He takes painkillers, but they leave him zoned out and with even worse insomnia so he doesn't take them a lot. Sometimes uses medicinal weed if the pain is really bad. Ash tries to help by rubbing his back, though she says she's not that useful. He always feels better afterwards tho ❤️

-Smokes if he is really stressed, but he's ashamed about it and tries not to do it too much. Picked it up after stealing some of his mom's cigarettes when he was younger.

-his inner voice is extremely negative and he is generally under the impression that everybody hates him. Tries to act like this doesn't bother him and acts like a nuisance because if everybody hates him why even bother filtering his thoughts or actions?

-why were you even born? Who'd love a screw up like you? Your own parents didn't even want you.

-rejection sensitivity and gets really depressed if he's upset one of his friends. Will usually self harm to cope because he think lashing out will make things worse and he just doesn't know what else to do.

-he loves deeply and he's fiercely loyal. He's good with children. He's a wonderful artist. And he is so very incredibly kind. His bpd does not define him as a person.

I don't know if anybody needs to hear this, but, having BPD is not a death sentence. You're not doomed to be a bad person or an abuser, and I say this as somebody who was abused by someone with BPD (my own father). People with BPD are scared, they are struggling, and most of all, they're tired. If you or somebody you care about thinks they're have bpd, try to contact a doctor or specialist and seek professional help.

I'm gonna go cry in the shower now :)

[outpost51]

— The Unlikely Adventures of Bitchface and Go F*ck Yourself (18+)

Expiration dates are for bologna and bad boyfriends, not sisters.

Chapter WC: 8,363

Warning(s): violence, gore

{READ HERE ON AO3} or below the cut ˏˋ°•*⁀➷

Dillon was grateful for the emergency towels Cheryl kept in the trunk, because both she and Daisy were covered in enough mud to start another garden for their mom.

“I think we’ll need to hose off in the backyard.” Daisy’s voice was soft, but Dillon’s nerves were so frayed she almost ran a red light. If her sister was affected by the jolt, she didn’t show it. “Like when we were little, remember?”

“Yeah,” Dillon replied numbly. Of course she remembered. Her sister’s death forced her mind to unlock every happy memory they ever made together to protect it from the trauma of losing her. The sun had just started its ascent when they pulled into the driveway. She felt like a robot helping her sister out of the car and sneaking around the back of the house; her limbs were stiff and her heart was shuttered the whole way when she knew she should have been ecstatic — Daisy was back, but at what cost? Had her sister left anything behind? Would she be forced to relive the night she died in her dreams night after night? Would she even dream anymore?

Would she ever smile again?

A cold blast of water hit her square in the ass and she squealed, then nearly collapsed as a wheezy giggle filtered through the stuttering stream of the hose. Oh, how she missed that sound, even as weak as it was. When she turned, Daisy was looking down at herself, clad in nothing but the frumpy church dress she’d been buried in and holding the drooping hose in both hands, as if she couldn’t believe she was standing in our yard again. “I’m alive,” she whispered, and Dillon wasn’t sure if those two words broke her heart or made it swell so large it popped.

“That’s good… right?” She suddenly wasn’t as sure of her actions as she was when she first lit the candles.

Daisy dropped the hose to prod at her stomach, chest, and face. The pause was long enough for Dillon to give herself two separate internal lectures and a mild anxiety attack. “Yeah,” she finally replied, an echo of her sister. “When my car landed… I wanted to text you. I wanted to tell you I was sorry I wouldn’t make it in time, and that I loved you, but I think my phone went out the window, or maybe I dropped it.” She wrung out the hem of her dress, and the action was so unnervingly… normal. “I thought about how sad you’d be, and Mom and Dad. I had so much I needed to tell you and I just, I couldn’t stop crying, I couldn’t find my phone—”

Dillon didn’t know what she expected when she brought her sister back; maybe something shambling, maybe a hollow echo, but not… normal. “Daze, it’s—”

“I know, I know. It was such a silly thing to fret over, wasn’t it?” She looked up and smiled. It wasn’t the same one that brightened the breakfast table every morning. “Think Mom’s gonna flip if we waddle in with our clothes soaked?”

Dillon shook her head. “I think she’ll fuss about us catching cold,” she snorted, then froze. “Fuck, I’m sor—”

“Whatever for?” Daisy’s eyebrows crinkled in sympathy. “Oh, Dill, I’m not upset at you, it just feels weird being back in my body, and my stomach kinda hurts, and I’m still trying to shake off the heartache.” She closed the distance between them and sank to one knee to hug her little sister.

That was it, that was the thing that finally broke what thin veneer of composure Dillon had managed to work up on the way home. “Because you died?” she sniffled.

Daisy lifted her head, resting her chin on Dillon’s chest. “Because I lost my sister, too.”

There was no telling how long it took them to stop sobbing on each other, but the sun had almost cleared the copse of trees at the edge of the neighborhood by the time they stumbled through the front door. The smell of bacon and eggs assaulted Dillon’s senses and made her knees wobbly. She hadn’t eaten since picking at breakfast before they left for the funeral.

“Cheryl, we’re home!” she called, toeing off her soggy boots by the door.

“Who’s ‘we’ this morning?” Cheryl didn’t look up from the stove. “Did you pick up Moira?”

Daisy waved at her back. “Hi, Mom.”

A pancake hit the ceiling and stuck there. Their mother might have, too, if she wasn’t in heels. Her scream made Dillon’s ears ring, though.

“That’s what you get for springing the werewolf thing on me last year,” Daisy mumbled as she made her way towards the stairs. “I’m gonna get cleaned up for breakfast. Did they find my phone by my car?”

Cheryl shook her head numbly.

“Bummer,” Daisy sighed, and continued up to her room.

The door had just barely shut before Cheryl was on the phone with her ex husband. “Darren? Darren, shut up, I don’t care if you’re at the office, it’s never mattered before,” she huffed. “Daisy’s home.”

There was a pause, a few muffled words Dillon couldn’t make out. Her mom hung up the phone and turned to her. She suddenly wanted to be anywhere but shoveling pancakes in her mouth at the kitchen counter. “Dillon Marie, what in God’s name did you do?”

“I’m pretty sure a god was involved, but I don’t think capital-G had anything to do with it.” That was apparently not the correct answer, because the fork was removed from her hand and her mom’s fists went to her hips. “A weird lady gave me a zombie recipe book when I stayed behind at the grave. I was desperate and stupid, I know I shouldn’t have messed with forces unknown, but Daisy—”

“What book?”

Dillon retrieved her bag, then the book inside it. “I did what it said to do. It worked, but Daisy’s headstone—”

“Your dad doesn’t remember.”

“Remember what?”

“That your sister died.” Cheryl flipped through a few pages. Raised her eyebrows a few times. She set the book down and went down to the basement, leaving Dillon alone at the counter with a massive stack of pancakes. Unattended. Four fell prey to her grabby hands before Cheryl returned.

With a severed head, its face frozen in a scream.

That she promptly whacked against the counter over and over until it cracked open.

“You cut up bodies three nights out of the month, pickle,” Cheryl chided as her daughter lost her pancakes in the sink.

Dillon looked at her mother with a mix of shock and disgust. “Yeah, I cut ‘em up, I don’t brutalize them.”

“Oh, don’t be so dramatic, it’s not like it’s bleeding.” Cheryl dropped the pulpy remains in her daughter’s outstretched hands. “Do something with that, please. I need to scramble this before your sister comes back down.”

With her mind completely dissociated from her physical form, Dillon sputtered, “Like what? I can’t just throw this in the trash!”

Cheryl exhaled through her nose. “Of course not, that’s wasteful. Put it in a bag and put it back in the freezer. I’ll boil it later to make freezie-pops.” She scoffed at Dillon’s continued perturbation. “What? Werewolves get hot, too. It’s too much work to fill a kiddie pool with ice for Gus to roll in every time we go on a run. Get some of my bacon while you’re down there.”

Dillon inhaled to respond, but swallowed the thought at her mother’s look.

Until she returned from her task. “Who’s Gus?” she asked as she set the paper-wrapped package on the counter. She’d taken to labeling the meat in their freezer according to what living thing in came from after one unfortunate incident involving a pig-bacon and people-bacon mixup that left her with far more questions about herself than she ever wanted answered.

The stairs creaked under a weight much more significant than Daisy’s, and the clicking of heavy claws on the kitchen floor prickled painful gooseflesh over her whole body. “I heard my name,” a gruff voice rumbled behind her as a massive shadow fell over the kitchen. “Pancakes?”

Cheryl smiled up at the mountain of scruffy black werewolf draped over her head and shoulders. Like he belonged there. Much too fucking comfortable for Dillon’s liking. “Mmhm, eggs and bacon, too. Dillon resurrected her sister.”She pushed the grabby wolf-hand away from her pan. “Don’t touch the scrambled ones, Gus-Gus, there’s brain in there.”

Their guest — or intruder, by Dillon’s perspective— looked like he told his mother he wanted to be a cloud when he grew up and subsequently made weightlifting his entire personality. His piercing yellow eyes might have been intimidating if Dillon hadn’t seen the same glow in her mother’s. “Daisy died?”

“Long story.”

He grunted in response. No shock, no theatrics. Was it such a casual thing in their world? “Coffee?”

“Still fresh. Make Dilly a cup, would you? I doubt she’s gotten any sleep.”

Dillon accepted the mug with far more grace than she expected she would have when faced with a potential — “So are you gonna make Cheryl an honest woman, or do I need to go put my boots back on?”

Gus choked, sputtering black coffee out of his nose. It matted down the thick, fluffy fur on his chest in twin rivers like tire tracks through a cornfield.

“Dillon Marie!” Cheryl’s hands went to her hips.

“There’s a naked wolfman in our house, Cheryl!”

There was a squeak of surprise from the stairs, rapid thumping away, and finally Daisy skidded into the kitchen, one of Darren’s abandoned golf clubs in her hands. She wound up, ready to swing.

Cheryl nearly turned purple. “Gus, I am so sorry, they’re just protective.”

“No harm done, Cherry, I’m the same way with my mom,” Gus snorted as he scrubbed the coffee out of his fur with a kitchen towel.

The outrage from the girls was simultaneous, though the volume was inversely proportional to their sizes — where Daisy was softly inquisitive, Dillon shattered a wine glass in the rack above the sink. The jolt of energy almost, almost startled her enough to derail her tirade.

“Cherry?”

“Cherry!”

“Dillon!”

“Rasso,” announced another newcomer, who caught Daisy’s golf club in a sandy-furred hand an inch from his head. “Nice swing. Why are we yelling names?”

“Oh, there’s a naked werewolf in our kitchen,” Daisy replied. “He hugged Mom, I think, Dillon’s protective.” She looked at her captured golf club, then up further to Rasso’s face. “You pulled me out of the car.”

The action in the kitchen froze as everyone looked to the eldest Monroe daughter on the stairs; Gus had Dillon in both hands, held aloft in a rocketship pose, she had one of his ears in a vice grip, and Cheryl was doing her best to keep one eye on her youngest daughter and the other on her oldest.

Rasso tilted his head. “What car?”

“Long story,” the kitchen inhabitants intoned in unison.

Daisy’s bright smile brought a choked sob from her sister. “Dill brought me back from the dead last night,” she explained. Pride coated every word in a gilded shell as they fell from her mouth in a waterfall of riches. “Nobody can remember, apparently. My friends think I lost my mind, but I remember your eyes. You held my hand and told me about the lake in Arizona so I wouldn’t be scared.”

“Well, how about that? Small world.” Cheryl gave Rasso a warm, grateful smile and plated Daisy’s breakfast. “Come eat, baby, you must be starving.” That warmth turned into a glare that froze him to the stairs when he stepped forward at the same time as Daisy. “If you want to stay for breakfast, you can ask nicely instead of assuming.”

Gus’s snicker abruptly ended in a choke as Dillon managed to land a solid kick to his Adam’s apple. He released her to the wild. “If this is what she’s like at twelve, she’ll be the first human to run with a pack by the time she hits twenty.”

Daisy at least had the courtesy to shove a bite of eggs in her mouth to hide her laugh.

“She’ll be nineteen in a few months, Gus,” Cheryl snorted.

As if the silent shock bulging his eyes wasn’t enough to give Dillon the vindication she deserved after her unjust humiliation, the wayward pancake chose that moment to unstick itself from the ceiling and crown Gus as the king of fools.

“Got something on your face, Gus,” she sneered as she plated up her own breakfast and took the spot next to Daisy. To her great disappointment, he merely put his hands up in surrender, then accepted the plate of meat and eggs Cheryl offered. He at least possessed the skill to read the room, leaning his hip on the counter to eat rather than sitting at the table. Rasso followed suit, and Cheryl took her usual seat.

“Dilly, I know you love your dad—”

“But,” Dillon huffed. She cut into her stack of pancakes a little more aggressively than necessary and with a little too much eye contact with her mother’s guests. Rasso twiddled his fingers in a cheeky wave. “There’s a ‘but’ in that sentence.”

Cheryl exhaled through her nose. “But I am an adult, and I can date if I’d like to, and I am not dating my packmates,” she concluded. “We just buried your sister and I needed my pack. That’s what werewolves do when we’re upset.” Dillon must not have hidden her watery eyes and wobbly lip as well as she thought, because her mother’s face softened with heartbreak. “We both needed to process things on our own in our own ways, pickle. Daisy wouldn’t be here if I made you spend time consoling me.”

The thought sobered the entire room, and they ate in a tense silence until Daisy broke it.

“Brett ran me off the road,” she admitted.

Dillon checked her pockets for her phone when a sudden rumble rattled the plates on the table, the windows, and her entire skeleton. She must have left it in her bag, then, and the violent pulse came from three pissed off werewolves.

Cheryl went unnaturally still. Politely set down her fork. “Excuse me?”

“He doubled back and pulled over to make sure I didn’t get out, I think. I saw his car, but he was making a bunch of vague threats the day before too.” Daisy frowned at her eggs, pushing them around the plate. “I shouldn’t have—”

“Don’t you dare say what you’re about to say,” Cheryl warned. “Don’t you dare. None of this is on you, do you understand me? Not a single bit. You didn’t make him hurt you, or yell at you, or run you off the road, Daisy-mae, all you ever did was want somebody to love you, and that is not a fucking crime. Pass me the people-bacon, Dilly.”

Dillon passed the plate across the table without question. “Holy shit, Cheryl.”

“Language, pickle.”

Dillon was wired as she laid down to sleep that night, kicking her feet and tossing and turning until finally, mercifully, her brain and body gave in around two in the morning. She’d feel like shit when she inevitably dragged her carcass out of bed, but it was fine; she had her sister back, her mom was still single, and she was right about Brett. She just had to figure out how to bring him to justice, but that was a problem for future Dillon. Present Dillon just wanted to sleep.

A weight sank down on the edge of her mattress, stirring her slightly back into awareness but not enough to jolt her awake. Cheryl checked on her a lot that week, so it was nothing new. She’d probably kiss her forehead and go back to her room. “Dillon, wake up, baby,” she whispered.

“Muh?”

“I need you to drive me somewhere. I’ll buy you burritos.”

Dillon pulled her blanket up higher and scrunched her nose up. She didn’t want burritos. She wanted to go back to sleep. “Why?” she grumbled. “It’s late.” The overhead light seared her eyes even behind her eyelids. Fuck it. She peeled one open to see what all the fuss was about. The other followed suit with gusto.

Her mother stood over her in her silky, auburn-furred glory, wolfed the fuck out and clearly ready to party; her gardening belt was strapped around her waist and loaded down with knives, a hammer, duct tape — “I thought werewolves didn’t need weapons to hunt,” Dillon slurred.

“These aren’t for hunting, pickle,” Cheryl growled. “They’re for making that piece of shit wish he never looked at your sister.” She pulled out a screwdriver, twirling it around between her fingers. “And to make sure he never looks at another girl again.”

Dillon had her helping-Cheryl-in-the-garden pants on and her backpack slung over her shoulder before her mother could utter another word. It was funny what a little time and a heaping spoonful of trauma could do to someone; just two years ago, she was worried about disposing of a body her mother left on the front lawn, but now? She was more than happy to help her make one.

She plugged the address Cheryl sent her into the car’s GPS, handed her mom the aux cord, and off they went to pay a visit to her sister’s murderous piece-of-shit ex.

A murderous piece-of-shit ex whose car was not in the driveway of his parents’ grotesquely huge house. “Cut the lights and stay here,” Cheryl hissed, and before Dillon could ask why and what she was doing, she was halfway across the yard, loping silently through the shadows to check all the windows. One must have been open, because her ass shimmied right inside and Dillon felt her heart stop. What if they got caught? Was her mom going to murder Brett’s parents? That wasn’t part of the deal, she didn’t sign up for —

Cheryl slammed into the car, a shirt in her mouth. “Drive, pickle!”

Once she stopped screaming and remembered how to breathe, Dillon floored it. “Where are we going?”

“To the edge of the neighborhood, I can catch his scent from there.” She took a deep whiff of the shirt and discarded it at her feet before rolling down the window. “Slow down at the intersection, I think I have it.” Cheryl hung her head out the window and sniffed a few times. Her snout abruptly jerked to the left. “That way, go! But stop at each intersection and I’ll tell you whether to turn or stay straight.”

They tracked him to a gas station a few miles down the road. Dillon pulled the car up behind a truck to stay out of sight while Cheryl kept a lookout. She didn’t know what he could possibly be doing that took half an hour, considering his was the only other car in the parking lot, and she didn’t want to know.

Cheryl climbed back in and rolled up her window. “Keep the lights cut until it’s too dark to see the road, and don’t follow him too close, not yet,” she said, keeping her voice low and steady. She was way too calm about what they were doing. What Dillon suspected they’d be doing next. Just what did her mom get up to on her runs besides hunting predators in the park? “You okay driving, or do you need me to shift back? I’m not going to make you do anything you’re uncomfortable with. We can even turn around if you want to, but once we leave this parking lot, we have to commit.”

“Commit to what?” Dillon didn’t think she wanted the answer. She wanted to be blissfully unaware until the very last minute.

Cheryl answered anyway. “We’re gonna run this motherfucker off the road and make him wish he didn’t survive.”

Dillon swallowed. She needed less time to think about it than she probably should have. He hurt Daisy, and if he wasn’t hurting Daisy, he’d hurt someone else, and no one was doing anything about it. It ended tonight. “Okay,” she breathed. “Let’s do this.”

She kept the lights off as they drove in silence until she couldn’t make out anything in the dark but Brett’s taillights. “I can’t see anymore,” she said.

Cheryl nodded. “Count of three, turn on the brights and lay on the horn. Three… two…”

Dillon clicked the headlights all the way up and slammed all her weight on the horn. Brett swerved, but stayed in his lane.

“Do you trust me?”

Dillon nodded, afraid to take her eyes off the road. Her mom might have been practically invincible, but Dillon was still very much a small human with bones that broke and skin that cut.

“Speed up, get beside him in the left lane.”

She pressed the accelerator as hard as she could with her limited reach.

When their windows were side by side, Cheryl barked, “Now flip his ass the bird.” Dillon gladly did so. Her mom rolled down her own window and snarled. Where she expected to see anger on Brett’s face, she saw only palpable fear. “He’s gonna run. Let him.” Sure enough, he sped up with a sudden screech of tires. “Keep on his ass, baby!”

It was exhilarating. Terrifying. Was that how Cheryl felt when she ran free during the full moon, hunting the worst of the worst?

When her mom screamed, “Clip his flank!” she jerked the wheel without hesitation. There was a sickening crunch like breaking bone and Brett’s candy-red car lurched hard towards the shoulder. His front tire caught on something and the whole thing went airborne, flipping sideways twice before landing on its side. It slid into the woods running along the interstate and Dillon hit the breaks, skidding to a squealing stop a hundred yards away, heart pounding, breath coming in ragged pants.

It was a lot easier to think about when it wasn’t real. When she wasn’t faced with the glossy smear of fluids Brett’s car left behind. When her bones didn’t ache from the impact.

“Holy shit,” she wheezed. “We just killed somebody. We fuckin’… oh my god. Oh my god, we killed—”

“Back it up, Dilly, come on, we can’t make assumptions,” her mom urged.

She nodded numbly and carefully reversed the car until her mom held up a hand to stop her.

Cheryl was out of the car before Dillon could even park, bounding down the hill on all fours with an excited howl. She’d never seen her mother hunt, just the aftermath, and for a few seconds, the logical, human part of her brain made her hesitate. They ran him off the road. If he survived, he’d be scared out of his mind and probably wouldn’t fuck with Daisy ever again.

It was the probably that boiled her blood and thawed her feet. He didn’t spare Daisy a second thought except to make sure she wasn’t getting back up. There wasn't room for probably.

They were going to make it a definite thing.

She could have her morality crisis later, after she’d taken the eye that he owed.

They found the car flipped on its side, slotted between two trees like a CD on a rack. The engine was still ticking to the beat of whatever country song warbled out on the radio’s dying breaths.

Dillon kicked her foot up on the door and leaned into the smashed window. “Sup, bitch,” she spat. Brett’s eyes weren’t quite focusing, and he squinted like she was blurry and swayed like she was floating around. He sure as hell didn’t have a problem seeing six-foot-nine Cheryl hulking behind her. “You’ve met my mom, yeah?” She leaned in closer to sneer in his face. “You’re about to meet your maker.” He got half a scream out before Cheryl ripped his door off with one hand and yanked him out of the car with the other.

“How did you like that taste of your own medicine, Mr. Lawson?” Cheryl asked sweetly, or as sweet as she could through an elongated snout and dozens of very big, very sharp teeth.

“How’d you… nobody else rem-remembers,” he slurred. He definitely had some kind of head trauma. Oh well. “You wrecked my fucking car, you psycho bitches.”

Cheryl pulled him closer in case he didn’t see her dozens of very big, very sharp teeth the first time. He kicked his feet uselessly. A mouse dangling in the talons of a flying owl. “Tell Little Red Riding Douche what the book said, Dilly-willy.”

Dillon climbed up on her mom’s back and held up the book. “When somebody dies tragically, it makes a shallow scar on the world and a deep one for people directly affected by their death,” she explained. “When they come back, it heals that shallow scar and erases it from everyone’s memories, but the deep scar stays. Cheryl and I were waiting up all night for Daisy to come home when your itsy-bitsy teenie-weenie havin’ ass decided your poor widdle feelies were too hurtsy-wurtsy over getting dumped like the trash you are.”

Brett bared his teeth. Cheryl bared hers. Brett pissed his pants.

“So we remember,” Dillon continued. “We remember how it felt to bury her, and you remember because you’re the reason we had to.” She pointed the book’s spine at Brett. “But you? There’s not gonna be enough of you left for your folks to bury.”

“Pick a piece to leave behind,” Cheryl sneered.

Dillon thought it would make her sick, the crunch of bone, the slick squelch of viscera being torn inch by inch from a living, screaming person. He was another human being, flesh and bone like her. It should have. She knew that on a logical level, she should have been repulsed. Guilty. Afraid.

Maybe losing her sister broke something in her. Maybe it had been broken long before that, when she butchered John Doe. Or even before that, when Darren and Cheryl divorced. Maybe, maybe, maybe. The maybes didn’t matter anymore. Life was too short for maybes.

Dillon pulled a filleting knife from Cheryl’s gardening belt. “I never liked you, Brett,” she said, gently pushing the point of the blade under his chin.

“Fuck you,” he spat, turning his head blindly to find the source of her voice. Cheryl hadn’t waited around to use the screwdriver. “Dunno why my Daisy even bothered with your emo little ass. I told her not to fuck with you anymore, it fucked up her image.” He coughed up a wad of phlegm and blood.

“First of all.” Dillon applied more pressure and drew blood. He screamed. “I’m not emo, I’m goth, there’s a fucking difference. Not that it’s gonna matter in about twenty minutes.” She looked up at her mom, who was lurking close by and picking her teeth like she was bored. Nice touch, Cheryl. “Ten if I get tired of you.” She pressed the knife in further. “And second, you lost the privilege to call her your Daisy the second you hit her, you worthless, pathetic little worm.”

Dillon didn’t know this version of herself. She didn’t know where it came from. It was twisted, angry, sadistic. She wasn’t any of those things.

But grief did funny things to people, made them do things they wouldn’t normally do.

And so did assholes.

“Pathetic? I make more in a week working for my dad than your whole family makes in a year. You’re nothing, noth—”

Brett’s tirade was cut short by a strangled yelp as Dillon brought her heel down between his legs until she felt a pop. “No, Brett. You made more in a week. Past tense, buddy.” She removed the knife. “And now you’re nothing but breakfast for the next couple weeks.”

“My dad—”

“Can fuck a better son into existence,” she barked, slicing her hand through the air. The ground shook. His body jolted and fell limp.

Cheryl nudged his prone form with her foot. Something sloshed around with the motion. “Shit, pickle, I think you liquefied his insides,” she muttered. “Might need to have a family meeting about—”

Something slammed into Dillon’s head, and she managed half a realization that it was the force of her mother catching her before the world went dark.

Dillon awoke to the world moving around her and a headache to rival the time she fell off the monkey bars in elementary school. Her upper lip felt tight, and when she rubbed at it, her hand came away crusted with blood.

“How’re you feeling, Dilly?” Cheryl’s voice was soft and gentle so as not to contribute to the pain she clearly expected.

Dillon grumbled in response, rolling her face across the cool surface of the door’s interior. The chill made it feel moderately better, so she opened the air vents on her side. Cheryl turned the air conditioning up without prompting. She heard the motors inside the door whir shortly before a strong gust of wind sucked her hair out the window. “Thanks,” she mumbled. Her throat was scratchy.

The car turned gently, but the speed stayed constant. She was about to ask where they were, but when she looked up, the sight of her mother hanging her head out the driver side window, ears back and mouth open, wiped all memory of potential questions from her mind.

Cheryl glanced back at her and a smile tugged at the corners of her maw. She leaned out further, rolling her head and lolling her tongue.

Dillon’s headache all but disappeared in the wake of a full on giggle fit, and when Cheryl howled with joy, she couldn’t help but do the same, though hers was much quieter and less haunting.

Her mom finally retreated into the car and rolled up the windows when they approached their neighborhood. There was a noise ordinance, after all, and the Homeowners’ Association was notoriously bitchy about it. The vice president once called the cops on a toddler greeting her mother, who had been deployed overseas, at nine p.m., because the volume of her enthusiasm exceeded the allowable limit. “So, we’re not telling Daisy what actually happened, right?” Cheryl proposed as they pulled into the garage.

Dillon snorted. “You got it, Mom.” She imagined the utter surprise on her mother’s face matched her own. She touched her fingers to her mouth to assuage the tingle; the word felt so foreign now, it was like she’d repeated a swear in another language. “Lights are still off,” she redirected, gesturing to the darkened upstairs windows. “I think we can get him down to the basement through the house, Daisy’s still asleep.”

Cheryl checked the tape binding the plastic tarp they wrapped around Brett’s body, ensuring the seals were tight and it wouldn’t leak on the carpet. Satisfied, she gathered the bundle into her arms and followed closely behind Dillon once she got the door unlocked. She wasn’t as silent as she was on a hunt thanks to the crinkly plastic, but between the two of them, they managed to get Brett’s body down to the basement and processed without waking Daisy.

As it turned out, they had enough time to get showers, change clothes, start a load of laundry, and get breakfast mostly done before the eldest Monroe daughter shambled into the kitchen, rubbing her eyes and yawning. “Turns out being dead isn’t the same as a long nap,” she sighed. “I feel like I haven’t slept in a month, it’ll take weeks to get back to normal.” She flopped down in her seat next to Dillon and sniffed at her plate, nearly drowning in her own salivation when one was set down in front of her. It smelled different than her sister’s, but not in a bad way. “What’s for breakfast?”

In unison, her mother and younger sister chirped, “Brett!”

She blinked slowly. Poked at the eggs. There were little greyish-pink bits hiding among the egg curds again, and her bacon had a different fat pattern than Dillon’s. “Mom…?” she hazarded.

“Yes, Daisy-mae?” Cheryl sank down across from her. Her wet hair was just starting to shrink up into gentle waves.

“Is this… actually Brett?”

Her mother took a few bites of her own bacon and eggs, and for a minute Daisy thought she wasn’t going to answer. “You read those articles I sent you, right?”

“Yes, Mom, I know I have different dietary needs now, and that’s fine, I’d just like to be in the loop if I’m helping you cover up a crime by eating the evidence.”

Cheryl grinned proudly. “That’s my girl,” she beamed. That was all the answer Daisy needed, and after another moment of hesitation, she tucked in.

A few days passed before the authorities located Brett’s car, but no Brett. From the evidence they did find, however — a few patches of thick fur, claw marks on nearby trees, the entire door ripped off — they concluded it was a bear attack. Coincidentally, there were quite a few empty liquor bottles covered in his DNA and fingerprints in his back seat, and in the absence of a body, they assumed he was drunk, drove off the road, and bears came across the wreckage. So while Brett thought he got away with murder for a little while, yet again the Monroe girls had him beat. They actually got away with it, and had enough meat in the freezer to last until the next full moon.

Two years later

The first sign something was wrong was how late Daisy was for breakfast — typically, she was up minutes after Cheryl to help out and was already on her second cup of coffee by the time Dillon dragged herself to the table. She took her new diet in stride, and was downright enthusiastic about it, learning and modifying recipes, mixing up her own spice blends, and even learning a few recipes for their mother and her packmates, too. That was just how Daisy was; she didn’t just make lemonade out of the citrus storm life threw at her, she made everything she could think of and used the leftover zest in a cocktail.

The second was her lack of pep. Even before she had her daily dose of caffeine, Daisy at least had a little bounce and bubble, but when she shambled down the stairs in an old t-shirt, looking like she hadn’t eaten in weeks and slept in just as long, Dillon knew something wasn’t right. “You okay, sis?” she asked. “Did you get a zombie cold?”

Daisy’s eyes took a while to follow her head as it turned to her sister, but they were still dull and unfocused. “I don’t… I’m not sure,” she replied, voice dazed, airy, quiet.

She went down in a heap of limbs.

Dillon shouted her name. No response.

Cheryl shook her. She was limp.

“No, no, nonono,” Dillon sobbed. “Not again, please, not again, you just opened your own studio, Daze, you can’t go yet, you can’t—”

Cheryl dropped a firm hand on her shoulder. “Go get your books, baby. I’ll call Denise. Her heart’s still beating, she’s still with us.”

It was the still that bothered Dillon. Still wasn’t a certain word. It wasn’t permanent. Still was what you said to people so they wouldn’t panic while the boat was sinking. It was still above water, sure, but it wouldn’t be forever. She sprinted up the stairs, not even acknowledging the pain in her chin, hip, and hand when she tripped on the top step in her haste. They didn’t have time for her to lick her wounds. She could do that later, when Daisy was back to being Daisy.

She had only just set down the last of her books on the table when the front door slammed open and Denise jogged in, kitted out in her hunting gear — khaki cargos, black tank top, boots, utility belt, entirely too many weapons for the current situation but sometimes, somehow, still not enough for the particular brand of nasties she hunted — with her short brown ponytail swishing behind her. “What can we do to help, girls?” She always called them girls, despite Cheryl being thirty-eight and Dillon nearly twenty-one; she was the second oldest in Cheryl’s friend group at forty-eight. “Where’s — oh, Daisy,” she gasped.

Dillon raised an eyebrow. The fresh piercing did not like the motion and she winced. “We?”

Denise’s veritable army filed in — Charlotte, Dottie, Regina, Joyce — followed by Cheryl’s pack, or at least the ones who were off work. Dillon counted ten people in total, but then Bailey, her mother’s newest (and shortest, clocking in at two whole inches taller than Dillon) packmate, squeezed out of the crowd to hoist Daisy into her arms and move her to the couch so she could at least be a corpse with dignity.

No, not corpse, that was a bad thought, and Dillon didn’t need to be thinking those things lest they come to pass.

Eleven people had dropped everything they were doing and hauled ass to the Monroe house. For Daisy. Dillon quickly wiped the tears from her eyes and swore. She’d already put eyeliner on that morning. Fuck.

“Move, bitches!” Moira’s voice was the most heavenly sound, bellowing over the din of the gathered crowd’s planning and brainstorming. Regina didn’t even chastise her daughter for her piss-poor manners. Not with bigger things to worry about. The familiar jingle of her best friend’s heavy pants was the only warning Dillon got before she was tackled nearly off her feet in a tight hug. Her shoulder-length shock of pink hair enveloped Dillon in the familiar comfort of strawberry sparkle body spray. “Show me what to read, Pugsley.” They’d called each other Wednesday and Pugsley for as long as Dillon could remember, because even when they wanted to kill each other, deep down they had an unbreakable bond. Moira dropped her voice to a stage whisper. “I brought the sacrifices.”

“Please don’t sacrifice us,” Faith quipped, dropping an armload of books next to Dillon’s.

Rosie, ever the perfect twin, was right behind her with an entire basket of baked goods and other snacks. “Mmhm, we’d be really rotten sacrifices. Scream the whole time. Mom and the other church ladies sent this, we were at Bible study.”

“When Daisy wakes up, I’m so thanking her for picking today to pull a Princess Aurora.” Dillon appreciated the when, and knew Faith picked the word on purpose. When was certain. When was sure.

Bonnie dropped her backpack in the only empty spot left on the table. She was the most recent addition to their friend group, having been dragged in by the twins a year prior when they met her in the local used book store. They liked her vibe, and thus Bonnie Lucas was adopted into the fold. “My cousin’s in town. You know, the one that’s spooky by our standards,” she explained, pulling out beat-up notebooks that smelled like incense and books that looked like they might have been bound in human skin.

“Damien?” Moira grimaced. It took a lot to make her cringe, but Bonnie’s cousin was definitely a lot.

Bonnie snorted. “Yeah, Eugene. Don’t call him Damien, it makes his ego annoying. Anyway, apparently he’s a necromancer for a private firm that like, brings rich old people back from the dead for succession issues, or whatever.” She scrunched up her nose. “Sorry, ‘resurrectionist’” she mocked. “He said it sounds like your ritual is wearing off.”

“What do you mean ‘wearing off’? I put her soul back in her body and she’s been taking really good care of herself,” Dillon sputtered.

“Yeah, he said you’re a fucking badass for managing it without any training whatsoever, by the way. And if you want a job that pays better than night stocking at Sprawlmart, he’ll vouch for you,” Bonnie replied idly as she flipped through her cousin’s books. “Here, look.” She set one of the possibly-skin books in front of Dillon and pointed to the page she was looking at. “This isn’t the same book you used, but see how this one says it lasts… five years, but in really pretentious magic terms? There should be a follow-up ritual in your book.”

Dillon looked through the pile of books on the table for the one the mysterious graveyard woman left behind, then thumbed through the pages until she found her ritual — still as vague as ever — and turned one more page. There it was right at the top, in bolder lettering than the rest:

TO BE EXECUTED BEFORE THE THIRD ANNIVERSARY OF RISING.

“Fuck,” she sobbed, quickly turning her head so the escaping tear wouldn’t damage the pages any further.

Moira looked up from the thick tome she was digging through. “Why can’t she just use that other one? It lasts longer.”

“Because it has to be the ritual specifically designed to follow the one used to bring back the person in the first place,” Bonnie explained, holding up something that looked like a textbook.

Rosie cocked her head and pushed her glasses up with a finger when they threatened to fall off with the motion. “And why can’t Dam— uh, Eugene do it?”

“Because he’s a fucking prick,” Moira scoffed.

“Because he probably costs money we don’t have,” Dillon corrected.

“You’re both right, but also wrong. Dillon has to do it. It’s her energy binding Daisy’s soul to her body.”

Faith furrowed her brows. “Well, why can’t we just let, ugh, this sounds so insensitive, Dill, I’m sorry.” She took a deep breath. “Why can’t we just let Daisy… uh, leave and then someone else can bring her back with a ritual that lasts longer?”

Dillon felt her heart shatter as Bonnie’s RBF softened like butter next to an oven. “If her soul gets detached, that’s it. Game over. People can only be resurrected once per reincarnation. She has to be refreshed by the third anniversary of her resurrection, by Dillon, out of that book, or Daisy’s gone for real this time.” Her lip wobbled, but the mask was back before Dillon could blink. “I’m really sorry, Dill. I wish I knew sooner.”

The twins called over the group before Dillon could tell them not to. They were just trying to help. Everyone was just trying to help, but their help was overwhelming, and she felt the heartbreak of inadequacy roiling within her. She couldn’t figure out the problem herself, other people had to step in and fix the mess she made, because she was stupid, and weak, and—

“Hey, stop,” Moira urged softly, pulling her into a hug to shield her from view. “You haven’t fucked around with magic in two years, Pugs, and you fucked around with it before without knowing anything about it. You can ask for help with this.”

She couldn’t, though, this was her mess, and her sister —

“You know Daisy would tell you the same thing, Dillon, you know she would.” Moira pushed her away to dab her sleeve under Dillon’s eyes. “Would I lie to you?”

She wouldn’t, and she was right. Dillon shook her head and looked up at the expectant crowd. “I have to—” Her voice cracked as she choked on a thousand emotions all at once. “I need—”

Moira stepped up and placed her hands on her best friend’s shoulders. “Daisy’s batteries are losing their juice, folks, that’s all,” she announced with all the confidence of a lighthouse in a storm. “Pugsley here just needs to reset her zombie clock, and we have a few months for her to train before Daisy goes critical.”

“What happens in a few months?” Cheryl asked.

Dillon tried to look everywhere but directly at her mom, but the tears came anyway, because no matter where she looked, she saw family. “We lose Daisy.”

“Ah, shit.” Regina’s brows sank as she dropped down to Dillon’s level and wrapped her in a hug. “We’re not gonna lose Daisy, pickle, you’re both Monroes. Monroe girls are unstoppable,” she cooed, peppering the top of Dillon’s head with kisses. She was the only other person that could call her ‘pickle’ and get away with it; she’d been Aunt Reggie since Dillon and Moira met in preschool and bonded over a vampire cartoon they both loved. Daisy and McKinleigh, Moira’s older sister, becoming fast friends sealed her place as an honorary Monroe. She could use Cheryl’s dumb nicknames if she wanted.

Her hair tickled Dillon’s neck and ears, and when she turned her head to escape it, she only managed to get the black shoulder-length waterfall up her nose. She tried not to sneeze on Regina’s very nice fleece jacket, even though she knew she was already smearing the remnants of her eyeliner all over her shoulder, but she couldn’t fight it. She bruised the bridge of her nose on Regina’s shoulder.

“D’you get snot on my jacket, missy?”

“Sorry, Aunt Reggie,” Dillon grumbled, wiping at the spot with her own hoodie sleeve.

A small noise in the living room drew everyone’s attention, and from the immediate, ecstatic uproar, Dillon knew Daisy was awake. “I need to tell her,” she insisted. “I need to be the one she hears it from. I brought her back, this is my—” Moira yanked a handful of her hair, knowing damn well what was about to come out of her mouth. “This is my thing.” Not much better than blaming herself, but at least Moira didn’t pull her hair again.

Regina let her go to start shooing people out of the house. Denise and a few of Cheryl’s packmates stayed behind ‘to help out around the house,’ which was code for ‘Cheryl didn’t want to be alone but was too proud to ask in front of a crowd.’

Dillon found Daisy sitting up on the couch, staring absently out the window and clutching a blanket to her chest. She looked confused, lost, unsure how she got there and where she was in the first place. “Daisy?” She perched as carefully as possible on the edge of the cushions, caging her sister between herself and the back of the couch. “How are you feeling?”

“Like I fainted in the kitchen and got hit by a train,” Daisy replied. She sounded distant, and when she finally turned to look at Dillon, her eyes weren’t as clear as they usually were. Was she going blind? “Did everybody come here for me?”

Dillon nodded. “Yeah, you had us worried for a second.” How did she even approach the subject? She couldn’t just say ‘hey, so, you’re dying, sorry.’ There wasn’t a segue in the world that would cushion that blow enough.

Lucky for her, she didn’t have to come up with one. “I’m dying, aren’t I?” Daisy was so matter-of-fact, so calm, so… accepting about it, it broke Dillon’s heart all over again. “I’ve felt a little off all week, but I didn’t want to worry anybody.”

“Daze, you can’t do that anymore. This isn’t a head cold you can sleep off.” Dillon took a deep breath to stave off the tears. She needed to be brave. Daisy was facing her second death with grace and—

“I’m scared, Dill,” she said softly.

So much for sucking it up. After several agonizing minutes of painful sobs wracking her body, she found herself leaning heavily against Daisy, her sister’s arm wrapped protectively over her shoulders and cradling Dillon against her collarbone while she played with her messy mop of hair, brushing out the tangles. Daisy was comforting her, when she should have been the one comforting her sister. “I just have to do another ritual to refresh your binding, or whatever, but I’m scared, too.”

“Because you haven’t messed with the magic stuff since Brett?”

Dillon made a noise in her chest.

“Mom told me what happened,” Daisy sighed, holding Dillon tighter so she couldn’t whip a betrayed look at Cheryl. “I asked, Dill. You know she can’t lie to us, it would break her. You scared yourself, didn’t you?”

“I didn’t try to… to—”

“Turn his guts into a smoothie?”

A bitter snort snuck its way out. “Yeah. That. I didn’t tell it to do that, I was just… angry. I was so angry, and I just wanted to shut him up, and I put my hand out like—” She repeated the motion from the woods, slicing her hand through the air in front of her. Nothing happened. She didn’t know why she expected anything different. “But it hurt, Daze. It hurt bad.”

Daisy hummed. “Maybe because you used it as a weapon, and a really big one at that. You’ll tear muscles if you try to sprint a mile without training or stretching. Magic is the same thing, isn’t it? Just using a muscle to bend the world to your will?”

Dillon shrugged.

“How long do we have?”

“Until next July. The twentieth. The ritual only lasts three years, and we can’t use a different one to make it last longer.” Dillon knitted her brows. “I’m so stupid, I should have studied it more and maybe I would have known that and picked a different one, or—”

Daisy shushed her with a squeeze. It wasn’t as strong as her hugs used to be. “It’s fine, Dill. I believe in you,” she said, with all the confidence she could muster in her weakened state. “You did it once, right? You can do it again. And even if you can’t, if the worst comes to pass, I won’t be upset. I got to see my family again and spend a few more years with you, and I’ll get to say goodbye this time. You gave me that, you know?”

Dillon’s lip wobbled. Her throat seized around everything she wanted to say and everything she couldn’t find the words for. She had to do it now. She had to, and she would.

Because Daisy believed she could.

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[krystlind]

Just had a phone call with Jean. wow I just really broke open

she said she noticed sadness in my eyes

a year ago... that’s what Kristie from yoga retreat said

it’s people who see a flicker of it.. through the happy veneer front I have. where does this sadness come from? she wants to be loved

not a coincidence that this morning, I was crying, driving the car home, and crying out to God. “I can’t do it like this anymore. put me somewhere else. I can’t keep feeling this way.” which turned into another part of my anger. “I need help. I can’t keep doing it on my own.” bringing up the resentment I have towards dad and mom for never wanting to help me out. that I’m always on my own. all of that. fighting for myself.

wishing that I had some kind of help. a partner. an investor. I said “anything God! please I’m tired.” and then I’m mad because I should be so grateful. look at what’s around you! I acknowledge all of that, those emotions too. took paco on a walk, and took in the blue water and sky. and kept walking, and declaring “I’m grateful for my friends. I’m grateful for my home. I’m grateful for this beautiful weather.” and even better, “I’m grateful that I can choose my day.”

i’m tormented by what I’m not putting out there, what I’m not saying or creating, why can’t I just show up like them?

and then I talked to Jean today. and it made me see. I need help and to ask for help. and maybe I haven’t been so good. at admitting when something is wrong inside. I’ve been really good at keeping a high vibration. but something deep inside me wants to be loved. she feels alone and scared. 

I threw a tantrum to God. and that’s when it started feeling real. like all filters off, just like a little kid again. I guess that’s how I want to feel like. i’m on the floor, typing this with paco below me, i wanted ice cream...

Jean said: “It’s okay to want to be taken care of.” I thought of how I look for that.. from a man. and I shamed myself for it. I shared how from a young age I didn’t feel like dad would treat me like a liability, I guess I lost my trust in him, so I promised myself I wouldn’t let someone make me feel that way, I’d run far away. I’d be so independent you couldn’t touch me. i guess that’s the little girl I’m still meeting.

Jean said: “I’m sorry I made you feel you had to fix this” referencing after I had a monologue with her and Jonathan about my next transition of understanding about dating, my body, feeling safe, etc. and her saying that I have to be healing something individually. “I’m sorry if I shamed you about that.”

The best thing I heard: “I’m sorry you’re made to feel you have to fix all of this by yourself, and it’s your fault. it’s not your fault.”

It’s not my fault. I’m not broken, I am so beautiful.

it roots so far back.

the brokenness I’m scared to share, or talk about

my ocd, my body relationship, my antics, my sexualization

dad telling me when I started growing, to stop myself, and I took that to heart. I wanted to trust every word he said. I saw he was smart and I wanted to make him proud. so I did that. and it affected how I would develop. then how guys would see me. how I would feel undesirable. this would turn into me oversexualizing myself later. and now this. my body is dealing with this. the antics. 

the “taking care of” habits (mentally always calculating how I would “fill” my “gap” and “take care” of myself, a food, an experience, etc)

None of this is my fault. none of this is mine to heal alone.

How I feel so much weight and am one person. How I am so frustrated at not doing the showing up thing.

Jean said “You started a movement. You built this and it wasn’t there. You are always there for everyone else. No one is there for you. You cared about their mental health. what about yours. It’s okay that you want love, support, a partner.”

and maybe right now, it’s about

looking to be helped. not putting out stuff all the time. letting myself be taken care of. letting myself have love. receive love. 

Letting love in.

“You don’t heal this on your own, it’s with someone who can help you learn how to be touched safely. someone who will take their time, who will treat you respect, and be gentle. you deserve that. You deserved to be treated like that, to be loved like that.” <3

[sparklypinkflightsuit]

The Witching Hour: Chapter 9

Pairing: Detective!Bob Floyd x Reader x Sheriff!Bradley Bradshaw

WitchAU

Warnings: Fluff, Angst, Smut, Love Triangle, Drinking, Swearing, Witchcraft, Ritual Sacrifice, Danger

- Chapter 8 Here -

———————————————

18+ Only After this Point

———————————————

You roused awake when the car came to a halt, the morning light barely shifting from darkness but yellow lamplights lit up the cabin of the truck like the sun was high in the sky.

You jolted up in your seat, “Are we here?”

Bradley chuckled, unbuckling his seatbelt and turning to you, “We’ve still got another 7 hours, I just need to get gas, and maybe coffee. You want anything?”

“Mmmm, coffee please.” You hummed with a sleepy grin.

Bradley grinned and left the truck, while you rubbed your eyes and adjusted to the bright lights of the gas station. You watched as early risers filtered in and filled up their cars, looking half as exhausted as you felt, and you had to stifle a yawn.

Bradley returned shortly after with two coffees and a box of doughnuts, you laughed as you took them from him.

“Now this really is a cliche, a cop with doughnuts?” You chuckled.

“Hey, first; I’m Sheriff. Second, I haven’t had a doughnut in 5 years. How do you think I look like this?” He smirked, wiggling his eyebrows.

You rolled your eyes and grinned, opening the box and handing him a doughnut as he pulled away and set back towards your destination.

“So… I really do wanna know more about you.” You mumbled in between bites.

“Where do you want me to start?”

“At the beginning.” You quipped, and Bradley laughed.

“Okay, I was born on June 27th 1984 to Nick and Carole Bradshaw. My dad was Sheriff of our town for as long as I can remember, the best Sheriff, and my mom was the best mom in our town, which in turn… ya know, makes me the best Bradley in the whole town-“

You cut him off with a roll of your eyes, “You’re stalling. I already know you’re the best Bradley in the whole of that town. Tell me things I need to know.” You smiled at him.

Bradley grinned, “Okay fine, but get them tissues ready.” He joked.

Bradley told you about how his dad died on the job when he was just 4, and how it was really hard on his mom. She had to raise him on her own and never remarried, rendering Bradley an only child. He told you how he would have loved to have more family, because his mom passed away from a long standing illness when he was 16.

His godfather took him in, but when he was old enough Bradley moved back to his home town to become a cop, and to walk in his fathers footsteps.

You asked Bradley why he was still single and he’d told you that work mostly took priority and he’d never found the one. When he said that his eyes lingered on your for a long time, until you eventually reminded him to keep his eyes on the road.

“For what it’s worth, any girl would be lucky to have you.” You said softly, as a comfortable lull fell over you.

Bradley was silent for a moment, before he took a deep breath. “Are you going back to him? Once we find him?”

You looked over at Bradley, surprised at his question. “I’m not sure, I’m still mad at him.”

Bradley looked hurt that you hadn’t immediately said no, but he powered through, “Is there… do I stand a chance?”

“I don’t know Bradley.” You said simply.

Bradley cleared his throat and nodded once, refocusing on the road.

You felt bad, you really shouldn’t have dragged him into this. Your feelings for Bradley were growing and so a momentary lapse in judgement could now cause a very complicated love triangle.

Truth was you weren’t sure if you’d forgive Bob for leaving. You understood why he did it, but the way he did it broke you.

Maybe Bradley would stick around and end up being the one, eventually, but you knew deep down that what you had with Bob was different.

Not just a little crush, or a growing feeling. It was instant with Bob… not even that, it was a feeling you had before you had even met him.

It was as old as the earth.

The rest of the drive was awkward, but eventually Bradley said he was tired and you pulled into a Motel. You wanted to get to Boston as quickly as possible so offered to drive, but Bradley pointed out that you’d both need to be clear headed when you got there.

You agreed reluctantly and Bradley stopped the car. You looked around at the grotty Motel, trying to hide your disappointment as the 1 single star dangled limply from the sign, flickering as the frayed wires gradually pulled away from their circuit board.

“I can get us separate rooms if you’d like?” Bradley offered sullenly as he got out of the car.

You shot him a surprised look, “No, I’d rather we stick together. Is that okay with you?” You quirked an eyebrow.

Bradley mumbled an “Mmhmm.” And walked ahead, not bothering to wait for you.

You ran after him, annoyance starting to take over. He was the one who knew you were already involved, he knew what he was getting himself into and now he was acting like a hurt schoolboy.

“Brad!” You grabbed his arm to stop him from storming away.

“What!?” He snapped as he whipped around.

You let go in surprise and looked up at him as if you’d just touched an open flame, shock at his sudden outburst.

Bradley’s face softened as he realised what he’d done, “Bree… I’m sorry. I’m just… I just need a minute to clear my head. Please?” He apologised, his voice now soft, gentle.

You nodded, and watched as Bradley turned away from you, rubbing his face with both hands in what was clearly frustration.

You felt a pang of guilt for causing this, just days ago he was the happy-go-lucky, carefree Sheriff, probably not a worry in the world in terms of his emotions, but now…

You grit your teeth at the thought that suddenly popped into your head.

——————————————

Bradley had booked you into a room and asked if you were hungry. When you told him you were fine, he said he was going to try and get some sleep and you should too, he would hit the road once you both felt rested.

“Sleep well.” You gave him a week smile as he turned away from you, and just before he went to sit on the bed, you quickly crossed over to him l, turned him to face you and hugged him. A long hug so tight you could feel his heart racing and his muscles ripple under your hold.

You looked up at him as you let go and kissed him. A lengthy peck at best, but it made your heart race and put a soft smile on Bradley’s plush lips.

“What was that for?” He hummed.

“Nothing,” you grinned, “just wanted to do it.”

Bradley quickly fell asleep, his exhaustion from being awake for well over 24 hours now taking a hold of him, and once you heard the soft snoring noises that emitted from his lips, you decided to make your move.

You were about to pull a Bob.

You knew it was horrible, but you’d leave a note this time.

“Dearest Bradley,

I’m so sorry to do this to you. I feel horrible writing this letter but I know in my heart it’s the right thing.

You’ll be safer this way. You should never have been dragged into this mess in the first place.

I’m taking the truck, and you can have me arrested if you want, but once I get Bob I’ll come back for you and I’ll suffer the consequences then.

I want you to know that I really do have feelings for you, I really, really care about you Bradley, and that’s why I’m doing this. You have a part of my heart, now and forever, but the other part of my heart is in danger and I need to be there for him.

I hope you’ll forgive me.

Love, Bree.”

You left the note on a chair by the door, carefully and quietly grabbing the keys for the truck. Once you’d taken a second to look back at Bradley once more, you left the room quietly and made your way to the truck.

You climbed in and got your bearings before starting the engine and backing out of there.

You drove quickly, over the speed limit more than once, and within a few hours you had arrived.

Boston.

What Bob was doing here you had no idea, the plan was New York, but maybe he’d gotten turned around, or thought Boston was the safer option, you weren’t sure.

As you drove into the city his voice rang around your skull.

“Bree, help! I’m in some sort of warehouse, it… it has a big green door, and I think I can hear seagulls, please, hurry!”

Seagulls, he must be near the harbour. You began to drive towards the water, following the road where you could and keeping an eye out for any buildings with green doors.

Eventually you ran out of unexplored area that connected to a street, so you parked the truck and decided to continue on foot.

You walked and walked, up and down little side streets and alley ways, down by the harbour itself and slightly inland, you walked until your feet screamed at you to stop.

You must have walked for close to 2 hours when something caught your eye.

You turned as a green door creaked open, inviting you in.

Without hesitation you moved towards it and peered inside.

“Bob?” You whispered. It was pitch black inside and you had to adjust your eyes as you edged in.

“Robby, are you here?” You said slightly louder, trying to make out any objects in the warehouse.

“Bree?” You heard a tired, surprised voice croak.

“Bob?” You whimpered, lurching towards his voice.

“No, Bree, stop! It’s a trap!” He croaked out with all of his might.

And the big green door closed behind you, submerging you in total darkness.

You stopped in your tracks and listened, panting and struggling to tune out the rush of blood in your ears.

“Bob.” You said. “Are they in here with you?”

“Bree, Bree help me! Help me! Help me you stupid little cow!” Bobs voice rang out, in your head this time, before a cackling laughter sprang from the corner of the dark room. You couldn’t see her, but you knew it was Gillian.

Bob stifled a sob, “Bree, I’m so sorry, it wasn’t me calling for you. They were luring you here because I wouldn’t.”

Your blood suddenly went cold. It wasn’t the fact that they lured you here, it wasn’t the fact that you’d fallen for a trap, but the fact that had they not lured you here, Bob would likely have died.

“The boy’s right, sweetie. And you know it probably would have been easier to just sacrifice him, I mean he was more than willing to take your place, but after you fucked me over and made me chase you, I figured… maybe it would be more fun this way.” Gillian giggled maniacally.

“Well you got what you wanted, I’m here! Let Bob go and you can have me.”

“No, no… that’s not what I meant. It would be more fun to have you both.”

Suddenly candles flickered to life across the room, and you had to shield your eyes from the sudden brightness.

When you lowered your hand you saw Bob tied to a load bearing beam in the middle of the room, his eyes were pleading for you to leave, to get out as fast as you could.

But you couldn’t, and not because of the fact that your aunts followers were standing around you in a circle, enclosing you and Bob, preventing you from getting to the door, but because there was no way you would leave Bob.

“Bob…” you said calmly, “I’m getting you out of here, okay?”

You weren’t sure how, but you knew you’d die trying.

——————————————

- Final Chapter Here -

[ecodweeb]

Toaster: 2014 BMW i3 REx

After converting the daily drivers into electric, I was ready to add it into the long-haul mix. The Range-extended BMW i3 let us hold the battery charge at 75% and run off the 2-gallon repurposed-BMW-motorcycle engine/generator to charge the battery/power the motor in a series fashion. Its quirkiness was on the level of a Volvo, and it was actually the first Electric Car I’d ever ridden in.

Service Stats

In Service Date: 7/30/2016 In Service Mileage: 13,134 Out of Service Date: 9/15/2020 Out of Service Mileage: 67,031 Service Life: 4 years, 53,892 miles Avg. Miles/yr: ~13,473

The History & Story

My husband, who works for a BMW dealer, brought home a dealer demo 2014 i3 Tera to drive while volunteering with a BMW Car Club of America Teen Driving School. I liked the car, but it reminded me of a pug and that made me take pause. It felt weird, and it was made with weird materials. But as my husband said, BMW’s attitude was “this is the future, deal with it.” Ah, so very German. What I remember of our weekend with the i3 was that using a long extension cord (which in hindsight we know wasn’t up to snuff to safely charge the car) will reduce the added range significantly. 

So why then, did I buy one? Well, the gas engine did mean I could road trip with it and keep transporting rescue animals on weekends. It also was going to do it cheaper than the Mazda5 we had at the time. So after putting together a plan, I settled on a vehicle in Atlanta, Georgia. The dealer beat my out the door offer, much to the complete shock of the salesman, and I got 1.0% financing plus $2500 off for being a recent college graduate -- and to date this discount is the only thing I believe my diploma has gotten me. I digress, the deal worked out on this vehicle was really good -- less than what I was paying on the van.

I sold the Van to my dad, who used it to shuttle around my grandfather who had recently moved in with him and my mother. Dad got the van for payoff plus trade of his 2001 Passat with well over 150,000 miles on it. The Passat’s air conditioner gave out before I’d even crossed into Alabama from Mississippi, and there was no way I was driving another car without air conditioning through the heart of the south in July again. Whatever the dealer agreed to, I was taking that i3 home. When they handed me the keys the guy said it had 53 miles of estimated range, how did I plan to take it home to North Carolina? And I said, “I plan to drive it. You can refill the gas tank like any other car.” The look on his face was priceless.

The drive home was an adventure as I left the dealership and didn’t even know how to use the cruise control on the car. I hurried to IKEA where we bought the first part of our new sofa, and then hurried back home. After stopping for fuel in Spartanburg, South Carolina, the car threw a drive train error but said continued driving is possible. I made it the rest of the way home without any issue, other than the warning message popping up. 

This was a really good little car to me. When it had big issues -- like when the cooling fan failed and the Range Extender wouldn’t turn on, or it had a flat tire! -- was close to home and in the best possible conditions. Even with the fuel filter door release broke and I had to use the emergency pull, it was on the way home from a rescue run. The little car was so base it didn’t even have DC fast charging, but at the time the DC fast network didn’t really exist -- Electrify America wouldn’t be a thing for nearly three years when I bought this car. I knew at that time that getting a DC charging car was a moot point, as we’d be looking to replace it in 3-5 years time anyway.

I loved the traditions with this car, like the waltz to open the back door and bringing home our Christmas trees. I rented this car to my best friend on Turo so he would have a million dollar insurance policy to drive it down to Florida and back -- the longest trip this vehicle has ever been on, over 100 miles longer than the Canada trip!

I will always hold a special place in my heart for this little car, it was my first and only BMW and I had a very good ownership experience with it overall. 

[gallavichfanficlibrary]

Hi guys! Is there any good fics that just happen to not have a lot of tags? Like I’ve seen some reeeaally good works that have been tagged only like “Ian/Mickey” and nothing more, and I’ve been wondering if you know some more examples of those ^3^

Hey! That’s an interesting question, you’re absolutely right. There are a few fics that aren’t/barely tagged or tagged with something unhelpful like ‘french toast’ :D We’re gonna list some authors that have a few fics like that, and then some separate fics we wanna share :)

romanticalgirl:

 - Bon Appétit - Ian can't stand the new chef at the restaurant he works at. Until he gets to know him.

 - OSHA Compliant series - Post 5x12. It's been two years since they broke up. And Mickey's got his life together. Which means it's about time for something to come along and screw it up.

 - I Must Be Lonely series - ‘the fire alarm went off at 3 am and now the cute guy from the flat next door is standing next to me in his underwear’ AU

toraten

- Muse - Interior designer!Mickey and dancer!Ian.

- Ian Gallagher And All Of His Mistakes -  In which everything is about the same, except that Ian and Mickey meet each other a little later in life, and manage to make a million mistakes anyway.

MintSauce:

 - Take Me In - Mickey's Dad finds out about Mickey being gay and even though Ian's not there, but he finds the Gallaghers are still willing to take Mickey in.

 - The Halfway House - After his mum took off, Ian sort of expected he'd wind up in foster care. What he didn't expect was to meet a sort of dirty boy called Mickey Milkovich there.

anythingbutgrief

 -  Scar Tissue - Ian and Mickey go to have dinner with that cop who let Mickey go in 4x11 and his husband Carlos..

 - Dugout - "When did you start loving me?"

joidianne4eva:

 - Like Fathers, Like Son (Yevgeny Milkovich Is A Horrible Criminal) - Ian has to come and bail out his son and his husband who got in trouble together.

 - Ride (On Me) - Ian was away on deployment, which means he hasn’t gotten laid in seven months. Some really nice smutty story.

milominderbinder:

 - the spaces between my fingers - Amanda’s POV on Ian and Mickey at the Gallagher’s dinner.

 - a thousand and one ways to show you care - In which Mickey cooks for Ian, washes his clothes, stays over more than four nights a week, helps him out with random stuff, and is, essentially, his ghetto husband.

Don’t forget to check out these writers’ other fics!

*** Some very good fics separately:

Fast Car - 5x12 fix-it. Sammi didn’t shoot Mickey. Mickey steals a car, takes Ian for a ride, and they talk their break up through.

Mythical Unicorn -  Lip can count on one hand how many times something has genuinely surprised him over the years. What’s not surprising is that Mickey Milkovich is responsible for most of them.

so collect your scars and wear them well - Ian and Mickey stumble home after the fight at the Alibi and deal with the aftermath of the war they just won.

Crazy Stupid Shit - Some great smut set around S3.

i'm a gallagher...get me out of here! - a gallagher house quarantine fic.

lucky streak - Ian’s POV on Mickey and their relationship in S3.

Pills & Flowers - Mickey goes to pick up Ian's meds for him, and on his way back, he decides to get him a little something else.

it's brighter now - Someone mentions that they don’t look like a couple, so Mickey learns to call Ian his boyfriend in front of other people.

That list got too long, but there are more interesting fics with no or few tags. If you're curious about finding more, go on ao3 in the Ian/Mickey tag and exclude as many ‘additional tags’ in the filters as possible :) You will find some!

[ashintheairlikesnow]

Learn to Fly

CW: Self-loathing, some internalized victim-blaming, references to parental death and grief, VERY vague reference to past noncon once or twice

Note: I made a decision to switch a little of the timeline around, so Laken and Chris’s breakup at this point happens after the original conversations about the Speak Out Arc start happening but before the Olympics themselves. I’m folding this bit into the larger Speak Out Arc.

Follows Time Apart and It Doesn’t Work As Well As You’d Hoped

-

He curls up on the couch in the coffeeshop, sipping something warm he barely tastes. It might have coffee in it - he feels a little drowsy, and that usually happens when there’s just a little caffeine.

Maybe that’s just because he hasn’t slept since Jake was hurt, not really. And he’s slept even less since... since he and Laken broke up.

Outside, there's unseasonable heavy rain. The clouds are low and heavy, a deep gunmetal gray that blocks out the light and has the streetlights on at 9:30 in the morning. The raindrops seem less to fall than to slam into the ground with terrible violence. 

The baristas talk in low voices about how grateful they are for the rain, burying the wildfires outside the city in a deluge the heat can’t overcome. Chris likes the rain, too, if only because it reflects the inside of him, suggests that the world can tell he is a storm within himself and reflects it to him.

He takes another sip.

He hasn’t showered in three days. His hair is dulled with it, like a penny left too long in the dirt.  He’s dressed himself like he used to, back before when he was still learning he was a person and not a pet - in one of Jake’s hooded sweatshirts over his compression shirt, so oversized on him it’s nearly a tunic, and a pair of mesh basketball shorts. His knees still look knobby, he thinks.

He can see the ghosts of the bruises there that used to never quite heal before his Sir sent him to his knees and made new ones to lay over them. He can see a couple of scars, some from training when the baton would crack into the backs of his legs and send him dropping like a stone, some from gymnastics, some from just being a kid.

Chris’s eyes lower, to look at his own hands holding his coffee cup. He put star stickers on his nails last night, and a few of them have already peeled off. Those that remain glitter, just a little. 

Something about the sight of it - the memory of when he put star stickers on Laken’s cheekbones at a concert until they sparkled under the starlight, laughing, a blur of bright eyes and dark hair - makes his throat nearly close, sends a new rush of tears to burn hot behind his eyes.

He has to close them to hold them back.

“You’ve had a hard time of late, have you, then?”

The voice is a rumble, cracked with decades of cigarettes and too much liquor, but Chris remembers it, anyway. At least, he remembers it now.

He turns to look up at the old man, in his shirt and slacks, a bit bent with age. There’s a merry twinkle in his slightly rheumy eyes, though, that shows that a young man is still there, under an old man’s experiences. There’s a slight smile on his face, warm and welcoming. 

Chris swallows, struggling to find the words. They flit away from him, he has to chase them down, but eventually he manages to clear his throat and says, “I, I, um. I know you. You, you, you knew my dad.”

“I did, at that. Worked with him for years.” The old man settles onto the other end of the couch, giving Chris plenty of space, a nice wide berth for safety. “What’s got you looking like a television commercial for depression, hm, Tristan?”

No one calls him that. 

Chris feels his heart twist, a little. 

By the time they saw the meteor, Tris, it was already too late for anything but a blink or two. When it touched down into land, it was so big the end of it was still in space. Can you imagine anything so big? Can you?

No, Dad.

 The earthquakes alone would have been immense thousands of miles away. Imagine, you’re eating leaves, living your life, and you see a shadow - and then in an instant, the world is shaking and you’re breathing glass. How does life go on after that?

I, I, I don’t know, um, um... how how does it?

It just does. That’s what’s amazing, Tris. It just goes on.

“Nothing. I, I, I broke up with my, my partner is all.”

“Hm, that nice young person who comes with you to the shops?” The old man nods, slowly. He’s got his own cup of coffee, plain black, steaming gently into the air-conditioning. Outside, the rain creates a curtain that walls them off from everything else. Chris can’t even see all the way across the street. He can barely see a woman with an umbrella racing from her car into the nail salon place off to the side. 

“Yeah, them. I’m, um. It wasn’t anything they they they did.”

It’s something I did.

It’s something I am.

It’s something I’ll never stop being.

“Well, breakups do happen now and again. Usually the one who does the leaving isn’t the one who does the moping about and staring at rain, though.”

“I didn’t want to.” Chris sits back, keeping his coffee cup in one hand. The other drops to his stomach, to tap, soothing his nerves at being so close to a man he knows and doesn’t-know. His memories are there, fuzzy and hazy from being overwritten by fear and pain, but they’re there. He knows this man, Mr. Malley, who would watch him sometimes when his parents went out, or when his father needed to stop by work.

The memories are there, but they still hurt. 

His head starts to throb, a pulsing pain behind his temples. 

“I didn’t-... I, I love them, I d-didn’t want to.”

“Well, now, that’s a conundrum, isn’t it? Are you moving, then, Tristan?”

It hurts to hear his name, but it hurts in a way that feels good. He was that person, too, before he was Chris. He hums, low under his breath. “No. I, I, I just… you know, um, I’m just. I’m… hard. Difficult. To, to, to, to be with, to, um, to-... there’s a bunch wrong with-... with me.”

“You sound like your dad.” Mr. Malley laughs, a deep chuckle that rumbles more in his chest than out of his throat. “You know that? You sound just like him.”

Chris ignores the pain in his head and he turns, now, to look fully at Mr. Malley, blinking rapidly. “My, my, my dad?”

“Yep. Paul was a good man, and a good dad, but before he was that he was a scared boy with a baby on the way and a plan that might not work.” Mr. Malley sighs. “A scared boy who’d always had it a little rough, trying to make the world work for him when it did nothing but work against him. You were always his spitting image. He’d probably be tickled to see you still are.”

There is a sense, in Chris’s mind, of a blurry man with short red hair, sitting near him but not quite touching him, speaking with animation about how there are dinosaurs that lived closer to human beings than they did to other dinosaurs.

He remembers a man whose eyes sparkled with animated focus when he talked about the world millions of years ago, who loved him by sharing the information he held within his own mind.

He and his dad had understood each other, in ways that no one else did but his mother, and Chris was beginning to see that it had been her determination to know him that had fueled his mother’s actions, her endless support. The same way Jake and Nat were determined, and stubborn, and kept trying even when they got it wrong. 

Everyone gets it wrong sometimes, but that doesn’t… that doesn’t mean they aren’t trying. 

Maybe he got it wrong.

“He never broke up with your mom, but oh, he thought about it. You know, when he came to work with us, he had a plan. But plans… they have a way of going off the road and into a ditch. He worried he couldn’t make it work, he worried that it would be too hard for Ronnie to be with him and have a child, too.”

Ronnie.

Chris’s throat closes up, and he closes his eyes. 

All right, Tris, I got you these so the noise won’t bother you so much. We’re going to have a good day at the parade, okay?

“Her family never liked him, for one. That’s a rough spot to be in, I think.” Mr. Malley is quiet for a moment, sipping his coffee and watching the rain fall. “Ronnie didn’t see it that way, of course. That woman was a freight train and God help anyone who got in the way. My late wife, God rest her soul, helped Ronnie with some things when her own family wouldn’t. She’d come over big as a house, eyes sparkling. You were a kicker, she used to say, kept her up all hours of the night. Just a girl, still, your mom, but she had a steel spine and she wasn’t going to live any life but the one she wanted. But your dad… he worried, that it would be too hard on her.”

“Having, um, having me would?”

“No. Having him. Paul was a smart man, you know. He knew his job would be trouble. He gave her chance after chance to go, if she wanted. But that’s the thing, isn’t it? She didn’t.”

Chris looks at his phone, lying on the little table in front of the couch. There’s some text messages he hasn’t looked at. Couple of voicemails he hasn’t listened to. 

“Maybe he, he, he didn’t want to keep hurting her,” Chris whispers. 

“Hurt’s a part of living, lad, take it from someone who’s given out his fair share of it and more.” Mr. Malley hums. Outside, a car pulls up, almost bumping the curb. “Perhaps you’re meant to separate from your young partner, Tristan, perhaps not. It’s like I told your dad, way back in the Stone Age. You choose if you love someone, to be sure, but they choose if they love you back. You can’t decide that for them.”

“But, but I’m-... but, but I’ve been… what I am, it’s-”

“I know what you’ve been made to do,” Mr. Malley says gently. “You don’t have to explain, lad. We knew.”

Chris’s lips tremble. He doesn’t want his coffee any longer. He sets it down next to his phone, on the little table. The baristas talk quietly about a date that one went on the night before, there’s a low sound of machinery. It all filters into Chris’s mind, a cacophony of sound he picks apart or doesn’t. Right now it’s hard for him to think around all the sound, but he tries. “Then, then, then why… if you knew, um, why… didn’t you-”

He can’t finish the question. 

Why didn’t you save me from it?

“We couldn’t. It’s shite, is what it is, but we couldn’t. And by the time we could, you were with that nice young man who you live with now. I’m sorry for the time you lost, Tristan, and sorrier still I can’t give it back to you somehow. You’re your dad’s child through and through, but you’ve got your mother in you, too. You know what Ronnie did when there was something she couldn’t get through?”

Chris turns to look at this man, who knew his mother and father in ways he never could have. He swallows. “What?”

“She went over it. Or around it. Or blew it to smithereens and went through the wreckage. Whatever it took. They tried to kick you out of school when you were a wean, she fought them ‘til they realized they’d never win against her. They tried to tell her you wouldn’t read, she told them to go, well, to go sit on a thing or two and not to tell her what her boy could or couldn’t do.”

Chris thinks of Nat sitting next to him on the floor, patiently encouraging him to keep trying to turn the letters into words, despite his headaches, his tears, his certainty he’d never get reading back.

You will, Chris. I know you will. Just keep fighting for it. They won’t take anything from you forever, I won’t let them and you won’t let them either.

Don’t let them keep you from yourself.

“They told her she’d never have a happy life, having a wee one so young, but she built that happy life anyway with her own two hands and dared anyone to try and knock it down.”

“Someone… some, someone did, though.” The gunshots, his mother’s eyes going dull and blank, her whispered I love you so much, Tris…

“Sure. Yes.” Mr. Malley’s expression goes serious, and sad. “But it took breaking into her house at midnight and bullets to stop her. You’ve got plenty of your mom in you, lad. Plenty of your dad, too, he was always a stubborn git himself. Do you love this person you’ve broken up with? Hm?”

“Yes.” The answer comes without hesitation, even though his voice shakes and his heart races. “I, I, I do. That’s, that’s why I don’t want to-to keep hurting them by, by, by by being messed up from what, um, from what happened to me, I don’t… I don’t want to keep h-hurting them-”

“Let them decide how they feel about that,” Mr. Malley says, voice gentle and low. “Plenty of people are hurt and find their way forward together after.”

Jake and Kauri, laughing in the kitchen as Jake spins Kauri around in a circle, dips him backwards, presses a kiss to his nose that has him giggling. 

Antoni at the stove, sighing but with a smile on his face, watching them. Being pulled into the hug not quite against his will, all three of them laughing then. Kauri bright and sparkling, Jake a deeper harmony, Antoni soft and genuine. 

“Maybe it won’t last, maybe it will - but don’t let a hard past keep you from the people who love you. I’ve seen many ruined by believing you may only be loved if you’ve no pain inside you. We’ve all got pain, lad. Carrying it together’s a sight easier than trying to go it alone.”

From the car parked right outside, an elderly man unfolds himself, opening an umbrella to shield from the driving rain. Mr. Malley looks up and smiles. “Ah, right on time, must be ten sharp. That’ll be Cilly. D’you remember Cilly, lad?”

Chris looks as the man shuffles his way inside, pushing open the door. The little bell over the top jingles and the baristas cut off their conversation, standing up straight to call out a familiar greeting to a regular customer. 

He squints.

“Not… not very well,” He confesses, a little ashamed.

“Ah, well, that’s not a problem. He and I’ve known each other a long time. I was an angry man for a while after my wife died, you know. Seemed a crime that I should outlive her, when Christa deserved to live to a hundred and six if she so wished. Cilly helped me carry that anger when I needed to be angry, and he helped me put it down later on.” 

He gives a wave to the man - to Cilly - who looks at Chris and then back to Mr. Malley with clear surprise, then heads towards the counter to make his own order. 

“Be angry, Tristan,” Mr. Malley says, a little heavily, leaning over to him on the leg as he pushes himself, with a grunt of effort to his feet. “You may need your anger, in the days ahead. But if you’ve a love to help you carry it, who wants to help you carry it and who will be angry right there with you, and you love them back… well… don’t let the wickedness of others keep you from the happiness you could have. You’ll be a poorer person for it.”

Mr. Malley walks away without another word, leaving Chris by himself again on the couch, tapping at his stomach, thinking. He keeps looking at his phone, thinking about all the texts he hasn’t read, the way he’s refused to call them back when Laken kept trying to reach him.

He leans over to reach out.

He stops, hand hovering just above the plastic with its colorful case, the sensory sticker on the back of it that Laken had bought him. 

What happened after all the dinosaurs died, Tristan?

I, I, I don’t know, Dad.

Trick question, buddy. They didn’t. Paul’s eyes, bright and vibrant, gesturing to a bird in a tree nearby. Nothing stays the same and lives forever except alligators and sharks.

Right because, because they’re perfect.

Exactly. Dinosaurs died, sure, but they didn’t die, too. They just changed to suit the world after the one they knew how to live in was gone. Imagine, Tris. 

Imagine what?

Imagine the world destroyed and in darkness, buried in ash. Everything you know is gone, ruined, wrecked beyond repair. And imagine… imagine that you learn to eat seeds and little mice instead of big animals and leaves. Imagine you become smaller and smaller. Imagine that your arms turn to wings, that your bones hollow out to carry you higher above the piles of ash that turn to grass and to life again.

What? I, I, I don’t, um, I don’t understand-... Dad, um, I don’t, I don’t... know what you mean.

Right, sorry. Just... imagine you’re a dinosaur.

He’d laughed. Okay.

Now imagine your dinosaur family is gone, and you have to become something else. What do you become? Being a dinosaur means dying, right?

Um. Right.

So imagine that you look at death and say, no thanks. No, you’re not going to be over. This isn’t it for you. Even a meteor the size of the entire sky can’t end you. Instead of dying out, no, you look at history, at geological time, and you say…

Paul had trailed off.

Say what? What, what do I say?

Don’t tell your mom but-... you look at the end of the world and you say... fuck this, I’m going to learn to fly.

Chris picks up his phone, finds Laken’s name and photo in his contacts. It’s a photo of the two of them together, Chris and Laken smiling and laughing as he smears whipped cream on their nose and they smear a cross of fluffy white into his forehead. 

He dials.

They pick up on the third ring.

“Chris? Oh my God, Chris, are you okay? Are you-... are you okay, baby?” Their voice shakes, and he closes his eyes. 

This time, he lets the tears slip out and run down his face. “H-Hey, Laken, um, I, I, I-... I’m… I wondered if you, um, if you could, uh… are you busy?”

“Am I-... Chris, where are you?”

“The, um, the coffeeshop-”

“I’m on my way. Don’t you dare fucking move.”

At their usual table, at their usual time, Cilly and Sean Malley start to talk amicably about the week ahead. But he keeps an eye on Paul’s boy, where he speaks a few sentences and then hangs up the phone, looking out the window at the rain.

It’s twenty minutes before a new car pulls up outside, and umbrella-less, the partner Sean has seen with Tristan before comes racing inside, a blur of black clothes and black hair and brown skin. Paul’s boy stands, and his partner throws themself at him so hard the two of them fall backwards onto the couch.

They start laughing, and shortly after to cry. 

Their hands come up to either side of Tristan’s face, and they lean forward to kiss the scar on his forehead. He can’t hear what they say to each other, but he doesn’t need to. 

Ronnie, he thinks, would like this spitfire person that Paul’s boy is so in love with. 

That’s one wrong put right, at least for the moment.

One more to go.

Sean smiles and sips his cooling coffee.

-

@burtlederp @finder-of-rings @endless-whump @astrobly @newandfiguringitout @doveotions @pretty-face-breaker @gonna-feel-that-tomorrow @boxboysandotherwhump @oops-its-whump @cubeswhump @whump-tr0pes @downriver914 @whumptywhumpdump @whumpiary @orchidscript @nonsensical-whump @outofangband @eatyourdamnpears

Just Go On from Kimmy Schmidt

[watchmegetobsessed]

Family Of Four - Tom Holland

a/n: i saw a video of tom and tessa right after i woke up and then BAM i just needed to write this little blurb! so here is tessa meeting your and tom’s baby for the first time!

pairing: Dad!Tom X Reader

word count: 1166

masterlist

Tom’s phone lights up the same time you hear the car pull up on the driveway. He presses a soft kiss to the sleepy newborn’s forehead in his arms before babbling to her as if she could understand every world he says.

“You ready to meet your bestie, Emma? Tessa is so excited to see you!” he coos as he hands her over to you, handling her tiny body so carefully, making sure she is secured in your arms before he pulls his hands back. “Gonna let them in. Want to go sit on the couch, love?” he hums, kissing your forehead before doing the same to Emma.

“Yeah,” you nod and watch him walk out to greet Harry who’s been dog sitting Tessa since your water broke exactly a week ago and you rushed to the hospital. You and Tom both agreed that it might be best if Tessa spends a short vacation at her uncle’s house when you bring Emma home. It’s not that you’re afraid she might to something to the baby, you just knew you’d be exhausted and stressed about having Emma home for the first time. It was easier to only worry about your recovery and just one newborn baby in the house rather than adding an extremely cuddly and nosy dog into the equation.

Emma yawns in your arms, her little hat has slid down to her eyebrows so you fix it before gently caressing her cheeks. You drink up the rest of your tea before moving to the living room. You hear Tom greeting Harry and then his usual sweet talk hits your ears, the one he always gives Tessa when he sees her for the first time.

“Who is my good girl? Hmm? Did you miss me? I missed you so much!” Tessa’s feet tippy-tap on the concrete outside the front door and judging from the sounds, she is over the moon to be back home.

“How is Y/N doing?” Harry asks while Tom probably rubs Tessa wherever he can reach her, trying to make her excitement die down a little before they get inside.

“She is doing great! Getting used to the new sleeping schedule, but things are going good.”

You smile at his words, because you’re not the only one with a new sleeping schedule, especially since Tom is always the one to check on Emma when her cries fill the room through the baby monitor and if it’s not time to feed her, he always tells you to go back to sleep and let him handle it. He has been on full daddy duty and you had no doubt he would be the most wonderful dad to ever walk this earth.

The boys talk outside a little longer before you see the front door opening and Tom sticks his head inside. You smile up at him, Emma nestled comfortably in your arms.

“Hey, you ready for Tess?” he asks softly.

“Yeah, it’s time for their first meeting,” you chuckle. Tom nods and disappears from your vision. Then Harry walks in, greeting you sweetly before he kisses Emma’s head.

“Look at her! She’s already changed so much!” he beams, watching his niece in awe.

“Right? She looks less like an old man,” you joke. Your daughter was the most beautiful thing you’ve ever laid your eyes on, but that didn’t stop you from cracking a joke that she was so wrinkly when she was born, she resembled an old man. The wrinkles have smoothed out a little by now and though she is the queen of weird faces, especially when she is creaming her diapers mercilessly, you’ve never seen anything like her before.

Harry sits on the other end of the couch and pulls his phone out to tape the first meeting. Tom’s fans have been begging to see this interaction since you announced your pregnancy with a sweet post on Instagram in your third trimester, especially because it featured Tessa. During your pregnancy Tessa was obsessed with your belly, she would always snuggle close to it in bed or on the couch, as if she was guarding the baby from day one and on the photo you posted, she had her head resting on your bump as the two of you were cuddled up on the couch. People went crazy over how cute it was, the picture got ten million likes within the first thirty minutes and it’s been still going up since then. And now it’s time for their first official meeting.

“Tess, gently! Calm down!” Tom calls out as he appears again, this time holding Tessa’s collar so she doesn’t run free, but it’s pretty clear that she is about to jump out of her fur, probably already smelling Emma. Her eyes quickly find you on the couch and the little bundle of joy in your arms and Tessa whines to her daddy to be let free, but Tom holds onto her tightly.

“Tessa, calm down. You have to be gentle with mommy and Emma,” he warns her again and though her jumps die down a little, her tail keeps wiggling like crazy as her eyes never leave the baby in your arms.

“Hi Tessa, I missed you so much!” you coo at her and she licks her face, nudging your leg as her way of saying that she missed you too. You share a special bond with Tessa, you still remember the first time Tom brought you home and you met her. It’s like you became instant best friends, Tom often complained that whenever you were sleeping over Tessa preferred to snuggle up to you instead of him.

“Tess, meet your new sister, Emma,” Tom softly tells her, holding her back with two hands as you bring Emma closer to her, still keeping a little distance at first.

All three of you watch the interaction in silence, Tessa sniffs the baby around, getting used to the new smell, a few more whines fall from her mouth before she slowly calms down and nudges Emma’s bum in your arms gently. When Tessa has clearly calmed down, Tom carefully lets go of her but still stays close in case she needs to be pulled back, but you know Tessa would never hurt Emma, she is already just as obsessed with her as you are.

“I’m literally about to cry,” Tom whispers, when Tessa lays her head across Emma’s lap, as if she was guarding the tiny baby.

“Keep it together, Daddy,” you chuckle, but you can feel your eyes watering as well.

Harry snaps a few more pictures once he stops recording and he manages to take one that resembles the photo you posted on Instagram about the pregnancy announcement. It’s perfect to announce Emma’s arrival that’s been kept a secret so far. Tom puts a black and white filter over it before writing a sweet caption, letting the world know that now you are a family of four: Tom, you, Emma and Tessa.

Thank you for reading, please like and reblog if you enjoyed it!

[1kook]

some way, some how

jeon jungkook x (f) reader

Summary: Maybe you don’t know Jungkook as well as you thought you did. Maybe he doesn’t know you. Warnings: emotional constipation, toxic ex, internalized misogyny, jk has bad experiences w/his ex’s dad, one scene where jk throws up, brief episode of panic, mentions of terminal cancer (minor); smut; fingering, praise kink, face fucking, spitting kink, cunnilingus, unprotected sex on top of a car im sorry Misc: autoshop owner!jk, businesswoman!oc, slice of life, childhood crushes, friends to lovers, ex gfs, pining, country bumpkin pjm w/crush on oblivious oc, ex-bf kth but it’s not real lol Wc: 19.4k (wow!!!)

the spirit of auto shop jk possessed me n next thing i knew i was 11k into a drabble. if ur curious: the 1975 corvette, car at the end, the tweed suitskirt (not actually chanel ☹️sowwyyy) also: this is the longest fic I've written!!!!! clap for me!!!!! i proofread the first few paragraphs n was like thats enough professionalism for the day

inspired by ain’t no mountain high enough one of my fave songs ever🥺 the title is a lyric from the song bc i love it so much enjoy !!

The garage is mostly dark when you enter, the faint hum of a radio quietly filtering through the stagnant room, its source coming from the back wall, where the only light is. It’s a rolling lamp, shining down an ugly yellow glow onto the figure of one man.

Jungkook’s sitting in that same rolling stool he always is, the metal one that’s rusted beyond repair, the cushion so uncomfortably flat. He’s caught up in whatever paint job he’s been tasked with this time around, a classic muscle car from what looks like the 80’s. He’s humming along to the radio, so caught up in stenciling out his design that he doesn’t notice you creep behind him until you’re very purposefully rattling the tool cart beside him, a teasing “boo!” making him jump.

“Fuck, you scared me,” he gasps, rubs over his chest as if to check if his heart is in fact still there. You grin, brandish your bag of takeout out for him before he can lecture you on the dangers of startling people who work around very complex machinery. Instead, all he says is, “you’re an angel.”

Once you’ve got the food carefully scattered across his work bench, your cherry cola tucked next to a canister of gasoline like that’s the safest practice, Jungkook wastes no time diving into all the details of his project, the 1975 Chevy Corvette behind him. The longer you look at it, the more you feel you’ve seen it somewhere. Probably a car show, you presume.

“Purrs like a kitten,” he sighs dreamily, completely ignoring the way half his toppings slide out from the opposite end of his cheeseburger. You don’t, and you swipe a fallen pickle from his tray before he can catch you.

“A kitten?” You ask, glance over at the car. It’s desperately in need of a paint job, and you only realize this now as you stare at it more in depthly. The niggling feeling that you know this car is still there, but you ignore it in favor of indulging your best friend. “Don’t people usually compare cars to bigger, better cats?”

There’s a taped stencil running alongside the car, a thick stripe followed by a thinner one, and you suppose Jungkook’s trying to spice her up, give her back the same youthfulness she probably had in her prime. What better way to do so than by adding some classic stripes alongside it.

Jungkook hums, gulps down his soda noisily. “Not this one. Never heard an engine as soft as hers.”

You roll your eyes. For a minute, the two of you quietly chew through your burgers, the radio filling in the gaps while you analyze the car. You know this car, but you can’t remember where. Jungkook coughs into his palm, probably from trying to inhale his fries too fast like he does every time you go to the diner you’re eating from today.

The diner.

A mouthful of braces. A pretty waitress. A strict dad.

“Holy shit, this is Sojin’s dad’s car,” you inhale, the memories from high school suddenly hitting you full force. Jungkook chokes, out of surprise this time, and furiously goes to deny your claims. “This is totally his car. The one he tried to run you over with when he caught you trying to put her on the back of your bike.”

“He didn’t try to run me over,” Jungkook whines, and the tips of his ears are red from your revelation.

You glare. “Why are you fixing that asshole’s car for him?” You interrogate, the last quarter of your burger forgotten in favor of squeezing the truth out of him. You’d had enough of that treacherous woman and her equally deranged father causing Jungkook trouble, and to catch him still helping her now, almost ten years later, was enough to make a brain vessel pop.

He shrugs, avoids your eyes as he picks through his fries. The radio is still on, some tune you recognize from those old days at the diner when Jungkook had become so unbelievably smitten with the part timer that served you milkshakes every Wednesday afternoon.

He had been in love with her the moment he saw her, and the look in his eyes was only magnified by those dorky glasses he wore pre-lasik. You'd been his friend long enough, recognized the jump of his scrawny thigh beneath the table. Like a bunny, thumping in excitement at the sight of her.

Sojin was... full of surprises.

She was nothing less than a supermodel, long legs carrying her around the diner as if it was her runway. She was nice too, so you hadn’t originally had an excuse to dislike her. She was nice, and so endeared with your best friend that it was inevitable when they began dating. Her presence consumed the end of your high school careers, overtook the time that should have been yours and Jungkook’s last year before being thrown into adulthood. He decided on studying at a technical school nearby—per your encouragement to save money—while you travelled five hours out for your degree in business. That last year, when you had finally come to terms with your feelings, had been so painfully ripped away by Sojin and her never-ending list of teenage drama, and by Sojin’s dad and his overbearing need to police her and Jungkook every chance he got.

Jungkook still hung out—“Sojin was busy, do you wanna do something?”—but more often than not those hang outs consisted of Jungkook telling you about her and her dad, about how hard he tried to get into his good graces.

The bike incident had only been one of many. Times where Jungkook would put his heart—and life—on the line for that girl only for it to be in vain every time she broke up with him over the simplest things. You’d heard stories from Jungkook, all told with a tight smile, of a handshake that would bruise, a man chasing him with a bat, of a car following him to school. All things he put up with for a girl who didn’t care for him. One day, after Jungkook had grudgingly sat through an hour long dinner with her family, the stare of her father piercing through him, she broke up with him because she didn’t like how long his hair had gotten.

(If anyone were to ask you, he was handsome with long hair. Dreamy even.)

He cut it that same day.

As her childishness grew, you quickly came to dislike her. She strung Jungkook around, you thought, and just when you thought she was finally done toying with him and making his life difficult in the sneakiest ways, the damn kid started hitting the gym. His growing frame, toned arms and now straightened teeth had turned him into a heartthrob, and Sojin was just as aware of this as you were. “Don’t we look perfect together?” She’d ask, twirl around him like they were on the cover of a magazine and not standing on his chipped front porch.  

Needless to say, by the time graduation had rolled around you despised the woman. You absolutely disliked how she treated Jungkook, how she let her father treat Jungkook without ever stepping up and defending him. Granted, you didn’t know exactly what went on in her household behind closed doors, you’d seen enough of her uncaring attitude to want to ram her and her dad’s head against the hood of the car.

Which is why seeing the old car, in Jungkook’s shop nonetheless, was rekindling a boiling hatred in your chest. “That man should rot in hell for all he put you through,” you huff, glare at the car like it holds some magical connection to him and he can feel the intensity of your stare.

“___,” Jungkook scolds, swirls his cup around to distract himself. “He was just trying to protect his only daughter,” he defends, quietly, like it’s what he tells himself to justify all those years of mistreatment. Even when he and Sojin had continued through college, it had never stopped. You, being five hours away, couldn’t do a damn thing. “Besides, the guy’s old as hell now.”

You snort, finally breaking your staring match with the car. Glancing at Jungkook, he’s got that same forlorn expression on his face, the one he started wearing when he first came to terms with the fact that her dad would never like him. There was a time it was stuck permanently on his face, the pressure and the discomfort that came from the father of the girl you’ve dated for five years looking at you like you were nothing more than a speck of dirt on the bottom of his shoe.

When you came back from school, educated and confident, you almost didn’t recognize your best friend. Tall and broad, tattoos splattered over his arm. Hair long like you loved it, but eyes still as round and wondrous as they’d been when you were kids. He had his own place now, he told you, and you vaguely remembered all the times he mentioned him and Sojin moving in together, mentally preparing yourself to see that wench for the first time in a while.

Much to your surprise, there was no Sojin in sight. No lingering artifacts of her presence. Nothing that showed she existed in this space besides an ugly orange mug she’d given him for his birthday one year, tucked into the very back of his cabinets. They’d broken up, he explained. Almost immediately after graduation.

After stringing him along for the better part of five years, she had decided this wasn’t what she wanted. No, what she wanted was a man ten years her senior with an abundance of cash to flow. Jungkook hadn’t cried. Hadn’t even looked the tiniest bit upset when you ordered pizza and drank some beer, watched your favorite episodes of The Simpsons like you were seventeen and avoiding your homework again.

You stayed the night, a little too tipsy to drive home. Besides, Jungkook had a spare bedroom. It was a room beside his, just a full bed with a chest of drawers. You liked it, liked the scent of him surrounding you after only seeing each other for a couple weeks in between months of distance. You liked it, because when he shifted in bed you realized the beds were pressed against the same wall, and you liked it until the shared wall spared you no secrets, and you listened to him quietly sob into his pillow.

“Old or not, he’s still the devil,” you murmur, snapping back to the present where Jungkook is wheeling himself closer to the car again. “Where did you find that thing anyway?”

He stays silent, quietly pretending like he still has something to do on the car besides paint it. Then, “I bumped into Sojin at the store.”

You sigh, drop your head between your shoulders. You can only imagine what whirlwind of a sob story she had to throw on him to win this favor.

“Kook,” you start, gauging his reaction only from his backside. His muscles ripple beneath his dark t-shirt, his usual red jumpsuit knitted around his waist. “What happened?”

Again, silence.

You say nothing, let him sort through the hurt on his own while you creep up behind him, sliding your hands over his shoulders and pressing down on the cricks behind his neck. He melts into your touch, head lolling forwards as a quiet sigh escapes him.

“She told me she was low on cash, and she needed the car to get to work,” he confesses, and from his ducked position, his voice trembles. You roll your eyes.

“And the paint job?”

A particularly rough press of your fingers has a whimper escaping him. God, this boy needed to see a chiropractor and a masseuse soon. All that hunching over and under these cars was doing a number on his back.

“I… I figured I might as well fix up the exterior too.” Of course he would, you think, Jungkook’s heart was stupidly big and easy to manipulate. He would get so swept up in it sometimes, trying to do the best he can for everyone’s benefit that he’d ignore himself.

You sit in his confession, fingers digging into his skin for a few minutes as you consider what to say.

The mature adult in you, the logical half of you, wants to hit him upside the head, scold him for letting that wench into his life again so easily. You were going on twenty-six now, all three of you, and you didn’t have time to be fixing him every time that childish woman decided to toy with him. Granted, it’s been four years since you last saw her, since you heard him muffle his cries on the other side of the wall, and you liked to think Jungkook was a respectful adult of society now. He didn’t have time to get dragged around by self-absorbed women with insane fathers.

The other part, the best friend since childhood, wants to run away. Wants to pack Jungkook into a suitcase and take him far away from here and from her. Unlike you, who now lived in the city, Jungkook had stayed in your small hometown, a quiet place just outside the bustling city. It was difficult to ensure his happiness when you were always forty-five minutes out of reach. It would be so much easier to just take him and fly to another province, maybe on the beach, Jungkook loved the beach.

“Listen,” he says, successfully pulling you out from your spiral. “I know what you’re gonna say and I just wanna tell you it’s not like that.”

You blink, hands stilling on his shoulders. Your lack of movement allows him to spin around on his chair, gaze up at you with the same shiny gaze he’s given you ever since you were kids. “I’m just doing her this tiny favor. She looked...” he trails off, face scrunching to find the words.

“Like shit?” You propose, and he smiles. “Like flaming dumpster shit behind a club?”

Jungkook laughs, loud and beautiful. You want to kiss the mole beneath his lip.

“She looked bad, okay?” He settles, reaches forward to take your palm in his. You’re standing between his thighs, and you wonder how he would have acted if you were Sojin. “Don’t think things worked out with that CEO she was dating. I’m just giving her a push.”

You sigh, try to push those crestfallen sobs to the back of your head. “Okay,” you agree, briefly glancing back at the damn car. “You fix her car, and that’s it,” you state. Jungkook nods, makes a little X over his heart. He knows how much you hate that woman. “No funny business.”

“No funny business,” he agrees, then reaches down for a white spray can. “You wanna spray some dicks on it before I paint it?”

“Please,” you laugh, taking the face mask he offers you with a grin.

—

One day your car starts making a weird noise as you pull out of the underground parking garage of your building. It’s somewhere between a pig squealing and metal scraping. You’ve been around Jungkook long enough to know this is probably something to do with your breaks, something about them being loose or old, one of the two. You have a short day at work today. There’s repairs being done to the office you work at, so everyone’s been spending more time working from home.

You leave work a little after two pm, head pounding from the hour long meeting you sat through, the mediocre business proposals your boss had asked you to look through and file. There’s a hefty load of emails waiting in your inbox, mostly the interns requesting you write them a recommendation letter. You’ll have to look through those later, pick out the good ones and write them each a unique piece kissing the ground they walk on.

The scent of freshly fried donuts hits your nose as you pull into your old town; the bakery down the road from Jungkook’s has their windows open. You can already taste the sweetness on the tip of your tongue, the iced coffee cooling your insides as you sit and watch Jungkook work on your car.

Jungkook’s shop is on the corner of the street, takes up a huge chunk with it’s massive garage and driveway; the office area is tiny compared to the sheer size of the actual work floor. There’s music blaring through the overhead speakers, and when you pull in you recognize it as Jimin’s playlist.

“Morning, Miss,” the country bumpkin says, leaning against your car door as you rifle through your purse. “What’re you in for?”

“Hi, Jimin,” you reply sweetly, take his hand as he helps you out the door. You very vaguely explain the noise your car had made that morning, glancing around the shop as Jimin gets to work inspecting it. “Where’s Jungkook?”

Jimin’s waving over some other employees, all greeting you in their matching red jumpsuits. “Kook’s in the office,” he tells you, and it’s almost sensual the way his hand glides over your palm for your keys. God, you needed to get laid. “Has some lady friend in there with him.”

You pause, the bustling of the crew behind you fading into the background. Something inside you snaps, and you whirl around the garage, before catching sight of a 1975 Chevy Corvette, almost unrecognizable from how you’d last seen it. It’s bright red now, a color you only briefly saw before you’d left the other night, with two, lightning bolt racing stripes decorating each side. It looks new, almost in mint condition, and the fact it’s still here has you storming through the garage.

Your heels clack loudly, the crew moving to the side as you torpedo straight into the offices. You barely remember to greet the receptionist before you’re stomping straight into the main office.

There’s no knock, no warning given, before you’re flinging the door open, seeing exactly what you’d expected. 

“___,” Jungkook stutters, jumping onto his feet from his position on the couch. He looks frantic, wide eyes flickering between you and the woman sitting in front of him, her back turned to you. But you’d recognize that silhouette anywhere.

“Did you say ___?” She says, and she’s still as tall and as beautiful as you remember her. Had it not been for the heels you wore, you don’t doubt she’d tower over you. She flashes you a killer smile, lips carefully painted red. It almost looks murderous. “My! ___, you haven’t changed a bit,” Sojin exclaims, rushing around the couch to pull you into a tight hug. You don’t return it.

You let her cling to you for a second, before pushing her away as gently as you can by the shoulders. As much as you’d like to rip her in half, tear her apart for all she did to Jungkook, you won’t. You’re older now, elegant in all the ways you weren’t before. It would be a huge disservice to your maturity if you shoved your heel up her ass right now.

“It’s lovely seeing you, Sojin,” you smile, taking her hand in yours.

Besides, being a woman in business meant you knew better, more creative ways to strike.

“And your boyfriend?” You ask, tilting your head in staged confusion. You even glance around the office, like you’ll find the geezer hiding behind the potted plant or Jungkook’s frozen figure. “The rich one with the huge company? Did he come with you today?”

Her smile tightens, red lips pursed as she gauges you with those cat eyes that haunt your nightmares every now and then. “My ex-boyfriend,” she corrects after a minute, pastes a forlorn expression onto her features. “We’ve separated, and you know how it is for women like us,” she jests. “We need a man to push us along—“

“Do we?” You ask, think back on all those years of school, of studying and working and pushing yourself, all the time you spent investing in yourself for yourself. “I don’t think so,” you contemplate. “It’s really embarrassing if you can’t care for yourself without the help of a man. Almost like you don’t trust in your own abilities, and ride other’s coattails instead.”

A beat of silence. Two completely different worlds, and Jungkook hovering awkwardly beside you.

Two palms grasp your shoulders from behind, and when you turn Jungkook is smiling at you, forced and stressed like he can’t stand to be in this uncomfortable situation any longer. “Well,” he announces, pushing you behind him as he guides Sojin towards the door. “There was an issue with her car, so I’ll just check on it real quick, okay?”

You nod, feel empty as he takes her by the wrist, and not you. He hands her her purse, palm on the small of her back as they exit the office. When the door clicks shut behind them, you throw your own handbag at the ground, barely stop yourself from stomping like a child.

Instead, you breathe in, hold it, and exhale, just like your Tuesday yoga instructor taught you. By the time you’ve collected yourself a few minutes have passed, so you kneel down to gather your fallen lipstick tubes and cellphone from the floor, scooping them back into your purse.

Tugging the door shut behind you, you mindlessly wander down the hall, until you reach the small receptionist area and nearly get jumped by Kim Taehyung. “Holy shit, you won’t believe this,” he gasps, takes you by the shoulders and nearly shakes you until your brain falls out through your ears. You would have slapped him, had this been any other man, but he’s quite possibly the only man besides Jungkook you’d let jostle you like this. “You’ll never guess who just left the office with J—wait,” he pales, suddenly connecting two and two, your exit from said offices definitely a key factor in whatever conclusion he’s drawn. “You were in the office with Hwang Sojin and you didn’t kill her?!”

You huff, let him shake you again until you’re nearly tripping in your heels. “Yes, I know,” you groan, finally slap his hands away when you begin to feel this morning’s breakfast bubbling from all the motion. “I’m surprised too.”

“Wow,” Taehyung marvels, leans back against the receptionist desk even though the poor girl has told him time and time again not to. He ignores her, something he can do as second best friend to the boss. “Remember when she showed up crying outside his mom’s house and you threw a potted plant at her? Oh how the great have fallen.”

Rolling your eyes, you drift over to the plexiglass window in the office that looks out across the entirety of the garage floor. In the corner, Jungkook’s got the hood of the Corvette open as he works away on something, Sojin tapping at her phone beside him. “Why are you here, Tae?”

He steps beside you, tuned into the same scene. “Can’t visit my ex-girlfriend every now and then?” He teases, you groan.

“We dated for three days, dude, let it go,” you whine, and watch with rapt attention as Jungkook motions for her to start the engine. She does, and it purrs to life, soft and silky just like Jungkook said it does. She squeals and claps, launches herself into his arms in thanks. You look away.

“Yuck,” Taehyung gags and you couldn’t agree more. “Can’t believe you ended the best 72 hours of my life for that pinhead and the hussy attached to his hip.”

He shrieks when you pinch his side, and you take great satisfaction in the judgemental stare half the crew sends him through the glass. After all, they weren’t soundproof. “You embarrassed me and my brand,” he huffs, crossing his arms as the two of you return to watching Jungkook and the hussy.

“He’s not a pinhead,” you softly retort, watch him wipe a bead of sweat off his forehead as he waves her off. Sojin sends him a brigade of air kisses, none of which he catches. A sick sense of glee consumes you at the sight, but then he’s turning to stare directly at you and Taehyung through the glass, and the both of you quickly whirl away.

“His ability to find you in less than a second is so weird,” Taehyung shivers, and you ignore it, taking the candy from the bowl on the receptionist desk. She doesn’t care, having heard these conversations more than enough times to get the general gist of what you and Taehyung gossip about. You’re surprised she’s never mentioned it to Jungkook before.

Regardless, you listen to Taehyung complain about his life for a few more minutes, before Jimin’s sweet voice pops into the room. His ash blonde hair is all ruffled, and there’s something dark smeared over his otherwise perfect skin as he tells you your car is fixed. Taehyung bids you goodbye, and Jimin walks you back to your car out on the garage floor.

“All set, miss,” Jimin grins, puts a hand against the car so you don’t hit your head as you go in. You thank him, and don’t miss the way he lingers by your window.

“Is something wrong?” You ask, tilt your head quizzically. Jimin’s cheeks flush, and he looks shyly at the ground.

“Actually, I was wondering if—“

“___,” Jungkook calls, jogging over beside Jimin, who looks almost ashamed to be caught doing...whatever it was he was gonna do. Jungkook glances at him, catches him in some weird staring contest before crouching down to your window. “You needed your car fixed? Why didn’t you tell me?”

You blink, don’t know how to politely tell him he was too busy kissing the ass of his toxic ex-girlfriend to help you out. “Jimin helped me,” you smile, the same practiced expression you’ve mastered since college. You usually get by, usually trick people with that look, but not with him. Jungkook knows you too well, knows that look, and knows you’re holding yourself back. “You were busy.”

His lips part in surprise, tugged downwards with the hint of a frown. “I,” he stutters, looks at Jimin, who doesn’t seem that impressed with him either. “I… I would’ve came if you called.”

You tug your sunglasses out from their little case, slide them over the bridge of your nose as you strap your seatbelt over yourself. “Would you though?” You ask, flash him another polite smile before shifting your car’s gears. Jimin walks off, clears the path for you to exit, and with just Jungkook standing there, you speak freely. “I would hate to distract you from something important.”

—

Some of the proposals end up being better than expected, and after carefully sifting through them, your boss asks you to sit through presentations for the next few days. Your time gets consumed in graphs and budgets. There’s a multitude of businesses you have to look into, some big and well-known, and others small and local. You drive around the city one day, visiting business after business, until your ankles hurt in your heels and your cheeks hurt from all the smiling. Your only comfort is the nice Chanel skirt suit you’re wearing that makes you feel like the most important person in the room wherever you go.

By the time the week’s over, there’s a thin cut forming on the back of your ankles from all the walking you’ve done in your heels. You slump against your front door, tossing your heels in the vague direction of the closet before padding through your house.

You nearly scream yourself sore at the figure in your kitchen, hunched over what looks to be a hastily made cake with a number three candle. “Oh my god,” you seethe, turning the overhead light on to illuminate Jungkook’s grinning figure, dirty and sweaty from work. You glance at the clock on the stove; it’s only been about an hour since his garage closed.

“Surprise!” He exclaims, and you’re not the slightest bit amused when he begins humming the happy birthday song on a day that is definitely not your birthday.

When he’s done, you don’t clap and his beaming smile doesn’t waver. “It is not my birthday,” you calmly state, placing your leather padfolio on the counter.

Jungkook blows the candle out for you. “It’s the birthday of when we first met,” he explains, and gets to cutting the cake. How he remembers such a day, you don’t know. You do know that this is his mom’s birthday cake recipe, and you love that. “Can you believe it? Friends for almost three decades.”

“Almost,” you repeat, dutifully sitting across from him and taking the plate he offers. He nods at you like a bobblehead. 

His eyes are sparkly and big, like he’s drunk, and it’s only then you notice the red wine on the table, bottle open and halfway done. You set your fork down, grasp the neck of the bottle in your hand. “Have you been drinking?” You ask, even though the answer stares you right in the face. You frown. “You hate drinking.”

Jungkook rolls his eyes, shovels more cake into his mouth to delay his response. “Needed it,” he offhandedly explains, nearly eats the candle but you jump forward to snatch it off his fork before he can.

“What do you mean?” You inquire. You’re not hungry anymore, too interested in whatever’s going on in his head to make him think he needs to be drunk around you.

Jungkook gulps, reaches forward for more wine but you cradle the bottle to your chest. You nearly gasp when he levels you with a real, stony glare, the expression out of place on his face. “Cuz you’re mad,” he huffs. “At me.”

There was a time you would coddle Jungkook’s every mistake, never let him think he was at fault for anything. You’d grown out of it shortly before high school, recognizing boys were stupid no matter how much you tried to prove otherwise. Since then, you’ve watched him get into trouble time and time again—Sojin being the prime example—and only intervened when absolutely necessary. Some part of you, the half that hates seeing him upset, wants to tell him you’re not. The mature part in you, however, doesn’t let that happen.

“I am,” you agree, watch his eyes widen almost comically at your admission. You set the wine bottle back on the table, leaning your chin on your palm as you level him with the most unimpressed gaze you can. “I’m furious, actually.”

He whimpers, actually whimpers like a kicked puppy, and you can almost see the metaphorical ears pressed against his head and the tail tucked between his legs. His lips are big and pouty, stained from the wine. You’d love to know what they feel like.

Jungkook’s vulnerability lasts all of three seconds, before he’s shaking himself out of whatever emotional pit his foggy brain has him in. “Well, it’s dumb,” he spits, and it’s your turn to sit in shock. “You can’t tell me what to do.”

“Excuse me?” You ask, incredulously, because this has never happened before. Are you overprotective and sometimes overbearing? Sure. Has Jungkook ever voiced discomfort with that before? Never. “I’m not telling you what to do,” you sneer, crossing your arms over your chest.

He rolls his eyes, pushes away from the table like a moody teen. You know it’s because he’s drunk, because he’s not himself, but you have to remind yourself that he obviously felt this way somewhere in his heart to voice it to you now. “You’re not my mom.”

You choke. “I’m not!” You angrily agree, pushing away from the table as well.

Jungkook snarls, “well you sure do love acting like her.” He picks up his plate, glances over at you with a look in his eyes that can only be likened to that of a sneaky cat, and then purposefully shoves the bread and frosting down the garbage disposal in the sink. You shriek, fly around the table and shove him away.

“What is wrong with you?” You seethe, push him away rudely with a hand on his face. Jungkook stumbles back, slips on the floor and nearly cracks his head on the corner of the counter. “Oh my god,” you exclaim, abandoning the sink in favor of watching the way his face twists up at the sudden motion, stomach contracting beneath his black t-shirt, cheeks puffing. “Oh god, oh god,” you stammer, tugging him to his feet with the strength only a panicked individual about to see an entire cake regurgitated onto their kitchen tile can have.

You’ve barely kicked the door to the bathroom open when Jungkook begins throwing up, gooey vomit spewing from his mouth and onto the floor. It touches your arm, and you shriek before shoving him in the general direction of the toilet.

“Ew, ew,” you freak, shoving your hand under the sink faucet to get that gross feeling away. You wanna vomit yourself, but you tell yourself there can only be one sick person at a time, and right now it’s Jungkook.

He’s got his head in the toilet, disgusting sounds echoing off the ceramic of it. By the time you’ve calmed down and washed your arm thrice, you move over to pull his bangs away from his face, letting him hurl in peace.

“I’m sorry,” he mopes, spews another round of birthday cake into the toilet.

You look away, blindly reach out to turn the bathroom fan on. “Mhm,” you nod, rubbing a hand over his back. Jungkook nods sadly against the toilet seat.

“‘M sorry,” he repeats, gags around nothing but the gross feeling left in his throat. “I-I know you just want…” a pause as he considers throwing up some more, “...want what’s best for me.”

“I do,” you agree, wipe a hand down the side of his face that he leans into. “Not trying to be your mom,” you assure him, and he snorts.

“Be a good mom,” he murmurs, so soft you don’t hear him. You hum, leaning closer and he repeats it. “You’d be… a good mom.”

Not knowing what to do with that information, you just pat his back until he falls asleep, cheek against the toilet seat.

—

“Woah, the sexual tension in this garage is off the charts,” Taehyung blurts from behind you, and you smack your clipboard against his chest. “Oof,” he grunts, rubbing his chest like it actually hurt. “You doing finances for him again?” He asks and you nod.

In an ideal world, Taehyung would leave upon finding out you’re busy. In this world, he simply leans into your personal space, nearly knocking you into an empty tool cart. “Oooh, an extensive list of all the money Jungkook’s stupidly blown this month. How much did he spend on neon signs this time?”

You relent, showing him the shop’s finances. Anywhere else, revealing a business’s finances without the consent of the owner would be a federal crime. Here, it’s the equivalent of showing Taehyung Jungkook’s browser history. “He spent how much on window tint?!”

“A lot,” you say.

There’s a whistle from across the garage, the shop’s resident country bumpkin Park Jimin standing at the huge garage doors with his hand on his hip. “No fraternizing, please.”

Taehyung rolls his eyes. “Boooo,” he shouts, peels himself away from you to flick an impolite finger Jimin’s way. “He’s just jealous,” he tells you, and you frown.

“Of what?” You ask, and Taehyung nearly loses his shit.

“My precious ___,” he sighs, leans his forehead on your shoulder. “So beautiful and smart, yet so slow.” You flick the side of his forehead just as Jungkook strolls by and, seeing your attack, slaps the back of Taehyung’s neck. “Why do you guys hate me!” Taehyung exclaims, jumping at least five feet away from you and Jungkook’s giggling forms.

“How’s it going?” Jungkook asks you, completely ignoring Taehyung’s soulful cries as he glances over your shoulder at the clipboard. You tilt it his way, but he stands close anyway, until you can feel his breath huffing against the back of your neck.

“Okay, but you’re spending a lot of money stockpiling on things that haven’t shown signs of running out yet,” you explain, pointing at the window tint that had astonished Taehyung only a moment ago.

Jungkook grimaces, pink tongue swiping across his lip as he looks at the total amount he’s spent the last three months. “Well, it’s a good thing I have my accountant,” he grins, throwing an arm over your shoulder.

“Not your accountant,” you correct, “just a friend who doesn’t wanna see you run your business to the ground from overspending.”

Jungkook waves you off, and Taehyung tries to sneak into the receptionist office behind you, but Jungkook catches him with his free hand. “This is the life,” he sighs, wistfully gazing over the garage floor. It reeks of motor oil and car paint.

“Count me out,” Taehyung snorts, voicing your disinterest toward such greasy and smelly work. He tries to wiggle out of Jungkook’s hold, but the muscle bunny only straps an arm around his neck, until Taehyung’s squirming and clawing for air against the red sleeve of his jumpsuit.

“My own successful business, a shitload of sexy cars, and of course,” he pauses, squeezes the two of you tighter until you’re both groaning. “My two best friends.” The sap has the gall to peck the top of your heads, and that seems to be the final straw for Taehyung who rips himself away.

“Have this lovefest somewhere else, man,” Taehyung says, flattening his rumpled clothing down. “You’re really putting a nail in my reputation around here.”

Jungkook cackles, mindlessly goes to wrap himself around you from behind. “Your reputation has been trash since that scream you let out the other day,” he informs him, swaying the two of you back and forth. Your heart thunders in your chest, and you just barely manage to avoid Taehyung’s pointed stare.

“Whatever, I’m outta here.” With Taehyung peaced out, you’re left in Jungkook’s arms, gazing over his business like two old lovers. It makes your chest tight, so you quickly go to shake him off.

“We’re okay?” Jungkook murmurs, so soft you almost don’t hear. He’s got his hand wrapped around your wrist, thumb massaging over the bone there like he’s afraid you’ll bolt the second he lets you go.

You nod, tuck the clipboard to your side. “Why wouldn’t we be?”

Those sad puppy eyes, pouty lips turned southward. You want to wipe that look off his face. He sighs, glances at where your skin meets and gives it a squeeze. “I’ve been an ass lately,” he settles on saying. “Said some mean things and ruined your bathroom rug—I’m sorry.”

You don’t know what to say.

Jungkook takes your silence as understanding, reaching down to hold both your hands in his slightly dirty ones. “It won’t happen again. I’d rather lose a million friends than lose you,” he confesses, and something about it feels too real, too raw. “I don’t know what I’d do without you.”

You nod, the constricting feeling in your throat only tightening when he smiles at you, those gentle eyes and plush lips for only you to see. You want to kiss him, swallow him whole. Right here on the garage floor so everyone knows he’s yours.

But you can’t because he’s not.

You settle on swinging your arms between you. “Just don’t do anything stupid,” you warn him, narrowing your eyes playfully. There’s a heavy feeling in your heart, something akin to anguish, but you could never voice it out loud.

“I won’t,” Jungkook promises.

—

Jungkook visits again on a weekday, and you nearly send him straight home when he brandishes another bottle of wine in your face. “It’s nonalcoholic!” He exclaims before you can shut the door on him, foot lodged against the frame. You give in.

“To what do I owe the pleasure?” You ask, curling up on the couch in just your shorts and huge t-shirt. Jungkook pops the bottle open, pouring the wine into two limited edition Shrek 2 cups you pulled out from the depths of your cabinet.

“Can’t hang with my bestie?” He throws back at you, snatching the remote from your hands before you can click on another episode of that dumb housewives show. You end up watching National Geographic, some documentary about the role of bioluminescent shrimp in the sea.

“Aw look, they’re kissing,” he cooes at a pair of seahorses that wander across the screen halfway through a shot of some school of shrimp. “How romantic.”

“Wonder what that’s like,” you comment, not thinking too much on the meaning behind your words until you can feel Jungkook’s stare pierce your cranium. “What?”

“You’ve never been kissed?” He blurts, and you choke on your wine.

“You were my first kiss,” you remind him, flush at the memory of the two of you sitting criss-cross applesauce on his bed, knees knocking in what was probably the worst first kiss in the history of first kisses.

Jungkook blinks. “Oh yeah,” he laughs. “With the Tony Hawk poster behind my bed, right?”

“The one and only.”

Jungkook hums, and the two of you melt back into the silence. Nice aquatic sounds fill the room, the camera panning over more colorful fish that Jungkook oohs at appreciatively. You don’t really pay attention, more interested in the way the wine swirls in your cup and the way you can feel Jungkook’s thigh pressed against your knee, like when you were thirteen and trying something new.

You know it doesn’t mean a lot to him. Just another silly childhood memory of you. Not like you have hundreds, thousands of them with each other. By the way he’d blurted the question, you doubt he even remembered it most days. But you did.

It plagued your mind all the time, the soft feel of his mouth and the trembling hand that had held yours. You wonder if he kisses the same still, lips gently puckered. He’s had years to learn, half a decade to get creative with Sojin, and the past four years of being a bachelor to explore more.

You’ve kissed too, plenty of guys who had no meaning and ones you thought would replace him. But it’d been a long time since you’ve let anyone into your bed, more content to please yourself without the overbearing weight of feelings and emotions to wrap around your throat.

Jungkook coughs, and you shake yourself from your thoughts.

He’s looking at you inquisitively, like he can’t get his usual read on you and would rather just ask what’s wrong. “You don’t,” a pause, “hang out with guys?”

It’s devastatingly cute, the way he asks if you’re fucking, and you want to pinch his cheeks. Instead you shake your head, try to hide the grin on your face from his inquisitive expression. “Just you and Taehyung,” you admit.

Jungkook nods. “Do you and Tae…?”

You shake your head furiously. “No! God no, we don’t do anything like that,” you clarify, the thought of Taehyung in your bed enough to make you want to gag.

Jungkook says nothing, just turns back to the documentary to watch more Nemos and Dorys flit across the screen. You polish off your cup of wine, leaning forward to settle it back on the coffee table. As you settle back into the couch cushions, Jungkook speaks again. “So you take care of yourself?”

You freeze.

“Yeah,” you admit after one complete meltdown in your head. Where was this coming from? Why did he want to know? You and Jungkook were close, but you never did this. You never divulged the details of your sex life, never bragged about who you slept with or how many there were. What was going on?

Jungkook doesn’t say anything after that, just turns his attention back to the tv screen, where you’re almost certain the sea horses from before are fucking. Not that you know what it looks like, but you hope at least someone in this room was enjoying themselves and not drowning in the mortification of having their life long crush ask them if they masturbate.

“So, do you use your hands or a toy?”

You choke, slap your chest to ease the pounding of your heart at Jungkook asking such a question. “E-Excuse me?” You ask, scandalized that Jungkook, your sweet and caring childhood friend turned Fabio, could ask you such a bold question about your personal affairs.

“What?” Jungkook says, like he truly doesn’t see the inappropriateness of the situation. He even raises his eyebrows at you, as if urging you to answer the question.

You sigh, fight the flush of your cheeks and stare idly at the cups on the table. “A toy. Hands don’t feel good,” you curtly reply, crossing your arms over your chest and straightening your legs off the couch, hoping that’s the end of his curiosity. This was enough to fuel your 3am anxiety meltdowns for the next five years.

Jungkook nods, and you can feel his penetrating gaze on the side of your face again. A great white shark swims across the screen. Jungkook strikes. “My hands feel good.”

“Jungkook!” You exclaim in horror (and excitement, but you’ll pretend it wasn’t there). “What has gotten into you?”

“What!” Jungkook defends, Bambi eyes looking at you like you’re the unreasonable one here. “We’re having a civil conversation in which I’m trying to open up your worldview.”

You’re flabbergasted. “This is not a civil conversation, what are you even talking about?” You scold, tug your arms around yourself like it’ll actually protect you from the words that don’t seem to be filtering out of his mouth properly. “Why are you so concerned about that?” You interrogate, hope your forceful tone will scare him away.

It doesn’t. Jungkook shrugs, some noncommittal i dont know sound. “I can’t be interested in what you get up to? What my best friend gets up to?” It’s the obvious emphasis on best friend that makes you step down.

“No,” you sigh, rub a hand down your face. “You can be interested,” you tell him gingerly. “We just never really… talked about... those kinds of things,” you rush out, turn away from him as the narrator on screen dives into the intricacies of bioluminescent shrimp in the animal food chain.

As if sensing your discomfort, Jungkook softens, scooting closer to you. “I’m sorry,” he murmurs, too close and too warm. “I didn’t mean to make you uncomfortable,” he says, places a palm on your knee.

“I’m not!” You rush to assure him, facing him head on again. His eyes are big and implorative still, and you wonder why he became stuck on that of all things today. “It just surprised me.”

His lips quirk to the side, an unsure grin that has you leaning into his shoulder. You sit in silence, the rise and fall of his body with every breath lulling you into a sense of comfort.

A false one that Jungkook zeroes in on.

The documentary’s wrapping up, soothing ocean sounds and wind instruments playing as the credits roll across the screen, when the hand that had been laying so comfortably on your thigh inches up. At first, you don’t notice it, writing it off as Jungkook just shifting around. You tell yourself it’s just that, until his pinky makes contact with the end of your shorts.

Slowly, you turn towards him, catch his mocha irises lustfully lidded as he toys with the hem. “Kook?” You murmur, so soft, barely there.

“Hm?” He replies, continuing to play with the edge of your shorts, until he gets brave and his fingers slip beneath, index finger just barely grazing the panties underneath. You gasp. “This okay?”

Stuck between your arousal and your common sense, you flounder for a response. He’s so close, and smells so good, curls brushing against your temple the closer he gets. You want him so bad, want him to find his place between your thighs and put those pouty lips to use. But you know it’ll make things different, change whatever it is you’ve had for the past almost thirty years, and you’ll never bounce back. Another brush against your panties, pointer finger wiggling it’s way beneath the fabric, and you’re choking out a “yes.”

“Good girl,” he murmurs, and something in your core tingles at the name, thighs clenching together. “Uh uh,” he chides, nudges them open. “Stay still for me,” he commands, and you do, for all of ten seconds, but then he’s pressing his finger on your clit, panties and shorts muting the sensation. Still, it makes you squirm, fingers clutching the couch cushion beneath you as you struggle to keep them open. “Too much?” He asks, and you shake your head no.

“I-It’s fine,” you whisper, and Jungkook smiles.

He pets you, almost wondrously, for a few beats, watches the way the muscles in your thighs twitch with every press against your mound. Eventually, he decides it’s enough. “Hands don’t feel good for you?” He inquires, your words from earlier obviously having left their mark on him. Slowly, you shake your head. He glances down at the fist you have on the couch, composed features sliding up your face. “Well, yours are so small, princess. Of course they don’t feel good.”

He manhandles you around, tugs you onto the couch until you’re laying down, legs sprawled on either side of him. Pleased with the arrangement, Jungkook glances back down to your bottoms. “These have to go,” he tells you, hooks his fingers in the waistband and abruptly yanks down, leaving you just in your t-shirt.

You go to shy away, but Jungkook stops you, palms resting on the insides of your thighs, thumbs pressing into the skin soothingly. “My fingers are long, see?” He says, raising a hand to wiggle his fingers at you. You nod, heartbeat thundering in your ears. “They’ll feel nice inside.”

You know they will.

You can tell he knows his way around a woman’s body just from the way his hands glide over yours, carefully like he’s mapping you out. Ever so slowly, one hand grows closer, until his thumb is gently circling your clit, and you inhale sharply.

“So wet,” Jungkook hums, his other hand traveling further down, until he’s spreading your pussy lips with two fingers, trailing them through the arousal that gathers there.

You’ve never been so attentively cared for, never had a man zero in on your cunt like it was his first meal in ages. Jungkook’s eyes are clouded with lust, tongue peeking out from between his lips as he watches your pussy lips flutter at his touch.

He swirls his hand over your clit, pressing down. The first sound escapes you, a soft whimper that has you clamping your hand over your mouth in embarrassment. Jungkook grins down at you, shifts closer to press a kiss to the knuckles over your mouth.“Don’t hide from me,” he purrs, pulling away and pressing a kiss to your neck.

You cry out when he gets back to it, massaging your pussy with gentle hands and a thumb against your clit to placate you. “Jungkook,” you choke out, and he beams at his name, takes it as a sign to finally slip two fingers inside. “A-ah,” you whine, arching beneath him.

He basks in your noises, leans close again to press a kiss beneath your ear, against your jaw. “This okay?” He murmurs, curling the fingers inside of you. You mewl, throwing your arms around him as he begins working you open. “How does it feel, baby?”

“G-good,” you pant, turn your head until you can bury your nose in his hair, drown even more in his all-consuming aura.

Another kiss to your neck, before he’s suctioning his lips right below your ear, nipping and sucking at the skin to brand you his. “You like my hands?” He husks, and the patch of saliva he leaves on your neck feels cold without his mouth there. You nod, and Jungkook rewards you with a soft smooch over the hickey he’s left.

His fingers inside you curl and scissor, brush against every inch of your walls until you’re quivering beneath him, gasping his name out. You could melt if his fingers weren’t holding you together. “So tight,” he groans, curling his fingers. The movement touches upon something sensitive within you, and you moan his name loudly.

“O-Oh,” you pant, wiggling beneath him as you try to feel that again. Jungkook lets you, watches you desperately rut into his hands. He drifts away, lets his tongue mouth over your breasts, licking until there’s a damp spot on your t-shirt, the flimsy house bra you’d worn and the t-shirt combined not enough to hide your pebbled nipples.

The drag of his hands against your pussy isn’t enough, the motions not quick enough. Jungkook glances at your twisted features, your quivering pussy, and then, ever so gently, ducks over you, puckered lips letting one, long glob of saliva touch down on your pussy, trickling around his knuckles.

“Fuck,” you choke, watch his tongue swipe over his lip to break the thin bridge that connects you too. Suddenly, everything is smoother, the combined lubrication of your arousal and his spit making the glide of his fingers sinfully slick.

Frantic for release, you lose yourself in him, ready to free fall into your pleasure so long as Jungkook is there to catch you. “That’s it,” he encourages, picks up the pace of his fingers inside you. “Come on, beautiful, let me see that gorgeous face of yours when you come.”

“K-Kook,” you sob, and he smiles against your neck. His fingers work fast, until your muscles are all pulled tight, waiting for that final push to unravel. You make the mistake of glancing down, only to be caught by that pearly smile and adoring gaze. You’re in heaven, you know you are.

There’s no other explanation for this—the way Jungkook holds you like you’re his, hands so gently caressing your most intimate parts. You’re almost convinced you’re having a fever dream, a sick, too realistic dream, but then Jungkook’s biting down on your shoulder through your t-shirt, subtly rutting against your thigh.

“Cum for me,” he purrs against your neck, and you do, sobbing as your orgasm rolls over you, the heavy weight of his cock against your thigh. “Jungkook,” you cry, so pitifully, it has him lunging forward, a kiss pressed to the corner of your mouth.

You feel sweaty and gross, unbelievably tired from the gentle way he opened you up. Blindly, you reach down, feel the hardness of his cock beneath his sweatpants, but Jungkook nudges you away. You huff. “Let me,” you whimper, reach for him again even though you can see the slowness in your movement. “Need your cock in my mouth,” you drawl, almost sleepily. 

“Shh,” he soothes, lips pressed against your neck, where he’s still licking and sucking over every inch of you. You whine. “You don’t have to do a thing, gorgeous,” he assures you, “just wanted to make you feel good.”

—

Work gets stressful shortly after. There’s a new batch of interns coming in this season, new faces who will mess up your coffee orders and jam the printers for a good few weeks. There’s normally a team of employees who train them, a mix of relatively older people from different departments who show them around; a girl in the finance department, the one who usually trains them, is on maternity leave. With no one else to fall back on, the head of the department pushes the duties off on you, claiming your flexibility and work ethic make you the perfect candidate for such a role.

Normally you’d thrive at the praise, eat up every single word like it sustained you. In a way, it did. It was nice to be appreciated and recognized for your hard work, to be thought of so highly, especially in a male-dominated company. However, this time, you know it’s out of convenience that the head kisses up to you, and you end up begrudgingly taking the role.

The gaps in your schedule you’d normally spend relaxing or catching up on other projects are filled with bumbling interns, calling for help every chance they get. It’s like they’ve never done anything on their own, this group, always asking you the correct way to do this, the right way to do that. You haven’t mentored interns in a while, so you spend the first day breezing over old powerpoints and print outs you made years ago. You remember why you’re not fit for mentoring when one of them asks you how to navigate Excel. You nearly rip their head off.

There’s so much going on, you barely get time to see Jungkook, let alone text him. You saw him once the morning after, stack of pancakes on your kitchen table as he rushed you off to work. The shop didn’t open for another hour. He was sweet, kissed your forehead as you left, but he’s always done that. You didn’t have time to talk about whatever the night before was, or what that made the two of you now.

On Friday night, one week into your nightmarish role, you pull into the shop. You'd like to convince yourself it was routine, visiting the shop, but that’s a lie. You desperately miss Jungkook. 

 Most of the garage doors that are usually pulled open during the day are shut, save for one. The last of Jungkook’s employees are leaving, bidding you adieu as you step out of your car. Park Jimin is there, repairing some rickety car in the back corner.

“Boo,” you call playfully, and Jimin doesn’t flinch, merely pulls his head from out of the hood to flash you an easygoing smile.

He whistles at the sight of you. “You look like you’ve been through one of helluva week,” he says, and you, despite your strong personality, feel yourself blush at his comment. Jeez, did you look that bad? Jimin doesn’t elaborate, just pulls out a stool for you to sit on beside where he’s working. “Penny for your thoughts?”

You glance at the plexiglass, the offices hiding down the hall. Jungkook could wait, you presume, settling down beside him. Your skirt tugs up as you settle onto the pleather seat, so you cover your legs meekly with your purse. “Work’s been crazy,” you explain, and Jimin laughs at the obvious.

“You’re telling me,” He hums, and you roll your eyes playfully. “What’s going on at work?”

What hasn’t been going on, you think to yourself, before launching into a full retelling of your new horrendous position, of all the interns with their clueless eyes and useless notebooks. Jimin chuckles, indulges you in a few comments here and there that only fuel you on. He’s just about done with whatever he’s doing to the car at the same time your story wraps up, explaining how you found yourself here, desperate for Jungkook to whisk you off to that arcade you loved as kids. “Jungkook?” He asks, and you nod. “He left a while ago.”

You freeze. “Huh?” You say, dumbly. You almost want to laugh at your own impulsiveness, for showing up without sending him a text or a warning to let him know you were coming. You almost do laugh, but then you remember you and Jungkook never did that anyway. Hell, he showed up at your house a few weeks ago unannounced and drunk. The two of you were hardly the type to plan ahead, so it was weird for him to not be here. He’s been at the shop almost every night since it’s opened, the days he’s not usually a holiday.

“Jimin…” you begin, glancing at the receptionist window once more. “Where’s Jungkook?”

Jimin shuts his tool box, kicking a cart off to the side. “He left with that lady,” he tells you, doesn’t hear the way your heart rips straight out of your chest. No way. “Tall, pretty. Had that nice Corvette he fixed up a while ago.”

“Sojin,” you mumble, and Jimin nods.

“Think that was her name.” As if sensing your tumultuous thoughts, he steps closer, one hand reaching out to steady you. “You alright?”

“God,” you exhale, pushing yourself away from Jimin and the garage and the window. The stool rolls away, almost hits the side of another car but Jimin catches it. He rushes over towards you, watching you wobble in your heels.

“Honey,” Jimin says, steady and warm beside you. “Sit down for me, yeah?” He guides you to a row of seats against the wall, nailed into the floor so you can’t push them away and make even more of a mess. Not that that’s your concern, your mind and heart too preoccupied with thoughts of Jungkook lying to you, going out with that woman again, despite your obvious hatred for her and his promise to you.

Jimin disappears, rushes over to the other side of the garage before returning with a water bottle for you. He cracks it open, presses it into your hands, and then against your lips when you don’t move. “Drink,” he encourages, watching you with worried eyes that only grow more and more concerned the deeper you fall into your thoughts.

You want to cry and beat Jungkook up at the same time. You want to scream at him for lying to you after treating you so nicely, holding you so warmly. Instead, you gasp for breath, clutching your face in your hands like it’s the only thing that grounds you.

There’s a beep outside, chirpy and cute in the way only older models are, and you whip your head up, the headlights of the Corvette painting you in shades of yellow as it rolls to a stop, the tears you hadn’t felt glistening under the light.

Jungkook flings himself out of the driver’s seat, and a sob catches in your throat when Sojin steps out of the passenger seat. Jungkook shoves everything in his path to the side, carts flying into the few automobiles on the floor, tools clanging loudly onto the cement, and just as those arms you love so much are reaching out for you, there’s a hand on his chest stopping him.

“What did you do to her?” Jungkook snarls, pushing Jimin roughly to the side. Jimin, smaller but not weaker, holds his ground, clutching Jungkook by the material of his jumpsuit a second time. “Let— go!” Jungkook shouts, finally worming away from his employee.

He nearly trips before you, stumbling to his knees as he takes your quivering hands in his. “What’s wrong,” he asks, throwing a nasty glare back at Jimin who watches silently from the side. Sojin is still by her car, leaning across the driver’s side now. “What did he do, what did he say?”

You shake your head, dropping your head to tuck your chin against your chest. You hate this. Hate letting him or Jimin or Sojin see you cry. It’s not the person you are, not the self-made woman you claim to be as you cry over the same man who is unknowingly defending you from himself.

“Let go,” you whisper, hoarse and choked. You shake your arms, but he doesn’t let up.

“Tell me what's wrong,” Jungkook pleads, inching closer to you. His breath is warm and he smells like oil, just like he always does. He also smells sweet and floral in a way only a woman could. He smells like Sojin.

You sob, rip your hands away from and scurry blindly towards Jimin, who catches you in his arms despite the shock that paints his face.

Jungkook watches with an expression of hurt, watches you snuggle into the arms of another man over an issue you won’t tell him about. Jimin says nothing, just rubs his palm over your back. He gestures towards the red corvette, the woman standing by it and Jungkook takes the hint.

You hear the kitten-like purr as it pulls off, the silence that follows afterwards. You don’t know where Jungkook is, if he’s here or if he left with her, and you don’t want to. “Tell me he’s gone,” you beg Jimin, quiet gasps against his neck.

He nods, slowly lets you untangle yourself from his arms as the two of you stare over the empty garage. The Corvette is gone, and so is Jungkook. Before Jimin can tell you where he is, you’re wiping a hand over your face, embarrassed at the moisture it comes back with. 

“I take it he’s not supposed to be with her?” Jimin tries to joke. 

Neither of you laugh. 

You sniffle, process what just happened, how you acted. You’ve never felt that way before, never experienced such brutal heartbreak. 

You don’t know what you expected from Jungkook. In your heart, you convinced yourself what happened in your apartment was the start of something new between the two of you, a natural result of your long friendship. Realistically, you know you should’ve waited until the two of you spoke, discussed whatever happens next. But you’d spent the past week comforted by the fact you’d finally gotten to experience something like that with him, daydreaming about him every chance you got. 

Somewhere in your mind, you had convinced yourself your involvement with him would finally be what broke his connection with Sojin, the final nail that would make him forget about her. It’s painfully funny how such wasn’t the case. 

Jimin breaks you out of your thoughts. “You okay to drive home?” He gently inquires, and you turn your gaze over toward your car. 

Did you trust yourself to make it home without shedding a single tear? Absolutely not. But between Sojin and Jimin, you had let enough strangers see you fall apart over a man tonight. 

“Perfectly okay,” you tell him. 

—

The interns pick up on your sour attitude the week that follows. They don’t ask dumb questions, and don’t mess up your order. You talk them through a presentation, show them how to properly organize finance charts. There’s a slide that has clip art, a goofy dollar sign with a smile and shoes. Jungkook put it there when you first made the PowerPoint. After the little lesson, you go to the bathroom and try not to cry.

A week later, and the interns don’t need you anymore. They do well, and your boss praises you for being such a good mentor. You thank him and he lets you go home early.

Home is empty. Jungkook doesn’t show up unannounced, mostly because you’ve changed the number lock on the door. You want to eat salad today, for some reason, but don’t have any of the ingredients for it, so you walk to the supermarket a few blocks away.

The supermarket feels the same as it always does at night. That ghostly feeling of being watched in an empty aisle, the scratchy tune of whatever Top 50 radio station they settled on today. You get there and decide you don’t want salad anymore, so you buy ingredients for a stew instead, all of which you probably had at home.

When you step outside, the air around your bare thighs is cold. Summer was ending, which meant Jungkook’s birthday was coming up. You ball the receipt in your hand and fling it at the trash. You miss, so you hobble over to pick it up.

The trash is beside a red Corvette with two racing stripes.

“Hey,” Sojin says, arms crossed over her chest as she walks up behind you, sizing up your crouched form beside her car. “What’re you doing to my car?”

You breathe in, shake the crumpled up receipt at her, before stuffing it in the garbage. She says nothing as you stalk by her, and you’re back on the main road when she pulls up next to you, window rolled down to speak to you. “Get in,” she gestures, “it’s gonna rain.”

“No,” you say, and a fat raindrop falls right on your nose.

The door unlocks and you climb in, plastic bags crowded by your feet.

The drive is silent. You only live a few minutes from the store, and you point out an empty spot by the sidewalk for her to pull up to. A dry thanks is on the tip of your tongue, but you never get to say it.

“My dad has cancer,” Sojin says.

“That sucks,” you respond, feel bad right away and say, “I’m sorry.”

Sojin doesn’t seem bothered by it, shifting the Corvette out of drive and cutting the engine. “He’s probably not gonna see Christmas,” she adds, and you don’t know what to say. You don’t care about her or her crazy father.  “I wanted to do something nice for him before he, y’know.”

“Died,” you fill, and at that she glares.

“Yeah,” she huffs. “Before he died. So I fixed up his car. But the place I took it to didn’t know how to fix an engine so old, and ended up fucking it up even more.” You nod, she continues. “Then I bumped into Jungkook and—“

“Took advantage of his kindness,” you finish, remembering the twinkle in his eyes when he’d told you about their encounter, that day in the empty garage that seemed lightyears away. “Well congrats. Hope your dad liked it,” you sigh, push open the door and get soaked to the bone immediately.

“Wait!” Sojin calls, hopping out after you. She’s still as beautiful as she was when you were seventeen, even with rain soaking her entire being. “I didn’t ask him to repaint it, but that’s what my dad loved the most.”

You want to go inside, make your stew, and cry in it.

Sojin doesn’t seem bothered by the bangs that stick to her forehead or the water that washes down her spine. “When I told him Jungkook did it… he wanted to see him. Apologize and stuff.”

You snort. “Apologize,” you repeat, tightening your grip on your shoppings bags. “For what, Sojin? For almost killing him with this car or for treating him like shit for five years?” She says nothing, stares at the hood of the car like she doesn’t know what you’re talking about. “He was crazy for you, you know that? He would have done anything for you and not once did you stand up to your dad for him. You let that man call him worthless, stupid, a waste of space. And for what? For you to break up with him for some rich asshole who would never treat you half as good as Jungkook did?” You sneer.

The rain feels cold and your groceries feel heavier, so you whirl on your heel and make for your building entrance.

“He never liked me,” Sojin calls out, and you wonder if she even heard the second half of your emotional outburst. You turn to face her with fire in your eyes, and are only a little surprised at the sadness that paints hers. “He never liked me the way he said he did.” You could knock her teeth out.

“You’re stupid,” you spit, and she rounds the car at an insane speed until she’s glaring down at you over her perfectly sculpted nose.

“He never liked me,” Sojin repeats angrily. “He was always busy looking at you—for approval, for attention, I don’t fucking know. He would hold me and touch me but it never felt real. It always felt like practice for him…” she sniffles and your breath hitches in your throat. “We dated all through college,” she says like you don’t know, like you didn’t stress about it for years. “Everyday closer to graduation felt like a ticking bomb. Like he was just waiting for you to come back. To come home.”

You remember it.

The excited texts he’d send you everyday, the plans he made for you. Jungkook was more excited than your parents about you coming home. The five hours had done a number on him, and after four years all he wanted was to have you close again. You remember the hug in his driveway, the way his mom had told you he’d waited all day for you. It’s weird hearing it from Sojin.

Too overwhelmed, you decide to deflect. “You don’t know what you’re talking about,” you murmur, and you’re surprised she hears it over the pouring rain.

A loud scoff. “You’re stupid,” she repeats back, jabbing a finger at your chest. You glare, and so does she. Like two animals in a cage you size each other up. “You’re stupid and ugly and I hate you,” she spits, and you drop your shopping bags to lunge at her.

You don’t swing, just grab her by the shirt and move to slam her against the wall, but she’s tall and a little strong, bony fingers wrapping around your wrists like spiders. “Why can’t you see how much he likes you?” She screams, like it hurts to admit it. “He’s been in love with you since forever, and all you’ve ever done is run away!”

“I never—“ you gasp, pushing her away from you. Sojin stumbles, but she doesn’t fall. “I’ve never run away,” you defend, heart beating in your chest too fast to be normal. “Some of us have careers and lives we want to live—I don’t want to depend on a man for the rest of my life!”

She growls, tugs at her wet hair like you’re giving her a headache. Stomping up to you once more, she pushes you hard with both hands, and you barely catch yourself in time. “He would have followed you to that fucking fancy school, but you told him it was better to save money here! Told him to not waste his time and just settle there! You did this to us—to all of us!”

You choke. Lightning flashes behind her, and for a moment all you can see is your gentle prodding, sitting behind him as he filled out applications, big wannabe business brain telling him the easiest way to save money for his auto shop was by going straight into technical school. The small frown on his face that day you’d packed for college, and the way he’d stood in your parent’s driveway until you couldn’t see him anymore, a little spec in your rearview mirror.

Sojin, sensing she’s made her point, says nothing. She scoops up your fallen grocery bags and shoves them into your trembling hands, stomping back to her car and pulling off with a roar, loud and ferocious, and nothing like a kitten.

The groceries in your bag end up in the trash.

—

Taehyung invites you to lunch one day, and you go. You’re starving and desperate to get away from work, where you’re paranoid everyone knows there’s something wrong with you. You meet up at a cute little bistro, and he smiles and hugs you when you arrive. You sit in comfort for all of two seconds before he jumps into his interrogation.

“What’s going on with you and Kook?” He asks, casually flipping through the menu. Your hand stills around your glass of water, and you eventually set it down without ever taking a drink. Your mind instinctively maps out a lie, but Taehyung has known you a while now, knows the quirk of your lips when you’re about to lie your ass off. “Don’t lie to me. I haven’t seen you at the shop in almost a month. And he doesn’t go out,” he mentions. “I think he spent four nights at the shop before I made him go home.”

You deflate.

Too embarrassed to explain, you flip through your own menu, and when the waitress comes you order the first words your eyes focus on. Taehyung doesn’t push you, just patiently gazes out over the bustling street.

Finally, you break. “We… did a thing.”

“Uh huh,” he nods, reading some ad on the side of a bus that passes by. “Need you to elaborate, babe.”

You squirm. “We… fooled around,” you say for lack of more appropriate wording. There’s a family sitting beside you, and you’d rather die than let some nooby pre-teen listen to the details of yours and Jungkook’s night.

“You fucked?” You choke, make a loud sputtering noise like it’ll drown out Taehyung’s voice to the other patrons. “What’s wrong with that? We all knew it’d happen sooner or later,” he shrugs.

“No,” you seethe. “We didn—I didn’t.” Taehyung rolls his eyes, the same way Sojin did that day on the sidewalk. You almost throw your glass of water at him. “We…” you sigh. “We did a thing, and then the week after he went out with Sojin.”

Taehyung scowls at the mere mention of her, so the glass of water is returned to its coaster. “Really? He went out with her right away? He’s cancelled.”

You nod, rubbing your hands over your face. “He… her dad has cancer and is literally on his deathbed so she wanted to fix up his car for memories sake, which he loved, so he wanted to apologize to Kook and thank him for fixing up his car,” you rush out, and now Taehyung chokes, water spewing out of his nose. You shriek, drawing everyone’s attention as you pat down your soaked blouse. “Tae!”

“I’m sorry,” he cries, wiping at the sting in his nose. “He-she, what?!” You ignore him, focus on battling the damp spot on your blazer. “God, that’s crazy,” Taehyung snorts, winces at the feeling in his nose.

After the two of you have settled, the manager kicks you out for your inappropriate conversations and childish behavior. You leave with your tails tucked between your legs. Taehyung holds your hand as he walks you back to your workplace, you quietly fill him in on all the other details surrounding yours and Jungkook’s fallout, from your breakdown in the garage to your weirdly dramatic confrontation with Sojin. “Well,” he claps, slamming a hand down on the traffic light button, even though both of you know it doesn’t work. “That explains a lot of things.”

“Yeah,” you agree, pushing down the crosswalk when the light finally changes of its own accord. “Do you,” you pause, feet glued to the sidewalk. “Do you think she was right?”

Taehyung glances back at you, so small and unsure in the midst of a bustling crowd. He smiles, sweet and soft. Rare coming from him. His free hand ruffles the top of your head, and he brings you into his chest. “Babe, the hottest guy in your grade was intimidated by scrawny, pre-muscle bunny Jungkook. I’m pretty sure he feels some type of way towards you.”

Your lip wobbles dangerously, and you bite down on it to stop. Taehyung pats your head, barks at some old guy when he yells at the two of you for standing in the middle of the sidewalk.

When you’re outside your office, you speak again. “You were not the hottest guy in our grade, by the way.”

Taehyung snorts. “I totally was.”

—

You hideout for the rest of the week.

On Friday night, you finally have the balls to show yourself again, and you hop on the highway leading out of the city before you can overthink it. The buildings slowly melt away, replaced with cozier homes, tinier shops, and by the time you’re pulling up the street, you’re deep in doubt again.

It’s not that late yet, only a little past sunset, but the garage doors, usually open to the street, are all shut. You frown, pull around the block, reverse into a spot across the street. Locking your car, a gust of wind nearly trips you as you cross the street. The front office is dark, metal shutters pulled over the entrance.

Eventually, you stumble around until you find the tiny backdoor squeezed beside some dumpsters, grateful for the key Jungkook had given you so long ago.

Just as Taehyung predicted, a pair of red jumpsuit clad feet stick out from beneath a car. A nice car, an even older Corvette than Sojin’s dad’s, still shiny despite the model it is. It looks like a show car with the way it glints at you, black paint almost glossy. The only light in the entire garage is a lamp, positioned over the area where the legs are working, and a flashlight that occasionally beams at you when the holder loses his grip. No music today, just the hum of a rotating fan. You creep over.

Jungkook’s humming a song when you get to him, foot tapping idly on the ground. You suck in a deep breath and nudge his foot with the tip of your heel. You have exactly two seconds to jump away when he abruptly rolls out from beneath the car, concentrated features scanning quickly around until they land on you.

The garage is still, until Jungkook jumps into action. “___,” he stammers, stumbling to his feet. The rolling board drifts away, bumping into the corner of the metal table beside you. “Hi, um,” he flounders, brushing his fingers through his hair, palms wiping over the front of his pants. Finally, “hi.”

The bad bitch Chanel skirt-suit you’d worn today fails you for the first time in a long time. Your hands feel sweaty, so you clutch them behind your back. “Hi, Jungkook,” you exhale, and all the emotions you’d swallowed for so long, the feelings that tightened around your chest and throat like boa constrictors, come oozing out, until all you can see is his puckered mouth and twinkling gaze.

He coughs, tries to casually lean against the car, but greatly miscalculates the distance. “What, um, what brings you here?” He asks, foot tapping nervously against the ground.

There’s a box of takeout on the floor he tries to subtly kick beneath the car, and a plastic bottle of soda that makes a loud noise when he tries that too. You twist your lips, watching the anxious shuffling of his feet. You breeze over his question, plaster a tight smile into your face, and ask your own question; “how long have you been here?” Tentatively, you lower yourself onto a rolling stool. “It’s late,” you state the obvious.

Jungkook’s leg bounces, and he pats his hand over it nervously. “Um, an hour? Just working on something,” he answers, cheeks warm as his eyes flicker everywhere but you. “What brings you here?” He repeats, and you know you can’t deflect it this time.

Shrugging half heartedly, you wait for him to finally look at you. When he does, he almost looks away but the glint in your eye stops him from doing so. “We need to talk,” you finally say. Jungkook visibly deflates, lips pulling into a thin line. You contemplate letting him relieve his thoughts first, but you came here with a point to make, for questions that needed answering, and you’re scared one word from him will wash them all away.

“Listen,” you start, smoothing your hand over the edge of your skirt. “I know something weird happened between us, and then I kinda freaked out on you, but… I need you to tell me the truth.”

Jungkook doesn’t hesitate. “Always.”

You swallow, try to push back the frustration that builds in his throat. “Did you ever even like Sojin?”

Jungkook blinks. “Huh?” A snort. “You’re joking,” he snickers, wipes at faux tears in the corner of his eyes, before your unsmiling face registers and he’s schooling his features. “___, I did like her. I dated her for five years. How could I not like her?”He says seriously, like he can’t believe you would ever question such a thing. 

You exhale, pick at your fingernails. “I met her,” you admit, and Jungkook’s face twists in confusion. “At the supermarket last week. She said you never liked her.”

Jungkook rolls his eyes. “Of course she’ll think that—we’re exes. I doubt she remembers all our best memories,” he sighs, turning back to organize his tool cart like he’s done with this conversation.

Raising to your feet you call his name again, and he hums absentmindedly. “Sojin said you never liked her because you were always chasing after me,” you accuse, laying all your cards out on the table. Your claim startles him, and you watch as he jostles half the tool cart with his surprise.

“She, what?” He huffs, cheeks as red as his jumpsuit. He forces out a laugh, airy and tight like you’re starring in your elementary school play again and the nerves are eating him up. “I-I don’t know why she’d say that.”

He’s flustered, obviously so, as he scoops the metal tools back onto the cart, bumping into three other things before settling back down on the floor to roll under the car. He pushes himself under, and you sternly call out, “Jungkook.” He freezes.

You strut over, brush your hands behind your skirt as you crouch beside him. “Always,” you quietly remind him. Jungkook says nothing. For a moment, you wonder if you’ve grossly misread the situation, if this was just another one of her schemes to drive the two of you apart.

Slowly, Jungkook appears from under the car. There’s a new stain on his cheekbone, brown and slick. He sits up, wide eyes tracing over your features likes he’s trying to seal them in his memory. “Yeah,” he admits, lips twisting as he watches the surprise take your features, before he’s lolling his head back to stare at the ceiling, leaving you to stare at the column of his neck.

“I do,” Jungkook admits, pushing through his emotions. It’s hard for him to confess, you realize, watching the way his Adam’s apples contracts and his jaw twitches from having to say so. “I like you so much it hurts.”

His confession leaves you feeling weird. On one hand, you want nothing more than to spring yourself on him and kiss his face until the stray oil marks are gone and replaced with the outline of your lipstick prints. You want to smother him and hold him, let him know he’s yours, always has been.

On the other hand… it’s sad. Going on thirty years and never did the two of you guess your feelings for each other. You doubt either of you are good at hiding them, with the way everyone seems to have known except you two. Maybe you don’t know Jungkook as well as you thought you did. Maybe he doesn’t know you.

A hand touches your knee, and you return your attention to his downtrodden appearance, chin tucked against his chest. “Please,” he murmurs. “Say something.”

You say nothing.

Tentatively, you reach a hand out, run it along the side of his head, through his mane, chocolate waves touching his cheekbones. He almost looks like when you guys were kids, round eyes watching your every move. Your hand continues down the back of his head, cupping the nape of his neck comfortingly. Jungkook leans into the touch, even though his shoulders are tense. You soothe your fingers over the tight muscles in his neck.

“Since when?” You inquire.

Jungkook blinks, lets your palm trace along his jawline and cup his cheek. “Since you dated Taehyung when we were sixteen.”

Mentally, you curse every deity in existence for putting Kim Taehyung in your life. “God,” you groan, burrowing your hands in your palms. Jungkook, surprised by your reaction, rolls closer, moves around until you’re crouched between his long legs. “Since me and that pinhead dated for twenty minutes?” You repeat.

Jungkook shifts closer, rubs your back. “It was 65 hours, actually,” he corrects, and the exact duration of your relationship makes you cringe. “I… counted.”

Small and shy, almost embarrassed. You glance back up at him. “Why?” You prod, and Jungkook’s cheek flush, palm stilling.

“Uh,” he starts. “I was nervous? That you two were in it for the long run. And I, I don’t know. It was easier to just count,” he lamely finishes, and his dangly earring whips around with him when he avidly avoids your gaze.

You sigh, catch his hand in yours. “Tae and I would have never lasted,” you tell him, remembering all the times the guy made you pick him up from one night stands in the last few years. “He wasn’t who I wanted.”

His foot jumps, toe tapping against the wheel of the car next to you. He wants to ask, you know he does, but Jungkook was quite possibly the only other person on this planet who could overthink something more than you.

Deciding to ease his worries, you give his hand a squeeze. “It was you,” you confess, feel like an elephant lands straight on your chest. “It is you,” you correct.

His forehead knocks against yours, hard, and you hiss at the bump that probably forms. “What the fu—“

“Tell me it’s not temporary,” Jungkook pleads, eyes crinkled in worry. You’re going cross eyed from trying to look at him like this, so you flit your eyes off somewhere to the side. His hand is heavy in yours. “Tell me you’re not just doing this for closure, or because you want to see what it would have been like, please,” he begs, “that would be so fucked up, because I’m so in love with you I actually think I might die.”

The dramatic confession makes you painfully warm. You nod, your lower lip trembling at the way he looks at you, like you single-handedly controlled this entire world with a flick of your wrist. “I-I love you too,” you parrot back, the first time you’ve ever said it, the millionth time you’ve ever thought it.

Jungkook visibly relaxes, pulls away from you to drop his head on your shoulder instead. Your legs are starting to cramp from the tight crouching position, ankles wobbly in your heels. His hair smells good still, despite the hours he’s probably spent beneath a car, and you gingerly pat the back of his head.

“I love you,” he murmurs, and you repeat it. “I love you,” he says again, and you repeat it. “I lov—“

“Me, yes, I’ve heard,” you cut him off, smile at the snort he releases, and when he turns his head, his lips brush against your neck. You’re instantly thrown back a few weeks, to that night on the couch with the limited edition Shrek 2 cups and the wine; the gentle touches that left you trembling for weeks. You inhale quickly, grabbing him by the shoulders and pushing him away.

His eyes are too soft, face too relaxed as he stares at you. “My legs hurt,” you tell him, quickly getting up. You whirl around, facing the car and digging through your purse like you suddenly have something to do.

“Oh,” you gasp, watch two arms wind around your waist, the dirty red jumpsuit contrasting against the tweed material of your high-end Chanel jacket. Jungkook sighs lovingly by your ear, snuggles his face into your neck. “W-we should go out,” you blurt, nerves jumping when he squeezes tighter, burrows closer. “To celebrate!”

Jungkook hums. “Yeah?” His voice is too low. You’re in trouble. “Celebrate what?”

You squirm, breath catching in your throat when he presses you closer against the hood of the car. “Um,” you shakily exhale, hands splaying out over the sleek surface of the black hood to steady yourself. It’s so shiny you can almost see your reflection. “U-Us!” You finally manage to exclaim.

A kiss against the side of your neck, and your spirit just about exits your body. Your knees feel weak, and you're just about ready to throw another mediocre excuse his way, when something warm and wet traces up the column of your neck. “Kook!” You gasp.

“Shh,” he murmurs, deep voice instantly soothing over your nerves. His hips nudge against your behind, and you jump at the bulge that presses against your lower back. One hand unwraps from around you, gliding down your arm sensually until he’s trapping your fingers on the hood of the car with his own. A swift kiss against your ear. “You owe me, remember?”

You flush, remember the filthy promises your list-addled brain has spewed that night at your house, the almost erratic development of your thoughts as you became consumed in the thought of him. Reminisce on the prod of his fingers against your cunt, his hot breath against your ear.

Suddenly, Jungkook whirls you around, traps you with his gaze as two hands flutter to rest on the small of your back. He’s looking down at you with those lovesick eyes, hooded with lust as they trace over the dip of your Cupid’s bow. “You’ll do that for me, won’t you?” A soft brush of his mouth against yours, pouty lips guiding you through a kiss, until you’re sighing against him, and he’s pulling away.

Numbly, you nod, almost hypnotized by the soft smirk that overtakes his features as he pushes you down, watches you sink to your knees before him. The concrete feels cold and hard beneath your knees. His jumpsuit is knotted around his waist, and you shakily unravel it, the elastic waistband staring you in the face afterwards.

“Take your time,” Jungkook croons, hand coming to rest on the side of your face, knuckles brushing over your skin delicately.

You tug it down, and one flash of that underwear band has your nerves flying out the window. You shove his t-shirt out of the way, let your hands trail over the ridges of his abdomen in your haste. He helps you by tugging it over his head. With that gone, his black boxers stare you in the face, and you yank those down with no hesitation.

“Jesus, baby,” Jungkook chuckles, though it’s choked off when you grasp his engorged cock in his hand. You should be surprised, marveling at the sight, considering it’s the first time you’ve ever seen him like this. But you brain is working overtime, too immersed in the vein that runs alongside it and the tip that throbs back at you. Later you can worship it, you think. Right now, you needed it down your throat.

The tip is flaming and swollen, his cock still growing plump in your hold, your hands slowly dragging up and down the length. You lean forward, press a gentle kiss below the mushroom head, trail kisses down the length until you're meeting your knuckles, and trail them back again. Jungkook sucks in a tight breath, leans to rest his palms on the car behind you, as he watches you on him.

A head of precum escapes, and you lunge for it, swirl your tongue in and around the slit on his cock, until his entire body tenses up. “Fuck,” he grunts, watches you ease his cock into your mouth. You groan at the stretch, the drag against the corners of your lips making your eyes roll backwards. “___, baby, a little more?” He asks, voice hoarse as he watches you sink down further on his cock.

You comply, close your eyes and focus on relaxing your throat. There’s a hand on the back of your head, impatiently pushing you down his length. “Shit,” he cries, unconsciously ruts against you. You gag, and he shushes you with a caress against your cheek. “Sorry,” he huffs, “just a little more for me, okay?”

Eyes squeezed shut tightly, you let him push you down until his cock hits the back of your throat and you can’t take anymore. The prod against your throat has tears springing to your eyes. “Gonna move now,” Jungkook announces, thumb brushing away the tears that collect in the corners. “Be good.”

He drags himself out, your saliva coating every inch of him, and when just the tip is resting on your tongue, he shoves back in. You whimper, palms digging into his thighs. Jungkook brushes a hand down your hair, soothes you for all of two seconds before he’s pulling out and doing it all over again. He picks up the pace, loses himself in the feeling of your hot mouth around him, tongue dragging over his cock.

The feeling in your throat burns, each thrust of his hips against your mouth making your jaw more and more sore. But god, it feels good to have him so close, his scent swarming your sense, groans like music to your ears. You want to please him, want him to feel as good as you did at your place. You want it even more now that you know how he feels, know he’s probably thought about this before.

A brutal thrust has you gagging, throat contracting around his length. “Shh,” Jungkook sighs, the fingers buried in your hair flattening out to run over your head. “Doing so good for me, beautiful.”

You bask in the praise, let a hand flutter down to the apex of your thighs, pressing down to relieve some of the pressure. Jungkook groans, rolls his hips against you and keeps you there for a second. Your throat spasms, his dick pressed hotly against it, and you feel your panties grow embarrassingly sticky. Eventually, he draws back out.

“You like this?” He hums, rutting against you faster now, nose brushing against the sparse hairs on his pelvis with every slam of his hips. You nod around a gag, eyes clouding with tears, lips slippery with saliva and precum. One particular thrust is so hard, it nearly sends you knocking back into the car, Jungkook’s hand on the back of your head barely saving you. “Fucking hell,” he spits, “look so pretty with my cock shoved down your throat, princess.”

You moan around him, feel a subtle twitch against your tongue before he’s pulling himself out. “Shit,” he cursed, pushing you away as he goes to grab his own dick in his hand, tugging at it like a madman. “Wh-Where?” He asks, and you stare dumbly at the sight of him playing with himself, almost don’t realize he’s asking you a question.

You take too long, scramble for words too long, and even if you did have one your throat is far too sensitive yo answer. Jungkook grows impatient. Pulling you closer by the collar of your Chanel suit jacket, tugging it open until the flimsy buttons snap, and the tank top you wore beneath comes into view. He aims the tip of his cock towards your sternum, and a few jacks later, he’s coming, cum spurting against your chest. You watch the cum trail down between the valley of your breasts, until the feeling comes to rest against the inside wire of your bra, sticky and gross, sliding along the underside of your boobs. “Shit,” Jungkook repeats, eyes furrowed over you.

Your knees ache, and you nearly trip when you stand up, steadying yourself against the side of the car. Jungkook seems to regain his sense by then, hand trailing around your waist. You meet his eye, and almost immediately turn away, the blood in your face rapidly rising.

Jungkook laughs. “Don’t get shy on me now,” he teases, gets too close and your noses bump. “Sorry,” he smiles, too shiny and bright for the sinful acts you just committed in an auto shop.

“Put your dick away,” you huff, let him nuzzle closer to you, and when he doesn’t move to tuck himself into his pants, you go do it for him.

Jungkook frowns, swats your hand away. “This dick has places to be,” he informs you, and you scoff.

“Refractory period,” you remind him, and he rolls his eyes.

“Well I’m not exactly gonna stick it in you this instant,” he drawls. “Gotta stretch you out first.”

You go to complain, tell him he doesn’t have to over exert himself. Truthfully, with Jungkook you feel like one good session was enough to sustain you for weeks. After last time, your skin had flowed for an entire week. But then his hand is slithering up your backside, sneaking under your skirt to grab a handful of your ass.

There’s quickly drying drool collecting at the corners of your mouth, saliva from when he’d fucked your throat just a few moments prior, that he kisses away. His mouth slots over yours, and your heart and pussy both flutter at the kiss.

It’s gentle and sweet for all of ten seconds, his mouth moving against yours until you feel the wet press of his tongue against your bottom lip, tracing along until you open your mouth. He wastes no time shoving his tongue past your lips, letting it dance with yours as he pulls you closer, hands gripping the globes of your ass. You let him lick his way into your mouth, more and more saliva catching in the corners of your mouth until he’s pulling away with a wet pop.

He pulls away, doesn’t stray too far, proud smirk crossing his features at the sight of your slicked lips. “You liked that, didn’t you?”

“Huh?” You ask dumbly, tongue mindlessly swiping over your lips.

Jungkook’s eyes track the movement. “The saliva,” he clarifies. “The spit. You liked it at your place too,” he reminisces, moving in on you again. “Liked watching me slobber and spit all over your body. Isn’t that right, baby?”

You blush, discreetly rub your thighs together. “I-I do,” you admit, willing the warmth of your face away because at this distance he must certainly feel it.

Jungkook nods, doesn’t say anything else as he captures your lips a second time. He doesn’t bother with the gentle prodding anymore, jumping straight into tongue right away. He’s messier, letting his saliva coat your lips and drip down your mouth, and as messy as it is, you love it. You whimper when he pulls away, but gasp when his hand tugs at the hair by the nape of your neck, pulling you back until you’re looking up at him.

“Open,” he murmurs, and you do, tongue pressing against your bottom lip.

It should be disgusting, the rev of his throat, the sound of his saliva collecting, and the way his jaw shifts when he’s got enough. It should be filthy, the way he shoots it down your open lips, the way it splatters against the back of your throat. It should be gross, but god do you love it. “Swallow,” Jungkook commands, and you do, feel his spit drip down your throat like it’s your own, whimpering at the feeling. A quirk of his lips. “Good girl.”

You have to bite down the pride that grows in your chest.

Jungkook’s hands continue their mapping out of your behind, eventually ending with a hard squeeze that has you squealing. Automatically, your back arches in surprise, breasts pressing against Jungkook’s chest. He smirks down at you.

“Bet you taste good,” he says, pressing a kiss against your cheek. “Let me taste?”

“Please,” you beg, nearly losing your shit when he lifts you up onto the car, the cool metal making you jump, heel on your foot nearly kicking the side view mirror clean off. “Wait, Jungkook,” you sputter, glancing down at the sleek metal. “This is someone’s car.”

Jungkook ignores you, pushes your legs apart to slot himself between them. His palms run up your legs, over your thighs, until they’re toying with the hem of your skirt. Mocha eyes glance up at you, as if daring you to question him again, so you promptly zip your lips shut. The skirt goes, ever so slowly, over your thighs, bunches up at your waist until he’s staring at your lace panties.

He presses a kiss against the inside of your thigh, nose faintly brushing against your skin. The kisses trail over your skin, until he’s hovering over your panties, and he’s staring like a man starved. He gives no warning, suddenly leaning down to press his mouth over your party-clad folds, nose flush against your clit. “Kook!” You squeak, hands flying to clutch at his hair.

Jungkook mouths at you, drags his tongue against your panties until they’re soaked in both your essence and his saliva, just how you like. A hand slithers around your leg, wrapping around until he’s got a firm grip on it that he uses to hold it open.

“J-Just take them off,” you gasp, squirm when his mouth moves towards your clit, lapping against you. “Please,” you cry.

He doesn’t.

Jungkook tortures you with those kitten licks, muted through your panties, until you’re begging him to stop, to take them off and do it right. He loves it, you can tell, dazzling smile peeking up at you every time you tug against his hair, until finally, he’s had enough.

The underwear comes off, dangling uselessly by your ankle, and then the show really begins.

“Wait,” you choke, head falling back against the hood of the car when he finally gets his mouth on you, suctioning his lips around your swollen clit. The niggling reminder that this is some stranger’s car he’s eating you out on rings in your brain, and perhaps that’s what makes it more exciting.

His mouth is warm, tongue flicking over your sensitive bud like it’s candy and he needs the sugar. The sounds are so loud and wet, the squelching of your pussy every time he pulls off a pop that resounds throughout the garage. He pampers your clit for what seems like hours, switching the movements of his tongue every time he gets the chance until you’re quivering.

When you think he’s done, he’s not.

Fingers slide up your thigh, featherlight, as they reach your drenched cunt. They drag over your lips, and you mewl, feeling the muscles jump and tighten at his touches. “Jungkook, please,” you moan, rolling your hips against him, but it’s hard and everytime you move, you feel the sweat on your skin weigh you down, glued to the metal beneath you.

The first finger breaches you, just the tip of his index slowly wiggling inside. You muffle a moan in your palm, and Jungkook pulls away with a huff. “No hiding,” he warns, slowly lowering back to your cunt with a stern glare. You nod, but can’t help it when his second finger pushes its way in and you bite down on your knuckles.

“Oh,” You sob, body quivering as he begins scissoring his two fingers inside you. With your attention focused on the digits sheathed inside you, he pulls away from your clit, bestowing one final kiss against it that has your foot kicking out wildly. “Th-there.” His other hand catches your palm in his, presses it against the metal by your head.

Jungkook smiles, curls his fingers around until he finds the soft spot inside you that turns you to jelly. “There we go, beautiful,” he purrs, pushing himself to his full height, leaning over your trembling form. “So sweet for me,” he sighs, licks his lips like he’s remembering your taste.

“I'm gonna,” you choke, become hypnotized by the dark cloud in his gaze, the arrogant smirk on his lips. He curls his fingers, palm brushing against your abandoned clit. The touch makes you jump, nerves tingling.

“Cum for me,” he encourages, silky tone swarming your head as your pleasure slowly washes over you. It’s probably the most relaxed orgasm you’ve had in your entire life, his low voice and delighted eyes guiding you through it, until your entire body clenches, dissolving in a puddle of contentment. Your arousal surges around his fingers, trickling down onto the metal.

“Oh, Jungkook,” you pant, overwhelmed from the touches and the kisses. Jungkook’s smile gets swallowed by your greedy mouth, desperate for more kisses now that he’s made you feel like this.

The kisses only placate him for so long, and when he presses his body against yours, there’s an awfully hard cock that slides against your dripping cunt. “Think you can go again, gorgeous?” He murmurs against your jaw, nipping at the skin on the way down. You nod, eyes falling shut at the warmth you feel in your bones.

Jungkook kisses your neck one last time, before leaning back once more to line himself up.

This was a scene straight from your teenage fantasies, a dripping, shirtless Jungkook at full mast between your thighs, looking at you so lovingly. It makes your heart thunder, imagining how long you could have been doing this if you weren’t both so stupid. As if reading your thoughts, Jungkook rubs a palm over your thigh, eyebrow quirked. You nod his concern away, squirm closer until the tip of his cock nudges against your hole.

“Fuck,” Jungkook sighs, moving his hands to your hips as he slowly pushes in. His fingers, bless their intentions, could have never prepared you for the size of Jungkook’s cock, thick and veiny as it pushes inside. You whimper, clawing at the hands on your waist that stop you from impaling yourself on it fully. “Waited so long for this.”

“Then fucking do it,” you beg, nearly pass out when he shoves in harshly at your tone. “J-Jung—“

“I got you, baby,” he assures you, jostles you until you’re flush against his cock, clit brushing against his pelvis. Your back arches, and Jungkook slips his arm around you, the other lingering on your waist.

Every subtle shift has him brushing along your swollen clit, and you sob at the sensation, begging him to move. He complies, changes his stance to make it easier, and finally begins thrusting into your throbbing pussy.

“So good,” he huffs, eyes zeroed in on where the two of you meet. You would have looked too, if your body hadn’t felt so completely boneless beneath him, the grinding of his cock sending shocks of pleasure up your spine. “So pretty and mine.”

“Yours,” you choke, heart swelling in your chest at his words. It’s almost animalistic, the way he ducks down to bite at your neck, like some animal staking its claim, and you like it. You like it because it’s all you ever dreamed of for so long. “Faster, Kook,” you urge, wrapping your arms around him.

He does as you say, slow and careful thrusts transitioning into a fast piston that would have had you bouncing out of his reach if he wasn’t holding you so tightly. “Fuck,” he chokes, lost in the way you clench around him, lips dragging against his cock with each thrust. “Baby,” he grunts, sweat trailing down his temple, eyes furrowed shut. Eventually, his head falls into the crook of your neck, his weight pressing down on you uncomfortably, subtle ridges on the hood making you ache. At this point, you’re too far gone to care. “All I ever wanted,” he gasps.

You could cry, right now and he’d pull out right away, big heart fretting over your emotional well-being. Which is exactly why you hold your emotions in, let yourself get fully immersed in the feeling of Jungkook pounding you against some stranger’s car and not the inevitable emotional crash you’ll have later.

He fucks like he’s waited all his life for this, and you guess he sort of has if what he’s saying is true. You have no doubt it is, and when his lips suck a mark against your neck, you feel like you’re in heaven. “Almost,” you pant, legs wrapping around his waist tightly. Jungkook nods, his hair tickling your jaw and neck, as he picks up the pace. Your cunt swallows him up every single time, suctions him in until he’s shaking, and so are you.

It can only last for so long, your heart and body eventually reaching their peak, and you unravel. His arms are there to catch you, to pick up the pieces and hold you together. You want to cry, you really do, and when the coil in your stomach snaps, you finally do. “I love you,” you sob, and Jungkook shudders, glances at your tear-struck face to push himself off.

“Love you too,” he mumbles, grinds his cock against your spasming folds one last time, and comes mid-thrust, cum spurting inside you. He holds you, just like you knew he would, as you come down from your highs, hot breath fanning across your skin.

You feel warm, loved, and in love, body trembling in sensitivity afterwards. He’s pulled out since, soothingly rubbing a hand against your side. You’d like to say you wouldn’t be anywhere else, but one shift reminds you of where you are.

“Shit,” you groan, taking in your surroundings before letting your head fall back against the hood. Jungkook hums, round eyes looking your way. “We really just confessed and had sex on some stranger’s car.”

Jungkook snorts, leans away just the slightest to look you in the eye. He’s lost in thought, chocolate irises swirling as they drink you in. “Say thanks to Taehyung,” he finally says.

You roll your eyes, and when you shift beneath him, your sweaty skin sticks uncomfortably against the metal hood. “Yeah, let me thank Taehyung for dating me for three days and awakening your crush,” you huff sarcastically, resigning yourself to your new life stuck against the hood of some classic automobile from the 50s. Jungkook laughs, tucks himself back into his underwear. “Thanks Taehyung, for your noble sacrifice ten years ago that allowed me to fuck Jungkook on some stranger’s car—“

Jungkook hums, snuggles closer to you. “Tae’s car.”

“—after confessing our—Taehyung’s car?” You shriek, sitting up with the strength of three football players, Jungkook toppling off you. “Oh my god. No.” Jungkook rubs his elbow where he knocked it against the hood, looks at you with solemn eyes. Slowly, a smirk crawls over his features. “No,” you gasp, mortification crawling up your spine. “We didn’t.”

He tugs you off the car, tugs your skirt down when you wobble on unsteady heels. “Yup,” he says, pops the end of the word like a child. “Say hello to Taehyung’s new car!” He exclaims, patting the hood you just defiled. “Straight from the car auction he went to this morning,” he beams.

“Oh my god,” you groan, covering your face with your hands when you finally spot the puddles of... something on the black hood. “This is terrible.”

Jungkook ignores you, wipes up the mess with some napkins from his takeout bag, but there’s already some that's dried, only fueling your mortification. “Not like he’ll find out,” he shrugs, then narrows his eyes at you. “Or will he?”

“No!” You stutter, carefully rounding the car as if inspecting it for any more signs of the treacherous things you and Jungkook did on or around it. “I-I won’t tell him.”

“Uh huh,” Jungkook teases, settles on that rolling stool and pushes himself towards you. There’s a hand easing itself around your waist, tugging you between open legs. Still in shock, your hands flutter around his neck, muscle memory causing you to immediately begin massaging the skin there.

Jungkook sighs into the touch, eyes falling shut. “Too bad Jimin’s not here,” he sighs, and you visibly see his nose grow in arrogance. 

“What? Why should Jimin be here?” You ask, pushing your fingers against the knots in his neck. 

Jungkook levels you with an unimpressed, one-eyed glare. He scoffs, “maybe you are as dumb ad Taehyung says.” And then, “hey!” when you tug his ear. He isn’t upset, just tugs you closer until his face is buried against your stomach. “You know country folk like him marry on the spot right?”

“What are you even saying,” you huff, burying your hands in the hair at the nape of his neck, tugging his head back to properly look at him. “Why do you care who Jimin marries?” He doesn’t bother answering. 

Instead, Jungkook sighs into the touch, an easygoing smile thrown your way, and for a moment you forget about the trauma Taehyung will have when he inevitably learns about this. “This is the life.”

[youwerenevermeanttofeelalone]

Payback | Dean Winchester

✦ pairing — Dean Winchester x female!Plus Size Reader

✦ word count — 2.2k

✦ request — I was wondering if you could do a dean winchester imagine that is like the reader is like young and has been with the boys since she was 18 and now she’s like around 21 or 22. She lives at the bunker with them and helps with research. So, basically she’s fallen in love with dean and has been in love with him for years. She never says anything because she watches him go after all these skinny girls and thinks she will never be good enough since she’s big and doesn’t think he’d ever like her. Then one day she basically just reaches a breaking point and it comes out to dean, and after some angst they get together. Then maybe some fluff or smut?

✦ warnings — angst, age gap (reader is in her twenties while Dean is in his forties), reader is kinda insecure at times, language, mentions of past sexual partners, mentions of a past ilegal relationship, a twinge of jealousy, suggestive stuff, some fluff.

════════════════════════

You heard laughs on the other side of the bar, right under the Bud Light neon sign. Unable to stop yourself, you looked that way.

A small friend group had erupted in laughter. There was a tall guy in the middle of two redheads — you couldn’t see very well, but you could tell he had caught you staring.

So you deviated your eyes to the right, where the bartender served one of your companions another beer. A couple of beers in fact. Dean was talking to a woman, undoubtedly charming her as he rested his elbow on the bar and leaned in to whisper in her ear.

You couldn’t look any longer, you would be sick if you did. He should’ve been doing that to you.

Realistically, you were probably twice her size or more, but you still could dream.

That was the problem, truly — you only could dream. Dean would quit hunting before even considering seeing you as a potential conquest. By this point, you should have been used to it.

Your eyes went back to the friend group from earlier. The tall guy held your gaze for a moment — you couldn’t figure out his eye color, or what his eyes showed under the uneven light, but you damn well could see he was handsome.

Not wanting to give him the wrong impression, you turned to your side and picked up your jacket.

Maybe you should also start to pay attention to the men who were actually interested.

But they weren’t Dean Winchester.

Comparing every man you met to him was a reflex, just like comparing yourself to the women he picked up at bars.

The Bunker was eerie every hour of the day, but there was something especially uncanny about an empty Bunker in the middle of the night. Devastatingly so.

Turning on the lights as you made your way towards the library, you made a beeline towards the kitchen. You weren’t in the mood for drinking anymore or for food, but you knew you needed to drink water.

Taking refugee in the library, you looked around a few news sites to see if you found something. It wasn’t difficult to find something shady or weird going on, but filtering out conspiracy theories was a pain in the ass.

Eventually, you found just what you were hoping you would. Dean and Sam rarely took you with them for hunts, but perhaps you could convince them this time to at least let you watch from the car.

Sam came home a little later, tipsy enough to be in a good mood. You told him about the case you had found, he said he would check it out in the morning and wished you a goodnight.

Dean didn’t come home. Why would he when he could have literally anybody he wanted?

You didn’t get any sleep. You had hoped that listening to an audiobook would lull you, but like most things, it wasn’t enough to even entertain you.

You were sick of this, of being into somebody who would never be into you. And who the fuck loses sleep for somebody who doesn’t see them as anything more than a sibling? You, apparently.

You needed coffee and a hug, but coffee by itself would have to do.

To your luck, Dean was already in the kitchen when you entered. His hair was wet which meant he was, thankfully, fresh out of the shower.

Instead of greeting you, he asked, “Where’s Sammy?”

You shrugged. “I haven’t seen him since last night.”

“He took the car.”

You didn’t even know Sam had brought the car home the night before. “He must have found the case interesting.”

“There’s a case?”

“Kind of. It’s not too far away from here,” you explained, “but I wasn’t sure it was something up our alley. I guess Sam thought it was.”

“Why didn’t you tell me?”

“Because you weren’t here.” You could tell your answer offended him. Good.

“You should have called.”

“Babying you isn’t my job, Dean.”

“Funny you say that when babysitting you isn’t mine and yet...”

“Can you stop treating me like a fucking child for two seconds?”

“Stop acting like one and I might.”

“God, you’re fucking insufferable. I can’t believe I’m in love with you!”

You didn’t know whose eyes were wider, if his or yours.

“Shit,” you muttered under your breath.

He tried to be nonchalant, but Dean couldn’t even move. “Sweetheart, come on. It’s okay.”

You effusively shook your head. “It’s isn’t.”

“You’re overreacting.”

“No, you don’t get to tell me what to do or how to fucking react.” You were yelling now. Why were you yelling over this?

“I— well, I don’t know what to say.” He stuttered. “I mean, you are a kid. I could be your dad who had a kid at a young age, okay? This is fucking crazy.”

“You weren’t supposed to know. It’s humiliating.”

“I’m not going to give you shit about it.”

“No, you are. And then you’re gonna go and fuck somebody who’s actually hot and interesting and you’re gonna make me feel worse.”

“Hey, you’re interesting.”

“I’m not. And even then, you don’t go for them because they’re interesting, do you?”

“What do you want me to say?”

You wanted him to say that you were attractive too, that he would go for you in a heartbeat.

“Nothing.”

Both of you remained silent then. He had many chances to make it right, to have enough pity for you to at least apologize for not realizing you were in love with him sooner.

“ I’m gonna go,” you announced, having decided that this wasn’t worth it. The humiliation hurt, but his reaction stung.

He reached over and stopped you. “Wait, wait, wait.”

“What now?” Your voice broke and your lip trembled. Not now, you thought. But now it was.

“Don’t cry.”

“I can’t help it.”

He hugged you to his chest. “I hate seeing you cry.”

His arms were tightly wrapped around you, a hand on the back of your head and the other on your upper back.

“You’re making me feel even more stupid,” you admitted through tears.

Dean sighed heavily. His hand twitched against your clothed skin as he tried to keep himself from rubbing his face. “You know, maybe you need a break.”

“Are you really trying to get rid of me already?”

He didn’t deny it. So you pushed him off you and stormed out. You couldn’t even get a fucking consolation hug.

════════════════════════

You liked to think you were doing a good job avoiding him. It wasn’t like he spent that much time at home either way.

Expecting him to care had been too much, it seemed. You hadn’t wanted him to beg, or even fantasized about him chasing after you — you just wanted him to care, to at least told you he would forget about it or pretend you hadn’t said anything.

Sam entered the library, feigning interest in the stack of books you had piled on the table two nights ago.

He stalled, opening the one on top as though he hadn’t seen it before.

You shuffled in your seat. Waiting for whatever he would say.

He cleared his throat so you’d look up. You did.

“Dean and I are going out for a drink or two. Want to come?”

“No, I’m gonna watch something on my laptop and go to bed early.”

Sam gave you a worried look. “Well, if you need anything...”

“Have fun.”

Maybe Dean had been right, maybe you needed a break, and maybe —just maybe— this wasn’t the place you were meant to be at.

But you wanted to be there, and you wanted him. It fucking sucked that you would never get what you wanted just because you weren’t thin.

Story of your life.

You stayed in the library longer than you planned and eventually your tv marathon was held there. You had everything you needed and the chairs were comfortable enough.

Your laptop rested on the other side of the table as you leaned onto said table with your forearms and laid your head on your arm.

A knock on the thick door startled you. Looking up, you found green eyes.

“Did I scare you?”

You pressed the space bar to pause your show. “I wasn’t expecting you guys to come back early.”

“Sammy left with somebody so he’s not coming home tonight.”

You hummed, unsure as to what you were supposed to say. Should you say that you were happy for Sam? Should you ask why he hadn’t left with somebody too?

Dean spoke before you could come up with something. “Can we, uh, talk?”

Seeing you nod, Dean approached the table. He didn’t sit down, forcing you to crane your neck.

“I’ll find somewhere else to live,” you assured him.

He frowned, looking down as he searched for your now shifty eyes. “You’re leaving?”

“Isn’t that what you wanted to talk about?”

“No.” He rubbed his palm against his forehead. “I don’t want things to be awkward between us.”

You twisted your mouth. “It’s a little late for that.”

He hurriedly said, “I don’t want you to leave. You’re part of the family.”

“I think I deserve space to move on.”

A groan slipped past his throat and lips, rumbling in his chest. He was growing desperate. “Look... I’m trying to be the responsible adult here because God knows you won’t be.”

“So now I’m an adult?”

“It was never my intention to treat you like a child. I just wanted to put some distance between us.”

“You could have said so.” You didn’t think you would need to state the obvious to somebody as smart as Dean.

“I didn’t want things to be weird or to give the impression that I could take advantage of you if you were too close. I would never do that.”

Not proud enough to pretend you knew what he was talking about, you admitted, “I don’t understand what you’re getting at.”

“You’re pretty,” he blurted. “Really fucking pretty and interesting and so attractive that’s kinda unfair. And you’re also too young.”

“Dean.”

“Mmmh?”

“Kiss me.”

“Weren’t you listening to me?”

“Just kiss me,” you insisted. “We’ll forget about it if it doesn’t feel right.”

Dean took the chair beside yours out and pulled it to the side. His eyes didn’t meet yours as he leaned in, but they did when his nose brushed yours.

He softly placed his lips on top of yours. You saw his eyes screw shut before you closed yours. It was short and sweet, and when he parted from you, you feared you would have to go back to hide the way you felt about him.

Grabbing you by the waist, Dean made you stand up. He wrapped an arm around you while you rested your hands on his sides as a reflex.

He kissed you again, hard. So hard he unintentionally pushed you against the table. His tongue tasted of whiskey and those bacon-flavored chips you had never had the heart to tell him weren’t that good.

You brought a hand up to the back of his neck, kissing him deeply.

Dean took advantage of the fact that he had you trapped between the table and his body to caress yours. He started with your back and dragged his hands down to your ass.

His hands traveled to your torso, where he could surely feel your belly up, fingers toying with the hem of your black t-shirt.

You stopped his fingers from lifting your top and pulled away from the kiss. “Wait.”

“Having second thoughts?” he breathlessly asked.

“I’m not what you’re used to,” you explained through ragged breathing. “At all.”

”Really?”

You nodded, ashamed. One thing was him knowing how big you were and other was him seeing it for himself.

“Don’t take this the wrong way...”

“That’s a great way to let me know you’re about to insult me.” Fuck. You were getting defensive again — what a way to kill the mood.

“I’m not!” he defended himself. “I was going to point out that you’ve been around for a relatively short amount of time to know what I’m used to.”

“I’ve never seen you with a fat person before.”

“And I’ve never seen you with somebody older than you before.”

Was he playing dumb? “Of course you have.”

“Huh? When?”

“That guy in Texas was well in his thirties. And I dated somebody in their twenties when I was 16, I’m not too proud of that one, but—“

He interrupted you. “Nevermind. Shut up.” Dean kissed you again, bringing you flush against him.

You smiled against his mouth. “Is somebody jealous?”

“Maybe.”

“Good. Serves you right.”

“You’re evil.” He bit down your bottom lip and pulled on it.

“It’s just payback, I promise.”

Dean snorted. “Can’t say I don’t deserve it.”

You remained silent, allowing him to dissipate the tension. You would let him do whatever he wanted, regardless of the outcome, but you were too scared to say it.

You didn’t have to.

“Hey.” He cupped your face. “We don’t have to do anything you’re not comfortable with,” he assured you. His voice was uncharacteristically soft. “We can take our time.”

[mysticalrambling]

Hey there hope you are doing well🥰🥰🥰Saw you were open to blurb request...can you please write a fluff related to my second steve rogers x reader story...where the reader forgives steve after his tiresome efforts to win back his family..Like can you write about how a domestic sunday willl be in their lives Steve's, reader's and Ollie's? how they will enjoy breakfasta and Steve enjoys the day with his wife and son❤❤❤

A/N: This is basically an alternative ending to Regretting his Decisions. The original one basically ended in all angst so I hope you guys like this as well. It is totally different from the first one. Just something new :)

Regretting His Decisions (S.R)

Steve Rogers AU (Fan fiction Masterlist)

Summary: Steve and reader come together after she forgives him for all the things that he had done in the past. Now, they are spending a Sunday together with their son, Oliver. It is all fluff.

Warning: None. Fluff all the way.

._._._._._.

There were times when you thought that you shouldn’t have forgiven Steve because society thought that you were in a toxic relationship. They thought that he shouldn’t have come back into your life as he chose Peggy. But Tony told you the real reason. Peggy had hijacked the time machine and Steve had to spend his whole life in the past to rebuild that time machine. That’s why he didn’t come back to you.

However, Steve came back to you like he promised he would. He got Scott to help him reverse the past and become his old self. He was going to choose you and that’s what mattered the most. Your husband knew that the things he did in the start of your marriage were cruel and he didn’t deserve you. But he had suffered a lot and he was truly in love with you. That’s why you gave him a chance. You deserved to be happy as well and your family needed a proper chance.

At first, your interaction was just limited to Oliver and you lived separately even though you knew the truth. It was hard to forgive him for the things he had actually done like belittling you or abandoning you. But as time progressed, you saw how he was with your son and how he treated you with nothing but respect.

Steve gave you as much space as you needed and he was there for you when you needed him. He was there when your library burnt down during a fire hazard. He was there to console you when your parents suddenly died in a car crash. He was there when Ollie broke his arm while playing football. He was always there and that’s what got you to eventually open up to him. You finally asked to try again and for him to move into the house. Your family was happy and that’s what mattered. Other people can go to hell.

“Stevie, mommy needs pancakes.” Your three year old was sitting on the counter with his legs swinging back and forth. He was currently arguing with his father about your breakfast preference because apparently he knew you better than your husband.

“No, Mommy loves waffles. You want pancakes so you’re telling me to make them.” The little boy had been up for the past two hours because he had a nightmare. He always wanted to cuddle with his father afterwards and now, he was angry. “I’m your dad, buddy. Not Stevie.”

“But Mommy calls you Stevie.” He whined as he jumped in his place. Steve was quick to hold him in his place before he could fall. Oliver was never afraid to get hurt because he healed too quickly. The serum running through his veins always made him feel like a super hero. In a way, he was but Steve was always worried about him.

“She can do that. Not you.” At this point, he was just messing with his son.

“I can, Stevie.” Oliver asserted his point.

“Okay, buddy. Can I call you Ollie then?” This was going to get interesting, really fast.

“No! Mommy calls me that name only.” Giving him a pointed look, Steve laughed out loud. “Okay, daddy. I get it now.”

“Good boy. Now, let’s start making the breakfast.” Tying an apron around himself, he started taking out all the ingredients.

It was Sunday so you didn’t have work today. You always slept in late on Sundays and Steve always made sure that you got your much needed rest. A twelve hour job and a hyper three year old sucked out most of your energy so he didn’t like to disturb you for anything. Morning breakfast was your family’s tradition.

Steve didn’t know how to cook properly but you never complained. His burnt french toasts are better than any five star chicken steal and that was saying a lot. You loved him too much to ever say that you didn’t want to eat the breakfast made by him. It was such a sweet gesture that you teared up whenever you saw them entering the room with a tray in their hands.

“Baby, you have to hold on to the vase tightly.” Your husband’s hushed voice filtered through the door and woke you up from your deep slumber. Footsteps echoed through the wooden floor and soon the door opened.

“Mommy!!! Look I made you breakfast.” Jumping on the bed, he completely forgot about the vase of pink flowers and dropped them on the bed.

“Oh, thank you, baby.” Oliver’s knee accidentally hit you in the stomach and knocked the breath out of your lung. Gasping, you slightly cradled your child, “Be careful, bubs.”

“Sorry, mommy.”

Laughing, Steve corrected his son, “Oliver, we both made the breakfast and I did most of the work.”

“I beat waffle mixture.”

“You dropped it all on the kitchen counter. Not the same thing, baby.” He got up on the bed but still was not a match for his father’s height.

“I made it. I’m better than you.”

Interrupting them before Oliver truly got angry, “My baby is better than everyone. Stevie, don’t tease him.”

“’kay, darling.” He raised his hands in surrender and joined you both on the bed.

Steve was thankful for his little family and he tried to spend every waking moment with them. He didn’t want to miss the special moments so he made sure to take time off from missions. Nothing was more important than his family. There was still regret in his heart for treating you like crap in the early years of marriage. He would never forgive himself for the heinous acts that he committed. He will spend every moment making it up to you.

Finishing the breakfast with a lot of teasing and jokes, you went to get ready for the day. Meanwhile, your husband took Oliver to his room and gave him a shower. Oliver was a total boy in the sense that he ran away from the idea of shower. Only Steve could make him sit in a tub long enough to actually bathe him and by the end of it, no one knew who actually showered. Steve would emerge out of the washroom with water dripping down his hair and drenched clothes.

Today was no different. ”Help this little devil with his clothes while I go change.”

“Aw. Thank you, babe.” You tried to hold in your laughter when you saw his condition but you couldn’t help it.

“Next time, you’re doing it.”

“Sure sure.” Pecking him on the lips, you went into Ollie’s closet. He always said this but he was there to take your son before you could even think about taking him to shower. He would never admit it but he liked this chore. It was a bonding time for him and Oliver.

For today you all agreed that it would be best to just relax around the house. With the upcoming Hydra missions, the media had been loitering around your house to have an interview with Steve. You both decided that the best way to attain some privacy would be to stay home.

“Incredible, please!” The little boy sitting on your lap looked at you with puppy dog eyes that you didn’t have the heart to refuse.

“But we have watched that movie a hundred times.” Steve whined from his place on the couch.

“Not a hundred times, daddy. Just seven times.” Counting on his fingers, he showed you both eight fingers instead of seven.

“That’s eight fingers, baby.” You put one of his fingers down and squished his cheeks. He was too cute for his own good. “And we can watch it one more time but that’s it.”

Steve knew that he would be outnumbered in this match so he just gave up. At this point, he knew the dialogues by heart. But he preferred this over being lonely. He stocked up on all the snacks a day before so you were all set for a movie marathon. It was going to be really fun.

In between the movie, Oliver made you sing all the songs and you all cried when Mufasa died. Even Steve had slight tears in his eyes. Fate was cruel to the Lion King and he could never think of leaving his family alone. It was too much but then the happy ending always brought him joy. This movie truly was a true roller coaster.

“I wanna watch Boss Baby now.” The little boy demanded as soon as credits rolled in.

“Okay, boss.”

“He truly is the boss, isn’t he?” You looked down at the snuggled up child on the couch.

“Yes, he is.” Ruffling his hair, Steve gave his son an adoring smile.

The whole day, you kept going through movies that were demanded by Oliver and around five, you all fell asleep on the couch. It was a really good nap and you woke up before both your boys. You made them dinner because you wanted to eat proper food. Steaks and broccoli was the best option so you went with it.

“You made dinner?” The two hands snaking around your waist startled for you a second but you relaxed when you heard his voice.

“Yeah. Got up before you guys so just thought to start working on dinner.” You kept your hands on the side of his face while he nuzzled his face in your neck. He was extra clingy today and you loved that about him.

“Okay, I loved spending time with you both today.”

“We both did as well. I love you.”

“I love you too.” You were interrupted before you could kiss your husband.

“I’m hungry!” Oliver came waltzing into the kitchen and Steve picked him up.

Both of you looked at each other before saying it together, “We love you, Ollie.”

“Family hug!” Your son was demanding and you both would never deny his wishes. Your family was too cute and you loved them too much.

Hope you guys enjoyed it!!

._._._._._.

A/N: Tell me if you guys enjoyed it. I am open to blurbs and requests so feel free to send in asks. Love you guys!! And tell me if you want to be added to my tag list.

Tag list: @peculiarpenman, @kalopsia-flaneur, @justile, @agnesk, @caanyoonmoon, @nostxlgia18

Like, comment and reblog.

._._._._._.

[blessednereid]

First Line Tryouts

Series Masterlist

Masterlist

Mentions/Warnings: Implied Smut, making out, cursing, eating/food mentions, mentions dead bodies, slasher film mention, dementia mention, slight domesticality(?)

Word Count: <4,200

A/N: This took so long im so sorry, tried to sum up the events of ep 1, while adding some isaac moments! Enjoy! LMK If I need to add anymore tw’s or cw’s.

Taglist: @rogershoe Dm me to be added to the taglist. 

~---~---~---~---~

There was a week left until your second semester began. Isaac was determined to thank you for everything you had done for him since he told you about his dad. 

He enlisted Stiles and a reluctant Lydia to help him with the planning. Isaac was going to make a picnic basket with your favorite foods. After that, Stiles would drive him to Lookout Point, and Lydia would take you there right after he gave her the go-ahead to let her know it was ok to leave. 

Lydia would take you to the mall so that Isaac could prepare the picnic basket. He had bought assorted fruits, a platter of ham and cheese pinwheels, passion-fruit fruit champagne, your favorite desserts, and your favorite chips. He packed a picnic blanket as well as two smaller ones so that you both could lay under the stars and watch them dance. 

After everything was packed, Stiles drove him to the point in the woods, and two miles away from his destination, he called Lydia and gave her the signal. 

When he reached the peak, before he could do anything, Stiles scolded him.

"Hey scarf," he barked. Isaac turned his head.

"Don't try anything with my sister tonight, alright? You may not be in the house, but I will still be watching everything?"

Isaac paused. "Aren't you going back to Scott's house?" 

"I have eyes everywhere, Lahey," he stated simply before waltzing away.

~---~---~---~---~

When you arrived, Isaac had everything set up, the picnic cloth was laid down on a flat chunk, the colorful plastic champagne glasses he had bought were carefully placed down on top of the plates, 

When you arrived, Isaac had already laid everything out. The picnic blanket was spread out on a flat chunk of land, and the ceramic plates sat on top of it. There was a bundle of spoons and forks, knives, and colorful plastic champagne glasses for the both of you. 

"I-saac, haha," you chuckled.

He bowed. "Good evening, madame. How can I serve you today?" He walked over to you and led you to the setting. 

"Isaac, you didn't have to do all this, you know?" 

"I know, but you've done so much for me recently, and I wanted to thank you."

You looked at him fondly, and he stared back at you before breaking away to grab the fruit. He fed you a strawberry, and after that, you both took turns tossing berries into the air and trying to catch them. 

~---~---~---~---~

After you both were done eating, Isaac packed all the remaining food (which was a lot) into the basket and tossed you a cover. He pulled you closer to him once you were wrapped in the blanket and laid down to watch the stars with his favorite person in the world. 

"That's Orion's belt, right there," you thought out loud. 

"That's the big dipper then," 

"How do you know so many constellations?" Isaac questioned, and you frowned. 

"I- uh…" 

"What's wrong?" He looked at you with worry.

"It was something me and my mom did before she died. She would go out to the woods with me—" you paused."—and she would show me where all the stars were. Stiles was never interested. My obsession with finding the stars became so big she decided to get me a telescope and a big book of all the constellations." 

"Oh, so I'm guessing it's a touchy subject?" 

You laughed. "It's a subject that brings up memories. To be honest, I haven't tried stargazing since my mom's death. This was nice." 

"You never told me much about your mom…" 

"And you never told me about yours," you hit back. 

"Touché." 

You went first. "Before everything, my mom was…in all aspects… perfect. Every day when we came home from school, she would have lunch ready, even if we already ate, just some chips and cookies on the table for Stiles and me." 

You smiled. "Mom would take us outside to the backyard and play soccer with us, us two against her. I think she would go easy on us." 

"When she got diagnosed, she started becoming less… tolerant of us. She would yell for the tiniest things,  and they didn't hurt me as much because Dad would always remind us that she didn't mean it, but I guess it always hurt Stiles more—"

"How do you mean?" Isaac asked.

"He was always a mommy's boy. One night we went to visit her at the hospital, I went to the vending machine to get snacks for Stiles and me, and he was gone. When he came back, he was crying nonstop. I kept trying to get him to tell me what was wrong, but he wouldn't tell me.  The next day it was like he just forgot about it." 

You both sat there in silence for a while longer. 

"My mom…. My mom was always working. She had her own business making soaps and perfumes and stuff like that." 

"She would always ask—" he gulped. "—she would ask my brother and me to help her with her orders. We would always make a mess, so after we were done, she made bubble baths for us." He giggled at the memory. "When she died, I guess we all changed a bit." 

"I got a little shier, Camden got more impulsive, Dad just lost his filter. He put more effort into making sure we were disciplined." He saw your eyes squint. "He didn't hit us back then. He just had stricter rules." 

You pulled him closer to your chest, and you guys just stayed there, looking at the stars, and feeling, even more, closer to each other than before.

You broke the silence.

"Isaac…" 

"Yes, Y/N?"

"I love you…" 

He leaned down to your face and pecked your lips.

"I love you too," he smiled.

~---~---~---~---~

"Y/n!" Isaac was trying to wake you up. You had fallen asleep watching Nightmare on Elm Street. You had been desensitized to all the blood and gore because you and stiles would always stay up late and watch slasher films. This was when your dad worked extra shifts at the Sheriff's station, and your mom was at the hospital.

"N/n, Wake up!" 

He grabbed your ringing phone and pulled it up to your ear, despite knowing he would face your wrath for doing that later on. Stiles had just called you for the 4th time that night, and you weren't waking up.

When you still wouldn't wake up, he did the only thing he could think of, as illogical as it was. He laid down flat on his back and rolled over, pushing you off the bed. You woke with a start. 

"ISAAC, WHAT THE HELL!!"

"Stiles has called you 4 times in 5 minutes, and you told me to wake you up whenever someone calls you…" He fake-pouted. 

Your expression softened because you couldn't resist his cobalt eyes, but you were still angry. You answered the phone and shouted at Stiles to release your frustration. 

"Stiles, what the hell, you're across the hall. Did you really have to call?"

"Hurry up and get ready, Dad just went out, and we need to go get Scott."

"Why do we have to follow dad? It's his job."

"Someone found a dead body, but half of it is missing,"

"Ok, I'm coming," You said while putting on your jeans. 

"Oh, and leave the golden retriever."

"His name is Isaac, not 'golden retriever,' Stiles!" you scolded. 

"Yeah, yeah, whatever, hurry up!"

You finished putting on Isaac's hoodie and turned to face him. 

"I gotta go, love."

He pouted. "Why can't I go with you?"

You went to give him a hug. "We should go with the least amount of people possible., so we don't get caught…" you lied. 

"Is Scott going?" He was always able to tell when you were lying. He knew all your tells and your poker face before you were even dating. 

"Fine, It's Stiles."

"So, I realized. Do I really look like a golden retriever?"

You shrugged and said in a pitchy voice, "An adorable golden retriever?" 

He sighed. 

"Be safe, and come back before midnight, please? I don't wanna go to sleep without you…"

"Nervous for tomorrow?"

"It's the start of first-line tryouts. I really wanna make it this year,"

"I'm sure that you'll make it Isaac, you are one of the most hand-eye coordinated people I know, and at every game, I will be there to cheer you guys on!"

 He smiled at your statement and kissed you. 

"Be sa—"

"Y/N, Hurry up!" Stiles shouted from downstairs. 

~---~---~---~---~

You stayed in the car while Stiles was getting Scott, silently cursing him for not allowing Isaac to come but going to get Scott. 

Scott and Stiles got out of the house and piled into the car. 

"Next time you wanna leave the 'golden retriever,' Stiles, we're also leaving the poodle," you angrily intoned.

Scott took up an offended expression. "Poodle?"

"Would you rather chihuahua?"

"Nevermind..."

"No, we're not leaving Scott. He's my best friend," Stiles said defensively.

"Oh yeah? Isaac is my boyfriend, yet he couldn't come!" 

"My car, my choice of guests."

"Fuck off, Miechyvslaw!"

~---~---~---~---~

"We're seriously doing this?"

"Obviously," you stated simply.

He started driving the car, and they headed to the woods where the search party for the body and the other half of it would be located. 

"You're the one always bitching that nothing ever happens in this town," Stiles said.

"I was trying to get a good night's sleep before practice tomorrow."

"Right, cause sitting on the bench is such a grueling effort," Stiles sassed.

"No, because I'm playing this year. In fact, I'm making the first line."

"Hey, that's the spirit. Everyone should have a dream, even a pathetically unrealistic one."

You interrupted their bickering. "Just out of curiosity, do either of you know what half of the body we're even looking for?"

"Uhhh-" Stiles stuttered.

"And uh- what if whoever killed the body is still out there," Scott questioned.

"Also, something I did not think about."

"It's comforting to know that you've planned this out with your usual attention to detail," Scott stated. 

Stiles and Scott continued bickering, but soon, you saw a flashlight.

"Shit! Hide!" you warned, but Stiles kept going. You leaped forward, trying to grab his shirt and pull him back, but your dad caught you.

"Hang on. Hang on. These two delinquents belong to me."

Stiles sighed. 

"I told you to hide, you brat!" you whispered to him.

"Daaaaad!" He enunciated. "How are you doing?"

"So, do you, uh, listen into all my phone calls?"

"Not the boring ones," Stiles said. 

"So, where's your usual partner in crime?"

"Wh-who Scott? Scott's home, he said before continuing to ramble.

Your dad had called out for Scott, and when he didn't respond, dragged you and Stiles back to the Jeep. 

~---~---~---~---~

You went back to your room once you got to the house and found Isaac asleep on the bed.

"Izzie!" You grabbed a plush pillow from beside him and whacked him softly with it. 

You went home that night, not knowing where Scott was or what had happened to him while worrying about what Melissa would do to you if Scott got bitten by a coyote and she found out you lured him out there.

He stirred but didn't wake. You groaned and moved beside him.

"Isaac?" you shrilled. "Isaac, you were supposed to wait for me to come back!!"

You shook his body left and right until he woke up groggily.

"N/n?"

He fully opened his eyes and groaned at the comfort that it was you.

"You scared me!" he complained.

You began shuffling towards him and running your hands down his covered pectorals. "Aww… what can I do to make you feel better?"

"Anything?" he said before sucking in a breath.

"Anything, baby," You nodded. 

He pulled you onto his lap and started kissing you passionately, your lips meshing together. He trailed his lips from yours to your cheekbones, then to your jawline, nibbling slightly. You moved your hips forcefully against his, and he brought one hand down to your waist.

"Hey, is this ok?"

You nodded vehemently. 

He pushed your hips back and forth along his while leaving dark red marks towards the base of your neck and your collarbone. He sucked a hickey onto a pulse point, making you let out a moan, which you tried muffling by pressing your lips together. 

He brought his hands to the hem of your shirt and tugged slightly before looking up at you. You replaced his hands and pulled your shirt off of your torso. 

He placed open-mouthed kisses onto the tops of your breasts, causing you to throw your head back in delight. He brought his hand back to the small of your back and shuffled you forwards on his lap. 

He turned you over onto your back and continued to kiss from your chest up. He stood on his knees in front of you and pulled his shirt off of his body. He placed one more brief kiss on your lips before gripping your thighs and lowering down your body.

~---~---~---~---~

Stiles drove you, Isaac, and Scott to school the next day. When you got out of the car, Scott and Stiles were talking about a bite that Scott had gotten when he went to the woods, but he assured you that you wouldn't face Melissa's wrath. 

When you saw Lydia amongst the crowd, you dragged Isaac all the way to her. Lydia had never liked Isaac, feeling like her best friend could do much better than someone who wouldn't even talk to her(you) for extensive periods of time. 

"Hey Lyds!" you said with Isaac's face buried in your neck. He was not fond of Lydia either, not that she had done anything, but he had picked up on her apathy towards him and just decided he would do the same. 

"Hey Y/N! Isaac." You all walked into the building and headed for your respective classes. 

~---~---~---~---~

You had English first, and the teacher was rambling about the dead body found in the woods. 

A familiar faced walked into the room, and you almost squealed. It was your godsister, Allison Argent. You knew that her family was moving to  Beacon Hills, but you hadn't known when they would be arriving. 

Chris Argent, Allison's dad, was your mother's best friend in high school. When she gave birth to you and Stiles, she made Chris your godfather.

You quietly clapped your hands at her appearance. She smiled at you before taking the seat diagonally across from you and right behind Scott. You noticed how when he turned around to give her a pencil, he looked highly flustered. 

Before you could point this out and tease him about it, your teacher began to talk about the novel you were reading as a class.

~---~---~---~---~

When you got out of class, you decided to introduce Lydia to Allison. 

When you both approached Allison, she squealed and ran to give you a hug, almost causing you to stumble. You hugged her back for a good five seconds before letting her go. 

"That jacket is absolutely killer! Where'd you get it?" Lydia asked the brunette.

"My mom was a buyer for a boutique back in San Francisco."

"And, you are my new best friend!" Lydia said before greeting her boyfriend, Jackson, who had come up behind her. 

"Hey? What about me? Already replacing me with my godsister?" you asked before you felt two slender arms wrap around your waist.

"Never!" Lydia smiled. "We can all be friends." 

You could hear a girl talking about Lydia or Allison or both, and you decided you would defend your friends. 

You walked over to where she was talking to Stiles and Scott.

"Hey, what's going on over here?"

"Oh, Audrey here was asking what Allison did to already be hanging out with your exclusive clique."

"Uh, nothing? She's just Allison." You said, looking at Scott and Stiles but directing it towards Aubrey. You then turned on your heels and walked away.

You had found that your friends had told Allison about the upcoming party and were just about to head to the lacrosse practice for the day.

~---~---~---~---~

You gave Isaac a good luck kiss before he went out to the field, and Lydia looked at you weirdly.

"What is it?" you asked, rolling your eyes.

"Nothing, Nothing."

"Why do you have such a problem with my boyfriend?"

She turned to look at you. "I don't know, maybe it's because you caught feelings when he hadn't said a single word to you for a week and didn't for another week after you first kissed him"

"It could be that when you asked him out and actually confessed your feelings, he waited a week to give you a response and made you think that he was rejecting you, which made you cry?"  

You rubbed your temples. "Lydia, I explained all this to you. He's a shy guy. He just doesn't talk much to people, and he thought I was playing a joke on him."

She shook her head. "Mark my words, Y/N, he's going to end up breaking your heart, and when he does, I'll be left to pick up the pieces."

You groaned. "Allison, does Isaac look like someone who would hurt me?"

"No? He looks like… He looks like a golden retriever!"

The three of you burst out laughing, and Lydia promised to try and be tolerant of Isaac.

Suddenly, it was Scott's turn to try guarding the goal. He allowed the first shot through before finding his footing and blocking the rest of the throws. 

"Who is that?" Your godsister asked. 

"Hmm… I'm not sure who he is," Lydia said questioningly.

You scoffed. "That is Scott McCall. Stiles' best friend. Why?"

"He's in our English class. He seems like he's pretty good," she said sagely.

She changed the subject. "Speaking of Stiles, how is he? I haven't talked to him since I got back."

"He's-" you tried answering but stopped short. "Wooh! Go, Isaac!"

He smiled at you before going to shoot lacrosse balls at the goalie.

On the final day of tryouts, you and Isaac had done stretches, though he didn't know why, and they had run laps around the field before practice had started.

The coach started talking to the players, and you, Lydia, and Allison sat in the stands. By the time practice was over, Scott had made the first line, but Stiles and Isaac didn't. To cheer them up, you had taken them to their favorite to-go restaurant and bought dessert for them.

~---~---~---~---~

It was a Friday night. You were particularly sad, not only because Isaac couldn't go with you, but because Isaac had his weekly dinner with his dad today. So, he wouldn't even be there when you fell asleep. 

Scott and Stiles had gotten into a fight earlier, so he wasn't going to the party. This left Jackson to drive you, who was taking Lydia to the party. This didn't make you too happy, seeing as how Jackson was a self-entitled bastard who got his status from his family and isn't grateful for any of it. 

You didn't understand how Lydia had decided it would be a good idea to date him. But, you knew that the same way she couldn't change your mind about Isaac, she wouldn't change your mind about Jackson. 

You wore a pink satin body-con dress that reached your mid-thigh. Isaac had picked it out for you when he realized he wouldn't have been able to attend the party. He was ok with it being as short because he knew all the guys there would remember what happened to Garrett Ferrero after he started hitting on you at a party. He had to get nose surgery because Isaac had broken it, and his nose swelled up so large, he didn't come to school until it shrunk.

You paired it with opaque tights with fishnets on top and a pair of red, 3-inch, cut-out heels. As for makeup, you had outlined your lips with a black lip liner and smeared a cherry red lipstick over it. You applied minimal foundation and went for a nude eyeshadow look. 

When you stepped out of the bathroom in your outfit, Isaac nearly went feral. He lightly kissed the expanse of your neck, knowing you would kill him if he messed up your makeup, and he ended up backing you both into a wall. 

You had to swat him away after a few seconds of this affair because you had to leave soon, and so did he, albeit reluctantly. You put a black jean jacket on top of your outfit before heading downstairs. 

He left your house a few minutes before you did, but just before you left, Stiles pulled you aside.

"Hey, Y/N, just watch out for Scott today, and especially Allison." Stiles was overprotective of both of you. Before Allison and her family began moving around, she was like a sister to both of you. You three did almost everything together. 

"Stiles, what's going on?"

He sighed. "Ok, this is going to be hard to explain, but you have to go. So I'm going to give you the brief version right now and explain later."

You nodded, beckoning him to continue. 

"The night Scott got bit by that 'coyote'... it wasn't a coyote. It was a wolf, and wolf hairs were reported on the autopsy of the dead body. Scott has been experiencing heightened senses, and he's been stronger. Y/N, he hasn't needed his inhaler all week."

Your eyes widened. You didn't know what to say.

"So… you think he's a werewolf."

"Better to be safe and absurd than sorry and sad. Tonight's a full moon, and he just wouldn't cancel that date. Just look out for them, you know?"

You bobbed your head up and down vigorously. 

You left the house, and outside were Jackson and Lydia, in the front seat of his Porsche. It was a nice ride but a bit overly embellished for someone who only just got his license.

 ~---~---~---~---~

Later at the party, you had last seen Allison and Scott as they were dancing. You were dancing with your friend, Marya Cullen. She was a freshman, so she didn't really know most of your other friends. You had met her through your job at Forever 21, and you instantly clicked. 

She was really drunk, so you called another one of her friends and asked them to take her home. Marya had given her friends a list of the people allowed to drive her home if this happened. 

It was just as you were putting Marya in the backseat, you saw Scott walking away from her, dazed. While that happened, a mysterious guy who looked much older than you were approaching Allison. 

"Hey, I'm her friend. I got it, thanks!" 

You walked with Allison back to her house after grabbing all your belongings and immersed in conversation, mostly about how weird Stiles was being. Stiles was driving in his Jeep when he saw you coming from Allison's house. You got into the Jeep, and you both went home. 

When you got there, you changed into your pajamas and laid down onto the surface of a cold bed. You grabbed your thickest pillow and pulled it into your arms, trying to create some semblance of a feeling of Isaac laying down with you.

~---~---~---~---~

You awoke to bright sunlight and a buzzing phone by your head. Isaac had been calling you to ask you to let him in the house. You realized it was high time that he gets a key to the front door. 

You went downstairs to greet your boyfriend, and you noticed that he had brought Starbucks. You almost caused him to fall to the floor had he not caught you in time. He set you on the floor and kissed your lips before heading to the kitchen.

He had gotten your regular order, as well as your favorite drink, and he had gotten his order as well. 

You guys say down to just eat and relax.

He took a sip of his iced coffee before saying anything.

"My dad wants me to work at the graveyard," he said, pensive.

You choked on your food. "What?" 

"Well, he said he's cutting off my allowance." 

"So he said I can either earn it by working at the graveyard or stay broke." 

"That's fine, darling?" 

"I know, but I still want to get a job to save so once I turn 18, I can move out. And, he is willing to let me choose my own hours, or really just give me hours that don't interfere with lacrosse practice."

You gave him a solemn look and whined. "But that means we won't have as much cuddle time?" 

"He shouldn't even be in your room," your dad said, approaching you from behind.

"Hi, dad."

"Good morning, Mr. Stilinsk—"

"Isaac," your dad interjected. "It's fine. You can call me Noah." 

Isaac smiled. 

-------fin--------

[thegirlwithataser]

hey hey, could you write buck and eddie in a car accident with hurt!buck and love confession from eddie? thank youu

Hi! Thank you so much for this prompt, I hope I did it justice. I really enjoyed writing this, so let me know what you think!

If you have a prompt for anything surrounding 911 on Fox send it to me and I can almost guarantee I'll write it for you!

You can also read this on ao3!

Never Letting You Go

Eddie doesn’t mean to tell Buck that he’s in love with him as the other man bleeds out. It just kind of happens.

They’d been driving back to Eddie’s house after a shift, Buck offering to drive Eddie to and from work while his truck was in the shop. They’d been joking about something Chimney had said during shift when Eddie saw a truck careening towards them, running the red light and going at least seventy-five in a forty-five. Eddie had barely gotten out Buck’s name in warning before the Jeep jolted and everything spun.

Eddie comes back to the present slowly. His vision is blurry and he tastes something metallic. Blood, his mind supplies. His ears are ringing and for a moment he can’t remember where he is.

It all crashes back to him as his vision clears partially. Car accident. They were in a car accident. The jeep seems to be upright, but there’s glass everywhere and the metal frame of the car is bent unnaturally.

Buck, Eddie’s mind screams at him. Where is Buck?

Eddie turns his head, sending a sharp pain to his shoulder as he moves.

His breath rushes right out of him when he looks at his best friend in the driver’s seat. His eyes are closed and there’s blood trickling down his face. Too much blood. Buck isn’t moving and Eddie can’t tell if he’s breathing. Frantically, he tries to reach over to Buck but he can’t move. Seatbelt, right.

Eddie groans as he manages to unclick his seatbelt. He extends his arms, bruised, but not broken, and sighs in relief. He’s able to maneuver himself closer to Buck with some difficulty, forcefully ignoring the throbbing in his head and focusing on getting them out of this. Alive, preferably.

Buck still isn’t moving but looking closely, Eddie can see the shallow rise and fall of the other man’s chest.

“Buck,” he says. His voice is scratchy and desperate but he doesn’t care. Buck has to be ok. He’s going to be. Eddie reaches over and puts his hand on Buck’s cheek. “Buck, come on, I need you to wake up.” Nothing happens. Eddie is panicking now. “Buck! Wake up, damn it!”

Buck doesn’t respond. Eddie drops his hand from Buck’s face and his head rolls to the side. Eddie forces his knees under him on the seat so he can lean over Buck and assess the damage.

Buck’s left arm is visibly broken, but that will heal. Eddie can’t see his legs, so he has no idea if they’re broke or not. He prays that they’re fine, Buck can’t handle redoing the crush injury from the fire truck. There’s blood on Buck’s shirt and Eddie reaches out to pull it up. There’s a long gash on Buck’s abdomen, deep enough that he’s going to need stitches. There’s another cut on Buck’s neck. It looks like it missed the carotid but it’s bleeding heavily. That combined with the cut on Buck’s abdomen and the cuts on his head could mean that he’ll bleed out if they don’t get help soon.

Eddie takes off his own shirt, faintly registering that there’s blood on it. He must be bleeding somewhere, but he can’t bring himself to care right now. “Buck, please, you need to wake up.” Eddie puts the shirt on the gash on Buck’s torso and presses down hard, hoping to stem the blood flow. “Buck,” he sobs, “Buck, you have to wake up. Wake up! Buck, don’t leave me, don’t do this to me. Don’t do this to Christopher. Please, Buck, we need you, I need you. Buck! Please, I love you, you can’t die, not like this.”

Eddie is truly crying now, desperate to hear his best friend's voice, to see the light in his eyes when he laughs.

Eddie hears Buck groan right as he hears the sirens and he nearly sobs in relief. “Buck, that’s it, wake up.” Eddie wipes the blood away from Buck’s eyes, still pressing his other hand over the cut on his stomach. “Come on, Buck.”

“Ed—“ Buck’s voice catches in his throat. His eyes blink open slowly, but only slightly and Eddie lets out another sob.

“I’m here, Buck, I’m right here.” Buck’s eyes flutter closed again and Eddie’s panic is back. “Hey, no, you gotta stay awake for me. Buck, open your eyes.”

With what looks like a considerable amount of effort, Buck opens his eyes. He mutters incoherently but Eddie nods. “I’ve got you, help us coming, you just have to stay awake.”

Buck nods before groaning in pain. A paramedic runs up to the car, bag in hand being followed closely by a firefighter holding jaws. Eddie nearly passed out from relief.

What comes next is more of a blur than anything else. They get Buck out of the car first and onto a stretcher, rushing him over to an ambulance. Eddie goes next, and honestly doesn’t remember much of the ride to the hospital.

Doctors rush around the emergency room as he gets checked out. A few cuts that need stitches and a mild concussion but overall he’ll be fine. He asks everyone that passes him if they know anything about an Evan Buckley but no one will tell him anything.

What if—no. No, he’s not doing that to himself, he’s not letting himself go down that road.

“Dad!” Eddie whips his head around too fast and feels a sharp pain behind his eyes. Chris is coming towards him as fast as he can with Carla’s hand on his shoulder.

“Chris,” Eddie breathes out, deliriously grateful to see his son. He pulls him into a tight hug, hoping he never has to let go.

“Dad,” Chris repeats into his neck, holding him just as tightly. “Are you ok?”

Eddie pulls back slightly to brush a piece of hair away from his son’s eyes and give him a watery smile. “Yeah, buddy, I’m ok?”

Chris nods, looking unsure. “Where’s Buck?”

Eddie chokes back a sob, looking out at the emergency room, then to Carla, then back to Chris. “I’m not sure, but we’ll see him as soon as we can, ok?”

Carla puts a hand on Eddie’s shoulder reassuringly. “I’ll go see what I can find out.”

She disappears around the corner, presumably to go harass some nurses into telling her what they know. Eddie helps Chris onto the bed and settles back against the pillows, holding his son close. He starts to drift off immediately, even though he knows he needs to stay awake.

“Eddie, oh my god,” Maddie’s voice snaps him back to reality and he stares groggily at her.

“Maddie?” he finally manages to say.

She sighs, eyes roaming over him, obviously trying to assess the damage. “I was on my way to work when they called about Evan. The nurse says he’s still in surgery but directed me to you,” she explains before he’s able to ask.

“Did she say anything else?” Eddie asks, fully awake now and desperate to see Buck.

Maddie shakes her head, looking like she’s barely holding back tears. “No, she didn’t. God, what happened?”

Eddie closes his eyes, fighting back tears as well. “There was a car accident, a truck sped through a red light and hit the driver’s side. I don’t remember much else, but it was bad. I’m mostly fine, a few stitches and a mild concussion but Buck—“ Eddie’s cut off by a sob and he has to look away.

Maddie’s eyes are wide when he finally looks back at her. She nods and clearly puts a lot of effort into composing herself. “He’ll be fine, he has to be. Everyone else should be here any minute,” she says softly. “Chim took Jee-Yun to Mrs. Lee and Bobby, Athena, and Hen said they’re on their way.”

Eddie nods, looking down at Christopher who is sitting silently in his arms.

“He’s still in surgery,” Carla says, appearing around the curtain again.

Eddie nods, thankful that she’s here if nothing else. Maddie looks up at Carla hopefully. “Did they tell you anything else?”

Carla shakes her head sadly. “I’m sorry, dear.”

Maddie nods, shrinking into herself as silence settles over their little crowd.

Eddie’s doctor comes back in a few minutes later and gives him the all clear as long as he follows concussion protocol. Eddie thanks him with less gratitude than he’s probably owed and follows Maddie and Carla to the waiting room with his hand on Chris’s shoulder.

Bobby and Athena rush into the waiting room mere moments after the other four sit down. They both frantic as Carla waves them over.

“What happened?” Bobby asks, his voice desperate.

“You said there was an accident?” Athena adds.

“Eddie!” They all look around and see Hen rushing towards them. She pulls Eddie into a tight hug, looking terrified. “Are you alright? Where’s Buck?”

“I’m—“ Eddie can’t get out the words. He can’t say anything. How is he supposed to explain this to the people he loves, the only family Buck really has he… he can’t.

Carla steps forward, filling them all in on what happened, Eddie’s condition, and what they know about Buck. Eddie sits silently the whole time, barely registering a word.

Chimney arrives a few minutes later and someone must explain the situation to him but Eddie doesn’t hear it, doesn’t notice anything around him.

They sit there in silence for what feels like hours. Dozens of people filter in and out of the waiting room as they all wait for news. Eddie sees a few people crying. Me too, he thinks.

At some point someone must have gone to get coffee because a hot cup is pressed into his hands. He doesn’t drink it.

“Family of Evan Buckley?” a female voice says. Eddie hears it distantly, not registering what’s going on until Maddie stands up shakily.

“That’s us, uh, I’m his sister. This is Eddie, he was in the car with Evan.” Eddie snaps his head up and watches the doctor walk over. She’s wearing a scrub cap.

“Of course, well, Mr. Buckley has just come out of surgery. There was quite a bit of internal bleeding from the accident but we got him fixed up.” The doctor looks at Eddie. “The paramedics told me you stopped the blood flow before they got there. You saved his life.”

Eddie nods, unable to say anything. The doctor gives him a small smile and turns back to Maddie. “He has a few broken ribs, a broken arm, a pretty bad concussion, and more stitches than I’d like to see on one patient but he’s stable. He’s still asleep, but you can go visit him if you’d like. We just ask that you limit it to two at a time.”

“So he’s going to be ok?” Maddie asks, a drop of hope finally seeping into her voice.

The doctor smiles. “He should be just fine. He’s going to need lots of rest and someone to keep an eye on him with that concussion, but he’s okay.”

Maddie sobs in relief. “Thank you. Can you take us to him?” She looks over at Eddie, motioning for him to stand up. He does, on autopilot. His mind is reeling. Buck is okay. He’s alive. I love him.

Eddie follows Maddie and the doctor down the hallway silently. The mantra of Buck is okay continuing in his head on repeat.

Maddie goes in first as Eddie takes a moment to steel himself for the sight that lays ahead.

Buck is unconscious when they walk it, although the doctor had already told them that. He’s hooked up to a heart monitor abd a few other machines are beeping around him but overall he looks better than Eddie expected. He’s breathing on his own, there’s no more blood caking his face. He has bruises up and down the left side of his body and the cuts in his face are still ugly and red but he’s alive.

Eddie doesn’t realize he’s crying until Maddie grabs his hand, forcing his eyes to meet her gaze. “He’s alive, Eddie. You saved him.”

Eddie shakes his head. “He was only on that road because of me, he wouldn’t have—“

“Stop.” Maddie’s voice is firm and there’s a strong emotion flaring in her eyes. “This was not your fault, this is that idiot driver’s fault. You did everything right, Eddie. You saved my baby brother’s life.”

Eddie stares back at her, tears stream down both their faces. Without warning, Maddie pulls him into a bone crushing hug and he winces, pain flaring from where she’d hit a bruise.

“Sorry!” She says, pulling back quickly. “I forgot.”

Eddie manages a watery smile. “It’s ok.”

They each take a seat on either side of Buck’s bed. There’s a cast on his left arm, so maddie can’t grab his hand. Instead, she reaches out and brushes a lock of hair off his face. “You’ve gotta stop scaring me like this, Evan,” she says sadly.

They sit together quietly for ages. At some point, Eddie takes Buck’s right hand in his own and squeezes. He puts his other hand over Buck’s wrist, feels the pulse beat in time with the monitor.

“I told him that I love him,” Eddie whispers. Maddie’s gaze snaps to his face, shock clear in her expression. She doesn’t say anything, simply sits and waits. Eddie takes a shaky breath, staring at Buck’s face. “He was unconscious, back at the accident and I—he needed to wake up. I needed him to wake up, I couldn’t let him die. I wasn’t thinking about anything but keeping him alive and it just—I said that he couldn’t leave me like that because I love him.”

“Eddie,” Maddie says, barely above a whisper. She looks like she wants to say something else but then Buck groans and Eddie feels Buck’s fingers tighten around his own. “Hey, Evan, are you awake?” Maddie asks, immediately moving to rest her hand on his cheek.

Buck makes a noise that almost sounds like a word and his eyes flutter open. He looks around the room slowly, his eyes pausing on Maddie before they land on Eddie. He squeezes Eddie’s hand again and Eddie chokes on a delirious laugh. “You’re awake,” he says, almost in awe.

Buck cracks a small smile. “Did you mean it?” His voice is scratchy and it comes out weak.

Eddie's heart starts beating harder in his chest. “Mean what?”

Buck looks down at their intertwined hands then back up at Eddie. “At the accident. You told me you loved me.”

Maddie stares between the two of them, fighting a smile. Eddie gapes at Buck. “You heard that?”

Buck nods. “Did you mean it?” he repeats.

Eddie is at a complete loss for words. Buck was unconscious, he was dying, he—he heard Eddie? Eddie gives a miniscule nod.

Buck laughs, although it sounds more like a cough. “Good. I love you too.”

Eddie stares at Buck. This isn’t real. This can’t be real. Eddie must have died at the accident because this isn’t possible. “Buck, you—“

“I love you,” Buck repeats, firmer this time. “I’ve loved you for a long time, Eddie.”

And suddenly Eddie is grinning. Buck is alive and he loves Eddie back and none of this should be happening but it is and Eddie is crying again. “God, I love you so much, Buck. I thought you were dead.”

Buck smiles. “I can’t believe you waited until you thought I was dead to tell me you love me.”

Eddie huffs out a surprised laugh. Maddie is looking between them both like she can’t decide if she’s happy or angry. “I didn’t want to ruin anything,” Eddie explains. It feels like an inadequate reason now that he knows Buck loves him too.

Buck rolls his eyes at Eddie fondly. “Is Chris here?” he asks hopefully.

Eddie nods. “Yeah, uh, I can—“

“I’ll go get him,” Maddie says, interrupting him. She shoots her a grateful smile. He’s not ready to let go of Buck’s hand just yet.

Buck comes to stay with Eddie and Chris while he’s recovering. Bobby and Athena offered, since Maddie and Chimney have baby Jee-Yun to take care of, but Buck declines.

“I’d rather be with you,�� he says, when Eddie asks.

It’s a long recovery for Buck, Eddie is back at work after a few weeks off. But this is better than when his leg was crushed. Buck isn’t afraid that he won’t be able to return to the 118 this time around. Eddie worries about him all the time, but he knows that Buck has Chris and Carla with him all the time and at night Eddie gets to climb into bed with the man he loves.

Eventually, Buck is completely recovered and asks if he should go back to his apartment. Eddie doesn’t even hesitate before saying no. He just got Buck, he’s not letting go of him. Not ever letting go if he has any say in it.

[inforapound]

The Devil Inside  - Part 4

Ugg, I did it again. This was supposed to be the last chapter but it didn’t happen. Sorry. Thank you so much for reading and your lovely comments and likes. 

Pairing – Ivar x reader

Warning – jealousy, possessiveness, arguing, me making up words 

For months your life ran more or less in the same way, that black Camaro like a waiting chariot, always ready to whisk you off.

Friday and Saturday nights were spent driving around, going to the movies or the mall, hand in hand with your gorgeous boyfriend, always ending up in his room to fool around. Occasionally, very occasionally, he’d give you a night off so you could stay at home and study.

Lunches were spent in much of the same way; in Ivar’s bed with most of your clothes on the floor. Kissing, cuddling, touching and tasting and... well...sucking. He had been true to his word, though, and despite the amount of time spent between your legs, you had not yet done the deed. In a way, it surprised you as he was so demanding for affection and you had done pretty much everything else. Made you wonder if he had his own hang-ups but some topics with him were off-limits.

It took some time but your friends were finally resigned to the fact that you were never around. Amanda going as far as to call you the person she used to know. They weren’t upset really but you couldn’t say they were thrilled with your all-consuming relationship. And it was all-consuming. You were in la-la land and when you weren’t with him, you were thinking about him; his cutting blue eyes, his gorgeous face, and wicked, sexy body. You had done things with him you hadn’t even known about so it was hard to imagine, once you did start having sex, how much needier he’d become. How much more he’d want you close. In reality, he craved you, and getting time on your own resulted in what you referred to as an ‘Ivar pout-a-thon.’ It was cute and if asked he would deny it, obviously.

At times it was difficult to understand his upset, his constant need to know where you were, who you were with and why. Yes, why was a big one for Ivar. Why did you need to do other things? Why did you need time alone? Oh, and why did you need to study at the library as he had a perfectly good desk in his room?

Love was new to him, like it was to you, and he just handled it differently. It was sweet though and you simply ignored Amanda’s jokes, when walking class to class, that you better text him and let him know you were on the move. Yes, on the outside, it would seem intense but Ivar was intense. Moody and brooding, in a constant state of internal struggle until you were there. You seemed to make everything better and with you, he seemed free; sweet and smiling, overwhelmingly affectionate, so incredibly loving, kissing, even in public, any part of your skin that showed. Always, always, always holding your hand. He called you his baby, his princess, bought you so many cute things, and kept a picture of you up in his car. Even texted in the morning to ask what he should bring you that day for lunch. And you were truly lucky as some boyfriends weren’t communicators. Not your Ivar; his messages were non-stop and he loved to talk on the phone at night too, always saying “just a few minutes more” until you were both half asleep and mumbling. He was beyond adorable, totally devoted and you felt cherished.

Ivar Lothbrok was the best boyfriend ever.

----

On that day, pulling out of school, he did not make the normal right hand turn to head to his place but drove straight and eventually into Maxwell Park. The flat-black Camaro roared on, hugging the winding road all the way up to the lookout, Ivar, as usual, holding your hand.

Killing the engine, he tilted his steering wheel up before releasing and sliding his seat back as far as it would go. Once reclined, he extended his arms out to you and you climbed over the console to lie on him. It took a moment to shift and settle so your weight wasn’t on his legs but then you snuggled in, eliciting from him the world’s loudest sigh.

“Why are we here?” you asked knowing by the strength of his hug and the deep crease between his eyebrows that his thoughts were heavier than normal.

“Where’s my boob?” was his response and you automatically unbuttoned you’re blouse enough for him to reach in and rest his hand where he liked to keep it.

The silence continued and you knew you couldn’t ask again so you waited and while doing so enjoyed the feel of your cheek on his broad chest and the smell of his neck; that perfect mix of aftershave and leather. Ahhh, his strong arms were wrapped around you and his lips were pressed to the top of your head. God, you loved having such a tall boyfriend and as attached as he was to you, you were a total leech.

But... it did feel strange that you were there, alone, so close and he wasn’t trying to grope you or kiss you or reach up your kilt. It made you feel a little insecure, in fact.

“I dated a girl last year for a bit,” he kissed your hair, taking his time, and you wondered where it was going. “Some chick that always hung out with my brothers and their girlfriends so... it seemed like it made sense. She was good-looking and stuff but, I don’t know... the whole time...it just didn’t feel like I thought it should. And she was my first. That’s supposed to make you feel something…like... how it feels with you,” he squeezed you tighter. “My brothers couldn’t understand why I broke it off but I know now that this is how it’s supposed to feel. Like it does with us. I would do anything for you. Anything. I love you so fucking much it hurts. And when we’re not together, it's like....it’s like...I can‘t....”

“Breathe?”

“Yes,” he exhaled loudly. “See baby, you know. You feel the same,” he kissed the top of your head again. “Don’t you?”

“Yes,” you whispered back, hugging him tighter not entirely sure you did; however, you did understand that’s how it felt for him, so…pretty much the same thing.

There was no question that you were in love! So much, but, if you were being honest, there was a small part of you, just a tiny part, you purposefully held back. It felt like the only way to keep a little power and not get swallowed up entirely. You still loved him though. Head over heels.

Tipping your head up, you looked at him and his eyes were shining with what looked like the start of tears and his expression was vulnerable and heart-stoppingly handsome.

Clearing his throat a few times, he looked down at the console between the seats.

“I wanna give you something.”

Popping open the compartment, he grabbed a small burgundy velvet box and you pushed yourself up from his chest to better see. It felt important.

Opening it, he held it up and showed you a locket inside. It was large and silver with a long silver chain and from the patina around its edges, you knew it was an antique. The entire thing was gorgeous.

“It was my mother’s,” he said quietly, watching your face as you picked it up, holding it carefully. “She always wore it.... even when things turned to shit with my dad. It was like...a symbol of her promise to him,” he shook his head as if just thinking about it was painful. “She wore it right up until the end like they might find their way back to each other.”

For a moment, he was silent but you could tell he wasn’t done.

“Baby,” he grabbed your free hand in his large one. “Let’s promise to never get lost in the first place? I want us to be together always. Hmm?”

It was hard to speak. You weren’t sure what to say but nodded your head, the gravity of his gift and his beautiful words filtering through, making your own tears rise in your eyes.  

“Let me put it on you,” he whispered and took it out of your hand, spreading the chain to drape over your head. The chain was long and the pendant sat low on your chest, right between your breasts and you loved that it was so close to your heart.

“Ivar,” you picked up the locket again, running your thumb over the intricate, oval surface. “It's so beautiful. So special. Are you sure you want me to have it?” You glanced up. “It means so much to you.”

Shit.

Shifting his jaw around, you watched his face tighten and his mood begin to sink.  

Shit. Shit. Shit.

“I wouldn’t be giving it to you if I wasn’t sure,” he spoke in a low, slow voice, stressing each word. “Would I?” His nostrils flared and you could see in his eyes that he was hurt.

SHIT!!!

“I’m sorry,” you rushed, “that’s not what I meant. I’m sorry.” Immediately you leaned forward and kissed and kissed him, not pulling your lips away from his until you felt his body begin to ease and let you back in. “I’m sorry,” you whispered again, hugging him harder. “I love it so much and I love you. It’s the most beautiful thing anyone has ever given me. I’ll never take it off. Never.”

As if returning to the moment, he adjusted in the seat and cleared his throat, his eyes focusing on yours again. And thank god, some of the brightness from before was returning to his expression. Brushing your bangs away from the side of your face, he kissed you softly, so perfectly and with so much feeling, before pulling back and gazing into your eyes. There were instances like that, fragments in time, even after kissing you likely a thousand times, that he still looked blown away by you. Blown away that you were there and his and looking back at him with love in your eyes.

“My mother was the most beautiful and most important person in my life. Now you are. Of course, you should wear it. It is my gift to you.”

“Thank you,” you smiled unable to look away from his beautiful, sincere blue eyes. “I love it,” you whispered.

“And I love you,” he whispered back. “Forever.”

The ride back to school, holding Ivar’s free hand did not seem close enough and so you leaned over and rested your head on his shoulder. It was then that you decided that you would call him later that night and tell him you were ready to take the next step. The ‘point of no return’ you had heard it called in some psychology book or.... somewhere. In your heart of hearts, you knew that he was the one and felt that there wasn’t anything you didn’t want to share with him.

“What baby?” he asked, side glancing down at your smiling face.

“I’m just happy.”

Kissing your forehead, he mumbled that he was too.

In truth, you were also laughing at the fleeting thought of telling him right then that you wanted to have sex but Ivar was a walking hard-on! You’d never make it back to school. Instead, you decided to wait and tell him before bed on the phone. He was going to be thrilled.

Yes, everything had fallen into place. You were weeks away from graduation, you had met the love of your life and the future felt full of possibilities. Nothing could slow you down.

----    

As expected, Ivar had responded enthusiastically to the news, so much so, you spent 15 minutes pleading with him not to try and sneak into your room. So, in the morning, as you dressed for school, it was a bit ridiculous that you took extra care selecting a pretty bra and panties to wear, knowing that they would last about 3.5 seconds on your body after entering his room. Some days, he couldn’t even wait to get home and made you take off your underwear while still en route. He loved stuff like that, evidenced by his nightstand full of your drawers.

So, at lunch that day, you were surprised when climbing into your waiting chariot that your gorgeous boyfriend looked rather serious and had two subway sandwiches sitting in a bag between the seats.

“We’ll eat here,” was all he said as he passed you your favourite veggie sub loaded with extra olives and pickles. Roast beef for him, of course.

You ate in silence and by the way he didn’t look over at you, you knew he was upset about something. In your head, you ran through your phone conversation from the previous night, analyzing what you could have said wrong, but your attention was pulled back when he started the car.

“We’re going home now?” you asked, trying to keep your anxiousness out of your voice.

He didn’t answer.

“Ivar?”

“Reynolds,” was all he said.

“Pardon?

“Reynolds,” he said again and pulled the Camaro out onto the road.

“Reynolds High? Why? Are you selling something to someone?”

When he didn’t answer, you reached over and squeezed his arm but he pulled it away and you were stunned.

“Ivar?” you mewed, sounding baffled.

“I want you to point out that guy you dated. The one you slept with.”

What the fuck.

“Why?” You straightened in your seat, confused but it was mostly dread that came over you. “Why?” you asked again, a little louder.

He still didn’t answer and it was not helping your nerves.

“Ivar!”

Inhaling loudly, he blew air out his nose as if barely coping.

“After we got off the phone last night, I was so fucking happy about today. But then....” he shook his head keeping his eyes on the road, “I couldn’t stop myself from thinking about the fact that you had done it already with someone else. It made me sick.”

Oh no.

“Why do you want to know who Adam is? “

“Adam!” he exclaimed, his voice shooting high. “Adam?” he glared over at you, repeating the name like it was poison in his mouth.

“Ivar stop,” you whined. “You knew that I was with someone before. God, it was nothing even close to what we have. Not even close.”

Stewing, he just kept staring ahead, his face frozen in the most miserable, disgusted look.

“Babe, pull over, please, so we can talk,” you were using your gentlest voice attempting to coax him down but he ignored you. “Okay, at least tell me what you are going to do once we get there.”

Still nothing.

“Ivar!” you shouted. “What are you going to do?”

“Nothing,” he sneered. “I just want to see him. Know who he is……and I want you to tell me everything you did with him. Every detail,” he looked over again, shooting you some look as if you better not even think about lying.

“What? No!” you were dumbfounded but knew he was serious. “Ivar, it was over before I met you. None of that matters. I love you so much, Ivar.”

“It does matter!” he sneered again. “As long as I don’t know the details, it’s like a secret that the two of you share. My girlfriend is not going to keep secrets with other dudes,” his voice was dramatic as if he was talking about hundreds of other guys. “It’s enough that you’ve been fucked before.”

Woah. You felt punched in the chest. In the stomach. You felt attacked like he was shaming you and despite understanding it was all coming from his insecurities, it felt like a knife in the heart.

“Ivar?” you pleaded softly. “Please babe. This is crazy.”

“Crazy? You think I’m crazy?” he chuckled, glancing over, his laugh sounding awful and his eyes looking strange. “As far as I’m concerned, you are the only girl I’ve ever been with.

Ummm….

“Ohh-kay...,” you replied cautiously, “but that’s not actually true…. is it?”

“Tell me!” he shouted again. “What did he do to you?”

“Please stop the car. I want to get out.”

This was insane.

“Fucking tell me!” he kept at you.

“Fine!” you gave in, just wanting it to end. “You tell me first then,” you yelled. “What did you do with that girl before me? The one who was good-looking and stuff,” you mimicked him sarcastically.  

“Barely anything,” he scoffed as if it was absolutely absurd that you were even asking. “She was a lump. Something that was just…. there. A body that followed me around all the time. I couldn’t cum with her either!” he announced as if that explained everything. “That’s how in-love I am with you. You make me blow my load so fast and we haven’t even had sex yet,” he shot you a sharp eye. “Your turn.”

Watching his demented expression and listening to his bullshit, you were floored. He was totally unable to see the situation from any perspective but his own twisted one. You were horrified…. possibly a little jealous and, maybe even a bit proud. It was true, you could make him finish quickly.  Sidelining the thought, you just wished the hurricane storming inside of him would head out to sea.  

“Tell me,” he snarled, “and then it will be over and we won’t ever talk about it again.”

That seemed unlikely, you thought.

“You’re the one dragging it out,” he added.

“Fine, I hung out with him for eight or nine months before anything happened. We started dating and fooled around a bit and then, well, we tried it,” you threw up your hands in defeat. “I can’t believe you.”

“Why did it end?”

“I just didn’t have those feelings for him. I just wanted to be friends.”

“How many times did you sleep with him?”

“Only a couple of times. I wasn’t... I don’t know... I wasn’t turned on. That’s it, okay?”

Apparently, it was not okay.

“Did he cum in you?”

“What!”

“Did he cum in you!” Ivar shouted.

“This is so stupid, Ivar.”

“Tell me!” he shouted again, the speed of the Camaro getting a little faster.

“The first time no, cause it hurt,” your eyes skipped over watching the needle on the speedometer rise. “It was my first time…..but…the second time he did…. with a condom.”

That was it, Ivar shrieked and punched the center of the steering wheel making you jump. Adrenaline surged through you and you were both pissed off and out of patience. Fuck you Ivar, you said in your head.

“Feel better?” you jabbed. “Glad you know. Are my answers everything you hoped they’d be? Done treating me like I cheated on you…before we met?”

“Don’t fucking mock me,” he growled.

“You know what. Pull over. I’m done. I’m getting out.”

“No.”

“Pull over right now,” you glared at the side of his face. “I’m walking back to school.”

Leaning forward in his seat, his hand squeezed the wheel tighter and you felt the car speed up a bit more.

Okay, you thought, he wanted to fight. Wanted to attack you and punish you for something that happened in the past. That’s fine, you could hit back, hard, and aim right for his soft spots.  

Reaching up, you grabbed the chain of the locket around your neck and pulled it off up over your head. Unwinding the window, you looked over at him and dangled it out of the car.

“Pull. Over. Asshole.”

Doing a double-take, his eyes shot wide and he growled, taking a swipe at your arm holding the necklace but you shifted your hand away just in time.

“Pull over!” you shouted. “Or I’ll let go.”

His eyes blazed at you, terrifyingly, but somehow it worked. Magically, he hit the breaks and swerved off the road, the tires jumping from the pavement to the dirt shoulder on the side, jostling you both before coming to a dusty stop.  

Run, your own voice screamed in your head and you tossed the necklace in his direction and at the same time pulled the handle on the door, shooting out. Thank god, there was virtually no traffic and you rounded the back of the Camaro bolting straight out into the road, across the street, not looking back when you heard him scream your name.  There was an opening in the guard rail fence and concrete steps down which you took, two at a time, knowing it led to a path that cut through the neighborhood back toward your campus. It was the very same path you and Kim and Amanda used to walk back in the days before boys and cars when everything was simple.

On you ran, not stopping when you heard him call a second time and without looking back, you imagined him standing at the top of the stairs, crutch under one arm, watching you desert him. It wasn’t until you reached the edge of the grass hockey field at your school, that you stopped and bent over, leaning on your knees, to catch your breath.

It was…. The whole thing was…. What just…

You couldn’t process it.  Couldn’t put thought to what had just happened. It was insanity and you felt a rise of emotion making you straighten and look up at the sky, your hands on your chest as if it might help slow your speeding heart. Were you going to be sick? Throw up? Were you going to cry? Scream? Nope. You stopped and.... started to laugh. You started to fucking laugh. You laughed until your cheeks hurt and your eyes watered. You laughed like a psycho who hadn’t just been accosted by her boyfriend. You laughed as if it was all one big fat game.

Maybe it was shock. Maybe it was something else…but it was hard to stop. Feeling sweaty from the run, you took off your cardigan and tied it around your waist, and headed off in the direction of school not wanting to be late for your chem class.

Not once on that walk over, with a dazed smile on your face, did you think about what Ivar would do next.

Next chapter

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