#I miss the theatre scene and living 10min walk from Camden Market. I do not miss the monarchy and the Arts Council budget cuts.

[laundrybiscuits]

Hey hey adoring battleship move incoming, so how about: 16 for that Spotify prompt? Hope life (the move? There was talk about a move I think?) Is treating you well!

can you tell I’ve been posing / this way alone for hours / waiting for your affection / waiting for you

Steve had still been feeling pretty stupid until maybe five or ten minutes ago. He’s not sure exactly what happened, but something had shifted right around the time he’d realized it was too late to get everything untied and put away before Eddie was due back. Even if he changes his mind right now, he won’t have enough time to hide the evidence. There’s no backing out of this anymore.

It’s not his usual kind of thing. None of this is. He doesn’t do any of this, normally.

But someone had donated a bag of VHS tapes to the library, and Steve got assigned to go through them, and there had been one—

It hadn’t looked that difficult, and he’d told himself he was just curious. He’s always been good with his hands, so how tough could some knots be? 

Pretty tough, as it turns out, but manageable. He works through the basic ties pretty quickly, and he’s still flexible enough to do a lot of it himself, even though the video is very clearly meant for someone to do on someone else. 

The idea is…not unappealing. As he works through securing his ankles in a messy double-column tie, it’s easy to start thinking about what it might be like to loop the rope around someone’s wrists and pull it snug. Yeah, he could see why people might like that kind of thing. It takes a lot of trust, right? There’s no way to laugh it off, when someone hands you that kind of control. It’d be exactly like saying I can take it, I want to take it. Whatever you want to give me. 

And that’s when he gets the idea.

It takes a little more preparation and a shopping trip, because he can already tell that the random stuff he’s been using to try different knots isn’t going to be comfortable enough for what he’s planning. Plus, he likes the idea of getting something that’ll look good on his skin. Something that makes people want to touch.

By this point, he’s stopped pretending that this is anything other than what it is: a hail-mary, last-ditch attempt to get Eddie Munson’s hands on him again. 

He doesn’t try for anything too advanced, just the easiest harness on the tape and a frog tie holding his legs into a kneeling position. He practices the whole thing all together a couple times and it seems to go okay. He wastes some rope early on when he fucks up a knot so bad he has to shuffle all the way to the kitchen and grab some scissors to cut it, but it’s fine, he’d bought enough silky blue rope to tie a dozen harnesses at once. It had been way too expensive for freaking rope, but it had looked so much better than the hemp that he’d handed over the cash without a second thought. 

He doesn’t try cuffs or a collar. It’s not—the cuffs feel okay, actually; the rope is soft and snug, and he can glance down any time and see how good the blue looks looped around his wrists. But he struggles to get them tied evenly when he’s one-handed, and he doesn’t want it to look sloppy. 

Eddie likes effort. It’s a weird thing to notice about a friend, even a friend you might’ve hooked up with a couple times. It’s pretty obvious, though; Steve watched him run a game for the kids once, and promptly decided never to watch again. 

Eddie throws all of himself into the game, all the time. It’s so much work. Steve’s seen the pages and pages of notes he keeps in his ragged binders, the way he commits to acting out all the different characters even when he sounds objectively dumb, how he gets so caught up in the moment that he’ll climb up on the goddamn table. Eddie never holds back.

He demands a lot from his players, too. They can fail. But even in that one game that Steve watched, it was obvious that Eddie doesn’t want them to fail; he just wants them to win while struggling against the toughest possible challenge. He wants to find their limits, and then push just a little to find their real limits. 

Nothing’s happened with Eddie since before Steve saw that stupid game, but now it’s all mixed up in his head. He keeps thinking about how Eddie had crowded close, hands hovering and light, darting in and then away again; he keeps thinking about what it would be like to hear Eddie’s voice sound the way it does when he’s telling his players off, firm and deep, as he put his hands wherever he wanted on Steve. 

So that’s what Steve’s been thinking about lately. 

And it’s why he’s here on Eddie’s bed, frog-tied and wearing a rope harness that he wishes he’d done a little fancier, because he thinks Eddie would appreciate that. Every time he’s tried a fancier harness it’s gone wrong or looked weird, though, so this will have to do. He hopes it’s enough. 

He’s not worried about it, exactly, because all of that stuff seems far away and smoothed over right now. He can remember worrying about a bunch of stuff, like whether he should be wearing clothes or not. He’d settled on just underwear because it had seemed a little too vulnerable to go without, but now that he’s all settled and feeling pretty good, he thinks that was a dumb thing to worry about.

Despite the weird way Eddie’s been avoiding him lately, Eddie had really seemed to like his dick at least twice before, so even if it’s not anything more for Eddie—even if dick is the only thing Eddie wants from Steve—he should get to have it. Eddie should get whatever he wants.

Steve shuts his eyes. He fills his lungs all the way, feeling the harness grip him a little tighter, and he exhales slowly.

He waits for the door to open.

Send me a number between 1-100 and I'll write a ficlet based on the corresponding song from my Spotify Wrapped! It will definitely be gay and may possibly be musical theater