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forasecondtherewedwon · 4 years ago

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Do You Tree What I Tree?

Pairing: Peter Parker x Michelle Jones (Spideychelle) Rating: T Word Count: 8730

For @justmattycakes! Happy holidays!!! Massive thanks to @spiderman-homecomeme for organizing this Spideychelle Secret Santa!

Summary: Home from their various colleges for winter break, MJ and her friends make a day out of going to cut down their own Christmas trees. Being alone in the woods—just her, Peter, and an axe—seems like the perfect opportunity to admit that her feelings for her friend have changed.

“Wine and cider!” Peter announces, jabbing a finger at the car window as they pass a rustic-looking roadside sign.

MJ smirks to herself. His touch will probably leave a smudge on the glass, which Flash will painstakingly wipe clean later. She likes Flash much more now than she did in high school—they all do—but she likes to build up a little vindictiveness towards him in advance, for when he inevitably says or does something douchey.

“Whine inside her, is that what you’d do if you could actually get a girlfriend?” Flash asks immediately. Sweet justification for MJ, though she rolls her eyes.

Flash is driving, but Betty trusts his skill enough to smack his arm from the passenger seat, then turn to smile back at Peter.

“That sounds nice. We should definitely stop on the way back.”

“Yeah,” Ned pipes up. “Maybe they’ll have a fireplace too, where we can thaw our fingers.”

“Babe, I won’t let your fingers get cold.”

“Aw, babe,” he croons, reaching over his girlfriend’s shoulder where she sits in front of him to tangle their fingers together.

“Back to your intense lack of dateability,” Flash persists. MJ swears his original asshole persona comes out so much more whenever he slides behind the wheel of his dad’s Cadillac Escalade. “Are you having a lonely winter, Parker? With only your cold lab bench to keep you warm?”

Next to MJ, Peter sighs and mutters, “Same old Flash.” She thinks he says it only to himself, but he darts a look at her and they share a smile.

“Well, I don’t have your L.A. weather,” he allows, artfully changing topic.

Flash will talk for an hour straight about the numerous perks of attending UCLA, including the constant sunshine, the short-shorts, and the absence of his current listeners. The last they all recognize to be a blatant lie, but they like him enough to let him get away with it. MJ has a special sympathy for Flash in those moments; she’s still growing from the girl she was when they were all at Midtown together, when she found it so much easier to edge away from other people or, when she did interact, to speak defensively, insultingly, and with liberal use of the middle finger. Her communication skills have flourished with not being able to see these people in person every day. She’s actually amazed with how she’s clung to them, certain she’d failed to develop the kind of solid relationships people were supposed to form in high school and that she’d just stagger forward through her fine art degree (PoliSci minor) with a wild hope of connecting to other humans through the doodles that she’s developed into graceful sketches, from sketches to oil paintings with sweep and verve.

The five of them are in their second year at their respective centres of learning now and it feels really nice to gather after living by too-brief text exchanges, missed calls, and videocalls that somebody’s roommate inevitably arrives home in the middle of, loud and invasive. When MJ’s speaking to Ned or Flash, they can push through. They have the boisterousness and, in Ned’s case, natural good nature, to conduct two separate conversations at the same time. Betty prefers to hang up and try at a better time, when they can speak uninterrupted. Peter’s different from all of the above. MJ always sees how he blushes, as though he’s being caught talking to her. It makes her flush in return. There’s no reason for them not to be as close as either of them are with any of the others, but conversations with him make her feel different. Without meaning to, their voices lower and they wander away from whatever topic they start with; on some nights, into the most intimate tracks of their inner lives. She gets why he feels caught to be interrupted because it’s disorienting for her too, being dragged back to the larger world, hearing a voice other than his in her ear. She likes traditional phone calls with him the best because she can lie in bed with her phone pressed to her ear and he doesn’t have to know.

“Are we almost there?” Ned says when Flash pauses in his rhapsodizing of Venice Beach.

MJ, sitting in the middle of the backseat, watches her friend unlock her phone and check the map.

“Yes. Under two miles to go.”

“And we’re super sure about this place?” Ned checks.

“Mhmm. A friend of a friend in my French workshop went last year and got the most spectacular Fraser fir,” Betty assures him. “I saw it at her Christmas party. That’s the one you couldn’t go to because you got the flu, remember?”

“Ugh,” he agrees.

“We passed a tree farm awhile ago,” Peter ventures. “That wasn’t it?”

“Betty told me the owners of that farm own this lot too. It’s cheaper to get your tree here because they don’t tend the lot in the same way,” MJ informs him. She likes the look on his face when he listens. She likes the feel of his leg bumping against hers as they traverse the uneven gravel sideroad.

“Yeah, I think I’ll be making up the cost difference paying for a paint job. I can hear the stone chips!” Flash complains. As if he’s ever paid for so much as a tank of gas.

“It’s an adventure, moron,” she says.

“I wasn’t prepared for stone chips.”

“I told you everything in an email last week, when we were planning this,” Betty calmly reminds him. “We should all be prepared.”

It isn’t visible to her right now, but MJ knows her friend has a shiny, compact saw at her feet, tucked into a neat black case, looking bizarrely like a tennis racket. Her own axe is trapped beneath Peter’s shoe so it doesn’t slide forward under Flash’s seat and slice the soles off his shoes. It’s quite sharp. She made sure.

“Listen,” Flash demands, “I’m the transport. Someone else can take care of the less significant details.”

“That is so fucking dumb,” Peter mumbles.

“What?”

“I said, I hope your feet don’t go numb,” he says more loudly. MJ turns her head, like she’s trying to follow the gentle backwards sweep of falling snow with her eyes when she’s really trying to hide her smile from Flash’s suspicious gaze in the rear-view mirror. “Did you wear waterproof boots and warm socks?”

“Of course. About to make winter my bitch.”

Betty twists to catch MJ’s eye.

“You wanna take this one?”

“Go for it.”

While Betty educates Flash on why that is not an acceptable thing for him to say—not with two of his female friends in the car, or ever—MJ drums her fingers on her knees. Her mittens are piled in her lap for now; despite her natural inclination to insult Flash’s ride, it heats up nicely. Plus, she’s tucked between Peter and Ned. She glances to her right to check on the latter and finds him huffing a warm breath on the window. He traces his finger through the resulting condensation, drawing a heart and writing ‘B+N’ in the middle. MJ glances at Peter and he’s already looking at her.

“So, tree?”

“Yeah,” she says. “I’ve been told to keep it under six feet. A measuring tape and a ladder might’ve been helpful, but there wouldn’t have been anyplace to put the ladder once we got the trees on the roof of this thing.” She smacks the SUV’s ceiling and Flash goes, “HEY!”

“You can just choose a taller one,” Peter suggests, “and then cut it shorter.”

“I feel bad about the waste though. It’s a living thing.”

“I can help you with that.”

“Oh yeah?” MJ’s genuinely curious. She knows May prioritizes Hanukkah customs to keep Peter’s connection to both his ethnoreligious traditions and his lost love ones strong, so she doesn’t know how a Christmas tree fits into that.

“Right before you guys picked me up, May had an idea. She thought it might be nice just to get some pine branches for, like, generic winter decorating and to make the apartment smell good.”

“That’s a really good idea.”

“Yeah. I was gonna grab scraps from where other trees had been cut down, but I can get them off whatever tree you pick instead. Or you can. You have the axe.”

“I’ll give you a turn with it if you help me drag my tree back to the car,” MJ bargains with a smile.

“I can definitely help.”

Of course he can. He could probably carry a dozen trees if he felt like it. Over his head. With all the roots and clumps of frozen earth still attached. But the thought of him hauling the tree back with her rather than for her is something she appreciates. As she nods, she gets the fluttery feeling she’s been experiencing more and more whenever he’s called her this term. Their calls have gotten longer. A younger version of herself would be amazed at the way she can now talk for hours without noticing the time slipping past. And it never feels wasted. Actually, when they aren’t talking, MJ misses Peter. She can’t completely put it into words and so she hasn’t. What she’s done, besides continue to answer every time he calls, is offer him a chance to swing the axe she brought. Romantically, there’s room for improvement.

Their overlapping winter breaks are going to end in another week and she’s scared the calls, as treasured as they’ve become to her, won’t be enough.

“There!” Betty cries. She flings her arm across the dash to point.

“That’s the woods,” Flash says, brushing her off.

“No, that’s the driveway! You’re going to pass it!”

The jarring, inelegant jerk of the wheel as he takes Betty’s directions at the last moment tips Ned into MJ and MJ into Peter. They all groan in discomfort, but Flash seems supremely pleased with himself as he straightens the tires. Off the gravel, their passage between the trees is muffled by the packed snow on the laneway other cars have driven over. There’s a dusting on top as today’s thin flurry continues to fall. As she sits up straight following Flash’s terrible Baby Driver impression, MJ feels Peter’s hand on her back, through her coat, and her face gets hot. Unable to meet his eyes in thanks, she leans towards Ned instead and the two of them stare out at the picturesque scene where low drifts spill over the ground and every pine, spruce, and fir—all dusted in white—looks like the perfect Christmas tree.

“Hats on,” Betty instructs as Flash pulls to a stop next to a pickup truck with a tarp already laid out in its bed, awaiting a tree. “Shoelace check. Gloves and mitts secure.”

“You sound like you’re prepping us to jump out of an airplane,” Flash laughs.

He swings his door open while Betty’s trying to get back into her winterwear checklist with the rest of them, letting in a gust of cold air that disturbs the warmth MJ’s hoarded as well as Betty’s good temper. She reaches across the center console and shoves Flash with both hands, pushing him straight out of the vehicle with a “WHOA!”

Betty’s nonchalant as she flips her mirror down and adjusts the positioning of her pompom hat before stepping out of the SUV herself. Peter and Ned pile out, laughing, and MJ climbs out Peter’s side. Flash is next to the car, brushing himself off.

“I’m going to get sick,” he pouts.

“Say cheese!” Ned encourages, snapping a picture as Betty runs into shot to pose next to her victim, cupping his face between her gloved hands.

“Maybe this’ll make him change his mind about the cider place,” MJ notes to Peter hopefully.

“I feel like we’d be stopping there no matter what,” he muses. “It was either making Flash fear hypothermia or Betty sneaking back to the car first and tampering with his brake line or something.”

“So, which way looks good, babe?” Ned asks his girlfriend.

As she told them, this lot isn’t the manicured family attraction the last place was. There aren’t any employees standing around—easily spotted even as they drove past the tree farm down the road in their orange crossing-guard-style vests—or a map marking which areas are which type of tree. There’s just sort of a main track that’s been tramped down by passing feet leading between trees. It’s easy to see for a ways, but beyond that, the forest grows denser. MJ knows Betty did her homework and can identify tree varieties, and she doesn’t actually care which type she gets. She’s here for the experience, and for the idiot next to her who gives her a thrill every time the nylon sleeves of their winter coats rush against each other.

“Hmm,” Betty says, and strides forward through the narrow entrance. From there, things fan out. She taps her bow saw, now loose, against the side of her leg. “Well, what would everyone like to do?”

“I’m going wherever you are,” Ned vows. She shoots him a soft smile.

“Me too,” Flash decides. “You’ll get us in and out of here fast so we can get warm. Not like Parker, who’ll probably get lost in the first five minutes.”

“What?” Peter asks, insulted. “Will not.”

“Oh yeah? How’s your sense of direction without that robot lady in your head?”

“Karen is not a robot lady, she’s an AI.”

“Same diff.”

“It is not. A robot lady is like what they have on The Jetsons.”

“Whatever. Point is, without your GPS, I don’t trust you.”

“Well,” Peter counters, “we can just look at our phones.”

“Already tried that,” Flash informs him. “I don’t get a signal out here.”

Regardless, the rest of them check.

“That’s alright,” Betty persists, trying to be chipper to maintain group morale, MJ’s sure. “It’s daylight, the snow’s not coming down hard, and nobody’s going off alone. Now, Flash, Ned, and I are going that way.” She points, then glances from MJ to Peter. “Do you guys want to stick with us, or…?”

MJ opens her mouth and looks to Peter, shuffling beside her and doing some sort of best-friend telepathy with Ned, based on the stupid, scrunched up looks on their faces. Is he going to say something? He’ll probably want to stay with Ned. It’ll be weird if she speaks up for both of them. But if she doesn’t, when are they going to talk, just the two of them? Since they’ve all been back in the city, everything’s been done in a group—buying presents for friends and relatives, going skating, getting hot chocolate, attending Flash’s ugly holiday t-shirt party (L.A.-themed, so no sweaters allowed). The woods though. The woods are quiet and friendly and private. Snow muffles sound, fresh air and cold wake her up and fill her lungs until they burn with everything she’d say to Peter if she just had this opportunity. No Ned and Betty hanging back to offer encouraging looks, no Flash to ruin everything with a terribly timed innuendo. MJ just needs Peter. Just her and Peter. Please, dork, she thinks, don’t say Ned.

The words come from her.

“I think Peter and I’ll go that way,” she declares, nodding sharply in a direction that isn’t Betty’s.

“Yeah,” Peter adds.

Oh, thank god, MJ thinks.

“He’s gonna get you lost,” Flash warns. He’s already stamping his feet like he’s freezing to death on the spot, though the cold isn’t that bad with the tree cover. “Then he’ll go nuts in the woods.”

“I have an axe,” MJ reminds him flatly. She glances at Peter. “Bring it.”

Peter snorts a laugh.

“No one will be re-enacting anything that remotely resembles The Shining,” Betty instructs. “Meet back here in, how long, do you think?”

“Depends,” Flash says. “How long should we wait before declaring those two missing and sending out a search party, of which I will not be a member, but will be happy to direct from the comfort of the Escalade with a hot drink in my hand and my feet against the heating vent.”

“Dude, don’t do that,” Ned pleads. “You’ll make the whole car smell like your feet.”

“My ride, my rules.”

“Should we just…?” Peter asks MJ. She nods.

“Let’s go.”

“Ok, um, an hour!” Betty decides.

Peter gives her a thumbs up and the two of them follow the path as it diverges, then cut away again, wading through ankle-deep snow where no other tree-hunter has walked today. The sound of Flash goading the other two fades. MJ stops for a minute and turns to watch them march into the trees. She takes a deep breath in and out.

“You good?” Peter asks.

“Yeah.” She hefts the axe onto her shoulder to look more lumberjack-esque (and so she doesn’t slice it into her calf as she walks). “Come on.”

Despite promises to share, she refuses to surrender the tool any sooner than she must. Soon enough, she’s huffing, face passing through damp clouds of her own breath and chilling her flushed cheeks and frozen nose. Balancing her temperature out here is a tricky thing; as long as they keep moving, as they are, she stays warm, but with Peter crunching along in the snow beside her, she’s too warm. MJ bites her mitt between her teeth and unzips her coat a little to let the brisk air circulate around the back of her sweaty neck.

“You’re not gonna catch cold?” Peter asks solicitously.

She shakes her head.

“Ok,” he says, “but it’d be just like you to get sick and say nothing about it while Flash complains all the way home that he is sick when nothing’s wrong with him.”

“The only thing he’s suffering through is his body’s natural rejection of us. He spent too many years thinking he was better than we are just to end up right here, hacking down Christmas trees together.”

“Probably caroling,” Peter guesses.

“Probably. He claims his favourite holiday song is the instrumental version of ‘Carol of the Bells,’ but that has to be a lie.”

“My money’s on something super cheesy.”

“Mine too,” MJ agrees with a grin.

Gradually, she slows, taking in the pine trees around them. Her guesstimation is that some of these go up to ten or twelve feet, but there are shorter options tucked in between. Younger, or those that maybe didn’t get as much light as they grew. She wipes the back of her mittened hand across her forehead, pushing her slipping fleece headband back where it’s been sliding forward.

“So,” she asks, “any of this look good to you?”

She lowers her gaze to find Peter hastily averting his from her face.

“That one?” he says, pointing to a tree at random.

“Peter, that one’s longer than Flash’s SUV.”

“Oh. Right. Um, ok…”

Focusing now, she watches his upturned face and the serious expression that sinks into it, the way snow’s been sinking into her hair. Maybe Betty was right about wearing a hat, though Betty’s hair is also significantly flatter than hers and thus more conducive to hat-wearing. Well, it’ll be fine. They aren’t stranded or anything and the snow’s not getting to them as much as it was when they had to walk across the clearing to reach this stand of trees. They’re sheltered here. As MJ hoped, it’s quiet.

Instead of asking Peter how much of his remaining holiday he’d like to spend with her, or how he feels when she forces him to hang up the phone first (he must notice), or why, exactly, he was so quick to agree to go off into the woods with her when he could just as easily have insisted they all stay together, she criticizes the first tree he takes genuine interest in.

“Crooked.”

“Too dense.”

“Too sparse.”

“Weird empty area.”

“I swear to god, something moved in there, Peter. I do not want a fucking National Lampoon Christmas, ok? My mom will freak out if I bring a live squirrel into our home.”

He’s laughing at her when they finally spot one that looks pretty good: shorter but not squat, full but with soft, long needles rather than nasty ones bent on treating them both to non-consensual acupuncture if they stand too close. It doesn’t look sickly or as though it’s currently inhabited by birds or rodents.

“So young,” MJ does note, assessing its size in comparison to a taller tree a yard away. “Oh well.” She raises the axe and adjusts her grip.

Peter goes scrambling backwards, almost slipping, then tries to pretend he was only calmly moving out of the way, that he is not afraid of the radius of her swing. When he starts babbling about how quickly his body could probably heal from an axe wound (though, with all the crazy shit he gets up to, that’s actually not something he’s experienced yet), she finally laughs at him.

“Relax,” she says. “You can just hold the branches up at the bottom while I chop through the trunk.”

Fearless—and even more determined to prove it now that she’s given Peter a scare—MJ drops to the snow and wriggles under the tree, as close as she thinks she should be while still being able to swing the axe. Peter’s hand makes her jump. She whips her head around, nearly getting a clump of needles in the eye, but he’s only skimming her coat by accident as he gathers the lowest branches away from her. As she asked. Right, he’s not touching her on purpose and he’s not even doing the not-touching activity on purpose but because she told him to. He’s trying to help. Frustrating.

She props herself up on her elbow and takes an awkward whack at the tree. The blade sinks into the bark like it’s supposed to, but it’s still somehow surprising to feel the give. MJ takes a few more tentative swings and the axe sinks deeper, requiring some force to yank it out again. She grunts and hears Peter crouch down behind her.

“Is it going ok? Can I do anything?”

“Umm, maybe be prepared to pull the top of the tree in the other direction so it doesn’t fall on my head. I think I’m almost halfway.”

“Yes, please don’t make it fall on your head,” he requests.

“It won’t as long as you do your job,” she promises gruffly, hewing in once more.

“Do you think this would be easier with a saw?” Peter’s voice is higher now, coming from the other side of the tree. Though the branches fell when he changed position, she can feel them only resting lightly on her as he holds the top of the tree away. Probably standing on his toes.

“Don’t say anything against my axe.”

“I’m not! I was just thinking out loud!”

“A saw,” MJ informs him with another swing, “is not as badass.”

“Good point.”

But is he just agreeing because the tree’s starting to topple and the final swings to break through it take her blade closer to his shins as he dances out of the way? Maybe.

She clambers out and, with the tree now on an angle, is able to chop from an upright position, down on a diagonal until she buries her axe in the snow, then yanks it free.

“Oh, you can lay it down,” MJ tells Peter when she realizes he’s standing there with his arms full of tree, face hidden as he keeps his head pulled back from the branches.

He does so gently and then they stand there in triumph. MJ hurls her axe into the ground.

“Would you quit that?” Peter requests, jumpy.

She grins.

“Sorry. Just really feeling this.”

“I can tell.”

They took their time making their selection and can do one of two things next: either trim the branches for Peter to take home to May right here or drag the tree back to Flash’s SUV and perform the necessary amputations there. They do neither. MJ shrugs her shoulders and flexes her fingers inside her mittens, exorcising the tension of gripping the axe’s handle. She turns, glancing casually around, but really looking for something invisible—a reason to stay. A rational delay before rejoining the others.

“Hold still,” Peter says, as she’s looking back the way they came. The way she thinks they came. They stomped around this area, circling every tree, for a while, so the footprints are a little confused.

“What? If you try to tell me there’s a squirrel in my hair, I’m not going to believe you.”

He smiles softly.

“No squirrel, just snow.”

She stares at her friend warily as he approaches, then sweeps snow from her headband. That’s when she realizes one side of her coat is soaked from lying on the ground. It can’t get through though, it’s just the outer layer. Still, Peter walks a complete circle around her, wiping snow away.

“There,” he says.

MJ sighs.

“Peter…”

“Yeah?”

His face is so open as he looks at her, flakes flying around and between them. Her heart squeezes almost painfully because there have been so many days of not seeing his face without the assistance of a screen. Now that he’s here, it’s too much.

“Umm… how many branches do you think May wants?”

MJ crouches and puts her back to him, feigning being deep in concentration over the fresh Christmas corpse splayed out in the snow. She feels like a detective at a crime scene. Peter exhales heavily behind her, then drops to her level.

“More is probably better, right? She’ll probably take some in to work or try to give them to the neighbours anyway.”

“True.” They both reach for the axe. “Go ahead,” MJ says, quickly withdrawing her hand.

Peter shaves off what he thinks May might like—plus at least an armload more—in quick slices and snips.

“Jeeze, this thing is sharp.”

“I know,” she says proudly.

“I want one. For the suit, I mean. You think that could work?”

“Well, you already have a bunch of less probable-sounding features, so why not a spider with an axe made of webs?”

“Ned’s gonna be so excited when I tell him.”

“I’m excited,” she says, maybe a little too forcefully. It’s not a competition. She doesn’t think he’s already forgotten about her. There’s just some kind of glitch in her brain-to-mouth connection that no Spidey tech could possibly fix.

“I think we’re ahead of schedule,” Peter tells her.

He pulls out his phone to check the time while MJ cleaves into the fallen tree’s trunk, cutting it down to a size more suited to transport and her family’s apartment.

“We could do this in two trips,” he presses. “Take the tree and come back for the branches? Or vice versa?”

“I think we can manage it in one.”

She glances at him and he looks mildly frantic.

“Or two,” MJ amends. “Two would be better.”

Are they finally going to talk? That has to be the reason for Peter stretching this out, doesn’t it? But he moves quickly to grip the lowest branches of the tree, down where MJ severed it, and she grabs those on the opposite side of the trunk. After a jerk to get it going, they slide the tree smoothly over the snow, leaving a fine trail of needles. It occurs to her, as they walk, that she was worried about this part on the way in here, that the tree might pick up dirt from where others have walked, but the ground looks fresh and sparkling in the sun. That’s not familiar.

“Peter? Are we going the right way?”

“What? Yeah. Aren’t we? We have to be. Because the sun was…”

He gestures very unconvincingly overhead and her heart plummets in her chest. For once, not because she’s scared of saying something about her feelings for him and hearing they aren’t reciprocated, but because what Peter’s not saying directly is that they might be lost. And the worst part of that scenario is Flash being right. No, no, no, Peter will not make Flash right, not today.

“It’s been snowing,” she reviews. Stupid and obvious, but facts are soothing to her. “How much do you think it’s snowed? Not that much, right? It can’t have. We must’ve just started walking the wrong way.”

“Definitely. Ok, let’s turn around.”

So, they swing the tree with them and strike out in the opposite direction, not going very quickly as they navigate the trees. They pass the stump they lately created and MJ plucks her axe from the snow on the way past. It just makes her feel better, having it.

Unfortunately, this way isn’t correct either.

“Alright,” she says slowly. “What the fuck.”

“Let’s leave the tree for a minute.”

They set it down. She realizes she’s sweating.

“How could we be lost? How could you be lost?”

“There aren’t exactly landmarks,” Peter says. “It’s just… trees.”

“Maybe we should’ve gone to a place with signposts and neat little rows.”

“That doesn’t sound like you.”

He wanders over to her, watching her with careful eyes.

“I wasn’t this cold when I called today an adventure.”

“Maybe you should zip your coat back up.”

But she’s too warm and uncomfortable to do that just to challenge how he’s calling her bluff.

“Are you scared?” he asks. “You don’t need to be scared. I think we did a lot of circling. We didn’t walk too far in any one direction. I could climb a tree and look around?”

“Climb a tree? One of these trees? The ones covered in snow with the thin branches and the spiky needles?”

“Hey,” Peter jokes, hitting her arm with his elbow, “you’re supposed to be cheering me on.”

“I…” She closes her mouth. He frowns.

“Is something wrong?”

“We’re lost and Flash is going to gloat.”

“Besides that.”

“You’re trying really hard to get us out of here.” That should be a compliment, a commendation, but it sounds accusing as it leaves her mouth. MJ feels on-edge, heart beating all wrong.

“…Should I not be?”

God, she’s being strange. She can feel herself being strange. Everything’s aligning to buy her more time and she’s panicking trying to work out what to do with it. The snow is falling softly all around and she’s auditioning to play the most awkward protagonist in the history of Hallmark holiday movies.

“Are you looking forward to going back?” MJ asks abruptly.

“To the car?”

“To school. In January.”

“Umm, kinda? I mean, it’s going well. But you know that, we talked about this stuff the other day when you and Ned were over at May’s.”

“Yeah.” She’s thinking, staring down at her cut tree, debating how to mention that there’s one thing they didn’t talk about, that she couldn’t bring up, because she felt strange about doing it with Ned there. She goes to continue, unsure of her phrasing, but ready to push onward, when Peter answers, looking thoughtfully up at the pale-grey snow clouds.

“It’s really nice to be home, but I also don’t like living in the past.”

He glances at her to see what she thinks. She’s noticed that he does that a lot, when they’re on a video call. Sometimes, she teases him about it—the way he makes certain assertions sound like questions because he wants her input, values her opinion, thinks of her as wiser than him (she is) though he’s the genius playing around at the upper end of the grading curve in all of his classes.

“Sorry, what were you gonna say?” he asks, spotting the unfinished thought in her expression, how she holds her eyebrows a little too tightly together.

MJ shakes her head.

“It’s nice to have you home.” As Peter’s beginning to smile, swaying slightly towards her, she rambles on, “It’s nice to have everyone home. I mean, I could go longer between having to see Flash in person, but what can you do, right? It’s worth it to have Ned home. And Betty. And you.”

She swallows.

“There!” he shouts, pointing past her. She squints.

“What is it?”

“Our tracks.”

Trusting his superior eyesight, MJ troops after him. Sure enough, their deep treads from earlier are still faintly present—now gentle indents as the snowfall works to even everything out again.

“But we don’t have to hurry back,” Peter says. She avoids his eyes.

“Except we probably do, now that we’ve wasted time being lost.”

“We were never actually lost.”

“Whatever you need to tell yourself so you can sleep at night, Spider-Man. Help me with the tree.”

He does, then hightails it back to collect May’s branches once MJ’s in the clearing with only the little trail left between her and the makeshift parking lot. She pulls her bounty along and through the gap, suddenly back with the rest of her friends.

“Did you manage to lose Parker out there?” Flash asks immediately. “Nice. Up top.”

She rolls her eyes instead of meeting his hand in a high five.

“He just had to go back for something,” MJ explains, expressly for the benefit of Ned and Betty.

“What’d he do, drop some of you guys’ sexual tension in the woods?”

Flushing with the sting in the air and self-consciousness, she walks past Flash. Just close enough to drag the tree over his feet and make him start whining about getting dirt on his blindingly-white designer snow boots. When his complaints cut off, she knows she’s in trouble. It’s like the sudden silence in a horror movie that you just know means nothing good.

“Never mind,” Flash says loudly. “Sexual tension present and accounted for.”

MJ whirls around to see Peter’s arrived and is staring at her with a pleading look on his face. Or he was, until Flash’s words sunk in. Surely, Peter’s fast enough to snatch his keys, toss them to Betty, and have them all climb into the SUV and wheel outta here, leaving Flash behind? But during the holidays? She’d feel bad. He’s lucky.

“Can we just get the trees loaded?” Peter asks, moving to help MJ pull hers closer to demonstrate that it’s not so much a question for Flash as a demand for him to shut the hell up. Flash probably doesn’t understand. He’d need tact for that.

“Fine. And not a scratch on the Escalade,” Flash commands.

He opens the trunk to reveal a set of carefully folded tarps; they’re too ratty to actually belong to him, so MJ’s betting that they’re Betty’s or Ned’s. Those two went on a big, romantic camping trip together right after high school graduation, so these could be remnants. The first tarp crinkles in Peter’s hands as he pulls it out and unfolds it. Beneath the second—removed by Ned—there’s a Burberry blanket protecting the SUV from the tarps. Honestly. Momentarily forgetting about their awkward moment in the forest, MJ catches Peter’s eye and nods at the blanket. The two of them start laughing and soon, Betty and Ned have spotted them and are laughing too. Flash is perplexed, which, as always, is when he gets grouchy and defensive.

“Can we pick up the pace, people?” he requests. “I need a hot drink and an even hotter fire. I can barely feel my fingers.”

“Wait.” MJ frowns and pauses in assisting Peter with dragging the longest tarp onto the roof of the SUV. “I have a tree, Ned and Betty each have trees… Flash, where’s your tree?”

She turns her head and notices Ned just cutting off a gesture of slicing a hand across his throat to insist on her not finishing that question. Betty sighs and explains.

“Flash’s service came back while we were out there.”

“Dude,” Peter huffs, stretching to reach and finish tugging the tarp into place, “you had service? You could’ve texted us to see if we were, I don’t know, lost.”

“This should come as no surprise to you, Parker,” Flash says snootily, “but I had other priorities.”

“Oh yeah?” MJ questions suspiciously.

“He went online and bought an artificial tree,” Betty says with a roll of her eyes.

“Sacrilege.”

“More like brilliance,” Flash corrects. “It has snow-encrusted branches, pre-strung lights, and the thing isn’t gonna die in a week, so it’s better for the environment.”

“Isn’t it plastic?” MJ checks in a slow voice, waiting for him to catch on.

“Yeah.”

“Then the process used to produce it created harmful emissions and when you find it next year and decide to throw it out because you’re no longer ‘feelin’ it’ or whatever excuse you have, it’ll go straight in the trash and from there to one of the many, many local and international landfills that house our city’s waste.”

“You’re pretty judgy for a girl who just fucking murdered a tree.”

“I did my research,” MJ counters easily. “This is a sustainably managed forest. They maintain the trees, protect new growth and transplant saplings every spring to ensure the health of not only the cash crop, but the forest as a whole. Pre-light that, dickhead.”

Feeling flustered, she goes to give Betty and Ned a hand with positioning their tree on the roof. MJ stands on the ledge offered by the open trunk and stabilizes the tree while the others guide it into position.

“Tension,” she hears Flash diagnose under his breath. He’s smart enough to not meet her eye when she glares down at him.

They encounter a small problem while loading the second tree: both Betty and Ned have selected especially full specimens. Side by side, they take up the entire roof, and MJ’s tree is still on the ground with Peter’s mountain of branches, waiting to be slung onboard.

“I don’t think it’ll fit,” Ned says after jumping into the air twice to take a look at the available space (none).

“Neither do I,” she agrees. “Guess it’s going in the trunk.”

“In the trunk?” Flash is there in a, well, flash. He slipped into the driver’s seat, ostensibly to doublecheck their route home, but really to start his seat-warmer and turn the Christmas radio station back on. His distress is juxtaposed against a jazzy rendition of ‘Winter Wonderland.’

“Yeah. There’s nowhere else.”

“Guys, please. Are you trying to get back at me for the sexual tension comment? It’s forgotten. I lied. No tension here. Cut the act and tell me that thing’s going on the roof with the others.”

“While ‘that thing’ is a capitalist nexus, it’s also a precious symbol of everything I love about Christmas,” MJ says firmly, “and it’s going in the trunk of this SUV.”

“Guys?” Flash glances at the other three, but nobody sides with him.

“Don’t worry, Flash,” Betty says kindly. “We won’t use the second tarp to go on top of the roof trees, we’ll line the trunk with it instead. There won’t be any needles, I promise.”

That is definitely not a promise she can make, and MJ’s sure her friend is aware, but she’s taking a shortcut to winning this standoff and MJ admires that. The placating seems to wash over Flash like the spirit of Christmas over Scrooge McDuck. Suddenly, he’s smiling.

“Yeah. We can do that. Of course. But.” Oh no. The smile’s warping. Flash is about to be an asshole again, MJ can see it coming fast on the horizon. “The tree’s going to take up more space than just the trunk.”

MJ peers into the SUV. Shit. He’s probably right.

“Oh,” says Betty, not getting the issue, “well, we can fold the seats down, right? The tree isn’t that tall. Come on, guys, we’ve had real problems. This is nothing!”

She beams at them and Ned wraps an arm around her, hugging her to his side.

“We’ll lose a seat in the back,” MJ says.

She’s profoundly annoyed by the satisfaction on Flash’s face as she’s the one to say the words, point out the obvious. Isn’t she always? It feels like her role in this friend group and she never minds that, never has until this very situation and its inevitable conclusion.

“Somebody’s gotta sit on somebody else’s lap,” Flash singsongs. “And it’s not me because I’m the driver!”

The other four look at each other.

“Betty,” Ned begins, “you and I could…”

“But she needs to be in the front to navigate,” Flash irritatingly points out, “and before you say it, you shouldn’t double up in the front. It’s not safe.”

Maybe they can back over him when they steal his ride and drive out of here, MJ theorizes. She sighs. Loudly. Vexedly.

“I’ll sit on Peter.”

She proceeds to make eye contact with none of them, just fishes a sloppy coil of rope out of the back and works with Betty to feed it over the trees and through the windows. Some cold air will blow into the SUV, but that won’t matter so much to her, she guesses, since she’ll have the benefit of Peter’s body heat. Who needs a seat-warmer when you can have an actual human lap? Ugh, no, not funny, but she tried to consider it in a way that doesn’t make her want to volunteer to sit in the trunk with her tree.

Finally, they lift her tree and Peter’s branches inside, position them, and shut the trunk. Flash is whistling ‘Carol of the Bells’ as he practically skips to the driver’s seat. Betty, far more compassionate, gives MJ a reassuring look before she gets in. Then Peter climbs into the back, taking the middle seat, and glances at her, lingering in the snow. She groans to herself and folds into the car as Ned gives her an encouraging pat on the back.

Maneuvering is awkward. Peter cranes his neck back like his whole body is leaning to make room for her, but it’s not possible—he’s already pressed back against the seat. She sits. He rustles beneath and behind her. Before she can panic and insist on walking home, Ned gets in and slams the door closed (Flash complains).

“Uh,” Peter starts, “do you wanna shift forward so I can buckle my—”

“Absolutely not. If we’re sharing a seat, we’re sharing a seatbelt. I don’t want to end this excursion by flying through the windshield when Flash swerves the car off the road because he sees a snowdrift that looks like a butt or something.”

“Hey! I’m an excellent driver,” he complains, starting the car.

“I could just, like, hold onto you?” Peter offers.

MJ’s heartbeat rockets. She presses the top of her head to the ceiling to ground herself.

“No. We’re using the seatbelt.”

Peter stretches it away from the seat and holds it for her to grab; she passes it back for him to fasten. The second it clicks into place, Flash throws the SUV into reverse and hits the gas. Peter must move his head away from behind hers because MJ’s genuinely surprised not to feel his nose break against the back of her skull.

“Excellent driver, huh?” she questions flatly.

“There was ice.”

“Sure there was.”

Flash winks at her in the rear-view mirror and instead of siding with her, MJ catches Ned chuckling.

“I’m sorry, but it’s funny. You guys look ridiculous seatbelted together,” he says.

But she doesn’t feel so much ridiculous as confused and on alert, swaying with Flash’s accelerations and decelerations (thankfully minor compared to how he started off). Every time, Peter’s hands jump to grab her: shoulders, waist, legs. Once, he grabs her hands and even though she still has her mittens on, dripping melting snow onto the seat on one side and the tree branch she’s clutching on the other, it’s startling.

“Sit still,” Peter tells her when she jerks out of his hold.

“You sit still.”

He laughs.

“I can’t go anywhere—you’re sitting on me.”

“Then try having less bony legs,” she suggests, though they both know the nerd has more muscle mass in one of his legs than the rest of the SUV’s occupants have in their entire bodies combined.

“Right up here!” Betty directs. “We have to pay.”

MJ sags gratefully into Peter, relaxed for the first moment of the short drive from the lot to the tree farm. She tenses up again when they pull in and Betty offers to be the one to hop out and pay for their trees. There is no reprieve from Peter’s lap. She hands over her cash to her friend with a sigh and listens while the trees are removed from the roof, shaken by a machine to rid them of loose needles, and replaced for transport home. When the trunk opens and the tree farm guy slides MJ’s little tree free, she shivers at the cold air blowing in.

“Take off your mitts and put your hands by the vent,” Peter suggests.

MJ looks around and sees that the only vent she can reach is the one their feet are bracketing, down by the floor. She fights the grip of the seatbelt to bend forward. Ah. Hot air on her freezing fingers, plus, she’s out of the draft coming through the open trunk.

“This is better. Thanks, dork.”

She glances back and spots the stricken look on her friend’s face as he watches her, still seated on his lap, but now bent over. MJ sits swiftly upright.

“I’m actually not that cold,” she says, spine rigid beneath her coat and her sweaters.

Peter sighs and, while Ned’s looking out the window to watch her tree get vibrated and wrapped, tentatively offers MJ his hands. If Ned notices that they’re holding hands when the SUV is completely repacked and they’re on their way to the place with the wine and cider, he doesn’t say a word about it. It’s shared body heat. It’s a survival tactic. That’s what MJ tells herself as she finds her and Peter’s fingers moving gently from a perfunctory clasp to intertwining.

They stay that way until Flash pulls off the road at the cider spot, which turns out to be an apple orchard. Well, more than just the orchard; there’s a whole barn here, but fancy, with a designated lot and possibly a restaurant inside.

“This is so cute!” Betty says.

MJ concentrates on shaking her hands out of Peter’s before Flash puts the SUV in park and turns around to see them.

The two of them are the last out of the car and she’s stiff with the silence, listening to their friends laugh and gripe about the cold (Flash) as they wait with Ned’s door open. Before MJ can push through her thoughts and fears to say anything, Peter’s arm comes around her. Her eyes widen. …And he unbuckles the seatbelt. Probably just because she was taking too long. She slips over into Ned’s vacant seat and is about to scramble out when Peter catches her hand. MJ turns.

“Will you tell them we’ll meet them inside?” he requests.

Heart hammering, she relays the message, then looks on as Ned and Betty hustle Flash through the doors before can make another of his unwelcome comments or otherwise interfere.

“I think we really need to talk,” Peter says, after MJ pulls the door closed to preserve what little heat is left in the vehicle.

“We talk all the time,” she argues. She thinks, Yes, please talk to me.

“About a lot of stuff. You know, most stuff.” He wedges his fingers under the edge of his hat to run them nervously through his hair.

“That’s a generalization, but a fair one.”

“But, you know, lately, I’ve been, uh, wishing that we could talk about…”

“…even more stuff?” MJ guesses, hopes.

“Yeah.”

“Me too.”

“You know, our schools aren’t that far apart,” he says, like it’s the first time he’s realizing this.

She smiles wryly.

“I’m aware. That’s why I came out for Thanksgiving first year when you couldn’t make it back to Queens. Even if we did eat take-out shrimp Pad Thai instead of homecooked turkey.”

“And,” Peter adds, “it’s why I showed up at your dorm to help you study for that midterm you were stressing about in October.”

“And why I picked up when you called me every night,” MJ says, quieter. He smiles softly.

“I was talking about the distance.”

Summoning her courage, she looks him right in the eye and lets her still-uncovered hand sneak back over his.

“What distance?”

“You’re my best friend,” Peter starts. “You and Ned.” MJ frowns. Oh shit. Shit, shit, shit, she’s misjudged this, seriously misjudged this.

“Oh. Well. Great. Cool.”

“No, MJ!” he says quickly, noticing the look on her face. He flips his hand under hers so their palms meet. “I’m definitely in love with you, I just mean… Well, oops, I guess I said it.”

She’s pretty impressed with her own control over her facial features—maintaining a slightly-happier-than-neutral expression—when half of her brain is setting off fireworks that seem to be landing and fizzing around on the other half. He’s in love with her. Definitely.

“For as fast as your mind works, your mouth always manages to get ahead of it,” she observes.

Peter’s expression goes from tortured and fumbling to sharp and decisive.

“That’s good advice.”

“What? That wasn’t advi—”

He darts forward and kisses her, hand emphatically clutching hers. There’s a humorous smack when their mouths separate.

“Oh my god,” Peter says, “I forgot to ask if it was ok to do that.”

MJ smirks.

“My only complaint is that you beat me to it when I’ve been trying to figure out how to do that all day.”

“I did wonder,” he admits with a small smile.

“And you couldn’t have helped me out?” she asks, exasperated.

“A big part of being friends with you is knowing you rarely need help. You’re good, like, ninety percent of the time.”

“What do you do the other ten percent?”

Peter shrugs.

“Kiss you and ask if you have plans for New Year’s? By the way, do you have plans for New Year’s?”

He tries to adopt a casual expression but now that MJ thinks about it, she can’t recall the last time her friend looked at her with anything like mild interest. He can’t pull it off anymore, if he ever could. Apparently, she wasn’t always watching that well, because she clearly didn’t know everything.

Peter loves her. He loves her.

“I have a feeling I’ll probably be available,” she tells him. “I have a bad habit of trying to be where you are.”

“I love that about you.”

MJ kisses him quickly, then shoves him away, nearly into the pine tree resting on his other side. Whoops. It’s just that she can feel how easy it would be to get caught up in this moment, and they’re still in the back of Flash’s SUV. People are waiting for them. She takes a deep breath and gives Peter a searching look.

“If we walk in there like this—” She shakes their clasped hands. “—what do I say?”

“Tell them your hands were cold.”

“I… I don’t want to hide it, I just…”

“I know. It’s ok. It’s new.”

“Yeah.”

Peter nods sympathetically. He’s her friend first; he’s not going to push her to speak before she’s ready. (He probably knows he couldn’t if he wanted to.)

She hauls the door open and they stride through the snowy parking lot together. The sun’s already struggling to come out and flakes whip high into the air, catching in the light. They step inside the building to see brightness streaming through the windows, their trio of friends crowded around a table. Flash seems to be making Ned sprinkle cinnamon into his hot apple cider while he films it—presumably to post for the enjoyment of the Flash Mob. (That’s still going. He has a shocking number of followers.) Betty turns and her gaze slips down to their joined hands. She smiles.

MJ has the excuse ready. When Flash and Ned glance over, she’s prepared to tell them her hands were cold.

She opens her mouth.

“Peter’s my boyfriend now.”

#my writing #spideychelle secret santa #spideychelle #spideychelle fanfiction #peter parker #peter x mj #peter x michelle #peter parker x michelle jones #michelle jones #ned leeds #betty brant #Flash Thompson #nettypot

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papermoonloveslucy · 3 years ago

Text

INDOMINATABLE LIFESTYLE

July 16, 1972

HOLLYWOOD - Indomitable funny girl Lucille Ball, with a messy scoop hair the color of an orange popsicle, flashes on the scene in a sad predicament.

She's got a lame leg.

Lucy hobbled from her sleek silver Rolls Royce and into the yellow cubbyhole dressing room which is a sunny retreat near the Lucy set which Is crawling with rehearsal activity.

On the surface, everything's ha-ha-ha. But the fact is that surgeons have inserted pins into the shattered leg bone suffered last year in a Snowmass Peak, Colo., skiing accident. The leg brace is a semi-intolerable ball and chain. But, as always, crippling situations must be mastered. Lucy's inextinguishable spirit pulsates despite the physical handicap.

Lucy Is showing a smiling color photograph of herself in a flowing white hooded cape coat rimmed in fluffy fox. The picture, radiating exterior happiness, doesn't reflect the inner pain. Lucy's leg, in a hip cast, is disguised under a blanket.

You know the familiar Lucy grin? She's grinning it and saying hell no, baby, she's not ever going to ski again. She couldn't stomach another goddam ordeal like that. Besides, on the immediate horizon is an operation to remove the pins.

Lucy, being Lucy, bears the cross with humor: "Honey," she says, "skiing is just getting into those nice winter clothes and being a show off." The burdensome subject of broken bones is dismissed with frivolity.

Brainy Lucy, now 60 and president of a $30 million corporation, is an American institution.

But, like all super-successful females, she vibrates complex contradictions. The fashion plate - who initiated her career as a Hattie Carnegie hat model - is a winsome dumb broad on the tube. In reality she's tough executive who barks orders left and right. Staffers instantly do like the lady says. God has spoken. Lucy runs a tight ship, but she is more respected than feared.

Yet Lucy is softie with a heart of spun sugar. Trappings, which she has in predictable abundance, aren't a psychic crutch.

"Success is knowing that if everything were wiped away tomorrow, it wouldn't really matter. I wouldn't die if I lost my things," she says. Then the awesome simplicity: "Dear, I still go home and let the cat out"

Lucy has always run her home life with a liberal hand.

Desi Arnaz, Jr. is currently Involved in well-publicized liaison with Liza Minnelli. There was a previous Desi scandal regarding Patty Duke. People gossip a lot here because they live in a city where the major industry is make-believe and fact and fiction become blurred.

Lucy isn't deaf to the talk about her son's romances:

"What the hell, they're having a fine spree. I just hope it lasts for Desi and Liza. They don't have time to get married. Their scene is the world and they're swinging in there. I'm the one who talked marriage to them. One night I said: Look, kids, don't get married too soon. They were upset. Desi countered with the observation that you don't have to settle down when you get married. So I go - well, that's true son! The subject of marriage just never came up again. They're a nice couple. They present themselves well without becoming asses. I've told the kids to do as they wish."

Lucy, who was a good friend to Judy Garland, makes no bones about her affection for Liza. And once Lucy loves, the feeling lasts. After 20 years of marriage to Desi Arnaz, there was the divorce. Still Lucy looks people straight in the eyes and says the present Mrs. Desi Arnaz is a "wonderful woman." And she can see it in her heart to rent ex-husband Desi studio space on her lot so that he can work in the shadow of a success they initiated together.

When Liza Minnelli was a child, Lucy kept a scrapbook of Liza's activities at play, in ballet school, attending birthday parties. There, in a battered old photo album, are the precious pictures. Liza didn't know about the book until recently. Desi brought Liza home and Lucy accidentally-on-purpose left the book on a coffee table. "Oh! Wow!" exclaimed Liza through a flow of uncontrollable tears.

Lucy; "And I said to Liza, honey-baby, I told you I've known you for a long time. Didn't you believe me?" Lucille Ball speaks in an affectionate aside about Liza and the loyalty is simultaneously visible and audible:

"That kid is liable to explode any minute. I just hope I'm around to pick up the pieces. No one knows why she works so hard. She's made it her objective to clear her mother financially. Those b--- lawyers took her --- really took her. But she's paying back every damn cent herself."

Life is, of course, an inexplicable mixture of tears and laughter. Buoyant Lucy can see the funnies in everything. Love, she says, is looking beyond someone's minor faults and caring passionately despite the irritations. Lucy's 80-year-old mom, Dede (Desiree Ball) lives near Lucy's sprawling colonial house in Beverly Hills. Dede has a longstanding idiosyncrasy which used to drive Lucy wild but is now an amusement.

In that familiar screechy scratchy soprano voice oozing feigned stupidity, Lucy sing-songs the dialogue;

"I say to Dede: Hey Dede, I've got a pain in my elbow. Dede always says: 'stupid, it's because you're not eating right!" Honest to God, if you've got a pain in your big toe, it's not because someone stepped on it it's the food. Drives you nuts! Dede really has a thing about food. The other day I went home and cooked a batch of chicken. 'Chicken!!" says Dede, 'you know it's gonna make me sick.' Of course Dede eats more chicken than anybody. Next day I say: Dede you been up all night throwin', huh? Naw," says Dede, the chicken wasn't half bad.'"

The ridiculous story illustrates two things Dede taught Lucy early in life. One: That without good health you've got nothing. Two; That without a non-pliant, thoroughly independent attitude, you've got less than nothing because show business kills the weak.

Lucy is in constant awe of Dede. When Lucy built the five-story ski chalet 9,800 feet on the side of a Colorado mountain she was certain Dede couldn't take either the long trip or the altitude. Besides, once you get to Lucy's place, there are a million icy steps to climb before you make the front door. "Even the dogs stop to get their breath," says Lucy. "But when I start huffing, Dede looks over her shoulder and sorta snaps: Aw, Lucy, you're a sissy!' That woman is my challenge."

Does Lucy ever get down? Do the burdens of crushing disappointments halt her enthusiasm even temporarily? "Jesus," she says, "I cry. I cry a lot. Then anger sets in. When I'm angry, I become a fighter. And I always fight to win."

When Lucy talks to you, she taps your knee in a natural gesture of intimacy. Her gaze is through black fringed x-ray eyes that sear through trivia. She smokes her cigarette twirled ceremoniously between her thumb and forefinger. Lucy always spews gut honesty:

"Love is a great peace of mind. There's no panic in the relationship. It's never having to prove yourself. Love is not playing games. Baby, some women have to put up with mysterious absenteeism. That's always a sign of hanky panky-ism. Christ, I never have to worry where Gary is."

Gary is Gary Morton, Lucy's husband and executive producer. Suddenly he bursts into the dressing room and asks for the afternoon off. Lucy's going to work the full day. Her answer is affirmative, but she doesn't use the word "yes"; "Just don't forget to tell the cook to get out the steaks and have a big salad ready."

The show is all in the family. Lucy's sister, Cleo Smith, is another producer. Lucy is having the talk-about twosome of Desi Jr. and Liza written into a script. Little Lucy, who has been Mrs. Phil Vandervort for a year, is a regular. She, too, bursts into the dressing room to use the john. The jeans are already embarrassingly unzipped. As she whizzes by she comments only to her famous mama: "Jeez, I though you were alone!"

But an emergency is an emergency. Lucy, quick to seize the humor, quips: "Our togetherness is only occasionally splintered."

In retrospect, Lucy is pleased with her real-life mother role. "I've been one hell of a mom," she says. "I always knew where they were every minute." Lucille Ball is a profound woman who often uses great simplicities to get her points across.

Once, when the kids were small, a nurse observed to Lucy that Little Lucy was calling Desi Jr., "fatso," and jabbing him in the stomach-when no one was looking. Desi didn't hit back because mama had said never to hit defenseless little girls. Lucy relives the old conversation with her daughter, first announcing each "part" and changing voices to portray the back-and-forth swing of conversation:

Big Lucy: "Got a problem, Little Lucy?"

Little Lucy: "Me? No."

Big Lucy: "Let's talk. Whose fault is it? No, actually it doesn't matter whose fault it is. Next time one of you is hurt, I'm going to hit the one who is hurt."

Little Lucy: "What does that mean, ma?"

Big Lucy: "You'll see."

Soon there was another battle. As usual, Little Lucy elbowed Desi in the stomach and he howled, Lucy illogically whacked Desi hard on the rear and his screams got louder. Little Lucy immediately became hysterical: "Mom, don't hit him! For God's sake, why are you hitting HIM?"

Lucy delivered the punch line which is the credo of their life: "I hit Desi because you let things go too far. Never let things go too far. Someone innocent always suffers. Do you understand?"

That was the end of sibling squabbling. Forever.

Once, before her chorus girl days, New York-born Lucy worked as a fashion mannequin for various Seventh Ave. houses. She's still got a clotheshorse figure but she won't splurge on couture: "I'm just one of those normal working women who doesn't go in for hifalutin’ fashion."

Lucy haunts three fabric shops in Beverly Hills and has local movie set seamstresses make all her clothes. "I'm not the type who dresses and goes out," says Lucy who long ago graduated from the silly-but-necessary movie star game of being seen in the right places.

"Once when I was in Paris, I bought a designer dress grey flannel, I think and wore it out from the salon to my car. When I sat down the damn thing was so strictly constructed that the neckline popped up to my nose. I was on my way to Switzerland and I mumbled to my driver, God, did that designer expect me to stand up on the plane?" Lucy can afford emergencies. When she got to Orly, she bought a dress from an airport boutique and changed in the ladies room.

And, so, the sweet saga of Lucy continues, there are no plans to quit. The word - retirement - isn't in her vocabulary. "I can't imagine doing nothing," she says. "If you don't keep moving, you're buried."

The beauty is still there. The complexion is like alabaster. Lucy confesses that she washes her face with Ivory soap, colors her own hair and occasionally gives herself offbeat facials."

"Honey, the idiot who said to put honey on your face never explained that it has to be mixed with cream," she says. The face melts into that wonderful famous grin. "I put honey on straight from the goddamn jar and it closed my pores for a month."

That's lovable Lucy.

[Ed. Note: The original photographs were degraded by copying so similar shots were substituted as close to the originals as possible.]

# # #

#Lucille Ball #Desi Arnaz #Gary Morton #Wildcat #Dede Ball #Lucie Arnaz #Desi Arnaz Jr.#Liza Minnelli

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unsettlingshortstories · 3 years ago

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The Laughing Man

J.D. Salinger (1949)

IN 1928, when I was nine, I belonged, with maximum esprit de corps, to an organization known as the Comanche Club. Every school day afternoon at three o’clock, twenty-five of us Comanches were picked up by our Chief outside the boys’ exit of P. S. 165, on 109th Street near Amsterdam Avenue. We then pushed and punched our way into the Chief’s reconverted commercial bus, and he drove us (according to his financial arrangement with our parents) over to Central Park. The rest of the afternoon, weather permitting, we played football or soccer or baseball, depending (very loosely) on the season. Rainy afternoons, the Chief invariably took us either to the Museum of Natural History or to the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Saturdays and most national holidays, the Chief picked us up early in the morning at our various apartment houses and, in his condemned-looking bus, drove us out of Manhattan into the comparatively wide open spaces of Van Cortlandt Park or the Palisades. If we had straight athletics on our minds, we went to Van Cortlandt, where the playing fields were regulation size and where the opposing team didn’t include a baby carriage or an irate old lady with a cane. If our Comanche hearts were set on camping, we went over to the Palisades and roughed it. (I remember getting lost one Saturday somewhere on that tricky stretch of terrain between the Linit sign and the site of the western end of the George Washington Bridge. I kept my head, though. I just sat down in the majestic shadow of a giant billboard and, however tearfully, opened my lunchbox for business, semi-confident that the Chief would find me. The Chief always found us.)

In his hours of liberation from the Comanches, the Chief was John Gedsudski, of Staten Island. He was an extremely shy, gentle young man of twenty-two or -three, a law student at N.Y.U., and altogether a very memorable person. I won’t attempt to assemble his many achievements and virtues here. Just in passing, he was an Eagle Scout, an almost-All-America tackle of 1926, and it was known that he had been most cordially invited to try out for the New York Giants’ baseball team. He was an impartial and unexcitable umpire at all our bedlam sporting events, a master fire builder and extinguisher, and an expert, uncontemptuous first-aid man. Every one of us, from the smallest hoodlum to the biggest, loved and respected him.

The Chief’s physical appearance in 1928 is still clear in my mind. If wishes were inches, all of us Comanches would have had him a giant in no time. The way things go, though, he was a stocky five three or four–no more than that. His hair was blue-black, his hair-line extremely low, his nose was large and fleshy, and his torso was just about as long as his legs were. In his leather windbreaker, his shoulders were powerful, but narrow and sloping. At the time, however, it seemed to me that in the Chief all the most photogenic features of Buck Jones, Ken Maynard, and Tom Mix had been smoothly amalgamated.

Every afternoon, when it got dark enough for a losing team to have an excuse for missing a number of infield popups or end-zone passes, we Comanches relied heavily and selfishly on the Chief’s talent for storytelling. By that hour, we were usually an overheated, irritable bunch, and we fought each other–either with our fists or our shrill voices–for the seats in the bus nearest the Chief. (The bus had two parallel rows of straw seats. The left row had three extra seats–the best in the bus–that extended as far forward as the driver’s profile.) The Chief climbed into the bus only after we had settled down. Then he straddled his driver’s seat backward and, in his reedy but modulated tenor voice, gave us the new installment of “The Laughing Man.” Once he started narrating, our interest never flagged. “The Laughing Man” was just the right story for a Comanche. It may even have had classic dimensions. It was a story that tended to sprawl all over the place, and yet it remained essentially portable. You could always take it home with you and reflect on it while sitting, say, in the outgoing water in the bathtub.

The only son of a wealthy missionary couple, the Laughing Man was kidnapped in infancy by Chinese bandits. When the wealthy missionary couple refused (from a religious conviction) to pay the ransom for their son, the bandits, signally piqued, placed the little fellow’s head in a carpenter’s vise and gave the appropriate lever several turns to the right. The subject of this unique experience grew into manhood with a hairless, pecan-shaped head and a face that featured, instead of a mouth, an enormous oval cavity below the nose. The nose itself consisted of two flesh-sealed nostrils. In consequence, when the Laughing Man breathed, the hideous, mirthless gap below his nose dilated and contracted like (as I see it) some sort of monstrous vacuole. (The Chief demonstrated, rather than explained, the Laughing Man’s respiration method.) Strangers fainted dead away at the sight of the Laughing Man’s horrible face. Acquaintances shunned him. Curiously enough, though, the bandits let him hang around their headquarters–as long as he kept his face covered with a pale-red gossamer mask made out of poppy petals. The mask not only spared the bandits the sight of their foster son’s face, it also kept them sensible of his whereabouts; under the circumstances, he reeked of opium.

Every morning, in his extreme loneliness, the Laughing Man stole off (he was as graceful on his feet as a cat) to the dense forest surrounding the bandits’ hideout. There he befriended any number and species of animals: dogs, white mice, eagles, lions, boa constrictors, wolves. Moreover, he removed his mask and spoke to them, softly, melodiously, in their own tongues. They did not think him ugly.

(It took the Chief a couple of months to get that far into the story. From there on in, he got more and more high-handed with his installments, entirely to the satisfaction of the Comanches.)

The Laughing Man was one for keeping an ear to the ground, and in no time at all he had picked up the bandits’ most valuable trade secrets. He didn’t think much of them, though, and briskly set up his own, more effective system. On a rather small scale at first, he began to free-lance around the Chinese countryside, robbing, highjacking, murdering when absolutely necessary. Soon his ingenious criminal methods, coupled with his singular love of fair play, found him a warm place in the nation’s heart. Strangely enough, his foster parents (the bandits who had originally turned his head toward crime) were about the last to get wind of his achievements. When they did, they were insanely jealous. They all single-filed past the Laughing Man’s bed one night, thinking they had successfully doped him into a deep sleep, and stabbed at the figure under the covers with their machetes. The victim turned out to be the bandit chief’s mother–an unpleasant, haggling sort of person. The event only whetted the bandits’ taste for the Laughing Man’s blood, and finally he was obliged to lock up the whole bunch of them in a deep but pleasantly decorated mausoleum. They escaped from time to time and gave him a certain amount of annoyance, but he refused to kill them. (There was a compassionate side to the Laughing Man’s character that just about drove me crazy.)

Soon the Laughing Man was regularly crossing the Chinese border into Paris, France, where he enjoyed flaunting his high but modest genius in the face of Marcel Dufarge, the internationally famous detective and witty consumptive. Dufarge and his daughter (an exquisite girl, though something of a transvestite) became the Laughing Man’s bitterest enemies. Time and again, they tried leading the Laughing Man up the garden path. For sheer sport, the Laughing Man usually went halfway with them, then vanished, often leaving no even faintly credible indication of his escape method. Just now and then he posted an incisive little farewell note in the Paris sewerage system, and it was delivered promptly to Dufarge’s boot. The Dufarges spent an enormous amount of time sloshing around in the Paris sewers.

Soon the Laughing Man had amassed the largest personal fortune in the world. Most of it he contributed anonymously to the monks of a local monastery–humble ascetics who had dedicated their lives to raising German police dogs. What was left of his fortune, the Laughing Man converted into diamonds, which he lowered casually, in emerald vaults, into the Black Sea. His personal wants were few. He subsisted exclusively on rice and eagles’ blood, in a tiny cottage with an underground gymnasium and shooting range, on the stormy coast of Tibet. Four blindly loyal confederates lived with him: a glib timber wolf named Black Wing, a lovable dwarf named Omba, a giant Mongolian named Hong, whose tongue had been burned out by white men, and a gorgeous Eurasian girl, who, out of unrequited love for the Laughing Man and deep concern for his personal safety, sometimes had a pretty sticky attitude toward crime. The Laughing Man issued his orders to the crew through a black silk screen. Not even Omba, the lovable dwarf, was permitted to see his face.

I’m not saying I will, but I could go on for hours escorting the reader–forcibly, if necessary–back and forth across the Paris-Chinese border. I happen to regard the Laughing Man as some kind of super-distinguished ancestor of mine–a sort of Robert E. Lee, say, with the ascribed virtues held under water or blood. And this illusion is only a moderate one compared to the one I had in 1928, when I regarded myself not only as the Laughing Man’s direct descendant but as his only legitimate living one. I was not even my parents’ son in 1928 but a devilishly smooth impostor, awaiting their slightest blunder as an excuse to move in–preferably without violence, but not necessarily–to assert my true identity. As a precaution against breaking my bogus mother’s heart, I planned to take her into my underworld employ in some undefined but appropriately regal capacity. But the main thing I had to do in 1928 was watch my step. Play along with the farce. Brush my teeth. Comb my hair. At all costs, stifle my natural hideous laughter.

Actually, I was not the only legitimate living descendant of the Laughing Man. There were twenty-five Comanches in the Club, or twenty-five legitimate living descendants of the Laughing Man–all of us circulating ominously, and incognito, throughout the city, sizing up elevator operators as potential archenemies, whispering side-of-the-mouth but fluent orders into the ears of cocker spaniels, drawing beads, with index fingers, on the foreheads of arithmetic teachers. And always waiting, waiting for a decent chance to strike terror and admiration in the nearest mediocre heart.

One afternoon in February, just after Comanche baseball season had opened, I observed a new fixture in the Chief’s bus. Above the rear-view mirror over the windshield, there was a small, framed photograph of a girl dressed in academic cap and gown. It seemed to me that a girl’s picture clashed with the general men-only decor of the bus, and I bluntly asked the Chief who she was. He hedged at first, but finally admitted that she was a girl. I asked him what her name was. He answered unforthrightly, “Mary Hudson.” I asked him if she was in the movies or something. He said no, that she used to go to Wellesley College. He added, on some slow-processed afterthought, that Wellesley College was a very high class college. I asked him what he had her picture in the bus for, though. He shrugged slightly, as much as to imply, it seemed to me, that the picture had more or less been planted on him.

During the next couple of weeks, the picture–however forcibly or accidentally it had been planted on the Chief–was not removed from the bus. It didn’t go out with the Baby Ruth wrappers and the fallen licorice whips. However, we Comanches got used to it. It gradually took on the unarresting personality of a speedometer.

But one day as we were on our way to the Park, the Chief pulled the bus over to a curb on Fifth Avenue in the Sixties, a good half mile past our baseball field. Some twenty back-seat drivers at once demanded an explanation, but the Chief gave none. Instead, he simply got into his story-telling position and swung prematurely into a fresh installment of “The Laughing Man.” He had scarcely begun, however, when someone tapped on the bus door. The Chief’s reflexes were geared high that day. He literally flung himself around in his seat, yanked the operating handle of the door, and a girl in a beaver coat climbed into the bus.

Offhand, I can remember seeing just three girls in my life who struck me as having unclassifiably great beauty at first sight. One was a thin girl in a black bathing suit who was having a lot of trouble putting up an orange umbrella at Jones Beach, circa 1936. The second was a girl aboard a Caribbean cruise ship in 1939, who threw her cigarette lighter at a porpoise. And the third was the Chief’s girl, Mary Hudson.

“Am I very late?” she asked the Chief, smiling at him.

She might just as well have asked if she was ugly.

“No!” the Chief said. A trifle wildly, he looked at the Comanches near his seat and signalled the row to give way. Mary Hudson sat down between me and a boy named Edgar something, whose uncle’s best friend was a bootlegger. We gave her all the room in the world. Then the bus started off with a peculiar, amateur-like lurch. The Comanches, to the last man, were silent.

On the way back to our regular parking place, Mary Hudson leaned forward in her seat and gave the Chief an enthusiastic account of the trains she had missed and the train she hadn’t missed; she lived in Douglaston, Long Island. The Chief was very nervous. He didn’t just fail to contribute any talk of his own; he could hardly listen to hers. The gearshift knob came off in his hand, I remember.

When we got out of the bus, Mary Hudson stuck right with us. I’m sure that by the time we reached the baseball field there was on every Comanche’s face a some-girls-just-don’t-know-when-to-go-home look. And to really top things off, when another Comanche and I were flipping a coin to decide which team would take the field first, Mary Hudson wistfully expressed a desire to join the game. The response to this couldn’t have been more clean-cut. Where before we Comanches had simply stared at her femaleness, we now glared at it. She smiled back at us. It was a shade disconcerting. Then the Chief took over, revealing what had formerly been a well-concealed flair for incompetence. He took Mary Hudson aside, just out of earshot of the Comanches, and seemed to address her solemnly, rationally. At length, Mary Hudson interrupted him, and her voice was perfectly audible to the Comanches. “But I do,” she said. “I do, too, want to play!” The Chief nodded and tried again. He pointed in the direction of the infield, which was soggy and pitted. He picked up a regulation bat and demonstrated its weight. “I don’t care,” Mary Hudson said distinctly, “I came all the way to New York–to the dentist and everything–and I’m gonna play.” The Chief nodded again but gave up. He walked cautiously over to home plate, where the Braves and the Warriors, the two Comanche teams, were waiting, and looked at me. I was captain of the Warriors. He mentioned the name of my regular center fielder, who was home sick, and suggested that Mary Hudson take his place. I said I didn’t need a center fielder. The Chief asked me what the hell did I mean I didn’t need a center fielder. I was shocked. It was the first time I had heard the Chief swear. What’s more, I could feel Mary Hudson smiling at me. For poise, I picked up a stone and threw it at a tree.

We took the field first. No business went out to center field the first inning. From my position on first base, I glanced behind me now and then. Each time I did, Mary Hudson waved gaily to me. She was wearing a catcher’s mitt, her own adamant choice. It was a horrible sight.

Mary Hudson batted ninth on the Warriors’ lineup. When I informed her of this arrangement, she made a little face and said, “Well, hurry up, then.” And as a matter of fact we did seem to hurry up. She got to bat in the first inning. She took off her beaver coat–and her catcher’s mitt–for the occasion and advanced to the plate in a dark-brown dress. When I gave her a bat, she asked me why it was so heavy. The Chief left his umpire’s position behind the pitcher and came forward anxiously. He told Mary Hudson to rest the end of her bat on her right shouder. “I am,” she said. He told her not to choke the bat too tightly. “I’m not,” she said. He told her to keep her eye right on the ball. “I will,” she said. “Get outa the way.” She swung mightily at the first ball pitched to her and hit it over the left fielder’s head. It was good for an ordinary double, but Mary Hudson got to third on it–standing up.

When my astonishment had worn off, and then my awe, and then my delight, I looked over at the Chief. He didn’t so much seem to be standing behind the pitcher as floating over him. He was a completely happy man. Over on third base, Mary Hudson waved to me. I waved back. I couldn’t have stopped myself, even if I’d wanted to. Her stickwork aside, she happened to be a girl who knew how to wave to somebody from third base.

The rest of the game, she got on base every time she came to bat. For some reason, she seemed to hate first base; there was no holding her there. At least three times, she stole second.

Her fielding couldn’t have been worse, but we were piling up too many runs to take serious notice of it. I think it would have improved if she’d gone after flies with almost anything except a catcher’s mitt. She wouldn’t take it off, though. She said it was cute.

The next month or so, she played baseball with the Comanches a couple of times a week (whenever she had an appointment with her dentist, apparently). Some afternoons she met the bus on time, some afternoons she was late. Sometimes she talked a blue streak in the bus, sometimes she just sat and smoked her Herbert Tareyton cigarettes (cork-tipped). When you sat next to her in the bus, she smelled of a wonderful perfume.

One wintry day in April, after making his usual three o’clock pickup at 109th and Amsterdam, the Chief turned the loaded bus east at 110th Street and cruised routinely down Fifth Avenue. But his hair was combed wet, he had on his overcoat instead of his leather windbreaker, and I reasonably surmised that Mary Hudson was scheduled to join us. When we zipped past our usual entrance to the Park, I was sure of it. The Chief parked the bus on the comer in the Sixties appropriate to the occasion. Then, to kill time painlessly for the Comanches, he straddled his seat backward and released a new installment of “The Laughing Man.” I remember the installment to the last detail, and I must outline it briefly.

A flux of circumstances delivered the Laughing Man’s best friend, his timber wolf, Black Wing, into a physical and intellectual trap set by the Dufarges. The Dufarges, aware of the Laughing Man’s high sense of loyalty, offered him Black Wing’s freedom in exchange for his own. In the best faith in the world, the Laughing Man agreed to these terms. (Some of the minor mechanics of his genius were often subject to mysterious little breakdowns.) It was arranged for the Laughing Man to meet the Dufarges at midnight in a designated section of the dense forest surrounding Paris, and there, by moonlight, Black Wing would be set free. However, the Dufarges had no intention of liberating Black Wing, whom they feared and loathed. On the night of the transaction, they leashed a stand-in timber wolf for Black Wing, first dyeing its left hind foot snow white, to look like Black Wing’s.

But there were two things the Dufarges hadn’t counted on: the Laughing Man’s sentimentality and his command of the timber-wolf language. As soon as he had allowed Dufarge’s daughter to tie him with barbed wire to a tree, the Laughing Man felt called upon to raise his beautiful, melodious voice in a few words of farewell to his supposed old friend. The stand-in, a few moonlit yards away, was impressed by the stranger’s command of the language and listened politely for a moment to the last-minute advice, personal and professional, that the Laughing Man was giving out. At length, though, the stand-in grew impatient and began shifting his weight from paw to paw. Abruptly, and rather unpleasantly, he interrupted the Laughing Man with the information that, in the first place, his name wasn’t Dark Wing or Black Wing or Gray Legs or any of that business, it was Armand, and, in the second place, he’d never been to China in his life and hadn’t the slightest intention of going there.

Properly infuriated, the Laughing Man pushed off his mask with his tongue and confronted the Dufarges with his naked face by moonlight. Mlle. Dufarge responded by passing out cold. Her father was luckier. By chance, he was having one of his coughing spells at the moment and thereby missed the lethal unveiling. When his coughing spell was over and he saw his daughter stretched out supine on the moonlit ground, Dufarge put two and two together. Shielding his eyes with his hand, he fired the full clip in his automatic toward the sound of the Laughing Man’s heavy, sibilant breathing.

The installment ended there.

The Chief took his dollar Ingersoll out of his watch pocket, looked at it, then swung around in his seat and started up the motor. I checked my own watch. It was almost four-thirty. As the bus moved forward, I asked the Chief if he wasn’t going to wait for Mary Hudson. He didn’t answer me, and before I could repeat my question, he tilted back his head and addressed all of us: “Let’s have a little quiet in this damn bus.” Whatever else it may have been, the order was basically unsensible. The bus had been, and was, very quiet. Almost everybody was thinking about the spot the Laughing Man had been left in. We were long past worrying about him–we had too much confidence in him for that–but we were never past accepting his most perilous moments quietly.

In the third or fourth inning of our ball game that afternoon, I spotted Mary Hudson from first base. She was sitting on a bench about a hundred yards to my left, sandwiched between two nursemaids with baby carriages. She had on her beaver coat, she was smoking a cigarette, and she seemed to be looking in the direction of our game. I got excited about my discovery and yelled the information over to the Chief, behind the pitcher. He hurried over to me, not quite running. “Where?” he asked me. I pointed again. He stared for a moment in the right direction, then said he’d be back in a minute and left the field. He left it slowly, opening his overcoat and putting his hands in the hip pockets of his trousers. I sat down on first base and watched. By the time the Chief reached Mary Hudson, his overcoat was buttoned again and his hands were down at his sides.

He stood over her for about five minutes, apparently talking to her. Then Mary Hudson stood up, and the two of them walked toward the baseball field. They didn’t talk as they walked, or look at each other. When they reached the field, the Chief took his position behind the pitcher. I yelled over to him. “Isn’t she gonna play?” He told me to cover my sack. I covered my sack and watched Mary Hudson. She walked slowly behind the plate, with her hands in the pockets of her beaver coat, and finally sat down on a misplaced players’ bench just beyond third base. She lit another cigarette and crossed her legs.

When the Warriors were at bat, I went over to her bench and asked her if she felt like playing left field. She shook her head. I asked her if she had a cold. She shook her head again. I told her I didn’t have anybody in left field. I told her I had a guy playing center field and left field. There was no response at all to this information. I tossed my first-baseman’s mitt up in the air and tried to have it land on my head, but it fell in a mud puddle. I wiped it off on my trousers and asked Mary Hudson if she wanted to come up to my house for dinner sometime. I told her the Chief came up a lot. “Leave me alone,” she said. “Just please leave me alone.” I stared at her, then walked off in the direction of the Warriors’ bench, taking a tangerine out of my pocket and tossing it up in the air. About midway along the third-base foul line, I turned around and started to walk backwards, looking at Mary Hudson and holding on to my tangerine. I had no idea what was going on between the Chief and Mary Hudson (and still haven’t, in any but a fairly low, intuitive sense), but nonetheless, I couldn’t have been more certain that Mary Hudson had permanently dropped out of the Comanche lineup. It was the kind of whole certainty, however independent of the sum of its facts, that can make walking backwards more than normally hazardous, and I bumped smack into a baby carriage.

After another inning, the light got bad for fielding. The game was called, and we started picking up all the equipment. The last good look I had at Mary Hudson, she was over near third base crying. The Chief had hold of the sleeve of her beaver coat, but she got away from him. She ran off the field onto the cement path and kept running till I couldn’t see her any more.

The Chief didn’t go after her. He just stood watching her disappear. Then he turned around and walked down to home plate and picked up our two bats; we always left the bats for him to carry. I went over to him and asked if he and Mary Hudson had had a fight. He told me to tuck my shirt in.

Just as always, we Comanches ran the last few hundred feet to the place where the bus was parked, yelling, shoving, trying out strangleholds on each other, but all of us alive to the fact that it was again time for “The Laughing Man.” Racing across Fifth Avenue, somebody dropped his extra or discarded sweater, and I tripped over it and went sprawling. I finished the charge to the bus; but the best seats were taken by that time and I had to sit down in the middle of the bus. Annoyed at the arrangement, I gave the boy sitting on my right a poke in the ribs with my elbow, then faced around and watched the Chief cross over Fifth. It was not yet dark out, but a five-fifteen dimness had set in. The Chief crossed the street with his coat collar up, the bats under his left arm, and his concentration on the street. His black hair, which had been combed wet earlier in the day, was dry now and blowing. I remember wishing the Chief had gloves.

The bus, as usual, was quiet when he climbed in–as proportionately quiet, at any rate, as a theatre with dimming house lights. Conversations were finished in a hurried whisper or shut off completely. Nonetheless, the first thing the Chief said to us was “All right, let’s cut out the noise, or no story.” In an instant, an unconditional silence filled the bus, cutting off from the Chief any alternative but to take up his narrating position. When he had done so, he took out a handkerchief and methodically blew his nose, one nostril at a time. We watched him with patience and even a certain amount of spectator’s interest. When he had finished with his handkerchief, he folded it neatly in quarters and replaced it in his pocket. He then gave us the new installment of “The Laughing Man.” From start to finish, it lasted no longer than five minutes.

Four of Dufarge’s bullets struck the Laughing Man, two of them through the heart. When Dufarge, who was still shielding his eyes against the sight of the Laughing Man’s face, heard a queer exhalation of agony from the direction of the target, he was overjoyed. His black heart beating wildly, he rushed over to his unconscious daughter and brought her to. The pair of them, beside themselves with delight and coward’s courage, now dared to look up at the Laughing Man. His head was bowed as in death, his chin resting on his bloody chest. Slowly, greedily, father and daughter came forward to inspect their spoils. Quite a surprise was in store for them. The Laughing Man, far from dead, was busy contracting his stomach muscles in a secret manner. As the Dufarges came into range, he suddenly raised his face, gave a terrible laugh, and neatly, even fastidiously, regurgitated all four bullets. The impact of this feat on the Dufarges was so acute that their hearts literally burst, and they dropped dead at the Laughing Man’s feet. (If the installment was going to be a short one anyway, it could have ended there; the Comanches could have managed to rationalize the sudden death of the Dufarges. But it didn’t end there.) Day after day, the Laughing Man continued to stand lashed to the tree with barbed wire, the Dufarges decomposing at his feet. Bleeding profusely and cut off from his supply of eagles’ blood, he had never been closer to death. One day, however, in a hoarse but eloquent voice, he appealed for help to the animals of the forest. He summoned them to fetch Omba, the lovable dwarf. And they did. But it was a long trip back and forth across the Paris-Chinese border, and by the time Omba arrived on the scene with a medical kit and a fresh supply of eagles’ blood, the Laughing Man was in a coma. Omba’s very first act of mercy was to retrieve his master’s mask, which had blown up against Mlle. Dufarge’s vermin-infested torso. He placed it respectfully over the hideous features, then proceeded to dress the wounds.

When the Laughing Man’s small eyes finally opened, Omba eagerly raised the vial of eagles’ blood up to the mask. But the Laughing Man didn’t drink from it. Instead, he weakly pronounced his beloved Black Wing’s name. Omba bowed his own slightly distorted head and revealed to his master that the Dufarges had killed Black Wing. A peculiar and heart-rending gasp of final sorrow came from the Laughing Man. He reached out wanly for the vial of eagles’ blood and crushed it in his hand. What little blood he had left trickled thinly down his wrist. He ordered Omba to look away, and, sobbing, Omba obeyed him. The Laughing Man’s last act, before turning his face to the bloodstained ground, was to pull off his mask.

The story ended there, of course. (Never to be revived.) The Chief started up the bus. Across the aisle from me, Billy Walsh, who was the youngest of all the Comanches, burst into tears. None of us told him to shut up. As for me, I remember my knees were shaking.

A few minutes later, when I stepped out of the Chief’s bus, the first thing I chanced to see was a piece of red tissue paper flapping in the wind against the base of a lamppost. It looked like someone’s poppy-petal mask. I arrived home with my teeth chattering uncontrollably and was told to go right straight to bed.

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hopelikethemoon · 4 years ago

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The NSFW ABCs of Annie & Javier {MTMF}

You can find out everything you need to know about Maybe Today, Maybe Forever right here.

(gif from @heather-lynn‘s gifset here)

A = Aftercare

Javier is dedicated when it comes to aftercare. Regardless of who he’s with, whether it’s a one night stand from the bar or a sex worker, he knows how to dole out aftercare. He had a really good reputation among the brothels in Colombia, because he took care of the girls after he was done with them. He wasn’t just a pump and dump. It was a whole thing for him.

But with Annie, it becomes his top priority. Especially after particularly rough sex, he absolutely loves doting on her. He’ll leave the bed to grab a washcloth, returning to clean her up and leave kisses along her inner thighs. He loves leaving marks on her, almost as much as she loves when he leaves marks, and even days later he’ll check on them to make sure bruises are fading and marks are healing. There are some moments, at the beginning of their relationship, where he tends to feel a little guilty about leaving marks on her or being too rough.

Annie loves doting on Javier, but it drives Javier absolutely fucking up the wall. Especially after they get more adventurous in their relationship, the aftercare continues the entire day after sex. He secretly loves it though, even if he says he hates the attention.

B = Body part

Annie has always been a little bit in love with Javier’s nose and his hair. Even before they were together, her fingers were known to find their way into his hair. But after they’re together, she’s always finding reasons to play with his hair, fingers at the nape of his neck, fluffing the hair that falls across his forehead.

It might be cliche, but Javier loves Annie’s body — like really loves it. He’d happily just sit and study her, if she’d let him. He also really loved when she was pregnant, there was something he just adored about seeing the way her body changed as their child grew within her. He sometimes wishes he’d taken more time to worship her during both pregnancies, even though Annie would assure him he was very devout in his adoration of her body. He also loves her stretch marks, knows each and every one of them by heart.

Javier is a tits man, so it kinda kills him that he goes literal years without being able to play with Annie’s the way he wants to, but he’s not the type to complain about it. She told him once not to touch them, while she was pregnant with Josie, and he respected that request until she told him otherwise. He really enjoys them, regardless of whether he’s allowed to touch them. He’s content to just look.

C = Cum

Javier doesn’t have any qualms about kissing Annie after she’s had her mouth wrapped around his cock. He also doesn’t have an issue with going down on her while his cum is still leaking out of her pussy. In fact, he kinda enjoys it. It’s messy, it’s primal, it’s intimate. She’s the same way, honestly, she doesn’t mind a little making out, while Javier’s lips taste like her.

When it comes to sex, these two are not fans of condoms. Javier almost always finishes in her, preferring the actual act of sex over getting a blowjob. But that’s not to say he doesn’t absolutely lose his shit when Annie gives him head. The things she can do with her mouth? Incredible.

The first time they tried pegging and Annie made a show of licking his come off his stomach? That went straight into Javier’s spankbank for the rest of eternity.

D = Dirty Secret

Their dirtiest secret is pegging. That is probably the one sexual activity of theirs that no one will ever find out about. They’re both fairly open about their sex lives with their friends, like Steve and Connie, but pegging will be the secret they take to the grave. That’s between Javier, Annie, and everyone’s favorite sex shop worker Rocky.

Javier might not be the best at expressing himself, but deep down he enjoys how liberating it is. He loves when Annie takes control. He loves being completely at her mercy. Not to mention, there’s something much more powerful about when he comes that way. Even though he hates being fussed over, he loves how Annie treats him afterwards. She’s very doting.

E = Experience

Both Annie and Javier are very experienced. Given the nature of their friendship-turned-relationship they’re also pretty intimately familiar with who each other has fucked and how. Honestly, that was one of the things they both loved about each other early on. There was no shame, no judging, and they actively supported each other in their pursuit of getting their rocks off.

Lance was the longest “long term” relationship Annie was ever in. She dated a little in high school and college, but nothing very serious. Similar to how Javier’s only “long term” relationship was Lorraine.

F = Favourite Position

I feel like it would be easier to discuss which positions they don’t like. They’re both down to try anything once. Later on in their relationship, they mostly stick to positions that won’t hurt Javier’s back or knees. But he’s willing to soldier through a little pain.

Annie and Javier are both switches, though Annie has a tendency to start out in control and then let Javier take over. Annie also tends to enjoy rough sex more than Javier. They both love any position that lets him fuck her hard and deep.

Annie secretly loves it when they get so worked up, Javier barely gets a chance to undress before he starts fucking her. Maybe it’s because it brings back memories of them in the bathroom, or maybe she just loves the urgency of the moment. There’s something hot about feeling his jeans scrape the back of her thighs as she rides his cock on the sofa after the kids are down for the night.

G = Goofy

Javier and Annie both look like they could kill you with a single look, but they’re the biggest dorks when it comes to each other. Sex for them, while often intense, is always fun. There’s teasing, giggling, and absolute adoration in every encounter. Annie in particular is a goofball when it comes to Javier.

But it wasn’t always like that with other partners, being goofy is something that is reserved for the two of them alone.

H = Hair

Annie keeps her bush maintained, but it is indeed a bush. She is not a fan of waxing or keeping things hairless. And Javier certainly has no issue with it. If Annie had her way, she wouldn’t ever shave her legs either. But alas, she wears dresses too often to really enjoy going au naturale.

Javier also keeps his own pubes neat, but there’s no real manscaping going on there. Javier always keeps his mustache neatly groomed, but will often let his facial hair on his cheeks go untamed because he knows Annie loves it.

I like to think they’re both forged in the 70s and they fall in line with a lot of the ideologies of that era.

I = Intimacy

Their love language is touch.

Annie and Javier are both deeply romantic people, even if they won’t admit it. In the heat of the moment, there’s always loving touches, tender kisses, and murmured words of encouragement.

They’re very touchy people too — even before they were together, they were very comfortable touching each other. That shifted into their signature three squeezes, when they couldn’t verbally or really physically express their feelings for each other in public.

Even their roughest sexual encounters are layered with passion and intimacy. They care so deeply for each other, it’s hard not to show that compassion in the moment.

J = Jack Off

While they’re both always going to prefer fucking each other, they both have a healthy relationship with their own hands. Sometimes Annie isn’t in the mood, but she’ll know Javier’s wound up so she’ll ask him to get himself off and let her watch. She loves it, even if she isn’t really aroused. There’s something super hot about watching Javier come for her like that.��

Ever since they moved to Miami, Annie has had her vibrator to help take care of her own needs. Sometimes she’ll have had a really exhausting day at work and she just needs to take the edge off. Maybe she’ll sprawl out on their bed, face buried in Javier’s pillow while she uses the toy to come or maybe she’ll take a nice long shower and use her own hands and the showerhead. Javier’s definitely caught her in the act a handful of times, he loves watching her as much as she loves watching him.

K = Kink

Annie loves being marked and she loves marking Javier. If she doesn’t have a few finger shaped bruises, she’s not happy. She especially loved this when they were keeping their relationship secret in Colombia, because she knew they were both covered in marks, but no one else did.

Javier has a definite hair pulling kink. He loves when Annie gets her fingers in his hair and pulls. That little twinge of pain, the pull at his scalp that sends little tremors of pleasure straight to his cock? Yes.

Other kinks? Annie loves being overstimulated and Javier loves getting her off more than once when they have the time to make an evening of it.

L = Location

Don’t judge, but Javier and Annie love a quickie in the bathroom of their favorite bar. It drives Steve and Connie crazy because they’re not subtle about it. At all. There’s something really sexy about fucking in the bathroom and returning to the table — Javier loves knowing that he’s dripping out of her and Annie loves the feeling of it too. They’re usually all over each other afterwards too. Javier will keep a hand on her leg or wrapped around her shoulders, while Annie will sit there playing with his hair, all but laying on him.

Javier also loves when they fuck on the sofa or really anywhere where that Annie can straddle him and ride his cock.

M = Motivation

A brisk breeze could get them going.

These two are truly and completely in love with each other and pretty much constantly thinking about how they can get the other one alone. Annie’s kink is Javi and Javi’s kink is Annie. Which isn’t to say that there isn’t the occasional dry spell — like that seven month period where neither of them really instigated anything beyond a few kisses and a cuddle before and after Sofía.

They don’t need an excuse. As long as they’re both in the mood, they’re good to go.

Sometimes Annie has a dress on that sits at just the right place on her thighs and it drives Javier wild, making him think about pulling it up around her hips and sinking his cock into her. Other times, it can be in the midst of a heated conversation where they both get off a little on the argument.

They really feed off each other’s desire.

N = NO

You know, they’d probably be willing to try almost anything once. That being said, they would never have a threesome and they would never invite anyone else into their relationship. Annie and Javier are both extremely greedy personalities and they don’t share.

Miami, unsurprisingly, actually had a pretty active swinger scene during the time period that they lived in the city. They’ve definitely been propositioned by couples and they probably accidentally ended up at the wrong type of party before. Especially since they’re not married, they’re not interested in marriage, and they just refer to each other as partners. People mistake that for meaning that they’re in an open relationship and they’re not. At all. They wouldn’t even humor that as a scenario for their relationship.

O = Oral

If they’re going to have sex, Javier is going to be between Annie’s thighs at some point. He could spend hours eating pussy. He loves it, she loves it — it happens a lot.

They both love giving and receiving. But, like I mentioned above, Javier really prefers having sex over getting head. If they’re planning to go at it for awhile, he’s more amenable to letting Annie get him off with her mouth. At least then he has time to work himself back up to actually fuck her.

Annie and Javier also have an agreement about somnophilia. They’re both very open to being woken up by each other that way. Annie, in particular, really loves being woken up with an orgasm.

P = Pace

It honestly depends. Annie really enjoy rough sex, Javier not so much. But even during rough sex they’re very sensual and tender with each other. Soft caresses, partnered with sharp thrusts. Sometimes they take their time, enjoying a little lovemaking, other times Javier’s fucking Annie into the mattress until she can’t walk straight tomorrow.

Sometimes they’ll start out with Annie on top, setting the pace as she rides him — but they’ll both realize they need more. That tends to be how she ends up face down-ass up with Javier pounding into her.

Q = Quickie

They love quickies. See Location.

With two kids and both of them working? Quickies are a must. They try to work a little alone time into every day. Sometimes that means a quickie in the morning, or hopping into the shower with each other, or taking advantage of the girls naptime.

They make it work. Especially since sex is the quickest way for both of them to get on the same page and ground each other.

R = Risk

They’re always up to experimenting with toys, but even then Javier has it definite hard limits with how far he’s willing to take things like pegging or using toys on him.

The riskiest thing they’d be up to is semi-public teasing and sex. They love the increased risk of getting caught. Whether that’s Javier fingering her in the back of a cab or Annie palming him under the table at the bar.

Mostly, they love seeing how far they can push it before one of them snaps.

S = Stamina

With enough build-up, Javier is usually good to go at least two rounds. Maybe more. But again, it really depends on the foreplay and the intensity of the encounter. They’re both pretty worn out after particularly rough sex or if they’ve really wound each other up beforehand.

Annie loves when Javier can pull multiple orgasms from her. They have safe words for a reason, just in case it’s ever too much.

T = Toy

Initially, she only has the one, but later on in their relationship Annie buys a couple vibrators for her personal use. Though she’s definitely been known to use them to tease Javier’s cock. There’s something she just loves about watching the way it twitches and the way he squirms while she edges him towards a release. And of course, she has her purple rocket for use during anal play.

Of course, they have the neon blue dildo they use on Javier that also fits into her strap-on harness. It’s the only one they ever procure. Javier isn’t really interested in trying any sizes larger than that one and he prefers it because it’s just an oblong toy that doesn’t look phallic at all.

Annie would 100% be down for wearing the rocket while she does laundry or make dinner and letting Javier tease her with it. They definitely experiment with remote control toys.

U = Unfair

They both love teasing each other, but never in a hurtful fashion. Annie, in particular, really enjoys a good delayed orgasm and she loves how attentive Javier is when he plays with her. A little overstimulation goes a long way.

Javier enjoys being edged, but he much prefers edging Annie. He also loves when Annie plays with his nipples, it’s never really something that was done before Annie and he enjoys the stimulation.

V = Volume

Annie could be really loud if she had the opportunity. But usually they’re in an apartment or they’ve got the kids down the hall.

Javier definitely expresses himself and is pretty comfortable letting Annie know exactly how much he enjoys what they’re doing. But Annie is, without a doubt, the loudest of the two of them. And Javier loves it.

W = Wild Card

Javier is way more into roleplay than Annie is. She cannot take it seriously and any of their attempts at roleplay usually descend into giggles. He’s fine with it not really being part of their relationship and the few times they have managed to make it, he really enjoyed it.

They have only had success with roleplay when it involves them being their past selves. Which works for Javier.

X = X-Ray

Let’s just say, Annie is very satisfied with the length of Javier’s cock. He’s got length and girth working for him.

Y = Yearning

I love how yearning is about libido, because Annie and Javier both have extremely high sexual drives but they also have extremely high yearning drives too.

These two are the picture in the dictionary under yearning. They spent five years yearning for each other, but they still yearn for each other even when they’re in a relationship together.

Z = ZZZ

Javier definitely falls asleep first.

Annie tends to stay awake, fingers playing through his hair or stroking any patch of skin she can reach. She loves listening to him snoring quietly and usually follows him shortly afterwards into the afterglow of post-sex sleep.

They alternate between who is the big spoon. Sometimes they go to sleep with Javier’s arms wrapped around her, other times they’ll wake up and Annie is curled around his back.

Javier secretly loves being the little spoon because homeboy just needs hugs and cuddles.

#javier pena #javier pena x reader #pedro pascal x reader

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recentanimenews · 4 years ago

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Random Reads 2/18/21

Are You in the House Alone? by Richard Peck Are You in the House Alone? came out in 1976 and though I totally could’ve read it when I was a teen—and thus still a member of its target audience—I never did.

Gail Osburne is a sixteen-year-old high school junior and native New Yorker who’s not at home in the quaint Connecticut village her family relocated to several years back. I knew that the plot involved Gail receiving menacing anonymous notes and phone calls, and I was expecting these events to get started quickly and the suspense to remain high throughout. But that doesn’t happen.

Instead, the story is told retroactively, so we know Gail survives. Also, obvious culprit is obvious. (I hope the reveal wasn’t intended to be a surprise, but perhaps readers were less savvy about such things in 1976.) Initially, much more of the focus is on Gail’s relationships with her parents, boyfriend, and best friend, and in particular how the latter two are in the slow process of dissolution. Eventually she receives some threatening notes and creepy phone calls, gets scared, is let down by people in positions of authority, and comes face-to-face with said obvious culprit. That happens halfway through this slim novel. The rest of the book is about Gail’s recovery from her ordeal.

I thought Are You in the House Alone? was going to be fun, suspenseful fluff, but it turned out to be fairly serious and occasionally (intentionally) infuriating. I really appreciated how Peck was able to weave in a couple of threads that seemed very random at first and make them integral to the denouement, too. Ultimately, I didn’t love the book, but I kind of… respect it, if that makes sense. It didn’t go the cheap route.

The Automatic Detective by A. Lee Martinez Mack Megaton is a hulking robot who was created to destroy. He developed self-determination, however, and went against his programming. Now, he’s a probationary citizen of Empire City, where mutagens and pollution have created a very diverse population. While some “biologicals” are still “norms,” others have been physically transformed (like rat-like Detective Alfredo Sanchez) and others have been changed in not-so-visible ways (like Mack’s friend, Jung, a talking gorilla with refined literary taste). Mack works as a cab driver and is trying to keep a low profile, but when his neighbors are abducted, he can’t help but try to rescue them. This gets him into all sorts of trouble, of course.

Despite its name, The Automatic Detective isn’t really much of a mystery. I suppose it’s more… sci-fi noir. Mack meets various thugs, beats some of them up, gets beat up himself, etc. Slowly, he makes progress on uncovering a huge conspiracy. At times, I felt like Martinez was a little too enamored of the gimmick he created, and places in the middle dragged a bit as a result, but the ending is pretty satisfying and overall the book was enjoyable enough, even though it’s quite far from the sort of thing I usually read.

As a final note: I really liked that Martinez limited himself when it came time to invent universe-specific profanity. Instead of the text being liberally sprinkled with words like “frell” or “frak,” the phrase “Oh, flurb” appears but once (during a moment where the meaning is 100% apparent) and made me laugh out loud.

I don’t know if I’m necessarily eager to read more by Martinez, but I’m glad I read this one.

The Inimitable Jeeves by P. G. Wodehouse When I read My Man Jeeves back in 2010, I was somewhat disappointed because so much of it was repetitive. While there are some common elements that recur within the eleven stories that comprise The Inimitable Jeeves, it is still so very much superior that I’d now say… forget about that first book. Start here. Go back and read My Man Jeeves for completist purposes, if that’s your inclination, but start here for the best introduction to these characters and Wodehouse’s uniquely charming and amusing writing.

First published in 1923, The Inimitable Jeeves contains a linked set of stories that typically involve affable Bertie Wooster being imposed upon by either his eternally lovesick friend Bingo Little (who is “always waylaying one and decanting his anguished soul”) or his mischief-making younger cousins, Claude and Eustace. One plot thread involves convincing Bingo’s uncle (who provides him with an allowance) to agree to Bingo marrying a waitress. Jeeves comes up with the idea to ply the uncle with romance novels featuring class differences to soften his heart, and it ends up that Bertie is compelled to go visit the old fellow and claim to be the author. In addition to containing the most elegant description of sweat I’ve ever seen—“The good old persp was bedewing my forehead by this time in a pretty lavish manner.”—this situation is referenced a few times in subsequent stories until Bingo succeeds in getting married to a different waitress who really is the author of those romance novels.

So, even though you’ve got episodic happenings, it’s rather a satisfactory conclusion. Bertie is endearing, Jeeves is competent, the writing is excellent, and it made me laugh. (I especially liked when a character was described as resembling “a sheep with a secret sorrow.”) I’m so glad that I didn’t give up on the series after the first book; now I feel as though I finally see what the fuss is all about. I’d also like to give credit to the fabulous narration by Jonathan Cecil. I’m not sure if it’s deliberate, but I hear echoes of Fry and Laurie in his performance, and I heartily approve. I will certainly seek out more unabridged versions read by him.

The Murders of Richard III by Elizabeth Peters This is the second in the Jacqueline Kirby series of mysteries. I haven’t read the first, and wouldn’t normally begin with the second, but the book promised an English country mansion plus “fanatic devotees of King Richard III” so my usual routine flew right out the window.

Even before university lecturer Thomas Carter likened himself unto Watson, I’d noticed the similarities between how this tale is told and the Sherlock Holmes stories. We are never permitted inside Jacqueline’s head. Instead, we see her how Thomas, hopeful of one day securing her romantic affections, views her. It’s fairly interesting, actually, because Thomas’ opinion of her fluctuates, sometimes peevishly. “You drive me crazy with your arrogance and your sarcasm and your know-it-all airs,” he says at one point. And though he soon after claims “I’m no male chauvinist; I don’t mind you showing off,” the fact is that earlier he was grumbling inwardly about her feigning “girlish ignorance” to reel in mansplainers and then walloping the “unwitting victim” with a cartload of knowledge. It’s true that Jacqueline isn’t especially likeable sometimes, but for remorselessly trouncing the sexist louts she encounters throughout the book, I must commend her!

The mystery itself is somewhat bland, unfortunately. The leader of a Ricardian society has received a letter purportedly written by Elizabeth of York, which would exonerate Richard of the deaths of her brothers, the “princes in the tower.” He calls a meeting of the society, with each attendee costumed as one of the historical personages involved, and summons the press, planning to unveil his find with much fanfare. But someone begins playing practical jokes on the Ricardians reminiscent of the fates of the people they are pretending to be. The book isn’t a long one, and soon the pranks start coming right on the heels of one another. Because of the swift pace—and some shallow characterization—the solution is rather anti-climactic.

Still, while I’m not sure I’ll seek out any more Jacqueline Kirby mysteries, this was overall a decent read.

A Perfect Match by Jill McGown The series of books featuring Detective Inspector Lloyd (whose first name is a secret for now) and Detective Sergeant Judy Hill begins with a short yet enjoyable mystery in which a wealthy young widow is found dead in a small English town on property she’d just inherited from her recently deceased husband. Unlike some mysteries of which I am fond, there’s no preamble where readers get to know the victim or the circumstances of their life. Instead, immediately there’s a policeman discovering the body and then Lloyd turns up to question the victim’s next of kin. This same lack of character development hampers the romantic tension between Lloyd and Hill, leaving me with no idea what motivated Hill to finally decide to act on her feelings for him, betraying her marriage vows in the process.

The mystery itself is interesting enough, however, involving long-married Helen and Donald Mitchell who have ties to both the victim, Julia—her late husband was Donald’s older brother and Helen thinks they were having an affair—and chief suspect, Chris, originally a friend of Donald’s who has fallen in love with Helen. I can’t claim to have mustered anything more than a mild curiosity as to what the outcome would be, but neither did I guess the specifics, so that was good. I liked the interrogation scenes, too.

McGown’s writing had some fun moments. I loved the super-evocative imagery of Lloyd telling Hill that her new perm makes her look like Kevin Keegan. I also really appreciated a recurring bit where each chapter ends with the point of view of wildlife. When Chris is eventually brought in by the police, his arrest is depicted from a bird’s perspective, for example. There are also ducks, a moth, a fly, a cat… I don’t know if this device recurs in later books in the series, but I look forward to finding out.

Reconstructing Amelia by Kimberly McCreight This is the second mystery/thriller I’ve read in which a single mom who is a lawyer with a cold and unfeeling mother of her own attempts to work out the mystery of what happened to a family member (the other being Girl in the Dark by Marion Pauw). Is that some kind of trend these days?

Kate Baron has a demanding job at a swanky firm, but she’s trying her best to be a good mom to her fifteen-year-old bookworm daughter, Amelia. She’s shocked to get a call from Grace Hall, the prestigious private school Amelia attends, saying that her daughter has been accused of cheating, and by the time she makes her way to the school, Amelia has evidently jumped to her death from the school roof. The police are only too happy to classify her death as a suicide, but when Kate gets a text that says “Amelia didn’t jump,” she starts trying to put together the pieces of what happened.

Reconstructing Amelia has quite a few problems. Despite her better judgment (and a promise to her best friend), Amelia joins a clique of bitchy girls at school who end up publicly humiliating her and trying to get her expelled when she falls in love with someone deemed off-limits. It’s hard to muster sympathy for what she ends up going through when one remembers the cruel prank she was willing to pull on someone else as part of the initiation process (largely kept off-camera to keep us from disliking her too much, I guess). We’re repeatedly told about the great relationship Amelia and her mom share, but never shown it. The subplot about Amelia’s dad is the literary equivalent of wilted lettuce. And the fact that the new detective who gets assigned to the case allows Kate to question suspects is absolutely ludicrous.

And yet, I couldn’t hate the book, largely because of Amelia’s friend, Sylvia. For much of the book she comes across as shallow and self-absorbed, but when Amelia really needs her, she’s there. She gives Amelia this tour of “great moments at Grace Hall” to cheer up her impressive pal, right before breaking down about her own legitimate pain. I never would’ve thought at the outset that I would have such immense sympathy for Sylvia, but I do. I find myself hoping that she’ll be okay.

Shutter Island by Dennis Lehane It sure is nice going into a book unspoiled, particularly one as twisty as Shutter Island. I was quite happy with the book as it began, with U.S. Marshals Teddy Daniels and Chuck Aule taking the ferry to Shutter Island to track down a patient missing from Ashcliffe Hospital for the Criminally Insane. It’s late summer 1954, and these guys are manly but accessible, and surprisingly funny. Consider this relatiely early exchange that cracked me up:

Pretentious Doctor: *makes remarks on the lives of violence the marshals must lead* Chuck: Wasn’t raised to run, Doc. Pretentious Doctor: Ah, yes. Raised. And who did raise you? Teddy: Bears.

For a while, all seems straightforward. Then Teddy confides to Chuck that he’s actually come there looking for a patient named Andrew Laediss, who was responsible for setting the fire that killed Teddy’s wife two years before. Gradually, one starts to doubt everything (and there was a point where all of the uncertainty got to be a little much for me) but the ultimate conclusion is a very satisfactory one.

Why Did You Lie? by Yrsa Sigurdardottir Set in Iceland, Why Did You Lie? starts out with three different storylines taking place a few days apart. The first involves a photographer on a helicopter journey to take pictures of a lighthouse on a rock in the middle of the ocean, the second is about a policewoman whose journalist husband has recently attempted suicide, and the third is about a family who returns from a house swap with an American couple to find some of their stuff missing and weird footage on the security camera. Of course, as the book progresses, these storylines converge, and it’s pretty neat when the police activity the helicopter flew over in chapter one turns out to be almost the culmination of the policewoman’s plot thread.

For some reason, I can’t help wondering how Ruth Rendell might’ve written this book. I think Rendell would’ve done a lot more with characterization, for one thing. There’s certainly some here, especially for the anxious husband who struggles to make his wife admit something really has gone wrong with their houseguests, but the primary concern seems to be getting on with the suspenseful action. Quickly, each plot features some kind of creepy lurker and then ominous notes (variations on the “why did you lie?” theme) figure in to all three, as well. Nina, the policewoman, digs around and talks to people and works out that everything connects to a supposed suicide from thirty years ago.

The result is certainly an entertaining book, but not one I could really love. One major issue I had is being able to predict something very significant. The number of characters who could’ve been angry enough about the 30-year-old lies in question to terrorize people in the present is very small. And once the existence of a certain person is oh-so-casually mentioned two-thirds through the book, I thought, “Oh, well, it’s them, then.” And then a little later, I figured out which of the characters it must be and I was right. This made for an anticlimactic ending that was clearly meant to be a shocking one. Also, I would’ve liked to have cared more that one character ends the novel poised to move on with life but, in reality, still in jeopardy.

I still would read more by this author, though.

By: Michelle Smith

#Anime #News #Manga Bookshelf

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elizabethrobertajones · 8 years ago

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On a different note to 12x16, do you have any thoughts/meta on spn + virgin shaming? It's the one thing that I really, really despise about the show 😩

Yeah, it does bother me that it’s persistently an easy target. Also the 3 big moments I can think of? 3x12, 5x12 and 9x08? written by women. 3 separate women as well (Sera Gamble, Julie Seige, Jenny Klein - the last one of which had some really nasty stuff about women in general, like some implications about one of the larger women stealing food, or general cattiness among that church group…)

In a weird way, “Like a Virgin” by Adam Glass was the LEAST weird about virgins and written by a man, although one who always seemed aware that he should at least try not to be a dick about women, though I always thought it was kind of with mixed results with execution (e.g. I watched 8x18 today and I still think the guy in that group of kids is a grade A creep, and Josephine and Krissy are plenty dismissive of him and his behaviour in the start, but nothing is made of him going through Krissy’s phone for evidence of a boyfriend, there’s the whole teasing her that she liked kissing him while playing bait (and the fact they DID that) so Josephine telling him he’ll get nowhere with Krissy with bad pick up lines or whatever totally misses the point even while the writing seemed aware he was a creep and going about it all wrong, and of course at the end it’s that sort of assumption they’ll get together, and the warning Dean won’t kill him for Krissy she’ll do it herself, which is the sort of old school feminist victory in writing female characters, not the one these days that would actually seem progressive by addressing all the issues that make him a creep instead of handwaving it all with “yay girl power she can look after herself” - I mean she CAN but the writing doesn’t really do anything to admonish the guy being a creep or open up a good discussion on what to do about it, you know? Anyway. Massive diversion. Literally just watched that episode in the last few hours. Pet peeve about male writers in general typified there :P) - I mean same deal, with his virgin episode, that it still makes a big deal out of the women being virgins, I think that’s the one where Dean reads the girl’s diary talking about her “special gift” and so on… Also reminds me in 5x14 Edlund had the couple in the cold open where I think it was implied the girl was a virgin and had been saving herself for the right person, although in that case everything else was so fucked up I don’t think there was time to get too judgy about that, when she and her boyfriend ate each other :P

Anyway at least that episode they were just incidentally virgins and that had to be established somehow or other, but all things considered it didn’t get weird or police them or whatever.

In 3x11 I think the Nancy thing that bothered me the most was that after all her strength and generally not being presented SO badly in the main drama, that rooftop scene, she’s like “I’m having so much sex after this is all over” despite the fact it seemed like she’d had a huge religious experience with discovering demons existed, and she’d been on a really interesting personal journey with that great speech about believing in demons and all, but then that’s really her last character beat except for I guess she’s around for the wrap up at the end for the winchesters, and being killed by Lilith - so it seems her conclusion from all that is just “wow being a virgin means now I know I could be sacrificed at any moment for a spell, better give up waiting for whatever important personal and probably religious reasons I’d remained a virgin and just, like, indulge in casual sex now” - it was just… weird. I don’t think her faith broke at all in that episode about other things? Like, she even volunteered to be sacrificed because she felt it was the right thing to do to save everyone; unless the Winchesters trying a different way where no one sacrificed any virgins, suddenly made her contextualise her whole life that it was a meaningless concept anyway (despite clearly being important if it was used in such a spell) and realise she could try to live her life another way without this ritualistic saving herself…

I don’t know, it’s just… that’s her big take away from everything, it seems. Being a virgin sucks, better have sex so I don’t get sacrificed, and once I do that, it’s not just hurrying up to find Mr Right and not being scared to hook up instead of waiting for marriage or some other safe compromise, it’s like there’s this dam between being a virgin and having ALL the sex.

And in Swap Meat, Gary is basically implied to have done all the witchcraft because he’s a bored frustrated virgin, and if the pretty girl had just hooked up with him, she “wasn’t into witchcraft, she’s into you” or whatever Sam said - like, sex cures satanism and would turn Gary into a well-rounded person. With the bonus creepy non-con that he goes and uses Sam’s body to get laid.

And overlooking the fact they’re HIGH SCHOOL students, like… I’m just saying, he’s probably not the only virgin in his year group and some of them would be generically attractive and popular students - and Gary is just unfortunate enough to look like the sort of kid no one would ever believe had sex at his larval stage of development where a mixture of puberty and allergies have been unkind to him… Maybe the others haven’t either but people don’t look at them and just assume they’re a virgin, because it’s got connotations of being undesirable and a loser in this context.

(It’s especially disappointing Sam says it there - again, it seems weirdly out of character like preconceptions about virgins and assumptions about it just immediately derail characterisation… I just don’t think Sam would judge, and also honestly probably between being an outcast and feeling cursed since forever and the total lack of privacy and apparently Dean hooking up with his prom date… who knows when Sam lost his virginity but I’d bet he made it most of the way through school at least >.> And he kept his virginity pledge from 9x08, accidentally maybe, for years…)

Also 9x08 is a trainwreck when it comes to this and. Ugh. :P Maybe 6x12 just seems good because this is the comparison about when an episode isn’t just incidentally about virgins, but explores it - all these horny but determinedly chaste women immediately breaking into a sweat around Dean, made out to be unattractive or frumpy in various ways to suggest maybe they’re virgins because they wouldn’t get any anyway, except for the retired porn star wearing a hoodie to make herself look more drab… Jody, who we look to, just laughs it off about promises she can’t keep when asked if she’d do it, which is great Jody characterisation but then at the expense of making it clear all these other women are going about it all wrong; they’re unhappy and breaking their oaths because they all secretly want sex (except the slightly-larger-than-TV-skinny woman who just wants to steal cake) and then the goddess complains about how they’re all tainted and impure, because in this universe, virginity is an actual state of purity of the body, with strong magical properties. And then Jody kills her because she’s, I guess, spiritually pure somehow, despite happily admitting she’d have sex and wants to, which makes it basically nothing to do with virginity, like it’s always been a false way to be spiritually clean - like was Nancy only a useful virgin for the spell because she was religious as well? Gary was a little shit of a satanist but he was a virgin - if they’d had him in the police station, would Ruby’s spell have worked?? Maybe not! Who knows!!

Anyway it’s messed up and I am nowhere near qualified in like, whatever sort of sociology and other stuff you need to have to discuss this in a wider context, so I’ll just express general horror that I always pull a face when the show mentions virginity because it’s just such a MESS and unkind and despite the fact everyone is a virgin to start with and it’s a silly social construct and many people are virgins longer than the expected social average (which is shockingly low, and, dude, we had great sex ed in my school and I still don’t think I was REALLY ready when I was at university as a supposedly grown up adult living my life so I can’t imagine how terrible teenage fumbling is except I see it described with that word so often it can’t be a worthwhile experience except for, well, the bragging right to say you’re not a virgin :P) and it’s all so pointless to judge anyone for this??? It’s still such a common thing I don’t think people even realise just how pointless and unkind it is, that it’s just a part of human behaviour and it seems weirdly normal to treat virgins like they’re weird or magical or whatever.

OH WAIT I nearly rounded this off before I remembered Cas and various escapades relating to his virginity and… you know what it’s 2am, I’m just going to make a face and post this :P

#Asks #on scrolling past this to tag it I realised I dropped my point about the women writers #I was mostly thinking of why 9x08 was so CATTY and I just.. expect more sympathy I guess #I went to a super liberal all girls school and in some respects like the constant PSHE lessons #it just felt weirdly enlightened?#maybe because there were no boys in the mix #but no matter how bitchy people got I don't remember there ever being weirdness and cattiness about virgins #I mean fads for accusing everyone they hated of lesbianism sure #but that's implying they were having MORE sex :P lol #probably a bubble universe to me but it feels like this is not something women should care or police each other about and yet #...#3x12 #5x12 #9x08 #wank for ts

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jj-lynn21 · 5 years ago

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HOLLYWOOD MOBSTERS Starring Bill Skarsgard and his family ch 7

ch 1 ch 2 ch 3 ch 4 ch 5 ch 6

thanks for reading @candygirl2123 @super-pink-a-palouza @crazyjam-pot

Warnings: violence, cussing, angst, smut, grab your tissues reader, death

Angel’s tryout Delicate by Taylor Swift

Photos from esquire Singapore September 2019, Calvin Klein, IMDB and Ejalo’s Instagram

Cool air comes off the ocean as waves crash on to the beach. The sky looks to be threatening a storm. Alex and Stellan stand looking out the water. Their hair blowing in the wind that has been picking up speed. Their button up shirts rippling. Summer weather is on the verge of giving into fall.

“Valter is wearing a wire for the F.B.I.” Alex informs his Father. “He wrote on paper as we chatted in the office. I directed the F.B.I. to think the Malforals killed Genna. They should not be taking so much for so little from us as soon as they get a little F.B.I. visit.”

“Good,” Stellan said. “How are you?”

“I think I went to far getting Bill back in the fold,” Alex admitted.

“Your brother seems to be doing good now so don’t dwell on things that had to be done,” Stellan took a breath of the salty air. “He is doing everything he always should have. The Malforals said something to make Bill think they did it. Don’t whine over spilled milk. Was she the first you had to take care of yourself?”

“Yeah,” Alex cracked his stiff neck. “I didn’t think I’d feel,” He paused, “guilt.”

“I suggest you let it go,” Stellan sigh. “I was reminded of my first problem I had to take care of today. I can barely look that girl in the eyes. She looks so much like her father. He was going to take some family business elsewhere and I could not let that happen. Bunny’s Father was one of our best guys before you were old enough to help me. One of the original people that helped build this business up. But business is business. You should be delighted your brother found happiness again. Let the past stay in the past.”

“He does seem very happy with Bunny.” Alex chuckles, “They are like rabbits.”

“Great,” he pats Alex on the back. “Go have some wine and pastries. I will talk with Valter next and then Bill. We do this as we always do. I’ll talk to Valter about his girl so the F.B.I. doesn’t realize we know they are listening.”

They head back to the main house. What they did not realize was Princess was close enough to hear what they were saying. She was going to surprise Alex with her stealthy skills. He must have been distracted or she was really getting better because he did not even notice her. It is one thing to be helping him in the cannabis trade and other recreational drugs she thought should be regulated like liquor to just those over twenty-one. This revelation that he killed his brother’s girl and his Father had killed his associated was not right. It was evil and unforgivable in her book.

But who could she tell? Who could she trust to do the right thing? Alex had allies in local law enforcement. She could not go to the F.B.I. because of everything she had done to help the family. Princess knew better than to fall for one of their immunity deals that always had some little clause that let other law enforcement put you in prison even if they guaranteed they would not bring you up on charges. Disappearing without telling someone would just be suspicious. She really had some serious thinking to do. Until then she would just come in though the front door and pretend she just got there. Pretend she never heard her lover and his father were killers.

Princess smiles as she opens the door. Alex tipped his drink to her with a grin from across the room. She walks over to the group with Valter first getting his attention.

“Congratulations on graduating business school.” She kept her eye on Alex as he smirked at her.

“Thanks,” He said. “My best girl Angel has graduated with a liberal Arts degree.”

“Congratulations to you also young lady.” She saunters over to Alex like she heard nothing. “Where can I get something strong around here.”

“You Found it Princess.” He pours her mostly pineapple rum with a dash of cola. Tosses a cherry in with it. “Is this what you were after?”

“For now,” She laughed.

“How about we take the rest of this conversation into the office?” He puts his hand on the small of her back as he guides her into the office.

Chills run up her spine when he touches her. But this time they are not the good chills his touch usually brings.

“How is the import business?” He moves her towards the desk looking at her seductively the whole time.

“Shipments have been on time.” She turns to face him at the desks edge. “Three more this coming week. Is it true what people are saying about your brother Bill?”

“Extremely exaggerated.” His face dips into her cleavage. He works his mouth up to her neck then ear. “I promise you things didn’t go down as rumors might say. Now turn around and try to be quiet.”

Princess gasped into Alex’s hand covering her mouth. He drilled deep. His thrusting hard. Quick. Nothing she was not used to. Nothing she would not usually saver with gritted teeth. But today it was like he was ripping her heart out with every hip pulse. Tears streamed down her face. Alex leans over her to growl in her ear as his free works her clit. This usually pushes her right over the top so they can both be satisfied.

“Come on Princess, let go,” He was on the cusp of his release. “come with me baby…oh fuck right now…” he groaned. He fills her up as she whimpered. He removes his hand from her mouth. “I’m sorry Princess. What can I do to help you finish? I hate to think you were not satisfied completely” He kisses the back of her neck.

She turns putting her arms around him. Smiles, “I’m good. Maybe later, you can take me somewhere more private, so I can scream out how superior you are compared to any other.”

Alex grins, “That’s a deal.”

They walk back into the living room like nothing ever happened.

“Angel would you like to try out to be a dancer, in the office, right now while Valter to taking a walk with out Father?” Alex asked the young girl that almost looked lost without her suiter.

“Sure,” She jumped up bouncier than Alex expected.

He chuckled, “Good, right this way.”

When they left, Princess downed another pineapple rum and cola. Then she went to Bunny whispering in her ear as Bill chatted with his sister. “Can I talk to you privately?”

Bunny nod, “Excuse us.” She kisses Bill on the cheek.

Bill smiles and continues his conversation with his sister.

“How about we talk outside.” Bunny walked to the door. Princess followed. “I’m told it is less likely that someone can listen outside the house.

Bunny sits on the swing. Princess sits on a rocking chair scooting up closely.

“Can I talk to you in confidence.” Princess starts.

“Of course you can, Princess.” Bunny sat closer to her since it seemed that was what her current patient wanted. “What’s bothering you?”

Princess looks around as if scared to speak, “Would you be surprised this family has killed people.”

“I don’t have any knowledge of that,” Bunny said defensively. “Whatever you have heard is probably a complete exaggeration of the situation. You know someone drops the ball on something and suddenly it is exaggerated that four or ten guys were killed.” Bunny laughs. “Did you hear something that has bothered you enough to come to me?”

Princess looks around again, “I’m not talking about Bill. He really doesn’t seem like the rest of them. He seems um clean.”

Bunny nods in agreement. She doesn’t exactly know what Princess is getting at but clean is not a word she would ever use to describe Bill.

“I mean those guys Bill thought killed his girl didn’t do it.” Princess swallowed hard. “I heard Alex and Stellan talking. Alex killed Bill’s girl to get him back in the family and the reason Stellan was stunned when he first saw you is because he killed your father.”

Bunny looked completely shocked, “No no, you had to have heard them wrong.”

“I didn’t,” Princess said, “Bunny Stellan Killed your Father and Alex killed Genna. I’m..”

“What the fuck? What the fuck” Bill screamed. He came out to see if Bunny needed her sweater. “Their dead.”

He walked back in the house. He busted into the office. Angel was dancing to Delicate by Taylor Swift as Alex watched expressionless sitting behind the desk. Alex jumped up surprised when he saw Bill enter.

Bill drew his gun,” Get the fuck out of her Angel.”

She grabbed her cloths and rushed out. Put them on before going to get Valter.

“Is it true Alex?” Bill demanded. “Did you kill Genna to get me back in the fold?”

As soon as Alex grin slightly planning to say something that might get him out of this situation, Bill shot him right in the heart. Alex looked stunned as he grabbed his chest before falling on the desk. Gustaf and Eija stood at the door in udder disbelief. Bill pushed them out of the way.

“Bill what are you doing,” Gustaf pleaded as he took out his gun.

Eija ran behind the couch to dazed and confused to scream.

“I’m making things right,” Bill screeched. “Alex Killed Genna Gustaf. And…”

“Ok, now you shot him,” Gustaf tried negotiating with Bill to put the gun down. “We can fix this. We do not blame you. Just hand me the gun, Bill. It is going to be ok?” Gustaf reach out.

Stellan comes in with Valter and Angel. Angel is clinging on Valter sobbing and shaking.

“What the fuck is going…” Stellan does not even get the words out before Bill shoots him between the eyes. “Bunny did not need to lose her fucking father so young.”

The F.B.I swarmed the place as the gunshots go off. “Put the guns down. Everyone down on the ground.”

Gustaf and Bill put their guns down before getting on the floor with everyone else.

“I’m sorry bunny,” Bill cried. “I had do it for you and Genna.”

Gustaf yelled. “Shut up Bill. Do not say another word.”

When all was said, and done Bill was the only one that did prison time. Gustaf, Valter, Princess and Bunny took on more responsibilities with out the two highest respected Skarsgards. Bunny visited Bill every day they would let her. Her hand on the glass. His on the other side of the glass. She usually ended up crying when she left but never showed him her tears.

#mobsters #valter skarsgård #bill skarsgard #gustaf skarsgard #alex skarsgard #stellan skarsgard #fan fiction #fiction #fantasy #creative writing

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bonesloveeverandemilyanddavid · 5 years ago

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Emily Deschanel on Biggest 'Bones' Lessons, Working With David Boreanaz and Returning to TV

June 04, 2019 9:45am PT by Jean Bentley

The actress formerly known as Temperance Brennan is returning to television in TNT's 'Animal Kingdom,' and discusses the evolution of her career with The Hollywood Reporter.

When Emily Deschanel graduated from theater school, she planned to spend her career doing off-Broadway shows and the occasional indie film. The actress, who is best known for the 12 years she spent starring on Fox procedural Bones, chuckled on the phone while remembering those early career goals.

"I remember somebody laughing at me, like, 'OK, if you never want to make any money, then great,'" she told The Hollywood Reporter.

While her earliest credited parts include small roles in not-so-indie films including Cold Mountain, Glory Road and The Alamo, Deschanel's big break came after being cast in Stephen King's ABC miniseries Rose Red. A couple of pilot seasons later and she was the No. 2 on the call sheet for Bones, behind former Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Angel star David Boreanaz, where she'd spend the next decade-plus of her life.

Two years after her Fox drama ended, Deschanel now finds herself headed back to television in a recurring role on TNT's crime family drama Animal Kingdom. While she spent 12 years playing forensic anthropologist and straight-laced FBI collaborator Temperance Brennan on Bones, she's on the other side of the law as recovering addict Angela on Animal Kingdom.

Deschanel spoke with The Hollywood Reporter about her nearly two decades in Hollywood — including following in the footsteps of her younger sister, Zoey Deschanel (their parents are both in the industry; their father is the Oscar-nominated cinematographer Caleb Deschanel and their mother is Twin Peaks actor Mary Jo Deschanel), working with occasionally difficult co-workers, the Bones lawsuit that has made her wary of signing contracts, and deciding to return to the small screen after a hiatus.

When did you start acting?

When I was growing up I always wanted to be an architect, for whatever reason. I guess it's the perfect blend of art and math and science, which, to me, was really appealing. But then I went to Crossroads for high school and I discovered theater and discovered acting, and I really loved doing it. I think I wouldn't have become an actor if I hadn't gone to the conservatory at Boston University for theater. You get to do four plays a year there, and I think I wouldn't have had the experience to give me the confidence to pursue being an actor after college if I hadn't done something like that. Of course, I look back and wish I'd gone to a liberal arts school and got a more well-rounded education, but there's always time to educate yourself, I guess. I think it was probably the right path for me because it gave me the experience, it gave me the confidence to try and pursue acting. My sister was already [acting]. She was always a natural performer, so she didn't need an external source to tell her she could pursue something.

I just loved theater, I loved to study, I loved Shakespeare. I'm the kid that went to Shakespeare camp three years in a row. Of course when I left school I was like, "I'm going to do Off-Broadway theater only and maybe independent film. And that's all." I remember somebody laughing at me, like, "Okay, if you never want to make any money, then great." It was such a specific thing. I can't say that I had a grand plan of what my career would be. Clearly I had one idea that changed completely, and I've done television for many years.

I moved back to L.A. after a period of time in New York and I finally got representation that sent me out. I had representation in New York but I think I got zero auditions for a whole year, so I was just working in a restaurant there, but it was still fun. A few months in, I think it was six months after moving back, I got this miniseries: Stephen King's Rose Red. Such a big job to get, where I was in Seattle for many months and it was so exciting to me. It was not a main character but it was a character that was in the show a lot. It was so much fun and I quickly loved being a complete sellout. [Laughs] I met one of my best friends, Melanie Lynskey, on that. We're still so close. I love the camaraderie with the actors — I love working on set and being on location too, you get to know people even more because you're kind of stuck in a place far away. I loved it.

Then I did a pilot after that and I did a Law & Order: SVU, so my first several jobs were all in television, and then I did some independent films and small parts in other films.

What was it like when Bones came along? It was probably exciting to book a pilot, but obviously at the time you have no idea that it's going to last more than a decade.

I had zero idea, and that was not my plans for things, either. I had done a couple pilots before and this was towards the end of the pilot season, or the end of their casting of the show, and I got a call to come in and audition for it. I met with Hart Hanson, who created the show; Barry Josephson, the producer; Greg Yaitaines, who was directing it. They laughed at my jokes, so I thought they were really nice people. Especially Hart Hanson loved my stupid jokes, so I'll always remember that.

I remember loving the dialogue between the two characters, really quick witty repartee, and I liked that relationship. I liked that it was a strong female character. When you sign on to do a TV show you have to think about the long term, especially in the beginning when you're doing the pilot, what kind of message you're putting out there for people. Of course this is like the opposite of now what I'm doing — Animal Kingdom is like the worst thing that could ever happen to a person for what you put out there. On Bones it was a different show. Younger people watched it, so you have to think about young girls watching the show and seeing female role models and scientists who are really smart and accomplished in their careers, and are successful.

I thought about all of that and I really responded to the script, and then I met David Boreanaz. He already had the part when I auditioned for it. I remember thinking, Oh, this could last us three years. That would be the longest I could ever in a million years imagine that it could ever last. And then it kept going and going and it was a lot of fun, with some great people. I look back with such fondness.

I [spoke with] a friend recently who was an actor on the show as well, and he was saying, "You seem so might lighter than when you were on the show!" And I'm looking back on it thinking I was so easy-breezy but apparently I was like "I will stress out about every single thing that I could possibly stress out about." It's a lot to be the lead of a television show. It's a lot of responsibility and it's an honor, but you do have to set a tone for a set, and there's pressure to keep the show going and be good. There's all kinds of things that I was probably holding on to that I wasn't realizing, and I look back just remembering all the fun times we had on set with the other actors — like the times in between when they say "cut" and before they say "action" — and of all the conversations we had. I look back thinking I was so easy-breezy but was usually very stressed about everything.

She's also a character who is not very emotional, so you probably also had to tamp down your own feelings more when you were playing her.

Yeah, that's true. I remember the first season doing takes where there was some things that were super upsetting. I remember there was an episode about a girl in foster care and my character was supposed to be in foster care and I was just bawling crying. We couldn't use any of it. I was so upset but my character was so cut off emotionally. I loved, like I was saying, that we had these strong female characters. Hart Hanson, who created it, was a feminist himself and we talked about how my character would never be saved by the male lead until I saved him first. We had things like that, and my favorite thing ever was when I met young girls who said they wanted to become scientists or they were in the process of studying science because of watching the show. That just makes me so happy that we had that kind of impact on people in such a positive way.

What was it like working with David Boreanaz, who had come off of a decade of successful shows with Buffy and Angel? What was it like for you as a relative newcomer to be paired up with someone who can be notoriously prickly sometimes?

No comment. [Laughs.] No, he was very respectful of me. He respected me from the very beginning, and I will always appreciate that. We had a great relationship. I had worked for several years but I'd never been a regular on a TV show before, so it was very new to me. He never tried to tell me what to do, never tried to school me in any way or make me feel like I didn't belong or like I was learning and new. We went to an acting coach, so we basically had therapy every week together which is kind of hilarious, in certain ways, 'cause we would talk about our lives as well in the sessions.

We also had an agreement: We spent more time with each other than we did with our own spouses — with anybody else, really — and we fully acknowledged that we would drive each other crazy. We gave each other permission to walk away at different times, or just say "you're really bothering me right now," or "you're annoying me, I have to get away from you." And we rarely used that because we gave each other permission and we talked about it. It really helped us to get along better in that way, and he always respected me and I love that about him. We would laugh about a million things and he became like a brother and played jokes on me and stuff. For some reason it became a joke that if someone was acting badly, you give them a Diet Coke. I don't drink soda, so if somebody brought me a Diet Coke, I knew it was because he would tell a PA to bring me a Diet Coke as a joke. I didn't do that to him every often. He was more of the mischievous one of the two of us for sure, but we had a lot of good times together.

That sounds like a healthy way to approach that type of relationship.

People have work husbands and work wives at their jobs. I think that's not uncommon, but it takes it to another level playing opposite each other and being married to each other, for sure.

You and David still have a lawsuit pending against Fox for withholding profits from the show. Is there anything you can say about what you learned from that whole experience, and how it has impacted your deals going forward, or even advice to other actors dealing with that issue?

I can't really talk about it because it's still going on. It's not over. I would love to talk about it at some point, but I can't talk about it now. I can talk about it with my friends, but I can't talk to the [press] about it. We can talk in a couple of years. It makes me nervous to sign a contract.

What's your biggest takeaway from your experience on Bones?

Oh, there's so much. I loved playing that character for 12 years. I loved the people I worked with, not just the cast but the crew. I loved telling the stories. I loved all of it. For me, going forward, I just don't want to do the same thing twice. At this point, I have no interest in doing 22 episodes of a television show. I want to play different characters, I'm open to anything — I'm not going to say that I'm not doing television because I'm currently filming television, but I'm not a series regular. That was a plus to me going in. I have flexibility. When you're a guest star you can come and go, and there's no contract, which is great going into my first job after doing Bones. And I don't want to take too much time away from my kids. So that's basically how I see things now, but I'm not anti-television by any means. It really is the golden age of television right now; there's so many amazing things going on, so many stories that are being told, and people doing it so well. I would never write off doing television.

You produced and directed on Bones, is that something you want to do more?

Yeah, all of it. I loved being a producer on Bones. It gives you a say in things, and I really appreciated that. Directing I really loved, and I'm very much interested in doing more of that in my life, but it takes up time. It depends on the time and finding the right project, because you don't want to spend all that time producing or directing something that isn't something you are completely passionate about. It's about finding the right project, and the right timing, with family and everything, I could do that again.

Your character on Animal Kingdom is very different than we've seen you play in the past.

I was really interested in having the conversation about addiction. The character is a recovering heroin addict, and this is a big issue in our country right now. This is a character you're seeing enter the show at rock bottom: She's just come out of prison, she's got nowhere to live, and she's trying to establish herself. This is a character who is sensitive to things, has seen everything in life, has done all kinds of things in her life, like a lot of people who have dealt with addiction have. This is a character who is a survivor. She's trying to find her way in the world and she's doing to do whatever it takes to establish herself to get what she needs, basically.

So she might come across as manipulative. She always has the reasons for doing what she does, but that's like all the characters on the show. They're like criminals, addicts, sociopaths,and she fits in with all that. My character is the best friend of Ellen Barkin's character's daughter so I've known the family for years and years and years, and I see it as an opportunity for myself to get in with the family and see what I can get out of it.

It sounds like there might be a throwdown between Angela and Smurf, Ellen Barkin's character.

Yeah, my character and her character did not like each other. I blame her for her daughter's death, and she blames me, essentially. There's no hiding how we feel about each other. It gets very intense between the two characters for sure. I'm the woman coming in for her territory and I move in to her house. She is not happy about that. I can't say that there's a throw-down fight between us, but it gets intense. Which is always uncomfortable because I love Ellen Barkin so much as a person and as an actor, so I hate the fact that our characters don't get along. But at least we get along off camera!

Animal Kingdom airs Tuesdays at 9 p.m. on TNT.

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yeswevegotavideo · 5 years ago

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Hi, my name’s (basically) Mercury

So @thegrandwilde asked me a question about my internet name, and I realized I’ve never actually explained the entire story of my name in context. Then I realized that, with context, it was an extremely long story, so I thought, “Why not make a whole post about it?”

It is a long post. I don’t know if it’s an interesting post. It’s interesting to me, at any rate.

If you’re curious, or if you have any interest in etymology, especially the etymology of names, and of the reasons people name themselves, then read on, because I’m about to give a comprehensive account of why I’ve been Mercury on the internet for so long that, for quite a while now, I’ve honestly thought of it as my “real” name in a lot of ways.

So, I was a goth in 8th grade, a grunge-goth really. I was in 8th grade in '95/'96 so like...I basically didn't have a choice in being FUCKING OBSESSED with grunge and alternative rock in general. And I was really into Courtney Love’s whole aesthetic at the time, so I sometimes did your standard, Riot Grrrl-style babydoll dresses with combat boots look, but also like, cut the hem off of my black hamper bag and wore it over a black slip and called it a skirt because fuck you, society, that’s why.

But the main reason I was a goth in 8th grade, is because in 8th grade, I had an enormous crush on Tara.

Tara was a goth girl who made friends with me just before summer break between 7th & 8th grade. We spent the summer hanging out, and she was kind, and friendly, and beautiful, and very protective of her friends (and especially of me) and within a month, I had a gargantuan crush on her.

I had known I was bi since I was 11, when I basically came out to my mom (who, despite being kinda’ the worst in a lot of ways, was extremely liberal, and very accepting of my and my brother’s queerness, and of the gay community as a whole. Seriously, my mom was so liberal that my form of teenage political rebellion was being a centrist. God I’m glad I grew out of that shit. Anyway). But Western culture being what it was/is, I had little-to-no understanding of how to talk to, flirt with, or otherwise romantically interact with, girls I liked. That had not changed by 8th grade (honestly, in the ways that count, it has not changed, period). So I spent all of 8th grade pining over Tara, and Tara was the de-facto leader of the rocker girl clique (in the Sacramento suburbs in the 90s, you were either a “rocker” or a “rapper", and rockers did not associate with rappers and vice-versa, because the capital of California, one of the most (and for a few years running, THE most) diverse and integrated cities in the United States, was, and is, a racist, conservative hellscape, and I had way too much internalized racism to even look at rap music so...), and I was in her favor and under her protection. (Looking back, I’m fairly sure Tara had a crush on me too, so it really was your standard wlw standing around confusedly pining for each other in silence sort of situation.)

Which is why, when I came to school after missing a day, and she informed me that, “we all picked nicknames yesterday and there’s only two left, you can either be Mercury or Star,” I was not offended by her providing me with a list of approved nicknames that had been essentially picked clean already. I was, in fact, rather honored that I got to be one of the people who got a nickname at all. I associated Star with the character from the movie The Lost Boys, who I (rather misogynistically, I think now) found to be incredibly irritating.

So I chose Mercury.

That’s not the end of the story. That’s the beginning of the story. So like, buckle up lol.

So to rewind a bit, in 7th grade, I discovered Paganism.

I was ostensibly raised atheist, but with an understanding that my spiritual beliefs were my own goddamn business and my parents weren’t going to make that kind of a decision for me (again, SUPER LIBERAL parents. To be clear, also SUPER ABUSIVE parents, but like, SUPER LIBERAL about it. Which like, growing up being taught that emotional expression is valid and anti-authoritarianism is cool, but also being punished for being a person with independent thoughts and emotions is...a whole other story. ANYWAY).

I tried on Christianity for like, half a second, went to church with friends a couple of times, and 7-8 year old me was immediately like, “this is fuckin’ stupid, why did God kill Jesus, he’s God, he’s fucking omnipotent, he could just choose to forgive everybody at like, any time, nobody had to die, what a dick” and decided it wasn’t for me.

But I feel an inherent need for spirituality in-general, a kinship to it. When I played in the mud as a child, I was 100% one of the little girls mixing mud & grass & mint leaves with hose water and “making potions”. For hours.

And when I met a girl in 7th grade whose entire family was Wiccan, I was fascinated. So, it being 1994, I picked up a couple Silver Ravenwolf books and some Scott Cunningham and got to studying. (I know. I KNOW!!! I was 12, there was barely an Internet, it’s hyper-cringy, I get it, don’t judge me.)

The Wiccanism didn’t stick, but the Paganism sure did. (My “official” spiritual descriptor is, “Eclectic, non-denominational kitchen witch”. I worship no gods, but am happy to work with those who don’t require sustained devotion, and I’m pretty into fae lore. There’s also a bunch of personal spiritual belief stuff involving conceptual quantum and molecular physics, like, String Theory and the Multiverse Theory, and anthropological concepts about the power of language and story in human development involved, too. And I’m also very much a skeptic, it’s complicated. “I am vast. I contain multitudes.")

And around Freshman year, while still figuring stuff out, I came upon the concept of having a magickal name. A secret name that one shares only with the gods or spirits when doing magickal work. And I already had Mercury, a name which was granted and then almost immediately forgotten, because we were 13 and had no fucking attention spans, and Tara moved away, and most of us didn’t even talk to each other anymore and...the name was, therefore, kinda’ perfect.

So I chose it for my ritual work. And then I noticed some weird coincidences. Like, I had a pagan calendar that listed stuff like moon phases and planetary motion, and it associated different planets with different days of the week. And the planet Mercury was associated with Wednesday, which has been my favorite day of the week for most of my life (oh wait, do you...not have a favorite day of the week? Is that just me? Anyway). And when I was in maybe 5th grade, I read this book that was pretty stupid and I didn’t even really enjoy, and I don’t even remember the title of, but it repeatedly used a symbol for “the mark of the devil” in its dumb ghost mystery or whatever, and as much as I disliked the book, I was instantly attracted to the symbol. It looked like this: ☿ I would draw it on things all the time, it was one of my go-to doodles. Guess what the alchemical symbol for Mercury turned out to be?

So in 1999, when I got a computer that came with an Earthlink subscription, and I was really, truly introduced to the Internet for the first time (and not just like, AOL), there was really only one online handle I could see myself using. After all, I was anonymous, it wasn’t “really” telling people my magickal name if they didn’t know who I was, right? (And honestly, by that point I’d kind-of left that concept behind.) So I used Mercury. And whenever that was already taken, I’d use a combination of those nickname choices from 8th grade: Mercury Star, or Mercurystar. And that eventually evolved into Mercury Starlight. And that’s me! :D

It became my fanfic pseudonym (like almost immediately, because I discovered fanfic in the year 2000 and never looked back), and then on message boards or in forums, people would just, like, call me that. And over time, I really started to like it.

I’ve never liked or felt particularly connected to my given, IRL name. And I actually have a bunch of identity and dissociation issues tied up in it (whole other story, yet again), so like, sometimes hearing people use it makes me really fucking uncomfortable. Like, that’s not really a strong enough word for it. Like, I’ve honestly sometimes wondered if name dysphoria is a thing, like similar to gender dysphoria but like, for your name. I mean, though we most frequently associate the two, dysphoria isn’t actually unique to gender identity. It’s a somewhat generic psychological concept, actually. And names are pretty innately tied to identity and sense of self, and having a name that feels so incongruous with who I am that sometimes when people use it I literally feel physically ill, or depressed, or panicky, or get like, instantly turned off if somebody uses it during sex, like...honestly, that certainly sounds like a type of dysphoria to me. I don’t know.

But every single time somebody online calls me Mercury, I just...I absolutely love it. I light up. I feel seen. It’s...it’s just my fucking name, now, man.

Buuut, I don’t really have the guts to legally change it IRL. Not yet, anyway. We’ll see what the future holds. I don’t know, I think about even just casually asking friends to call me Mercury and just...cringe right the fuck up. It’s scary. What if people think it’s stupid? That I’m being silly? Lose respect for me? I know people change their names all the time, but like, that’s them. But for me? Scaaaary.

Anyway, that’s the story, and if you made it all the way to the end, like, thank you for listening?

#personal #my name #that was a really long way to say 'because a friend gave it to me and it stuck'

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j-katz-blog1 · 5 years ago

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JACOB KATZMAN: ABOUT

GENERAL

first name? jacob. surname? katzman. middle name? alexander. nicknames? jake, jakey, katzman. on the more silly/ironic side: catman, catdaddy, katillac. date of birth? january 9th, 1987. age? thirty two.

APPEARANCE

height? 5′11″. build? fit ectomorph. hair color? dark brown. hairstyle? it’s on the longish side, to his chin. he keeps it swept back, typically using product to keep it loosely in place. eye color? dark brown. face shape? diamond. race/ethnicity? ashkenazi jew, european. glasses or contact lenses? neither, he has great vision. he will, however, occasionally wear tinted glasses simply because he likes the look. distinguishing facial features? his roman-shaped nose, and protruding eyes. types of clothes? jake wears business casual. tucked in shirts with the sleeves rolled up, dress pants, and loafers. never a tie (unless, of course, an event calls for it). how do they wear their clothes? again, tucked in shirts with rolled up sleeves. additionally, he’ll leave a button or two unbuttoned--the more casual the event, the more buttons unbuttoned. he also wears a lot of blues (light and dark), grays, whites, and browns. mannerisms? he uses his hands to talk, touches his face/hair when he’s thinking/talking, and has the tendency to stare off into space.

FAMILY

father? david katzman, 70. a retired corporate lawyer/partner at a well respected/known firm in manhattan: katzman and pinkett. he now works as a legal consultant to stay busy. mother? barbara katzman, 65. former administrative assistant. became a full time housewife when jacob was born/when david’s firm became far more successful. sister? tiffany katzman, 34. paralegal at katzman and pinkett. relationship with each? with his father: jake is close with his dad, though it seems they have kind of a... professional relationship rather than a father-son relationship. the way his dad talks to him is more along the lines of a mentor talking to his apprentice, but jake has never had an issue with that. with his mother: jake is his mom’s BABY BOY. her only son. the light of her life. she’s very publicly proud of him and his accomplishments, and she talks him up to everyone she meets. every time he visits, she kisses him, pinches his cheeks, and gives him hugs. there is no denying that jake is close with his mother, even though her overly-affectionate attitude towards him feels like a bit much to him at times. he calls her at least twice a week, and she is his main connection to everything going on at home. with his sister: jake and tiffany do not get along. when jake was first brought home from the hospital, the first thing tiffany had to say was ‘take it back’. growing up, they were always tormenting each other, fighting, and making mean comments about one another. no matter what their mother did to encourage getting along, nothing ever seemed to stick. even now as adults, they’re very immaturely hateful towards one another. through it all, however, they still technically love each other.

PERSONALITY

what words/phrases do they overuse? jake says ‘oh?’ and ‘i don’t care’ often. are they more optimistic or pessimistic? pessimistic. are they introverted or extroverted? somewhere in the middle. an ambivert. what bad habits do they have? being judgmental, imposing his beliefs on others, talking over people. what makes them laugh out loud? well-established inside jokes. how do they display affection? lots of touching (whether it’s romantic, like touching someone’s thigh/lower back/cheek. or platonic, like touching someone’s shoulder/arm.), smiling, joking around. how do they want to be seen by others? successful and capable. how competitive are they? extremely. he will make a competition out of anything. do they make snap judgments or take time to consider? mostly snap. he won’t think critically unless he’s having an in depth discussion, or when he’s called upon to. how do they react to praise? rather... smugly. like he knew he did a good job. how do they react to criticism? typically defensive. when it’s from someone he views as below him, he’ll get angry before dismissing it entirely. if it’s from someone he views as equal/above him, he’ll still show signs of being defensive before deciding to do better (usually for petty reasons). what is their greatest fear? settling. what is their philosophy of life? that there is always something to fight for. when was the last time they cried? jake doesn’t cry a lot. in fact, it can seem like he’s a robot with no emotions more often than not. but the last time he cried was when he came to the realization that he and odessa weren’t on the same life path, and that the only resolution at the time was saying goodbye. what are their political views? he is a registered democrat, leaning towards the more liberal side of the spectrum. he’s pro-choice, anti-gun, and a firm believer in taxing corporations/the one percent. he does not get along with a good chunk of conservatives. what are their pet peeves? people who aren’t registered to vote/don’t care to change that. slow walkers/talkers. loud eaters. smacking of gum. people who wait around to be told what to do instead of taking initiative.

PAST AND FUTURE

what was your character like as a baby? as a child? as a baby, jake was very well behaved and quite happy. he giggled a lot, smiled a lot, and hardly ever cried. everyone who ever took care of him said he was the easiest baby to tend to. as a child, he was super argumentative and too smart for his own good. example: he was the one kid who told all the kids who celebrated christmas that santa claus wasn’t real. he wasn’t afraid to tell other kids at his school that they were, in fact, stupid. on top of all that, he had a very leader-like essence about him. the kids in his grade followed him like ducks in a row. did they grow up rich or poor? his family is part of the upper-middle class--which mainly had to do with the fact that his parents became parents are a relatively ‘later’ age when their careers were firmly established. so because of that, jacob’s childhood teetered on the wealthier side of things. he went to private schools, after all. did they grow up nurtured or neglected? very, very nurtured. what was their first kiss like? horrible. it was with a girl a year older than him. tons of rumors surrounded her being super experienced, but after jake kissed her--he had a sense that she had no clue what she was doing, just like him. when he brought that up to her, he worded things in a way that was rude, and so she slapped him. what are their ambitions? right now, his long term goal is to become the campaign manager of a presidential campaign. what advice would they give their younger self? ‘sometimes people don’t need to be told how bad they are at something.’ what was their childhood ambition? his long term goal growing up was to get into an ivy league school. did they have an imaginary childhood friend? no, but when he was really young--he did try. simply because he thought it was something he had to do. when he realized it was something that wasn’t required, he moved on. when was the last time they were crushed with disappointment? circling back to his relationship with odessa--the last time jake was crushed with disappointment was when she drew the line for herself, and decided she didn’t want to be pushed the way jake was pushing her. it was a lot of frustration early on. the disappointment didn’t arrive until the dust began to settle.

LOVE

do they believe in love at first sight? no. but at times, he wished that he had the kind of light-hearted personality that allowed for beliefs like that. are they in a relationship? it’s complicated. how do they behave in a relationship? jake is super affectionate with his partners. hand holding. an arm around their waist. pda. he’ll also send them flowers, and call them when he’s away from them. he’s a very relationship-oriented person if the person he’s with feels right to him. if not? he’s alarmingly distant and unaffectionate. has your character ever been in love? it’s hard to say, he’s not super in tune with his emotions like that--but he knows for sure that if anything, he’s been close. have they ever been heartbroken? yes.

WORK / EDUCATION / HOBBIES

what is their current job? a campaign field director. what do they think of their current job? he enjoys it. he likes the impact he’s making, and the exciting ‘up in the air’ feeling of it all. but he knows he’d like to be doing more within the campaign, that he’s capable of doing more. what are some of their past jobs? a server at a restaurant to a variety of internships, to a political analyst, to his current position. educational background? he went to private school for grades k-12. from there, he went on to study at harvard where he graduated with honors in political science. do they have a natural talent for something? jake is scary good at written tests of any kind. what are their hobbies? he reads a lot of books and watches a lot of movies. he’s a little bit of a movie buff. he also really enjoys beer on a level that’s lowkey snobbish. do they play a sport? are they any good? he was on his middle school’s AND high school’s respective swim teams. he never took it super seriously, but he was pretty good at it. during the off season for swimming, he did cross country. he enjoyed the latter thoroughly.

DAILY LIFE

what are their eating habits? he eats very healthily, sticks to a somewhat strict diet that compliments his workout routine. he does, however, have a scary fast metabolism and can honestly get away with eating absolute garbage all while staying thin. what is their home like? as it currently stands, jake has two homes. his ‘main’ home in brooklyn, and his temporary home in richmond. both are extremely tidy. he’s always been a super clean person. his home in brooklyn reflects his personality a bit more than his richmond residence--as it is decorated with art, and modern furniture, whereas the richmond home is barren and cold, reminding him of just how temporary it is. with all of that in mind, the richmond residence has a bit more of a ‘lived in’ quality to it, since it’s currently the home he spends his nights at. the brooklyn home instead feels a bit staged, like it’s on the market and furnished only to look good to potential buyers simply because he’s not there to give it the feeling that someone lives there. are they a minimalist or a clutter hoarder? a minimalist. he’s always prepared to move. what do they first do on a weekday morning? first thing’s first, he’ll make coffee. second, he’ll go for a jog. after that, he’ll shower, eat breakfast, and then leave for work. what do they do on a sunday afternoon? sunday is his personal office day, so he spends most of the day knocking out stuff he needs to complete for the week. if he doesn’t have anything he needs to finish, though, he dedicated the day to relaxing/spending time with his loved ones. what do they do on a friday night? it depends on the friday in question. sometimes he’ll hit the gym. other times he’ll go on a date or get drunk with friends. what is their soda of choice? in all honesty? jake doesn’t drink soda, and honestly never has cared for it much in adulthood. when he was younger, though, he was partial to grape. what is their alcoholic drink of choice? beer. he likes to drink from local breweries.

#about

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onetenthoddity · 5 years ago

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A Big Personal Post

So word of warning, this is gonna be a very long tl;dr post about my struggles with my sexuality and I’m gonna get into some real TMI stuff. Also, while it is Pride Month (Happy Pride Month to any LGBT people reading this by the way!!), this is completely unrelated to that and has nothing to do with my sexual orientation or gender identity or anything similar. I’m just a boring cis straight guy. Sorry men, you just don’t do it for me.

This might seem like a weird and unexpected post coming from me, but I constantly keep all this locked away tight and it’s been eating at me for years and years and years and it’s gotten really bad recently, to the point of real emotional distress and depression, so I think I need to just let it out already. So that’s what I’m gonna do.

I’m just gonna jump right into it; I have a very high sex drive. I like sexual stuff; fanservice, big titty anime girls, lots of nsfw art and artists, the dreaded sexualized depictions of women, you know. The usual suspects. And it’s not like any of that is bad. Humans are sexual creatures, it’s biologically wired into us to have a sex drive and experience sexual attraction and desire. Pretending that’s not the case/telling people it’s wrong to feel that way is honestly absurd and really harmful. The real problem is I feel really bad about all of it; I have a huge amount of shame and guilt and embarrassment towards my sexuality. I never really talk about sex or sexual things with anyone, and I get uncomfortable whenever it gets brought up. Like I said, I bottle it all up, and that only makes me feel worse about it all. I’m not even religious at all by the way, I’ve been to church for religious purposes a grand total of once in my entire existence. But unfortunately the US is still a sexually repressive society whether you’re religious or not thanks to those good ol’ puritan roots that still fuck everyone over to this very day, so it was still hammered into me that sex is bad and something to be ashamed of. It’s so ridiculous; I live in an extremely liberal town right outside Boston, my family is full of accepting people, I actually got a good sexual education from school, and yet here we are. Even though I logically know it’s a load of shit, I just can’t seem to get rid of the idea that sex and sexual desire is inherently harmful or wrong.

But that’s not the only reason I feel so negative about my sexuality; as one of my exes once put it, I perhaps drank TOO much respect women juice. And while I lean very left/am a very progressive person in general, it’s not like I’m one of those male feminists that seem like they’re just trying to get brownie points or moral superiority, nor am I a “nice guy”. No; for most of my life I’ve just been around women. When I was little me and my older sister spent all our time together; she’s even the one taught me how to read. From middle school and beyond basically all of my closest friends were all girls. And since I was an art boy, I took a lot of art classes and went to art club, which were demographically mostly female. Hell, I was the only boy in my AP Portfolio class, and like one of three total in art club. And after that I went to an art college with a 30/70 male to female ratio. No exaggeration, for the past decade I have not had any close male friends, and for the past four or five years I haven’t had any at all. I feel much more comfortable around women than men; I actually have trouble talking to guys, especially guys who are more stereotypically masculine (which I am not at all nor care to ever be). I don’t just like girls from an attraction standpoint, I genuinely like and care about women as people. But because I have such a high sex drive and I like women in a sexual manner too, it kinda makes me feel like a hypocrite; like I’m betraying that fact. There’s always so much talk about how sexualizing women is wrong and harmful, and women face so much sexual abuse from men, that I feel like I’m a bad person for liking things like fanservice or porn or whatever. It makes me feel like I’m contributing to the problem. But of course, this too is absurd; sexualization and sexual objectification aren’t the same thing. You can both depict and view someone in a sexual manner without dehumanizing them, and to think just by making someone sexual you also objectify them is honestly kinda crazy. Once again, a lot of this thinking also stems from repressive religious ideologies. Men being shitty to women is much more a problem of gender and cultural norms. But even more importantly; I am absolutely not a bad person. I don’t harass women and I’ve never sexually mistreated anyone, and I have no desire to in the first place. I don’t try and make friends or relationships or do favors just for sex. I’m not a “nice guy;” I’m a genuinely good person. And I know I’m a good person because I can never admit to myself that I’m a good person despite literally overwhelming evidence.

The final problem is that I have built up an extreme amount of sexual frustration. I am a super introverted person with a lot of social anxiety and self esteem issues, or, as a therapist might put it, a very lonely person. I don’t have a huge desire to be social and I spend most of my time at home, and my anxiety tends to prevent me from being social when I actually want to. So, shockingly, I’ve never had sex. I’ve had a grand total of two relationships, both recent. One lasted four years and another four months, and while both had a sexual component to them neither went all the way. The four year one was especially frustrating, and in the last year of that relationship we basically stopped doing anything sexual, which really piled on the stress/guilt/shame for me (it turns out she was actually a lesbian; we had an amicable break and we’re still friends to this day). I’m also not interested in casual sex at all; I’m one of those truly disgusting people that needs an emotional connection and genuine feeling and such, which really doesn’t help matters. It feels like my sexual frustration is completely out of my control, and a lot of the time I feel like I’ll just never have sex. Like it’s something for me to admire from afar and never get to participate in myself, no matter how much I want to. I also feel like I’m just not very sexually attractive; the idea that someone would want to have sex with me doesn’t seem believable to me (if you knew what I looked like you would probably smack me upside the head for saying that, by the way). I do my best to try and manage my frustration on my own, but in the end I can only do so much. All of this frustration just ends up making me resent my sexuality, which just makes me feel more shame. It also makes me feel lonelier than I already am, especially in a romantic sense.

I made a deviantArt where I post NSFW art (along with my usual stuff) as an attempt to channel my frustrations and to try and accept and express my sexuality, but I don’t know if it’s helped that much, and honestly I’m terrified of someone close to me finding out. The link was on my tumblr before, but I tried to not draw attention to it because, you know, the shame and embarrassment and stuff. You can find it here: https://www.deviantart.com/asaragi

I think that’s everything I wanted to get off my chest. As I said my negativity towards my sexuality has been growing and gnawing at me from inside for a very long time, and combined with my sexual frustration it has really impacted my mental health recently. I’ve made a lot of positive changes in my life recently, and by all accounts I should be feeling a lot better yet I keep falling back in a depressive low, and I keep having trouble sleeping. I knew this was a problem but I was hoping I could just ignore it, that I could work on the other areas of my life that were causing stress and that would fix my depression. I was really hoping that the other stressors were just exaggerating my sex issues. I didn’t wanna face my shame or talk about it with anyone; I can’t even talk about it to my therapist. But no more; it’s time that I accept myself. I’m never gonna get past this if I don’t, and besides, it’s not healthy to hate yourself. If there’s one thing I’ve really come to understand recently, it’s to be kind to yourself and embrace yourself. My sexuality is an important part of who I am. It’s not something for me to be ashamed of, and it doesn’t make me a bad person. It’s simply part of being human.

This was really hard for me to write, so if you read it all, thank you. I hope you have a wonderful day, and remember to be kind to yourself <3

#personal #tl;dr #tmi #text post

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brainbuffering · 6 years ago

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Not epilepsy related, I know, but please bare with me. I made a joke on Twitter about how I could probably write a 2 page essay on the title page for Grayson #8.

The tweet was liked by Grayson Creatives: Jackson Lanzing, Tim Seeley and Mikel Janín. I intended to leave it just there, however, I couldn’t get it out of my mind, and apparently I have no self control because 3 days later I had written a five page essay on it, and well once you’ve written 2894 words on a subject you may as well publish it somewhere. And because I might as well say it here, if you ever want to read more essays like this, let me know, and you can support me on Ko-Fi if you’re feeling extra generous <3

So after a quick shout out to my sister Ruth for reading it over and providing invaluable feedback, and the wonderful Wednesday Club discord for helping me brainstorm titles and providing general encouragements, I present:

Climbing the Eiffel Tower: Dick Grayson as a feminist sex icon

Tim Seeley and Tom King’s 2014-2016 DC Comics series Grayson follows the story of Dick Grayson as he infiltrates the spy network known as Spyral and travels across the world chasing one adventure after another. Making his first appearance in 1940 as Batman’s sidekick and protégé, Robin, he became just as famous in popular media as the Batman himself. Unlike most comic book characters, Dick Grayson was allowed to age, going from the eager child circus acrobat to a teenage superhero leading his own team. He later went on to find a day job as a cop, whilst still moonlighting as a superhero under the new name Nightwing. For a short time he even picked up the cowl and became Batman following Bruce Wayne’s apparent (nobody stays dead in comics for very long) death and adopted Bruce’s son Damian as his own Robin. In 2014, following his own apparent death, he was granted the new moniker Agent 37.

Although Seeley and King’s Grayson series was very much grounded in the DC Universe, (where Super-powered humans saves the day by running backwards through time and green shape shifting aliens attend high school) the series had just as much in common with 60s Spy films. Nazis were punched, skimpy swimsuits were worn, and the day was saved again and again thanks to a handsome man with a dashing smile. Yet one of the distinguishing features of the much applauded series was the presentation of Dick Grayson as a sex icon. In an industry berated for its sexualisation of female characters, where a teenage girl is put into a purple metal bikini and it is called liberation, Grayson brought a rare respite for female fans. Suddenly the object of affection was male.

It is a running joke amongst DC fans that Dick Grayson is the sexiest man in all comics (at least from an American perspective). In 2013 Dick Grayson even gained the number one spot in Comics Alliance’s list of 50 Sexiest Guys in Comics, beating fellow former Robin Jason Todd (Ranked No. 23) and the Batman himself (ranked No. 46). It was in the 1980- 1984 New Teen Titans series that Dick Grayson was able to step out from the shadow of the Bat, and start to become the sex symbol he is known as today. Along with starting to appear shirtless, he was also shown to be in a sexually active relationship with his girlfriend, Starfire: a teenage alien princess clad in, yes, a purple metal bikini. Perhaps when created in 1940 he was meant to stay the eager young boy, that is not the character we see today, as one internet commentator described him, he’s “that kid at thirteen who’s hot at twenty-one” (Jaffe, 2017). Dick Grayson is now one of the few male comic book heroes who is deliberately designed to be a sex icon aimed at women. He’s the heir to a fortune, he’s charming, he respects women and he’s got an amazing arse. He’s the sort of non-threatening pin-up model you’d be happy to take home to meet your mother. That is, if you weren’t concerned your mother might not try and take him for herself.

This side to his character is demonstrated in Mikel Janín’s illustration for title page of Grayson #8: “Cross my heart and hope to die” published in 2014. The image depicts Dick Grayson demonstrating a gymnastic maneuver to seven teenage school girls during their gym class. He wears form fitting leggings and a sleeveless shirt, displaying his muscular physique. Meanwhile, the students wear a standard uniform for British Private School Girls: a red rugby shirt and white gym shorts. This helps depict both their social class and their social position. There is a text box at the top of the page which reads “...That doesn’t stop me from wanting to climb up on its Eiffel Tower.” Lower down on the page, a speech bubble depicts Dick saying “Ladies? Are you even paying attention? I swear.”

Janín’s layout is deliberately designed to draw attention to Dick’s butt. The support beams of the wall follow from the text box at the start of the top left of the panel, along to the right of the page and then straight down to the buttocks. The viewer then follows Dick’s legs down to take in the school girls whose attention is firmly set upon said buttocks. It is then their gaze that visually leads you down the rest of his body. The entire set up of the image is for the viewer to see Dick Grayson in the same sexual light as the teenagers do. It enforces Dick’s role within the DC Universe as a teenage heartthrob by showing just that, a line of teenaged girl whose hearts (and other parts) throb at the sight of him.

The fact that Dick’s legs lead you down along the line of students demonstrates that they have just as much importance within the image as Dick. Some would argue that this is an example of fan-service, that is to say, images simply put in place to titulate the consumer. However Janín has not drawn Dick with just the viewer in mind. He wants you to take in the school girls too, and see Dick from their point of view. Whilst this is still asking you to see him as a sexual figure, by having the overall view point be from above, the viewer is able to take step back from the scene, and allow us to also side with Dick. The viewer is meant to see the whole situation from a third-party perspective, yet still asks us to sympathise with the teenage girls crushing on their attractive gym teacher. If the purpose of the piece was for the viewer to sexualise Dick for themselves, his body would have a far more prominent feature, blocking out the girls entirely from view and posing in a more deliberately sexualised fashion, as opposed to the actual image where Dick is just going about his job in a conventional fashion, meaning there are no purple bikinis or broken spines in sight. Dick’s ignorance to the girls attraction towards him adds humour to the image, where his frustrations at their lack of attention are juxtaposed with their very real fascination with his body.

This use of humour helps to set a tone for the comic, wherein the reader is made to feel relaxed and amused by the content before it swiftly changes to something more serious. In the case of Grayson #8 it is one of the girls’ other mentors, a middle aged woman, screaming for help. While some might argue that the clear focus on Dick’s buttocks is purely for fan service, and so is an act of objectification on par with that shown towards female characters, the fact that the image genuinely helps progress the story suggests otherwise. The panel of Dick Grayson teaching gymnastics provides the reader with further insight into the characters’ personalities and roles within their society, whilst the general page layout sets up the pace and rhythm for the plot of the book. If it were just for fan service, it would have been easily removed from the story with no consequence.

However, it is true that one of the selling points of Dick Grayson is his sex appeal. Writers Gail Simone and Devin Grayson have both spoken about how they deliberately write Dick Grayson to have sex appeal. Simmone, who is probably most academically sited for her her women in refrigerators campaign (in which she points out the distressing prevalence for female characters to be brutally murdered in order to progress a male character’s story) as a comic book writer has often included sexualised male characters in her work, Dick Grayson being one of them. She argues that since there are enough female characters who are sexualised in the media, she therefore has said she needs “to have sexy characters who might appeal to more people” she wants “there to be characters for everyone” (Simone, 2014). It is important to note, that Simone does not specify that only women are sexually attracted towards these men, nor indeed that all women would be, simply that there in order to diversify audience, one needs to diversify character appeal. Whereas Simone’s approach may stem from a socio-political form of feminism, Grayson has a more capitalist approach. In an interview discussing Dick Grayson as a sex symbol, she suggested that not using the character as such is a serious marketing failure: “It’s astonishing to me that sexy male superheroes aren’t marketed as aggressively as sexy male vampires or sexy male boy bands. There’s obviously tons of money to be made there. There is no one on the planet that will devote more energy, social media advocacy, and money to a favoured cause than a smitten teenage girl.” (Grayson, 2015). Indeed, in editor Kate Kubert’s original pitch for Grayson, she described it as “a cool, slick, sexy spy book starring Dick Grayson” (Seeley, 2015). Dick Grayson’s sex appeal was always meant to be integral to the story.

Therefore, it is not really a surprise that it is the the title page for Grayson #8 that draws such attention to Dick Grayson’s sexy arse. This could be interpreted as male objectification, since it is Dick’s highly attractive body that is being used to draw in readers to the series. Indeed, the bottom panel in particular is designed to make the reader turn the page and find out what is happening. The viewer is only shown a hint of what the woman is possibly holding, and that she is in complete distress. She is asking for help, and the reader assumes that Dick Grayson is going to be the one to provide it, though one would have to buy the book to find out more. It would naturally appeal to a female heterosexual audience to have an attractive male hero go and rescue a woman in need of aid. It is important to note, that whilst other comic series (and indeed spy films) also have attractive men saving women, what makes Dick Grayson stand out here is his more nurturing role. He is in the middle of teaching a class, not sipping a martini in a cassino. Furthermore it is the female gaze depicted here (almost literally in this case since the audience is partially sees Dick through the eyes of teenage girls) and not the male gaze. This is not a power fantasy where a strong dashing man jumps in and saves the simpering young blonde woman, this is a fantasy in which you witness the nice, handsome teacher come to the aid of a grey haired middle-aged woman. The first fantasy is decidedly that of a heterosexual man, the second of a heterosexual woman. Therefore, if the fantasy that is being presented revolves around Dick’s personality and abilities, it cannot be objectification, since you cannot objectify someone who has personhood.

Yet, even if this image is an example of objectification, the question arises of whether it is harmful objectification, or whether it is acceptable given the context. The sexual objectification of a character takes away their agency, their personality and treats them as nothing better than a particularly life like sex toy. The prevalence of this in female characters reflects upon a society that does not value women, or even consider them as people. Therefore, if Dick Grayson is being objectified, is it as dangerous as when female characters, such as Starfire, are objectified? Dick Grayson already has an established character that goes back over 75 years, and as a rich white-passing (Grayson confirms him to be Romani in decent) cis-man has been granted narrative privileges that other characters have not been. Dick Grayson has always been empowered and valued by readers and creators, so objectifying him every now and then is not going to do too much harm to his overall characterisation, nor help maintain an existing real life precedent for a social inequality.

Dick Grayson’s sexualisation in Grayson #8 is a satirical commentary based upon just that. The book came out in an environment where criticism of female objectification and sexualisation in comic books was starting to become a more publicly discussed issue. 2012 saw the beginning of The Hawkeye Initiative which looked at how female characters were drawn in comics and parodied them by drawing Marvel’s Clint Barton (A.K.A Hawkeye) in the same pose. The campaign was widely celebrated across the internet, though many creators (predominantly male) were insulted by the disrespect shown to the original creators. Of course, part of the project was to disrespect the original creators by displaying how sexist their original drawings were, so to that extent, their reaction was incredibly valid. However, the spirit of the initiative was always to encourage conversation in a light hearted, humourous fashion that did not single out any one creator. Grayson #8 demonstrates the exact same humorous approach. The image does not speak to how Dick Grayson is purely a sex object, or oppressed in any way, it speaks of an understanding that it’s about time the playing field was evened out; that heterosexual women and gay men should have someone they too can fantasise about. It welcomes you to join the teenagers in admiring Dick, and let’s you understand that doing so is harmless and fun. This also helps to subvert a classic spy movie trope, where the male protagonist treats the female heroine as nothing but an object of desire, and she is shot from angles that only accentuate those elements. It is clear that when Kubert asked Seeley to create her a “sexy spy book” (Seeley, 2015) it was Dick Grayson who would be providing the sexy, and not his female co-stars.

As discussed in Camille Bacon-Smith’s seminal 1992 work on Fan Studies Enterprising Women, fandom has often been used as a tool for female sexual exploration, and though Bacon-Smith views this from a slightly more critical outsider’s perspective, more recent studies that have come from within fandom itself, and have shown the way it can help people develop an understanding of their sexuality in a safe manner. This has become particularly true for teenage fans, who often use fan-works to explore these parts of themselves. It is especially important to have these spaces celebrated, since teenage girls’ sexuality is often ridiculed elsewhere in popular media. From Stephanie Meyer to Ringo Starr, actors, musicians and writers have all been pushed to the side as irrelevant just because they’re popular amongst teenage girls, and the quality of their work is assumed straight away to be nonsense just based upon their fanbase. Yet, as Grayson said, it is these same fans who will show the utmost dedication and passion (Grayson, 2015) for works that speak to them, and treat them with respect. That is exactly what is being shown in Grayson #8, teenage girls who have sexualised fantasies about non-threatening men, where it is not presented as a set up to a Lolita-esc story of peodophillia. Dick Grayson is not interested in these girls sexually, the girls understand that they will not be entering into sexual relations with him, but that does not stop them from enjoying looking at him and fantasising about him in a safe manner. Even if their attention is unwanted, the girls cannot harm Dick Grayson and Dick Grayson will not harm them. It could be argued, that the humourous feel to the piece is mocking the girls for their sexuality, and asking the reader to laugh at them, not with them. However, the fact that the layout of the work has such a focus on Dick Grayson’s bottom, and that the page begins with one of the girl’s own comment of sexual innuendo about him as a sexy Eiffel Tower she wishes to climb (King, 2014), it is clear that the viewer is being asked to side with these teenagers and agree, that yes, if Dick Grayson was the Eiffel Tower, you too would gladly climb up it and enjoy that glorious view.

To conclude, Grayson #8’s Title Page is an example of how female sexuality (in particularly, that of teenage girls) can be celebrated in comic books in a fun and safe manner. The title page treats the character with respect and dignity, whilst still nodding to an fan base that have dedicated entire blogs to pictures of his butt. The image is tongue-in-cheek about it’s approach to the celebration of Dick Grayson’s bottom, however it is done with respect to both character and reader. Whilst some might argue that this is objectification, the existing social and historical structures within the industry and western society as whole negate this. It has now become an important act of feminist action to have such characters within comic books. Equal opportunity between the sexes, requires equal opportunity to celebrate sexuality. Dick Grayson’s butt in tight lycra is not going to change the world over night, but it is certainly a very good place to start. Grayson is not the first series to celebrate Dick Grayson’s bottom and share it in all it’s peach like glory, and it is unlikely to be the last, yet, much like Dick Grayson, it is still a beautiful piece of work that shall no doubt be cherished for the ages.

References:

Holy Robin Batman! The Wednesday Club, 9th August 2017 (Available on Geek and Sundry’s Twitch and Projectalpha.com)

http://comicsalliance.com/tim-seeley-grayson-nightwings-dc-comics-interview/

http://comicsalliance.com/why-is-nightwing-hot/

http://comicsalliance.com/comics-sexiest-male-characters/

https://www.themarysue.com/gail-simone-nightwing-butt/

https://www.cbr.com/seeley-king-enter-the-dcus-espionage-world-in-grayson/

https://journal.transformativeworks.org/index.php/twc/article/view/460/384

http://www.upenn.edu/pennpress/book/77.html

#Dick Grayson #Agent 37 #Nightwing #Comics #DC Comics #Comic Books #Tim Seeley #Mikel Janín #Tom King #Not Art #Not Comics #(even though it is really but not my comics at least)#My Dad asked me why I wrote this #apparently the answer #For Fun?#Did not clear things up

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asexualling · 6 years ago

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My Ace Experience

Tbh reading other people's life experiences with asexuality made it easier for me to be assured of who I am so I thought I'd share.

I didn't really have that "something clicked" moment. I didn't feel there's something wrong with me my entire life, saw the word Asexual, and realized that's what I am.

I never thought I was anything but straight until I was 14 years old.

When I was 13, I liked a boy for real for the first time in my life. We started dating (it was freshman year of high school) and I was happy, I had so much fun. We cuddled, watched movies togather, ate pizza. It was perfect. He was everything I wanted- thoughtful, loving, generous. He always knew how to make me happy, what food I'd like to eat, what words I needed to hear. And I was head over heels for him.

After 6 months of being in a relationship (now it's sophomore year), he said "no pressure or anything, and it's totally cool to say no and I won't say it again, but just so you know I want to kiss you if you'd like." I was dumbfounded. It haven't even occurred to me to do this. And I didn't feel pressure, I knew he would literally never say this again and let me do or not do whatever I wanted. But I had this, feeling, that I'm not gonna want to do this. And not in the "I'm young it's too early" kind of way, but more like... Never. And I was terrified. I truly did love him but from that moment on I felt like I didn't. I thought "well he feels more towards me so I must not really love him. I probably just confused liking him as a friend with wanting to date him." and 3 months later, I broke up with him. A bit before the brakeup I first saw the word "Asexual", learned what it was, and was like "nah that ain't me". But for some reason I felt connection to this word and started following ace blogs and such.

Later on this year I realized I was Bi. It wasn't a problem, I just one day had a big-ass crush on some girl and then thought back to all the times I was into a girl without realizing it. My Ex was still in love with me and was depressed for the whole year, and the entire time I prayed for him to get a new girlfriend so I won't have the chance to get back with him, even tho I really wanted to.

I sorta forgot about the whole Ace thing. Life went on, I liked people once in a while but mostly stayed away from relationships. All my friends started to express interest in sex or started doing it, and I didn't. "but that's normal" I thought, "I'm young. It'll come later. I'm just a late bloomer".

It was becoming pretty clear me and my friends felt different things towards sex, to the point some of me closest friends even referred to me as "Asexual" jokingly. Still, I thought, there's nothing different about me. Those feelings and needs will come someday.

Fast forward to senior year. I started talking to this amazing girl. For the first time since my first serious boyfriend I felt something big towards someone. After 4 months of talking (this is after I graduated from high school) we started dating. I was happy and excited. Not only was I back to dating, this was my first time dating a girl. She was a year older than me, and knew I was inexperienced (I've never even kissed someone), but was happy to guide me and respect my boundaries. She was my first kiss. I didn't really feel anything in that kiss (or any of the following). I mean, it was nice, and I enjoyed making her happy, but I felt no need to do it more that when she wanted. "that's normal" I thought, "kisses are probably overrated. Movies are exaggerating. People are exaggerating." and I moved on and didn't give that a second thought. She decided that since she was pretty much down with everything and i was the inexperienced one, I'll decide on the pace of progression (sexually). I didn't really want to do anything (even making out wasn't that comfortable) but decided to do it anyway. The most we did was shirtless making out. I didn't like it and was very scared she'll want to do it again and I'll have to reject her. And the entire time the "Ace thing" was sitting at the back of my head.

I succeeded in making her not ask me to do anything sexual, but even her texting me and saying she finds me "sexy" made me super uncomfortable. I decided enough was enough and I needed to come clean to her and to myself.

I came out to her as Ace.

And yes, we broke up (which was predictable, she's a very sexual person) but it was the most liberating thing I've ever done. I've never felt more like myself than when I came out to her.

Later on I came out to a few more trusted friends (who I made promise me they won't tell anybody bc I didn't want to be out as ace, being just Bi publicly was more comfortable for me) and the joy I felt was uncanny.

So now, I'm ace. I'm proud. And yeah, I may not tell everyone (bc I feel like that's kinda private) but I'm at peace with myself.

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virryth · 6 years ago

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Classmate!AU Jun

before we start can I disclaimer: this went on for longer than expected;; also it’ll be a little more emo than the rest of the classmate!au bc i got emo lol

1874 | Bullet | Fluff

where weak-hearted Jun signed up for a horror film class on a dare but you signed up to nap

Analysis of Modern Horror Films is the easiest class for anyone who wants to knock out the required cultural credit

It’s 6 hours once a week, and class lecture consists of watching one movie and a short analysis at the end of class wow it’s literally The Easiest class for nappers and busy non-liberal art kids who just want an easy A

And that’s why you’re here, your pre-med major literally sucks the life out of you and this is the perfect time slot to take a quick nap in the back corner

Except.. it’s not that easy

The dark and cold auditorium is the perfect environment, yes, but the sound system works a bit too well, and even though you’re a heavy sleeper it sometime gets too loud you wake up 20 minutes into a nap and couldn’t go back to sleep

On such a day you usually just sit and watch the movie since there’s not enough light for you to crack open your books and study

That day “The Conjuring” was shown, and you didn’t think this movie was super scary the first time you watched it but the guy sitting 2 seats from you certainly did

For the whole ten minutes where there was silence building up to the jump scare, the guy had his hands over his eyes and both of his legs pulled towards his body

The hood of his hoodie all the way stringed up so only his nose and eyes were visible

Also it’s kind of strange because you’ve never seen anyone all the way up at the top where you sit, it’s usually just you and another (probably premed) kid napping away the hours

Anyway, you watched the guy for the whole ten or so minutes and it’s super amusing bc he flinches at every single little noise but kept watching it through the gaps between his fingers

You got curious so you move to sit next to him and you wait for the jump scare and then you just.. poke his arm when the jump scare happens

I kid you not the guy jumped so high up in his seat and, since his legs were already drawn up, almost tumbled and fell over

But you caught his shoulders like a ninja right before he fell so you technically saved him from hitting his head on the seat in front

Even though it was because of you that he fell over

The guy turns and looks at you in horror

“sorry sorry I just wanted to scare you a bit,” you mumbled an apology between quiet breaths of laughter, both surprised and impressed that he didn’t scream

But the guy, instead of getting mad, clutched your hands and in a low, shaky voice asked if you could hold his hands until the movie finishes

And you’re still laughing, but a bit taken back

Usually you find skinship bothersome, but today.. you feel kinda bad for scaring the poor guy so you agree

For another hour you sit in darkness as the boy duck his head and occasionally squeezes your hand so tight you were sure there would be marks (and there were)

At the end of class the light goes back on and as usual the professor told the class to write a reflection and turn it in at the back door

Now, this is when you expect him to let go of your hand because the movie is over and, well, you have a reflection to write

Not that you need your right hand since you’re left-handed

But you’re also not gonna play bff and stay for the aftermath to comfort him

“J-just a few more minutes,” he takes a deep breath and swallows, “please.”

Now that the lights are on and you can see his face, he’s pretty cute

aNYWay you’re not kind enough to lend a shoulder to a total stranger but he honestly looked so shaken up he might pass out if he tries to stand up

So.. you think of it like helping a small animal

“I’m Jun, by the way. What’s your name?”

Honestly there really was no need for introduction as you were sure you’d never sit here again, but you conceded, partly to calm him bc you can feel the shakiness in his voice

Then Jun apologizes, something like this is the first time you’ve meet and he looks like a total loser

But you shake your head like no no it’s fine lol

And you catch a glimpse of the quick relief that spread across his face. Wow this guy is really good looking–

“Why do you take the class if you can’t stand horror films?” You managed to ask before the blood rushes to your face

At this he seems to hesitate, clearing his throat as he regains his composure

“I did it on a dare.”

“Just go ahead and laugh,” Jun broke into laughter as you epically failed to hide yours

He signed up for 6 hours a week of something he hates.. bc of a dare

Is he stupid or is he stupid–

“Sorry, I just.. it’s not everyday you meet someone signing up for a class they absolutely hate on a dare. Have you attended every lecture until now?”

Jun nodded a yes and you starts feeling some sort of respect for his bravery

He said something along the line of bringing ear plugs and secretly listening to music during class but to no avail, he always ends up covering his face with muffled scream because nothing had worked until today when he held your hand

This entire time you’re talking to the guy his hand still clutches to yours, and for the first time you feel slightly bashful about that huge small fact

As the both of you finishes the reflection, you said goodbye and left first since you have another class right after this

But Jun just looks at you after you left like you’re the most peculiar human he’s ever seen

“First of all, she didn’t know who I was”

Chan looks at Jun in disbelief, his mouth stops chewing the fish cake he was having for lunch

“What do you mean?? She doesn’t know Wen Junhui astrophysics and dance double major president of the school’s track team?”

“Isn’t that better?” Jihoon chimed in, taking a sip of his dark black coffee, “a clean slate. You hate people who only only sees you for your looks anyway.”

“I don’t hate them,” Jun clarified. It’s just that he finds it hard to connect with someone on an emotional level when all they care about is his outer appearance and reputation

But Jihoon’s words gave him something to think about

So the next time he saw you in class, you were in a different corner than where you usually were, so he went over and sit himself next to you and try to strike conversation

And at first you’re like.. who are you again?—ok just joking, but seriously why are we talking again lol

But he keeps trying every time to talk to you that eventually you just gave up

Talking and being next to you makes Jun feel a bit calmer in horror film class

Even though he still jumps every now and then, and you still scare him every now and then for your own amusement

Jun doesn’t mind it though, he loves interacting with you

Your personality is quite similar to his friend Jihoon— straightforward, a bit shy and silly, extremely unbothered sometimes but can be warm and engaging once your attention is focused on something or someone

And once that someone is Jun you give him your full attention because you’ve never met someone that responds to you with so much warmth

Even when he receives full attention anyway from the stares of girls and guys alike, nothing makes him feel as important and appreciated when it’s you

Sometimes he lay awake at night, unable to fall asleep, but when he does he’d wake up in the middle of the night and his thoughts would wander to you

Jun didn’t realize he was falling for you until one afternoon at a coffee shop, when Jihoon had played him a demo of a self-composed track, Run To You, and at that moment Jun had never wanted to see anyone else so badly

And as you’re walking to your last class at 2pm in the hot afternoon, in the distance you see Jun

He’s running towards you and jumping over fences and side-stepping so many people

He’s running so fast he almost tripped over a pot of plant around the corner and you gasped because be careful!!

And he makes you laugh again and again, like that time he was drinking water and a scary scene jumps out so he choked and coughed for a good ten minutes he almost had to leave class for making so much noise

Or that time you study together for a midterm and the both of you fell asleep against a bookshelf in the library but stupid Jun’s Attack on Titan alarm went off so loUD you woke up and bumped heads against the shelf

And a few books fell down but Jun shielded you so he got hurt instead, yet he was still smiling and laughing like an idiot

the many times he unintentionally did something either dumb or cute, he makes you laugh, and you were sure you’d never laugh so much if not for Jun

Jun stops in front of you to catch his breath, eyes never once left yours

For the first time he wasn’t smiling when meeting you, instead there was something desperate in his eyes

And in yours, too, perhaps, because in that moment you had realized how much he meant to you

“I have something to say,” he started between sharp takes of breath, “even if this doesn’t reach you, I—”

You don’t say anything to that, instead you pull his collar and kiss him

Jun is like!!! he can’t believe

But he reciprocated and you two kiss for a long time dndrjkgjfkd

In the middle of the courtyard

With everyone staring

And from that day on you two are known as the campus power couple

You bring each other coffee and have lunch date with talks over quantum fields theory and the expansion of stars it’s cute [and informative] bc it’s mostly Jun talking and you smiling

And he’s smiling at you and you’re just there like “Jun please we’re already dating stop giving me heart eyes”

But he can’t stop bc you’re adorable and you rarely initiate skinship with him in public but when you initiate to hold hands his heart leaped and he’s the happiest man in the world

And he’s one of the types that will interrupt you mid-sentence to kiss you and snuggle into your neck and you have to tell him to stop bc you keep losing your train of thoughts

“No I’m listening I’m just not mentally here hehe you’re so cute”

Minghao joked that seeing you two is like seeing Jun date Jihoon bc you’re both so similar

And Jihoon is like gross but he’s nodding at you from across the table in mutual respect

“Jun you have cool friends”

“I do. wait just my friends am I not cool?”

“no”

“?!?!?!? D:::”

“just kidding ilu”

“;DDDD <3333”</li>

#ughhh i love jun so much #protect the baby #svt au #seventeen au #sfw #jun #jun au #jun scenarios #jun imagines #classmate!au #seventeen scenarios #seventeen imagines #seventeen jun #virryth #Junhui #Junhui fluff #Junhui fic #jun fic #jun fluff

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